[3] Philosophie der Religion, i. p. 137 seqq.
CHAPTER XXIV.
FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT.
'It is, in my view, all important,' says Hegel[1], 'to apprehend and express the True not as Substance, but equally much as Subject.' Substance, as Spinoza defines it, is that which is in itself and which is conceived through itself, something which does not need the conception of something else by which its concept may be formed[2]. Substance, in other words, is something which serves to explain itself, which is causa sui. The mind, looking out on the wide world of mutable and manifold objects, finds its rest in the great calm of a something at their base, the eternal nature which, itself unmoved, is the one foundation, complete and sufficient, of all things,—a res aeterna et infinita, which can feed the mind with joy alone[3]. These words suggest only an object—a transcendent object—the basis of an objective order. They seem to leave little for the contemplating subject to do save to discern it and, so discerning, to rest in it and to love. They seem to leave substance a mere datum, a far-off all-embracing end in which the variety of human effort can find a central object and a final close. Yet, in the end it appears[4] that this Res aeterna loves himself with an intellectual love, and this love is identified with the love of man to God, so far at least as man's mind, considered sub specie aeternitatis, can be said to 'explicate' Deity. From this conclusion it might be said that Spinoza rises above the mere category of substance: God is no longer the mere foundation of things—the absolute object of all objects. He rises in human spirit (regarded in its eternal significance) to the rank of a true subject. He is not merely known as the True; but He himself, living and moving in the essential spirit of man, knows himself and acquiesces in his infinite beatitude. But if this be the legitimate inference to be drawn from the closing sections of the Ethics, it is not the view ordinarily suggested by the mention of Spinoza's doctrine. That doctrine, on the contrary, seems, as it first confronts us, and as it has taken its place in history, to omit the subjectivity which had found so decided a recognition in the commencement of Cartesianism. In the cogito ergo sum so much at least is clearly stated: true being—the true—is not merely known, but itself knows; not a mere object, but a subject: a subject-object, or, an Idea. It is to be admitted, indeed, that Descartes hardly remains at this altitude, but he touches it for a moment. Even when he finds in the conception of God a security for truth and reality, and thus seems to base these on a one-sidedly objective standard, he regards God as, on the other hand, the truth and reality postulated and presupposed by the structural system of our ideas. God—such seems the tendency of his so-called 'proof'—is the inevitable prius and presupposition of our thought and being: He makes us know, as much as He is ultimately the object known: He is the unity and the creator of subject and object.
But it is hardly possible to get in philosophy the full recognition of the antithesis between subject and substance and the inclusion of both in the fuller Idea, till after the time of Kant. Kant himself is, in essentials, the antithesis of Spinoza, but it is not till Fichte that the full force of that antithesis is expressly recognised. With Hegel, the two opposite points of view are equally insisted on: the immanence and the transcendence of the True, the Real, the Absolute: or, in other words, the unity in it of subject and object, or of thought and existence. Or, in the words of the religious spirit, though heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, He dwells in the spirit of the righteous, and is not far from any one of us. The truth is not the correspondence or agreement of an idea with a further reality which it represents. Such an idea or 'representation' is a projection which has escaped from our hands, which has slipped from our grip, and which, while owning its mere vicarious character, at the same time beckons us on to seek a reality we can never find. The 'representation' is in a way objective—it is set over against us: but yet it is not truly objective, not self-subsistent and self-possessed. Its objectivity is the objectivity of a name: a quasi-objectivity, which requires to be dipped in the living waters of intelligence before it can really exist and act. It seems, to the untrained observer, to point only outwards to the real object which it copies or designates: to a deeper reflection, it is seen to point equally inward to the mind which informed it and projected it. Thus the knowing subject, and the known object, with the representation which acts as a perpetual mediator to connect and yet not unify the one of these terms with the other,—all at last take their place, reduced and transfigured, in the unity of the Idea.
According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it might seem by a sort of miracle, dispels the mists that envelop and bewilder it, sees through the multeity of modes, and the isolated pictures of imagination, to the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before that august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude of a finite mind would seem to be resignation, worship, reverence,—deeply shading into the submission of absorption. For in it intellect and will are declared to have no place[5]. With such a statement, we get that first aspect of religion which has found its most imposing representative in the faith of Islam. In every religion there must, however, be more than this: or it would fail to do what all religion essentially does. Sheer dependence—Schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit (as Schleiermacher has named it)—can never be the whole burden of a religious teacher's message. Always—at least in the background—there is a contradictory element—in apparent discrepancy with the first—the deification of the worshipper. And as the Ethics of Spinoza—like every complete system of speculative truth—deals with a problem parallel to, if not even identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and main programme must never let us forget the tacit presuppositions worked out to explicitness, as they are partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect and Will are denied to the Deus = Natura = Substantia, it is meant that the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will can well name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the pronominal distinctions of gender matter nothing here), the separation of will from intellect is a fallacy which can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the lower passions, the affections of weakness; these as such, i. e. as elements of weakness, can have no place in Him. But in God, as in the free man who most resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself, there is—but that also in terms we cannot fathom—abundance of joy—the joy of infinite self-realisation.
Partly by the complementary theory of Leibniz, partly by the antagonist theories of Kant, the way had been prepared for setting forth, and in fuller outline, the implications so tardily admitted by Spinoza. It was only by a misuse or mal-extension of a word that Herder's God—a God who is Force—and the Force of Forces—could be supposed an advance upon Spinoza. There is in Force an analogue of Life; but it is life in dependence, life not self-centred, always going forth, and when it goes forth dissipated. It is as it were pushed from behind, and is lost in what comes after it. If a Force of Forces means anything, it means something more than Force: it means a master of force, a force-controller and force-adjuster, a unity and principle of forces. And Substance, as Spinoza understood it, is more than this variability, this deification of instability. It is the unity in which the variety and disparity of existence, the multiplicity of vicissitude, is merged and lost, only again to issue from it, and yet not leave it behind, in the infinitely-various modes of its two great and conspicuous attributes of consciousness and extensionality. If Hegel then sought to go beyond Spinoza, he sought to find a formula which would lose nothing that Spinoza had reached, but would at the same time bring out what Spinoza had left an implication, or noted in a partial rectification. As in religion, besides the utter dependence on God (so that, God failing, I perish), there must be also an absolute union, complete reconciliation—complete as culminating in unity and identity (so that God shall not be God, unless I am I): so it is in philosophy. The Absolute cannot merely be, and be far away—the last goal in which the variety of life is made one, and the turmoil of the passionate existences laid to rest. The Soul which is (as some of the medieval Christians would say) still in itinere, a wayfarer, is such because its glance is turned on outward circumstances: but country is no accident: the soul even here carries with it that patria, 'which is the heavenly,' in its longings, and has it, even while yet on pilgrimage, in that strong possession of all things by itself, which the theologian styles Faith. This goal determines the pilgrimage, fixes its direction, gives progress to its steps.
In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth, the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and a deep forgetfulness—only short of absolute—cuts it off from his every-day consciousness. In his present reality he finds himself in a land of darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking out only on the ghostly images that flit across his prison wall, cast there by the objects that move between his back and the light of a mysterious fire behind him and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the bodily eye: the estate of the lowly savage, whom superstition and ignorance seem to hold as their captive for ever. But, though his high home and his glory of other days have left no conscious memory in the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they have not departed without leaving a trace behind. For forgetfulness is not blank non-existence. The sample of humanity inherits the birthright of his fathers—he has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are his, if he can mature himself to take possession of them. He suffers from the pains of growth, from the sense of disparity between what he is and what he may and should be—from the noble uneasiness and dissatisfaction of a being who feels—if he does not know—his infinite potentialities. For these potentialities—otherwise they have no title even to that name—are also actualities, yet actualities which protest their own incompleteness, and crave imperiously for what they lack. What he has is his right, but his right only in so far as it is also his duty. It is as such, and only as such, that he still retains the soul in all its prerogatives: as the right, which is the duty, of knowledge. Such a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised, possession is what Plato has called Eros, or Love. But it is a Love whose wings are at first invisible, and who often seems rather to crawl among ignoble things than to soar in the free fresh air.