'For those,' he says, 'who ask for a royal road to science, no more convenient directions can be given than to trust to their own sound common sense, and, if they wish to keep up with the age and with philosophy, to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in these works themselves. The introductory remarks state the general and fundamental principles; and the reviews, besides their historical information, contain a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is the road of ordinary men: and it may be traversed in a dressing-gown. The other way is the way of intuition. It requires you to don the vestments of the high-priest. Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call "this a road. These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being, and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar vagueness and scantiness of common sense, that universality is a fully-formed and rounded intellect; and, contrasted with the un-vulgar generality of the natural gift of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its native form, and thus rendered the possible property of every self-conscious reason[15].'
These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily, perhaps) by the patron of the Intellectual Intuition rung the knell to the friendship of Hegel with his great contemporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying is also the keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In Hegel we need expect no brilliant apergus of genius, no intellectual legerdemain, but only the patient unraveling of the clue of thought through all knots and intricacies: a deliberate tracing and working-out of the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the contradiction and the mystery disappear. Perseverance is the secret of Hegel.
This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the V endeavour to clear up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial lectures.
Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed, accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in thought,—the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example, study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon. Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten, and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole, as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea is all-embracing as the universe,—illusions, from which the mind is time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete truth.
Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel. One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception, the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being, where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].'
[1] Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.
[2] Hegel's Briefe, ii. 377.