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

by William Wallace

Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests most strongly against the injury done to personality by reducing it to something fluid and not fixed, something in process and not in persistent substance, seems mostly to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis, or to the—so-called—higher materialism. He is an advocate of what we may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he would even hold, an absolutely permanent) substance or substratum of psychical reality which, no doubt, exhibits certain properties, but is always more than any one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been said, indeed, by one who spoke with authority that he that will save his soul shall lose it, and he that will lose it shall find it. But this has always been a hard saying, which has been as far as possible explained away by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very far removed from its philosophical equivalent. The true life is not that of self-seeking pleasure, but the life spent in the service of truth and love, the life dedicated to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in itself, but in its transfiguration, its purification, and liberation to higher forms of being. The Soul, in its first avatar in each of us, is after all of the earth, earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth and development on which it has entered. It is as Aristotle said, and said well, the first actualisation[6]—the proximate ideality of an organic body. In soul organic body carries out its promise: in soul we, the observers, or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of mental life in its organic environment. But there are other grades, other heights of achievement, yet set before the principle of life, which is more than mere life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ which must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all that it in promise and potency contains, it must dispossess itself of what clings to it and possess itself of what is its own; and so transmute its first phase into one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said, the awakening of mind from the sleep of nature[7]: it is nature gathering itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world, and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or synthetic pulse—as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised by science—re-appears in the actual concrete world. And as the earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to hardest as our prime and fundamental differentia. Here at least we are something—a centre of being, and not a mere centreless expanse of extension: something emerging from the world of silence and of night—something in which each feels

'I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'

And that something we would not lose, at any cost.—But the only way not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-stone to higher things. The metaphor, indeed, like metaphors in general, must not be pressed too far. For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never left behind as a mere dead self: there is

'Nothing of it that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.'

And that richer result into which it is transformed is the consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which wills and knows.

If it be asked in what respects the result is richer, the answer is as follows. The soul,—this 'first entelechy—is exclusive, and it is immersed in its natural limits of organic life. It has yet to go through the school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself above itself'; and of thus extending its view and its range of control over a wider field of objects. Gradually it attains to the rank of a consciousness before which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of objects set over against it, and even of a world within it; itself as an object deposed to the rank of something to be surveyed. As such, it seems almost to have left all immersion in corporeity completely behind, and to have completely divested itself of any limitation. It floats freely above the real psychical life out of which it emerged—a detached but somewhat shadowy self, not burdened by any restrictions of nature or circumstance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self—as the mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it surveys its real psychical self far below; it finds itself as a strange sort of thing, and says This was me (which however is not exactly the same as I am I, I = I). Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life and feeling, stirring in its several affections and modifications. In order to get forward, it was necessary to recoil a little: to save itself—and that must mean to get itself in fuller and richer being—the mind had, as it were, to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity, and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its own. In an attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies that it is the empty room, the tabula rasa, on which experience is to write itself: but in its secret heart it retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is the power of intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer. What it now seems to find—what fills up its consciousness, presumed empty and merely receptive,—it gradually recognises to be its very and original own. Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant form (the passive half of itself to which it deposed itself) of consciousness; and thus, as an intelligent self, a true mind, it has for itself and realises as in itself all the life and reality which in its earlier stage of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But on this stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre, sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact. It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness—a mere receptive and synthetic unity of apperception—but a reason and a mind. And a reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. In the province of free self-realised intelligence we at least seem to occupy a ground on which others can equally come,—to have nothing peculiar or merely individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned perception, and in Will, which is reasoned impulse, there is a king's highway, a public forum, where souls meet and converse and perform a collective work;—and in both mere, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at a discount[8].

Such would be the course of development if we looked at it only in the inwardness or subjectivity of psychical, conscious, and intelligent life. But an analogous or parallel development may be observed if we look at man as an active, i. e. a practical and moral being, a being who makes Nature his own, stamps it with his title of possession, and who gives to his fellowship with other souls an objective, outward existence in the forms and institutions of social life. Here too his first achievement is the affirmation of his individuality, the distinction in outward and tangible shape of the Mine from the Thine: the creation of property, and the projection of himself in a world of mutually-recognised personalities. As the individual soul in the inner life, so the personal being with its property is the solid, insoluble basis of the life in public—the field of social ethics. The same instinct, which in its dread of dissolution clings to the perpetuity of the inner nucleus of soul, upholds the other as containing the stable and eternal security of all social well-being. The immortality of soul in the inner world: the sacro-sanctity of property in the outer. But if these postulates are to be permitted, if individuality and personality are to abide, they must, in the one case as in the other, bow to the law of development, the law of history and of life. They must correct themselves, re-adjust themselves,—include what they excluded, and re-combine their elements, transmute themselves into what we have, after Hegel, called their truth: must redintegrate themselves with suppressed correlatives, and carry out their implications of larger unity. The soul, exclusive and fast-clad in its mere organic vestment, in which it is as yet only the name and form of intellectual life, has first of all to retract itself into the bare abstract consciousness, or mere self, on which the masses of reality stream, to fill its vacant rooms and empty forms up with ideas. So too the person—that close concretion or coalescence of mind with material—that identification of self with its 'clothes,' its property and all it can vulgarly be said to own, is only an aspect of truth which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected upon, and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and merged. Withdrawing itself from its clothing of earth and water, and even perhaps from its inner mansion of flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the impersonal personality of conscience,—the ethereal realm where pure practical reason rules. In that ether where morals reign absolutely is the home of the categorical imperative, of the Stoical law of duty, of the conscience which, here at least, has might as it has right. It too, like its parallel, consciousness, in the inner mental life, has, or seems to have, all its fulfilment from without. As even Kant admits, it is itself a vacant form; yet a form of such influence as to impress on whatever comes within its range an obligation to be universal and to be uniform. Here too, as in the parallel stage, it was of inestimable importance that mind should, in the socio-ethical sphere, see itself supreme in its innermost dignity and personality,—the personality which lies within,—even though that supremacy were at first no better than as a law, a form, a category, recognised as authoritative and imperative. For conscience, like the field of consciousness, is after all only a quasi-passive self—a remarkable property or endowment, a sort of innate principle or idea by which the mind was seen to be distinguished in a unique way from all things else. To realise once for all the fact that consciousness and conscience form an absolute tribunal from which there can be no appeal: that the 'synthetic unity of apperception' in the theoretical, and the 'autonomy of the rational will' in the practical sphere, are the ultimate and final a priori: this is a great thing to do,—even though it only expands and defines the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, and will remain as Kant's title of honour in the history of philosophy. He thus fenced off or consecrated the sanctuary of the mental and moral life.

But it was not enough to set apart the sacred principle, the central hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If at an earlier stage,—earlier, i.e. in this logical analysis,—the formal was wholly sunk in the material, if i. e. the mere series of legal formulae in their hard and brittle outlines were absolutely identified—without doubt or hesitation—with the morally and socially good; the formal side, or mere spirit and will of good, the abstract principle of morality, is now invested with an equally undue prominence. The actual or concrete ethical community—be it family or state, or other social organisation—is animated and maintained by a spirit which transcends and includes alike the outward shell of civil law and the inward law of conscience. For, curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both conscience and civil legislation assume the form of imperative and definite commands—laws political or civil, and laws moral. Both fall therefore into an inflexibility, a rigorous and mechanical hardness in their enouncements. Both worship the lord of what men call logic, i. e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, to an excess which sometimes issues in fantastic irregularities. Their several maxims of legal conformity and of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance excellent: but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a good many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws within its code, and Duty is often sadly to seek in presence of the collisions between what offer themselves as prima facie duties in any given case. The amplest code of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of loop-holes for negligence and villainy, and would never work for an instant, were it not for ever supplemented by the spirit of faith and love, by social piety and political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the abstractions of the conscientious imperative, of the law of duty, of the moral tribunal, of the man within the breast, and of the dignity and beauty of human nature, would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly count on the support of recognised and authoritative social law and usage. Outward rests upon inward; and rules direct feelings.

Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections, and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,—a unity which transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in which the development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth: for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual. They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an appearance:—confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.

But they do not destroy personality and individuality: they only transform it and made it a more adequate and consistent representation of reality, by giving in it a place to factors or 'moments' which, though always effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements, and treated only as externally interfering agencies. It may be a question, of course, how far it is wise to retain the term after its meaning has thus been altered by expansion and redistribution of elements. On the whole it seems impracticable—and it would be undesirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible—to be too hard and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly the province of philosophy to coin new terms in which to deposit the results of her researches. A term no doubt—particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be luckily discovered, or judiciously selected—may save the expenditure of thought. But it is hardly the business of philosophy to encourage economy in this direction. Much more is it the perpetual task of philosophy to counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,—to reinterpret the meaning which is absorbed in these 'counters of thought,' and make them once more sterling money for the market of life. What, for instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to set free the genii which the black magic of every-day intercourse has incarcerated in the non-significant Greek term Εὐδαιμονία? Like our own Happiness, it flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name, which is still prized, but—except for a few synonyms that are equally vague with itself—is attached to things which a little reflection shows it cannot truly denote. Aristotle seeks—we may say—to define it. But the phrase 'definition' seems barely applicable to the complex process thus implied,—a process of which definition, as ordinarily understood, is only one small portion. For to define happiness, is to reconstruct the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really to construct it or reproduce in consciousness its construction. As it stands, the thing to be defined is a name and a thing, of which certain relations to other things soon begin to show themselves, which is more or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be distinguished from another. To mark it off from these co-terminous things, and to show how they are related to it on different sides,—this would be what we may perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, or mere definition.