Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.
“The key,” says Carus, “for the ascertainment of the nature of the conscious psychical life lies in the region of the unconscious[71].” The view which these words take is at least as old as the days of Leibniz. It means that the mental world does not abruptly emerge a full-grown intelligence, but has a genesis, and follows a law of development: that its life may be described as the differentiation (with integration) of a simple or indifferentiated mass. The terms conscious and unconscious, indeed, with their lax popular uses, leave the door wide open for misconception. But they may serve to mark that the mind is to be understood only in a certain relation (partly of antithesis) to nature, and the soul only in reference to the body. The so-called “superior faculties”—specially characteristic of humanity—are founded upon, and do not abruptly supersede, the lower powers which are supposed to be specially obvious in the animals[72]. The individual and specific phenomena of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed to study, rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of sensibility, which in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into something irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life.
And yet the moment we attempt to leave the daylight of consciousness for the darker sides of sub-conscious life, the risks of misinterpretation multiply. The problem is to some extent the same as confronts the student of the ideas and principles of primitive races. There, the temptation of seeing things through the “spectacles of civilisation” is almost irresistible. So in psychology we are apt to import into the life of sensation and feeling the distinctions and relations of subsequent intellection. Nor is the difficulty lessened by Hegel's method which deals with soul, sentiency, and consciousness as grades or general characteristics in a developmental advance. He borrows his illustrations from many quarters, from morbid and anomalous states of consciousness,—less from the cases of savages, children and animals. These illustrations may be called a loose induction. But it requires a much more powerful instrument than mere induction to build up a scientific system; a framework of general principle or theory is the only basis on which to build theory by the allegation of facts, however numerous. Yet in philosophic science, which is systematised knowledge, all facts strictly so described will find their place and be estimated at their proper value.
(i.) Primitive Sensibility.
Psychology (with Hegel) takes up the work of science from biology. The mind comes before it as the supreme product of the natural world, the finest flower of organic life, the “truth” of the physical process. As such it is called by the time-honoured name of Soul. If we further go on to say that the soul is the principle of life, [pg cxlviii] we must not understand this vital principle to be something over and above the life of which it is the principle. Such a locally-separable principle is an addition which is due to the analogy of mechanical movement, where a detached agent sets in motion and directs the machinery. But in the organism the principle is not thus detachable as a thing or agent. By calling Soul the principle of life we rather mean that in the vital organism, so far as it lives, all the real variety, separation, and discontinuity of parts must be reduced to unity and identity, or as Hegel would say, to ideality. To live is thus to keep all differences fluid and permeable in the fire of the life-process. Or to use a familiar term of logic, the Soul is the concept or intelligible unity of the organic body. But to call it a concept might suggest that it is only the conception through which we represent to ourselves the variety in unity of the organism. The soul, however, is more than a mere concept: and life is more than a mere mode of description for a group of movements forming an objective unity. It is a unity, subjective and objective. The organism is one life, controlling difference: and it is also one by our effort to comprehend it. The Soul therefore is in Hegelian language described as the Idea rather than the concept of the organic body. Life is the generic title for this subject-object: but the life may be merely physical, or it may be intellectual and practical, or it may be absolute, i.e. will and know all that it is, and be all that it knows and wills.
Up to this point the world is what is called an external, which is here taken to mean (not a world external to the individual, but) a self-externalised world. That is to say, it is the observer who has hitherto by his interpretation of his perceptions supplied the “Spirit in Nature.” In itself the external world has no inside, [pg cxlix] no centre: it is we who read into it the conception of a life-history. We are led to believe that a principle of unity is always at work throughout the physical world—even in the mathematical laws of natural operation. It is only intelligible and credible to us as a system, a continuous and regular development. But that system is only a hypothetical idea, though it is held to be a conclusion to which all the evidence seems unequivocally to point. And, even in organic life, the unity, though more perfect and palpable than in the mechanical and inorganic world, is only a perception, a vision,—a necessary mode of realising the unity of the facts. The phenomenon of life reveals as in a picture and an ocular demonstration the conformity of inward and outward, the identity of whole and parts, of power and utterance. But it is still outside the observer. In the function of sensibility and sentiency, however, we stand as it were on the border-line between biology and psychology. At one step we have been brought within the harmony, and are no longer mere observers and reflecters. The sentient not merely is, but is aware that it is. Hitherto as life, it only is the unity in diversity, and diversity in unity, for the outsider, i.e. only implicitly: now it is so for itself, or consciously. And in the first stage it does not know, but feels or is sentient. Here, for the first time, is created the distinction of inward and outward. Loosely indeed we may, like Mr. Spencer, speak of outward and inward in physiology: but strictly speaking, what Goethe says is true, Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale[73]. Nature in the narrower sense knows no distinction of the inward and outward in its phenomena: it is a purely superficial order and succession of appearance and event. The Idea which has been visible to an intelligent [pg cl] percipient in the types and laws of the natural world, now is, actually is—is in and for itself—but at first in a minimum of content, a mere point of light, or rather the dawn which has yet to expand into the full day.
Spinoza has asserted that “all individual bodies are animate, though in different degrees[74].” Now it is to a great extent this diversity of degree on which the main interest turns. Yet it is well to remember that the abrupt and trenchant separations which popular practice loves are overridden to a deeper view by an essential unity of idea, reducing them to indifference. If, that is, we take seriously the Spinozist unity of Substance, and the continual correlation (to call it no more) of extension and consciousness therein, we cannot avoid the conclusion which even Bacon would admit of something describable as attraction and perception, something subduing diversity to unity. But whether it be well to name this soul or life is a different matter. It may indeed only be taken to mean that all true being must be looked on as a real unity and individuality, must, that is, be conceived as manifesting itself in organisation, must be referred to a self-centred and self-developing activity. But this—which is the fundamental thesis of idealism—is hardly all that is meant. Rather Spinoza would imply that all things which form a real unity must have life—must have inner principle and unifying reality: and what he teaches is closely akin to the Leibnitian doctrine that every substantial existence reposes upon a monad, a unity which is at once both a force and a cognition, a “representation” and an appetite or nisus to act. [pg cli] When Fechner in a series of works[75] expounds and defends the hypothesis that plants and planets are not destitute of soul, any more than man and animals, he only gives a more pronounced expression to this idealisation or spiritualisation of the natural world. But for the moment the point to be noted is that all of this idealistic doctrine is an inference, or a development which finds its point d'appui in the fact of sensation. And the problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby a mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception and a faith in the goodness, beauty and intelligence of the world.
Schopenhauer has put the point with his usual picturesqueness. Outward nature presents nothing but a play of forces. At first, however, this force shows merely the mechanical phenomena of pressure and impact, and its theory is sufficiently described by mathematical physics. But in the process of nature force assumes higher types, types where it loses a certain amount of its externality[76], till in the organic world it acquires a peculiar phase which Schopenhauer calls Will, meaning by that, however, an organising and controlling power, a tendency or nisus to be and live, which is persistent and potent, but without consciousness. This blind force, which however has a certain coherence and purposiveness, is in the animal organism endowed with a new character, in consequence of the emergence of a new organ. This organ, the brain and nervous system, causes the evolution into clear day of an element which has been growing more and more urgent. The gathering tendency of force to return into itself is now complete: the cycle of operation is [pg clii] formed: and the junction of the two currents issues in the spark of sensation. The blind force now becomes seeing.
But at first—and this is the point we have to emphasise—its powers of vision are limited. Sensibility is either a local and restricted phenomenon: or, in so far as it is not local, it is vague and indefinite, and hardly entitled to the name of sensibility. Either it is a dim, but far-reaching, sympathy with environing existence, and in that case only so-called blind will or feeling: or if it is clear, is locally confined, and at first within very narrow limits. Neither of these points must be lost sight of. On the one hand feeling has to be regarded as the dull and confused stirring of an almost infinite sympathy with the world—a pulse which has come from the far-distant movements of the universe, and bears with it, if but as a possibility, the wealth of an infinite message. On the other hand, feeling at first only becomes real, in this boundless ideality to which its possibilities extend, by restricting itself to one little point and from several points organising itself to a unity of bodily feeling, till it can go on from thence to embrace the universe in distinct and articulate comprehension.
Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and above the rest of nature: it is rather nature's “'universal immaterialism, and simple ideal life[77].” There were ancient philosophers who spoke of the soul as a self-adjusting number,—as a harmony, or equilibrium[78]—and the moderns have added considerably to the list of these analogical definitions. As definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things give, as it were, by anticipation, an image of soul, as the “ideality,” which reduces the manifold to [pg cliii] unity. The adhesions and cohesions of matter, its gravitating attractions, its chemical affinities and electrical polarities, the intricate out-and-in of organic structure, are all preludes to the true incorporating unity which is the ever-immanent supersession of the endless self-externalism and successionalism of physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or sensibility, the unity which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly present. It is implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,—which has no doors and no windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it has nothing outside it, because it “expresses” and “envelopes” (however confusedly at first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising phraseology, we may describe mind, where it appears emerging in the natural world, as a mere feeble and incidental outburst,—a rebellion breaking out as in some petty province or isolated region against the great law of the physical realm—we are in so speaking taking only an external standpoint. But with the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is implicitly overcome. To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside, nothing transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only outside a localised and limited mind—outside a mind which is imperfectly and abstractly realised—not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and externality of things into the unity and identity of one Idea, is the process of development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic knowledge, from appetite to art,—the process of culture through the social state under the influence of religion.
Sentiency or psychic matter (mind-stuff), to begin [pg cliv] with, is in some respects like the tabula rasa of the empiricists. It is the possibility—but the real possibility—of intelligence rather than intelligence itself. It is the monotonous undifferentiated inwardness—a faint self-awareness and self-realisation of the material world, but at first a mere vague psychical protoplasm and without defined nucleus, without perceptible organisation or separation of structures. If there is self-awareness, it is not yet discriminated into a distinct and unified self, not yet differentiated and integrated,—soul in the condition of a mere “Is,” which, however, is nothing determinate. It is very much in the situation of Condillac's statue-man—une statue organisée intérieurement comme nous, et animée d'un esprit privé de toute espèce d'idées: alike at least so far that the rigid uniformity of the latter's envelope prevents all articulated organisation of its faculties. The foundation under all the diversity and individuality in the concrete intelligent and volitional life is a common feeling,—a sensus communis—a general and indeterminate susceptibility to influence, a sympathy responsive, but responsive vaguely and equivocally, to all the stimuli of the physical environment. There was once a time, according to primitive legend, when man understood the language of beast and bird, and even surprised the secret converse of trees and flowers. Such fancies are but the exaggeration of a solidarity of conscious life which seems to spread far in the sub-conscious realm, and to narrow the individual's soul into limited channels as it rises into clear self-perception,
“As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.”
It may be a mere dream that, as Goethe feigns of Makaria in his romance[79], there are men and women in [pg clv] sympathy with the vicissitudes of the starry regions: and hypotheses of lunar influence, or dogmas of astrological destiny, may count to the present guardians of the sciences as visionary superstitions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to be dogmatic; her function hitherto can only be critical; and even for that, her data are scanty and her principles extremely general. The influences on the mental mood and faculty, produced by climate and seasons, by local environment and national type, by individual peculiarities, by the differences of age and sex, and by the alternation of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less questionable. It is easy no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark how indefinable and incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their radical and inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character. “The sum of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but always leaves a marvellous remainder[80].” Irrational this residue is, in the sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known quantities of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the more advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is remembered, it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting psychology for the application to education, and how dependent the solution of that problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of individual and national temperament and character.
The first stage in mental development is the establishment of regular and uniform relations between soul and [pg clvi] body: it is the differentiation of organs and the integration of function: the balance between sensation and movement, between the afferent and efferent processes of sensitivity. Given a potential soul, the problem is to make it actual in an individual body. It is the business of a physical psychology to describe in detail the steps by which the body we are attached to is made inward as our idea through the several organs and their nervous appurtenances: whereas a psychical physiology would conversely explain the corresponding processes for the expression of the emotions and for the objectification of the volitions. Thus soul inwardises (erinnert) or envelops body: which body “expresses” or develops soul. The actual soul is the unity of both, is the percipient individual. The solidarity or “communion” of body and soul is here the dominant fact: the soul sentient of changes in its peripheral organs, and transmitting emotion and volition into physical effect. It is on this psychical unity,—the unity which is the soul of the diversity of body—that all the subsequent developments of mind rest. Sensation is thus the prius—or basis—of all mental life: the organisation of soul in body and of body in soul. It is the process which historically has been prepared in the evolution of animal life from those undifferentiated forms where specialised organs are yet unknown, and which each individual has further to realise and complete for himself, by learning to see and hear, and use his limbs. At first, moreover, it begins from many separate centres and only through much collision and mutual compliance arrives at comparative uniformity and centralisation. The common basis of united sensibility supplied by the one organism has to be made real and effective, and it is so at first by sporadic and comparatively independent developments. If self-hood means reference [pg clvii] to self of what is prima facie not self, and projection of self therein, there is in primitive sensibility only the germ or possibility of self-hood. In the early phases of psychic development the centre is fluctuating and ill-defined, and it takes time and trouble to co-ordinate or unify the various starting-points of sensibility[81].
This consolidation of inward life may be looked at either formally or concretely. Under the first head, it means the growth of a central unity of apperception. In the second case, it means a peculiar aggregate of ideas and sentiments. There is growing up within him what we may call the individuality of the individual,—an irrational, i.e. not consciously intelligent, nether-self or inner soul, a firm aggregation of hopes and wishes, of views and feelings, or rather of tendencies and temperament, of character hereditary and acquired. It is the law of the natural will or character which from an inaccessible background dominates our action,—which, because it is not realised and formulated in consciousness, behaves like a guardian spirit, or genius, or destiny within us. This genius is the sub-conscious unity of the sensitive life—the manner of man which unknown to ourselves we are,—and which influences us against our nominal or formal purposes. So far as this predominates, our ends, rough hew them how we will, are given by a force which is not really, i.e. with full consciousness, ours: by a mass of ingrained prejudice and unreasoned sympathies, of instincts and passions, of fancies and feelings, which have condensed and organised themselves into a natural power. As the child in the mother's womb is responsive to her psychic influences, so the development of a man's psychic life is guided by feelings centred in objects and agents [pg clviii] external to him, who form the genius presiding over his development. His soul, to that extent, is really in another: he himself is selfless, and when his stay is removed the principle of his life is gone[82]. He is but a bundle of impressions, held together by influences and ties which in years before consciousness proper began made him what he is. Such is the involuntary adaptation to example and environment, which establishes in the depths below personality a self which becomes hereafter the determinant of action. Early years, in which the human being is naturally susceptible, build up by imitation, by pliant obedience, an image, a system, reproducing the immediate surroundings. The soul, as yet selfless, and ready to accept any imprint, readily moulds itself into the likeness of an authoritative influence.
The step by which the universality or unity of the self is realised in the variety of its sensation is Habit. Habit gives us a definite standing-ground in the flux of single impressions: it is the identification of ourselves with what is most customary and familiar: an identification which takes place by practice and repetition. If it circumscribes us to one little province of being, it on the other frees us from the vague indeterminateness where we are at the mercy of every passing mood. It makes thus much of our potential selves our very own, our acquisition and permanent possession. It, above all, makes us free and at one with our bodily part, so that henceforth we start as a subjective unit of body and soul. We have now as the result of the anthropological process a self or ego, an individual consciousness able to reflect and compare, setting itself on one side (a soul [pg clix] in bodily organisation), and on the other setting an object of consciousness, or external world, a world of other things. All this presupposes that the soul has actualised itself by appropriating and acquiring as its expression and organ the physical sensibility which is its body. By restricting and establishing itself, it has gained a fixed standpoint. No doubt it has localised and confined itself, but it is no longer at the disposal of externals and accident: it has laid the foundation for higher developments.
(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.
Psychology, as we have seen, goes for information regarding the earlier stages of mental growth to the child and the animal,—perhaps also to the savage. So too sociology founds certain conclusions upon the observations of savage customs and institutions, or on the earlier records of the race. In both cases with a limitation caused by the externality and fragmentariness of the facts and the need of interpreting them through our own conscious experiences. There is however another direction in which corresponding inquiries may be pursued; and where the danger of the conclusions arrived at, though not perhaps less real, is certainly of a different kind. In sociology we can observe—and almost experiment upon—the phenomena of the lapsed, degenerate and criminal classes. The advantage of such observation is that the object of study can be made to throw greater light on his own inner states. He is a little of the child and a little of the savage, but these aspects co-exist with other features which put him more on a level with the intelligent observer. Similar pathological [pg clx] regions are open to us in the case of psychology. There the anomalous and morbid conditions of mind co-exist with a certain amount of mature consciousness. So presented, they are thrown out into relief. They form the negative instances which serve to corroborate our positive inductions. The regularly concatenated and solid structure of normal mind is under abnormal and deranged conditions thrown into disorder, and its constituents are presented in their several isolation. Such phenomena are relapses into more rudimentary grades: but with the difference that they are set in the midst of a more advanced phase of intellectual life.
Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the mental range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the Unconscious seemed—and to many still seems—a region in which the charlatan and the dupe can and must play into each other's hands. Once in the whirl of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how far you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type. Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe; scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience against what Bacon has called “monodical” phenomena, phenomena i.e. which claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private and privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a determination to treat all instances which oppose its hitherto ascertained laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent observation, confusions of memory, and superstitions of ignorance. Above all, [pg clxi] great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect themselves with these revelations—interests, at any rate, to which our common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much was at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispassionate observation.
The philosophers were found—as might have been expected—amongst those most strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been fascinated by the spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned away sceptical. At least as early as 1806 Schelling had been interested by Ritter's researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human will to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a distance. He was looking forward to the rise of a Physica coelestis, or New Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in the range of the physical powers, especially of the physical powers of the human psyche as a natural agent. The divining-rod was revived. Clairvoyance and somnambulism were carefully studied, and the curative powers of animal magnetism found many advocates[83].
Interest in these questions went naturally with the new conception of the place of Man in Nature, and of Nature as the matrix of mind[84]. But it had been acutely stimulated by the performances and professions of Mesmer at Vienna and Paris in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. These—though by no means [pg clxii] really novel—had forced the artificial world of science and fashion to discuss the claim advanced for a new force which, amongst other things, could cure ailments that baffled the ordinary practitioner. This new force—mainly because of the recent interest in the remarkable advances of magnetic and electrical research—was conceived as a fluid, and called Animal Magnetism. At one time indeed Mesmer actually employed a magnet in the manipulation by which he induced the peculiar condition in his patients. The accompaniments of his procedure were in many respects those of the quack-doctor; and with the quack indeed he was often classed. A French commission of inquiry appointed to examine into his performances reported in 1784 that, while there was no doubt as to the reality of many of the phenomena, and even of the cures, there was no evidence for the alleged new physical force, and declared the effects to be mainly attributable to the influence of imagination. And with the mention of this familiar phrase, further explanation was supposed to be rendered superfluous.
In France political excitement allowed the mesmeric theory and practice to drop out of notice till the fall of the first Empire. But in Germany there was a considerable amount of investigations and hypotheses into these mystical phenomena, though rarely by the ordinary routine workers in the scientific field. The phenomena where they were discussed were studied and interpreted in two directions. Some theorists, like Jung-Stilling, Eschenmayer, Schubert, and Kerner, took the more metaphysicist and spiritualistic view: they saw in them the witness to a higher truth, to the presence and operation in this lower world of a higher and spiritual matter, a so-called ether. Thus Animal Magnetism supplied a sort of physical theory of the other world and the other life. Jung-Stilling, e.g. in his “Theory of Spirit-lore.” [pg clxiii] (1808), regarded the spiritualistic phenomena as a justification of—what he believed to be—the Kantian doctrine that in the truly real and persistent world space and time are no more. The other direction of inquiry kept more to the physical field. Ritter (whose researches interested both Schelling and Hegel) supposed he had detected the new force underlying mesmerism and the like, and gave to it the name of Siderism (1808); while Amoretti of Milan named the object of his experiments Animal Electrometry (1816). Kieser[85], again (1826) spoke of Tellurism, and connected animal magnetism with the play of general terrestrial forces in the human being.
At a later date (1857) Schindler, in his “Magical Spirit-life,” expounded a theory of mental polarity. The psychical life has two poles or centres,—its day-pole, around which revolves our ordinary and superficial current of ideas, and its night-pole, round which gathers the sub-conscious and deeper group of beliefs and sentiments. Either life has a memory, a consciousness, a world of its own: and they flourish to a large extent inversely to each other. The day-world has for its organs of receiving information the ordinary senses. But the magical or night-world of the soul has its feelers also, which set men directly in telepathic rapport with influences, however distant, exerted by the whole world: and through this “inner sense” which serves to concentrate in itself all the telluric forces (—a sense which in its various aspects we name instinct, presentiment, conscience) is constructed the fabric of our sub-conscious system. Through it man is a sort of résumé of all the cosmic life, in secret affinity and sympathy with all natural processes; and by the will which stands in response therewith he can exercise [pg clxiv] a directly creative action on external nature. In normal and healthy conditions the two currents of psychic life run on harmonious but independent. But in the phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance, and delirium, the magic region becomes preponderant, and comes into collision with the other. The dark-world emerges into the realm of day as a portentous power: and there is the feeling of a double personality, or of an indwelling genius, familiar spirit, or demon.
To the ordinary physicist the so-called Actio in distans was a hopeless stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature, that it would be very unphilosophical to deny the existence of phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.” Accordingly mesmerism and its allied manifestations were generally abandoned to the bohemians of science, and to investigators with dogmatic bias. It was still employed as a treatment for certain ailments: and philosophers, as different as Fichte and Schopenhauer[86], watched its fate with attention. But the herd of professional scientists fought shy of it. The experiments of Braid at Manchester in 1841 gradually helped to give research into the subject a new character. Under the name of Hypnotism (or, rather at first Neuro-hypnotism) he described the phenomena of the magnetic sleep (induced through prolonged staring at [pg clxv] a bright object), such as abnormal rigidity of body, perverted sensibility, and the remarkable obedience of the subject to the command or suggestions of the operator. Thirty years afterwards, the matter became an object of considerable experimental and theoretic work in France, at the rival schools of Paris and Nancy; and the question, mainly under the title of hypnotism, though the older name is still occasionally heard, has been for several years brought prominently under public notice.
It cannot be said that the net results of these observations and hypotheses are of a very definitive character. While a large amount of controversy has been waged on the comparative importance of the several methods and instruments by which the hypnotic or mesmeric trance may be induced, and a scarcely less wide range of divergence prevails with regard to the physiological and pathological conditions in connexion with which it has been most conspicuously manifested, there has been less anxiety shown to determine its precise psychical nature, or its significance in mental development. And yet the better understanding of these aspects may throw light on several points connected with primitive religion and the history of early civilisation, indeed over the whole range of what is called Völkerpsychologie. Indeed this is one of the points which may be said to emerge out of the confusion of dispute. Phenomena at least analogous to those styled hypnotic have a wide range in the anthropological sphere[87]: and the proper characters which belong to them will only be caught by an observer who examines them in the widest variety of examples. Another feature which has been put in prominence is what has been called “psychological automatism.” And in this name two points [pg clxvi] seem to deserve note. The first is the spontaneous and as it were mechanical consecution of mental states in the soul whence the interfering effect of voluntary consciousness has been removed. And the second is the unfailing or accurate regularity, so contrary to the hesitating and uncertain procedure of our conscious and reasoned action, which so often is seen in the unreflecting and unreasoned movements. To this invariable sequence of psychical movement the superior control and direction by the intelligent self has to adapt itself, just as it respects the order of physical laws.
But, perhaps, the chief conclusion to be derived from hypnotic experience is the value of suggestion or suggestibility. Even cool thinkers like Kant have recognised how much mere mental control has to do with bodily state,—how each of us, in this way, is often for good or for ill his own physician. An idea is a force, and is only inactive in so far as it is held in check by other ideas. “There is no such thing as hypnotism,” says one: “there are only different degrees of suggestibility.” This may be to exaggerate: yet it serves to impress the comparatively secondary character of many of the circumstances on which the specially mesmeric or hypnotic experimentalist is apt to lay exclusive stress. The methods may probably vary according to circumstances. But the essence of them all is to get the patient out of the general frame and system of ideas and perceptions in which his ordinary individuality is encased. Considering how for all of us the reality of concrete life is bound up with our visual perceptions, how largely our sanity depends upon the spatial idea, and how that depends on free ocular range, we can understand that darkness and temporary loss of vision are powerful auxiliaries in the hypnotic process, as in magical and superstitious rites. But [pg clxvii] a great deal short of this may serve to establish influence. The mind of the majority of human beings, but especially of the young, may be compared to a vacant seat waiting for some one to fill it.
In Hegel's view hypnotic phenomena produce a kind of temporary and artificial atavism. Mechanical or chemical means, or morbid conditions of body, may cause even for the intelligent adult a relapse into states of mind closely resembling those exhibited by the primitive or the infantile sensibility. The intelligent personality, where powers are bound up with limitations and operate through a chain of means and ends, is reduced to its primitively undifferentiated condition. Not that it is restored to its infantile simplicity; but that all subsequent acquirements operate only as a concentrated individuality, or mass of will and character, released from the control of the self-possessed mind, and invested (by the latter's withdrawal) with a new quasi-personality of their own. With the loss of the world of outward things, there may go, it is supposed, a clearer perception of the inward and particularly of the organic life. The Soul contains the form of unity which other experiences had impressed upon it: but this form avails in its subterranean existence where it creates a sort of inner self. And this inner self is no longer, like the embodied self of ordinary consciousness, an intelligence served by organs, and proceeding by induction and inference. Its knowledge is not mediated or carried along specific channels: it does not build up, piecemeal, by successive steps of synthesis and analysis, by gradual idealisation, the organised totality of its intellectual world. The somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their vision directly into regions where the waking consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter. [pg clxviii] But that region is not the world of our higher ideas,—of art, religion, and philosophy. It is still the sensitivity—that realm of sensitivity which is ordinarily covered by unconsciousness. Such sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were, hear themselves growing; they may discern the hidden quivers and pulses of blood and tissue, the seats of secret pain and all the unrevealed workings in the dark chambers of the flesh. But always their vision seems confined to that region, and will fall short of the world of light and ideal truth. It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive solidarity with earth, and flowers, and trees, the life that “rolls through all things,” not towards the spiritual unity which broods over the world and “impels all thinking things,” that these immersions in the selfless universe lead us.
What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on the natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the work of intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the fully-developed mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute Mind which in our highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate to. But mind, as it tends towards the higher end to “merge itself in light,” to identify itself yet not wholly lost, but retained, in the fullness of undivided intellectual being, so at the lower end it springs from a natural and underlying unity, the immense solidarity of nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature—the “Substance” which is to be raised into the “Subject” which is true divinity. Between these two unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won over-soul, lies the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which narrows and of redintegration which enlarges,—which alternately builds up an isolated personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and sympathy. It is because [pg clxix] mental or tacit “suggestion”[88] (i.e. will-influence exercised without word or sign, or other sensible mode of connexion), thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than dexterous apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or transposition of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive, clairvoyance (i.e. the power of describing, as if from direct perception, objects or events removed in space beyond the recognised limits of sensation), and somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed eyes,—it is because these things seem to show the essential ideality of matter, that Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of consciousness and even of practical life in society are a derivative and secondary state; a product of processes of individualism, which however are never completed, and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to fulfil. From a state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than can be described as personality—lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too, had regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world underlying the development of egoity and self-consciousness[89]: “the merely sensuous man is still in somnambulism,” only a somnambulism of waking hours: “the true waking is the life in God, to be free in him, all else is sleep and dream.” “Egoity,” he adds, “is a merely formal principle, utterly, and never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force).” For Schopenhauer, too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove the [pg clxx] absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to the intellectual categories of space, time, and causal sequence: to prove the reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious divisions.
(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.
The result of the first range in the process of psycho-genesis was to make the body a sign and utterance of the Soul, with a fixed and determinate type. The “anthropological process” has defined and settled the mere general sentiency of soul into an individualised shape, a localised and limited self, a bundle of habits. It has made the soul an Ego or self: a power which looks out upon the world as a spectator, lifted above immanence in the general tide of being, but only so lifted because it has made itself one in the world of objects, a thing among things. The Mind has reached the point of view of reflection. Instead of a general identifiability with all nature, it has encased itself in a limited range, from which it looks forth on what is now other than itself. If previously it was mere inward sensibility, it is now sense, perceptive of an object here and now, of an external world. The step has involved some price: and that price is, that it has attained independence and self-hood at the cost of surrendering the content it had hitherto held in one with itself. It is now a blank receptivity, open to the impressions of an outside world: and the changes which take place in its process of apprehension seem to it to be given from outside. The world it perceives is a world of isolated and independent objects: and it takes them as they [pg clxxi] are given. But a closer insistance on the perception develops the implicit intelligence, which makes it possible. The percipient mind is no mere recipiency or susceptibility with its forms of time and space: it is spontaneously active, it is the source of categories, or is an apperceptive power,—an understanding. Consciousness, thus discovered to be a creative or constructive faculty, is strictly speaking self-consciousness[90].
Self-consciousness appears at first in the selfish or narrowly egoistic form of appetite and impulse. The intelligence which claims to mould and construe the world of objects—which, in Kant's phrase, professes to give us nature—is implicitly the lord of that world. And that supremacy it carries out as appetite—as destruction. The self is but a bundle of wants—its supremacy over things is really subjection to them: the satisfaction of appetite is baffled by a new desire which leaves it as it was before. The development of self-consciousness to a more adequate shape is represented by Hegel as taking place through the social struggle for existence. Human beings, too, are in the first instance to the uninstructed appetite or the primitive self-consciousness (which is simply a succession of individual desires for satisfaction of natural want) only things,—adjectival to that self's individual existence. To them, too, his primary relation is to appropriate and master them. Might precedes right. But the social struggle for existence forces him to recognise something other which is kindred to himself,—a limiting principle, another self which has to form an element in his calculations, not to be neglected. And gradually, [pg clxxii] we may suppose, the result is the division of humanity into two levels, a ruling lordly class, and a class of slaves,—a state of inequality in which each knows that his appetite is in some measure checked by a more or less permanent other. Lastly, perhaps soonest in the inferior order, there is fashioned the perception that its self-seeking in its isolated appetites is subject to an abiding authority, a continuing consciousness. There grows up a social self—a sense of general humanity and solidarity with other beings—a larger self with which each identifies himself, a common ground. Understanding was selfish intelligence: practical in the egoistic sense. In the altruistic or universal sense practical, a principle social and unifying character, intelligence is Reason.
Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single objects in space and time, and as an appetitive self bent upon single gratifications, has ended as a rational being,—a consciousness purged of its selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on the universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal, swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer purely antithetical and exclusive[91]. He has reached what is really the moral standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal self-consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the antitheses of individualities and of outward [pg clxxiii] and inward have ceased to trouble. “The natural man,” says Hegel[92], “sees in the woman flesh of his flesh: the moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and spiritual being and by its means.” Hitherto we have been dealing with something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the third part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a being who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general truth, and carries out ideal purposes.
Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence and rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by which reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in theoretical and practical mind, is feeling—or immediate knowledge and immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate perception—a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the idea of a general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the outward existence conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent perception or intuition the important factor is attention, which raises it above mere passive acceptance and awareness of a given fact. Attention thus involves on one hand the externality of its object, and on the other affirms its dependence on the act of the subject: it sets the objects before and out of itself, in space and time, but yet in so doing it shows itself master of the objects. If perception presuppose attention, in short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make them ours, and the space and time they fill are projected by us. So attended to, they are appropriated, [pg clxxiv] inwardised and recollected: they take their place in a mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-individualised character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental property, but retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived. Such revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of association. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and recollected by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not really fully master of them until it has been able to give them a certain objectivity, by replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible sign. By means of words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations into quasi-realities: it creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world of language, where ideas live a potential, which is also an actual, life. Words are sensibles, but they are sensibles which completely lose themselves in their meaning. As sensibles, they render possible that verbal memory which is the handmaid of thought: but which also as merely mechanical can leave thought altogether out of account. It is through words that thought is made possible: for it alone permits the movement through ideas without being distracted through a multitude of associations. In them thought has an instrument completely at its own level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.
It is as such a thinking being—a being who can use language, and manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a rational will. A concept of something to be done—a feeling even of some end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what can be called will. At first [pg clxxv] indeed its material may be found as immediately given and all its volitionality may lie in the circumstance that the intelligent being sets this forward as a governing and controlling Ought. Its vehicle, in short, may be mere impulse, or inclination, and even passion: but it is the choice and the purposive adoption of means to the given end. Gradually it attains to the idea of a general satisfaction, or of happiness. And this end seems positive and definite. It soon turns out however to be little but a prudent and self-denying superiority to particular passions and inclinations in the interest of a comprehensive ideal. The free will or intelligence has so far only a negative and formal value: it is the perfection of an autonomous and freely self-developing mind. Such a mind, which in language has acquired the means of realising an intellectual system of things superior to the restrictions of sense, and which has emancipated reason from the position of slave to inclination, is endued with the formal conditions of moral conduct. Such a mind will transform its own primarily physical dependence into an image of the law of reason and create the ethical life: and in the strength of that establishment will go forth to conquer the world into a more and more adequate realisation of the eternal Idea.
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.
“In dealing,” says Hegel, “with the Idea of the State, we must not have before our eyes a particular state, or a particular institution: we must rather study the Idea, this actual God, on his own account. Every State, however bad we may find it according to our principles, however defective we may discover this or that feature to be, still contains, particularly if it belongs to the mature states of our time, all the essential factors of its existence. But as it is easier to discover faults than to comprehend the affirmative, people easily fall into the mistake of letting individual aspects obscure the intrinsic organism of the State itself. The State is no ideal work of art: it stands in the everyday world, in the sphere, that is, of arbitrary act, accident, and error, and a variety of faults may mar the regularity of its traits. But the ugliest man, the criminal, a sick man and a cripple, is after all a living man; the affirmative, Life, subsists in spite of the defect: and this affirmative is here the theme[93].” “It is the theme of philosophy,” he adds, “to ascertain the substance which is immanent in the show of the temporal and transient, and the eternal which is present.”
(i.) Hegel as a Political Critic.
But if this is true, it is also to be remembered that the philosopher is, like other men, the son of his age, and estimates the value of reality from preconceptions and aspirations due to his generation. The historical circumstances of his nation as well as the personal experiences of his life help to determine his horizon, even in the effort to discover the hidden pulse and movement of the social organism. This is specially obvious in political philosophy. The conception of ethics and politics which is presented in the Encyclopaedia was in 1820 produced with more detail as the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Appearing, as it did, two years after his appointment to a professorship at Berlin, and in the midst of a political struggle between the various revolutionary and conservative powers and parties of Germany, the book became, and long remained, a target for embittered criticism. The so-called War of Liberation or national movement to shake off the French yoke was due to a coalition of parties, and had naturally been in part supported by tendencies and aims which went far beyond the ostensive purpose either of leaders or of combatants. Aspirations after a freer state were entwined with radical and socialistic designs to reform the political hierarchy of the Fatherland: high ideals and low vulgarities were closely intermixed: and the noble enthusiasm of youth was occasionally played on by criminal and anarchic intriguers. In a strong and wise and united Germany some of these schemes might have been tolerated. But strength, wisdom, and unity were absent. In the existing tension between Austria and Prussia for the leadership, in the ill-adapted and effete constitutions of the several principalities which were yet expected to realise the [pg clxxviii] advance which had taken place in society and ideas during the last thirty years, the outlook on every hand seemed darker and more threatening than it might have otherwise done. Governments, which had lost touch with their peoples, suspected conspiracy and treason: and a party in the nation credited their rulers with gratuitous designs against private liberty and rights. There was a vast but ill-defined enthusiasm in the breasts of the younger world, and it was shared by many of their teachers. It seemed to their immense aspirations that the war of liberation had failed of its true object and left things much as they were. The volunteers had not fought for the political systems of Austria or Prussia, or for the three-and-thirty princes of Germany: but for ideas, vague, beautiful, stimulating. To such a mood the continuance of the old system was felt as a cruel deception and a reaction. The governments on their part had not realised the full importance of the spirit that had been aroused, and could not at a moment's notice set their house in order, even had there been a clearer outlook for reform than was offered. They too had suffered, and had realised their insecurity: and were hardly in a mood to open their gates to the enemy.
Coming on such a situation of affairs, Hegel's book would have been likely in any case to provoke criticism. For it took up a line of political theory which was little in accord with the temper of the age. The conception of the state which it expounded is not far removed in essentials from the conception which now dominates the political life of the chief European nations. But in his own time it came upon ears which were naturally disposed to misconceive it. It was unacceptable to the adherents of the ancien régime, as much as to the liberals. It was declared by one party to be a glorification [pg clxxix] of the Prussian state: by another to rationalise the sanctities of authority. It was pointed out that the new professor was a favourite of the leading minister, that his influence was dominant in scholastic appointments, and that occasional gratuities from the crown proved his acceptability. A contemporary professor, Fries, remarked that Hegel's theory of the state had grown “not in the gardens of science but on the dung-hill of servility.” Hegel himself was aware that he had planted a blow in the face of a “shallow and pretentious sect,” and that his book had “given great offence to the demagogic folk.” Alike in religious and political life he was impatient of sentimentalism, of rhetorical feeling, of wordy enthusiasm. A positive storm of scorn burst from him at much-promising and little-containing declamation that appealed to the pathos of ideas, without sense of the complex work of construction and the system of principles which were needed to give them reality. His impatience of demagogic gush led him (in the preface) into a tactless attack on Fries, who was at the moment in disgrace for his participation in the demonstration at the Wartburg. It led him to an attack on the bumptiousness of those who held that conscientious conviction was ample justification for any proceeding:—an attack which opponents were not unwilling to represent as directed against the principle of conscience itself.
Yet Hegel's views on the nature of political unity were not new. Their nucleus had been formed nearly twenty years before. In the years that immediately followed the French revolution he had gone through the usual anarchic stage of intelligent youth. He had wondered whether humanity might not have had a nobler destiny, had fate given supremacy to some heresy rather than the orthodox creed of Christendom. He had [pg clxxx] seen religion in the past “teaching what despotism wished,—contempt of the human race, its incapacity for anything good[94].” But his earliest reflections on political power belong to a later date, and are inspired, not so much by the vague ideals of humanitarianism, as by the spirit of national patriotism. They are found in a “Criticism of the German Constitution” apparently dating from the year 1802[95]. It is written after the peace of Lunéville had sealed for Germany the loss of her provinces west of the Rhine, and subsequent to the disasters of the German arms at Hohenlinden and Marengo. It is almost contemporaneous with the measures of 1803 and 1804, which affirmed the dissolution of the “Holy Roman Empire” of German name. The writer of this unpublished pamphlet sees his country in a situation almost identical with that which Macchiavelli saw around him in Italy. It is abused by petty despots, distracted by mean particularist ambitions, at the mercy of every foreign power. It was such a scene which, as Hegel recalls, had prompted and justified the drastic measures proposed in the Prince,—measures which have been ill-judged by the closet moralist, but evince the high statesmanship of the Florentine. In the Prince, an intelligent reader can see “the enthusiasm of patriotism underlying the cold and dispassionate doctrines.” Macchiavelli dared to declare that Italy must become a state, and to assert that “there is no higher duty for a state than to maintain itself, and to punish relentlessly every author of anarchy,—the supreme, and perhaps sole political crime.” And [pg clxxxi] like teaching, Hegel adds, is needed for Germany. Only, he concludes, no mere demonstration of the insanity of utter separation of the particular from his kin will ever succeed in converting the particularists from their conviction of the absoluteness of personal and private rights. “Insight and intelligence always excite so much distrust that force alone avails to justify them; then man yields them obedience[96].”
“The German political edifice,” says the writer, “is nothing else but the sum of the rights which the single parts have withdrawn from the whole; and this justice, which is ever on the watch to prevent the state having any power left, is the essence of the constitution.” The Peace of Westphalia had but served to constitute or stereotype anarchy: the German empire had by that instrument divested itself of all rights of political unity, and thrown itself on the goodwill of its members. What then, it may be asked, is, in Hegel's view, the indispensable minimum essential to a state? And the answer will be, organised strength,—a central and united force. “The strength of a country lies neither in the multitude of its inhabitants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its size, but solely in the way its parts are by reasonable combination made a single political force enabling everything to be used for the common defence.” Hegel speaks scornfully of “the philanthropists and moralists who decry politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private utility at the cost of right”: he tells them that “it is foolish to oppose the interest or (as it is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the utility of the state to its right”: that the “rights of a state are the utility of the state as established and recognised by compacts”: and that “war” (which they [pg clxxxii] would fain abolish or moralise) “has to decide not which of the rights asserted by either party is the true right (—for both parties have a true right), but which right has to give way to the other.”
It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of political supremacy which has been associated with the name of Hobbes. But his views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, “who can rule and dare not lie.” “All states,” he declares, “are founded by the sublime force of great men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his features which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against their will. Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is otherwise.... This is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to express the absolute will. All gather round his banner. He is their God.” “The state,” he says again, “is the self-certain absolute mind which recognises no definite authority but its own: which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception.” So also Hobbes describes the prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But the Hegelian God immanent in the state is a higher power than Hobbes knows: he is no mortal, but in his truth an immortal God. He speaks by (what in this early essay is called) the Absolute Government[97]: the government of the Law—the true impersonal sovereign,—distinct alike from the single ruler and the multitude of the ruled. “It is absolutely only universality as against particular. As this absolute, ideal, universal, compared to which everything else is a particular, it is the phenomenon of God. Its words are his decision, and it can appear [pg clxxxiii] and exist under no other form.... The Absolute government is divine, self-sanctioned and not made[98].” The real strength—the real connecting-mean which gives life to sovereign and to subject—is intelligence free and entire, independent both of what individuals feel and believe and of the quality of the ruler. “The spiritual bond,” he says in a lower form of speech, “is public opinion: it is the true legislative body, national assembly, declaration of the universal will which lives in the execution of all commands.” This still small voice of public opinion is the true and real parliament: not literally making laws, but revealing them. If we ask, where does this public opinion appear and how does it disengage itself from the masses of partisan judgment? Hegel answers,—and to the surprise of those who have not entered into the spirit of his age[99]—it is embodied in the Aged and the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in the real world: they are by nature and function disengaged from the struggles of particular existence, have risen above the divergencies of social classes. They breathe the ether of pure contemplation. “The sunset of life gives them mystical lore,” or at least removes from old age the distraction of selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions of human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel's view is that the real voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained indifference to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see life steadily and whole.
If this utterance shows the little belief Hegel had in the ordinary methods of legislation through “representative” bodies, and hints that the real substance of political [pg clxxxiv] life is deeper than the overt machinery of political operation, it is evident that this theory of “divine right” is of a different stamp from what used to go under that name. And, again, though the power of the central state is indispensable, he is far from agreeing with the so-called bureaucratic view that “a state is a machine with a single spring which sets in motion all the rest of the machinery.” “Everything,” he says, “which is not directly required to organise and maintain the force for giving security without and within must be left by the central government to the freedom of the citizens. Nothing ought to be so sacred in the eyes of a government as to leave alone and to protect, without regard to utilities, the free action of the citizens in such matters as do not affect its fundamental aim: for this freedom is itself sacred[100].” He is no friend of paternal bureaucracy. “The pedantic craving to settle every detail, the mean jealousy against estates and corporations administrating and directing their own affairs, the base fault-finding with all independent action on the part of the citizens, even when it has no immediate bearing on the main political interest, has been decked out with reasons to show that no penny of public expenditure, made for a country of twenty or thirty millions' population, can be laid out, without first being, not permitted, but commanded, controlled and revised by the supreme government.” You can see, he remarks, in the first village after you enter Prussian territory the lifeless and wooden routine which prevails. The whole country suffers also from the way religion has been mixed up with political rights, and a particular creed pronounced by law indispensable both for sovereign and full-privileged subject. In a word, the unity and vigour of the state is quite compatible with considerable latitude [pg clxxxv] and divergence in laws and judicature, in the imposition and levying of taxes, in language, manners, civilisation and religion. Equality in all these points is desirable for social unity: but it is not indispensable for political strength.
This decided preference for the unity of the state against the system of checks and counterchecks, which sometimes goes by the name of a constitution, came out clearly in Hegel's attitude in discussing the dispute between the Würtembergers and their sovereign in 1815-16. Würtemberg, with its complicated aggregation of local laws, had always been a paradise of lawyers, and the feudal rights or privileges of the local oligarchies—the so-called “good old law”—were the boast of the country. All this had however been aggravated by the increase of territory received in 1805: and the king, following the examples set by France and even by Bavaria, promulgated of his own grace a “constitution” remodelling the electoral system of the country. Immediately an outcry burst out against the attempt to destroy the ancient liberties. Uhland tuned his lyre to the popular cry: Rückert sang on the king's side. To Hegel the contest presented itself as a struggle between the attachment to traditional rights, merely because they are old, and the resolution to carry out reasonable reform whether it be agreeable to the reformed or not: or rather he saw in it resistance of particularism, of separation, clinging to use and wont, and basing itself on formal pettifogging objections, against the spirit of organisation. Anything more he declined to see. And probably he was right in ascribing a large part of the opposition to inertia, to vanity and self-interest, combined with the want of political perception of the needs of Würtemberg and Germany. But on the other hand, he failed to remember the insecurity and danger of such [pg clxxxvi] “gifts of the Danai”: he forgot the sense of free-born men that a constitution is not something to be granted (octroyé) as a grace, but something that must come by the spontaneous act of the innermost self of the community. He dealt rather with the formal arguments which were used to refuse progress, than with the underlying spirit which prompted the opposition[101].
The philosopher lives (as Plato has well reminded us) too exclusively within the ideal. Bent on the essential nucleus of institutions, he attaches but slight importance to the variety of externals, and fails to realise the practice of the law-courts. He forgets that what weighs lightly in logic, may turn the scale in real life and experience. For feeling and sentiment he has but scant respect: he is brusque and uncompromising: and cannot realise all the difficulties and dangers that beset the Idea in the mazes of the world, and may ultimately quite alter a plan which at first seemed independent of petty details. Better than other men perhaps he recognises in theory how the mere universal only exists complete in an individual shape: but more than other men he forgets these truths of insight, when the business of life calls for action or for judgment. He cannot at a moment's notice remember that he is, if not, as Cicero says, in faece Romuli, the member of a degenerate commonwealth, at least living in a world where good and evil are not, as logic presupposes, sharply divided but intricately intertwined.
(ii.) The Ethics and Religion of the State.
This idealism of political theory is illustrated by the sketch of the Ethical Life which he drew up about 1802. Under the name of “Ethical System” it presents in concentrated or undeveloped shape the doctrine which subsequently swelled into the “Philosophy of Mind.” At a later date he worked out more carefully as introduction the psychological genesis of moral and intelligent man, and he separated out more distinctly as a sequel the universal powers which give to social life its higher characters. In the earlier sketch the Ethical Part stands by itself, with the consequence that Ethics bears a meaning far exceeding all that had been lately called moral. The word “moral” itself he avoids[102]. It savours of excessive subjectivity, of struggle, of duty and conscience. It has an ascetic ring about it—an aspect of negation, which seeks for abstract holiness, and turns its back on human nature. Kant's words opposing duty to inclination, and implying that moral goodness involves a struggle, an antagonism, a victory, seem to him (and to his time) one-sided. That aspect of negation accordingly which Kant certainly began with, and which Schopenhauer magnified until it became the all-in-all of Ethics, Hegel entirely subordinates. Equally little does he like the emphasis on the supremacy of insight, intention, conscience: they lead, he thinks, to a view which holds the mere fact of conviction to be all-important, as if it mattered not what we thought and believed and did, so long as we were sincere in our belief. All this emphasis on the good-will, on the imperative of duty, on the rights of conscience, has, he admits, its justification in certain circumstances, as [pg clxxxviii] against mere legality, or mere natural instinctive goodness; but it has been overdone. Above all, it errs by an excess of individualism. It springs from an attitude of reflection,—in which the individual, isolated in his conscious and superficial individuality, yet tries—but probably tries in vain—to get somewhat in touch with a universal which he has allowed to slip outside him, forgetting that it is the heart and substance of his life. Kant, indeed, hardly falls under this condemnation. For he aims at showing that the rational will inevitably creates as rational a law or universal; that the individual act becomes self-regulative, and takes its part in constituting a system or realm of duty.
Still, on the whole, “morality” in this narrower sense belongs to an age of reflection, and is formal or nominal goodness rather than the genuine and full reality. It is the protest against mere instinctive or customary virtue, which is but compliance with traditional authority, and compliance with it as if it were a sort of quasi-natural law. Moralising reflection is the awakening of subjectivity and of a deeper personality. The age which thus precedes morality is not an age in which kindness, or love, or generosity is unknown. And if Hegel says that “Morality,” strictly so called, began with Socrates, he does not thereby accuse the pre-Socratic Greeks of inhumanity. But what he does say is that such ethical life as existed was in the main a thing of custom and law: of law, moreover, which was not set objectively forward, but left still in the stage of uncontradicted usage, a custom which was a second nature, part of the essential and quasi-physical ordinance of life. The individual had not yet learned to set his self-consciousness against these usages and ask for their justification. These are like the so-called law of the Medes and Persians which alters not: customs [pg clxxxix] of immemorial antiquity and unquestionable sway. They are part of a system of things with which for good or evil the individual is utterly identified, bound as it were hand and foot. These are, as a traveller says[103], “oral and unwritten traditions which teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed under certain penalties; and without the aid of fixed records, or the intervention of a succession of authorised depositaries and expounders, these laws have been transmitted to father and son, through unknown generations, and are fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and unalterable.”
The antithesis then in Hegel, as in Kant, is between Law and Morality, or rather Legality and Morality,—two abstractions to which human development is alternately prone to attach supreme importance. The first stage in the objectivation of intelligence or in the evolution of personality is the constitution of mere, abstract, or strict right. It is the creation of institutions and uniformities, i.e. of laws, or rights, which express definite and stereotyped modes of behaviour. Or, if we look at it from the individual's standpoint, we may say his consciousness awakes to find the world parcelled out under certain rules and divisions, which have objective validity, and govern him with the same absolute authority as do the circumstances of physical nature. Under their influence every rank and individual is alike forced to bow: to each his place and function is assigned by an order or system which claims an inviolable and eternal supremacy. It is not the same place and function for each: but for each the position and duties are predetermined in this metaphysically-physical order. The situation and its duties [pg cxc] have been created by super-human and natural ordinance. As the Platonic myth puts it, each order in the social hierarchy has been framed underground by powers that turned out men of gold, and silver, and baser metal: or as the Norse legend tells, they are the successive offspring of the white God, Heimdal, in his dealings with womankind.
The central idea of the earlier social world is the supremacy of rights—but not of right. The sum (for it cannot be properly called a system) of rights is a self-subsistent world, to which man is but a servant; and a second peculiarity of it is its inequality. If all are equal before the laws, this only means here that the laws, with their absolute and thorough inequality, are indifferent to the real and personal diversities of individuals. Even the so-called equality of primitive law is of the “Eye-for-eye, Tooth-for-tooth” kind; it takes no note of special circumstances; it looks abstractly and rudely at facts, and maintains a hard and fast uniformity, which seems the height of unfairness. Rule stands by rule, usage beside usage,—a mere aggregate or multitude of petty tyrants, reduced to no unity or system, and each pressing with all the weight of an absolute mandate. The pettiest bit of ceremonial law is here of equal dignity with the most far-reaching principle of political obligation.
In the essay already referred to, Hegel has designated something analogous to this as Natural or Physical Ethics, or as Ethics in its relative or comparative stage. Here Man first shows his superiority to nature, or enters on his properly ethical function, by transforming the physical world into his possession. He makes himself the lord of natural objects—stamping them as his, and not their own, making them his permanent property, his tools, his instruments of exchange [pg cxci] and production. The fundamental ethical act is appropriation by labour, and the first ethical world is the creation of an economic system, the institution of property. For property, or at least possession and appropriation, is the dominant idea, with its collateral and sequent principles. And at first, even human beings are treated on the same method as other things: as objects in a world of objects or aggregate of things: as things to be used and acquired, as means and instruments,—not in any sense as ends in themselves. It is a world in which the relation of master and slave is dominant,—where owner and employer is set in antithesis against his tools and chattels. But the Nemesis of his act issues in making the individual the servant of his so-called property. He has become an objective power by submitting himself to objectivity: he has literally put himself into the object he has wrought, and is now a thing among things: for what he owns, what he has appropriated, determines what he is. The real powers in the world thus established are the laws of possession-holding: the laws dominate man: and he is only freed from dependence on casual externals, by making himself thoroughly the servant of his possessions.
The only salvation, and it is but imperfect, that can be reached on this stage is by the family union. The sexual tie, is at first entirely on a level with the other arrangements of the sphere. The man or woman is but a chattel and a tool; a casual appropriation which gradually is transformed into a permanent possession and a permanent bond[104]. But, as the family constituted itself, it helped to afford a promise of better things. An ideal interest—the religion of the household—extending [pg cxcii] beyond the individual, and beyond the moment,—binding past and present, and parents to offspring, gave a new character to the relation of property. Parents and children form a unity, which overrides and essentially permeates their “difference” from each other: there is no exchange, no contract, nor, in the stricter sense, property between the members. In the property-idea they are lifted out of their isolation, and in the continuity of family life there is a certain analogue of immortality. But, says Hegel, “though the family be the highest totality of which Nature is capable, the absolute identity is in it still inward, and is not instituted in absolute form; and hence, too, the reproduction of the totality is an appearance, the appearance of the children[105].” “The power and the intelligence, the ‘difference’ of the parents, stands in inverse proportion to the youth and vigour of the child: and these two sides of life flee from and are sequent on each other, and are reciprocally external[106].” Or, as we may put it, the god of the family is a departed ancestor, a ghost in the land of the dead: it has not really a continuous and unified life. In such a state of society—a state of nature—and in its supreme form, the family, there is no adequate principle which though real shall still give ideality and unity to the self-isolating aspects of life. There is wanted something which shall give expression to its “indifference,” which shall control the tendency of this partial moralisation to sink at every moment into individuality, and lift it from its immersion in nature. Family life and economic groups (—for these two, which Hegel subsequently separates, are here kept close together) need an ampler and wider [pg cxciii] life to keep them from stagnating in their several selfishnesses.
This freshening and corrective influence they get in the first instance from deeds of violence and crime. Here is the “negative unsettling” of the narrow fixities, of the determinate conditions or relationships into which the preceding processes of labour and acquisition have tended to stereotype life. The harsh restriction brings about its own undoing. Man may subject natural objects to his formative power, but the wild rage of senseless devastation again and again bursts forth to restore the original formlessness. He may build up his own pile of wealth, store up his private goods, but the thief and the robber with the instincts of barbarian socialism tread on his steps: and every stage of appropriation has for its sequel a crop of acts of dispossession. He may secure by accumulation his future life; but the murderer for gain's sake cuts it short. And out of all this as a necessary consequence stands avenging justice. And in the natural world of ethics—where true moral life has not yet arisen—this is mere retaliation or the lex talionis;—the beginning of an endless series of vengeance and counter-vengeance, the blood-feud. Punishment, in the stricter sense of the term,—which looks both to antecedents and effects in character—cannot yet come into existence; for to punish there must be something superior to individualities, an ethical idea embodied in an institution, to which the injurer and the injured alike belong. But as yet punishment is only vengeance, the personal and natural equivalent, the physical reaction against injury, perhaps regulated and formulated by custom and usage, but not essentially altered from its purely retaliatory character. These crimes—or transgressions—are thus by Hegel quaintly conceived as storms which clear the air—which shake the individualist [pg cxciv] out of his slumber. The scene in which transgression thus acts is that of the so-called state of nature, where particularism was rampant: where moral right was not, but only the right of nature, of pre-occupation, of the stronger, of the first maker and discoverer. Crime is thus the “dialectic” which shakes the fixity of practical arrangements, and calls for something in which the idea of a higher unity, a permanent substance of life, shall find realisation.
The “positive supersession[107]” of individualism and naturalism in ethics is by Hegel called “Absolute Ethics.” Under this title he describes the ethics and religion of the state—a religion which is immanent in the community, and an ethics which rises superior to particularity. The picture he draws is a romance fashioned upon the model of the Greek commonwealth as that had been idealised by Greek literature and by the longings of later ages for a freer life. It is but one of the many modes in which Helena—to quote Goethe—has fascinated the German Faust. He dreams himself away from the prosaic worldliness of a German municipality to the unfading splendour of the Greek city with its imagined coincidence of individual will with universal purpose. There is in such a commonwealth no pain of surrender and of sacrifice, and no subsequent compensation: for, at the very moment of resigning self-will to common aims, he enjoys it retained with the added zest of self-expansion. He is not so left to himself as to feel from beyond the restraint of a law which controls—even if it wisely and well controls—individual effort. There is for his happy circumstances no possibility of doing otherwise. Or, it may be, Hegel has reminiscences from the ideals of other nations than the Greek. He recalls the Israelite depicted by the Law-adoring [pg cxcv] psalmist, whose delight is to do the will of the Lord, whom the zeal of God's house has consumed, whose whole being runs on in one pellucid stream with the universal and eternal stream of divine commandment. Such a frame of spirit, where the empirical consciousness with all its soul and strength and mind identifies its mission into conformity with the absolute order, is the mood of absolute Ethics. It is what some have spoken of as the True life, as the Eternal life; in it, says Hegel, the individual exists auf ewige Weise[108], as it were sub specie aeternitatis: his life is hid with his fellows in the common life of his people. His every act, and thought, and will, get their being and significance from a reality which is established in him as a permanent spirit. It is there that he, in the fuller sense, attains αὐτάρκεια, or finds himself no longer a mere part, but an ideal totality. This totality is realised under the particular form of a Nation (Volk), which in the visible sphere represents (or rather is, as a particular) the absolute and infinite. Such a unity is neither the mere sum of isolated individuals, nor a mere majority ruling by numbers: but the fraternal and organic commonwealth which brings all classes and all rights from their particularistic independence into an ideal identity and indifference[109]. Here all are not merely equal before the laws: but the law itself is a living and organic unity, self-correcting, subordinating and organising, and no longer merely defining individual privileges and so-called liberties. “In such conjunction of the universal with the particularity lies the divinity of a nation: or, if we give this universal a separate place in our ideas, [pg cxcvi] it is the God of the nation.” But in this complete accordance between concept and intuition, between visible and invisible, where symbol and significate are one, religion and ethics are indistinguishable. It is the old conception (and in its highest sense) of Theocracy[110]. God is the national head and the national life: and in him all individuals have their “difference” rendered “indifferent.” “Such an ethical life is absolute truth, for untruth is only in the fixture of a single mode: but in the everlasting being of the nation all singleness is superseded. It is absolute culture; for in the eternal is the real and empirical annihilation and prescription of all limited modality. It is absolute disinterestedness: for in the eternal there is nothing private and personal. It, and each of its movements, is the highest beauty: for beauty is but the eternal made actual and given concrete shape. It is without pain, and blessed: for in it all difference and all pain is superseded. It is the divine, absolute, real, existing and being, under no veil; nor need one first raise it up into the ideality of divinity, and extract it from the appearance and empirical intuition; but it is, and immediately, absolute intuition[111].”
If we compare this language with the statement of the Encyclopaedia we can see how for the moment Hegel's eye is engrossed with the glory of the ideal nation. In it, the moral life embraces and is co-extensive with religion, art and science: practice and theory are at one: life in the idea knows none of those differences which, in the un-ideal world, make art and morality often antithetical, and set religion at variance with science. It is, as we have said, a memory of Greek and perhaps Hebrew ideals. Or rather it is by the help of such [pg cxcvii] memories the affirmation of the essential unity of life—the true, complete, many-sided life—which is the presupposition and idea that culture and morals rest upon and from which they get their supreme sanction, i.e. their constitutive principle and unity. Even in the Encyclopaedia[112] Hegel endeavours to guard against the severance of morality and art and philosophy which may be rashly inferred in consequence of his serial order of treatment. “Religion,” he remarks, “is the very substance of the moral life itself and of the state.... The ethical life is the divine spirit indwelling in consciousness, as it is actually present in a nation and its individual members.” Yet, as we see, there is a distinction. The process of history carries out a judgment on nation after nation, and reveals the divine as not only immanent in the ethical life but as ever expanding the limited national spirit till it become a spirit of universal humanity. Still—and this is perhaps for each time always the more important—the national unity—not indeed as a multitude, nor as a majority—is the supreme real appearance of the Eternal and Absolute.
Having thus described the nation as an organic totality, he goes on to point out that the political constitution shows this character by forming a triplicity of political orders. In one of these there is but a silent, practical identity, in faith and trust, with the totality: in the second there is a thorough disruption of interest into particularity: and in the third, there is a living and intellectual identity or indifference, which combines the widest range of individual development with the completest unity of political loyalty. This last order is that which lives in conscious identification of private with public duty: all that it does has a universal and public function. Such a body is the ideal Nobility—the [pg cxcviii] nobility which is the servus servorum Dei, the supreme servant of humanity. Its function is to maintain general interests, to give the other orders (peasantry and industrials) security,—receiving in return from these others the means of subsistence. Noblesse oblige gives the death-blow to particular interests, and imposes the duty of exhibiting, in the clearest form, the supreme reality of absolute morality, and of being to the rest an unperturbed ideal of aesthetic, ethical, religious, and philosophical completeness.
It is here alone, in this estate which is absolutely disinterested, that the virtues appear in their true light. To the ordinary moralising standpoint they seem severally to be, in their separation, charged with independent value. But from the higher point of view the existence, and still more the accentuation of single virtues, is a mark of incompleteness. Even quality, it has been said, involves its defects: it can only shine by eclipsing or reflecting something else. The completely moral is not the sum of the several virtues, but the reduction of them to indifference. It is thus that when Plato tries to get at the unity of virtue, their aspect of difference tends to be subordinated. “The movement of absolute morality runs through all the virtues, but settles fixedly in none.” It is more than love to fatherland, and nation, and laws:—that still implies a relation to something and involves a difference. For love—the mortal passion, where “self is not annulled”—is the process of approximation, while unity is not yet attained, but wished and aimed at: and when it is complete—and become “such love as spirits know[113]”—it gives place to a calmer rest and an active immanence. The absolute morality is life in the fatherland and for the nation. In the individual however it is the process upward and inward [pg cxcix] that we see, not the consummation. Then the identity appears as an ideal, as a tendency not yet accomplished to its end, a possibility not yet made fully actual. At bottom—in the divine substance in which the individual inheres—the identity is present: but in the appearance, we have only the passage from possible to actual, a passage which has the aspect of a struggle. Hence the moral act appears as a virtue, with merit or desert. It is accordingly the very characteristic of virtue to signalise its own incompleteness: it emerges into actuality only through antagonism, and with a taint of imperfection clinging to it. Thus, in the field of absolute morality, if the virtues appear, it is only in their transiency. If they were undisputedly real in morality, they would not separately show. To feel that you have done well implies that you have not done wholly well: self-gratulation in meritorious deed is the re-action from the shudder at feeling that the self was not wholly good.
The essential unity of virtue—its negative character as regards all the empirical variety of virtues—is seen in the excellences required by the needs of war. These military requirements demonstrate the mere relativity and therefore non-virtuousness of the special virtues. They equally protest against the common beliefs in the supreme dignity of labour and its utilities. But if bravery or soldierlike virtue be essentially a virtue of virtues, it is only a negative virtue after all. It is the blast of the universal sweeping away all the habitations and fixed structures of particularist life. If it is a unity of virtue, it is only a negative unity—an indifference. If it avoid the parcelling of virtue into a number of imperfect and sometimes contradictory parts, it does so only to present a bare negation. The soldier, therefore, if in potentiality the unity of all the virtues, may [pg cc] tend in practice to represent the ability to do without any of them[114].
The home of these “relative” virtues—of morality in the ordinary sense—is the life of the second order in the commonwealth: the order of industry and commerce. In this sphere the idea of the universal is gradually lost to view: it becomes, says Hegel, only a thought or a creature of the mind, which does not affect practice. The materialistic worker of civilisation does not see further than the empirical existence of individuals: his horizon is limited by the family, and his final ideal is a competency of comfort in possessions and revenues. The supreme universal to which he attains as the climax of his evolution is only money. But it is only with the vaster development of commerce that this terrible consequence ensues. At first as a mere individual, he has higher aims, though not the highest. He has a limited ideal determined by his special sphere of work. To win respect—the character for a limited truthfulness and honesty and skilful work—is his ambition. He lives in a conceit of his performance—his utility—the esteem of his special circle. To his commercial soul the military order is a scarecrow and a nuisance: military honour is but trash. Yet if his range of idea is narrow and engrossing in details, his aim is to get worship, to be recognised as the best in his little sphere. But with the growth of the trading spirit his character changes: he becomes the mere capitalist, is denationalised, has no definite work and can claim no individualised function. Money now measures all things: it is the sole ultimate reality. It [pg cci] transforms everything into a relation of contract: even vengeance is equated in terms of money. Its motto is, The Exchanges must be honoured, though honour and morality may go to the dogs. So far as it is concerned, there is no nation, but a federation of shopkeepers. Such an one is the bourgeois (the Bürger, as distinct from the peasant or Bauer and the Adel). As an artisan—i.e. a mere industrial, he knows no country, but at best the reputation and interest of his own guild-union with its partial object. He is narrow, but honest and respectable. As a mere commercial agent, he knows no country: his field is the world, but the world not in its concreteness and variety, but in the abstract aspect of a money-bag and an exchange. The larger totality is indeed not altogether out of sight. But if he contribute to the needy, either his sacrifice is lifeless in proportion as it becomes general, or loses generality as it becomes lively. As regards his general services to the great life of his national state[115], they are unintelligently and perhaps grudgingly rendered.
Of the peasant order Hegel has less to say. On one side the “country” as opposed to the “town” has a closer natural sympathy with the common and general interest: and the peasantry is the undifferentiated, solid and sound, basis of the national life. It forms the submerged mass, out of which the best soldiers are made, and which out of the depths of earth brings forward nourishment as well as all the materials of elementary necessity. Faithfulness and loyalty are its virtues: but it is personal allegiance to a commanding superior,—not to a law or a general view—for the peasant is [pg ccii] weak in comprehensive intelligence, though shrewd in detailed observation.
Of the purely political function of the state Hegel in this sketch says almost nothing. But under the head of the general government of the state he deals with its social functions. For a moment he refers to the well-known distinction of the legislative, judicial and executive powers. But it is only to remark that “in every governmental act all three are conjoined. They are abstractions, none of which can get a reality of its own,—which, in other words, cannot be constituted and organised as powers. Legislation, judicature, and executive are something completely formal, empty, and contentless.... Whether the others are or are not bare abstractions, empty activities, depends entirely on the executive power; and this is absolutely the government[116].” Treating government as the organic movement by which the universal and the particular in the commonwealth come into relations, he finds that it presents three forms, or gives rise to three systems. The highest and last of these is the “educational” system. By this he understands all that activity by which the intelligence of the state tries directly to mould and guide the character and fortunes of its members: all the means of culture and discipline, whether in general or for individuals, all training to public function, to truthfulness, to good manners. Under the same head come conquest and colonisation as state agencies. The second system is the judicial, which instead of, like the former, aiming at the formation or reformation of its members is satisfied by subjecting individual transgression to a process of rectification by the general principle. With regard to the system of judicature, Hegel argues for a variety of procedure to suit different ranks, and for a corresponding [pg cciii] modification of penalties. “Formal rigid equality is just what does not spare the character. The same penalty which in one estate brings no infamy causes in another a deep and irremediable hurt.” And with regard to the after life of the transgressor who has borne his penalty: “Punishment is the reconciliation of the law with itself. No further reproach for his crime can be addressed to the person who has undergone his punishment. He is restored to membership of his estate[117].”
In the first of the three systems, the economic system, or “System of wants,” the state seems at first hardly to appear in its universal and controlling function at all. Here the individual depends for the satisfaction of his physical needs on a blind, unconscious destiny, on the obscure and incalculable properties of supply and demand in the whole interconnexion of commodities. But even this is not all. With the accumulation of wealth in inequality, and the growth of vast capitals, there is substituted for the dependence of the individual on the general resultant of a vast number of agencies a dependence on one enormously rich individual, who can control the physical destinies of a nation. But a nation, truly speaking, is there no more. The industrial order has parted into a mere abstract workman on one hand, and the grande richesse on the other. “It has lost its capacity of an organic absolute intuition and of respect for the divine—external though its divinity be: and there sets in the bestiality of contempt for all that is noble. The mere wisdomless universal, the mass of wealth, is the essential: and the ethical principle, the absolute bond of the nation, is vanished; and the nation is dissolved[118].”
It would be a long and complicated task to sift, in [pg cciv] these ill-digested but profound suggestions, the real meaning from the formal statement. They are, like Utopia, beyond the range of practical politics. The modern reader, whose political conceptions are limited by contemporary circumstance, may find them archaic, medieval, quixotic. But for those who behind the words and forms can see the substance and the idea, they will perhaps come nearer the conception of ideal commonwealth than many reforming programmes. Compared with the maturer statements of the Philosophy of Law, they have the faults of the Romantic age to which their inception belongs. Yet even in that later exposition there is upheld the doctrine of the supremacy of the eternal State against everything particular, class-like, and temporary; a doctrine which has made Hegel—as it made Fichte—a voice in that “professorial socialism” which is at least as old as Plato.