The sphere, therefore, and field in which philosophy has to move, or to which it has to apply itself, is no narrow one, hemmed in and confined by any unwarrantable exclusiveness. On the contrary, it must, so far is possible for aught that is human, be complete and perfect. And for this reason also, she must not, as indeed she can not, take her rise in a consciousness artificially parceled out and divided, and, in short, but one half of its true self, and which, being biassed and visionary in its views, is divorced from real life. It can originate only in the mind’s greatest perfection and in its full and most undivided entirety, inasmuch as to make this consciousness clear to itself and to others constitutes even its proper function and entire aim.
In the latest period of German philosophy many an ingenious path of investigation has, no doubt, been here and there struck out. By a critical comparison of different views, systems, and opinions, dialectics, as a preparatory course of study, has been improved, psychological research advanced, especially the philosophy of nature enlarged. Still, on the whole, a purely abstract mode of thinking, totally estranged and separate from actual life, is almost universally held to be the only right road to a profound philosophy. This so-called pure and abstract thinking takes nothing for granted, and allows of no postulate or axiom; it acknowledges none besides, and generally has no foundation save itself; it starts from itself alone, and in so far has, strictly speaking, no proper beginning. Consequently, without proper end or aim, it goes on continually revolving around itself as a center, and within its own charmed circle. Assuredly, where the dialectic art and system moves within this narrow range of thought, and restricts itself thereto, employing a language which, while it is sharply abstruse, metaphysically recondite, and pre-eminently abstract, has at least the merits of clearness and distinctness, and ingenious classification, then the very first result of such an exercise of dialectic art is profitable, although merely negative. For it establishes the fact, that truth and knowledge are not to be attained by this method; that thus it can not profitably be either sought or found. It shows, too, that this dialectical preludium itself in nothing more than a preliminary exercise that at most does but serve as an introduction to another more lively way of fruitful thought; though even as such it is suited, not indeed for all, but simply for those who enter upon it with this view of its nature.
Human language, with its wonderful suppleness, can adjust itself even to the consciousness which is parceled out and abstractedly divided, so as perfectly to copy and reflect it in its ever-movable mirror. It is able to give a perspicuous order and an artist-like shape even to the mere logical thought which has no subject-matter. It only fails when the logical conceit of mere empty thought contemptuously rejects in the giddy whirl of supreme abstraction, as its last earthly defect, the laws of grammatical art, and refuses to add to its abstract style the merit of perspicuity, in order that, as a metaphysical chimera, it may in the inaccessible darkness that shrouds the obscure of the high-enthroned “Ego,” soar higher and higher, and withdraw itself as much as possible from the eyes of man. A confused terminology, perfect unintelligibility, are the never-failing companions and peculiar characteristics of a false philosophy, which dreams of finding the inestimable jewel of truth and science in a never-ending and elaborate division of the consciousness. It places perfection in an abstraction carried continually higher and higher in its emptiness. But in truth it is only in the living unity of the full consciousness that we can properly understand the pure logical forms of thought, such as they are inborn in the human mind, or are engraved thereon as the first directive traits and principles of its intellect and rational activity. They must be judged of according to the place which they occupy in the whole, and relatively to the manner in which they act in or influence it. It is thus alone that their true signification can be determined and truly conceived.
As often, however, as from that self-styled pure, but in reality empty and totally abstract mode of thinking, which is divorced from life and the realities of things, it is hoped to raise or to evoke, as it were, by spell, a real system of true knowledge, we have a repetition of the old history of the Babylonian tower, with its consequent confusion of language. Every new system of this kind is nothing more than an additional section of or an appendix to that ancient confusion of speech, as well as of views and opinions, so ancient in the history of the human mind. Each of these builders in the edifice of endless error commences with pulling down the fabric that his immediate predecessor and all before him may have commenced, while in the space he has thus cleared for his own labors, he founds and rears the imaginary tower of his own knowledge and science. He has at least the firm intention to raise it still higher—nay, far and far above the height that all before him have attained. But one man understands another just as little as himself. More and more entangled and obscure, consequently, becomes this new confusion of ideas, till at last nothing remains but the anomalous ruins of crumbled and abraded thoughts, which even when entire were only so many lifeless stones—mere abstractions, soon either wholly forgotten, or if surviving, becoming daily more and more unintelligible—since the original lexicon or alphabet, or the all-explaining key to these rare and singular characters, can be recovered only with the greatest difficulty.
A true and living philosophy can not choose and pursue this method of ever-advancing abstraction; much less can it recognize it as the only right one. It proceeds rather from life itself and the feeling of life, and, in truth, from a feeling and consciousness of it, which strives to be as complete as possible. Far is it from dreaming that it is in any artificial and elaborately-worked-out division of the human mind, that it must seek its success or hope to attain its aim—the end of all true knowledge. Without that, it feels that man’s consciousness, in its existing state, at least, is already too much rent and distracted by division, and being by means of this dismemberment checked in its natural action, and weakened and impeded.
And this even is the point on which all turns. That philosophy of so-called pure, but properly empty thinking, separated and abstracted from actual reality, without end and without beginning, without ground as without aim, knows nothing of our postulate of life, in the full extent and sense of this word, so far as any thing is full and complete for man. The thinker, once entangled in the meshes of such a philosophy, can not admit of such an hypothesis, will allow to it no value, or, rather, knows nothing of it, and would never be able to make any thing of it. And yet, notwithstanding, in this very philosophy an hypothesis is started, or, rather, assumed beforehand—one, however, which in truth is entirely arbitrary, and which, when examined more closely and with rigid scrutiny, betrays at once its utter baselessness. It depends on or consists in assuming that the human mind, as it exists at present, is in a perfect state, and has remained entire and complete, and altogether unaltered from its original constitution. It holds that nothing is wanted for the attainment of truth, beyond a careful and skillful analysis of man’s self-consciousness, and a correct and appropriate classification of its several members. But, on the contrary, whenever we yield and give ourselves up to the feelings of our inward consciousness, and try carefully to understand it simply as it is, the first thing that strikes us most forcibly is a discord and opposition subsisting not only between ourselves and the external world, but a strife with one’s self raging in the inmost center of the mind, so that it seems to fall asunder and to rend itself into absolute unconsciousness and irreconcilable contrarieties.
Now, is it probable that strife would form the original state or the proper destiny of the human or even of any other being? can this, in short, have been the case from the first?
Strife, it is true, prevails every where in human life. It has its parties and divisions in the present no less than in the past, in the free intercourse of private as well as in political life, in the family as well as in the faith, in knowledge as in thought and opinion. Wherever these act upon life, or in any way affect it, they invariably involve it in hostile opposition and sectarian animosity.
But the immediate question here is not of this strife of the passions, or of the moral corruption of the inner character, which is excited by their indulgence, although, in truth, the external strife of human nature, which comes forward, as it were, in a visible and bodily shape, and its earliest source in the hidden contentions of the inmost soul, which arise from its entire constitution and the present condition and state of our faculty of thought.
Just a little also do we refer to any view taken of the sad mutilations of the human consciousness resulting either from some faulty organization and disease, or from those defects which proceed from defects of character or weakness of intellect. The conditions which, relatively speaking at least, we call physically and morally sound, as being free from all remarkable deficiencies or disorders, are, nevertheless, not to be regarded on this account as perfect, and endued with full living energy, and possessed of their original completeness. On the contrary, in the general mind, such as on the whole we find it at present, and which, in this respect, we may look upon as being in its true and proper state, there is much that is evidently perverted from its right object, much that has fallen a prey to disorder. And indeed we are naturally led to take the same view of it when we discover most of the several constituents of the mind for the greater part extremely weak, and as it were in a crippled state, and its different faculties seldom if ever maintaining a deep pervading harmony, and keeping in perfect unison with each other. It is to this internal opposition and original dissension of the thinking consciousness that I here would draw your attention, as psychologically manifesting itself between thinking, feeling, and willing. In this dissension, so deeply rooted in our inmost being, intellect and will are, even independently of the effect of human institutions and observances, but seldom in harmony; while reason and imagination, if not always opposed, are at least greatly estranged, and seldom maintain a mutual good understanding.