If this be so, then there is behind the external world and behind the mind an organism of pure types or forms of thought,—an organism which presents itself, in a long array of fragments, to the senses in the world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in a more than organic unity. The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover the nature and law of that totality or primeval unity,—the totality which we see appearing in the double aspect of nature and mind, and which we first become acquainted with as it is manifested in this state of dis-union. To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel seeks. It lays bare the kingdom of those potent shades,—the phases of the Idea—which embodies itself more concretely in the external world of body, and the inward world of mind. The psychological or individualist conditions, which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes seem to set up mind as an entity parallel to the objects of nature, and antithetic to nature as a whole, have fallen away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its actualisation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not in the narrow ground of an individual's level of development, but in the realised formations of reasonable knowledge and action, as shown in Art and Life, Science and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which might be in us or in the world, but which, being to a certain extent different from either, was the focus of two orders of manifestations.
To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind was the chief thing philosophy had to see to. But in order to do this, a good deal of preliminary work was necessary. The work of Logic, as understood by Hegel, involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day life or reflection on experience. It presupposes the whole process from the provisional starting-point which seems at first sight simplest and universally acceptable, upwards to the unhypothetical principle which—though at a long distance—it involves and leads up to, or presupposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum ᾽Εν τοῐς αὶσθητοῐς τὰ νοητά ἐστιν: Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. The fact of sense and feeling is the fact of experience: or rather the fact and reality of experience is the underlying truth which the expression of it in terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets. Even in the principles of sensation there is judgment, thought, reasoning: but it needs eliciting, re-statement, opening up, and explanation. The Phenomenology of Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of discovery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of traversing it, from the ill-founded and imperfect certainties of sense and common-sense, up through various scientific, moral, and religious modes of interpreting experience and expressing its net sum of reality, till it culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought,' of supreme or 'absolute' consciousness. It is certainly not a history of the individual mind: and equally little is it a history of the process of the intellectual development of the race. In a way it mixes up both. For its main interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges in bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts and phases of national life to works of fiction (compare its use of Goethe's Faust and his version of Rameau's Nephew). It lingers—for historical accuracy and proportion unduly—over the period of Kant and Fichte, and reads Seneca by the light of the Sorrows of Werther. For its aim is to gather from the inspection of all ways in which men have attempted to reach reality the indication of their several content of truth, and of the several defects from it, so as to show the one necessary path on which even all their errors converge and which they serve to set out in clearer light.
Hegel's philosophy is undoubtedly the outcome of a vast amount of historical experience, particularly in the ancient world, and implies a somewhat exhaustive study of the products of art, science, politics, and religion. By experience he was led to his philosophy, not by what is called a priori reasoning. It is curious indeed to observe the prevalent delusion that German philosophy is the 'high priori road,'—to hear its profundity admired, but its audacity and neglect of obvious facts deplored. The fact is that without experience neither Hegel nor anybody else will come to anything. But, on the other hand, experience is in one sense only the yet undeciphered mass of feeling and reality, the yet unexpounded psychical content of his life; or, taken in another acceptation, it is only a form which in one man's case means a certain power of vision, and in another a different degree. One man sees the idea which explains and unifies experience as actuality: to the other man it is only a subjective notion. And even when it is seen, there are differences in the subsequent development. One man sees it, asserts it on all hands, and then closes. Another sees it, and asks if this is all, or if it is only part of a system. An appeal to 'my experience' is very much like an appeal to 'my sentiments' or 'my feelings': it may prove as much or as little as can be imagined: in other words, it can prove nothing. The same is true of the appeal to consciousness, that oracle on whose dicta it has sometimes been proposed to found a system of philosophy. By that name seems meant the deliverances of some primal and unerring nucleus of mind, some real and central self, whose voice can be clearly distinguished from the mere divergent cries of self-interest and casual opinion. That such discernment is possible no philosophy will seek to deny: but it is a discernment which involves comparison, examination, and reasoning. And in that case the appeal to consciousness is the exhortation to clear and deliberate thinking. While, on another side, it hints that philosophy does not—in the end—deal with mere abstractions, but with the real concrete life of mind. And if an appeal to other people's experience is meant, that is only an argument from authority. What other people experience is their business, not mine. Experience means a great deal for which it is not the right name: and to give an explanation of what it is, and what it does, would render a great service to English methodologists.
There are, however, two modes in which these studies to discover the truth may appear. In the one case they are reproduced in all their fragmentary and patch-work character. They are supposed to possess a value of their own, and are enunciated with all the detail of historic incident. The common-place books of a man are, as it were, published to instruct the world and give some hint of the extent of his reading. But, in the other case, the scaffolding of incident and externality may be removed. The single facts, which gave the persuasion of the idea, are dismissed, as interesting only for the individual student on his way to truth: or, if the historical vehicle of truth be retained at all, it is translated into another and intellectual medium. Such a history, the quintessence of extensive and deep research, is presented in the Phenomenology. The names of persons and places have faded from the record, as if they had been written in evanescent inks,—dates are wanting,—individualities and their biographies yield up their place to universal and timeless principles. Such typical forms are the concentrated essence of endless histories. They remind one of the descriptions which Plato in his Republic gives of the several forms of temporal government. Or, to take a modern instance, the Hegelian panorama of thought which presents only the universal evolution of thought,—that evolution in which the whole mind of the world takes the place of all his children, whether they belong to the common level, or stand amongst representative heroes,—may be paralleled to English readers by Browning's poem of Sordello. There can be no question that such a method is exposed to criticism, and likely to excite misconception. If it tend to give artistic completeness to the work, it also tantalises the outsider who has a desire to reach his familiar standing-ground. He wishes a background of time and space, where the forms of the abstract ideas may be embodied to his mind's eye. In most ages, and with good ground, the world has been sceptical, when it perceived no reference to authorities, no foot-notes, no details of experiments made: nor is it better disposed to accept provisorily, and find, as the process goes on, that it verifies itself to intelligence.
[1] De Anima, iii. 4.
[2] A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The Indo-German,' says Misteli (Typen des Sprachbaues, p. 363), 'embraces or condenses several categories in a single idea in a way which though less logical is more fruitful; for in this way he procures graspable totals with which he can work further, and not patch-work which would crumble away in his hands. Our He includes four grammatical categories, which work not separately, but as a whole:—third person, masculine gender, singular, nominative; whereas the Magyar ö is the vehicle only of one category, the third person, which is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural by the addition of k: gender in these languages does not exist: and as subject again ö is specially interpreted from the context. The unification of the four categories makes He an individual and a word; the generality and isolation of one category makes ö an abstract and a stem.'
[3] Häckel, Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte, p. 157.
[4] See above, pp. [155], [198].
[5] Hegel's Werke, vol. i. p. 15.