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

by William Wallace

THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE.

The English reader may probably be taken to be familiar with the conception of Logic as the Science of the Form of Thought. He may also have heard this explained as equivalent to the Science of Thought as Thought, or of Thought as Form, or of Formal Thought. But, probably, also, he brings to the lesson no very high estimate of form as such. In the old language of Greek philosophy, transmitted through the Schoolmen of the West, and still lingering in the phraseology of Bacon and Shakespeare[1], Forms and substantial forms were powers in the world of reality. But a generation arose which knew them not: to which they were only belated survivals of the past. The forms had lost connexion with matter and content, and had come to seem something occult, transcendent, and therefore, to a practical and realistic age, something fantastic and superfluous. Yet it may be well to recall that the same author who has put on record his view that forms are only mental figments, unless they be fully 'determinate in matter,' has equally laid it down that the so-called 'causes' of vulgar philosophy—the matter and the agent—are only 'vehicles of the form,' Thus spontaneously did Bacon reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of the interdependence of form and matter, that form is always form of (or in) matter, and that matter is always for form.

The relativity of form and matter, or of form and content, is indeed almost a commonplace of popular discussion on logical subjects. But like other uncritical applications of great truths, this is both carried beyond its proper bounds, and is not carried out with sufficient thoroughness. There cannot—it is said—be a formal logic, because every exercise of thought is internally affected or modified by the material—the subject-matter—with which it deals. It is implied in such an argument that the 'subject-matter' finds no difficulty in existing by itself, but that the 'thought' is a mere vacuity or un-characterised something which owes its every character to the said matter. But a subject-matter which has content and character has therefore form: it is already known, already thought. And as to this thought, which is said to approach its matter with a self so blank, so impartial, so neutral—what is it? It is a thought or a thinking which has never as yet thought,—which is only named 'thought' by right of expectation, but is itself nothing actual. Of such —fictitious—thought there can hardly be a science.

On the other hand, that may be easily called a formal logic, which is much more than formal: and that may be called material, which is only a species of formal. Great indeed is the virtue of names, to suppress and to replace thought. When forms hang on as mysterious names after their day is passed—when they are retained in a certain honour, while the real working methods have assumed other titles; then these forms become purely formal and antiquated. Thus the Logic of Aristotle seemed in its unfamiliar language to a later generation to be purely formal and superfluous. It was only another side of the same mistake when the new forms—the forms efficient and active in matter,—were not recognised as formal, but were boldly styled material: and the Logic which discussed such matter-marked forms was called a material Logic.

The phrase Matter of Thought, like its many congeners, is a fruitful mother of misconceptions. Caught up by the pictorial imagination, which is always at hand to anticipate thought, it suggests a matter, which is not thought, but is there, all the same, lying in expectation of it. It suggests two things—(for are there not two words, and a preposition or term of relation between them?). But there are not two things. This matter is just as much a nonentity as the aforesaid thought: a matter of thought is a thought matter,—matter, thought once, and possibly to be thought again.

All this talk about the Relativity of form and matter is insincere, and semi-conventional. It is (like the well-known antithesis between Matter and Mind, of which indeed it is only a variation) a halting between two views. That which it chiefly leans to, is that there can be no form without matter, though there may well be matter which is not yet formed. At the best it goes no further than to admit or assert that besides the one there is also the other. It establishes a see-saw, and is proud of it. This is Dualism. Its maxim is, Don't forget that there is an Other. You have explored the One: you have perhaps done well. But there is also and always the Other. The second view is not the mere negation of this dualism. That there is a dualism is a fact which it acknowledges.[2] All life and reality is manifested in dualism—in antithesis: but the life and the reality is one. Mind—Geist—actualised and intelligent experience—is the one ultimate and essential reality.[3] In the face of its unity, mere matter is only a half-truth, and mere thought is only another. The reality, the unity, and the truth, is matter as formed, nature as reflected in mind. In the reality of experience there is always the presence of thought: and thought is only real when it is wedded with nature in the truth of man's mind. So far Bacon and Hegel coincide. Man—in so far as he is Mind—and of course Mind in its fullness is not merely subjective nor merely objective, but absolute—is the measure of all things, the central and comprehensive reality. Such a man—and such a mind—is, we need hardly add, not the man in the street, nor the man in the study: but the infinite, universal, eternal mind in whom these and all others essentially have their being. Such truth of Man—such Mind—is the Absolute: it is sometimes named God: it is the ideal of all aspiration, and the fountain of all truth.

'Logic,' says Hegel[4], 'is the science of the Idea in the medium of mere thought.' It exhibits the truth in one partial aspect, or shows one appearance of the total unity of the world,—the aspect it would wear if we could for a moment suppose the reality of Nature to vanish out of sight, and the ideality of Mind reduced to a ghost. It dissects the underlying organisation—the scheme of unification—which the world of mental or spiritual experience presents in all its concreteness. And it does so because it exhibits the last result of the ever clearer and clearer experience which Mind achieves as it comes to see and realise itself. The logical skeleton is the sublimated product of a rich concrete experience. It has been a curious delusion of some who were probably satisfied by a casual glance at Hegel's Logic, especially in its earlier chapters, to suppose that the Logic was meant to be the absolute beginning: and that pure or mere thought was the congenital endowment of the heaven-born philosopher[5]. To Hegel, on the contrary, Logic was an abstraction from a fuller, more concrete reality. He did not indeed suppose that the symbolical conception of Movement—in its popular pictorialness—would be an adequate substitute or representative for thought; but he knew that the energy of mental development was the fact, and the truth, of which 'becoming' is a meagre, abstract phase.

Logic, then, is not the Science of mere or pure thought, but of the Idea (which is co-terminous with reality)—of the Mind's synthetic unity of experience—looked at, however, abstractly, in the medium of pure thought. Just so, Nature-philosophy is the same Idea, as it turns up bit after bit distracted, fragmentary, and more or less mutilated, in the multiplication, the time and space division, of physical phenomena. But as science requires us to go from the simple to the more complex, as the truth has to prove itself true, by serving in its conclusion as the corroboration of all its premisses or presuppositions; so the system of philosophy begins with the Logic. Yet it can only begin there, because it has already apprehended itself in its completeness: and it can only move onward because it is the concentrated essence—the implicit being—of all that it actually and explicitly is. It may appear to emerge from a point: but that point has at its back the intellectual unity of a philosophy which embraces the world. It presupposes the complete philosopher who shall be the complete organ of absolute intelligence, of universal and eternal Spirit.

A satisfactory Logic then presupposes or implies a complete system of philosophy. No doubt, for a logic which deals with the minor problems of ratiocination or formal induction, all that is needed is a certain general acquaintance with popular conceptions, and with the results or methods of physical science. But if logic takes its business seriously, it must go behind these presuppositions. It must trace back reasoning to its roots, fibres, and first principles. And to do that it is not enough to put at the front a psychological chapter. Far from helping, psychology in these matters is much more in need of being helped itself. Till it has learned a little of the puzzle of the one and the many, the same and the diverse, being, quality, and essence, psychology will be as little use to Logic as blind guides generally are. Nor need this prevent us from saying that when psychology has thoroughly learned these mysteries, it will give fresh life and reality to the logic which it touches upon. The principles of Logic lie in another field,[6] and are deeper in the ground, than obvious psychological gossip.