Philosophy of Mind, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Part 3

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Friedrich Hegel
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Title: Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind
Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Release Date: March 5, 2012 [Ebook #39064]
Language: English
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND***
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind
By
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Translated From
The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
With
Five Introductory Essays
By
William Wallace, M.A., LL.D.
Fellow of Merton College, and Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Oxford
Oxford
Clarendon Press
1894
CONTENTS
Preface.
Five Introductory Essays In Psychology And Ethics.
Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.
Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.
Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.
Introduction.
Section I. Mind Subjective.
Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.
Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness.
Sub-Section C. Psychology. Mind.
Section II. Mind Objective.
Distribution.
Sub-Section A. Law.
Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience.
Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics.
Section III. Absolute Mind.
Sub-Section A. Art.
Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion.
Sub-Section C. Philosophy.
Index.
Footnotes
PREFACE.
I here offer a translation of the third or last part of Hegel’s
encyclopaedic sketch of philosophy,—the _Philosophy of Mind_. The volume,
like its subject, stands complete in itself. But it may also be regarded
as a supplement or continuation of the work begun in my version of his
_Logic_. I have not ventured upon the _Philosophy of Nature_ which lies
between these two. That is a province, to penetrate into which would
require an equipment of learning I make no claim to,—a province, also, of
which the present-day interest would be largely historical, or at least
bound up with historical circumstances.
The translation is made from the German text given in the Second Part of
the Seventh Volume of Hegel’s Collected Works, occasionally corrected by
comparison with that found in the second and third editions (of 1827 and
1830) published by the author. I have reproduced only Hegel’s own
paragraphs, and entirely omitted the _Zusätze_ of the editors. These
addenda—which are in origin lecture-notes—to the paragraphs are, in the
text of the Collected Works, given for the first section only. The
psychological part which they accompany has been barely treated elsewhere
by Hegel: but a good popular exposition of it will be found in Erdmann’s
_Psychologische Briefe_. The second section was dealt with at greater
length by Hegel himself in his _Philosophy of Law_ (1820). The topics of
the third section are largely covered by his lectures on Art, Religion,
and History of Philosophy.
I do not conceal from myself that the text offers a hard nut to crack. Yet
here and there, even through the medium of the translation, I think some
light cannot fail to come to an earnest student. Occasionally, too, as,
for instance, in §§ 406, 459, 549, and still more in §§ 552, 573, at the
close of which might stand the words _Liberavi animam meam_, the writer
really “lets himself go,” and gives his mind freely on questions where
speculation comes closely in touch with life.
In the _Five Introductory Essays_ I have tried sometimes to put together,
and sometimes to provide with collateral elucidation, some points in the
Mental Philosophy. I shall not attempt to justify the selection of
subjects for special treatment further than to hope that they form a more
or less connected group, and to refer for a study of some general
questions of system and method to my _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s
Philosophy_ which appear almost simultaneously with this volume.
OXFORD,
_December, 1893_.
FIVE INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS.
Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.
The art of finding titles, and of striking out headings which catch the
eye or ear, and lead the mind by easy paths of association to the subject
under exposition, was not one of Hegel’s gifts. A stirring phrase, a vivid
or picturesque turn of words, he often has. But his lists of contents,
when they cease to be commonplace, are apt to run into the bizarre and the
grotesque. Generally, indeed, his rubrics are the old and (as we may be
tempted to call them) insignificant terms of the text-books. But, in
Hegel’s use of them, these conventional designations are charged with a
highly individualised meaning. They may mean more—they may mean less—than
they habitually pass for: but they unquestionably specify their meaning
with a unique and almost personal flavour. And this can hardly fail to
create and to disappoint undue expectations.
(i.) Philosophy and its Parts.
Even the main divisions of his system show this conservatism in
terminology. The names of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia are, we may
say, non-significant of their peculiar contents. And that for a good
reason. What Hegel proposes to give is no novel or special doctrine, but
the universal philosophy which has passed on from age to age, here
narrowed and there widened, but still essentially the same. It is
conscious of its continuity and proud of its identity with the teachings
of Plato and Aristotle.
The earliest attempts of the Greek philosophers to present philosophy in a
complete and articulated order—attempts generally attributed to the
Stoics, the schoolmen of antiquity—made it a tripartite whole. These three
parts were Logic, Physics, and Ethics. In their entirety they were meant
to form a cycle of unified knowledge, satisfying the needs of theory as
well as practice. As time went on, however, the situation changed: and if
the old names remained, their scope and value suffered many changes. New
interests and curiosities, due to altered circumstances, brought other
departments of reality under the focus of investigation besides those
which had been primarily discussed under the old names. Inquiries became
more specialised, and each tended to segregate itself from the rest as an
independent field of science. The result was that in modern times the
territory still marked by the ancient titles had shrunk to a mere phantom
of its former bulk. Almost indeed things had come to such a pass that the
time-honoured figures had sunk into the misery of _rois fainéants_; while
the real business of knowledge was discharged by the younger and less
conventional lines of research which the needs and fashions of the time
had called up. Thus Logic, in the narrow formal sense, was turned into an
“art” of argumentation and a system of technical rules for the analysis
and synthesis of academical discussion. Physics or Natural Philosophy
restricted itself to the elaboration of some metaphysical postulates or
hypotheses regarding the general modes of physical operation. And Ethics
came to be a very unpractical discussion of subtleties regarding moral
faculty and moral standard. Meanwhile a theory of scientific method and of
the laws governing the growth of intelligence and formation of ideas grew
up, and left the older logic to perish of formality and inanition. The
successive departments of physical science, each in turn asserting its
independence, finally left Natural Philosophy no alternative between
clinging to its outworn hypotheses and abstract generalities, or
identifying itself (as Newton in his great book put it) with the
_Principia Mathematica_ of the physical sciences. Ethics, in its turn, saw
itself, on one hand, replaced by psychological inquiries into the
relations between the feelings and the will and the intelligence; while,
on the other hand, a host of social, historical, economical, and other
researches cut it off from the real facts of human life, and left it no
more than the endless debates on the logical and metaphysical issues
involved in free-will and conscience, duty and merit.
It has sometimes been said that Kant settled this controversy between the
old departments of philosophy and the new branches of science. And the
settlement, it is implied, consisted in assigning to the philosopher a
sort of police and patrol duty in the commonwealth of science. He was to
see that boundaries were duly respected, and that each science kept
strictly to its own business. For this purpose each branch of philosophy
was bound to convert itself into a department of criticism—an examination
of first principles in the several provinces of reality or experience—with
a view to get a distinct conception of what they were, and thus define
exactly the lines on which the structures of more detailed science could
be put up solidly and safely. This plan offered tempting lines to
research, and sounded well. But on further reflection there emerge one or
two difficulties, hard to get over. Paradoxical though it may seem, one
cannot rightly estimate the capacity and range of foundations, before one
has had some familiarity with the buildings erected upon them. Thus you
are involved in a circle: a circle which is probably inevitable, but which
for that reason it is well to recognise at once. Then—what is only another
way of saying the same thing—it is impossible to draw an inflexible line
between premises of principle and conclusions of detail. There is no spot
at which criticism can stop, and, having done its business well, hand on
the remaining task to dogmatic system. It was an instinctive feeling of
this implication of system in what professed only to be criticism which
led the aged Kant to ignore his own previous professions that he offered
as yet no system, and when Fichte maintained himself to be erecting the
fabric for which Kant had prepared the ground, to reply by the
counter-declaration that the criticism was the system—that “the curtain
was the picture.”
The Hegelian philosophy is an attempt to combine criticism with system,
and thus realise what Kant had at least foretold. It is a system which is
self-critical, and systematic only through the absoluteness of its
criticism. In Hegel’s own phrase, it is an immanent and an incessant
dialectic, which from first to last allows finality to no dogmatic rest,
but carries out Kant’s description of an Age of Criticism, in which
nothing, however majestic and sacred its authority, can plead for
exception from the all-testing _Elenchus_. Then, on the other hand, Hegel
refuses to restrict philosophy and its branches to anything short of the
totality. He takes in its full sense that often-used phrase—the Unity of
Knowledge. Logic becomes the all-embracing research of “first
principles,”—the principles which regulate physics and ethics. The old
divisions between logic and metaphysic, between induction and deduction,
between theory of reasoning and theory of knowledge,—divisions which those
who most employed them were never able to show the reason and purpose
of—because indeed they had grown up at various times and by “natural
selection” through a vast mass of incidents: these are superseded and
merged in one continuous theory of real knowledge considered under its
abstract or formal aspect,—of organised and known reality in its
underlying thought-system. But these first principles were only an
abstraction from complete reality—the reality which nature has when
unified by mind—and they presuppose the total from which they are derived.
The realm of pure thought is only the ghost of the Idea—of the unity and
reality of knowledge, and it must be reindued with its flesh and blood.
The logical world is (in Kantian phrase) only the _possibility_ of Nature
and Mind. It comes first—because it is a system of First Principles: but
these first principles could only be elicited by a philosophy which has
realised the meaning of a mental experience, gathered by interpreting the
facts of Nature.
Natural Philosophy is no longer—according to Hegel’s view of it—merely a
scheme of mathematical ground-work. That may be its first step. But its
scope is a complete unity (which is not a mere aggregate) of the branches
of natural knowledge, exploring both the inorganic and the organic world.
In dealing with this endless problem, philosophy seems to be baulked by an
impregnable obstacle to its progress. Every day the advance of
specialisation renders any comprehensive or synoptic view of the totality
of science more and more impossible. No doubt we talk readily enough of
Science. But here, if anywhere, we may say there is no Science, but only
sciences. The generality of science is a proud fiction or a gorgeous
dream, variously told and interpreted according to the varying interest
and proclivity of the scientist. The sciences, or those who specially
expound them, know of no unity, no philosophy of science. They are content
to remark that in these days the thing is impossible, and to pick out the
faults in any attempts in that direction that are made outside their pale.
Unfortunately for this contention, the thing is done by us all, and,
indeed, has to be done. If not as men of science, yet as men—as human
beings—we have to put together things and form some total estimate of the
drift of development, of the unity of nature. To get a notion, not merely
of the general methods and principles of the sciences, but of their
results and teachings, and to get this not as a mere lot of fragments, but
with a systematic unity, is indispensable in some degree for all rational
life. The life not founded on science is not the life of man. But he will
not find what he wants in the text-books of the specialist, who is obliged
to treat his subject, as Plato says, “under the pressure of necessity,”
and who dare not look on it in its quality “to draw the soul towards
truth, and to form the philosophic intellect so as to uplift what we now
unduly keep down(1).” If the philosopher in this province does his work
but badly, he may plead the novelty of the task to which he comes as a
pioneer or even an architect. He finds little that he can directly
utilise. The materials have been gathered and prepared for very special
aims; and the great aim of science—that human life may be made a higher,
an ampler, and happier thing,—has hardly been kept in view at all, except
in its more materialistic aspects. To the philosopher the supreme interest
of the physical sciences is that man also belongs to the physical
universe, or that Mind and Matter as we know them are (in Mr. Spencer’s
language) “at once antithetical and inseparable.” He wants to find the
place of Man,—but of Man as Mind—in Nature.
If the scope of Natural Philosophy be thus expanded to make it the unity
and more than the synthetic aggregate of the several physical sciences—to
make it the whole which surpasses the addition of all their fragments, the
purpose of Ethics has not less to be deepened and widened. Ethics, under
that title, Hegel knows not. And for those who cannot recognise anything
unless it be clearly labelled, it comes natural to record their censure of
Hegelianism for ignoring or disparaging ethical studies. But if we take
the word in that wide sense which common usage rather justifies than
adopts, we may say that the whole philosophy of Mind is a moral
philosophy. Its subject is the moral as opposed to the physical aspect of
reality: the inner and ideal life as opposed to the merely external and
real materials of it: the world of intelligence and of humanity. It
displays Man in the several stages of that process by which he expresses
the full meaning of nature, or discharges the burden of that task which is
implicit in him from the first. It traces the steps of that growth by
which what was no better than a fragment of nature—an intelligence located
(as it seemed) in one piece of matter—comes to realise the truth of it and
of himself. That truth is his ideal and his obligation: but it is
also—such is the mystery of his birthright—his idea and possession.
He—like the natural universe—is (as the _Logic_ has shown) a principle of
unification, organisation, idealisation: and his history (in its ideal
completeness) is the history of the process by which he, the typical man,
works the fragments of reality (and such mere reality must be always a
collection of fragments) into the perfect unity of a many-sided character.
Thus the philosophy of mind, beginning with man as a sentient organism,
the focus in which the universe gets its first dim confused expression
through mere feeling, shows how he “erects himself above himself” and
realises what ancient thinkers called his kindred with the divine.
In that total process of the mind’s liberation and self-realisation the
portion specially called Morals is but one, though a necessary, stage.
There are, said Porphyry and the later Platonists, four degrees in the
path of perfection and self-accomplishment. And first, there is the career
of honesty and worldly prudence, which makes the duty of the citizen.
Secondly, there is the progress in purity which casts earthly things
behind, and reaches the angelic height of passionless serenity. And the
third step is the divine life which by intellectual energy is turned to
behold the truth of things. Lastly, in the fourth grade, the mind, free
and sublime in self-sustaining wisdom, makes itself an “exemplar” of
virtue, and is even a “father of Gods.” Even so, it may be said, the human
mind is the subject of a complicated Teleology,—the field ruled by a
multifarious Ought, psychological, aesthetical, social and religious. To
adjust their several claims cannot be the object of any science, if
adjustment means to supply a guide in practice. But it is the purpose of
such a teleology to show that social requirements and moral duty as
ordinarily conceived do not exhaust the range of obligation,—of the
supreme ethical Ought. How that can best be done is however a question of
some difficulty. For the ends under examination do not fall completely
into a serial order, nor does one involve others in such a way as to
destroy their independence. You cannot absolve psychology as if it stood
independent of ethics or religion, nor can aesthetic considerations merely
supervene on moral. Still, it may be said, the order followed by Hegel
seems on the whole liable to fewer objections than others.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, the only English philosopher who has even attempted a
_System_ of Philosophy, may in this point be compared with Hegel. He also
begins with a _First Principles_,—a work which, like Hegel’s _Logic_,
starts by presenting Philosophy as the supreme arbiter between the
subordinate principles of Religion and Science, which are in it “necessary
correlatives.” The positive task of philosophy is (with some inconsistency
or vagueness) presented, in the next place, as a “unification of
knowledge.” Such a unification has to make explicit the implicit unity of
known reality: because “every thought involves a whole system of
thoughts.” And such a programme might again suggest the Logic. But
unfortunately Mr. Spencer does not (and he has Francis Bacon to justify
him here) think it worth his while to toil up the weary, but necessary,
mount of Purgatory which is known to us as Logic. With a naïve realism, he
builds on Cause and Power, and above all on Force, that “Ultimate of
Ultimates,” which seems to be, however marvellously, a denizen both of the
Known and the Unknowable world. In the known world this Ultimate appears
under two forms, matter and motion, and the problem of science and
philosophy is to lay down in detail and in general the law of their
continuous redistribution, of the segregation of motion from matter, and
the inclusion of motion into matter.
Of this process, which has no beginning and no end,—the rhythm of
generation and corruption, attraction and repulsion, it may be said that
it is properly not a first principle of all knowledge, but the general or
fundamental portion of Natural Philosophy to which Mr. Spencer next
proceeds. Such a philosophy, however, he gives only in part: viz. as a
Biology, dealing with organic (and at a further stage and under other
names, with supra-organic) life. And that the Philosophy of Nature should
take this form, and carry both the First Principles and the later portions
of the system with it, as parts of a philosophy of evolution, is what we
should have expected from the contemporaneous interests of science(2).
Even a one-sided attempt to give speculative unity to those researches,
which get—for reasons the scientific specialist seldom asks—the title of
biological, is however worth noting as a recognition of the necessity of a
_Natur-philosophie_,—a speculative science of Nature.
The third part of the Hegelian System corresponds to what in the
_Synthetic Philosophy_ is known as Psychology, Ethics, and Sociology. And
here Mr. Spencer recognises that something new has turned up. Psychology
is “unique” as a science: it is a “double science,” and as a whole quite
_sui generis_. Whether perhaps all these epithets would not, _mutatis
mutandis_, have to be applied also to Ethics and Sociology, if these are
to do their full work, he does not say. In what this doubleness consists
he even finds it somewhat difficult to show. For, as his fundamental
philosophy does not on this point go beyond noting some pairs of verbal
antitheses, and has no sense of unity except in the imperfect shape of a
“relation(3)” between two things which are “antithetical and inseparable,”
he is perplexed by phrases such as “in” and “out of” consciousness, and
stumbles over the equivocal use of “inner” to denote both mental (or
non-spatial) in general, and locally sub-cuticular in special. Still, he
gets so far as to see that the law of consciousness is that in it neither
feelings nor relations have independent subsistence, and that the unit of
mind does not begin till what he calls two feelings are made one. The
phraseology may be faulty, but it shows an inkling of the _a priori_.
Unfortunately it is apparently forgotten; and the language too often
reverts into the habit of what he calls the “objective,” i.e. purely
physical, sciences.
Mr. Spencer’s conception of Psychology restricts it to the more general
physics of the mind. For its more concrete life he refers us to Sociology.
But his Sociology is yet unfinished: and from the plan of its inception,
and the imperfect conception of the ends and means of its investigation,
hardly admits of completion in any systematic sense. To that incipiency is
no doubt due its excess in historical or anecdotal detail—detail, however,
too much segregated from its social context, and in general its tendency
to neglect normal and central theory for incidental and peripheral facts.
Here, too, there is a weakness in First Principles and a love of
catchwords, which goes along with the fallacy that illustration is proof.
Above all, it is evident that the great fact of religion overhangs Mr.
Spencer with the attraction of an unsolved and unacceptable problem. He
cannot get the religious ideas of men into co-ordination with their
scientific, aesthetic, and moral doctrines; and only betrays his sense of
the high importance of the former by placing them in the forefront of
inquiry, as due to the inexperience and limitations of the so-called
primitive man. That is hardly adequate recognition of the religious
principle: and the defect will make itself seriously felt, should he ever
come to carry out the further stage of his prospectus dealing with “the
growth and correlation of language, knowledge, morals, and aesthetics.”
(ii.) Mind and Morals.
A Mental Philosophy—if we so put what might also be rendered a Spiritual
Philosophy, or Philosophy of Spirit—may to an English reader suggest
something much narrower than it actually contains. A Philosophy of the
Human Mind—if we consult English specimens—would not imply much more than
a psychology, and probably what is called an inductive psychology. But as
Hegel understands it, it covers an unexpectedly wide range of topics, the
whole range from Nature to Spirit. Besides Subjective Mind, which would
seem on first thoughts to exhaust the topics of psychology, it goes on to
Mind as Objective, and finally to Absolute mind. And such combinations of
words may sound either self-contradictory or meaningless.
The first Section deals with the range of what is usually termed
Psychology. That term indeed is employed by Hegel, in a restricted sense,
to denote the last of the three sub-sections in the discussion of
Subjective Mind. The Mind, which is the topic of psychology proper, cannot
be assumed as a ready-made object, or datum. A Self, a self-consciousness,
an intelligent and volitional agent, if it be the birthright of man, is a
birthright which he has to realise for himself, to earn and to make his
own. To trace the steps by which mind in its stricter acceptation, as will
and intelligence, emerges from the general animal sensibility which is the
crowning phase of organic life, and the final problem of biology, is the
work of two preliminary sub-sections—the first entitled _Anthropology_,
the second the _Phenomenology of Mind_.
The subject of Anthropology, as Hegel understands it, is the Soul—the raw
material of consciousness, the basis of all higher mental life. This is a
borderland, where the ground is still debateable between Nature and Mind:
it is the region of feeling, where the sensibility has not yet been
differentiated to intelligence. Soul and body are here, as the phrase
goes, in communion: the inward life is still imperfectly disengaged from
its natural co-physical setting. Still one with nature, it submits to
natural influences and natural vicissitudes: is not as yet master of
itself, but the half-passive receptacle of a foreign life, of a general
vitality, of a common soul not yet fully differentiated into
individuality. But it is awaking to self-activity: it is emerging to
Consciousness,—to distinguish itself, as aware and conscious, from the
facts of life and sentiency of which it is aware.
From this region of psychical physiology or physiological psychology,
Hegel in the second sub-section of his first part takes us to the
“Phenomenology of Mind,”—to Consciousness. The sentient soul is also
conscious—but in a looser sense of that word(4): it has feelings, but can
scarcely be said _itself_ to know that it has them. As consciousness, the
Soul has come to separate what it is from what it feels. The distinction
emerges of a subject which is conscious, and an object _of_ which it is
conscious. And the main thing is obviously the relationship between the
two, or the Consciousness itself, as tending to distinguish itself alike
from its subject and its object. Hence, perhaps, may be gathered why it is
called Phenomenology of Mind. Mind as yet is not yet more than emergent or
apparent: nor yet self-possessed and self-certified. No longer, however,
one with the circumambient nature which it feels, it sees itself set
against it, but only as a passive recipient of it, a _tabula rasa_ on
which external nature is reflected, or to which phenomena are presented.
No longer, on the other hand, a mere passive instrument of suggestion from
without, its instinct of life, its _nisus_ of self-assertion is developed,
through antagonism to a like _nisus_, into the consciousness of self-hood,
of a Me and Mine as set against a Thee and Thine. But just in proportion
as it is so developed in opposition to and recognition of other equally
self-centred selves, it has passed beyond the narrower characteristic of
Consciousness proper. It is no longer mere intelligent perception or
reproduction of a world, but it is life, with perception (or apperception)
of that life. It has returned in a way to its original unity with nature,
but it is now the sense of its self-hood—the consciousness of itself as
the focus in which subjective and objective are at one. Or, to put it in
the language of the great champion of Realism(5), the standpoint of Reason
or full-grown Mind is this: “The world which appears to us is our percept,
therefore in us. The real world, out of which we explain the phenomenon,
is our thought: therefore in us.”
The third sub-section of the theory of Subjective Mind—the Psychology
proper—deals with Mind. This is the real, independent Psyché—hence the
special appropriation of the term Psychology. “The Soul,” says Herbart,
“no doubt dwells in a body: there are, moreover, corresponding states of
the one and the other: but nothing corporeal occurs in the Soul, nothing
purely mental, which we could reckon to our Ego, occurs in the body: the
affections of the body are no representations of the Ego, and our pleasant
and unpleasant feelings do not immediately lie in the organic life they
favour or hinder.” Such a Soul, so conceived, is an intelligent and
volitional self, a being of intellectual and “active” powers or phenomena:
it is a Mind. And “Mind,” adds Hegel(6), “is just this elevation above
Nature and physical modes and above the complication with an external
object.” Nothing is _external_ to it: it is rather the internalising of
all externality. In this psychology proper, we are out of any immediate
connexion with physiology. “Psychology as such,” remarks Herbart, “has its
questions common to it with Idealism”—with the doctrine that all reality
is mental reality. It traces, in Hegel’s exposition of it, the steps of
the way by which mind realises that independence which is its
characteristic stand-point. On the intellectual side that independence is
assured in language,—the system of signs by which the intelligence stamps
external objects as its own, made part of its inner world. A science, some
one has said, is after all only _une langue bien faite_. So, reversing the
saying, we may note that a language is an inwardised and mind-appropriated
world. On the active side, the independence of mind is seen in
self-enjoyment, in happiness, or self-content, where impulse and volition
have attained satisfaction in equilibrium, and the soul possesses itself
in fullness. Such a mind(7), which has made the world its certified
possession in language, and which enjoys itself in self-possession of
soul, called happiness, is a free Mind. And that is the highest which
Subjective Mind can reach.
At this point, perhaps, having rounded off by a liberal sweep the scope of
psychology, the ordinary mental philosophy would stop. Hegel, instead of
finishing, now goes on to the field of what he calls Objective Mind. For
as yet it has been only the story of a preparation, an inward adorning and
equipment, and we have yet to see what is to come of it in actuality. Or
rather, we have yet to consider the social forms on which this preparation
rests. The mind, self-possessed and sure of itself or free, is so only
through the objective shape which its main development runs parallel with.
An intelligent Will, or a practical reason, was the last word of the
psychological development. But a reason which is practical, or a volition
which is intelligent, is realised by action which takes regular shapes,
and by practice which transforms the world. The theory of Objective Mind
delineates the new form which nature assumes under the sway of
intelligence and will. That intellectual world realises itself by
transforming the physical into a social and political world, the given
natural conditions of existence into a freely-instituted system of life,
the primitive struggle of kinds for subsistence into the ordinances of the
social state. Given man as a being possessed of will and intelligence,
this inward faculty, whatever be its degree, will try to impress itself on
nature and to reproduce itself in a legal, a moral, and social world. The
kingdom of deed replaces, or rises on the foundation of, the kingdom of
word: and instead of the equilibrium of a well-adjusted soul comes the
harmonious life of a social organism. We are, in short, in the sphere of
Ethics and Politics, of Jurisprudence and Morals, of Law and Conscience.
Here,—as always in Hegel’s system—there is a triad of steps. First the
province of Law or Right. But if we call it Law, we must keep out of sight
the idea of a special law-giver, of a conscious imposition of laws, above
all by a political superior. And if we call it Right, we must remember
that it is neutral, inhuman, abstract right: the right whose principle is
impartial and impassive uniformity, equality, order;—not moral right, or
the equity which takes cognisance of circumstances, of personal claims,
and provides against its own hardness. The intelligent will of Man,
throwing itself upon the mere gifts of nature as their appointed master,
creates the world of Property—of things instrumental, and regarded as
adjectival, to the human personality. But the autonomy of Reason (which is
latent in the will) carries with it certain consequences. As it acts, it
also, by its inherent quality of uniformity or universality, enacts for
itself a law and laws, and creates the realm of formal equality or
order-giving law. But this is a _mere_ equality: which is not inconsistent
with what in other respects may be excess of inequality. What one does, if
it is really to be treated as done, others may or even must do: each act
creates an expectation of continuance and uniformity of behaviour. The
doer is bound by it, and others are entitled to do the like. The material
which the person appropriates creates a system of obligation. Thus is
constituted—in the natural give and take of rational Wills—in the
inevitable course of human action and reaction,—a system of rights and
duties. This law of equality—the basis of justice, and the seed of
benevolence—is the scaffolding or perhaps rather the rudimentary framework
of society and moral life. Or it is the bare skeleton which is to be
clothed upon by the softer and fuller outlines of the social tissues and
the ethical organs.
And thus the first range of Objective Mind postulates the second, which
Hegel calls “Morality.” The word is to be taken in its strict sense as a
protest against the quasi-physical order of law. It is the morality of
conscience and of the good will, of the inner rectitude of soul and
purpose, as all-sufficient and supreme. Here is brought out the
complementary factor in social life: the element of liberty, spontaneity,
self-consciousness. The motto of mere inward morality (as opposed to the
spirit of legality) is (in Kant’s words): “There is nothing without
qualification good, in heaven or earth, but only a good will.” The
essential condition of goodness is that the action be done with purpose
and intelligence, and in full persuasion of its goodness by the conscience
of the agent. The characteristic of Morality thus described is its
essential inwardness, and the sovereignty of the conscience over all
heteronomy. Its justification is that it protests against the authority of
a mere external or objective order, subsisting and ruling in separation
from the subjectivity. Its defect is the turn it gives to this assertion
of the rights of subjective conscience: briefly in the circumstance that
it tends to set up a mere individualism against a mere universalism,
instead of realising the unity and essential interdependence of the two.
The third sub-section of the theory of Objective Mind describes a state of
affairs in which this antithesis is explicitly overcome. This is the moral
life in a social community. Here law and usage prevail and provide the
fixed permanent scheme of life: but the law and the usage are, in their
true or ideal conception, only the unforced expression of the mind and
will of those who live under them. And, on the other hand, the mind and
will of the individual members of such a community are pervaded and
animated by its universal spirit. In such a community, and so constituting
it, the individual is at once free and equal, and that because of the
spirit of fraternity, which forms its spiritual link. In the world
supposed to be governed by mere legality the idea of right is exclusively
prominent; and when that is the case, it may often happen that _summum jus
summa injuria_. In mere morality, the stress falls exclusively on the idea
of inward freedom, or the necessity of the harmony of the judgment and the
will, or the dependence of conduct upon conscience. In the union of the
two, in the moral community as normally constituted, the mere idea of
right is replaced, or controlled and modified, by the idea of equity—a
balance as it were between the two preceding, inasmuch as motive and
purpose are employed to modify and interpret strict right. But this
effect—this harmonisation—is brought about by the predominance of a new
idea—the principle of benevolence,—a principle however which is itself
modified by the fundamental idea of right or law(8) into a wise or
regulated kindliness.
But what Hegel chiefly deals with under this head is the interdependence
of form and content, of social order and personal progress. In the picture
of an ethical organisation or harmoniously-alive moral community he shows
us partly the underlying idea which gave room for the antithesis between
law and conscience, and partly the outlines of the ideal in which that
conflict becomes only the instrument of progress. This organisation has
three grades or three typical aspects. These are the Family, Civil
Society, and the State. The first of these, the Family, must be taken to
include those primary unities of human life where the natural affinity of
sex and the natural ties of parentage are the preponderant influence in
forming and maintaining the social group. This, as it were, is the
soul-nucleus of social organisation: where the principle of unity is an
instinct, a feeling, an absorbing solidarity. Next comes what Hegel has
called Civil Society,—meaning however by civil the antithesis to
political, the society of those who may be styled _bourgeois_, not
_citoyens_:—and meaning by society the antithesis to community. There are
other natural influences binding men together besides those which form the
close unities of the family, gens, tribe, or clan. Economical needs
associate human beings within a much larger radius—in ways capable of
almost indefinite expansion—but also in a way much less intense and deep.
Civil Society is the more or less loosely organised aggregate of such
associations, which, if, on one hand, they keep human life from stagnating
in the mere family, on another, accentuate more sharply the tendency to
competition and the struggle for life. Lastly, in the Political State
comes the synthesis of family and society. Of the family; in so far as the
State tends to develope itself on the nature-given unit of the Nation (an
extended family, supplementing as need arises real descent by fictitious
incorporations), and has apparently never permanently maintained itself
except on the basis of a predominant common nationality. Of society; in so
far as the extension and dispersion of family ties have left free room for
the differentiation of many other sides of human interest and action, and
given ground for the full development of individuality. In consequence of
this, the State (and such a state as Hegel describes is essentially the
idea or ideal of the modern State)(9) has a certain artificial air about
it. It can only be maintained by the free action of intelligence: it must
make its laws public: it must bring to consciousness the principles of its
constitution, and create agencies for keeping up unity of organisation
through the several separate provinces or contending social interests,
each of which is inclined to insist on the right of home mis-rule.
The State—which in its actuality must always be a quasi-national state—is
thus the supreme unity of Nature and Mind. Its natural basis in land,
language, blood, and the many ties which spring therefrom, has to be
constantly raised into an intelligent unity through universal interests.
But the elements of race and of culture have no essential connexion, and
they perpetually incline to wrench themselves asunder. Blood and judgment
are for ever at war in the state as in the individual(10): the
cosmopolitan interest, to which the maxim is _Ubi bene, ibi patria_,
resists the national, which adopts the patriotic watchword of Hector(11).
The State however has another source of danger in the very principle that
gave it birth. It arose through antagonism: it was baptised on the
battlefield, and it only lives as it is able to assert itself against a
foreign foe. And this circumstance tends to intensify and even pervert its
natural basis of nationality:—tends to give the very conception of the
political a negative and superficial look. But, notwithstanding all these
drawbacks, the State in its Idea is entitled to the name Hobbes gave
it,—the Mortal God. Here in a way culminates the obviously objective,—we
may almost say, visible and tangible—development of Man and Mind. Here it
attains a certain completeness—a union of reality and of ideality: a
quasi-immortality, a quasi-universality. What the individual person could
not do unaided, he can do in the strength of his commonwealth. Much that
in the solitary was but implicit or potential, is in the State actualised.
But the God of the State is a mortal God. It is but a national and a
limited mind. To be actual, one must at least begin by restricting
oneself. Or, rather actuality is rational, but always with a conditioned
and a relative rationality(12): it is in the realm of action and
re-action,—in the realm of change and nature. It has warring forces
outside it,—warring forces inside it. Its unity is never perfect: because
it never produces a true identity of interests within, or maintains an
absolute independence without. Thus the true and real State—the State in
its Idea—the realisation of concrete humanity,—of Mind as the fullness and
unity of nature—is not reached in any single or historical State: but
floats away, when we try to seize it, into the endless progress of
history. Always indeed the State, the historical and objective, points
beyond itself. It does so first in the succession of times. _Die
Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht._(13) And in that doom of the world the
eternal blast sweeps along the successive generations of the temporal, one
expelling another from the stage of time—each because it is inadequate to
the Idea which it tried to express, and has succumbed to an enemy from
without because it was not a real and true unity within.
But if temporal flees away before another temporal, it abides in so far as
it has, however inadequately, given expression and visible reality—as it
points inward and upward—to the eternal. The earthly state is also the
city of God; and if the republic of Plato seems to find scant admission
into the reality of flesh and blood, it stands eternal as a witness in the
heaven of idea. Behind the fleeting succession of consulates and
dictatures, of aristocracy and empire, feuds of plebeian with patrician,
in that apparent anarchy of powers which the so-called Roman constitution
is to the superficial observer, there is the eternal Rome, one, strong,
victorious, _semper eadem_: the Rome of Virgil and Justinian, the ghost
whereof still haunts with memories the seven-hilled city, but which with
full spiritual presence lives in the law, the literature, the manners of
the modern world. To find fitter expression for this Absolute Mind than it
has in the Ethical community—to reach that reality of which the moral
world is but one-sidedly representative—is the work of Art, Religion, and
Philosophy. And to deal with these efforts to find the truth and the unity
of Mind and Nature is the subject of Hegel’s third Section.
(iii.) Religion and Philosophy.
It may be well at this point to guard against a misconception of this
serial order of exposition(14). As stage is seen to follow stage, the
historical imagination, which governs our ordinary current of ideas, turns
the logical dependence into a time-sequence. But it is of course not meant
that the later stage follows the earlier in history. The later is the more
real, and therefore the more fundamental. But we can only understand by
abstracting and then transcending our abstractions, or rather by showing
how the abstraction implies relations which force us to go further and
beyond our arbitrary arrest. Each stage therefore either stands to that
preceding it as an antithesis, which inevitably dogs its steps as an
accusing spirit, or it is the conjunction of the original thesis with the
antithesis, in a union which should not be called synthesis because it is
a closer fusion and true marriage of minds. A truth and reality, though
fundamental, is only appreciated at its true value and seen in all its
force where it appears as the reconciliation and reunion of partial and
opposing points of view. Thus, e.g., the full significance of the State
does not emerge so long as we view it in isolation as a supposed single
state, but only as it is seen in the conflict of history, in its actual
“energy” as a world-power among powers, always pointing beyond itself to a
something universal which it fain would be, and yet cannot be. Or, again,
there never was a civil or economic society which existed save under the
wing of a state, or in one-sided assumption of state powers to itself: and
a family is no isolated and independent unit belonging to a supposed
patriarchal age, but was always mixed up with, and in manifold dependence
upon, political and civil combinations. The true family, indeed, far from
preceding the state in time, presupposes the political power to give it
its precise sphere and its social stability: as is well illustrated by
that typical form of it presented in the Roman state.
So, again, religion does not supervene upon an already existing political
and moral system and invest it with an additional sanction. The true order
would be better described as the reverse. The real basis of social life,
and even of intelligence, is religion. As some thinkers quaintly put it,
the known rests and lives on the bosom of the Unknowable. But when we say
that, we must at once guard against a misconception. There are religions
of all sorts; and some of them which are most heard of in the modern world
only exist or survive in the shape of a traditional name and venerated
creed which has lost its power. Nor is a religion necessarily committed to
a definite conception of a supernatural—of a personal power outside the
order of Nature. But in all cases, religion is a faith and a theory which
gives unity to the facts of life, and gives it, not because the unity is
in detail proved or detected, but because life and experience in their
deepest reality inexorably demand and evince such a unity to the heart.
The religion of a time is not its nominal creed, but its dominant
conviction of the meaning of reality, the principle which animates all its
being and all its striving, the faith it has in the laws of nature and the
purpose of life. Dimly or clearly felt and perceived, religion has for its
principle (one cannot well say, its object) not the unknowable, but the
inner unity of life and knowledge, of act and consciousness, a unity which
is certified in its every knowledge, but is never fully demonstrable by
the summation of all its ascertained items. As such a felt and believed
synthesis of the world and life, religion is the unity which gives
stability and harmony to the social sphere; just as morality in its turn
gives a partial and practical realisation to the ideal of religion. But
religion does not merely establish and sanction morality; it also frees it
from a certain narrowness it always has, as of the earth. Or, otherwise
put, morality has to the keener inspection something in it which is more
than the mere moral injunction at first indicates. Beyond the moral, in
its stricter sense, as the obligatory duty and the obedience to law, rises
and expands the beautiful and the good: a beautiful which is
disinterestedly loved, and a goodness which has thrown off all utilitarian
relativity, and become a free self-enhancing joy. The true spirit of
religion sees in the divine judgment not a mere final sanction to human
morality which has failed of its earthly close, not the re-adjustment of
social and political judgments in accordance with our more conscientious
inner standards, but a certain, though, for our part-by-part vision,
incalculable proportion between what is done and suffered. And in this
liberation of the moral from its restrictions, Art renders no slight aid.
Thus in different ways, religion presupposes morality to fill up its
vacant form, and morality presupposes religion to give its laws an
ultimate sanction, which at the same time points beyond their limitations.
But art, religion, and philosophy still rest on the national culture and
on the individual mind. However much they rise in the heights of the ideal
world, they never leave the reality of life and circumstance behind, and
float in the free empyrean. Yet there are degrees of universality, degrees
in which they reach what they promised. As the various psychical _nuclei_
of an individual consciousness tend through the course of experience to
gather round a central idea and by fusion and assimilation form a complete
mental organisation; so, through the march of history, there grows up a
complication and a fusion of national ideas and aspirations, which, though
still retaining the individuality and restriction of a concrete national
life, ultimately present an organisation social, aesthetic, and religious
which is a type of humanity in its universality and completeness. Always
moving in the measure and on the lines of the real development of its
social organisation, the art and religion of a nation tend to give
expression to what social and political actuality at its best but
imperfectly sets in existence. They come more and more to be, not mere
competing fragments as set side by side with those of others, but
comparatively equal and complete representations of the many-sided and
many-voiced reality of man and the world. Yet always they live and
flourish in reciprocity with the fullness of practical institutions and
individual character. An abstractly universal art and religion is a
delusion—until all diversities of geography and climate, of language and
temperament, have been made to disappear. If these energies are in power
and reality and not merely in name, they cannot be applied like a panacea
or put on like a suit of ready-made clothes. If alive, they grow with
individualised type out of the social situation: and they can only attain
a vulgar and visible universality, so far as they attach themselves to
some simple and uniform aspects,—a part tolerably identical everywhere—in
human nature in all times and races.
Art, according to Hegel’s account, is the first of the three expressions
of Absolute Mind. But the key-note to the whole is to be found in
Religion(15): or Religion is the generic description of that phase of mind
which has found rest in the fullness of attainment and is no longer a
struggle and a warfare, but a fruition. “It is the conviction of all
nations,” he says(16), “that in the religious consciousness they hold
their truth; and they have always regarded religion as their dignity and
as the Sunday of their life. Whatever excites our doubts and alarms, all
grief and all anxiety, all that the petty fields of finitude can offer to
attract us, we leave behind on the shoals of time: and as the traveller on
the highest peak of a mountain range, removed from every distinct view of
the earth’s surface, quietly lets his vision neglect all the restrictions
of the landscape and the world; so in this pure region of faith man,
lifted above the hard and inflexible reality, sees it with his mind’s eye
reflected in the rays of the mental sun to an image where its discords,
its lights and shades, are softened to eternal calm. In this region of
mind flow the waters of forgetfulness, from which Psyche drinks, and in
which she drowns all her pain: and the darknesses of this life are here
softened to a dream-image, and transfigured into a mere setting for the
splendours of the Eternal.’”
If we take Religion, in this extended sense, we find it is the sense, the
vision, the faith, the certainty of the eternal in the changeable, of the
infinite in the finite, of the reality in appearance, of the truth in
error. It is freedom from the distractions and pre-occupations of the
particular details of life; it is the sense of permanence, repose,
certainty, rounding off, toning down and absorbing the vicissitude, the
restlessness, the doubts of actual life. Such a victory over palpable
reality has no doubt its origin—its embryology—in phases of mind which
have been already discussed in the first section. Religion will vary
enormously according to the grade of national mood of mind and social
development in which it emerges. But whatever be the peculiarities of its
original swaddling-clothes, its cardinal note will be a sense of
dependence on, and independence in, something more permanent, more august,
more of a surety and stay than visible and variable nature and
man,—something also which whether God or devil, or both in one, holds the
keys of life and death, of weal and woe, and holds them from some safe
vantage-ground above the lower realms of change. By this central being the
outward and the inward, past and present and to come, are made one. And as
already indicated, Religion, emerging, as it does, from social man, from
mind ethical, will retain traces of the two _foci_ in society: the
individual subjectivity and the objective community. Retain them however
only as traces, which still show in the actually envisaged reconciliation.
For that is what religion does to morality. It carries a step higher the
unity or rather combination gained in the State: it is the fuller harmony
of the individual and the collectivity. The moral conscience rests in
certainty and fixity on the religious.
But Religion (thus widely understood as the faith in sempiternal and
all-explaining reality) at first appears under a guise of Art. The poem
and the pyramid, the temple-image and the painting, the drama and the
fairy legend, these are religion: but they are, perhaps, religion as Art.
And that means that they present the eternal under sensible
representations, the work of an artist, and in a perishable material of
limited range. Yet even the carvers of a long-past day whose works have
been disinterred from the plateaux of Auvergne knew that they gave to the
perishable life around them a quasi-immortality: and the myth-teller of a
savage tribe elevated the incident of a season into a perennial power of
love and fear. The cynic may remind us that from the finest picture of the
artist, readily
“We turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn.”
And yet it may be said in reply to the cynic that, had it not been for the
deep-imprinted lesson of the artist, it would have been but a brutal
instinct that would have drawn our eyes. The artist, the poet, the
musician, reveal the meaning, the truth, the reality of the world: they
teach us, they help us, backward younger brothers, to see, to hear, to
feel what our rude senses had failed to detect. They enact the miracle of
the loaves and fishes, again and again: out of the common limited things
of every day they produce a bread of life in which the generations
continue to find nourishment.
But if Art embodies for us the unseen and the eternal, it embodies it in
the stone, the colour, the tone, and the word: and these are by themselves
only dead matter. To the untutored eye and taste the finest
picture-gallery is only a weariness: when the national life has drifted
away, the sacred book and the image are but idols and enigmas. “The
statues are now corpses from which the vivifying soul has fled, and the
hymns are words whence faith has departed: the tables of the Gods are
without spiritual meat and drink, and games and feasts no longer afford
the mind its joyful union with the being of being. The works of the Muse
lack that intellectual force which knew itself strong and real by crushing
gods and men in its winepress. They are now (in this iron age) what they
are for us,—fair fruits broken from the tree, and handed to us by a kindly
destiny. But the gift is like the fruits which the girl in the picture
presents: she does not give the real life of their existence, not the tree
which bore them, not the earth and the elements which entered into their
substance, nor the climate which formed their quality, nor the change of
seasons which governed the process of their growth. Like her, Destiny in
giving us the works of ancient art does not give us their world, not the
spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened,
but solely a memory and a suggestion of this actuality. Our act in
enjoying them, therefore, is not a Divine service: were it so, our mind
would achieve its perfect and satisfying truth. All that we do is a mere
externalism, which from these fruits wipes off some rain-drop, some speck
of dust, and which, in place of the inward elements of moral actuality
that created and inspired them, tries from the dead elements of their
external reality, such as language and historical allusion, to set up a
tedious mass of scaffolding, not in order to live ourselves into them, but
only to form a picture of them in our minds. But as the girl who proffers
the plucked fruits is more and nobler than the natural element with all
its details of tree, air, light, &c. which first yielded them, because she
gathers all this together, in a nobler way, into the glance of the
conscious eye and the gesture which proffers them; so the spirit of
destiny which offers us those works of art is more than the ethical life
and actuality of the ancient people: for it is the inwardising of that
mind which in them was still self-estranged and self-dispossessed:—it is
the spirit of tragic destiny, the destiny which collects all those
individualised gods and attributes of substance into the one Pantheon. And
that temple of all the gods is Mind conscious of itself as mind(17).”
Religion enters into its more adequate form when it ceases to appear in
the guise of Art and realises that the kingdom of God is within, that the
truth must be _felt_, the eternal _inwardly_ revealed, the holy one
apprehended by _faith_(18), not by outward vision. Eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, the things of God. They cannot be presented, or delineated:
they come only in the witness of the spirit. The human soul itself is the
only worthy temple of the Most High, whom heaven, and the heaven of
heavens, cannot contain. Here in truth God has come down to dwell with
men; and the Son of Man, caught up in the effusion of the Spirit, can in
all assurance and all humility claim that he is divinified. Here
apparently Absolute Mind is reached: the soul knows no limitation, no
struggle: in time it is already eternal. Yet, there is, according to
Hegel, a flaw,—not in the essence and the matter, but in the manner and
mode in which the ordinary religious consciousness represents to itself,
or pictures that unification which it feels and experiences.
“In religion then this unification of ultimate Being with the Self is
implicitly reached. But the religious consciousness, if it has this
symbolic idea of its reconciliation, still has it as a mere symbol or
representation. It attains the satisfaction by tacking on to its pure
negativity, and that externally, the positive signification of its unity
with the ultimate Being: its satisfaction remains therefore tainted by the
antithesis of another world. Its own reconciliation, therefore, is
presented to its consciousness as something far away, something far away
in the future: just as the reconciliation which the other Self
accomplished appears as a far-away thing in the past. The one Divine Man
had but an implicit father and only an actual mother; conversely the
universal divine man, the community, has its own deed and knowledge for
its father, but for its mother only the eternal Love, which it only
_feels_, but does not _behold_ in its consciousness as an actual immediate
object. Its reconciliation therefore is in its heart, but still at
variance with its consciousness, and its actuality still has a flaw. In
its field of consciousness the place of implicit reality or side of pure
mediation is taken by the reconciliation that lies far away behind: the
place of the actually present, or the side of immediacy and existence, is
filled by the world which has still to wait for its transfiguration to
glory. Implicitly no doubt the world is reconciled with the eternal Being;
and that Being, it is well known, no longer looks upon the object as alien
to it, but in its love sees it as like itself. But for self-consciousness
this immediate presence is not yet set in the full light of mind. In its
immediate consciousness accordingly the spirit of the community is parted
from its religious: for while the religious consciousness declares that
they are implicitly not parted, this implicitness is not raised to reality
and not yet grown to absolute self-certainty(19).”
Religion therefore, which as it first appeared in art-worship had yet to
realise its essential inwardness or spirituality, so has now to overcome
the antithesis in which its (the religious) consciousness stands to the
secular. For the peculiarly religious type of mind is distinguished by an
indifference and even hostility, more or less veiled, to art, to morality
and the civil state, to science and to nature. Strong in the certainty of
faith, or of its implicit rest in God, it resents too curious inquiry into
the central mystery of its union, and in its distincter consciousness sets
the foundation of faith on the evidence of a fact, which, however, it in
the same breath declares to be unique and miraculous, the central event of
the ages, pointing back in its reference to the first days of humanity,
and forward in the future to the winding-up of the business of terrestrial
life. Philosophy, according to Hegel’s conception of it, does but draw the
conclusion supplied by the premisses of religion: it supplements and
rounds off into coherence the religious implications. The unique events in
Judea nearly nineteen centuries ago are for it also the first step in a
new revelation of man’s relationship to God: but while it acknowledges the
transcendent interest of that age, it lays main stress on the permanent
truth then revealed, and it insists on the duty of carrying out the
principle there awakened to all the depth and breadth of its explication.
Its task—its supreme task—is to _explicate religion_. But to do so is to
show that religion is no exotic, and no _mere_ revelation from an external
source. It is to show that religion is the truth, the complete reality, of
the mind that lived in Art, that founded the state and sought to be
dutiful and upright: the truth, the crowning fruit of all scientific
knowledge, of all human affections, of all secular consciousness. Its
lesson ultimately is that there is nothing essentially common or unclean:
that the holy is not parted off from the true and the good and the
beautiful.
Religion thus expanded descends from its abstract or “intelligible” world,
to which it had retired from art and science, and the affairs of ordinary
life. Its God—as a true God—is not of the dead alone, but also of the
living: not a far-off supreme and ultimate Being, but also a man among
men. Philosophy thus has to break down the middle partition-wall of life,
the fence between secular and sacred. It is but religion come to its
maturity, made at home in the world, and no longer a stranger and a
wonder. Religion has pronounced in its inmost heart and faith of faith,
that the earth is the Lord’s, and that day unto day shows forth the divine
handiwork. But the heart of unbelief, of little faith, has hardly uttered
the word, than it forgets its assurance and leans to the conviction that
the prince of this world is the Spirit of Evil. The mood of Théodicée is
also—but with a difference—the mood of philosophy. It asserts the ways of
Providence: but its providence is not the God of the Moralist, or the
ideal of the Artist, or rather is not these only, but also the Law of
Nature, and more than that. Its aim is the Unity of History. The words
have sometimes been lightly used to mean that events run on in one
continuous flow, and that there are no abrupt, no ultimate beginnings,
parting age from age. But the Unity of History in its full sense is beyond
history: it is history “reduced” from the expanses of time to the eternal
present: its thousand years made one day,—made even the glance of a
moment. The theme of the Unity of History—in the full depth of unity and
the full expanse of history—is the theme of Hegelian philosophy. It traces
the process in which Mind has to be all-inclusive, self-upholding, one
with the Eternal reality.
“That process of the mind’s self-realisation” says Hegel in the close of
his _Phenomenology_, “exhibits a lingering movement and succession of
minds, a gallery of images, each of which, equipped with the complete
wealth of mind, only seems to linger because the Self has to penetrate and
to digest this wealth of its Substance. As its perfection consists in
coming completely to _know_ what it _is_ (its substance), this knowledge
is its self-involution in which it deserts its outward existence and
surrenders its shape to recollection. Thus self-involved, it is sunk in
the night of its self-consciousness: but in that night its vanished being
is preserved, and that being, thus in idea preserved,—old, but now
new-born of the spirit,—is the new sphere of being, a new world, a new
phase of mind. In this new phase it has again to begin afresh and from the
beginning, and again nurture itself to maturity from its own resources, as
if for it all that preceded were lost, and it had learned nothing from the
experience of the earlier minds. Yet is that recollection a preservation
of experience: it is the quintessence, and in fact a higher form, of the
substance. If therefore this new mind appears only to count on its own
resources, and to start quite fresh and blank, it is at the same time on a
higher grade that it starts. The intellectual and spiritual realm, which
is thus constructed in actuality, forms a succession in time, where one
mind relieved another of its watch, and each took over the kingdom of the
world from the preceding. The purpose of that succession is to reveal the
depth, and that depth is the absolute comprehension of mind: this
revelation is therefore to uplift its depth, to spread it out in breadth,
so negativing this self-involved Ego, wherein it is self-dispossessed or
reduced to substance. But it is also its time: the course of time shows
this dispossession itself dispossessed, and thus in its extension it is no
less in its depth, the self. The way to that goal,—absolute
self-certainty—or the mind knowing itself as mind—is the inwardising of
the minds, as they severally are in themselves, and as they accomplish the
organisation of their realm. Their conservation,—regarded on the side of
its free and apparently contingent succession of fact—is history: on the
side of their comprehended organisation, again, it is the science of
mental phenomenology: the two together, comprehended history, form at once
the recollection and the grave-yard of the absolute Mind, the actuality,
truth, and certitude of his throne, apart from which he were lifeless and
alone.”
Such in brief outline—lingering most on the points where Hegel has here
been briefest—is the range of the Philosophy of Mind. Its aim is to
comprehend, not to explain: to put together in intelligent unity, not to
analyse into a series of elements. For it psychology is not an analysis or
description of mental phenomena, of laws of association, of the growth of
certain powers and ideas, but a “comprehended history” of the formation of
subjective mind, of the intelligent, feeling, willing self or ego. For it
Ethics is part and only part of the great scheme or system of
self-development; but continuing into greater concreteness the normal
endowment of the individual mind, and but preparing the ground on which
religion may be most effectively cultivated. And finally Religion itself,
released from its isolation and other-world sacrosanctity, is shown to be
only the crown of life, the ripest growth of actuality, and shown to be so
by philosophy, whilst it is made clear that religion is the basis of
philosophy, or that a philosophy can only go as far as the religious
stand-point allows. The hierarchy, if so it be called, of the spiritual
forces is one where none can stand alone, or claim an abstract and
independent supremacy. The truth of egoism is the truth of altruism: the
truly moral is the truly religious: and each is not what it professes to
be unless it anticipate the later, or include the earlier.
(iv.) Mind or Spirit.
It may be said, however, that for such a range of subjects the term Mind
is wretchedly inadequate and common-place, and that the better rendering
of the title would be Philosophy of Spirit. It may be admitted that Mind
is not all that could be wished. But neither is Spirit blameless. And, it
may be added, Hegel’s own term _Geist_ has to be unduly strained to cover
so wide a region. It serves—and was no doubt meant to serve—as a sign of
the conformity of his system with the religion which sees in God no
other-world being, but our very self and mind, and which worships him in
spirit and in truth. And if the use of a word like this could allay the
“ancient variance” between the religious and the philosophic mood, it
would be but churlish perhaps to refuse the sign of compliance and
compromise. But whatever may be the case in German,—and even there the new
wine was dangerous to the old wine-skin—it is certain that to average
English ears the word Spiritual would carry us over the medium line into
the proper land of religiosity. And to do that, as we have seen, is to sin
against the central idea: the idea that religion is of one blood with the
whole mental family, though the most graciously complete of all the
sisters. Yet, however the word may be chosen, the philosophy of Hegel,
like the august lady who appeared in vision to the emprisoned Boëthius,
has on her garment a sign which “signifies the life which is on earth,” as
also a sign which signifies the “right law of heaven”; if her right-hand
holds the “book of the justice of the King omnipotent,” the sceptre in her
left is “corporal judgment against sin(20).”
There is indeed no sufficient reason for contemning the term Mind. If
Inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind has—perhaps to a dainty taste—made
the word unsavoury, that is no reason for refusing to give it all the
wealth of soul and heart, of intellect and will. The _mens aeterna_ which,
if we hear Tacitus, expressed the Hebrew conception of the spirituality of
God, and the Νοῦς which Aristotelianism set supreme in the Soul, are not
the mere or abstract intelligence, which late-acquired habits of
abstraction have made out of them. If the reader will adopt the term (in
want of a better) in its widest scope, we may shelter ourselves under the
example of Wordsworth. His theme is—as he describes it in the
_Recluse_—“the Mind and Man”: his
“voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted;—and how exquisitely too
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish.”
The verse which expounds that “high argument” speaks
“Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith.”
And the poet adds:
“As we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song;
Beauty—a living Presence of the earth
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms
... waits upon my steps.”
The reality duly seen in the spiritual vision
“That inspires
The human Soul of universal earth
Dreaming of things to come”
will be a greater glory than the ideals of imaginative fiction ever
fancied:
“For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.”
If Wordsworth, thus, as it were, echoing the great conception of Francis
Bacon,
“Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation,”
perhaps the poet and the essayist may help us with Hegel to rate the
Mind—the Mind of Man—at its highest value.
Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.
It is not going too far to say that in common estimation psychology has as
yet hardly reached what Kant has called the steady walk of science—_der
sichere Gang der Wissenschaft_. To assert this is not, of course, to throw
any doubts on the importance of the problems, or on the intrinsic value of
the results, in the studies which have been prosecuted under that name. It
is only to note the obvious fact that a number of inquiries of somewhat
discrepant tone, method, and tendency have all at different times covered
themselves under the common title of psychological, and that the work of
orientation is as yet incomplete. Such a destiny seems inevitable, when a
name is coined rather as the title of an unexplored territory, than fixed
on to describe an accomplished fact.
(i.) Psychology as a Science and as a Part of Philosophy.
The _De Anima_ of Aristotle, gathering up into one the work of Plato and
his predecessors, may be said to lay the foundation of psychology. But
even in it, we can already see that there are two elements or aspects
struggling for mastery: two elements not unrelated or independent, but
hard to keep fairly and fully in unity. On one hand there is the
conception of Soul as a part of Nature, as a grade of existence in the
physical or natural universe,—in the universe of things which suffer
growth and change, which are never entirely “without matter,” and are
always attached to or present in body. From this point of view Aristotle
urged that a sound and realistic psychology must, e.g. in its definition
of a passion, give the prominent place to its physical (or material)
expression, and not to its mental form or significance. It must remember,
he said, that the phenomena or “accidents” are what really throw light on
the nature or the “substance” of the Soul. On the other hand, there are
two points to be considered. There is, first of all, the counterpoising
remark that the conception of Soul as such, as a unity and common
characteristic, will be determinative of the phenomena or
“accidents,”—will settle, as it were, what we are to observe and look for,
and how we are to describe our observations. And by the _conception_ of
Soul, is meant not _a_ soul, as a thing or agent (subject) which has
properties attaching to it; but soul, as the generic feature, the
universal, which is set as a stamp on everything that claims to be
psychical. In other words, Soul is one, not as a single thing contrasted
with its attributes, activities, or exercises of force (such single thing
will be shown by logic to be a metaphysical fiction); but as the unity of
form and character, the comprehensive and identical feature, which is
present in all its manifestations and exercises. But there is a second
consideration. The question is asked by Aristotle whether it is completely
and strictly accurate to put Soul under the category of natural objects.
There is in it, or of it, perhaps, something, and something essential to
it, which belongs to the order of the eternal and self-active: something
which is “form” and “energy” quite unaffected by and separate from
“matter.” How this is related to the realm of the perishable and
changeable is a problem on which Aristotle has been often (and with some
reason) believed to be obscure, if not even inconsistent(21).
In these divergent elements which come to the fore in Aristotle’s
treatment we have the appearance of a radical difference of conception and
purpose as to psychology. He himself does a good deal to keep them both in
view. But it is evident that here already we have the contrast between a
purely physical or (in the narrower sense) “scientific” psychology,
empirical and realistic in treatment, and a more philosophical—what in
certain quarters would be called a speculative or metaphysical—conception
of the problem. There is also in Aristotle the antithesis of a popular or
superficial, and an accurate or analytic, psychology. The former is of a
certain use in dealing, say, with questions of practical ethics and
education: the latter is of more strictly scientific interest. Both of
these distinctions—that between a speculative and an empirical, and that
between a scientific and a popular treatment—affect the subsequent history
of the study. Psychology is sometimes understood to mean the results of
casual observation of our own minds by what is termed introspection, and
by the interpretation of what we may observe in others. Such observations
are in the first place carried on under the guidance of distinctions or
points of view supplied by the names in common use. We interrogate our own
consciousness as to what facts or relations of facts correspond to the
terms of our national language. Or we attempt—what is really an
inexhaustible quest—to get definite divisions between them, and clear-cut
definitions. Inquiries like these which start from popular distinctions
fall a long way short of science: and the inquirer will find that
accidental and essential properties are given in the same handful of
conclusions. Yet there is always much value in these attempts to get our
minds cleared: and it is indispensable for all inquiries that all alleged
or reported facts of mind should be realised and reproduced in our own
mental experience. And this is especially the case in psychology, just
because here we cannot get the object outside us, we cannot get or make a
diagram, and unless we give it reality by re-constructing it,—by
re-interrogating our own experience, our knowledge of it will be but
wooden and mechanical. And the term introspection need not be too
seriously taken: it means much more than watching passively an internal
drama; and is quite as well describable as mental projection, setting out
what was within, and so as it were hidden and involved, before ourselves
in the field of mental vision. Here, as always, the essential point is to
get ourselves well out of the way of the object observed, and to stand,
figuratively speaking, quite on one side.
But even at the best, such a popular or empirical psychology has no
special claim to be ranked as science. It may no doubt be said that at
least it collects, describes, or notes down facts. But even this is not so
certain as it seems. Its so-called facts are very largely fictions, or so
largely interpolated with error, that they cannot be safely used for
construction. If psychology is to accomplish anything valuable, it must go
more radically to work. It must—at least in a measure—discard from its
preliminary view the data of common and current distinctions, and try to
get at something more primary or ultimate as its starting-point. And this
it may do in two ways. It may, in the one case, follow the example of the
physical sciences. In these it is the universal practice to assume that
the explanation of complex and concrete facts is to be attained by (_a_)
postulating certain simple elements (which we may call atoms, molecules,
and perhaps units or monads), which are supposed to be clearly conceivable
and to justify themselves by intrinsic intelligibility, and by (_b_)
assuming that these elements are compounded and combined according to laws
which again are in the last resort self-evident, or such that they seem to
have an obvious and palpable lucidity. Further, such laws being always
axioms or plain postulates of mechanics (for these alone possess this
feature of self-evident intelligibility), they are subject to and invite
all the aids and refinements of the higher mathematical calculus. What the
primary and self-explicative bits of psychical reality may be, is a
further question on which there may be some dispute. They may be, so to
say, taken in a more physical or in a more metaphysical way: i.e. more as
units of nerve-function or more as elements of ideative-function. And
there may be differences as to how far and in what provinces the
mathematical calculus may be applicable. But, in any case, there will be a
strong tendency in psychology, worked on this plan, to follow, _mutatis
mutandis_, and at some distance perhaps, the analogy of material physics.
In both the justification of the postulated units and laws will be their
ability to describe and systematise the observed phenomena in a uniform
and consistent way.
The other way in which psychology gets a foundation and ulterior certainty
is different, and goes deeper. After all, the “scientific” method is only
a way in which the facts of a given sphere are presented in thoroughgoing
interconnexion, each reduced to an exact multiple or fraction of some
other, by an inimitably continued subtraction and addition of an assumed
homogeneous element, found or assumed to be perfectly imaginable
(conceivable). But we may also consider the province in relation to the
whole sphere of reality, may ask what is its place and meaning in the
whole, what reality is in the end driving at or coming to be, and how far
this special province contributes to that end. If we do this, we attach
psychology to philosophy, or, if we prefer so to call it, to metaphysics,
as in the former way we established it on the principles generally
received as governing the method of the physical sciences.
This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question
which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those
engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the
intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with
them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics
can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called empirical
(or, to use the more English phrase, inductive) sciences. On many hands
they are actually so treated: and not without result. Considering the
tendency of metaphysical inquiries, it may be urged that it is well to
avoid preliminary criticism of the current conceptions and beliefs about
reality which these sciences imply. Yet such beliefs are undoubtedly
present and effective. Schopenhauer has popularised the principle that the
pure empiricist is a fiction, that man is a radically metaphysical animal,
and that he inevitably turns what he receives into a part of a dogmatic
creed—a conviction how things ought to be. Almost without effort there
grows up in him, or flows in upon him, a belief and a system of beliefs as
to the order and values of things. Every judgment, even in logic, rests on
such an order of truth. He need not be able to formulate his creed: it
will influence him none the less: nay, his faith will probably seem more a
part of the solid earth and common reality, the less it has been reduced
to a determinate creed or to a code of principles. For such formulation
presupposes doubt and scepticism, which it beats back by mere assertion.
Each human being has such a background of convictions which govern his
actions and conceptions, and of which it so startles him to suggest the
possibility of a doubt, that he turns away in dogmatic horror. Such ruling
ideas vary, from man to man, and from man to woman—if we consider them in
all their minuteness. But above all they constitute themselves in a
differently organised system or aggregate according to the social and
educational stratum to which an individual belongs. Each group, engaged in
a common task, it may be in the study of a part of nature, is ideally
bound and obliged by a common language, and special standards of truth and
reality for its own. Such a group of ideas is what Bacon would have called
a scientific fetich or _idolum theatri_. A scientific _idolum_ is a
traditional belief or dogma as to principles, values, and methods, which
has so thoroughly pervaded the minds of those engaged in a branch of
inquiry, that they no longer recognise its hypothetical character,—its
relation of means to the main end of their function.
Such a collected and united theory of reality (it is what Hegel has
designated the Idea) is what is understood by a natural metaphysic. It has
nothing necessarily to do with a supersensible or a supernatural, if these
words mean a ghostly, materialised, but super-finely-materialised nature,
above and beyond the present. But that there is a persistent tendency to
conceive the unity and coherence, the theoretic idea of reality, in this
pseudo-sensuous (i.e. super-sensuous) form, is of course a well-known
fact. For the present, however, this aberration—this idol of the tribe—may
be left out of sight. By a metaphysic or fundamental philosophy, is, in
the present instance, meant a system of first principles—a secular and
cosmic creed: a belief in ends and values, a belief in truth—again
premising that the system in question is, for most, a rudely organised and
almost inarticulate mass of belief and hope, conviction and impression. It
is, in short, a _natural_ metaphysic: a metaphysic, that is, which has but
an imperfect coherence, which imperfectly realises both its nature and its
limits.
In certain parts, however, it is more and better than this crude
background of belief. Each science—or at least every group of sciences—has
a more definite system or aggregate of first principles, axioms, and
conceptions belonging to it. It has, that is,—and here in a much
distincter way—its special standard of reality, its peculiar forms of
conceiving things, its distinctions between the actual and the apparent,
&c. Here again it will probably be found that the scientific specialist is
hardly conscious that these are principles and concepts: on the contrary,
they will be supposed self-evident and ultimate facts, foundations of
being. Instead of being treated as modes of conception, more or less
justified by their use and their results, these categories will be
regarded as fundamental facts, essential conditions of all reality. Like
popular thought in its ingrained categories, the specialist cannot
understand the possibility of any limitation to his radical ideas of
reality. To him they are not hypotheses, but principles. The scientific
specialist may be as convinced of the universal application of his
peculiar categories, as the Chinese or the Eskimo that his standards are
natural and final.
Under such metaphysical or extra-empirical presuppositions all
investigation, whether it be crudely empirical or (in the physical sense)
scientific, is carried on. And when so carried on, it is said to be
prosecuted apart from any interference from metaphysic. Such a naïve or
natural metaphysic, not raised to explicit consciousness, not followed as
an imposed rule, but governing with the strength of an immanent faith,
does not count for those who live under it as a metaphysic at all. M.
Jourdain was amazed suddenly to learn he had been speaking prose for forty
years without knowing it. But in the present case there is something worse
than amazement sure to be excited by the news. For the critic who thus
reveals the secrets of the scientist’s heart is pretty sure to go on to
say that a good deal of this naïve unconscious metaphysic is incoherent,
contradictory, even bad: that it requires correction, revision, and
readjustment, and has by criticism to be made one and harmonious. That
readjustment or criticism which shall eliminate contradiction and produce
unity, is the aim of the _science_ of metaphysic—the science of the
meta-physical element in physical knowledge: what Hegel has chosen to call
the Science of Logic (in the wide sense of the term). This higher Logic,
this _science_ of metaphysic, is the process to revise and harmonise in
systematic completeness the imperfect or misleading and partial estimates
of reality which are to be found in popular and scientific thought.
In the case of the run of physical sciences this revision is less
necessary; and for no very recondite reason. Every science by its very
nature deals with a special, a limited topic. It is confined to a part or
aspect of reality. Its propositions are not complete truths; they apply to
an artificial world, to a part expressly cut off from the concrete
reality. Its principles are generally cut according to their
cloth,—according to the range in which they apply. The only danger that
can well arise is if these categories are transplanted without due
reservations, and made of universal application, i.e. if the scientist
elects on his speciality to pronounce _de omnibus rebus_. But in the case
of psychology and ethics the harmlessness of natural metaphysics will be
less certain. Here a general human or universal interest is almost an
inevitable coefficient: especially if they really rise to the full sweep
of the subject. For as such they both seem to deal not with a part of
reality, but with the very centre and purpose of all reality. In them we
are not dealing with topics of secondary interest, but with the very heart
of the human problem. Here the questions of reality and ideals, of unity
and diversity, and of the evaluation of existence, come distinctly to the
fore. If psychology is to answer the question, What am I? and ethics the
question, What ought I to do? they can hardly work without some formulated
creed of metaphysical character, without some preliminary criticisms of
current first principles.
(ii.) Herbart.
The German thinker, who has given perhaps the most fruitful stimulus to
the scientific study of psychology in modern times—Johann Friedrich
Herbart—is after all essentially a philosopher, and not a mere scientist,
even in his psychology. His psychological inquiry, that is, stands in
intimate connexion with the last questions of all intelligence, with
metaphysics and ethics. The business of philosophy, says Herbart, is to
touch up and finish off conceptions (_Bearbeitung der Begriffe_)(22). It
finds, as it supervenes upon the unphilosophical world, that mere and pure
facts (if there ever are or were such purisms) have been enveloped in a
cloud of theory, have been construed into some form of unity, but have
been imperfectly, inadequately construed: and that the existing concepts
in current use need to be corrected, supplemented and readjusted. It has,
accordingly, for its work to “reconcile experience with itself(23),” and
to elicit “the hidden pre-suppositions without which the fact of
experience is unthinkable.” Psychology, then, as a branch of this
philosophic enterprise, has to readjust the facts discovered in inner
experience. For mere uncritical experience or merely empirical knowledge
only offers _problems_; it suggests gaps, which indeed further reflection
serves at first only to deepen into contradictions. Such a psychology is
“speculative”: i.e. it is not content to accept the mere given, but goes
forward and backward to find something that will make the fact
intelligible. It employs totally different methods from the
“classification, induction, analogy” familiar to the logic of the
empirical sciences. Its “principles,” therefore, are not given facts: but
facts which have been manipulated and adjusted so as to lose their
self-contradictory quality: they are facts “reduced,” by introducing the
omitted relationships which they postulate if they are to be true and
self-consistent(24). While it is far from rejecting or ignoring
experience, therefore, psychology cannot strictly be said to build upon it
alone. It uses experimental fact as an unfinished datum,—or it sees in
experience a torso which betrays its imperfection, and suggests
completing.
The starting-point, it may be said, of Herbart’s psychology is a question
which to the ordinary psychologist (and to the so-called scientific
psychologist) has a secondary, if it have any interest. It was, he says,
the problem of Personality, the problem of the Self or Ego, which first
led to his characteristic conception of psychological method. “My first
discovery,” he tells us(25), “was that the Self was neither primitive nor
independent, but must be the most dependent and most conditioned thing one
can imagine. The second was that the elementary ideas of an intelligent
being, if they were ever to reach the pitch of self-consciousness, must be
either all, or at least in part, opposed to each other, and that they must
check or block one another in consequence of this opposition. Though held
in check, however, these ideas were not to be supposed lost: they subsist
as endeavours or tendencies to return into the position of actual idea, as
soon as the check became, for any reason, either in whole or in part
inoperative. This check could and must be calculated, and thus it was
clear that psychology required a mathematical as well as a metaphysical
foundation.”
The place of the conception of the Ego in Kant’s and Fichte’s theory of
knowledge is well known. Equally well known is Kant’s treatment of the
soul-reality or soul-substance in his examination of Rational Psychology.
Whereas the (logical) unity of consciousness, or “synthetic unity of
apperception,” is assumed as a fundamental starting-point in explanation
of our objective judgments, or of our knowledge of objective existence,
its real (as opposed to its formal) foundation in a “substantial” soul is
set aside as an illegitimate interpretation of, or inference from, the
facts of inner experience. The belief in the separate unity and
persistence of the soul, said Kant, is not a scientifically-warranted
conclusion. Its true place is as an ineffaceable postulate of the faith
which inspires human life and action. Herbart did not rest content with
either of these—as he believed—dogmatic assumptions of his master. He did
not fall in cheerfully with the idealism which seemed ready to dispense
with a soul, or which justified its acceptance of empirical reality by
referring to the fundamental unity of the function of judgment. With a
strong bent towards fully-differentiated and individualised experience
Herbart conjoined a conviction of the need of logical analysis to prevent
us being carried away by the first-come and inadequate generalities. The
Ego which, in its extremest abstraction, he found defined as the unity of
subject and object, did not seem to him to offer the proper guarantees of
reality: it was itself a problem, full of contradictions, waiting for
solution. On the other hand, the real Ego, or self of concrete experience,
is very much more than this logical abstract, and differs widely from
individual to individual, and apparently from time to time even in the
same individual. Our self, of which we talk so fluently, as one and the
self-same—how far does it really possess the continuity and identity with
which we credit it? Does it not rather seem to be an ideal which we
gradually form and set before ourselves as the standard for measuring our
attainments of the moment,—the perfect fulfilment of that oneness of being
and purpose and knowledge which we never reach? Sometimes even it seems no
better than a name which we move along the varying phenomena of our inner
life, at one time identifying it with the power which has gained the
victory in a moral struggle, at another with that which has been
defeated(26), according as the attitude of the moment makes us throw now
one, now another, aspect of mental activity in the foreground.
The other—or logical Ego—the mere identity of subject and object,—when
taken in its utter abstractness and simplicity, shrivels up to something
very small indeed—to a something which is little better than nothing. The
mere _I_ which is not contra-distinguished by a _Thou_ and a _He_—which is
without all definiteness of predication (the I=I of Fichte and
Schelling)—is only as it were a point of being cut off from all its
connexions in reality, and treated as if it were or could be entirely
independent. It is an identity in which subject and object have not yet
appeared: it is not a real I, though we may still retain the name. It
is—as Hegel’s _Logic_ will tell us—exactly definable as Being, which is as
yet Nothing: the impossible edge of abstraction on which we try—and in
vain—to steady ourselves at the initial point of thought. And to reach or
stand at that intangible, ungraspable point, which slips away as we
approach, and transmutes itself as we hold it, is not the natural
beginning, but the result of introspection and reflection on the concrete
self. But with this aspect of the question we are not now concerned.
That the unity of the Self as an intelligent and moral being, that the Ego
of self-consciousness was an ideal and a product of development, was what
Herbart soon became convinced of. The unity of Self is even as given in
mature experience an imperfect fact. It is a fact, that is, which does not
come up to what it promised, and which requires to be supplemented, or
philosophically justified. Here and everywhere the custom of life carries
us over gaps which yawn deep to the eye of philosophic reflection: even
though accident and illness force them not unfrequently even upon the
blindest. To trace the process of unification towards this unity—to trace,
if you like, even the formation of the concept of such unity, as a
governing and guiding principle in life and conduct, comes to be the
problem of the psychologist, in the largest sense of that problem. From
Soul (_Seele_) to Mind or Spirit (_Geist_) is for Herbart, as for Hegel,
the course of psychology(27). The growth and development of mind, the
formation of a self, the realisation of a personality, is for both the
theme which psychology has to expound. And Herbart, not less than Hegel,
had to bear the censure that such a conception of mental reality as a
growth would destroy personality(28).
But with so much common in the general plan, the two thinkers differ
profoundly in their special mode of carrying out the task. Or, rather,
they turn their strength on different departments of the whole. Herbart’s
great practical interest had been the theory of education: “paedagogic” is
the subject of his first important writings. The inner history of
ideas—the processes which are based on the interaction of elements in the
individual soul—are what he specially traces. Hegel’s interests, on the
contrary, are more towards the greater process, the unities of historical
life, and the correlations of the powers of art, religion, and philosophy
that work therein. He turns to the macrocosm, almost as naturally as
Herbart does to the microcosm. Thus, even in Ethics, while Herbart gives a
delicate analysis of the distinct aspects or elements in the Ethical
idea,—the diverse headings under which the disinterested spectator within
the breast measures with purely aesthetic eye his approach to unity and
strength of purpose, Hegel seems to hurry away from the field of moral
sense or conscience to throw himself on the social and political
organisation of the moral life. The General Paedagogic of Herbart has its
pendant in Hegel’s Philosophy of Law and of History.
At an early period Herbart had become impressed with the necessity of
applying mathematics to psychology(29). To the usual objection, that
psychical facts do not admit of measurement, he had a ready reply. We can
calculate even on hypothetical assumptions: indeed, could we measure, we
should scarcely take the trouble to calculate(30). To calculate (i.e. to
deduce mathematically) is to perform a general experiment, and to perform
it in the medium where there is least likelihood of error or disturbance.
There may be anomalies enough apparent in the mental life: there may be
the great anomalies of Genius and of Freedom of Will; but the Newton and
the Kepler of psychology will show by calculation on assumed conditions of
psychic nature that these aberrations can be explained by mechanical laws.
“The human Soul is no puppet-theatre: our wishes and resolutions are no
marionettes: no juggler stands behind; but our true and proper life lies
in our volition, and this life has its rule not outside, but in itself: it
has its own purely mental rule, by no means borrowed from the material
world. But this rule is in it sure and fixed; and on account of this its
fixed quality it has more similarity to (what is otherwise heterogeneous)
the laws of impact and pressure than to the marvels of an alleged
inexplicable freedom(31).”
Psychology then deals with a real, which exhibits phenomena analogous in
several respects to those discussed by statics and mechanics. Its
foundation is a statics and mechanics of the Soul,—as this real is called.
We begin by presupposing as the ultimate reality, underlying the
factitious and generally imperfect unity of self-consciousness and mind,
an essential and primary unity—the unity of an absolutely simple or
individual point of being—a real point which amongst other points asserts
itself, maintains itself. It has a character of its own, but that
character it only shows in and through a development conditioned by
external influences. The specific nature of the soul-reality is to be
representative, to produce, or manifest itself in, ideas
(_Vorstellungen_). But the character only emerges into actuality in the
conflict of the soul-atom with other ultimate realities in the
congregation of things. A soul _per se_ or isolated is not possessed of
ideas. It is merely blank, undeveloped, formal unity, of which nothing can
be said. But like other realities it defines and characterises itself by
antithesis, by resistance: it shows what it is by its behaviour in the
struggle for existence. It acts in self-defence: and its peculiar style or
weapon of self-defence is an idea or representation. The way the Soul
maintains itself is by turning the assailant into an idea(32): and each
idea is therefore a _Selbsterhaltung_ of the Soul. The Soul is thus
enriched—to appearance or incidentally: and the assailant is annexed. In
this way the one Soul may develop or evolve or express an innumerable
variety of ideas: for in response to whatever it meets, the living and
active Soul ideates, or gives rise to a representation. Thus, while the
soul is one, its ideas or representations are many. Taken separately, they
each express the psychic self-conservation. But brought in relation with
each other, as so many acts or self-affirmations of the one soul, they
behave as forces, and tend to thwart or check each other. It is as forces,
as reciprocally arresting or fostering each other, that ideas are objects
of science. When a representation is thus held in check, it is reduced to
a mere endeavour or active tendency to represent. Thus there arises a
distinction between representations proper, and those imperfect states or
acts which are partly or wholly held in abeyance. But the latent phase of
an idea is as essential to a thorough understanding of it as what appears.
It is the great blunder of empirical psychology to ignore what is sunk
below the surface of consciousness. And to Herbart consciousness is not
the condition but rather the product of ideas, which are primarily forces.
But representations are not merely in opposition,—impinging and resisting.
The same reason which makes them resist, viz. that they are or would fain
be acts of the one soul, but are more or less incompatible, leads them in
other circumstances to form combinations with each other. These
combinations are of two sorts. They are, first, complications, or
“complexions”: a number of ideas combine by quasi-addition and
juxtaposition to form a total. Second, there is fusion: ideas presenting
certain degrees of contrast enter into a union where the parts are no
longer separately perceptible. It is easy to see how the problems of
psychology now assume the form of a statics and mechanics of the mind.
Quantitative data are to be sought in the strength of each separate single
idea, and the degree in which two or more ideas block each other: in the
degree of combination between ideas, and the number of ideas in a
combination: and in the terms of relation between the members of a series
of ideas. A statical theory has to show the conditions required for what
we may call the ideal state of equilibrium of the “idea-forces”: to
determine, that is, the ultimate degree of obscuration suffered by any two
ideas of different strength, and the conditions of their permanent
combination or fusion. A mechanics of the mind will, on the contrary, deal
with the rate at which these processes are brought about, the velocity
with which in the movement of mind ideas are obscured or reawakened, &c.
It is fortunately unnecessary, here, to go further into details. What
Herbart proposes is not a method for the mathematical measurement of
psychic facts: it is a theory of mechanics and statics specially adapted
to the peculiarities of psychical phenomena, where the forces are given
with no sine or cosine, where instead of gravitation we have the constant
effort (as it were elasticity) of each idea to revert to its unchecked
state. He claims—in short—practically to be a Kepler and Newton of the
mind, and in so doing to justify the vague professions of more than one
writer on mind—above all, perhaps of David Hume, who goes beyond mere
professions—to make mental science follow the example of physics. And a
main argument in favour of his enterprise is the declaration of Kant that
no body of knowledge can claim to be a science except in such proportion
as it is mathematical. And the peculiarity of this enterprise is that
self-consciousness, the Ego, is not allowed to interfere with the free
play of psychic forces. The Ego is—psychologically—the result, the
product, and the varying product of that play. The play of forces is no
doubt a unity: but its unity lies not in the synthesis of consciousness,
but in the essential unity of Soul. And Soul is in its essence neither
consciousness, nor self-consciousness, nor mind: but something on the
basis of whose unity these are built up and developed(33). The mere
“representation” does not include the further supervenience of
consciousness: it represents, but it is not as yet necessary that we
should also be conscious that there is representation. It is, in the
phrase of Leibniz, perception: but not apperception. It is mere
straight-out, not as yet reflected, representation. Gradually there
emerges through the operation of mechanical psychics a nucleus, a floating
unity, a fixed or definite central aggregate.
The suggestion of mathematical method has been taken up by subsequent
inquirers (as it was pursued even before Herbart’s time), but not in the
sense he meant. Experimentation has now taken a prominent place in
psychology. But in proportion as it has done so, psychology has lost its
native character, and thrown itself into the arms of physiology. What
Herbart calculated were actions and reactions of idea-forces: what the
modern experimental school proposes to measure are to a large extent the
velocities of certain physiological processes, the numerical specification
of certain facts. Such ascertainments are unquestionably useful; as
numerical precision is in other departments. But, taken in themselves,
they do not carry us one bit further on the way to science. As
experiments, further,—to note a point discussed elsewhere(34)—their value
depends on the point of view, on the theory which has led to them, on the
value of the general scheme for which they are intended to provide a
special new determination. In many cases they serve to give a vivid
reality to what was veiled under a general phrase. The truth looks so much
more real when it is put in figures: as the size of a huge tree when set
against a rock; or as when Milton bodies out his fallen angel by setting
forth the ratio between his spear and the tallest Norway pine. But until
the general relationship between soul and body is more clearly formulated,
such statistics will have but a value of curiosity.
(iii.) The Faculty-Psychology and its Critics.
What Herbart (as well as Hegel) finds perpetual ground for objecting to is
the talk about mental faculties. This objection is part of a general
characteristic of all the higher philosophy; and the recurrence of it
gives an illustration of how hard it is for any class of men to see
themselves as others see them. If there be anything the vulgar believe to
be true of philosophy, it is that it deals in distant and abstruse
generalities, that it neglects the shades of individuality and reality,
and launches out into unsubstantial general ideas. But it would be easy to
gather from the great thinkers an anthology of passages in which they hold
it forth as the great work of philosophy to rescue our conceptions from
the indefiniteness and generality of popular conception, and to give them
real, as opposed to a merely nominal, individuality.
The Wolffian school, which Herbart (not less than Kant) found in
possession of the field, and which in Germany may be taken to represent
only a slight variant of the half-and-half attitude of vulgar thought, was
entrenched in the psychology of faculties. Empirical psychology, said
Wolff(35), tells the number and character of the soul’s faculties:
rational psychology will tell what they “properly” are, and how they
subsist in soul. It is assumed that there are general receptacles or
tendencies of mental operation which in course of time get filled or
qualified in a certain way: and that when this question is disposed of, it
still remains to fix on the metaphysical bases of these facts.
That a doctrine of faculties should fix itself in psychology is not so
wonderful. In the non-psychical world objects are easily discriminated in
space, and the individual thing lasts through a time. But a phase of mind
is as such fleeting and indeterminate: its individual features which come
from its “object” tend soon to vanish in memory: all freshness of definite
characters wears off, and there is left behind only a vague “recept” of
the one and same in many, a sort of hypostatised representative, faint but
persistent, of what in experience was an ever-varying succession. We
generalise here as elsewhere: but elsewhere the many singulars remain to
confront us more effectually. But in Mind the immense variety of real
imagination, memory, judgment is forgotten, and the name in each case
reduced to a meagre abstract. Thus the identity in character and
operation, having been cut off from the changing elements in its real
action, is transmuted into a substantial somewhat, a subsistent faculty.
The relationship of one to another of the powers thus by abstraction and
fancy created becomes a problem of considerable moment, their causal
relations in particular: till in the end they stand outside and
independent of each other, engaged, as Herbart says, in a veritable
_bellum omnium contra omnes_.
But this hypostatising of faculties becomes a source of still further
difficulties when it is taken in connexion with the hypostasis of the Soul
or Self or Ego. To Aristotle the Soul in its general aspect is Energy or
Essence; and its individual phases are energies. But in the hands of the
untrained these conceptions came to be considerably displaced. Essence or
Substance came to be understood (as may be seen in Locke, and still more
in loose talk) as a something,—a substratum,—or peculiar nature—(of which
_in itself_ nothing further could be said(36) but which notwithstanding
was permanent and perhaps imperishable): this something subsistent
exhibited certain properties or activities. There thus arose, on one hand,
the Soul-thing,—a substance misunderstood and sensualised with a
supernatural sensuousness,—a denizen of the transcendental or even of the
transcendent world: and, on the other hand, stood the actual
manifestations, the several exhibitions of this force, the assignable and
describable psychic facts. We are accordingly brought before the problem
of how this one substance or essence stands to the several entities or
hypostases known as faculties. And we still have in the rear the further
problem of how these abstract entities stand to the real and concrete
single acts and states of soul and mind.
This hypostatising of faculties, and this distinction of the “Substantial”
soul from its “accidentia” or phenomena, had grown—through the
materialistic proclivities of popular conception—from the indications
found in Aristotle. It attained its climax, perhaps in the Wolffian school
in Germany, but it has been the resort of superficial psychology in all
ages. For while it, on one hand, seemed to save the substantial Soul on
whose incorruptibility great issues were believed to hinge, it held out,
on the other, an open hand to the experimental inquirer, whom it bade
freely to search amongst the phenomena. But if it was the refuge of
pusillanimity, it was also the perpetual object of censure from all the
greater and bolder spirits. Thus, the psychology of Hobbes may be hasty
and crude, but it is at least animated by a belief that the mental life is
continuous, and not cut off by abrupt divisions severing the mental
faculties. The “image” (according to his materialistically coloured
psychology) which, when it is a strong motion, is called sense, passes, as
it becomes weaker or decays, into imagination, and gives rise, by its
various complications and associations with others, to reminiscence,
experience, expectation. Similarly, the voluntary motion which is an
effect or a phase of imagination, beginning at first in small
motions—called by themselves “endeavours,” and in relation to their cause
“appetites” or “desires(37)”—leads on cumulatively to Will, which is the
“last appetite in deliberating.” Spinoza, his contemporary, speaks in the
same strain(38). “Faculties of intellect, desire, love, &c., are either
utterly fictitious, or nothing but metaphysical entities, or universals
which we are in the habit of forming from particulars. Will and intellect
are thus supposed to stand to this or that idea, this or that volition, in
the same way as stoniness to this or that stone, or as man to Peter or
Paul.” They are supposed to be a general something which gets defined and
detached. But, in the mind, or in the cogitant soul, there are no such
things. There are only ideas: and by an “idea” we are to understand not an
image on the retina or in the brain, not a “dumb something, like a
painting on a panel(39),” but a mode of thinking, or even the act of
intellection itself. The ideas _are_ the mind: mind does not _have_ ideas.
Further, every “idea,” as such, “involves affirmation or negation,”—is not
an image, but an act of judgment—contains, as we should say, an implicit
reference to actuality,—a reference which in volition is made explicit.
Thus (concludes the corollary of Eth. ii. 49) “Will and Intellect are one
and the same.” But in any case the “faculties” as such are no better than
_entia rationis_ (i.e. auxiliary modes of representing facts).
Leibniz speaks no less distinctly and sanely in this direction. “True
powers are never mere possibilities: they are always tendency and action.”
The “Monad”—that is the quasi-intelligent unit of existence,—is
essentially activity, and its actions are perceptions and appetitions,
i.e. tendencies to pass from one perceptive state or act to another. It is
out of the variety, the complication, and relations of these miniature or
little perceptions and appetitions, that the conspicuous phenomena of
consciousness are to be explained, and not by supposing them due to one or
other faculty. The soul is a unity, a self-developing unity, a unity which
at each stage of its existence shows itself in a perception or idea,—each
such perception however being, to repeat the oft quoted phrase, _plein de
l’avenir et chargé du passé_:—each, in other words, is not stationary, but
active and urgent, a progressive force, as well as a representative
element. Above all, Leibniz has the view that the soul gives rise to all
its ideas from itself: that its life is its own production, not a mere
inheritance of ideas which it has from birth and nature, nor a mere
importation into an empty room from without, but a necessary result of its
own constitution acting in necessary (predetermined) reciprocity and
harmony with the rest of the universe.
But Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, were most attentively heard in the
passages where they favoured or combatted the dominant social and
theological prepossessions. Their glimpses of truer insight and even their
palpable contributions in the line of a true psychology were ignored or
forgotten. More attention, perhaps, was attracted by an attempt of a very
different style. This was the system of Condillac, who, as Hegel says (p.
61), made an unmistakable attempt to show the necessary interconnexion of
the several modes of mental activity. In his _Traité des Sensations_
(1754), following on his _Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines_
(1746), he tried to carry out systematically the deduction or derivation
of all our ideas from sense, or to trace the filiation of all our
faculties from sensation. Given a mind with no other power than
sensibility, the problem is to show how it acquires all its other
faculties. Let us then suppose a sentient animal to which is offered a
single sensation, or one sensation standing out above the others. In such
circumstances the sensation “becomes” (_devient_) attention: or a
sensation “is” (_est_) attention, either because it is alone, or because
it is more lively than all the rest. Again: before such a being, let us
set two sensations: to perceive or feel (_apercevoir ou sentir_) the two
sensations is the same thing (_c’est la même chose_). If one of the
sensations is not present, but a sensation made already, then to perceive
it is memory. Memory, then, is only “transformed sensation” (_sensation
transformée_). Further, suppose we attend to both ideas, this is “the same
thing” as to compare them. And to compare them we must see difference or
resemblance. This is judgment. “Thus sensation becomes successively
attention, comparison, judgment.” And—by further steps of the equating
process—it appears that sensation again “becomes” an act of reflection.
And the same may be said of imagination and reasoning: all are transformed
sensations.
If this is so with the intelligence, it is equally the case with the Will.
To feel and not feel well or ill is impossible. Coupling then this feeling
of pleasure or pain with the sensation and its transformations, we get the
series of phases ranging from desire, to passion, hope, will. “Desire is
only the action of the same faculties as are attributed to the
understanding.” A lively desire is a passion: a desire, accompanied with a
belief that nothing stands in its way, is a volition. But combine these
affective with the intellectual processes already noticed, and you have
thinking (_penser_)(40). Thus thought in its entirety is, only and always,
transformed sensation.
Something not unlike this, though scarcely so simply and directly
doctrinaire, is familiar to us in some English psychology, notably James
Mill’s(41). Taken in their literal baldness, these identifications may
sound strained,—or trifling. But if we look beyond the words, we can
detect a genuine instinct for maintaining and displaying the unity and
continuity of mental life through all its modifications,—coupled
unfortunately with a bias sometimes in favour of reducing higher or more
complex states of mind to a mere prolongation of lower and beggarly
rudiments. But otherwise such analyses are useful as aids against the
tendency of inert thought to take every name in this department as a
distinguishable reality: the tendency to part will from thought—ideas from
emotion—and even imagination from reason, as if either could be what it
professed without the other.
(iv.) Methods and Problems of Psychology.
The difficulties of modern psychology perhaps lie in other directions, but
they are not less worth guarding against. They proceed mainly from failure
or inability to grasp the central problem of psychology, and a disposition
to let the pen (if it be a book on the subject) wander freely through the
almost illimitable range of instance, illustration, and application.
Though it is true that the proper study of mankind is man, it is hardly
possible to say what might not be brought under this head. _Homo sum,
nihil a me alienum puto_, it might be urged. Placed in a sort of middle
ground between physiology (summing up all the results of physical science)
and general history (including the contributions of all the branches of
sociology), the psychologist need not want for material. He can wander
into ethics, aesthetic, and logic, into epistemology and metaphysics. And
it cannot be said with any conviction that he is actually trespassing, so
long as the ground remains so ill-fenced and vaguely enclosed. A desultory
collection of observations on traits of character, anecdotes of mental
events, mixed up with hypothetical descriptions of how a normal human
being may be supposed to develop his so-called faculties, and including
some dictionary-like verbal distinctions, may make a not uninteresting and
possibly bulky work entitled Psychology.
It is partly a desire of keeping up to date which is responsible for the
copious extracts or abstracts from treatises on the anatomy and functions
of the nerve-system, which, accompanied perhaps by a diagram of the brain,
often form the opening chapter of a work on psychology. Even if these
researches had achieved a larger number of authenticated results than they
as yet have, they would only form an appendix and an illustration to the
proper subject(42). As they stand, and so long as they remain largely
hypothetical, the use of them in psychology only fosters the common
delusion that, when we can picture out in material outlines a theory
otherwise unsupported, it has gained some further witness in its favour.
It is quite arguable indeed that it may be useful to cut out a section
from general human biology which should include the parts of it that were
specially interesting in connexion with the expression or generation of
thought, emotion, and desire. But in that case, there is a blunder in
singling out the brain alone, and especially the organs of sense and
voluntary motion,—except for the reason that this province of
psycho-physics alone has been fairly mapped out. The preponderant half of
the soul’s life is linked to other parts of the physical system. Emotion
and volition, and the general tone of the train of ideas, if they are to
be connected with their expression and physical accompaniment (or aspect),
would require a sketch of the heart and lungs, as well as the digestive
system in general. Nor these alone. Nerve analysis (especially confined to
the larger system), though most modern, is not alone important, as Plato
and Aristotle well saw. So that if biology is to be adapted for
psychological use (and if psychology deals with more than cognitive
processes), a liberal amount of physiological information seems required.
Experimental psychology is a term used with a considerable laxity of
content; and so too is that of physiological psychology, or
psycho-physics. And the laxity mainly arises because there is an
uncertainty as to what is principal and what secondary in the inquiry.
Experiment is obviously a help to observation: and so far as the latter is
practicable, the former would seem to have a chance of introduction. But
in any case, experiment is only a means to an end and only practicable
under the guidance of hypothesis and theory. Its main value would be in
case the sphere of psychology were completely paralleled with one province
of physiology. It was long ago maintained by Spinoza and (in a way by)
Leibniz, that there is no mental phenomenon without its bodily equivalent,
pendant, or correspondent. The _ordo rerum_ (the molecular system of
movements) is, he held, the same as the order of ideas. But it is only at
intervals, under special conditions, or when they reach a certain
magnitude, that ideas emerge into full consciousness. As consciousness
presents them, they are often discontinuous, and abrupt: and they do not
always carry with them their own explanation. Hence if we are confined to
the larger phenomena of consciousness alone, our science is imperfect:
many things seem anomalous; above all, perhaps, will, attention, and the
like. We have seen how Herbart (partly following the hints of Leibniz),
attempted to get over this difficulty by the hypothesis of idea-forces
which generate the forms and matter of consciousness by their mutual
impact and resistance. Physiological psychology substitutes for Herbart’s
reals and his idea-forces a more materialistic sort of reality; perhaps
functions of nerve-cells, or other analogous entities. There, it hopes one
day to discover the underlying continuity of event which in the upper
range of consciousness is often obscured, and then the process would be,
as the phrase goes, explained: we should be able to picture it out without
a gap.
These large hopes may have a certain fulfilment. They may lead to the
withdrawal of some of the fictitious mental processes which are still
described in works of psychology. But on the whole they can only have a
negative and auxiliary value. The value, that is, of helping to confute
feigned connexions and to suggest truer. They will be valid against the
mode of thought which, when Psyché fails us for an explanation, turns to
body, and interpolates soul between the states of body: the mode which, in
an older phraseology, jumps from final causes to physical, and from
physical (or efficient) to final. Here, as elsewhere, the physical has its
place: and here, more than in many places, the physical has been unfairly
treated. But the whole subject requires a discussion of the so-called
“relations” of soul and body: a subject on which popular conceptions and
so-called science are radically obscure.
“But the danger which threatens experimental psychology,” says
Münsterberg, “is that, in investigating details, the connexion with
questions of principle may be so lost sight of that the investigation
finally lands at objects scientifically quite worthless(43). Psychology
forgets only too easily that all those numerical statistics which
experiment allows us to form are only means for psychological analysis and
interpretation, not ends in themselves. It piles up numbers and numbers,
and fails to ask whether the results so formed have any theoretical value
whatever: it seeks answers before a question has been clearly and
distinctly framed; whereas the value of experimental answers always
depends on the exactitude with which the question is put. Let me remind
the reader, how one inquirer after another made many thousand experiments
on the estimation of small intervals of time, without a single one of them
raising the question what the precise point was which these experiments
sought to measure, what was the psychological occurrence in the case, or
what psychological phenomena were employed as the standard of
time-intervals. And so each had his own arbitrary standard of measurement,
each of them piled up mountains of numbers, each demonstrated that his
predecessor was wrong; but neither Estel nor Mehner have carried the
problem of the time-sense a single step further.
“This must be all changed, if we are not to drift into the barrenest
scholastic.... Everywhere out of the correct perception that problems of
principle demand the investigation of detailed phenomena, and that the
latter investigation must proceed in comparative independence of the
question of principles, there has grown the false belief that the
description of detail phenomena is the ultimate aim of science. And so,
side by side with details which are of importance to principles, we have
others, utterly indifferent and theoretically worthless, treated with the
same zeal. To the solution of their barren problems the old Schoolmen
applied a certain acuteness; but in order to turn out masses of numbers
from barren experiments, all that is needed is a certain insensibility to
fits of ennui. Let numbers be less collected for their own sake: and
instead, let the problems be so brought to a point that the answers may
possess the character of principles. Let each experiment be founded on far
more theoretical considerations, then the number of the experiments may be
largely diminished(44).”
What is thus said of a special group of inquiries by one of the foremost
of the younger psychologists, is not without its bearings on all the
departments in which psychology can learn. For physiological, or what is
technically called psychological, experiment, is co-ordinate with many
other sources of information. Much, for instance, is to be learnt by a
careful study of language by those who combine sound linguistic knowledge
with psychological training. It is in language, spoken and written, that
we find at once the great instrument and the great document of the
distinctively human progress from a mere _Psyche_ to a mature _Nous_, from
Soul to Mind. Whether we look at the varieties of its structure under
different ethnological influences, or at the stages of its growth in a
nation and an individual, we get light from language on the
differentiation and consolidation of ideas. But here again it is easy to
lose oneself in the world of etymology, or to be carried away into the
enticing questions of real and ideal philology.
“The human being of the psychologist,” says Herbart(45), “is the social
and civilised human being who stands on the apex of the whole history
through which his race has passed. In him is found visibly together all
the multiplicity of elements, which, under the name of mental faculties,
are regarded as a universal inheritance of humanity. Whether they are
originally in conjunction, whether they are originally a multiplicity, is
a point on which the facts are silent. The savage and the new-born child
give us far less occasion to admire the range of their mind than do the
nobler animals. But the psychologists get out of this difficulty by the
unwarranted assumption that all the higher mental activities exist
potentially in children and savages—though not in the animals—as a
rudimentary predisposition or psychical endowment. Of such a nascent
intellect, a nascent reason, and nascent moral sense, they find
recognisable traces in the scanty similarities which the behaviour of
child or savage offers to those of civilised man. We cannot fail to note
that in their descriptions they have before them a special state of man,
and one which, far from accurately defined, merely follows the general
impression made upon us by those beings we name civilised. An extremely
fluctuating character inevitably marks this total impression. For there
are no general facts:—the genuine psychological documents lie in the
momentary states of individuals: and there is an immeasurably long way
from these to the height of the universal concept of man in general.”
And yet Man in general,—Man as man and therefore as mind—the concept of
Man—normal and ideal man—the complete and adequate Idea of man—is the true
terminus of the psychological process; and whatever be the difficulties in
the way, it is the only proper goal of the science. Only it has to be
built up, constructed, evolved, developed,—and not assumed as a datum of
popular imagination. We want a concept, concrete and real, of Man and of
Mind, which shall give its proper place to each of the elements that, in
the several examples open to detailed observation, are presented with
unfair or exaggerated prominence. The savage and the child are not to be
left out as free from contributing to form the ideal: virtues here are not
more important than vices, and are certainly not likely to be so
informing: even the insane and the idiot show us what human intelligence
is and requires: and the animals are also within the sweep of psychology.
Man is not its theatre to the exclusion of woman; if it records the
results of introspection of the Me, it will find vast and copious quarries
in the various modes in which an individual identifies himself with others
as We. And even the social and civilised man gets his designation, as
usual, _a potiori_. He is more civilised and social than others: perhaps
rather more civilised than not. But always, in some measure, he is at the
same time unsocial or anti-social, and uncivilised. Each unit in the
society of civilisation has to the outside observer—and sometimes even to
his own self-detached and impartial survey—a certain oddity or fixity, a
gleam of irrationality, which shows him to fall short of complete sanity
or limpid and mobile intelligence. He has not wholly put off the
savage,—least of all, says the cynic, in his relations with the other sex.
He carries with him even to the grave some grains of the recklessness and
petulance of childhood. And rarely, if ever, can it be said of him that he
has completely let the ape and tiger die.
But that is only one way of looking at the matter—and one which, perhaps,
is more becoming to the pathologist and the cynic, than to the
psychologist. Each of these stages of psychical development, even if that
development be obviously describable as degeneration, has something which,
duly adjusted, has its place and function in the theory of the
normally-complete human mind. The animal, the savage, and the child,—each
has its part there. It is a mutilated, one-sided and superficial advance
in socialisation which cuts off the civilised creature from the natural
stem of his ancestry, from the large freedom, the immense _insouciance_,
the childlikeness of his first estate. There is something, again, wanting
in the man who utterly lacks the individualising realism and tenderness of
the woman, as in the woman who can show no comprehension of view or
bravery of enterprise. Even pathological states of mind are not mere
anomalies and mere degenerations. Nature perhaps knows no proper
degenerations, but only by-ways and intricacies in the course of
development. Still less is the vast enormity or irregularity of genius to
be ignored. It is all—to the philosophic mind—a question of degree and
proportion,—though often the proportion seems to exceed the scale of our
customary denominators. If an element is latent or quiescent (in arrest),
that is no index to its absolute amount: “we know not what’s resisted.”
Let us by all means keep proudly to our happy mediocrity of faculty, and
step clear of insanity or idiotcy on one hand, and from genius or heroism
on the other. But the careful observer will notwithstanding note how
delicately graded and how intricately combined are the steps which connect
extremes so terribly disparate. It is only vulgar ignorance which turns
away in hostility or contempt from the imbecile and the deranged, and only
a worse than vulgar sciolism which sees in genius and the hero nothing but
an aberration from its much-prized average. Criminalistic anthropology, or
the psychology of the criminal, may have indulged in much frantic
exaggeration as to the doom which nature and heredity have pronounced over
the fruit of the womb even before it entered the shores of light: yet they
have at least served to discredit the free and easy assumption of the
abstract averagist, and shown how little the penalties of an unbending law
meet the requirements of social well-being.
Yet, if psychology be willing to learn in all these and other provinces of
the estate of man, it must remember that, once it goes beyond the narrow
range in which the interpretations of symbol and expression have become
familiar, it is constantly liable to blunder in the inevitable effort to
translate observation into theory. The happy mean between making too much
of palpable differences and hurrying on to a similar rendering of similar
signs is the rarest of gifts. Or, perhaps, it were truer to say it is the
latest and most hardly won of acquirements. To learn to observe—observe
with mind—is not a small thing. There are rules for it—both rules of
general scope and, above all, rules in each special department. But like
all “major premisses” in practice, everything depends on the power of
judgment, the tact, the skill, the “gift” of applying them. They work not
as mere rules to be conned by rote, but as principles assimilated into
constituents of the mental life-blood: rules which serve only as condensed
reminders and hints of habits of thought and methods of research which
have grown up in action and reflection. To observe we must comprehend: yet
we can only comprehend by observing. We all know how unintelligible—save
for epochs of ampler reciprocity, and it may be even of acquired unity of
interest—the two sexes are for each other. Parents can remember how
mysteriously minded they found their own elders; and in most cases they
have to experience the depth of the gulf which in certain directions parts
them from their children’s hearts. Even in civilised Europe, the ordinary
member of each nation has an underlying conviction (which at moments of
passion or surprise will rise and find harsh utterance) that the foreigner
is queer, irrational, and absurd. If the foreigner, further, be so far
removed as a Chinaman (or an Australian “black”), there is hardly anything
too vile, meaningless, or inhuman which the European will not readily
believe in the case of one who, it may be, in turn describes him as a
“foreign devil.” It can only be in a fit of noble chivalry that the
British rank and file can so far temporise with its insular prejudice as
to admit of “Fuzzy-wuzzy” that
“He’s a poor benighted ’eathen—but a first-class fightin’ man.”
Not every one is an observer who chooses to dub himself so, nor is it in a
short lapse of time and with condescension for foreign habits, that any
observer whatever can become a trustworthy reporter of the ideas some
barbarian tribe holds concerning the things of earth and air, and the
hidden things of spirits and gods. The “interviewer” no doubt is a useful
being when it is necessary to find “copy,” or when sharp-drawn characters
and picturesque incidents are needed to stimulate an inert public, ever
open to be interested in some new thing. But he is a poor contributor to
the stored materials of science.
It is of other stuff that true science is made. And if even years of
nominal intercourse and spatial juxtaposition sometimes leave human
beings, as regards their inner selves, in the position of strangers still,
what shall be said of the attempt to discern the psychic life of animals?
Will the touch of curiosity which prompts us to watch the proceedings of
the strange creatures,—will a course of experimentation on their behaviour
under artificial conditions,—justify us in drawing liberal conclusions as
to why they so behaved, and what they thought and felt about it? It is
necessary in the first place to know what to observe, and how, and above
all what for. But that presumed, we must further live with the animals not
only as their masters and their examiners, but as their friends and
fellow-creatures; we must be able—and so lightly that no effort is
discernable—to lay aside the burden and garb of civilisation; we must
possess that stamp of sympathy and similarity which invites confidence,
and breaks down the reserve which our poor relations, whether human or
others, offer to the first approaches of a strange superior. It is
probable that in that case we should have less occasion to wonder at their
oddities or to admire their sagacity. But a higher and more philosophical
wonder might, as in other cases when we get inside the heart of our
subject, take the place of the cheap and childish love of marvels, or of
the vulgar straining after comic traits.
Of all this mass of materials the psychologist proper can directly make
only a sparing use. Even as illustrations, his data must not be presented
too often in all their crude and undigested individuality, or he runs the
risk of leaving one-sided impressions. Every single instance,
individualised and historical,—unless it be exhibited by that true art of
genius which we cannot expect in the average psychologist—narrows, even
though it be but slightly, the complete and all-sided truth. Anecdotes are
good, and to the wise they convey a world of meaning, but to lesser minds
they sometimes suggest anything but the points they should accentuate.
Without the detail of individual realistic study there is no psychology
worth the name. History, story, we must have: but at the same time, with
the philosopher, we must say, I don’t give much weight to stories. And
this is what will always—except in rare instances where something like
genius is conjoined with it—make esoteric science hard and unpopular. It
dare not—if it is true to its idea—rest on any amount of mere instances,
as isolated, unreduced facts. Yet it can only have real power so far as it
concentrates into itself the life-blood of many instances, and indeed
extracts the pith and unity of all instances.
Nor, on the other hand, can it turn itself too directly and intently
towards practical applications. All this theory of mental progress from
the animate soul to the fullness of religion and science deals solely with
the universal process of education: “the education of humanity” we may
call it: the way in which mind is made true and real(46). It is therefore
a question of intricacy and of time how to carry over this general theory
into the arena of education as artificially directed and planned. To try
to do so at a single step would be to repeat the mistake of Plato, if
Plato may be taken to suppose (which seems incredible) that a theoretical
study of the dialectics of truth and goodness would enable his rulers,
without the training of special experience, to undertake the supreme tasks
of legislation or administration. All politics, like all education, rests
on these principles of the means and conditions of mental growth: but the
schooling of concrete life, though it may not develop the faculty of
formulating general laws, will often train better for the management of
the relative than a mere logical Scholastic in first or absolute
principles.
In conclusion, there are one or two points which seem of cardinal
importance for the progress of psychology. (1) Its difference from the
physical sciences has to be set out: in other words, the peculiarity of
psychical fact. It will not do merely to say that experience marks out
these boundaries with sufficient clearness. On the contrary, the terms
consciousness, feeling, mind, &c., are evidently to many psychologists
mere names. In particular, the habits of physical research when introduced
into mental study lead to a good deal of what can only be called
mythology. (2) There should be a clearer recognition of the problem of the
relations of mental unity to mental elements. But to get that, a more
thorough logical and metaphysical preparation is needed than is usually
supposed necessary. The doctrine of identity and necessity, of universal
and individual, has to be faced, however tedious. (3) The distinction
between first-grade and second-grade elements and factors in the mental
life has to be realised. The mere idea as presentative or immediate has to
be kept clear of the more logico-reflective, or normative ideas, which
belong to judgment and reasoning. And the number of these grades in mental
development seems endless. (4) But, also, a separation is required—were it
but temporary—between what may be called principles, and what is detail.
At present, in psychology, “principles” is a word almost without meaning.
A complete all-explaining system is of course impossible at present and
may always be so. Yet if an effort of thought could be concentrated on
cardinal issues, and less padding of conventional and traditional detail
were foisted in, much might thereby be done to make detailed research
fruitful. (5) And finally, perhaps, if psychology be a philosophical
study, some hint as to its purpose and problem would be desirable. If it
is only an abstract branch of science, of course, no such hint is in
place.
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.
Allusion has already been made to the question of the boundaries between
logic and psychology, between logic and ethics, ethics and psychology, and
psychology and epistemology. Each of these occasionally comes to cover
ground that seems more appropriate to the others. Logic is sometimes
restricted to denote the study of the conditions of derivative knowledge,
of the canons of inference and the modes of proof. If taken more widely as
the science of thought-form, it is supposed to imply a world of fixed or
stereotyped relations between ideas, a system of stable thoughts governed
by inflexible laws in an absolute order of immemorial or eternal truth. As
against such fixity, psychology is supposed to deal with these same ideas
as products—as growing out of a living process of thought—having a history
behind them and perhaps a prospect of further change. The genesis so given
may be either a mere chronicle-history, or it may be a philosophical
development. In the former case, it would note the occasions of incident
and circumstance, the reactions of mind and environment, under which the
ideas were formed. Such a psychological genesis of several ideas is found
in the Second Book of Locke’s Essay. In the latter case, the account would
be more concerned with the inner movement, the action and reaction in
ideas themselves, considered not as due to casual occurrences, but as
self-developing by an organic growth. But in either case, ideas would be
shown not to be ready-made and independently existing kinds in a world of
idea-things, and not to form an unchanging diagram or framework, but to be
a growth, to have a history, and a development. Psychology in this sense
would be a dynamical, as opposed to the supposed statical, treatment of
ideas and concepts in logic. But it may be doubted how far it is well to
call this psychology: unless psychology deals with the contents of the
mental life, in their meaning and purpose, instead of, as seems proper,
merely in their character of psychic events. Such psychology is rather an
evolutionist logic,—a dialectic process more than an analytic of a datum.
In the same way, ethics may be brought into one kind of contact with
psychology. Ethics, like logic, may be supposed to presuppose and to deal
with a certain inflexible scheme of requirements, a world of moral order
governed by invariable or universal law; an eternal kingdom of right,
existing independently of human wills, but to be learned and followed out
in uncompromising obedience. As against this supposed absolute order,
psychology may be said to show the genesis of the idea of obligation and
duty, the growth of the authority of conscience, the formation of ideals,
the relativity of moral ideas. Here also it may reach this conclusion, by
a more external or a more internal mode of argument. It may try to show,
in other words, that circumstances give rise to these forms of estimating
conduct, or it may argue that they are a necessary development in the
human being, constituted as he is. It may again be doubted whether this is
properly called psychology. Yet its purport seems ultimately to be that
the objective order is misconceived when it is regarded as an external or
quasi-physical order: as a law written up and sanctioned with an external
authority—as, in Kant’s words, a heteronomy. If that order is objective,
it is so because it is also in a sense subjective: if it is above the mere
individuality of the individual, it is still in a way identical with his
true or universal self-hood. Thus “psychological” here means the
recognition that the logical and the moral law is an autonomy: that it is
not given, but though necessary, necessary by the inward movement of the
mind. The metaphor of law is, in brief, misleading. For, according to a
common, though probably an erroneous, analysis of that term, the essence
of a law in the political sphere is to be a species of command. And that
is rather a one-sidedly practical or aesthetic way of looking at it. The
essence of law in general, and the precondition of every law in special,
is rather uniformity and universality, self-consistency and absence of
contradiction: or, in other words, rationality. Its essential opposite—or
its contradiction in essence—is a privilege, an attempt at isolating a
case from others. It need not indeed always require bare
uniformity—require i.e. the same act to be done by different people: but
it must always require that every thing within its operation shall be
treated on principles of utter and thorough harmony and consistency. It
requires each thing to be treated on public principles and with publicity:
nothing apart and mere singular, as a mere incident or as a world by
itself. Differently it may be treated, but always on grounds of common
well-being, as part of an embracing system.
There is probably another sense, however, in which psychology comes into
close relation with ethics. If we look on man as a microcosm, his inner
system will more or less reproduce the system of the larger world. The
older psychology used to distinguish an upper or superior order of
faculties from a lower or inferior. Thus in the intellectual sphere, the
intellect, judgment, and reason were set above the senses, imagination,
and memory. Among the active powers, reasonable will, practical reason and
conscience were ranked as paramount over the appetites and desires and
emotions. And this use of the word “faculty” is as old as Plato, who
regards science as a superior faculty to opinion or imagination. But this
application—which seems a perfectly legitimate one—does not, in the first
instance, belong to psychology at all. No doubt it is psychically
presented: but it has an other source. It springs from an appreciation, a
judgment of the comparative truth or reality of what the so-called
psychical act means or expresses. Such faculties are powers in a hierarchy
of means and ends and presuppose a normative or critical function which
has classified reality. Psychically, the elements which enter into
knowledge are not other than those which belong to opinion: but they are
nearer an adequate rendering of reality, they are truer, or nearer the
Idea. And in the main we may say, that is truer or more real which
succeeds in more completely organising and unifying elements—which rises
more and more above the selfish or isolated part into the thorough unity
of all parts.
The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that
which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary
and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs
off no less abruptly into the unknown. Knowledge, on the contrary, is
unified: and its unity gives it its strength and superiority. The powers
which thus exist are the subjective counterparts of objectively valuable
products. Thus, reason is the subjective counterpart of a world in which
all the constituents are harmonised and fall into due relationship. It is
a product or result, which is not psychologically, but logically or
morally important. It is a faculty, because it means that actually its
possessor has ordered and systematised his life or his ideas of things.
Psychologically, it, like unreason, is a compound of elements: but in the
case of reason the composition is unendingly and infinitely consistent; it
is knowledge completely unified. The distinction then is not in the
strictest sense psychological: for it has an aesthetic or normative
character; it is logical or ethical: it denotes that the idea or the act
is an approach to truth or goodness. And so, when Butler or Plato
distinguishes reason or reflection from appetites and affections, and even
from self-love or from the heart which loves and hates, this is not
exactly a psychological division in the narrower sense. That is to say:
these are, in Plato’s words, not merely “parts,” but quite as much “kinds”
and “forms” of soul. They denote degrees in that harmonisation of mind and
soul which reproduces the permanent and complete truth of things. For
example, self-love, as Butler describes it, has but a partial and narrowed
view of the worth of acts: it is engrossing and self-involved: it cannot
take in the full dependence of the narrower interest on the larger and
eternal self. So, in Plato, the man of heart is but a nature which by fits
and starts, or with steady but limited vision, realises the larger life.
These parts or kinds are not separate and co-existent faculties: but
grades in the co-ordination and unification of the same one human nature.
(i.) Psychology and Epistemology.
Psychology however in the strict sense is extremely difficult to define.
Those who describe it as the “science of mind,” the “phenomenology of
consciousness,” seem to give it a wider scope than they really mean. The
psychologist of the straiter sect tends, on the other hand, to carry us
beyond mind and consciousness altogether. His, it has been said, is a
psychology without a Psyché. For him Mind, Soul, and Consciousness are
only current and convenient names to designate the field, the ground on
which the phenomena he observes are supposed to transact themselves. But
they must not on any account interfere with the operations; any more than
Nature in general may interfere with strictly physical inquiries, or Life
and vital force with the theories of biology. The so-called Mind is only
to be regarded as a stage on which certain events represent themselves. In
this field, or on this stage, there are certain relatively ultimate
elements, variously called ideas, presentations, feelings, or states of
consciousness. But these elements, though called ideas, must not be
supposed more than mechanical or dynamical elements; consciousness is
rather their product, a product which presupposes certain operations and
relations between them. If we are to be strictly scientific, we must, it
is urged, treat the factors of consciousness as not themselves conscious:
we must regard them as quasi-objective, or in abstraction from the
consciousness which surveys them. The Ego must sink into a mere receptacle
or arena of psychic event; its independent meaning or purport is to be
ignored, as beside the question.
When this line is once fixed upon, it seems inevitable to go farther.
Comte was inclined to treat psychology as falling between two stools: it
must, he thought, draw all its content either from physiology on the one
hand, or from social factors on the other. The dominant or experimental
psychology of the present day seems inclined, without however formulating
any very definite statement, to pronounce for the former alternative. It
does not indeed adopt the materialistic view that mind is only a function
of matter. Its standpoint rather is that the psychical presents itself
even to unskilled observation as dependent on (i.e. not independent of) or
as concomitant with certain physical or corporeal facts. It adds that the
more accurately trained the observer becomes, the more he comes to
discover a corporeal aspect even where originally he had not surmised its
existence, and to conclude that the two cycles of psychical and physical
event never interfere with each other: that soul does not intervene in
bodily process, nor body take up and carry on psychical. If it is said
that the will moves the limbs, he replies that the will which moves is
really certain formerly unnoticed movements of nerve and muscle which are
felt or interpreted as a discharge of power. If the ocular impression is
said to cause an impression on the mind, he replies that any fact hidden
under that phrase refers to a change in the molecules of the brain. He
will therefore conclude that for the study of psychical phenomena the
physical basis, as it may be called, is all important. Only so can
observation really deal with fact capable of description and measurement.
Thus psychology, it may be said, tends to become a department of
physiology. From another standpoint, biology may be said to receive its
completion in psychology. How much either phrase means, however, will
depend on the estimate we form of biology. If biology is only the study of
mechanical and chemical phenomena on the peculiar field known as an
organism, and if that organism is only treated as an environment which may
be ignored, then psychology, put on the same level, is not the full
science of mind, any more than the other is the full study of life. They
both have narrowed their subject to suit the abstract scheme of the
laboratory, where the victim of experiment is either altered by mutilation
and artificial restrictions, or is dead. If, on the contrary, biology has
a substantial unity of its own to which mechanical and chemical
considerations are subordinate and instrumental, psychology may even take
part with physiology without losing its essential rank. But in that case,
we must, as Spinoza said(47), think less mechanically of the animal frame,
and recognise (after the example of Schelling) something truly inward
(i.e. not merely locally inside the skin) as the supreme phase or
characteristic of life. We must, in short, recognise sensibility as the
culmination of the physiological and the beginning of the psychological.
To the strictly scientific psychologist, as has been noted—or to the
psychology which imitates optical and electrical science—ideas are only
psychical events: they are not ideas _of_ anything, relative, i.e. to
something else; they have no meaning, and no reference to a reality beyond
themselves. They are presentations;—not representations of something
outside consciousness. They are appearances: but not appearances of
something: they do not reveal anything beyond themselves. They are, we may
almost say, a unique kind of physical phenomena. If we say they are
presentations of something, we only mean that in the presented something,
in the felt something, the wished something, we separate the quality or
form or aspect of presentativeness, of feltness, of wishedness, and
consider this aspect by itself. There are grades, relations,
complications, of such presentations or in such presentedness: and with
the description and explanation of these, psychology is concerned. They
are fainter or stronger, more or less correlated and antithetical.
Presentation (or ideation), in short, is the name of a train of event,
which has its peculiarities, its laws, its systems, its history.
All reality, it may be said, subsists in such presentation; it is for a
consciousness, or in a consciousness. All _esse_, in its widest sense, is
_percipi_. And yet, it seems but the commonest of experiences to say that
all that is presented is not reality. It _is_, it has a sort of being,—is
somehow presumed to exist: but it is not reality. And this reference and
antithesis to _what_ is presented is implied in all such terms as “ideas,”
“feelings,” “states of consciousness”: they are distinguished from and
related to objects of sense or external facts, to something, as it is
called, outside consciousness. Thoughts and ideas are set against things
and realities. In their primitive stage both the child and the savage seem
to recognise no such difference. What they imagine is, as we might say, on
the same plane with what they touch and feel. They do not, as we
reproachfully remark, recognise the difference between fact and fiction.
All of us indeed are liable to lapses into the same condition. A strong
passion, a keen hope or fear, as we say, invests its objects with reality:
even a sanguine moment presents as fact what calmer reflection disallows
as fancy. With natural and sane intelligences, however, the recrudescence
of barbarous imagination is soon dispelled, and the difference between
hallucinations and realities is established. With the utterly wrecked in
mind, the reality of hallucinations becomes a permanent or habitual state.
With the child and the untrained it is a recurrent and a disturbing
influence: and it need hardly be added that the circle of these _decepti
deceptores_—people with the “lie in the Soul”—is a large one. There thus
emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and falsehood, of
reality and unreality, or between representation and reality. There arise
two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it is
supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly.
With this distinction we are brought across the problem sometimes called
Epistemological. Strictly speaking, it is really part of a larger problem:
the problem of what—if Greek compounds must be used—may be styled
Aletheiology—the theory of truth and reality: what Hegel called Logic, and
what many others have called Metaphysics. As it is ordinarily taken up,
“ideas” are believed to be something _in us_ which is representative or
symbolical of something truly real _outside us_. This inward something is
said to be the first and immediate object of knowledge(48), and gives
us—in a mysterious way we need not here discuss—the mediate knowledge of
the reality, which is sometimes said to cause it. Ideas in the Mind, or in
the Subject, or in us, bear witness to something outside the
mind,—trans-subjective—beyond us. The Mind, Subject, or Ego, in this
parallelism is evidently in some way identified with our corporeal
organism: perhaps even located, and provided with a “seat,” in some
defined space of that organism. It is, however, the starting-point of the
whole distinction that ideas _do not_, no less than they do, conform or
correspond to this supra-conscious or extra-conscious world of real
things. Truth or falsehood arises, according to these assumptions,
according as psychical image or idea corresponds or not to physical fact.
But how, unless by some miraculous second-sight, where the supreme
consciousness, directly contemplating by intuition the true and
independent reality, turns to compare with this immediate vision the
results of the mediate processes conducted along the organs of sense,—how
this agreement or disagreement of copy and original, of idea and reality,
can be detected, it is impossible to say.
As has been already noted, the mischief lies in the hypostatisation of
ideas as something existing in abstraction from things—and, of things, in
abstraction from ideas. They are two abstractions, the first by the
realist, the second by the idealist called subjective and psychological.
To the realist, things exist by themselves, and they manage to produce a
copy of themselves (more or less exact, or symbolical) in _our_ mind, i.e.
in a materialistically-spiritual or a spiritualistically-material locus
which holds “images” and ideas. To the psychological idealist, ideas have
a substantive and primary right to existence, them alone do we really
know, and from them we more or less legitimately are said (but probably no
one takes this seriously) to infer or postulate a world of permanent
things. Now ideas have no substantive existence as a sort of things, or
even images of things anywhere. All this is pure mythology. It is said by
comparative mythologists that in some cases the epithet or quality of some
deity has been substantialised (hypostatised) into a separate god, who,
however (so still to keep up the unity), is regarded as a relative, a son,
or daughter, of the original. So the phrase “ideas of things” has been
taken literally as if it was double. But to have an idea of a thing merely
means that we know it, or think it. An idea is not given: it is a thing
which is given in the idea. An idea is not an additional and intervening
object of our knowledge or supposed knowledge. That a thing is our object
of thought is another word for its being our idea, and that means we know
it.
The distinction between truth and falsehood, between reality and
appearance, is not arrived at by comparing what we have before us in our
mind with some inaccessible reality beyond. It is a distinction that grows
up with the growth and organisation of our presentations—with their
gradual systematisation and unification in one consciousness. But this
consciousness which thinks, i.e. judges and reasons, is something superior
to the contrast of physical and psychical: superior, i.e. in so far as it
includes and surveys the antithesis, without superseding it. It is the
“transcendental unity of consciousness” of Kant—his synthetic unity of
apperception. It means that all ideas ultimately derive their reality from
their coherence with each other in an all-embracing or infinite idea. Real
in a sense ideas always are, but with an imperfect reality. Thus the
education to truth is not—such a thing would be meaningless—ended by a
rough and ready recommendation to compare our ideas with facts: it must
teach the art which discovers facts. And the teaching may have to go
through many grades or provinces: in each of which it is possible to
acquire a certain virtuosoship without being necessarily an adept in
another. It is through what is called the development of intellect,
judgment, and reasoning that the faculty of truth-detecting or
truth-selecting comes. And the common feature of all of these is, so to
say, their superiority to the psychological mechanism, not in the sense of
working without it and directly, but of being the organising unity or
unifier and controller and judge of that mechanism. The certainty and
necessity of truth and knowledge do not come from a constraint from the
external thing which forces the inner idea into submission; they come from
the inner necessity of conformity and coherence in the organism of
experience. We in fact had better speak of ideas as experience—as felt
reality: a reality however which has its degrees and perhaps even its
provinces. All truth comes with the reasoned judgment, i.e. the
syllogism—i.e. with the institution or discovery of relations of fact or
element to fact or element, immediate or derivative, partial and less
partial, up to its ideal coherence in one Idea. It is because this
coherence is so imperfectly established in many human beings that their
knowledge is so indistinguishable from opinion, and that they separate so
loosely truth from error. They have not worked their way into a definitely
articulated system, where there are no gaps, no abrupt transitions: their
mental order is so loosely put together that divergences and
contradictions which vex another drop off ineffectual from them.
(ii.) Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
This was the idealism which Kant taught and Fichte promoted. Of the other
idealism there are no doubt abundant traces in the language of Kant: and
they were greedily fastened on by Schopenhauer. To him the doctrine, that
the world is my idea, is adequately represented when it is translated into
the phrase that the world is a phantasmagoria of my brain; and escape from
the subjective idealism thus initiated is found by him only through a
supposed revelation of immediate being communicated in the experience of
will. But according to the more consistently interpreted Kant, the problem
of philosophy consists in laying bare the supreme law or conditions of
consciousness on which depend the validity of our knowledge, our estimates
of conduct, and our aesthetic standards. And these roots of reality are
for Kant in the mind—or, should we rather say—in mind—in “Consciousness in
General.” In the _Criticism of Pure Reason_ the general drift of his
examination is to show that the great things or final realities which are
popularly supposed to stand in self-subsistent being, as ultimate and
all-comprehensive objects set up for knowledge, are not “things” as
popularly supposed, but imperative and inevitable ideas. They are not
objects to be known—(these are always finite): but rather the unification,
the basis, or condition, and the completion of all knowledge. To know
them—in the ordinary petty sense of knowledge—is as absurd and impossible
as it would be, in the Platonic scheme of reality, to know the idea of
good which is “on the further side of knowledge and being.” God and the
Soul—and the same would be true of the World (though modern speculators
sometimes talk as if they had it at least within their grasp)—are not mere
_objects_ of knowledge. It would be truer to say they are that by which we
know, and they are what in us knows: they make knowledge possible, and
actual. Kant has sometimes spoken of them as the objects of a faith of
reason. What he means is that reason only issues in knowledge because of
and through this inevitable law of reason bidding us go on for ever in our
search, because there can be nothing isolated and nowhere any _ne plus
ultra_ in science, which is infinite and yet only justified as it
postulates or commands unity.
Kant’s central idea is that truth, beauty, goodness, are not dependent on
some qualities of the object, but on the universal nature or law of
consciousness. Beauty is not an attribute of things in their abstractness:
but of things as ideas of a subject, and depends on the proportion and
symmetry in the play of human faculty. Goodness is not conformity to an
outward law, but is obligatory on us through that higher nature which is
our truer being. Truth is not conformity of ideas with supposed
trans-subjective things, but coherence and stability in the system of
ideas. The really infinite world is not out there, but in here—in
consciousness in general, which is the denial of all limitation, of all
finality, of all isolation. God is the essential and inherent unity and
unifier of spirit and nature—the surety that the world in all its
differentiations is one. The Soul is not an essential entity, but the
infinite fruitfulness and freshness of mental life, which forbids us
stopping at anything short of complete continuity and unity. The Kingdom
of God—the Soul—the moral law—is within us: within us, as supreme,
supra-personal and infinite intelligences, even amid all our littleness
and finitude. Even happiness which we stretch our arms after is not really
beyond us, but is the essential self which indeed we can only reach in
detail. It is so both in knowledge and in action. Each knowledge and
enjoyment in reality is limited and partial, but it is made stable, and it
gets a touch of infinitude, by the larger idea which it helps to realise.
Only indeed in that antithesis between the finite and the infinite does
the real live. Every piece of knowledge is real, only because it assumes
_pro tempore_ certain premisses which are given: every actual beauty is
set in some defect of aesthetic completeness: every actually good deed has
to get its foil in surrounding badness. The real is always partial and
incomplete. But it has the basis or condition of its reality in an idea—in
a transcendental unity of consciousness, which is so to say a law, or a
system and an order, which imposes upon it the condition of conformity and
coherence; but a conformity which is essential and implicit in it.
Fichte has called his system a _Wissenschaftslehre_—a theory of knowledge.
Modern German used the word _Wissenschaft_, as modern English uses the
word Science, to denote the certified knowledge of piecemeal fact, the
partial unification of elements still kept asunder. But by _Wissen_, as
opposed to _Erkennen_, is meant the I know, am aware and sure, am in
contact with reality, as opposed to the derivative and conditional
reference of something to something else which explains it. The former is
a wider term: it denotes all consciousness of objective truth, the
certainty which claims to be necessary and universal, which pledges its
whole self for its assertion. Fichte thus unifies and accentuates the
common element in the Kantian criticisms. In the first of these Kant had
begun by explaining the nature and limitation of empirical science. It was
essentially conditioned by the given sensation—dependent i.e. on an
unexplained and preliminary element. This is what makes it science in the
strict or narrow sense of the term: its being set, as it were, in the
unknown, the felt, the sense-datum. The side of reality is thus the side
of limitation and of presupposition. But what makes it truth and knowledge
in general, on the other hand,—as distinct from _a_ truth (i.e. partial
truth) and a knowledge,—is the ideal element—the mathematical, the
logical, the rational law,—or in one word, the universal and formal
character. So too every real action is on one hand the product of an
impulse, a dark, merely given, immediate tendency to be, and without that
would be nothing: but on the other hand it is only an intelligent and
moral action in so far as it has its constitution from an intelligence, a
formal system, which determine its place and function.
It is on the latter or ideal element that Kant makes the emphasis
increasingly turn. Not truths, duties, beauties, but truth, duty, beauty,
form his theme. The formal element—the logical or epistemological
condition of knowledge and morality and of beauty—is what he (and still
more Fichte) considers the prime question of fundamental philosophy. His
philosophy is an attempt to get at the organism of our fundamental
belief—the construction, from the very base, of our conception of reality,
of our primary certainty. In technical language, he describes our
essential nature as a Subject-object. It is the unity of an I am which is
also I know that I am: an I will which is also I am conscious of my
will(49). Here there is a radical disunion and a supersession of that
disunion. Action and contemplation are continually outrunning each other.
The I will rests upon one I know, and works up to another: the I know
reflects upon an I will, and includes it as an element in its idea.
Kant had brought into use the term Deduction, and Fichte follows him. The
term leads to some confusion: for in English, by its modern antithesis to
induction, it suggests _a priori_ methods in all their iniquity. It means
a kind of jugglery which brings an endless series out of one small term.
Kant has explained that he uses it in the lawyer’s sense in which a claim
is justified by being traced step by step back to some acknowledged and
accepted right(50). It is a regressive method which shows us that if the
original datum is to be accepted it carries along with it the legitimation
of the consequence. This method Fichte applies to psychology. Begin, he
says like Condillac, with the barest nucleus of soul-life; the mere
sentiency, or feeling: the contact, as it were, with being, at a single
point. But such a mere point is unthinkable. You find, as Mr. Spencer
says, that “Thought” (or Consciousness) “cannot be framed out of one term
only.” “Every sensation to be known as one must be perceived.” Such is the
nature of the Ego—a subject which insists on each part being qualified by
the whole and so transformed. As Mr. Spencer, again, puts it, the mind not
merely tends to revive, to associate, to assimilate, to represent its own
presentations, but it carries on this process infinitely and in ever
higher multiples. Ideas as it were are growing in complexity by
re-presenting: i.e. by embracing and enveloping elements which cannot be
found existing in separation. In the mind there is no mere presentation,
no bare sensation. Such a unit is a fiction or hypothesis we employ, like
the atom, for purposes of explanation. The pure sensation therefore—which
you admit because you must have something to begin with, not a mere
nothing, but something so simple that it seems to stand out clear and
indisputable—this pure sensation, when you think of it, forces you to go a
good deal further. Even to be itself, it must be more than itself. It is
like the pure or mere being of the logicians. Admit the simple
sensation—and you have admitted everything which is required to make
sensation a possible reality. But you do not—in the sense of vulgar
logic—deduce what follows out of the beginning. From that, taken by
itself, you will get only itself: mere being will give you only nothing,
to the end of the chapter. But, as the phrase is, sensation is an element
in a consciousness: it is, when you think of it, always more than you
called it: there is a curious “continuity” about the phenomena, which
makes real isolation impossible.
Of course this “deduction” is not history: it is logic. It says, if you
posit sensation, then in doing so, you posit a good deal more. You have
imagination, reason, and many more, all involved in your original
assumption. And there is a further point to be noted. You cannot really
stop even at reason, at intelligence and will, if you take these in the
full sense. You must realise that these only exist as part and parcel of a
reasonable world. An individual intelligence presupposes a society of
intelligences. The successive steps in this argument are presented by
Fichte in the chief works of his earlier period (1794-98). The works of
that period form a kind of trilogy of philosophy, by which the faint
outlines of the absolute selfhood is shown acquiring definite consistency
in the moral organisation of society. First comes the “Foundation for the
collective philosophy.” It shows how our conception of reality and our
psychical organisation are inevitably presupposed in the barest function
of intelligence, in the abstractest forms of logical law. Begin where you
like, with the most abstract and formal point of consciousness, you are
forced, as you dwell upon it (you identifying yourself with the thought
you realise), to go step by step on till you accept as a self-consistent
and self-explanatory unity all that your cognitive and volitional nature
claims to own as its birthright. Only in such an intelligent will is
perception and sensation possible. Next came the “Foundation of Natural
Law, on the principles of the general theory.” Here the process of
deduction is carried a step further. If man is to realise himself as an
intelligence with an inherent bent to action, then he must be conceived as
a person among persons, as possessed of rights, as incapable of acting
without at the same moment claiming for his acts recognition, generality,
and logical consecution. The reference, which in the conception of a
practical intelligence was implicit,—the reference to fellow-agents, to a
world in which law rules—is thus, by the explicit recognition of these
references, made a fact patent and positive—_gesetzt_,—expressly
instituted in the way that the nature and condition of things postulates.
But this is not all: we step from the formal and absolute into the
material and relative. If man is to be a real intelligence, he must be an
intelligence served by organs. “The rational being cannot realise its
efficient individuality, unless it ascribes to itself a material body”: a
body, moreover, in which Fichte believes he can show that the details of
structure and organs are equally with the general corporeity predetermined
by reason(51). In the same way it is shown that the social and political
organisation is required for the realisation—the making positive and yet
coherent—of the rights of all individuals. You deduce society by showing
it is required to make a genuine individual man. Thirdly came the “System
of Ethics.” Here it is further argued that, at least in a certain
respect(52), in spite of my absolute reason and my absolute freedom, I can
only be fully real as a part of Nature: that my reason is realised in a
creature of appetite and impulse. From first to last this deduction is one
process which may be said to have for its object to determine “the
conditions of self-hood or egoity.” It is the deduction of the concrete
and empirical moral agent—the actual ego of actual life—from the abstract,
unconditioned ego, which in order to be actual must condescend to be at
once determining and determined.
In all of this Fichte makes—especially formally—a decided advance upon
Kant. In Ethics Kant in particular, (—especially for readers who never got
beyond the beginning of his moral treatise and were overpowered by the
categorical imperative of duty) had found the moral initiative or dynamic
apparently in the other world. The voice of duty seemed to speak from a
region outside and beyond the individual conscience. In a sense it must do
so: but it comes from a consciousness which is, and yet is more than, the
individual. It is indeed true that appearances here are deceptive: and
that the idea of autonomy, the self-legislation of reason, is trying to
become the central conception of Kant’s Ethics. Still it is Fichte’s merit
to have seen this clearly, to have held it in view unfalteringly, and to
have carried it out in undeviating system or deduction. Man, intelligent,
social, ethical, is a being all of one piece and to be explained entirely
immanently, or from himself. Law and ethics are no accident either to
sense or to intelligence—nothing imposed by mere external or supernal
authority(53). Society is not a brand-new order of things supervening upon
and superseding a state of nature, where the individual was entirely
self-supporting. Morals, law, society, are all necessary steps (necessary
i.e. in logic, and hence in the long run also inevitable in course of
time) to complete the full evolution or realisation of a human being. The
same conditions as make man intelligent make him social and moral. He does
not proceed so far as to become intelligent and practical, under terms of
natural and logical development, then to fall into the hands of a foreign
influence, an accident _ab extra_, which causes him to become social and
moral. Rather he is intelligent, because he is a social agent.
Hence, in Fichte, the absence of the ascetic element so often stamping its
character on ethics, and representing the moral life as the enemy of the
natural, or as mainly a struggle to subdue the sensibility and the flesh.
With Kant,—as becomes his position of mere inquirer—the sensibility has
the place of a predominant and permanent foreground. Reason, to his way of
talking, is always something of an intruder, a stranger from a far-off
world, to be feared even when obeyed: sublime, rather than beautiful. From
the land of sense which we habitually occupy, the land of reason is a
country we can only behold from afar: or if we can be said to have a
standpoint in it, that is only a figurative way of saying that though it
is really over the border, we can act—it would sometimes seem by a sort of
make-believe—as if we were already there. But these moments of high
enthusiasm are rare; and Kant commends sobriety and warns against
high-minded _Schwärmerei_, or over-strained Mysticism. For us it is
reserved to struggle with a recalcitrant selfhood, a grovelling
sensibility: it were only fantastic extravagance, fit for “fair souls” who
unfortunately often lapse into “fair sinners,” should we fancy ourselves
already anchored in the haven of untempted rest and peace.
When we come to Fichte, we find another spirit breathing. We have passed
from the age of Frederick the Great to the age of the French Revolution;
and the breeze that burst in the War of Liberation is already beginning to
freshen the air. Boldly he pronounces the primacy of that faith of reason
whereby not merely the just but all shall live. Your will shall show you
what you really are. You are essentially a rational will, or a
will-reason. Your sensuous nature, of impulse and appetite, far from being
the given and found obstacle to the realisation of reason,—which Kant
strictly interpreted might sometimes seem to imply—(and in this point
Schopenhauer carries out the implications of Kant)—is really the condition
or mode of being which reason assumes, or rises up to, in order to be a
practical or moral being. Far from the body and the sensible needs being a
stumbling-block to hamper the free fullness of rationality and morality,
the truth rather is that it is only by body and sense, by flesh and blood,
that the full moral and rational life can be realised(54). Or, to put it
otherwise, if human reason (intelligence and will) is to be more than a
mere and empty inner possibility, if man is to be a real and concrete
cognitive and volitional being, he must be a member of an ethical and
actual society, which lives by bread, and which marries and has children.
(iii.) Psychology in Ethics.
In this way, for Fichte, and through Fichte still more decidedly for
Hegel, both psychology and ethics breathe an opener and ampler air than
they often enjoy. Psychology ceases to be a mere description of psychic
events, and becomes the history of the self-organising process of human
reason. Ethics loses its cloistered, negative, unnatural aspect, and
becomes a name for some further conditions of the same development,
essentially postulated to complete or supplement its shortcomings.
Psychology—taken in this high philosophical acceptation—thus leads on to
Ethics; and Ethics is parted by no impassable line from Psychology. That,
at least, is what must happen if they are still to retain a place in
philosophy: for, as Kant says(55), “under the government of reason our
cognitions cannot form a rhapsody, but must constitute a system, in which
alone can they support and further its essential aims.” As parts of such a
system, they carry out their special work in subordination to, and in the
realisation of, a single Idea—and therefore in essential interconnexion.
From that interconnecting band we may however in detail-enquiry dispense
ourselves; and then we have the empirical or inductive sciences of
psychology and ethics. But even with these, the necessity of the situation
is such that it is only a question of degree how far we lose sight of the
philosophical horizon, and entrench ourselves in special enquiry.
Something of the philosophic largeness must always guide us; even when, to
further the interests of the whole, it is necessary for the special
enquirer to bury himself entirely in his part. So long as each part is
sincerely and thoroughly pursued, and no part is neglected, there is an
indwelling reason in the parts which will in the long run tend to
constitute the total.
A philosophical psychology will show us how the sane intelligence and the
rational will are, at least approximately, built up out of elements, and
through stages and processes, which modify and complement, as they may
also arrest and perplex, each other. The unity, coherence, and
completeness of the intelligent self is not, as vulgar irreflectiveness
supposes and somewhat angrily maintains, a full-grown thing or agent, of
whose actions and modes of behaviour the psychologist has to narrate the
history,—a history which is too apt to degenerate into the anecdotal and
the merely interesting. This unity of self has to be “deduced,” as Fichte
would say: it has to be shown as the necessary result which certain
elements in a certain order will lead to(56). A normal mind,
self-possessed, developed and articulated, yet thoroughly one, a real
microcosm, or true and full monad, which under the mode of its
individuality still represents the universe: that is, what psychology has
to show as the product of factors and processes. And it is clearly
something great and good, something valuable, and already possessing, by
implication we may say, an ethical character.
In philosophy, at least, it is difficult, or rather impossible to draw a
hard and fast line which shall demarcate ethical from non-ethical
characters,—to separate them from other intellectual and reasonable
motives. Kant, as we know, attempted to do so: but with the result that he
was forced to add a doubt whether a purely moral act could ever be said to
exist(57); or rather to express the certainty that if it did it was for
ever inaccessible to observation. All such designations of the several
“factors” or “moments” in reality, as has been hinted, are only _a
potiori_. But they are misused when it is supposed that they connote
abrupt and total discontinuity. And Kant, after all, only repeated in his
own terminology an old and inveterate habit of thought:—the habit which in
Stoicism seemed to see sage and foolish utterly separated, and which in
the straiter sects of Christendom fenced off saint absolutely from sinner.
It is a habit to which Hegel, and even his immediate predecessors, are
radically opposed. With Herder, he might say, “Ethics is only a higher
physics of the mind(58).” This—the truth in Spinozism—no doubt demands
some emphasis on the word “higher”: and it requires us to read ethics (or
something like it) into physics; but it is a step on the right road,—the
step which Utilitarianism and Evolutionism had (however awkwardly) got
their foot upon, and which “transcendent” ethics seems unduly afraid of
committing itself to. Let us say, if we like, that the mind is more than
mere nature, and that it is no proper object of a merely natural science.
But let us remember that a merely natural science is only a fragment of
science: let us add that the _merely_ natural is an abstraction which in
part denaturalises and mutilates the larger nature—a nature which includes
the natural mind, and cannot altogether exclude the ethical.
What have been called “formal duties(59)” seem to fall under this
range—the province of a philosophical psychology which unveils the
conditions of personality. Under that heading may be put self-control,
consistency, resolution, energy, forethought, prudence, and the like. The
due proportion of faculty, the correspondence of head and heart, the
vivacity and quickness of sympathy, the ease and simplicity of mental
tone, the due vigour of memory and the grace of imagination, sweetness of
temper, and the like, are parts of the same group(60). They are lovely,
and of good report: they are praise and virtue. If it be urged that they
are only natural gifts and graces, that objection cuts two ways. The
objector may of course be reminded that religion tones down the
self-complacency of morality. Yet, first, even apart from that, it may be
said that of virtues, which stand independent of natural conditions—of
external supply of means (as Aristotle would say)—nothing can be known and
nothing need be said. And secondly, none of these qualities are mere
gifts;—all require exercise, habituation, energising, to get and keep
them. How much and how little in each case is nature’s and how much ours
is a problem which has some personal interest—due perhaps to a rather
selfish and envious curiosity. But on the broad field of experience and
history we may perhaps accept the—apparently one-sided—proverb that “Each
man is the architect of his own fortune.” Be this as it may, it will not
do to deny the ethical character of these “formal duties” on the ground
e.g. that self-control, prudence, and even sweetness of temper may be used
for evil ends,—that one may smile and smile, and yet be a villain.
That—let us reply,—on one hand, is a fault (if fault it be) incidental to
all virtues in detail (for every single quality has its defect): nay it
may be a limitation attaching to the whole ethical sphere: and, secondly,
its inevitable limitation does not render the virtue in any case one whit
less genuine so far as it goes. And yet of such virtues it may be said, as
Hume(61) would say (who calls them “natural,” as opposed to the more
artificial merits of justice and its kin), that they please in themselves,
or in the mere contemplation, and without any regard to their social
effects. But they please as entering into our idea of complete human
nature, of mind and spirit as will and intellect.
The moralists of last century sometimes divided the field of ethics by
assigning to man three grades or kinds of duty: duties to himself, duties
to society, and duties to God. For the distinction there is a good deal to
be said: there are also faults to be found with it. It may be said,
amongst other things, that to speak of duties to self is a metaphorical
way of talking, and that God lies out of the range of human duty
altogether, except in so far as religious service forms a part of social
obligation. It may be urged that man is essentially a social being, and
that it is only in his relations to other such beings that his morality
can find a sphere. The sphere of morality, according to Dr. Bain, embraces
whatever “society has seen fit to enforce with all the rigour of positive
inflictions. Positive good deeds and self-sacrifice ... transcend the
region of morality proper and occupy a sphere of their own(62).” And there
is little doubt that this restriction is in accordance with a main current
of usage. It may even be said that there are tendencies towards a narrower
usage still, which would restrict the term to questions affecting the
relations of the sexes. But, without going so far, we may accept the
standpoint which finds in the phrase “popular or social” sanction, as
equivalent to the moral sanction, a description of the average level of
common opinion on the topic. The morality of an age or country thus
denotes, first, the average requirement in act and behaviour imposed by
general consent on the members of a community, and secondly, the average
performance of the members in response to these requirements. Generally
speaking the two will be pretty much the same. If the society is in a
state of equilibrium, there will be a palpable agreement between what all
severally expect and what all severally perform. On the other hand, as no
society is ever in complete equilibrium, this harmony will never be
perfect and may often be widely departed from. In what is called a single
community, if it reach a considerable bulk, there are (in other words)
often a number of minor societies, more or less thwarting and modifying
each other; and different observers, who belong in the main to one or
other of these subordinate groups, may elicit from the facts before them a
somewhat different social code, and a different grade of social
observance. Still, with whatever diversity of detail, the important
feature of such social ethics is that the stress is laid on the
performance of certain acts, in accordance with the organisation of
society. So long as the required compliance is given, public opinion is
satisfied, and morality has got its due.
But in two directions this conception of morality needs to be
supplementing. There is, on one hand, what is called duty to God. The
phrase is not altogether appropriate: for it follows too closely the
analogy of social requirement, and treats Deity as an additional and
social authority,—a lord paramount over merely human sovereigns. But
though there may be some use in the analogy, to press the conception is
seriously to narrow the divine character and the scope of religion. As in
similar cases, we cannot change one term without altering its correlative.
And therefore to describe our relation to God under the name of duty is to
narrow and falsify that relation. The word is no longer applicable in this
connexion without a strain, and where it exists it indicates the survival
of a conception of theocracy: of God regarded as a glorification of the
magistrate, as king of kings and lord of lords. It is the social world—and
indeed we may say the outside of the social world—that is the sphere of
duties. Duty is still with these reductions a great august name: but in
literal strictness it only rules over the medial sphere of life, the
sphere which lies between the individual as such and his universal
humanity(63). Beyond duty, lies the sphere of conscience and of religion.
And that is not the mere insistence by the individual to have a voice and
a vote in determining the social order. It is the sense that the social
order, however omnipotent it may seem, is limited and finite, and that man
has in him a kindred with the Eternal.
It is not very satisfactory, either, as Aristotle and others have pointed
out, to speak of man’s duties to himself. The phrase is analogical, like
the other. But it has the merit, like that of duty to God, of reminding us
that the ordinary latitude occupied by morality is not all that comes
under the larger scope of ethics. The “ethics of individual life” is a
subject which Mr. Spencer has touched upon: and by this title, he means
that, besides his general relationship to others, a human being has to
mind his own health, food, and amusement, and has duties as husband and
parent. But, after all, these are not matters of peculiarly individual
interest. They rather refer to points which society at certain epochs
leaves to the common sense of the agent,—apparently on an assumption that
he is the person chiefly interested. And these points—as the Greeks taught
long ago—are of fundamental importance: they are the very bases of life.
Yet the comparative neglect in which so-called civilised societies(64)
hold the precepts of wisdom in relation to bodily health and vigour, in
regard to marriage and progeny, serve to illustrate the doctrine of the
ancient Stoics that πάντα ὑπόληψις, or the modern idealist utterance that
the World is my idea. More and more as civilisation succeeds in its
disruption of man from nature, it shows him governed not by bare facts and
isolated experiences, but by the systematic idea under which all things
are subsumed. He loses the naïveté of the natural man, which takes each
fact as it came, all alike good: he becomes sentimental, and artificial,
sees things under a conventional point of view, and would rather die than
not be in the fashion. And this tendency is apparently irresistible. Yet
the mistake lies in the one-sidedness of sentiment and convention. Not the
domination of the idea is evil; but the domination of a partial and
fragmentary idea: and this is what constitutes the evil of artificiality.
And the correction must lie not in a return to nature, but in the
reconstruction of a wider and more comprehensive idea: an idea which shall
be the unity and system of all nature; not a fantastic idealism, but an
attempt to do justice to the more realist as well as the idealist sides of
life.
There is however another side of individualist ethics which needs even
more especial enforcement. It is the formation of
“The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill:”
the healthy mind in a healthy body. Ethics is only too apt to suppose that
will and intelligence are assumptions which need no special justification.
But the truth is that they vary from individual to individual in degree
and structure. It is the business of ethical psychology to give to these
vague attributions the definiteness of a normal standard: to show what
proportions are required to justify the proper title of reason and will—to
show what reason and will really are if they do what they are encouraged
or expected to do. It talks of the diseases of will and personality: it
must also set forth their educational ideal. The first problem of Ethics,
it may be said, is the question of the will and its freedom. But to say
this is of course not to say that, unless freedom of will be understood in
some special sense, ethics becomes impossible. If the moral law is the
_ratio cognoscendi_ of freedom, then must our conception of morality and
of freedom hang together. And it will clearly be indispensable to begin by
some attempt to discover in what sense man may be in the most general way
described as a moral agent—as an intelligent will, or (more briefly, yet
synonymously) as a will. “The soil of law and morality,” says Hegel(65),
“is the intelligent life: and its more precise place and starting-point
the will, which is free, in the sense that freedom is its substance and
characteristic, and the system of law the realm of freedom realised, the
world of intelligence produced out of itself as a second nature.” Such a
freedom is a freedom made and acquired, the work of the mind’s
self-realisation, not to be taken as a given fact of consciousness which
must be believed(66). To have a will—in other words, to have freedom, is
the consummation—and let us add, only the formal or ideal consummation—of
a process by which man raises himself out of his absorption in sensation
and impulse, establishes within himself a mental realm, an organism of
ideas, a self-consciousness, and a self.
The vulgar apprehension of these things seems to assume that we have by
nature, or are born with, a general faculty or set of general faculties,
which we subsequently fill up and embody by the aid of experience. We
possess—they seem to imply—so many “forms” and “categories” latent in our
minds ready to hold and contain the raw materials supplied from without.
According to this view we have all a will and an intelligence: the
difference only is that some put more into them, and some put less. But
such a separation of the general form from its contents is a piece of pure
mythology. It is perhaps true and safe to say that the human being is of
such a character that will and intelligence are in the ordinary course
inevitably produced. But the forms which grow up are the more and more
definite and systematic organisation of a graded experience, of series of
ideas, working themselves up again and again in representative and
re-representative degree, till they constitute a mental or inner world of
their own. The will is thus the title appropriate to the final stage of a
process, by which sensation and impulse have polished and perfected
themselves by union and opposition, by differentiation and accompanying
redintegration, till they assume characters quite unsurmised in their
earliest aspects, and yet only the consolidation or self-realisation of
implications. Thus the mental faculties are essentially acquired
powers,—acquired not from without, but by action which generates the
faculties it seems to imply. The process of mind is a process which
creates individual centres, raises them to completer independence;—which
produces an inner life more and more self-centered and also more and more
equal to the universe which it has embodied. And will and intelligence are
an important stage in that process.
Herbart (as was briefly hinted at in the first essay) has analysed ethical
appreciation (which may or may not be accompanied by approbation) into
five distinct standard ideas. These are the ideas of inward liberty, of
perfection, of right, benevolence, and equity. Like Hume, he regards the
moral judgment as in its purity a kind of aesthetic pronouncement on the
agreement or proportion of certain activities in relations to each other.
Two of these standard ideas,—that of inward liberty and of perfection—seem
to belong to the sphere at present under review. They emerge as conditions
determining the normal development of human nature to an intelligent and
matured personality. By inward freedom Herbart means the harmony between
the will and the intellect: what Aristotle has named “practical truth or
reality,” and what he describes in his conception of wisdom or moral
intelligence,—the power of discerning the right path and of pursuing it
with will and temper: the unity, clear but indissoluble, of will and
discernment. By the idea of perfection Herbart means the sense of
proportion and of propriety which is awakened by comparing a progress in
development or an increase in strength with its earlier stages of promise
and imperfection. The pleasure such perception affords works in two ways:
it is a satisfaction in achievement past, and a stimulus to achievement
yet to come.
Such ideas of inward liberty and of growth in ability or in performance
govern (at least in part) our judgment of the individual, and have an
ethical significance. Indeed, if the cardinal feature of the ethical
sentiment be the inwardness and independence of its approbation and
obligation, these ideas lie at the root of all true morality. Inward
harmony and inward progress, lucidity of conscience and the resolution
which knows no finality of effort, are the very essence of moral life.
Yet, if ethics is to include in the first instance social relationships
and external utilities and sanctions, these conditions of true life must
rather be described as pre-ethical. The truth seems to be that here we get
to a range of ethics which is far wider than what is ordinarily called
practice and conduct. At this stage logic, aesthetic, and ethic, are yet
one: the true, the good, and the beautiful are still held in their
fundamental unity. An ethics of wide principle precedes its narrower
social application; and whereas in ordinary usage the social provinciality
is allowed to prevail, here the higher ethics emerge clear and imperial
above the limitations of local and temporal duty.
And though it is easy to step into exaggeration, it is still well to
emphasise this larger conception of ethics. The moral principle of the
“maximising of life,” as it has been called(67), may be open to
misconception (—so, unfortunately are all moral principles when stated in
the effrontery of isolation): but it has its truth in the conviction that
all moral evil is marked by a tendency to lower or lessen the total
vitality. So too Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxim, _Sei vornehm_(68), ensue
distinction, and above all things be not common or vulgar (_gemein_), will
easily lend itself to distortion. But it is good advice for all that, even
though it may be difficult to define in a general formula wherein
distinction consists, to mark the boundary between self-respect and vanity
or obstinacy, or to say wherein lies the beauty and dignity of human
nature. Kant has laid it down as the principle of duty to ask ourselves if
in our act we are prepared to universalise the maxim implied by our
conduct. And that this—which essentially bids us look at an act in the
whole of its relations and context—is a safeguard against some forms of
moral evil, is certain. But there is an opposite—or rather an apparently
opposite—principle which bids us be individual, be true to our own selves,
and never allow ourselves to be dismayed from our own unique
responsibility. Perhaps the two principles are not so far apart as they
seem. In any case true individuality is the last word and the first word
in ethics; though, it may be added, there is a good deal to be said
between the two termini.
(iv.) An Excursus on Greek Ethics.
It is in these regions that Greek ethics loves to linger; on the duty of
the individual to himself, to be perfectly lucid and true, and to rise to
ever higher heights of achievement. _Ceteris paribus_, there is felt to be
something meritorious in superiority, something good:—even were it that
you are master, and another is slave. Thus naïvely speaks Aristotle(69).
To a modern, set amid so many conflicting ideals, perhaps, the immense
possibilities of yet further growth might suggest themselves with
overpowering force. To him the idea of perfection takes the form of an
idea of perfectibility: and sometimes it smites down his conceit in what
he has actually done, and impresses a sense of humility in comparison with
what yet remains unaccomplished. An ancient Greek apparently was little
haunted by these vistas of possibilities of progress through worlds beyond
worlds. A comparatively simple environment, a fixed and definite mental
horizon, had its plain and definite standards, or at least seemed to have
such. There were fewer cases of the man, unattached or faintly attached to
any definite profession—moving about in worlds half realised—who has grown
so common in a more developed civilisation. The ideals of the Greek were
clearly descried: each man had his definite function or work to perform:
and to do it better than the average, or than he himself habitually had
done, that was perfection, excellence, virtue. For virtue to the Greek is
essentially ability and respectability: promise of excellent performance:
capacity to do better than others. Virtue is praiseworthy or meritorious
character and quality: it is achievement at a higher rate, as set against
one’s past and against others’ average.
The Greek moralists sometimes distinguish and sometimes combine moral
virtue and wisdom, ἀρετή and φρόνησις: capacity to perform, and wisdom to
guide that capacity. To the ordinary Greek perhaps the emphasis fell on
the former, on the attainment of all recognised good quality which became
a man, all that was beautiful and honourable, all that was appropriate,
glorious, and fame-giving; and that not for any special reference to its
utilitarian qualities. Useful, of course, such qualities were: but that
was not in question at the time. In the more liberal commonwealths of
ancient Greece there was little or no anxious care to control the
education of its citizens, so as to get direct service, overt contribution
to the public good. A suspicious Spartan legislation might claim to do
that. But in the free air of Athens all that was required was loyalty,
good-will—εὔνοια—to the common weal; it might be even a sentiment of human
kindliness, of fraternity of spirit and purpose. Everything beyond and
upon that basis was left to free development. Let each carry out to the
full the development of his powers in the line which national estimation
points out. He is—nature and history alike emphasise that fact beyond the
reach of doubt, for all except the outlaw and the casual stranger—a member
of a community, and as such has a governing instinct and ideal which
animates him. But he is also a self-centered individual, with special
endowments of nature, in his own person and in the material objects which
are his. A purely individualist or selfish use of them is not—to the
normal Greek—even dreamed of. He is too deeply rooted in the substance of
his community for that: or it is on the ground and in the atmosphere of an
assured community that his individuality is to be made to flourish. Nature
has secured that his individuality shall rest securely in the
presupposition of his citizenship. It seems, therefore, as if he were left
free and independent in his personal search for perfection, for
distinction. His place is fixed for him: _Spartam nactus es; hanc orna_:
his duty is his virtue. That duty, as Plato expresses it, is to do his own
deeds—and not meddle with others. Nature and history have arranged that
others, in other posts, shall do theirs: that all severally shall energise
their function. The very word “duty” seems out of place; if, at least,
duty suggests external obligation, an order imposed and a debt to be
discharged. If there be a task-master and a creditor, it is the inflexible
order of nature and history:—or, to be more accurate, of nature, the
indwelling and permanent reality of things. But the obligation to follow
nature is scarcely felt as a yoke of constraint. A man’s virtue is to
perform his work and to perform it well: to do what he is specially
capable of doing, and therefore specially charged to do.
Nowhere has this character of Greek ethics received more classical
expression than in the Republic of Plato. In the prelude to his
subject—which is the nature of Right and Morality—Plato has touched
briefly on certain popular and inadequate views. There is the view that
Right has its province in performance of certain single and external
acts—in business honesty and commercial straightforwardness. There is the
view that it is rendering to each what is due to him; that it consists in
the proper reciprocity of services, in the balance of social give and
take. There is the critical or hyper-critical view which, from seeing so
much that is called justice to be in harmony with the interest of the
predominant social order, bluntly identifies mere force or strength as the
ground of right. And there are views which regard it as due to social
conventions and artifices, to the influence of education, to political
arrangements and the operation of irrational prejudices. To all these
views Plato objects: not because they are false—for they are all in part,
often in large part, true—but because they are inadequate and do not go to
the root of the matter. The foundations of right lie, he says, not in
external act, but in the inner man: not in convention, but in nature: not
in relation to others, but in the constitution of the soul itself. That
ethical idea—the idea of right—which seems most obviously to have its
centre outside the individual, to live and grow only in the relations
between individuals, Plato selects in order to show the independent
royalty of the single human soul. The world, as Hume afterwards, called
justice artificial: Plato will prove it natural. In a way he joins company
with those who bid us drive out the spectre of duty, of obligation coming
upon the soul from social authority, from traditional idea, from religious
sanctions. He preaches—or he is about to preach—the autonomy of the will.
The four cardinal virtues of Plato’s list are the qualities which go to
make a healthy, normal, natural human soul, fit for all activity, equipped
with all arms for the battle of life. They tell us what such a soul is,
not what it does. They are the qualities which unless a soul has, and has
them each perfect, yet all co-operant, its mere outward and single acts
have no virtue or merit, but are only lucky accidents at the best. On the
other hand, if a man has these constitutive qualities, he will act in the
social world, and act well. Plato has said scornful things of mere outward
and verbal truthfulness, and has set at the very lowest pitch of
degradation the “lie in the soul.” His “temperance” or “self-restraint,”
if it be far from breathing any suggestion of self-suppression or
self-assertion, is still farther from any suspicion of asceticism, or war
against the flesh. It is the noble harmony of the ruling and the ruled,
which makes the latter a partner of the sovereign, and takes from the
dictates of the ruler any touch of coercion. It is literally sanity of
soul, integrity and purity of spirit; it is what has been sometimes called
the beautiful soul—the indiscerptible unity of reason and impulse. Plato’s
bravery, again, is fortitude and consistency of soul, the full-blooded
heart which is fixed in reason, the zeal which is according to knowledge,
unflinching loyalty to the idea, the spirit which burns in the martyrs to
truth and humanity: yet withal with gentleness and courtesy and noble
urbanity in its immediate train. And his truthfulness is that inner
lucidity which cannot be self-deceived, the spirit which is a safeguard
against fanaticism and hypocrisy, the sunlike warmth of intelligence
without which the heart is a darkness full of unclean things.
The full development and crowning grace of such a manly nature Aristotle
has tried to present in the character of the Great-souled man—him whom
Plato has called the true king by divine right, or the autocrat by the
patent of nature. Like all such attempts to delineate a type in the terms
necessarily single and successive of abstract analysis, it tends
occasionally to run into caricature, and to give partial aspects an absurd
prominency. Only the greatest of artists could cope with such a task,
though that artist may be found perhaps classed among the historians. Yet
it is possible to form some conception of the ideal which Aristotle would
set before us. The Great-souled man _is_ great, and he dare not deny the
witness of his spirit. He is one who does not quail before the anger and
seek the applause of popular opinion: he holds his head as his own, and as
high as his undimmed self-consciousness shows it is worth. There has been
said to him by the reason within him the word that Virgil erewhile
addressed to Dante:
“Libero, dritto, e sano è il tuo arbitrio
E fallo fora non fare a suo cenno;
Per ch’ io te sopra te corono e mitrio.”
He is his own Emperor and his own Pope. He is the perfected man, in whom
is no darkness, whose soul is utter clearness, and complete harmony. Calm
in self-possessed majesty, he stands, if need be, _contra mundum_: but
rather, with the world beneath his feet. The chatter of personality has no
interest for him. Bent upon the best, lesser competitions for distinction
have no attraction for him. To the vulgar he will seem cold,
self-confined: in his apartness and distinction they will see the signs of
a “prig.” His look will be that of one who pities men—rather than loves
them: and should he speak ill of a foe, it is rather out of pride of heart
and unbroken spirit than because these things touch him. Such an one, in
many ways, was the Florentine poet himself.
If the Greek world in general thus conceived ἀρετή as the full bloom of
manly excellence (we all know how slightly—witness the remarks in the
Periclean oration—Greeks, in their public and official utterances, rated
womanliness), the philosophers had a further point to emphasise. That was
what they variously called knowledge, prudence, reason, insight,
intelligence, wisdom, truth. From Socrates to Aristotle, from Aristotle to
the Stoics and Epicureans, and from the Stoics to the Neo-Platonists, this
is the common theme: the supremacy of knowledge, its central and essential
relation to virtue. They may differ—perhaps not so widely as current
prejudice would suppose—as to how this knowledge is to be defined, what
kind of knowledge it is, how acquired and maintained, and so on. But in
essentials they are at one. None of them, of course, mean that in order to
right conduct nothing more is needed than to learn and remember what is
right, the precepts and commandments of ordinary morality. Memory is not
knowledge, especially when it is out of mind. Even an ancient philosopher
was not wholly devoid of common sense. They held—what they supposed was a
fact of observation and reflection—that all action was prompted by
feelings of the values of things, by a desire of something good or
pleasing to self, and aimed at self-satisfaction and self-realisation, but
that there was great mistake in what thus afforded satisfaction. People
chose to act wrongly or erroneously, because they were, first, mistaken
about themselves and what they wanted, and, secondly, mistaken in the
means which would give them satisfaction. But this second point was
secondary. The main thing was to know yourself, what you really were; in
Plato’s words, to “see the soul as it is, and know whether it have one
form only or many, or what its nature is; to look upon it with the eye of
reason in its original purity.” Self-deception, confusion, that worst
ignorance which is unaware of itself, false estimation—these are the
radical evils of the natural man. To these critics the testimony of
consciousness was worthless, unless corroborated. To cure this mental
confusion, this blindness of will and judgment, is the task set for
philosophy: to give inward light, to teach true self-measurement. In one
passage, much misunderstood, Plato has called this philosophic art the due
measurement of pleasures and pains. It should scarcely have been possible
to mistake the meaning. But, with the catchwords of Utilitarianism ringing
in their ears, the commentators ran straight contrary to the true teaching
of the _Protagoras_, consentient as it is with that of the _Phaedo_ and
the _Philebus_. To measure, one must have a standard: and if Plato has one
lesson always for us, it is that a sure standard the multitude have not,
but only confusion. The so-called pleasures and pains of the world’s
experiences are so entitled for different reasons, for contrary aims, and
with no unity or harmony of judgment. They are—not a fact to be accepted,
but—a problem for investigation: their reality is in question, their
genuineness, solidity and purity: and till you have settled that, you
cannot measure, for you may be measuring vacuity under the idea that there
is substance. You have still to get at the unit—i.e. the reality of
pleasure. It was not Plato’s view that pleasure was a separate and
independent entity: that it was exactly as it was felt. Each pleasure is
dependent for its pleasurable quality on the consciousness it belongs to,
and has only a relative truth and reality. Bentham has written about
computing the value of a “lot” of pleasures and pains. But Plato had his
mind on an earlier and more fundamental problem, what is the truth and
reality of pleasure; and his fullest but not his only essay towards
determining the value or estimating the meaning of pleasure in the scale
of being is that given in the _Philebus_.
This then is the knowledge which Greek philosophy meant: not mere
intellect—though, of course, there is always a danger of theoretical
inquiry degenerating into abstract and formal dogma. But of the meaning
there can be no serious doubt. It is a knowledge, says Plato, to which the
method of mathematical science—the most perfect he can find
acknowledged—is only an _ouverture_, or perhaps, only the preliminary
tuning of the strings. It is a knowledge not eternally hypothetical—a
system of sequences which have no sure foundation. It is a knowledge which
rests upon the conviction and belief of the “idea of good”: a kind of
knowledge which does not come by direct teaching, which is not mere
theory, but implies a lively conviction, a personal apprehension, a crisis
which is a kind of “conversion,” or “inspiration.” It is as it were the
prize of a great contest, in which the sword that conquers is the sword of
dialectic: a sword whereof the property is, like that of Ithuriel’s spear,
to lay bare all deceptions and illusions of life. Or, to vary the
metaphor: the son of man is like the prince in the fairy tale who goes
forth to win the true queen; but there are many false pretenders decked
out to deceive his unwary eyes and foolish heart. Yet in himself there is
a power of discernment: there is something kindred with the truth:—the
witness of the Spirit—and all that education and discipline can do is to
remove obstacles, especially the obstacles within the self which perturb
the sight and mislead the judgment. Were not the soul originally possessed
of and dominated by the idea of good, it could never discern it elsewhere.
On this original kindred depends all the process of education; the
influence of which therefore is primarily negative or auxiliary. Thus the
process of history and experience,—which the work of education only
reproduces in an accelerated _tempo_—serves but to bring out the implicit
reason within into explicit conformity with the rationality of the world.
Knowledge, then, in this ethical sphere means the harmony of will,
emotion, intellect: it means the clear light which has no illusions and no
deceptions. And to those who feel that much of their life and of the
common life is founded on prejudice and illusion, such white light will
occasionally seem hard and steely. At its approach they fear the loss of
the charm of that twilight hour ere the day has yet begun, or before the
darkness has fully settled down. Thus the heart and feelings look upon the
intellect as an enemy of sentiment. And Plato himself is not without
anticipations of such an issue. Yet perhaps we may add that the danger is
in part an imaginary one, and only arises because intelligence takes its
task too lightly, and encroaches beyond its proper ground. Philosophy, in
other words, mistakes its place when it sets itself up as a dogmatic
system of life. Its function is to comprehend, and from comprehension to
criticise, and through criticising to unify. It has no positive and
additional teaching of its own: no addition to the burden of life and
experience. And experience it must respect. Its work is to maintain the
organic or super-organic interconnexion between all the spheres of life
and all the forms of reality. It has to prevent stagnation and absorption
of departments—to keep each in its proper place, but not more than its
place, and yet to show how each is not independent of the others. And this
is what the philosopher or ancient sage would be. If he is passionless, it
is not that he has no passions, but that they no longer perturb and
mislead. If his controlling spirit be reason, it is not the reason of the
so-called “rationalist,” but the reason which seeks in patience to
comprehend, and to be at home in, a world it at first finds strange. And
if he is critical of others, he is still more critical of himself:
critical however not for criticism’s sake (which is but a poor thing), but
because through criticism the faith of reason may be more fully justified.
To the last, if he is true to his mission and faithful to his loyalty to
reality, he will have the simplicity of the child.
Whether therefore we agree or not with Plato’s reduction of Right and Duty
to self-actualisation, we may at least admit that in the idea of
perfection or excellence, combined with the idea of knowledge or inward
lucidity, he has got the fundamental ideas on which further ethical
development must build. Self-control, self-knowledge, internal harmony,
are good: and so are the development of our several faculties and of the
totality of them to the fullest pitch of excellence. But their value does
not lie entirely in themselves, or rather there is implicit in them a
reference to something beyond themselves. They take for granted something
which, because it is so taken, may also be ignored and neglected, just
because it seems so obvious. And that implication is the social humanity
in which they are the spirits of light and leading.
To lay the stress on ἀρετή or excellence tends to leave out of sight the
force of duty; and to emphasise knowledge is allowed to disparage the
heart and feelings. The mind—even of a philosopher—finds a difficulty in
holding very different points of view in one, and where it is forced from
one to another, tends to forget the earlier altogether. Thus when the
ethical philosopher, presupposing as an absolute or unquestionable fact
that man the individual was rooted in the community, proceeded to discuss
the problem of the best and completest individual estate, he was easily
led to lose sight of the fundamental and governing condition altogether.
From the moment that Aristotle lays down the thesis that man is naturally
social, to the moment when he asks how the bare ideal of excellence in
character and life can become an actuality, the community in which man
lives has retired out of sight away into the background. And it only comes
in, as it first appears, as the paedagogue to bring us to morality. And
Plato, though professedly he is speaking of the community, and is well
aware that the individual can only be saved by the salvation of the
community, is constantly falling back into another problem—the development
of an individual soul. He feels the strength of the egoistic effort after
perfection, and his essay in the end tends to lose sight altogether of its
second theme. Instead of a man he gives us a mere philosopher, a man, that
is, not living with his country’s life, instinct with the heart and
feeling of humanity, inspired by art and religion, but a being set apart
and exalted above his fellows,—charged no doubt in theory with the duty of
saving them, of acting vicariously as the mediator between them and the
absolute truth—but really tending more and more to seclude himself on the
_edita templa_ of the world, on the high-towers of speculation.
And what Plato and Aristotle did, so to speak, against their express
purpose and effort, yet did, because the force of contemporary tendency
was irresistible—that the Stoa and Epicurus did more openly and
professedly. With a difference in theory, it is true, owing to the
difference in the surroundings. Virtue in the older day of the free and
glorious commonwealth had meant physical and intellectual achievement,
acts done in the public eye, and of course for the public good—a good with
which the agent was identified at least in heart and soul, if not in his
explicit consciousness. In later and worse days, when the political world,
with the world divine, had withdrawn from actual identity with the central
heart of the individual, and stood over-against him as a strange power and
little better than a nuisance, virtue came to be counted as endurance,
indifference, negative independence against a cold and a perplexing world.
But even still, virtue is excellence: it is to rise above the ignoble
level: to assert self-liberty against accident and circumstance—to attain
self-controlled, self-satisfying independence—and to become God-like in
its seclusion. Yet in two directions even it had to acknowledge something
beyond the individual. The Epicurean—following out a suggestion of
Aristotle—recognised the help which the free society of friends gave to
the full development of the single seeker after a self-satisfying and
complete life. The Stoic, not altogether refusing such help, tended rather
to rest his single self on a fellowship of ideal sort, on the great city
of gods and men, the _civitas Dei_. Thus, in separate halves, the two
schools, into which Greek ethics was divided, gave expression to the sense
that a new and higher community was needed—to the sense that the visible
actual community no longer realised its latent idea. The Stoic emphasised
the all-embracing necessity, the absolute comprehensiveness of the moral
kingdom. The Epicurean saw more clearly that, if the everlasting city came
from heaven, it could only visibly arise by initiation upon the earth.
Christianity—in its best work—was a conjunction of the liberty with the
necessity, of the human with the divine.
More interesting, perhaps, it is to note the misconception of reason and
knowledge which grew up. Knowledge came more and more to be identified
with the reflective and critical consciousness, which is outside reality
and life, and judges it from a standpoint of its own. It came to be
esteemed only in its formal and abstract shape, and at the expense of the
heart and feelings. The antithesis of philosophy (or knowledge strictly so
called) according to Plato was mere opinion, accidental and imperfect
knowledge. The knowledge which is truly valuable is a knowledge which
presupposes the full reality of life, and is the more and more completely
articulated theory of it as a whole. It is—abstractly taken—a mere form of
unity which has no value except in uniting: it is—taken concretely—the
matter, we may say, in complete unity. It is ideal and perfect harmony of
thought, appetite, and emotion: or putting it otherwise, the philosopher
is one who is not merely a creature of appetite and production, not merely
a creature of feeling and practical energy, but a creature, who to both of
these superadds an intelligence which sets eyes in the blind forehead of
these other powers, and thus, far from superseding them altogether, only
raises them into completeness, and realises all that is worthy in their
implicit natures. Always these two impulsive tendencies of our nature are
guided by some sort of ideas and intelligence, by beliefs and opinions.
But they, like their guides, are sporadically emergent, unconnected, and
therefore apt to be contradictory. It is to such erratic and occasional
ideas, half-truths and deceptions, that philosophy is opposed.
Unfortunately for all parties, the antithesis is carried farther.
Philosophy and the philosopher are further set in opposition to the faith
of the heart, the intimacy and intensity of feeling, the depth of love and
trust, which in practice often go along with imperfect ideas. The
philosopher is made one who has emancipated himself from the heart and
feelings,—a pure intelligence, who is set above all creeds, contemplating
all, and holding none. Consistency and clearness become his idol, to be
worshipped at any cost, save one sacrifice: and that one sacrifice is the
sacrifice of his own self-conceit. For consistency generally means that
all is made to harmonise with one assumed standpoint, and that whatever
presents discrepancies with this alleged standard is ruthlessly thrown
away. Such a philosophy mistakes its function, which is not, as Heine
scoffs, to make an intelligible system by rejecting the discordant
fragments of life, but to follow reverently, if slowly, in the wake of
experience. Such a “perfect sage,” with his parade of reasonableness, may
often assume the post of a dictator.
And, above all, intelligence is only half itself when it is not also will.
And both are more than mere consciousness. Plato—whom we refer to, because
he is the coryphaeus of all the diverse host of Greek philosophy—seems to
overestimate or rather to misconceive the place of knowledge. That it is
the supreme and crowning grace of the soul, he sees. But he tends to
identify it with the supreme or higher soul:—as Aristotle did after him,
to be followed by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists. For them the supreme, or
almost supreme reality is the intelligence or reason: the soul is only on
a second grade of reality, on the borders of the natural or physical
world. When Plato takes that line, he turns towards the path of
asceticism, and treats the philosophic life as a preparation for that
truer life when intelligence shall be all in all, for that better land
where “divine dialogues” shall form the staple and substance of spiritual
existence. Aristotle,—who less often treads these solitudes,—still extols
the theoretic life, when the body and its needs trouble no more, when the
activity of reason—the theory of theory—is attained at least as entirely
as mortal conditions allow man to be deified. Of the “apathy” and the
reasonable conformity of the Stoics, or of the purely negative character
of Epicurean happiness (the excision of all that pained) we need not here
speak. And in Plotinus and Proclus the deification of mere reason is at
any rate the dominant note; whatever protests the larger Greek nature in
the former may from time to time offer. The truth which philosophy should
have taught was that Mind or intelligence was the element where the inner
life culminated and expanded and flourished: the error which it often
tended to spread was that intelligence was the higher life of which all
other was a degenerate shortcoming, and something valuable on its own
account.
It may be that thus to interpret Plato is to do him an injustice. It has
been sometimes said that his division of parts or kinds of soul—or his
distinction between its fighting horses—tends to destroy the unity of
mental life. But perhaps this was exactly what he wanted to convey. There
are—we may paraphrase his meaning—three kinds of human being, three types
of human life. There is the man or the life of appetite and the flesh:
there is the man of noble emotion and energetic depth of soul: there is
the life of reasonable pursuits and organised principle. Or, we may take
his meaning to be that there are three elements or provinces of mental
life, which in all except a few are but imperfectly coherent and do not
reach a true or complete unity. Some unity there always is: but in the
life of mere appetite and impulse, even when these impulses are our nobler
sentiments of love and hatred, the unity falls very far short. Or, as he
puts the theme elsewhere, the soul has a passion for self-completion, a
love of beauty, which in most is but a misleading lust. It is the business
of the philosophic life to re-create or to foster this unity: or
philosophy is the persistent search of the soul for its lost unity, the
search to see that unity which is always its animating principle, its
inner faith. When the soul has reached this ideal—if it can be supposed to
attain it (and of this the strong-souled ancient philosophers feel no
doubt),—then a change must take place. The love of beauty is not
suppressed; it is only made self-assured and its object freed from all
imperfection. It is not that passion has ceased; but its nature is so
transfigured, that it seems worthy of a nobler name, which yet we cannot
give. To such a life, where battle and conflict are as such unknown, we
cannot longer give the title of life: and we say that philosophy is in
life a rehearsal of death(70). And yet if there be no battle, there is not
for that reason mere inaction. Hence, as the Republic concludes, the true
philosopher is the complete man. He is the truth and reality which the
appetitive and emotional man were seeking after and failed to realise. It
is true they at first will not see this. But the whole long process of
philosophy is the means to induce this conviction. And for Plato it
remains clear that through experience, through wisdom, and through
abstract deduction, the philosopher will justify his claim to him who hath
ears to hear and heart to understand. If that be so, the asceticism of
Plato is not a mere war upon flesh and sense as such, but upon flesh and
sense as imperfect truth, fragmentary reality, which suppose themselves
complete, though they are again and again confuted by experience, by
wisdom, and by mere calculation,—a war against their blindness and
shortsightedness.
Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.
“The key,” says Carus, “for the ascertainment of the nature of the
conscious psychical life lies in the region of the unconscious(71).” The
view which these words take is at least as old as the days of Leibniz. It
means that the mental world does not abruptly emerge a full-grown
intelligence, but has a genesis, and follows a law of development: that
its life may be described as the differentiation (with integration) of a
simple or indifferentiated mass. The terms conscious and unconscious,
indeed, with their lax popular uses, leave the door wide open for
misconception. But they may serve to mark that the mind is to be
understood only in a certain relation (partly of antithesis) to nature,
and the soul only in reference to the body. The so-called “superior
faculties”—specially characteristic of humanity—are founded upon, and do
not abruptly supersede, the lower powers which are supposed to be
specially obvious in the animals(72). The individual and specific
phenomena of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed
to study, rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of
sensibility, which in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into
something irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life.
And yet the moment we attempt to leave the daylight of consciousness for
the darker sides of sub-conscious life, the risks of misinterpretation
multiply. The problem is to some extent the same as confronts the student
of the ideas and principles of primitive races. There, the temptation of
seeing things through the “spectacles of civilisation” is almost
irresistible. So in psychology we are apt to import into the life of
sensation and feeling the distinctions and relations of subsequent
intellection. Nor is the difficulty lessened by Hegel’s method which deals
with soul, sentiency, and consciousness as grades or general
characteristics in a developmental advance. He borrows his illustrations
from many quarters, from morbid and anomalous states of
consciousness,—less from the cases of savages, children and animals. These
illustrations may be called a loose induction. But it requires a much more
powerful instrument than mere induction to build up a scientific system; a
framework of general principle or theory is the only basis on which to
build theory by the allegation of facts, however numerous. Yet in
philosophic science, which is systematised knowledge, all facts strictly
so described will find their place and be estimated at their proper value.
(i.) Primitive Sensibility.
Psychology (with Hegel) takes up the work of science from biology. The
mind comes before it as the supreme product of the natural world, the
finest flower of organic life, the “truth” of the physical process. As
such it is called by the time-honoured name of Soul. If we further go on
to say that the soul is the principle of life, we must not understand this
vital principle to be something over and above the life of which it is the
principle. Such a locally-separable principle is an addition which is due
to the analogy of mechanical movement, where a detached agent sets in
motion and directs the machinery. But in the organism the principle is not
thus detachable as a thing or agent. By calling Soul the principle of life
we rather mean that in the vital organism, so far as it _lives_, all the
real variety, separation, and discontinuity of parts must be reduced to
unity and identity, or as Hegel would say, to _ideality_. To live is thus
to keep all differences fluid and permeable in the fire of the
life-process. Or to use a familiar term of logic, the Soul is the concept
or intelligible unity of the organic body. But to call it a concept might
suggest that it is only the conception through which _we_ represent to
ourselves the variety in unity of the organism. The soul, however, is more
than a mere concept: and life is more than a mere mode of description for
a group of movements forming an objective unity. It is a unity, subjective
and objective. The organism is one life, controlling difference: and it is
also one by our effort to comprehend it. The Soul therefore is in Hegelian
language described as the Idea rather than the concept of the organic
body. Life is the generic title for this subject-object: but the life may
be merely physical, or it may be intellectual and practical, or it may be
absolute, i.e. will and know all that it is, and be all that it knows and
wills.
Up to this point the world is what is called an external, which is here
taken to mean (not a world external to the individual, but) a
self-externalised world. That is to say, it is the observer who has
hitherto by his interpretation of his perceptions supplied the “Spirit in
Nature.” In itself the external world has no inside, no centre: it is we
who read into it the conception of a life-history. We are led to believe
that a principle of unity is always at work throughout the physical
world—even in the mathematical laws of natural operation. It is only
intelligible and credible to us as a system, a continuous and regular
development. But that system is only a hypothetical idea, though it is
held to be a conclusion to which all the evidence seems unequivocally to
point. And, even in organic life, the unity, though more perfect and
palpable than in the mechanical and inorganic world, is only a perception,
a vision,—a necessary mode of realising the unity of the facts. The
phenomenon of life reveals as in a picture and an ocular demonstration the
conformity of inward and outward, the identity of whole and parts, of
power and utterance. But it is still outside the observer. In the function
of sensibility and sentiency, however, we stand as it were on the
border-line between biology and psychology. At one step we have been
brought within the harmony, and are no longer mere observers and
reflecters. The sentient not merely is, but is aware that it is. Hitherto
as life, it only is the unity in diversity, and diversity in unity, for
the outsider, i.e. only implicitly: now it is so for itself, or
consciously. And in the first stage it does not know, but feels or is
sentient. Here, for the first time, is created the distinction of inward
and outward. Loosely indeed we may, like Mr. Spencer, speak of outward and
inward in physiology: but strictly speaking, what Goethe says is true,
_Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale_(73). Nature in the narrower sense
knows no distinction of the inward and outward in its phenomena: it is a
purely superficial order and succession of appearance and event. The Idea
which has been visible to an intelligent percipient in the types and laws
of the natural world, now _is_, actually is—is in and for itself—but at
first in a minimum of content, a mere point of light, or rather the dawn
which has yet to expand into the full day.
Spinoza has asserted that “all individual bodies are animate, though in
different degrees(74).” Now it is to a great extent this diversity of
degree on which the main interest turns. Yet it is well to remember that
the abrupt and trenchant separations which popular practice loves are
overridden to a deeper view by an essential unity of idea, reducing them
to indifference. If, that is, we take seriously the Spinozist unity of
Substance, and the continual correlation (to call it no more) of extension
and consciousness therein, we cannot avoid the conclusion which even Bacon
would admit of something describable as attraction and perception,
something subduing diversity to unity. But whether it be well to name this
soul or life is a different matter. It may indeed only be taken to mean
that all true being must be looked on as a real unity and individuality,
must, that is, be conceived as manifesting itself in organisation, must be
referred to a self-centred and self-developing activity. But this—which is
the fundamental thesis of idealism—is hardly all that is meant. Rather
Spinoza would imply that all things which form a real unity must have
life—must have inner principle and unifying reality: and what he teaches
is closely akin to the Leibnitian doctrine that every substantial
existence reposes upon a monad, a unity which is at once both a force and
a cognition, a “representation” and an appetite or _nisus_ to act. When
Fechner in a series of works(75) expounds and defends the hypothesis that
plants and planets are not destitute of soul, any more than man and
animals, he only gives a more pronounced expression to this idealisation
or spiritualisation of the natural world. But for the moment the point to
be noted is that all of this idealistic doctrine is an inference, or a
development which finds its _point d’appui_ in the fact of sensation. And
the problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby
a mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception and a faith in the
goodness, beauty and intelligence of the world.
Schopenhauer has put the point with his usual picturesqueness. Outward
nature presents nothing but a play of forces. At first, however, this
force shows merely the mechanical phenomena of pressure and impact, and
its theory is sufficiently described by mathematical physics. But in the
process of nature force assumes higher types, types where it loses a
certain amount of its externality(76), till in the organic world it
acquires a peculiar phase which Schopenhauer calls _Will_, meaning by
that, however, an organising and controlling power, a tendency or _nisus_
to be and live, which is persistent and potent, but without consciousness.
This blind force, which however has a certain coherence and purposiveness,
is in the animal organism endowed with a new character, in consequence of
the emergence of a new organ. This organ, the brain and nervous system,
causes the evolution into clear day of an element which has been growing
more and more urgent. The gathering tendency of force to return into
itself is now complete: the cycle of operation is formed: and the junction
of the two currents issues in the spark of sensation. The blind force now
becomes seeing.
But at first—and this is the point we have to emphasise—its powers of
vision are limited. Sensibility is either a local and restricted
phenomenon: or, in so far as it is not local, it is vague and indefinite,
and hardly entitled to the name of sensibility. Either it is a dim, but
far-reaching, sympathy with environing existence, and in that case only
so-called blind will or feeling: or if it is clear, is locally confined,
and at first within very narrow limits. Neither of these points must be
lost sight of. On the one hand feeling has to be regarded as the dull and
confused stirring of an almost infinite sympathy with the world—a pulse
which has come from the far-distant movements of the universe, and bears
with it, if but as a possibility, the wealth of an infinite message. On
the other hand, feeling at first only becomes real, in this boundless
ideality to which its possibilities extend, by restricting itself to one
little point and from several points organising itself to a unity of
bodily feeling, till it can go on from thence to embrace the universe in
distinct and articulate comprehension.
Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and
above the rest of nature: it is rather nature’s “’universal immaterialism,
and simple ideal life(77).” There were ancient philosophers who spoke of
the soul as a self-adjusting number,—as a harmony, or equilibrium(78)—and
the moderns have added considerably to the list of these analogical
definitions. As definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things
give, as it were, by anticipation, an image of soul, as the “ideality,”
which reduces the manifold to unity. The adhesions and cohesions of
matter, its gravitating attractions, its chemical affinities and
electrical polarities, the intricate out-and-in of organic structure, are
all preludes to the true incorporating unity which is the ever-immanent
supersession of the endless self-externalism and successionalism of
physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or sensibility, the unity
which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly present. It is
implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,—which has no doors and no
windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it has nothing
outside it, because it “expresses” and “envelopes” (however confusedly at
first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising phraseology, we
may describe mind, where it _appears_ emerging in the natural world, as a
mere feeble and incidental outburst,—a rebellion breaking out as in some
petty province or isolated region against the great law of the physical
realm—we are in so speaking taking only an external standpoint. But with
the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is implicitly overcome.
To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside, nothing
transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only outside
a localised and limited mind—outside a mind which is imperfectly and
abstractly realised—not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute
negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may
be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To
accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and
externality of things into the unity and identity of one Idea, is the
process of development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic
knowledge, from appetite to art,—the process of culture through the social
state under the influence of religion.
Sentiency or psychic matter (mind-stuff), to begin with, is in some
respects like the _tabula rasa_ of the empiricists. It is the
possibility—but the real possibility—of intelligence rather than
intelligence itself. It is the monotonous undifferentiated inwardness—a
faint self-awareness and self-realisation of the material world, but at
first a mere vague _psychical protoplasm_ and without defined nucleus,
without perceptible organisation or separation of structures. If there is
self-awareness, it is not yet discriminated into a distinct and unified
self, not yet differentiated and integrated,—soul in the condition of a
mere “Is,” which, however, is nothing determinate. It is very much in the
situation of Condillac’s statue-man—_une statue organisée intérieurement
comme nous, et animée d’un esprit privé de toute espèce d’idées_: alike at
least so far that the rigid uniformity of the latter’s envelope prevents
all articulated organisation of its faculties. The foundation under all
the diversity and individuality in the concrete intelligent and volitional
life is a common feeling,—a _sensus communis_—a general and indeterminate
susceptibility to influence, a sympathy responsive, but responsive vaguely
and equivocally, to all the stimuli of the physical environment. There was
once a time, according to primitive legend, when man understood the
language of beast and bird, and even surprised the secret converse of
trees and flowers. Such fancies are but the exaggeration of a solidarity
of conscious life which seems to spread far in the sub-conscious realm,
and to narrow the individual’s soul into limited channels as it rises into
clear self-perception,
“As thro’ the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.”
It may be a mere dream that, as Goethe feigns of Makaria in his
romance(79), there are men and women in sympathy with the vicissitudes of
the starry regions: and hypotheses of lunar influence, or dogmas of
astrological destiny, may count to the present guardians of the sciences
as visionary superstitions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to
be dogmatic; her function hitherto can only be critical; and even for
that, her data are scanty and her principles extremely general. The
influences on the mental mood and faculty, produced by climate and
seasons, by local environment and national type, by individual
peculiarities, by the differences of age and sex, and by the alternation
of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less questionable. It is easy
no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark how indefinable and
incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their radical and
inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character. “The sum
of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but always
leaves a marvellous remainder(80).” Irrational this residue is, in the
sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known
quantities of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific
psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never
lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the
more advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in
indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is remembered,
it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting psychology
for the application to education, and how dependent the solution of that
problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of individual
and national temperament and character.
The first stage in mental development is the establishment of regular and
uniform relations between soul and body: it is the differentiation of
organs and the integration of function: the balance between sensation and
movement, between the afferent and efferent processes of sensitivity.
Given a potential soul, the problem is to make it actual in an individual
body. It is the business of a physical psychology to describe in detail
the steps by which the body we are attached to is made inward as our idea
through the several organs and their nervous appurtenances: whereas a
psychical physiology would conversely explain the corresponding processes
for the expression of the emotions and for the objectification of the
volitions. Thus soul inwardises (_erinnert_) or envelops body: which body
“expresses” or develops soul. The actual soul is the unity of both, is the
percipient individual. The solidarity or “communion” of body and soul is
here the dominant fact: the soul sentient of changes in its peripheral
organs, and transmitting emotion and volition into physical effect. It is
on this psychical unity,—the unity which is the soul of the diversity of
body—that all the subsequent developments of mind rest. Sensation is thus
the _prius_—or basis—of all mental life: the organisation of soul in body
and of body in soul. It is the process which historically has been
prepared in the evolution of animal life from those undifferentiated forms
where specialised organs are yet unknown, and which each individual has
further to realise and complete for himself, by learning to see and hear,
and use his limbs. At first, moreover, it begins from many separate
centres and only through much collision and mutual compliance arrives at
comparative uniformity and centralisation. The common basis of united
sensibility supplied by the one organism has to be made real and
effective, and it is so at first by sporadic and comparatively independent
developments. If self-hood means reference to self of what is prima facie
not self, and projection of self therein, there is in primitive
sensibility only the germ or possibility of self-hood. In the early phases
of psychic development the centre is fluctuating and ill-defined, and it
takes time and trouble to co-ordinate or unify the various starting-points
of sensibility(81).
This consolidation of inward life may be looked at either formally or
concretely. Under the first head, it means the growth of a central unity
of apperception. In the second case, it means a peculiar aggregate of
ideas and sentiments. There is growing up within him what we may call the
individuality of the individual,—an irrational, i.e. not consciously
intelligent, nether-self or inner soul, a firm aggregation of hopes and
wishes, of views and feelings, or rather of tendencies and temperament, of
character hereditary and acquired. It is the law of the natural will or
character which from an inaccessible background dominates our
action,—which, because it is not realised and formulated in consciousness,
behaves like a guardian spirit, or genius, or destiny within us. This
genius is the sub-conscious unity of the sensitive life—the manner of man
which unknown to ourselves we are,—and which influences us against our
nominal or formal purposes. So far as this predominates, our ends, rough
hew them how we will, are given by a force which is not really, i.e. with
full consciousness, ours: by a mass of ingrained prejudice and unreasoned
sympathies, of instincts and passions, of fancies and feelings, which have
condensed and organised themselves into a natural power. As the child in
the mother’s womb is responsive to her psychic influences, so the
development of a man’s psychic life is guided by feelings centred in
objects and agents external to him, who form the genius presiding over his
development. His soul, to that extent, is really in another: he himself is
selfless, and when his stay is removed the principle of his life is
gone(82). He is but a bundle of impressions, held together by influences
and ties which in years before consciousness proper began made him what he
is. Such is the involuntary adaptation to example and environment, which
establishes in the depths below personality a self which becomes hereafter
the determinant of action. Early years, in which the human being is
naturally susceptible, build up by imitation, by pliant obedience, an
image, a system, reproducing the immediate surroundings. The soul, as yet
selfless, and ready to accept any imprint, readily moulds itself into the
likeness of an authoritative influence.
The step by which the universality or unity of the self is realised in the
variety of its sensation is Habit. Habit gives us a definite
standing-ground in the flux of single impressions: it is the
identification of ourselves with what is most customary and familiar: an
identification which takes place by practice and repetition. If it
circumscribes us to one little province of being, it on the other frees us
from the vague indeterminateness where we are at the mercy of every
passing mood. It makes thus much of our potential selves our very own, our
acquisition and permanent possession. It, above all, makes us free and at
one with our bodily part, so that henceforth we start as a subjective unit
of body and soul. We have now as the result of the anthropological process
a self or ego, an individual consciousness able to reflect and compare,
setting itself on one side (a soul in bodily organisation), and on the
other setting an object of consciousness, or external world, a world of
other things. All this presupposes that the soul has actualised itself by
appropriating and acquiring as its expression and organ the physical
sensibility which is its body. By restricting and establishing itself, it
has gained a fixed standpoint. No doubt it has localised and confined
itself, but it is no longer at the disposal of externals and accident: it
has laid the foundation for higher developments.
(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.
Psychology, as we have seen, goes for information regarding the earlier
stages of mental growth to the child and the animal,—perhaps also to the
savage. So too sociology founds certain conclusions upon the observations
of savage customs and institutions, or on the earlier records of the race.
In both cases with a limitation caused by the externality and
fragmentariness of the facts and the need of interpreting them through our
own conscious experiences. There is however another direction in which
corresponding inquiries may be pursued; and where the danger of the
conclusions arrived at, though not perhaps less real, is certainly of a
different kind. In sociology we can observe—and almost experiment upon—the
phenomena of the lapsed, degenerate and criminal classes. The advantage of
such observation is that the object of study can be made to throw greater
light on his own inner states. He is a little of the child and a little of
the savage, but these aspects co-exist with other features which put him
more on a level with the intelligent observer. Similar pathological
regions are open to us in the case of psychology. There the anomalous and
morbid conditions of mind co-exist with a certain amount of mature
consciousness. So presented, they are thrown out into relief. They form
the negative instances which serve to corroborate our positive inductions.
The regularly concatenated and solid structure of normal mind is under
abnormal and deranged conditions thrown into disorder, and its
constituents are presented in their several isolation. Such phenomena are
relapses into more rudimentary grades: but with the difference that they
are set in the midst of a more advanced phase of intellectual life.
Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a
certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the
mental range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the
Unconscious seemed—and to many still seems—a region in which the charlatan
and the dupe can and must play into each other’s hands. Once in the whirl
of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how far
you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type.
Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and
observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract
observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe;
scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience
against what Bacon has called “monodical” phenomena, phenomena i.e. which
claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private and
privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a
determination to treat all instances which oppose its hitherto ascertained
laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent
observation, confusions of memory, and superstitions of ignorance. Above
all, great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect
themselves with these revelations—interests, at any rate, to which our
common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the
customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something
of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much
was at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispassionate
observation.
The philosophers were found—as might have been expected—amongst those most
strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been fascinated by the
spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned away sceptical. At
least as early as 1806 Schelling had been interested by Ritter’s
researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human will
to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a distance.
He was looking forward to the rise of a _Physica coelestis_, or New
Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date
his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel
phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in
the range of the physical powers, especially of the physical powers of the
human psyche as a natural agent. The divining-rod was revived.
Clairvoyance and somnambulism were carefully studied, and the curative
powers of animal magnetism found many advocates(83).
Interest in these questions went naturally with the new conception of the
place of Man in Nature, and of Nature as the matrix of mind(84). But it
had been acutely stimulated by the performances and professions of Mesmer
at Vienna and Paris in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
These—though by no means really novel—had forced the artificial world of
science and fashion to discuss the claim advanced for a new force which,
amongst other things, could cure ailments that baffled the ordinary
practitioner. This new force—mainly because of the recent interest in the
remarkable advances of magnetic and electrical research—was conceived as a
fluid, and called Animal Magnetism. At one time indeed Mesmer actually
employed a magnet in the manipulation by which he induced the peculiar
condition in his patients. The accompaniments of his procedure were in
many respects those of the quack-doctor; and with the quack indeed he was
often classed. A French commission of inquiry appointed to examine into
his performances reported in 1784 that, while there was no doubt as to the
reality of many of the phenomena, and even of the cures, there was no
evidence for the alleged new physical force, and declared the effects to
be mainly attributable to the influence of imagination. And with the
mention of this familiar phrase, further explanation was supposed to be
rendered superfluous.
In France political excitement allowed the mesmeric theory and practice to
drop out of notice till the fall of the first Empire. But in Germany there
was a considerable amount of investigations and hypotheses into these
mystical phenomena, though rarely by the ordinary routine workers in the
scientific field. The phenomena where they were discussed were studied and
interpreted in two directions. Some theorists, like Jung-Stilling,
Eschenmayer, Schubert, and Kerner, took the more metaphysicist and
spiritualistic view: they saw in them the witness to a higher truth, to
the presence and operation in this lower world of a higher and spiritual
matter, a so-called ether. Thus Animal Magnetism supplied a sort of
physical theory of the other world and the other life. Jung-Stilling, e.g.
in his “Theory of Spirit-lore.” (1808), regarded the spiritualistic
phenomena as a justification of—what he believed to be—the Kantian
doctrine that in the truly real and persistent world space and time are no
more. The other direction of inquiry kept more to the physical field.
Ritter (whose researches interested both Schelling and Hegel) supposed he
had detected the new force underlying mesmerism and the like, and gave to
it the name of Siderism (1808); while Amoretti of Milan named the object
of his experiments Animal Electrometry (1816). Kieser(85), again (1826)
spoke of Tellurism, and connected animal magnetism with the play of
general terrestrial forces in the human being.
At a later date (1857) Schindler, in his “Magical Spirit-life,” expounded
a theory of mental polarity. The psychical life has two poles or
centres,—its day-pole, around which revolves our ordinary and superficial
current of ideas, and its night-pole, round which gathers the
sub-conscious and deeper group of beliefs and sentiments. Either life has
a memory, a consciousness, a world of its own: and they flourish to a
large extent inversely to each other. The day-world has for its organs of
receiving information the ordinary senses. But the magical or night-world
of the soul has its feelers also, which set men directly in telepathic
rapport with influences, however distant, exerted by the whole world: and
through this “inner sense” which serves to concentrate in itself all the
telluric forces (—a sense which in its various aspects we name instinct,
presentiment, conscience) is constructed the fabric of our sub-conscious
system. Through it man is a sort of résumé of all the cosmic life, in
secret affinity and sympathy with all natural processes; and by the will
which stands in response therewith he can exercise a directly creative
action on external nature. In normal and healthy conditions the two
currents of psychic life run on harmonious but independent. But in the
phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance, and delirium, the magic region
becomes preponderant, and comes into collision with the other. The
dark-world emerges into the realm of day as a portentous power: and there
is the feeling of a double personality, or of an indwelling genius,
familiar spirit, or demon.
To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless
stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is
called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least
perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his
limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say
with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature, that
it would be very unphilosophical to deny the existence of phenomena solely
because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.”
Accordingly mesmerism and its allied manifestations were generally
abandoned to the bohemians of science, and to investigators with dogmatic
bias. It was still employed as a treatment for certain ailments: and
philosophers, as different as Fichte and Schopenhauer(86), watched its
fate with attention. But the herd of professional scientists fought shy of
it. The experiments of Braid at Manchester in 1841 gradually helped to
give research into the subject a new character. Under the name of
Hypnotism (or, rather at first Neuro-hypnotism) he described the phenomena
of the magnetic sleep (induced through prolonged staring at a bright
object), such as abnormal rigidity of body, perverted sensibility, and the
remarkable obedience of the subject to the command or suggestions of the
operator. Thirty years afterwards, the matter became an object of
considerable experimental and theoretic work in France, at the rival
schools of Paris and Nancy; and the question, mainly under the title of
hypnotism, though the older name is still occasionally heard, has been for
several years brought prominently under public notice.
It cannot be said that the net results of these observations and
hypotheses are of a very definitive character. While a large amount of
controversy has been waged on the comparative importance of the several
methods and instruments by which the hypnotic or mesmeric trance may be
induced, and a scarcely less wide range of divergence prevails with regard
to the physiological and pathological conditions in connexion with which
it has been most conspicuously manifested, there has been less anxiety
shown to determine its precise psychical nature, or its significance in
mental development. And yet the better understanding of these aspects may
throw light on several points connected with primitive religion and the
history of early civilisation, indeed over the whole range of what is
called _Völkerpsychologie_. Indeed this is one of the points which may be
said to emerge out of the confusion of dispute. Phenomena at least
analogous to those styled hypnotic have a wide range in the
anthropological sphere(87): and the proper characters which belong to them
will only be caught by an observer who examines them in the widest variety
of examples. Another feature which has been put in prominence is what has
been called “psychological automatism.” And in this name two points seem
to deserve note. The first is the spontaneous and as it were mechanical
consecution of mental states in the soul whence the interfering effect of
voluntary consciousness has been removed. And the second is the unfailing
or accurate regularity, so contrary to the hesitating and uncertain
procedure of our conscious and reasoned action, which so often is seen in
the unreflecting and unreasoned movements. To this invariable sequence of
psychical movement the superior control and direction by the intelligent
self has to adapt itself, just as it respects the order of physical laws.
But, perhaps, the chief conclusion to be derived from hypnotic experience
is the value of suggestion or suggestibility. Even cool thinkers like Kant
have recognised how much mere mental control has to do with bodily
state,—how each of us, in this way, is often for good or for ill his own
physician. An idea is a force, and is only inactive in so far as it is
held in check by other ideas. “There is no such thing as hypnotism,” says
one: “there are only different degrees of suggestibility.” This may be to
exaggerate: yet it serves to impress the comparatively secondary character
of many of the circumstances on which the specially mesmeric or hypnotic
experimentalist is apt to lay exclusive stress. The methods may probably
vary according to circumstances. But the essence of them all is to get the
patient out of the general frame and system of ideas and perceptions in
which his ordinary individuality is encased. Considering how for all of us
the reality of concrete life is bound up with our visual perceptions, how
largely our sanity depends upon the spatial idea, and how that depends on
free ocular range, we can understand that darkness and temporary loss of
vision are powerful auxiliaries in the hypnotic process, as in magical and
superstitious rites. But a great deal short of this may serve to establish
influence. The mind of the majority of human beings, but especially of the
young, may be compared to a vacant seat waiting for some one to fill it.
In Hegel’s view hypnotic phenomena produce a kind of temporary and
artificial atavism. Mechanical or chemical means, or morbid conditions of
body, may cause even for the intelligent adult a relapse into states of
mind closely resembling those exhibited by the primitive or the infantile
sensibility. The intelligent personality, where powers are bound up with
limitations and operate through a chain of means and ends, is reduced to
its primitively undifferentiated condition. Not that it is restored to its
infantile simplicity; but that all subsequent acquirements operate only as
a concentrated individuality, or mass of will and character, released from
the control of the self-possessed mind, and invested (by the latter’s
withdrawal) with a new quasi-personality of their own. With the loss of
the world of outward things, there may go, it is supposed, a clearer
perception of the inward and particularly of the organic life. The Soul
contains the form of unity which other experiences had impressed upon it:
but this form avails in its subterranean existence where it creates a sort
of inner self. And this inner self is no longer, like the embodied self of
ordinary consciousness, an intelligence served by organs, and proceeding
by induction and inference. Its knowledge is not mediated or carried along
specific channels: it does not build up, piecemeal, by successive steps of
synthesis and analysis, by gradual idealisation, the organised totality of
its intellectual world. The somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without
eyes, and carry their vision directly into regions where the waking
consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter. But that region is not
the world of our higher ideas,—of art, religion, and philosophy. It is
still the sensitivity—that realm of sensitivity which is ordinarily
covered by unconsciousness. Such sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were,
hear themselves growing; they may discern the hidden quivers and pulses of
blood and tissue, the seats of secret pain and all the unrevealed workings
in the dark chambers of the flesh. But always their vision seems confined
to that region, and will fall short of the world of light and ideal truth.
It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive solidarity with earth, and
flowers, and trees, the life that “rolls through all things,” not towards
the spiritual unity which broods over the world and “impels all thinking
things,” that these immersions in the selfless universe lead us.
What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on
the natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the
work of intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the
fully-developed mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute
Mind which in our highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate
to. But mind, as it tends towards the higher end to “merge itself in
light,” to identify itself yet not wholly lost, but retained, in the
fullness of undivided intellectual being, so at the lower end it springs
from a natural and underlying unity, the immense solidarity of
nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature—the “Substance” which is to be
raised into the “Subject” which is true divinity. Between these two
unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won over-soul, lies
the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which narrows and
of redintegration which enlarges,—which alternately builds up an isolated
personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and sympathy. It is
because mental or tacit “suggestion”(88) (i.e. will-influence exercised
without word or sign, or other sensible mode of connexion),
thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than dexterous
apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or transposition
of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive, clairvoyance (i.e.
the power of describing, as if from direct perception, objects or events
removed in space beyond the recognised limits of sensation), and
somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed eyes,—it is
because these things seem to show the essential ideality of matter, that
Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of consciousness and
even of practical life in society are a derivative and secondary state; a
product of processes of individualism, which however are never completed,
and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to fulfil. From a
state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than can be
described as personality—lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too, had
regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world underlying
the development of egoity and self-consciousness(89): “the merely sensuous
man is still in somnambulism,” only a somnambulism of waking hours: “the
true waking is the life in God, to be free in him, all else is sleep and
dream.” “Egoity,” he adds, “is a merely _formal_ principle, utterly, and
never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force).” For
Schopenhauer, too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove
the absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to
the intellectual categories of space, time, and causal sequence: to prove
the reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious
divisions.
(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.
The result of the first range in the process of psycho-genesis was to make
the body a sign and utterance of the Soul, with a fixed and determinate
type. The “anthropological process” has defined and settled the mere
general sentiency of soul into an individualised shape, a localised and
limited self, a bundle of habits. It has made the soul an Ego or self: a
power which looks out upon the world as a spectator, lifted above
immanence in the general tide of being, but only so lifted because it has
made itself one in the world of objects, a thing among things. The Mind
has reached the point of view of reflection. Instead of a general
identifiability with all nature, it has encased itself in a limited range,
from which it looks forth on what is now other than itself. If previously
it was mere inward sensibility, it is now sense, perceptive of an object
here and now, of an external world. The step has involved some price: and
that price is, that it has attained independence and self-hood at the cost
of surrendering the content it had hitherto held in one with itself. It is
now a blank receptivity, open to the impressions of an outside world: and
the changes which take place in its process of apprehension seem to it to
be given from outside. The world it perceives is a world of isolated and
independent objects: and it takes them as they are given. But a closer
insistance on the perception develops the implicit intelligence, which
makes it possible. The percipient mind is no mere recipiency or
susceptibility with its forms of time and space: it is spontaneously
active, it is the source of categories, or is an apperceptive power,—an
understanding. Consciousness, thus discovered to be a creative or
constructive faculty, is strictly speaking self-consciousness(90).
Self-consciousness appears at first in the selfish or narrowly egoistic
form of appetite and impulse. The intelligence which claims to mould and
construe the world of objects—which, in Kant’s phrase, professes to give
us nature—is implicitly the lord of that world. And that supremacy it
carries out as appetite—as destruction. The self is but a bundle of
wants—its supremacy over things is really subjection to them: the
satisfaction of appetite is baffled by a new desire which leaves it as it
was before. The development of self-consciousness to a more adequate shape
is represented by Hegel as taking place through the social struggle for
existence. Human beings, too, are in the first instance to the
uninstructed appetite or the primitive self-consciousness (which is simply
a succession of individual desires for satisfaction of natural want) only
things,—adjectival to that self’s individual existence. To them, too, his
primary relation is to appropriate and master them. Might precedes right.
But the social struggle for existence forces him to recognise something
other which is kindred to himself,—a limiting principle, another self
which has to form an element in his calculations, not to be neglected. And
gradually, we may suppose, the result is the division of humanity into two
levels, a ruling lordly class, and a class of slaves,—a state of
inequality in which each knows that his appetite is in some measure
checked by a more or less permanent other. Lastly, perhaps soonest in the
inferior order, there is fashioned the perception that its self-seeking in
its isolated appetites is subject to an abiding authority, a continuing
consciousness. There grows up a social self—a sense of general humanity
and solidarity with other beings—a larger self with which each identifies
himself, a common ground. Understanding was selfish intelligence:
practical in the egoistic sense. In the altruistic or universal sense
practical, a principle social and unifying character, intelligence is
Reason.
Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single
objects in space and time, and as an appetitive self bent upon single
gratifications, has ended as a rational being,—a consciousness purged of
its selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on
the universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal,
swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only
in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for
existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has
erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because
he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer
purely antithetical and exclusive(91). He has reached what is really the
moral standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal
self-consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the antitheses
of individualities and of outward and inward have ceased to trouble. “The
natural man,” says Hegel(92), “sees in the woman flesh of his flesh: the
moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and
spiritual being and by its means.” Hitherto we have been dealing with
something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate
sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and
secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the
third part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a
being who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general
truth, and carries out ideal purposes.
Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence
and rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by
which reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or
autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in
theoretical and practical mind, is feeling—or immediate knowledge and
immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate
perception—a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the
idea of a general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the
outward existence conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent
perception or intuition the important factor is attention, which raises it
above mere passive acceptance and awareness of a given fact. Attention
thus involves on one hand the externality of its object, and on the other
affirms its dependence on the act of the subject: it sets the objects
before and out of itself, in space and time, but yet in so doing it shows
itself master of the objects. If perception presuppose attention, in
short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make them ours, and the space
and time they fill are projected by us. So attended to, they are
appropriated, inwardised and recollected: they take their place in a
mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-individualised
character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental property, but
retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived. Such
revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of
association. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and
recollected by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not
really fully master of them until it has been able to give them a certain
objectivity, by replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible
sign. By means of words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations
into quasi-realities: it creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world
of language, where ideas live a potential, which is also an actual, life.
Words are sensibles, but they are sensibles which completely lose
themselves in their meaning. As sensibles, they render possible that
verbal memory which is the handmaid of thought: but which also as merely
mechanical can leave thought altogether out of account. It is through
words that thought is made possible: for it alone permits the movement
through ideas without being distracted through a multitude of
associations. In them thought has an instrument completely at its own
level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that
machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only
serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.
It is as such a thinking being—a being who can use language, and
manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a
rational will. A concept of something to be done—a feeling even of some
end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what
can be called will. At first indeed its material may be found as
immediately given and all its volitionality may lie in the circumstance
that the intelligent being sets this forward as a governing and
controlling Ought. Its vehicle, in short, may be mere impulse, or
inclination, and even passion: but it is the choice and the purposive
adoption of means to the given end. Gradually it attains to the idea of a
general satisfaction, or of happiness. And this end seems positive and
definite. It soon turns out however to be little but a prudent and
self-denying superiority to particular passions and inclinations in the
interest of a comprehensive ideal. The free will or intelligence has so
far only a negative and formal value: it is the perfection of an
autonomous and freely self-developing mind. Such a mind, which in language
has acquired the means of realising an intellectual system of things
superior to the restrictions of sense, and which has emancipated reason
from the position of slave to inclination, is endued with the formal
conditions of moral conduct. Such a mind will transform its own primarily
physical dependence into an image of the law of reason and create the
ethical life: and in the strength of that establishment will go forth to
conquer the world into a more and more adequate realisation of the eternal
Idea.
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.
“In dealing,” says Hegel, “with the Idea of the State, we must not have
before our eyes a particular state, or a particular institution: we must
rather study the Idea, this actual God, on his own account. Every State,
however bad we may find it according to our principles, however defective
we may discover this or that feature to be, still contains, particularly
if it belongs to the mature states of our time, all the essential factors
of its existence. But as it is easier to discover faults than to
comprehend the affirmative, people easily fall into the mistake of letting
individual aspects obscure the intrinsic organism of the State itself. The
State is no ideal work of art: it stands in the everyday world, in the
sphere, that is, of arbitrary act, accident, and error, and a variety of
faults may mar the regularity of its traits. But the ugliest man, the
criminal, a sick man and a cripple, is after all a living man; the
affirmative, Life, subsists in spite of the defect: and this affirmative
is here the theme(93).” “It is the theme of philosophy,” he adds, “to
ascertain the substance which is immanent in the show of the temporal and
transient, and the eternal which is present.”
(i.) Hegel as a Political Critic.
But if this is true, it is also to be remembered that the philosopher is,
like other men, the son of his age, and estimates the value of reality
from preconceptions and aspirations due to his generation. The historical
circumstances of his nation as well as the personal experiences of his
life help to determine his horizon, even in the effort to discover the
hidden pulse and movement of the social organism. This is specially
obvious in political philosophy. The conception of ethics and politics
which is presented in the _Encyclopaedia_ was in 1820 produced with more
detail as the _Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts_. Appearing, as it
did, two years after his appointment to a professorship at Berlin, and in
the midst of a political struggle between the various revolutionary and
conservative powers and parties of Germany, the book became, and long
remained, a target for embittered criticism. The so-called War of
Liberation or national movement to shake off the French yoke was due to a
coalition of parties, and had naturally been in part supported by
tendencies and aims which went far beyond the ostensive purpose either of
leaders or of combatants. Aspirations after a freer state were entwined
with radical and socialistic designs to reform the political hierarchy of
the Fatherland: high ideals and low vulgarities were closely intermixed:
and the noble enthusiasm of youth was occasionally played on by criminal
and anarchic intriguers. In a strong and wise and united Germany some of
these schemes might have been tolerated. But strength, wisdom, and unity
were absent. In the existing tension between Austria and Prussia for the
leadership, in the ill-adapted and effete constitutions of the several
principalities which were yet expected to realise the advance which had
taken place in society and ideas during the last thirty years, the outlook
on every hand seemed darker and more threatening than it might have
otherwise done. Governments, which had lost touch with their peoples,
suspected conspiracy and treason: and a party in the nation credited their
rulers with gratuitous designs against private liberty and rights. There
was a vast but ill-defined enthusiasm in the breasts of the younger world,
and it was shared by many of their teachers. It seemed to their immense
aspirations that the war of liberation had failed of its true object and
left things much as they were. The volunteers had not fought for the
political systems of Austria or Prussia, or for the three-and-thirty
princes of Germany: but for ideas, vague, beautiful, stimulating. To such
a mood the continuance of the old system was felt as a cruel deception and
a reaction. The governments on their part had not realised the full
importance of the spirit that had been aroused, and could not at a
moment’s notice set their house in order, even had there been a clearer
outlook for reform than was offered. They too had suffered, and had
realised their insecurity: and were hardly in a mood to open their gates
to the enemy.
Coming on such a situation of affairs, Hegel’s book would have been likely
in any case to provoke criticism. For it took up a line of political
theory which was little in accord with the temper of the age. The
conception of the state which it expounded is not far removed in
essentials from the conception which now dominates the political life of
the chief European nations. But in his own time it came upon ears which
were naturally disposed to misconceive it. It was unacceptable to the
adherents of the _ancien régime_, as much as to the liberals. It was
declared by one party to be a glorification of the Prussian state: by
another to rationalise the sanctities of authority. It was pointed out
that the new professor was a favourite of the leading minister, that his
influence was dominant in scholastic appointments, and that occasional
gratuities from the crown proved his acceptability. A contemporary
professor, Fries, remarked that Hegel’s theory of the state had grown “not
in the gardens of science but on the dung-hill of servility.” Hegel
himself was aware that he had planted a blow in the face of a “shallow and
pretentious sect,” and that his book had “given great offence to the
demagogic folk.” Alike in religious and political life he was impatient of
sentimentalism, of rhetorical feeling, of wordy enthusiasm. A positive
storm of scorn burst from him at much-promising and little-containing
declamation that appealed to the pathos of ideas, without sense of the
complex work of construction and the system of principles which were
needed to give them reality. His impatience of demagogic gush led him (in
the preface) into a tactless attack on Fries, who was at the moment in
disgrace for his participation in the demonstration at the Wartburg. It
led him to an attack on the bumptiousness of those who held that
conscientious conviction was ample justification for any proceeding:—an
attack which opponents were not unwilling to represent as directed against
the principle of conscience itself.
Yet Hegel’s views on the nature of political unity were not new. Their
nucleus had been formed nearly twenty years before. In the years that
immediately followed the French revolution he had gone through the usual
anarchic stage of intelligent youth. He had wondered whether humanity
might not have had a nobler destiny, had fate given supremacy to some
heresy rather than the orthodox creed of Christendom. He had seen religion
in the past “teaching what despotism wished,—contempt of the human race,
its incapacity for anything good(94).” But his earliest reflections on
political power belong to a later date, and are inspired, not so much by
the vague ideals of humanitarianism, as by the spirit of national
patriotism. They are found in a “Criticism of the German Constitution”
apparently dating from the year 1802(95). It is written after the peace of
Lunéville had sealed for Germany the loss of her provinces west of the
Rhine, and subsequent to the disasters of the German arms at Hohenlinden
and Marengo. It is almost contemporaneous with the measures of 1803 and
1804, which affirmed the dissolution of the “Holy Roman Empire” of German
name. The writer of this unpublished pamphlet sees his country in a
situation almost identical with that which Macchiavelli saw around him in
Italy. It is abused by petty despots, distracted by mean particularist
ambitions, at the mercy of every foreign power. It was such a scene which,
as Hegel recalls, had prompted and justified the drastic measures proposed
in the _Prince_,—measures which have been ill-judged by the closet
moralist, but evince the high statesmanship of the Florentine. In the
_Prince_, an intelligent reader can see “the enthusiasm of patriotism
underlying the cold and dispassionate doctrines.” Macchiavelli dared to
declare that Italy must become a state, and to assert that “there is no
higher duty for a state than to maintain itself, and to punish
relentlessly every author of anarchy,—the supreme, and perhaps sole
political crime.” And like teaching, Hegel adds, is needed for Germany.
Only, he concludes, no mere demonstration of the insanity of utter
separation of the particular from his kin will ever succeed in converting
the particularists from their conviction of the absoluteness of personal
and private rights. “Insight and intelligence always excite so much
distrust that force alone avails to justify them; then man yields them
obedience(96).”
“The German political edifice,” says the writer, “is nothing else but the
sum of the rights which the single parts have withdrawn from the whole;
and this justice, which is ever on the watch to prevent the state having
any power left, is the essence of the constitution.” The Peace of
Westphalia had but served to constitute or stereotype anarchy: the German
empire had by that instrument divested itself of all rights of political
unity, and thrown itself on the goodwill of its members. What then, it may
be asked, is, in Hegel’s view, the indispensable minimum essential to a
state? And the answer will be, organised strength,—a central and united
force. “The strength of a country lies neither in the multitude of its
inhabitants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its size, but
solely in the way its parts are by reasonable combination made a single
political force enabling everything to be used for the common defence.”
Hegel speaks scornfully of “the philanthropists and moralists who decry
politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private utility at the cost of
right”: he tells them that “it is foolish to oppose the interest or (as it
is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the utility of the state
to its right”: that the “rights of a state are the utility of the state as
established and recognised by compacts”: and that “war” (which they would
fain abolish or moralise) “has to decide not which of the rights asserted
by either party is the true right (—for both parties have a true right),
but which right has to give way to the other.”
It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of
political supremacy which has been associated with the name of Hobbes. But
his views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, “who can rule and dare
not lie.” “All states,” he declares, “are founded by the sublime force of
great men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his
features which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against
their will. Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is
otherwise.... This is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to
express the absolute will. All gather round his banner. He is their God.”
“The state,” he says again, “is the self-certain absolute mind which
recognises no definite authority but its own: which acknowledges no
abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception.”
So also Hobbes describes the prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But
the Hegelian God immanent in the state is a higher power than Hobbes
knows: he is no mortal, but in his truth an immortal God. He speaks by
(what in this early essay is called) the Absolute Government(97): the
government of the Law—the true impersonal sovereign,—distinct alike from
the single ruler and the multitude of the ruled. “It is absolutely only
universality as against particular. As this absolute, ideal, universal,
compared to which everything else is a particular, it is the phenomenon of
God. Its words are his decision, and it can appear and exist under no
other form.... The Absolute government is divine, self-sanctioned and not
made(98).” The real strength—the real connecting-mean which gives life to
sovereign and to subject—is intelligence free and entire, independent both
of what individuals feel and believe and of the quality of the ruler. “The
spiritual bond,” he says in a lower form of speech, “is public opinion: it
is the true legislative body, national assembly, declaration of the
universal will which lives in the execution of all commands.” This still
small voice of public opinion is the true and real parliament: not
literally making laws, but revealing them. If we ask, where does this
public opinion appear and how does it disengage itself from the masses of
partisan judgment? Hegel answers,—and to the surprise of those who have
not entered into the spirit of his age(99)—it is embodied in the Aged and
the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in the real world: they are
by nature and function disengaged from the struggles of particular
existence, have risen above the divergencies of social classes. They
breathe the ether of pure contemplation. “The sunset of life gives them
mystical lore,” or at least removes from old age the distraction of
selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions
of human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel’s view is that the
real voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained
indifference to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see
life steadily and whole.
If this utterance shows the little belief Hegel had in the ordinary
methods of legislation through “representative” bodies, and hints that the
real _substance_ of political life is deeper than the overt machinery of
political operation, it is evident that this theory of “divine right” is
of a different stamp from what used to go under that name. And, again,
though the power of the central state is indispensable, he is far from
agreeing with the so-called bureaucratic view that “a state is a machine
with a single spring which sets in motion all the rest of the machinery.”
“Everything,” he says, “which is not directly required to organise and
maintain the force for giving security without and within must be left by
the central government to the freedom of the citizens. Nothing ought to be
so sacred in the eyes of a government as to leave alone and to protect,
without regard to utilities, the free action of the citizens in such
matters as do not affect its fundamental aim: for this freedom is itself
sacred(100).” He is no friend of paternal bureaucracy. “The pedantic
craving to settle every detail, the mean jealousy against estates and
corporations administrating and directing their own affairs, the base
fault-finding with all independent action on the part of the citizens,
even when it has no immediate bearing on the main political interest, has
been decked out with reasons to show that no penny of public expenditure,
made for a country of twenty or thirty millions’ population, can be laid
out, without first being, not permitted, but commanded, controlled and
revised by the supreme government.” You can see, he remarks, in the first
village after you enter Prussian territory the lifeless and wooden routine
which prevails. The whole country suffers also from the way religion has
been mixed up with political rights, and a particular creed pronounced by
law indispensable both for sovereign and full-privileged subject. In a
word, the unity and vigour of the state is quite compatible with
considerable latitude and divergence in laws and judicature, in the
imposition and levying of taxes, in language, manners, civilisation and
religion. Equality in all these points is desirable for social unity: but
it is not indispensable for political strength.
This decided preference for the unity of the state against the system of
checks and counterchecks, which sometimes goes by the name of a
constitution, came out clearly in Hegel’s attitude in discussing the
dispute between the Würtembergers and their sovereign in 1815-16.
Würtemberg, with its complicated aggregation of local laws, had always
been a paradise of lawyers, and the feudal rights or privileges of the
local oligarchies—the so-called “good old law”—were the boast of the
country. All this had however been aggravated by the increase of territory
received in 1805: and the king, following the examples set by France and
even by Bavaria, promulgated of his own grace a “constitution” remodelling
the electoral system of the country. Immediately an outcry burst out
against the attempt to destroy the ancient liberties. Uhland tuned his
lyre to the popular cry: Rückert sang on the king’s side. To Hegel the
contest presented itself as a struggle between the attachment to
traditional rights, merely because they are old, and the resolution to
carry out reasonable reform whether it be agreeable to the reformed or
not: or rather he saw in it resistance of particularism, of separation,
clinging to use and wont, and basing itself on formal pettifogging
objections, against the spirit of organisation. Anything more he declined
to see. And probably he was right in ascribing a large part of the
opposition to inertia, to vanity and self-interest, combined with the want
of political perception of the needs of Würtemberg and Germany. But on the
other hand, he failed to remember the insecurity and danger of such “gifts
of the Danai”: he forgot the sense of free-born men that a constitution is
not something to be granted (_octroyé_) as a grace, but something that
must come by the spontaneous act of the innermost self of the community.
He dealt rather with the formal arguments which were used to refuse
progress, than with the underlying spirit which prompted the
opposition(101).
The philosopher lives (as Plato has well reminded us) too exclusively
within the ideal. Bent on the essential nucleus of institutions, he
attaches but slight importance to the variety of externals, and fails to
realise the practice of the law-courts. He forgets that what weighs
lightly in logic, may turn the scale in real life and experience. For
feeling and sentiment he has but scant respect: he is brusque and
uncompromising: and cannot realise all the difficulties and dangers that
beset the Idea in the mazes of the world, and may ultimately quite alter a
plan which at first seemed independent of petty details. Better than other
men perhaps he recognises in theory how the mere universal only exists
complete in an individual shape: but more than other men he forgets these
truths of insight, when the business of life calls for action or for
judgment. He cannot at a moment’s notice remember that he is, if not, as
Cicero says, _in faece Romuli_, the member of a degenerate commonwealth,
at least living in a world where good and evil are not, as logic
presupposes, sharply divided but intricately intertwined.
(ii.) The Ethics and Religion of the State.
This idealism of political theory is illustrated by the sketch of the
Ethical Life which he drew up about 1802. Under the name of “Ethical
System” it presents in concentrated or undeveloped shape the doctrine
which subsequently swelled into the “Philosophy of Mind.” At a later date
he worked out more carefully as introduction the psychological genesis of
moral and intelligent man, and he separated out more distinctly as a
sequel the universal powers which give to social life its higher
characters. In the earlier sketch the Ethical Part stands by itself, with
the consequence that Ethics bears a meaning far exceeding all that had
been lately called moral. The word “moral” itself he avoids(102). It
savours of excessive subjectivity, of struggle, of duty and conscience. It
has an ascetic ring about it—an aspect of negation, which seeks for
abstract holiness, and turns its back on human nature. Kant’s words
opposing duty to inclination, and implying that moral goodness involves a
struggle, an antagonism, a victory, seem to him (and to his time)
one-sided. That aspect of negation accordingly which Kant certainly began
with, and which Schopenhauer magnified until it became the all-in-all of
Ethics, Hegel entirely subordinates. Equally little does he like the
emphasis on the supremacy of insight, intention, conscience: they lead, he
thinks, to a view which holds the mere fact of conviction to be
all-important, as if it mattered not what we thought and believed and did,
so long as we were sincere in our belief. All this emphasis on the
good-will, on the imperative of duty, on the rights of conscience, has, he
admits, its justification in certain circumstances, as against mere
legality, or mere natural instinctive goodness; but it has been overdone.
Above all, it errs by an excess of individualism. It springs from an
attitude of reflection,—in which the individual, isolated in his conscious
and superficial individuality, yet tries—but probably tries in vain—to get
somewhat in touch with a universal which he has allowed to slip outside
him, forgetting that it is the heart and substance of his life. Kant,
indeed, hardly falls under this condemnation. For he aims at showing that
the rational will inevitably creates as rational a law or universal; that
the individual act becomes self-regulative, and takes its part in
constituting a system or realm of duty.
Still, on the whole, “morality” in this narrower sense belongs to an age
of reflection, and is formal or nominal goodness rather than the genuine
and full reality. It is the protest against mere instinctive or customary
virtue, which is but compliance with traditional authority, and compliance
with it as if it were a sort of quasi-natural law. Moralising reflection
is the awakening of subjectivity and of a deeper personality. The age
which thus precedes morality is not an age in which kindness, or love, or
generosity is unknown. And if Hegel says that “Morality,” strictly so
called, began with Socrates, he does not thereby accuse the pre-Socratic
Greeks of inhumanity. But what he does say is that such ethical life as
existed was in the main a thing of custom and law: of law, moreover, which
was not set objectively forward, but left still in the stage of
uncontradicted usage, a custom which was a second nature, part of the
essential and quasi-physical ordinance of life. The individual had not yet
learned to set his self-consciousness against these usages and ask for
their justification. These are like the so-called law of the Medes and
Persians which alters not: customs of immemorial antiquity and
unquestionable sway. They are part of a system of things with which for
good or evil the individual is utterly identified, bound as it were hand
and foot. These are, as a traveller says(103), “oral and unwritten
traditions which teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed
under certain penalties; and without the aid of fixed records, or the
intervention of a succession of authorised depositaries and expounders,
these laws have been transmitted to father and son, through unknown
generations, and are fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and
unalterable.”
The antithesis then in Hegel, as in Kant, is between Law and Morality, or
rather Legality and Morality,—two abstractions to which human development
is alternately prone to attach supreme importance. The first stage in the
objectivation of intelligence or in the evolution of personality is the
constitution of mere, abstract, or strict right. It is the creation of
institutions and uniformities, i.e. of laws, or rights, which express
definite and stereotyped modes of behaviour. Or, if we look at it from the
individual’s standpoint, we may say his consciousness awakes to find the
world parcelled out under certain rules and divisions, which have
objective validity, and govern him with the same absolute authority as do
the circumstances of physical nature. Under their influence every rank and
individual is alike forced to bow: to each his place and function is
assigned by an order or system which claims an inviolable and eternal
supremacy. It is not the same place and function for each: but for each
the position and duties are predetermined in this metaphysically-physical
order. The situation and its duties have been created by super-human and
natural ordinance. As the Platonic myth puts it, each order in the social
hierarchy has been framed underground by powers that turned out men of
gold, and silver, and baser metal: or as the Norse legend tells, they are
the successive offspring of the white God, Heimdal, in his dealings with
womankind.
The central idea of the earlier social world is the supremacy of
rights—but not of right. The sum (for it cannot be properly called a
system) of rights is a self-subsistent world, to which man is but a
servant; and a second peculiarity of it is its inequality. If all are
equal before the laws, this only means here that the laws, with their
absolute and thorough inequality, are indifferent to the real and personal
diversities of individuals. Even the so-called equality of primitive law
is of the “Eye-for-eye, Tooth-for-tooth” kind; it takes no note of special
circumstances; it looks abstractly and rudely at facts, and maintains a
hard and fast uniformity, which seems the height of unfairness. Rule
stands by rule, usage beside usage,—a mere aggregate or multitude of petty
tyrants, reduced to no unity or system, and each pressing with all the
weight of an absolute mandate. The pettiest bit of ceremonial law is here
of equal dignity with the most far-reaching principle of political
obligation.
In the essay already referred to, Hegel has designated something analogous
to this as Natural or Physical Ethics, or as Ethics in its relative or
comparative stage. Here Man first shows his superiority to nature, or
enters on his properly ethical function, by transforming the physical
world into his possession. He makes himself the lord of natural
objects—stamping them as his, and not their own, making them his permanent
property, his tools, his instruments of exchange and production. The
fundamental ethical act is appropriation by labour, and the first ethical
world is the creation of an economic system, the institution of property.
For property, or at least possession and appropriation, is the dominant
idea, with its collateral and sequent principles. And at first, even human
beings are treated on the same method as other things: as objects in a
world of objects or aggregate of things: as things to be used and
acquired, as means and instruments,—not in any sense as ends in
themselves. It is a world in which the relation of master and slave is
dominant,—where owner and employer is set in antithesis against his tools
and chattels. But the Nemesis of his act issues in making the individual
the servant of his so-called property. He has become an objective power by
submitting himself to objectivity: he has literally put himself into the
object he has wrought, and is now a thing among things: for what he owns,
what he has appropriated, determines what he is. The real powers in the
world thus established are the laws of possession-holding: the laws
dominate man: and he is only freed from dependence on casual externals, by
making himself thoroughly the servant of his possessions.
The only salvation, and it is but imperfect, that can be reached on this
stage is by the family union. The sexual tie, is at first entirely on a
level with the other arrangements of the sphere. The man or woman is but a
chattel and a tool; a casual appropriation which gradually is transformed
into a permanent possession and a permanent bond(104). But, as the family
constituted itself, it helped to afford a promise of better things. An
ideal interest—the religion of the household—extending beyond the
individual, and beyond the moment,—binding past and present, and parents
to offspring, gave a new character to the relation of property. Parents
and children form a unity, which overrides and essentially permeates their
“difference” from each other: there is no exchange, no contract, nor, in
the stricter sense, property between the members. In the property-idea
they are lifted out of their isolation, and in the continuity of family
life there is a certain analogue of immortality. But, says Hegel, “though
the family be the highest totality of which Nature is capable, the
absolute identity is in it still inward, and is not instituted in absolute
form; and hence, too, the reproduction of the totality is an appearance,
the appearance of the children(105).” “The power and the intelligence, the
‘difference’ of the parents, stands in inverse proportion to the youth and
vigour of the child: and these two sides of life flee from and are sequent
on each other, and are reciprocally external(106).” Or, as we may put it,
the god of the family is a departed ancestor, a ghost in the land of the
dead: it has not really a continuous and unified life. In such a state of
society—a state of nature—and in its supreme form, the family, there is no
adequate principle which though real shall still give ideality and unity
to the self-isolating aspects of life. There is wanted something which
shall give expression to its “indifference,” which shall control the
tendency of this partial moralisation to sink at every moment into
individuality, and lift it from its immersion in nature. Family life and
economic groups (—for these two, which Hegel subsequently separates, are
here kept close together) need an ampler and wider life to keep them from
stagnating in their several selfishnesses.
This freshening and corrective influence they get in the first instance
from deeds of violence and crime. Here is the “negative unsettling” of the
narrow fixities, of the determinate conditions or relationships into which
the preceding processes of labour and acquisition have tended to
stereotype life. The harsh restriction brings about its own undoing. Man
may subject natural objects to his formative power, but the wild rage of
senseless devastation again and again bursts forth to restore the original
formlessness. He may build up his own pile of wealth, store up his private
goods, but the thief and the robber with the instincts of barbarian
socialism tread on his steps: and every stage of appropriation has for its
sequel a crop of acts of dispossession. He may secure by accumulation his
future life; but the murderer for gain’s sake cuts it short. And out of
all this as a necessary consequence stands avenging justice. And in the
natural world of ethics—where true moral life has not yet arisen—this is
mere retaliation or the _lex talionis_;—the beginning of an endless series
of vengeance and counter-vengeance, the blood-feud. Punishment, in the
stricter sense of the term,—which looks both to antecedents and effects in
character—cannot yet come into existence; for to punish there must be
something superior to individualities, an ethical idea embodied in an
institution, to which the injurer and the injured alike belong. But as yet
punishment is only vengeance, the personal and natural equivalent, the
physical reaction against injury, perhaps regulated and formulated by
custom and usage, but not essentially altered from its purely retaliatory
character. These crimes—or transgressions—are thus by Hegel quaintly
conceived as storms which clear the air—which shake the individualist out
of his slumber. The scene in which transgression thus acts is that of the
so-called state of nature, where particularism was rampant: where moral
right was not, but only the right of nature, of pre-occupation, of the
stronger, of the first maker and discoverer. Crime is thus the “dialectic”
which shakes the fixity of practical arrangements, and calls for something
in which the idea of a higher unity, a permanent substance of life, shall
find realisation.
The “positive supersession(107)” of individualism and naturalism in ethics
is by Hegel called “Absolute Ethics.” Under this title he describes the
ethics and religion of the state—a religion which is immanent in the
community, and an ethics which rises superior to particularity. The
picture he draws is a romance fashioned upon the model of the Greek
commonwealth as that had been idealised by Greek literature and by the
longings of later ages for a freer life. It is but one of the many modes
in which Helena—to quote Goethe—has fascinated the German Faust. He dreams
himself away from the prosaic worldliness of a German municipality to the
unfading splendour of the Greek city with its imagined coincidence of
individual will with universal purpose. There is in such a commonwealth no
pain of surrender and of sacrifice, and no subsequent compensation: for,
at the very moment of resigning self-will to common aims, he enjoys it
retained with the added zest of self-expansion. He is not so left to
himself as to feel from beyond the restraint of a law which controls—even
if it wisely and well controls—individual effort. There is for his happy
circumstances no possibility of doing otherwise. Or, it may be, Hegel has
reminiscences from the ideals of other nations than the Greek. He recalls
the Israelite depicted by the Law-adoring psalmist, whose delight is to do
the will of the Lord, whom the zeal of God’s house has consumed, whose
whole being runs on in one pellucid stream with the universal and eternal
stream of divine commandment. Such a frame of spirit, where the empirical
consciousness with all its soul and strength and mind identifies its
mission into conformity with the absolute order, is the mood of absolute
Ethics. It is what some have spoken of as the True life, as the Eternal
life; in it, says Hegel, the individual exists _auf ewige Weise_(108), as
it were _sub specie aeternitatis_: his life is hid with his fellows in the
common life of his people. His every act, and thought, and will, get their
being and significance from a reality which is established in him as a
permanent spirit. It is there that he, in the fuller sense, attains
αὐτάρκεια, or finds himself no longer a mere part, but an ideal totality.
This totality is realised under the particular form of a Nation (_Volk_),
which in the visible sphere represents (or rather is, as a particular) the
absolute and infinite. Such a unity is neither the mere sum of isolated
individuals, nor a mere majority ruling by numbers: but the fraternal and
organic commonwealth which brings all classes and all rights from their
particularistic independence into an ideal identity and indifference(109).
Here all are not merely equal before the laws: but the law itself is a
living and organic unity, self-correcting, subordinating and organising,
and no longer merely defining individual privileges and so-called
liberties. “In such conjunction of the universal with the particularity
lies the divinity of a nation: or, if we give this universal a separate
place in our ideas, it is the God of the nation.” But in this complete
accordance between concept and intuition, between visible and invisible,
where symbol and significate are one, religion and ethics are
indistinguishable. It is the old conception (and in its highest sense) of
Theocracy(110). God is the national head and the national life: and in him
all individuals have their “difference” rendered “indifferent.” “Such an
ethical life is absolute truth, for untruth is only in the fixture of a
single mode: but in the everlasting being of the nation all singleness is
superseded. It is absolute culture; for in the eternal is the real and
empirical annihilation and prescription of all limited modality. It is
absolute disinterestedness: for in the eternal there is nothing private
and personal. It, and each of its movements, is the highest beauty: for
beauty is but the eternal made actual and given concrete shape. It is
without pain, and blessed: for in it all difference and all pain is
superseded. It is the divine, absolute, real, existing and being, under no
veil; nor need one first raise it up into the ideality of divinity, and
extract it from the appearance and empirical intuition; but it is, and
immediately, absolute intuition(111).”
If we compare this language with the statement of the Encyclopaedia we can
see how for the moment Hegel’s eye is engrossed with the glory of the
ideal nation. In it, the moral life embraces and is co-extensive with
religion, art and science: practice and theory are at one: life in the
idea knows none of those differences which, in the un-ideal world, make
art and morality often antithetical, and set religion at variance with
science. It is, as we have said, a memory of Greek and perhaps Hebrew
ideals. Or rather it is by the help of such memories the affirmation of
the essential unity of life—the true, complete, many-sided life—which is
the presupposition and idea that culture and morals rest upon and from
which they get their supreme sanction, i.e. their constitutive principle
and unity. Even in the Encyclopaedia(112) Hegel endeavours to guard
against the severance of morality and art and philosophy which may be
rashly inferred in consequence of his serial order of treatment.
“Religion,” he remarks, “is the very substance of the moral life itself
and of the state.... The ethical life is the divine spirit indwelling in
consciousness, as it is actually present in a nation and its individual
members.” Yet, as we see, there is a distinction. The process of history
carries out a judgment on nation after nation, and reveals the divine as
not only immanent in the ethical life but as ever expanding the limited
national spirit till it become a spirit of universal humanity. Still—and
this is perhaps for each time always the more important—the national
unity—not indeed as a multitude, nor as a majority—is the supreme real
appearance of the Eternal and Absolute.
Having thus described the nation as an organic totality, he goes on to
point out that the political constitution shows this character by forming
a triplicity of political orders. In one of these there is but a silent,
practical identity, in faith and trust, with the totality: in the second
there is a thorough disruption of interest into particularity: and in the
third, there is a living and intellectual identity or indifference, which
combines the widest range of individual development with the completest
unity of political loyalty. This last order is that which lives in
conscious identification of private with public duty: all that it does has
a universal and public function. Such a body is the ideal Nobility—the
nobility which is the _servus servorum Dei_, the supreme servant of
humanity. Its function is to maintain general interests, to give the other
orders (peasantry and industrials) security,—receiving in return from
these others the means of subsistence. _Noblesse oblige_ gives the
death-blow to particular interests, and imposes the duty of exhibiting, in
the clearest form, the supreme reality of absolute morality, and of being
to the rest an unperturbed ideal of aesthetic, ethical, religious, and
philosophical completeness.
It is here alone, in this estate which is absolutely disinterested, that
the virtues appear in their true light. To the ordinary moralising
standpoint they seem severally to be, in their separation, charged with
independent value. But from the higher point of view the existence, and
still more the accentuation of single virtues, is a mark of
incompleteness. Even quality, it has been said, involves its defects: it
can only shine by eclipsing or reflecting something else. The completely
moral is not the sum of the several virtues, but the reduction of them to
indifference. It is thus that when Plato tries to get at the unity of
virtue, their aspect of difference tends to be subordinated. “The movement
of absolute morality runs through all the virtues, but settles fixedly in
none.” It is more than love _to_ fatherland, and nation, and laws:—that
still implies a relation to something and involves a difference. For
love—the mortal passion, where “self is not annulled”—is the process of
approximation, while unity is not yet attained, but wished and aimed at:
and when it is complete—and become “such love as spirits know(113)”—it
gives place to a calmer rest and an active immanence. The absolute
morality is _life in_ the fatherland and for the nation. In the individual
however it is the process upward and inward that we see, not the
consummation. Then the identity appears as an ideal, as a tendency not yet
accomplished to its end, a possibility not yet made fully actual. At
bottom—in the divine substance in which the individual inheres—the
identity is present: but in the appearance, we have only the passage from
possible to actual, a passage which has the aspect of a struggle. Hence
the moral act appears as a virtue, with merit or desert. It is accordingly
the very characteristic of virtue to signalise its own incompleteness: it
emerges into actuality only through antagonism, and with a taint of
imperfection clinging to it. Thus, in the field of absolute morality, if
the virtues appear, it is only in their transiency. If they were
undisputedly real in morality, they would not separately show. To feel
that you have done well implies that you have not done wholly well:
self-gratulation in meritorious deed is the re-action from the shudder at
feeling that the self was not wholly good.
The essential unity of virtue—its negative character as regards all the
empirical variety of virtues—is seen in the excellences required by the
needs of war. These military requirements demonstrate the mere relativity
and therefore non-virtuousness of the special virtues. They equally
protest against the common beliefs in the supreme dignity of labour and
its utilities. But if bravery or soldierlike virtue be essentially a
virtue of virtues, it is only a negative virtue after all. It is the blast
of the universal sweeping away all the habitations and fixed structures of
particularist life. If it is a unity of virtue, it is only a negative
unity—an indifference. If it avoid the parcelling of virtue into a number
of imperfect and sometimes contradictory parts, it does so only to present
a bare negation. The soldier, therefore, if in potentiality the unity of
all the virtues, may tend in practice to represent the ability to do
without any of them(114).
The home of these “relative” virtues—of morality in the ordinary sense—is
the life of the second order in the commonwealth: the order of industry
and commerce. In this sphere the idea of the universal is gradually lost
to view: it becomes, says Hegel, only a thought or a creature of the mind,
which does not affect practice. The materialistic worker of civilisation
does not see further than the empirical existence of individuals: his
horizon is limited by the family, and his final ideal is a competency of
comfort in possessions and revenues. The supreme universal to which he
attains as the climax of his evolution is only money. But it is only with
the vaster development of commerce that this terrible consequence ensues.
At first as a mere individual, he has higher aims, though not the highest.
He has a limited ideal determined by his special sphere of work. To win
respect—the character for a limited truthfulness and honesty and skilful
work—is his ambition. He lives in a conceit of his performance—his
utility—the esteem of his special circle. To his commercial soul the
military order is a scarecrow and a nuisance: military honour is but
trash. Yet if his range of idea is narrow and engrossing in details, his
aim is to get worship, to be recognised as the best in his little sphere.
But with the growth of the trading spirit his character changes: he
becomes the mere capitalist, is denationalised, has no definite work and
can claim no individualised function. Money now measures all things: it is
the sole ultimate reality. It transforms everything into a relation of
contract: even vengeance is equated in terms of money. Its motto is, The
Exchanges must be honoured, though honour and morality may go to the dogs.
So far as it is concerned, there is no nation, but a federation of
shopkeepers. Such an one is the _bourgeois_ (the _Bürger_, as distinct
from the peasant or _Bauer_ and the _Adel_). As an artisan—i.e. a mere
industrial, he knows no country, but at best the reputation and interest
of his own guild-union with its partial object. He is narrow, but honest
and respectable. As a mere commercial agent, he knows no country: his
field is the world, but the world not in its concreteness and variety, but
in the abstract aspect of a money-bag and an exchange. The larger totality
is indeed not altogether out of sight. But if he contribute to the needy,
either his sacrifice is lifeless in proportion as it becomes general, or
loses generality as it becomes lively. As regards his general services to
the great life of his national state(115), they are unintelligently and
perhaps grudgingly rendered.
Of the peasant order Hegel has less to say. On one side the “country” as
opposed to the “town” has a closer natural sympathy with the common and
general interest: and the peasantry is the undifferentiated, solid and
sound, basis of the national life. It forms the submerged mass, out of
which the best soldiers are made, and which out of the depths of earth
brings forward nourishment as well as all the materials of elementary
necessity. Faithfulness and loyalty are its virtues: but it is personal
allegiance to a commanding superior,—not to a law or a general view—for
the peasant is weak in comprehensive intelligence, though shrewd in
detailed observation.
Of the purely political function of the state Hegel in this sketch says
almost nothing. But under the head of the general government of the state
he deals with its social functions. For a moment he refers to the
well-known distinction of the legislative, judicial and executive powers.
But it is only to remark that “in every governmental act all three are
conjoined. They are abstractions, none of which can get a reality of its
own,—which, in other words, cannot be constituted and organised as powers.
Legislation, judicature, and executive are something completely formal,
empty, and contentless.... Whether the others are or are not bare
abstractions, empty activities, depends entirely on the executive power;
and this is absolutely the government(116).” Treating government as the
organic movement by which the universal and the particular in the
commonwealth come into relations, he finds that it presents three forms,
or gives rise to three systems. The highest and last of these is the
“educational” system. By this he understands all that activity by which
the intelligence of the state tries directly to mould and guide the
character and fortunes of its members: all the means of culture and
discipline, whether in general or for individuals, all training to public
function, to truthfulness, to good manners. Under the same head come
conquest and colonisation as state agencies. The second system is the
judicial, which instead of, like the former, aiming at the formation or
reformation of its members is satisfied by subjecting individual
transgression to a process of rectification by the general principle. With
regard to the system of judicature, Hegel argues for a variety of
procedure to suit different ranks, and for a corresponding modification of
penalties. “Formal rigid equality is just what does not spare the
character. The same penalty which in one estate brings no infamy causes in
another a deep and irremediable hurt.” And with regard to the after life
of the transgressor who has borne his penalty: “Punishment is the
reconciliation of the law with itself. No further reproach for his crime
can be addressed to the person who has undergone his punishment. He is
restored to membership of his estate(117).”
In the first of the three systems, the economic system, or “System of
wants,” the state seems at first hardly to appear in its universal and
controlling function at all. Here the individual depends for the
satisfaction of his physical needs on a blind, unconscious destiny, on the
obscure and incalculable properties of supply and demand in the whole
interconnexion of commodities. But even this is not all. With the
accumulation of wealth in inequality, and the growth of vast capitals,
there is substituted for the dependence of the individual on the general
resultant of a vast number of agencies a dependence on one enormously rich
individual, who can control the physical destinies of a nation. But a
nation, truly speaking, is there no more. The industrial order has parted
into a mere abstract workman on one hand, and the _grande richesse_ on the
other. “It has lost its capacity of an organic absolute intuition and of
respect for the divine—external though its divinity be: and there sets in
the bestiality of contempt for all that is noble. The mere wisdomless
universal, the mass of wealth, is the essential: and the ethical
principle, the absolute bond of the nation, is vanished; and the nation is
dissolved(118).”
It would be a long and complicated task to sift, in these ill-digested but
profound suggestions, the real meaning from the formal statement. They
are, like Utopia, beyond the range of practical politics. The modern
reader, whose political conceptions are limited by contemporary
circumstance, may find them archaic, medieval, quixotic. But for those who
behind the words and forms can see the substance and the idea, they will
perhaps come nearer the conception of ideal commonwealth than many
reforming programmes. Compared with the maturer statements of the
_Philosophy of Law_, they have the faults of the Romantic age to which
their inception belongs. Yet even in that later exposition there is upheld
the doctrine of the supremacy of the eternal State against everything
particular, class-like, and temporary; a doctrine which has made Hegel—as
it made Fichte—a voice in that “professorial socialism” which is at least
as old as Plato.
INTRODUCTION.
§ 377. The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it
is the most “concrete” of sciences. The significance of that “absolute”
commandment, _Know thyself_—whether we look at it in itself or under the
historical circumstances of its first utterance—is not to promote mere
self-knowledge in respect of the _particular_ capacities, character,
propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands
means that of man’s genuine reality—of what is essentially and ultimately
true and real—of mind as the true and essential being. Equally little is
it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called _knowledge of
men_—the knowledge whose aim is to detect the _peculiarities_, passions,
and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the
human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless,
unless on the assumption that we know the _universal_—man as man, and,
that always must be, as mind. And for another, being only engaged with
casual, insignificant and _untrue_ aspects of mental life, it fails to
reach the underlying essence of them all—the mind itself.
§ 378. Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has
been already alluded to in the Introduction to the Logic as an _abstract_
and generalising metaphysic of the subject. _Empirical_ (or inductive)
psychology, on the other hand, deals with the “concrete” mind: and, after
the revival of the sciences, when observation and experience had been made
the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, such psychology
was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about
that the metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and
so prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the
same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common-sense
metaphysic, with its analysis into forces, various activities, &c., and
rejected any attempt at a “speculative” treatment.
The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its
special aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most
admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this
topic. The main aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to re-introduce
unity of idea and principle into the theory of mind, and so re-interpret
the lesson of those Aristotelian books.
§ 379. Even our own sense of the mind’s _living_ unity naturally protests
against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or,
what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each
other. But the craving for a _comprehension_ of the unity is still further
stimulated, as we soon come across distinctions between mental freedom and
mental determinism, antitheses between free _psychic_ agency and the
corporeity that lies external to it, whilst we equally note the intimate
interdependence of the one upon the other. In modern times especially the
phenomena of _animal magnetism_ have given, even in experience, a lively
and visible confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power
of its “ideality.” Before these facts, the rigid distinctions of practical
common sense were struck with confusion; and the necessity of a
“speculative” examination with a view to the removal of difficulties was
more directly forced upon the student.
§ 380. The “concrete” nature of mind involves for the observer the
peculiar difficulty that the several grades and special types which
develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many
separate existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise
in external nature. There, matter and movement, for example, have a
manifestation all their own—it is the solar system; and similarly the
_differentiae_ of sense-perception have a sort of earlier existence in the
properties of _bodies_, and still more independently in the four elements.
The species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their
separate existence and become factors, states and features in the higher
grades of development. As a consequence of this, a lower and more abstract
aspect of mind betrays the presence in it, even to experience, of a higher
grade. Under the guise of sensation, e.g., we may find the very highest
mental life as its modification or its embodiment. And so sensation, which
is but a mere form and vehicle, may to the superficial glance seem to be
the proper seat and, as it were, the source of those moral and religious
principles with which it is charged; and the moral and religious
principles thus modified may seem to call for treatment as species of
sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades of mental life are
under examination, it becomes necessary, if we desire to point to actual
cases of them in experience, to direct attention to more advanced grades
for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects will be treated of by
anticipation which properly belong to later stages of development (e.g. in
dealing with natural awaking from sleep we speak by anticipation of
consciousness, or in dealing with mental derangement we must speak of
intellect).
What Mind (or Spirit) is.
§ 381. From our point of view Mind has for its _presupposition_ Nature, of
which it is the truth, and for that reason its _absolute prius_. In this
its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the “Idea” entered
on possession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are
one—either is the intelligent unity, the notion. This identity is
_absolute negativity_—for whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its
objectivity perfect but externalised, this self-externalisation has been
nullified and the unity in that way been made one and the same with
itself. Thus at the same time it is this identity only so far as it is a
return out of nature.
§ 382. For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of
mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion’s absolute negativity or
self-identity. Considered as this formal aspect, it _may_ withdraw itself
from everything external and from its own externality, its very existence;
it can thus submit to infinite _pain_, the negation of its individual
immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in this
negativity and possess its own identity. All this is possible so long as
it is considered in its abstract self-contained universality.
§ 383. This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a
being of its own, the universal is self-particularising, whilst it still
remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is
“_manifestation_.” The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds
utterance or externality only in a form distinct from itself: it does not
manifest or reveal _something_, but its very mode and meaning is this
revelation. And thus in its mere possibility Mind is at the same moment an
infinite, “absolute,” _actuality_.
§ 384. _Revelation_, taken to mean the revelation of the _abstract_ Idea,
is an unmediated transition to Nature which _comes_ to be. As Mind is
free, its manifestation is to _set forth_ Nature as _its_ world; but
because it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same
time _presupposes_ the world as a nature independently existing. In the
intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its being—a
being in which the mind procures the _affirmation_ and _truth_ of its
freedom.
_The Absolute is Mind_ (Spirit)—this is the supreme definition of the
Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen
was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy:
it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science:
and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The
word “Mind” (Spirit)—and some glimpse of its meaning—was found at an early
period: and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It
remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get
hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the
ultimate reality: and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational
methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme
and the soul of philosophy.
Subdivision.
§ 385. The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:—
(1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the _ideal_ totality of
the Idea—i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is
to be self-contained and free. This is _Mind Subjective_.
(2) In the form of _reality_: realised, i.e. in a _world_ produced and to
be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape
of necessity. This is _Mind Objective_.
(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and, of mind as ideality and
concept, which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself,
mind in its absolute truth. This is _Mind Absolute_.
§ 386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite
mind. Mind is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the
disproportion between the concept and the reality—but with the
qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind’s own light—a show or
illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in
order, by its removal, actually to realise and become conscious of freedom
as _its_ very being, i.e. to be fully _manifested_. The several steps of
this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the
function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pass,
are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given
the identification of the three stages—finding a world presupposed before
us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it
and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself
till it becomes a consciousness of it.
A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician
is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere
matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern,
to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is
reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in
fact such a _modesty_ of thought, as treats the finite as something
altogether fixed and _absolute_, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to
a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of
theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated
and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic
for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in
the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the
finite _is not_, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an
emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far
examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another
and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the _implicit_
Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which
nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded
to is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it
is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind’s development we
shall see this vanity appear as _wickedness_ at that turning-point at
which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its
most central contradiction.
SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE.
§ 387. Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as
_cognitive_: Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical
category of the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the
_concrete_ mind.
Subjective mind is:—
(A) Immediate or implicit: a soul—the Spirit in _Nature_—the object
treated by _Anthropology_.
(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and
into other things: mind in correlation or particularisation:
consciousness—the object treated by the _Phenomenology of Mind_.
(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject—the object
treated by _Psychology_.
In the Soul is the _awaking of Consciousness_: Consciousness sets itself
up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and
this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the
consciousness of its intelligent unity.
For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification
it presents is an advance of _development_: and so in mind every character
under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and
development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself
into, and to realise in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again,
is itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was
implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer) it is _for
itself_—for the special form, viz. which the mind has in that step. The
ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the mind or soul is, what
happens to it, what it does. The soul is presupposed as a ready-made
agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which
we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it
possesses—all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the
soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes
it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.
We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here
studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is
the individual’s only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind to exist
in them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as
self-instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and
utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself,
links it in unity with itself, and so makes it actual mind.
Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.
§ 388. Spirit (Mind) _came into_ being as the truth of Nature. But not
merely is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first of what
went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion
the special meaning of “_free judgment_.” Mind, thus come into being,
means therefore that Nature in its own self realises its untruth and sets
itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the
universality which in corporal individuality is always self-externalised,
but as a universality which in its concretion and totality is one and
simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but _soul_.
§ 389. The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is
Nature, the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple “ideal” life.
Soul is the _substance_ or “absolute” basis of all the particularising and
individualising of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on
which its character is wrought, and the soul remains the pervading,
identical ideality of it all. But as it is still conceived thus
abstractly, the soul is only the _sleep_ of mind—the passive νοῦς of
Aristotle, which is potentially all things.
The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except
where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something _true_, and mind
conceived as a _thing_, on the other. But in modern times even the
physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come
upon _imponderable_ matters, like heat, light, &c., to which they might
perhaps add space and time. These “imponderables,” which have lost the
property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the
capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence
and outness of part to part; whereas the “vital”_ matter_, which may also
be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every
other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The
fact is that in the Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is
_implicitly_ at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception
of life—with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is
still at the same time forfeited to the sway of self-externalism. It is
otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as
freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural
individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the
unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental
feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into
universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is
the existent truth of matter—the truth that matter itself has no truth.
A cognate question is that of the _community of soul and body_. This
community (interdependence) was assumed as a _fact_, and the only problem
was how to _comprehend_ it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an
_incomprehensible_ mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely
antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each
other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found
only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not: whence
Epicurus, when attributing to the gods a residence in the pores, was
consistent in not imposing on them any connexion with the world. A
somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this
relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza,
and Leibnitz have all indicated God as this _nexus_. They meant that the
finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and,
so holding, these philosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely
as another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true
identity of finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the
case of Spinoza, is too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibnitz, though
his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so only by an act of
judgment or choice. Hence, with Leibnitz, the result is a distinction
between soul and the corporeal (or material), and the identity is only
like the _copula_ of a judgment, and does not rise or develop into system,
into the absolute syllogism.
§ 390. The Soul is at first—
(_a_) In its immediate natural mode—the natural soul, which only _is_.
(_b_) Secondly, it is a soul which _feels_, as individualised, enters into
correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modes of that being,
retains an abstract independence.
(_c_) Thirdly, its immediate being—or corporeity—is moulded into it, and
with that corporeity it exists as _actual_ soul.
(a) The Physical Soul(119).
§ 391. The soul universal, described, it may be, as an _anima mundi_, a
world-soul, must not be fixed on that account as a single subject; it is
rather the universal _substance_ which has its actual truth only in
individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single
soul, it is a single soul which _is_ merely: its only modes are modes of
natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free
existence: i.e. they are natural objects for consciousness, but objects to
which the soul as such does not behave as to something external. These
features rather are _physical qualities_ of which it finds itself
possessed.
(α) Physical Qualities(120).
§ 392. While still a “substance” (i.e. a physical soul) the mind (1) takes
part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the
changes of the seasons and the periods of the day, &c. This life of nature
for the main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of
mental tone.
In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and
telluric life of man. In such a sympathy with nature the animals
essentially live: their specific characters and their particular phases of
growth depend, in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it.
In the case of man these points of dependence lose importance, just in
proportion to his civilisation, and the more his whole frame of soul is
based upon a substructure of mental freedom. The history of the world is
not bound up with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the
destinies of individuals with the positions of the planets.
The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the
response to the changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only
in faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the fore only in morbid
states (including insanity) and at periods when the self-conscious life
suffers depression.
In nations less intellectually emancipated, which therefore live more in
harmony with nature, we find amid their superstitions and aberrations of
imbecility _a few_ real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundation
what seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of
events arising therefrom. But as mental freedom gets a deeper hold, even
these few and slight susceptibilities, based upon participation in the
common life of nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary,
remain for ever subject to such influences.
§ 393. (2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial globe,
the general planetary life of the nature-governed mind specialises itself
and breaks up into the several nature-governed minds which, on the whole,
give expression to the nature of the geographical continents and
constitute the diversities of _race_.
The contrast between the earth’s poles, the land towards the north pole
being more aggregated and preponderant over sea, whereas in the southern
hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant from each other,
introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which
Treviranus (_Biology_, Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and
fauna.
§ 394. This diversity descends into specialities, that may be termed
_local_ minds—shown in the outward modes of life and occupation, bodily
structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency and
capacity of the intellectual and moral character of the several peoples.
Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations
each possessing a persistent type of its own.
§ 395. (3) The soul is further de-universalised into the individualised
subject. But this subjectivity is here only considered as a
differentiation and singling out of the modes which nature gives; we find
it as the special temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other
disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or single individuals.
(β) Physical Alterations.
§ 396. Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as
alterations in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its
development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a more
concrete definition or description of them would require us to anticipate
an acquaintance with the formed and matured mind.
The (1) first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man’s life. He
begins with _Childhood_—mind wrapt up in itself. His next step is the
fully-developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality
which is still subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions)
against his immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the
world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the
position of the individual himself, who is still short of independence and
not fully equipped for the part he has to play (_Youth_). Thirdly, we see
man in his true relation to his environment, recognising the objective
necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it,—a world no
longer incomplete, but able in the work which it collectively achieves to
afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his
share in this collective work he first is really _somebody_, gaining an
effective existence and an objective value (_Manhood_). Last of all comes
the finishing touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while
on its realist side it passes into the _inertia_ of deadening habit, on
its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests and
entanglements of the outward present (_Old Age_).
§ 397. (2) Next we find the individual subject to a _real_ antithesis,
leading it to seek and find _itself_ in _another_ individual. This—the
_sexual relation_—on a physical basis, shows, on its one side,
subjectivity remaining in an instinctive and emotional harmony of moral
life and love, and not pushing these tendencies to an extreme _universal_
phase, in purposes political, scientific or artistic; and on the other,
shows an active half, where the individual is the vehicle of a struggle of
universal and objective interests with the given conditions (both of his
own existence and of that of the external world), carrying out these
universal principles into a unity with the world which is his own work.
The sexual tie acquires its moral and spiritual significance and function
in the _family_.
§ 398. (3) When the individuality, or self-centralised being,
distinguishes itself from its _mere_ being, this immediate judgment is the
_waking_ of the soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life, in
the first instance, as one natural quality and state confronts another
state, viz. _sleep_.—The waking is not merely for the observer, or
externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the _judgment_ (primary
partition) of the individual soul—which is self-existing only as it
relates its self-existence to its mere existence, distinguishing itself
from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes
generally all self-conscious and rational activity in which the mind
realises its own distinct self.—Sleep is an invigoration of this
activity—not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from
the world of specialisation, from dispersion into phases where it has
grown hard and stiff,—a return into the general nature of subjectivity,
which is the substance of those specialised energies and their absolute
master.
The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those _posers_, as they
may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy:—Napoleon, e.g., on
a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class of
ideology. The characterisation given in the section is abstract; it
primarily treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental
element _implicite_ but not yet as invested with a special being of its
own. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in
fundamentals it remains the same), we must take the self-existence of the
individual soul in its higher aspects as the Ego of consciousness and as
intelligent mind. The difficulty raised anent the distinction of the two
states properly arises, only when we also take into account the dreams in
sleep and describe these dreams, as well as the mental representations in
the sober waking consciousness, under one and the same title of mental
representations. Thus superficially classified as states of mental
representation the two coincide, because we have lost sight of the
difference; and in the case of any assignable distinction of waking
consciousness, we can always return to the trivial remark that all this is
nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete theory of the waking soul
in its realised being views it as _consciousness_ and _intellect_: and the
world of intelligent consciousness is something quite different from a
picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main only
externally conjoined, in an unintelligent way, by the laws of the
so-called _Association of Ideas_; though here and there of course logical
principles may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves
essentially as a concrete ego, an intelligence: and because of this
intelligence his sense-perception stands before him as a concrete totality
of features in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the
same time determined through and with all the rest. Thus the facts
embodied in his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjective
representation and distinction of the facts as something external from the
person, but by virtue of the concrete interconnexion in which each part
stands with all parts of this complex. The waking state is the concrete
consciousness of this mutual corroboration of each single factor of its
content by all the others in the picture as perceived. The consciousness
of this interdependence need not be explicit and distinct. Still this
general setting to all sensations is implicitly present in the concrete
feeling of self.—In order to see the difference of dreaming and waking we
need only keep in view the Kantian distinction between subjectivity and
objectivity of mental representation (the latter depending upon
determination through categories): remembering, as already noted, that
what is actually present in mind need not be therefore explicitly realised
in consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the intellectual
sense to God need stand before consciousness in the shape of proofs of
God’s existence, although, as before explained, these proofs only serve to
express the net worth and content of that feeling.
(γ) Sensibility(121).
§ 399. Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere alterations,
but _alternating_ conditions (a progression _in infinitum_). This is their
formal and negative relationship: but in it the _affirmative_ relationship
is also involved. In the self-certified existence of waking soul its mere
existence is implicit as an “ideal” factor: the features which make up its
sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are
_found_ by the waking soul, in its own self, and, be it noted, for itself.
The fact that these particulars, though as a mode of mind they are
distinguished from the self-identity of our self-centred being, are yet
simply contained in its simplicity, is what we call sensibility.
§ 400. Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the
inarticulate breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and
unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still
“immediate,”—neither specially developed in its content nor set in
distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to its most
special, its natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is thus limited
and transient, belonging as it does to natural, immediate being,—to what
is therefore qualitative and finite.
_Everything is in sensation_ (feeling): if you will, everything that
emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin
in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner
in which a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and
religion only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling.
What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the
facts of it are objective—set over against consciousness, so that as it is
put in me (my abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me
(from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a
mode of my individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a
form: it is thus treated as my _very own_. My own is something inseparate
from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with
its underlying self in all its definite content is just this
inseparability; which however yet falls short of the ego of developed
consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is
with a quite different intensity and permanency that the will, the
conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever be true of
feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no
philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is correct to say that above everything
the _heart_ must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by which
anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, &c., and an
appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad.
This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than
that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, godless, mean, &c.? That the
heart is the source only of such feelings is stated in the words: “From
the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, blasphemy,
&c.” In such times when “scientific” theology and philosophy make the
heart and feeling the criterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it
is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; just as it is
nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property
by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and that he has feeling in
common with them.
§ 401. What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the
naturally immediate, as “ideally” in it and made its own. On the other
hand and conversely, what originally belongs to the central individuality
(which as further deepened and enlarged is the conscious ego and free
mind) get the features of the natural corporeity, and is so felt. In this
way we have two spheres of feeling. One, where what at first is a
corporeal affection (e.g. of the eye or of any bodily part whatever) is
made feeling (sensation) by being driven inward, memorised in the soul’s
self-centred part. Another, where affections originating in the mind and
belonging to it, are in order to be felt, and to be as if found, invested
with corporeity. Thus the mode or affection gets a place in the subject:
it is felt in the soul. The detailed specification of the former branch of
sensibility is seen in the system of the senses. But the other or inwardly
originated modes of feeling no less necessarily systematise themselves;
and their corporisation, as put in the living and concretely developed
natural being, works itself out, following the special character of the
mental mode, in a special system of bodily organs.
Sensibility in general is the healthy fellowship of the individual mind in
the life of its bodily part. The senses form the simple system of
corporeity specified. (_a_) The “ideal” side of physical things breaks up
into two—because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality,
distinction appears as mere variety—the senses of definite _light_, §
287—and of _sound_, § 300. The “real” aspect similarly is with its
difference double: (_b_) the senses of smell and taste, §§ 321, 322; (_c_)
the sense of solid reality, of heavy matter, of heat and shape. Around the
centre of the sentient individuality these specifications arrange
themselves more simply than when they are developed in the natural
corporeity.
The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific
bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science—a
_psychical physiology_. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in
the feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate
sensation to the persistent tone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and
unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underlies the
symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. But
the most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying
not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily form adopted by
certain mental modifications, especially the passions or emotions. We
should have, e.g., to explain the line of connexion by which anger and
courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the “irritable” system, just as
thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the
’sensible’ system. We should want a more satisfactory explanation than
hitherto of the most familiar connexions by which tears, and voice in
general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other
specialisations lying in the line of pathognomy and physiognomy, are
formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and the organs
are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they
form at the same time a physical system for the expression of mental
states, and in this way they get quite another interpretation.
§ 402. Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found existing,
are single and transient aspects of psychic life,—alterations in the
substantiality of the soul, set in its self-centred life, with which that
substance is one. But this self-centred being is not merely a formal
factor of sensation: the soul is virtually a reflected totality of
sensations—it feels _in itself_ the total substantiality which it
_virtually_ is—it is a soul which feels.
In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly
distinguished: still we do not speak of the sensation,—but of the feeling
(sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected with
sensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasises rather the side of
passivity—the fact that we find ourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of
mode in feeling—whereas feeling at the same time rather notes the fact
that it is _we ourselves_ who feel.
(b) The Feeling Soul.—(Soul as Sentiency.)(122)
§ 403. The feeling or sentient individual is the simple “ideality” or
subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise
its substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the character of
subjectivity, to take possession of it, to realise its mastery over its
own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere natural, but an inward,
individuality: the individuality which in the merely substantial totality
was only formal to it has to be liberated and made independent.
Nowhere so much as in the case of the soul (and still more of the mind) if
we are to understand it, must that feature of “ideality” be kept in view,
which represents it as the _negation_ of the real, but a negation, where
the real is put past, virtually retained, although it does not _exist_.
The feature is one with which we are familiar in regard to our mental
ideas or to memory. Every individual is an infinite treasury of
sensations, ideas, acquired lore, thoughts, &c.; and yet the ego is one
and uncompounded, a deep featureless characterless mine, in which all this
is stored up, without existing. It is only when _I_ call to mind _an_
idea, that I bring it out of that interior to existence before
consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, ideas and information, supposed to
have been forgotten years ago, because for so long they had not been
brought into consciousness, once more come to light. They were not in our
possession, nor by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for the
future come into our possession; and yet they were in us and continue to
be in us still. Thus a person can never know how much of things he once
learned he really has in him, should he have once forgotten them: they
belong not to his actuality or subjectivity as such, but only to his
implicit self. And under all the superstructure of specialised and
instrumental consciousness that may subsequently be added to it, the
individuality always remains this single-souled inner life. At the present
stage this singleness is, primarily, to be defined as one of feeling—as
embracing the corporeal in itself: thus denying the view that this body is
something material, with parts outside parts and outside the soul. Just as
the number and variety of mental representations is no argument for an
extended and real multeity in the ego; so the “real” outness of parts in
the body has no truth for the sentient soul. As sentient, the soul is
characterised as immediate, and so as natural and corporeal: but the
outness of parts and sensible multiplicity of this corporeal counts for
the soul (as it counts for the intelligible unity) not as anything real,
and therefore not as a barrier: the soul is this intelligible unity _in
existence_,—the existent speculative principle. Thus in the body it is one
simple, omnipresent unity. As to the representative faculty the body is
but _one_ representation, and the infinite variety of its material
structure and organisation is reduced to the _simplicity_ of one definite
conception: so in the sentient soul, the corporeity, and all that outness
of parts to parts which belongs to it, is reduced to _ideality_ (the
_truth_ of the natural multiplicity). The soul is virtually the totality
of nature: as an individual soul it is a monad: it is itself the
explicitly put totality of its particular world,—that world being included
in it and filling it up; and to that world it stands but as to itself.
§ 404. As _individual_, the soul is exclusive and always exclusive: any
difference there is, it brings within itself. What is differentiated from
it is as yet no external object (as in consciousness), but only the
aspects of its own sentient totality, &c. In this partition (judgment) of
itself it is always subject: its object is its substance, which is at the
same time its predicate. This _substance_ is still the content of its
natural life, but turned into the content of the individual
sensation-laden soul; yet as the soul is in that content still particular,
the content is its particular world, so far as that is, in an implicit
mode, included in the ideality of the subject.
By itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its features
are not developed to conscious and intelligent content: so far it is
formal and only formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in cases where it
is as a _form_ and appears as a special _state_ of mind (§ 350), to which
the soul, which has already advanced to consciousness and intelligence,
may again sink down. But when a truer phase of mind thus exists in a more
subordinate and abstract one, it implies a want of adaptation, which is
_disease_. In the present stage we must treat, first, of the abstract
psychical modifications by themselves, secondly, as morbid states of mind:
the latter being only explicable by means of the former.
(α) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy.
§ 405. (αα) Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic
individual, it is because immediate, not yet as _its self_ not a true
subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the
individuality of its true self is a different subject from it—a subject
which may even exist as another individual. By the self-hood of the latter
it—a substance, which is only a non-independent predicate—is then set in
vibration and controlled without the least resistance on its part. This
other subject by which it is so controlled may be called its _genius_.
In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its
mother’s womb:—a condition neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but
psychical—a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in
undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no _self_, as yet nothing
impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject,
the _single_ self of the two. The mother is the _genius_ of the child; for
by genius we commonly mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence
of its own, and constitutes the subjective substantiality of some one else
who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal
independence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of
existence, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or
capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiency and realised activity, as
concrete subjectivity.
If we look only to the spatial and material aspects of the child’s
existence as an embryo in its special integuments, and as connected with
the mother by means of umbilical cord, placenta, &c., all that is
presented to the senses and reflection are certain anatomical and
physiological facts—externalities and instrumentalities in the sensible
and material which are insignificant as regards the main point, the
psychical relationship. What ought to be noted as regards this psychical
tie are not merely the striking effects communicated to and stamped upon
the child by violent emotions, injuries, &c. of the mother, but the whole
psychical _judgment_ (partition) of the underlying nature, by which the
female (like the monocotyledons among vegetables) can suffer disruption in
twain, so that the child has not merely got _communicated_ to it, but has
originally received morbid dispositions as well as other pre-dispositions
of shape, temper, character, talent, idiosyncrasies, &c.
Sporadic examples and traces of this _magic_ tie appear elsewhere in the
range of self-possessed conscious life, say between friends, especially
female friends with delicate nerves (a tie which may go so far as to show
“magnetic” phenomena), between husband and wife and between members of the
same family.
The total sensitivity has its self here in a separate subjectivity, which,
in the case cited of this sentient life in the ordinary course of nature,
is visibly present as another and a different individual. But this
sensitive totality is meant to elevate its self-hood out of itself to
subjectivity in one and the same individual: which is then its indwelling
consciousness, self-possessed, intelligent, and reasonable. For such a
consciousness the merely sentient life serves as an underlying and only
implicitly existent material; and the self-possessed subjectivity is the
rational, self-conscious, controlling genius thereof. But this sensitive
nucleus includes not merely the purely unconscious, congenital disposition
and temperament, but within its enveloping simplicity it acquires and
retains also (in habit, as to which see later) all further ties and
essential relationships, fortunes, principles—everything in short
belonging to the character, and in whose elaboration self-conscious
activity has most effectively participated. The sensitivity is thus a soul
in which the whole mental life is condensed. The total individual under
this concentrated aspect is distinct from the existing and actual play of
his consciousness, his secular ideas, developed interests, inclinations,
&c. As contrasted with this looser aggregate of means and methods the more
intensive form of individuality is termed the genius, whose decision is
ultimate whatever may be the show of reasons, intentions, means, of which
the more public consciousness is so liberal. This concentrated
individuality also reveals itself under the aspect of what is called the
heart and soul of feeling. A man is said to be heartless and unfeeling
when he looks at things with self-possession and acts according to his
permanent purposes, be they great substantial aims or petty and unjust
interests: a good-hearted man, on the other hand, means rather one who is
at the mercy of his individual sentiment, even when it is of narrow range
and is wholly made up of particularities. Of such good nature or goodness
of heart it may be said that it is less the genius itself than the
_indulgere genio_.
§ 406. (ββ) The sensitive life, when it becomes a _form_ or _state_ of the
self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human being is a disease. The
individual in such a morbid state stands in direct contact with the
concrete contents of his own self, whilst he keeps his self-possessed
consciousness of self and of the causal order of things apart as a
distinct state of mind. This morbid condition is seen in _magnetic
somnambulism_ and cognate states.
In this summary encyclopaedic account it is impossible to supply a
demonstration of what the paragraph states as the nature of the remarkable
condition produced chiefly by animal magnetism—to show, in other words,
that it is in harmony with the facts. To that end the phenomena, so
complex in their nature and so very different one from another, would have
first of all to be brought under their general points of view. The facts,
it might seem, first of all call for verification. But such a verification
would, it must be added, be superfluous for those on whose account it was
called for: for they facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring
the narratives—infinitely numerous though they be and accredited by the
education and character of the witnesses—to be mere deception and
imposture. The _a priori_ conceptions of these inquirers are so rooted
that no testimony can avail against them, and they have even denied what
they had seen with their own eyes. In order to believe in this department
even what one sees with these eyes, and still more to understand it, the
first requisite is not to be in bondage to the hard and fast categories of
the practical intellect. The chief points on which the discussion turns
may here be given:
(α) To the _concrete_ existence of the individual belongs the aggregate of
his fundamental _interests_, both the essential and the particular
empirical ties which connect him with other men and the world at large.
This totality forms _his_ actuality, in the sense that it lies in fact
immanent in him; it has already been called his _genius_. This genius is
not the free mind which wills and thinks: the form of sensitivity, in
which the individual here appears immersed, is, on the contrary, a
surrender of his self-possessed intelligent existence. The first
conclusion to which these considerations lead, with reference to the
contents of consciousness in the somnambulist stage, is that it is only
the range of his individually moulded world (of his private interests and
narrow relationships) which appear there. Scientific theories and
philosophic conceptions or general truths require a different
soil,—require an intelligence which has risen out of the inarticulate mass
of mere sensitivity to free consciousness. It is foolish therefore to
expect revelations about the higher ideas from the somnambulist state.
(β) Where a human being’s senses and intellect are sound, he is fully and
intelligently alive to that reality of his which gives concrete filling to
his individuality: but he is awake to it in the form of interconnexion
between himself and the features of that reality conceived as an external
and a separate world, and he is aware that this world is in itself also a
complex of interconnexions of a practically intelligible kind. In his
subjective ideas and plans he has also before him this causally connected
scheme of things he calls his world and the series of means which bring
his ideas and his purposes into adjustment with the objective existences,
which are also means and ends to each other. At the same time, this world
which is outside him has its threads in him to such a degree that it is
these threads which make him what he really is: he too would become
extinct if these externalities were to disappear, unless by the aid of
religion, subjective reason, and character, he is in a remarkable degree
self-supporting and independent of them. But, then, in the latter case he
is less susceptible of the psychical state here spoken of.—As an
illustration of that identity with the surroundings may be noted the
effect produced by the death of beloved relatives, friends, &c. on those
left behind, so that the one dies or pines away with the loss of the
other. (Thus Cato, after the downfall of the Roman republic, could live no
longer: his inner reality was neither wider than higher than it.) Compare
home-sickness, and the like.
(γ) But when all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside
it and its relationship to that world is under a veil, and the soul is
thus sunk in sleep (in magnetic sleep, in catalepsy, and other diseases,
e.g. those connected with female development, or at the approach of death,
&c.), then that _immanent actuality_ of the individual remains the same
substantial total as before, but now as a purely sensitive life with an
inward vision and an inward consciousness. And because it is the adult,
formed, and developed consciousness which is degraded into this state of
sensitivity, it retains along with its content a certain nominal
self-hood, a formal vision and awareness, which however does not go so far
as the conscious judgment or discernment by which its contents, when it is
healthy and awake, exist for it as an outward objectivity. The individual
is thus a monad which is inwardly aware of its actuality—a genius which
beholds itself. The characteristic point in such knowledge is that the
very same facts (which for the healthy consciousness are an objective
practical reality, and to know which, in its sober moods, it needs the
intelligent chain of means and conditions in all their real expansion) are
now immediately known and perceived in this immanence. This perception is
a sort of _clairvoyance_; for it is a consciousness living in the
undivided substantiality of the genius, and finding itself in the very
heart of the interconnexion, and so can dispense with the series of
conditions, external one to another, which lead up to the
result,—conditions which cool reflection has in succession to traverse and
in so doing feels the limits of its own individual externality. But such
clairvoyance—just because its dim and turbid vision does not present the
facts in a rational interconnexion—is for that very reason at the mercy of
every private contingency of feeling and fancy, &c.—not to mention that
foreign _suggestions_ (see later) intrude into its vision. It is thus
impossible to make out whether what the clairvoyants really see
preponderates over what they deceive themselves in.—But it is absurd to
treat this visionary state as a sublime mental phase and as a truer state,
capable of conveying general truths(123).
(δ) An essential feature of this sensitivity, with its absence of
intelligent and volitional personality, is this, that it is a state of
passivity, like that of the child in the womb. The patient in this
condition is accordingly made, and continues to be, subject to the power
of another person, the magnetiser; so that when the two are thus in
psychical _rapport_, the selfless individual, not really a “person,” has
for his subjective consciousness the consciousness of the other. This
latter self-possessed individual is thus the effective subjective soul of
the former, and the genius which may even supply him with a train of
ideas. That the somnambulist perceives in himself tastes and smells which
are present in the person with whom he stands _en rapport_, and that he is
aware of the other inner ideas and present perceptions of the latter as if
they were his own, shows the substantial identity which the soul (which
even in its concreteness is also truly immaterial) is capable of holding
with another. When the substance of both is thus made one, there is only
one subjectivity of consciousness: the patient has a sort of
individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual: and this
nominal self accordingly derives its whole stock of ideas from the
sensations and ideas of the other, in whom it sees, smells, tastes, reads,
and hears. It is further to be noted on this point that the somnambulist
is thus brought into _rapport_ with two genii and a twofold set of ideas,
his own and that of the magnetiser. But it is impossible to say precisely
which sensations and which visions he, in this nominal perception,
receives, beholds and brings to knowledge from his own inward self, and
which from the suggestions of the person with whom he stands in relation.
This uncertainty may be the source of many deceptions, and accounts among
other things for the diversity that inevitably shows itself among
somnambulists from different countries and under _rapport_ with persons of
different education, as regards their views on morbid states and the
methods of cure, or medicines for them, as well as on scientific and
intellectual topics.
(ε) As in this sensitive substantiality there is no contrast to external
objectivity, so within itself the subject is so entirely one that all
varieties of sensation have disappeared, and hence, when the activity of
the sense-organs is asleep, the “common sense,” or “general feeling”
specifies itself to several functions; one sees and hears with the
fingers, and especially with the pit of the stomach, &c.
To comprehend a thing means in the language of practical intelligence to
be able to trace the series of means intervening between a phenomenon and
some other existence on which it depends,—to discover what is called the
ordinary course of nature, in compliance with the laws and relations of
the intellect, e.g. causality, reasons, &c. The purely sensitive life, on
the contrary, even when it retains that mere nominal consciousness, as in
the morbid state alluded to, is just this form of immediacy, without any
distinctions between subjective and objective, between intelligent
personality and objective world, and without the aforementioned finite
ties between them. Hence to understand this intimate conjunction, which,
though all-embracing, is without any definite points of attachment, is
impossible, so long as we assume independent personalities, independent
one of another and of the objective world which is their content—so long
as we assume the absolute spatial and material externality of one part of
being to another.
(β) Self-feeling (Sense of Self)(124).
§ 407. (αα) The sensitive totality is, in its capacity of individual,
essentially the tendency to distinguish itself in itself, and to wake up
to the _judgment in itself_, in virtue of which it has _particular_
feelings and stands as a _subject_ in respect of these aspects of itself.
The subject as such gives these feelings a place as _its own_ in itself.
In these private and personal sensations it is immersed, and at the same
time, because of the “ideality” of the particulars, it combines itself in
them with itself as a subjective unit. In this way it is _self-feeling_,
and is so at the same time only in the _particular feeling_.
§ 408. (ββ) In consequence of the immediacy, which still marks the
self-feeling, i.e. in consequence of the element of corporeality which is
still undetached from the mental life, and as the feeling too is itself
particular and bound up with a special corporeal form, it follows that
although the subject has been brought to acquire intelligent
consciousness, it is still susceptible of disease, so far as to remain
fast in a _special_ phase of its self-feeling, unable to refine it to
“ideality” and get the better of it. The fully-furnished self of
intelligent consciousness is a conscious subject, which is consistent in
itself according to an order and behaviour which follows from its
individual position and its connexion with the external world, which is no
less a world of law. But when it is engrossed with a single phase of
feeling, it fails to assign that phase its proper place and due
subordination in the individual system of the world which a conscious
subject is. In this way the subject finds itself in contradiction between
the totality systematised in its consciousness, and the single phase or
fixed idea which is not reduced to its proper place and rank. This is
Insanity or mental Derangement.
In considering insanity we must, as in other cases, anticipate the
full-grown and intelligent conscious subject, which is at the same time
the _natural_ self of _self-feeling_. In such a phase the self can be
liable to the contradiction between its own free subjectivity and a
particularity which, instead of being “idealised” in the former, remains
as a fixed element in self-feeling. Mind as such is free, and therefore
not susceptible of this malady. But in older metaphysics mind was treated
as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing, i.e. as something
natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity—the settled fixture of
some finite element in it. Insanity is therefore a psychical disease, i.e.
a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement may appear to start
from one more than other, and so also may the cure.
The self-possessed and healthy subject has an active and present
consciousness of the ordered whole of his individual world, into the
system of which he subsumes each special content of sensation, idea,
desire, inclination, &c., as it arises, so as to insert them in their
proper place. He is the _dominant genius_ over these particularities.
Between this and insanity the difference is like that between waking and
dreaming: only that in insanity the dream falls within the waking limits,
and so makes part of the actual self-feeling. Error and that sort of thing
is a proposition consistently admitted to a place in the objective
interconnexion of things. In the concrete, however, it is often difficult
to say where it begins to become derangement. A violent, but groundless
and senseless outburst of hatred, &c., may, in contrast to a presupposed
higher self-possession and stability of character, make its victim seem to
be beside himself with frenzy. But the main point in derangement is the
contradiction which a feeling with a fixed corporeal embodiment sets up
against the whole mass of adjustments forming the concrete consciousness.
The mind which is in a condition of mere _being_, and where such being is
not rendered fluid in its consciousness, is diseased. The contents which
are set free in this reversion to mere nature are the self-seeking
affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest of the
passions—fancies and hopes—merely personal love and hatred. When the
influence of self-possession and of general principles, moral and
theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the natural temper under lock
and key, the earthly elements are set free—that evil which is always
latent in the heart, because the heart as immediate is natural and
selfish. It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper hand in
insanity, but in distinction from and contrast to the better and more
intelligent part, which is there also. Hence this state is mental
derangement and distress. The right psychical treatment therefore keeps in
view the truth that insanity is not an abstract _loss_ of reason (neither
in the point of intelligence nor of will and its responsibility), but only
derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason;—just as
physical disease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and total, loss of health
(if it were that, it would be death), but a contradiction in it. This
humane treatment, no less benevolent than reasonable (the services of
Pinel towards which deserve the highest acknowledgment), presupposes the
patient’s rationality, and in that assumption has the sound basis for
dealing with him on this side—just as in the case of bodily disease the
physician bases his treatment on the vitality which as such still contains
health.
(γ) Habit(125).
§ 409. Self-feeling, immersed in the detail of the feelings (in simple
sensations, and also desires, instincts, passions, and their
gratification), is undistinguished from them. But in the self there is
latent a simple self-relation of ideality, a nominal universality (which
is the truth of these details): and as so universal, the self is to be
stamped upon, and made appear in, this life of feeling, yet so as to
distinguish itself from the particular details, and be a realised
universality. But this universality is not the full and sterling truth of
the specific feelings and desires; what they specifically contain is as
yet left out of account. And so too the particularity is, as now regarded,
equally formal; it counts only as the _particular being_ or immediacy of
the soul in opposition to its equally formal and abstract realisation.
This particular being of the soul is the factor of its corporeity; here we
have it breaking with this corporeity, distinguishing it from
itself,—itself a _simple_ being,—and becoming the “ideal,” subjective
substantiality of it,—just as in its latent notion (§ 359) it was the
substance, and the mere substance, of it.
But this abstract realisation of the soul in its corporeal vehicle is not
yet the self—not the existence of the universal which is for the
universal. It is the corporeity reduced to its mere _ideality_; and so far
only does corporeity belong to the soul as such. That is to say, as space
and time—the abstract one-outside-another, as, in short, empty space and
empty time—are only subjective form—pure act of intuition; so that pure
being (which through the supersession in it of the particularity of the
corporeity, or of the immediate corporeity as such has realised itself) is
mere intuition and no more, lacking consciousness, but the basis of
consciousness. And consciousness it becomes, when the corporeity, of which
it is the subjective substance, and which still continues to exist, and
that as a barrier for it, has been absorbed by it, and it has been
invested with the character of self-centred subject.
§ 410. The soul’s making itself an abstract universal being, and reducing
the particulars of feelings (and of consciousness) to a mere feature of
its being is Habit. In this manner the soul has the contents in
possession, and contains them in such manner that in these features it is
not as sentient, nor does it stand in relationship with them as
distinguishing itself from them, nor is absorbed in them, but has them and
moves in them, without feeling or consciousness of the fact. The soul is
freed from them, so far as it is not interested in or occupied with them:
and whilst existing in these forms as its possession, it is at the same
time open to be otherwise occupied and engaged—say with feeling and with
mental consciousness in general.
This process of building up the particular and corporeal expressions of
feeling into the being of the soul appears as a _repetition_ of them, and
the generation of habit as _practice_. For, this being of the soul, if in
respect of the natural particular phase it be called an abstract
universality to which the former is transmuted, is a reflexive
universality (§ 175); i.e. the one and the same, that recurs in a series
of units of sensation, is reduced to unity, and this abstract unity
expressly stated.
Habit, like memory, is a difficult point in mental organisation: habit is
the mechanism of self-feeling, as memory is the mechanism of intelligence.
The natural qualities and alterations of age, sleep and waking, are
“immediately” natural: habit, on the contrary, is the mode of feeling (as
well as intelligence, will, &c., so far as they belong to self-feeling)
made into a natural and mechanical existence. Habit is rightly called a
second nature; nature, because it is an immediate being of the soul; a
second nature, because it is an immediacy created by the soul, impressing
and moulding the corporeality which enters into the modes of feeling as
such and into the representations and volitions so far as they have taken
corporeal form (§ 401).
In habit the human being’s mode of existence is “natural,” and for that
reason not free; but still free, so far as the merely natural phase of
feeling is by habit reduced to a mere being of _his_, and he is no longer
involuntarily attracted or repelled by it, and so no longer interested,
occupied, or dependent in regard to it. The want of freedom in habit is
partly merely formal, as habit merely attaches to the being of the soul;
partly only relative, so far as it strictly speaking arises only in the
case of bad habits, or so far as a habit is opposed by another purpose:
whereas the habit of right and goodness is an embodiment of liberty. The
main point about Habit is that by its means man gets emancipated from the
feelings, even in being affected by them. The different forms of this may
be described as follows: (α) The _immediate_ feeling is negated and
treated as indifferent. One who gets inured against external sensations
(frost, heat, weariness of the limbs, &c., sweet tastes, &c.), and who
hardens the heart against misfortune, acquires a strength which consists
in this, that although the frost, &c.—or the misfortune—is felt, the
affection is deposed to a mere externality and immediacy; the universal
psychical life keeps its own abstract independence in it, and the
self-feeling as such, consciousness, reflection, and any other purposes
and activity, are no longer bothered with it. (β) There is indifference
towards the satisfaction: the desires and impulses are by the _habit_ of
their satisfaction deadened. This is the rational liberation from them;
whereas monastic renunciation and forcible interference do not free from
them, nor are they in conception rational. Of course in all this it is
assumed that the impulses are kept as the finite modes they naturally are,
and that they, like their satisfaction, are subordinated as partial
factors to the reasonable will. (γ) In habit regarded as _aptitude_, or
skill, not merely has the abstract psychical life to be kept intact _per
se_, but it has to be imposed as a subjective aim, to be made a power in
the bodily part, which is rendered subject and thoroughly pervious to it.
Conceived as having the inward purpose of the subjective soul thus imposed
upon it, the body is treated as an immediate externality and a barrier.
Thus comes out the more decided rupture between the soul as simple
self-concentration, and its earlier naturalness and immediacy; it has lost
its original and immediate identity with the bodily nature, and as
external has first to be reduced to that position. Specific feelings can
only get bodily shape in a perfectly specific way (§ 401); and the
immediate portion of body is a particular possibility for a specific aim
(a particular aspect of its differentiated structure, a particular organ
of its organic system). To mould such an aim in the organic body is to
bring out and express the “ideality” which is implicit in matter always,
and especially so in the specific bodily part, and thus to enable the
soul, under its volitional and conceptual characters, to exist as
substance in its corporeity. In this way an aptitude shows the corporeity
rendered completely pervious, made into an instrument, so that when the
conception (e.g. a series of musical notes) is in me, then without
resistance and with ease the body gives them correct utterance.
The form of habit applies to all kinds and grades of mental action. The
most external of them, i.e. the spatial direction of an individual, viz.
his upright posture, has been by will made a habit—a position taken
without adjustment and without consciousness—which continues to be an
affair of his persistent will; for the man stands only because and in so
far as he wills to stand, and only so long as he wills it without
consciousness. Similarly our eyesight is the concrete habit which, without
an express adjustment, combines in a single act the several modifications
of sensation, consciousness, intuition, intelligence, &c., which make it
up. Thinking, too, however free and active in its own pure element it
becomes, no less requires habit and familiarity (this impromptuity or form
of immediacy), by which it is the property of my single self where I can
freely and in all directions range. It is through this habit that I come
to realise my _existence_ as a thinking being. Even here, in this
spontaneity of self-centred thought, there is a partnership of soul and
body (hence, want of habit and too-long-continued thinking cause
headache); habit diminishes this feeling, by making the natural function
an immediacy of the soul. Habit on an ampler scale, and carried out in the
strictly intellectual range, is recollection and memory, whereof we shall
speak later.
Habit is often spoken of disparagingly and called lifeless, casual and
particular. And it is true that the form of habit, like any other, is open
to anything we chance to put into it; and it is habit of living which
brings on death, or, if quite abstract, is death itself: and yet habit is
indispensable for the _existence_ of all intellectual life in the
individual, enabling the subject to be a concrete immediacy, an “ideality”
of soul—enabling the matter of consciousness, religious, moral, &c., to be
his as _this_ self, _this_ soul, and no other, and be neither a mere
latent possibility, nor a transient emotion or idea, nor an abstract
inwardness, cut off from action and reality, but part and parcel of his
being. In scientific studies of the soul and the mind, habit is usually
passed over—either as something contemptible—or rather for the further
reason that it is one of the most difficult questions of psychology.
(c) The Actual Soul.(126)
§ 411. The Soul, when its corporeity has been moulded and made thoroughly
its own, finds itself there a _single_ subject; and the corporeity is an
externality which stands as a predicate, in being related to which, it is
related to itself. This externality, in other words, represents not
itself, but the soul, of which it is the _sign_. In this identity of
interior and exterior, the latter subject to the former, the soul is
_actual_: in its corporeity it has its free shape, in which it _feels
itself_ and makes _itself felt_, and which as the Soul’s work of art has
_human_ pathognomic and physiognomic expression.
Under the head of human expression are included, e.g., the upright figure
in general, and the formation of the limbs, especially the hand, as the
absolute instrument, of the mouth—laughter, weeping, &c., and the note of
mentality diffused over the whole, which at once announces the body at the
externality of a higher nature. This note is so slight, indefinite, and
inexpressible a modification, because the figure in its externality is
something immediate and natural, and can therefore only be an indefinite
and quite imperfect sign for the mind, unable to represent it in its
actual universality. Seen from the animal world, the human figure is the
supreme phase in which mind makes an appearance. But for the mind it is
only its first appearance, while language is its perfect expression. And
the human figure, though its proximate phase of existence, is at the same
time in its physiognomic and pathognomic quality something contingent to
it. To try to raise physiognomy and above all cranioscopy (phrenology) to
the rank of sciences, was therefore one of the vainest fancies, still
vainer than a _signatura rerum_, which supposed the shape of a plant to
afford indication of its medicinal virtue.
§ 412. Implicitly the soul shows the untruth and unreality of matter; for
the soul, in its concentrated self, cuts itself off from its immediate
being, placing the latter over against it as a corporeity incapable of
offering resistance to its moulding influence. The soul, thus setting in
opposition its being to its (conscious) self, absorbing it, and making it
its own, has lost the meaning of mere soul, or the “immediacy” of mind.
The actual soul with its sensation and its concrete self-feeling turned
into habit, has implicitly realised the ’ideality’ of its qualities; in
this externality it has recollected and inwardised itself, and is infinite
self-relation. This free universality thus made explicit shows the soul
awaking to the higher stage of the ego, or abstract universality in so far
as it is _for_ the abstract universality. In this way it gains the
position of thinker and subject—specially a subject of the judgment in
which the ego excludes from itself the sum total of its merely natural
features as an object, a world external to it,—but with such respect to
that object that in it it is immediately reflected into itself. Thus soul
rises to become _Consciousness_.
Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness.
§ 413. Consciousness constitutes the reflected or correlational grade of
mind: the grade of mind as _appearance_. _Ego_ is infinite self-relation
of mind, but as subjective or as self-certainty. The immediate identity of
the natural soul has been raised to this pure “ideal” self-identity; and
what the former _contained_ is for this self-subsistent reflection set
forth as an _object_. The pure abstract freedom of mind lets go from it
its specific qualities,—the soul’s natural life—to an equal freedom as an
independent _object_. It is of this latter, as external to it, that the
_ego_ is in the first instance aware (conscious), and as such it is
Consciousness. Ego, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly the
identity in the otherness: the _ego_ is itself that other and stretches
over the object (as if that object were implicitly cancelled)—it is one
side of the relationship and the whole relationship—the light, which
manifests itself and something else too.
§ 414. The self-identity of the mind, thus first made explicit as the Ego,
is only its abstract formal identity. As _soul_ it was under the phase of
_substantial_ universality; now, as subjective reflection in itself, it is
referred to this substantiality as to its negative, something dark and
beyond it. Hence consciousness, like reciprocal dependence in general, is
the contradiction between the independence of the two sides and their
identity in which they are merged into one. The mind as ego is _essence_;
but since reality, in the sphere of essence, is represented as in
immediate being and at the same time as “ideal,” it is as consciousness
only the _appearance_ (phenomenon) of mind.
§ 415. As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the dialectical
movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. the successive steps in further
specification of consciousness, does not to it seem to be its own
activity, but is implicit, and to the ego it seems an alteration of the
object. Consciousness consequently appears differently modified according
to the difference of the given object; and the gradual specification of
consciousness appears as a variation in the characteristics of its
objects. Ego, the subject of consciousness, is thinking: the logical
process of modifying the object is what is identical in subject and
object, their absolute interdependence, what makes the object the
subject’s own.
The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described as having viewed
the mind as consciousness, and as containing the propositions only of a
_phenomenology_ (not of a _philosophy_) of mind. The Ego Kant regards as
reference to something away and beyond (which in its abstract description
is termed the thing-at-itself); and it is only from this finite point of
view that he treats both intellect and will. Though in the notion of a
power of _reflective_ judgment he touches upon the _Idea_ of mind—a
subject-objectivity, an _intuitive intellect_, &c., and even the Idea of
Nature, still this Idea is again deposed to an appearance, i.e. to a
subjective maxim (§ 58). Reinhold may therefore be said to have correctly
appreciated Kantism when he treated it as a theory of consciousness (under
the name of “faculty of ideation”). Fichte kept to the same point of view:
his non-ego is only something set over against the ego, only defined as in
_consciousness_: it is made no more than an infinite “shock,” i.e. a
thing-in-itself. Both systems therefore have clearly not reached the
intelligible unity or the mind as it actually and essentially is, but only
as it is in reference to something else.
As against Spinozism, again, it is to be noted that the mind in the
judgment by which it “constitutes” itself an ego (a free subject
contrasted with its qualitative affection) has emerged from substance, and
that the philosophy, which gives this judgment as the absolute
characteristic of mind, has emerged from Spinozism.
§ 416. The aim of conscious mind is to make its appearance identical with
its essence, to raise its _self-certainty to truth_. The _existence_ of
mind in the stage of consciousness is finite, because it is merely a
nominal self-relation, or mere certainty. The object is only abstractly
characterised as _its_; in other words, in the object it is only as an
abstract ego that the mind is reflected into itself: hence its existence
there has still a content, which is not as its own.
§ 417. The grades of this elevation of certainty to truth are three in
number: first (_a_) consciousness in general, with an object set against
it; (_b_) self-consciousness, for which _ego_ is the object; (_c_) unity
of consciousness and self-consciousness, where the mind sees itself
embodied in the object and sees itself as implicitly and explicitly
determinate, as Reason, the _notion_ of mind.
(a) Consciousness Proper(127).
(α) Sensuous consciousness.
§ 418. Consciousness is, first, _immediate_ consciousness, and its
reference to the object accordingly the simple and underived certainty of
it. The object similarly, being immediate, an existent, reflected in
itself, is further characterised as immediately singular. This is
sense-consciousness.
Consciousness—as a case of correlation—comprises only the categories
belonging to the abstract ego or formal thinking; and these it treats as
features of the object (§ 415). Sense-consciousness therefore is aware of
the object as an existent, a something, an existing thing, a singular, and
so on. It appears as wealthiest in matter, but as poorest in thought. That
wealth of matter is made out of sensations: they are the _material_ of
consciousness (§ 414), the substantial and qualitative, what the soul in
its anthropological sphere is and finds _in itself_. This material the ego
(the reflection of the soul in itself) separates from itself, and puts it
first under the category of being. Spatial and temporal Singularness,
_here_ and _now_ (the terms by which in the Phenomenology of the Mind (W.
II. p. 73), I described the object of sense-consciousness) strictly
belongs to _intuition_. At present the object is at first to be viewed
only in its correlation to _consciousness_, i.e. a something _external_ to
it, and not yet as external on its own part, or as being beside and out of
itself.
§ 419. The _sensible_ as somewhat becomes an _other_: the reflection in
itself of this _somewhat_, the _thing_, has _many_ properties; and as a
single (thing) in its immediacy has several _predicates_. The muchness of
the sense-singular thus becomes a breadth—a variety of relations,
reflectional attributes, and universalities. These are logical terms
introduced by the thinking principle, i.e. in this case by the Ego, to
describe the sensible. But the Ego as itself apparent sees in all this
characterisation a change in the object; and self-consciousness, so
construing the object, is sense-perception.
(β) Sense-perception(128).
§ 420. Consciousness, having passed beyond the sensibility, wants to take
the object in its truth, not as merely immediate, but as mediated,
reflected in itself, and universal. Such an object is a combination of
sense qualities with attributes of wider range by which thought defines
concrete relations and connexions. Hence the identity of consciousness
with the object passes from the abstract identity of “I am sure” to the
definite identity of “I know, and am aware.”
The particular grade of consciousness on which Kantism conceives the mind
is perception: which is also the general point of view taken by ordinary
consciousness, and more or less by the sciences. The sensuous certitudes
of single apperceptions or observations form the starting-point: these are
supposed to be elevated to truth, by being regarded in their bearings,
reflected upon, and on the lines of definite categories turned at the same
time into something necessary and universal, viz. _experiences_.
§ 421. This conjunction of individual and universal is admixture—the
individual remains at the bottom hard and unaffected by the universal, to
which however it is related. It is therefore a tissue of
contradictions—between the single things of sense apperception, which form
the alleged ground of general experience, and the universality which has a
higher claim to be the essence and ground—between the individuality of a
thing which, taken in its concrete content, constitutes its independence
and the various properties which, free from this negative link and from
one another, are independent universal _matters_ (§ 123). This
contradiction of the finite which runs through all forms of the logical
spheres turns out most concrete, when the somewhat is defined as _object_
(§ 194 seqq.).
(γ) The Intellect(129).
§ 422. The proximate _truth_ of perception is that it is the object which
is an _appearance_, and that the object’s reflection in self is on the
contrary a self-subsistent inward and universal. The consciousness of such
an object is _intellect_. This inward, as we called it, of the thing is on
one hand the suppression of the multiplicity of the sensible, and, in that
manner, an abstract identity: on the other hand, however, it also for that
reason contains the multiplicity, but as an interior “simple” difference,
which remains self-identical in the vicissitudes of appearance. This
simple difference is the realm of _the laws_ of the phenomena—a copy of
the phenomenon, but brought to rest and universality.
§ 423. The law, at first stating the mutual dependence of universal,
permanent terms, has, in so far as its distinction is the inward one, its
necessity on its own part; the one of the terms, as not externally
different from the other, lies immediately in the other. But in this
manner the interior distinction is, what it is in truth, the distinction
on its own part, or the distinction which is none. With this new
form-characteristic, on the whole, consciousness _implicitly_ vanishes:
for consciousness as such implies the reciprocal independence of subject
and object. The ego in its judgment has an object which is not distinct
from it,—it has itself. Consciousness has passed into self-consciousness.
(b) Self-consciousness(130).
§ 424. _Self-consciousness_ is the truth of consciousness: the latter is a
consequence of the former, all consciousness of an other object being as a
matter of fact also self-consciousness. The object is my idea: I am aware
of the object as mine; and thus in it I am aware of me. The formula of
self-consciousness is I = I:—abstract freedom, pure “ideality.” In so far
it lacks “reality”: for as it is its own object, there is strictly
speaking no object, because there is no distinction between it and the
object.
§ 425. Abstract self-consciousness is the first negation of consciousness,
and for that reason it is burdened with an external object, or, nominally,
with the negation of it. Thus it is at the same time the antecedent stage,
consciousness: it is the contradiction of itself as self-consciousness and
as consciousness. But the latter aspect and the negation in general is in
I = I potentially suppressed; and hence as this certitude of self against
the object it is the _impulse_ to realise its implicit nature, by giving
its abstract self-awareness content and objectivity, and in the other
direction to free itself from its sensuousness, to set aside the given
objectivity and identify it with itself. The two processes are one and the
same, the identification of its consciousness and self-consciousness.
(α) Appetite or Instinctive Desire(131).
§ 426. Self-consciousness, in its immediacy, is a singular, and a desire
(appetite),—the contradiction implied in its abstraction which should yet
be objective,—or in its immediacy which has the shape of an external
object and should be subjective. The certitude of one’s self, which issues
from the suppression of mere consciousness, pronounces the _object_ null:
and the outlook of self-consciousness towards the object equally qualifies
the abstract ideality of such self-consciousness as null.
§ 427. Self-consciousness, therefore, knows itself implicit in the object,
which in this outlook is conformable to the appetite. In the negation of
the two one-sided moments by the ego’s own activity, this identity comes
to be _for_ the ego. To this activity the object, which implicitly and for
self-consciousness is self-less, can make no resistance: the dialectic,
implicit in it, towards self-suppression exists in this case as that
activity of the ego. Thus while the given object is rendered subjective,
the subjectivity divests itself of its one-sidedness and becomes objective
to itself.
§ 428. The product of this process is the fast conjunction of the ego with
itself, its satisfaction realised, and itself made actual. On the external
side it continues, in this return upon itself, primarily describable as an
individual, and maintains itself as such; because its bearing upon the
self-less object is purely negative, the latter, therefore, being merely
consumed. Thus appetite in its satisfaction is always destructive, and in
its content selfish: and as the satisfaction has only happened in the
individual (and that is transient) the appetite is again generated in the
very act of satisfaction.
§ 429. But on the inner side, or implicitly, the sense of self which the
ego gets in the satisfaction does not remain in abstract
self-concentration or in mere individuality; on the contrary,—as negation
of _immediacy_ and individuality the result involves a character of
universality and of the identity of self-consciousness with its object.
The judgment or diremption of this self-consciousness is the consciousness
of a “_free_” object, in which ego is aware of itself as an ego, which
however is _also_ still outside it.
(β) Self-consciousness Recognitive(132).
§ 430. Here there is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness, at
first immediately as one of two things for another. In that other as ego I
behold myself, and yet also an immediately existing object, another ego
absolutely independent of me and opposed to me. (The suppression of the
singleness of self-consciousness was only a first step in the suppression,
and it merely led to the characterisation of it as _particular_.) This
contradiction gives either self-consciousness the impulse to _show_ itself
as a free self, and to exist as such for the other:—the process of
_recognition_.
§ 431. The process is a battle. I cannot be aware of me as myself in
another individual, so long as I see in that other an other and an
immediate existence: and I am consequently bent upon the suppression of
this immediacy of his. But in like measure _I_ cannot be recognised as
immediate, except so far as I overcome the mere immediacy on my own part,
and thus give existence to my freedom. But this immediacy is at the same
time the corporeity of self-consciousness, in which as in its sign and
tool the latter has its own _sense of self_, and its being _for others_,
and the means for entering into relation with them.
§ 432. The fight of recognition is a life and death struggle: either
self-consciousness imperils the other’s like, and incurs a like peril for
its own—but only peril, for either is no less bent on maintaining his
life, as the existence of his freedom. Thus the death of one, though by
the abstract, therefore rude, negation of immediacy, it, from one point of
view, solves the contradiction, is yet, from the essential point of view
(i.e. the outward and visible recognition), a new contradiction (for that
recognition is at the same time undone by the other’s death) and a greater
than the other.
§ 433. But because life is as requisite as liberty to the solution, the
fight ends in the first instance as a one-sided negation with inequality.
While the one combatant prefers life, retains his single
self-consciousness, but surrenders his claim for recognition, the other
holds fast to his self-assertion and is recognised by the former as his
superior. Thus arises the status of _master and slave_.
In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see,
on their phenomenal side, the emergence of man’s social life and the
commencement of political union. _Force_, which is the basis of this
phenomenon, is not on that account a basis of right, but only the
necessary and legitimate factor in the passage from the state of
self-consciousness sunk in appetite and selfish isolation into the state
of universal self-consciousness. Force, then, is the external or
phenomenal commencement of states, not their underlying and essential
principle.
§ 434. This status, in the first place, implies _common_ wants and common
concern for their satisfaction,—for the means of mastery, the slave, must
likewise be kept in life. In place of the rude destruction of the
immediate object there ensues acquisition, preservation, and formation of
it, as the instrumentality in which the two extremes of independence and
non-independence are welded together. The form of universality thus
arising in satisfying the want, creates a _permanent_ means and a
provision which takes care for and secures the future.
§ 435. But secondly, when we look to the distinction of the two, the
master beholds in the slave and his servitude the supremacy of his
_single_ self-hood, and that by the suppression of immediate self-hood, a
suppression, however, which falls on another. This other, the slave,
however, in the service of the master, works off his individualist
self-will, overcomes the inner immediacy of appetite, and in this
divestment of self and in “the fear of his lord” makes “the beginning of
wisdom”—the passage to universal self-consciousness.
(γ) Universal Self-consciousness.
§ 436. Universal self-consciousness is the affirmative awareness of self
in an other self: each self as a free individuality has his own “absolute”
independence, yet in virtue of the negation of its immediacy or appetite
without distinguishing itself from that other. Each is thus universal
self-conscious and objective; each has “real” universality in the shape of
reciprocity, so far as each knows itself recognised in the other freeman,
and is aware of this in so far as it recognises the other and knows him to
be free.
This universal re-appearance of self-consciousness—the notion which is
aware of itself in its objectivity as a subjectivity identical with itself
and for that reason universal—is the form of consciousness which lies at
the root of all true mental or spiritual life—in family, fatherland,
state, and of all virtues, love, friendship, valour, honour, fame. But
this appearance of the underlying essence may be severed from that
essential, and be maintained apart in worthless honour, idle fame, &c.
§ 437. This unity of consciousness and self-consciousness implies in the
first instance the individuals mutually throwing light upon each other.
But the difference between those who are thus identified is mere vague
diversity—or rather it is a difference which is none. Hence its truth is
the fully and really existent universality and objectivity of
self-consciousness,—which is _Reason_.
Reason, as the _Idea_ (§ 213) as it here appears, is to be taken as
meaning that the distinction between notion and reality which it unifies
has the special aspect of a distinction between the self-concentrated
notion or consciousness, and the object subsisting external and opposed to
it.
(c) Reason(133).
§ 438. The essential and actual truth which reason is, lies in the simple
identity of the subjectivity of the notion, with its objectivity and
universality. The universality of reason, therefore, whilst it signifies
that the object, which was only given in consciousness _quâ_
consciousness, is now itself universal, permeating and encompassing the
ego, also signifies that the pure ego is the pure form which overlaps the
object, and encompasses it without it.
§ 439. Self-consciousness, thus certified that its determinations are no
less objective, or determinations of the very being of things, than they
are its own thoughts, is Reason, which as such an identity is not only the
absolute _substance_, but the _truth_ that knows it. For truth here has,
as its peculiar mode and immanent form, the self-centred pure notion, ego,
the certitude of self as infinite universality. Truth, aware of what it
is, is mind (spirit).
Sub-Section C. Psychology. Mind(134).
§ 440. Mind has defined itself as the truth of soul and consciousness,—the
former a simple immediate totality, the latter now an infinite form which
is not, like consciousness, restricted by that content, and does not stand
in mere correlation to it as to its object, but is an awareness of this
substantial totality, neither subjective nor objective. Mind, therefore,
starts only from its own being and is in correlation only with its own
features.
Psychology accordingly studies the faculties or general modes of mental
activity _quâ_ mental—mental vision, ideation, remembering, &c., desires,
&c.—apart both from the content, which on the phenomenal side is found in
empirical ideation, in thinking also and in desire and will, and from the
two forms in which these modes exist, viz. in the soul as a physical mode,
and in consciousness itself as a separately existent object of that
consciousness. This, however, is not an arbitrary abstraction by the
psychologist. Mind is just this elevation above nature and physical modes,
and above the complication with an external object—in one word, above the
material, as its concept has just shown. All it has now to do is to
realise this notion of its freedom, and get rid of the _form_ of immediacy
with which it once more begins. The content which is elevated to
intuitions is _its_ sensations: it is _its_ intuitions also which are
transmuted into representations, and its representations which are
transmuted again into thoughts, &c.
§ 441. The soul is finite, so far as its features are immediate or
con-natural. Consciousness is finite, in so far as it has an object. Mind
is finite, in so far as, though it no longer has an object, it has a mode
in its knowledge; i.e., it is finite by means of its immediacy, or, what
is the same thing, by being subjective or only a notion. And it is a
matter of no consequence, which is defined as its notion, and which as the
reality of that notion. Say that its notion is the utterly infinite
objective reason, then its reality is knowledge or _intelligence_: say
that knowledge is its notion, then its reality is that reason, and the
realisation of knowledge consists in appropriating reason. Hence the
finitude of mind is to be placed in the (temporary) failure of knowledge
to get hold of the full reality of its reason, or, equally, in the
(temporary) failure of reason to attain full manifestation in knowledge.
Reason at the same time is only infinite so far as it is “absolute”
freedom; so far, that is, as presupposing itself for its knowledge to work
upon, it thereby reduces itself to finitude, and appears as everlasting
movement of superseding this immediacy, of comprehending itself, and being
a rational knowledge.
§ 442. The progress of mind is _development_, in so far as its existent
phase, viz. knowledge, involves as its intrinsic purpose and burden that
utter and complete autonomy which is rationality; in which case the action
of translating this purpose into reality is strictly only a nominal
passage over into manifestation, and is even there a return into itself.
So far as knowledge which has not shaken off its original quality of
_mere_ knowledge is only abstract or formal, the goal of mind is to give
it objective fulfilment, and thus at the same time produce its freedom.
The development here meant is not that of the individual (which has a
certain _anthropological_ character), where faculties and forces are
regarded as successively emerging and presenting themselves in external
existence—a series of steps, on the ascertainment on which there was for a
long time great stress laid (by the system of Condillac), as if a
conjectural natural emergence could exhibit the origin of these faculties
and _explain_ them. In Condillac’s method there is an unmistakable
intention to show how the _several_ modes of mental activity could be made
intelligible without losing sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their
necessary interconnexion. But the categories employed in doing so are of a
wretched sort. Their ruling principle is that the sensible is taken (and
with justice) as the _prius_ or the initial basis, but that the later
phases that follow this starting-point present themselves as emerging in a
solely _affirmative_ manner, and the negative aspect of mental activity,
by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed _as_ a
sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As the theory of Condillac
states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left as
if it were the true and essential foundation.
Similarly, if the activities of mind are treated as mere manifestations,
forces, perhaps in terms stating their utility or suitability for some
other interest of head or heart, there is no indication of the true final
aim of the whole business. That can only be the intelligible unity of
mind, and its activity can only have itself as aim; i.e. its aim can only
be to get rid of the form of immediacy or subjectivity, to reach and get
hold of itself, and to liberate itself to itself. In this way the
so-called faculties of mind as thus distinguished are only to be treated
as steps of this liberation. And this is the only _rational_ mode of
studying the mind and its various activities.
§ 443. As consciousness has for its object the stage which preceded it,
viz. the natural soul (§ 413), so mind has or rather makes consciousness
its object: i.e. whereas consciousness is only the virtual identity of the
ego with its other (§ 415), the mind realises that identity as the
concrete unity which it and it only knows. Its productions are governed by
the principle of all reason that the contents are at once potentially
existent, and are the mind’s own, in freedom. Thus, if we consider the
initial aspect of mind, that aspect is twofold—as _being_ and as _its
own_: by the one, the mind finds in itself something which _is_, by the
other it affirms it to be only _its own_. The way of mind is therefore
(_a_) to be theoretical: it has to do with the rational as its immediate
affection which it must render its own: or it has to free knowledge from
its pre-supposedness and therefore from its abstractness, and make the
affection subjective. When the affection has been rendered its own, and
the knowledge consequently characterised as free intelligence, i.e. as
having its full and free characterisation in itself, it is
(_b_) Will: _practical_ mind, which in the first place is likewise
formal—i.e. its content is at first _only_ its own, and is immediately
willed; and it proceeds next to liberate its volition from its
subjectivity, which is the one-sided form of its contents, so that it
(_c_) confronts itself as free mind and thus gets rid of both its defects
of one-sidedness.
§ 444. The theoretical as well as the practical mind still fall under the
general range of Mind Subjective. They are not to be distinguished as
active and passive. Subjective mind is productive: but it is a merely
nominal productivity. Inwards, the theoretical mind produces only its
“ideal” world, and gains abstract autonomy within; while the practical,
while it has to do with autonomous products, with a material which is its
own, has a material which is only nominally such, and therefore a
restricted content, for which it gains the form of universality. Outwards,
the subjective mind (which as a unity of soul and consciousness, is thus
also a reality,—a reality at once anthropological and conformable to
consciousness) has for its products, in the theoretical range, the _word_,
and in the practical (not yet deed and action, but) _enjoyment_.
Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in modern times
have yet derived least profit from the more general mental culture and the
deeper conception of reason. It is still extremely ill off. The turn which
the Kantian philosophy has taken has given it greater importance: it has,
and that in its empirical condition, been claimed as the basis of
metaphysics, which is to consist of nothing but the empirical apprehension
and the analysis of the facts of human consciousness, merely as facts,
just as they are given. This position of psychology, mixing it up with
forms belonging to the range of consciousness and with anthropology, has
led to no improvement in its own condition: but it has had the further
effect that, both for the mind as such, and for metaphysics and philosophy
generally, all attempts have been abandoned to ascertain the necessity of
essential and actual reality, to get at the notion and the truth.
(a) Theoretical mind.
§ 445. Intelligence(135) _finds_ itself determined: this is its apparent
aspect from which in its immediacy it starts. But as knowledge,
intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity
has to do with the empty form—the pretence of _finding_ reason: and its
aim is to realise its concept or to be reason actual, along with which the
content is realised as rational. This activity is _cognition_. The nominal
knowledge, which is only certitude, elevates itself, as reason is
concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge. The course of this
elevation is itself rational, and consists in a necessary passage
(governed by the concept) of one grade or term of intelligent activity (a
so-called faculty of mind) into another. The refutation which such
cognition gives of the semblance that the rational is _found_, starts from
the certitude or the faith of intelligence in its capability of rational
knowledge, and in the possibility of being able to appropriate the reason,
which it and the content virtually is.
The distinction of Intelligence from Will is often incorrectly taken to
mean that each has a fixed and separate existence of its own, as if
volition could be without intelligence, or the activity of intelligence
could be without will. The possibility of a culture of the intellect which
leaves the heart untouched, as it is said, and of the heart without the
intellect—of hearts which in one-sided way want intellect, and heartless
intellects—only proves at most that bad and radically untrue existences
occur. But it is not philosophy which should take such untruths of
existence and of mere imagining for truth—take the worthless for the
essential nature. A host of other phrases used of intelligence, e.g. that
it receives and accepts impressions from outside, that ideas arise through
the causal operations of external things upon it, &c., belong to a point
of view utterly alien to the mental level or to the position of
philosophic study.
A favourite reflectional form is that of powers and faculties of soul,
intelligence, or mind. Faculty, like power or force, is the fixed quality
of any object of thought, conceived as reflected into self. Force (§ 136)
is no doubt the infinity of form—of the inward and the outward: but its
essential finitude involves the indifference of content to form (ib.
note). In this lies the want of organic unity which by this reflectional
form, treating mind as a “lot” of forces, is brought into mind, as it is
by the same method brought into nature. Any aspect which can be
distinguished in mental action is stereotyped as an independent entity,
and the mind thus made a skeleton-like mechanical collection. It makes
absolutely no difference if we substitute the expression “activities” for
powers and faculties. Isolate the activities and you similarly make the
mind a mere aggregate, and treat their essential correlation as an
external incident.
The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called _cognition_
(knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence _inter alia_
knows,—besides which it also intuites, conceives, remembers, imagines, &c.
To take up such a position is in the first instance part and parcel of
that isolating of mental activity just censured; but it is also in
addition connected with the great question of modern times, as to whether
true knowledge or the knowledge of truth is possible,—which, if answered
in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort. The numerous aspects
and reasons and modes of phrase with which external reflection swells the
bulk of this question are cleared up in their place: the more external the
attitude of understanding in the question, the more diffuse it makes a
simple object. At the present place the simple concept of cognition is
what confronts the quite general assumption taken up by the question, viz.
the assumption that the possibility of true knowledge in general is in
dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either
to prosecute or to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of
cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason:
the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence. It
follows from this that it is absurd to speak of intelligence and yet at
the same time of the possibility or choice of knowing or not. But
cognition is genuine, just so far as it realises itself, or makes the
concept its own. This nominal description has its concrete meaning exactly
where cognition has it. The stages of its realising activity are
intuition, conception, memory, &c.: these activities have no other
immanent meaning: their aim is solely the concept of cognition (§ 445
note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that
they are useful for something else than cognition, or that they severally
procure a cognitive satisfaction of their own; and that leads to a
glorification of the delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It
is true that even as isolated (i.e. as non-intelligent), intuition,
imagination, &c. can afford a certain satisfaction: what physical nature
succeeds in doing by its fundamental quality—its
out-of-selfness,—exhibiting the elements or factors of immanent reason
external to each other,—that the intelligence can do by voluntary act, but
the same result may happen where the intelligence is itself only natural
and untrained. But the _true satisfaction_, it is admitted, is only
afforded by an intuition permeated by intellect and mind, by rational
conception, by products of imagination which are permeated by reason and
exhibit ideas—in a word, by _cognitive_ intuition, cognitive conception,
&c. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that intuition,
conception, &c. are not isolated, and exist only as “moments” in the
totality of cognition itself.
(α) Intuition (Intelligent Perception)(136).
§ 446. The mind which as soul is physically conditioned,—which as
consciousness stands to this condition on the same terms as to an outward
object,—but which as intelligence _finds itself_ so characterised—is (1)
an inarticulate embryonic life, in which it is to itself as it were
palpable and has the whole _material_ of its knowledge. In consequence of
the immediacy in which it is thus originally, it is in this stage only as
an individual and possesses a vulgar subjectivity. It thus appears as mind
in the guise of _feeling_.
If feeling formerly turned up (§ 399) as a mode of the _soul’s_ existence,
the finding of it or its immediacy was in that case essentially to be
conceived as a congenital or corporeal condition; whereas at present it is
only to be taken abstractly in the general sense of immediacy.
§ 447. The characteristic form of feeling is that though it is a mode of
some “affection,” this mode is simple. Hence feeling, even should its
import be most sterling and true, has the form of casual
particularity,—not to mention that its import may also be the most scanty
and most untrue.
It is commonly enough assumed that mind has in its feeling the material of
its ideas, but the statement is more usually understood in a sense the
opposite of that which it has here. In contrast with the simplicity of
feeling it is usual rather to assume that the primary mental phase is
judgment generally, or the distinction of consciousness into subject and
object; and the special quality of sensation is derived from an
independent _object_, external or internal. With us, in the truth of mind,
the mere consciousness point of view, as opposed to true mental
“idealism,” is swallowed up, and the matter of feeling has rather been
supposed already as _immanent_ in the mind.—It is commonly taken for
granted that as regards content there is more in feeling than in thought:
this being specially affirmed of moral and religious feelings. Now the
material, which the mind as it feels is to itself, is _here_ the result
and the mature result of a fully organised reason: hence under the head of
feeling is comprised all rational and indeed all spiritual content
whatever. But the form of selfish singleness to which feeling reduces the
mind is the lowest and worst vehicle it can have—one in which it is not
found as a free and infinitely universal principle, but rather as
subjective and private, in content and value entirely contingent. Trained
and sterling feeling is the feeling of an educated mind which has acquired
the consciousness of the true differences of things, of their essential
relationships and real characters; and it is with such a mind that this
rectified material enters into its feeling and receives this form. Feeling
is the immediate, as it were the closest, contact in which the thinking
subject can stand to a given content. Against that content the subject
re-acts first of all with its particular self-feeling, which though it
_may_ be of more sterling value and of wider range than a onesided
intellectual standpoint, may just as likely be narrow and poor; and in any
case is the form of the particular and subjective. If a man on any topic
appeals not to the nature and notion of the thing, or at least to
reasons—to the generalities of common sense—but to his feeling, the only
thing to do is to let him alone, because by his behaviour he refuses to
have any lot or part in common rationality, and shuts himself up in his
own isolated subjectivity—his private and particular self.
§ 448. (2) As this immediate finding is broken up into elements, we have
the one factor in _Attention_—the abstract _identical_ direction of mind
(in feeling, as also in all other more advanced developments of it)—an
active self-collection—the factor of fixing it as our own, but with an as
yet only nominal autonomy of intelligence. Apart from such attention there
is nothing for the mind. The other factor is to invest the special quality
of feeling, as contrasted with this inwardness of mind, with the character
of something existent, but as a _negative_ or as the abstract otherness of
itself. Intelligence thus defines the content of sensation as something
that is out of itself, projects it into time and space, which are the
forms in which it is intuitive. To the view of consciousness the material
is only an object of consciousness, a relative other: from mind it
receives the rational characteristic of being _its very other_ (§§ 147,
254).
§ 449. (3) When intelligence reaches a concrete unity of the two factors,
that is to say, when it is at once self-collected in this externally
existing material, and yet in this self-collectedness sunk in the
out-of-selfness, it is _Intuition_ or Mental Vision.
§ 450. At and towards this its own out-of-selfness, intelligence no less
essentially directs its attention. In this its immediacy it is an awaking
to itself, a recollection of itself. Thus intuition becomes a concretion
of the material with the intelligence, which makes it its own, so that it
no longer needs this immediacy, no longer needs to find the content.
(β) Representation (or Mental Idea)(137).
§ 451. Representation is this recollected or inwardised intuition, and as
such is the middle between that stage of intelligence where it finds
itself immediately subject to modification and that where intelligence is
in its freedom, or, as thought. The representation is the property of
intelligence; with a preponderating subjectivity, however, as its right of
property is still conditioned by contrast with the immediacy, and the
representation cannot as it stands be said to _be_. The path of
intelligence in representations is to render the immediacy inward, to
invest itself with intuitive action in itself, and at the same time to get
rid of the subjectivity of the inwardness, and inwardly divest itself of
it; so as to be in itself in an externality of its own. But as
representation begins from intuition and the ready-found material of
intuition, the intuitional contrast still continues to affect its
activity, and makes its concrete products still “syntheses,” which do not
grow to the concrete immanence of the notion till they reach the stage of
thought.
(αα) Recollection(138).
§ 452. Intelligence, as it at first recollects the intuition, places the
content of feeling in its own inwardness—in a space and a time of its own.
In this way that content is (1) an _image_ or picture, liberated from its
original immediacy and abstract singleness amongst other things, and
received into the universality of the ego. The image loses the full
complement of features proper to intuition, and is arbitrary or
contingent, isolated, we may say, from the external place, time, and
immediate context in which the intuition stood.
§ 453. (2) The image is of itself transient, and intelligence itself is as
attention its time and also its place, its when and where. But
intelligence is not only consciousness and actual existence, but _quâ_
intelligence is the subject and the potentiality of its own
specialisations. The image when thus kept in mind is no longer existent,
but stored up out of consciousness.
To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a
world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in
consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which
bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat e.g. the germ as
affirmatively containing, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that
come into existence in the subsequent development of the tree. Inability
to grasp a universal like this, which, though intrinsically concrete,
still continues _simple_, is what has led people to talk about special
fibres and areas as receptacles of particular ideas. It was felt that what
was diverse should in the nature of things have a local habitation
peculiar to itself. But whereas the reversion of the germ from its
existing specialisations to its simplicity in a purely potential existence
takes place only in another germ,—the germ of the fruit; intelligence
_quâ_ intelligence shows the potential coming to free existence in its
development, and yet at the same time collecting itself in its inwardness.
Hence from the other point of view intelligence is to be conceived as this
sub-conscious mine, i.e. as the _existent_ universal in which the
different has not yet been realised in its separations. And it is indeed
this potentiality which is the first form of universality offered in
mental representation.
§ 454. (3) An image thus abstractly treasured up needs, if it is to exist,
an actual intuition: and what is strictly called Remembrance is the
reference of the image to an intuition,—and that as a subsumption of the
immediate single intuition (impression) under what is in point of form
universal, under the representation (idea) with the same content. Thus
intelligence recognises the specific sensation and the intuition of it as
what is already its own,—in them it is still within itself: at the same
time it is aware that what is only its (primarily) internal image is also
an immediate object of intuition, by which it is authenticated. The image,
which in the mine of intelligence was only its _property_, now that it has
been endued with externality, comes actually into its _possession_. And so
the image is at once rendered distinguishable from the intuition and
separable from the blank night in which it was originally submerged.
Intelligence is thus the force which can give forth its property, and
dispense with external intuition for its existence in it. This “synthesis”
of the internal image with the recollected existence is _representation_
proper: by this synthesis the internal now has the qualification of being
able to be presented before intelligence and to have its existence in it.
(ββ) Imagination(139).
§ 455. (1) The intelligence which is active in this possession is the
_reproductive imagination_, where the images issue from the inward world
belonging to the ego, which is now the power over them. The images are in
the first instance referred to this external, immediate time and space
which is treasured up along with them. But it is solely in the conscious
subject, where it is treasured up, that the image has the individuality in
which the features composing it are conjoined: whereas their original
concretion, i.e. at first only in space and time, as a _unit_ of
intuition, has been broken up. The content reproduced, belonging as it
does to the self-identical unity of intelligence, and an out-put from its
universal mine, has a general idea (representation) to supply the link of
association for the images which according to circumstances are more
abstract or more concrete ideas.
The so-called _laws of the association of ideas_ were objects of great
interest, especially during that outburst of empirical psychology which
was contemporaneous with the decline of philosophy. In the first place, it
is not _Ideas_ (properly so called) which are associated. Secondly, these
modes of relation are not _laws_, just for the reason that there are so
many laws about the same thing, as to suggest a caprice and a contingency
opposed to the very nature of law. It is a matter of chance whether the
link of association is something pictorial, or an intellectual category,
such as likeness and contrast, reason and consequence. The train of images
and representations suggested by association is the sport of vacant-minded
ideation, where, though intelligence shows itself by a certain formal
universality, the matter is entirely pictorial.—Image and idea, if we
leave out of account the more precise definition of those forms given
above, present also a distinction in content. The former is the more
consciously-concrete idea, whereas the idea (representation), whatever be
its content (from image, notion, or idea), has always the peculiarity,
though belonging to intelligence, of being in respect of its content given
and immediate. It is still true of this idea or representation, as of all
intelligence, that it finds its material, as a matter of fact, to _be_ so
and so; and the universality which the aforesaid material receives by
ideation is still abstract. Mental representation is the mean in the
syllogism of the elevation of intelligence, the link between the two
significations of self-relatedness—viz. _being_ and _universality_, which
in consciousness receive the title of object and subject. Intelligence
complements what is merely found by the attribution of universality, and
the internal and its own by the attribution of being, but a being of its
own institution. (On the distinction of representations and thoughts, see
Introd. to the Logic, § 20 note.)
Abstraction, which occurs in the ideational activity by which general
ideas are produced (and ideas _quâ_ ideas virtually have the form of
generality), is frequently explained as the incidence of many similar
images one upon another and is supposed to be thus made intelligible. If
this super-imposing is to be no mere accident and without principle, a
force of attraction in like images must be assumed, or something of the
sort, which at the same time would have the negative power of rubbing off
the dissimilar elements against each other. This force is really
intelligence itself,—the self-identical ego which by its internalising
recollection gives the images _ipso facto_ generality, and subsumes the
single intuition under the already internalised image (§ 453).
§ 456. Thus even the association of ideas is to be treated as a
subsumption of the individual under the universal, which forms their
connecting link. But here intelligence is more than merely a general form:
its inwardness is an internally definite, concrete subjectivity with a
substance and value of its own, derived from some interest, some latent
concept or Ideal principle, so far as we may by anticipation speak of
such. Intelligence is the power which wields the stores of images and
ideas belonging to it, and which thus (2) freely combines and subsumes
these stores in obedience to its peculiar tenor. Such is creative
imagination(140)—symbolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination—where the
intelligence gets a definite embodiment in this store of ideas and informs
them with its general tone. These more or less concrete, individualised
creations are still “syntheses”: for the material, in which the subjective
principles and ideas get a mentally pictorial existence, is derived from
the data of intuition.
§ 457. In creative imagination intelligence has been so far perfected as
to need no helps for intuition. Its self-sprung ideas have pictorial
existence. This pictorial creation of its intuitive spontaneity is
subjective—still lacks the side of existence. But as the creation unites
the internal idea with the vehicle of materialisation, intelligence has
therein _implicitly_ returned both to identical self-relation and to
immediacy. As reason, its first start was to appropriate the immediate
datum in itself (§§ 445, 455), i.e. to universalise it; and now its action
as reason (§ 458) is from the present point directed towards giving the
character of an existent to what in it has been perfected to concrete
auto-intuition. In other words, it aims at making itself _be_ and be a
fact. Acting on this view, it is self-uttering, intuition-producing: the
imagination which creates signs.
Productive imagination is the centre in which the universal and being,
one’s own and what is picked up, internal and external, are completely
welded into one. The preceding “syntheses” of intuition, recollection,
&c., are unifications of the same factors, but they are “syntheses”; it is
not till creative imagination that intelligence ceases to be the vague
mine and the universal, and becomes an individuality, a concrete
subjectivity, in which the self-reference is defined both to being and to
universality. The creations of imagination are on all hands recognised as
such combinations of the mind’s own and inward with the matter of
intuition; what further and more definite aspects they have is a matter
for other departments. For the present this internal studio of
intelligence is only to be looked at in these abstract
aspects.—Imagination, when regarded as the agency of this unification, is
reason, but only a nominal reason, because the matter or theme it embodies
is to imagination _quâ_ imagination a matter of indifference; whilst
reason _quâ_ reason also insists upon the _truth_ of its content.
Another point calling for special notice is that, when imagination
elevates the internal meaning to an image and intuition, and this is
expressed by saying that it gives the former the character of an
_existent_, the phrase must not seem surprising that intelligence makes
itself _be_ as a _thing_; for its ideal import is itself, and so is the
aspect which it imposes upon it. The image produced by imagination of an
object is a bare mental or subjective intuition: in the sign or symbol it
adds intuitability proper; and in mechanical memory it completes, so far
as it is concerned, this form of _being_.
§ 458. In this unity (initiated by intelligence) of an independent
representation with an intuition, the matter of the latter is, in the
first instance, something accepted, somewhat immediate or given (e.g. the
colour of the cockade, &c.). But in the fusion of the two elements, the
intuition does not count positively or as representing itself, but as
representative of something else. It is an image, which has received as
its soul and meaning an independent mental representation. This intuition
is the _Sign_.
The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different
import from what naturally belongs to it; it is the pyramid into which a
foreign soul has been conveyed, and where it is conserved. The _sign_ is
different from the _symbol_: for in the symbol the original characters (in
essence and conception) of the visible object are more or less identical
with the import which it bears as symbol; whereas in the sign, strictly
so-called, the natural attributes of the intuition, and the connotation of
which it is a sign, have nothing to do with each other. Intelligence
therefore gives proof of wider choice and ampler authority in the use of
intuitions when it treats them as designatory (significative) rather than
as symbolical.
In logic and psychology, signs and language are usually foisted in
somewhere as an appendix, without any trouble being taken to display their
necessity and systematic place in the economy of intelligence. The right
place for the sign is that just given: where intelligence—which as
intuiting generates the form of time and space, but is apparently
recipient of sensible matter, out of which it forms ideas—now gives its
own original ideas a definite existence from itself, treating the
intuition (or time and space as filled full) as its own property, deleting
the connotation which properly and naturally belongs to it, and conferring
on it an other connotation as its soul and import. This sign-creating
activity may be distinctively named “productive” Memory (the primarily
abstract “Mnemosyne”); since memory, which in ordinary life is often used
as interchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection), and
even with conception and imagination, has always to do with signs only.
§ 459. The intuition—in its natural phase a something given and given in
space—acquires, when employed as a sign, the peculiar characteristic of
existing only as superseded and sublimated. Such is the negativity of
intelligence; and thus the truer phase of the intuition used as a sign is
existence in _time_ (but its existence vanishes in the moment of being),
and if we consider the rest of its external psychical quality, its
_institution_ by intelligence, but an institution growing out of its
(anthropological) own naturalness. This institution of the natural is the
vocal note, where the inward idea manifests itself in adequate utterance.
The vocal note which receives further articulation to express specific
ideas—speech and, its system, language—gives to sensations, intuitions,
conceptions, a second and higher existence than they naturally
possess,—invests them with the right of existence in the ideational realm.
Language here comes under discussion only in the special aspect of a
product of intelligence for manifesting its ideas in an external medium.
If language had to be treated in its concrete nature, it would be
necessary for its vocabulary or material part to recall the
anthropological or psycho-physiological point of view (§ 401), and for the
grammar or formal portion to anticipate the standpoint of analytic
understanding. With regard to the elementary _material_ of language, while
on one hand the theory of mere accident has disappeared, on the other the
principle of imitation has been restricted to the slight range it actually
covers—that of vocal objects. Yet one may still hear the German language
praised for its wealth—that wealth consisting in its special expression
for special sounds—_Rauschen_, _Sausen_, _Knarren_, &c.;—there have been
collected more than a hundred such words, perhaps: the humour of the
moment creates fresh ones when it pleases. Such superabundance in the
realm of sense and of triviality contributes nothing to form the real
wealth of a cultivated language. The strictly raw material of language
itself depends more upon an inward symbolism than a symbolism referring to
external objects; it depends, i.e. on anthropological articulation, as it
were the posture in the corporeal act of oral utterance. For each vowel
and consonant accordingly, as well as for their more abstract elements
(the posture of lips, palate, tongue in each) and for their combinations,
people have tried to find the appropriate signification. But these dull
sub-conscious beginnings are deprived of their original importance and
prominence by new influences, it may be by external agencies or by the
needs of civilisation. Having been originally sensuous intuitions, they
are reduced to signs, and thus have only traces left of their original
meaning, if it be not altogether extinguished. As to the _formal_ element,
again, it is the work of analytic intellect which informs language with
its categories: it is this logical instinct which gives rise to grammar.
The study of languages still in their original state, which we have first
really begun to make acquaintance with in modern times, has shown on this
point that they contain a very elaborate grammar and express distinctions
which are lost or have been largely obliterated in the languages of more
civilised nations. It seems as if the language of the most civilised
nations has the most imperfect grammar, and that the same language has a
more perfect grammar when the nation is in a more uncivilised state than
when it reaches a higher civilisation. (Cf. W. von Humboldt’s _Essay on
the Dual_.)
In speaking of vocal (which is the original) language, we may touch, only
in passing, upon written language,—a further development in the particular
sphere of language which borrows the help of an externally practical
activity. It is from the province of immediate spatial intuition to which
written language proceeds that it takes and produces the signs (§ 454). In
particular, hieroglyphics uses spatial figures to designate _ideas_;
alphabetical writing, on the other hand, uses them to designate vocal
notes which are already signs. Alphabetical writing thus consists of signs
of signs,—the words or concrete signs of vocal language being analysed
into their simple elements, which severally receive
designation.—Leibnitz’s practical mind misled him to exaggerate the
advantages which a complete written language, formed on the hieroglyphic
method (and hieroglyphics are used even where there is alphabetic writing,
as in our signs for the numbers, the planets, the chemical elements, &c.),
would have as a universal language for the intercourse of nations and
especially of scholars. But we may be sure that it was rather the
intercourse of nations (as was probably the case in Phoenicia, and still
takes place in Canton—see _Macartney’s Travels_ by Staunton) which
occasioned the need of alphabetical writing and led to its formation. At
any rate a comprehensive hieroglyphic language for ever completed is
impracticable. Sensible objects no doubt admit of permanent signs; but, as
regards signs for mental objects, the progress of thought and the
continual development of logic lead to changes in the views of their
internal relations and thus also of their nature; and this would involve
the rise of a new hieroglyphical denotation. Even in the case of
sense-objects it happens that their names, i.e. their signs in vocal
language, are frequently changed, as e.g. in chemistry and mineralogy. Now
that it has been forgotten what names properly are, viz. externalities
which of themselves have no sense, and only get signification as signs,
and now that, instead of names proper, people ask for terms expressing a
sort of definition, which is frequently changed capriciously and
fortuitously, the denomination, i.e. the composite name formed of signs of
their generic characters or other supposed characteristic properties, is
altered in accordance with the differences of view with regard to the
genus or other supposed specific property. It is only a stationary
civilisation, like the Chinese, which admits of the hieroglyphic language
of that nation; and its method of writing moreover can only be the lot of
that small part of a nation which is in exclusive possession of mental
culture.—The progress of the vocal language depends most closely on the
habit of alphabetical writing; by means of which only does vocal language
acquire the precision and purity of its articulation. The imperfection of
the Chinese vocal language is notorious: numbers of its words possess
several utterly different meanings, as many as ten and twenty, so that, in
speaking, the distinction is made perceptible merely by accent and
intensity, by speaking low and soft or crying out. The European, learning
to speak Chinese, falls into the most ridiculous blunders before he has
mastered these absurd refinements of accentuation. Perfection here
consists in the opposite of that _parler sans accent_ which in Europe is
justly required of an educated speaker. The hieroglyphic mode of writing
keeps the Chinese vocal language from reaching that objective precision
which is gained in articulation by alphabetic writing.
Alphabetic writing is on all accounts the more intelligent: in it the
_word_—the mode, peculiar to the intellect, of uttering its ideas most
worthily—is brought to consciousness and made an object of reflection.
Engaging the attention of intelligence, as it does, it is analysed; the
work of sign-making is reduced to its few simple elements (the primary
postures of articulation) in which the sense-factor in speech is brought
to the form of universality, at the same time that in this elementary
phase it acquires complete precision and purity. Thus alphabetic writing
retains at the same time the advantage of vocal language, that the ideas
have names strictly so called: the name is the simple sign for the exact
idea, i.e. the simple plain idea, not decomposed into its features and
compounded out of them. Hieroglyphics, instead of springing from the
direct analysis of sensible signs, like alphabetic writing, arise from an
antecedent analysis of ideas. Thus a theory readily arises that all ideas
may be reduced to their elements, or simple logical terms, so that from
the elementary signs chosen to express these (as, in the case of the
Chinese _Koua_, the simple straight stroke, and the stroke broken into two
parts) a hieroglyphic system would be generated by their composition. This
feature of hieroglyphic—the analytical designations of ideas—which misled
Leibnitz to regard it as preferable to alphabetic writing is rather in
antagonism with the fundamental desideratum of language,—the name. To want
a name means that for the immediate idea (which, however ample a
connotation it may include, is still for the mind simple in the name), we
require a simple immediate sign which for its own sake does not suggest
anything, and has for its sole function to signify and represent sensibly
the simple idea as such. It is not merely the image-loving and
image-limited intelligence that lingers over the simplicity of ideas and
redintegrates them from the more abstract factors into which they have
been analysed: thought too reduces to the form of a simple thought the
concrete connotation which it “resumes” and reunites from the mere
aggregate of attributes to which analysis has reduced it. Both alike
require such signs, simple in respect of their meaning: signs, which
though consisting of several letters or syllables and even decomposed into
such, yet do not exhibit a combination of several ideas.—What has been
stated is the principle for settling the value of these written languages.
It also follows that in hieroglyphics the relations of concrete mental
ideas to one another must necessarily be tangled and perplexed, and that
the analysis of these (and the proximate results of such analysis must
again be analysed) appears to be possible in the most various and
divergent ways. Every divergence in analysis would give rise to another
formation of the written name; just as in modern times (as already noted,
even in the region of sense) muriatic acid has undergone several changes
of name. A hieroglyphic written language would require a philosophy as
stationary as is the civilisation of the Chinese.
What has been said shows the inestimable and not sufficiently appreciated
educational value of learning to read and write an alphabetic character.
It leads the mind from the sensibly concrete image to attend to the more
formal structure of the vocal word and its abstract elements, and
contributes much to give stability and independence to the inward realm of
mental life. Acquired habit subsequently effaces the peculiarity by which
alphabetic writing appears, in the interest of vision, as a roundabout way
to ideas by means of audibility; it makes them a sort of hieroglyphic to
us, so that in using them we need not consciously realise them by means of
tones, whereas people unpractised in reading utter aloud what they read in
order to catch its meaning in the sound. Thus, while (with the faculty
which transformed alphabetic writing into hieroglyphics) the capacity of
abstraction gained by the first practice remains, hieroglyphic reading is
of itself a deaf reading and a dumb writing. It is true that the audible
(which is in time) and the visible (which is in space), each have their
own basis, one no less authoritative than the other. But in the case of
alphabetic writing there is only a _single_ basis: the two aspects occupy
their rightful relation to each other: the visible language is related to
the vocal only as a sign, and intelligence expresses itself immediately
and unconditionally by speaking.—The instrumental function of the
comparatively non-sensuous element of tone for all ideational work shows
itself further as peculiarly important in memory which forms the passage
from representation to thought.
§ 460. The name, combining the intuition (an intellectual production) with
its signification, is primarily a single transient product; and
conjunction of the idea (which is inward) with the intuition (which is
outward) is itself outward. The reduction of this outwardness to
inwardness is (verbal) Memory.
(γγ) Memory(141).
§ 461. Under the shape of memory the course of intelligence passes through
the same inwardising (recollecting) functions, as regards the intuition of
the _word_, as representation in general does in dealing with the first
immediate intuition (§ 451). (1) Making its own the synthesis achieved in
the sign, intelligence, by this inwardising (memorising) elevates the
_single_ synthesis to a universal, i.e. permanent, synthesis, in which
name and meaning are for it objectively united, and renders the intuition
(which the name originally is) a representation. Thus the import
(connotation) and sign, being identified, form one representation: the
representation in its inwardness is rendered concrete and gets existence
for its import: all this being the work of memory which retains names
(retentive Memory).
§ 462. The name is thus the thing so far as it exists and counts in the
ideational realm. (2) In the name, _Reproductive_ memory has and
recognises the thing, and with the thing it has the name, apart from
intuition and image. The name, as giving an _existence_ to the content in
intelligence, is the externality of intelligence to itself; and the
inwardising or recollection of the name, i.e. of an intuition of
intellectual origin, is at the same time a self-externalisation to which
intelligence reduces itself on its own ground. The association of the
particular names lies in the meaning of the features sensitive,
representative, or cogitant,—series of which the intelligence traverses as
it feels, represents, or thinks.
Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor
its image even: the name alone, if we _understand_ it, is the unimaged
simple representation. We _think_ in names.
The recent attempts—already, as they deserved, forgotten—to rehabilitate
the Mnemonic of the ancients, consist in transforming names into images,
and thus again deposing memory to the level of imagination. The place of
the power of memory is taken by a permanent tableau of a series of images,
fixed in the imagination, to which is then attached the series of ideas
forming the composition to be learned by rote. Considering the
heterogeneity between the import of these ideas and those permanent
images, and the speed with which the attachment has to be made, the
attachment cannot be made otherwise than by shallow, silly, and utterly
accidental links. Not merely is the mind put to the torture of being
worried by idiotic stuff, but what is thus learnt by rote is just as
quickly forgotten, seeing that the same tableau is used for getting by
rote every other series of ideas, and so those previously attached to it
are effaced. What is mnemonically impressed is not like what is retained
in memory really got by heart, i.e. strictly produced from within
outwards, from the deep pit of the ego, and thus recited, but is, so to
speak, read off the tableau of fancy.—Mnemonic is connected with the
common prepossession about memory, in comparison with fancy and
imagination; as if the latter were a higher and more intellectual activity
than memory. On the contrary, memory has ceased to deal with an image
derived from intuition,—the immediate and incomplete mode of intelligence;
it has rather to do with an object which is the product of intelligence
itself,—such a _without book_(142) as remains locked up in the
_within-book_(143) of intelligence, and is, within intelligence, only its
outward and existing side.
§ 463. (3) As the interconnexion of the names lies in the meaning, the
conjunction of their meaning with the reality as names is still an
(external) synthesis; and intelligence in this its externality has not
made a complete and simple return into self. But intelligence is the
universal,—the single plain truth of its particular self-divestments; and
its consummated appropriation of them abolishes that distinction between
meaning and name. This extreme inwardising of representation is the
supreme self-divestment of intelligence, in which it renders itself the
mere _being_, the universal space of names as such, i.e. of meaningless
words. The ego, which is this abstract being, is, because subjectivity, at
the same time the power over the different names,—the link which, having
nothing in itself, fixes in itself series of them and keeps them in stable
order. So far as they merely _are_, and intelligence is here itself this
_being_ of theirs, its power is a merely abstract subjectivity,—memory;
which, on account of the complete externality in which the members of such
series stand to one another, and because it is itself this externality
(subjective though that be), is called mechanical (§ 195).
A composition is, as we know, not thoroughly conned by rote, until one
attaches no meaning to the words. The recitation of what has been thus got
by heart is therefore of course accentless. The correct accent, if it is
introduced, suggests the meaning: but this introduction of the
signification of an idea disturbs the mechanical nexus and therefore
easily throws out the reciter. The faculty of conning by rote series of
words, with no principle governing their succession, or which are
separately meaningless, e.g. a series of proper names, is so supremely
marvellous, because it is the very essence of mind to have its wits about
it; whereas in this case the mind is estranged in itself, and its action
is like machinery. But it is only as uniting subjectivity with objectivity
that the mind has its wits about it. Whereas in the case before us, after
it has in intuition been at first so external as to pick up its facts
ready-made, and in representation inwardises or recollects this datum and
makes it its own,—it proceeds as memory to make itself external in itself,
so that what is its own assumes the guise of something found. Thus one of
the two dynamic factors of thought, viz. objectivity, is here put in
intelligence itself as a quality of it.—It is only a step further to treat
memory as mechanical—the act implying no intelligence—in which case it is
only justified by its uses, its indispensability perhaps for other
purposes and functions of mind. But by so doing we overlook the proper
signification it has in the mind.
§ 464. If it is to be the fact and true objectivity, the mere name as an
existent requires something else,—to be interpreted by the representing
intellect. Now in the shape of mechanical memory, intelligence is at once
that external objectivity and the meaning. In this way intelligence is
explicitly made an _existence_ of this identity, i.e. it is explicitly
active as such an identity which as reason it is implicitly. Memory is in
this manner the passage into the function of _thought_, which no longer
has a _meaning_, i.e. its objectivity is no longer severed from the
subjective, and its inwardness does not need to go outside for its
existence.
The German language has etymologically assigned memory (_Gedächtniß_), of
which it has become a foregone conclusion to speak contemptuously, the
high position of direct kindred with thought (_Gedanke_).—It is not matter
of chance that the young have a better memory than the old, nor is their
memory solely exercised for the sake of utility. The young have a good
memory because they have not yet reached the stage of reflection; their
memory is exercised with or without design so as to level the ground of
their inner life to pure being or to pure space in which the fact, the
implicit content, may reign and unfold itself with no antithesis to a
subjective inwardness. Genuine ability is in youth generally combined with
a good memory. But empirical statements of this sort help little towards a
knowledge of what memory intrinsically is. To comprehend the position and
meaning of memory and to understand its organic interconnexion with
thought is one of the hardest points, and hitherto one quite unregarded in
the theory of mind. Memory _quâ_ memory is itself the merely _external_
mode, or merely _existential_ aspect of thought, and thus needs a
complementary element. The passage from it to thought is to our view and
implicitly the identity of reason with this existential mode: an identity
from which it follows that reason only exists in a subject, and as the
function of that subject. Thus active reason is _Thinking_.
(γ) Thinking(144).
§ 465. Intelligence is recognitive: it cognises an intuition, but only
because that intuition is already its own (§ 454); and in the name it
re-discovers the fact (§ 462): but now it finds _its_ universal in the
double signification of the universal as such, and of the universal as
immediate or as being,—finds i.e. the genuine universal which is its own
unity overlapping and including its other, viz. being. Thus intelligence
is explicitly, and on its own part cognitive: _virtually_ it is the
universal,—its product (the thought) is the thing: it is a plain identity
of subjective and objective. It knows that what is _thought_, _is_, and
that what _is_, only _is_ in so far as it is a thought (§ 521); the
thinking of intelligence is to _have thoughts_: these are as its content
and object.
§ 466. But cognition by thought is still in the first instance formal: the
universality and its being is the plain subjectivity of intelligence. The
thoughts therefore are not yet fully and freely determinate, and the
representations which have been inwardised to thoughts are so far still
the given content.
§ 467. As dealing with this given content, thought is (α) _understanding_
with its formal identity, working up the representations, that have been
memorised, into species, genera, laws, forces, &c., in short into
categories,—thus indicating that the raw material does not get the truth
of its being save in these thought-forms. As intrinsically infinite
negativity, thought is (β) essentially an act of partition,—_judgment_,
which however does not break up the concept again into the old antithesis
of universality and being, but distinguishes on the lines supplied by the
interconnexions peculiar to the concept. Thirdly (γ), thought supersedes
the formal distinction and institutes at the same time an identity of the
differences,—thus being nominal _reason_ or inferential understanding.
Intelligence, as the act of thought, cognises. And (α) understanding out
of its generalities (the categories) _explains_ the individual, and is
then said to comprehend or understand itself: (β) in the judgment it
explains the individual to be an universal (species, genus). In these
forms the _content_ appears as given: (γ) but in inference (syllogism) it
characterises a content from itself, by superseding that form-difference.
With the perception of the necessity, the last immediacy still attaching
to formal thought has vanished.
In _Logic_ there was thought, but in its implicitness, and as reason
develops itself in this distinction-lacking medium. So in _consciousness_
thought occurs as a stage (§ 437 note). Here reason is as the truth of the
antithetical distinction, as it had taken shape within the mind’s own
limits. Thought thus recurs again and again in these different parts of
philosophy, because these parts are different only through the medium they
are in and the antithesis they imply; while thought is this one and the
same centre, to which as to their truth the antithesis return.
§ 468. Intelligence which as theoretical appropriates an immediate mode of
being, is, now that it has completed _taking possession_, in its own
_property_: the last negation of immediacy has implicitly required that
the intelligence shall itself determine its content. Thus thought, as free
notion, is now also free in point of _content_. But when intelligence is
aware that it is determinative of the content, which is _its_ mode no less
than it is a mode of being, it is Will.
(b) Mind Practical(145).
§ 469. As will, the mind is aware that it is the author of its own
conclusions, the origin of its self-fulfilment. Thus fulfilled, this
independency or individuality form the side of existence or of _reality_
for the Idea of mind. As will, the mind steps into actuality; whereas as
cognition it is on the soil of notional generality. Supplying its own
content, the will is self-possessed, and in the widest sense free: this is
its characteristic trait. Its finitude lies in the formalism that the
spontaneity of its self-fulfilment means no more than a general and
abstract ownness, not yet identified with matured reason. It is the
function of the essential will to bring liberty to exist in the formal
will, and it is therefore the aim of that formal will to fill itself with
its essential nature, i.e. to make liberty its pervading character,
content, and aim, as well as its sphere of existence. The essential
freedom of will is, and must always be, a thought: hence the way by which
will can make itself objective mind is to rise to be a thinking will,—to
give itself the content which it can only have as it thinks itself.
True liberty, in the shape of moral life, consists in the will finding its
purpose in a universal content, not in subjective or selfish interests.
But such a content is only possible in thought and through thought: it is
nothing short of absurd to seek to banish thought from the moral,
religious, and law-abiding life.
§ 470. Practical mind, considered at first as formal or immediate will,
contains a double ought—(1) in the contrast which the new mode of being
projected outward by the will offers to the immediate positivity of its
old existence and condition,—an antagonism which in consciousness grows to
correlation with external objects. (2) That first self-determination,
being itself immediate, is not at once elevated into a thinking
universality: the latter, therefore, virtually constitutes an obligation
on the former in point of form, as it may also constitute it in point of
matter;—a distinction which only exists for the observer.
(α) Practical Sense or Feeling(146).
§ 471. The autonomy of the practical mind at first is immediate and
therefore formal, i.e. it _finds_ itself as an _individuality_ determined
in _its_ inward _nature_. It is thus “practical feeling,” or instinct of
action. In this phase, as it is at bottom a subjectivity simply identical
with reason, it has no doubt a rational content, but a content which as it
stands is individual, and for that reason also natural, contingent and
subjective,—a content which may be determined quite as much by mere
personalities of want and opinion, &c., and by the subjectivity which
selfishly sets itself against the universal, as it may be virtually in
conformity with reason.
An appeal is sometimes made to the sense (feeling) of right and morality,
as well as of religion, which man is alleged to possess,—to his benevolent
dispositions,—and even to his heart generally,—i.e. to the subject so far
as the various practical feelings are in it all combined. So far as this
appeal implies (1) that these ideas are immanent in his own self, and (2)
that when feeling is opposed to the logical understanding, it, and not the
partial abstractions of the latter, _may_ be the _totality_—the appeal has
a legitimate meaning. But on the other hand feeling too _may_ be onesided,
unessential and bad. The rational, which exists in the shape of
rationality when it is apprehended by thought, is the same content as the
_good_ practical feeling has, but presented in its universality and
necessity, in its objectivity and truth.
Thus it is on the one hand _silly_ to suppose that in the passage from
feeling to law and duty there is any loss of import and excellence; it is
this passage which lets feeling first reach its truth. It is equally silly
to consider intellect as superfluous or even harmful to feeling, heart,
and will; the truth and, what is the same thing, the actual rationality of
the heart and will can only be at home in the universality of intellect,
and not in the singleness of feeling as feeling. If feelings are of the
right sort, it is because of their quality or content,—which is right only
so far as it is intrinsically universal or has its source in the thinking
mind. The difficulty for the logical intellect consists in throwing off
the separation it has arbitrarily imposed between the several faculties of
feeling and thinking mind, and coming to see that in the human being there
is only _one_ reason, in feeling, volition, and thought. Another
difficulty connected with this is found in the fact that the Ideas which
are the special property of the thinking mind, viz. God, law and morality,
can also be _felt_. But feeling is only the form of the immediate and
peculiar individuality of the subject, in which these facts, like any
other objective facts (which consciousness also sets over against itself),
may be placed.
On the other hand, it is _suspicious_ or even worse to cling to feeling
and heart in place of the intelligent rationality of law, right and duty;
because all that the former holds more than the latter is only the
particular subjectivity with its vanity and caprice. For the same reason
it is out of place in a scientific treatment of the feelings to deal with
anything beyond their form, and to discuss their content; for the latter,
when thought, is precisely what constitutes, in their universality and
necessity, the rights and duties which are the true works of mental
autonomy. So long as we study practical feelings and dispositions
specially, we have only to deal with the selfish, bad, and evil; it is
these alone which belong to the individuality which retains its opposition
to the universal: their content is the reverse of rights and duties, and
precisely in that way do they—but only in antithesis to the latter—retain
a speciality of their own.
§ 472. The “Ought” of practical feeling is the claim of its essential
autonomy to control some existing mode of fact—which is assumed to be
worth nothing save as adapted to that claim. But as both, in their
immediacy, lack objective determination, this relation of the
_requirement_ to existent fact is the utterly subjective and superficial
feeling of pleasant or unpleasant.
Delight, joy, grief, &c., shame, repentance, contentment, &c., are partly
only modifications of the formal “practical feeling” in _general_, but are
partly different in the features that give the special tone and character
mode to their “Ought.”
The celebrated question as to the origin of evil in the world, so far at
least as evil is understood to mean what is disagreeable and painful
merely, arises on this stage of the formal practical feeling. Evil is
nothing but the incompatibility between what is and what ought to be.
“Ought” is an ambiguous term,—indeed infinitely so, considering that
casual aims may also come under the form of Ought. But where the objects
sought are thus casual, evil only executes what is rightfully due to the
vanity and nullity of their planning: for they themselves were radically
evil. The finitude of life and mind is seen in their judgment: the
contrary which is separated from them they also have as a negative in
them, and thus they are the contradiction called evil. In the dead there
is neither evil nor pain: for in inorganic nature the intelligible unity
(concept) does not confront its existence and does not in the difference
at the same time remain its permanent subject. Whereas in life, and still
more in mind, we have this immanent distinction present: hence arises the
Ought: and this negativity, subjectivity, ego, freedom are the principles
of evil and pain. Jacob Böhme viewed egoity (selfhood) as pain and
torment, and as the fountain of nature and of spirit.
(β) The Impulses and Choice(147).
§ 473. The practical ought is a “real” judgment. Will, which is
essentially self-determination, finds in the conformity—as immediate and
merely _found_ to hand—of the existing mode to its requirement a negation,
and something inappropriate to it. If the will is to satisfy itself, if
the implicit unity of the universality and the special mode is to be
realised, the conformity of its inner requirement and of the existent
thing ought to be its act and institution. The will, as regards the form
of its content, is at first still a natural will, directly identical with
its specific mode:—natural _impulse_ and _inclination_. Should, however,
the totality of the practical spirit throw itself into a single one of the
many restricted forms of impulse, each being always in conflict to
another, it is _passion_.
§ 474. Inclinations and passions embody the same constituent features as
the practical feeling. Thus, while on one hand they are based on the
rational nature of the mind; they on the other, as part and parcel of the
still subjective and single will, are infected with contingency, and
appear as particular to stand to the individual and to each other in an
external relation and with a necessity which creates bondage.
The special note in _passion_ is its restriction to one special mode of
volition, in which the whole subjectivity of the individual is merged, be
the value of that mode what it may. In consequence of this formalism,
passion is neither good nor bad; the title only states that a subject has
thrown his whole soul,—his interests of intellect, talent, character,
enjoyment,—on one aim and object. Nothing great has been and nothing great
can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed,
a hypocritical moralising which inveighs against the form of passion as
such.
But with regard to the inclinations, the question is directly raised,
Which are good and bad?—Up to what degree the good continue good;—and (as
there are many, each with its private range) In what way have they, being
all in one subject and hardly all, as experience shows, admitting of
gratification, to suffer at least reciprocal restriction? And, first of
all, as regards the numbers of these impulses and propensities, the case
is much the same as with the psychical powers, whose aggregate is to form
the mind theoretical,—an aggregate which is now increased by the host of
impulses. The nominal rationality of impulse and propensity lies merely in
their general impulse not to be subjective merely, but to get realised,
overcoming the subjectivity by the subject’s own agency. Their genuine
rationality cannot reveal its secret to a method of outer reflection which
pre-supposes a number of _independent_ innate tendencies and immediate
instincts, and therefore is wanting in a single principle and final
purpose for them. But the immanent “reflection” of mind itself carries it
beyond their particularity and their natural immediacy, and gives their
contents a rationality and objectivity, in which they exist as necessary
ties of social relation, as rights and duties. It is this objectification
which evinces their real value, their mutual connexions, and their truth.
And thus it was a true perception when Plato (especially including as he
did the mind’s whole nature under its right) showed that the full reality
of justice could be exhibited only in the _objective_ phase of justice,
viz. in the construction of the State as the ethical life.
The answer to the question, therefore, What are the good and rational
propensities, and how they are to be co-ordinated with each other?
resolves itself into an exposition of the laws and forms of common life
produced by the mind when developing itself as _objective_ mind—a
development in which the _content_ of autonomous action loses its
contingency and optionality. The discussion of the true intrinsic worth of
the impulses, inclinations, and passions is thus essentially the theory of
legal, moral, and social _duties_.
§ 475. The subject is the act of satisfying impulses, an act of (at least)
formal rationality, as it translates them from the subjectivity of content
(which so far is _purpose_) into objectivity, where the subject is made to
close with itself. If the content of the impulse is distinguished as the
thing or business from this act of carrying it out, and we regard the
thing which has been brought to pass as containing the element of
subjective individuality and its action, this is what is called the
_interest_. Nothing therefore is brought about without interest.
An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which
executes this aim: unless the subject were in this way in the most
disinterested action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be
no action at all.—The impulses and inclinations are sometimes depreciated
by being contrasted with the baseless chimera of a happiness, the free
gift of nature, where wants are supposed to find their satisfaction
without the agent doing anything to produce a conformity between immediate
existence and his own inner requirements. They are sometimes contrasted,
on the whole to their disadvantage, with the morality of duty for duty’s
sake. But impulse and passion are the very life-blood of all action: they
are needed if the agent is really to be in his aim and the execution
thereof. The morality concerns the content of the aim, which as such is
the universal, an inactive thing, that finds its actualising in the agent;
and finds it only when the aim is immanent in the agent, is his interest
and—should it claim to engross his whole efficient subjectivity—his
passion.
§ 476. The will, as thinking and implicitly free, distinguishes itself
from the particularity of the impulses, and places itself as simple
subjectivity of thought above their diversified content. It is thus
“reflecting” will.
§ 477. Such a particularity of impulse has thus ceased to be a mere datum:
the reflective will now sees it as its own, because it closes with it and
thus gives itself specific individuality and actuality. It is now on the
standpoint of _choosing_ between inclinations, and is option or _choice_.
§ 478. Will as choice claims to be free, reflected into itself as the
negativity of its merely immediate autonomy. However, as the content, in
which its former universality concludes itself to actuality, is nothing
but the content of the impulses and appetites, it is actual only as a
subjective and contingent will. It realises itself in a particularity,
which it regards at the same time as a nullity, and finds a satisfaction
in what it has at the same time emerged from. As thus contradictory, it is
the process of distracting and suspending one desire or enjoyment by
another,—and one satisfaction, which is just as much no satisfaction, by
another, without end. But the truth of the particular satisfactions is the
universal, which under the name of _happiness_ the thinking will makes its
aim.
(γ) Happiness(148).
§ 479. In this idea, which reflection and comparison have educed, of a
universal satisfaction, the impulses, so far as their particularity goes,
are reduced to a mere negative; and it is held that in part they are to be
sacrificed to each other for the behoof that aim, partly sacrificed to
that aim directly, either altogether or in part. Their mutual limitation,
on one hand, proceeds from a mixture of qualitative and quantitative
considerations: on the other hand, as happiness has its sole _affirmative_
contents in the springs of action, it is on them that the decision turns,
and it is the subjective feeling and good pleasure which must have the
casting vote as to where happiness is to be placed.
§ 480. Happiness is the mere abstract and merely imagined universality of
things desired,—a universality which only ought to be. But the
particularity of the satisfaction which just as much _is_ as it is
abolished, and the abstract singleness, the option which gives or does not
give itself (as it pleases) an aim in happiness, find their truth in the
intrinsic _universality_ of the will, i.e. its very autonomy or freedom.
In this way choice is will only as pure subjectivity, which is pure and
concrete at once, by having for its contents and aim only that infinite
mode of being—freedom itself. In this truth of its autonomy, where concept
and object are one, the will is an _actually free will_.
Free Mind(149).
§ 481. Actual free will is the unity of theoretical and practical mind: a
free will, which realises its own freedom of will now that the formalism,
fortuitousness, and contractedness of the practical content up to this
point have been superseded. By superseding the adjustments of means
therein contained, the will is the _immediate individuality_
self-instituted,—an individuality, however, also purified of all that
interferes with its universalism, i.e. with freedom itself. This
universalism the will has as its object and aim, only so far as it thinks
itself, knows this its concept, and is _will_ as free _intelligence_.
§ 482. The mind which knows itself as free and wills itself as this its
object, i.e. which has its true being for characteristic and aim, is in
the first instance the rational will in general, or _implicit_ Idea, and
because implicit only the _notion_ of absolute mind. As _abstract_ Idea
again, it is existent only in the _immediate_ will—it is the _existential_
side of reason,—the _single_ will as aware of this its universality
constituting its contents and aim, and of which it is only the formal
activity. If the will, therefore, in which the Idea thus appears is only
finite, that will is also the act of developing the Idea, and of investing
its self-unfolding content with an existence which, as realising the idea,
is _actuality_. It is thus “Objective” Mind.
No Idea is so generally recognised as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to
the greatest misconceptions (to which therefore it actually falls a
victim) as the idea of Liberty: none in common currency with so little
appreciation of its meaning. Remembering that free mind is _actual_ mind,
we can see how misconceptions about it are of tremendous consequence in
practice. When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the
abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its
uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and
that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have
never had this idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans,
Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary,
they saw that it is only by birth (as e.g. an Athenian or Spartan
citizen), or by strength of character, education, or philosophy (—the sage
is free even as a slave and in chains) that the human being is actually
free. It was through Christianity that this idea came into the world.
According to Christianity, the individual _as such_ has an infinite value
as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute
relationship with God himself, and have God’s mind dwelling in him: i.e.
man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom. If, in religion as such,
man is aware of this relationship to the absolute mind as his true being,
he has also, even when he steps into the sphere of secular existence, the
divine mind present with him, as the substance of the state of the family,
&c. These institutions are due to the guidance of that spirit, and are
constituted after its measure; whilst by their existence the moral temper
comes to be indwelling in the individual, so that in this sphere of
particular existence, of present sensation and volition, he is _actually_
free.
If to be aware of the idea—to be aware, i.e. that men are aware of freedom
as their essence, aim, and object—is matter of _speculation_, still this
very idea itself is the actuality of men—not something which they _have_,
as men, but which they _are_. Christianity in its adherents has realised
an ever-present sense that they are not and cannot be slaves; if they are
made slaves, if the decision as regards their property rests with an
arbitrary will, not with laws or courts of justice, they would find the
very substance of their life outraged. This will to liberty is no longer
an _impulse_ which demands its satisfaction, but the permanent
character—the spiritual consciousness grown into a non-impulsive nature.
But this freedom, which the content and aim of freedom has, is itself only
a notion—a principle of the mind and heart, intended to develope into an
objective phase, into legal, moral, religious, and not less into
scientific actuality.
SECTION II. MIND OBJECTIVE.
§ 483. The objective Mind is the absolute Idea, but only existing _in
posse_: and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual
rationality retains the aspect of external apparency. The free will finds
itself immediately confronted by differences which arise from the
circumstance that freedom is its _inward_ function and aim, and is in
relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits
up into different heads: viz. anthropological data (i.e. private and
personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness,
and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of
their own diversity and particularity. These aspects constitute the
external material for the embodiment of the will.
§ 484. But the purposive action of this will is to realise its concept,
Liberty, in these externally-objective aspects, making the latter a world
moulded by the former, which in it is thus at home with itself, locked
together with it: the concept accordingly perfected to the Idea. Liberty,
shaped into the actuality of a world, receives the _form of Necessity_ the
deeper substantial nexus of which is the system or organisation of the
principles of liberty, whilst its phenomenal nexus is power or authority,
and the sentiment of obedience awakened in consciousness.
§ 485. This unity of the rational will with the single will (this being
the peculiar and immediate medium in which the former is actualised)
constitutes the simple actuality of liberty. As it (and its content)
belongs to thought, and is the virtual _universal_, the content has its
right and true character only in the form of universality. When invested
with this character for the intelligent consciousness, or instituted as an
authoritative power, it is a _Law_(150). When, on the other hand, the
content is freed from the mixedness and fortuitousness, attaching to it in
the practical feeling and in impulse, and is set and grafted in the
individual will, not in the form of impulse, but in its universality, so
as to become its habit, temper and character, it exists as manner and
custom, or _Usage_(151).
§ 486. This “reality,” in general, where free will has _existence_, is the
_Law_ (Right),—the term being taken in a comprehensive sense not merely as
the limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions of
freedom. These conditions, in relation to the _subjective_ will, where
they, being universal, ought to have and can only have their existence,
are its _Duties_; whereas as its temper and habit they are _Manners_. What
is a right is also a duty, and what is a duty, is also a right. For a mode
of existence is a right, only as a consequence of the free substantial
will: and the same content of fact, when referred to the will
distinguished as subjective and individual, is a duty. It is the same
content which the subjective consciousness recognises as a duty, and
brings into existence in these several wills. The finitude of the
objective will thus creates the semblance of a distinction between rights
and duties.
In the phenomenal range right and duty are _correlata_, at least in the
sense that to a right on my part corresponds a duty in some one else. But,
in the light of the concept, my right to a thing is not merely possession,
but as possession by a _person_ it is _property_, or legal possession, and
it is a _duty_ to possess things as _property_, i.e. to be as a person.
Translated into the phenomenal relationship, viz. relation to another
person—this grows into the duty of some one _else_ to respect _my_ right.
In the morality of the conscience, duty in general is in me—a free
subject—at the same time a right of my subjective will or disposition. But
in this individualist moral sphere, there arises the division between what
is only inward purpose (disposition or intention), which only has its
being in me and is merely subjective duty, and the actualisation of that
purpose: and with this division a contingency and imperfection which makes
the inadequacy of mere individualistic morality. In social ethics these
two parts have reached their truth, their absolute unity; although even
right and duty return to one another and combine by means of certain
adjustments and under the guise of necessity. The rights of the father of
the family over its members are equally duties towards them; just as the
children’s duty of obedience is their right to be educated to the liberty
of manhood. The penal judicature of a government, its rights of
administration, &c., are no less its duties to punish, to administer, &c.;
as the services of the members of the State in dues, military services,
&c., are duties and yet their right to the protection of their private
property and of the general substantial life in which they have their
root. All the aims of society and the State are the private aim of the
individuals. But the set of adjustments, by which their duties come back
to them as the exercise and enjoyment of right, produces an appearance of
diversity: and this diversity is increased by the variety of shapes which
value assumes in the course of exchange, though it remains intrinsically
the same. Still it holds fundamentally good that he who has no rights has
no duties and _vice versa_.
Distribution.
§ 487. The free will is
A. itself at first immediate, and hence as a single being—the _person_:
the existence which the person gives to its liberty is _property_. The
_Right as_ right (law) is _formal, abstract right_.
B. When the will is reflected into self, so as to have its existence
inside it, and to be thus at the same time characterised as a
_particular_, it is the right of the _subjective_ will, _morality_ of the
individual conscience.
C. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject
and conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is
the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state.
Sub-Section A. Law.(152)
(a) Property.
§ 488. Mind, in the immediacy of its self-secured liberty, is an
individual, but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free
will: it is a _person_, in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in
itself still abstract and empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not
yet on its own part, but on an external _thing_. This thing, as something
devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and
volition, and is by that subjectivity made adjectival to it, the external
sphere of its liberty;—_possession_.
§ 489. By the judgment of possession, at first in the outward
appropriation, the thing acquires the predicate of “mine.” But this
predicate, on its own account merely “practical,” has here the
signification that I import my personal will into the thing. As so
characterised, possession is _property_, which as possession is a _means_,
but as existence of the personality is an _end_.
§ 490. In his property the person is brought into union with itself. But
the thing is an abstractly external thing, and the I in it is abstractly
external. The concrete return of me into me in the externality is that I,
the infinite self-relation, am as a person the repulsion of me from
myself, and have the existence of my personality in the _being of other
persons_, in my relation to them and in my recognition by them, which is
thus mutual.
§ 491. The thing is the _mean_ by which the extremes meet in one. These
extremes are the persons who, in the knowledge of their identity as free,
are simultaneously mutually independent. For them my will has its
_definite recognisable existence_ in the thing by the immediate bodily act
of taking possession, or by the formation of the thing or, it may be, by
mere designation of it.
§ 492. The casual aspect of property is that I place my will in _this_
thing: so far my will is _arbitrary_, I can just as well put it in it as
not,—just as well withdraw it as not. But so far as my will lies in a
thing, it is only I who can withdraw it: it is only with my will that the
thing can pass to another, whose property it similarly becomes only with
his will:—_Contract_.
(b) Contract.
§ 493. The two wills and their agreement in the contract are as an
_internal_ state of mind different from its realisation in the
_performance_. The comparatively “ideal” utterance (of contract) in the
_stipulation_ contains the actual surrender of a property by the one, its
changing hands, and its acceptance by the other will. The contract is thus
thoroughly binding: it does not need the performance of the one or the
other to become so—otherwise we should have an infinite regress or
infinite division of thing, labour, and time. The utterance in the
stipulation is complete and exhaustive. The inwardness of the will which
surrenders and the will which accepts the property is in the realm of
ideation, and in that realm the word is deed and thing (§ 462)—the full
and complete deed, since here the conscientiousness of the will does not
come under consideration (as to whether the thing is meant in earnest or
is a deception), and the will refers only to the external thing.
§ 494. Thus in the stipulation we have the _substantial_ being of the
contract standing out in distinction from its real utterance in the
performance, which is brought down to a mere sequel. In this way there is
put into the thing or performance a distinction between its immediate
specific _quality_ and its substantial being or _value_, meaning by value
the quantitative terms into which that qualitative feature has been
translated. One piece of property is thus made comparable with another,
and may be made equivalent to a thing which is (in quality) wholly
heterogeneous. It is thus treated in general as an abstract, universal
thing or commodity.
§ 495. The contract, as an agreement which has a voluntary origin and
deals with a casual commodity, involves at the same time the giving to
this “accidental” will a positive fixity. This will may just as well not
be conformable to law (right), and, in that case, produces a _wrong_: by
which however the absolute law (right) is not superseded, but only a
relationship originated of right to wrong.
(c) Right versus Wrong.
§ 496. Law (right) considered as the realisation of liberty in externals,
breaks up into a multiplicity of relations to this external sphere and to
other persons (§§ 491, 493 seqq.). In this way there are (1) several
titles or grounds at law, of which (seeing that property both on the
personal and the real side is exclusively individual) only one is the
right, but which, because they face each other, each and all are invested
with a _show_ of right, against which the former is defined as the
intrinsically right.
§ 497. Now so long as (compared against this show) the one intrinsically
right, still presumed identical with the several titles, is affirmed,
willed, and recognised, the only diversity lies in this, that the special
thing is subsumed under the one law or right by the _particular_ will of
_these_ several persons. This is naïve, non-malicious wrong. Such wrong in
the several claimants is a simple _negative judgment_, expressing the
_civil suit_. To settle it there is required a third judgment, which, as
the judgment of the intrinsically right, is disinterested, and a power of
giving the one right existence as against that semblance.
§ 498. But (2) if the semblance of right is willed as such _against_ right
intrinsical by the particular will, which thus becomes _wicked_, then the
external _recognition_ of right is separated from the right’s true value;
and while the former only is respected, the latter is violated. This gives
the wrong of _fraud_—the infinite judgment as identical (§ 173),—where the
nominal relation is retained, but the sterling value is let slip.
§ 499. (3) Finally, the particular will sets itself in opposition to the
intrinsic right by negating that right itself as well as its recognition
or semblance. [Here there is a negatively infinite judgment (§ 173) in
which there is denied the class as a whole, and not merely the particular
mode—in this case the apparent recognition.] Thus the will is violently
wicked, and commits a _crime_.
§ 500. As an outrage on right, such an action is essentially and actually
null. In it the agent, as a volitional and intelligent being, sets up a
law—a law however which is nominal and recognised by him only—a universal
which holds good _for him_, and under which he has at the same time
subsumed himself by his action. To display the nullity of such an act, to
carry out simultaneously this nominal law and the intrinsic right, in the
first instance by means of a subjective individual will, is the work of
_Revenge_. But, revenge, starting from the interest of an immediate
particular personality, is at the same time only a new outrage; and so on
without end. This progression, like the last, abolishes itself in a third
judgment, which is disinterested—_punishment_.
§ 501. The instrumentality by which authority is given to intrinsic right
is (α) that a particular will, that of the judge, being conformable to the
right, has an interest to turn against the crime (—which in the first
instance, in revenge, is a matter of chance), and (β) that an executive
power (also in the first instance casual) negates the negation of right
that was created by the criminal. This negation of right has its existence
in the will of the criminal; and consequently revenge or punishment
directs itself against the person or property of the criminal and
exercises _coercion_ upon him. It is in this legal sphere that coercion in
general has possible scope,—compulsion against the thing, in seizing and
maintaining it against another’s seizure: for in this sphere the will has
its existence immediately in externals as such, or in corporeity, and can
be seized only in this quarter. But more than _possible_ compulsion is
not, so long as I can withdraw myself as free from every mode of
existence, even from the range of all existence, i.e. from life. It is
legal only as abolishing a first and original compulsion.
§ 502. A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and the
subjective will. The “reality” of right, which the personal will in the
first instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to the
instrumentality of the subjective will,—whose influence as on one hand it
gives existence to the essential right, so may on the other cut itself off
from and oppose itself to it. Conversely, the claim of the subjective will
to be in this abstraction a power over the law of right is null and empty
of itself: it gets truth and reality essentially only so far as that will
in itself realises the reasonable will. As such it is _morality_(153)
proper.
The phrase “Law of Nature,” or Natural Right(154), in use for the
philosophy of law involves the ambiguity that it may mean either right as
something existing ready-formed in nature, or right as governed by the
nature of things, i.e. by the notion. The former used to be the common
meaning, accompanied with the fiction of a _state of nature_, in which the
law of nature should hold sway; whereas the social and political state
rather required and implied a restriction of liberty and a sacrifice of
natural rights. The real fact is that the whole law and its every article
are based on free personality alone,—on self-determination or autonomy,
which is the very contrary of determination by nature. The law of
nature—strictly so called—is for that reason the predominance of the
strong and the reign of force, and a state of nature a state of violence
and wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one ought to
depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, is the condition in
which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted and
sacrificed is just the wilfulness and violence of the state of nature.
Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience(155).
§ 503. The free individual, who, in mere law, counts only as a _person_,
is now characterised as a _subject_, a will reflected into itself so that,
be its affection what it may, it is distinguished (as existing in it) as
_its own_ from the existence of freedom in an external thing. Because the
affection of the will is thus inwardised, the will is at the same time
made a particular, and there arise further particularisations of it and
relations of these to one another. This affection is partly the essential
and implicit will, the reason of the will, the essential basis of law and
moral life: partly it is the existent volition, which is before us and
throws itself into actual deeds, and thus comes into relationship with the
former. The subjective will is _morally_ free, so far as these features
are its inward institution, its own, and willed by it. Its utterance in
deed with this freedom is an _action_, in the externality of which it only
admits as its own, and allows to be imputed to it, so much as it has
consciously willed.
This subjective or “moral” freedom is what a European especially calls
freedom. In virtue of the right thereto a man must possess a personal
knowledge of the distinction between good and evil in general: ethical and
religious principles shall not merely lay their claim on him as external
laws and precepts of authority to be obeyed, but have their assent,
recognition, or even justification in his heart, sentiment, conscience,
intelligence, &c. The subjectivity of the will in itself is its supreme
aim and absolutely essential to it.
The “moral” must be taken in the wider sense in which it does not signify
the morally good merely. In French _le moral_ is opposed to _le physique_,
and means the mental or intellectual in general. But here the moral
signifies volitional mode, so far as it is in the interior of the will in
general; it thus includes purpose and intention,—and also moral
wickedness.
a. Purpose(156).
§ 504. So far as the action comes into immediate touch with _existence_,
_my part_ in it is to this extent formal, that external existence is also
_independent_ of the agent. This externality can pervert his action and
bring to light something else than lay in it. Now, though any alteration
as such, which is set on foot by the subject’s action, is its _deed_(157),
still the subject does not for that reason recognise it as its
_action_(158), but only admits as its own that existence in the deed which
lay in its knowledge and will, which was its _purpose_. Only for that does
it hold itself _responsible_.
b. Intention and Welfare(159).
§ 505. As regards its empirically concrete _content_ (1) the action has a
variety of particular aspects and connexions. In point of _form_, the
agent must have known and willed the action in its essential feature,
embracing these individual points. This is the right of _intention_. While
_purpose_ affects only the immediate fact of existence, _intention_
regards the underlying essence and aim thereof. (2) The agent has no less
the right to see that the particularity of content in the action, in point
of its matter, is not something external to him, but is a particularity of
his own,—that it contains his needs, interests, and aims. These aims, when
similarly comprehended in a single aim, as in happiness (§ 479),
constitute his _well-being_. This is the right to well-being. Happiness
(good fortune) is distinguished from well-being only in this, that
happiness implies no more than some sort of immediate existence, whereas
well-being regards it as also justified as regards morality.
§ 506. But the essentiality of the intention is in the first instance the
abstract form of generality. Reflection can put in this form this and that
particular aspect in the empirically-concrete action, thus making it
essential to the intention or restricting the intention to it. In this way
the supposed essentiality of the intention and the real essentiality of
the action may be brought into the greatest contradiction—e.g. a good
intention in case of a crime. Similarly well-being is abstract and may be
set on this or that: as appertaining to this single agent, it is always
something particular.
c. Goodness and Wickedness(160).
§ 507. The truth of these particularities and the concrete unity of their
formalism is the content of the universal, essential and actual, will,—the
law and underlying essence of every phase of volition, the essential and
actual good. It is thus the absolute final aim of the world, and _duty_
for the agent who _ought_ to have _insight_ into the _good_, make it his
_intention_ and bring it about by his activity.
§ 508. But though the good is the universal of will—a universal determined
in itself,—and thus including in it particularity,—still so far as this
particularity is in the first instance still abstract, there is no
principle at hand to determine it. Such determination therefore starts up
also outside that universal; and as heteronomy or determinance of a will
which is free and has rights of its own, there awakes here the deepest
contradiction. (α) In consequence of the indeterminate determinism of the
good, there are always _several sorts_ of good and _many kinds of duties_,
the variety of which is a dialectic of one against another and brings them
into _collision_. At the same time because good is one, they _ought_ to
stand in harmony; and yet each of them, though it is a particular duty, is
as good and as duty absolute. It falls upon the agent to be the dialectic
which, superseding this absolute claim of each, concludes such a
combination of them as excludes the rest.
§ 509. (β) To the agent, who in his existent sphere of liberty is
essentially as a _particular_, his _interest and welfare_ must, on account
of that existent sphere of liberty, be essentially an aim and therefore a
duty. But at the same time in aiming at the good, which is the
not-particular but only universal of the will, the particular interest
_ought not_ to be a constituent motive. On account of this independency of
the two principles of action, it is likewise an accident whether they
harmonise. And yet they _ought_ to harmonise, because the agent, as
individual and universal, is always fundamentally one identity.
(γ) But the agent is not only a mere particular in his existence; it is
also a form of his existence to be an abstract self-certainty, an abstract
reflection of freedom into himself. He is thus distinct from the reason in
the will, and capable of making the universal itself a particular and in
that way a semblance. The good is thus reduced to the level of a mere “may
happen” for the agent, who can therefore resolve itself to somewhat
opposite to the good, can be wicked.
§ 510. (δ) The external objectivity, following the distinction which has
arisen in the subjective will (§ 503), constitutes a peculiar world of its
own,—another extreme which stands in no rapport with the internal
will-determination. It is thus a matter of chance, whether it harmonises
with the subjective aims, whether the good is realised, and the wicked, an
aim essentially and actually null, nullified in it: it is no less matter
of chance whether the agent finds in it his well-being, and more precisely
whether in the world the good agent is happy and the wicked unhappy. But
at the same time the world _ought_ to allow the good action, the essential
thing, to be carried out in it; it _ought_ to grant the good agent the
satisfaction of his particular interest, and refuse it to the wicked; just
as it _ought_ also to make the wicked itself null and void.
§ 511. The all-round contradiction, expressed by this repeated _ought_,
with its absoluteness which yet at the same time is _not_—contains the
most abstract ’analysis’ of the mind in itself, its deepest descent into
itself. The only relation the self-contradictory principles have to one
another is in the abstract certainty of self; and for this infinitude of
subjectivity the universal will, good, right, and duty, no more exist than
not. The subjectivity alone is aware of itself as choosing and deciding.
This pure self-certitude, rising to its pitch, appears in the two directly
inter-changing forms—of _Conscience_ and _Wickedness_. The former is the
will of goodness; but a goodness which to this pure subjectivity is the
_non-objective_, non-universal, the unutterable; and over which the agent
is conscious that _he_ in his _individuality_ has the decision. Wickedness
is the same awareness that the single self possesses the decision, so far
as the single self does not merely remain in this abstraction, but takes
up the content of a subjective interest contrary to the good.
§ 512. This supreme pitch of the “_phenomenon_” of will,—sublimating
itself to this absolute vanity—to a goodness, which has no objectivity,
but is only sure of itself, and a self-assurance which involves the
nullification of the universal—collapses by its own force. Wickedness, as
the most intimate reflection of subjectivity itself, in opposition to the
objective and universal, (which it treats as mere sham,) is the same as
the good sentiment of abstract goodness, which reserves to the
subjectivity the determination thereof:—the utterly abstract semblance,
the bare perversion and annihilation of itself. The result, the truth of
this semblance, is, on its negative side, the absolute nullity of this
volition which would fain hold its own against the good, and of the good,
which would only be abstract. On the affirmative side, in the notion, this
semblance thus collapsing is the same simple universality of the will,
which is the good. The subjectivity, in this its _identity_ with the good,
is only the infinite form, which actualises and developes it. In this way
the standpoint of bare reciprocity between two independent sides,—the
standpoint of the _ought_, is abandoned, and we have passed into the field
of ethical life.
Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics(161).
§ 513. The moral life is the perfection of spirit objective—the truth of
the subjective and objective spirit itself. The failure of the latter
consists—partly in having its freedom _immediately_ in reality, in
something external therefore, in a thing,—partly in the abstract
universality of its goodness. The failure of spirit subjective similarly
consists in this, that it is, as against the universal, abstractly
self-determinant in its inward individuality. When these two imperfections
are suppressed, subjective _freedom_ exists as the covertly and overtly
_universal_ rational will, which is sensible of itself and actively
disposed in the consciousness of the individual subject, whilst its
practical operation and immediate universal _actuality_ at the same time
exist as moral usage, manner and custom,—where self-conscious _liberty_
has become _nature_.
§ 514. The consciously free substance, in which the absolute “ought” is no
less an “is,” has actuality as the spirit of a nation. The abstract
disruption of this spirit singles it out into _persons_, whose
independence it however controls and entirely dominates from within. But
the person, as an intelligent being, feels that underlying essence to be
his own very being—ceases when so minded to be a mere accident of it—looks
upon it as his absolute final aim. In its actuality he sees not less an
achieved present, than somewhat he brings it about by his action,—yet
somewhat which without all question _is_. Thus, without any selective
reflection, the person performs its duty as _his own_ and as something
which _is_; and in this necessity _he_ has himself and his actual freedom.
§ 515. Because the substance is the absolute unity of individuality and
universality of freedom, it follows that the actuality and action of each
individual to keep and to take care of his own being, while it is on one
hand conditioned by the pre-supposed total in whose complex alone he
exists, is on the other a transition into a universal product.—The social
disposition of the individuals is their sense of the substance, and of the
identity of all their interests with the total; and that the other
individuals mutually know each other and are actual only in this identity,
is confidence (trust)—the genuine ethical temper.
§ 516. The relations between individuals in the several situations to
which the substance is particularised form their _ethical duties_. The
ethical personality, i.e. the subjectivity which is permeated by the
substantial life, is _virtue_. In relation to the bare facts of external
being, to _destiny_, virtue does not treat them as a mere negation, and is
thus a quiet repose in itself: in relation to substantial objectivity, to
the total of ethical actuality, it exists as confidence, as deliberate
work for the community, and the capacity of sacrificing self thereto;
whilst in relation to the incidental relations of social circumstance, it
is in the first instance justice and then benevolence. In the latter
sphere, and in its attitude to its own visible being and corporeity, the
individuality expresses its special character, temperament, &c. as
personal _virtues_.
§ 517. The ethical substance is
AA. as “immediate” or _natural_ mind,—the _Family_.
BB. The “relative” totality of the “relative” relations of the individuals
as independent persons to one another in a formal universality—_Civil
Society_.
CC. The self-conscious substance, as the mind developed to an organic
actuality—the _Political Constitution_.
AA. The Family.
§ 518. The ethical spirit, in its _immediacy_, contains the _natural_
factor that the individual has its substantial existence in its natural
universal, i.e. in its kind. This is the sexual tie, elevated however to a
spiritual significance,—the unanimity of love and the temper of trust. In
the shape of the family, mind appears as feeling.
§ 519. (1) The physical difference of sex thus appears at the same time as
a difference of intellectual and moral type. With their exclusive
individualities these personalities combine to form a _single person_: the
subjective union of hearts, becoming a “substantial” unity, makes this
union an ethical tie—_Marriage_. The ’substantial’ union of hearts makes
marriage an indivisible personal bond—monogamic marriage: the bodily
conjunction is a sequel to the moral attachment. A further sequel is
community of personal and private interests.
§ 520. (2) By the community in which the various members constituting the
family stand in reference to property, that property of the one person
(representing the family) acquires an ethical interest, as do also its
industry, labour, and care for the future.
§ 521. The ethical principle which is conjoined with the natural
generation of the children, and which was assumed to have primary
importance in first forming the marriage union, is actually realised in
the second or spiritual birth of the children,—in educating them to
independent personality.
§ 522. (3) The children, thus invested with independence, leave the
concrete life and action of the family to which they primarily belong,
acquire an existence of their own, destined however to found anew such an
actual family. Marriage is of course broken up by the _natural_ element
contained in it, the death of husband and wife: but even their union of
hearts, as it is a mere “substantiality” of feeling, contains the germ of
liability to chance and decay. In virtue of such fortuitousness, the
members of the family take up to each other the status of persons; and it
is thus that the family finds introduced into it for the first time the
element, originally foreign to it, of _legal_ regulation.
BB. Civil Society(162).
§ 523. As the substance, being an intelligent substance, particularises
itself abstractly into many persons (the family is only a single person),
into families or individuals, who exist independent and free, as private
persons, it loses its ethical character: for these persons as such have in
their consciousness and as their aim not the absolute unity, but their own
petty selves and particular interests. Thus arises the system of
_atomistic_: by which the substance is reduced to a general system of
adjustments to connect self-subsisting extremes and their particular
interests. The developed totality of this connective system is the state
as civil society, or _state external_.
a. The System of Wants(163).
§ 524. (α) The particularity of the persons includes in the first instance
their wants. The possibility of satisfying these wants is here laid on the
social fabric, the general stock from which all derive their satisfaction.
In the condition of things in which this method of satisfaction by
indirect adjustment is realised, immediate seizure (§ 488) of external
objects as means thereto exists barely or not at all: the objects are
already property. To acquire them is only possible by the intervention, on
one hand, of the possessors’ will, which as particular has in view the
satisfaction of their variously defined interests; while on the other hand
it is conditioned by the ever continued production of fresh means of
exchange by the exchangers’ _own labour_. This instrument, by which the
labour of all facilitates satisfaction of wants, constitutes the general
stock.
§ 525. (β) The glimmer of universal principle in this particularity of
wants is found in the way intellect creates differences in them, and thus
causes an indefinite multiplication both of wants and of means for their
different phases. Both are thus rendered more and more abstract. This
“morcellement” of their content by abstraction gives rise to the _division
of labour_. The habit of this abstraction in enjoyment, information,
feeling and demeanour, constitutes training in this sphere, or nominal
culture in general.
§ 526. The labour which thus becomes more abstract tends on one hand by
its uniformity to make labour easier and to increase production,—on
another to limit each person to a single kind of technical skill, and thus
produce more unconditional dependence on the social system. The skill
itself becomes in this way mechanical, and gets the capability of letting
the machine take the place of human labour.
§ 527. (γ) But the concrete division of the general stock—which is also a
general business (of the whole society)—into particular masses determined
by the factors of the notion,—masses each of which possesses its own basis
of subsistence, and a corresponding mode of labour, of needs, and of means
for satisfying them, besides of aims and interests, as well as of mental
culture and habit—constitutes the difference of Estates (orders or ranks).
Individuals apportion themselves to these according to natural talent,
skill, option and accident. As belonging to such a definite and stable
sphere, they have their actual existence, which as existence is
essentially a particular; and in it they have their social morality, which
is _honesty_, their recognition and their _honour_.
Where civil society, and with it the State, exists, there arise the
several estates in their difference: for the universal substance, as
vital, _exists_ only so far as it organically _particularises_ itself. The
history of constitutions is the history of the growth of these estates, of
the legal relationships of individuals to them, and of these estates to
one another and to their centre.
§ 528. To the “substantial,” natural estate the fruitful soil and ground
supply a natural and stable capital; its action gets direction and content
through natural features, and its moral life is founded on faith and
trust. The second, the “reflected” estate has as its allotment the social
capital, the medium created by the action of middlemen, of mere agents,
and an ensemble of contingencies, where the individual has to depend on
his subjective skill, talent, intelligence and industry. The third,
“thinking” estate has for its business the general interests; like the
second it has a subsistence procured by means of its own skill, and like
the first a certain subsistence, certain however because guaranteed
through the whole society.
b. Administration of Justice(164).
§ 529. When matured through the operation of natural need and free option
into a system of universal relationships and a regular course of external
necessity, the principle of casual particularity gets that stable
articulation which liberty requires in the shape of _formal right_. (1)
The actualisation which right gets in this sphere of mere practical
intelligence is that it be brought to consciousness as the stable
universal, that it be known and stated in its specificality with the voice
of authority—the _Law_(165).
The _positive_ element in laws concerns only their form of _publicity_ and
_authority_—which makes it possible for them to be known by all in a
customary and external way. Their content _per se_ may be reasonable—or it
may be unreasonable and so wrong. But when right, in the course of
definite manifestation, is developed in detail, and its content analyses
itself to gain definiteness, this analysis, because of the finitude of its
materials, falls into the falsely infinite progress: the _final_
definiteness, which is absolutely essential and causes a break in this
progress of unreality, can in this sphere of finitude be attained only in
a way that savours of contingency and arbitrariness. Thus whether three
years, ten thalers, or only 2-1/2, 2-3/4, 2-4/5 years, and so on _ad
infinitum_, be the right and just thing, can by no means be decided on
intelligible principles,—and yet it should be decided. Hence, though of
course only at the final points of deciding, on the side of external
existence, the “positive” principle naturally enters law as contingency
and arbitrariness. This happens and has from of old happened in all
legislations: the only thing wanted is clearly to be aware of it, and not
be misled by the talk and the pretence as if the ideal of law were, or
could be, to be, at _every_ point, determined through reason or legal
intelligence, on purely reasonable and intelligent grounds. It is a futile
perfectionism to have such expectations and to make such requirements in
the sphere of the finite.
There are some who look upon laws as an evil and a profanity, and who
regard governing and being governed from natural love, hereditary,
divinity or nobility, by faith and trust, as the genuine order of life,
while the reign of law is held an order of corruption and injustice. These
people forget that the stars—and the cattle too—are governed and well
governed too by laws;—laws however which are only internally in these
objects, not _for them_, not as laws _set to_ them:—whereas it is man’s
privilege to _know_ his law. They forget therefore that he can truly obey
only such known law,—even as his law can only be a just law, as it is a
_known_ law;—though in other respects it must be in its essential content
contingency and caprice, or at least be mixed and polluted with such
elements.
The same empty requirement of perfection is employed for an opposite
thesis—viz. to support the opinion that a code is impossible or
impracticable. In this case there comes in the additional absurdity of
putting essential and universal provisions in one class with the
particular detail. The finite material is definable on and on to the false
infinite: but this advance is not, as in the mental images of space, a
generation of new spatial characteristics of the same quality as those
preceding them, but an advance into greater and ever greater speciality by
the acumen of the analytic intellect, which discovers new distinctions,
which again make new decisions necessary. To provisions of this sort one
may give the name of _new_ decisions or _new_ laws; but in proportion to
the gradual advance in specialisation the interest and value of these
provisions declines. They fall within the already subsisting
“substantial,” general laws, like improvements on a floor or a door,
within the house—which though something _new_, are not a new _house_. But
there is a contrary case. If the legislation of a rude age began with
single provisos, which go on by their very nature always increasing their
number, there arises, with the advance in multitude, the need of a simpler
code,—the need i.e. of embracing that lot of singulars in their general
features. To find and be able to express these principles well beseems an
intelligent and civilised nation. Such a gathering up of single rules into
general forms, first really deserving the name of laws, has lately been
begun in some directions by the English Minister Peel, who has by so doing
gained the gratitude, even the admiration, of his countrymen.
§ 530. (2) The positive form of Laws—to be _promulgated and made known_ as
laws—is a condition of the _external obligation_ to obey them; inasmuch
as, being laws of strict right, they touch only the abstract will,—itself
at bottom external—not the moral or ethical will. The subjectivity to
which the will has in this direction a right is here only publicity. This
subjective existence is as existence of the essential and developed truth
in this sphere of Right at the same time an externally objective
existence, as universal authority and necessity.
The legality of property and of private transactions concerned
therewith—in consideration of the principle that all law must be
promulgated, recognised, and thus become authoritative—gets its universal
guarantee through _formalities_.
§ 531. (3) Legal forms get the necessity, to which objective existence
determines itself, in the _judicial __ system_. Abstract right has to
exhibit itself to the _court_—to the individualised right—as _proven_:—a
process in which there may be a difference between what is abstractly
right and what is provably right. The court takes cognisance and action in
the interest of right as such, deprives the existence of right of its
contingency, and in particular transforms this existence,—as this exists
as revenge—into _punishment_ (§ 500).
The comparison of the two species, or rather two elements in the judicial
conviction, bearing on the actual state of the case in relation to the
accused,—(1) according as that conviction is based on mere circumstances
and other people’s witness alone,—or (2) in addition requires the
confession of the accused, constitutes the main point in the question of
the so-called jury-courts. It is an essential point that the two
ingredients of a judicial cognisance, the judgment as to the state of the
fact, and the judgment as application of the law to it, should, as at
bottom different sides, be exercised as _different functions_. By the said
institution they are allotted even to bodies differently qualified,—from
the one of which individuals belonging to the official judiciary are
expressly excluded. To carry this separation of functions up to this
separation in the courts rests rather on extra-essential considerations:
the main point remains only the separate performance of these essentially
different functions.—It is a more important point whether the confession
of the accused is or is not to be made a condition of penal judgment. The
institution of the jury-court loses sight of this condition. The point is
that on this ground certainty is completely inseparable from truth: but
the confession is to be regarded as the very acmé of certainty-giving
which in its nature is subjective. The final decision therefore lies with
the confession. To this therefore the accused has an absolute right, if
the proof is to be made final and the judges to be convinced. No doubt
this factor is incomplete, because it is only one factor; but still more
incomplete is the other when no less abstractly taken,—viz. mere
circumstantial evidence. The jurors are essentially judges and pronounce a
judgment. In so far, then, as all they have to go on are such objective
proofs, whilst at the same time their defect of certainty (incomplete in
so far as it is only _in them_) is admitted, the jury-court shows traces
of its barbaric origin in a confusion and admixture between objective
proofs and subjective or so-called “moral” conviction.—It is easy to call
_extraordinary_ punishments an absurdity; but the fault lies rather with
the shallowness which takes offence at a mere name. Materially the
principle involves the difference of objective probation according as it
goes with or without the factor of absolute certification which lies in
confession.
§ 532. The function of judicial administration is only to actualise to
necessity the abstract side of personal liberty in civil society. But this
actualisation rests at first on the particular subjectivity of the judge,
since here as yet there is not found the necessary unity of it with right
in the abstract. Conversely, the blind necessity of the system of wants is
not lifted up into the consciousness of the universal, and worked from
that period of view.
c. Police and Corporation(166).
§ 533. Judicial administration naturally has no concern with such part of
actions and interests as belongs only to particularity, and leaves to
chance not only the occurrence of crimes but also the care for public
weal. In civil society the sole end is to satisfy want—and that, because
it is man’s want, in a uniform general way, so as to _secure_ this
satisfaction. But the machinery of social necessity leaves in many ways a
casualness about this satisfaction. This is due to the variability of the
wants themselves, in which opinion and subjective good-pleasure play a
great part. It results also from circumstances of locality, from the
connexions between nation and nation, from errors and deceptions which can
be foisted upon single members of the social circulation and are capable
of creating disorder in it,—as also and especially from the unequal
capacity of individuals to take advantage of that general stock. The
onward march of this necessity also sacrifices the very particularities by
which it is brought about, and does not itself contain the affirmative aim
of securing the satisfaction of individuals. So far as concerns them, it
_may_ be far from beneficial: yet here the individuals are the
morally-justifiable end.
§ 534. To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the
powers composing that social necessity act, and their variable
ingredients, and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the
work of an institution which assumes on _one_ hand, to the concrete of
civil society, the position of an external universality. Such an order
acts with the power of an external state, which, in so far as it is rooted
in the higher or substantial state, appears as state “police.” On the
_other_ hand, in this sphere of particularity the only recognition of the
aim of substantial universality and the only carrying of it out is
restricted to the business of particular branches and interests. Thus we
have the _corporation_, in which the particular citizen in his private
capacity finds the securing of his stock, whilst at the same time he in it
emerges from his single private interest, and has a conscious activity for
a comparatively universal end, just as in his legal and professional
duties he has his social morality.
CC. The State.
§ 535. The State is the _self-conscious_ ethical substance, the
unification of the family principle with that of civil society. The same
unity, which is in the family as a feeling of love, is its essence,
receiving however at the same time through the second principle of
conscious and spontaneously active volition the _form_ of conscious
universality. This universal principle, with all its evolution in detail,
is the absolute aim and content of the knowing subject, which thus
identifies itself in its volition with the system of reasonableness.
§ 536. The state is (α) its inward structure as a self-relating
development—constitutional (inner-state) law: (β) a particular individual,
and therefore in connexion with other particular
individuals,—international (outer-state) law; (γ) but these particular
minds are only stages in the general development of mind in its actuality:
universal history.
α. Constitutional Law(167).
§ 537. The essence of the state is the universal, self-originated and
self-developed,—the reasonable spirit of will; but, as self-knowing and
self-actualising, sheer subjectivity, and—as an actuality—one individual.
Its _work_ generally—in relation to the extreme of individuality as the
multitude of individuals—consists in a double function. First it maintains
them as persons, thus making right a necessary actuality, then it promotes
their welfare, which each originally takes care of for himself, but which
has a thoroughly general side; it protects the family and guides civil
society. Secondly, it carries back both, and the whole disposition and
action of the individual—whose tendency is to become a centre of his
own—into the life of the universal substance; and, in this direction, as a
free power it interferes with those subordinate spheres and retains them
in substantial immanence.
§ 538. The laws express the special provisions for objective freedom.
First, to the immediate agent, his independent self-will and particular
interest, they are restrictions. But, secondly, they are an absolute final
end and the universal work: hence they are a product of the “functions” of
the various orders which parcel themselves more and more out of the
general particularising, and are a fruit of all the acts and private
concerns of individuals. Thirdly, they are the substance of the volition
of individuals—which volition is thereby free—and of their disposition:
being as such exhibited as current usage.
§ 539. As a living mind, the state only is as an organised whole,
differentiated into particular agencies, which, proceeding from the one
notion (though not known as notion) of the reasonable will, continually
produce it as their result. The _constitution_ is this articulation or
organisation of state-power. It provides for the reasonable will,—in so
far as it is in the individuals only _implicitly_ the universal
will,—coming to a consciousness and an understanding of itself and being
_found_; also for that will being put in actuality, through the action of
the government and its several branches, and not left to perish, but
protected both against _their_ casual subjectivity and against that of the
individuals. The constitution is existent _justice_,—the actuality of
liberty in the development all its reasonable provisions.
Liberty and Equality are the simple rubrics into which is frequently
concentrated what should form the fundamental principle, the final aim and
result of the constitution. However true this is, the defect of these
terms is their utter abstractness: if stuck to in this abstract form, they
are principles which either prevent the rise of the concreteness of the
state, i.e. its articulation into a constitution and a government in
general, or destroy them. With the state there arises inequality, the
difference of governing powers and of governed, magistracies, authorities,
directories, &c. The principle of equality, logically carried out, rejects
all differences, and thus allows no sort of political condition to exist.
Liberty and equality are indeed the foundation of the state, but as the
most abstract also the most superficial, and for that very reason
naturally the most familiar. It is important therefore to study them
closer.
As regards, first, Equality, the familiar proposition, All men are by
nature equal, blunders by confusing the “natural” with the “notion.” It
ought rather to read: _By nature_ men are only unequal. But the notion of
liberty, as it exists as such, without further specification and
development, is abstract subjectivity, as a person capable of property (§
488). This single abstract feature of personality constitutes the actual
_equality_ of human beings. But that this freedom should exist, that it
should be _man_ (and not as in Greece, Rome, &c. _some_ men) that is
recognised and legally regarded as a person, is so little _by nature_,
that it is rather only a result and product of the consciousness of the
deepest principle of mind, and of the universality and expansion of this
consciousness. That the citizens are equal before the law contains a great
truth, but which so expressed is a tautology: it only states that the
legal status in general exists, that the laws rule. But, as regards the
concrete, the citizens—besides their personality—are equal before the law
only in these points when they are otherwise equal _outside the law_. Only
that equality which (in whatever way it be) they, as it happens, otherwise
have in property, age, physical strength, talent, skill, &c.—or even in
crime, can and ought to make them deserve equal treatment before the
law:—only it can make them—as regards taxation, military service,
eligibility to office, &c.—punishment, &c.—equal in the concrete. The laws
themselves, except in so far as they concern that narrow circle of
personality, presuppose unequal conditions, and provide for the unequal
legal duties and appurtenances resulting therefrom.
As regards Liberty, it is originally taken partly in a negative sense
against arbitrary intolerance and lawless treatment, partly in the
affirmative sense of subjective freedom; but this freedom is allowed great
latitude both as regards the agent’s self-will and action for his
particular ends, and as regards his claim to have a personal intelligence
and a personal share in general affairs. Formerly the legally defined
rights, private as well as public rights of a nation, town, &c. were
called its “liberties.” Really, every genuine law is a liberty: it
contains a reasonable principle of objective mind; in other words, it
embodies a liberty. Nothing has become, on the contrary, more familiar
than the idea that each must _restrict_ his liberty in relation to the
liberty of others: that the state is a condition of such reciprocal
restriction, and that the laws are restrictions. To such habits of mind
liberty is viewed as only casual good-pleasure and self-will. Hence it has
also been said that “modern” nations are only susceptible of equality, or
of equality more than liberty: and that for no other reason than that,
with an assumed definition of liberty (chiefly the participation of all in
political affairs and actions), it was impossible to make ends meet in
actuality—which is at once more reasonable and more powerful than abstract
presuppositions. On the contrary, it should be said that it is just the
great development and maturity of form in modern states which produces the
supreme concrete inequality of individuals in actuality: while, through
the deeper reasonableness of laws and the greater stability of the legal
state, it gives rise to greater and more stable liberty, which it can
without incompatibility allow. Even the superficial distinction of the
words liberty and equality points to the fact that the former tends to
inequality: whereas, on the contrary, the current notions of liberty only
carry us back to equality. But the more we fortify liberty,—as security of
property, as possibility for each to develop and make the best of his
talents and good qualities, the more it gets taken for granted: and then
the sense and appreciation of liberty especially turns in a _subjective_
direction. By this is meant the liberty to attempt action on every side,
and to throw oneself at pleasure in action for particular and for general
intellectual interests, the removal of all checks on the individual
particularity, as well as the inward liberty in which the subject has
principles, has an insight and conviction of his own, and thus gains moral
independence. But this liberty itself on one hand implies that supreme
differentiation in which men are unequal and make themselves more unequal
by education; and on another it only grows up under conditions of that
objective liberty, and is and could grow to such height only in modern
states. If, with this development of particularity, there be simultaneous
and endless increase of the number of wants, and of the difficulty of
satisfying them, of the lust of argument and the fancy of detecting
faults, with its insatiate vanity, it is all but part of that
indiscriminating relaxation of individuality in this sphere which
generates all possible complications, and must deal with them as it can.
Such a sphere is of course also the field of restrictions, because liberty
is there under the taint of natural self-will and self-pleasing, and has
therefore to restrict itself: and that, not merely with regard to the
naturalness, self-will and self-conceit, of others, but especially and
essentially with regard to reasonable liberty.
The term political liberty, however, is often used to mean formal
participation in the public affairs of state by the will and action even
of those individuals who otherwise find their chief function in the
particular aims and business of civil society. And it has in part become
usual to give the title constitution only to the side of the state which
concerns such participation of these individuals in general affairs, and
to regard a state, in which this is not formally done, as a state without
a constitution. On this use of the term, the only thing to remark is that
by constitution must be understood the determination of rights, i.e. of
liberties in general, and the organisation of the actualisation of them;
and that political freedom in the above sense can in any case only
constitute a part of it. Of it the following paragraphs will speak.
§ 540. The guarantee of a constitution (i.e. the necessity that the laws
be reasonable, and their actualisation secured) lies in the collective
spirit of the nation,—especially in the specific way in which it is itself
conscious of its reason. (Religion is that consciousness in its absolute
substantiality.) But the guarantee lies also at the same time in the
actual organisation or development of that principle in suitable
institutions. The constitution presupposes that consciousness of the
collective spirit, and conversely that spirit presupposes the
constitution: for the actual spirit only has a definite consciousness of
its principles, in so far as it has them actually existent before it.
The question—To whom (to what authority and how organised) belongs the
power to make a constitution? is the same as the question, Who has to make
the spirit of a nation? Separate our idea of a constitution from that of
the collective spirit, as if the latter exists or has existed without a
constitution, and your fancy only proves how superficially you have
apprehended the nexus between the spirit in its self-consciousness and in
its actuality. What is thus called “making” a “constitution,” is—just
because of this inseparability—a thing that has never happened in history,
just as little as the making of a code of laws. A constitution only
develops from the national spirit identically with that spirit’s own
development, and runs through at the same time with it the grades of
formation and the alterations required by its concept. It is the
indwelling spirit and the history of the nation (and, be it added, the
history is only that spirit’s history) by which constitutions have been
and are made.
§ 541. The really living totality,—that which preserves, in other words
continually produces the state in general and its constitution, is the
_government_. The organisation which natural necessity gives is seen in
the rise of the family and of the ’estates’ of civil society. The
government is the _universal_ part of the constitution, i.e. the part
which intentionally aims at preserving those parts, but at the same time
gets hold of and carries out those general aims of the whole which rise
above the function of the family and of civil society. The organisation of
the government is likewise its differentiation into powers, as their
peculiarities have a basis in principle; yet without that difference
losing touch with the _actual unity_ they have in the notion’s
subjectivity.
As the most obvious categories of the notion are those of _universality_
and _individuality_ and their relationship that of _subsumption_ of
individual under universal, it has come about that in the state the
legislative and executive power have been so distinguished as to make the
former exist apart as the absolute superior, and to subdivide the latter
again into administrative (government) power and judicial power, according
as the laws are applied to public or private affairs. The _division_ of
these powers has been treated as _the_ condition of political equilibrium,
meaning by division their _independence_ one of another in
existence,—subject always however to the above-mentioned subsumption of
the powers of the individual under the power of the general. The theory of
such “division” unmistakably implies the elements of the notion, but so
combined by “understanding” as to result in an absurd collocation, instead
of the self-redintegration of the living spirit. The one essential canon
to make liberty deep and real is to give every business belonging to the
general interests of the state a separate organisation wherever they are
essentially distinct. Such real division must be: for liberty is only deep
when it is differentiated in all its fullness and these differences
manifested in existence. But to make the business of legislation an
independent power—to make it the first power, with the further proviso
that all citizens shall have part therein, and the government be merely
executive and dependent, presupposes ignorance that the true idea, and
therefore the living and spiritual actuality, is the self-redintegrating
notion, in other words, the subjectivity which contains in it universality
as only one of its moments. (A mistake still greater, if it goes with the
fancy that the constitution and the fundamental laws were still one day to
make,—in a state of society, which includes an already existing
development of differences.) Individuality is the first and supreme
principle _which_ makes itself fall through the state’s organisation. Only
through the government, and by its embracing in itself the particular
businesses (including the abstract legislative business, which taken apart
is also particular), is the state _one_. These, as always, are the terms
on which the different elements essentially and alone truly stand towards
each other in the logic of “reason,” as opposed to the external footing
they stand on in ’understanding,’ which never gets beyond subsuming the
individual and particular under the universal. What disorganises the unity
of logical reason, equally disorganises actuality.
§ 542. In the government—regarded as organic totality—the sovereign power
(principate) is (_a_) _subjectivity_ as the _infinite_ self-unity of the
notion in its development;—the all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the
state, its highest peak and all-pervasive unity. In the perfect form of
the state, in which each and every element of the notion has reached free
existence, this subjectivity is not a so-called “moral person,” or a
decree issuing from a majority (forms in which the unity of the decreeing
will has not an _actual_ existence), but an actual individual,—the will of
a decreeing individual,—_monarchy_. The monarchical constitution is
therefore the constitution of developed reason: all other constitutions
belong to lower grades of the development and realisation of reason.
The unification of all concrete state-powers into one existence, as in the
patriarchal society,—or, as in a democratic constitution, the
participation of all in all affairs—impugns the principle of the division
of powers, i.e. the developed liberty of the constituent factors of the
Idea. But no whit less must the division (the working out of these factors
each to a free totality) be reduced to “ideal” unity, i.e. to
_subjectivity_. The mature differentiation or realisation of the Idea
means, essentially, that this subjectivity should grow to be a _real_
“moment,” an _actual_ existence; and this actuality is not otherwise than
as the individuality of the monarch—the subjectivity of abstract and final
decision existent in _one_ person. All those forms of collective decreeing
and willing,—a common will which shall be the sum and the resultant (on
aristocratical or democratical principles) of the atomistic of single
wills, have on them the mark of the unreality of an abstraction. Two
points only are all-important, first to see the necessity of each of the
notional factors, and secondly the form in which it is actualised. It is
only the nature of the speculative notion which can really give light on
the matter. That subjectivity—being the “moment” which emphasises the need
of abstract deciding in general—partly leads on to the proviso that the
name of the monarch appear as the bond and sanction under which everything
is done in the government;—partly, being simple self-relation, has
attached to it the characteristic of _immediacy_, and then of
_nature_—whereby the destination of individuals for the dignity of the
princely power is fixed by inheritance.
§ 543. (_b_) In the _particular_ government-power there emerges, first,
the division of state-business into its branches (otherwise defined),
legislative power, administration of justice or judicial power,
administration and police, and its consequent distribution between
particular boards or offices, which having their business appointed by
law, to that end and for that reason, possess independence of action,
without at the same time ceasing to stand under higher supervision.
Secondly, too, there arises the participation of _several_ in
state-business, who together constitute the “general order” (§ 528) in so
far as they take on themselves the charge of universal ends as the
essential function of their particular life;—the further condition for
being able to take individually part in this business being a certain
training, aptitude, and skill for such ends.
§ 544. The estates-collegium or provincial council is an institution by
which all such as belong to civil society in general, and are to that
degree private persons, participate in the governmental power, especially
in legislation—viz. such legislation as concerns the universal scope of
those interests which do not, like peace and war, involve the, as it were,
personal interference and action of the State as one man, and therefore do
not belong specially to the province of the sovereign power. By virtue of
this participation subjective liberty and conceit, with their general
opinion, can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy the
satisfaction of feeling themselves to count for something.
The division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, is
still the most definite statement of their difference in relation to
sovereignty. They must at the same time be regarded as necessary
structures in the path of development,—in short, in the history of the
State. Hence it is superficial and absurd to represent them as an object
of _choice_. The pure forms—necessary to the process of evolution—are, in
so far as they are finite and in course of change, conjoined both with
forms of their degeneration,—such as ochlocracy, &c., and with earlier
transition-forms. These two forms are not to be confused with those
legitimate structures. Thus, it may be—if we look only to the fact that
the will of one individual stands at the head of the state—oriental
despotism is included under the vague name monarchy,—as also feudal
monarchy, to which indeed even the favourite name of “constitutional
monarchy” cannot be refused. The true difference of these forms from
genuine monarchy depends on the true value of those principles of right
which are in vogue and have their actuality and guarantee in the
state-power. These principles are those expounded earlier, liberty of
property, and above all personal liberty, civil society, with its industry
and its communities, and the regulated efficiency of the particular
bureaux in subordination to the laws.
The question which is most discussed is in what sense we are to understand
the participation of private persons in state affairs. For it is as
private persons that the members of bodies of estates are primarily to be
taken, be they treated as mere individuals, or as representatives of a
number of people or of the nation. The aggregate of private persons is
often spoken of as the _nation_: but as such an aggregate it is _vulgus_,
not _populus_: and in this direction, it is the one sole aim of the state
that a nation should _not_ come to existence, to power and action, _as
such an aggregate_. Such a condition of a nation is a condition of
lawlessness, demoralisation, brutishness: in it the nation would only be a
shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy, elemental sea,
which however is not self-destructive, as the nation—a spiritual
element—would be. Yet such a condition may be often heard described as
that of true freedom. If there is to be any sense in embarking upon the
question of the participation of private persons in public affairs, it is
not a brutish mass, but an already organised nation—one in which a
governmental power exists—which should be presupposed. The desirability of
such participation however is not to be put in the superiority of
particular intelligence, which private persons are supposed to have over
state officials—the contrary may be the case—nor in the superiority of
their good will for the general best. The members of civil society as such
are rather people who find their nearest duty in their private interest
and (as especially in the feudal society) in the interest of their
privileged corporation. Take the case of _England_ which, because private
persons have a predominant share in public affairs, has been regarded as
having the freest of all constitutions. Experience shows that that
country—as compared with the other civilised states of Europe—is the most
backward in civil and criminal legislation, in the law and liberty of
property, in arrangements for art and science, and that objective freedom
or rational right is rather _sacrificed_ to formal right and particular
private interest; and that this happens even in the institutions and
possessions supposed to be dedicated to religion. The desirability of
private persons taking part in public affairs is partly to be put in their
concrete, and therefore more urgent, sense of general wants. But the true
motive is the right of the collective spirit to appear as an _externally
universal_ will, acting with orderly and express efficacy for the public
concerns. By this satisfaction of this right it gets its own life
quickened, and at the same time breathes fresh life in the administrative
officials; who thus have it brought home to them that not merely have they
to enforce duties but also to have regard to rights. Private citizens are
in the state the incomparably greater number, and form the multitude of
such as are recognised as persons. Hence the will-reason exhibits its
existence in them as a preponderating majority of freemen, or in its
“reflectional” universality, which has its actuality vouchsafed it as a
participation in the sovereignty. But it has already been noted as a
“moment” of civil society (§§ 527, 534) that the individuals rise from
external into substantial universality, and form a _particular_ kind,—the
Estates: and it is not in the inorganic form of mere individuals as such
(after the _democratic_ fashion of election), but as organic factors, as
estates, that they enter upon that participation. In the state a power or
agency must never appear and act as a formless, inorganic shape, i.e.
basing itself on the principle of multeity and mere numbers.
Assemblies of Estates have been wrongly designated as the _legislative
power_, so far as they form only one branch of that power,—a branch in
which the special government-officials have an _ex officio_ share, while
the sovereign power has the privilege of final decision. In a civilised
state moreover legislation can only be a further modification of existing
law, and so-called new laws can only deal with minutiae of detail and
particularities (cf. § 529, note), the main drift of which has been
already prepared or preliminarily settled by the practice of the
law-courts. The so-called _financial law_, in so far as it requires the
assent of the estates, is really a government affair: it is only
improperly called a law, in the general sense of embracing a wide, indeed
the whole, range of the external means of government. The finances deal
with what in their nature are only particular needs, ever newly recurring,
even if they touch on the sum total of such needs. If the main part of the
requirement were—as it very likely is—regarded as permanent, the provision
for it would have more the nature of a law: but to be a law, it would have
to be made once for all, and not be made yearly, or every few years,
afresh. The part which varies according to time and circumstances concerns
in reality the smallest part of the amount, and the provisions with regard
to it have even less the character of a law: and yet it is and may be only
this slight variable part which is matter of dispute, and can be subjected
to a varying yearly estimate. It is this last then which falsely bears the
high-sounding name of the “_Grant_” of the _Budget_, i.e. of the whole of
the finances. A law for one year and made each year has even to the plain
man something palpably absurd: for he distinguishes the essential and
developed universal, as content of a true law, from the reflectional
universality which only externally embraces what in its nature is many. To
give the name of a law to the annual fixing of financial requirements only
serves—with the presupposed separation of legislative from executive—to
keep up the illusion of that separation having real existence, and to
conceal the fact that the legislative power, when it makes a decree about
finance, is really engaged with strict executive business. But the
importance attached to the power of from time to time granting “supply,”
on the ground that the assembly of estates possesses in it a _check_ on
the government, and thus a guarantee against injustice and violence,—this
importance is in one way rather plausible than real. The financial
measures necessary for the state’s subsistence cannot be made conditional
on any other circumstances, nor can the state’s subsistence be put yearly
in doubt. It would be a parallel absurdity if the government were e.g. to
grant and arrange the judicial institutions always for a limited time
merely; and thus, by the threat of suspending the activity of such an
institution and the fear of a consequent state of brigandage, reserve for
itself a means of coercing private individuals. Then again, the pictures
of a condition of affairs, in which it might be useful and necessary to
have in hand means of compulsion, are partly based on the false conception
of a contract between rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the
possibility of such a divergence in spirit between these two parties as
would make constitution and government quite out of the question. If we
suppose the empty possibility of getting _help_ by such compulsive means
brought into existence, such help would rather be the derangement and
dissolution of the state, in which there would no longer be a government,
but only parties, and the violence and oppression of one party would only
be helped away by the other. To fit together the several parts of the
state into a constitution after the fashion of mere understanding—i.e. to
adjust within it the machinery of a balance of powers external to each
other—is to contravene the fundamental idea of what a state is.
§ 545. The final aspect of the state is to appear in immediate actuality
as a single nation marked by physical conditions. As a single individual
it is exclusive against other like individuals. In their mutual relations,
waywardness and chance have a place; for each person in the aggregate is
autonomous: the universal of law is only postulated between them, and not
actually existent. This independence of a central authority reduces
disputes between them to terms of mutual violence, a _state of war_, to
meet which the general estate in the community assumes the particular
function of maintaining the state’s independence against other states, and
becomes the estate of bravery.
§ 546. This state of war shows the omnipotence of the state in its
individuality—an individuality that goes even to abstract negativity.
Country and fatherland then appear as the power by which the particular
independence of individuals and their absorption in the external existence
of possession and in natural life is convicted of its own nullity,—as the
power which procures the maintenance of the general substance by the
patriotic sacrifice on the part of these individuals of this natural and
particular existence,—so making nugatory the nugatoriness that confronts
it.
β. External Public Law(168).
§ 547. In the game of war the independence of States is at stake. In one
case the result may be the mutual recognition of free national
individualities (§ 430): and by peace-conventions supposed to be for ever,
both this general recognition, and the special claims of nations on one
another, are settled and fixed. External state-rights rest partly on these
positive treaties, but to that extent contain only rights falling short of
true actuality (§ 545): partly on so-called _international_ law, the
general principle of which is its presupposed recognition by the several
States. It thus restricts their otherwise unchecked action against one
another in such a way that the possibility of peace is left; and
distinguishes individuals as private persons (non-belligerents) from the
state. In general, international law rests on social usage.
γ. Universal History(169).
§ 548. As the mind of a special nation is actual and its liberty is under
natural conditions, it admits on this nature-side the influence of
geographical and climatic qualities. It is in time; and as regards its
range and scope, has essentially a _particular_ principle on the lines of
which it must run through a development of its consciousness and its
actuality. It has, in short, a history of its own. But as a restricted
mind its independence is something secondary; it passes into universal
world-history, the events of which exhibit the dialectic of the several
national minds,—the judgment of the world.
§ 549. This movement is the path of liberation for the spiritual
substance, the deed by which the absolute final aim of the world is
realised in it, and the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness and
self-consciousness. It is thus the revelation and actuality of its
essential and completed essence, whereby it becomes to the outward eye a
universal spirit—a world-mind. As this development is in time and in real
existence, as it is a history, its several stages and steps are the
national minds, each of which, as single and endued by nature with a
specific character, is appointed to occupy only one grade, and accomplish
one task in the whole deed.
The presupposition that history has an essential and actual end, from the
principles of which certain characteristic results logically flow, is
called an _a priori_ view of it, and philosophy is reproached with _a
priori_ history-writing. On this point, and on history-writing in general,
this note must go into further detail. That history, and above all
universal history, is founded on an essential and actual aim, which
actually is and will be realised in it—the plan of Providence; that, in
short, there is Reason in history, must be decided on strictly
philosophical ground, and thus shown to be essentially and in fact
necessary. To presuppose such aim is blameworthy only when the assumed
conceptions or thoughts are arbitrarily adopted, and when a determined
attempt is made to force events and actions into conformity with such
conceptions. For such _a priori_ methods of treatment at the present day,
however, those are chiefly to blame who profess to be purely historical,
and who at the same time take opportunity expressly to raise their voice
against the habit of philosophising, first in general, and then in
history. Philosophy is to them a troublesome neighbour: for it is an enemy
of all arbitrariness and hasty suggestions. Such _a priori_
history-writing has sometimes burst out in quarters where one would least
have expected it, especially on the philological side, and in Germany more
than in France and England, where the art of historical writing has gone
through a process of purification to a firmer and maturer character.
Fictions, like that of a primitive age and its primitive people, possessed
from the first of the true knowledge of God and all the sciences,—of
sacerdotal races,—and, when we come to minutiae, of a Roman epic, supposed
to be the source of the legends which pass current for the history of
ancient Rome, &c., have taken the place of the pragmatising which detected
psychological motives and associations. There is a wide circle of persons
who seem to consider it incumbent on a _learned_ and _ingenious_ historian
drawing from the original sources to concoct such baseless fancies, and
form bold combinations of them from a learned rubbish-heap of
out-of-the-way and trivial facts, in defiance of the best-accredited
history.
Setting aside this subjective treatment of history, we find what is
properly the opposite view forbidding us to import into history an
_objective purpose_. This is after all synonymous with what _seems_ to be
the still more legitimate demand that the historian should proceed with
_impartiality_. This is a requirement often and especially made on the
_history of philosophy_: where it is insisted there should be no
prepossession in favour of an idea or opinion, just as a judge should have
no special sympathy for one of the contending parties. In the case of the
judge it is at the same time assumed that he would administer his office
ill and foolishly, if he had not an interest, and an exclusive interest in
justice, if he had not that for his aim and one sole aim, or if he
declined to judge at all. This requirement which we may make upon the
judge may be called _partiality_ for justice; and there is no difficulty
here in distinguishing it from _subjective_ partiality. But in speaking of
the impartiality required from the historian, this self-satisfied insipid
chatter lets the distinction disappear, and rejects both kinds of
interest. It demands that the historian shall bring with him no definite
aim and view by which he may sort out, state and criticise events, but
shall narrate them exactly in the casual mode he finds them, in their
incoherent and unintelligent particularity. Now it is at least admitted
that a history must have an object, e.g. Rome and its fortunes, or the
Decline of the grandeur of the Roman empire. But little reflection is
needed to discover that this is the presupposed end which lies at the
basis of the events themselves, as of the critical examination into their
comparative importance, i.e. their nearer or more remote relation to it. A
history without such aim and such criticism would be only an imbecile
mental divagation, not as good as a fairy tale, for even children expect a
_motif_ in their stories, a purpose at least dimly surmiseable with which
events and actions are put in relation.
In the existence of a _nation_ the substantial aim is to be a state and
preserve itself as such. A nation with no state formation, (a _mere
nation_), has strictly speaking no history,—like the nations which existed
before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of
savagery. What happens to a nation, and takes place within it, has its
essential significance in relation to the state: whereas the mere
particularities of individuals are at the greatest distance from the true
object of history. It is true that the general spirit of an age leaves its
imprint in the character of its celebrated individuals, and even their
particularities are but the very distant and the dim media through which
the collective light still plays in fainter colours. Ay, even such
singularities as a petty occurrence, a word, express not a subjective
particularity, but an age, a nation, a civilisation, in striking
portraiture and brevity; and to select such trifles shows the hand of a
historian of genius. But, on the other hand, the main mass of
singularities is a futile and useless mass, by the painstaking
accumulation of which the objects of real historical value are overwhelmed
and obscured. The essential characteristic of the spirit and its age is
always contained in the great events. It was a correct instinct which
sought to banish such portraiture of the particular and the gleaning of
insignificant traits, into the _Novel_ (as in the celebrated romances of
Walter Scott, &c.). Where the picture presents an unessential aspect of
life it is certainly in good taste to conjoin it with an unessential
material, such as the romance takes from private events and subjective
passions. But to take the individual pettinesses of an age and of the
persons in it, and, in the interest of so-called truth, weave them into
the picture of general interests, is not only against taste and judgment,
but violates the principles of objective truth. The only truth for mind is
the substantial and underlying essence, and not the trivialities of
external existence and contingency. It is therefore completely indifferent
whether such insignificancies are duly vouched for by documents, or, as in
the romance, invented to suit the character and ascribed to this or that
name and circumstances.
The point of interest of _Biography_—to say a word on that here—appears to
run directly counter to any universal scope and aim. But biography too has
for its background the historical world, with which the individual is
intimately bound up: even purely personal originality, the freak of
humour, &c. suggests by allusion that central reality and has its interest
heightened by the suggestion. The mere play of sentiment, on the contrary,
has another ground and interest than history.
The requirement of impartiality addressed to the history of philosophy
(and also, we may add, to the history of religion, first in general, and
secondly, to church history) generally implies an even more decided bar
against presupposition of any objective aim. As the State was already
called the point to which in political history criticism had to refer all
events, so here the “_Truth_” must be the object to which the several
deeds and events of the spirit would have to be referred. What is actually
done is rather to make the contrary presupposition. Histories with such an
object as religion or philosophy are understood to have only subjective
aims for their theme, i.e. only opinions and mere ideas, not an essential
and realised object like the truth. And that with the mere excuse that
there is no truth. On this assumption the sympathy with truth appears as
only a partiality of the usual sort, a partiality for opinion and mere
ideas, which all alike have no stuff in them, and are all treated as
indifferent. In that way historical truth means but correctness—an
accurate report of externals, without critical treatment save as regards
this correctness—admitting, in this case, only qualitative and
quantitative judgments, no judgments of necessity or notion (cf. notes to
§§ 172 and 175). But, really, if Rome or the German empire, &c. are an
actual and genuine object of political history, and the aim to which the
phenomena are to be related and by which they are to be judged; then in
universal history the genuine spirit, the consciousness of it and of its
essence, is even in a higher degree a true and actual object and theme,
and an aim to which all other phenomena are essentially and actually
subservient. Only therefore through their relationship to it, i.e. through
the judgment in which they are subsumed under it, while it inheres in
them, have they their value and even their existence. It is the spirit
which not merely broods _over_ history as over the waters, but lives in it
and is alone its principle of movement: and in the path of that spirit,
liberty, i.e. a development determined by the notion of spirit, is the
guiding principle and only its notion its final aim, i.e. truth. For
Spirit is consciousness. Such a doctrine—or in other words that Reason is
in history—will be partly at least a plausible faith, partly it is a
cognition of philosophy.
§ 550. This liberation of mind, in which it proceeds to come to itself and
to realise its truth, and the business of so doing, is the supreme right,
the absolute Law. The self-consciousness of a particular nation is a
vehicle for the contemporary development of the collective spirit in its
actual existence: it is the objective actuality in which that spirit for
the time invests its will. Against this absolute will the other particular
natural minds have no rights: _that_ nation dominates the world: but yet
the universal will steps onward over its property for the time being, as
over a special grade, and then delivers it over to its chance and doom.
§ 551. To such extent as this business of actuality appears as an action,
and therefore as a work of _individuals_, these individuals, as regards
the substantial issue of their labour, are _instruments_, and their
subjectivity, which is what is peculiar to them, is the empty form of
activity. What they personally have gained therefore through the
individual share they took in the substantial business (prepared and
appointed independently of them) is a formal universality or subjective
mental idea—_Fame_, which is their reward.
§ 552. The national spirit contains nature-necessity, and stands in
external existence (§ 423): the ethical substance, potentially infinite,
is actually a particular and limited substance (§§ 549, 550); on its
subjective side it labours under contingency, in the shape of its
unreflective natural usages, and its content is presented to it as
something _existing_ in time and tied to an external nature and external
world. The spirit, however, (which _thinks_ in this moral organism)
overrides and absorbs within itself the finitude attaching to it as
national spirit in its state and the state’s temporal interests, in the
system of laws and usages. It rises to apprehend itself in its
essentiality. Such apprehension, however, still has the immanent
limitedness of the national spirit. But the spirit which thinks in
universal history, stripping off at the same time those limitations of the
several national minds and its own temporal restrictions, lays hold of its
concrete universality, and rises to apprehend the absolute mind, as the
eternally actual truth in which the contemplative reason enjoys freedom,
while the necessity of nature and the necessity of history are only
ministrant to its revelation and the vessels of its honour.
The strictly technical aspects of the Mind’s elevation to God have been
spoken of in the Introduction to the Logic (cf. especially § 51, note). As
regards the starting-point of that elevation, Kant has on the whole
adopted the most correct, when he treats belief in God as proceeding from
the practical Reason. For that starting-point contains the material or
content which constitutes the content of the notion of God. But the true
concrete material is neither Being (as in the cosmological) nor mere
action by design (as in the physico-theological proof) but the Mind, the
absolute characteristic and function of which is effective reason, i.e.
the self-determining and self-realising notion itself,—Liberty. That the
elevation of subjective mind to God which these considerations give is by
Kant again deposed to a _postulate_—a mere “ought”—is the peculiar
perversity, formerly noticed, of calmly and simply reinstating as true and
valid that very antithesis of finitude, the supersession of which into
truth is the essence of that elevation.
As regards the “mediation” which, as it has been already shown (§ 192, cf.
§ 204 note), that elevation to God really involves, the point specially
calling for note is the “moment” of negation through which the essential
content of the starting-point is purged of its finitude so as to come
forth free. This factor, abstract in the formal treatment of logic, now
gets its most concrete interpretation. The finite, from which the start is
now made, is the real ethical self-consciousness. The negation through
which that consciousness raises its spirit to its truth, is the
purification, _actually_ accomplished in the ethical world, whereby its
conscience is purged of subjective opinion and its will freed from the
selfishness of desire. Genuine religion and genuine religiosity only issue
from the moral life: religion is that life rising to think, i.e. becoming
aware of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only from the
moral life and by the moral life is the Idea of God seen to be free
spirit: outside the ethical spirit therefore it is vain to seek for true
religion and religiosity.
But—as is the case with all speculative process—this development of one
thing out of another means that what appears as sequel and derivative is
rather the absolute _prius_ of what it appears to be mediated by, and what
is here in mind known as its truth.
Here then is the place to go more deeply into the reciprocal relations
between the state and religion, and in doing so to elucidate the
terminology which is familiar and current on the topic. It is evident and
apparent from what has preceded that moral life is the state retracted
into its inner heart and substance, while the state is the organisation
and actualisation of moral life; and that religion is the very substance
of the moral life itself and of the state. At this rate, the state rests
on the ethical sentiment, and that on the religious. If religion then is
the consciousness of “absolute”_ truth_, then whatever is to rank as right
and justice, as law and duty, i.e. as _true_ in the world of free will,
can be so esteemed only as it is participant in that truth, as it is
subsumed under it and is its sequel. But if the truly moral life is to be
a sequel of religion, then perforce religion must have the _genuine_
content; i.e. the idea of God it knows must be the true and real. The
ethical life is the divine spirit as indwelling in self-consciousness, as
it is actually present in a nation and its individual members. This
self-consciousness retiring upon itself out of its empirical actuality and
bringing its truth to consciousness, has in its _faith_ and in its
_conscience_ only what it has consciously secured in its spiritual
actuality. The two are inseparable: there cannot be two kinds of
conscience, one religious and another ethical, differing from the former
in body and value of truth. But in point of form, i.e. for thought and
knowledge—(and religion and ethical life belong to intelligence and are a
thinking and knowing)—the body of religious truth, as the pure
self-subsisting and therefore supreme truth, exercises a sanction over the
moral life which lies in empirical actuality. Thus for self-consciousness
religion is the “basis” of moral life and of the state. It has been the
monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables as
separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent. The view
taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas
the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some
force and power, religion was a later addition, something desirable
perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in
individuals:—or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect
on the moral life of the state, i.e. its reasonable law and constitution
which are based on a ground of their own.
As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth
while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is
primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to
the body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or
indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then
self-consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is
free. But if this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be
created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though
the _implicit_ content of religion is absolute spirit. This great
difference (to cite a specific case) comes out within the Christian
religion itself, even though here it is not the nature-element in which
the idea of God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as
a factor into its central dogma and sole theme of a God who is known in
spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in
actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first
of all, God is in the “host” presented to religious adoration as an
_external thing_. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as
such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in
the annihilation of its externality, and in the act of faith, i.e. in the
free self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be
present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalisation flows
every other phase of externality,—of bondage, non-spirituality, and
superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine
truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without
and from another order—which order again does not get possession of that
knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an
external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of
praying—partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the
subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to
pray—addressing his devotion to miracle-working images, even to bones, and
expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by
external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even
to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit
under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and
misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience,
responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.
Along with this principle of spiritual bondage, and these applications of
it in the religious life, there can only go in the legislative and
constitutional system a legal and moral bondage, and a state of
lawlessness and immorality in political life. Catholicism has been loudly
praised and is still often praised—logically enough—as the one religion
which secures the stability of governments. But in reality this applies
only to governments which are bound up with institutions founded on the
bondage of the spirit (of that spirit which should have legal and moral
liberty), i.e. with institutions that embody injustice and with a morally
corrupt and barbaric state of society. But these governments are not aware
that in fanaticism they have a terrible power, which does not rise in
hostility against them, only so long as and only on condition that they
remain sunk in the thraldom of injustice and immorality. But in mind there
is a very different power available against that externalism and
dismemberment induced by a false religion. Mind collects itself into its
inward free actuality. Philosophy awakes in the spirit of governments and
nations the wisdom to discern what is essentially and actually right and
reasonable in the real world. It was well to call these products of
thought, and in a special sense Philosophy, the wisdom of the world(170);
for thought makes the spirit’s truth an actual present, leads it into the
real world, and thus liberates it in its actuality and in its own self.
Thus set free, the content of religion assumes quite another shape. So
long as the form, i.e. our consciousness and subjectivity, lacked liberty,
it followed necessarily that self-consciousness was conceived as not
immanent in the ethical principles which religion embodies, and these
principles were set at such a distance as to seem to have true being only
as negative to actual self-consciousness. In this unreality ethical
content gets the name of _Holiness_. But once the divine spirit introduces
itself into actuality, and actuality emancipates itself to spirit, then
what in the world was a postulate of holiness is supplanted by the
actuality of _moral_ life. Instead of the vow of chastity, _marriage_ now
ranks as the ethical relation; and, therefore, as the highest on this side
of humanity stands the family. Instead of the vow of poverty (muddled up
into a contradiction of assigning merit to whosoever gives away goods to
the poor, i.e. whosoever enriches them) is the precept of action to
acquire goods through one’s own intelligence and industry,—of honesty in
commercial dealing, and in the use of property,—in short moral life in the
socio-economic sphere. And instead of the vow of obedience, true religion
sanctions obedience to the law and the legal arrangements of the state—an
obedience which is itself the true freedom, because the state is a
self-possessed, self-realising reason—in short, moral life in the state.
Thus, and thus only, can law and morality exist. The precept of religion,
“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” is not enough:
the question is to settle what is Caesar’s, what belongs to the secular
authority: and it is sufficiently notorious that the secular no less than
the ecclesiastical authority have claimed almost everything as their own.
The divine spirit must interpenetrate the entire secular life: whereby
wisdom is concrete within it, and it carries the terms of its own
justification. But that concrete indwelling is only the aforesaid ethical
organisations. It is the morality of marriage as against the sanctity of a
celibate order;—the morality of economic and industrial action against the
sanctity of poverty and its indolence;—the morality of an obedience
dedicated to the law of the state as against the sanctity of an obedience
from which law and duty are absent and where conscience is enslaved. With
the growing need for law and morality and the sense of the spirit’s
essential liberty, there sets in a conflict of spirit with the religion of
unfreedom. It is no use to organise political laws and arrangements on
principles of equity and reason, so long as in religion the principle of
unfreedom is not abandoned. A free state and a slavish religion are
incompatible. It is silly to suppose that we may try to allot them
separate spheres, under the impression that their diverse natures will
maintain an attitude of tranquillity one to another and not break out in
contradiction and battle. Principles of civil freedom can be but abstract
and superficial, and political institutions deduced from them must be, if
taken alone, untenable, so long as those principles in their wisdom
mistake religion so much as not to know that the maxims of the reason in
actuality have their last and supreme sanction in the religious conscience
in subsumption under the consciousness of “absolute” truth. Let us suppose
even that, no matter how, a code of law should arise, so to speak _a
priori_, founded on principles of reason, but in contradiction with an
established religion based on principles of spiritual unfreedom; still, as
the duty of carrying out the laws lies in the hands of individual members
of the government, and of the various classes of the administrative
_personnel_, it is vain to delude ourselves with the abstract and empty
assumption that the individuals will act only according to the letter or
meaning of the law, and not in the spirit of their religion where their
inmost conscience and supreme obligation lies. Opposed to what religion
pronounces holy, the laws appear something made by human hands: even
though backed by penalties and externally introduced, they could offer no
lasting resistance to the contradiction and attacks of the religious
spirit. Such laws, however sound their provisions may be, thus founder on
the conscience, whose spirit is different from the spirit of the laws and
refuses to sanction them. It is nothing but a modern folly to try to alter
a corrupt moral organisation by altering its political constitution and
code of laws without changing the religion,—to make a revolution without
having made a reformation, to suppose that a political constitution
opposed to the old religion could live in peace and harmony with it and
its sanctities, and that stability could be procured for the laws by
external guarantees, e.g. so-called “chambers,” and the power given them
to fix the budget, &c. (cf. § 544 note). At best it is only a temporary
expedient—when it is obviously too great a task to descend into the depths
of the religious spirit and to raise that same spirit to its truth—to seek
to separate law and justice from religion. Those guarantees are but rotten
bulwarks against the consciences of the persons charged with administering
the laws—among which laws these guarantees are included. It is indeed the
height and profanity of contradiction to seek to bind and subject to the
secular code the religious conscience to which mere human law is a thing
profane.
The perception had dawned upon Plato with great clearness of the gulf
which in his day had commenced to divide the established religion and the
political constitution, on one hand, from those deeper requirements which,
on the other hand, were made upon religion and politics by liberty which
had learnt to recognise its inner life. Plato gets hold of the thought
that a genuine constitution and a sound political life have their deeper
foundation on the Idea,—on the essentially and actually universal and
genuine principles of eternal righteousness. Now to see and ascertain what
these are is certainly the function and the business of _philosophy_. It
is from this point of view that Plato breaks out into the celebrated or
notorious passage where he makes Socrates emphatically state that
philosophy and political power must coincide, that the Idea must be
regent, if the distress of nations is to see its end. What Plato thus
definitely set before his mind was that the Idea—which implicitly indeed
is the free self-determining thought—could not get into consciousness save
only in the form of a thought; that the substance of the thought could
only be true when set forth as a universal, and as such brought to
consciousness under its most abstract form.
To compare the Platonic standpoint in all its definiteness with the point
of view from which the relationship of state and religion is here
regarded, the notional differences on which everything turns must be
recalled to mind. The first of these is that in natural things their
substance or genus is different from their existence in which that
substance is as subject: further that this subjective existence of the
genus is distinct from that which it gets, when specially set in relief as
genus, or, to put it simply, as the universal in a mental concept or idea.
This additional “individuality”—the soil on which the universal and
underlying principle _freely_ and expressly exists,—is the intellectual
and thinking _self_. In the case of _natural_ things their truth and
reality does not get the form of universality and essentiality through
themselves, and their “individuality” is not itself the form: the form is
only found in subjective thinking, which in philosophy gives that
universal truth and reality an existence of its own. In man’s case it is
otherwise: his truth and reality is the free mind itself, and it comes to
existence in his self-consciousness. This absolute nucleus of man—mind
intrinsically concrete—is just this—to have the form (to have thinking)
itself for a content. To the height of the thinking consciousness of this
principle Aristotle ascended in his notion of the entelechy of thought,
(which is νοῆσις τῆς νοήσεως), thus surmounting the Platonic Idea (the
genus, or essential being). But thought always—and that on account of this
very principle—contains the immediate self-subsistence of subjectivity no
less than it contains universality; the genuine Idea of the intrinsically
concrete mind is just as essentially under the one of its terms
(subjective consciousness) as under the other (universality): and in the
one as in the other it is the same substantial content. Under the
subjective form, however, fall feeling, intuition, pictorial
representation: and it is in fact necessary that in point of time the
consciousness of the absolute Idea should be first reached and apprehended
in this form: in other words, it must exist in its immediate reality as
religion, earlier than it does as philosophy. Philosophy is a later
development from this basis (just as Greek philosophy itself is later than
Greek religion), and in fact reaches its completion by catching and
comprehending in all its definite essentiality that principle of spirit
which first manifests itself in religion. But Greek philosophy could set
itself up only in opposition to Greek religion: the unity of thought and
the substantiality of the Idea could take up none but a hostile attitude
to an imaginative polytheism, and to the gladsome and frivolous humours of
its poetic creations. The _form_ in its infinite truth, the _subjectivity_
of mind, broke forth at first only as a subjective free _thinking_, which
was not yet identical with the _substantiality_ itself,—and thus this
underlying principle was not yet apprehended as _absolute mind_. Thus
religion might appear as first purified only through philosophy,—through
pure self-existent thought: but the form pervading this underlying
principle—the form which philosophy attacked—was that creative
imagination.
Political power, which is developed similarly, but earlier than
philosophy, from religion, exhibits the onesidedness, which in the actual
world may infect its _implicitly_ true Idea, as demoralisation. Plato, in
common with all his thinking contemporaries, perceived this demoralisation
of democracy and the defectiveness even of its principle; he set in relief
accordingly the underlying principle of the state, but could not work into
his idea of it the infinite form of subjectivity, which still escaped his
intelligence. His state is therefore, on its own showing, wanting in
subjective liberty (§ 503 note, § 513, &c.). The truth which should be
immanent in the state, should knit it together and control it, he, for
these reasons, got hold of only the form of thought-out truth, of
philosophy; and hence he makes that utterance that “so long as
philosophers do not rule in the states, or those who are now called kings
and rulers do not soundly and comprehensively philosophise, so long
neither the state nor the race of men can be liberated from evils,—so long
will the idea of the political constitution fall short of possibility and
not see the light of the sun.” It was not vouchsafed to Plato to go on so
far as to say that so long as true religion did not spring up in the world
and hold sway in political life, so long the genuine principle of the
state had not come into actuality. But so long too this principle could
not emerge even in thought, nor could thought lay hold of the genuine idea
of the state,—the idea of the substantial moral life, with which is
identical the liberty of an independent self-consciousness. Only in the
principle of mind, which is aware of its own essence, is implicitly in
absolute liberty, and has its actuality in the act of self-liberation,
does the absolute possibility and necessity exist for political power,
religion, and the principles of philosophy coinciding in one, and for
accomplishing the reconciliation of actuality in general with the mind, of
the state with the religious conscience as well as with the philosophical
consciousness. Self-realising subjectivity is in this case absolutely
identical with substantial universality. Hence religion as such, and the
state as such,—both as forms in which the principle exists—each contain
the absolute truth: so that the truth, in its philosophic phase, is after
all only in one of its forms. But even religion, as it grows and expands,
lets other aspects of the Idea of humanity grow and expand also (§ 500
sqq.). As it is left therefore behind, in its first immediate, and so also
one-sided phase, Religion may, or rather _must_, appear in its existence
degraded to sensuous externality, and thus in the sequel become an
influence to oppress liberty of spirit and to deprave political life.
Still the principle has in it the infinite “elasticity” of the “absolute”
form, so as to overcome this depraving of the form-determination (and of
the content by these means), and to bring about the reconciliation of the
spirit in itself. Thus ultimately, in the Protestant conscience the
principles of the religious and of the ethical conscience come to be one
and the same: the free spirit learning to see itself in its reasonableness
and truth. In the Protestant state, the constitution and the code, as well
as their several applications, embody the principle and the development of
the moral life, which proceeds and can only proceed from the truth of
religion, when reinstated in its original principle and in that way as
such first become actual. The moral life of the state and the religious
spirituality of the state are thus reciprocal guarantees of strength.
SECTION III. ABSOLUTE MIND(171).
§ 553. The _notion_ of mind has its _reality_ in the mind. If this reality
in identity with that notion is to exist as the consciousness of the
absolute Idea, then the necessary aspect is that the _implicitly_ free
intelligence be in its actuality liberated to its notion, if that
actuality is to be a vehicle worthy of it. The subjective and the
objective spirit are to be looked on as the road on which this aspect of
_reality_ or existence rises to maturity.
§ 554. The absolute mind, while it is self-centred _identity_, is always
also identity returning and ever returned into itself: if it is the one
and universal _substance_ it is so as a spirit, discerning itself into a
self and a consciousness, for which it is as substance. _Religion_, as
this supreme sphere may be in general designated, if it has on one hand to
be studied as issuing from the subject and having its home in the subject,
must no less be regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute spirit
which as spirit is in its community.
That here, as always, belief or faith is not opposite to consciousness or
knowledge, but rather to a sort of knowledge, and that belief is only a
particular form of the latter, has been remarked already (§ 63 note). If
nowadays there is so little consciousness of God, and his objective
essence is so little dwelt upon, while people speak so much more of the
subjective side of religion, i.e. of God’s indwelling in us, and if that
and not the truth as such is called for,—in this there is at least the
correct principle that God must be apprehended as spirit in his community.
§ 555. The subjective consciousness of the absolute spirit is essentially
and intrinsically a process, the immediate and substantial unity of which
is the _Belief_ in the witness of the spirit as the _certainty_ of
objective truth. Belief, at once this immediate unity and containing it as
a reciprocal dependence of these different terms, has in _devotion_—the
implicit or more explicit act of worship (_cultus_)—passed over into the
process of superseding the contrast till it becomes spiritual liberation,
the process of authenticating that first certainty by this intermediation,
and of gaining its concrete determination, viz. reconciliation, the
actuality of the spirit.
Sub-Section A. Art.
§ 556. As this consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape, its
immediacy produces the factor of finitude in Art. On one hand that is, it
breaks up into a work of external common existence, into the subject which
produces that work, and the subject which contemplates and worships it.
But, on the other hand, it is the concrete _contemplation_ and mental
picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the _Ideal_. In this ideal, or
the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy,
which is only a _sign_ of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing
spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it
alone:—the shape or form of _Beauty_.
§ 557. The sensuous externality attaching to the beautiful,—the _form of
immediacy_ as such,—at the same time _qualifies_ what it _embodies_: and
the God (of art) has with his spirituality at the same time the stamp upon
him of a natural medium or natural phase of existence—He contains the
so-called _unity_ of nature and spirit—i.e. the immediate unity in
sensuously intuitional form—hence not the spiritual unity, in which the
natural would be put only as “ideal,” as superseded in spirit, and the
spiritual content would be only in self-relation. It is not the absolute
spirit which enters this consciousness. On the subjective side the
community has of course an ethical life, aware, as it is, of the
spirituality of its essence: and its self-consciousness and actuality are
in it elevated to substantial liberty. But with the stigma of immediacy
upon it, the subject’s liberty is only a _manner of life_, without the
infinite self-reflection and the subjective inwardness of _conscience_.
These considerations govern in their further developments the devotion and
the worship in the religion of fine art.
§ 558. For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires
not only an external given material—(under which are also included
subjective images and ideas), but—for the expression of spiritual
truth—must use the given forms of nature with a significance which art
must divine and possess (cf. § 411). Of all such forms the human is the
highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its
corporeity and thus its visible expression.
This disposes of the principle of the _imitation of nature_ in art: a
point on which it is impossible to come to an understanding while a
distinction is left thus abstract,—in other words, so long as the natural
is only taken in its externality, not as the “characteristic” meaningful
nature-form which is significant of spirit.
§ 559. In such single shapes the “absolute” mind cannot be made explicit:
in and to art therefore the spirit is a limited natural spirit whose
implicit universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in
detail, breaks up into an indeterminate polytheism. With the essential
restrictedness of its content, Beauty in general goes no further than a
penetration of the vision or image by the spiritual principle,—something
formal, so that the thought embodied, or the idea, can, like the material
which it uses to work in, be of the most diverse and unessential kind, and
still the work be something beautiful and a work of art.
§ 560. The one-sidedness of _immediacy_ on the part of the Ideal involves
the opposite one-sidedness (§ 556) that it is something _made_ by the
artist. The subject or agent is the mere technical activity: and the work
of art is only then an expression of the God, when there is no sign of
subjective particularity in it, and the net power of the indwelling spirit
is conceived and born into the world, without admixture and unspotted from
its contingency. But as liberty only goes as far as there is thought, the
action inspired with the fullness of this indwelling power, the artist’s
_enthusiasm_, is like a foreign force under which he is bound and passive;
the artistic _production_ has on its part the form of natural immediacy,
it belongs to the _genius_ or particular endowment of the artist,—and is
at the same time a labour concerned with technical cleverness and
mechanical externalities. The work of art therefore is just as much a work
due to free option, and the artist is the master of the God.
§ 561. In work so inspired the reconciliation appears so obvious in its
initial stage that it is without more ado accomplished in the subjective
self-consciousness, which is thus self-confident and of good cheer,
without the depth and without the sense of its antithesis to the absolute
essence. On the further side of the perfection (which is reached in such
reconciliation, in the beauty of _classical art_) lies the art of
sublimity,—_symbolic art_, in which the figuration suitable to the Idea is
not yet found, and the thought as going forth and wrestling with the
figure is exhibited as a negative attitude to it, and yet all the while
toiling to work itself into it. The meaning or theme thus shows it has not
yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet conscious of
itself, as free spirit. The artist’s theme only is as the abstract God of
pure thought, or an effort towards him,—a restless and unappeased effort
which throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to find its
goal.
§ 562. In another way the Idea and the sensuous figure it appears in are
incompatible; and that is where the infinite form, subjectivity, is not as
in the first extreme a mere superficial personality, but its inmost depth,
and God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an
external form, but as only finding himself in himself, and thus giving
himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone. _Romantic art_
gives up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of
beauty: it presents him as only condescending to appearance, and the
divine as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it always
disengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards
its significance.
The Philosophy of Religion has to discover the logical necessity in the
progress by which the Being, known as the Absolute, assumes fuller and
firmer features; it has to note to what particular feature the kind of
cultus corresponds,—and then to see how the secular self-consciousness,
the consciousness of what is the supreme vocation of man,—in short how the
nature of a nation’s moral life, the principle of its law, of its actual
liberty, and of its constitution, as well as of its art and science,
corresponds to the principle which constitutes the substance of a
religion. That all these elements of a nation’s actuality constitute one
systematic totality, that one spirit creates and informs them, is a truth
on which follows the further truth that the history of religions coincides
with the world-history.
As regards the close connexion of art with the various religions it may be
specially noted that _beautiful_ art can only belong to those religions in
which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is
not yet absolute. In religions where the Idea has not yet been revealed
and known in its free character, though the craving for art is felt in
order to bring in imaginative visibility to consciousness the idea of the
supreme being, and though art is the sole organ in which the abstract and
radically indistinct content,—a mixture from natural and spiritual
sources,—can try to bring itself to consciousness;—still this art is
defective; its form is defective because its subject-matter and theme is
so,—for the defect in subject-matter comes from the form not being
immanent in it. The representations of this symbolic art keep a certain
tastelessness and stolidity—for the principle it embodies is itself stolid
and dull, and hence has not the power freely to transmute the external to
significance and shape. Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its
condition the self-consciousness of the free spirit,—the consciousness
that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its own:
it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is
thus the inner form that gives utterance to itself alone.
But with a further and deeper study, we see that the advent of art, in a
religion still in the bonds of sensuous externality, shows that such
religion is on the decline. At the very time it seems to give religion the
supreme glorification, expression and brilliancy, it has lifted the
religion away over its limitation. In the sublime divinity to which the
work of art succeeds in giving expression the artistic genius and the
spectator find themselves at home, with their personal sense and feeling,
satisfied and liberated: to them the vision and the consciousness of free
spirit has been vouchsafed and attained. Beautiful art, from its side, has
thus performed the same service as philosophy: it has purified the spirit
from its thraldom. The older religion in which the need of fine art, and
just for that reason, is first generated, looks up in its principle to an
other-world which is sensuous and unmeaning: the images adored by its
devotees are hideous idols regarded as wonder-working talismans, which
point to the unspiritual objectivity of that other world,—and bones
perform a similar or even a better service than such images. But even fine
art is only a grade of liberation, not the supreme liberation itself.—The
genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought,—the medium in
which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is
accompanied with reverence,—is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the
work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness.
§ 563. Beautiful Art, like the religion peculiar to it, has its future in
true religion. The restricted value of the Idea passes utterly and
naturally into the universality identical with the infinite form;—the
vision in which consciousness has to depend upon the senses passes into a
self-mediating knowledge, into an existence which is itself
knowledge,—into _revelation_. Thus the principle which gives the Idea its
content is that it embody free intelligence, and as “absolute” _spirit it
is for the spirit_.
Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion(172).
§ 564. It lies essentially in the notion of religion,—the religion i.e.
whose content is absolute mind—that it be _revealed_, and, what is more,
revealed _by God_. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is
mind) is a self-determining principle, as infinite self-realising form,—it
therefore is manifestation out and out. The spirit is only spirit in so
far as it is for the spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the
absolute spirit which manifests no longer abstract elements of its being
but itself.
The old conception—due to a one-sided survey of human life—of Nemesis,
which made the divinity and its action in the world only a levelling
power, dashing to pieces everything high and great,—was confronted by
Plato and Aristotle with the doctrine that God is not _envious_. The same
answer may be given to the modern assertions that man cannot ascertain
God. These assertions (and more than assertions they are not) are the more
illogical, because made within a religion which is expressly called the
revealed; for according to them it would rather be the religion in which
nothing of God was revealed, in which he had not revealed himself, and
those belonging to it would be the heathen “who know not God.” If the word
of God is taken in earnest in religion at all, it is from Him, the theme
and centre of religion, that the method of divine knowledge may and must
begin: and if self-revelation is refused Him, then the only thing left to
constitute His nature would be to ascribe envy to Him. But clearly if the
word Mind is to have a meaning, it implies the revelation of Him.
If we recollect how intricate is the knowledge of the divine Mind for
those who are not content with the homely pictures of faith but proceed to
thought,—at first only “rationalising” reflection, but afterwards, as in
duty bound, to speculative comprehension, it may almost create surprise
that so many, and especially theologians whose vocation it is to deal with
these Ideas, have tried to get off their task by gladly accepting anything
offered them for this behoof. And nothing serves better to shirk it than
to adopt the conclusion that man knows nothing of God. To know what God as
spirit is—to apprehend this accurately and distinctly in thoughts—requires
careful and thorough speculation. It includes, in its fore-front, the
propositions: God is God only so far as he knows himself: his
self-knowledge is, further, his self-consciousness in man, and man’s
knowledge _of_ God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God.—See the
profound elucidation of these propositions in the work from which they are
taken: _Aphorisms on Knowing and Not-knowing, &c._, by C. F. G—l.: Berlin
1829.
§ 565. When the immediacy and sensuousness of shape and knowledge is
superseded, God is, in point of content, the essential and actual spirit
of nature and spirit, while in point of form he is, first of all,
presented to consciousness as a mental representation. This
quasi-pictorial representation gives to the elements of his content, on
one hand, a separate being, making them presuppositions towards each
other, and phenomena which succeed each other; their relationship it makes
a series of events according to finite reflective categories. But, on the
other hand, such a form of finite representationalism is also overcome and
superseded in the faith which realises one spirit and in the devotion of
worship.
§ 566. In this separating, the form parts from the content: and in the
form the different functions of the notion part off into special spheres
or media, in each of which the absolute spirit exhibits itself; (α) as
eternal content, abiding self-centred, even in its manifestation; (β) as
distinction of the eternal essence from its manifestation, which by this
difference becomes the phenomenal world into which the content enters; (γ)
as infinite return, and reconciliation with the eternal being, of the
world it gave away—the withdrawal of the eternal from the phenomenal into
the unity of its fullness.
§ 567. (α) Under the “moment” of _Universality_,—the sphere of pure
thought or the abstract medium of essence,—it is therefore the absolute
spirit, which is at first the presupposed principle, not however staying
aloof and inert, but (as underlying and essential power under the
reflective category of causality) creator of heaven and earth: but yet in
this eternal sphere rather only begetting himself as his _son_, with whom,
though different, he still remains in original identity,—just as, again,
this differentiation of him from the universal essence eternally
supersedes itself, and, though this mediating of a self-superseding
mediation, the first substance is essentially as _concrete individuality_
and subjectivity,—is the _Spirit_.
§ 568. (β) Under the “moment” of _particularity_, or of judgment, it is
this concrete eternal being which is presupposed: its movement is the
creation of the phenomenal world. The eternal “moment” of mediation—of the
only Son—divides itself to become the antithesis of two separate worlds.
On one hand is heaven and earth, the elemental and the concrete nature,—on
the other hand, standing in action and reaction with such nature, the
spirit, which therefore is finite. That spirit, as the extreme of inherent
negativity, completes its independence till it becomes wickedness, and is
that extreme through its connexion with a confronting nature and through
its own naturalness thereby investing it. Yet, amid that naturalness, it
is, when it thinks, directed towards the Eternal, though, for that reason,
only standing to it in an external connexion.
§ 569. (γ) Under the “moment” of _individuality_ as such,—of subjectivity
and the notion itself, in which the contrast of universal and particular
has sunk to its identical ground, the place of presupposition (1) is taken
by the _universal_ substance, as actualised out of its abstraction into an
_individual_ self-consciousness. This individual, who as such is
identified with the essence,—(in the Eternal sphere he is called the
Son)—is transplanted into the world of time, and in him wickedness is
implicitly overcome. Further, this immediate, and thus sensuous, existence
of the absolutely concrete is represented as putting himself in judgment
and expiring in the pain of _negativity_, in which he, as infinite
subjectivity, keeps himself unchanged, and thus, as absolute return from
that negativity and as universal unity of universal and individual
essentiality, has realised his being as the Idea of the spirit, eternal,
but alive and present in the world.
§ 570. (2) This objective totality of the divine man who is the Idea of
the spirit is the implicit presupposition for the _finite_ immediacy of
the single subject. For such subject therefore it is at first an Other, an
object of contemplating vision,—but the vision of implicit truth, through
which witness of the spirit in him, he, on account of his immediate
nature, at first characterised himself as nought and wicked. But,
secondly, after the example of his truth, by means of the faith on the
unity (in that example implicitly accomplished) of universal and
individual essence, he is also the movement to throw off his immediacy,
his natural man and self-will, to close himself in unity with that example
(who is his implicit life) in the pain of negativity, and thus to know
himself made one with the essential Being. Thus the Being of Beings (3)
through this mediation brings about its own indwelling in
self-consciousness, and is the actual presence of the essential and
self-subsisting spirit who is all in all.
§ 571. These three syllogisms, constituting the one syllogism of the
absolute self-mediation of spirit, are the revelation of that spirit whose
life is set out as a cycle of concrete shapes in pictorial thought. From
this its separation into parts, with a temporal and external sequence, the
unfolding of the mediation contracts itself in the result,—where the
spirit closes in unity with itself,—not merely to the simplicity of faith
and devotional feeling, but even to thought. In the immanent simplicity of
thought the unfolding still has its expansion, yet is all the while known
as an indivisible coherence of the universal, simple, and eternal spirit
in itself. In this form of truth, truth is the object of _philosophy_.
If the result—the realised Spirit in which all meditation has superseded
itself—is taken in a merely formal, contentless sense, so that the spirit
is not also at the same time known as _implicitly_ existent and
objectively self-unfolding;—then that infinite subjectivity is the merely
formal self-consciousness, knowing itself in itself as absolute,—Irony.
Irony, which can make every objective reality nought and vain, is itself
the emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and
its own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master
over it, is not bound by it,—and, with the assertion that it stands on the
very summit of religion and philosophy, falls rather back into the vanity
of wilfulness. It is only in proportion as the pure infinite form, the
self-centred manifestation, throws off the one-sidedness of subjectivity
in which it is the vanity of thought, that it is the free thought which
has its infinite characteristic at the same time as essential and actual
content, and has that content as an object in which it is also free.
Thinking, so far, is only the formal aspect of the absolute content.
Sub-Section C. Philosophy.
§ 572. This science is the unity of Art and Religion. Whereas the
vision-method of Art, external in point of form, is but subjective
production and shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes,
and whereas Religion, with its separation into parts, opens it out in
mental picture, and mediates what is thus opened out; Philosophy not
merely keeps them together to make a total, but even unifies them into the
simple spiritual vision, and then in that raises them to self-conscious
thought. Such consciousness is thus the intelligible unity (cognised by
thought) of art and religion, in which the diverse elements in the content
are cognised as necessary, and this necessary as free.
§ 573. Philosophy thus characterises itself as a cognition of the
necessity in the content of the absolute picture-idea, as also of the
necessity in the two forms—on one hand, immediate vision and its poetry,
and the objective and external revelation presupposed by
representation,—on the other hand, first the subjective retreat inwards,
then the subjective movement of faith and its final identification with
the presupposed object. This cognition is thus the _recognition_ of this
content and its form; it is the liberation from the one-sidedness of the
forms, elevation of them into the absolute form, which determines itself
to content, remains identical with it, and is in that the cognition of
that essential and actual necessity. This movement, which philosophy is,
finds itself already accomplished, when at the close it seizes its own
notion,—i.e. only _looks back_ on its knowledge.
Here might seem to be the place to treat in a definite exposition of the
reciprocal relations of philosophy and religion. The whole question turns
entirely on the difference of the forms of speculative thought from the
forms of mental representation and “reflecting” intellect. But it is the
whole cycle of philosophy, and of logic in particular, which has not
merely taught and made known this difference, but also criticised it, or
rather has let its nature develop and judge itself by these very
categories. It is only by an insight into the value of these forms that
the true and needful conviction can be gained, that the content of
religion and philosophy is the same,—leaving out, of course, the further
details of external nature and finite mind which fall outside the range of
religion. But religion is the truth _for all men_: faith rests on the
witness of the spirit, which as witnessing is the spirit in man. This
witness—the underlying essence in all humanity—takes, when driven to
expound itself, its first definite form under those acquired habits of
thought which his secular consciousness and intellect otherwise employs.
In this way the truth becomes liable to the terms and conditions of
finitude in general. This does not prevent the spirit, even in employing
sensuous ideas and finite categories of thought, from retaining its
content (which as religion is essentially speculative,) with a tenacity
which does violence to them, and acts _inconsistently_ towards them. By
this inconsistency it corrects their defects. Nothing easier therefore for
the “Rationalist” than to point out contradictions in the exposition of
the faith, and then to prepare triumphs for its principle of formal
identity. If the spirit yields to this finite reflection, which has
usurped the title of reason and philosophy—(“Rationalism”)—it strips
religious truth of its infinity and makes it in reality nought. Religion
in that case is completely in the right in guarding herself against such
reason and philosophy and treating them as enemies. But it is another
thing when religion sets herself against comprehending reason, and against
philosophy in general, and specially against a philosophy of which the
doctrine is speculative, and so religious. Such an opposition proceeds
from failure to appreciate the difference indicated and the value of
spiritual form in general, and particularly of the logical form; or, to be
more precise, still from failure to note the distinction of the
content—which may be in both the same—from these forms. It is on the
ground of form that philosophy has been reproached and accused by the
religious party; just as conversely its speculative content has brought
the same charges upon it from a self-styled philosophy—and from a pithless
orthodoxy. It had too little of God in it for the former; too much for the
latter.
The charge of _Atheism_, which used often to be brought against philosophy
(that it has _too little_ of God), has grown rare: the more wide-spread
grows the charge of Pantheism, that it has _too much_ of him:—so much so,
that it is treated not so much as an imputation, but as a proved fact, or
a sheer fact which needs no proof. Piety, in particular, which with its
pious airs of superiority fancies itself free to dispense with proof, goes
hand in hand with empty rationalism—(which means to be so much opposed to
it, though both repose really on the same habit of mind)—in the wanton
assertion, almost as if it merely mentioned a notorious fact, that
Philosophy is the All-one doctrine, or Pantheism. It must be said that it
was more to the credit of piety and theology when they accused a
philosophical system (e.g. Spinozism) of Atheism than of Pantheism, though
the former imputation at the first glance looks more cruel and insidious
(cf. § 71 note). The imputation of Atheism presupposes a definite idea of
a full and real God, and arises because the popular idea does not detect
in the philosophical notion the peculiar form to which it is attached.
Philosophy indeed can recognise its own forms in the categories of
religious consciousness, and even its own teaching in the doctrine of
religion—which therefore it does not disparage. But the converse is not
true: the religious consciousness does not apply the criticism of thought
to itself, does not comprehend itself, and is therefore, as it stands,
exclusive. To impute Pantheism instead of Atheism to Philosophy is part of
the modern habit of mind—of the new piety and new theology. For them
philosophy has too much of God:—so much so, that, if we believe them, it
asserts that God is everything and everything is God. This new theology,
which makes religion only a subjective feeling and denies the knowledge of
the divine nature, thus retains nothing more than a God in general without
objective characteristics. Without interest of its own for the concrete,
fulfilled notion of God, it treats it only as an interest which _others_
once had, and hence treats what belongs to the doctrine of God’s concrete
nature as something merely historical. The indeterminate God is to be
found in all religions; every kind of piety (§ 72)—that of the Hindoo to
asses, cows,—or to dalai-lamas,—that of the Egyptians to the ox—is always
adoration of an object which, with all its absurdities, also contains the
generic abstract, God in General. If this theory needs no more than such a
God, so as to find God in everything called religion, it must at least
find such a God recognised even in philosophy, and can no longer accuse it
of Atheism. The mitigation of the reproach of Atheism into that of
Pantheism has its ground therefore in the superficial idea to which this
mildness has attenuated and emptied God. As that popular idea clings to
its abstract universality, from which all definite quality is excluded,
all such definiteness is only the non-divine, the secularity of things,
thus left standing in fixed undisturbed substantiality. On such a
presupposition, even after philosophy has maintained God’s absolute
universality, and the consequent untruth of the being of external things,
the hearer clings as he did before to his belief that secular things still
keep their being, and form all that is definite in the divine
universality. He thus changes that universality into what he calls the
pantheistic:—_Everything is_—(empirical things, without distinction,
whether higher or lower in the scale, _are_)—all possess substantiality;
and so—thus he understands philosophy—each and every secular thing is God.
It is only his own stupidity, and the falsifications due to such
misconception, which generate the imagination and the allegation of such
pantheism.
But if those who give out that a certain philosophy is Pantheism, are
unable and unwilling to see this—for it is just to see the notion that
they refuse—they should before everything have verified the alleged fact
that _any one philosopher, or any one man_, had really ascribed
substantial or objective and inherent reality to _all_ things and regarded
them as God:—that such an idea had ever come into the hand of any body but
themselves. This allegation I will further elucidate in this exoteric
discussion: and the only way to do so is to set down the evidence. If we
want to take so-called Pantheism in its most poetical, most sublime, or if
you will, its grossest shape, we must, as is well known, consult the
oriental poets: and the most copious delineations of it are found in
Hindoo literature. Amongst the abundant resources open to our disposal on
this topic, I select—as the most authentic statement accessible—the
Bhagavat-Gita, and amongst its effusions, prolix and reiterative _ad
nauseam_, some of the most telling passages. In the 10th Lesson (in
Schlegel, p. 162) Krishna says of himself(173):—“I am the self, seated in
the hearts of all beings. I am the beginning and the middle and the end
also of all beings ... I am the beaming sun amongst the shining ones, and
the moon among the lunar mansions.... Amongst the Vedas I am the
Sâma-Veda: I am mind amongst the senses: I am consciousness in living
beings. And I am Sankara (Siva) among the Rudras, ... Meru among the
high-topped mountains, ... the Himalaya among the firmly-fixed
(mountains).... Among beasts I am the lord of beasts.... Among letters I
am the letter A.... I am the spring among the seasons.... I am also that
which is the seed of all things: there is nothing moveable or immoveable
which can exist without me.”
Even in these totally sensuous delineations, Krishna (and we must not
suppose there is, besides Krishna, still God, or a God besides; as he said
before he was Siva, or Indra, so it is afterwards said that Brahma too is
in him) makes himself out to be—not everything, but only—the most
excellent of everything. Everywhere there is a distinction drawn between
external, unessential existences, and one essential amongst them, which he
is. Even when, at the beginning of the passage, he is said to be the
beginning, middle, and end of living things, this totality is
distinguished from the living things themselves as single existences. Even
such a picture which extends deity far and wide in its existence cannot be
called pantheism: we must rather say that in the infinitely multiple
empirical world, everything is reduced to a limited number of essential
existences, to a polytheism. But even what has been quoted shows that
these very substantialities of the externally-existent do not retain the
independence entitling them to be named Gods; even Siva, Indra, &c. melt
into the one Krishna.
This reduction is more expressly made in the following scene (7th Lesson,
p. 7 sqq.). Krishna says: “I am the producer and the destroyer of the
whole universe. There is nothing else higher than myself; all this is
woven upon me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread. I am the taste in
water;... I am the light of the sun and the moon; I am ‘Om’ in all the
Vedas.... I am life in all beings.... I am the discernment of the
discerning ones.... I am also the strength of the strong.” Then he adds:
“The whole universe deluded by these three states of mind developed from
the qualities [sc. goodness, passion, darkness] does not know me who am
beyond them and inexhaustible: for this delusion of mine,” [even the Maya
is _his_, nothing independent], “developed from the qualities is divine
and difficult to transcend. Those cross beyond this delusion who resort to
me alone.” Then the picture gathers itself up in a simple expression: “At
the end of many lives, the man possessed of knowledge approaches me,
(believing) that Vasudeva is everything. Such a high-souled mind is very
hard to find. Those who are deprived of knowledge by various desires
approach other divinities... Whichever form of deity one worships with
faith, from it he obtains the beneficial things he desires really given by
me. But the fruit thus obtained by those of little judgment is
perishable.... The undiscerning ones, not knowing my transcendent and
inexhaustible essence, than which there is nothing higher, think me who am
unperceived to have become perceptible.”
This “All,” which Krishna calls himself, is not, any more than the Eleatic
One, and the Spinozan Substance, the Every-thing. This every-thing,
rather, the infinitely-manifold sensuous manifold of the finite is in all
these pictures, but defined as the “accidental,” without essential being
of its very own, but having its truth in the substance, the One which, as
different from that accidental, is alone the divine and God. Hindooism
however has the higher conception of Brahma, the pure unity of thought in
itself, where the empirical everything of the world, as also those
proximate substantialities, called Gods, vanish. On that account
Colebrooke and many others have described the Hindoo religion as at bottom
a Monotheism. That this description is not incorrect is clear from these
short citations. But so little concrete is this divine unity—spiritual as
its idea of God is—so powerless its grip, so to speak—that Hindooism, with
a monstrous inconsistency, is also the maddest of polytheisms. But the
idolatry of the wretched Hindoo, when he adores the ape, or other
creature, is still a long way from that wretched fancy of a Pantheism, to
which everything is God, and God everything. Hindoo monotheism moreover is
itself an example how little comes of mere monotheism, if the Idea of God
is not deeply determinate in itself. For that unity, if it be
intrinsically abstract and therefore empty, tends of itself to let
whatever is concrete, outside it—be it as a lot of Gods or as secular,
empirical individuals—keep its independence. That pantheism indeed—on the
shallow conception of it—might with a show of logic as well be called a
monotheism: for if God, as it says, is identical with the world, then as
there is only one world there would be in that pantheism only one God.
Perhaps the empty numerical unity must be predicated of the world: but
such abstract predication of it has no further special interest; on the
contrary, a mere numerical unity just means that its _content_ is an
infinite multeity and variety of finitudes. But it is that delusion with
the empty unity, which alone makes possible and induces the wrong idea of
pantheism. It is only the picture—floating in the indefinite blue—of the
world as _one thing_, _the all_, that could ever be considered capable of
combining with God: only on that assumption could philosophy be supposed
to teach that God is the world: for if the world were taken as it is, as
everything, as the endless lot of empirical existence, then it would
hardly have been even held possible to suppose a pantheism which asserted
of such stuff that it is God.
But to go back again to the question of fact. If we want to see the
consciousness of the One—not as with the Hindoos split between the
featureless unity of abstract thought, on one hand, and on the other, the
long-winded weary story of its particular detail, but—in its finest purity
and sublimity, we must consult the Mohammedans. If e.g. in the excellent
Jelaleddin-Rumi in particular, we find the unity of the soul with the One
set forth, and that unity described as love, this spiritual unity is an
exaltation above the finite and vulgar, a transfiguration of the natural
and the spiritual, in which the externalism and transitoriness of
immediate nature, and of empirical secular spirit, is discarded and
absorbed(174).
I refrain from accumulating further examples of the religious and poetic
conceptions which it is customary to call pantheistic. Of the philosophies
to which that name is given, the Eleatic, or Spinozist, it has been
remarked earlier (§ 50, note) that so far are they from identifying God
with the world and making him finite, that in these systems this
“everything” has no truth, and that we should rather call them
monotheistic, or, in relation to the popular idea of the world, acosmical.
They are most accurately called systems which apprehend the Absolute only
as substance. Of the oriental, especially the Mohammedan, modes of
envisaging God, we may rather say that they represent the Absolute as the
utterly universal genus which dwells in the species or existences, but
dwells so potently that these existences have no actual reality. The fault
of all these modes of thought and systems is that they stop short of
defining substance as subject and as mind.
These systems and modes of pictorial conception originate from the one
need common to all philosophies and all religions of getting an idea of
God, and, secondly, of the relationship of God and the world. (In
philosophy it is specially made out that the determination of God’s nature
determines his relations with the world.) The “reflective” understanding
begins by rejecting all systems and modes of conception, which, whether
they spring from heart, imagination or speculation, express the
interconnexion of God and the world: and in order to have God pure in
faith or consciousness, he is as essence parted from appearance, as
infinite from the finite. But, after this partition, the conviction arises
also that the appearance has a relation to the essence, the finite to the
infinite, and so on: and thus arises the question of reflection as to the
nature of this relation. It is in the reflective form that the whole
difficulty of the affair lies, and that causes this relation to be called
incomprehensible by the agnostic. The close of philosophy is not the
place, even in a general exoteric discussion, to waste a word on what a
“notion” means. But as the view taken of this relation is closely
connected with the view taken of philosophy generally and with all
imputations against it, we may still add the remark that though philosophy
certainly has to do with unity in general, it is not however with abstract
unity, mere identity, and the empty absolute, but with concrete unity (the
notion), and that in its whole course it has to do with nothing else;—that
each step in its advance is a peculiar term or phase of this concrete
unity, and that the deepest and last expression of unity is the unity of
absolute mind itself. Would-be judges and critics of philosophy might be
recommended to familiarise themselves with these phases of unity and to
take the trouble to get acquainted with them, at least to know so much
that of these terms there are a great many, and that amongst them there is
great variety. But they show so little acquaintance with them—and still
less take trouble about it—that, when they hear of unity—and relation
_ipso facto_ implies unity—they rather stick fast at quite abstract
indeterminate unity, and lose sight of the chief point of interest—the
special mode in which the unity is qualified. Hence all they can say about
philosophy is that dry identity is its principle and result, and that it
is the system of identity. Sticking fast to the undigested thought of
identity, they have laid hands on, not the concrete unity, the notion and
content of philosophy, but rather its reverse. In the philosophical field
they proceed, as in the physical field the physicist; who also is well
aware that he has before him a variety of sensuous properties and
matters—or usually matters alone, (for the properties get transformed into
matters also for the physicist)—and that these matters (elements) _also_
stand in _relation_ to one another. But the question is, Of what kind is
this relation? Every peculiarity and the whole difference of natural
things, inorganic and living, depend solely on the different modes of this
unity. But instead of ascertaining these different modes, the ordinary
physicist (chemist included) takes up only one, the most external and the
worst, viz. _composition_, applies only it in the whole range of natural
structures, which he thus renders for ever inexplicable.
The aforesaid shallow pantheism is an equally obvious inference from this
shallow identity. All that those who employ this invention of their own to
accuse philosophy gather from the study of God’s _relation_ to the world
is that the one, but only the one factor of this category of relation—and
that the factor of indeterminateness—is identity. Thereupon they stick
fast in this half-perception, and assert—falsely as a fact—that philosophy
teaches the identity of God and the world. And as in their judgment either
of the two,—the world as much as God—has the same solid substantiality as
the other, they infer that in the philosophic Idea God is _composed_ of
God and the world. Such then is the idea they form of pantheism, and which
they ascribe to philosophy. Unaccustomed in their own thinking and
apprehending of thoughts to go beyond such categories, they import them
into philosophy, where they are utterly unknown; they thus infect it with
the disease against which they subsequently raise an outcry. If any
difficulty emerge in comprehending God’s relation to the world, they at
once and very easily escape it by admitting that this relation contains
for them an inexplicable contradiction; and that hence, they must stop at
the vague conception of such relation, perhaps under the more familiar
names of, e.g. omnipresence, providence, &c. Faith in their use of the
term means no more than a refusal to define the conception, or to enter on
a closer discussion of the problem. That men and classes of untrained
intellect are satisfied with such indefiniteness, is what one expects; but
when a trained intellect and an interest for reflective study is
satisfied, in matters admitted to be of superior, if not even of supreme
interest, with indefinite ideas, it is hard to decide whether the thinker
is really in earnest with the subject. But if those who cling to this
crude “rationalism” were in earnest, e.g. with God’s omnipresence, so far
as to realise their faith thereon in a definite mental idea, in what
difficulties would they be involved by their belief in the true reality of
the things of sense! They would hardly like, as Epicurus does, to let God
dwell in the interspaces of things, i.e. in the pores of the
physicists,—said pores being the negative, something supposed to exist
_beside_ the material reality. This very “Beside” would give their
pantheism its spatiality,—their everything, conceived as the mutual
exclusion of parts in space. But in ascribing to God, in his relation to
the world, an action on and in the space thus filled on the world and in
it, they would endlessly split up the divine actuality into infinite
materiality. They would really thus have the misconception they call
pantheism or all-one-doctrine, only as the necessary sequel of their
misconceptions of God and the world. But to put that sort of thing, this
stale gossip of oneness or identity, on the shoulders of philosophy, shows
such recklessness about justice and truth that it can only be explained
through the difficulty of getting into the head thoughts and notions, i.e.
not abstract unity, but the many-shaped modes specified. If statements as
to facts are put forward, and the facts in question are thoughts and
notions, it is indispensable to get hold of their meaning. But even the
fulfilment of this requirement has been rendered superfluous, now that it
has long been a foregone conclusion that philosophy is pantheism, a system
of identity, an All-one doctrine, and that the person therefore who might
be unaware of this fact is treated either as merely unaware of a matter of
common notoriety, or as prevaricating for a purpose. On account of this
chorus of assertions, then, I have believed myself obliged to speak at
more length and exoterically on the outward and inward untruth of this
alleged fact: for exoteric discussion is the only method available in
dealing with the external apprehension of notions as mere facts,—by which
notions are perverted into their opposite. The esoteric study of God and
identity, as of cognitions and notions, is philosophy itself.
§ 574. This notion of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the truth
aware of itself (§ 236),—the logical system, but with the signification
that it is universality approved and certified in concrete content as in
its actuality. In this way the science has gone back to its beginning: its
result is the logical system but as a spiritual principle: out of the
presupposing judgment, in which the notion was only implicit and the
beginning an immediate,—and thus out of the _appearance_ which it had
there—it has risen into its pure principle and thus also into its proper
medium.
§ 575. It is this appearing which originally gives the motive of the
further development. The first appearance is formed by the syllogism,
which is based on the Logical system as starting-point, with Nature for
the middle term which couples the Mind with it. The Logical principle
turns to Nature and Nature to Mind. Nature, standing between the Mind and
its essence, sunders itself, not indeed to extremes of finite abstraction,
nor itself to something away from them and independent,—which, as other
than they, only serves as a link between them: for the syllogism is _in
the Idea_ and Nature is essentially defined as a transition-point and
negative factor, and as implicitly the Idea. Still the mediation of the
notion has the external form of _transition_, and the science of Nature
presents itself as the course of necessity, so that it is only in the one
extreme that the liberty of the notion is explicit as a self-amalgamation.
§ 576. In the second syllogism this appearance is so far superseded, that
that syllogism is the standpoint of the Mind itself, which—as the
mediating agent in the process—presupposes Nature and couples it with the
Logical principle. It is the syllogism where Mind reflects on itself in
the Idea: philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty
is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it.
§ 577. The third syllogism is the Idea of philosophy, which has
self-knowing reason, the absolutely-universal, for its middle term: a
middle, which divides itself into Mind and Nature, making the former its
presupposition, as process of the Idea’s subjective activity, and the
latter its universal extreme, as process of the objectively and implicitly
existing Idea. The self-judging of the Idea into its two appearances (§§
575, 576) characterises both as its (the self-knowing reason’s)
manifestations: and in it there is a unification of the two aspects:—it is
the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and
development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition.
The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself
to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind.
Ἡ δὲ νόησις ἡ καθ᾽ αὑτὴν τοῦ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ ἀρίστου, καὶ ἡ μάλιστα τοῦ
μάλιστα. Αὑτὸν δὲ νοεῖ ὁ νοῦς κατὰ μετάληψιν τοῦ νοητοῦ νοητὸς γὰρ
γίγνεται θιγγάνων καὶ νοῶν, ὥστε ταὐτὸν νοῦς καὶ νοητόν. Τὸ γὰρ
δεκτικὸν τοῦ νοητοῦ καὶ τῆς οὐσίας νοῦς. Ἐνεργεῖ δὲ ἔχων. Ὥστ᾽
ἐκεῖνο μᾶλλον τούτου ὂ δοκεῖ ὁ νοῦς θεῖον ἔχειν, καὶ ἡ θεωρία τὸ
ἥδιστον καὶ ἄριστον. Εἰ οὖν οὕτως εὖ ἔχει, ὡς ἡμεῖς ποτέ, ὁ θεὸς
ἀεί, θαυμαστόν; εἰ δὲ μᾶλλον, ἔτι θαυμασιώτερον. Ἔχει δὲ ὡδί. Καὶ
ζωὴ δέ γε ὑπάρχει; ἡ γὰρ νοῦ ἐνέργεια ζωή, ἐκεῖνος δὲ ἡ ἐνέργεια;
ἐνέργεια δὲ ἡ καθ᾽ αὑτὴν ἐκείνου ζωὴ ἀρίστη καὶ ἀΐδιος. Φαμὲν δὲ
τὸν θεὸν εἶναι ζῷον ἀΐδιον ἄριστον, ὥστε ζωὴ αἰὼν συνεχὴς καὶ
ἀΐδιος ὑπάρχει τῷ θεῷ; τοῦτο γὰρ ὁ θεός. (ARIST. _Met._ XI. 7.)
INDEX.
Absolute (the), xlviii, 7.
Abstraction, 74.
Accent, 81, 87.
Ages of man, 17.
Alphabets, 81.
Altruism, 57.
Animal magnetism, clxi, 5, 29 seqq.
Anthropology, xxv, lxxxviii, 12 seqq.
Appetite, 53.
_Aristotle_, liii, cxxxiii, 4, 63, 163.
Art, xxxix seqq., 169 seqq.
Asceticism, cxv, cxliii, clxxxvii, 159.
Association of ideas, 73.
Atheism, 183.
Athens, cxxx.
Attention, clxxiii, 69.
Automatism (psychological), clxv.
_Bacon_ (Fr.), xxi, lii, lix, clx.
_Bain_ (A.), cxxi.
Beauty, 169.
Bhagavat-Gita, 186 seqq.
Biography, 151.
Body and Soul (relations of), lxxxii, cxvi, clvi, 13.
_Boëthius_, l.
_Böhme_ (J.), 95.
_Braid_ (J.), clxiv.
Bravery, cxcix.
Budget, 144.
Capitalism, cci seqq.
Cardinal virtues, cxxxii.
Categories, lx.
Catholicism, 157.
Children, lxxxvii, cii.
Chinese language, 81 seqq.
Choice, 98.
Christianity, xliv, cxli, clxxix, 7, 101, 157.
Clairvoyance, clviii, clxi, 33.
Cognition, 64.
Commercial morality, cci.
_Comte_ (C.), xcix.
_Condillac_, lxxviii, 61.
Conscience, xxx, cxxii, clxxxvii, 117, 156, 161.
Consciousness, xxv, xcix, 47 seqq.
Constitution of the State, 132.
Contract, 108.
Corporation, 130.
Crime, cxciii, 109.
Criticism, xvi, cxxxviii, 149.
Custom, clxxxix, 104.
_Dante_, cxxxiv.
Deduction (Kantian and Fichtean), cx seqq.
Democracy, 141.
Development, 60.
Disease (mental), 27, 37.
Duty, cxiv, cxix, cxxi seqq., cxxxi, cxxxix, 97, 104, 116.
Economics, 122.
Education, xcii, cxxxvii, 11.
Ego (the), lxiv seqq., 47 seqq.
Egoism, 55.
Eleaticism, 190.
England, 143.
Epicureanism, cxli, 195.
Epistemology, ciii.
Equality (political and social), cxc, 133.
Equity, xxxi.
Estates, 123.
Ethics, xv, xix, xxx seqq., xcv, cxiii seqq., cxc seqq., 113 seqq.
Experience, 51.
Experimental psychology, lxxxi seqq., c.
Expression (mental), 23, 45.
Faculties of Mind, lxxiii seqq., xcvii, cxxvi, 58, 65.
Faith, cvii.
Faith-cure, clxi, 35.
Fame, 153.
Family, xxxii, cxcii, 121.
_Fechner_ (G. T.), cli.
Feeling, 22, 68, 92.
_Fichte_ (J. G.), cvi, cix seqq., clxiv, clxix, 49.
Finance, 144.
Finitude, 8.
Fraud, 110.
Freedom, cxxv seqq., clxxv, 6, 99, 113, 133 seqq.
_Fries_, clxxix.
Genius (the), clvii, 28.
German language, 78, 88:
politics, clxxvii;
empire, clxxxi.
God, xxxiv, xli, cxxii, 20, 154, 176.
_Goethe_, cliv, clxix.
Goodness, 115.
Government, 137;
forms of, 141.
Greek ethics, cxxix seqq., cxciv;
religion, 164.
Habit, clviii, 39.
Happiness, 99.
_Herbart_, lxii seqq., lxxxv, cxxvii.
Hieroglyphics, 80.
History, xxxiv, xlvii, xci, 147 seqq.
_Hobbes_, lxxvi, clxxxii.
Holiness, 159.
Honour, 124.
_Humboldt_ (W. v.), 79.
_Hume_, lxxi, cxx.
Hypnotism, clxiv seqq., 31 seqq.
Idea (Platonic), 163.
Idealism, civ; political, clxxxvi.
Ideality, clxviii, 25.
Ideas, lxix seqq., ci seqq.
Imagination, 72.
Immaterialism, clii, 12, 45.
Impulse, 95.
Individualist ethics, cxx seqq.
Individuality in the State, 139.
Industrialism, cc, 123.
Insanity, 37.
Intention, 114.
International Law, 147.
Intuition, 67.
Irony, 179.
_Jelaleddin-Rumi_, 189.
Judgment, 89.
Judicial system, 127.
_Jung-Stilling_, clxii.
Juries, 128.
_Kant_ (I.), xv, lxiv, lxxi, xcvi, cvii, cxxviii, clxxxviii, 20, 48, 51,
63, 154.
_Kieser_, clxiii.
Knowledge, cv, cxxxv, cxli, 64.
Krishna, 186 seqq.
Labour, 123.
Language, clxxiv, 79 seqq.
_Laplace_, clxiv.
Law, xxix, xcvi, cxc, 104, 125.
Legality, xxx, clxxxix.
Legislation, 125.
_Leibniz_, lxxii, lxxvii, cxlvi, 14, 80, 82.
Liberty, see Freedom.
Life, 13.
Logic, xiv, xvii, lxi, xcv, 196.
Lutheranism, 157.
_Macchiavelli_, clxxx.
Magic, clxi, 29.
Manifestation, 7.
Manners, 104.
Marriage, 121, 159.
Master and slave, 56.
Mathematics in psychology, lxviii.
Medium, 34.
Memory, clxxiv, 70, 84.
_Mesmer_, clxi.
Metaphysic, lviii seqq.
_Mill_ (James), lxxix.
Mind (= Spirit), xlix seqq., 58, 196.
Mnemonics, 85.
Monarchy, 139.
Monasticism, 159.
Monotheism, 188.
Morality, xxx, xxxviii, cxxi, clxxxviii seqq., cxcviii, 113 seqq.
_Münsterberg_ (H.), lxxxiii.
_Napoleon_, 19.
Nationality, 142, 150, 154, cxcv.
Natural Philosophy, xv, xvii, xxii.
Natural rights, 112.
Nature, cxx, cxxiv, 12, 133, 196.
Nemesis, 174.
_Nietzsche_ (F.), cxxviii.
Nobility, cxcvii.
Observation, lxxxix.
Orders (social), cxcvii seqq., 124.
Ought, clxxv, 94, 116.
Pain, 6, 94.
Pantheism, 184, 194.
Parliament, 142.
Passion, 95.
Peasantry, cci.
_Peel_ (Sir R.), 127.
Perception, 67.
Perfection, cxxvii, cxxix.
Person, 107, 119.
Personality, lxiv, clxvii.
Philosophy, xiv, cxvii, cxxxviii, 159 seqq., 179 seqq.
Phrenology, 35.
Physiology, lxxxi, c.
_Pinel_, 39.
_Plato_, xcviii, cxxxi, cxxxv, 33, 97, 102, 162.
Pleasure, cxxxvi, 94.
_Plotinus_, cxliv.
Police, 130.
_Porphyry_, xx.
Positivity of laws, 125.
Powers (political), ccii, 138.
Practice, 92.
Property, xxix, cxcii, 107.
Protestantism, 166.
Prussia, clxxviii, clxxxiv.
Psychiatry, 33.
Psychology, xxii, xxiv, lii seqq., lxiii, lxxxvi, xcv, cxvii, 4, 58, 63.
Psycho-physics, clvi, 23.
Punishment, cxciii, cciii, 111.
Purpose, 97, 114.
Races, 16.
Rationalism, clxv, 183.
Reason, cxv, cxliii, clxxii, 58.
Recollection, 70.
_Reinhold_, 49.
Religion, xxxvii seqq., cxcvi, 155 seqq., 167 seqq.
Representation, cxi, 70;
political, clxxxiii, 142.
Responsibility, 114.
Revelation, 7, 175.
Right, xxix, 104 (see Law).
_Ritter_, clxi, clxiii.
Romances, 151:
romantic art, 172.
Savages, lxxxvii, cii.
_Schelling_, clxi.
_Schindler_, clxiii.
_Schopenhauer_, cvi, cxvi, cli, clxiv, clxix, clxxxvii.
Science, xviii.
_Scott_ (Sir W.), 151.
Self-consciousness, clxxi, 53 seqq.
Sensibility and sensation, 20, 50.
Sex, 18.
Siderism, clxiii, 15.
Signs (in language), 76.
Skill (acquired), 42.
Slavery, 56, 101.
Sleep, 18.
Society, xxxii, 56.
Sociology, xxiii.
Somnambulism, 30.
Soul, liv, lxix, lxxv, 26.
_Spencer_ (H.), xxi seqq., cxi, cxxiii, cxliv.
_Spinoza_, lxxvi, ci, cxix, cl, 14, 49, 188.
Spiritualism, clxii.
State, xxxii seqq., clxxvi, clxxxiii, 131 seqq.
Stoicism, cxix, cxxiv, cxi, cxliii.
Suggestion, clxv seqq., 33.
Superstition, 158.
Syllogism, 90.
Symbol, 77, 171.
Sympathy, clv.
Telepathy, clxi, 34.
Tellurism, clxiii, 15.
Theology, 155.
Thinking, clxxiv, 89.
_Tholuck_, 191.
Trinity, 177 seqq.
Truth, cv, 182.
Unconscious (the), cxlvi.
Understanding, 52, 89.
Universalising, cxxviii.
Utilitarianism, cxxxvi.
Value, 109.
Virtues, cxxxi, cxcviii, 120.
War, cxcix, 146.
Wartburg, clxxix.
Welfare, 114.
Wickedness, 9, 94, 117.
Will, xxviii, cxxv, clxxv, 62, 90.
_Wolff_, lxxiii.
Words, clxxiv, 79.
_Wordsworth_, li, clxviii.
Written language, 81 seqq.
Wrong, 109.
Würtemberg, clxxxv.
FOOTNOTES
1 Plato, _Rep._ 527.
2 The prospectus of the _System of Synthetic Philosophy_ is dated
1860. Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ is 1859. But such ideas, both in
Mr. Spencer and others, are earlier than Darwin’s book.
3 Hegel’s _Verhältniss_, the supreme category of what is called
actuality: where object is necessitated by outside object.
4 Cf. Herbart, _Werke_ (ed. Kehrbach), iv. 372. This consciousness
proper is what Leibniz called _« __Apperception,__ »__ la
connaissance réflexive de l’état intérieur (Nouveaux Essais)_.
5 Herbart, _Werke_, vi. 55 (ed. Kehrbach).
6 p. 59 (§ 440).
7 p. 63 (§ 440).
8 These remarks refer to four out of the five Herbartian ethical
ideas. See also Leibniz, who (in 1693, _De Notionibus juris et
justitiae_) had given the following definitions: “Caritas est
benevolentia universalis. Justitia est caritas sapientis. Sapientia
est scientia felicitatis.” The jus naturae has three grades: the
lowest, jus strictum; the second, aequitas (or caritas, in the
narrower sense); and the highest, pietas, which is honeste, i.e. pie
vivere.
9 To which the Greek πόλις, the Latin civitas or respublica, were only
approximations. Hegel _is not writing a history_. If he were, it
would be necessary for him to point out how far the individual
instance, e.g. Rome, or Prussia, corresponded to its Idea.
10 Shakespeare’s phrase, as in _Othello_, iii. 2; _Lover’s Complaint_,
v. 24.
_ 11 Iliad_, xii. 243.
12 See Hegel’s _Logic_, pp. 257 seq.
13 See p. 153 (§ 550).
14 Cf. _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel_, chaps. xviii, xxvi.
15 As stated in p. 167 (_Encycl._ § 554). Cf. _Phenom. d. Geistes_,
cap. vii, which includes the Religion of Art, and the same point of
view is explicit in the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia_.
_ 16 Philosophie der Religion_ (_Werke_, xi. 5).
17 Hegel, _Phenomenologie des Geistes_ (_Werke_, ii. 545). The
meeting-ground of the Greek spirit, as it passed through Rome, with
Christianity.
18 Ib., p. 584.
_ 19 Phenomenologie des Geistes_ (_Werke_, ii. 572). Thus Hegelian
idealism claims to be the philosophical counterpart of the central
dogma of Christianity.
20 From the old Provençal _Lay of Boëthius_.
21 It is the doctrine of the _intellectus agens_, or _in actu_; the
_actus purus_ of the Schoolmen.
_ 22 Einleitung in die Philosophie_, §§ 1, 2.
_ 23 Psychologie als Wissenschaft_, Vorrede.
_ 24 Einleitung in die Philosophie_, §§ 11, 12.
_ 25 Einleitung in die Philosophie_, § 18: cf. _Werke_, ed. Kehrbach, v.
108.
26 Cf. Plato’s remarks on the problem in the word Self-control.
_Republ._ 430-1.
_ 27 Lehrbuch der Psychologie_, §§ 202, 203.
_ 28 Allgemeine Metaphysik_, Vorrede.
_ 29 Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik_ (1806), § 13.
_ 30 Werke_, ed. Kehrbach (_Ueber die Möglichkeit_, &c), v. 96.
_ 31 Ibid._, p. 100.
32 One might almost fancy Herbart was translating into a general
philosophic thesis the words in which Goethe has described how he
overcame a real trouble by transmuting it into an ideal shape, e.g.
_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, cap. xii.
33 Herbart’s language is almost identical with Hegel’s: _Encycl._ § 389
(p. 12). Cf. Spencer, _Psychology_, i. 192. “Feelings are in all
cases the materials out of which the superior tracts of
consciousness and intellect are evolved.”
_ 34 Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel_, ch. xvii.
_ 35 Psychologia Empirica_, § 29.
36 As is also the case with Herbart’s metaphysical reality of the Soul.
_ 37 Human Nature_, vii. 2. “Pleasure, Love, and appetite, which is also
called desire, are divers names for divers considerations of the
same thing....” Deliberation is (ch. xii. 1) the “alternate
succession of appetite and fears.”
_ 38 Eth._ ii. 48 Schol.
_ 39 Eth._ ii. 43 Schol.: cf. 49 Schol.
40 This wide scope of thinking (_cogitatio_, _penser_) is at least as
old as the Cartesian school: and should be kept in view, as against
a tendency to narrow its range to the mere intellect.
41 e.g. _Analysis of the Human Mind_, ch. xxiv. “Attention is but
another name for the interesting character of the idea;” ch. xix.
“Desire and the idea of a pleasurable sensation are convertible
terms.”
42 As Mr. Spencer says (_Psychology_, i. 141), “Objective psychology
can have no existence as such without borrowing its data from
subjective psychology.”
43 The same failure to note that experiment is valuable only where
general points of view are defined, is a common fault in biology.
44 Münsterberg, _Aufgaben und Methoden der Psychologie_, p. 144.
_ 45 Lehrbuch der Psychologie_, § 54 (2nd ed.), or § 11 (1st ed.).
46 See p. 11 (§ 387).
47 Cf. Nietzsche, _Also sprach Zarathustra_, i. 43. “There is more
reason in thy body than in thy best wisdom.”
48 This language is very characteristic of the physicists who dabble in
psychology and imagine they are treading in the steps of Kant, if
not even verifying what they call his guesswork: cf. Ziehen,
_Physiol. Psychologie_, 2nd ed. p. 212. “In every case there is
given us only the psychical series of sensations and their
memory-images, and it is only a universal hypothesis if we assume
beside this psychical series a material series standing in causal
relation to it.... The material series is not given equally
originally with the psychical.”
49 It is the same radical feature of consciousness which is thus noted
by Mr. Spencer, _Psychology_, i. 475. “Perception and sensation are
ever tending to exclude each other but never succeed.” “Cognition
and feeling are antithetical and inseparable.” “Consciousness
continues only in virtue of this conflict.” Cf. Plato’s resolution
in the _Philebus_ of the contest between intelligence and feeling
(pleasure).
50 It is the quasi-Aristotelian ἀπαγωγή, defined as the step from one
proposition to another, the knowledge of which will set the first
proposition in a full light.
_ 51 Grundlage des Naturrechts_, § 5.
_ 52 System der Sittenlehre_, § 8, iv.
53 Even though religion (according to Kant) conceive them as divine
commands.
54 Cf. Hegel’s _Werke_, vii. 2, p. 236 (Lecture-note on § 410). “We
must treat as utterly empty the fancy of those who suppose that
properly man should have no organic body,” &c.; and see p. 159 of
the present work.
_ 55 Criticism of Pure Reason_, Architectonic.
56 Spencer, _Psychology_, i. 291: “Mind can be understood only by
observing how mind is evolved.”
57 Cf. Spencer, _Principles of Ethics_, i. 339: “The ethical sentiment
proper is, in the great mass of cases, scarcely discernible.”
_ 58 Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel_, p. 143.
59 Windelband (W.), _Präludien_ (1884), p. 288.
60 Cf. Plato, _Republic_, p. 486.
_ 61 Human Nature: Morals_, Part III.
_ 62 Emotion and Will_, ch. xv. § 23.
63 It is characteristic of the Kantian doctrine to absolutise the
conception of Duty and make it express the essence of the whole
ethical idea.
64 Which are still, as the Socialist Fourier says, states of social
incoherence, specially favourable to falsehood.
_ 65 Rechtsphilosophie_, § 4.
66 Cf. Schelling, ii. 12: “There are no _born_ sons of freedom.”
67 Simmel (G.), _Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft_, i. 184.
_ 68 Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, p. 225.
69 Aristot. _Polit._ i. 6.
70 Plato, _Phaedo_.
71 Carus, _Psyche_, p. 1.
72 See Arist., _Anal. Post._ ii. 19 (ed. Berl. 100, a. 10).
73 Cf. _The Logic of Hegel_, notes &c., p. 421.
74 “Omnia individua corpora quamvis diversis gradibus animata sunt.”
_Eth._ ii. 13. schol.
_ 75 Nanna_ (1848): _Zendavesta_ (1851): _Ueber die Seelenfrage_ (1861).
76 Described by S. as the rise from mere physical _cause_ to
physiological _stimulus_ (Reiz), to psychical _motive_.
77 Infra, p. 12.
78 Aristot., _De Anima_, i. c. 4, 5.
_ 79 Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre_, i. 10.
_ 80 Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre_, iv. 18.
81 Works like Preyer’s _Seele des Kindes_ illustrate this aspect of
mental evolution; its acquirement of definite and correlated
functions.
82 Cf. the end of Caleb Balderstone (in _The Bride of Lammermoor_):
“With a fidelity sometimes displayed by the canine race, but seldom
by human beings, he pined and died.”
83 See Windischmann’s letters in _Briefe von und an Hegel_.
84 Cf. _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel_, chaps. xii-xiv.
85 Kieser’s _Tellurismus_ is, according to Schopenhauer, “the fullest
and most thorough text-book of Animal Magnetism.”
86 Cf. Fichte, _Nachgelassene Werke_, iii. 295 (_Tagebuch über den
animalischen Magnetismus_, 1813), and Schopenhauer, _Der Wille in
der Natur_.
87 Bernheim: _La suggestion domine toute l’histoire de l’humanité_.
88 An instance from an unexpected quarter, in Eckermann’s conversations
with Goethe: “In my young days I have experienced cases enough,
where on lonely walks there came over me a powerful yearning for a
beloved girl, and I thought of her so long till she actually came to
meet me.” (Conversation of Oct. 7, 1827.)
_ 89 Gleichsam in einer Vorwelt, einer diese Welt schaffenden Welt_
(_Nachgelassene Werke_, iii. 321).
_ 90 Selbst-bewusstsein_ is not self-consciousness, in the vulgar sense
of brooding over feelings and self: but consciousness which is
active and outgoing, rather than receptive and passive. It is
practical, as opposed to theoretical.
91 The more detailed exposition of this Phenomenology of Mind is given
in the book with that title: Hegel’s _Werke_, ii. pp. 71-316.
_ 92 System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 15 (see Essay V).
93 Hegel’s _Werke_, viii. 313, and cf. the passage quoted in my _Logic
of Hegel_, notes, pp. 384, 385.
94 Hegel’s _Briefe_, i. 15.
_ 95 Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands_, edited by G. Mollat (1893).
Parts of this were already given by Haym and Rosenkranz. The same
editor has also in this year published, though not quite in full,
Hegel’s _System der Sittlichkeit_, to which reference is made in
what follows.
96 In which some may find a prophecy of the effects of “blood and iron”
in 1866.
_ 97 Die Absolute Regierung_: in the _System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 32:
cf. p. 55. Hegel himself compares it to Fichte’s _Ephorate_.
_ 98 Die Absolute Regierung_, l.c. pp. 37, 38.
99 Some idea of his meaning may perhaps be gathered by comparison with
passages in _Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre_, ii. 1, 2.
_ 100 Kritik der Verfassung_, p. 20.
101 In some respects Bacon’s attitude in the struggle between royalty
and parliament may be compared.
102 Just as Schopenhauer, on the contrary, always says _moralisch_—never
_sittlich_.
103 Grey (G.), _Journals of two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West
and Western Australia_, ii. 220.
104 With some variation of ownership, perhaps, according to the
prevalence of so-called matriarchal or patriarchal households.
105 Cf. the custom in certain tribes which names the father after his
child: as if the son first gave his father legitimate position in
society.
_ 106 System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 8.
_ 107 Aufhebung_ (_positive_) as given in _absolute Sittlichkeit_.
_ 108 System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 15.
109 This phraseology shows the influence of Schelling, with whom he was
at this epoch associated. See _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel_,
ch. xiv.
110 Cf. the intermediate function assigned (see above, p. clxxxiii) to
the priests and the aged.
_ 111 System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 19.
112 See _infra_, p. 156.
113 Wordsworth’s _Laodamia_.
114 “For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the
brute!’
But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.”
115 “I can assure you,” said Werner (the merchant), “that I never
reflected on the State in my life. My tolls, charges and dues I have
paid for no other reason than that it was established usage.”
(_Wilh. Meisters Lehrjahre_, viii. 2.)
_ 116 System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 40.
_ 117 System der Sittlichkeit_, p. 65.
_ 118 Ibid._ p. 46.
_ 119 Natürliche Seele._
_ 120 Natürliche Qualitäten._
_ 121 Empfindung._
_ 122 Die fühlende Seele._
123 Plato had a better idea of the relation of prophecy generally to the
state of sober consciousness than many moderns, who supposed that
the Platonic language on the subject of enthusiasm authorised their
belief in the sublimity of the revelations of somnambulistic vision.
Plato says in the _Timaeus_ (p. 71), “The author of our being so
ordered our inferior parts that they too might obtain a measure of
truth, and in the liver placed their oracle (the power of divination
by dreams). And herein is a proof that God has given the art of
divination, not to the wisdom, but, to the foolishness of man; for
no man when in his wits attains prophetic truth and inspiration; but
when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is
enthralled by sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or
possession (enthusiasm).” Plato very correctly notes not merely the
bodily conditions on which such visionary knowledge depends, and the
possibility of the truth of the dreams, but also the inferiority of
them to the reasonable frame of mind.
_ 124 Selbstgefühl._
_ 125 Gewohnheit._
_ 126 Die wirkliche Seele._
_ 127 Das Bewußtsein als solches_: (a) _Das sinnliche Bewußtsein._
_ 128 Wahrnehmung._
_ 129 Der Verstand._
_ 130 Selbstbewußtsein._
_ 131 Die Begierde._
_ 132 Das anerkennende Selbstbewußtsein._
_ 133 Die Vernunft._
_ 134 Der Geist._
_ 135 Die Intelligenz._
_ 136 Anschauung._
_ 137 Vorstellung._
_ 138 Die Erinnerung._
_ 139 Die Einbildungskraft._
_ 140 Phantasie._
_ 141 Gedächtniß._
_ 142 Auswendiges._
_ 143 Inwendiges._
_ 144 Das Denken._
_ 145 Der praktische Geist._
_ 146 Der praktische Gefühl._
_ 147 Der Triebe und die Willkühr._
_ 148 Die Glückseligkeit._
_ 149 Der freie Geist._
_ 150 Gesess._
_ 151 Sitte._
_ 152 Das Recht._
_ 153 Moralität._
_ 154 Naturrecht._
_ 155 Moralität._
_ 156 Der Vorsatz._
_ 157 That._
_ 158 Handlung._
_ 159 Die Absicht und das Wohl._
_ 160 Das Gute und das Böse._
_ 161 Die Sittlichkeit._
_ 162 Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft._
_ 163 Das System der Bedürfnisse._
_ 164 Die Rechtspflege._
_ 165 Geseß._
_ 166 Die Polizei und die Corporation._
_ 167 Inneres Staatsrecht._
_ 168 Das äußere Staatsrecht._
_ 169 Die Weltgeschichte._
_ 170 Weltweisheit._
_ 171 Der absolute Geist._
_ 172 Die geoffenbarte Religion._
173 [The citation given by Hegel from Schlegel’s translation is here
replaced by the version (in one or two points different) in the
_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. viii.]
174 In order to give a clearer impression of it, I cannot refrain from
quoting a few passages, which may at the same time give some
indication of the marvellous skill of Rückert, from whom they are
taken, as a translator. [For Rückert’s verses a version is here
substituted in which I have been kindly helped by Miss May Kendall.]
III.
I saw but One through all heaven’s starry spaces gleaming:
I saw but One in all sea billows wildly streaming.
I looked into the heart, a waste of worlds, a sea,—
I saw a thousand dreams,—yet One amid all dreaming.
And earth, air, water, fire, when thy decree is given,
Are molten into One: against thee none hath striven.
There is no living heart but beats unfailingly
In the one song of praise to thee, from earth and heaven.
V.
As one ray of thy light appears the noonday sun,
But yet thy light and mine eternally are one.
As dust beneath thy feet the heaven that rolls on high:
Yet only one, and one for ever, thou and I.
The dust may turn to heaven, and heaven to dust decay;
Yet art thou one with me, and shalt be one for aye.
How may the words of life that fill heaven’s utmost part
Rest in the narrow casket of one poor human heart?
How can the sun’s own rays, a fairer gleam to fling,
Hide in a lowly husk, the jewel’s covering?
How may the rose-grove all its glorious bloom unfold,
Drinking in mire and slime, and feeding on the mould?
How can the darksome shell that sips the salt sea stream
Fashion a shining pearl, the sunlight’s joyous beam?
Oh, heart! should warm winds fan thee, should’st thou floods
endure,
One element are wind and flood; but be thou pure.
IX.
I’ll tell thee how from out the dust God moulded man,—
Because the breath of Love He breathed into his clay:
I’ll tell thee why the spheres their whirling paths began,—
They mirror to God’s throne Love’s glory day by day:
I’ll tell thee why the morning winds blow o’er the grove,—
It is to bid Love’s roses bloom abundantly:
I’ll tell thee why the night broods deep the earth above,—
Love’s bridal tent to deck with sacred canopy:
All riddles of the earth dost thou desire to prove?—
To every earthly riddle is Love alone the key.
XV.
Life shrinks from Death in woe and fear,
Though Death ends well Life’s bitter need:
So shrinks the heart when Love draws near,
As though ’twere Death in very deed:
For wheresoever Love finds room,
There Self, the sullen tyrant, dies.
So let him perish in the gloom,—
Thou to the dawn of freedom rise.
In this poetry, which soars over all that is external and sensuous,
who would recognise the prosaic ideas current about so-called
pantheism—ideas which let the divine sink to the external and the
sensuous? The copious extracts which Tholuck, in his work _Anthology
from the Eastern Mystics_, gives us from the poems of Jelaleddin and
others, are made from the very point of view now under discussion.
In his Introduction, Herr Tholuck proves how profoundly his soul has
caught the note of mysticism; and there, too, he points out the
characteristic traits of its oriental phase, in distinction from
that of the West and Christendom. With all their divergence,
however, they have in common the mystical character. The conjunction
of Mysticism with so-called Pantheism, as he says (p. 53), implies
that inward quickening of soul and spirit which inevitably tends to
annihilate that external _Everything_, which Pantheism is usually
held to adore. But beyond that, Herr Tholuck leaves matters standing
at the usual indistinct conception of Pantheism; a profounder
discussion of it would have had, for the author’s emotional
Christianity, no direct interest; but we see that personally he is
carried away by remarkable enthusiasm for a mysticism which, in the
ordinary phrase, entirely deserves the epithet Pantheistic. Where,
however, he tries philosophising (p. 12), he does not get beyond the
standpoint of the “rationalist” metaphysic with its uncritical
categories.
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