But an adequate principle must have other qualities.[3] What has been said up to this point, only amounts to a condition, that our principle must cease to be abstract and formal, and must become concrete and real. What we want, it may be said, is a Beginning. But a beginning is not exactly the same thing as a principle: a beginning is to a large extent a matter of choice and convenience,—a matter depending on the state and prospects of the beginner; and the main point is not where we should begin, but that we should be thorough in our treatment. It is otherwise, however, in the present case. For the skill of the expositor simply lies in the exactitude with which he reproduces the spontaneous movement of growth in his object. His art is celare artem: to retire, as it were, into the background, and seem to leave the object to expound itself. In a dramatic work it is no doubt the hand of the dramatist that seems to set the whole of the characters in motion, that weaves destinies and snips the thread of life. And yet in a perfect work of dramatic art everything must seem to flow on by a necessity of character, a consecution of inner fate. The true artist dare not act or allow the deus ex machina. So every genuine work of science—which is more than a compilation, a school-book, a bundle of notes, and contributions toward a subject—must be a self-determined unity—a self-justifying scheme in which the personality of the worker enters into and is absorbed in the system of his work.
If this is generally true, it is above all a canon to rule the logician. He at least must follow the Logos and the Logos alone. His theme must be a law unto itself: all its movements must be freely and nobly objective. For his subject-matter is at least an organism, and develops according to an inward law. But it is even more than an organism: it must not merely develop, as organisms do,—not merely live and grow—but know that it develops and as it were will its own development—and in that harmony of being, willing, and knowing, be essentially one. In Hegelian language it must not merely be implicit—an sich or für uns—the subject of a change which it undergoes and feels, but without definitely realising,—the subject of a change which we (the historians) perceive. It must also be für sich: aware of its modifications, an agent in bringing them about: and yet withal in so looking forth and willing, be self-possessed, and self-enjoying.
The principle of Hegelianism is the principle of Development, the principle of the Notion—but a Notion which is objective as well as subjective—the Idea. That principle then determines the beginning of Logic. We must know the whole course of growth and history before we can say where is the true commencement. It must be that out of which the end can obviously and spontaneously issue. In a sense, it must implicitly contain the end. It must show us the very beginning of thought, before it has yet come to the full consciousness of itself,—when the truth of what it is still lurks in the background and has to be developed. We must see thought in its first and fundamental calling. As the biologist, when he describes the structure of a plant, rests upon the assumption of a previous development of parts, in an existing plant, which has resulted in a seed,—but begins with the seed from which the plant is derived: so the logician must begin with a point which in a way presupposes the system to which it leads. But in its beginning this presupposition is not apparent: and in fact, the presupposition will only appear when the development of the system is complete. The first step in a process, just because it is a step, may be said to presuppose the completed process. Thus the beginning of Logic presumes the fullest realisation of Mind, as the beginning of botany can only be told by one who knows the whole story of the plant. It is from this circumstance that Hegel describes philosophy as a circle rounded in itself, where the end meets with the beginning, or says that philosophy has to grasp its original grasp or conceive its concept. In other words, it is not till we reach the conclusion that we see, in the light thus shed upon the beginning, what that beginning really was. From the general analogy of the sciences we should not expect that the beginning of thought would be full-grown thought, or indeed seem to the undiscerning eye to be thought at all. In many cases, the embryonic organism shows but little similarity to the adult, and occasionally a violent abruptness seems, on cursory glance, to mark off one stage of a creation's growth from the next. Who that knew not the result could in the seed prefigure to himself the tree? The beginning is not usually identifiable with the final issue, except by some effort to trace the process of connexion. The object of science only appears in its truth when the science has done its work.
The beginning of philosophy must hold a germ of development, however dead and motionless it may seem. But it must also to some extent be a result,—the result of the development or concentration of consciousness;—of the other forms of which it is the hypothetical foundation, or, of which it is (otherwise viewed) the first appearance. The variety of imaginative conception, and the chaos of sense, must vanish in a point, by an act of abstraction, which leaves out all the variety and the chaos,—or rather by an act of distillation, which draws out of them their real essence and concentrated virtue. This variety, when thoroughly examined and tested, shrivels up into a point:—it only is. Everything definite as we call it, the endless repetitions of existence, have disappeared, and have left only the energy of concentration, the unitary point of Being.
We may describe the process in two ways. We may say that we have left out of sight all existing differences,—that we have stripped off every vestige of empirical conceptions, and left a residue of pure thought. The thought is pure, perhaps, but it is not entire. In this way of describing it, pure thought is the most abstract thought,—the last outcome of those operations which have divested our conceptions of everything real and concrete about them. But thus to speak of the process as Abstraction would be to express half of the truth only: and would really leave us a mere zero, or gulf of vacuity. In the beginning there would then be nothing—the mere annihilation of all possible and actual existence. And it is certainly true that in the beginning there can be nothing.—On the other hand, and secondly, there is affirmation as well as negation involved in the ultimate action by which sense and imagination pass into thought. They are not left behind, and the emptiness only retained: they are carried into their primary consequence, or into their proximate truth. They are reduced to their simplest equivalent or their lowest term in the vocabulary of thought: which is Being. The process which creates the initial point of pure thought is at once an abstraction from everything, and a concentration upon itself in a point:—which point, accordingly, is a unity or inter-penetration of positive and negative. This absolute self-concentration into a point is the primary step by which Mind comes to know itself,—the first step in the Absolute's process of self-cognition—that process which it is the purpose of Logic to trace, so far as it is conducted in the range of mere thought.
The bare point of Being and nothing more is the beginning in the process of the Absolute's self-cognition: it is, in other words, our first and rudimentary apprehension of reality,—the narrow edge by which we come in contact with the universe of Reason. For these are two aspects of the same. The process of the self-cognition or manifestation of the Absolute Idea is the very process by which philosophers (not philosophers only) have built up the edifice of thought. What the one statement views from the universal side or the totality, the other views in connexion with the several achievements of individual thinkers. Of course the evolution of the system of thought, as it is brought about by individuals, leaves plenty of room for the play of what is known as Chance. The Natural History of Thought or the History of Philosophers has to regard the action of national character upon individual minds, and the reciprocal action of these minds upon one another. The History of Organic Nature similarly presents the dependence of the species upon their surroundings, and of one species upon another in the medium of its conditions. Gradually Physical Science reduces these conditions to their universal forms, and may try to exhibit the evolution of the animal through its species in all grades of development. So in the Science of the development of this Idea the accidents, as we may call them, disappear: and the temporary and local questions, which once engrossed the deepest attention, fade away into generalised forms of universal application. Philosophy, as it historically presents itself in the world, is not an accidental production, or dependent on the arbitrary choice of men. The accident, if such there be, is that these particular men should have been the philosophers, and not that such should have been their philosophy. They were, according to their several capacity for utterance, only the mouth-pieces of the Spirit of the Times,—of the absolute mind under the superficial limitations of their period. They saw the Idea of their world more clearly and distinctly than other men; and therein lies their title to fame: but really their words were only a reflex,—an almost involuntary and necessary movement, due to the pressure of the cosmical reason. The great philosophers are, like all men in all estates, and according to their measure, the ministers of the Truth,—apostles charged to bring about that consummation of the times in which reality is more fully apprehended and more adequately estimated. Necessity is laid upon them to consecrate themselves to the service of the Idea, and to devote their lives to the noble but austere work of speculation—the work which seeks sine ira et studio to reconstruct that city of God which is the permanent, if it often be the hidden, foundation of human life.
[1] Cf. p. 90.
[2] Augustin. Soliloq. i. 7. 'Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino.'