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

by William Wallace

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE I AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC.

The ordinary logic-books have made us all familiar with the popular distinction between Abstract and Concrete. By a concrete term they mean the name of an existence or reality which is obvious to the senses, and is found in time and place;—or they mean the name of an attribute when we expressly or tacitly recognise its dependence upon such a thing of the senses. When, on the contrary, the attribute is forcibly withdrawn from its context and made an independent entity in the mind, the term expressing it becomes in the usual phraseology abstract. Any term therefore which denotes a non-sensible or intelligible object would probably be called abstract. And there is something to be said for the distinction, which, though unsuccessful in its expression, has some feeling of the radical antithesis between mere being and mere thought. It is true, that in the totality of sense and feeling, in the full sense-experience, there is a concrete fulness, as it were, an infinite store of features and phases waiting for subsequent analysis to detect. In the real kind of actual nature there is an inexhaustible mine of properties, which no artificial classification and description can ever come to the end of. Every quality which we state, every relation which we predicate, is a partial and incomplete element in this presupposed reality, this implicit concrete; and as such is abstract, and comparatively unreal. It is something forcibly torn out of and held apart from its context. But on the other hand the concrete reality is not at first real, but implicit: it becomes really concrete only as it re-embraces, and re-constitutes in its totality the elements detected by analysis. But the popular distinction forgets this, and gives the title and rank of concrete to what very poorly deserves the name, viz. to the yet undiscerned reality denoted by a substantive name. Yet there can be little doubt that the popular use of these terms, or the popular apprehension of what constitutes reality,—for that is what it comes to,—is sufficiently represented by the ordinary logic-books. So that, if the whole business of the logician lies in formulating the distinctions prevalent in popular thought, the ordinary logic is correct.

Now the popular logic of the day,—the logic which has long been taught in our schools and universities—has three sources.—In the first place, but in a slight degree, it trenches upon the province of psychology, and gives some account of the operation by which concepts or general ideas are supposed to be formed, and of the errors or fallacies which naturally creep into the process of reasoning. This is the more strictly modern, the descriptive part of our logic-books.—But, secondly, the logic of our youth rests in a much higher degree upon the venerable authority of Aristotle. That logic, within its own compass, was a masterpiece of analysis, and for many centuries maintained an ascendency over the minds of men, which it well deserved. But it was not an analysis of thought or knowledge as a whole, and it treated its subject in fragments. It gave in one place an analysis of science and in another an analysis of certain methods, which could be observed in popular discussions and practical oratory. As Lord Bacon remarked, it did little else than state and, it may be, exaggerate the rationale of argumentation. A high level of popular thought it unquestionably was, which Aristotle had to investigate,—a level which many generations of less favoured races were unable to reach. But there were defects in this Logic which fatally marred its general usefulness, when the limited scope of its original intention had been lost sight of. The thoughts of Greece, it has been said, were greatest and most active in the line of popular action for the city and the public interest, in the discussions, the quibbles, the fallacies, and rhetorical arts of the barber's shop and the 'agora.' The aim of such exercises was to convince, to demonstrate, to persuade, to overcome;—it might be for good and truth, but also it might not. And accordingly the Logic of Aristotle has been said to have for its end and canon the power to convince and to give demonstrative certainty. There is some ground, it may be, for this charge. The ancient logician seems to luxuriate in a rank growth of forms of sophism, and in an almost childlike fondness for variety of argumentative method. He seems resolved to trace the wayward tricks of thought and its phases through every nook and cranny, to exhaust all the permutations and complications of its elements. But let us be just, and remember that all this was in the main a speculative inquiry—for the sake of theory. It developed the powers of judgment and inference, just as the modern research for new metals, new plants, or new planets, develops the powers of observation. Both have some value in the material results they discover: but, after all, the mental culture they give is the main thing. And the talents quickened by deductive research are no whit less valuable than those owed to the other. Forms are essential, even if it be possible to make the terrible mistake of regarding them as all-important to the exclusion of matter.

And then, this is not the whole truth. There is a perfectly serious Greek science—Mathematics—a science of many branches: a science which, from Plato downwards, always stood in alliance with the studies of philosophy. Now, it might be said, perhaps with ground, that the conception of mathematical method too much dominated all attempts to get at the rationale of science, and led to the supremacy of syllogism. It would be fairer perhaps to put this objection in another shape. We should then say that the logic of Aristotle,—the Analytics—is too much restricted to dealing with the most general and elementary principles of reasoning. But this is not in itself a fault. It becomes a fault only where there is no growth in philosophy—when it is merely handed on from master to pupil; and where there is a tendency to put philosophic doctrine to immediate use. To expend the whole energy of intellect in laying bare the general principles, the fundamental method, of knowledge and inference, is precisely what the founder of a science has a duty to do. But the beginning thus made requires development—and development which is fruitful must proceed by correction and antithesis, no less than by positive additions. It was not given to Aristotle's logic to be so carried on. His logic, like his system in general, had no real successor to carry it on in the following generation: and when in the less original ages of early Byzantine rule it again found students, it had become a quasi-sacred text which could only be commented on, not modified and developed. From the great Exegetai of Greece it passed westward to Boethius and eastward to the Syrian and Persian commentators in the early centuries of the Caliphate. From these, and from other intermediaries, it may be, it finally culminated in the work of the Latin Schoolmen of the later Middle Ages. But the very reverence which all these expositors felt for the text of the Philosopher rendered true development impossible.

Then, on the other hand, the lust of practical utility caused a grave misconception of what logic can do. For Aristotle, logic is a scientific analysis of the modes of inference; its uses are those which follow intrinsically from all noble activity freely and zealously prosecuted. But with the death of Aristotle the great days of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and divine wisdom were over. The Stoics into whose hands the chief sceptre of philosophy, directly or indirectly, passed never rose above the conception of life as a task and a duty, and of all other things, literature, science, and art, as subservient to the performance of that task. The conception is an ennobling one: but only with a relative or comparative nobility. It ennobles, if it is set beside and against the view that life is a frivolous play, a sport of caprice and selfishness. But it darkens and narrows the outlook of humanity, when it loses sight of life as a joy, a self-enlarging and self-realising freedom, of life as in its supreme phase θεωρία—or the enjoyment of God. To the Stoic, therefore,—and to the dominant Christian theory which entered to some extent on the Stoic inheritance—logic, like the rest of philosophy, was something only valuable because ultimately it helped to save the soul.

It thus sunk into the position of an Organon or instrument. To the Stoic,—for instance to Epictetus—its value was its use to establish the doctrines of the Stoic faith, by confuting the ill-arranged and futile inferences on which were founded the aims and approvals of ordinary worldly life. To the Christian, again, it served as a method for putting into systematic shape (under the guidance of certain supreme categories or principles also borrowed from Greek thought) the variety of fundamental and derivative aspects which successive minds, pondering on the power and mystery of the Christian faith, had set forward as its essential dogmas. It thus helped to build up (out of the leading ideas of Greek metaphysics, and the principles emerging in the earliest attempts to formulate the law of Christ) that amalgam of the power of a divine life with the reflective thought of the teachers of successive generations, which constitutes the dogmatic creed of Christendom. Such a reconstruction in thought of the reality which underlies experience—(in this case the experience of the Christian life), is inevitable if man is to be man, a free intelligence, and not a mere animal-like feeling. But its success is largely, if not entirely, dependent on the value of the logic and metaphysics which it employs: and it would be a bold thing to say that the subtle, abstract, and unreal system of Neo-Platonist and Neo-Aristotelian thought was an organon adequate to cope with the breadth and depth, latent if not very explicit, in the fulness and reality of the religious life.

Yet even as an Organon, Logic had to sink to a lower rank. As traditionalism grew supreme, and religion ossified into a stereotyped form of belief and practice, logic had less to do as an organiser of dogma. It sank, or seemed to sink (for it would be rash to speak too categorically of an epoch of thought so far removed from modern sympathy and understanding as the age of the Schoolmen), into a futile (and as it seems occasionally almost a viciously-despairing) play with pro and contra,—into a lust of argumentation which in masters like Ockam comes perilously close to scepticism or agnosticism. More and more, Scholastic thought, which, at one time, had been in the centre of such intellectual life as there was, came to be stranded on the shore, while the onward-flowing tide spread in other directions. These were the great days of logical sway, when it seemed as if logic could create new truth: as if forms could beget matter. So at least ran an outside rumour, which was probably based on some amount of real folly. But the more important point was that the old logic had lost touch with reality. New problems were arising, which it was—without a profound reconstruction—quite incapable of solving. Of these there were obviously two—not unconnected perhaps, but arising in different spheres of life. There was the revival of religious experience, growing especially since the thirteenth century with an ever-swelling stream in the souls of men and women, till it burst through all bounds of outward organisation in the catastrophe of the Reformation. Luther may have been historically unjust (as Bacon afterwards was) to the 'blind heathen master,' as he called Aristotle: but he was governed by a true instinct when (unlike the compromise-loving Melanchthon) he found the traditional system of logic and metaphysics no proper organon for the new phase of faith and theory. So, too, the new attempts at an inception and instauration of the sciences grew up outside the walls of old tradition, and were at first perhaps discouraged and persecuted as infidel and heretical, and were, even without that burden, pursued at much hap-hazard and with much ignorance both in aims and methods. Intelligent onlookers,—especially if inspired by an enthusiasm for the signs of an age happier for human welfare—could not but sec how needful it was to come to some understanding on the aims and methods of the rising sciences.

This want, which he keenly felt, Francis Bacon tried to satisfy. He pointed out, vaguely, but zealously and in a noble spirit, the end which that new logic had to accomplish. Bacon, however, could not do more than state these bold suggestions: he had not the power to execute them. He imagined indeed that he could display a method, by which science would make incredible advances, and the kingdom of truth in a few years come into the world. But this is a sort of thing which no man can do. Plato, if we take his Republic for a political pamphlet, had tried to do it for the social life of Athens. What Plato could not do for the political world of Greece, Bacon could not do for the intellectual world in his time: for as the Athenian worked under the shadow of his own state, over-mastered even without his knowledge by the ordinances of Athens, so the Englishman was evidently enthralled by the medieval conceptions and by the logic which he condemned. What Aristotle had for ages been supposed to do, no philosopher could do for the new spirit of inquiry which had risen in and before the days of Bacon. That spirit, as exhibited in his great contemporaries, Bacon, as he has himself shown, could not rightly understand or appreciate. He failed, above all, to recognise the self-corrective, tentative, and hypothetical nature, of all open inquiry. But one need not for this disparage his work. It showed a new sense of the magnitude of the modern problem: it set prominently forward the comprehensive aim of human welfare: and by its conception of the 'forma' it kept science pledged to a high ideal. But Bacon could only play the part of the guide-post: he could not himself lay down the road. And negatively he could warn against the belief that mathematics could generate or do more indeed than define the sciences. The spirit of free science, of critical investigation, of inductive inquiry, must and did constitute its forms, legislation, and methods for itself. For no philosopher can lay down laws or methods beforehand which the sciences must follow. The logician only comes after, and, appreciating and discovering the not always conspicuous methods of knowledge, endeavours to gather them up and give them their proper place in the grand total of human thought, correcting its inadequacies by their aid, and completing their divisions by its larger unities. Or rather this is a picture of what English logic might have done. But it does not do so in the ordinary and accepted text-books on the subject. What it does do, is rather as follows. To the second and fundamental part which it subjects to a few unimportant alterations,—i. e. to the doctrine of terms, propositions, and reasonings,—it subjoins an enumeration of the methods used in the sciences.

To the rude minds of the Teutonic peoples the logical system of Aristotle had seemed almost a divine revelation. From the brilliant intellect of Greece a hand was stretched to help them in the arrangement of their religious beliefs. The Church accepted the aid of logic, foreign though logic was to its natural bent, as eagerly as the young society tried for a while to draw support from the ancient forms of the Roman Empire. So with the advance of the Sciences in modern times some hopeful spirits looked upon the Inductive Logic of Mill in the light of a new revelation. The vigorous action of the sciences hailed a systematic account of its methods almost as eagerly as the strong, but untaught intellect of the barbarian world welcomed the lessons of ancient philosophy. For the first time the sciences, which had been working blindly or instinctively, but with excellent success, found their procedure stated clearly and definitely, yet without any attempt to reduce their varied life to the Procrustean bed of mathematics, which had once been held to possess a monopoly of method. The enormous influence of the physical sciences saw itself reflected in a distinct logical outline: and the new logic became the dominant philosophy. Such for a while was the proud position of the Inductive Logic. Enthusiastic students of science in all countries, who were not inaccessible to wider culture, used quotations from Mill to adorn and authorise their attempts at generalisation and theory. A period of speculation in the scientific world succeeded the period of experiment, in which facts had been collected and registered. A chapter on Method became a necessary introduction to all higher scientific treatises. In our universities methodology was prodigally applied to the study of ancient philosophy. And so long as the scientific epoch lasts in its one-sided prominence, so long the theory of inductive and experimental methods may dominate the intellectual world.

But the Inductive Logic hardly rose to the due sense of its situation. It has not held to the same high ideal as Bacon set before it. It has planted itself beside what it was good enough to call the Deductive Logic, and given the latter a certain toleration as a harmless lunatic, or an old pauper who had seen better days. Retaining the latter with certain modifications, although it has now lost its meaning in the changed outlines of the intellectual world, Inductive Logic adds a methodology of the sciences, without however founding this methodology upon a comprehensive analysis of knowledge as a whole, when enlarged and enlightened by the work of the sciences. Hence the two portions,—the old logic, mutilated and severed from the Greek world it grew out of, and the new Inductive or specially-scientific logic, not going beyond a mere classification of methods,—can never combine, any more than oil and water. And the little psychology, which is sometimes added, does not facilitate the harmony.