# The Secret of Hegel/Volume 1/Section 1/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
NOTES OF THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL.
A. I.
The criticism on Ex nihilo nihil fit is crucial. If it is admitted, we are at once and ever after Hegelians; if it is rejected, we can never become Hegelian. Is that axiom false, then, and is its contrary true? From nothing can something come? That sparrow passing the window was not, is, and will cease to be; but it neither comes from nothing, nor goes to nothing. All that belongs to Daseyn (translate it, for the nonce, existence) is a Vermitteltes—is a product, a result of means; it has real elements and real factors. Hegel's principle, then, which transcends Daseyn, which ascends to Seyn (Being) can relate only to a first act of creation. But of this we know nothing. In all our world such a principle is not to be found. It may be applied to a certain extent to function (the function of a watch, of a steam-engine, of a plant, of an animal), which we see, if not coming from nothing, at least passing into nothing: but then all functions are vermittelt, are products, and have factors. No: for Hegel, there is nothing but creation. Unless in a creative act, Hegel's process (something from nothing) is not true, as applied to any Bestimmung of Daseyn, to actual existence, or appurtenance of the same: nowhere do ​we see nothing passing into something, or something into nothing; we see only processes of combination out of something, and of resolution into something.
I was not, I am, I shall cease to be. True; but if I am only functional manifestation, I have no privilege over the sparrow. It is here, however, that the other element, the crux of existence, steps in—the principle of Self-consciousness, which we cannot allow ourselves to degrade to a level with what we call material Daseyn; we cannot believe it mere function of material elements. Here then, perhaps, we approach the essential position of Hegel, who subordinates the material to the spiritual, who begins with the spiritual and derives all thence. Hegel refuses to build up the world from without; he begins from within. In this point of view, then, is there any countenance, any holding-ground for his principle?——Hegel's idea is there, really there to a certain extent. This lily was not, and is; that lily was, and is not: the bottom thought at least relates to Something and Nothing. If not constitutive of the process, they are regulative of it.
What does Hegel intend by his Logic?—Categories, the lowest (or highest) general ideal forms, the meta​physical skeleton of the body of thought: we are exercised in pure thought—in the material as well as in the formal element of Logic. It is a reduction of the matter of thought to its ultimate elements. Can he believe in any possible cosmogonical power through the progressive self-concretion of the Idea? How does it connect itself with his general idea of the Absolute, his general expression of Idealism—Thought, the Idea, passing into objectivity and returning thence, enriched and reconciled, into its own subjectivity again? This is true of us; and from us is it, as it were, impersonified into the Absolute? Well, it is reasonable to present the primary and simple forms first, as the first stage of the Idea; but even in its first stage, it is triune and possesses analogues of the others.
There may be a cosmogony at the bottom, too. There is the step from Schelling's substance to an impersonal subject as Absolute, whose life is from An sich (In itself) to Für sich (By and for itself), through Ausser sich (Out of itself). Take this as Regulative—with reflexes of a Constitutive also—then Philosophy as demonstrating this process on the part of the All will present three parts or moments: 1. An sich; 2. Ausser sich; and, 3. Für sich. What will fall under the two ​latter heads is plain (Nature and Spirit, namely), but what are we to put under the first? Why, thought, as yet unformed, the rudimentary skeleton of the Idea an sich—that which is common to both of the other parts, but yet possesses nothing that is specially characteristic of these parts. But the primal forms of thought that interpenetrate both Nature and Spirit is Logic Proper—Logic not as confined to the mere formal rules of reasoning, but Logic that constitutes the very essence of thought. In all three, the principle of progress will be the same as the general principle: it will be thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
A. 2.
The Idea is thought: thought consists of ideas—to think is to follow ideas. Thought, then, as whole of ideas, is an element sui generis, and will possess its own organic order; ideas will follow an order native and inherent to them: but the general, the universal of all ideas may be called the idea. The idea, then, is self-identical thinking; self-identical because in its own nature the idea is two-sided—an objective side is, as it were, exposed and offered to a subjective side, and the result is the return, so to speak, of the idea from its other, which is its objective side, into itself, or subjective side, as satisfied, gratified, and contented knowledge. We are not required to think of existent nature in all this, but only of the nature of a general idea—of the idea in its own self. Besides being self-identical thinking, it is thus also seen to be, as defined by Hegel, the capability of opposing or exposing itself to itself, and that for the purpose of being in its own self and for its own self—just its own self, in fact. ​In this process, the objective side can evidently be very properly called its state of otherness or hetereity; and it is only when it arrives at this state of otherness or hetereity, and has identified it with itself, that it can be said to be by itself—that is, at home and reconciled with itself.
The notion of a general idea—idea as a general, as a universal—the idea is taken and looked at by the mind, and is seen to possess this immanent process or nature. But idea follows idea—or the idea is in constant process: to show the order and train of these, or the moments of this process, may be called the system of thought, that is, of Logic, then. Now, what is concerned here, is not the succession of ideas as they occur subjectively on what is called the association of ideas, but it is that succession which occurs in real thinking, in thought as thought—in objective thought, in the performance of the Idea's own immanent process and function.
Now, how then will the Idea, the speculative Idea, arise and develop itself in any subject? The first question that will naturally suggest itself will relate to Being. The idea will be first asked, or will first ask itself, to exercise its function, to do its spiriting on the fact of existence, for the nearest and first character of the Idea is that it is. The idea, then, first of all, holds itself as a mirror to the general thought of existence—to Being in its abstract generality, to the mere essence of the word is. Now, it cannot do so without the opposite notion of nothing also arising. It is implies or involves it is not, or, at all events, it was not; it cannot help saying to itself, the moment it looks at it is, it was not. Not and is, then, is and not, must arise together, and cannot help arising together. Neither can they ​help flowing into the kindred notions, origin and decease, or coming to be and ceasing to be. The instant we think of Being, Existence, just as Being, Existence, in general, without a single property or quality, the notions of not, of coming to be, and of ceasing to be (which are both included in Becoming), must follow and do follow. So it is with us when we think, so is it with our speculative ideas—that is, so is it with the speculative idea—the Idea then; and so was it also in History. The first philosophical systems must have revolved around these simple notions, and Hegel is quite in earnest when he maintains the coincidence of History and of Logic. What is this Seyn, this Being? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? What is change? What is the influence of number, quantity, proportion? Why is it? These are the simple questions that circle round Being, Origin, Decease, Becoming. What is it particularly to be—individually to be (Daseyn, Fürsichseyn)? These really are the questions of the Ionics, of the Eleatics, of Heraclitus, of Pythagoras, of Democritus, &c.
Now these notions are all capable of being included under the designation Quality, for they are all replies to Qualis? Mere existence as an Idea soon passes into that of special and actual existence, that really is and continues to be in the middle of that coming to be and ceasing to be. It is next also seen to be not only existent in the middle of this process, but individually existent, as it were personally existent. The whole progress of Hegel through Seyn, Nichts, Werden, Entstehen, Vergehen, Daseyn, Reality, Negation, Something, Other, Being-in-itself, Being-for-Other, Precise Nature, manifested Property, Limit, &c.; these may be viewed as adumbrations of stages of infantile conscious​ness: Dim thought that there is, that there is nothing, that there comes to be, that there ceases to be, that there is a middle state that is in the coming to being and the going from being; that this is marked-off being, defined being; that there is a definite and an indefinite; that there was negation, that there is reality; that this reality thickens itself under reflexion and reference on reality and on negation, and from reality to negation, and from negation to reality, into a something that is what it is to be in itself, in which distinction disappears and it remains a familiar Unity.
When a blind man recovers sight, all is a blur, an indistinct formless blur that seems to touch him, that is not distinguished from himself, or that conceivably he could not have distinguished from himself, had he not learned from the other senses that there was another than himself. Now, a child is in the position of the blind man who recovers sight, without ever having learned a single item from any other sense, or in any other manner. Naturally, then that there is, &c., abstract Seyn, &c., will be the sequence of unrecorded consciousness. Distinctions of quality will certainly precede those of quantity—the differences of kind will be seen before the fact of the repetition of an individual.
This Logic, then, may be viewed as the way we came to think—the way in which thought grew, till there was a world for Reflexion, for Understanding to turn upon. Even this, then, is an othering of its own self to see its own self, and it is the mode in which it did other itself. It is quite apart from nature or from mind raised into spirit; it is the unconscious product of thought; and it follows its own laws, and deposits itself according to its own laws. Hegel, as it were, swoons himself back into infancy—trances himself through all ​childhood, and awakes when the child awakes, that is, with reflexion, but retaining a consciousness of the process, which the child does not. It is a realisation of the wish that we could know the series of development in the mind of the child. His meaning of Reflexion, of Understanding, of Reason, comes out very plain now, for the process is a transcending of the Understanding, and a demonstration of the work of pure Reason. Then, again, it is common to us all—it is an impersonal subject.
To repeat—conceivably there is first a sense of being—or the vague, wide idea Being; there is no I in it: I is the product of reflexion; it is just a general there is; it is the vast vague infinite of Being; it has its circumference everywhere, and its centre nowhere. That is plain—that Being is at once such centre and circumference; for though it is vast, and everything and everywhere—and, at the same time indefinite, and vague and nowhere—still, as Being, as a vast that is, there is a principle of punctual stop in it—of fixture, of definiteness; it is indefinite and indeterminate, but, as is, it is also definite and determinate.
This is conceivably the first sense of Being. But evidently in what has been already said there is a sense of Nothing involved. It is the boundless blank, that is, and no more; it is the roofless, wall-less, bottomless gulf of all and of nothing: senses or ideas of Being and Nothing, like vast and infinite confronting vapours—the infinite vaporous warp and infinite vaporous woof, confronting, meeting, interpenetrating, wave and weave together, waft and waver apart, to wave and weave together again.
Then, as the only conceivably true existence—the only thing conceivably worth existence—is mind, ​thought, intelligence, spirit,—this must have been the first, if not as man, then as God. And the first of the first was such process. The sense of the indistinguishable—the necessity, the besoin of the distinguishable! No, then, is the principle that creates distinction. There is no use to explain this; we can go back no further: it is the universe—it is what is. Understanding begins, so to speak, when Reason ceases.
The Logic, then, is the deposit and crystallisation in Reason previous to Reflexion. It is the structure that comes ready constructed to Understanding. The detection of its process is the analysis or resolution of what the Understanding looks upon as something simply and directly there—something ready to its hand, something simply and directly given, and which is as it is given. It is what each of us has done for himself during infancy and childhood, in darkness and unconsciousness; or it is the work of Reason before Reflexion. We see, then, that Understanding, which transcends so much, as in Astronomy, &c., must itself be transcended, and speculative Reason adopted instead. Carlyle's unfathomableness of the universe must be seen to rest on Understanding.
After all, too, there may be Jacob Böhmic cosmogonic ideas at bottom: no saying how far he allows these notions of Being and Nothing to take the form of forces, and build up the All. If there be no Jenseits—only a here and this—which supposition does not, in Hegel's way, infringe in the slightest the truth of Immortality—then his theory is as good as any. How otherwise are we to conceive a beginning? A beginning is what is begun, and is not what is begun. The beginning of all beginnings cannot differ. Being, too, is the basal thought and fact of all. Nothing, ​the principle of distinction and difference, is equally basal. It is very difficult to conceive objective thought, however, and to conceive it gradually developing itself into this actual concrete me, with these five fingers, which now write on paper, with pen and ink, &c. Something seems always to lie in the actual present, the actual immediate, that says such a genesis from abstract thought is impossible. Yet, again a genesis of thought from mere matter—that is equally impossible; thought must be the prius: then how conceive a beginning and progress with reference to that prius? Our system of reconciliation (English Idealism) is a Deus ex Machina: I—the thinking principle—am so made that such a series presents itself! Which just amounts to—I am tired thinking it; I just give it up to another, and say he cuts the knot—believing my own saying with much innocence and simplicity, and resting quite content therein, as if I really had got rid of the whole difficulty and solved the whole matter. English Idealism, in its one series, is certainly a simpler theory than the ordinary one, that there are two series—that first it (the object) and that then I (the subject) are so made. Stone-masonry and wood-carpentry are thus spared the Prius. Yet, again, there is nothing spared the Prius; all has been thrust into it, out of the way, as into a drawer, which is then shut, but it is all still in the drawer. Whether it is so made and I am so made, or only I am so made, the so is in the Prius; whatever else be in the Prius, the Prius is responsible to that extent: the so is; and since the so is, the Prius must be so. We are still in presence, then, of the whole problem, which is simply the So. All this is plain to a Hegel, and all this he would meet by his absolute Idealism. Hegel has a particular dislike to ​the Deus of modern enlightenment, which he names an empty abstraction. An abstract Summum—an abstract Prius—and nothing more, seems indeed to constitute what goes to make up the idea, when we examine it closely. But if Hegel ridicules the Deus of Deism, it must be allowed he is sincere in his devotion before God—who, as every man's own heart—as tradition, as Scripture tells us, is a Spirit. Nor does he believe that he contradicts either Reason or Scripture when he endeavours 'to know God.' Hegel is probably right in opening his eyes to a Deus ex Machinâ, and in desiring to draw close to God, the Spirit, in that he endeavours to deduce from this Universe, the Universal Subject of this Universe. Nevertheless, his principle has much more the look of a mere Regulative than of a Constitutive—and it is a Constitutive that we must have.
A. 3.
Plato discovers a boyish delight in the exercise of the new-found power of conscious generalisation extended to him by Socrates. Hegel seems to have learned a lesson in this art from Plato, for ταὐτὸν and θάτερον, or identity and otherness, which are the instruments or moments of the generalisation of the latter, seem to perform a like function in the dialectic of the former. The Socratic evolution of the idea—through elimination of the accidental from the concrete example—presents analogies (when transferred from mere ethical ideas to ideas in general) to both the Heraclitic and the Eleatic modes of thought. The accidental which is eliminated, is analogous to the fluent and changeable of Heraclitus; while the idea that remains is analogous to the permanent and abiding ​One of the Eleatics. As if what is were an absolute Being, but also a relative—yet really existent—Non-being. In the relations of the Ideas, the principle of Identity is Eleatic, that of Difference is Heraclitic. The Ideas are the Universal and Necessary in the Particular and Contingent: the latter is only by reason of them; still the former come forward or appear only in it. How very analogous the categories, the dialectic, &c. &c. of Hegel to all this!
B.
One, single, empirical man cannot be taken, but he and what he embodies are universalised, as it were, into a universal subject. The Logic is the immanent process of the Reason of this subject. The logical values are, as it were, depositions from the great sea of Reason; and yet, by a turn, the great sea takes all up again into its own transparent simplicity and unity. We are admitted to the ultimate and elementary fibres of the All. Being and Nothing interweave to Becoming. Coming to be and Ceasing to be interweave to So-to-be, to So-being, or Here-being—to sublunary existentiality, to mortal state, which again is just Quality. Reality and Negation interweave to Something and Other. In Something and other, the subtle delicacy of the thought-manipulation comes well to light, and displays the nature of the whole work, which is the construction of the Thing-in-itself from materials of thought only. So it is that the Understanding succeeds Reason, and turns on the work of Reason as on its material. Let us rapidly sketch the development in a single wave.
There is a tree, a horse, a man—there is a feeling, ​there is a passion, there is a thought. All these phrases are, without doubt, universally intelligible. Now, in the whole six of them, there is presents itself as a common element; and it suffers no change in any, but is absolutely the same in all. There is a tree, &c.—there is a thought, &c.—however different a thought may be from a tree, or a feeling from a house, the phrase there is has precisely the same meaning when attached to tree or house that it has when attached to thought or feeling. Let us abstract, then, from these subjects, from these words, and repeat the phrase there is, there is, till the special element which these two words contribute begins to dawn on our consciousness. Let us repeat to ourselves there is with reference to matters not only outward, but inward; and let us repeat it, and again repeat it, till it acquires, so to speak, some body as a distinct thought. If we succeed well with the two words there is, we shall find no difficulty in making one other step in advance, and in realising to ourselves a conception of what is meant by the bare word is.
But the reader must understand that he is to do this. He is now to cease reading, and to occupy himself a good half-hour with the rumination of what he has just read. If he contents himself with simple perusal, he will find himself very soon stopped by insurmountable obstacles, and most probably very soon compelled to give it up in disgust. But if he will devote one half-hour in the manner we have indicated, the result will be a perfect conception of the meaning of is, that is, of Abstract or Pure Being, of Abstract or Pure Existentiality, of the Hegelian Seyn. And most appropriately is it named abstract; for it is the ultimate and absolute Abstract. Is it that which may ​be abstracted or extracted from every fact and form of existence, whether celestial or terrestrial, material or spiritual. Rather it is the residue when we abstract from all these. It is the absolutely terminal calx—the absolutely final residuum that continues and must continue for our thought when abstraction is made from the whole world. Let there be no stone, no plant, no sea, no earth, no sun, no star in all the firmament—let there be no mind, no thought, no idea, no space, no time, no God—let the universe disappear—we have not yet got rid of is: is will not, cannot disappear. Let us do our best to conceive the universe abolished—let us do our best to conceive what we call existence abolished—still we shall find that we cannot escape from the abstract shadow is which we have indicated. Being is absolutely necessary to thought; to thought, that is, it is absolutely necessary that there be Being. Ask yourself, What would there be, if there were just nothing at all, and if there never had been anything—neither a God, nor a world, nor an existence at all? Ask yourself this and listen! Then just look at the question itself, and observe how it contains its own dialectic and contradiction in presupposing the Being it is actually supposing not to be!
It may appear to the reader a very simple thought, this, and a very unnecessary one: still, if he will consider that it is the universal element—that there is nothing in the heaven above nor in the earth beneath where it is not present, and that it is as essential a constituent of thought as of matter, it will probably appear not unnatural that it should be begun with in a system of Universal Logic, of Universal Thought. Without it there is no thought, and without it there is no thing. Take ​it even as a matter of conception, it is that which is absolutely first—that which, without us or within us, is absolutely over-against us, absolutely immediate, absolutely and directly present to us. The Eleatics had a perfect right to exclaim, 'Being only is, and nothing is just nothing at all!'
Look at it again, now; call up the shadow is—let us once more realise to ourselves all that we think when we say there is with any reference or with no reference—let us place before us the conception of abstract existence, of abstract Seyn, and we shall perceive that it is characterised by a total and complete absence of any possible predicate. It is the absolute void, the absolute inane. Like the mathematical point, it is position without magnitude; and again, it is magnitude without position—it is everything in general, and nothing in particular: it is, in fact, nothing.
If this prove repugnant to the reader, let him ask himself, what then is it, if it is not nothing? or let him ask himself, what then is nothing? and the result of his deepest pondering will be that, after all, the shadow nothing is the shadow is—that abstract nothing and abstract being, or the abstract not and the abstract is, contain precisely the same thought, and that the one, quite as much as the other, is the absolute void, the absolute inane—that the one quite as much as the other is position without magnitude, and magnitude without position—that each involves and implies the other, and that both are all in general, and nothing in particular. It is absolutely indifferent, then, which we take first, as either only leads to the other. Nothing—the conception contained in the absolutely abstract Nothing, involves the position implied in abstract Being, and the latter is as absolutely predicateless as the former. The ​shadow is, abstract existentiality, will, if the endeavour to think it be continued long enough, be seen in the end to be the absolute nothing, the absolute void. There is no object whatever suspended in it; nay, there is not even space to admit of either object or suspension. For the reader is required to realise the conception there is in reference not only to material things, but in reference also to immaterial things—ideas, thoughts, passions, &c., where already qualities of space are excluded. And then, again, nothing or not similarly perseveringly pondered and realised to thought, will be seen in the end to imply is or Being, and to possess an absolutely identical characterisation, or an absolutely identical want of characterisation, as is or Being.
The reader may possibly feel it absurd, unreasonable, even unnatural, to be asked to occupy himself with such thoughts; but we pray him not to be disheartened, but in simple and good faith to believe that the call is made on him for his best endeavours to cooperate with us, not without hopes of a solid and satisfactory result. That Being should be Nothing, and Nothing Being, is not absurd, if only that Being and that Nothing be thought which we have done our best to indicate. We are not fools, and we discern as perfectly as another the difference of house and no house, dinner and no dinner, a hundred dollars and no dollar; and when our remark that Philosophy does not occupy itself with such questions is described as 'delicious,' we know well that it is not our philosophic stolidity, but rather the Unbefangenheit, the uninitiated innocence and innocent uninitiatedness of our lovely opponent, that is in truth delicious.
The reader must have the goodness to recollect that our Nothing is the abstract Nothing—the thoroughly ​indeterminate, and not the, so to speak, concrete and determinate Nothing implied in that word when used as the contrary of some concrete and determinate Something. No dinner is nothing certainly, but then it is a qualified nothing: it is a nothing that refers to a special something, dinner; it contains in itself, so to speak, this reference, and so is distinguished from other analogous terms. We hope, then—and, however apparently unmeaning our language may be, we hope also that the reader will lend us his faith yet awhile longer—that it is now plain to everyone that, in our sense of the terms, Pure Being and Pure Nothing are the same. They are both absolute blanks, and each is the same blank; still it must be understood that our sense is the true sense of Pure Being and Pure Nothing—the true sense of Being and Nothing taken strictly as such, taken in ultimate analysis. Again, it is still true that Being is not Nothing and Nothing is not Being. We feel that though each term formulises the absolute blank, and the absolutely same blank, there is somehow and somewhere a difference between them. They point to and designate the absolutely same thought, yet still a distinction is felt to exist between them. Being and Nothing are the same, then, and they are not the same. Each formulises and implies the same elements; but one formulises what the other only implies, which latter, in turn, formulises what the former only implies. Being formulises, so to speak, Being and implies Nothing; while Nothing implies Being but formulises Nothing. Being implies negation but accentuates position; while Nothing implies position but accentuates negation. But this is just another way of saying they are the same. The two conceptions, as pointing to absolutely the same thought, are still essentially the ​same. Their difference, however, when the two are steadily looked at in thought, is seen to generate a species of movement in which they alternately mutually interchange their own identity. Being, looked at isolatedly, vanishes of its own accord, and disappear in its own opposite; while Nothing again, similarly looked at, refuses to remain Nothing, and transforms itself to Being. The thought Being leads irresistibly to the thought Nothing, and the thought Nothing leads as irresistibly to the thought Being: that is, they disappear mutually into each other.
The real truth of the whole thought, therefore, is represented by neither the one expression nor the other: this truth is seen to lie rather in the movement we have indicated, or the immediate passage of the one—no matter which we make the first—into the other. The truth of the thought, then, is that they mutually pass, or rather, that they mutually have passed, the one into the other. But what is this process? If Being pass into Nothing, is not that the process that we name decease? and if Nothing pass into Being, is not that the process that we name birth, or origin, or coming to be? Are not both processes a coming to be—in the one case, Nothing coming to be Being, and in the other Being coming to be Nothing? Are they not both, then, but forms of Becoming, and does not the general process Becoming contain and express the whole truth of Being and of Nothing?
The abstract thoughts, then, that we name Pure Being and Pure Nothing are so mutually related that they are the same, and yet not the same; in other words, they are susceptible of distinction, but not of separation. Again, the abstract process of which birth, growth, decay, death, &c. are concrete examples, and ​which we name pure or abstract Becoming, is so constituted that it presents itself as the truth of both Being and Nothing; it is seen to contain both as in their own nature inseparate and inseparable, and yet distinguishable, but only by a distinctivity which immediately resolves and suppresses itself. Their truth, in fact, is this mutual disappearance of the one into the other, this mutual interchange; and that is precisely the process that we name Becoming. The truth of the matter is that the one passes into the other—and not that they are—but this is Becoming.
There may, to the general reader, appear something unsatisfactory in all this. It is not what he has been accustomed to; he is not at home in it; he feels himself in doubt and embarrassment. He has been led, in a manner new and strange to him, from one thought to another; he is not sure that the process is a legitimate one; and he is in considerable apprehension as to the results. Still we beg a little further attention on his part, and we shall not hurry him. He may suspect us of having practised on him a mere tour de force; but as yet he has not gone very far, and we entreat him to retrace his steps and examine the road he has already beaten. Let him realise to himself again the thought is, pure being, and he will find himself impelled by the very nature of the thing, and not by any external influence of ours, to the thought not, nought, or pure nothing. Having then realised these thoughts, he will find again that they, in their own peculiar mutual influences, imply the process, and impel him involuntarily to the thought, of pure Becoming.
If we consider now the process or thought expressed by the term Becoming, we shall see that in it Being and Nothing are elements, or, rather—to borrow a word ​from mechanical science—Moments. Becoming is the unity of both; neither is self-dependent, each is distinct, yet each disappears into the other, and Becoming is the result of the mutual eclipse of both. They are thus, then, moments of Becoming, and, though transformed and—so to speak—vanished, they are still there present, and still operative and active. Becoming has two forms according as we begin with Being and refer to Nothing, or begin with Nothing and refer to Being. It is evident, too, that Coming to be, and Ceasing to be, involve a middle ground of reality, that is: nay, Becoming itself, as based on the diversity of its moments, and yet as constituting their disappearance, involves a neutral point, a period as it were of rest, where Becoming is become. This neutral point, this period of rest, in the process of Becoming where Becoming is become, this middle point of reality between Coming to be and Ceasing to be, we name There-being or So-being, that is the being distinguishably there, or the being distinguishably so, what we might also call state.
The reader, probably, will not have much difficulty in realising to himself this further step which, not we, but the thing itself, the idea itself, has taken. Pure Being leads irresistibly to pure Nothing, and both together lead irresistibly to pure Becoming, the forms or moments of which are Coming to be and Ceasing to be: now, between these moments, or in the mutual interpenetration of these moments—that is to say, in Becoming itself—there is involved or implied an intermediate punctum that is, a middle point of unity, of repose—this point, this stable moment, or quasi-stable moment, in which Becoming is as it were Become, is There-being or So-being. Becoming indicates abso​lutely a become, and that become—as such and in perfect generality—is mortal state, sublunariness, in every reference, but in no special.
So-being, then, as being no longer becoming but become, is eminently in the form of being; or, in other words, So-being emphatically is. The one-sidedness, however, does not in reality exclude the other element, the not, the nothing; Becoming lies behind it—it is but product of Becoming, and both elements must appear. The other element, indeed, the not, will manifest itself as the distinctive element. (We are now, let us remark, following Hegel almost literally, as the reader will see for himself by referring to the actual translation which he will find elsewhere.)
So-being, or There-being, is being, but it is now predicable being. It is not like pure being, wholly unlimited, wholly indeterminate; it is now, on the contrary, limited and determinate. But limitation is negation. So-being, in fact, is Being qualified by Non-being; but both present themselves in a condition of intimate and perfect interpenetration and union. The resultant unity is, as it were, no compound, but a simple. Neither element preponderates over the other. As far as So-being is being, so far is it non-being, so far is it definite, determinate, limited. The defining element appears in absolute unity with the element of being, and neither is distinguished from the other. Again, the determinating principle, viewed as what gives definiteness, as itself definiteness, as definiteness that is, is quality. Quality is the characteristic and distinctive principle of So-being. But as So-being is constituted, so is Quality. Quality, with special reference to the positive element of So-being, quality viewed as being, is Reality, while, on the other hand, with ​reference to the negative element, viewed as determinatingness, it is Negation.
We see, then, the presence of distinction, difference in So-being; we see in it two moments, one of reality and one of negation. Still it is easy to see also that these distinctions are null; in fact, that quality is inseparable from So-being, and that these moments are inseparable from quality; that is, that they subsist—or consist—there in absolute unity. Each, in fact, can be readily seen to imply and constitute the other; or each is reflexion from and to the other. But the resolution or suppression of distinction is a most important step here, for from it results the next determination, one of the most important of all. For this perception yet withdrawal of distinction involves a reflexion, a return from the limit or difference back to the reality. But this reflexion, this doubling back to and on itself—implying at the same time absorption or assimilation of the limit, the difference—is the special constitutive nature of So-being. But a further thought springs up to consciousness here. In saying all this, we are manifestly saying of So-being, that it is in itself or within itself (for reflexion from, with absorption of, the limit into the reality itself is nothing else)—that it is a somewhat that is, or just that it is Something.
Something, then, as Self-reference, as simple reference to self, is the first negation of the negation. Arriving at the negation, reflexion took place back on itself with resolution of the negation. Something, then, as negation of the negation is the restoration of simple reference to self, but just thus is it mediation, or commediation of itself with itself. This principle manifests itself, but quite abstractly, even in Becoming; and it will be found in the sequel a determination of the ​greatest importance. But if reflexion back to and on itself in So-being gives birth to Something, a similar reflexion in regard to negation gives birth to the conception or determination of otherness, or other in general. So-being, then, appears again in these moments as Becoming, but of this Becoming the moments are no longer abstract Being and Nothing, but—themselves in the form of So-being—Something and Other.
Here the reader will do well once again to retrace his steps, and ascertain accurately the method which has determined results so important and striking. The results Something and Other are the most important we have yet obtained, and it is absolutely necessary to be decided as to the legitimacy or non-legitimacy of their acquisition.
We started then with Being, in which, as abstract, the decisive point is its indefiniteness, through which indefiniteness it passes into Nothing. Being and Nothing, in their mutual interchange of identity, led directly to Becoming, which, in its own nature, and in the opposition of its moments, manifested a quasi-permanent middle point of There-being or So-being. So-being, then, manifested itself as Being with a limit, with a restriction. The element being was its proximate genus, while the limit was its differentia. The proximate genus appears, then, as Reality, while the differentia appears as negation. Between being and limit, proximate genus and differential, reality and negation, a process of reflexion, as between reciprocally reflex centres, takes place, rather has taken place. This reflexion, on the side of reality, elicits the conception of simple reference to self, which involves a being in or within self, of somewhat within itself or Something. On the side of negation, reflexion elicited ​the conception of otherness, of another, or other in general. And it is these determinations of Something and Other which we have now to examine.
Something and Other readily show themselves as interchangeable. Each is Something, and each is relatively Other. True, the Other is constituted by this reference to Something, but it manifests itself as external to this Something. It may thus be isolated and considered by itself. But thus considered, it presents itself as the abstract other, the other as other, the other in itself, the other of itself, the other of the other. Physical nature is such other. It is the other of Spirit. Its nature, then, is a mere relativity, by which not an inherent quality, but a mere outer relation is expressed. Spirit, then, is the true Something, and Nature is what it is only as opposed to Spirit. The quality of Nature, then, isolated and viewed apart, is just that it is the other as other, that it is that which exists externally to its own self (in Space and Time, &c.).
C. 1.
That there is, is thought only in itself. Thought in itself—come to itself—come to be—constitutes is. Thought in its very commencement and absolute beginning—the very first reference of thought—the very first act of thought—could only be is—i. e. the feeling, sentiment, or sense of Being. This is the Cogito-Sum of Descartes, and this is the Ich-Ich of Fichte. In fact, the Ich-Ich of Fichte having passed through the alembic of Schelling and become a neutrum, an impersonativum, receives from Hegel the expression of est—Seyn—which single word conveys to him the whole burthen of the phrase, 'Seyn ist der Bagriff nur an sich,', or 'Being is the Notion only in itself.'
​To Hegel, a commencement, address beginning, is not, as it is to us, a creature of time, an occurrence, a thing that took place; it is a mere thought—a thought that possesses in itself its own nature, and in the sphere of thoughts its own place. And just thus is it again for Hegel a creature of time, an event, an occurrence, a thing that took place. To Hegel, then, the idea of a commencement is unavoidable; but still it is only an idea so and so constituted and so and so placed in respect of others. To us it is more than an idea—it is an event, an actuality. To Hegel it is also, in one sense, more than an idea. To Hegel also it is an event, an actuality; but still to him it remains in its essence ideal—it remains an idea so placed and so constituted that we name it event, actuality, &c. To us, too, the notion of a beginning is an unavoidable and absolutely necessary presupposition; but this beginning we attribute to the act of an agent—God. In the system of Hegel, God, too, is present; and without God it were difficult to see what the system would be; but to Hegel, when used as a word that contains in it a dispensation from the necessity of a beginning, this word amounts only to a Deus ex machina; or the idea which it is supposed to imply, being but an ultimate abstraction, void, empty (in fact, idea-less), is slighted by him as the Gallic Deus, la dieu français, le dieu-philosophe, the Deus of the Aufklärung—for by such phrases we may at least allow ourselves to translate his thought. To Hegel the introduction of this Deus is only a postponement of the question, only a removal of the difficulty, and that by a single step; it is but the Indian elephant, which, if it supports the world, demands for its own feet the tortoise. To Hegel, in his way, too, God is a Subject, a Person, a Spirit; but as that he is the sphere ​of spheres and circle of circles, in whose dialectic evolution the notion of a beginning is a constitutive point, element, or moment, but at the same time not participating in that material and sensuous nature which we attribute to the character of a beginning.
Still, when our object is a beginning in relation to Thought as Thought—to Thought perfectly universally, whether the reference of our view be to the thought of God, or to the thought of man, we must all of us admit that a beginning of thought is to thought a presupposition absolutely necessary. Such necessity exists for my thought, for your thought, for all thought—let us say, then, for thought in general. But the beginning of thought as thought could only be that it was. All that thought beginning could say for itself would be is, or, if you like, am; both words referring simply, so to speak, to the felt thought of existence in general. The absolutely first as regards Thought just is—Thought is, or rather the possibility of Thought, is, for as yet it is only undeveloped and unformed. We look at thought as it was necessarily constituted at the moment of its supposed birth, and entirely apart from involution in any material organ or set of organs—with that or these we have nothing to do, our whole business is with thought, and with thought as it in its own self unfolded and expanded itself. We have nothing to do with any physiological process—we watch only thought, the evolution of thought, the process of thought. Taking thought, then, supposititiously at its moment of birth, we can only say of it, it is. Nay, as already remarked, it could only say is, or am, of itself, or to itself; for thought is reflex, thought speaks to itself, thought is conscious, and the very first act of thought—though in blindness, dumbness, and, in a certain sense, in uncom​sciousness—would, of necessity, be a sense of Being. Thought, then, begins with the single predicate is (or am), and its further progress or process will evidently consist of an evolution or multiplication of predicates; thought will simply go on naming to itself what it finds itself to be;—and this is just the history of the world. It is at this system of predication, then—at this evolution of predicates—that here, in Logic, we are invited to assist.
The meaning of the phrase, 'Being is the Notion only in itself,' will probably now be beginning to show itself. The Begriff, the Notion, has just come to be; Der Begriff ist, or Cogito-sum; for Begriff is Cogito, and sum is is. Thought now is, thought is in itself, it has come to itself so far; it refers to itself, to its being; it has come to be, it simply is—as yet, however, only in itself. There is, as yet, only blank self-identity.
It will not be too much to say further, here also, that as thought grows, the characteristics, the predicates that will add themselves, will all possess as well the form of Being—they will all be—we shall be able to say of each of them, it is. Further, we shall be able to say that they are distinguishable, that is that they are different, that is that they are other to other. The very process of the growth—the progression—will be from one to the other, a constant transition, that is, to other, others, or otherness. The reason common to all this is just that as yet the Notion is only in itself, the form as yet is only that of a Seyn, of a Being, of an Is, of simple self-identity.
The process is predication merely—a substrate or subject is excluded, and there can be no form of proposition or judgment. It is a progression from predicate to predicate—because the progress of Reason ​before consciousness—the Seyn—is rather a process of deposition and concretion, and implies neither subject nor proposition.
C. 2.
Shall I be able to conduct you through this vast Cyclopean edifice—this huge structure—this enormous pile—this vast mass—that resembles nothing which has ever yet appeared in France or England or the world? One of those vast palaces, it is, of Oriental dream, gigantic, endless,—court upon court, chamber on chamber, terrace on terrace,—built of materials from the east and the west and the north and the south,—marble and gold and jasper and amethyst and ruby,—old prophets asleep with signet rings,—guarded by monsters winged and unwinged, footed and footless,—there out in the void desert, separated from the world of man by endless days and nights, and eternally recurrent and repeating solitudes—lonely, mysterious, inexplicable,—a giant dreamland, but still barbaric, incoherent, barren! After all, the omnium gatherum of infinite laboriousness,—a Chinese puzzle, a mighty ball (in snow-ball fashion) of picked-up pieces of broken crystal—reflexions of Heraclitus, and Parmenides, and Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Plotinus, and Proclus, and Descartes, and Spinoza, and Kant, and Fichte, and Jacob Böhm, and a thousand others! No growth, but a thing of infinite meddle and make—a mass of infinite joinings, of endless seams and sutures, whose opposing edges no cunning of gum, or glue, or paste, or paint can ever hide from us!
Like Goethe, Hegel is a proof of the simple open susceptibility and ready impressibility of the Germans. ​Contrary to general supposition, they are really inoriginative. Nothing in Germany grows. Everything is made: all is a Gemachtes. It is an endless recurrence to the beginning, and a perpetual refingering of the old, with hardly the addition of a single new original grain.
Hegel coolly accepts the new position—demands no proof, supplies no proof—only sets to work new-arranging and new-labelling. All is ideal, and all is substance, but all must have the schema of subject. Nature is but the other of Spirit, and the Logical Idea unites them both. This is parallel to the scheme of Spinoza, Extension, Thought, and Substance. The general schema is to be considered applicable also as particular, or as method. All are ideas; they must be classified, then—thrown into spheres, objective, subjective, and so on. The logical are the common categories—the secret machinery of the whole—the latent, internal, invisible skeleton.
Say a pool of water reflects the world above. Now, let there be no above, but let the pool still reflect as before. The pool, then, becomes in itself reflector and reflexion, subject and object—Man. Restore now again the above which we withdrew, the above that was reflected in the pool—the mighty blue gulf of the universe; and call that the reflexion of a mightier—to us invisible—pool, which is thus also reflector and reflexion, subject and object, but, as pool of all pools, God. This is an image of Hegel's world. He will have no Jenseits, no Yonder and Again; all shall be Diesseits, a perpetual Here and Now. God shall be no mystery; he will know God. He will apply the predicates and name the subject. The logical formulæ are the real predicates of God. God is that real and concrete—not ​that unreal and abstract, not that nonentity and nowhere that is understood as le dieu français, the Dieu of the Philosophes, the Gallic God, the infidel God. Being and Non-being are the ultimate secrets of the universe, the ultimate and essential predicates of God.
He blinks no consequences; each individual as only finite, as only Daseyn, as only quasi-permanent moment must be resolved into the Werden, which alone is the truth of Being and Non-being. He will pack all into the form he has got—he will not see that anything sticks out of it—he will not allow himself to think that either he or we see that it is a packing.
Again, the system is like the three legs which are the symbol of the Isle of Man. Throw it as you will, it keeps its feet. Turn it, toss it, it is ever the same, and triune. There is a magical toy just like it—consisting of three plates or so—seize any one of them, and all clatters down into the same original form.
The Thing-in-itself is a mere abstraction, a surface of reflexion, a regulative. Is, taken immediately, that is, without reflexion, is a pure abstraction. It is a pure thought—a mere thought. Hegel sees thus an immense magical hollow universe construct itself around from a few very simple elementary principles in the centre.
He has completely wrested himself from mere mortal place—on the outside—groping into a concrete delusion. He sees himself like a planet circling round a centre; he sees that his own nature mirrors that centre; then he forcibly places himself in the centre, to take up, as it were, the position of God, the Maker, and sees himself—as mere man—as concrete delusion—circle round himself.
How small must all other men appear to him—such ​as——or as——in their outer and utter delusion! And the other pigmies that trip over his Seyn and his Nichts! What fearful laughter is in this man!
Does he not come out from the centre of that world, that den, that secret chamber of his, begrimed with powder, smelling of sulphur—like some conjuror,—hard and haggard, his voice sepulchral and his accents foreign, but his laugh the laugh of demons? Contrast this with the simple pious soul, on the green earth, in the bright fresh air, patiently industrious, patiently loving, piously penitent, piously hopeful, sure of a new world and a new life—a better world and a better life—united to his loved ones; there for ever in the realms of God, though the merits of his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
C. 3.
In Wesen Hegel has to exhibit the metaphysical nature of Essence; the peculiarity of which is assumed by us to lie in this, that it alone constitutes the reality, while the manifestation constitutes the unreality; nevertheless, at the same time, also, the manifestation depends on the essence, and yet, no less, the essence depends on the manifestation. This is a simple idea; but with this, and this only, Hegel contrives to wash over page after page. Such a conception quite suits the nature of the man; his delight is endless in it. He looks at it incessantly, finding ever some new figure, some new phrase for the extraordinary inter-relations of essence and manifestation. And never were such words written—selcouth, uncouth, bizarre, baroque—pertinent and valuable only to a Hegel. Style and terminology how clumsy, inelegant, obscure! Then the figures, like 'life in excrement,' an endless sprawl— ​an endless twist and twine—endless vermiculation, like an anthill.
We will not remain content with the manifestation, we must pierce through it to the centre verity, he says; it is the background that contains the true, the immediate outside and surface is untrue. Then this knowledge is a reflexive knowledge—it does not take place by or in the essence—it begins in another, it has a preliminary path to travel—a path that transcends the directly next to us, or, rather, that enters into this. Thought must take hints from the immediate, and thus through interagency attain to essence. Then, &c. &c. &c. Strange, meaningless, stupid as all this may seem, it is still the same thing that is spoken of—the mutual relations that result from a thing considered at once as essence and manifestation. The manifestation exhibits itself as real and unreal, as separable from essence and inseparable, and the whole idea is the product of a process of reflexion between the two parts—between the sort of negative abstraction or interior that is viewed as what is eminently real and that corresponds to essence, and the affirmative manifestation or exterior, that is yet viewed as relatively negative and unreal. Essence, in short, is an idea resulting from reflexes between an outer manifestation and an inner centre or verity. Such is the whole Metaphysic of the matter, and to this we have page after page applied.
C. 4.
Kant ideally constructed all as far as the Thing-in-itself, God, Immortality, &c. Fichte transmuted the ​Thing-in-itself into the Anstoss, the Appulse, and summed up the others under the Ego. Schelling got rid of Ego, Anstoss, &c. in his neutrum of the Absolute. Hegel only mediated what Kant had left immediate, up to the stand-point of Schelling; that is, he deduced by a process of evolution the Thing-in-itself, &c. The means he adopted consisted of his expedients of abstraction and reflexion. Through these he succeeds in showing the mediate nature of these Bestimmungen, values, previously looked on as immediate.
There is much that is suggestive in Kant, much that is sound and pregnant; but there is again even in him, mainly Britannic as he is, the German tendency to ride an idea to death—to be carried on one's hobby-horse, nothing doubting, far into the inane. The unreality of his categories, the inconceivableness of their application, the unsatisfactoriness of his conclusions on Time and Space, the insufficiency of his schema of Time in regard to Causality (bunglingly borrowed, though it be, and in a crumb-like fashion, by Sir W. Hamilton)—all this, and much more, must be held as evident. Then Fichte developes a most pregnant conception in that of the pure Ego, but he stops there; or, rather, everyone instinctively refuses to follow him farther on his hobby-horse of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and wonders at the simple, futile laboriousness of the noble, honest man. Schelling and his neutrum must content themselves with their temporary or contemporary influence. He was ever, as it were, a susceptible, ardent stripling—a creature of books and the air of chambers: his transcendence of the Ego only misled Hegel, and his neutrum is untenable. If ever man dropped into the grave an 'exasperated stripling' ​of fourscore, it was Schelling. He longed to be great; but neither Fichte, nor Spinoza, nor Jacob Böhm, nor Plotinus, nor Hegel could supply him with a bridge to what he coveted. Hegel has a brassier and tougher determination to be original at all costs than Schelling. He attacks all, and he reconciles all. He is as resolute a Cheap-John, as cunning and unscrupulous and unhesitating a hawker, as ever held up wares in market. Here, too, we have the same credulity in the sufficiency of his hobby-horse, the same tendency to superfetation and monstrosity. Strange how such a tough, shrewd, worldly man should have so egregiously deceived himself! Because he could new-classify and new-name, he actually thinks that he new-knows and new-understands! He actually believes himself to say something that explains the mystery, when he says materiature has no truth as against Spirit, and when he talks of the monstrous power of contingency in Nature! No; the current belief (as shown in Kossuth) that the Germans have got deeper into the infinite than other people is an out-and-out mistake. They have generated much monstrosity both in literature and philosophy, through the longing to be great and new; to equal the bull, they have blown themselves out like the frog, and burst—that's all! A few grains of sound thinking can be gathered out of them, but with what infinite labour! From Fichte, the Ego; from Schelling, Nil; from Hegel, amid infinite false, some true classification and distinction; from old Kant, certainly the most, and with him the study of Metaphysic must in Great Britain recommence.
In regard to Hegel, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are seldom far from each other, but the latter predominates. If, for a moment, the words light up, and ​a view be granted, as it were, into the inner mysteries, they presently quench themselves again in the appearance of mere arbitrary classification and artificial nomenclature. The turns are so quick and thorough! one moment we are north, the next south, and, in fact, we are required to be in both poles at once! An art that so deftly and so swiftly turns this into that, and that into this, rouses suspicion: we fear it is but the trick of speech; we fear we have to do with a fencer but all too cunning; we are jealous of the hot and cold blowing, and, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, we exclaim, 'An I thought he had been so cunning in fence,' &c.
We cannot help seeing an attempt to knead together all the peculiarities of his predecessors: the categories, freedom, and antinomies of Kant, the Ego and the method of Fichte, the substance and the neutrum of Schelling. It is thus he would make his Absolute Subject, to whom we can see no bridge!—who is either ourselves, or we cannot get at him. If he is not ourselves, he refuses to cohere; we cannot articulate the bones of this Universal, nor breathe into him individual life! He will not cohere, indeed; like the great image in Daniel, he breaks in pieces of his own accord, and falls down futile. The sense is often multiform, like a gipsy's prophecy or the scrolls of the alchemists. The Singular is being constantly hypostasised, but not as singular—as transformed rather into his huge, vast, self-contradictory, untenable Universal!
D. 1.
The transition from Seyn (Being) to Daseyn (There-being, That-being) is a faulty one. The contradiction ​latent in Werden (Becoming) itself, and made obvious to thought by alternate consideration of its two antagonistic forms, moments, or elements, is inadequately expressed by Daseyn. The inadequacy is one of excess: Daseyn means more than the idea to which it is applied. Fixedness in the flux, or quasi-permanence in the flux, is the sole notion arrived at by consideration of the contradiction in question. Now Daseyn, it must be admitted, implies, so far as its etymology is concerned, but little more than this. While Seyn is Being, Daseyn is There-being or Here-being; while the former is is, the latter is there or here is; and the there or here, though in itself an appellative of Space, and though as yet Space and its concerns have no place among these abstract thoughts, involves an error so completely of the infinitely small kind, that it may justifiably be neglected. But an appellative of space is not the only foreign element, the interpolation of which we have here to complain of, and it is not the etymological use of the word which we are here inclined to blame. It is in the ordinary and everyday use of the word that the source of the error lurks. Daseyn, in fact, not by virtue of the step it indicates in the process, but by virtue of its own signification, introduces us at once to a general insphering universe, and particular insphered unities. Nay, Hegel himself tacitly accepts all this new material so conveniently extended to him, for he says at once Daseyn is Quality; that is, having arrived at the one particular quality, fixedness, he hesitates not to sublime it into the type of all quality, or into quality in general. This, however, is just what the Germans themselves call Erschleichung; there is here the semblance only of exact science, the reality, however, of interpolation and surreptitious adoption. Seyn, Nichts, ​Werden, Entstehen, Vergehen (Being, Nothing, Becoming, Origin, Decease), have been turned and tossed, rattled and clattered before us, till the sort of involuntary voluntary admission is extracted, 'Oh, yes, we see; Daseyn is the next step.' But after this admission the logical juggler has it all his own way: Daseyn being conceded him in one sense, the fine rogue uses it henceforth freely in all.
It may be objected that we do not sufficiently consider the nature of the fixedness—that we do not sufficiently realise what fixedness it is. This fixedness, it may be said, is the fixedness in the flux, the fixedness between coming to be and ceasing to be; and fixedness, so placed, indicates a very peculiar quality—the quality, in fact, of all quality. It is the abstract expression of every existent unity, whether bodily or mental; just such fixedness is the abstract absolute constitution of every existent particular entity; and it is no subreption to call it quality, for every entity that bodily or mentally is there, is there by virtue of this fixedness in the coming and going—that is, by virtue of its quality. To this, the only reply is, You admit the objection, you drag in the empirical world. Then they say, Why, we have never excluded it. We admit the presence of Anschauen (perception) behind all our reasoning; but we content that all our reasoning is absolutely free from it, that there is no materiature whatever in it, that it consists of absolutely pure abstract thought. Our Werden is the pure thought of all actual Werdens; our Daseyn is just what of pure thought all actual Daseyns contain. Daseyn is nothing but that abstract fixedness. Then we conclude with—It is all very well to say so, but the presence of actual perception is constantly throwing in prismatic colours, and ​the whole process, if it is to be conceived as a rigorous one, is a self-delusion.
This (of 'Bestimmung, Beschaffenheit, und Grenze,' in the full Logic) is the most intricate and the least satisfactory discussion we have yet been offered. There is no continuous deduction: the deduction, in fact, seems to derive its matter from without, and so to be no deduction at all. The distinctions are wire-drawn, equivocal, shadowy, evanescent. The turns and contradictions are so numerous, that suspicion lowers over the whole subject. It is an imbroglio and confusion that no patience, no skill can satisfactorily disentangle. The greater the study, the more do weak points come to light. For what purpose, for example, has Eigenschaft, a word involving the same matter, been treated several pages previously in an exoteric fashion, if not to prepare the way for the esoteric fashion here? Then will this hocus-pocus with Bestimmtheit, Bestimmung, Beschaffenheit, An sich, An ihm, &c., really stand the test of anything like genuine inspection? We are first told that, &c.—He then describes, &c. A very pretty imbroglio, truly! and one that results from the same thoughts being contorted through all manner of different terms. But this is the least of the confusion, the greatest is behind, &c.—We are next told, &c. Suppose we apply his own illustration to his own words, we shall find that in man his Bestimmung is Denken, his Bestimmtheit ditto, his An sich ditto, and his An ihm ditto. His Seyn-für-Anderes is called his Natürlichkeit, but might easily be shown to be just Denken too. The confusion, in fact, becomes everywhere worse confounded. All seems a mere arbitrary play of words, the player perpetually shifting his point of view without giving notice of the shift. But ​what, then, can be the truth here? The truth is, we have just to do with a brassy adventurer who passes himself off as a philosopher, but presents as his credentials only an involved, intricate, and inextricable reformation of the industry of Kant; and this, in the middle of adventure-like perpetual abuse, derision, and condemnation of this same Kant. The object he seems to have here before his eyes, is the special constitutive quality of Something, which is a compound of outer manifestation and inner capability. Then, that there is sometimes an outer manifestation that does not seem directly to depend on the inner force, but to be mere outside. Then, that accidental and essential manifestations are really the same. Then, that a thing changed by influence of something, reacts on that something, contributes elements to its own change and maintains itself against the Other. Water liquid, and water frozen, are the same yet different, for example, two somethings and one something; the negation seems immanent, it is the development of the Within-itself of the Something. Otherness appears as own moment of Something—as belonging to its Within-itself. Then, that the identity and diversity of the two Somethings lead to Limit, &c. &c. The whole business of Hegel is here to reduce these empirical observations into abstract terms, and to treat them as if they were results of thought alone, and as if they were legitimately and duly deduced from his abstract commencement with pure Being. The confusion of language, the interpolation of foreign elements, the failure of exact deduction, the puzzle-headed fraudulence of the whole process, can escape no one. He draws first his great lines of Being and Nothing. Then, over the cross of these two lines, he sets himself, like a painter, to lay ​on coat after coat of verbal metaphysic with the extravagant expectation that the real world will at length emerge. The first coat to the cross is Werden; again it is Daseyn; and again it is Fürsichseyn. It also becomes manifest that he alternately paints with two colours and with one: Being and Nothing two, Becoming one, Origin and Decease two, Daseyn one, Reality and Negation two, Something one, An sich and Seyn-für-Anderes two, and so on. It will be found, in fact, that the whole process is but a repeated coating of Being and Nothing, now as diverse and again as identical till the end of the entire three volumes.
Nor is it a bit better with his exoteric works—not a bit with the 'Philosophy of History,' the most exoteric of all! Second chapter, second section, second part, it has a strange effect to hear Hegel talk of the Greek and Christian Gods in the same breath: 'Man, as what is spiritual, constitutes what is True in the Grecian Gods, that by which they come to stand above all Nature-gods, and above all abstractions of a One and Supreme Being. On the other side, it is also stated as an advantage in the Grecian Gods, that they are conceived as human, whereas this is supposed to be wanting in the Christian God. Schiller says, "Men were more Godlike when Gods were more Menlike." But the Grecian Gods are not to be regarded as more human than the Christian God. Christ is much more Man: he lives, dies, suffers death on the Cross; and this is infinitely more human than the man of beautiful nature among the Greeks!' Was there ever any really divine sense of the All awakened in him? What curious maundering dreaming, or dreaming maundering, is all that playing at philosophising over the Greek Gods! He talks much of abstract and con​crete; but, after all, did the concrete ever shine into him but through the abstractions of books? Of the origin of these Gods in common human nature, do we get a single glimpse in all his maundering? They came from other nations and they did not, they are local and not local, they are spiritual and they are natural; and it is black and white, and red and green, and look here and look there, and this is so and so, and that is so and so: and so all is satisfactorily explained, clear and intelligible! How could he ever get anyone to listen to such childish theorising—disconnected theorising, and silly, aimless maundering—the thought of his substance, that developes itself from An sich to Für sich, recurring to him only at rare intervals, and prompting then a sudden spasmodic but vain sprattle at concatenation and reconciliation? The fact is, it is all maundering, but with the most audacious usurpation of authoritative speech on the mysteries that must remain mysteries. 'God must take form, for nothing is essential that does not take form;' 'but if God is to appear in an appropriate Expression, this can only be the human form:'—what is this maundering—does Hegel see anything? What is God to Hegel? Does he figure a universal thought, conscience, will, emotion,—a universal spirit? Has that spirit the sense of 'I'?—can there be thought, conscience, emotion, will, without 'I'? How am I to figure myself beside this Hegelian universal? How comes my thought to be mine, egoised into my 'I'? How am I specialised out of the Universal? Is it not a vain wrestling to better name the All in characteristics of mind? Is there any deduction—any explanation?
The exasperating sensation in attempting to construe all this into ordinary words or forms of thought! ​It is just that there is no Jenseits, no Yonder, only a Here and Now of Spirit running through its moments! What relief to the Understanding on such premises, but the Materialism of Feuerbach or the Singleism of Stirner, which seem indeed to have so originated?
Language contains so many words, distinguished by so very slight, subtle, and delicate meanings, that it gives vast opportunities to a genius such as that of Hegel; who delights to avail himself of them all, to join them, disjoin them, play with them like an adept, arriving finally to be able to play a dozen games at once of this sort of chess, blindfold. His whole talk seems to be a peculiar way of naming the common,—a simply Hegel's way of speaking of Naturalism. What is, is, and I give such and such names to it and its process,—but I do not fathom or explain it and its process—I merely mention it in other than the usual words.
The 'Vestiges' transcend the actual only in a Physical interest; but here the Physical is translated into the Metaphysical. The final aim of all is Consciousness; and said Consciousness is figured, not as subjective, as possessed by some individual, but as objective and general, as substantive and universal. The realised freedom of spirit viewed as substantive Reason, this is the process we are to see taking place, and it is in the form of the State we are to recognise its closest approximation to realisation! The State is the nidus in which are deposited all the successive gains of the world-spirit. The State is the grand pupa of existence, surrounded by the necessary elements of nourishment, &c. Mankind are seen, then, like coral insects, subjectively secreting intelligence, and depositing the same objectively in the rock of the State!
Is, then, a Constitution the great good, as it were ​the fruit and outcome of the whole universe? In spite of all changes in Ideals and Reals, is there an objective spiritual gain handed down from generation to generation? Can this be exhibited? Out of the human real, reposing on and arising from the human ideal, is there a universal real or ideal gained? Can it be characterised? Carlyle, 'as witness Paris-city,' admits that much has been realised; but is not his stand-point chiefly rejection of the objective and assertion of the subjective? Is not that the nucleus of Hero-worship,—which looks for weal from living individuals, not from the objective depositions of Reason (in the shape of Institutions) in time? Is, then, the great practical question that of Hegel, not what was he or what was another, but what are the objective gains of the world-spirit?
Hegel alludes to an 'element in man that elevates him above the place of a mere tool and identifies him with the Universal itself; there is the divine in him, freedom, &c.—the brute is not, &c.—but,' he says, 'we enter not at present on proof; it would demand an extensive analysis, &c. &c.!!' Fancy the audacious cheek of the Professor, beating down his hearers by mere words—giving other names to common categories—as if they were all thereby explained and in his waistcoat pocket! Where is his justification—where is the basis of all those fine airs of superiority? Does he believe more than a Divine government of the world—does he see aught else than the hard lot of much that is good and true? Is the one explained or only named by the word Reason, and the other by Contingency?—'which latter has received from the former, the Idea, authority to exercise its monstrous influence!' Must we not repeat—dedit verba?
​It is intelligible how the State looms so large in Hegel's eyes. It is a type of the step in Philosophy named the transcending of the Ego. The will and the idea here are not expressions of what is individual, but of what is general. This is true, too, to the aim of the Socratic generalisation which raised up the Universal and Necessary out of the Particular and Accidental. But does all one's worth come from the State? Since the State grows in worth, must not a portion of worth come from the Individual? Is not the individual always higher than the State,—Christ than Jewry, Socrates than Athens, Confucius than China?
Hegel is always pedagogue-like—with him naming is explaining. Nor is it true that we are more subjective, the Greeks more objective. Xenophon (the murmurs of the individual Ten Thousand) as well as Homer (Thersites) shows subjectivity to have had greater influence then than now.
How definitely conclusive Hegel is to himself on all these matters in this 'Philosophy of History!' Whether he is in Africa or Europe, America or Asia, he dictates his views equally imperially—his findings are infallible, never doubt it, sir!—Ah me! these sentences on all and everything in the world are quite irreversible! 'In Aschantee, the solemn ceremony begins with an ablution of the bones of the mother of the king in the blood of men:' why does Absolute Wisdom omit to ask itself, What, if she still live? The statesman shows his son how very little wisdom is required in the governing of the world; and Hegel makes plain here that Absolute Knowledge has only to assert and again assert, and always assert. How unscrupulous that sniff of condemnation! How unhesitating that decisiveness of sentence in the midst of so ​little certainty!—bless you! he does not fear! An impure spirit, with impure motives, takes to an ethereal subject, will take rank with the best, will speak as authoritatively as they, and pours out indiscriminately slag and ore: Germany here, too, true to its character of external intentional effort according to the receipt in its hands. But in that leaden head of his, what strange shapes his thoughts take, and how strangely he names them!
In the Preface to the 'Phaenomenology,' observe the dry, sapless, wooden characterisation, in strange, abstract, prosaic figures, of the hapless plight of the unfortunate Schellingian! Hegel it is, rather than Schelling, who has put in place of reasoning, a curious species of inward vision—applied it is to strange things of wire in an element of sawdust, dull, dead, half-opaque, soundless, fleshless, inelastic—a motion as of worms in a skull of wood—not the rich shapes in the blue heaven of the true poet's phantasy! How he continues throwing the same abstract, abstruse, confused prose figures at Schelling! Verily, as Hunnboldt says of him, language here has not got to the Durchbrech: that is, we may say, perhaps, language remains ever underground here, muffled, and never gets to break through, as flowers elsewhere do, or as other people's teeth do! Really, Hegel's rhetoric is absolutely his own. There is something unbefangenes—simpletonish—in him: he is still the Suabian lout!
D. 2.
This—referring to a passage in the same Preface—is just a description in abstracto of Self-consciousness. The Ego is first unal simplicity,—that is, unal or simple ​negativity; but just, as it were, for this very reason (that is, to know itself and be no longer negative, or because it finds itself in a state of negativity) it becomes self-separated into duality—it becomes a duplication, a duad, the units of which confront each other, in the forms of Ego-subject and Ego-object; and then, again, this very self-separation, this very self-duplication, becomes again its own negation—the negation of the duality, inasmuch as its confronting units are seen to be identical, and the antithesis is reduced, the antagonism vanishes. This process of individual self-consciousness has just to be transferred to the All, the Absolute, the Substance, to enable us to form a conception of unal negativity of Spirit passing into the hetereity of external Nature, finally to return reconciled, harmonious, and free into its own self. Surely, too, that process of self-consciousness strikes the key-note of the whole method and matter of Hegel!
An sich may be illustrated by an ill-fitting shoe. First, consciousness is only in itself—or, as the German seems to have it, only at itself, only in its own proximity: there is malaise quite general, indefinite, and indistinct; it is everywhere in general, and nowhere in particular. But, by degrees, the mist and blur, the nebula, resolves itself into foci and shape; Ansichseyn becomes Fürsichseyn, and it is seen—that the shoe is too wide in the heel—that and nothing else.
The intermedium is the first step in the divine process (the phase of universality, latent potentiality being first assumed); it is reflexion into its own self, and as such only, and no more, it is the awakening of consciousness, the kindling, the lighting, the flashing up of the Ego, which is pure negativity as yet. First, the Ego was only in or at itself, everywhere in general and ​nowhere in particular,—that is, latent only, potential only (the formless infinite, indefinite nebula); then comes reflexion of this into itself or on to itself, and this reflexion is a sort of medium, an element of union, a principle of connection between self and self. In this stage, the previously Indefinite comes to be for itself; that is to say, in the physical world, it is a finite, circumscribed, individual entity, and in the metaphysical a self-consciousness. Reduced to its most abstract form, it is nothing but a Becoming—a becoming something—a focus in the nebula, an Ego in consciousness. Ego is immediate to Ego, focus to focus; the mediacy then leads only to a condition of immediacy. Process is no prejudice to unity, nor mediacy to immediacy; it is a one, a whole, an Absolute, all the same.
The same reason—the same forms, processes, peculiar experiences and characters, exist in the outer world which exist in the inner: analogy passes into its very depths—the outer is just the inner, but in the form of outerness or hetereity. Thus Hegel, horsed on his idea, penetrates and permeates the whole universe both of mind and matter, and construes all into a one individuality—which is Substance, the True, the Absolute, God.
The idea is evidently substance, for it is common to all; it is the common element; it is the net into which all is wrought, whether physical or metaphysical. Behind the logical categories, there lie side by side the physical and the spiritual. Hegel really meant it—and Rosenkranz is wrong to take it as mere figurative exaggeration—when he says that what is here is 'the Demonstration of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit.'
​Much is Aristotelian in the above. There are reflexes of the ὸύναμις and the ὲνέργεια. It is Metaphysic Proper, an inquiry into the essential τὸ τί ὲστιν.
Negation to Hegel always seems to produce affirmation, not destruction. Negation seems in him, indeed, but the specific title of the element of variety and distinction. Such element is, in fact, negation. It is negation of its own unity, and each constituent member is the negative of the rest and of the whole.
The whole is to be conceived as an organic idea—a concrete idea—in which beginning is to be taken as also ideal, not a thing in time and nature, but a mere thought so and so characterised and articulated with the rest. The same is the case with subjectivity in general, and my subjectivity in special.
'There are periods when Thought compromises Existence—when it becomes destructive, negative. These are periods of so-called Enlightenment. But Thought, that has done this, must in its turn be looked at.' The true nature of the Begriff must be seen into; and he who understands Hegel's word Begriff, understands Hegel.
Despite the intensity of his abstraction, there is always in Hegel a glance at the whole concrete actual universe. Yet to read him is not to judge of things as this or that, but to follow a thread of aqua regia that dissolves and resolves the things themselves—a menstruum in which the most hard and solid objects become quick and flow. Hegel, indeed, seems ever to drive into the very grounds of things. Still, his secret is very much the translating of the concrete individual into the abstract general or universal. He is always intelligible when we keep before us the particular individual he is engaged translating; but let us lose the ​object, the translation becomes hopeless. The eye must never wander; let a single hint be missed, let a single stitch drop, the whole is to recommence again. The first chapter of the 'Phaenomenology,' on Senuous Certainty, is generally looked on as very extravagant and untenable; still it is really in abstract terms a very fair description of the progress of consciousness from crude Sensation to intelligent Perception. This is its intention, and not a dialectic destruction of an outer world. Still, Hegel may very well speak of a reversion or inversion; for whereas elsewhere things support thoughts, in him, on the contrary, thoughts support things, and the tendency in the reader to dazzle, dizziness, and turn, cannot be wondered at. But the thought being the prius, this method must be right.
D. 3.
Hegel will look at everything and say what it is. In his eyes, what we call the common idea of God is an abstraction utterly vague and predicateless. Then, again, it is thought that is the true mental act applicable to God. God, as a universal, is not only thought, but in the form of thought. We see here, then, that Hegel's system is a universe of thought, in which Nature, the Ego—God himself, in a sense—are but moments; or the universe is an organon of thought into which all particulars—the whole itself—are absorbed as moments; and the aggregate of these moments—which, however, is other than an aggregate—constitutes the organic whole. The general conception under the phrase supreme being—as eighteenth century enlightenment (in which the bulk even of Ecclesiastics, forgetting their Bible, now share) has it—is quite abstract, quite ​formal, or formell; that is, it is an empty formal act in which there is no substance—it is a longing opening of the jaws, but there is no nut between them.
The universe in time is viewed grandly as a Spirit whose object is to bring before his own consciousness all that he is in himself, and each new fact so brought becomes superseded and transformed as a step to a higher stage. History is really such—consciousness in perpetual enlargement, enfranchisement, elevation. This can be personified as a Spirit; and—all being thought—this Spirit is the Universe, the One, the All, God. In it empirical Egos are but as moments, but as scales of thought. It is plain, then, that Philosophy with Hegel will be the developed sum of all preceding Philosophies. The progress pictured in the 'History of Philosophy' is the process of Philosophy itself; and in Philosophy, this progress is seen in unempirical development. Thought as it is, is concrete; that is, it is Idea. The knowledge or science of this, relating as it does to a concrete, will be a system—for a concrete is self-diremption in self-union or self-conservation. And here, then, is it at once necessity and freedom: necessity, as so and so constituted; freedom, as that constitution is its own, and has its own play, its own life. A sphere of spheres it is, each a necessary moment, and the entire idea constituted by the system of these, at the same time that the entire idea appears also in each.
The idea is thought, not as formal, but as the self-evolving totality of its own peculiar principles and laws, which it gives to its own self, and not already has and finds to its hand in its own self. This is characteristic of Hegel. He thus avoids the question of a first cause; constituting thought as the first, the ​last, and the only. That thought might give itself its own distinctions is evident from language. To use but inadequate examples, thing is but a form of think, thankful but another way of saying thinkful.
Can creation be accounted for otherwise? Assume God—well, creation is simply his thought; in the world of man and nature we have simply to do with the thought of God. We cannot suppose God making the world like a mason. It is sufficient that God think the world. But we have thus access to the thought of God—the mind of God. Then our own thought—as thought—is analogous. So the progress of generalisation is to study thought as thought in the form of a Universal. Thought being viewed in this way, the whole is changed: creation, God, and all else have taken up quite new and different relations; nor is there any longer the difficulty of a beginning, &c. Logic, thus, has to do quite with the supersensual; Mathematic is seen to be quite sensuous in comparison.
In the beginning—Seyn und Nichts, Being and Nothing—there is room for much reflexion. We are not to suppose that it relates to formal and professional Logic only. It must be taken sub specie œterni. The whole question, What was the beginning—what was it that was the first?—is there. The answer, God, does not suffice; for the question still recurs, And God—whence? Hegel must be credited with the most profound and exhaustive thought here. It is the first question in universal Metaphysic. What was the beginning? How are we to conceive that? Rather, we feel that it is inconceivable: we feel that, when we answer, Oh, God of course, we have yielded to our own impatience—to our own weariness of what is never-ending, and that the terminus we have so set ​up is arbitrary merely, a word mainly; that, in short, the business is to begin again so soon as we have taken breath and recovered temper. There is a whole school, however, which pronounces this to be the answer; that is, that answer there is none for us. Humanity is to see here its own deficiency and insufficiency of original nature. We are only adequate to a compartment, not to the whole. Our sphere is limited; our functions must learn and acknowledge their own bounds. Perception and confession of ignorance in regard to all such questions, constitute on our part wisdom and philosophy.
This however, is, in reality, but again the human mind halting for breath, resting for temper. The question recurs, and will recur, so soon as action itself, after its own pause, recurs. Not but that the new action may fare similarly, and be obliged to halt with the same result; a state of matters which will simply continue till there is a successful effort towards the satisfaction of a need which is absolutely inextinguishable, however temporarily appeasable. To a mind like Hegel's, all this is obvious, and he will look steadily along the line, his mind made up to this—that the necessity for an answer shall, so far as he is concerned, not be shirked. How are we to conceive the beginning, then, he asks himself, and continues asking himself, till the thought emerges, What is a beginning? and in a few moments more he feels he has the thread: of the organon, thought, the distinction beginning is but a moment, but an involved and constituent element, joint, or article. It is but a portion of the articulated apparatus, of the whole system or series. It is a characteristic of the universe, thought—a characteristic among others—that it has a particular pin or pole, or special pinion, named beginning ​—a pole which it gives to its own self for its own distribution, disposition, and arrangement.
Gives its own self! the reader may exclaim: why, then there is something before the beginning, that gives the beginning! Well, yes; but that is not the way to put it. There is thought, and there is nothing but thought; thought is the All, and, as the All, it is, of course, also what we mean by the term the prius—it is the first: these terms prius, first, beginning, &c., are, in fact, predicates, attributes of its own, part and parcel of its own machinery, of its own structure, of its own constitution. When we use the expression God, we are just saying the same thing, for God is obviously thought; or God is Spirit, and the life of Spirit is thought. Creation, then, is thought also; it is the thought of God. God's thought of the Creation is evidently the prius of the Creation; but with God to think must be to create, for he can require no wood-carpentry or stone-masonry for his purpose: or even should we suppose him to use such, they must represent thought, and be disposed on thought. The stone-masonry and wood-carpentry, then, can be set aside as but the accessory and non-essential, and the Creation can be pronounced thought: whether ​direct through thought, or indirect through stone-masonry and wood-carpentry, all recurs to God. Then God viewed personally, on the question of a beginning must still yield the same answer. God is thought, and 'beginning' is but one of its own natural poles, or centres of gravitation, disposition, and revolution.
Now, in the conception 'beginning,' the first step or element, in regard to anything whatever beginning or begun, is—so far as thought is concerned—just the thought 'is.' Even God placed under the focus of the category 'beginning,' must have first said to himself 'is,' 'there is.' But in this first step there is no more than that. Descartes called the first step sum, but manifestly he ought to have said est. The ego involved in sum is a concrete infinitely higher in ascent than est, esse, Seyn, Being. That there is, is manifestly the most abstract thought that can be reached. That is, when we perform the process of abstraction, when we strip off all empirical qualities, one after the other, 'is' is the residuum—abstract Being, predicateless 'is.' Even when we think of any natural entity, when we think even of life, say, it is evident that the first step of the beginning is 'is.' But what, even under that point of view, would be the second? Why, 'is not.' There must be, at first (we are using the category, we are seeing through our lens 'beginning' at this moment) a wholly indefinite and indeterminate, and, so to speak, (since the category natural life accompanies our thought ​here,) instinctive thought or feeling 'is,' but this must be immediately followed by the thought or feeling 'not.' There is as yet only 'is,' there is nothing else. That is, the very 'is' is nought or not. But throwing off any reference to natural life, and restricting ourselves to thought absolutely and per se, it is still plainer that the abstract initial 'is' is identical with the abstract and initial 'non-is.' Because the 'is' is the last product of abstraction; it has no attribute, it is bodiless position; it not only 'is,' but it is 'non.' One can readily see, then, that in Hegel's so abstract, formal, and professional statement of Seyn und Nichts, there is involved a creative substratum of the most anxious, persevering, and comprehensive concrete reflexion. One can see that he has bottomed the whole question of a beginning. Why he should have set it up so abruptly and so unconnectedly steep, is a query impossible for us to answer. 'Is' and 'is-non,' then, contain the same subject-matter, or the same no subject-matter: each is an absolute and ultimate abstraction; the 'is' is a 'non-is,' and the 'non-is' is in the same sense an 'is.' In this sense, then, Being and Non-being are identical; neither the one nor the other possesses a predicate—they are each nothing. But, if they are the same, they are again not the same, there is a distinction between them, and so on.
From the position that thought is the All and the prius, it follows that thought must contain in itself a principle of progression or movement. Hegel asserts his method to be this principle; and we should certainly very decidedly stultify ourselves, if we should suppose that Hegel sets up this method in the merely arbitrary fashion of an impostor bent on some personal result. Hegel's method is the product of reflexion ​equally deep and earnest with that which originated his beginning. Thought's own nature is, first, position; second, opposition; and third, composition. It is evident that, however we figure a beginning of thought, in God or ourselves, it must possess a mode of progression, a mode of production, and that is absolutely impossible on a principle of absolutely simple, single, unal identity. The first, then, though unal, must have separated into distinctions; and these by union, followed again by disunion and reunion ad infinitum, must have produced others till thought became the articulated organon it is now. It is also plain that, were there movement only by separation into contraries without reunion into higher stages, the progress would fail in systematic articulation, and also in improvement. Re-union, then, is evidently a step as necessary as separation. The union of 'is' and 'non-is' in 'becomes,' need also not be confined to logical abstractions, but may be illustrated from the concrete. Every concrete process of Becoming is a union of the two. Resuming our illustration, too, from the life of thought, it is evident that, after the first dim consciousness 'is' and the second 'not,' the third of 'becomes' of a coming to be and of a ceasing not to be must succeed.
D. 4.
The question is, What is Truth? i.e. What is the Absolute? But the Absolute cannot be hoped to by means of some cabalistic hocus-pocus. It must be worked up to. But where does it lie? Wherever it lies, to be known it must come into our knowledge. But we already possess knowledge. Is it so sure that the Absolute is not already there? Let us take our ​knowledge just as we have it, and look at it. Let us take knowledge, not in some out-of-the-way, enchanted-looking corner, we do not know where, but as it comes up. Let us take this thing knowledge, not as we suppose it, not as in some sublime indeterminateness we imagine it, but as it manifests itself—now and here—to us, just as it at once directly shows or appears. For result—as the 'Phaenomenology,' which starts thus, will show—it will be found that the opinion of object will disappear, and that there will remain the idea only. Our knowing and what we know are identical. The object becomes, so to speak, intelligised, and the intellect objectivised. The relation between the supposed two is one of mere otherness in identity. The object is knowing but in the form of otherness. Knowledge involves the relation of two factors; but they are both the same substance. Knowing, even to know itself, must have a something to know; and this process involves and introduces at once the relation of otherness. Man's error is the hypostasising of his ideas—the separating of his indivisible self, by a dead wall of his own assumption, into an irreconcilable duality of thinking and thought. We have been desperately hunting the whole, infinite, unreachable heaven for an Absolute, which, folded up within us, smiled in self-complacent security, at the infatuation of its very master. We have wearied heaven and earth with our importunate clamours for a glass that bestrid the bridge of our own nose. What we wanted lay at the door; but to and fro we stepped over it, vainly asking for it, and plunging ourselves vainly into the far forest.
It is the peculiar nature of the idea to be the union of the universal and the particular in the individual. ​Here lie the elements of the explanation of the relation which the subjective bears to the objective. Such questions as Life and Death, the Soul, Immortality, God, are to be regarded from a wholly-changed point of view. Death is a constituent of the sphere of the Finite, but the Idea is imperishable. I am the Idea—you—he—&c.; but we are also singulars. As singulars, there is change—death ; but, as participant of the self-conscious Idea, we are immortal. It is just an all of thought—triple-natured—with infinite gradations and spheres. Freedom, perfect self-consciousness, is the goal. Take it as Nature, the same thing can be said. In fact, it is just a double language, the object and the idea; the same goal, the same gradations in the one as in the other.
The Preface to the 'Phaenomenology' is the plainest piece of speaking anywhere in Hegel, and capable of being put as key to the whole system. It is full of the most hard, heavy, and effective thought, in new, subtle, and original directions; and the expression is as heavy and effective. A most surprising light is thrown upon what passes unquestioned under our eyes and among our hands; and the object Hegel sets himself here will be something beyond all precedent, if accomplished.
At present, thought is thus and thus constituted: but the process of which this constitution is the result, is simply experience. A history, then, of the phases of experience since the beginning, the first stage of thought, up to the present, would enable us to understand how this present arose; and thus we should get an insight into the nature of thought itself. But this process to Hegel has reached the highest stage of absolute thought: therefore, then, if he can conduct us through ​all the stages actually experienced by consciousness from the first to the last, he will conduct us—necessarily, and with full conviction—to ultimate and absolute thought itself. We are supposed to see only the bare process itself: but Hegel has helped himself by diligent reference to actual history; and we shall assist ourselves by looking out for reflexions of the same. There is everywhere a power of naming, in consequence of perception of the inner nature and limits of what is looked at, that must give pause, at all events, and open the eyes. The necessity and coherence of the systematisation will, at least, benefit all effort for the future. Hegel, indeed, clamours always for necessity and completeness of exposition. He cannot allow a subject to be attacked from an indefinite, conceded, common ground. The common ground must prove its nature, legitimacy, extent, &c. to the last dregs. He must begin with the beginning, and work all up into a one bolus of thought.
D. 5.
Kant, in demonstrating the 'possibility of a Transcendental Logic,' begins the realisation of Idealism. Idealism before that was but an abstract conception, an announced probability on a balance of reasons. With Kant actual development commences, and he very fairly initiates the business proper of Hegel, which was, not to prove the principle of Idealism, but construct its system, lay out its world. In the series, Kant is as Geometry, Fichte as Algebra, Schelling as Applied Mathematic, and Hegel as the Calculus.
Thinking of Quantity as an intellectual notion to which things must adapt themselves as universal, particular, and singular,—of Quality, and the à priori ​necessities to which all à posteriori elements must submit in its regard,—of Substance and Accident, and the conditions they impose on all experience before experience,—one gets to see the origin of Hegel. The Idea, which is the All, is so constituted that it organises itself on these categories—suppose them God's creative thoughts—or suppose them simply the elements of the monad, of that which is, the Absolute.
In the 'Kritik of Practical Reason,' pp. 219, 220, Part 8 of the collected Works, occurs a passage which may be translated thus:—
'Because we consider here, in its practical function, Pure Reason, which acts consequently on à priori principles, and not on empirical motives, the division of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason will necessarily resemble that of a Syllogism. That is, it will proceed from the Universal in the Major (the Moral principle), through a subsumption under the same, in the Minor, of possible acts (as Good or Bad) to the Conclusion, namely, the subjective actualisation of Will (an Interest in the practically possible good and the consequent Maxim). To him who follows with conviction the positions of the Analytic, such comparisons will prove pleasing; for they countenance the expectation that we shall yet attain to a perception of the Unity of the entire business of pure Reason (theoretical as well as practical), and be able to deduce all from a single principle, which is the inevitable demand of human reason; for we can find full satisfaction only in a complete systematic unity of all the possessions of our reason.'
More than one deep germ of Hegel seems to lie here. The movement of the Syllogism, for example, is seen here as it were in concrete and material application, and not as only formal and abstract. Then the demand of Unity, of a single principle! The Universal appears in Hegel as the Logic, the Particular as ​Nature, the singular as Spirit. Then the Universal, the Abstract, is seen to be the ground of the other two. At page 107 of the 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,' we hear of the electric brush—that Electricity is as a brush. Well, let us say here, the Logic, the Universal, is the electric brush, the Particular (Nature) is the materiature which attaches to and crassifies the ramification of said electric brush to the development, as it were, of a system of organs, and the singular (Spirit) is the one envelope of subjectivity that converts all into an absolute unity, at once absolutely negative and absolutely positive. In this way, we may conceive formed Hegel's Idée-Monade. Again, Kant's one general principle is to universalise the particular, objectify the subject, convert An sich or nature into Für sich or Spirit; and Hegel's really is just the same.
In the Kritik of 'Judgment,' section 86, occurs the following:—
'For (such is the conviction of everyone) if the world consisted of Beings merely inanimate, or some animate and some inanimate, but the animate still without reason, the existence of such a world would have no worth at all, for there would exist in it no being that possessed the slightest notion of any worth. If, again, there were also rational beings supposed to exist, but whose reason was such only as knew to put a value on things according to the relation of nature which these things bore to them (to their own gratification), but not to give their own selves à priori, and independent of the experiences of nature, a value (in freewill), then there were (relative) aims in the world, but no (absolute) End-aim, because the existence of such rational beings would remain still aimless. But Moral Laws are of this peculiarity, that they prescribe to Reason something as aim without condition—consequently in the manner in which the notion of an End-aim requires it; and the existence of such reason as, in the relation of an aim, can be the supreme ​law to itself—in other words, the existence of rational beings under moral laws—can therefore alone be thought as End-aim (Final Cause) of the existence of a world. Is this not so, then there lie in the existence of the same either no aim at all, as regards its cause, or aims without End-aim.'
To this noble passage, let us add portion of the note at the bottom of the same page:—
'The glory of God is not inaptly named by Theologians, the final cause of creation. It is to be observed, that we understand by the word creation, nothing else than the cause of the existence of a world, or of the things, the substances in it ['die Ursache vom Daseyn einer Welt;' literally, to a Hegel, the original or primal thing or matter of the being there of a world]; as also the proper notion of the word [Schöpfung, creation, but literally a drawing; compare scooping] brings that same sense with it (actuatio substantiœ est creatio), which consequently does not already involve the presupposition of a spontaneously operative, and therefore intelligent Cause (whose existence we would first of all prove).'
There were no worth in a world, then, that cannot appreciate worth. The world were blind and worthless without a being that can think. But what is the action on the world of a being that can think? By thinking, he arranges all in his own way—all takes place and meaning, not from itself, but from him (it had no meaning before him). It is thus his own self he projects around him; the other is but the stand for his own qualities, thereon disposed. The analogy of his own inner construction converts the opacity of the other into lucidity, transmutes its rigidity into pliancy; and the other remains as nothing when opposed to the qualities it merely sustains. Hegel, in reading Kant, may be conceived as falling on such ideas, and so, as arriving at his anthropological Monad, which, as all that is ours, as all that we can know—anything else, too, ​being merely suppositious, i.e., again our own, again ourselves—may be reasonably made, All, Absolute, and Infinite. Actuatio substantiœ est creatio is a phrase, too, that has not failed to bear fruit in Hegel. Ursache vom Daseyn, and the remarkable phrase 'with laws, not under laws,' which occurs in the same neighbourhood, may be also viewed as suggestive of Hegelian elements. The passage in Kant offers to the spiritualist or idealist a bulwark impregnable to any materialist, a talisman in the light of which every materialist must fade and die.
On Kant's theory, the world being phenomenal, materiature being simply an unknown appulse, giving rise to a subjective material, not necessarily at all like the materiature, nor necessarily the same in all subjects, and incapable of comparison as between subjects,—this subjective material (all that holds of sensation or feeling), to become a world, would require a system of forms which can themselves be only subjective, only ab intra. These, then, would appear somehow as projected into the subjective material, to form part and parcel of the same. Further, they themselves, though subjective as belonging to the subject, might be objective as belonging to all the subjects, and as capable of being identified in each by actual comparison; they might be of an objective and universally determinable nature. They might come from our intellectual nature, for example. This is Kant. The subjective material in us set up by the unknown outer materiature, is received into an objective but internal net of arrangement. Feeling is the matter, but intellect is the form of all experience, however outer and independent it appear to us. Well, Kant succeeds in placing Sensation and Perception under Understanding, and Will under Reason; but he has still Emotion, in ​the general scheme of man's faculties, and Judgment in the particular of the cognitive faculties, undiscussed. Now, what is he to do with design and beauty, which still keep apart from Understanding and Reason? If he is right in his world, they cannot come from without; they, too, must be subjective in the sense of coming from within, or they may be due to some harmony of the outer and inner. It is in this way, and from such considerations, that Judgment becomes the sphere of design and beauty, which are of an Emotional nature. One, can see then, what led Kant to be averse to all theoretic arguments about God; for there was nothing noumenal known in Kant's world but the categorical Imperative; all the rest was phenomenal—unknown materiature apart—and depended on forms ab intra: Kant's theoretical world, in short, or world of knowledge, was only phenomenal. Plainly, then to Kant, all form being ab intra, design and beauty would present a peculiar phrase to him, and would require peculiarly to be dealt with.
It was easy to Kant's followers to see how small a rôle was left for materiature, and to fall on the idea of expunging it. Hence it was that Fichte attempted to build all up from these internal forms, and to that he required a principle of movement in themselves, and a radiation from a single bottom one through a systematic articulation of all the others. As left by Kant, however, he was still on the platform of consciousness and a subjective intellect; hence his system could only be one of subjective idealism or objective egoism, which terms imply the same thing. From this limited form Schelling freed the advancing system by his principle of an absolute or neutrum into which both Nature and Thought were resolved. But in Schelling the sides ​remained apart, and the Absolute had to be sprung to. Hegel examined, all, rethought all, and completed all. He perfected, first, the Thought-forms into a complete self-formative system—into an organic and, so to speak, personal whole, to which the particular, Nature, took up the position of, as regards the first, only its other, and in it the universal forms only repeated themselves as in particularity or otherness, while, third, he summed up both in the singular of Spirit. His three parts present analogies to the three of the syllogism, the three cognitive faculties, the three faculties in general &c.; and to the last Kant is repeated.
Hegel in his main principle has certainly put his finger on the rhythmus of the universe. Understanding steps from abstraction to abstraction; but Reason conjoins and concretes them. 'Beginning' is an abstraction, and, as such, is untrue; it is concrete only with its end, and so true. Life and death must also for their truth be concretely joined, and the result is the higher new, the birth of the Spirit. God abstractly, as Hegel puts it, is the mere empty word, the infidel God; he is true only as concrete in Christianity, the God-man. So in all other cases. The true notion is the conjunction of the contradictories.
D. 6.
Kant's Categories form really the substance of Hegel; but Hegel's whole endeavour is to conceal this. Hegel seems a crafty borrower generally. His absolute is the neutrum of Schelling, converted into subject by the Ego of Fichte. Aristotle assists him in the further characterisation of his subject through the distinctions of Matter, Form, Actuality, &c. Plato lends his aid in ​enabling him to look at it as idea, and to develop it as idea. The very monad of Leibnitz, the triad of Proclus, and the Qualirung of Böhme are auxiliary to him. But his infinitely greatest obligations are to Kant, who enables him to lay out his whole system and carry out his whole process.
Must we conceive, as well as name, to understand—but how is the conception of heterisation to Nature possible?
Are we encouraged by the general nature of the case (all being Werden, and Werden being always a union of identical opposites) to believe that even in death there is process, that there again Non-being is passed into Being, and that this applies to all members of the universe, spiritual or material? Or are these abstractions but a system of fantastic and delusive shadows shed of the universe into the brain of man? Or, even so, are they not still thoughts—are they not threads of essential thought, threads from the main of thought, electric threads round which cluster and accrete in senuous opacity the matter-motes that make the universe? It is important to pause on this. Again, it must be noted that the admission Seyn und Nichts ist dasselbe is the other important point;—grant that, and Werden cannot be repressed. It is a conjunction of the extremes of thought; for Being is regarded as the primal fount of possibility, while Nothing is that of all impossibility. It seems violent to force us to coinjoin them for the birth of reality. Still, each is a thought, and each can be thinkingly examined: if the result declares identity, we must accept it, it and its consequences.
Take any actual Concrete, abstract from quality after quality, and observe the result. Let the Concrete be ​this paper, for example: well, we say there is whiteness in it, there is cohesion, there is pliancy, &c. &c.—now let us throw out all these, and we shall be left at last with there is nothing. The whole question now is, is this caput mortuum of abstraction an allowable base for the whole world of thought? In such sentence, it is very plain that there is and nothing, subject and predicate, are equally nothing, and, so far as that goes, identical; but the objection is obvious that this results only from their having now no longer any matter of application—any applicability—any use. So long as they were in use, in actual application, in actual work, they were very different. When out of use, they are both of course equally idle, and, so far as any result is concerned, equally null. Food and no food are of identical result—are, so to speak, equally nothing, if placed in a stomach that will not digest. Distinctions are distinctions only when in use; they are empty, void, null, when unapplied; and so, unapplied, may be set equal if you will. But where is the warrant to make such equality a foundation for the whole burthen of concrete thought in its abstract, or formal, or logical form? To do so is a feat of ingenuity; but it is a feat, a trick, a mockery, a delusion; and the human mind that, dazzled, may admire, will still refuse conviction and assent. There still recurs the question, however, Are we not at liberty to take up the notions Being and Non-being with a view to analysis and comparison? To this the answer must be yes, But that yes does not empower you to set Being as identical with Non-being. You say you do not wish so to set them, that it is not you who set them at all, that they set themselves, and that they set themselves as both equal and unequal, and it is this duplicity of relation that sets free the ​notion Becoming as a notion that, essentially single, is yet more essentially double and contains both of the others. You say you do not ask us to make any reference to concrete things, outer or inner—that you only wish us to see how abstract thought may build itself, &c. But—
Another objection is the refusal of the mind to believe in a concrete not or nothing—in the identification of positive determination with negative limitation—yet such is the chief lever of Hegel. In short, the main result will be, as regards Hegel, that we shall have to reject his system as articulated, and yet retain it largely both as a whole and in parts. The system as articulated is probably the result of the mere striving, so common at the time, after universality and necessity, which are the only two elements that can produce a coherent and complete whole, a Kosmos. Still, Hegel shows the connexion of positive determination and negative limitation—that they are but different sides of the same reality—that, as abstract thoughts, they coalesce and run together. It must be understood to shadow out also the only possible mode of conceiving an actual beginning.
But, let us do our best, we cannot help feeling from time to time, that there crops out an element of weakness, of mere verbal hocus-pocus, distinctions which will not maintain their objective truth before the test of another language. No: the system that has built itself up so laboriously out of the unresting river must resolve itself into the same again, though largely to its material enrichment. So with the system of Kant. Still, in both, principles of form as well as matter will be found of permanent and abiding worth.
E. 1.
'Being is the Notion only in itself.' This can be taken, first, subjectively, and second, objectively.
First, subjectively,—the notion is thought, thought in act, a subject, a thinker, a spirit, God, you, I. The notion then (with such meaning) as being, as is, as the absolutely first, crude, dim, dull, opaque, chaotic, unconscious, brute I am, the first flutter of life, the absolute A in quickening (alphabetic A) is only in itself—latent, undeveloped. The German an, not quite the English in, here. An means properly at, beside, near. So the notion an sich is the notion at itself, like the first speck of life on the edge of the disc. The notion is, as it were, just come to itself. There is no answer possible, in one sense, to what is a thing in itself, for every possible answer would involve what is for another. An sich is thus just Seyn; both are equally incapable of direct explanation, neither can be said. To say it, would be to limit it, to negate it, to give it a determinate manifestation, &c. Whatever were said, it would be still more than that; that, then, would describe it falsely, imperfectly, incompletely, that is, negatively, &c. Latency, undevelopment, inchoation, is what the term implies; and this amounts to the universal universal, the summum genus, the utterly unspecified, indeterminate, indefinite universal principle of all particulars—the Seyn—the base, the case, the all-embracing sphere and mother liquor, and yet also the invisible dimensionless first of everything manifest. At bottom, virtually, occultly, independently, absolutely, are all shades of An sich; and they all resolve themselves into Seyn, and that into absolute, or abstract, or blank self-identity.
​This description of An sich is pertinent in every application of the term, whether to the all of things or any single particular whole; it is a constituent in the thinking of every whole. The universe has no advantage in this respect over this little crystal. This gives a glimpse into the constitution of thought as thought; of which, it is not right to say that it is subject to such and such poles, but rather that these are just its modi and constitute it so and so; thought is just such.
Second, objectively,—of everything we may form a notion, but the notion is no true notion unless it correspond to its object. Call the object Seyn now, then obviously Seyn is just the Notion but as yet an sich, in itself, potentially that is. Or, take it, in a slightly other way. Existence, as it is there before us, or here with us, is just God's Notien; but in this form, it is only the Notion in itself, occultly, latently, undemonstrated by explanation and development. Again, the phrase may be taken historically objectively, as symbolising the first stage of thought historically. The hoof of Seyn breaks up into the fingers (Bestimmungen), which also are (sind or sind seyend). As thus separated, they are to each other, other.
'A setting out of the Notion as here in itself, or a going into itself of Being.' This susceptible of the same points of view: First, subjectively, I set myself out of myself, or I develop myself; and this just amounts again to—I go into myself. The reference to me, of course, to be universalised into reference to the whole or any whole.
There are four forms shadowed out then:—1. The first subject; 2. The present sensuous object; 3. History as applied to Thought; 4. The Notion qua notion, ​without distinction of object. The three first are but illustrative of the last.
The second forms of a sphere are the finite (the fingers of the hoof). The importance of thinking through predicates and eliminating the subject—as an entity of mere supposition and conception. This the root of the multi-applicability of the Hegelian discussion.
The first, the beginning, cannot be a product or result; neither can it contain more than one significate. The beginning must be an absolutely first, and also an absolutely simple; were it either a derivative or a compound, it would contradict itself and be no beginning. But when we can say, it is, I am, &c., we have a beginning. The beginning of a thing is when it is. As with a part, so with the whole. The am or is is the absolutely first predicate that can be attached. To begin an examination of thought, then, (Logic), is to begin with A in the alphabet of predication, is to begin with the absolutely first predicate, and that is Being. In this shape, it is pure thought; it is utterly indeterminate, incompound, and inderivative or first. Thought is but predication, an ascription or attribution of predicates; for predicate in the thinking subject corresponds to specificate in the thought object; i.e. these are identical, because the specificate can only exist in thought as predicate. The latter term, then, is the preferable in a system of Logic.
'Seyn is pure abstraction.' Something of the Hegelian, peculiar use of the word, as the separation and isolation effected by the analysing Understanding, floats here. Suppose we apply, as regards Non-being, the four forms previously applied to Being. 1. The first subject: it is evident I am in such position (first ​subject) is equal to—I am not or nought as yet. 2. The present sensuous object also is and is not, for it properly is only in its absolutely first principle. 3. History as applied: at A, thought both was and was not. 4. The Notion qua notion: it is in itself, and not as it is there. That it is, then, is also that it is not. Even as that outward Seyn, it is not—as not me, &c. But it is only necessary to think Being in abstract generality.
The Absolute is an affair of thought, it is not just as much as it is: for what is is a variety; there is not only identity, but difference also. An absolute cannot be thought without a non-absolute. It is the non-absolute that gives the cue to the absolute. So when we ask what a thing is—which is the same as asking what is it in itself—we imply by the very question that it is not,—or why the question? It is the non-being that gives the cue to the being. Here is a crystal of salt: we ask, what is it? The very question involves that as it is, it is not. Thought is itself evidently just so constituted; it has opposite poles. Nothing, then, is thus a definition of the Absolute. The Absolute is Nothing. There is only the absolute and the non-absolute. Only the synthesis is; neither of its antitheses per se is. Pure Seyn is the absolute Negative—of whatever is: it is the Absolute, &c. This seen in the Thing-in-itself, in God as merely abstract supreme being of enlightenment, &c. The Nothing of Buddha is precisely the same Abstraction. We seek the universal of Being by abstracting from every particular Being, and the resultant abstraction in which we land is precisely the same entity, however we name it—whether Being or Nothing—whether the Supreme Being of Voltaire or the Nothing of Buddha.
​What is, is thought, concrete thought, that, of itself, determines itself, thus and thus. The empirical ego—of you or me—with all its empirical realities—it and these but forms of thought—modi of the great sea. This great sea still is, truly is, is great and the all, though in me, though in you. The my and me, the you and yours, the in me, the in you, are but constituents of the sea, and can be so placed as to become mere pebbles and cockle-shells by it. I deceive myself, you deceive yourself: I, this I, and my, and all mine, you and yours, and he and his, but mere straws blowing beside the sea. It is my error—a case applicable to you and him, and each of us—to think them me, true me. These, me, true me, are only that ocean and that one crystal-drop, that infinite of space and that one eye-gleam, that unreachable all and that invisible point, that everywhere and that nowhere—Thought.
Our discontent with the abstractions Seyn and Nichts arises from their own proper life. They tend of themselves further, that is, to further specification. This attaches to the true idea of a true beginning. Freedom, as form of Nothing, shows the necessity of the existence of Nothing.
Nothing is the same as Being. This is partly as taking each abstractly; but the other meaning hovers near also. The Seyn as Ansichseyn is really the same as Nothing. Determinate Is, is built around a womb of nothing, which womb is also called the Seyn. They are thus together Becoming: what is become was not, but is. The crust upon the gulf which is the womb of all, holds at once of Being and of Non-being: if it is this, it is not that; it is not all, it is but part; that is, it is limited, negated, or—contains Nothing quite as much as Being. Said womb, too, being the absolute ​A and source and base of all, is the veritable is; the other veritably is not, its is is elsewhere, its is is in another. Every whole is similarly placed; every whole is similarly a womb of nothing and being. It is in this womb, which is nothing, that it veritably is; and from it, this nothing, it is, that it develops, that it draws what it is. But this drawing or development is just Becoming. Becoming, then, contains both, and is the truth of both. A system of monads thus, and of monads in monads and a monad.
The elements of Something are reality and negation—negation that is an otherwise-being. This latter is form; it is not the reality, it is form and may vary without affecting the reality. It is thus an otherwise-being of the Reality itself: it is thus the other of the Reality; it is there where the other also finds its other, its bar, its halt; it is the general region of otherness, of distinction, separation, discrimination; it is being-for-other, as it is that of the being that alone is for the other; it is there being-for-other also as regards its own self; it is also its being by or with the other; it is there where it is wholly for the other, for distinction, &c. (Realise this by reference to yourself as a Something. Your naturality, your personality, is your being-for-other; but are you in any part of that person? It is other than your reality.) Otherwise-being is a predicable of each and all, for by the otherwise-being only is it capable of discrimination: it is there where its being is for another.
Something becomes another. This process endless, ceaseless, but what is othered is just the other. The something thus retains itself. It is thus the true Infinite; that, that going over into another, retains, in this going over and in this other, distinct reference to its ​own self. This the substance or substratum of Kant and Spinoza. In this process, too, or in this notion of Kant and Spinoza, lies Being-for-self (Fürsichseyn), or self-reference and self-retention. Despite the other and othering, that which is, still is for itself and by itself, and with itself. This the true Infinite which remains and abides—the negation of the negation—the mediating process of itself with itself—not the bastard Infinite that arises from mere repetition of alternation, and ends in an ébahi 'and so on ad infinitum!' It is our own fault if we make absolute the mere other, the mere finite and changeable.
With Self-reference (Being-for-self) the principle of Ideality appears; it is here we refer to something that does not exist as there or here, as a This, in outside crust, but that is ideally there in the centre—the substance of Spinoza, the substrate of Kant, the absolute of Hegel. The finite is reality, but its truth is its ideality. The Infinite of the understanding even—the spurious one—is idea. Here we see that all philosophy, as it idealises reality, is idealism.
To be for, by, and with one's own self, this is the Fürsichseyn, and it is the substance or substrate of Kant, &c. Hegel's phrase is its perfect abstract expression.
One bottom principle—God—must be assumed; but thus all change is quite indifferent, and the true Infinite is this bottom principle that abides. The surface endlessness of difference is but a spurious Infinite.
Self-reference is immediacy, no result of intermediacy; it is directly first and present, it is inderivative, it is uncaused; it is A, it is the first, the absolute—but as negation of negation. The negativity of self-reference involves the exclusion of other units from the one ​unit; as, for example, the distinction of my me from my empirical affections and experiences. The one self-reference, thus—the single unit—flows over into Many. This the vital cell from which arises the whole chapter on Fürsichseyn. This chapter developing thus One and Many, Attraction and Repulsion, &c., mediates the transition from Quality to Quantity, and becomes itself readily intelligible.
The repulsion of the Ones will probably appear forced and artificial, however—perhaps, at best ingenious. To the musing mind, it has a certain credibility. Suppose a subject of the Werden, suppose a beginning and progressing consciousness, the first thought presumably will be am, which is tantamount to is. Such is is but nothing, and must give rise to such thought; but the not has also is, or positivity, that is, there becomes. But if there becomes or arises, there also departs or ceases; while, at the same time, there is between both the quasi-stable moment of there is there. Attention is now directed to this quasi-stable moment as such. It has reality, it has determinateness, it implies another, it becomes other, and that equally other. It is thus limited and alterable; but in the midst of this, the subject, the consciousness, remains—by itself and for itself. It is one. But this one, as so produced, as affirmative to self and negative to other, implies several ones, &c. It is possible to figure what is for itself as something with qualities—a crystal of salt—in which case there is a mean of passage from the one to the many. Absolutise this crystal to the world: the one is the many, the many the one—or the whole of many, which is Quantity.
That there is, there must have been not. That not is is, there must have been becomes. But becomes is ​negative positivity, or it involves quality. But quality, as what it is, is reality; and as what it is not, it is determinateness. But reality with determinateness, or determinate reality, is something. Something, as far as it is, as far as it has reality, is in itself; while so far as it is determinate, or as far as it has form, it has an element of otherness; for form is where something is other, where it may be othered while it at the same time remains unaffected. Determinateness is thus the otherwise-being of the something, it is where the being of the something is with other. There also is it that there is the general region of otherness—the region of separation, distinction, discrimination. It is there where the other and all others are separated from the something. It is there where the something is, in every reference, for other. It is there where something is for, by, and with its own other. The two factors or constituent elements of the something, then, are Ansichseyn and Seyn-für-Anderes, or the quality to be in self and the quality to be for other; in which the latter phrase, the 'for' is equivalent to for, by, and with. Where the something is for, by, and with, another, however, it is there precisely that the bound or limit falls. Something thus, then, is bounded, limited, or finite. It has also, as we have seen, an element of otherness in itself. In fact, the other involved by limit is itself something. Something then becomes something, or the other becomes other, ad infinitum. But as it is only the other that is othered, the Self remains for, by, and with itself. But this Being-for-self, the true Infinite, is a principle of ideality, &c. &c. One cell is thus formed—a self-subsistent monad; for self-reference is self-presence or immediacy. As excluding the other, it is absolute.
​But even thus, must we not say Hegelianism is the crystal of Naturalism?
After all, the navel-string and mother-cake of Hegel are still the desiderata. Where does he attach to? whence is he? Well, these are multiform; they may be found generally in the history of philosophy. The absolutely first radical is sum, which, objectified, becomes est and so on. Fichte's beginning can be shown to lead to Hegel's, as also Schelling's principle, &c. &c. Then there is a beginning findable in this way, that he just takes up the actual as he finds it, and sorts it and names it in his own fashion, and as it leads him. Or he says, God is the Wesen, and God is a Spirit; and matter, &c., as made by him, can be called just his other. He is thought; but as having made matter, this also is his—that is, it is just his other. But materiality is in itself just the other of spirituality: the one outer, the other inner; the one extense, the other intense, &c. &c.: in fact, there are the Two.
This view not without consolation. The superior actual is certainly thought, which uses up matter as mere aliment, and converts it into its own element. Such is the process, the transformation of the Natural into the Spiritual. Death of the Natural is a matter of course, then; but that involves—as always—a step higher, and there is no destruction. Again matter is itself thought. The nearest actual is, after all, the subjective moment of thought. The element of despair lies in the inessentiality of the particular, of the singular subject. Still the singular subject—in himself—is the Objective, &c. The sheet-anchor of hope is thought.
The immortality probably no concern of Hegel's; he is above all doubt or anxiety or thought in that respect with his views of Matter, Thought, Spirit, the ​Absolute generally. His God, then, le Dieu Absolu, that which is, but that is Thought, Spirit: moi, je suis l'Absolu; toi, tu es l'Absolu; lui, il est l'Absolu: il faut que nous nous prosternions devant l'Absolu, ce qui est notre mystère, notre vie essentielle, notre vrai nous-meme, l'Universel, ce qui est, le vrai, le tout, le seul!
E. 2.
There is a certain justification for the Hegelian God-man historically, not only in the outward Christ, but in the fact that, whereas formerly one's God was foreign and external to oneself in a priest, &c., and to be propitiated externally by a sacrifice, by rites, &c., the mind (Reason) is now a law—in conscience—unto its own self, that it obeys God in obeying itself. This, in short, is the identification of man's essential reason with the Divine nature. Thus, then, God is no longer an outer, an other, but within, and Us. Hegel must have largely in view this historical alteration of the historical stand-point. Had Hegel been an honester man and a more generous heart, what fine things we might have had from him! As this: No proof would ever, or could ever, have been offered of God's existence, had our knowledge of and belief in such existence been obliged to wait for the proof.
Remark.
The preceding Notes, though not to be regarded as expressive of definitive conclusions in any reference, will, nevertheless, assist such; and so justify of themselves, we hope, their respite from fire. They are not, we are disposed to believe, hard to understand; and a reader who has any interest in the subject may be ​expected, we shall say, to read them pretty well through. But this effected, there will result, surely, some amount of familiarity with the variety of the leading notions and peculiar terms involved; a familiarity which must somewhat mitigate the shock of the abrupt steepness, the strangeness and the difficulty of the access, which Hegel himself accords. The rôle to be assigned to Thought as Thought, for example—the Metaphysic of a Beginning, the nature of abstract Being, the special significations to be attached to Abstraction, Understanding, Reason, &c.—all this, and other such matter, must, as regards intelligibility and currency, very much gain to the reader as his consideration proceeds. A slight glimpse, too, of the genetic history of the subject may not be wanting. One or two of the summaries, again—that is, if long separation from them may allow me to speak as a stranger in their regard—will be found, perhaps, so far as they go, not without spirit and not without accuracy, nor yet failing, it may be, in something of that dialectic nexus without which Hegel can but yield up the ghost, leaving the structure he has raised to tumble all abroad into the thousand disconnected clauses of a mere etymological discursus.
To such readers as approach Hegel with prejudice and preconceived aversion, even the objections and vituperations which we have unsparingly—but possibly quite gratuitously—expended in his regard, may prove, on a sort of homœopathic principle, not only congenial, but remedial. The 'charlatan' of Schopenhauer is, perhaps, the ugliest of all the missiles which have ever yet been flung at Hegel; but others quite as ugly will be found under C. and D. of the present chapter, and it is only the peculiarity of their place, ​together with the hope of service, which can excuse us for exhibiting them.
On this head, it may be worth while remarking that it is quite possible that Rosenkranz, who chronicles this reproach of Schopenhauer, is himself not without a certain complacency in view of the same. Not improbably, even as he chronicles it, though with rejection of course, he feels at the same time that there exists in Hegel a side where it is at least intelligible. It was an age of systems, and Hegel produced his. Nor did he feel, the while, under any obligation to explain it, or account for it, or, in any way, make it down. To him, it was enough that he had produced it; there it was; let the reader make what he could of it! But just here lay the difficulty! With the others—with Kant, with Fichte, with Schelling—there was a perceived and received beginning,—there was an understood method,—above all, there was a universally intelligible speech. But, Hegel!—Hegel had changed all that. The ball he flung down to us showed no clue; the principles that underlay the winding of it, were undiscoverable; and what professed to be the explication was a tongue unknown; not the less unknown, indeed, but the more exasperating, that it was couched, for the most part, in the oldest and commonest of terms. Yet still—all previous great ones looking small and inferior when dressed in its forms—it was seen, indirectly in this and directly in other respects, to involve claims and pretensions of a dominant and even domineering supremacy. Nay, though at once the necessity and the hopelessness of investigation were felt (necessity,—in that there could be no security till a competent jury had set on that laborious rope of the Hegelian categories, and, after due inspection, ​pronounced its sufficiency;—hopelessness, in that the very nature of the case seemed somehow to postpone the possibility of this inquiry into an indefinite future)—the very paramountcy of the pretensions, the very inextricability of the proof, had, with a public so prepared as then, strange power to dazzle, seduce, or overawe into acquiescence.
Nor was this hid from Hegel himself; so that there necessarily arose on his part, as well as on that of his hearers, such secret consciousness as gradually infected and undermined whatever frankness the mutual relation might have originally contained. To be obliged to speak, as to be obliged to hear, what is felt to be only half understood, is to be very peculiarly placed; and the development, in such circumstances, of a certain bias, of a certain disingenuousness, will, in hearer as well as speaker, be hardly prevented. Distrust grows in both; distrust, which assertion in the one, as acceptance in the other, strives vainly to overbid. You, on the one side, show possession of what is taken for a mystery of price; why blow away, then, you feel, this mystery, and consequently this price, by any indiscreet simplicity of speech? You, on the other side, again, are credited with understanding the same; and the feathers of everyone concerned are flattered the right way when you smile the smile of the initiated—not but that all the while, to be sure, the very fibres of your midriff are cramped to agony with your unavailing efforts to discern.
But there is no necessity to go so far as this in either case. The bias to both, consequent on an equivocal claim, made on the one hand, and granted on the other, suffices. The relations in such a case are unsound, the common-ground largely factitious, and frankness ​there can be none. What results is a readiness to fall into loudness and—let us say here—effrontingness, over which hangs ever an air of fraudulence.
Again, scholars, men of letters, are, for the most part, by original constitution, and acquired habits—the latter from seclusion mainly—that is, both in temperament and temper, keen, intense, single-sighted, and precipitate; naturally prone, therefore, to exhibit a certain unsparingness, a certain inconsiderate thoroughness, a certain unwitting procacity, as well in demonstrating the failures of others as the successes of themselves. Now this element has decided place in Hegel. This it is that prompts the unnecessary bitterness of his antagonistic criticism, as in the case of Kant, where, from the good, honest, sincere, moderate, and modest soul that fronted him, provocation was impossible, and where, indeed, grace, if not gratitude, should have reduced him to respectfulness as in presence of the quarry of his own whole wealth. This too it is,—but charged with influence from the disingenuous sphere,—which lies at the bottom of those very sweeping and unhesitatingly pronunziamentos on every the minutest occurrent detail, no matter how remote, which, apropos of the Philosophy of History, have been already alluded to, and in regard to which the reader feels, and cannot help feeling, at once the aplomb of the assertion and the insecurity of the knowledge.
There is a side in Hegel, then, where the 'charlatan' of Schopenhauer may have at least appeared intelligible even to Rosenkranz. Nay, Rosenkranz himself, in telling us (first words of his Wissenschaft der logischen Idee) that, in his case, the study of Hegel has been 'the devotion of a life, alternately attracted and repelled,' virtually admits that a taint of doubt will penetrate ​even to the simplest faith and the most righteous inclination. On the whole, the conclusion may be considered legitimate then, that, from the circumstances explained, there is apt to fall on Hegel, a certain air as it were of an adventurer, which it takes all his own native force, all his own genuine weight, all his own indisputable fulness to support and carry off, even in the eyes of those who, in his regard, cannot be considered superficial students.
There is that in the above which may suggest, that it is not the spirit of the partisan which is to be anticipated here; where, indeed, the whole object is neither condemnation, or vindication, but simply presentation, or re-presentation. To Hegel, that is, we would hold ourselves nakedly suscipient, as to the reader nakedly reflectent. And this is the nearest need at present, for Hegel hitherto has been but scantly understood anywhere; receiving judgments, consequently, not only premature but stupid. This reminds me to say, what is hardly necessary, however, that the objections and vituperations which occur in this chapter are not judgments: they are but the student's travail cries. Again, it is to be noted that, if we judge not against, neither do we judge here for, Hegel. There has been too much difficulty to understand, to think as yet of judging; this will follow of itself, however, as soon as that has been effected. There is no seeking in all this to speak apologetically of Hegel; such impertinent worldly squeamishness, did it exist, were what alone required apology. Hegel wants none. He is the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity, and closes the modern world as Aristotle the ancient. Nor can it be doubted but much of what he has got to tell us is precisely that which is adapted 'to bring peace' ​in our times,—peace to the unquiet hearts of men,—peace to the unquiet hearts of nations.
The preceding Notes, then, will, it is hoped, prove useful, and constitute, on the whole, no ineffective introduction. In the succeeding chapters, the approach to Hegel becomes considerably closer, to end, as we believe, at last in arrival.
* ↑ See third paragraph of Remark I. of Quality, both as translated and commented.
* ↑ Constitutive and Regulative.—'The distinction between speculative and regulative knowledge holds an important place in the philosophy of Kant.' These words occur in Mansel's 'Bampton Lectures,' and it was amusing to observe the unanimity with which the critics of the day took the supererogatory leap, and repeated the blunder of their authority: they, too, were eloquent about speculative and regulative. It needs, however, but very slight acquaintance with the subject to know that Kant could not possible perpetrate any such false distinction. What Kant means by Speculative, and what by Regulative, may be found in scores of passages by opening his chief work almost at a venture; but in no passage will Speculative be found opposed to Regulative. What Kant opposes to the latter word is, as is found in the text, Constitutive. Without express reference to Kant for his definition of the meaning of these words, let the reader, to save time and space, understand by Constitutive, material elements of composition, elements that make part and parcel of the matter, elements that constitute objects; while by Regulative, again, let him understand formal elements of disposition, elements productive of unity of reference and arrangement in a multitude of particulars, elements that regulate or give form (rule, law) to objects. To know the constitutive elements of the material universe, we should look to Chemistry; to know the regulative, we should look to Natural Philosophy. It is barely possible that the error which substitutes Speculative for Constitutive may be due to a slip of the pen. This excuse, however, can at best only serve the Lecturer; it is inadmissible as regards his critics. But, it must be said, so indissoluble is the association of constitutive with regulative; and so well known and discrepant is the meaning of speculative, that, to any one really familiar with Kant, the substitution of the last word for the first would have instantly grated on the ear its own detection. In truth, it seems to me that the burthen of Mr. Mansel's utterances in this whole reference, suggests in general the same superficial, desultory, fallacious acquaintance with the writings of Kant which underlies the heedless injustice and petulant effrontery of his master, Sir William Hamilton. It is positively melancholy to be obliged to witness the ignorance of this country in regard to all—the commonest and currentest—that bears on German Philosophy. That, for example, Bishop Colenso and the Essayists and Reviewers—mere products of that Aufklärung whose correction was the express mission directly of Hegel, and only a little less directly of Kant—should be styled here the German Party! But ignorance is not the worst feature in the case. Simple ignorance might be excused. But how are we to excuse the pretensions— the calculated pretensions—united, too, with denunciations not the less morally sublime that they are wholly empty? Ever since, in the vanity of a weak ambition, the example was set by Sir William Hamilton, men of the highest position in England have thought it no inconsistency to claim to refute what at the same time they complained to be unintelligible. The distinguished disciple of Sir William Hamilton, for instance, from whose 'Bampton Lectures' we have just quoted, is not content to place himself in an equivocal position as regards Kant; but, with a simmilar consequence in reference to Hegel, he seeks to win a smile from us by citing a jocose proposal to translate this author by—distillation! That is, Hegel is absolutely unintelligible, but, as a last chance, we—distil him! Mr. Mansel, like Coleridge, like Hamilton, and others, quotes liberally from Plotinus, Aquinas, &c.; and what he quotes being intelligible, the practice is intelligible: but why should he diversify his squares of Greek and his oblongs of Latin by 'coming us cranking in with huge half-noons' of the German of Kant 'and monstrous cantles' of the Egyptian of Hegel, seeing that the one is very plainly not understood, and the other is declared unintelligible? Square of Plotinus, cantle of Kant, oblong of Aquinas, half-moon of Hegel! Why should obscure cantle and utterly dark half-moon be intruded on the brightness of square and oblong? Is it at all possible to account for this, unless on the hypothesis—the mechanical tessellation being so glaring—of a certain love of external effect? But is Mr. Mansel barely just to himself in placing quotations from the unreadable Hegel beside others from his Plato and his Aristotle? Or is Philosophy but sporadic quotation? But perhaps we ought not to forget that Hegel is now understood by distillation! Henceforth we shall conquer the Principia and the Mécanique Céleste, not by mastering a technical dialect, but—by process of distillation!Perhaps, the truth is this: since David Hume, thought qua thought has neither been represented nor understood in England.
* ↑ This just shows, however, that we must verify our categories—our distinctions—our common terms of thought and speech.
* ↑ For us, then, truly to think them, is to reproduce the thought of God, which preceded their creation, and which, so to speak, therefore contained them.
* ↑ But it is pleonastic to assume stone-masonry and wood-carpentry as independent self-substantial entities, out of, and other than, thought. Let us say rather that thought is perceiving thought, thought is a perceptive thought, or the understanding is a perceptive understanding. So Kant conceived the understanding of God. Our perception he conceived to be derivative or sensuous (intuitus derivativus); while that of God appeared to him necessarily original and intellectual (intuitus originarius). Now the force of this is, that the perception of God makes its objects; creation and perception, with understanding of the same, are but a one act in God. Man, Kant conceived, possessed no such direct perception, but only a perception indirect through media of sense, which media, adding elements of their own, separated us for ever from the thing-in-itself (or things-in-themselves), at the very moment that they revealed it (or them). But suppose thought in all cases to be perceptive thought, thought where subject thinking and object thought are identical—identical in difference if you like, even as the one side and the other side of this sheet of paper are identical in difference—then we come tolerably close to the stand-point of Hegel.