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

by William Wallace

FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT.

Induction and Experience are names to which is often assigned the honour of being the source of all our knowledge. But what induction and experience consist in, is what we are supposed to be already aware of; and that is—it may be briefly said—the concentration of the felt and sense-given fragments into an intimate unity. The accidents and fortunes that have befallen us in lapses of time, the scenes that have been set before and around us in breadths of space, are condensed into a mood of mind, a habitual shading of judgment, or frame of thought. The details of fact re-arrange themselves into a general concept; their essence gets distilled into a concentrated form. Their meaning disengages itself from its embodiment, and floats as a self-sustaining form in an ideal world. Thus if we look at the larger process of history, we see every period trying to translate the sensuous fact of its life into a formula of thought, and to fix it in definite characters. The various parts of existence, and existence as a whole, are stripped of their sensible or factual nature, in which we originally feel and come into contact with them, and are reduced to their simple equivalents in terms of thought. From sense and immediate feeling there is, in the first place, generated an image or idea which at least represents and stands for reality; and from that, in the second place, comes a thought or notion proper, which holds the facts in unity.

The phenomenon may, perhaps, be illustrated by the case of numbers. To the adult European, numbers and numbering are an obvious and essential part of our scheme of things that seems to need no special explanation. But the experience of children suggests its artificiality, and the evidence from the history of language corroborates that surmise. If number be in a way describable as part of the sense-experience, or total impression, it certainly does not come upon us with the same passivity on our part as the perception of taste or colour, or even of shape. It postulates a higher grade of activity. As Plato says, it 'awakes the intelligence': it implies a question and looks forward to an answer: it is thus the first appearance of what in its later fullness will be called 'Dialectic,' To put it otherwise: Numbering can only proceed where there is a unit, and an identity: it implies a one, and it implies an infinite repetibility of that one[1] It thus postulates the double mental act, first of reducing the various to its basis of identity, and, secondly, of performing a synthesis of the identical units thus created. In the highly artificial world in which we live all this seems simple enough. The products of machinery, articles of furniture, dress, &c., &c., are already uniform items: and the strokes of a clock seem almost to invite summation. But in free nature this similarity is much less obviously stamped on things: and the products of primitive art—of literal manu-facture—display an individuality, an element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it was necessary, before we could number, to reduce the qualitatively different to a quantitative equality or comparability. There are indeed some instances, in that nearest of things to us, the human body, which might help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and limbs which go in pairs, and which might easily suggest a dual, as, so to speak, a sensuous fact amongst other facts. Again, there is the hand and its five fingers, or the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten, as a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers in natural aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here we may keep at first to the fingers proper, minus the thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said to give us a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike, and needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to create the numerical scale from one to four. It is by them, indeed, that Plato, it may be unconsciously, illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short you have the natural abacus of the nations, but one restricted, first, perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the group 1-10.

We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances, almost a natural perceptive fact. But when it is so envisaged, it is hardly recognised as number strictly so called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous attribute of things: a thing which has the quality of duplication, not a thought which is the synthesis of two identical units. It is a sort of accident, not part of a regular system or series. So again with the plural, which may appear in several shapes before it is assigned to its proper place as a systematic function of the singular. If the Malay, in order to say 'the king of all apes' has to enumerate one after another the several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses' he has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word meaning 'all' or 'many,' we can see that the conception of number is for him still in the bonds of sense. It is not a synthetic category, but only a material multitude. But in other cases the plural proper is almost confounded with the so-called 'collective.' It is not an unfamiliar fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has acquired a meaning of its own,—not the mere multiple of its singular; as also that the collective term is occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally as the more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals. Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of language and conception when the aggregate of singulars form a uniquely-qualified case of the object. And the peculiarity of them is seen in the way the plurality is immersed in and restricted to the special class of objects: as e. g. when in English the plurality of a number of ships is verbally stereotyped as against the plurality of a number of sheep, or of partridges (fleet, flock, covey). In such instances the category of number is completely pervaded and modified by the quality of the objects it is applied to. So, in the Semitic languages, the so-called 'broken plural' is a quasi-collective, which grammatically counts as a feminine singular (like so many Latin and Greek collectives): and whereas the more regular plural is generally shown by separable affix, this quasi-collective plural enters the very body of the word by vowel-change, indicating as it were by this absorption the constitution of a specifically new view of things. On the other hand, it may be said, there is in this collective a trace of the emergence of the universal and identical element through the generalisation due to the conjunction of several similars all acting as one[2]

In a true plural, on the contrary, it is required that the sign of number be clearly eliminated from any peculiarities of its special object, and be distinctly separated from the collective. And similarly the true numeral has to be realised in its abstractness, as a category per se. And to do this requires some amount of abstraction. In Greek, for example, we meet the distinction between numbers in the abstract, pure numbers (such as four and six), and bodily or physical numbers (such as four men, six trees)[3]. The geometrical aspect under which numbers were regarded by the Greeks, e. g. as oblong or square numbers, bears in the same direction. But another phenomenon in language tells the tale more distinctly[4]. Abundantly in Sanscrit and Greek, more rarely in Zend and Teutonic, and here and there in the Semitic languages, we meet with what is known as the dual number, a special grammatical form intended to express a pair of objects. The witty remark of Du Ponceau[5] concerning the Greek dual, that it had apparently been invented only for lovers and married people, may illustrate its uses, but hardly suffices to explain its existence in language. But a comparison of barbarian dialects serves to show that the dual is, as it were, a prelude to the plural,—a first attempt to grasp the notion of plurality in a definite way, which served its turn in primitive society, but afterwards disappeared, when the plural had been developed, and the numerals had attained a form of their own. If this be so, the dual is what physiologists call a rudimentary organ, and tells the same story as these organs do of the processes of nature.

The language of the Melanesian island of Annatom, one of the New Hebrides, may be taken as an instance of a state of speech in which the dual is natural. That language possesses a fourfold distinction of number in its personal pronouns, a different form to mark the singular, dual, trial, and plural: and the pronoun of the first person plural distinguishes in addition whether the person addressed is or is not included in the 'we-two,' 'we-three,' or 'we-many' of the speaker[6]. The same language however possesses only the first three numerals, and in the translation of the Bible into this dialect it was necessary to introduce the English words, four, five, &c. The two facts must be taken together: the luxuriance of the personal pronouns and the scanty development of numerals in such languages are two phenomena of the same law. The numeral 'four' to these tribes is said to bear the meaning of 'many' or 'several,' Another fact points in the same direction. In many languages, such as those of China, Further India and Mexico, it is customary in numbering to use what W. von Humboldt has called class-words. Here it is felt that an artificial unity has to be created, a common denominator found, and all reduced to it, before any summation can be carried out. Scholars and officials, in Chinese, can only be classed under the rubric of 'jewel' or dignity: and animals or fish by 'tails,' as if thereby only could one get a handle to hold them and count them. (The idiom still lingers in western languages: as in English, heads of cabbage, or of cattle: or German, sechs Mann Soldaten.) So in Malay, instead of 'five boys' the phrase used is 'boy five-man': in other words, the numerals are supposed to inhere as yet in objects of a special kind or common occurrence[7]. And among the South Sea Islanders the consciousness of number is decidedly personal: that is to say, the distinction between one and two is first conceived as a distinction between 'I' and 'we two.' Even this amount of simplification surpasses what is found amongst some Australian tribes. There we find four duals: one for brothers and sisters: one for parents and children: one for husbands and wives: and one between brothers-in-law[8]. Each pair has a different form. We thus seem to see to what early language is applied: not to designate the objects of nature, but the members of the primitive family and their interests. The consciousness of numbers was first awakened by the need of distinguishing and combining the things that belonged to and specially interested men and women in the narrow circle of barbarian life[9]. It is not altogether imaginative in principle, though it may be occasionally surmise in details, to connect the rise of grammatical forms with the temperament and character of the people, and therefore with its social organisation. If the Bantoo or Caffir languages of Southern Africa instead of a single third personal pronoun and third personal termination to the verb use the separate forms corresponding to the ten class-prefixes of the nouns, it must be in accordance with the general spirit and system of these tribes. The various plural forms, if they persist, will reflect contemporary modes of life.

Numbers were at first immersed in the persons, and then, as things came to be considered also, in the things numbered. The mind seems to have proceeded slowly from the vague one to definite numbers. And the first decided step was taken towards an apprehension of numbers when two was distinguished from one, and the distinction was made part of the personal terminations. The plural was a further step in the same direction: the real value of which, however, did not become apparent until the numerals had been separately established in forms of their own. When that was accomplished, the special form of the dual became useless: it had outlived its purpose, and henceforth it ceased to have, any but that poetical beauty of old association which often adorns the once natural, but now obsolete growths of the past. When the numerals were thus emancipated from their material and sensuous environment, quantity was translated from outward being in its embodiments into a form of thought. At first, indeed, it was placed in an ethereal or imaginative space, the counterpart as it were of the sensuous space in which it had been previously immersed. It became a denizen of the mental region, as it had been before a habitant of the sense-world.

The mind was informed with quantity in the shape of number: but it does not follow from this, that the new product was comprehended, or the process of its production kept in view. Like all new inventions (and numeration may fairly be classed under that head), it was laid hold of, and all its consequences, results, and uses estimated and realised by the practical and defining intellect. In one direction, it became, like many new inventions in the early days of society, a magic charm, and was invested with mystery, sacredness, and marvellous powers. But the intelligent mind,—the understanding,—resolved to make better use of the new instrument: and that in two ways, in practical work and in theory. On the one hand it was applied practically in the dealings of life,—in commerce, contracts, legislation, and religion. On the other hand, the new conception of number, which common sense and the instinctive action of men had evolved, was carried out in all its theory: it was analysed in all directions, and its elements combined in all possible ways. The result was the science of arithmetic, and mathematics in general. Such consequences did the reflective understanding derive from the analysis of its datum,—the fact of quantity freed from its sensuous envelope.

The general action of understanding, and of practical thought, is of this kind. It accepts the representative images which have emerged from sensation, as they occur: and tries to appreciate them, to give them precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse them until their utmost limits of meaning are explored. Where they have come from, and where they lead to,—the process out of which they spring, and which fixes the extent of their validity,—are questions of no interest to the understanding[10]. It takes its objects, as given in popular conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be expounded in detail.

We have taken number as one example of the transference of a sensible or sense-immersed fact into a form of thought: but a form which is still placed in a superior or mental space. One advantage of taking number as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished from numbers in an emphatic and recognised way. Nobody will dispute that the abstraction, as it is called, has an existence of its own, and can be made a legitimate object of independent investigation. But if the process be more obvious in the case of the numerals, there must have been a similar course of development leading to the pronouns, the prepositions, and the auxiliary verbs—to what has been called the 'formal' or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative' element, the connective and constructive tissue of language. Whether these pronominal 'roots' form a special and originally-distinct class of their own, or are derived from a transmutation of more material or substantial elements, is a question on which linguistic research casts as yet no very certain light. It is true that on the one hand etymology is mainly silent on the origin of pronouns, numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions (i. e. cannot refer them to roots significant of qualitative being): and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that of Gabelenz[11], that in the Indo-Chinese languages the words for I, five, fish have a like sound, as do those for thou, two, ear, or that I am, originally means I breathe. In all languages—though with immense diversities of degree, this formal element has attained a certain independence. And in many instances we can more or less trace the process by which there grew up in language an independent world of thought: we can see the natural existence passing out of the range of the senses into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of reason is slowly constituting itself in the history of culture: and we, who live now, enter upon the inheritance which past ages have laid up for us.