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

by William Wallace

Philosophy, said one of the ancients[2], begins in wonder, and ends in wonder. It begins from the surprise that something could be what it purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our having thought anything else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious to find out all that can be known,—like the young wanderer on the sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accumulations of the past grow heavier in the receptacle, the need of a re-examination of the stores becomes imperative. The bright colours have faded—and generally they fade soon: there has been much picked up in the inexperience of youthful enthusiasm which maturer reflection hardly can think worth carrying further.

The duty of doubt and of re-examination of what tradition has bequeathed has been enforced by philosophy in all ages. For it is the cardinal principle of philosophy to be free—to possess its soul—never to be a mere machine or mere channel of tradition. But, in some ages, this assertion of its freedom has had for the soul a pre-eminently negative aspect. It has meant only freedom from—and not also freedom in and through—its environing, or rather constituting, substance. Such an epoch was seen in the ancient world when the New Academy, with its sceptical abstention from all objective assertions, had to protest against the dogmatism of the Stoic and Epicurean schoolmen. In modern times the initial shudder before plunging in has been a recurrent crisis. Each thinker—as he personally resolved to thread his way through the wilderness of current opinion to the realm of certified truth—has had to remind himself (and his contemporaries) that in knowledge at least no possessions are secured property unless they have been earned by the sweat of their owner's brow. This is the common theme of Bacon's aphorisms in the beginning of the Novum Organum, of Descartes' Discourse of Method, and of Spinoza's unfinished essay on the Emendation of the Intellect. There is indeed a discrepancy in these utterances as to the measure in which they severally think it needful to insist as preliminary on a kind of moral and religious consecration of life to the service of truth. But a more compelling division arises. The maxim may be understood to say, 'Divest thy mind of its ill-gotten gains, its evil habits, prejudices, and system, and in childlike simplicity prepare thine eye and ear to receive in pure vessels the stores of truth which are ready to stream in from the world.' Or it may rather be held to say, 'Remember that thou art a conscious, waking mind, and that every idea thou hast is thine by thine own assent: insist upon thy right of free intelligence, and give no place to any belief which thou hast not raised into full light of consciousness, and found to be completely consistent with the whole power and content of thy clearest thought.' And, we may add, if the maxim be obeyed too exclusively in either way, it will be obeyed amiss.

With Locke the question comes into even greater prominence. On what conditions can I have knowledge? How can I be certified that my ideas—the subjective images in my mind—have a reference to something objective and real? Locke's answer is, not unnaturally perhaps, somewhat prolix, and wanting in fundamental precision of principles. After dismissing the view that, even before experience, there are certain common ideas spontaneously and by original endowment present in all human beings, he goes on to show how we can sufficiently account for the ideas we actually find by supposing in us an almost unlimited power of joining and disjoining, of comparing, relating, and unifying the various elementary 'ideas' which make their way into the empty chambers of our mind by the senses. As to the source, the channel, and the nature of these sense-ideas, Locke is obscure and apparently inconsistent: though clearly it should be all important to know how an idea can be caused by, or spring from, a material thing. When in his fourth book he comes to the question of what is the reality, or the meaning of our ideas, he does not really get beyond a few—rather dubiously reasoned-out—conclusions that, although strictly we cannot go beyond 'the present testimony of our senses employed about the particular objects that do affect them,' we may for practical purposes allow a good deal to the presumptions of general probability.

But Locke had also begun to criticise our ideas, in his account of their formation out of the 'simple ideas'— (which neither Locke nor any other atomist of mind has succeeded in making clear)—which the several senses give, and by observing or reflecting on what goes on or is present in our minds, we 'form,' he says, various ideas. In a style of discussion which is on the borderland between vulgar and philosophical analysis— (never quite false, but nearly always inadequate, because it almost invariably assumes what it ostensibly proposes to explain,) Locke tells us how we get one idea by 'enlarging,' another by 'repeating,' as we please, the bounteous data of the touch and sight. But amongst the compounds there are some of more disputable origin. There are some—e.g. ideas of punishable acts or legalised states—which are 'voluntary collections of ideas put together in the mind independent from any original patterns in nature,' These, though entirely subjective, are entirely real, because they only serve as patterns by which we may judge or designate things so and so. It is worse with the idea of power, which we only 'collect' or 'infer,' and that not from matter, where it is invisible, but only in a clear light when we consider God and spirits. Still worse, perhaps, is it with the idea of substance, which is a 'collection' of simple ideas with the 'supposition' of an 'incomprehensible' something in which the collection 'subsists.'

Hump put all this rather more pointedly. We have 'impressions,' i. e. lively perceptions by sense. We have also 'ideas,' i. e. fainter images of these, but otherwise identical. An idea should be a copy of an impression. If you cannot point out any such impression, you may be certain you are mistaken when you imagine you have any such idea. There is prevalent in the mental world a kind of association; a 'gentle force' connects ideas in our imagination according to certain relations they possess. This 'mind' or this 'imagination' is only a bundle or collection of impressions and ideas; but a collection which is continually and rapidly changing in its constituents, and in the scale of liveliness possessed by each constituent. When an idea is particularly fresh and forcible, it is a belief or it is believed in: when faint, not so. Or, otherwise put, the object of an idea is said to exist, when the idea itself is vividly felt[3]. Really there is no such thing as 'external existence' taken literally. 'Our universe is the universe of the imagination': all existence is for a consciousness.

Impressions arise in certain orders of sequence or co-existence. When two impressions frequently recur and always in the same order, the custom binds them so closely together, that, should one of them only be given as impression, we cannot help having an idea of the other, which, growing more vivid by the contagion of the contiguous impression, creates, or is, a belief in its reality. Between the perceptions as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent existences. They only get a connexion through our feeling; we feel a 'determination' of our thought to pass from one to another. The one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does not cause the other. 'We never have any impression that contains any power or efficacy[4],' Hence the power and necessity we attribute to the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation of our incapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real bond between the two impressions themselves, The necessity is in the mind—as a habit-caused compulsion—not in the objects.

As with the relation of cause and effect, so it is with others. The identity of continued existence is only another name—an objective transcript—of the feeling of smooth uninterrupted succession of impressions in which our thought glides along from one in easy transition to another. And here the coherence and continuity of perceptions need not be absolute. A vivid impression of unbroken connexion in a part will, if predominant, by association fill up the gaps and weak points, and behind the admitted breaks in the line of our ideas will suppose—invent—or create an imperceptible but real continuity in the supposed things. And by this fiction of a continuous existence of our perceptions, we easily lapse into the doctrine that our perceptions have an independent existence as objects or things in themselves:—a doctrine which according to Hume is contrary to the plainest experience.

But if the world is always the world of imagination—of Vorstellung—of mental representation, Hume is aware that we must admit two orders or grades of such representation. We must distinguish, he remarks[5], 'in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible and universal (such as the customary transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes), and the principles which are changeable, weak and irregular. The former are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions,' There are, in other words, normal and general laws of association—such as the relation of cause and effect—which persuade us of real existence. By its own laws, therefore, within the realm of Vorstellung or Mental idea, there grows up a permanent, objective world for all, contrasted with the temporary, accidental perception of the individual and of the moment; and this serves as the standard or the one common measure by which occasional perturbations are to be measured. Within the limits of the subjective in general there arises a subjective of higher order, which is truly objective. This same change of front—as it may be called—Hume makes in morals. There the mind can modify and control its passions according as it can feel the objects of them near or far; and though each of us has his 'peculiar position,' we can—so creating the ethical basis—'fix on some steady and general points of view, and always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation[6]': we can 'choose some common point of view,' and from the vantage-ground of a permanent principle, however distant, we have a chance of gaining the victory over our passion, however near.

Thus far Hume had gone in the development of idealism,' Whether his theory is consistent from end to end, need not be here discussed. But it is evident that Hume was not lost in the quagmire of subjective idealism. The objective and the subjective are with him akin: the objective is the subjective, which is universal, permanent, and normal. The causal relation has, in the first instance, only a subjective necessity; but through that subjective necessity or its irresistible belief, it generates an objective world. But it has been and is the fortune of philosophers to be known in the philosophical world by some conspicuous red rag of their system which first caught the eye of the bull-like leaders of the human herd. It was so notably with Hobbes and Spinoza; and most of the thinkers whose names appear in the pages of Kant suffer from this curtailment. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, are there not the real philosophers, discoverable in their works, but the creatures of historic reputation and of popular simplification who do duty for them.

Kant's Hume is therefore a somewhat imaginary being: the product, partly of imperfect knowledge of Hume's writings, partly of prepossessions derived from a long previous training in German rationalism. Such a Hume was—or would have been, had he existed—a philosopher who 'took the objects of experience for things in themselves,' who 'treated the conception of cause as a false and deceptive illusion,' who did not indeed venture to assail the certainty of mathematics, but held—as regards all knowledge about the existence of things—'empiricism to be the sole source of principles,' founding his conclusion mainly on an examination of the causal nexus[7]. This 'note of warning' sounded against the claims of pure reason—as he calls Hume's Enquiry was what about 1762 broke Kant's dogmatic slumber and forced him to give his researches in speculative philosophy a new direction. His first step was to generalise Hume's problem from an inquiry into the origin of the causal idea into a general study of the synthetic principles in knowledge. His next was to attempt to fix the number of these concepts and synthetic principles. And his third was to 'deduce' them: i. e., to prove the reciprocal implication between experience or knowledge and the concepts or categories of intelligence.