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

by William Wallace

In those days when reflection had not set in,—when humanity had not yet found itself a stranger in the house of Nature, and had not yet dared to regard her as a mere automatic slave, men had no doubts as to the meaning of things. They lived sympathetically her life.

'Man, once descried, imprints for ever
His presence on all lifeless things: the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh.'

To the extent of his abilities and his culture, indeed man has in all ages read himself into the phenomena external to him. Such readings, in times when he feared and loved his kinsfolk of Nature, were fetichism and anthropomorphism. Gradually, however, forgetting his community, he claimed to be the measure and master of all things: to decree their use and function. But in course of time, when the sciences had emancipated themselves from the yoke of philosophy, they refused to borrow any such help in reading the riddle of the universe, and resolved to begin, ab ovo, from the atom or cell, and leave the elements to work out their own explanation. Modern science in so doing practises the lessons learned from Spinoza and Hume. The former teaches that all conception of order, i. e. of adaptation and harmony in nature, and indeed all the methods by which nature is popularly explained, are only modes of our emotional imagination, betraying how imperfect has been in most of us the emancipation of human intellect from the servitude to the affections[2]. The latter points out that all connexions between things are solely mental associations, ingrained habits of expectation, the work of time and custom, accredited only by experience[3]. There must be no pre-suppositions allowed in the studies of science, no help derived prematurely from the later terms in the process to elucidate the earlier. Let man, it is said, be explained by those laws, and by the action of those primary elements which build up every other part of nature: let molecules by mechanical union construct the thinking organism, and then construct society. The elements which we find by analysis must be all that is required to make the synthesis. Thus in modern times science carries out, fully and with the details of actual knowledge in several branches, the principles of the atom and the void, which Democritus suggested.

The scientific spirit, however, the spirit of analysis and abstraction (or of 'Mediation' and 'Reflection'), is not confined in its operations to the physical world. The criticism of ordinary beliefs and conventions has been applied—and applied at an earlier period—to what has been called the Spiritual world, to Art, Religion, Morality, and the institutions of human Society. Under these names the agency of ages, acting by their individual minds, has created organic systems, unities which have claimed to be permanent, inviolable, and divine. Such unities or organic structures are the Family, the State, the works of Art, the forms, doctrines, and systems of Religion, existing and recognised in ordinary consciousness. But in these cases, as in Nature, the reflective principle may come forward and ask what right these unities have to exist. This is the question which the 'Encyclopaedic,' the 'Aufklärung,' the 'Rationalist' and 'Freethinking' theories, raise and have raised in the last century and the present. What is the Family, it is said, but a fiction or convention, which is used to give a decent, but somewhat transparent covering to a certain animal appetite, and its probable consequences? What is the State, and what is Society, but a fiction or compact, by which the weak try to make themselves seem strong, and the unjust seek to shelter themselves from the consequences of their own injustice? What is Religion, it is said, but a delusion springing from the fears and weakness of the crowd, and the cunning of the few, which men have fostered until it has wrapped humanity in its snaky coils? And Poetry, we are assured, like its sister Arts, will perish and its illusions fade away, when Science, now in the cradle, has become the full-grown Hercules. As for Morality and Law, and the like, the same condemnation has been prepared from of old. All of them, it is said, are but the inventions of power and craft, or the phantoms of human imagination, which the strength of positive science and bare facts is destined in no long time to dispel.

When they insisted upon a severance of the elements in the vulgarly-accepted unities of the world, Science and Freethinking, like Epicurus in an older day, have believed that they were liberating the world from its various superstitions, from the bonds which instinct and custom had fastened upon things so as to combine them into systems more or less arbitrary. They denied the supremacy and reality of those ideas which insist on the essential unity and self-sameness in things that visibly and tangibly have a separate existence of their own, and branded these ideas comprehensively as mysticism and metaphysics. They sought to disabuse us of spirits, vital forces, divine right of governments, final causes, et hoc genus omne. They were exceedingly jealous for the independence of the individual, and for his right to demand satisfaction for the questioning, ground-seeking faculty of his nature. But while they did so they hardly realised how entirely the spectator is the part, the product of what he surveys, and while surveying treats as if it were but a spot or mark on the circumference of the circle that lies—some way off—around him. 'Phenomenalism,' as this mode of looking at things has been called, is false to life, and would cut away the ground from philosophy.[4]

To some extent philosophy returns to the position of the wider consciousness, to the general belief in harmony and symmetry. It reverts to the unity or connexion, which the natural presumptions of mankind find in the picture of the world. The nolo philosophari of the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excesses of the sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement of the popular creed. If science, e. g., had shown that the perception of an external world pre-supposed for its accomplishment an unsuspected series of intermediate steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied the intermediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the natural instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Conviction and natural instinct were declared to counterbalance the abstractions of science. But philosophy which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the testimony of science. If the spiritual unity of the world has been denied and lost to sight, mere assertion that we feel and own its pervading power will not do much good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmentary, but in its fragments elaborated, result of science.

The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis. They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things. They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses the work of science to fill up the lacunae, the gaps, which make popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished: and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of his sons, and investing them in the common store. They are set aside and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in their daily beliefs,—a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring.

Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science, but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition. The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either, until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for themselves[5]. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere recipient: the result, when cut off from the process which produced it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.

'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific forms or types of unity.[6] There are many species and grades of this unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,—to do for the spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were, an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another, but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase.