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

by William Wallace

Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions—and they are serviceable at the outgoing in any branch of enquiry,—they are not precisely the work we expect a philosopher to do for us. And assuredly it is not Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of definitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose of realising what happiness—the common name for human good—means, he is obliged to bring into the field the whole system of his thought in its cardinal notions of Energy, Soul, &c. Aristotle here as elsewhere retraces the path of thought which carries us from mere, vulgar, inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows the same process in his treatment of pleasure, friendship &c.—to take only ethical examples) to true, essential and completely-apprehended happiness,—or, to use Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it is an-sich (in or at itself) or as it is für-sich (for or to itself), to happiness as it is an-und-für-sich. In so 'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus obliged to bring in his conceptions of man and of society, of human life and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind in its relations to nature; and if not to expound, at least to employ, his fundamental categories of philosophical thought. Such a machinery can hardly be called less than a construction, i. e. a re-construction by conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation of the elements in the fact.

In this case we traverse the distance which separates mere happiness from true happiness, from happiness imperfectly or abstractly conceived to happiness adequately and concretely conceived. Of course when we say real or true happiness, we use these terms as they are used within the ordinary range of human speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and reality is for us at any given time only a comparatively or relatively ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so far as we can see and think (all philosophising presumably goes on under this stipulation, tacit or express), gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning and a construction to reality which leaves no feature unrecognised, no contradiction unsolved, no discord unreconciled, which leaves nothing outside and alien to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you like so to call it, the completest, or (if you are really in earnest with your philosophising and have carried it on to what for you is the end) the complete formula of the Absolute—of that which in a transcendent sense is, is all, is the infinite and eternal one. Yet, after all, it is a formula. But here that undying adversary of all thought steps in and says A mere formula. And to that we must here as elsewhere rejoin: No, not a mere formula. A mere formula would be not even a formula,—a formula only in name—and with no reality which it served to formulate. It is a real and true formula, if it be a formula at all, and not something which merely swaggers about under that title. Nay more, if it be a true and real formula, it is the truth and the reality in its day and generation, until at least a truer truth and a more real reality shall have been discovered. Let us by all means be modest: but there is a false humility which becomes no man and is the guise of hypocrisy or insincere sincerity. Let us—in other words—never assume that 'we are the men, and that wisdom will die with us': but equally let us hold fast the faith of reason that what we know as true and real can never be false, i. e. utterly false, however much it may turn out one day to be surmounted. And, on the other hand, let us equally remember that in the mere and abstract commencement—the unreal and the untrue, as we must perforce style it by contrast with the (pro tempore) truth and reality—there is no utter and sheer error or unreality. It has always been felt to be one of the most loveable sides of Aristotelianism—this recognition of the reasonableness of all actual fact, or of the truth latent in the honest, though narrow and ill-defined judgments of the mass.

Thus, coming back to personality, let us admit that the mere personality which at first sight seemed only worth rejecting, is an element, at least, in true personality,—or is a part which, because an organic member and no mere mechanical part, is full of traces and indications which involve and postulate the whole. The true personality and the true individuality of being is something which presupposes for its completeness the social state—the organic community. It is no doubt familiar to us that, according to an old but never quite dormant view, the collective community is but the aggregate or congeries of individuals. But the individuals whose aggregation makes the community are themselves products of the social union. Complete, all-round, harmonious personality, it is sometimes said, is the highest fruit to be yielded by social development. Or, as the last century would have preferred to put it, the main or sole aim of the State is furtherance towards Humanity—to the stature of the perfect man. And these are true sayings,—but perhaps only half true. If all must grow so that one and each may grow, so and not less must each one grow so that the all—the commonwealth of reason and the kingdom of God—may be more and more present, 'may come.' And that kingdom only comes when All is in Each, and Each is in All: and when, without loss or diminution, each is each and all is all. Then and not till then does personality become true and infinite, free and harmonious individuality, which is in the same instant universality. The monad—to use the language of the great Idealist who did not find individuality at all incompatible with universality—never ceases to be a monad: it is eternal and indestructible, an absolute centre of being. The monad in its individual measure 'expresses' or 'envelops' the Infinite or Absolute: it is, i. e. under a subjective limitation, identical with the absolute, a concentration or condensation of it into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an individual, point,—but a point which is in the psychical or intellectual world never entirely carens recordatione, or oblivious of its essential totality. But if the monad 'expresses' the Absolute, it no less concords or sympathises in harmonious development with all its congeners, the other monads: so that while it neither interferes with them, nor suffers violence from them, it yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may be called its side of passivity, but passivity here does not mean mere passivity, but rather the essential limitation due to its special and peculiar stand-point—a limitation which in the higher orders of being becomes transparent or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in reconciling this apparent contradiction—how far even any one can reveal the mystic indwelling of universal and individual in each other, this is a serious question in its place: but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say that he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of reality, and that if one 'moment' is predominant and fundamental in his work it is not the monad, but the Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right word to express the relation of the Universal Law to the individual being and to affirm that the individual is not a loose self-supporting unit (and Leibniz, far from thinking so, always uses in its stead the phrase inclinat, non necessitat[9], to emphasise the immanence of law, or the autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is not less, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His difference from Spinoza, in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in his clearer recognition of the transcendence, no less than the immanence, of the Absolute, which Spinoza has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance of the difference between natura naturans and natura naturata. Yet the Monad of Monads is no supra-mundane, or merely transcendent God.

But if we further ask whether such personality is attainable in the world of experience and describable in terms of thought—whether there be any actual and visible agent possessed of this true personality, as we have agreed to call it, we are in face with a higher stage of the problem of personality. And that question in other words brings us back to where we began. A true and real personality, a complete individuality is something which so transmutes all that we are most accustomed to call by that name that it is hardly any use clinging to it, unless to protest against the danger of mistaking such expansion and transmutation to be only a blank negation. Yet to cling to it too much involves a danger for the true recognition of that transcendent's universality. All human personality, all natural individuality is, as Lotze has eloquently pointed out[10], something which falls far short of what it professes to be. But in the general failure to unite the universal with the particular, or the fact with the idea, there are degrees; and we can at least affirm so much as this that the truest individuality and the most real personality is not that which is least permeated by thought, but that in which thought has had the largest share. Individuality is something more than a mere sum of general qualities;—that is certainly the fact; but it is not less the fact, that for us an individuality and personality is more perfect and true in proportion as more general function and universal character coalesce into harmony and power in it. Assert then the initial presence and virtue of individuality and personality in the human soul: but remember that it has this virtue, not for what it is, but for what it promises and may reasonably be expected to be, and that, to realise the promise, it has to behave inclusively, rather than exclusively, gather up into itself and make its own all content, rather than set itself up in reserve and isolation.

We have seen that the social organisation, animated as it is by the moral idea, is rather the arena on which the true union of mind and matter, of idea and nature, of thought and fact may be worked for, than itself the fruition of such an effort. All-important is the State; all-important the ethical idea which pervades it. But the world of freedom—the ideal world so far made actual—is not what it promised to be. 'Is it not,' said Plato, 'the nature of things that the actual should always lack the perfection of theory?' In the visible world the State, indeed, rules supreme: 'it is,' as Hegel might say in the words of his great predecessor in political theory, 'that Leviathan or mortal God to whom under the immortal God we owe our welfare and safety.' But there is something in the State which the State in its palpable reality cannot adequately express. If it is highest in the hierarchy of this world, the lowest in the ideal kingdom of the Absolute is higher than it. Above the State as the embodiment and the guarantee of the moral life, there is the realm of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. In them man's craving for individuality and personality finds a satisfaction it could never hope for below them: they at least restore the truth and reality of man's life and of the universe in a measure far exceeding what even morality could do. If we ask then what Art, Religion, and Science have to show of Personality or true realised individuality, the answer is briefly as follows. Had it not been that august names have spoken of imitation as the essence of Art-work, we should hardly have deemed it possible that men should speak of Realistic Art. Yet here, as in Religion and in Science, the epithet is introduced to guard against a misconception of the province of Idealism. All Art, all Religion, all Science, are and must be idealistic: but they can never be—as the familiar phrase puts it—merely idealistic, i. e. visionary, fantastic, unreal. All of them, in other words, may be said to show us 'the light that never was on sea or land'—the heavenly city—the eternal truth of things. But they must, on their peril, show it here and now, and not in a pretended or other world. They must—no less than law and morality—work in terrestrial materials, and not with superfine celestialities. Mentem mortalia tangunt. It is out of the oldest and commonest realities of life and death that the poet and the painter make the melodies of heaven sound in our ears, and gladden us with the rays of the empyrean. It is out of the hard rock of the real that the artist's rod must strike the well-spring of the ideal. So too, in like manner, a religion must show the Divine, but show Him immanent: an immanence which, on one hand, shall not drag Godhead down to the level of casual reality, nor on the other set Him far off in lonely transcendence.

The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the natural response of man's perceptions to the harmonies of existence, to the spontaneous coherency of its many parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the creative work of human art, which moulds even the naturally discordant or unconnected into a concordant expression (sometimes it may be, as in handicraft, only to satisfy human needs), lifts us above the imperfections and fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest in them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole and perfect, and yet one and veritably individual. In its supreme or comprehensive phase it does not deal merely with the beautiful, nor merely with the beautiful and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul, or steels it to endurance, has a common characteristic; and that is to raise the single instance, the prosaic or commonplace fact, into its universal, eternal, infinite significance. It frees the fact from the limitations which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness, the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality, into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as was said, the gift of common nature, which speaks peace, comfort, joy, self-possessed fruition for all her children when their sense is open and free: partly it comes through those select ones among these children who have a larger perception of the meaning and inner truth of her works, and who can by a sensible reconstruction, which if it is fair and successful will only bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which deeper insight detects, help others to see and enjoy what they have felt and rejoiced over. Such are the poets—in the widest sense—the makers, the seers, who in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture—who, in human lives, it may be even in the conduct of their own, show us how divine a thing is nature and humanity: show us the secret and unheard harmonies that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the lower discords of life and vulgar reality. It is they who give immortality and divinity, who make heroes and demigods[11]. Or, if they may not be said to make them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures which stand high and beneficent in the history of the world. And by those who thus half-construct, and half-reveal, are meant not merely the single artists in whom the process culminates to final outline and publicity, but the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart which out of its myriad elemental springs constitutes the total figure, the august image of the hero, and the saint, lending him from its plenitude all that his abstract self seemed to want. It is on the tide of national and human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up to realise the full significance of his ideal figure, and his imaginative craft can only be inspired by the vigour and warmth of the collective passion for noble ends and high action.

Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality and many-sided individuality more adequately realised. Here, at last, the whole truth of life, the indwelling of individual and universal in one body, seems to be realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is—if we analyse it—a synthesis of three elements; partly in the material reality which serves as bodily vehicle; partly in the conception and technique of the artist; partly in the general mind which inspires both the material and the form with its own larger life. It is—as its name implies—an artificial product—a synthesis of elements which tend to fall apart. Technique varies, conceptions lose their interest, the tone of general culture alters, and materials are dependent on locality. When that happens, the work of art is left high and dry: no longer a living God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speaking no more its human language.

So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the purer air of universal history. They also—so far as they live with a personal power—are works of art: works of real-idealism. For all history which deserves the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust chronicle (as to the possibility of which utter aridity there may be legitimate doubts), is a work of fiction or invention, of reconstruction. It seeks to understand its characters. But to understand them it is not (and as historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference to motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to understand them with and in their times—to see in them the full measure of contemporary life and thought which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal,—whether in what is called history, or what is called art. It exaggerates a truth, because it loses sight of the background. And that background, which helps to constitute such ideal personality, is no constant element. The centuries and generations as they roll contribute their varying quota to set, as they say, the historical character in its true light, in its fulness and truth of reality. And thus this personality of the great leaders of human life is only an image and a sign—a fruit of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged and always the same. It is rather a personification than a personality. It incarnates the living spirit who is universal and eternal in the limits of a sensuously-defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so much as the generation it speaks to can see of complete truth. It is only after all a vehicle of truth; though a nobler vehicle than social and personal ethics can afford.

As it is felt that the treasure of the idea—that the full power of spiritual life—cannot be adequately stored in the earthen vessels of mortality, the consummation of personality is forced to recede into the invisible if it would be still conceived as attainable. 'True personality,' says Lotze, 'is with the Infinite,' What here is fragmentary, is there a rounded total, a perfect unity: He alone is absolutely self-determining, self-explaining: is all that He means to be, and means all that He is. In a sense, philosophy does not hesitate to countersign all this. But, in adopting it, philosophy must reserve the right of noting the danger and the ambiguity of such language. Religion does well, philosophy may say, in thus insisting upon the dependence of all appearance on one Absolute reality; but it is well also not to forget that all appearance is also the appearance of that reality or Absolute. And in so saying, be it added, philosophy assumes no essential superiority to religion. Religion in its fulness, and apart from any theories that may grow up under its wing, is more than theory, more than mere philosophy: it is the consummating unity of life—the enthusiasm and supreme power of life, its consecration and divinisation by its assured immanence in the eternal and universal. It is, in short, as was long ago said of it, the true life, the light which is the light and life of men; and its inspiring principles are faith, hope, and love. But when unassisted religion proceeds to set before itself the meaning and lesson of its life, when it proceeds to formulate a theory of the world and set out a scheme of world-history, it trespasses on the field of knowledge, and is amenable to the criticisms of the reflective spirit—the spirit of philosophy. And that criticism briefly is to the effect that the religious theory in its ordinary form is an imperfect interpretation of the religious experience. Nor is this to derogate from the prerogative of the friends of God. It is only to criticise the formulae and phrases of dogmatic theology—a theology, however, which is as old as religion itself, and which takes different forms from age to age, and from one level of thought to another, always in its measure translating religious reality, truth, or experience into the categories, naive or artificial, simple or complex, of the science (it may be the pseudo-science) of the time. Philosophy, therefore, is the criticism of the science of God—that is of theology—as it is the criticism of other sciences. For criticism philosophy always is: always the reflection upon fixed dogma, and the discussion of it till it becomes sensible of its defects, and stands upon another and higher plane. And to some it may seem that this is the sole function which philosophy can legitimately undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked, 'the good critic must know what he criticises.' He must not merely reflect upon it from outside, but deal with it from the plenitude of experience, from the abundance of the heart. If he be a critic then, he cannot be a mere critic, but also an agent in the work of reconstruction. Or, if we put the thing otherwise; though, as Fichte said (p. 28), philosophy is a different thing from life, the true philosopher can never be a mere philosopher, but must, if he is to reach the height of his vocation, have also entered into the full experience of reality, into the whole truth of life. His philosophy will then not be outside of religion and aesthetic perception. In its comprehension of all grades and forms of reality and truth, goodness, holiness, beauty, will have their place. He also will be among the theologians.