P. [14], § 7 (note). The speech from the throne was read on Feb. 3rd, 1825.
The shipowners' dinner was on Feb. 12. The Times of Feb. 14 gives as Canning's the words 'the just and wise maxims of sound not spurious philosophy.'
P. [17], § 10. 'Scholasticus' is the guileless 'freshman,' hero of certain Facetiae (attributed to the Pythagorean philosopher Hierocles) which used occasionally to form part of the early Greek reading of schoolboys.
K. L. Reinhold (1754-1823) presents in his intellectual history a picture of the development of ideas in his age. At the beginning his Attempt of a new theory of the human representative faculty (1789) is typical of the tendency to give a subjective psychological interpretation of Kant's theory of knowledge But the period of Reinhold's teaching here referred to is that of Contributions to an easier survey of the condition of philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Beiträge, 1801): the tendency which Hegel, who reviewed him in the Critical Journal of Philosophy (Werke, i. 267 seqq.), calls 'philosophising before philosophy.'—A similar spirit is operative in Krug's proposal (in his Fundamental Philosophy, 1803) to start with what he called 'philosophical problematics.'
P. [19], § 11. Plato, Phaedo, p. 89, where Socrates protests against the tendency to confound the defect of a particular piece of reasoning with the incompetence of human reason altogether.
P. [22], § 13. The dictum that the historical succession of philosophical systems is identical with their logical sequence should not be taken too literally and mechanically. Its essential point is simply the theorem that history is not a casual series of unconnected events—the deeds of particular persons, but is an evolution under laws and uniformities:—it is this theorem applied to philosophies. But difficulties may easily arise in the application of the general principle: e.g. it will be seen (by comparison of § 86 and § 104) that though Pythagoras precedes Parmenides, and number is a stepping-stone to pure thought still pure Being comes at an earlier stage than Quantity.
P. [23], § 13. There is a silent reference to what Reinhold professed to make the subject of his teaching at Jena—'philosophy without surnames' (ohne Beinamen),—i.e. not a 'critical' philosophy;—or to the 'Philosophy which may not bear any man's name of Beck. As Hegel says, Werke, xvi. 138, 'The solicitude and apprehension against being one-sided is only too often part of the weakness which is capable only of many-sided illogical superficiality.'
P. [27], § 16. By 'anthropology' is meant not the anthropology of modern writers, who use the name to denote mainly the history of human culture in its more rudimentary stages, and as exhibited chiefly in material products, but the study of those aspects of psychology which are most closely allied with physiological conditions.
With the power of the intuition of genius to give almost all that logical synthesis can produce, cf. Werke, I. 331: 'In this way a grand and pure intuition is able, in the purely architectonic features of its picture, though the inter-connection of necessity and the mastery of form does not come forward into visibility, to give expression to the genuine ethical organism—like a building which silently exhibits the spirit of its author in the several features of its mass, without the image of that spirit being set forth anywhere in one united shape. In such a delineation, made by help of notions, it is only a want of technical skill which prevents reason from raising the principle it embraces and pervades into the "ideal" form and becoming aware of it as the Idea. If the intuition only remains true to itself and does not let analytic intellect disconcert it, it will probably—just because it cannot dispense with notions for its expression—behave awkwardly in dealing with them, assume distorted shapes in its passage through consciousness, and be (to the speculative eye) both incoherent and contradictory: but the arrangement of the parts and of the self-modifying characters betray the inward spirit of reason, however invisible. And so far as this appearance of that spirit is regarded as a product and a result, it will as product completely harmonise with the Idea.' Probably Goethe is before Hegel's mind.
P. [28], § 17. The triplicity in unity of thought—its forthgoing 'procession,' (cf. p. 362 seqq.) and its return, which is yet an abiding in itself (Bei:sich:sein) was first explicitly schematised by Proclus, the consummator of Neo-Platonism. In his Institutio Theologica he lays it down that the essential character of all spiritual reality (aσώματον) is to be πρὸς ἑαυτὸ ἐπιστρεπτικόν, i.e. to return upon itself, or to be a unity in and with difference,—to be an original and spontaneous principle of movement (c. 15): or, as in C 31: πὰν τὸ πρoῒὸν ἀπό τινος κατ' οὐσίαν ἐπιστρέφεται πρὸς ἐκεῖνο ἀφ' οὗ πρόεισιν. Its movement, therefore, is circular κυκλικὴν ἔχει τὴν ἐνέργειαν (c. 33): for everything must at the same time remain altogether in the cause, and proceed from it, and revert to it (c. 35). Such an essence is self-subsistent (αὐθυπόςτατον),—is at once agent (πάραγον) and patient (παραγόμενον). This 'mysticism' (of a trinity which is also unity of motion which is also rest), with its πρόοδoς, ἐπιστroφή, and μονή, is taken up, in his own way, by Scotus Erigena (De Divisione Naturae) as processio (or divisio), reditus, and adunatio. From God 'proceed'—by an eternal creation—the creatures, who however are not outside the divine nature; and to God all things created eternally return.