Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
The panorama of history is the progressive knowledge of the Absolute appearing under successively moreadequate forms. Morality is the Absolute in ever enlarging social relations. Religion is the Absolute in personal relations to man. Philosophy is the Absolute in reasoned apprehension of himself. The Absolute is not to be conceived in anthropomorphic terms, but is the world-process realized as an individual self-consciousness. It is cosmic consciousness become more significant. It is Being regarded as an individuality and including all development.
The Cosmic Law. If the cosmic unity is a cosmic synthetic consciousness, it must be subject to the law of reason which is fundamental in consciousness. The process of consciousness is an unfolding. It is an evolution, but an evolution that is an unfolding. Ordinarily biological evolution restricts itself to the particular type under consideration. It does not take account of the fact that the growth of one type means the destruction of another. It does not view nature in a universal way and consider construction and destruction, action and reaction, equal. It looks upon development as a process along a tangent or like the infinite series of numbers. But the destructions, the defeats, the reciprocal retrogressions, must be accounted for in a truly Absolute consciousness. Evolution is not therefore an upward advance, but a closed circle. The Absolute is not therefore a consistency, but includes contradictions; and evolution cannot truly be interpreted in quantitative but in qualitative terms, as the unfolding of consciousness. The only way to include everything in the Absolute is to think of the Absolute as coming to a consciousness of itself. The Absolute Reality is the same at any temporal beginning or ending. Its meaning is becoming clearer to itself alone. Such clearness appears in the clearness with which thecategories which are the forms of any consciousness become related. The task of philosophy is not to understand these forms together or seriatim, but as moments of a unitary development. They are the links in the development of Spirit, God, the Idea, or the Absolute.
What is this law of spiritual circular development? What are the categories of the cosmic Ego? How can the cosmic organism take account of the contradictions as well as the consistencies of life? The three necessary categories or three fundamental conceptions of the cosmic consciousness are “to be,” “to be denied,” “to be transcended,”—Thesis, its Antithesis, and the Synthesis of the two. In other words they are Assertion, Contradiction, and Return-to-itself. The cosmic law is the Law of Negativity. It is a dialectic process in the union of contradictories, of extremes meeting, of the equality of action and reaction. In Hegel’s hands contradiction becomes the very principle of cosmic harmony. It is the struggle of thought to comprehend itself by using its own contradictory and created experiences for such comprehension. “The phenomenon is the arising and passing away which itself does not pass away, but exists in itself. It constitutes the movement and reality of the life of truth.” The law of human consciousness is this: Assume the truth of any doctrine. Examine it and you will find it in some detail asserting not only its own contradiction or opposite, but also the relation between its assertion and its contradiction. The truth lies in the assertion that transcends the two opposites. The law of the cosmic consciousness is the same. Any stage of history appears in the conscious assurance of the truth of the principles upon which history is founded. But any such assertion by any epoch arouses opposition; and thenext stage in historical development is the assertion of principles that synthesize the assertion of the previous epoch and the opposition to it. The law of consciousness drives history to oppose its own self-assertions and then to a deeper apprehension of itself in a higher assertion, until it finds rest in the knowledge of the Absolute Idea—that Absolute Truth is continuous contradiction. Perhaps Hegel’s most notable contribution to modern thought was his emphasis upon the tremendous power of negation and the stimulating force in contradiction. Spiritual advance is made through opposition.
Hegel’s Application of his Theory. Formulating his theory in 1800, Hegel spent the most of his literary career in exemplifying it. The Phänomenologie (1807) is an attempt to show the natural history of thought in experience. He shows there the series of stages through which the mind passes,—stages corresponding to logic, to the growth of the individual, and to society. In the dialectic movement, consciousness views the world in an external way until it becomes self-conscious; then reason is evolved as a synthesis of the two: i. e. of external consciousness and self-consciousness. Reason then develops by continually turning back upon itself into an ethical, religious, and, lastly, an absolute reason. Hegel wrote his Logic (1812) as an application of his theory to thought—regarding thought as consisting of general concepts. Then came his Encyclopædia (1816), containing his Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind. In his Philosophy of Nature, nature is regarded as revealing the same dialectic as logic, but in the external world. Nature, therefore, stands to logic as its antithesis. The Philosophy of Mind places mind as the synthesis of logic and nature, and elaborates thesubject as mind, objective mind, and the synthesis of the two, or Absolute mind. Thus the dialectic of the Logic is repeated and applied to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. Logic and history are therefore parallel. The content is always the same in both; and the development is always in logical forms. The Absolute Idea by differentiation with itself comes to itself: (1) in Logic through Being, Essence, and Idea; (2) in Nature through matter, individual forms, and organism; (3) in Spirit through consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, right, morality, social morality, art, religion, philosophy. Logic is the Spirit an-sich; nature is the spirit für-sich; mind is the Spirit an-und-für-sich.
CHAPTER XII
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE THING-IN-ITSELF
Herbart and Schopenhauer. The main line of development of the critical Kantian movement was the idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It was the most perfect expression of the period of German philosophy. There were, however, so many distinct elements in the Kantian doctrine, and these were so loosely tied together by Kant, that one is not surprised to find many divergent lines of its subsequent elaboration. It is difficult to classify all these later philosophers. But most prominent in this group stood Herbart and Schopenhauer. Herbart was a Realist, and Schopenhauer a voluntarist and pessimist. They had a common ground and motive for their respective philosophies, and may be placed together in the second group of the disciples of Kant. They were allied (1) in their emphasis upon the importance of the thing-in-itself and (2) in their strong opposition to the idealist movement. While both published their principal writings before the death of Hegel in 1831, both lived to the middle of the nineteenth century and both represent the reaction against the period of idealism. They speak more for the subsequent nineteenth century than for German ideals and Romanticism. They represented a certain feeling of the time that Kant’s doctrine had not received its due at the hands of the Idealists.
Some philosophers had remained true to Kant, but they could not get the public ear until they were reinforced by the positive science and historical criticism of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Bands ofmen had gathered to study Kant even while Idealism was dominant. These were not professional philosophers, but politicians and others engaged in active service. Kant himself in his later years protested against his “false disciples.” Fries and Herbart, even though pupils of Fichte, were true to Kant; and turned attention away from idealistic construction to an examination of the psychological foundations upon which the Kantian criticism rested. Herbart was the most prominent of the empirical psychologists and physicists who turned away from the speculative tendency back to Kant. Schopenhauer was the early spokesman for that mysticism and pessimism which characterized the nineteenth century and appeared in the music of Wagner, the literature of Ibsen, and the philosophy of Von Hartmann and Nietzsche.