# The Secret of Hegel/Volume 1/Preface

PREFACE.
In intruding on the Public with a work on Hegel, the first duty that seems to offer, is, to come to an understand with it as regards the prepossessions which commonly obtain, it is to be feared, not only as against the particular writer named, but as against the whole body of what is called German Philosophy. It will be readily admitted, to be sure, by all from whom the admission is of any value, that just in proportion to the relative knowledge of the individual is his perception as well of the relative ignorance of the community. But this—general ignorance, to wit—were no dispensation from the duty indicated: for just in such circumstances is it that there are prepossessions, that there are—in the strict sense of the word—prejudices; and prejudices constitute, here as everywhere, that preliminary obstacle of natural error which requires removal before any settlement of rational truth can possibly be effected. We cannot pretend, however, to reach all the prejudices concerned; for, thought in this connexion being still so incomplete, as usual, the variety of opinion passes into the indefinite; night reigns—a night peopled by our own fancies—and distinct enumeration becomes impossible.
Nevertheless, restricting ourselves to what is either actually or virtually prominent—in the one case by ​public rumour, and in the other by private validity—perhaps we shall accomplish a sufficiently exhaustive discussion by considering the whole question of objections as reduced to the two main assertions, that German Philosophy is, firstly, obsolete and, secondly, bad. The latter category, indeed, is so comprehensive, that there is little reason to fear but that we shall be able to include under it (with its fellow) all of any consequence that has been anywhere said on the subject.—Of these two assertions in their order, then.
Of this First, certain proceedings of Schelling constitute the angle; but to understand these proceedings, and the influence they exerted, a word is first of all necessary in regard to what, at the date in question, was universally held to be the historical progress of German Philosophy. The sum of general opinion here, in fact, we may state at once to have been this: Kant was supplanted by Fichte, Fichte by Schelling, and Schelling by Hegel. Any dissension, indeed, as to the sequent signification of this series was, as is natural, only to be found among the terms or members of it themselves. Kant, for example, publicly declined the affiliation which Fichte claimed from him. But then this was still settled by the remark of Reinhold, that, though Kant's belief could no longer be doubted, it yet by no means followed that Fichte was wrong. As for Fichte and Schelling, they had had their differences certainly, the master and the pupil, for the latter had gone to school to other masters, and had insisted on the addition to the original common property of a considerable amount of materials from without: nevertheless, it may be taken for granted that they themselves, ​though not without reluctance on the part of one of them perhaps, acquiesced in the universal understanding of their mutual relations. Hegel again, who had at first fought for Schelling, who had produced the bulk of that Critical Journal which had on the face of it no origin and no object but polemically to stand by Schelling—who, in particular, had written there that article which demonstrated the advance of Schelling over all his predecessors, and the consequent truth of the Identitätssystem—who, in a word, had publicly adopted this system and openly declared himself an adherent of Schelling,—Hegel, it is true, had afterwards declared off, or, as the Germans have it, said himself loose from Schelling. But here, too, it was not necessary to take Hegel at his own word; for who does not know what every such mere declaration, such more saying, is worth? Every man, in view of the special nick which he himself seems to have effected in the end, would fain see eliminated before it all the nicks of his predecessors, but not the less on that account is this former but the product of those latter. On the whole, then, despite some little natural interior dissension, it was certain that Fichte was the outcome of Kant—more certain, perhaps, that Schelling was the outcome of Fichte, and even quite in the superlative degree certain that Hegel was the outcome of Schelling.
Such we may assume to have been the universal belief at the death of Hegel in 1831. But now it was the fortune of Schelling to survive Hegel, and for a period of no less than twenty-three years, during part of which it became his cue to overbid Hegel, and pass him in his turn. During what we may call the reign ​of Hegel, which may be taken to have commenced, though at first feebly, with the appearance of the Phaenomenologie in 1807, Schelling had preserved an almost unbroken and very remarkable silence. (Could he have been trying to understand Hegel?) No sooner was Hegel dead, however, than Schelling let hints escape him—this was as early as 1832—of the speedy appearance of his part of yet another Philosophy, and, this time, of transcendent and unimagined import. No publication followed these hints, nevertheless, till 1834, when, in reference to a certain translation of Cousin, he gave vent to 'a very sharp and depreciatory estimate of the Hegelian Philosophy,' and on grounds that were equally hostile to his own, from which that of Hegel was supposed to have sprung. Lastly, at Berlin in 1841, he publicly declared his previous Philosophy—and, of course, the Philosophy of Hegel seemed no less involved—to have been a poem, 'a mere poem,' and he now offered in its place his 'Philosophy of Revelation.' Now, with these facts before it, at the same time that all Germany united to reject this last Philosophy as certainly for its part a poem whatever its predecessor might have been, how could the general public be expected to feel? Worn out with the two generations of fever that had followed the Kritik of Kant, would not the natural impulse be to take the remaining philosopher of the series at his word, and believe with him that the whole matter had been in truth a poem, a futile striving of mere imagination in the empty air of an unreal and false abstraction? This same public, moreover, found itself on trial compelled to forego the hope of judging Hegel for itself, and, ​while the very difficulty that produced this result would seen to it to throw an anterior probability on the judgment of Schelling, it had every reason to feel convinced that he, of all men, was the one who, in a supereminent degree, was the best qualified to judge for it. He, by universal acknowledgement, had thoroughly understood and thoroughly summed both Kant and Fichte; by an acknowledgment equally universal, it was his system that had given origin to the system of Hegel: moreover, he had lived longer than Hegel, and had enjoyed, counting from the Critical Journal, the ample advantage of more than fifty years of the study of the works of Hegel. If any man, then, possessed the necessary ability, the necessary acquirements, the necessary presuppositions every way, to enable him to understand Hegel, that man was Schelling, and there could, therefore, be no hesitation whatever in accepting the judgment of Schelling as what, in reference to the Philosophy of Hegel, was to be universally considered the absolutely definitive conclusion, the absolutely definitive sentence. If Schelling were inadequate to understand Hegel, what other German could hope success?—and, the door being shut on Germany, was it possible to expect an 'open sesame' from the lips of any foreigner? Rosenkranz remarks, as if twittingly, of the Times, that 'it ridiculed the attention which we devoted to the conflict of Schelling with the School of Hegel and opined that we were abstruse enthusiasts, for the whole difference between Hegel and Schelling came at last to this, that the first was very obscure, and the second obscurer still.' But surely, in the circumstances described, the Times, though for the rest obviously strange to the ​region, was not only entitled to say as much as this, but, more still, that the whole thing had been but an intellectual fever, and was now at an end, self-stultified by the admission of its own dream. In fact, as has been said, the declaration of Schelling amounted to a sentence. And so the general public took it—we may say—not only in Germany, but throughout Europe. Thenceforth, accordingly, stronger natures turned themselves to more hopeful issues, and German Philosophy was universally abandoned, unless, as it were, for the accidental studies of a few exceptional spirits. Since then, indeed, and especially since the failure of political hopes in 1848, Germany on the whole has, by a complete reaction, devoted to the crass concretes of empirical science the same ardour which she previously exhibited in the abstract atmosphere of the pure Idea.
This will probably be allowed to suffice as regards the case of the Affirmative in reference to the first assertion that German Philosophy is obsolete. What may be said for the Negative, will be considered later. Meanwhile, we shall proceed to state the case of the Affirmative of the second assertion that German Philosophy is bad.
The proof of this assertion, current opinion usually rests, firstly, on the indirect evidence of the reputed friends of German Philosophy, and secondly, on the direct findings of its intelligent foes.
Are not the friends of the German Philosophers, we are asked, for example, just all those people who occupy themselves nowadays with Feuerbach and with Strauss; and do not they belong, almost all of them, to an inferior Atheistico-Materialistic set, or, at ​all events, to those remnants of the Aufklärung, of Eighteenth Century Illumination, which still exist among us? Then, are not Essayists and Reviewers, with Bishop Colenso, generally spoken of as 'the German Party;' while, as for Strauss and Renan, are they not, by universal assertion and express name, the pupils of Hegel; and is not the one aim of the whole of these writers to establish a negative as regards the special inspiration of the Christian Scriptures, and shake Faith? There was Mr. Buckle, too, who, as is very clearly to be seen, though, to be sure, his mind was not very well made up, and he vacillated curiously between the Deism with an Immortality (say) of Hume and the Atheism without an Immortality of Comte—there was Mr. Buckle, who still knew nothing and would know nothing but the Illumination, and did not he round his vacant but tumid periods with allusions to the German Philosophers as 'advanced thinkers' of the most exemplary type? By their fruits you shall know them, and shall we not judge of Kant and Hegel by these their self-proclaimed friends, which are the fruits they produced? Nor so judging, and in view of the very superfluous extension—in an age like the present—of scepticism and misery (which is the sole vocation of such friends), shall we hesitate to declare the whole movement bad?
But, besides this indirect evidence of the reputed friends, there is the direct testimony of the intelligent foes of the Philosophy and Philosophers in question: we possess writers of the highest ability in themselves, and of the most consummate accomplishment as to all learning requisite—Sir William Hamilton, Coleridge, ​De Quincey, for example—who have instituted each of them his own special inquest into the matter, and who all agree in assuring us of the Atheistic, Pantheistic, and, for the rest, self-contradictory, and indeed nugatory, nature of the entire industry, from Kant, who began it, to Hegel and Schelling, who finished it. Surely, then, a clear case here, if anywhere, has been made out against the whole body of German Philosophy, which really, besides, directly refutes itself, even in the eyes of the simplest, by its own uncouth, outré, bizarre, and unintelligible jargon. Beyond a doubt the thing is bad, radically bad, and deservedly at an end. 'Advanced Thinkers' come themselves to see, more and more clearly daily, the nullity of its Idealism, as well as its obstructiveness generally to the legitimate progress of all sensible speculation, and Mr. Lockhart (if we mistake not) had perfect reason, if not in the words, at least in the thoughts, when he exclaimed to a would-be translator of German Philosophy, 'What! would you introduce that d——d nonsense into this country?'
It would seem, then, that the affirmative possesses an exceedingly strong case as regards both assertions, and that the negative has imposed on it a very awkward dilemma in each. Either grant German Philosophy obsolete, or prefer yourself to Schelling: this is the dilemma on one side, and on the other it cries: Either grant German Philosophy bad, or justify Scepticism.
Now, to take the latter alternative of the first dilemma would be ridiculous. To take that of the second, again, would be to advance in the teeth of our own deepest convictions.
Scepticism has done its work, and it were an ​anachronism on our part, should we, like Mr. Buckle, pat Scepticism on the back and urge it still further forward. Scepticism is the necessary servant of Illuminations,—and Illuminations are themselves very necessary things; but Scepticism and Illuminations are no longer to be continued when Scepticism and Illuminations have accomplished their mission, fulfilled their function. It is all very well, when the new light breaks in on us, to take delight in it, and to doubt every nook and corner of our old darkness. It is very exhilarating then, too, though it breed but wind and conceit, to crow over our neighbours, and to be eager to convince them of the excellence of our position and of the wretchedness of theirs. But when, in Schelling's phrase, Aufklärung has passed into Ausklärung—when the Light-up has become a Light-out, the Clearing-up a Clearing-out—when we are cleared, that is, of every article of our stowage, of our Inhalt, of our Substance—things are very different. As we shiver then for hunger and cold in a crank bark that will not sail, all the clearing and clearness, all the light and lightness in the world, will not recompense or console us. The Vanity of being better informed, of being superior to the prejudices of the vulgar, even of being superior to the 'superstition' of the vulgar, will no longer support us. We too have souls to be saved. We too would believe in God. We too have an interest in the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul. We too would wish to share the assurance of the humble pious Christian who takes all thankfully, carrying it in perfect trust of the future to the other side.
To maintain the negative, then, as regards the two ​assertions at issue, will demand on our part some care. Would we maintain, as regards the first, that German Philosophy is not obsolete, we must so present what we maintain as not in any way offensively to derogate from the dignity and authority of the intellect and position of Schelling. On the other hand, would we maintain, as regards the second, that German Philosophy is not bad, this too must be so managed that Scepticism, or, more accurately, the continuance of Scepticism, shall not be justified—rather so that German Philosophy shall appear not bad just for this reason, that it demonstrates a necessary end to Scepticism—and this, too, without being untrue to the Aufklärung, without being untrue to the one principle of the Aufklärung, its single outcome—the Right of Private Judgment.
With reference to the first assertion, the, that German Philosophy is obsolete, we hold the negative, and we rest our position simply on the present historical truth, that the sentence of Schelling, however infallible its apparent authority, has not, in point of fact, been accepted. The several considerations which go to prove this follow here together.
Many other Germans, for example, of good ability, of great accomplishment, and thoroughly versed in Schelling himself, have, despite the ban of the latter, continued to study Hegel, and have even claimed for him a superior significance, not only as regards Schelling or Fichte, but even as regards Kant. As concerns other countries, the same state of the case has been attested by the translations which have appeared. Translations are public matters, and call for no express enumeration; and as regards the German writers to ​whom we allude, perhaps general statement will suffice also. We shall appeal only, by way of instance, to one friend and to one foe. The former is Schwegler, whose premature death has been universally deplored, and whom we have to thank, as well for a most exhaustive and laborious investigation of the Metaphysic of Aristotle, as for what it is, perhaps, not rash to name the most perfect Epitome of General Philosophy at present in existence. This latter work is easily accessible, and the summaries it contains are of such a nature generally, and as respects Schelling and Hegel in particular,—though drawbacks are not wanting,—as to relieve us of the fear that its authority in the case of either will be readily impugned. The foe whom we would adduce here is Haym, who applies to Schelling's estimate of Hegel such epithets as 'spiteful' and 'envious,' and asserts it to contain 'rancour,' 'misintelligence,' and 'a good deal of distortion.' The same evidence, both of friend and foe, is illustrated and made good by the present state, not only in Germany, but everywhere in Europe, of the study of the four writers who represent the Philosophy in question. As regards Schelling himself, for example, that study may be almost named null, and his writings are probably never read now unless for purposes of an historic and business nature. Reading, indeed, seems unnecessary in the case of what was life-long inconsistency, stained too by the malice, and infected by the ineptitude, of the end. Of Fichte, much of the philosophical framework has fallen to the ground, and what works of his are still current, at the same time that they are in their nature ​exoteric, interest rather by their literary merits and the intrinsic nobleness of the man. But the hopes that were founded on Kant and Hegel have not yet withered down, and the works of both are still fondled in the hands with however longing a sigh over the strange spell of difficulty that clasps them from the sight. With reference to the former, Germany, at this very moment, loudly declares that with him is a beginning again to be made, and openly confesses that she has been too fast—that aspiration and enthusiasm have outstripped intelligence. As for Hegel, the case is thus put by an accomplished English Metaphysician: 'Who has ever yet uttered one intelligible word about Hegel? Not any of his countrymen—not any foreigner—seldom even himself. With peaks here and there more lucent than the sun, his intervals are filled with a sea of darkness, unnavigable by the aid of any compass, and an atmosphere, or rather vacuum, in which no human intellect can breathe. . . . . Hegel is impenetrable, almost throughout, as a mountain of adamant.' This is the truth, and it would have been well had other writers but manifested an equal courage of honest avowal. But it is with very mixed feelings that one watches the allures of those who decorate their pages with long passages from the Delian German of this modern Heraclitus, as if these passages were pertinent to their pages and intelligible to themselves—this at the very moment that they declare the utter impossibility of extracting any meaning from what they quote—unless by a process of distillation! Hegelian iron, Hegelianly tempered into Hegelian steel—the absolute ​adamant—this to be distilled! Bah, take heart, hang out, sew on your panni purpurei all the same!
The verdict of Schelling, then, seems practically set aside by the mere progress of time; and there appears to lie no wish nearer to the hearts of all honest students nowadays, than that Hegel (and with him Kant is usually united) should be made permeable. And justification of this wish, on the part of students who are confessedly only on the outside, is to be found in this—that, even from this position, the works of both these writers, however impenetrable in the main, afford intimations of the richest promise on all the deeper interests of man. The Kritik of Pure Reason and the Kritik of Judgment remain still vast blocks of immovable opacity; and even the Kritik of Practical Reason has not yet been represented with any approach to entirety in England: nevertheless, from this last work there have shone, even on British breasts, some of those rays which filled the soul of Richter with divine joy—with divine tranquillity as regards the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. Hegel is more impervious than Kant; yet still, despite the exasperation, the positive offence which attends the reading of such exoteric works of his as have been attempted to be conveyed to the Public in French or English, we see cropping occasionally to the surface in these, a meaningness of speech, a facility of manipulating, and of reducing into ready proportion, a vast number of interests which to the bulk of readers are as yet only in a state of instinctive chaos, and, just on every subject that is approached, a general overmastering grasp of thought to which no other writer ​exhibits a parallel. In short, we may say that, as regards these great Germans, the general Public carries in its heart a strange secret conviction, and that it seems even to its own self to wait on them with a dumb but fixed expectation of infinite and essential result. On this head, then, the conclusion forced upon us seems to be, that German Philosophy is indeed not understood, but not, on that account, by any means obsolete.
We come now to the negative of the second assertion, that German Philosophy is bad, and have to consider, first of all, what, on the opposite side, has been said for the affirmative, and under the two heads of the indirect evidence of reputed friends, and the direct testimony of intelligent foes. Under the first head, the plea began by alluding to a certain small Atheistico-Materialistic Party; but to this it is sufficient reply to point out that the adherents of a Strauss and a Feuerbach must be widely discriminated from those of a Kant and a Hegel. Further, what the plea states next, that Strauss and Renan are named par excellence the pupils of Hegel, is, as mere ascription, of small moment before the fact that their supposed master would have found the industry of both, in view of what he had done himself, not only superfluous, but obstructive, contradictory, and even, in a certain point of view, contemptible. Much the same thing can be said as regards the English writers who seem to follow a similar bent: whatever may be the inner motives of these writers (Essayists and Reviewers, &c.), their activity belongs to that sphere of Rationalism against which Hegel directly opposed himself. Still to spread the negative—a negative the spreading of which has ​long reached ultimate tenuity—and in those days when it is not the negative but the affirmative we need—this would have seemed to a Hegel of all things the most unnecessary, of all things the most absurd.
Mr. Buckle—who comes next—certainly praises Kant as, perhaps, the greatest thinker of his century; and, though he does not name Hegel, he seems to speak of the Philosophers of Germany in general as something very exalted. But, observe, there is always in all this the air of a man who is speaking by anticipation, and who only counts on verifying the same. Nor—beyond anticipation—can any broader basis of support be extended to those generous promises he so kindly advanced, of supplying us with definitive light at length on German Philosophy, and on the causes of the special accumulation of Thought and Knowledge—in that great country! It is, indeed, to be feared that those promises rested only on reliance in his own invincible intellect, and not on any knowledge as yet of the subject itself. He had a theory, had Mr. Buckle, or, rather, a theory had him—a theory, it is true, small rather, but still a theory that to him loomed huge as the universe, at the same time that it was the single drop of vitality in his whole soul.—Now, that such redoubted thinkers as Kant and Hegel, who, in especial, had been suspected or accused of Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms dear to Enlightenment, but hateful to Prejudice—(or vice versâ)—that these should be found not to fit his theory—such doubt never for a moment crossed even the most casual dream of Buckle!
We hold, then, that Mr. Buckle spoke in undoubted anticipation, and in absence of any actual knowledge. ​His book, at all events, would argue absolute destitution of any such knowledge, despite a certain amount of the usual tumid pretension; and it was just when he found himself brought by his own programme face to face with the Germans, that, it appears, he felt induced to take that voyage of recreation, the melancholy result of which we still deplore. The dilemma is this: once arrived at the actual study of the Germans, either Mr. Buckle penetrated the Germans, or he did not. Now, on the one horn, if he did, he surely found, to his amazement, consternation, horror—a spirit, a thought the very reverse of his theory—the very reverse of that superiority to established prejudice and constituted superstition which his own unhesitating conviction had led him so innocently to expect. In other words, if Mr. Buckle did penetrate the Germans, he found that there was nothing left him but to burn every vestige of that shallow Enlightenment which, supported on such semi-information, on such weak personal vanity, amid such hollow raisonnement, and with such contradictory results, he had been tempted, so boyishly ardent, so vaingloriously pompous, to communicate—to a world in many of its members so ignorant, that it hailed a crude, conceited boy (of formal ability, quick conscientiousness, and the pang of Illumination—inherited probably from antecedents somewhere) as a 'Vast Genius,' and his work—a bundle of excerpts of mere Illumination, from a bundle of books of mere Illumination, disposed around a ready-made presupposition of mere Illumination—as a 'Magnificent Contribution,' fruit of 'Vast Learning,' and even 'Philosophy.'
Such would have been the case if Mr. Buckle had penetrated the Germans: he would have been in haste to hide out of the way all traces of the blunder (and of the blundering manner of the blunder) which had pretentiously brought forward as new and great what had received its coup de grâce at the hands—and thereafter been duly ticketed and shelved as Aufklärung by the industry—of an entire generation of Germans, and at least not less than half a century previously.
On the other horn, if Mr. Buckle had not penetrated and could not penetrate the Germans—a supposition not incompatible with the formal ability of even Mr. Buckle—vexation the most intense would replace the boyish anticipations, the conceited promises, which had been with so much confidence announced. A certain amount of matter was here indispensable; mere hollow, swashbuckler peroration about superstition, fanaticism, and the like, would no longer serve: his own programme forced him to show some of the knowledge which had been here—as he had himself declared—so preeminently accumulated, as well as to demonstrate something of the peculiar means and influences which had brought about so remarkable a result. The Theme was Civilisation, and to him civilisation was knowledge,—the accumulation of knowledge, therefore, was ​necessarily to him the very first and fundamental condition, and of this condition Germany had been publicly proclaimed by himself the type and the exemplar. Mere generalities would no longer suffice, then—the type itself would require to be produced—the Germans must be penetrated!—But how if they could not be penetrated?
Thus, choosing for Mr. Buckle which horn we may, the dilemma is such as to truncate or reverse any influence of his praise on the German Philosophers. Mr. Buckle's sanguine expectations, indeed, to find there but mirrors of the same small Enlightenment and Illumination which he himself worshipped, are to be applied, not in determination of Kant and Hegel, but of Mr. Buckle himself.
On the general consideration at present before us, then, we are left with the conclusion that the German Philosophers are unaffected by the indirect evidence of their reputed friends.
On the other issue, as regards what weight is to be attached to the verdict of the supposed intelligent foes of the Germans, here were required a special analysis at least of the relative acquirements of each of these; and this would lead to an inquest and discussion of greater length than to adapt it for insertion here. This, then, though on our part an actual accomplishment, will be carried over to another work. We remark here only, that if Sir William Hamilton, Coleridge, and others have averred this and that of the Germans, whatever they aver is something quite indifferent, for the ignorance of ​all such, in the field before us, is utter, and, considering the pretensions which accompany it, disgraceful. As for Mr. Lockhart, it will be presently seen, perhaps, that he only made a mistake when he styled German Philosophy 'd——d nonsense,' and that it is to that 'nonsense' we have probably to attribute some very important results.
As regards the unfriendly 'advanced thinkers' who denounce the Idealism and Jargon of German Philosophy, this is as it should be: for German Philosophy, while it considers the general movement concerned as the one evil of the present, cannot but feel amused with the simple ways of this odd thing which calls itself an 'advanced thinker' nowadays. 'There was a time,' says Hegel, 'when a man who did not believe in Ghosts or the Devil was named a Philosopher!' But an 'advanced thinker,' to these distinctions negative of the unseen, adds—what is positive of the seen—an enlightened pride in his father the monkey! He may enjoy, perhaps, a well-informed satisfaction in contemplating mere material phenomena that vary to conditions as the all of this universe—or he may even experience an elevation into the moral sublime when he points to his future in the rock in the form of those bones and other remains of a Pithecus Intelligens, which, in all probability (he reflects), no subsequent intelligence will ever handle—but monkey is the pass-word! Sink your pedigree as man, and adopt for family-tree a procession of the skeletons of monkeys—then superior enlightenment radiates from your very person, and your ​place is fixed—a place of honour in the acclamant brotherhood that names itself 'advanced!' So it is in England at present; this is the acknowledged pinnacle of English thought and English science now. Just point in these days to the picture of some huge baboon, and—suddenly—before such Enlightenment—superstition is disarmed, priests confess their imposture, and the Church sinks—beneath the Hippocampus of a Gorilla!
And this is but one example of the present general truth, that Spiritualism seems dying out in England, and that more and more numerous voices daily cry hail to the new God, Matter—matter, too, independent of any law—(even law-loving Mr. Buckle left behind!)—matter pliant only to the moulding influence of contingent conditions! This, surely, may be legitimately named the beginning of the end!
In Germany, indeed, despite a general apathy as under stun of expectations shocked, matters are not yet quite so bad; and that they are not yet quite so bad may, perhaps, be attributed to some glimmering influence, or to some glimmering hope of its Philosophy yet. Germany is certainly not without Materialism at present; but still that extreme doctrine cannot be said to be so widely spread there as in either France or England. This we may abscribe to the 'd——d nonsense' perhorresced by Mr. Lockhart.
Be this as it may, we shall take leave to ascribe to this 'nonsense' another difference between England and Germany which, let it be ascribed to what it may, will as a fact be denied by none. This difference or this fact is, that this country is at this present moment far outstripped by Germany in regard to ​everything that holds of the intellect—with the sole exception, perhaps, of Poetry and Fiction. Even as regards these, Germany has it still in her power to say a strong word for herself; but, these apart, in what department of Literature are we not now surpassed by the Germans? From whom have we received that 'more penetrative spirit' of Criticism and Biography that obtains at present? Who sets us an example of completed research, of thorough accuracy, of absolutely impartial representation? Who reads the Classics for us, and corrects and makes them plain to us—plain in the minutest allusion to the concrete life from which they sprang? Who gathers information for us, and refers us to the sources of the same, on every subject in which it may occur to us to take an interest? But Literature is not the strong point here: what of Science?—and no one will dispute the value of that—is there any department of science in which at this moment the Germans are not far in advance of the rest of Europe? Consider Chemistry alone—or Physiology alone! In this last, there is Virchow, for example—in comparison with him, it is to be feared that we, but too many of us, the medical men of the rest of Europe, in our semi-information, semi-education, in our innocent Latin and Greek, in our barbarously learned nomenclature—in those crude, chaotic clouds of vapour and verbiage generally on which our conceit looks fondly as on wonders of intellect,—seem like charlatans!
Now, all this activity which gives to Germany the ​intellectual lead in Europe is subsequent to her Philosophies, and is, in all probability, just to be attributed to her Philosophies.—It is quite possible, at the same time, that the scientific men of Germany are no students of what is called the Philosophy of their country—nay, it appears to the present writer a matter of certainty that the Philosophy is not yet essentially understood anywhere: it by no means follows, on that account, however, that this Philosophy is not the motive spring to that science. If the essential secret of Philosophy has not been won, still much of the mass has been invaded from without, has been broken up externally, and has fallen down and resolved itself into the general current. Its language, its distinctions have passed into the vernacular, and work there with their own life. Hence it is that Germany seems to possess at present, not only a language of its own, but, as it were, a system of Thought-counters of its own for which no other language can find equivalents. Let anyone take up the Anzeige der Vorlesungen, the notice of lectures at any German University, and he will find much matter of speculation presented to him; for everything will seem there to him sui generis, and quite dissimilar to anything of which he may have experience in Great Britain or in France. Haym remarks, as regards this vast difference between the spirit of Germany and that of England, that to compare the books that issue from the press of the one country with those that issue from that ​of the other, one is tempted to suppose that the two nations move on wholly different courses.—Now, mere difference would be a matter of no moment; but what if the difference point to retrogression on one side, and progression on the other? It is very certain that we are behind the Germans now, and it is also certain that these latter continue to rush forward with a speed in every branch of science which threatens to leave us in the end completely in the lee.
Associating this difference of progress with that difference of the language used for the purposes of thought, it does seem not unreasonable to conclude that the former is but a corollary of the latter. In other words, it appears probably that the 'd——d nonsense' has been the means of introducing into the German mind such series of new and marvellously penetrant terms and distinctions as has carried it with ease into the solution of a variety of problems impossible to the English, despite the induction of Bacon, the good sense of Locke, and even Adam Smith's politico-economical revelations.
We have mentioned Virchow, who seems almost to have initiated a new Era in Physiological Science.—Now, if anyone will take the trouble to examine the language of Virchow, he will find it instinct with the peculiar terms of the new philosophy. The very cell which is Virchow's First, and beyond which there is in that sphere no other, is quite Hegelian, not only in that respect, but in its very construction. ​Quality, being complete, turns itself into Quantity, from which drinking, it grows. So is it with the cell: it is as the completed Quality, that stands in need now of Quantity alone. No germ of life but is an example of this; for to the invisible spore as Quality, matter is but as Quantity. But the cell itself, regarded as Quality alone, presents a striking resemblance to the completed Quality of Hegel. Seyn, Daseyn, and Fürsichseyn are, as is well known, the elements of the latter, and they seem to repeat themselves in the cell of Virchow. Seyn (Being) is the Universal—the one membrane; Daseyn (So-being) is the Particular—the distinguishable involution of the membrane; Fürsichseyn (Self-being or Self-ness) is the Singular—the apex, the Kernchen, the functioning and individual one. Something of fancy may have mingled here, but really the cell of Virchow seems but a reflexion from the triplicity and the Notion of Hegel. The analogy of the former is, at lowest, admirably illustrative of the latter. But it is not necessary to demand as much as this—the new distinctions introduced by the general language and spirit of thought suffice for the support of all that we would maintain here.
The denunciations of German Philosophy, then, emitted by 'advanced thinkers,' would seem powerless beside the superiority of German Science to that of the rest of Europe when collated with the terms and distinctions of the Philosophy which preceded it. These advanced thinkers, in fact, are the logical contradictory of German Philosophy, and, if they denounce it, it in turn—not denounces, but, lifting the drapery, simply names them.
​It is, perhaps, now justifiable to conclude on the whole, then, that, as regards the negative of the assertions that German Philosophy is obsolete or bad, a case has been led of sufficient validity to set aside the opposing plea of the affirmative. It is not be inferred, however, that the case is now closed, and all said that can be said in support of the Germans. We have spoken of the benefits which seem to have derived from the very terms; but these surely are not restricted to the mere words, and others, both greater in number and more important in kind, may be expected to flow from the thoughts which these words or terms only represent. It were desirable, then, to know these latter benefits, which, if they really exist, ought to prove infinitely more recommendatory of the study we advocate than any interest which has yet been adduced. It is this consideration which shall form the theme, on the whole, of what we think it right yet prefatorily to add.
The misfortune is, however, that, as regards the benefits in question, they—as yet—only 'may be expected:' it cannot be said that, from German Philosophy, so far as the thoughts are concerned, any adequate harvest has yet been reaped. Nevertheless, this harvest is still potentially there, and, perhaps, it is not quite impossible to find a word or two that shall prefigure something of its general nature and extent. It is evident, however, that, if it is true, be it as it may with the terms, that the thoughts of German Philosophy are not yet adequately turned to account, but remain as yet almost, as it were, beyond the reach whether of friend or foe, there must exist some unusual difficulty ​of intelligence in the case; and it may be worth while to look to this first. For the duty of a Preface—though necessarily for the most part in a merely cursory manner—is no less to relieve difficulty than to meet objections, explain connexions, and induce a hearing. The difficulty we have at present before us, however, must be supposed to concern Hegel only; what concerns Kant must be placed elsewhere. Nor, even as regards Hegel, is it to be considered possible to enumerate at present all the sources of his difficulty, and for this reason, that a certain knowledge of the matter involved must be presupposed before any adequate understanding can be expected in this reference. The great source of difficulty, for example, if our inmost conviction be correct, is that an exhaustive study of Kant has been universally neglected—a neglect, as Hegel himself—we may say—chuckles, 'not unrevenged,'—and the key-note of this same Hegel has thus remained inaccessible. Now this plainly concerns a point for which a preface can offer no sufficient breadth. We shall confine ourselves, therefore, to one or two sources of difficulty which may contain auxiliary matter in themselves, and may prove, on the whole, not quite insusceptible of intelligible discussion at once.
What is called the Jargon of German Philosophy, for example, and has been denounced as Barbarisch by a multitude of Germans themselves (Haym among them), though, under the name of terms and distinctions, it has just been defended, may not unprofitably receive another word. Now, we may say at once, that if on one side this Jargon is to be admitted, it is to be denied on the other. The truth is, that if on one side it looks ​like jargon and sounds like jargon, on the other it is not jargon, but a philosophical nomenclature and express system of terms. The scandal of philosophy hitherto has been its logomachies, its mere verbal disputes. Now, with terms that float loosely on the lips of the public, and vary daily, misunderstandings and disputes in consequence of a multiplicity of meanings were hardly to be avoided; but here it is that we have one of the most peculiar and admirable of the excellences of Hegel: his words are such and so that they must be understood as he understands them, and difference there can be none. In Hegel, thing and word arise together, and must be comprehended together. A true definition, as we know, is that which predicates both the proximum genus and the differentia: now the peculiarity of the Hegelian terms is just this—that at their very birth, then, they arise in a perfect definition. This is why we find no dictionary and so little explanation of terms in Hegel; for the book itself is that dictionary; and how each term comes, that is the explanation;—each comes forward, indeed, as it is wanted, and where it is wanted, and just so, in short, that it is no mere term, but the thought itself. It is useless to offer examples of this, for every paragraph of the Logic is an example in point. If the words, then, were an absolutely new coinage, this would be their justification, and the nickname of jargon would fall to the ground. But what we have here is no new coinage,—Hegel has carefully chosen for his terms those words which are the known and familiar names of the current Vorstellungen, of the current figurate ​conceptions which correspond to his Begriffe, to his pure notions, and are as the metaphors and externalisations of these Begriffe, of these pure notions. They have thus no mere arbitrary and artificial sense, but a living and natural one, and their attachment through the Vorstellung to the Begriff, through the figurate conception to the pure notion, converts an instinctive and blind, into a conscious and perceptive use,—to the infinite improvement both of thought and speech even in their commonest daily applications. The reproach of jargon, then, concerns one of the greatest merits of Hegel—a merit which distinguishes him above all other philosophers, and which, while it extends to us a means of the most assured movement, secures himself from those misunderstandings which have hitherto sapped philosophy, and rendered it universally suspect.—Jargon is an objection, then, which will indeed remove itself, so soon as the objector shall have given himself the trouble to understand it.
Another difficulty turns on this word Vorstellung which we have just used. A Vorstellung is a sort of senuous thought; it is a symbol, a metaphor, as it were, an externalisation of thought: or Vorstellung, as a whole, is what we commonly mean by Conception, Imagination, the Association of Ideas, &c. Hegel pointedly declares of this Association of Ideas, that it is not astrict to the three ordinary laws only which, since Hume, have been named Contiguity, Similitude, and Contrast, but that it floats on a prey to a thousandfold contingency. Now, it is this Association of Ideas that constitutes thought to most of us,—a blind, ​instinctive secution of a miscellaneous multitude of unverified individuals. These individuals are Vorstellungen, figurate conceptions—Ideas—crass, emblematic bodies of thoughts rather than thoughts themselves. Then, the process itself, as a whole, is also nameable Vorstellung in general. An example, perhaps, will illustrate this—an example which by anticipation may be used here, though it will be found elsewhere.—'God might have thrown into space a single germ-cell from which all that we see now might have developed itself.' We take these words from a periodical which presumes itself—and justly—to be in the van at present: the particular writer also to whom they are due, speaks with the tone of a man who knows—and justly—that he is at least not behind his fellows. What is involved in this writing, however, is not thought, but Vorstellung. In the quotation, indeed, there are mainly three Vorstellungen—God, Space, and a Germ-cell. Now, with these elements the writer of this particular sentence conceives himself to think a beginning. To take all back to God, Space, and a single Germ-cell, that is enough for him and his necessities of thought; that to him is to look at the thought beginning, sufficiently closely. But all these three elements are already complete and self-dependent.—God, one Vorstellung, finished, ready-made, complete by itself, takes up a Germ-cell, another Vorstellung, finished, ready-made, complete by itself, and drops it into Space, a third Vorstellung, finished, ready-made, complete by itself. This done—without transition, without explanation, the rest (by the way, another Vorstellung) follows. This, then, is not thought, but an idle mis-spending of the time ​with empty pictures which, while they infect the mind of the reader only with other pictures equally empty, tend to infect that of the writer also with wind—the wind of vanity.—'Yes; I looked into Spinoza some time ago, and it was a clear ether, but there was no God:' this, the remark of a distinguished man in conversation, is another excellent example of Vorstellung, figurate conception, imagination—in lieu of thought. If one wants to think God, one has no business to set the eye a-roving through an infinite clear ether in hopes of—seeing him at length! 'I have swept space with my telescope,' says Lalande, 'and found no God.' To the expectation of this illuminated Astronomer, then, God was an optical object; and as he could find with his glasses no such optical object—rather no optical object to correspond to his Vorstellung, which Vorstellung he had got he knew not where and never asked to know, which Vorstellung, in fact, it had never occurred to him in any way to question—God there was none! These, then, are examples of Vorstellungen, and not of thought; and we may say that the Vorstellung of the Materialist as to space constitutes a rebuke to the Vorstellung of the Spiritualist as to a clear ether in which it was a disappointment that no God was to be seen! God, as revealed to us by Scripture, and demonstrated by Philosophy, is a Spirit; and a Spirit is to be found and known by thought only, and neither by the sensuous eye of the body nor the imaginative eye of the mind.
Unfortunately, it can hardly be said that there is thought proper anywhere at present; and circumstances universally exist which have substituted figurate conception in its stead. In England, for example, the ​literature with which the century began was a sort of poetical re-action against the Aufklärung, and the element of that literature is Vorstellung, Imagination merely. Acquired stories, experience, thought,—these were not, but, instead of these, emotions enough, images enough, cries enough! Nature was beautiful, and Love was divine: this was enough—with Genius!—to produce the loftiest works, pictures, poems, even alchemy! An empty belly, when it is active, is adequate to the production of—gripes: and when an empty head is similarly active, what can you expect but gripes to correspond—convulsions namely, contortions of conceit, attitudinisings, eccentric gesticulations in a wind of our own raising? It were easy to name names and bring the criticism home; but it will be prudent at present to stop here. It is enough to say that the literature of England during the present century largely consists of those Genieschwünge, those fervours, those swings or springs or flights of genius, which were so suspicious and distasteful both to Kant and Hegel. Formal personal ability, which is only that, if it would produce, can only lash itself into efforts and energies that are idle—that have absolutely no filling whatever but one's own subjective vanity. Or formal personal ability which is only that, has nothing to develope from itself but reflexes of its own longing, self-inflicted convulsions; it has no thoughts—only Vorstellungen, figurate conceptions, emotional images,—mostly big, haughty enough ones, too. One result of all this, is what we may call the Photographic writing which alone obtains at present. For a long time back, writers have desired to write only to our eyes, not to our thoughts. ​History now is a picture-gallery, or as a puppet-show; men with particular legs and particular noses, street-processions, battle-scenes—these—images—all images!—mow and mop and grin on us from every canvass now. We are never asked to think—only to look—as into a peep-show, where, on the right, we see that, and on the left this! This, however, must culminate and pass, if, indeed, it has not already culminated in the extraordinary attempt we saw some time ago to enable us to be present—through mere reading—at the Niagara Falls. Now, this it is which constitutes an immense source of difficulty in the study of Hegel. Lord Macaulay remarks on 'the slovenly way in which most people are content to think;' and we would extend the remark to the slovenly way in which nowadays most people are content to read. Everything, indeed, has been done by our recent writers to relieve us even of that duty, and a book has become but a succession of optical presentments followed easily by the eye. Reading is thus, now, a sort of sensuous entertainment: it costs only a mechanical effort, and no greater than that of smoking or of chewing. The consequence of this reading is, that the habit of Vorstellungen, and without effort of our own, has become so inveterate, that not only are we unable to move in Begriffe, in pure notions, but we are shut out from all Begriffe by impervious clouds of ready-made Vorstellungen. Thus it is that writers like Kant and Hegel are sealed books to us, or books that have to be shut by the most of us—after five minutes—in very weariness of the flesh—in very oppression of the eyes.
We must bear in mind, on the other hand, that Vor​stellungen are always the beginning, and constitute the express conditions, of thought. We are not to remain by them, nevertheless, as what is ultimate. When Kant says that the Greeks were the first to think in abstract, and that there are nations, even nowadays, who still think in concreto, he has the same theme before him, though from another side. The concrete Vorstellung is the preliminary condition, but it must be purified into the abstract Begriff; else we never attain to mastery over ourselves, but float about a helpless prey to our own pictures. (We shall see a side again where our abstractions are to be re-dipped in the concrete, in order to be restored to truth; but the contradiction is only apparent.)
So much, indeed, is Vorstellung the condition of the Begriff, that we should attribute Hegel's success in the latter to his immense power in the former. No man had ever clearer, firmer Vorstellungen than he; but he had the mastery over them—he made them at will tenaciously remain before him, or equally tenaciously draw themselves the one after the other. Vorstellung, in fact, is for the most part the key to mental power; and if you know a man's Vorstellungen, you know himself. If, on one side, then, the habit of Vorstellungen, and previous formation of Vorstellungen without attempt to reduce them to Begriffe, constitute the greatest obstacle to the understanding of Hegel, power of Vorstellung is, on the other side, absolutely necessary to this understanding itself. So it is that, of all our later literary men, we are accustomed to think of Shelley and Keats as those the best adapted by nature for the understanding of Hegel. These young ​men had a real power of Vorstellung; and their Vorstellungen were not mere crass, external pictures, but fine images analytic and expressive of original thought.
These are Vorstellungen from Shelley (whose every line, we may say, teems with such); and if they are Vorstellungen, they are also thoughts. Keats is, perhaps, subtler and not less rich, though more sensual and less ethereally pure, than Shelley; Vorstellungen in him are such as these:—
How much these images are thoughts, how they are but analytic and expressive of thought, will escape no one.
Compare with these this:—
This, too, is a Vorstellung; but, in comparison with the ​preceding, it is external and thought-less, it is analytic of nothing, it is expressive of nothing; it is a bar to thought, and not a help. Yet there is so much in it of there mere picture, there is so much in it of that unexpectedness that makes one stare, that it has been cited a thousand times, and is familiar to everybody; while those of Keats and Shelley are probably known to those only who have been specially trained to judge. By as much, nevertheless, as the Vorstellungen of Keats and Shelley are superior to this Vorstellung of Wordsworth's, (Coleridge gives it to him,) inferences may be drawn as to an equal original superiority of quality on the part of both the former relatively to the latter. Neither will Coleridge stand this test any better than Wordsworth; and even the maturer products, however exquisite, of Tennyson (whose genius seems bodily to rise out of these his predecessors) display not Vorstellungen equally internal, plastic, creative, with those of Keats and Shelley.—Intensely vivid Vorstellung, this, we may say, almost constitutes Mr. Carlyle: in him, however, it is reproductive mainly; in him, too, it very frequently occurs in an element of feeling: and feeling is usually an element hot and one-sided, so that the Vorstellung glares, or is fierce, keen, Hebraic. The test applied here is not restricted to writers—it can be extended to men of action; and Alexander and Cæsar, Wellington, Napoleon, Cromwell, will readily respond to it. Cromwell here, however, is almost to be included as an exception; for he can hardly be said to have had any traffic with Vorstellung at all; or what of that faculty he shows is very confused, very incompetent, and almost to be named incapable. Cromwell, in fact, had direct ​being in his categories, and his expression accordingly was direct action. We have here, however, a seductive subject, and of endless reach; we will do well to return.
There is a distinction, then, between those who move in Vorstellungen wholly as such, and those who use them as living bodies with a soul of thought consciously within them; and the classes separated by this distinction will be differently placed as regards Hegel: while the former, in all probability, will never get near him, the latter, on the other hand, will possess the power to succeed; but success even to them, as habits now are, will demand immense effort, and will arrive when they have contrived to see, not with their Vorstellungen, but without them, or at least through them.
As regards the difficulty which we have just considered, the division between Hegel and his reader is ​so, that the former appears on the abstract, the latter on the concrete side; but we have now to refer to a difficulty where this position is reversed—where, Hegel being concrete, the reader cannot get at him, just for this, that he himself cannot help remaining obstinately abstract. The abstractions of the understanding, this is the word which is the cue to what we have in mind at present. It is impossible to enter here into any full exposition of how Hegel, in the end, regarded understanding, or of how his particular regards were in the first case introduced. It must suffice to say at once, that understanding was to Hegel as the god Horos, it was the principle and agent of the definite everywhere; but, as such, it necessarily separated and distinguished into isolated, self-dependent individuals. Now this which has been indicated is our (the readers') element; we live and move among wholly different, self-identical entities which—each of them as regards the other—are abstractly held. This, however, is not the element of Hegel; his element is the one concrete, where no entity is, so to speak, its own self, but quite as much its other—where if the one is to him, as it is to us (but without consciousness of the one), the all, the all are equally to him the one. Hegel's world is a concrete world, and he discovered the key of this concrete world in that he was enabled, through Kant, to perceive that the conditions of a concrete and of every concrete are two opposites: in other words, Hegel came to see that there exists no concrete which consists not of two antagonistic characters, where, at the same time, strangely, somehow, the one is not only through the other, but actually is this other. Now it is this ​condition of Things which the abstractions of the Understanding interfere to shut out from us; and it is our life in these abstractions of the understanding which is the chief source of our inability to enter and take up the concrete element of Hegel. The Logic of Hegel is an exemplification of this Cosmical fact, from the very beginning even to the very end; but it will sufficiently illustrate what we have said, perhaps, to take the single example of Quantity.
To us, as regards Quantity, Continuity is one thing, and Discretion quite another: we see a line unbroken in the one case, and but so many different dots in the other. Not so Hegel, however: to him Continuity is not only impossible without Discretion, and Discretion is not only impossible without Continuity, but Discretion is Continuity, and Continuity is Discretion. We see them, abstractly, apart—the one independent of, different from, the other: he sees them, concretely, together—the one dependent on, identical with, the other. To Hegel it is obvious that continuity and discretion, not either single, but both together, constitute Quantity—that, in short, these are the constitutive moments or elements of the single pure, abstract, yet in itself concrete, Notion, Quantity. If a continuum were not in itself discrete, it were no quantity; and nowhere in rerum natura can there be found any continuum that is not in itself discrete. Similarly, if a discretum were not in itself continuous, it were no quantity, and so on. In fact, to the single notion, quantity, these two sub-notions are always necessary: it is impossible to conceive, it is impossible that there should be, a How Much that were not as well continuous as discrete: it is ​the discretion that makes the continuity, and it is the continuity of discretion that makes quantity; or it is the continuity that makes the discretion, and it is the discretion of continuity that makes quantity. Quantity is a concrete of the two; they are indivisibly, inseparably together in it. Now every Notion—truly such—is just such disjunctive conjunction or conjunctive disjunct. Hence is it that Dialectic arises: false in us as we cannot bring the opposing characters together, because of the abstractions of the understanding; true in Hegel, because he has attained to the power—will ever any other man reach it equally?—of seeing these together, that is, in their truth, their concrete, actually existent truth.
For example, it is on the notion, Quantity as such, on the dissociation and antagonism of its two constituent moments, that all these supposed insoluble puzzles concerning the infinite divisibility of Time, Space, Matter, &c., depend; and all disputes in this connexion are kept up by simply neglecting to see both sides, or to bring both of the necessary moments together. My friend tells me, for instance, that matter is not infinitely divisible, that that table—to take an actual case—can be passed over, can both factually and mathematically be proved to be passed over, and hence is not infinite, but finite. I, again, point out that division takes nothing away from what it divides; that that table, consequently, (and every part of the table is similarly situated,) is divisible, and again divisible usque ad infinitum, or so long as there is a quantity left, and, as for that, that there must always be a quantity left—for, as said, division takes nothing away. Or I too can bring ​my mathematics.—In this way, he persisting on his side, I persisting on my side, we never come together. But we effect this, or we readily come together, when we perceive that both sides are necessary to the single One (Quantity), or that each, in fact, is necessary to the other. In short, quantity as continuous is infinitely divisible; as discrete, it consists in parts which are as ultimate and further indivisible. These are the two points of view, under either of which quantity can be set; and, more than that, these two points of view are, each of them, equally essential to the single thing, quantity, and are the moments which together constitute the single thing (correctly notion), quantity. 'The One,' then, (moment, that is,) as Hegel sums up here, and we refer to the full discussion in its proper place for complete details, 'is as one-sided as the other.'
This is not the place to point out the entire significance of the single fact that is suggested here, nor of how Hegel was led to it, and what he effected with it: this which we so suggest were a complete exposition of the one Secret and of the entire System of Hegel. Such exposition is the business of the general work which we here introduce; but it will be found brought in some sense to a point—though necessarily imperfectly, as the reader arrived there will readily understand—in the 'last word' at the end of the second volume. Our sole object here is to illustrate the difficulty we labour under relatively to Hegel from the abstractions of the understanding, and to render these themselves, to some preliminary extent, intelligible.
We may add, that the above is the true solution to those difficulties which have at different times been brought ​forward as paradoxes of Zeno, or as antinomies of Kant. The case, as summed by Hegel, (see under Quantity,) will be found to be particularly disastrous not only to the German pretensions, but even to the Grecian pretensions—not only to the Hegelian pretensions, but even to the Aristotelian pretensions, of such men as Sir William Hamilton, Coleridge, and De Quincey. The two last, indeed, with that 'voice across the ages,' between them, are even ludicrous.
It is to be feared that the view given here of the difficulties of Hegel will prove disappointing to many. As was natural to a public so prepared by the passions, the interjections, the gesticulations of those whom we regard as our recent men of genius, the general belief, in all probability was, and still is, that Kant and Hegel are difficult because they 'soar so high,' because they have so very much of the 'fervid' in them, and especially because they are 'mystic.' To be disabused of these big figurate conceptions on which we rise so haughtily may prove a pain. Indeed, as by a sudden dash on the solid ground, it may be a rather rude shaking out of us of these same bignesses, to be brought to understand that the difficulties of Hegel are simply technical, and that his Logic is to be read only by such means as will enable us to read the Principia of Newton—industry, tenacity, perseverance! In England, ever since these same fervid men of genius, a vast number of people, when they are going to write, think it necessary, first of all, to put their mouths askew, and blow the bellows of their breasts up: only so, they hope, on the strong bias of their breath, to 'soar'—to blow themselves and us, that is—'into the Empyrean!' But ​Hegel, alas! never puts his mouth askew, never thinks of biasing his breath, never lays himself out at all for the luxury of a soar. Here are no ardours, no enthusiasms, no aspirations; here is an air so cool, so clear, that all such tropical luxuriances wither in it. Hegel, no more than Kant, will attempt anything by a Genieschwung: all in both is thought, and thought that rises, slowly, laboriously, only by unremitting step after step. Apart from thought qua thought, Kant and Hegel are both very plain fellows: Kant, a very plain little old man, whose only obstacle to us is, after all, just his endless garrulity, his iterating, and again iterating, and always iterating Geschwätz; Hegel, a dry Scotsman who speaks at, rather than to us, and would seem to seek to enlighten by provoking us! It is not at all rhetoric, eloquence, poetry, that we are to expect in them, then; in fact, they are never in the air, but always on the ground, and this is their strength. Many people, doubtless, from what they hear of Hegel, his Idealism, his Absolute Idaelism, &c., will not be prepared for this. They have been told by men who pretended to know, that Hegel, like some common conjuror, would prove the chair they sat on not a chair, &c. &c. This is a very vulgar conception, and must be abandoned, together with that other that would consider Hegel as impracticable, unreal, visionary, a dreamer of dreams, 'a man with too many bees in his bonnet.' Hegel is just the reverse of this; he is wholly down on the solid floor of substantial fact, and will not allow himself to quit it—no, not for a moment's indulgence to his subjective vanity—a moment's recreation on a gust of genius. Hegel is a Suabian. There are Suabian licks as well as Lockerby licks. ​Hegel is as a son of the border, home-spun, rustic-real, blunt: as in part already said, there are always the sagacious ways about him of some plain, honest, deep-seen, old Scotsman. Here, from the Aesthetic, is a little illustrative specimen of him, which the extracts of Franz and Hillert extend to us:—
'Romances, in the modern sense of the word, follow those of Knight-errantry and those named Pastoral. In them we have Knight-errantry become again earnest and substantially real. The previous lawlessness and precariousness of outward existence has become transformed into the fixed and safe arrangements of civilised life; so that Police, Law, the Army, Government, now replace the chimerical duties which the Knight-errant set himself. Accordingly, the Knight-errantry of the modern Hero is correspondently changed. As an individual with his subjective ends of ambition, love, honour, or with his ideals of a world reformed, he stands in antagonism to this established order and prosa of actuality, which thwarts him on all hands. In this antagonism, his subjective desires and demands are worked up into tremendous intensity; for he finds before him a world spell-bound, a world alien to him, a world which he must fight, as it bears itself against him, and in its cold indifference yields not to his passions, but interposes, as an obstacle to them, the will of a father, of an aunt, societary arrangements, &c. It is especially our youths who are these new Knights-errant that have to fight their way through that actual career which realises itself in place of their ideals, and to whom it can only appear a misery that there are such things at all as Family, Conventional Rules, Laws, a State, Professions, &c., because ​these substantial ties of human existence place their barriers cruelly in the way of the Ideals and infinite Rights of the heart. The thing to be done now, then, is for the hero to strike a breach into this arrangement of things—to alter the world, to reform it, or, in its despite, to carve out for himself a heaven on earth, to seek out for himself the maiden that is as a maiden should be—to find her, to woo her, and win her and carry her off in triumph, maugre all wicked relations and every other obstruction. These stampings and strugglings, nevertheless, are in our modern world, nothing else than the apprenticeship, the schooling of the individual in actual existence, and receive thus their true meaning. For the end of such apprenticeship is, that the subject gets his oats sown and his horns rubbed off—accommodates himself, with all his wishes and opinions, to existent relations and their reasonableness; enters into the concatenation of the world, and earns for himself there his due position. One may have ever so recalcitrantly laid about him in the world, or been ever so much shoved and shouldered in it, in the end, for the most part, one finds one's maiden and some place or other for all that, marries, and becomes a slow-coach, a Philistine, just like the rest: the wife looks after the house; children thicken; the adored wife that was at first just the one, an angel, comes to look, on the whole, something like all the rest: one's business is attended with its toils and its troubles, wedlock with house-hold cross; and so there are the reflective Cat-dumps ​of all the rest over again.'—If the reader will but take the trouble to read this Scoticè, the illustration will be complete.
It is a mistake, then, to conceive Hegel as other than the most practical of men, with no object that is not itself of the most practical nature. To the right of private judgment he remains unhesitatingly true, and every interest that comes before him must, to be accepted, demonstrate its relevancy to empirical fact. With all this, however, his function here is that of a Philosopher; and his Philosophy, while the hardest to penetrate, is at once the deepest and the widest that has been yet offered to mortals. If the deepest and the widest, it is probably at this moment also the most required.
It has been said already that our own day is one—a pretty late one, it is to be hoped—in that general movement which has been named Aufklärung, Illumination, the principle of which we declared to be the Right of Private Judgment. Now Kant, who participated deeply in the spirit of this movement, and who with his whole heart accepted this principle, became, nevertheless, the closer of the one and the guide of the other—by this, that he saw the necessity of a positive complement to the peculiar negative industry to which, up to his day, both movement and principle had alone seemed adequate. The subtle suggestions of Hume seemed to have loosened every joint of the Existent, and there seemed no conclusion but universal Scepticism. Against this the conscientious purity of Kant revolted, and he set himself to seek out some other outlet. We may have seen in some other country the elaborate ​structure of a baby dressed. The board-like stiffness in which it was carried, the manifest incapacity of the little thing to move a finger, the enormous amount and extraordinary nature of the various appliances—swathes, folders, belts, cloths, bandages, &c., points and trusses innumerable—all this may have struck us with astonishment, and we may have figured ourselves addressing the parents, and, by dint of invincible reason, persuading them to give up the board, then the folder, then the swathe, then the bandage, &c.; but, in this negative action of taking off, we should have stopped somewhere; even when insisting on free air and free movement, we should have found it necessary to leave to the infant what should keep it warm. Nay, the question of clothes as a whole were thus once for all generalised, and debate, once initiated, would cease never till universal reason were satisfied—till the infant were at length fairly rationally dressed. As the function of the Aufklärung must stop somewhere, then, when it applies itself to the undressing of the wrong-dressed baby, so must the same function stop somewhere when it applies itself to the similar undressing of the similarly wrong-dressed (feudally-dressed) State. A naked State would just be as little likely to thrive as a naked infant: and how far—it is worth while considering—is a State removed from absolute nudity, when it is reduced to the self-will of the individual controlled only by the mechanical force of a Police?
No partisan of the Illumination has ever gone further than that; no partisan of the Illumination has ever said, Let the self-will of each be absolutely all: the control of a Police (Protection of Person and Property) has been ​a universal postulate, insisted on by even the extremest left of the movement. Yet there are those who say this—there are those who say, Remove your meddlesome protection of the police; by the aid of free competition we can parson and doctor ourselves, and by the aid of free competition, therefore, we can also police ourselves: remove, then, here also all your vicious system of checks, as all your no less vicious system of bounties and benefits; let humanity be absolutely free—let there be nothing left but self-will, individual self-will pur et simple! There are those who say this: they are our Criminals! Like the cruel mother whose interest is not in its growth, but in its decease, our criminals would have the naked baby. But if self-will is to be proclaimed the principle, if self-will is the principle, our criminals are more consistent than our 'advanced thinkers,' who, while they assert this principle, and believe this principle, and think they observe this principle, open the door to the Police, and find themselves unable to shut it again, till it is driven to the wall before the whole of reason, before Reason herself who enters with the announcement that self-will is not the principle, and the direct reverse of the principle.
Now, Kant saw a great deal of this—Kant saw that the naked baby would not do; that, if it were even necessary to strip off every rag of the old, still a new would have to be procured, or life would be impossible. So it was that, though unconsciously to himself, he was led to seek his Principles. These, Kant came to see, were the one want; and surely, if they were the one want in his day, they are no less the want now. Self-will, individual commodity, this has been made the principle, and ​accordingly we have turned to it, that we might enjoy ourselves alone, that we might live to ourselves alone, that the I might be wholly the I unmixed and unobstructed; and, for result, the I in each of us is dying of inanition—even though we make (it is even because we make) the seclusion to self complete—even though we drive off from us our very children, and leave them to corrupt at Boarding-schools into the one common model that is stock there. We all live now, in fact, divorced from Substance, forlorn each of us, isolated to himself—an absolutely abstract unit in a universal, unsympathising, unparticipant Atomism. Hence the universal rush at present, as of maddened animals, to material possession; and, this obtained, to material ostentation, with the hope of at least buying sympathy and bribing respect.—Sympathy! Oh no! it is the hate of envy. Respect! say rather the sneer of malice that disparages and makes light. Till even in the midst of material possession and material ostentation, the heart within us has sunk into weary, weary, hopeless, hopeless ashes. And of this the Aufklärung is the cause. The Aufklärung has left us nothing but our animality, nothing but our relationship to the monkey! It has emptied us of all essential humanity—of Philosophy, Morality, Religion. So it is that we are divorced from Substance. But the animality that is left in the midst of such immense material appliance becomes disease; while the Spirit that has been emptied feels, knows that it has been only robbed, and, by very necessity of nature, is a craving, craving, ever-restless void.
These days, therefore, are no improvement on the days of Kant; and what to him appeared necessary then, ​is still more necessary now. Nay, as we see, the Illumination itself does not leave self-will absolutely independent, absolutely free. Even the Illumination demands for self-will clothing and control. At lowest it demands Police; for the most part, it adds to Police a School and a Post-office; and it sometimes thinks, though reluctantly, hesitatingly, that there is necessary also a Church. It sees not that it has thus opened the whole question, and cannot any longer, by its will, close it. When Enlightenment admits at all the necessity of control, the what and how far of this control can be argued out from this necessity—and self-will is abandoned. For it is Reason that finds the necessity, it is Reason that prescribes the control; and Reason is not an affair of one or two Civic Regulations, but the absolute round of its own perfect and entire System. In one word, the principle must not be Subjective Will, but Objective Will; not your will or my will or his will, and yet your will and my will and his will—Universal Will—Reason! Individual will is self-will or caprice; and that is precisely the one Evil, or the evil One—the Bad. And is it to be thought that Police alone will ever suffice for the correction of the single will into the universal will—for the extirpation of the Bad?
To this there are wanting—Principles. And with this want Kant began; nor had he any other object throughout his long life than the discovery of Principles—Principles for the whole substance of man—Principles Theoretical, Practical, and Aesthetic: and this Rubric, in that it is absolutely comprehensive, will include plainly Politics, Religion, &c., in their respective places. This is the sole object of the three great works of Kant, ​which correspond to the three divisions just named. This, too, is the sole object of Hegel; for Hegel is but the continuator, and, perhaps, in a sort the completer, of the whole business inaugurated by Kant.
The central principle of Kant was Freiheit, Freewill; and when this word was articulated by the lips of Kant, the Illumination was virtually at an end. The single sound Freiheit was the death-sentence of the Aufklärung. The principle of the Aufklärung, the Right of Private Judgment, is a perfectly true one. But it is not true as used by the Aufklärung, or it is used only one-sidedly by the Aufklärung. Of the two words, Private Judgment, the Aufklärung asks only that the Private man, the individual, be satisfied. Its principle is Subjectivity, pure and simple. But its own words imply more than subjectivity—its own words imply objectivity as well; for the accent on Private ought not to have blinded it to the fact that there is question of Judgment as well. Now, I as a subject, you as a subject, he as a subject, there is so no guarantee of agreement: I may say, A, you B, and he C. But all this is changed the instant we have said Judgment. Judgment is not subjectively mine, or subjectively yours, or subjectively his: it is objectively mine, yours, his, &c.; it is a common possession; it is a thing in which we all meet and agree. At all events, it is not subjective, and so incapable of comparison,—but objective, capable of comparison, and consequently such that in its regard, in the end, we shall all agree. Now, Private Judgment with the accent on Private is self-will; but with the accent on Judg​ment, it is Freiheit, Freedom Proper, Free-will, Objective Will, Universal Will. This is the Beginning: this is the first stone of the new world which is to be the sole work of at least several succeeding generations.—Formally subjective, I am empty; exercising my will alone, I am mere formalism, I am only formally a man; and what is formal merely is a pain and an obstacle to all the other units of the concrete—it is a pain and an obstacle to itself—it is a false abstraction in the concrete, and must, one way or other, be expunged. The subject, then, must not remain Formal—he must obtain Filling, the Filling of the Object. This subject is not my true Me; my true Me is the Object—Reason—the Universal Thought, Will, Purpose of Man as Man. So it is that Private Judgment is not enough: what is enough is Judgment. My right is only to share it, only to be there, present to it, with my conviction, my subjective conviction. This is the only Right of the Subject. In exercising the Right of Private Judgment, then, there is more required than what attaches to the word Private; there must be some guarantee of the Judgment as well. The Rights of the Object are above the Rights of the Subject; or, to say it better, the Rights of the object are—the true Rights of the Subject. That the Subject should not be empty, then—that he should be filled up and out to his true size, shape, strength, by having absorbed the Object,—this is a necessity; only so can the Private Judgment be Judgment, and as such valid.—If, then, the Aufklärung said, Self-will, Kant and Hegel put an end to this by reversing phrase, and by declaring, Self-will shall work out, shall realise Self-will ​by following the Universal Will. The two positions are diametrically opposed: the Aufklarung, with whatever belongs to it, is virtually superseded. The Aufklärung is not superseded, however, in the sense of being destroyed; it is superseded only in that, as it were, it has been absorbed, used as food, and assimilated into a higher form. The Right of Private Judgment, the Rights of Intelligence—these, the interests of the Aufklärung, are not by any means lost, or pushed out of the way: they are only carried forward into their truth. Nay, Liberté—Egalité—Fraternité themselves are not yet lost; they, too, will be carried forward into their truth: to that, however, they must be saved from certain merely empty, formal subjectives, blind remnants of the Aufklärung, furious sometimes from mistaken conscientiousness; furious, it is to be feared, sometimes also from personal self-seeking.
But what is the Object?—what is Reason?—what is objective Judgment? So we may put the questions which the Aufklärung itself might put with sneers and jeers. Lord Macaulay, a true child of the Aufklärung, has already jeeringly asked, 'Who are wisest and best, and whose opinion is to decide that?'—Perhaps an answer is not so hopeless as it appeared to this distinguished Aufgeklärter. Let us see—
It was not without meaning that we spoke of Reason as entering with the announcement that Self-will was not the principle, and we seek firstly to draw attention to this, that Reason does not enter thus only for the first time now; there is at least another occasion in the world's history when she so entered. The age into which Socrates was born was one of Aufklärung, even ​as that of Kant and Hegel. Man had awoke then to the light of thought, and had turned to see by it the place he lived in, all the things that had fallen to his lot,—his whole inheritance of Tradition. Few things that are old can stand the test of day, and the sophists had it speedily all their own way in Greece. There seemed nothing fit any longer to be believed in, all was unfixed; truth there seemed none but the subjective experience of the moment; and the only wisdom, therefore, was to see that that experience should be one of enjoyment. Thus in Greece, too, man was emptied of his Substance and reduced to his senses, his animality, his relationship to the monkey—and, for that part, to the rat. Now it was, then, that Socrates appeared and demanded Principles, Objective Standards, that should be absolutely independent of the good-will and pleasure of any particular subject. Of this quest of Socrates, the industries of Plato and Aristotle were but Systematisations. It was to Thought as Thought that Socrates was led as likely to contain the Principles he wanted, and on that side which is now named Generalisation. Socrates, in fact, seems to have been the first man who expressly and consciously generalised, and for him, therefore, we must vindicate the title of the True Father of Practical Induction. A, he said, is valour, and B is valour, and C is valour; but what is valour universally? So the inquiry went forward also as regards other virtues, for the ground that Socrates occupied was mainly moral. Plato absolutely generalised the Socratic act, and sought the universal of everything, even that of a Table, till all such became hypostasised, presences to him, and the only true presences, the Ideas. Aristotle ​substituted for this Hypostasis of the Ideas the theory of the abstract universal, and a collection of abstract generalised Sciences—Logic, and then Ethics, &c. Thus in Greece, too, Reason, in the person of Socrates, entered with the announcement that the principle is not self-will, but a universal.
But were such principles actually found in Greece? And, if so, why did Greece perish, and why have we been allowed to undergo another Aufklärung? It will be but a small matter that Socrates saw the want, if he did not supply it: and that he did not supply it, both the fate of Greece and we ourselves are here to prove! It must be admitted at once that Socrates and his followers cannot have truly succeeded, for in that case surely the course of history would have been far otherwise. The first corollary for us to draw, however, is—Look at the warning! Aufklärung, Illumination, Enlightenment, destroyed Greece; it lowered man from Spirit to Animal; and the Greek became, as now, the serf of every conqueror. In Rome we have the same warning, but—material appliances being there so infinitely greater, and the height from which the descent was made being there, perhaps, so much higher—in colours infinitely more glaring, forms infinitely more hideous, and with a breadth and depth of wallowing misery and sin that would revolt the most abandoned. It is characteristic, too, that for Socrates, Rome had only Cicero—(the vain, subjective, logosophic Cicero, who, however, as pre-eminently a master of words, will always be pre-eminent with scholarly men). In presence of such warnings, then, the necessity of a success in the quest of objective standards greater on our part ​than that on the part of Socrates, becomes of even terrible import. Nevertheless, again, the unsuccessful of the latter and his followers was by no means absolute. Such principles as are in question were set up by all of them. By way of single example, take the position, that it is better to suffer than to do injustice, where, as it were, the subject gains himself by yielding himself. We shall afterwards see, too, that Aristotle had at least reached terms of the concrete notion about as good as any that can be given yet. Nevertheless, it is to be said that, on the whole, the inquest in their hands proved unsuccessful: their principles remained a loose, miscellaneous, uncertiorated many; the concrete notion was probably blindly touched only; unity and system were never attained to; and, in the main, the ground occupied at last was but that of formal generalisation and the abstract universal.
But now at last have we succeeded better?—do we know Reason?—have we the Object? Or, in the phrase of Macaulay, can we tell who are wisest and best, and whose opinion is to decide that?—In the first place, we may say that the question of wisest and best is pertinent only to the position of Hero-worship; a position not occupied by us—a position which sets up only the untenable principle of subjectivity as subjectivity. A man is not wisest and best by chance only, or caprice of nature; we were but badly off, had we always only to wait for our guidance so—we were but badly off, were it left to each of us, as it were, to taste our wisest and best by subjective feeling. A man is wisest and best by that which is in him, his Inhalt, his Filling—his absorbed, assimilated, and incorporated ​matter: it is the Filling, then, which is the main point; and in view of that Filling, abstraction can be made altogether from the great man it fills. Lord Macaulay's questions, then, (and those of Hero-worship itself,) are seen, abstraction being made from the form, to be identical with our own—do we know Reason, have we the Object?
Now, if it were question of an Algebra, a Geometry, an Astronomy, a Chemistry, &c., I suppose it would never occur to anyone to ask about the wisest and best, &c.; I suppose, in these cases, it is a matter of little moment whether we say Euler, Bourdon, or Bonnycastle; Euclid, Legendre, or Hutton; Berzelius, Liebig, or Reid, &c.: I suppose the main thing is to have the object (otherwise called the subject) itself, and that then there would be no interest in any wisest and best, or in opinion at all. In the matter of Will, Reason, Judgment, then, did we but know the Object, the Universal, and could we but assign it, in the same way as we know and assign the Object, the Universal, in the case of Algebra, Chemistry, &c., the problem, we presume, would, by universal acknowledgment, be pretty well solved. But just this is what Hegel asserts of the Kantian Philosophy. We hear much in these days of Metaphysic, Philosophy having crumbled down definitively into ruins—this, by an unworthy misapplication and perversion, on the authority of Kant himself—this, at the very moment that Hegel claims for himself the completion of the Kantian Philosophy into a Science, an exact Science, and its establishment for ever—this, from men more ignorant of what they speak about than any Mandarin in China!—Nay, if we are to be​lieve Hegel—and no man alive is at this moment competent to gainsay him—the exploit is infinitely greater still, the science accomplished infinitely more perfect and complete than any Algebra, Astronomy, Chemistry, or other science we possess. This perfection and completion we may illustrate thus: Geometry is an exact science; it rests on demonstration, it is thoroughly objective, it is utterly independent of any subjective authority whatever. But Geometry is just a side-by-side of particulars; it is just a crate of miscellaneous goods; it properly begins not, ends not; it is no whole, and no whole product of a single principle. Now, let us conceive Geometry perfected into this—a perfectly-rounded whole of organically-articulated elements which out of a single principle arise and into a single principle retract,—let us conceive this, and we have before us an image of the Hegelian System. This science, too, is to be conceived as the Science of Science—the Scientia of Scientia; it is to be conceived to contain the ultimate principles of al things and of all thoughts—to be, in a word, the essential diamond of the universe. These pretensions have, of course, yet to be verified, and not by one man, or two or three men, but by a sufficient jury of men—extended, too, probably, over several generations. In this jury the present writer does not yet make one: his task as yet has been—for himself entrance, for the reader exposition: the power of judgment and the privilege of vote must come, if indeed ever, later. Nevertheless, the Concrete Notion, which is the secret of Hegel, will be found a principle of such rare virtue that it recommends itself almost irresistibly. The unity and ​systematic wholeness, too, attract powerfully, and not less the inexpugnable position which seems, at length, extended to all the higher interests of man. And at last we can say this,—should the path be but a vista of the imagination and conduct us nowhere, it yields at every step the choicest aliment of humanity—such aliment as nourishes us strongly into our true stature.
To such claims of this new science of Philosophy—or, in better speech, of this new science of Logic—there lies a very close objection in Germany itself. 'In all practical matters,' the German is said to be 'slow,' and, indeed, 'quite behind;' and such quality and such position are held to comport but ill with the alleged pre-eminence of his philosophy.—In the first place, we may say in reply, that the fact is capable of dispute: the rising of 1848 and other democratic movements may be pointed to; and the German, with reference at least to his philosophy, may be declared much too fast, and much too rash. In the next place, what is meant by 'practical matters,' is Politics, and Politics such as the Aufklärung accepts; all those measures, namely, which, be they in themselves bad, or be they in themselves good, lead nowhere at present unless to that American Constitution of no Institution but an incompetent Police. His philosophy teaches the German to view these things in another light than that of the unverified Aufklärung: that is very certain. But the truth of the whole matter is just this—that German Politics cannot as yet be attributed to German Philsophy, for that philosophy cannot be said to be yet known in Germany. Even what political influence has overflowed from the writings of ​Hegel or of Kant, or from the general terms and distinctions of philosophy, has not fallen on the masses, but on isolated students, who are by no means induced thereby to put shoulder to shoulder with the remnants of the Aufklärung. Any argument against German Philosophy from Politics, as Politics appear to an ordinary English eye, is to be held, therefore, as inapposite. Yet, probably, it is true that all true Germans are slow; that all true Germans, however small the number, wait—wait till we understand, till they understand how to advance: for Reform, the Reform of Illumination, is but as a detected trick of the trade which cannot any longer raise a hope. These Germans, then, wait for principles of position, and leave to others the completion of that single principle of negation—'throw off every tie of feudalism'—which the Aufklärung still so cheerfully executes, in the simple faith that it is realising something positive—new Sciences, new Political Systems, and what not! Such principles these Germans hope, too, to find in their philosophy—were it but once open to them. Nor even were it found incomplete when open, would it then wholly disappoint, did it but still appear—as all the rest only are, Algebra, Astronomy, Chemistry, &c.—a science begun.
We have now said nearly all that we desired to say by way of Preface, with the view of meeting objections, explaining connexions, removing difficulties, and demonstrating something of the value of the proffered wares, as well as of our present need of them. We shall only add now a word of conclusion by naming a little nearer some of the Principles concerned.
​To Kant the three interests that were vital, and which lay at the centre of every thought and movement in him, were the Existence of God, the Freedom of the Will, and the Immortality of the Soul. These three positions Kant conceived himself to have demonstrated, and in the only manner at once consistent with themselves and with the thinking faculties of man. It is precisely in these themes that Hegel follows Kant; these are his objects also: yet it is precisely here—especially in reference to God and Immortality—that the teaching of Hegel has been held, and by what is called his own school, to be inexplicit. Not the less, however, is it to be said that every step of his system is towards the Immortality of the Soul, that every step is towards the Freedom of the Will, that every step is towards God. Hegel, in truth, would restore to us all that Understanding, all that Reflexion, all that the Illumination has deprived us of, and that, too, in a higher and richer form, and not less in the light and element of the Illumination itself, and in perfect harmony with its principle and truth. Hegel, in fact, completes the compromise of Understanding by the complement of Reason. Philosophy is to him not Philosophy unless, or rather Philosophy is to him only Philosophy when, it stands up for the Substance of Humanity, for all those great religious interest to which alone we virtually live. Accordingly, it is not only the interest of what is called Natural Religion that he seeks to restore, but those of Christianity itself: there, too, he would complete the compromise of Understanding by the complement of Reason. Surely, then, these are great matters!
​What we shall take leave to name the Historic Pabulum, this alone is the appointed food of every successive generation, this alone is the condition of the growth of Spirit; and this food neglected, we have a generation that but vacillates—vacillates, it may be, even into temporary retrogression. This last is the unfortunate position now. The Historic Pabulum passing from the vessel of Hume, was received into that of Kant, and thence finally into that of Hegel; but from the vessels of the two latter the generations have not yet eaten.—This is the whole.—Europe—Germany as Germany is itself no exception—has continued to nourish itself from the vessel of Hume, long after the Historic Pabulum had abandoned it for another and others. Hence all that we see. Hume is our Politics, Hume is our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our Religion,—it wants little but that Hume were even our Taste.
A broad subject is here indicated, and we cannot be expected at present to point out the retrogression or the beside-the-point of all philosophy else, as in the case of Reid, Stewart, &c. Neither can we be expected to dwell on the partial re-actions against the Aufklärung which we have witnessed in this country; as, firstly, the Prudential Re-action that was conditioned, in some cases, by Public considerations, and in others by only Private ones; secondly, the Re-action of Poetry and Nature, as in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, &c.; and, thirdly, the Germanico-Literary Re-action, as in Carlyle and Emerson. The great point here is to see that all these re-actions have been partial and, so far as Thought qua Thought is concerned, incomplete, resting for their advancement, for the most part, on subjective conceit ​(calling itself to itself genius, it may be), that has sought aliment, inspiration, or what was to it prophecy, in contingent crumbs. Hence it is that what we have now, is a retrograde re-action—a revulsion—and of the shallowest order, back to the Aufklärung again; a re-action the members of which call themselves 'advanced thinkers,' although at bottom they are but friends of the monkey, and would drain us to our Senses. In this Revulsion—in this perverted or inverted re-action, we must even reckon Essayists and Reviewers, Strauss, Renan, Colenso, Feuerbach, Buckle, and others. It is this retrogressive re-action, this revulsion to the Aufklärung, that demonstrates the insufficiency of the previous progressive re-actions against the Aufklärung, Prudential, Poetical, and Germanico-Literary. in short, the only true means of progress have not been brought into service. The Historic Pabulum, however greedily it has been devoured out of Hume, has been left untouched in the vessel of Hegel, who alone of all mankind has succeeded in eating it all up out of the vessel of Kant. This is the true nature of the case, and these generations, therefore, have no duty but to turn from their blunder—a blunder, it is to be admitted, at the same time, not quite voluntary, but necessitated by certain difficulties—and apply themselves to the in-haustion of the only food on which, it will be found, Humanity will thrive. It is towards this object that these very imperfect introductory works are now offered to the Public; and we venture to hope that the importance of the object will, in some measure, excuse the imperfection of the means.
* ↑ Vide Haym: Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 23.
* ↑ Professor Ferrier, whose recent death we are now mourning.
* ↑ The theory entertained in explanation of Mr. Buckle here, has not in regard his particular age when he wrote this work, but a youthful ideal, whose burthen was Aufklärung, which had been kindled in him probably from early communication with some—to him—hero or heroes of Aufklärung, and which was filled up by what quotations he was able to make from a miscellaneous and more reading in the direction of the Aufklärung. In a certain way, there is not much said here as against Mr. Buckle: while his talent of love of truth are both acknowledged, his matter is identified with the Aufklärung, and this last consideration is not likely to be taken ill by the friends of the Aufklärung.
* ↑ Our world-renowned 'Times' may have, once on a time, surprised others besides ourselves, by calling on Mr. Buckle (conjoined with Mr. Mill, it is true,) to think for us! As if Mr. Buckle could think for us anything that was not already—the Illumination to wit—a century old!
* ↑ The pretensions of Coleridge have been already made notorious. Those of others, though less simple, are equally demonstrable.
* ↑ Of course, the question is only of present literature, and alone of literature, not of men. As for these last, we certainly have still some great men whom we place second to no German.
* ↑ 'Let us compare, to go no further, the scientific works of the English with those of our own country, and we shall very soon perceive that the type of English thought is essentially different from that of the German; that the scientific faculty of the countrymen of Bacon and Locke moves in quite other paths, and makes quite other stadia; that its combinations proceed by quite other notions, both principal and accessory, than is the case, in the same respect, with the countrymen of Kant and Hegel.'—Haym: Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 309.
* ↑ This brief statement of Cromwell may be slight; but it is worth supporting, by suggesting that it may have more value to the reader when he shall have become familiar with the full force of the word Categories. Of these Hegel says, in a passage quoted by Rosenkranz from the Naturphilosophie (Hegel's Werke, vii. 18), 'That by which Naturphilosophie distinguishes itself from Physics is more particularly the species of Metaphysic which each employs; for metaphysic is nothing else than the complement of the universal thought-forms [Categories]; the diamond net, as it were, into which we bring and by which only we render intelligible any and every concrete matter whatever. No formed consciousness but has its metaphysic, the instinctive thought, the absolute might in us, of which we become master only when we make it itself the object of our knowledge. Philosophy, in general, has, as philosophy, other categories than ordinary consciousness; all culture reduces itself to difference of categories. All revolutions, in the sciences, no less than in general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehending of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, deeper, more inner and intimate relation with himself.
* ↑ Catdumps (Reflective Seediness) translates Katzenjammer. The metaphor involved in the word probably refers to the penitent morning-misery of a cat that has been out all night.