'At Kilne there was no weathercock,
And that's the reason why.'
Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly, religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the inner peace, the absolute harmony of the true reality. Pectus facit theologum. The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the sense of absolute independence in God—that strength of faith is the very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs a risk of falling into the fallacy of Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only a parable,—they are but
'Flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine.'
Hegel—in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—is reported to have given the following characteristics of 'representation,' (a) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative thought divest itself:—the eternally living idea is chained to the transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (b) Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names, incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical and philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (c) The terms by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective arrangement[3].
The thing—the so-called subject of the properties, of which it is really no more than the substratum—affords no sufficient ground for the unity of the properties attached to it. The substratum or subject of the proposition is given, and we then look around to see what other properties accompany the primary characteristic for which the name was applied. But the term of popular language is not a real unity capable of supporting differences; it is only one aspect of a thing, a single point fixed and isolated in the process of language by the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the properties are related to the thing, is to ask how one aspect, taken out of its setting, is related to another isolated aspect: which is evidently an unanswerable question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing' of popular conception. If a is a, and nothing more, as the law of Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible to get on to b, c, d, and the rest. The union between the thing divided or defined, and its divided or defining members, is what is termed extra-logical; in other words, it is not evident from what is given or stated in the popular conception. That union must be sought elsewhere, and deeper.
And when we step in to overcome the repugnance which the point of conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting a diversity of predicates,—when we force it into union with these properties: or when we try to remove the separation which leaves the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought, as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts as each solid and independent,—the world of external objects or conceptions, and the world of self,—meet and coincide in the free agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold' or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension of it. Our action, as we incline to call it, which mends the inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account. To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,—of the organic and self-developing system of thought.
The difference between a representative conception and a thought proper may be illustrated by the case of the term 'Money.' Money may be either a materialised thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or a Notion Proper. In the former case, money is identified with a piece of money. It is probably, in the first instance, embodied in coins of gold, silver, and bronze. In the second place, a wide gulf is placed between it and the other articles for which it is given in exchange. If other things are regarded as money, they are generally treated on the assumption that they can in case of need be reduced to coinage. The conception of money by the unscientific vulgar considers it separately from other commodities: and the laws which forbade its exportation gave a vigorous expression to the belief that it was something sui generis, and subject to conditions of its own. The scientific notion of money modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of money. Science does so historically, when it can point to a time and a race where money in our sense of the word does not exist, and where barter takes the place of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically, when it expounds what may be called the process of money,—the inter-action or meeting of conditions to which the existence of money is due. The notion of money, as given in the Ethics of Aristotle, says that it is the common measure of utility or demand. When we leave out of sight the specific quality of an object, and consider only its capacity of satisfying human wants, we have what is called its worth or value. This value of the thing,—the psychological fact which is left, when all the qualities marking the objective thing are reduced to their social efficiency—is the notion, of which the currency is the representation, reducing thought to the level of the senses, and embodying the 'ideality' of value in a tangible and visible object. So long as this 'idea' of value is kept in view, the currency is comprehended: but when the perception of the notion disappears, money is left a mere piece of currency, the general notion being narrowed down to the coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions in their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things merely: it is what from a minor point of view, when we and the things are regarded under the head of want or need, may be called the truth of both, the unity of the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its proper place in the order of things.
[1] Werke, ii. 529, 555.
[2] Hegel's Werke, ii. 431: 'Wobei das Selbst nur repräsentirt und vorgestellt ist, da ist es nicht wirklich: we es vertreten ist, ist es nicht.' Cf. ib. 416.