But 'many heroes lived before the days of Agamemnon,' The records of culture no longer begin with Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices, like those of the poet Rückert (in his 'habilitation'-exercise), were heard declaring that the true fountain of European thought, the real philosophy, was to be sought in the remoter East. Since the time of Hegel, the study of primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas in morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent to trace the early gropings of barbarian fancy and reason. The comparative study of languages has, on the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances by which human reason has risen from one grade of consciousness to another. The sciences of language and of primitive culture have revealed new depths in the development of thought, where thought is still enveloped in nature and sense and symbols,—depths which were scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of the present century. Here and there, investigators have even supposed that they had found the cradle of some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may be, of humanity itself.
These researches have accomplished much, and they promise to accomplish more. They help us perhaps to take a juster view of the early Greek thinkers, and show how much they still laboured under conditions of thought and speech from which their struggles have partly freed us. But for the present, and with certain explanations to be given later, it may still be said that the birthday of our modern world is the moment when the Greek sages began to construe the facts of the universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were, in a dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time the spirit of the world was growing,—its faculties forming in secresy and silence,—until the day of birth when the preparations were completed, and the young spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A new and to us all-important epoch in the history of thought begins with the Greeks: and the utterances of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still somewhat material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we live. Other nations of an older day had gathered the materials: in their languages, customs, religions, &c., there was an unconscious deposit of reason. It was reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason: and thus in them reason became conscious.
For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who distinctly drew the distinction between sense and thought, and who first translated the actual forms of our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this transition, this elevation into pure thought, is what gives the dramatic interest to the Dialogues of Plato and keeps the sympathy of his readers always fresh. Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general definition: not to be content with having—like Pythagoreans—their meaning wrapped up inseparably in psychical images and quasi-material symbols. He taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the underlying idea by the collision and comparison of instances, to get at the 'content' which was identical in all the multiplicity of forms. He taught them, in—brief, to think: and Plato carried out widely and deeply the lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world, which, at its very creation, seems often to be transformed into a refined and attenuated copy of the sense-world, meets us in almost every page of his Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant tendency to give 'sensible' form to the ideal, is so far over and past; and some sort of intellectual world, perhaps narrow and inadequate, is reached,—the logical scheme in which immediate experience was expressed and codified. What these thinkers began, succeeding ages have inherited and promoted.
In the environment of reason, therefore, which encompasses the consciousness of our age, are contained under a generalised form and with elimination of all the particular circumstances, the results won in the development of mind and morals. These results now constitute the familiar joints and supports in the framework of ordinary thought: around and upon them cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at first by the mouth of its great men, its illustrious statesmen, artists, and philosophers, has explicitly recognised, and translated into terms of thought,—into logical language,—that synthesis of the world which the period had practically secured by the action of its children. That activity went on, as is the way of natural activities, spontaneously, through the pressure of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends, not in conscious straining after a result. For the conscious or reflective effort of large bodies of men is often in a direction contrary to the Spirit of the Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind, which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite and absolute in its season, is the real motive principle of the world. But that Spirit of the Time is not always the voice that is most effective at the poll, or rings loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still small voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the unselfish hear. And he who hears it and obeys it, not he who follows the blatant crowd, is the hero. It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated hero-worship, therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great men are great: but the Spirit of the Time is greater: their greatness lies in understanding it and bringing it to consciousness. The man, who would act independently of his time and in antagonism to it, is only the exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the synthesis be always formulated by a philosopher in order to leaven the minds of the next generation. The whole system of thought,—the theory of the time,—its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not explicitly formulated and stated: it becomes the nursery of future thought and speculation. Philosophy in its articulate utterances only gives expression to the silent and half-conscious grasp of reason over its objects. But when the adaptation is not merely reached but seen and felt, when the synthesis or world of that time is made an object of self-consciousness, the exposition has made an advance upon the period which preceded. For that period started in its growth from the last exposition, the preceding system of philosophy, after it had become the common property of the age, and taken its place in their mental equipment.
Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by the philosopher restores or re-affirms the unity which in the divided energies of the period, in its progressive, reforming, and reactionary aspects, in its differentiating time, had to a great extent been lost. By the reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of which each period is full, the unity or totality with which it began is shown to be defective. The value of the initial synthesis is impaired; its formula is found inadequate to comprehend the totality: and the differences which that unity involved, or which were implicitly in it, are now explicitly affirmed. But the bent towards unity is a natural law making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken harmony. And that pain—which is the sign of an ever-present life that refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements—is the stimulus to re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs, and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. The integrating principle is present and active. There is then an effort, a re-action; the feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly felt: the implicit has to be actually put in its place, forced as it were into action and set forth[3]: and the existing contrasts and differences which the re-forming agency has called into vigorous life are lifted from their isolation, and show of independence, and kept, as it were, suspended in the unity[4]. The differences are not lost or annihilated: but they come back to a centre, they find themselves, as it were, at home: they lose their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and sink into their places as constituents in the embracing organism[5]. The unity which comes is not however the same as the unity which disappeared, however much it may seem so. The mere notion—the inner sense and inner unity—has put itself forward into the real world: it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but as moulded into actuality, into the objective world, it has become an Idea. (Begriff is now Idee.) For the Idea is always more than a notion: it is a notion translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity not sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts, but retaining them 'ideally'—united by links of thought and service—in its larger ideal-reality. It is all that the object ought to be (and which in a sense it must be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to be and looked forward to.
The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles, but with each new cycle a difference supervenes, a new tone is perceptible. History, which reflects the changing aspects of reality, does and does not repeat itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of them the same after each step as they were before it: they have both suffered a change: it is a new scene that comes above the horizon, however like the last it may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the process of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated in higher terms, multiplied, and with a higher power or wider range of meaning[6]. Each unification however is a perfect world, a complete whole: it is the same sum of being; but in each successive level of advance it receives a fuller expression, and a more complexly-grouped type of features[7]. Such is the rhythmic movement,—the ebb and flow of the world, always recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but hope, with richer variety of tones, and fuller sense of itself. The sum of actuality, the Absolute, is neither increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimate reality of experience and life, was as much a rounded total to the Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us: without advancing, it has been, we may say, in its expression deepened, developed, and organised. In one part of the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower, insistance (by practical and business minds) on the sufficiency of a definite principle to satisfy all wants and to make all mysteries plain, and a disposition to ignore all other elements of life: at another, there is a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and contradictions, involved in the last synthesis,—which recognition it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of reforming efforts, of innovation, to produce: and in the last period of the sway, there is a stronger and more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading these differences,—which is the work appointed to philosophy gathering up the results of science and practical amendments.
To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated the name of Dialectic. The name came in the first instance from Kant, but ultimately from Plato, where it denotes the process which brings the 'many' under the 'one,' and divides the 'one' into the 'many.' But how, it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we begin with unity, and how do the differences return into the unity? In other words, given a universal, how are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these particulars ever give rise to a real individual? Such is the problem, in the technical language of the Logic of the 'Notion.' And we may answer, that the unity or universal in question is either a true and adequate or an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere unit, amid other units, bound to them and serving to recall them by relations of contrast, complement, similarity. It is one of many,—a subordinate member in a congeries, and not the One. If, on the contrary, it be a true Unity, it is a concrete universal,—the parent of perpetual variety. The unity, if it be its genuine shape which is formulated by philosophers, is not mere monotony without differences. If it is a living and real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of principles: it is not a single line of action, but the organic confluence of several. No one single principle by itself is enough to state a life, a character, or a period. But as the unity comes before the eye of the single thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its fulness of life and difference. The whole synthesis, although it is implicitly present and underlies experience and life as its essential basis, is not consciously apprehended, but for the most part taken on one side only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated itself. And even if the master could grasp the whole, could see the unity of actuality in all its differences, (and we may doubt whether any man or any philosopher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,) his followers and the popular mind would not imitate him. While his grasp of comprehension may possibly have been thorough, though he may have seen life whole through all its differences, inequalities, and schisms, and with all these reduced or idealised to their due proportions, into the unity beyond, the crowd who follow him are soon compelled to lay exclusive stress on some one side of his theory. Some of them see the totality from one aspect, some from another. It is indeed the whole which in a certain sense they see: but it is the whole narrowed down to a point. While his theory was a comprehensive and concrete grasp, including and harmonising many things which seem otherwise wide apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate: it fixes on a single point, which is thus withdrawn from its living and meaning-giving context, and left as an empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the word. Popular thought wants the time and perseverance necessary to retain a whole truth, and so is contented with a partial image. It seeks for simple and sharp precision: it likes to have something distinctly before it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable of being stated in a clear and unambiguous formula for the intellect. And popular thought—the dogmatic insistence on one-sided truth—is not confined to the so-called non-philosophic world: just as, on the other hand, the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and reality is seen and felt and recognised by many—and felt by them first—who have no claim to the technical rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought which skims the surface of reality, which addresses itself to the level of opinion prevalent in all members of the mass as such, and does not go beyond that into the ultimate and complex depths of experience.
Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate synthesis which should have appeared in the self-conscious thought of the period, when it reflected upon what it was, has been replaced by a narrow and one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal, a universal which does not express all the particulars. One predominant side of the synthesis steals the place of the total: what should have been a comprehensive universal has lowered itself into a particular. Not indeed the same particular as existed before the union: because it has been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue with a new colouring, as if it had been steeped in a fresh liquid. But still it is really a particular: and as such, it evokes a new particular in antagonism to it and exhibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the first side of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the total, or universal, be called Conservative, the second must be called Reforming or Progressive. If the first step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical. If the one side assumes to be the whole, the other practically refutes the assumption. If the one agency clings blindly to the unity,—as when pious men rally round the central idea of religion, the other as tenaciously and narrowly holds to the difference,—as when science displays the struggle for existence and the empire of chance among the myriads of aimless organisms. They are two warring abstractions, each in a different direction. But as they are the offspring of one parent,—as they have each in their own way narrowed the whole down to a point, it cannot but be that when they evolve or develop all that is in them, they will ultimately coincide, and complete each other. The contradiction will not disappear until it has been persistently worked out,—when each opposing member which was potentially a total has become what it was by its own nature destined to be. And this disappearance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity in all its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new distinctions.
Thus on a large scale we have seen the law of growth, of development, of life. It may be called growth by antagonism. But the antagonism here is over-ruled, and subject to the guidance of an indwelling unity. Mere antagonism—if there be such a thing—would lead to nothing. A mere positive or affirmative point of being would lead to no antithesis, were it not, so to speak, a point floating in an ether of larger life and being, whence it draws an outside element which it overcomes, assimilates and absorbs. A bare national mind only grows to richer culture, because it lives in a universal human life, and can say Nihil humani a me alienum puto. So too the mere unit is always tainted with a dependence on outside: or it is always implicitly more than a mere unit: and what seems to come upon it from outside, is really an enemy from within, and it falls because there is treason within its walls. The revolution succeeds because the party of conservative order is not so hard and homogeneous as it appears. So, too, it is the immanent presence of the complete thought, of the Idea, which is the heart and moving spring that sets going the pulse of the universal movement of thought, and which reappears in every one of these categories to which the actualised thought of an age has been reduced. In every term of thought there are three stages or elements: the original narrow definiteness, claiming to be self-sufficient,—the antagonism and criticism to which this gives rise,—and the union which results when the two supplement and modify each other. In the full life and organic unity of every notion there is a definite kernel, with rigid outlines as if it were immovable: there is a revulsion against such exclusiveness, a questioning and critical attitude: and there is the complete notion, where the two first stages interpenetrate.