Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the perception—the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception—of faith, a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once, something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head. It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed conversion—a new birth—becoming a new man. But though such a change always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,—as if the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history and a preparation. Of that pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the record: a record which Hegel has written both in the Phenomenology of Mind, and, more methodically, in his Encyclopaedia. The passage from nature to God—or from man's limitations to the divine fullness—must be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].'
'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:—as a fixed invincible finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature, which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy—as if the delineation of eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too Philosophy—on this view—must not portray the Idea of man, but the abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible, and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.
'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it. The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real) may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible. So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole: that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to consist in the temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain, should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'
Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher has been drawn by Hegel[13] in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi touched hands—though not in a sympathetic spirit—with a somewhat motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates, but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing stages, in which we are not ourselves,—whereby we also lose the true perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of spiritual being. We have grown into verständige Leute—people of practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come—if it could come—as the great breath of life—of 'reason' (Vernunft) which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and knowledge. But to this band—which has been styled the Romantic School of Germany—the liberation came in ways more analogous to that craved for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh, ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,—free in the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princely jus aggratiandi, the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.
The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, as well as in England, was a period of effervescence:—there was a good deal of fire, and naturally there was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom. The Romantic School, which had grown up under the stimulus of Fichte's resolve to enact thought, and had for a time been closely allied with Schelling, counted amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels, of Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world, as that generation dreamed, was to be made young again,—first by drinking, where Wordsworth led, from the fresh springs of nature,—afterwards when, as often has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was really to be found, by an elixir distilled from the withered flowers of medieval Catholicism and chivalry,
'Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time'
and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. The good old times of faith and harmonious beauty were to be brought back again by the joint labours of ideas and poetry.—
'So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'
To that period of incipient and darkling energy Hegel stands in very much the same position as Luther did to the pre-Reformation mystics, to Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the 'German Theology.' It was from this side, from the school of Genius and Romance in philosophy, that Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer re-action, but into system, development, and science.
To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can not, as Jacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy the things of God[14]. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.