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

by William Wallace

But, as perhaps may have been apparent, to call this way of thought idealism need not keep us from acknowledging that the same philosophy is also realism. If it insists, so to say, on the idealism of—what we sometimes call material—nature, it no less insists on the realism of—what is supposed immaterial—mind. The mental or spiritual world loses its unsubstantial intangibleness, its mere supposedness, its 'ideal' or merely-ideal character. To the older, and we may say vulgar, view the mind or soul was a mere 'thought,' something of which all that could be seen were certain acts or phenomena. It was a mere idea, which one could pretty well get on without—so long as he kept, as the phrase was, to the phenomena—phenomena without reality. How vague and aery again was the subject-matter of morals! A few virtues and vices, confessedly general descriptive titles, a talk about will and conscience,—all of them merely several predicates of an unknown, spoken of, postulated, but unproducible. Compared with this mere supposedness the spiritual world in Schelling and Hegel acquires the reality of a quasi-organism (really supra-organic), growing and constituting itself, and making room in it for a host of human relationships. The abstract faculties of mind get reality (not indeed sensible): the intangible notions of morals become almost palpable: the kingdom of mind becomes a real pendant to the kingdom of nature. And, on the other hand, the kingdom of nature gets its ideality recognised: its unity and continuity made effective in an Idea which embraces, co-ordinated and systematised, its disparate and unconnected portions.

This new Idealism, if it led men back from the historical world to nature, was yet hardly in all respects a pupil of Rousseau. Not 'Back from civilisation and artificiality to nature and the freedom of the woodland,' was its cry: but rather 'Remember that man always rests on and grows out of nature, always has his ideals made directly or indirectly visible in physical (sensible) structures; and that, when culture turns away from sense and nature to some supposed higher, it is really entering on a path which leads to abysses,' Its voice, in fact, was much like the longing expressed in Schiller's Gods of Greece; it wished man more godlike and the divine more human. But instead of backward,—its motto was forward: or back to nature, only to resume the true starting-point, and retreat from a path of civilisation whose end is perdition. Man also was nature[1]—if he is never mere nature, i. e. the nature unexalted to its truth—but he brought to expression, and might bring to ever clearer and fuller expression, a something which was in infra-human nature, but which nature elsewhere had failed adequately to present. Thus the relation of Man to Nature was apparently twofold. On one hand, the physical world was essentially a world of reason and intelligence—though of intelligence petrified[2]. So far Hegel agreed with Schelling. But, on the other hand (and here Hegel took up the great paradox of Fichte), man's place in the universe is to fulfil the promise and implication of Nature to the full reality of Spirit, to fulfil it by law and morality; but (here he completes Fichte by the help of Schelling) also in higher measure, by art, religion, and science. The world of intelligence and reason which man constructs as an ethical, artistic, and religious being, is the full truth of the natural world,—the higher meaning, and fuller, more consistent, and complete reality of the sensible: and it is so, because the lord of Nature is one with the lord of the human soul. The new way of philosophy therefore, if it could be ever charged with saying that the so-called real things of ordinary life were only ideas, or mental images, meant that, as taken by the unthinking or imperfectly thinking perception, they were something of which all that could be said was to describe their relations to something else, of which in turn the same remark might be made; so that—as far as they went—reality was never with us, but only an assurance (soon to be proved vain) that it was next door[3]. On the contrary—in its use of the term Idea—what this idealism asserted rather was that the objects of Nature in their prima facie apprehension were not yet an Idea: if, i.e., an Idea is a mental or spiritual reality which explains and completes itself, instead of sending us on endless fool's errands elsewhere—, is a concept which is exactly adequate to reality, and has gathered in it the power of reality.

The new idealism is not subversive of realism, but includes it and makes it the reality it professed to be. It may therefore, as Schelling proposed[4], be called an ideal-realism, or a real-idealism. If any body likes, he may even, if he is no Greek scholar, call it Monism; but in that case he had better begin by admitting to himself that any Monism, which can stand its ground and serve for an explanation of the universe, will not exclude Dualism. All is indeed one life, one being, one thought; but a life, a being, a thought, which only exists as it opposes itself within itself, sets itself apart from itself, projects its meaning and relations outwards and upwards, and yet retains and carries out the power of reuniting itself. The Absolute may be called One: but it is also the All; it is a One which makes and overcomes difference: it is, and it essentially is, in the antithesis of Nature and Spirit, Object and Subject, Matter and Mind; but under and over the antithesis it is fundamental and completed unity. Monism, literally understood, is absurd—for it ignores, what cannot be ignored, the many: and Dualism, which is offered sometimes as a competitive scheme, is not much better; unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded antithesis which is the witness to the power and the freedom of the One,—which is not alone, but One and All, One in All, and All in One.

The central or cardinal point of Idealism is its refusal to be kept standing at a fixed disruption between Subject and Object, between Spirit and Nature. Its Idea is the identity or unity (not without the difference) of both. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of repeating, There is no Object without a Subject and no Subject without an Object[5]. The difficulty arises in remembering these excellent truisms when one of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems to be independent and to come before us with a title to recognition apparently all its own. When the Subject figures as the individual consciousness, encased, it may perhaps be added, in an individual body, and the Object as a thing apparently out there in a world beyond all by itself, then the lapse from this rudimentary idealism becomes easy. In the practice of life and business, each of us, self-conscious and autonomous subject as he may be, comes to rank in the estimate of others, and ere long to some extent in his own, as also a part of the aggregate of objects. All reality and substance seem as it were to slide over into the object-side. The conscious subject counts as a mere onlooker or the passive spectator of a performance that goes on in an outside field of event,—yet that outside is his own object-mind; his mind counts as a mere idea, or rather as a succession of ideas, i. e. of mental pictures with a certain meaning in them. A little step more and the very subject-mind itself is turned into an object. There stands indeed—according to the ordinary introspective psychology—as it were in one corner, or at one loop-hole of vision, a mind looking on, observing and criticising another thing which is also called a mind; but the mind observing can only reflect or register, and the mind which is observed is very much thing-like, apparently acted upon by other things, and acting upon them in turn. This object-mind, a real among other reals, in relations of cause and effect with them, does not, if we can trust the words of those who tell about it, see itself, but lies open to the inspection of this other mind, represented by the psychological observer, who is good enough to report to us something of its blind and dark estate. Its re-actions, he informs us, exhibit a remarkable peculiarity. They are equivalent to states of consciousness: and even to acts of will and knowledge. As when a violin is touched in certain ways by the bow, you get a musical note, so when certain agents come in contact with this peculiar real, they elicit a re-action, termed sense or idea.

To distinguish in this manner between mental passivity and activity is natural and right. The basis of all consciousness and mental activity is an original division, a 'judgment' or dijudication of self from self. But, once the dijudication made for such ends, it is a mistake to forget its initiation and lose sight entirely of the fact that the observing mind is also the active, and that the object-self is not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in a higher unity is identifiable therewith. Still the thing is done, habitually done. We all profess this faith of ordinary realism in our first reflections upon ourselves. And the effect of the oblivion is that we seek elsewhere for the initial activity, which we have abstracted from and lost sight of. The receptive passive mind,—called subject still, but now become a subject in the sense of the anatomist,—has to be set in motion, to be impinged upon or impressed. The psychical event which you call knowledge, and which no doubt means knowledge,—the mental 'state' which you observe—or, it may even, if your authority is a particularly obstinate and intransigcant realist, be the molecular change in brain cells,—requires an antecedent event to account for it. The origin of the movement which issued in the given psychical or molecular change is sought in a self-subsistent thing which out there gives rise to a series of movements which in here result in a sensation. Or, a thing somehow produces an attenuated image of itself in the brain, or in the mind; for, in this mythological tale of psychical occurrence, accuracy is unattainable, and one must not seek to be too precise. In any case the relationship between thing and idea is conceived after the analogy of the nexus of cause and effect, or original and copy; and the verbal imagination of the analogical reasoner is satisfied. What Hegel, after Schelling, teaches, on the other side, is that the process of sense-impression and the manipulations to which it is subjected by intellect presuppose, for their existence and their objective truth, a Reason which is the unity of subject and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to being.

But the same defect of unphilosophic consciousness has another phase which philosophy has to remember. Popular language speaks of things,—of things here and things there, which act upon each other and upon the so-called mind: i. e. on this imagined and supposed passive mind. For things, a more 'scientific' conception has been substituted—that of forces; which, whether attached to atoms or not, are asserted to be the real sources of the change and event which fill the world of our experience. And as, according to some psychologists, the mind is only a vacant ground or space with more or less narrow limits of room, on which the entities called ideas are for that reason forced into more or less close relationships, without any nearer or more essential tie; so, too, the mind is apt to be treated by others only as a battle-field or wrestling-ground of opposing forces. Here the atom-forces, as in the other case the atom-ideas, are, it is assumed, merely and purely independent: and yet such is the force of a limited environment—shall we say, in more popular language, the force of space and time?—that they must meet with one another, must, as it were, form associations, connexions, relationships. Great, verily, is the force of juxtaposition. Space and time, because they are essentially limiting, correlating, defining, weld links which the great prophet of this empirical school has not scrupled to call insoluble, ineradicable, inseparable. Space and time, says his great successor, are infinite. But they are infinite only in the sense that they can never be exhausted: they are everywhere, and for ever: but as real they are only here and now. Time can precede time, and space fade away into remoter space: but every space and every time is finite, defining, limiting, relative, and synthetic. And, if we look closer, space and time may come to seem the visible, ghostly, abstract outline—on one hand stiffening and bodying-out the ideal synthesis of thought and intelligence, on the other, faintly reproducing or fore-casting the real synthesis of organisation and living nature.

In saying this we give the reasonable interpretation of 'association':—so far at least as association is supposed to be brought about by juxtaposition in time and space. Time and space, as Kant might say, give the schema—the sensible and visible reflex of the eternal and universal thought-relation: they are a priori because they are in the physical world the primitive, the first phase and the lowest manifestation of that unity which as we know it in nature and mind always blends with sense, or displays itself in sensible forms. They are the first stamp of reality, of real Nature: with them we are in Nature, but it is an abstract shadowy nature. They mark the ascent (which only from the mere logician's standpoint shall we call the descent) of the abstract (pure) idea into the element of multiplicity, of opposition, of life and consciousness. In the psychical and intellectual world, again, as it rises to more perfect ideality (as it elicits more meaning from crude fact) they lose their prominence; they sink into the powers of memory and imagination, which build up past and future into the unity of the ever present, until in their consummation they leave as their residual product the abstract element of pure thought: a thought which claims the attributes of universality and eternity, which claims, i. e., to merge or submerge in it all space and all time[6].

It is evident therefore that if an associationist theory, like that of Hume, proposes to explain the actual field of mental life by elements given in it, and by no other, it can only do so on certain assumptions, which may be summed up in the proposition that the mind—the real mental space and time even (and not its supposed 'image')—is at once subjective and objective, at once real and ideal, at once the field of operation, the force which directs operations, and the mind which is aware of itself and its acts. To say, as Hume appears to do, that an unintermittent long-established custom breeds in us certain irresistible and essential habits of thought, can only refer to an unexplained and unnoticed duplication of the self. There is here, one self, which is only a bundle of fragments, of ideas intrinsically separate and only incidentally connected by outside pressure, which enter into ties, peradventure necessary or indissoluble, though not due to inner affinity. And there is another self which is a self-same unity, dividing and growing, or assimilating, acted upon but only because it solicits action, and in a way controlling the process going on within it. The difficulty for the investigator is to realise that these two selves are one. No amount of ingenuity will ever succeed in honestly showing unity to be the mere resultant—even should it be a fictitious or phenomenal unity—of the collisions and fortuitous attachments or detachments of different and independent reals. The reals which behave in such a way as to engender unities, to cause syntheses, are reals in a mind; and the mind must not merely, as it were, flow around them, but have them fluid members of itself. If they are reals, they are ideal-reals. You must begin with an ideal-unity which is also a real-unity, in which variety can play and by which it is controlled.

'Forces,' no less than 'things,' are terms of thought, names of reality indeed, but inadequate because due to an abstraction and leaving their correlatives out of sight—names of momentary elements seized in the flux, and made with more or less success to indicate 'moments' and 'factors' or 'aspects' in the total sum and power of reality. Explanation by permanent and separate forces labours under the same disadvantages as that by things. Science, grown more self-critical, begins to see that in forces, &c., it has names and formulae which are not the full reality, but only useful (if useful) abstractions. Neither things nor forces, though called real, are so in the full sense. Hume said,—and said not untruly, though with some relish of paradox,—that we never had any real impression or idea of power and force. The statement should be taken along with another that what we mistake for power in things is only our own want of power to overcome a suggested association, or to break a customary train of ideas. Lotze, again, has remarked that the supposed consciousness of power exerted in voluntary movement is confused with a feeling of work done, or inertia overcome. Whatever may be the truth about the psychological experience, there can be no doubt for the epistemologist that the so-called perception of force is an interpretation of one aspect of experience which, with a certain amount of arbitrary arrest and simplification, renders it intelligible and real by means of an antithesis and correlation. Force in fact only exists, or arises, in relation or opposition to a counter-force: action and re-action are always equal and opposite, says the mathematical formula. Two forces are as little independent as an up and a down, or as a west and a north; force solicits force, and force only is in so far as it is solicited. The soliciting can only solicit because it is solicited. In other words, it is not enough to say that the forces which thus confront each other are correlatives. The relationship must be carried up a stage higher: the forces themselves get their pseudo-real character, only so long as they are kept apart forcibly or by inertia. Carry out their implications: and they re-unite (not however to the loss of all distinction) in a higher idea, an intelligible unity which, by its division and return to unity, makes possible and real their contention. It is this carrying-out of implications to their explicit truth which is at the root of Schopenhauer's playing fast and loose with the distinction between force and will. But with him the two terms are taken up vague and indefinite, in the haze of popular conception or want of conception, and are without effort or justification identified: whereas in Hegel, there is, on the lowest estimate, an attempt made to trace the somewhat intricate steps which mediate the metamorphosis.

The new idealism thus maintains the organic and even supra-organic nature of thought and being. The world of experience, when taken in its reality and fullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills, and which is life, action, knowledge; its own means and its own end. The subject acting, living, knowing is action, knowledge, life. In the ordinary organism there is a subject of functions, a being in relation to an inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the inadequate name is still to be retained) there is no outside world, no inorganic or extra-organic thing. In the world-organism the organ and its environment is combined in one, re-united: the plant or animal is not without its place, and its place is not without plant or animal. They are not merely in correlation, but essentially and actually one. Quid prosunt leges sine moribus? asks the moralist: but in the Absolute or the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart: the necessity is also freedom: the law is not severed from its phenomenon. Such an organism which is life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea: an organism which is completely organic, with no mere matter: and that Idea is the foundation of his Idealism. Conceived under its conditions, the forces which are sometimes represented as struggling with each other on the field of man's life, are no longer independent; still less completely separable forces. They are the inner division by which the spirit re-establishes and makes secure its unity: their antagonisms are the breath of life. And they have their relations in their common service, building up one life. They form a certain hierarchy of organisation; in which however the higher or more developed does not merely supervene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and yet contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.