[7] Encycl. Sect. 244 (Logic, p. 379).
[8] Encyclop. §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given in Werke vii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies from Hegel's Naturphilosophie has been collected by Riehl in his Philosophisher Criticismus, ii. 2, 120.
[9] See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME.
We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect and set in relation,—to connect, it may be erroneously, or without proper scrutiny, or under the influence of passions or prejudices,—but at any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has impatiently banned this tendency as a mere fountain of errors. The human mind, says Francis Bacon, always assumes a greater uniformity in things than it finds; it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional cases, and would fain go beyond all limits in its everlasting cry, Why and To what end. It varies in individuals between a passion for discovering similarities and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness. But notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly duckling Reason will go beyond what is given: it knows no insuperable limitation. It may be guilty of what Bacon calls 'anticipation'—an induction on evidence insufficient—or it may subdue itself to the duty of 'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in either case, it is an act of association, synthesis, unification. For Nous is archè, and knows that it is: it will not yield to clamour or mere rebuke: it, too, cannot be commanded, unless by first obeying it: and Bacon, having duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself,' is obliged to let it go to gather the grapes before they are quite ripe, and to indulge it with a 'prerogative' of instances. As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others are never weary of telling us: 'We think in relations. This is truly the form of all thought: and if there are any other forms they must be derived from this[1].' Man used to be defined as a thinking or rational animal: which means that man is a connecting and relation-giving animal; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making him out to be a 'political' animal, is only a corollary, most applicable in the region of Ethics. Here is the ultimate point, from which the natural consciousness, and the energies of science, art, and religion equally start upon their special missions.
In ordinary life we attach but little importance to this machinery of cognition. We incline to let the fact of synthesis drop out of sight, as if it required no further study or notice, and we regard the things connected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest centres on the object—on the matter: the formal element—the connective tissue—is only an instrument of no importance, except in view of the end it helps us to. We use general and half-explained terms, such as development, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to another, without giving any regard to the means of locomotion on their own account. Some one thing is the product of something else: we let the term 'product' slip out of the proposition as unimportant: and then read the statement so as to explain the one thing by turning it into the other. Things, according to this opinion, are all-important: the rest is mere words. These relations between things are not open to further investigation or definition: they are each sui generis, or peculiar: and even if the logician in his analysis of inference finds it advisable to deal with them, he will be content, if he can classify them in some approximate way, as a basis for his subdivision of propositions. This is certainly one way of getting rid of Metaphysics—for the time.
But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity, the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? Would it not be more proper to refrain altogether from the use of such conceptions?