Part 34

The characteristic of the system is the gradual way in which idea is linked to idea so as to make the division into chapters only an arrangement of convenience. The judgment is completed in the syllogism; the syllogistic form as the perfection of subjective thought passes into objectivity, where it first appears embodied in a mechanical system; and the teleological object, in which the members are as means and end, leads up to the idea of life, where the end is means and means end indissolubly till death. In some cases these transitions may be unsatisfactory and forced; it is apparent that the linear development from "being" to the "idea" is got by transforming into a logical order the sequence that has roughly prevailed in philosophy from the Eleatics; cases might be quoted where the reasoning seems a play upon words; and it may often be doubted whether certain ideas do not involve extra-logical considerations. The order of the categories is in the main outlines fixed; but in the minor details much depends upon the philosopher, who has to fill in the gaps between ideas, with little guidance from the data of experience, and to assign to the stages of development names which occasionally deal hardly with language. The merit of Hegel is to have indicated and to a large extent displayed the filiation and mutual limitation of our forms of thought; to have arranged them in the order of their comparative capacity to give a satisfactory expression to truth in the totality of its relations; and to have broken down the partition which in Kant separated the formal logic from the transcendental analytic, as well as the general disruption between logic and metaphysic. It must at the same time be admitted that much of the work of weaving the terms of thought, the categories, into a system has a hypothetical and tentative character, and that Hegel has rather pointed out the path which logic must follow, viz. a criticism of the terms of scientific and ordinary thought in their filiation and interdependence, than himself in every case kept to the right way. The day for a fuller investigation of this problem will partly depend upon the progress of the study of language in the direction marked out by W. von Humboldt.

Philosophy of nature.

The Philosophy of Nature starts with the result of the logical development, with the full scientific "idea." But the relations of pure thought, losing their inwardness, appear as relations of space and time; the abstract development of thought appears as matter and movement. Instead of thought, we have perception; instead of dialectic, gravitation; instead of causation, sequence in time. The whole falls under the three heads of mechanics, physics and "organic"--the content under each varying somewhat in the three editions of the _Encyklopadie_. The first treats of space, time, matter, movement; and in the solar system we have the representation of the idea in its general and abstract material form. Under the head of physics we have the theory of the elements, of sound, heat and cohesion, and finally of chemical affinity--presenting the phenomena of material change and interchange in a series of special forces which generate the variety of the life of nature. Lastly, under the head of "organic," come geology, botany and animal physiology--presenting the concrete results of these processes in the three kingdoms of nature.

The charges of superficial analogies, so freely urged against the "Natur-philosophie" by critics who forget the impulse it gave to physical research by the identification of forces then believed to be radically distinct, do not particularly affect Hegel. But in general it may be said that he looked down upon the mere natural world. The meanest of the fancies of the mind and the most casual of its whims he regarded as a better warrant for the being of God than any single object of nature. Those who supposed astronomy to inspire religious awe were horrified to hear the stars compared to eruptive spots on the face of the sky. Even in the animal world, the highest stage of nature, he saw a failure to reach an independent and rational system of organization; and its feelings under the continuous violence and menaces of the environment he described as insecure, anxious and unhappy.

His point of view was essentially opposed to the current views of science. To metamorphosis he only allowed a logical value, as explaining the natural classification; the only real, existent metamorphosis he saw in the development of the individual from its embryonic stage. Still more distinctly did he contravene the general tendency of scientific explanation. "It is held the triumph of science to recognize in the general process of the earth the same categories as are exhibited in the processes of isolated bodies. This is, however, an application of categories from a field where the conditions are finite to a sphere in which the circumstances are infinite." In astronomy he depreciates the merits of Newton and elevates Kepler, accusing Newton particularly, a propos of the distinction of centrifugal and centripetal forces, of leading to a confusion between what is mathematically to be distinguished and what is physically separate. The principles which explain the fall of an apple will not do for the planets. As to colour, he follows Goethe, and uses strong language against Newton's theory, for the barbarism of the conception that light is a compound, the incorrectness of his observations, &c. In chemistry, again, he objects to the way in which all the chemical elements are treated as on the same level.

Philosophy of mind. 1. Psychology.

The third part of the system is the Philosophy of Mind. Its three divisions are the "subjective mind" (psychology), the "objective mind" (philosophic jurisprudence, moral and political philosophy) and the "absolute mind" (the philosophy of art, religion and philosophy). The subjects of the second and third divisions have been treated by Hegel with great detail. The "objective mind" is the topic of the _Rechts-Philosophie_, and of the lectures on the Philosophy of History; while on the "absolute mind" we have the lectures on Aesthetic, on the Philosophy of Religion and on the History of Philosophy--in short, more than one-third of his works.

The purely psychological branch of the subject takes up half of the space allotted to _Geist_ in the _Encyklopadie_. It falls under the three heads of anthropology, phenomenology and psychology proper. Anthropology treats of the mind in union with the body--of the natural soul--and discusses the relations of the soul with the planets, the races of mankind, the differences of age, dreams, animal magnetism, insanity and phrenology. In this obscure region it is rich in suggestions and rapprochements; but the ingenuity of these speculations attracts curiosity more than it satisfies scientific inquiry. In the Phenomenology consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are dealt with. The title of the section and the contents recall, though with some important variations, the earlier half of his first work; only that here the historical background on which the stages in the development of the ego were represented has disappeared. Psychology, in the stricter sense, deals with the various forms of theoretical and practical intellect, such as attention, memory, desire and will. In this account of the development of an independent, active and intelligent being from the stage where man like the Dryad is a portion of the natural life around him, Hegel has combined what may be termed a physiology and pathology of the mind--a subject far wider than that of ordinary psychologies, and one of vast intrinsic importance. It is, of course, easy to set aside these questions as unanswerable, and to find artificiality in the arrangement. Still it remains a great point to have even attempted some system in the dark anomalies which lie under the normal consciousness, and to have traced the genesis of the intellectual faculties from animal sensitivity.

2. Law and history.

The theory of the mind as objectified in the institutions of law, the family and the state is discussed in the "Philosophy of Right." Beginning with the antithesis of a legal system and morality, Hegel, carrying out the work of Kant, presents the synthesis of these elements in the ethical life (_Sittlichkeit_) of the family and the state. Treating the family as an instinctive realization of the moral life, and not as the result of contract, he shows how by the means of wider associations due to private interests the state issues as the full home of the moral spirit, where intimacy of interdependence is combined with freedom of independent growth. The state is the consummation of man as finite; it is the necessary starting-point whence the spirit rises to an absolute existence in the spheres of art, religion and philosophy. In the finite world or temporal state, religion, as the finite organization of a church, is, like other societies, subordinate to the state. But on another side, as absolute spirit, religion, like art and philosophy, is not subject to the state, but belongs to a higher region.

The political state is always an individual, and the relations of these states with each other and the "world-spirit" of which they are the manifestations constitute the material of history. The _Lectures on the Philosophy of History_, edited by Gans and subsequently by Karl Hegel, is the most popular of Hegel's works. The history of the world is a scene of judgment where one people and one alone holds for awhile the sceptre, as the unconscious instrument of the universal spirit, till another rises in its place, with a fuller measure of liberty--a larger superiority to the bonds of natural and artificial circumstance. Three main periods--the Oriental, the Classical and the Germanic--in which respectively the single despot, the dominant order, and the man as man possess freedom--constitute the history of the world. Inaccuracy in detail and artifice in the arrangement of isolated peoples are inevitable in such a scheme. A graver mistake, according to some critics, is that Hegel, far from giving a law of progress, seems to suggest that the history of the world is nearing an end, and has merely reduced the past to a logical formula. The answer to this charge is partly that such a law seems unattainable, and

## partly that the idealistic content of the present which philosophy

extracts is always an advance upon actual fact, and so does throw a light into the future. And at any rate the method is greater than Hegel's employment of it.

3. Art, religion and philosophy.

But as with Aristotle so with Hegel--beyond the ethical and political sphere rises the world of absolute spirit in art, religion and philosophy. The psychological distinction between the three forms is that sensuous perception (_Anschauung_) is the organon of the first, presentative conception (_Vorstellung_) of the second and free thought of the third. The work of art, the first embodiment of absolute mind, shows a sensuous conformity between the idea and the reality in which it is expressed. The so-called beauty of nature is for Hegel an adventitious beauty. The beauty of art is a beauty born in the spirit of the artist and born again in the spectator; it is not like the beauty of natural things, an incident of their existence, but is "essentially a question, an address to a responding breast, a call to the heart and spirit." The perfection of art depends on the degree of intimacy in which idea and form appear worked into each other. From the different proportion between the idea and the shape in which it is realized arise three different forms of art. When the idea, itself indefinite, gets no further than a struggle and endeavour for its appropriate expression, we have the symbolic, which is the Oriental, form of art, which seeks to compensate its imperfect expression by colossal and enigmatic structures. In the second or classical form of art the idea of humanity finds an adequate sensuous representation. But this form disappears with the decease of Greek national life, and on its collapse follows the romantic, the third form of art; where the harmony of form and content again grows defective, because the object of Christian art--the infinite spirit--is a theme too high for art. Corresponding to this division is the classification of the single arts. First comes architecture--in the main, symbolic art; then sculpture, the classical art _par excellence_; they are found, however, in all three forms. Painting and music are the specially romantic arts. Lastly, as a union of painting and music comes poetry, where the sensuous element is more than ever subordinate to the spirit.

The lectures on the Philosophy of Art stray largely into the next sphere and dwell with zest on the close connexion of art and religion; and the discussion of the decadence and rise of religions, of the aesthetic qualities of Christian legend, of the age of chivalry, &c., make the _Asthetik_ a book of varied interest.

The lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, though unequal in their composition and belonging to different dates, serve to exhibit the vital connexion of the system with Christianity. Religion, like art, is inferior to philosophy as an exponent of the harmony between man and the absolute. In it the absolute exists as the poetry and music of the heart, in the inwardness of feeling. Hegel after expounding the nature of religion passes on to discuss its historical phases, but in the immature state of religious science falls into several mistakes. At the bottom of the scale of nature-worships he places the religion of sorcery. The gradations which follow are apportioned with some uncertainty amongst the religions of the East. With the Persian religion of light and the Egyptian of enigmas we pass to those faiths where Godhead takes the form of a spiritual individuality, i.e. to the Hebrew religion (of sublimity), the Greek (of beauty) and the Roman (of adaptation). Last comes absolute religion, in which the mystery of the reconciliation between God and man is an open doctrine. This is Christianity, in which God is a Trinity, because He is a spirit. The revelation of this truth is the subject of the Christian Scriptures. For the Son of God, in the immediate aspect, is the finite world of nature and man, which far from being at one with its Father is originally in an attitude of estrangement. The history of Christ is the visible reconciliation between man and the eternal. With the death of Christ this union, ceasing to be a mere fact, becomes a vital idea--the Spirit of God which dwells in the Christian community.

The lectures on the History of Philosophy deal disproportionately with the various epochs, and in some parts date from the beginning of Hegel's career. In trying to subject history to the order of logic they sometimes misconceive the filiation of ideas. But they created the history of philosophy as a scientific study. They showed that a philosophical theory is not an accident or whim, but an exponent of its age determined by its antecedents and environments, and handing on its results to the future. (W. W.; X.)

_Hegelianism in England._--On the continent of Europe the direct influence of Hegelianism was comparatively short-lived. This was due among other causes to the direction of attention to the rising science of psychology, partly to the reaction against the speculative method. In England and Scotland it had another fate. Both in theory and practice it here seemed to supply precisely the counter-active to prevailing tendencies towards empiricism and individualism that was required. In this respect it stood to philosophy in somewhat the same relation that the influence of Goethe stood to literature. This explains the hold which it had obtained upon both English and Scottish thought soon after the middle of the 19th century. The first impulse came from J. F. Ferrier and J. H. Stirling in Edinburgh, and B. Jowett in Oxford. Already in the seventies there was a powerful school of English thinkers under the lead of Edward Caird and T. H. Green devoted to the study and exposition of the Hegelian system. With the general acceptance of its main principle that the real is the rational, there came in the eighties a more critical examination of the precise meaning to be attached to it and its bearing on the problems of religion. The earlier Hegelians had interpreted it in the sense that the world in its ultimate essence was not only spiritual but self-conscious intelligence whose nature was reflected inadequately but truly in the finite mind. They thus seemed to come forward in the character of exponents rather than critics of the Western belief in God, freedom and immortality. As time went on it became obvious that without departure from the spirit of idealism Hegel's principle was susceptible of a different interpretation. Granted that rationality taken in the sense of inner coherence and self-consistency is the ultimate standard of truth and reality, does self-consciousness itself answer to the demands of this criterion? If not, are we not forced to deny ultimate reality to personality whether human or divine? The question was definitely raised in F. H. Bradley's _Appearance and Reality_ (1893; 2nd ed., 1897) and answered in the negative. The completeness and self-consistency which our ideal requires can be realized only in a form of being in which subject and object, will and desire, no longer stand as exclusive opposites, from which it seemed at once to follow that the finite self could not be a reality nor the infinite reality a self. On this basis Bradley developed a theory of the Absolute which, while not denying that it must be conceived of spiritually, insisted that its spirituality is of a kind that finds no analogy in our self-conscious experience. More recently J. M. E. McTaggart's _Studies in Hegelian Dialectic_ (1896), _Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_ (1901) and _Some Dogmas of Religion_ (1906) have opened a new chapter in the interpretation of Hegelianism. Truly perceiving that the ultimate metaphysical problem is, here as ever, the relation of the One and the Many, McTaggart starts with a definition of the ideal in which our thought upon it can come to rest. He finds it where (a) the unity is for each individual, (b) the whole nature of the individual is to be _for_ the unity. It follows from such a conception of the relation that the whole cannot itself be an individual apart from the individuals in whom it is realized, in other words, the Absolute cannot be a Person. But for the same reason--viz. that in it first and in it alone this condition is realized--the individual soul must be held to be an ultimate reality reflecting in its inmost nature, like the monad of Leibniz, the complete fulness and harmony of the whole. In reply to Bradley's argument for the unreality of the self, Hegel is interpreted as meaning that the opposition between self and not-self on which it is founded is one that is self-made and in being made is transcended. The fuller our knowledge of reality the more does the object stand out as an invulnerable system of ordered parts, but the process by which it is thus set in opposition to the subject is also the process by which we understand and transform it into the substance of our own thought. From this position further consequences followed. Seeing that the individual soul must thus be taken to stand in respect to its inmost essence in complete harmony with the whole, it must eternally be at one with itself: all change must be appearance. Seeing, moreover, that it is, and is maintained in being, by a fixed relation to the Absolute, it cannot fail of immortality. No pantheistic theory of an eternal substance continuously expressing itself in different individuals who fall back into its being like drops into the ocean will here be sufficient. The ocean is the drops. "The Absolute requires each self not to make up a sum or to maintain an average but in respect of the self's special and unique nature." Finally as it cannot cease, neither can the individual soul have had a beginning. Pre-existence is as necessary and certain as a future life. If memory is lacking as a link between the different lives, this only shows that memory is not of the substance of the soul.

In view of these differences (amounting almost to an antinomy of paradoxes) in interpretation, it is not surprising to find that recent years have witnessed a violent reaction in some quarters against Hegelian influence. This has taken the direction on the one hand of a revival of realism (see METAPHYSICS), on the other of a new form of subjective idealism (see PRAGMATISM). As yet neither of these movements has shown sufficient coherence or stability to establish itself as a rival to the main current of philosophy in England. But they have both been urged with sufficient ability to arrest its progress and to call for a reconsideration and restatement of the fundamental principle of idealist philosophy and its relation to the fundamental problems of religion. This will probably be the main work of the next generation of thinkers in England (see IDEALISM).

Among Italian Hegelians are A. Vera, Raffaele Mariano and B. Spaventa (1817-1883); see V. de Lucia, _L'Hegel in Italia_ (1891). In Sweden, J. J. Borelius of Lund; in Norway, G. V. Lyng (d. 1884), M. J. Monrad (1816-1897) and G. Kent (d. 1892) have adopted Hegelianism; in France, P. Leroux and P. Prevost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Shortly after Hegel's death his collected works were published by a number of his friends, who combined for the purpose. They appeared in eighteen volumes in 1832, and a second edition came out about twelve years later. Volumes i.-viii. contain the works published by himself; the remainder is made up of his lectures on the Philosophy of History, Aesthetic, the Philosophy of Religion and the History of Philosophy, besides some essays and reviews, with a few of his letters, and the Philosophical Propaedeutic.

For his life see K. Rosenkranz, _Leben Hegels_ (Berlin, 1844); R. R. Haym, _Hegel und seine Zeit_ (Berlin, 1857); K. Kostlin, _Hegel in philosophischer, politischer und nationaler Beziehung_ (Tubingen, 1870); Rosenkranz, _Hegel als deutscher National-Philosoph_ (Berlin, 1870), and his _Neue Studien_, vol. iv. (Berlin, 1878); Kuno Fischer, _Hegels Leben und Werke_.