[1] For this account, to which he has devoted perhaps the greatest of his works, Hegel has coined the term “Phenomenology of the Mind.” It is the history of the emergence of the free or modern spirit from the undeveloped consciousness of the ancient world, to which, for instance, slavery seemed a natural thing.
The story of mind, then, begins long before the free mind, the object of Psychology to-day, has appeared on the scene. And as to this there would be no great difference of opinion. The peculiarity of Hegel’s treatment is that his romance of the intelligence not only begins long before the phase of free mind is reached, but continues long after. Investigation can no more stop at the individual of to-day than it can begin with him. His “mind” is not a separable entity, and throughout the story no such entity has appeared. It has been convenient for Hegel to treat the earlier division of the Philosophy of Mind, comprising the Anthropology, Phenomenology, [1] and Psychology, as dealing par excellence with Mind Subjective. This is because its main purpose was to trace the growth of “subjectivity,” the emergence of the man of full mental {255} stature, aware of himself, of his ideas and purposes, and confident in his “subjectivity” his self-hood against all comers.
[1] See previous note.
But the following division of the work, under the title of Mind Objective, deals with a necessary implication which might have been noted at any point of the entire history of consciousness, though at any earlier point it could have been treated as referring to mind only by anticipation.
Here, however, the problem can no longer be deferred. The “free mind” does not explain itself and cannot stand alone. Its impulses cannot be ordered, or, in other words, its purposes cannot be made determinate, except in an actual system of selves. Except by expressing itself in relation to an ordered life, which implies others, it cannot exist. And, therefore, not something additional and parallel to it, which might or might not exist, but a necessary form of its own action as real and determinate, is the actual fabric in which it utters itself as Society and the State. This is what Hegel treats in the second division of the Philosophy of Mind under the name of Mind Objective. It is not for him ultimate. A particular society stands in time, and is open to criticism and to destruction. Beyond it lies the reality, continuous with mind as known in the State, but eternal as the former is perishable, which as Absolute Mind is open to human experience in Art, Religion, and Philosophy.
We will pursue in the following chapter Hegel’s analysis of the modern State as Mind Objective, a magnified edition, so to speak, of Plato’s Republic, bringing before the eye in full detail distinctions and articulations which were there invisible.
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CHAPTER X.
THE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL’S “PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT.”
1. We are about to analyse a modern State into groups of facts which are also ways of thinking. And a question may arise in what sense the connection is to be understood which will be alleged to bind together these groups of facts or points of view. When it is urged that group b or view b is suggested and made necessary by the shortcomings of group a or view a, does this imply that group a or its idea came into existence first, and group b or the notion of it sprang up subsequently or as an effect of the former? And could such a relation be reasonably maintained as between the component parts of a unity like the State?