CHAPTER IV.
P. [80], § 38. The verses (forming part of the advice which Mephistopheles, personating Faust, gives to the recently-arrived pupil) stand in the original in a different order: beginning "Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand," &c. The meaning of these and the two preceding lines is somewhat as follows, in versification even laxer than Goethe's:—
If you want to describe life and gather its meaning,
To drive out its spirit most be your beginning,
Then though fast in your hand lie the parts one by one
The spirit that linked them, alas! is gone.
And 'Nature's Laboratory' is only a name
That the chemist bestows on't to hide his own shame.
One may compare Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, iii. 3, where it is remarked, in reference to some anatomical exercises: 'You will learn ere long that building-up is more instructive than tearing-down, combining more than separating, animating the dead more than killing again what was killed already.... Combining means more than separating: reconstructing more than onlooking.' The first part of Faust appeared 1808: the Wanderjahre, 1828-9.
P. [82], § 39. The article on the 'Relation of scepticism to philosophy, an exposition of its various modifications, and comparison of the latest with the ancient'—in form a review of G. E. Schulze's Criticism of Theoretical Philosophy'—was republished in vol. xvi. of Hegel's Werke (vol. i. of the Vermischte Schriften).
P. [87], § 42. In an earlier review of Kant's work (Werke, i. 83) on Glauben und Wissen (an article in Sendling and Hegel's Journal) Hegel attaches more weight to a factor in the critical theory of knowledge, here neglected. Kant, he says, has—within the limits allowed by his psychological terms of thought—'put (in an excellent way) the à priori of sensibility into the original identity and multiplicity, and that as transcendental imagination in the "higher power" of an immersion of unity in multiplicity: whilst Understanding (Verstand) he makes to consist in the elevation to universality of this à priori synthetic unity of sensibility,—whereby this identity is invested with a comparative antithesis to the sensibility: and Reason (Vernunft) is presented as a still higher power over the preceding comparative antithesis, without however this universality and infinity being allowed to go beyond the stereotyped formal pure infinity. This genuinely rational construction by which, though the bad name "faculties" is left, there is in truth presented a single identity of them all, is transformed by Jacobi into a series of faculties, resting one upon another.'
P. [87], § 42. Fichte: cf. Werke, i. 420: 'I have said before, and say it here again, that my system is no other than the Kantian. That means: it contains the same view of facts, but in its method is quite independent of the Kantian exposition.' 'Kant, up to now, is a closed book.'—i. 442. There are two ways of critical idealism. 'Either' (as Fichte) 'it actually deduces from the fundamental laws of intelligence, that system of necessary modes of action, and with it, at the same time, the objective conceptions thus arising, and thus lets the whole compass of our conceptions gradually arise under the eyes of the reader or hearer; or' (like Kant and his unprogressive disciples) 'it gets hold of these laws from anywhere and anyhow, as they are immediately applied to objects, therefore on their lowest grade (—on this grade they are called categories), and then asseverates that it is by these that objects are determined and arranged.' And i. 478: 'I know that the categories which Kant laid down are in no way proved by him to be conditions of self-consciousness, but only said to be so: I know that space and time and what in the original consciousness is inseparable from them and fills them both, are still less deduced as such conditions, for of them it is not even said expressly—as of the categories—that they are so, but only inferentially. But I believe quite as surely that I know that Kant had the thought of such a system: that everything he actually propounds are fragments and results of this system; and that his statements have meaning and coherence only on this presupposition.' Cf. viii. 362.
P. [89], § 42. Transcendental unity of self-consciousness. Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, § 16: 'The I think must be able to accompany all my ideas.... This idea is an act of spontaneity. ... I name it pure apperception ... or original apperception ... because it is that self-consciousness which can be accompanied by none further. The unity of it I also call the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to denote the possibility of cognition à priori from it.'
P. [92], § 44. Caput mortuum: a term of the Alchemists to denote the non-volatile precipitate left in the retort after the spirit had been extracted: the fixed or dead remains, 'quando spiritus animam sursum vexit.'