[4] Spin. Eth. v. 35.
[5] Eth. i. 17 schol.
CHAPTER XXV.
REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING.
Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted and developed in their consequences. Because they are so accepted, as given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only institute relations between them. Its business as thus conceived is progressive unification, comparing objects with one another, demonstrating the similarities which exist between them, and combining them with each other. The exercise of thought which deals with such objects is limited by their existence: it is only formal. It is finite thought, because it is only subjective: it begins at a given point and stops somewhere, and never gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems to be outside of it, and independent of it. Each point of fact, again, when it is carried out to its utmost, meets with other thoughts which limit it, and claim to be equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from point to point. To this thinking German philosophy from the time of Kant and Jacobi applied a name, which since the days of Coleridge has been translated by 'Understanding'[1]. This degree or mode of thinking —not a faculty of thought—is the systematised and thorough exercise of what in England is called 'Common Sense.' In the first place, it is synonymous with practical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts, or things, as given, and aims only at arranging and combining them and drawing from them counsels of prudence or rules of art. Seeing things on a superficies, as it were so many unconnected points, here itself and there the various things of the world, it tries to bring them into connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks to render them more precise by pointing out and sifting the elements of sameness. Its greatest merit is an abhorrence of vagueness, inconsistency, and what it stigmatises as mysticism: it wishes to be clear, distinct, and practical. In its proper sphere,—and it has an indispensable function to perform even in philosophy: wherever, that is, it is unnecessary to go into the essential truth of things, and one has only to do good work in a clearly defined sphere,—the understanding has an independent value of its own[2] Nor is this true merely of practical life, where a man must accommodate himself to facts: it is equally applicable in the higher theoretic life,—in art, religion, and philosophy. If intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in these, there is something wrong about them.
It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded as a ne plus ultra, and its mandates to restrict investigation by the limits of foregone conclusions find obedience, that understanding deserves the reproachful language which was lavished upon it by the German philosophers at the close of the last century. The understanding is abstract: this sums up its offences in one word. Its objects, that is the things it deals with and believes utterly real, are only partly so, and when that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only abstractions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and common sense, and in its systematic form, the logical or narrowly-consistent intellect, it is partial and liable to be tenacious of half-truths. Only that whereas in feeling and common-sense there is often a great deal which they cannot express,—whereas the heart is often more liberal than its interpreting mind will allow—the reverse is true of the logically-consistent intellect. The narrowness of the latter is, in its own opinion, exactly equal to the truth of things: and whatever it expresses is asserted without qualification to be the absolute fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which is assumed to be certain and perspicuous), to see all which that point will necessarily involve or lead to. For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent arguer (without wasting time on abstruse inquiries as to what Order is or means, and what sort of Order we want), to what consequences and institutions this conception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the State is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms of organisation will this hypothesis (also assumed a self-evident conception) lead? Or we may go a step further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty. How are we to proceed—what laws and ordinances will be necessary, to secure the proper equilibrium of these two principles? The two must be blended, and each have its legitimate influence.
These are examples of the operation of Understanding. It can only reach a synthesis (or conjunction), never a real unity, because it believes in the omnipotence of the abstractions with which it began: but must either carry out one partial principle to its consequences, or allow an alternate and combined force to two opposite principles. Its canon is identity: given something, let us see what follows when we keep the same point always in view, and compare other points with the one which we are supposed to know. Its method is analytic: given a conception in which popular thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all the elements of truth which can be deduced from it. Its statements are abstract and narrow: or, in the words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut off from another with a hatchet[3]. In its excess it degenerates into dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or naturalistic.
The fact is that the Understanding, as this analytic, abstract, and finite action of mind is called,—the thought which holds objective ideas distinct from one another, and from the subjective faculties of thought as a whole,—that this Understanding is, when it claims to be heard and obeyed in science, not sufficiently thorough-going. It begins at a point which is not so isolated as it seems, but is a member of a body of thought: nor is it aware that the whole of this body of thought is in organic, and even more than organic, union. It errs in taking too much for granted: and in not seeing how this given point is the result of a process,—that in it, in any thought or idea, several tendencies or elements converge and are held in union, but with the possibility of working their way into a new independence. In other words, the Understanding requires, as the organon and method of philosophy, to be replaced by the Reason[4],—by infinite thought, concrete, at once analytic and synthetic. How then, it may be asked, can we make the passage from the inadequate to the adequate? To that question the answer may be given that it is our act of arbitrary arrest which halts at the inadequate: that in complete Reason, which is the constituent nature both of us and of things, the Understanding is only a grade which points beyond itself, and therefore presupposes and struggles up to the adequate thought. In other words, it is Reason which creates or lays down for behoof of its own organisation the aims, conditions, and fixed entities,—the objects, by which it is bound and limited in its analytic exercise as understanding. Reason, therefore, is the implicit tendency to correct its own inadequacy: and we have only to check self-will and prejudice so far that the process may be accomplished.