Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic

by William Wallace

Perhaps the main hindrance in the way of a clear vision is the contrast which Hegelian philosophy offers to our ordinary habits of mind. Generally speaking, we rest contented if we can get tolerably near our object, and form a general picture of it to set before ourselves. It might almost be said that we have never thought of such a thing as being in earnest either with our words or with our thoughts. We get into a way of speaking with an uncertain latitude of meaning, and leave a good deal to the fellow-feeling of our hearers, who are expected to mend what is defective in our utterances. For most of us the place of exact thought is supplied by metaphors and pictures, by mental images, and figures generalised from the senses. And thus it happens that, when we come upon a single precise and definite statement, neither exceeding nor falling short in its meaning, we are thrown out of our reckoning. Our fancy and memory have nothing left for them to do: and, as fancy and memory make up the greater part of what we loosely call thinking, our powers of thought seem to be brought to a standstill. Those who crave for fluent reading, or prefer easy writing, something within the pale of our usual mental lines, are more likely to find what they seek in the ten partially correct and approximate ways commonly used to give expression to a truth, than in the one simple and accurate statement of the thought. We prefer a familiar name, and an accustomed image, on which our faculties may work. But in the atmosphere of Hegelian thought, we feel very much as if we had been lifted into a vacuum, where we cannot breathe, and which is a fit habitation for unrecognisable ghosts only.

Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs the heights of Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after circling in grand curve upon the mountain-side, and perhaps after having been dragged mysterious distances through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself as it would seem back at the same place as he looked forth from some minutes before; and it is only after a brief comparison that he realises he now commands a wider view from a point some hundreds of feet higher. So the student of Hegel—(and it might be the case with Fichte also) as the machinery of the dialectical method, with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, carries him round and round from term to term of thought—like the Logos and the Spirit, which blow us whithersoever they list—begins to suffer from dizziness at the apprehension that he has been the victim of phantasmagoria and has not really moved at all. It is only later—if ever—that he recognises that the scene, though similar, is yet not altogether the same. It is only later—if ever—that he understands that the path of philosophy is no wandering from land to land more remote in search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God; no setting forth of new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and move, and have our being,—the manifestation in more closely-knit unity and more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal, which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps even no, traces of its power and glory.

To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we have to go through in trying to answer a riddle. The terms of the problem to be solved are all given to us: the features of the object are, it may be, fully described: and yet somehow we cannot at once tell what it is all about, or add up the sum of which we have the several items. We are waiting to learn the subject of the proposition, of which all these statements may be regarded as the predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly been said: but we are at a loss to see what it has been said about. Our mind wanders round from one familiar object to another, and tries them in succession to see whether any one satisfies the several points in the statement and includes them all. We grope here and there for something we are acquainted with, in which the bits of the description may cohere, and get a unity which they cannot give themselves. When once we have hit upon the right object, our troubles are at an end: and the empty medium is now peopled with a creature of our imagination. We have reached a fixed point in the range of our conception, around which the given features may cluster.

All this trouble caused by the Hegelian theory of what philosophy involves—viz. really beginning at the beginning, is saved by a device well known to the several branches of Science. It is the way with them to assume that the student has a rough general image of the objects which they examine; and under the guidance, or with the help of this generalised image, they go on to explain and describe its outlines more completely. They start with an approximate conception, such as anybody may be supposed to have; and this they seek to render more definite. The geologist, for example, could scarcely teach geology', unless he could pre-suppose or produce some acquaintance on the part of his pupils with what Hume would have called an 'impression' or an 'idea' of the rocks and formations of which he has to treat. The geometer gives a short, and, as it were, popular explanation of the sense in which angles, circles, triangles, &c. are to be understood: and then by the aid of these provisional definitions we come to a more scientific notion of the same terms. The third book of Euclid, for example, brings before us a clearer notion of what a circle is, than the nominal explanation in the list of definitions. By means of these temporary aids, or, as we may call them, leading-strings for the intellect, the progress of the ordinary scientific student is made tolerably easy. But v in philosophy, as it is found in Hegel, there is quite another way of working. The helps in question are absent: and until it be seen that they are not even needed, the Hegelian theory will remain a sealed mystery. For that which the first glance seemed to show as an enigma, is only the plain and unambiguous statement of thought. Instead of casting around for images and accustomed names, we have only to accept the several terms and articles in the development of thought as they present themselves. These terms merely require to be apprehended. They stand in no immediate need of illustration from our experience. What we have to bring to the work, is patience, self-restraint, the sacrifice of our cherished habits of mind, the surrender of the natural wish to see at once what it all comes to, what it is good for, how it squares with other convictions. As Bacon reminded his age, Into the kingdom of philosophy, as into the kingdom of heaven, none can enter, nisi sub persona infantis: i. e. unless he at least steadfastly resolve to renounce that world which lieth in the Evil.

Ordinary knowledge consists in referring a new object to a class of objects, that is to say, to a generalised image with which we are already acquainted. It is not so much cognition as re-cognition. '"What is the truth?"' asked Lady Chettam of Mrs. Cadwallader in Middle-march. "The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic—nasty to take, and sure to disagree." "There could not be anything worse than that," said Lady Chettam, with so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned something exact about Mr. Casaubon's 'disadvantages.' Once we have referred the new individual to a familiar category or a convenient metaphor, once we have given it a name, and introduced it into the society of our mental drawing-room, we are satisfied. We have put a fresh object in its appropriate drawer in the cabinet of our ideas: and hence, with the pride of a collector, we can calmly call it our own. But such acquaintance, proceeding from a mingling of memory and naming, is not the same thing as knowledge in the strict sense of the term.[2] 'What is he?' 'Do you know him?' These are our questions: and we are satisfied when we learn his name and his calling. We may never have penetrated into the inner nature of those objects, with whose tout ensemble, or rough outlines, we are so much at home, that we fancy ourselves thoroughly cognisant of them. Classifications are only the first steps in science: and we do not understand a thought because we can view it under the guise of some of its illustrations.

In the case of the English reader of Hegel some peculiar hindrances spring from the foreign language. In strong contrast to most of the well-known German philosophers, he may be said to write in the popular and national dialect of his country. Of course there are tones and shades of meaning given to his words by the general context of his system. But upon the whole he did what he promised to J. H. Voss—the translator of Homer, and the poet of the Luise, in a letter written from Jena in 1805. He there says of his projects: 'Luther has made the Bible, and you have made Homer speak German. No greater gift than this could be given to the nation. So long as a nation is not acquainted with a noble work in its own language, it is still barbarian, and does not regard the work as its own. Forget these two examples, and I may describe my own efforts as an attempt to teach philosophy to speak in German.[3]

Yet, in this matter of nationalising or Germanising philosophy, he only carried a step further what Wolff and even Kant had begun; just as, on the other hand, he falls a long way short of what K. C. F. Krause, his contemporary, attempted in the same direction. Such an attempt, by its very nature, could never command a popular success. It runs directly counter to that tendency already noted, to escape the requirement to think and think for ourselves, by taking refuge under the shadow of a familiar term, which conceals in its apparent simplicity a great complex of ill-apprehended elements. The ordinary mind—and the more readily perhaps the more vulgar it is—flees for ease and safety to a cosmopolitan term, to the denationalised vocable of learned origin, to the language of general European culture. To such an ordinary mind—and up at least to a certain extent we all at times come under that heading—the effort to remain in the pellucid air of our unadulterated mother-tongue is too embarrassing to be long continued. Nor, after all, is it more than partially practicable. The well of German undefiled is apt to run dry. Hegel himself never shrinks when it is needful to appropriate non-Teutonic words, and is in the habit of employing the synonymous terms of native and of classical origin with a systematic difference of meaning [4]

Hegel is unquestionably par excellence the philosopher of Germany,—German through and through. For philosophy, though the common birthright of full-grown reason in all ages and countries, must like other universal and cosmopolitan interests, such as the State, the Arts, or the Church, submit to the limits and peculiarities imposed upon it by the natural divisions of race and language. The subtler nuances, as well as the coarser differences of national speech, make themselves vividly felt in the systems of philosophy, and defy translation. If Greek philosophy cannot, no more can German philosophy be turned into a body of English thought by a stroke of the translator's pen. There is a difference in this matter, a difference at least in degree, between the special sciences and philosophy. The several sciences have a de-nationalised and cosmopolitan character, like the trades and industries of various nations; they are pretty much the same in one country and another, especially when we consider the details, and neglect the general subdivisions. But in the political body, in the works of high art, and in the systems of philosophy, the whole of the character and temperament of the several peoples finds its expression, and stands distinctly marked, in a shape of its own. If the form of German polity be not transferable to this side of the Channel, no more will German philosophy. Direct utilisation for English purposes is out of the question: the circumstances are too different. But the study of the great works of foreign thought is not on that account useless, any more than the study of the great works of foreign statesmanship.

Hegel did good service, at least, by freeing philosophy from that aspect of an imported luxury, which it usually had,—as if it were an exotic plant removed from the bright air of Greece into the melancholy mists of Western Europe. 'We have still,' he says, 'to break down the partition between the language of philosophy, and that of ordinary consciousness: we have to overcome the reluctance against thinking what we are familiar with[5].' Philosophy must be brought face to face with ordinary life, so as to draw its strength from the actual and living present, and not from the memories or traditions of the past. It has to become the organised and completed thinking of what is contained blindly and vaguely in the various levels of popular intelligence, as these are more or less educated and ordered. It must grow naturally, as in ancient Greece, from the necessities of the social situation, and not be a product of artificial introduction and nurture: the revelation by the mind's own energy of an implicit truth, not the communication of a mystery sacramentally received. To suppose that a mere change of words can give this grace, would be absurd. Yet where the national life pulses strong, as that of Germany in those days did at first in letters and then in social reform, the dominant note will make itself felt even in the neutral regions of speculation. It was a step on the right road to banish a pompous and aristocratic dialect from philosophy, and to lead it back to those words and forms of speech, which are at least in silent harmony with the national feeling.