Part 33

One of the last literary undertakings in which he took part was the establishment of the Berlin _Jahrbucher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik_, in which he assisted Edward Gans and Varnhagen von Ense. The aim of this review was to give a critical account, certified by the names of the contributors, of the literary and philosophical productions of the time, in relation to the general progress of knowledge. The journal was not solely in the Hegelian interest; and more than once, when Hegel attempted to domineer over the other editors, he was met by vehement and vigorous opposition.

The revolution of 1830 was a great blow to him, and the prospect of democratic advances almost made him ill. His last literary work, the first part of which appeared in the _Preussische Staatszeitung_, was an essay on the English Reform Bill of 1831. It contains primarily a consideration of its probable effects on the character of the new members of parliament, and the measures which they may introduce. In the latter connexion he enlarged on several points in which England had done less than many continental states for the abolition of monopolies and abuses. Surveying the questions connected with landed property, with the game laws, the poor, the Established Church, especially in Ireland, he expressed grave doubt on the legislative capacity of the English parliament as compared with the power of renovation manifested in other states of western Europe.

In 1831 cholera first entered Europe. Hegel and his family retired for the summer to the suburbs, and there he finished the revision of the first part of his _Science of Logic_. On the beginning of the winter session, however, he returned to his house in the Kupfergraben. On this occasion an altercation occurred between him and his friend Gans, who in his notice of lectures on jurisprudence had recommended Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_. Hegel, indignant at what he deemed patronage, demanded that the note should be withdrawn. On the 14th of November, after one day's illness, he died of cholera and was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and Solger.

Hegel in his class-room was neither imposing nor fascinating. You saw a plain, old-fashioned face, without life or lustre--a figure which had never looked young, and was now prematurely aged; the furrowed face bore witness to concentrated thought. Sitting with his snuff-box before him, and his head bent down, he looked ill at ease, and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance was interrupted by frequent coughing; every sentence came out with a struggle. The style was no less irregular. Sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would be specially awkward, while in abstruse passages he seemed specially at home, rose into a natural eloquence, and carried away the hearer by the grandeur of his diction.

_Philosophy._--Hegelianism is confessedly one of the most difficult of all philosophies. Every one has heard the legend which makes Hegel say, "One man has understood me, and even he has not." He abruptly hurls us into a world where old habits of thought fail us. In three places, indeed, he has attempted to exhibit the transition to his own system from other levels of thought; but in none with much success. In the introductory lectures on the philosophy of religion he gives a rationale of the difference between the modes of consciousness in religion and philosophy (between _Vorstellung_ and _Begriff_). In the beginning of the _Encyklopadie_ he discusses the defects of dogmatism, empiricism, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi. In the first case he treats the formal or psychological aspect of the difference; in the latter he presents his doctrine less in its essential character than in special relations to the prominent systems of his time. The _Phenomenology of Spirit_, regarded as an introduction, suffers from a different fault. It is not an introduction--for the philosophy which it was to introduce was not then fully elaborated. Even to the last Hegel had not so externalized his system as to treat it as something to be led up to by gradual steps. His philosophy was not one aspect of his intellectual life, to be contemplated from others; it was the ripe fruit of concentrated reflection, and had become the one all-embracing form and principle of his thinking. More than most thinkers he had quietly laid himself open to the influences of his time and the lessons of history.

The Phenomenology.

The _Phenomenology_ is the picture of the Hegelian philosophy in the making--at the stage before the scaffolding has been removed from the building. For this reason the book is at once the most brilliant and the most difficult of Hegel's works--the most brilliant because it is to some degree an autobiography of Hegel's mind--not the abstract record of a logical evolution, but the real history of an intellectual growth; the most difficult because, instead of treating the rise of intelligence (from its first appearance in contrast with the real world to its final recognition of its presence in, and rule over, all things) as a purely subjective process, it exhibits this rise as wrought out in historical epochs, national characteristics, forms of culture and faith, and philosophical systems. The theme is identical with the introduction to the _Encyklopadie_; but it is treated in a very different style. From all periods of the world--from medieval piety and stoical pride, Kant and Sophocles, science and art, religion and philosophy--with disdain of mere chronology, Hegel gathers in the vineyards of the human spirit the grapes from which he crushes the wine of thought. The mind coming through a thousand phases of mistake and disappointment to a sense and realization of its true position in the universe--such is the drama which is consciously Hegel's own history, but is represented objectively as the process of spiritual history which the philosopher reproduces in himself. The _Phenomenology_ stands to the _Encyklopadie_ somewhat as the dialogues of Plato stand to the Aristotelian treatises. It contains almost all his philosophy--but irregularly and without due proportion. The personal element gives an undue prominence to recent phenomena of the philosophic atmosphere. It is the account given by an inventor of his own discovery, not the explanation of an outsider. It therefore to some extent assumes from the first the position which it proposes ultimately to reach, and gives not a proof of that position, but an account of the experience (_Erfahrung_) by which consciousness is forced from one position to another till it finds rest in _Absolutes Wissen_.

The _Phenomenology_ is neither mere psychology, nor logic, nor moral philosophy, nor history, but is all of these and a great deal more. It needs not distillation, but expansion and illustration from contemporary and antecedent thought and literature. It treats of the attitudes of consciousness towards reality under the six heads of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason (_Vernunft_), spirit (_Geist_), religion and absolute knowledge. The native attitude of consciousness towards existence is reliance on the evidence of the senses; but a little reflection is sufficient to show that the reality attributed to the external world is as much due to intellectual conceptions as to the senses, and that these conceptions elude us when we try to fix them. If consciousness cannot detect a permanent object outside it, so self-consciousness cannot find a permanent subject in itself. It may, like the Stoic, assert freedom by holding aloof from the entanglements of real life, or like the sceptic regard the world as a delusion, or finally, as the "unhappy consciousness" (_Ungluckliches Bewusstseyn_), may be a recurrent falling short of a perfection which it has placed above it in the heavens. But in this isolation from the world, self-consciousness has closed its gates against the stream of life. The perception of this is reason. Reason convinced that the world and the soul are alike rational observes the external world, mental phenomena, and specially the nervous organism, as the meeting ground of body and mind. But reason finds much in the world recognizing no kindred with her, and so turning to practical

## activity seeks in the world the realization of her own aims. Either in

a crude way she pursues her own pleasure, and finds that necessity counteracts her cravings; or she endeavours to find the world in harmony with the heart, and yet is unwilling to see fine aspirations crystallized by the act of realizing them. Finally, unable to impose upon the world either selfish or humanitarian ends, she folds her arms in pharisaic virtue, with the hope that some hidden power will give the victory to righteousness. But the world goes on in its life, heedless of the demands of virtue. The principle of nature is to live and let live. Reason abandons her efforts to mould the world, and is content to let the aims of individuals work out their results independently, only stepping in to lay down precepts for the cases where individual actions conflict, and to test these precepts by the rules of formal logic.

So far we have seen consciousness on one hand and the real world on the other. The stage of _Geist_ reveals the consciousness no longer as critical and antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a community, as no longer isolated from its surroundings but the union of the single and real consciousness with the vital feeling that animates the community. This is the lowest stage of concrete consciousness--life, and not knowledge; the spirit inspires, but does not reflect. It is the age of unconscious morality, when the individual's life is lost in the society of which he is an organic member. But increasing culture presents new ideals, and the mind, absorbing the ethical spirit of its environment, gradually emancipates itself from conventions and superstitions. This _Aufklarung_ prepares the way for the rule of conscience, for the moral view of the world as subject of a moral law. From the moral world the next step is religion; the moral law gives place to God; but the idea of Godhead, too, as it first appears, is imperfect, and has to pass through the forms of nature-worship and of art before it reaches a full utterance in Christianity. Religion in this shape is the nearest step to the stage of absolute knowledge; and this absolute knowledge--"the spirit knowing itself as spirit"--is not something which leaves these other forms behind but the full comprehension of them as the organic constituents of its empire; "they are the memory and the sepulchre of its history, and at the same time the actuality, truth and certainty of its throne." Here, according to Hegel, is the field of philosophy.

The preface to the _Phenomenology_ signalled the separation from Schelling--the adieu to romantic. It declared that a genuine philosophy has no kindred with the mere aspirations of artistic minds, but must earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. It sets its face against the idealism which either thundered against the world for its deficiencies, or sought something finer than reality. Philosophy is to be the science of the actual world--it is the spirit comprehending itself in its own externalizations and manifestations. The philosophy of Hegel is idealism, but it is an idealism in which every idealistic unification has its other face in the multiplicity of existence. It is realism as well as idealism, and never quits its hold on facts. Compared with Fichte and Schelling, Hegel has a sober, hard, realistic character. At a later date, with the call of Schelling to Berlin in 1841, it became fashionable to speak of Hegelianism as a negative philosophy requiring to be complemented by a "positive" philosophy which would give reality and not mere ideas. The cry was the same as that of Krug (q.v.), asking the philosophers who expounded the absolute to construe his pen. It was the cry of the Evangelical school for a personal Christ and not a dialectical Logos. The claims of the individual, the real, material and historical fact, it was said, had been sacrificed by Hegel to the universal, the ideal, the spiritual and the logical.

There was a truth in these criticisms. It was the very aim of Hegelianism to render fluid the fixed phases of reality--to show existence not to be an immovable rock limiting the efforts of thought, but to have thought implicit in it, waiting for release from its petrifaction. Nature was no longer, as with Fichte, to be a mere spring-board to evoke the latent powers of the spirit. Nor was it, as in Schelling's earlier system, to be a collateral progeny with mind from the same womb of indifference and identity. Nature and mind in the Hegelian system--the external and the spiritual world--have the same origin, but are not co-equal branches. The natural world proceeds from the "idea," the spiritual from the idea and nature. It is impossible, beginning with the natural world, to explain the mind by any process of distillation or development, unless consciousness or its potentiality has been there from the first. Reality, independent of the individual consciousness, there must be; reality, independent of all mind, is an impossibility. At the basis of all reality, whether material or mental, there is thought. But the thought thus regarded as the basis of all existence is not consciousness with its distinction of ego and non-ego. It is rather the stuff of which both mind and nature are made, neither extended as in the natural world, nor self-centred as in mind. Thought in its primary form is, as it were, thoroughly transparent and absolutely fluid, free and mutually interpenetrable in every part--the spirit in its seraphic scientific life, before creation had produced a natural world, and thought had risen to independent existence in the social organism. Thought in this primary form, when in all its parts completed, is what Hegel calls the "idea." But the idea, though fundamental, is in another sense final, in the process of the world. It only appears in consciousness as the crowning development of the mind. Only with philosophy does thought become fully conscious of itself in its origin and development. Accordingly the history of philosophy is the pre-supposition of logic, or the three branches of philosophy form a circle.

Logic.

The exposition or constitution of the "idea" is the work of the Logic. As the total system falls into three parts, so every part of the system follows the triadic law. Every truth, every reality, has three aspects or stages; it is the unification of two contradictory elements, of two partial aspects of truth which are not merely contrary, like black and white, but contradictory, like same and different. The first step is a preliminary affirmation and unification, the second a negation and differentiation, the third a final synthesis. For example, the seed of the plant is an initial unity of life, which when placed in its proper soil suffers disintegration into its constitutents, and yet in virtue of its vital unity keeps these divergent elements together, and reappears as the plant with its members in organic union. Or again, the process of scientific induction is a threefold chain; the original hypothesis (the first unification of the fact) seems to melt away when confronted with opposite facts, and yet no scientific progress is possible unless the stimulus of the original unification is strong enough to clasp the discordant facts and establish a reunification. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a Fichtean formula, is generalized by Hegel into the perpetual law of thought.

In what we may call their psychological aspect these three stages are known as the abstract stage, or that of understanding (_Verstand_), the dialectical stage, or that of negative reason, and the speculative stage, or that of positive reason (_Vernunft_). The first of these attitudes taken alone is dogmatism; the second, when similarly isolated, is scepticism; the third, when unexplained by its elements, is mysticism. Thus Hegelianism reduces dogmatism, scepticism and mysticism to factors in philosophy. The abstract or dogmatic thinker believes his object to be one, simple and stationary, and intelligible apart from its surrounding. He speaks, e.g., as if species and genera were fixed and unchangeable; and fixing his eye on the ideal forms in their purity and self-sameness, he scorns the phenomenal world, whence this identity and persistence are absent. The dialectic of negative reason rudely dispels these theories. Appealing to reality it shows that the identity and permanence of forms are contradicted by history; instead of unity it exhibits multiplicity, instead of identity difference, instead of a whole, only parts. Dialectic is, therefore, a dislocating power; it shakes the solid structures of material thought, and exhibits the instability latent in such conceptions of the world. It is the spirit of progress and change, the enemy of convention and conservatism; it is absolute and universal unrest. In the realm of abstract thought these transitions take place lightly. In the worlds of nature and mind they are more palpable and violent. So far as this Hegel seems on the side of revolution. But reason is not negative only; while it disintegrates the mass or unconscious unity, it builds up a new unity with higher organization. But this third stage is the place of effort, requiring neither the surrender of the original unity nor the ignoring of the diversity afterwards suggested. The stimulus of contradiction is no doubt a strong one; but the easiest way of escaping it is to shut our eyes to one side of the antithesis. What is required, therefore, is to readjust our original thesis in such a way as to include and give expression to both the elements in the process.

The universe, then, is a process or development, to the eye of philosophy. It is the process of the absolute--in religious language, the manifestation of God. In the background of all the absolute is eternally present; the rhythmic movement of thought is the self-unfolding of the absolute. God reveals Himself in the logical idea, in nature and in mind; but mind is not alike conscious of its absoluteness in every stage of development. Philosophy alone sees God revealing Himself in the ideal organism of thought as it were a possible deity prior to the world and to any relation between God and actuality; in the natural world, as a series of materialized forces and forms of life; and in the spiritual world as the human soul, the legal and moral order of society, and the creations of art, religion and philosophy.

This introduction of the absolute became a stumbling-block to Feuerbach and other members of the "Left." They rejected as an illegitimate interpolation the eternal subject of development, and, instead of one continuing God as the subject of all the predicates by which in the logic the absolute is defined, assumed only a series of ideas, products of philosophic activity. They denied the theological value of the logical forms--the development of these forms being in their opinion due to the human thinker, not to a self-revealing absolute. Thus they made man the creator of the absolute. But with this modification on the system another necessarily followed; a mere logical series could not create nature. And thus the material universe became the real starting-point. Thought became only the result of organic conditions--subjective and human; and the system of Hegel was no longer an idealization of religion, but a naturalistic theory with a prominent and peculiar logic.

The logic of Hegel is the only rival to the logic of Aristotle. What Aristotle did for the theory of demonstrative reasoning, Hegel attempted to do for the whole of human knowledge. His logic is an enumeration of the forms or categories by which our experience exists. It carried out Kant's doctrine of the categories as a priori synthetic principles, but removed the limitation by which Kant denied them any constitutive value except in alliance with experience. According to Hegel the terms in which thought exhibits itself are a system of their own, with laws and relations which reappear in a less obvious shape in the theories of nature and mind. Nor are they restricted to the small number which Kant obtained by manipulating the current subdivision of judgments. But all forms by which thought holds sensations in unity (the formative or synthetic elements of language) had their place assigned in a system where one leads up to and passes over into another.

The fact which ordinary thought ignores, and of which ordinary logic therefore provides no account, is the presence of gradation and continuity in the world. The general terms of language simplify the universe by reducing its variety of individuals to a few forms, none of which exists simply and perfectly. The method of the understanding is to divide and then to give a separate reality to what it has thus distinguished. It is part of Hegel's plan to remedy this one-sided character of thought, by laying bare the gradations of ideas. He lays special stress on the point that abstract ideas when held in their abstraction are almost interchangeable with their opposites--that extremes meet, and that in every true and concrete idea there is a coincidence of opposites.

The beginning of the logic is an illustration of this. The logical idea is treated under the three heads of being (_Seyn_), essence (_Wesen_) and notion (_Begriff_). The simplest term of thought is being; we cannot think less about anything than when we merely say that it is. Being--the abstract "is"--is _nothing_ definite, and nothing at least is. Being and not being are thus declared identical--a proposition which in this unqualified shape was to most people a stumbling-block at the very door of the system. Instead of the mere "is" which is as yet nothing, we should rather say "becomes," and as "becomes" always implies "something," we have determinate being--"a being" which in the next stage of definiteness becomes "one." And in this way we pass on to the quantitative aspects of being.

The terms treated under the first head, in addition to those already mentioned, are the abstract principles of quantity and number, and their application in measure to determine the limits of being. Under the title of essence are discussed those pairs of correlative terms which are habitually employed in the explanation of the world--such as law and phenomenon, cause and effect, reason and consequence, substance and attribute. Under the head of notion are considered, firstly, the subjective forms of conception, judgment and syllogism; secondly, their realization in objects as mechanically, chemically or teleologically constituted; and thirdly, the idea first of life, and next of science, as the complete interpenetration of thought and objectivity. The third part of logic evidently is what contains the topics usually treated in logic-books, though even here the province of logic in the ordinary sense is exceeded. The first two divisions--the "objective logic"--are what is usually called metaphysics.