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

by William Wallace

What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature—the basis of all things—the fundamental prius—is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving to be, to do, to live,—but an appetitus or nisus which ascends from grade to grade—from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of existence—the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside, indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a nerve-system—a new species of matter. But there is another side to the Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time. Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and religious life its aim is to annihilate the craving and the lust for more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union with the One-and-All.

Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak of Hegel's system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it is only of the Logic that this is the proper name: there, unquestionably, reason is all and in all. Yet to hold that reason is the very life and centre of things is for philosophy the cardinal article—the postulate which must inspire her first and last steps and guide her throughout. But the Logical Idea, if put at the beginning, is at first only put as a presupposition, which it is the task of human intelligence to work out and organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature and render it intelligible, it is a key which has only been gained in the process—the long process—by which man has risen from his natural origin—never however parting company with it—to survey and comprehend himself and his setting. The faculty of 'pure thinking,' which is the pre-condition of Logical study, is the result of a gradual development in which animal sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of discerning and fulfilling the universal and the eternal. Thus in the Logic the system constructs the pure Idea—the ideal timeless organisation of thoughts or λόγοι on which all knowledge of reality rests—the diamond net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes: in the Philosophy of Nature it tries to put together in unity and continuity the phases and partial aspects which the physical universe presents in graduated exemplification of the central truth: and in the Philosophy of Mind it traces the steps by which a merely natural being becomes the moral and aesthetic idealist in whom man approaches deity.

It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable. But the actuality is not the appearance—the temporary phases—the succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence—the succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited understandings and not ex ordine universi. Hegel's doctrine is after all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their personal aims as the standards of judgment.

So too there is reason—there is the Idea—in Nature. But it is there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher; and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint of the absolute—sub specie quadam aeternitatis. It is therefore a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private and personal ideas of the student.

But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.

'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'

—till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is there, and in the great laboratory of natura naturans is the principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean'—for nature is spirit in disguise.

It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with gipsy tread. Who has not—in his early studies of mathematics—been fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our sense for the symmetries of celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed—as they have never since done—with a tangible demonstration of that appetitus ad invicem, that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity—the bifurcation of reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement in each other—eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus only to exist—became a process pressed into general service. Lastly, what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the environment—and of the environment to the individual—of the organs in him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw—the same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history, Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the dullest.