The Logic of Hegel

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The language of Descartes on the maxim that the 'I' which thinks must also at the same time be, his saying that this connexion is given and implied in the simple perception of consciousness,—that this connexion is the absolute first, the principle, the most certain and evident of all things, so that no scepticism can be conceived so monstrous as not to admit it:—all this language is so vivid and distinct, that the modern statements of Jacobi and others on this immediate connexion can only pass for needless repetitions.

65.] The theory of which we are speaking is not satisfied when it has shown that mediate knowledge taken separately is an adequate vehicle of truth. Its distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone, to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a content which is true. This exclusiveness is enough to show that the theory is a relapse into the metaphysical understanding, with its pass-words 'Either—or.' And thus it is really a relapse into the habit of external mediation, the gist of which consists in clinging to those narrow and one-sided categories of the finite, which it falsely imagined itself to have left for ever behind. This point, however, we shall not at present discuss in detail. An exclusively immediate knowledge is asserted as a fact only, and in the present Introduction we can only study it from this external point of view. The real significance of such knowledge will be explained, when we come to the logical question of the opposition between mediate and immediate. But it is characteristic of the view before us to decline to examine the nature of the fact, that is, the notion of it; for such an examination would itself be a step towards mediation and even towards knowledge. The genuine discussion on logical ground, therefore, must be deferred till we come to the proper province of Logic itself.

The whole of the second part of Logic, the Doctrine of Essential Being, is a discussion of the intrinsic and self-affirming unity of immediacy and mediation.

66.] Beyond this point then we need not go: immediate knowledge is to be accepted as a fact. Under these circumstances examination is directed to the field of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If that be so, we need only note, as the commonest of experiences, that truths, which we well know to be results of complicated and highly mediated trains of thought, present themselves immediately and without effort to the mind of any man who is familiar with the subject. The mathematician, like every one who has mastered a particular science, meets any problem with ready-made solutions which pre-suppose most complicated analyses: and every educated man has a number of general views and maxims which he can muster without trouble, but which can only have sprung from frequent reflection and long experience. The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or technical expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even we may say, immediate in our very limbs, in an out-going activity. In all these instances, immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the two things are linked together,—immediate knowledge being actually the product and result of mediated knowledge.

It is no less obvious that immediate existence is bound up with its mediation. The seed and the parents are immediate and initial existences in respect of the off-spring which they generate. But the seed and the parents, though they exist and are therefore immediate, are yet in their turn generated: and the child, without prejudice to the mediation of its existence, is immediate, because it is. The fact that I am in Berlin, my immediate presence here, is mediated by my having made the journey hither.

67.] One thing may be observed with reference to the immediate knowledge of God, of legal and ethical principles (including under the head of immediate knowledge, what is otherwise termed Instinct, Implanted or Innate Ideas, Common Sense, Natural Reason, or whatever form, in short, we give to the original spontaneity). It is a matter of general experience that education or development is required to bring out into consciousness what is therein contained. It was so even with the Platonic reminiscence; and the Christian rite of baptism, although a sacrament, involves the additional obligation of a Christian up-bringing. In short, religion and morals, however much they may be faith or immediate knowledge, are still on every side conditioned by the mediating process which is termed development, education, training.

The adherents, no less than the assailants, of the doctrine of Innate Ideas have been guilty throughout of the like exclusiveness and narrowness as is here noted. They have drawn a hard and fast line between the essential and immediate union (as it may be described) of certain universal principles with the soul, and another union which has to be brought about in an external fashion, and through the channel of given objects and conceptions, There is one objection, borrowed from experience, which was raised against the doctrine of Innate ideas. All men, it was said, must have these ideas; they must have, for example, the maxim of contradiction, present in the mind,—they must be aware of it; for this maxim and others like it were included in the class of Innate ideas. The objection may be set down to misconception; for the principles in question, though innate, need not on that account have the form of ideas or conceptions of something we are aware of. Still, the objection completely meets and overthrows the crude theory of immediate knowledge, which expressly maintains its formulae in so far as they are in consciousness.—Another point calls for notice. We may suppose it admitted by the intuitive school, that the special case of religious faith involves supplementing by a Christian or religious education and development. In that case it is acting capriciously when it seeks to ignore this admission when speaking about faith, or it betrays a want of reflection not to know, that, if the necessity of education be once admitted, mediation is pronounced indispensable.

The reminiscence of ideas spoken of by Plato is equivalent to saying that ideas implicitly exist in man, instead of being, as the Sophists assert, a foreign importation into his mind. But to conceive knowledge as reminiscence does not interfere with, or set aside as useless, the development of what is implicitly in man;—which development is another word for mediation. The same holds good of the innate ideas that we find in Descartes and the Scotch philosophers. These ideas are only potential in the first instance, and should be looked at as being a sort of mere capacity in man.

88.] In the case of these experiences the appeal turns upon something that shows itself bound up with immediate consciousness. Even if this combination be in the first instance taken as an external and empirical connexion, still, even for empirical observation, the fact of its being constant shows it to be essential and inseparable. But, again, if this immediate consciousness, as exhibited in experience, be taken separately, so far as it is a consciousness of God and the divine nature, the state of mind which it implies is generally described as an exaltation above the finite, above the senses, and above the instinctive desires and affections of the natural heart: which exaltation passes over into, and terminates in, faith in God and a divine order. It is apparent, therefore, that, though faith may be an immediate knowledge and certainty, it equally implies the interposition of this process as its antecedent and condition.

It has been already observed, that the so-called proofs of the being of God, which start from finite being, give an expression to this exaltation. In that light they are no inventions of an over-subtle reflection, but the necessary and native channel in which the movement of mind runs: though it may be that, in their ordinary form, these proofs have not their correct and adequate expression.