# The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 7

LECTURE VII. HEGEL.
Concerning Hegel, who forms our special topic in this lecture, it is extraordinarily difficult to get or to give any general impressions that will not be seriously misleading. I undertake my task, therefore, with a very strong impression of its importance and its difficulty. The outcome of what we have thus far discussed in these lectures is briefly this: Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe, and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason itself, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers appeared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny, dogmatic and uncertain. Thought endeavored, nevertheless, to re-win its great assurances in a new form. Truth, said Idealism, is essentially an affair of the inner life. The world of truth is the world as it would appear to a complete and fully self-conscious self. The outer universe is only a show world. Its reality is only practical. It is essentially a mirage of the inner life. The real universe is the universe of the spirit. Our deepest relation is not to the natural order at all, but to the one true self, namely, God’s own life.
Such, as we found, was the position reached alike by Fichte and the romanticists. But in their further thought they diverged. For Fichte, the centre of the universe, as ​his idealism conceives it, is the moral law. The infinite self longs for rational and active self-possession. Hence it differentiates itself into numerous forms, as the vine grows out into its own branches. These branchings of the one great vine of the spirit form our finite and essentially incomplete selves.
But for the romanticists, as we found, the centre of the world is not so much the moral law as the interest which every spirit has in a certain divine wealth of emotion and of experience. The world is the world of ideas; things exist because spirits experience them; and spirits experience because, as parts of the divinely complete life, it is their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in their self-realization as possible.
I.
Before we now pass directly to Hegel it is necessary to say yet a word of the more technical speculations of Schelling, of whom, in his character as romanticist, we heard something in the last lecture. Schelling’s development, as you already know, was very rapid; his writings were early voluminous. He was a man of mark and a professor at Jena by the time he had reached his twenty-third year. His systematic views during his youthful period seemed to his readers to alter with a dangerously magical ease and swiftness of transformation. He himself meanwhile denied, during the years up to 1809, that there was so far any significant change from the essential doctrines of his early works. He had added, he said, to what he at first taught. More truth had come to him; not a contradiction of former insight. But readers found it suspicious that each new book of Schelling’s seemed to supersede all his previous efforts. In 1797, he published his “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature.” During the next three years appeared his “System of Transcendental Idealism” and his “First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature.” These two latter works were ​to be a first statement, so their author declared, of the two great and seemingly opposed aspects of philosophy. The outer world was to be shown as after all the manifestation of spirit; the inner world of the self was to be exhibited as inevitably expressing itself in relation to an outer, a natural order. The fundamental thought of the whole doctrine was in substance this: Fichte had declared that it is the self-assertion of the absolute self, the free choice of the true Ego, that is the source of all truth. When I as knower recognize a truth, that is because I as doer have first made this truth. This view Schelling also accepts. But now, as one sees, a conscious self is at once the doer of its present act, and the contemplator of the results of its past acts. As I look out on the world of nature, I see crystallized before me the expression of what my true and absolute self has already been doing. The same activity that this present consciousness exemplifies for me has been there from eternity, and nature is the concrete embodiment to the onlooker of the results of his own eternal deeds. Nature then is not merely, as Fichte had said, my duty made manifest to my senses; it is also my timelessly past spiritual life, — not of course my finite or individual and private past life, but the life of my deeper self, of the one and absolute divine spirit. This autobiography of spirit, manifest to our eyes, is then the natural order. On the other hand, the inner life as such is capable of a philosophical treatment; for this is, as it were, not the record of the spirit's past, but the fullness of the spirit’s conscious actuality We have thus a twofold philosophy to be wrought out, and Schelling in 1799 and 1800 publishes his two sketches as though in topic, if not in execution, they completely covered the ground. But In 1801 appeared a new treatise, called by Schelling simply “Exposition of my System of Philosophy,” and here the doctrine seems to take a new form, which readers could only with great difficulty reconcile with what had ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/217 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/218 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/219 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/220 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/221 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/222 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/223 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/224 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/225 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/226 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/227 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/228 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/229 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/230 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/231 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/232 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/233 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/234 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/235 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/236 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/237 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/238 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/239 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/240 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/241 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/242 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/243 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/244 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/245 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/246 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/247 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/248 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/249 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/250 ​but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic; so that you in vain endeavor to get satisfaction from Hegel’s treatment of outer nature, of science, of mathematics, or of any coldly theoretical topic. About all these things he is immensely suggestive, but never final. His system, as system, has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains forever.