[12] Wissenschaft der Logik, i. p. 43.
CHAPTER XXVII.
ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES.
According to the strict reasonings of Kant in his Criticism of Pure Reason, and the somewhat looser discussions of Mr. Spencer in his First Principles a science of Metaphysics or theory of the Infinite, Absolute, or Unconditioned is impossible. As a result of the criticism by Kant, Jacobi claimed the Absolute for Faith: and Spencer banishes the Absolute or Unknowable to the sphere of Religion to be worshipped or ignored, but in either case blindly. As we have already seen, Hegel does not accept this distribution of provinces between religion and philosophy. There is only one world, one reality: but it is known more or less fully, more or less truly and adequately. It is presented in one way to the sensuous imagination: in another to the scientific analyst: in a third to the philosopher. To the first it is a mere succession or expanse of pictures, facts, appearances: and outside it—somewhere, but not here,—there is a land, a being of perfect wholeness and harmony. To the second it is an unending chain of causes and effects, of one thing simplified by being referred to another till at last a mighty all-explaining nullity, called an 'Ultimate Cause,' is presumed to linger, eternally unperceived at the infinitely-distant end of the series. To the third everything is seen in connexion, but not a mere uni-linear connexion: each, when studied, more and more completes itself by including those relations which seemed to stand outside: each fully realised, or completely invested with its ideal implications, is seen no longer to be an incident or isolated fact, but an implicit infinite, and a vice-gerent of the eternal. Philosophy thus releases both ordinary and scientific knowledge from their limitations; it shows the finite passing into the infinite. And Hegel, accordingly, purposes to show that this unfathomable Absolute is very near us, and at our very door: in our hands, as it were, and especially present in our every-day language. If we are ever to gain the Absolute, we must be careful not to lose one jot or tittle of the Relative[1]. The Absolute—this term, which is to some so offensive and to others so precious—always presents itself to us in Relatives: and when we have persistently traced the Proteus through all its manifestations,—when we have, so to speak, seen the Absolute Relativity of Relation, there is very little more needed in order to apprehend the Absolute pure and entire. One may say of the Absolute what Goethe[2] says of Nature: 'She lives entirely in her children: and the mother, where is she?'
It is a great step, when we have detected the Relativity of what had hitherto seemed Absolute,—when a new aspect of the infinite fullness of the world, the truth of things, dawns upon us. But it is even a greater step when we see that the Relativity which we have thus discovered is itself Relative. And this is one advantage of first studying the value of the categories of ethics and physics on Logical ground. On the concreter region of Nature and Mind, the several grades and species into which reality is divided have a portentous firmness and grandeur about them, and the intrinsic dialectic seems scarcely adequate to shaking the foundations of their stability. They severally stand as independent self-sustaining entities, separate from each other, and stereotyped in their several formations. But in the ether of abstract Idea, in the fluid and transparent form of mere thoughts, the several stages in the development of the Absolute, the various grades of category, clearly betray their Relativity, and by the negation of this Relativity lead on to a higher Absolute.
To the practical man,—so long as his reflection does not go deep,—the concepts on which his knowledge and faith are built seem eternal, unshifting rock, parts of the inmost fabric of things. He accepts them as ultimate validities. To him matter and force, cause and effect, distinctions between form and content, whole and part, quantity and quality, belong to the final constitution of the world. (And so, in a sense, they do.) If he ever overcome the absoluteness which popular thought attributes to the individual things of sense and imagination, and show their relativity, he does so only to fall under the glamour of a new deception. Causes and matters, forces and atoms, become new ultimates, new absolutes, of another order. Fictions or postulates of the understanding take the place of the figments of imagination. The ordinary scientific man labours especially under the 'metaphysical' fallacy: he realises abstractions in their abstractness. As against this it is the business of the logician to show how such terms are to be interpreted as steps in a process of interpretation—containing so much that others of simpler structure have handed on, and themselves presupposing by implication a great deal they fail properly to explicate. Thus, the logician evinces at one blow the relativity of each term in its mereness, abstractness, or false absoluteness, and the ideal absoluteness which always carries it beyond itself, and makes it mean more than it says.
The natural mind always hastens to substantiate the terms it employs. It makes them a fixed, solid foundation, an hypostasis, on which further building may be raised. If such pseudo-absolutising of concepts is to be called metaphysics, then logic has to free us from the illusions of metaphysics, to de-absolutise them, to disabuse us of a false Absolute. The false Absolute is what Hegel calls the Abstract: it is the part which, because it succeeded in losing sight of its dependence, had believed itself to be a whole. Logic shows—in the phrase of Hegel—that each such term or concept is only an attempt to express, explicate, or define the Absolute[3]: a predicate of the Absolute, but falling short of its subject, or only uttering part of the whole truth of reality. But while Logic shows it only to be an attempt, and therefore in an aspect relative, it equally shows its ingrained tendency to complete itself, to carry out to realisation its ideal implication,—shows, in short, that e. g. force is more than mere force, that thing-in-itself is not properly even a thing; that a veritable notion (Begriff) or grasp of a thing is more than a mere (subjective) notion, &c. Thus the true Absolute is not the emptiest and most meagre of abstractions,—what is left as a residual after the relative in all its breadth and length has been cut out of it; it is the concretest of all being, the whole which includes without destroying all partial aspects. Yet as it includes them, it shows itself their master and more than master: making each lose and win in the other, till all are satisfied in unity, and no shade of individuality is utterly lost in the totality of the Universal.
Accordingly, Metaphysics and Logic tend to form one body. For the distant and transcendent Absolute, which was the object of older Metaphysics, was substituted an Absolute, self-revealing in the terms of thought. Being is deposed from its absoluteness, and made the first postulate of thought. Former Metaphysics had dashed itself in vain against the reefs that girdle the island of the supersensible and noümenal, the supposed world of true Being: and the struggle at last grew so disastrous that Kant gave the signal to retreat, and to leave the world of true Being, the impregnable Thing-in-itself, to its repose. His advice to metaphysicians[4] was that, while scientific research continued to concentrate the attack of analysis upon single experiences conforming to certain conditions, they should investigate these' conditions of possible experience or foundations of objectivity. In other words, he turned observation to what he called Transcendental Logic. It was by means of this suggestion, understood in the widest sense, that Hegel was led to treat Logic as the science of ultimate reality. He had to show how these conditions when carried out in full gave the Unconditioned. He attacked the Absolute, if we may say so, in detail. The Absolute, as the totality, universe or system of Relativity, lays itself open to observation by deposing itself to a Relative. It possesses the differentiating power of separating itself as an object in passivity, from itself as a subject in action,—of deposing itself to appearance, of being for itself, and also in and for itself. And thus Thought is the active universal,—which actualises itself more and more out of abstraction into concreteness.