CHAPTER V.
PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI.
It is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a philosophy in a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle separated the pure 'energy' of philosophy from the activities which leave works made and deeds done behind them, it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a philosophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,—nothing on which you can put your finger, and say definitely: Here it is. The spirit of a philosophy always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of the principle or tendency of a philosophical system tells not what that system is, but what it is not. It marks off the position from contiguous points of view; and on that account never gets beyond the borderland, which separates that system from something else. The method and process of reasoning is as essential in knowledge, as the result to which it leads: and the method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, therefore, or a mere record of the purpose and outcome of the system, would be, the one as well as the other, a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words. Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in a few sentences and in large outlines seems foreclosed. The theory of Hegel has an abhorrence of mere generalities, of abstractions with no life in them, and no growth out of them. His principle has to prove and verify itself to be true and adequate: and that verification fills up the whole circle of circles, of which philosophy is said to consist.
It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which the world—the outside observer—rarely sees except in separation. On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds, with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract from the one thing needful—who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the year,'—those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect, with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit. Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence of all that is prosaic, both outside and in[1].' Yet, seen from other points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general unfathomableness of his doctrine,—all seem to support such a charge. Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be a philosopher[2]. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism, and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And, perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,' or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage to expand and lose itself in its explication[3]. It must prove its profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.
The purpose of philosophy—as has been pointed out—is, for Hegel—to know God, which is to know things in their Truth—to see all things in God—to comprehend the world in its eternal significance. Supposing the purpose capable of being achieved, what method is open to its attainment? There is on one hand the method of ordinary science in dealing with its objects. These are things, found as it were projected into space before the observer, lying outside one another in prima facie independence, though connected (by a further finding) with each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities and relations. Among the objects of knowledge, there are included, by the somewhat naïve intellect that accepts tradition like a physical fact, certain 'things' of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God: the others, which a historical criticism has subjoined, are the Soul and the World. And whatever may be said of the thinghood, reality, or existence of the World, there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure, and figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race as entities, differing probably in many respects from other things, but still possessed of certain fundamental features in common, and thus playing a part as distinct realities amongst other realities.
Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind to attempt to make out a science of God and a science of the Soul, just as of other 'things.' And to these, a system-loving philosopher might add a science of the world (Cosmology)[4]. It was felt, indeed, that these objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example, as regards God, it was held necessary by the logician who saw tradition in its true light to prove His existence': and various arguments to that end were at different times devised. With regard to the human Soul, similarly, it was considered essential to establish its independent reality as a thing really separate from the bodily organism with which its phenomena were obviously connected,—to prove, in short, its substantial existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of dissolution and decay. With reference to the World, the problem was rather different: it was felt that the name suggested problems for thought rather than denoted reality. How can we predicate of the whole what is predicable of its parts? This or that may have a beginning and a cause, may have a limit and an end: but can the totality be presented under these aspects, without leading to self-contradiction? And the result of these questions in the case of 'Cosmology' was to shed in the long run similar doubts on 'Rational' Theology and 'Rational' Psychology.
Practically this metaphysical science—which is so called as dealing with a province or provinces of being beyond the ordinary or natural (physical) realities—treated God and the Soul by the same terms (or categories) as it used in dealing with 'material' objects. God e. g. was a force, a cause, a being; so, too, was the Soul. The main butt of Kant's destructive Criticism of pare Reason is to challenge the justice of including God and the Soul among the objects of science,—among the things we can know as we may know plants or stars. To make an object of knowledge (in the strict sense), to make a thing, the prerequisite, Kant urges, is perception in space and time. Without a sensation—and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and duration—an object of science is impossible. No mere demonstration will conjure it into existence. And with that requirement the old theology and psychology, which professed to expound the object-God and the object-soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the sciences, therefore, does not lead beyond the conditioned,' beyond the regions of space and time. It has nothing to say of a 'first cause' or of an ultimate end.