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

by William Wallace

GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE.

Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that the mind was nothing before it exercised itself[1]. The mind,—and the same will turn out true of many things else where it is at first unsurmised,—is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly refined substance, which we can lay hold of without further trouble. It is what it has become, or what it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be' = 'To have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom never to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It is easy to talk of and about conscience and freewill, as if these were existing things in a sort of mental space, as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and an orange, or as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is free or not, as glibly as one might ask whether an orange is sweet; and the answer can be given with equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases. Everything in these cases depends on whether the will has made itself free or not, whether indeed we are speaking of the will at all, and on what we mean by freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way, taking no account of circumstances, is one of those temptations which lead the intellect astray and produce only confusion and wordy war—as a good deal of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind and its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dissected with the same calmness of analysis as other substances which adapt themselves to the scalpel: nor is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific process, subject to the control of the synthesis in physiology.

The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy and his thoughtful reader's a burden, by plunging too lightly in medias res. He wants patience—often, perhaps, because he thinks too much of his reader's impatience at analysis—to unravel the tangled mass which human experience, when first looked at, presents. He is apt to catch at any end which promises to effect a temporary clearance. True philosophy, on the contrary, must show that it has got hold of what it means to discuss: it has to construct its subject-matter: and it constructs it by tracing every step and movement in its construction shown in actual history. The mind is what it has been made and has made itself; and to see what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and Omega of research, as popular conception and language tend to represent it, but in the stages constituting its process, in the fluidity of its development, in the elements out of which it results. We must penetrate the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes forward, and see through it into the process which bears it into being. For, otherwise, the object of our investigation is taken, as if it were the most unmistakable thing of sense and fancy,—as if everybody were agreed that this and no other were the point in question.

But in this matter of stability and the reverse, there is a broad distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. In Nature every step in the organisation, by which the Cosmos is developed, has an independent existence of its own: and the lowest formation confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside the other. Matter and motion, for example, are not merely found as subordinate elements entering into the making of a plant or an animal. They have a free existence of their own: and the free existence of matter in motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system. So, too, chemical or electrical phenomena can be observed by themselves, operating in spheres where they are untrammeled by the influence of biological conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be different in the case of mind. There the specific types or several stages in the integrating process of mental development seem to have no substantive existence in the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as states or factors entering into, and merged in, the higher grades of development. This causes a peculiar difficulty in the study of mind. We cannot seize a formation in an independent shape of its own: we must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental fusion and coalescence of elements is peculiarly close, and hardly leaves any traces of its constituent factors[2]. Sensation, for instance, in its purity, as mere sensation, is apparently something which we can never study in isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the strictly psychological (as opposed to the physiological) mode of study, examine, i. e. which we can reproduce in ourselves, is more than mere sensation: it includes elements of thought, and probably of desire and will. This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called introspection: difficulties so great and real that they have provoked in natural reaction a set against introspection altogether, and the adoption of the external observation (physiological or so-called psycho-physical) employed in the 'objective' sciences. And hence when we accept the name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &c., as if it expressed something specially existent in a detached shape of its own, we make an assumption which it is impossible to justify. We are reckoning with paper-money which belongs to no recognised currency, and may be stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence is that the thing with which we begin our examination is an opaque point,—a mere terminus a quo, from which we start on our journey of explication, leaving the terminus itself behind us unexplained.

The constituents of mind do not lie side by side tranquilly co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses. Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity. In our investigations we cannot begin with what is to be defined. The botanist, if he is to give us a science of the plant, must begin with something whose indwelling aim it is to be itself and to realise its own possibility. He must begin with what is not the plant, and end with what is; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the tendency to pass into the plant. The speculative science of biology begins with a cell, and builds these cells up into the tissues and structures out of which vegetables and animals are constituted. The object of the science appears as the result of the scientific process: or, a science is the ideal construction of its object. As in these cases, so in the case of thought. We must see it grow up from its simplest element, from the bare point of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of thought will grow and spread; and see it appear as a result due to the ingrowing and outgrowing union of many elements, none of which satisfies by itself, but leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of abstractions in what is more and more concrete. The will and conscience, understanding and reason, of man are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and examined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have in hand: and to be sure of that is to see that the mind is the necessary outcome of a course of development. The mind is not an immediate datum, with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediated unity, i. e. a unity which has grown up through a complex interaction of forces, and which lives in differences through comprehending and reconciling antagonisms.

If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in the sum and context of its relations, we may mean what we like with each mental object that comes under our observation: but with as much right another observer may mean something else. We may, of course, define as we please: we may build up successive definitions into a consistent total: but such a successful arrangement is not a real science. Unless we show how this special form of mind is constituted, we are dealing with abstractions, with names which we may analyse, but which remain as they were when our analysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They are not destroyed: like immaterial and aery beings they elude the sword which smites them, and part but to re-unite. The name, and the conception bodied forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appearance become the ready prey of analysis: but there is something behind this materialised and solidified conception, this worn-out counter or sign, which mere analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying nature is a process or movement, a meeting of elements, which it is the business of philosophy to unfold. The analyst in this case has dealt with ideas as if they were a finer sort of material product, a fixed and assailable point: and this is perhaps the character of the generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in our customary habits of mind. But ideas, when they have real force and life, are not hard and solid, but, as it were, fluid and transparent, and can easily escape the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is unwise to fight with ghosts like these, and that the best plan would be to disregard this war of words altogether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life: that men will talk of them and conjure by their means, with or without intelligence; and that the best course is to understand them. It will then be seen that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the process, by which the spiritual unity divides and yet retains its divided members in unity. Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of an object we see this. To understand it, we must deprive it of its seeming independence. Every individual object is declared by the logician to be the meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two movements. It concentrates into an undecompounded unit,—at least such it appears to representative or material thought,—two elements, each of which it is in turn identifiable with. The one of these elements has been called the self-same (or identity), the universal, the genus, the whole: while the second is called the difference, the particular, the part. And by these two points of reference it is fixed,—by two points which are for the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus been stated in the technical language of Logic is often repeated in the scientific parlance of the day, but with more materialised conceptions and in more concrete cases. The dynamic theory of matter represents it as a unity of attraction and repulsion. A distinguished Darwinian remarks that 'all the various forms of organisms are the necessary products of the unconscious action and reaction between the two properties of adaptability and heredity, reducible as these are to the functions of nutrition and reproduction[3]. The terms 'action and reaction' are hardly sufficient, it may be, to express the sort of unity which is called for: but the statement at least shows the reduction of an actual fact to the interaction of two forces, the meeting of two currents. The one of these is the power of the kind, or universal, which tends to keep things always the same: the other the power of localised circumstances and particular conditions, which tends to render things more and more diversified. The one may be called a centripetal, the other a centrifugal force. If the one be synthetic, the other is analytic. But such names are of little value, save for temporary distinction, and must never be treated as permanent differences which explain themselves. The centre is relative, and so is the totality.

Thus it is that the so-called Evolutionist explains the origin of natural kinds. They are what they severally are by reason of a process, a struggle, by alliances and divisions, by re-unions and selections. They are not independent of the inorganic world around them: it has entered into their blood and structure, and made them what they are. To understand them we must learn all we can of the simpler and earlier forms, which have left traces in their structure: traces which, without the existence of such more primitive forms, we might have misunderstood, or have passed by unperceived. And, again, we learn that our hard and fast distinctions are barely justified by Nature. There, kind in its extreme examples seems to run into kind, and we do not find the logically-exact type accurately embodied anywhere. Our classifications into genera and species turn out to be in the first instance prompted by a practical need to embrace the variety in a simple shape. But though perfectly valid, so far as we use them for such ends, they tend to lead us false, if we press them too far.

And when we have seen so much, we may learn the further lesson that the variety of organisation, animal and vegetable, is only the exhibition in an endless detail by single pictures, more or less complementary, more or less inclusive of each other, of that one vital organisation in principle and construction which we could not otherwise have had presented to us. In a million lessons from the vast ranges of contemporary and of extinct life there is impressed upon the biological observer the idea of that system of life-function and life-structure which is the goal of biological science. The interest in the mere variety whether of modern or of primeval forms of life is as such merely historical; its truer use is to enable the scientific imagination to rise above local or temporary limitations. And thus in the end the records and guesses of evolution in time and place serve to build up a theory of the timeless universal nature of life and organisation.

And what is true of Nature is equally true of the Mind. For these two, as we have already seen, are not isolable from each other. Neither the mind nor the so-called external world are either of them self-subsistent existences, issuing at once and ready-made out of nothing. The mind does not come forth, either equipped or un-equipped, to conquer the world: the world is not a prey prepared for the spider, waiting for the mind to comprehend and appropriate it. The mind and the world, the so-called 'subject' and so-called 'object,' are equally the results of a process: and it is only when we isolate the terminal aspects of that process, and in the practical business of life forget the higher theoretical point of view, that we lose sight of their origin, and have two worlds facing each other. As the one side or aspect of the process gathers feature and form, so does the other. As the depth and intensity of the intellect increases, the limits of the external world extend also. For the psychical life is just the power which maintains a continuing correlation between the body and its environment, and between the various elements in that environment. It is the unity in which that correlation lives and is aware of itself. It is the subject-object, which sets one element against another, and gives it quasi-independence. The mind of the savage is exactly measured by the world he has around him. The dull, almost animal, sensation and feeling, which is what we may call his mental action, is just the obverse of the narrow circumference that girdles his external world. The beauty and interest of the grander phenomena of terrestrial nature, and of the celestial movements, are ideally non-existent for a being, whose whole soul is swallowed up in the craving for food, the fear of attack, and the lower enjoyments of sense. In the course of history we can see the intellect growing deeper and broader, and the limits of the world recede simultaneously with the advance of the mind. This process or movement of culture takes place in the sequence of generations, and in the variety of races and civilisations spread over the face of the world. But here too, the higher science, not resting in the merely historical inquiry, takes no interest in the medium of time, and merely uses it to supply material for the rational sequence of ideas[4].

The objective world of knowledge is really at one with the subjective world: they spring from a common source, what Kant called the 'original synthetic unity of apperception.' The distinction between them flows from abstraction, from failure to keep in view the whole round of life and experience. The subjective world—the mind of man—is really constituted by the same force as the objective world of nature: the latter has been translated from the world of extension, with its externality of parts in time and space, into an inner world of thought where unity, the fusion or coalescence of all types and forms, is the leading feature. The difficulty of passing from the world of being to the world of thoughts, from notion to thing, from subject to object, from Ego to Non-ego, is a difficulty which men have unduly allowed to grow upon them. It grows by talking of and analysing mere being, mere thought, mere notion, or mere thing. And it will be dispelled when it is seen that there is no mere being, and no mere thought: that these two halves of the unity of experience—the unity we divide and the division we unify in every judgment we make—are continually leaning out of themselves, each towards the other. But men, beginning as they must from themselves, and failing to revise and correct their stand-point till it became an ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος, argued from a belief that the individual mind was a fixed and absolute centre, from which the universe had to be evaluated. In Hegel's words, they made man and not God the object of their philosophy[5]. So that Kant really showed the outcome of a system which acted on the hypothesis that man in his individual capacity was all in all. Hegel, on his own showing, came to prove that the real scope of philosophy was God;—that the Absolute is the 'original synthetic unity' from which the external world and the Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they return to unity.