Sophist
the compass of the mind the form of universal knowledge. We rather
incline to think that the method of knowledge is inseparable from actual
knowledge, and wait to see what new forms may be developed out of
our increasing experience and observation of man and nature. We are
conscious of a Being who is without us as well as within us. Even
if inclined to Pantheism we are unwilling to imagine that the meagre
categories of the understanding, however ingeniously arranged or
displayed, are the image of God;--that what all religions were seeking
after from the beginning was the Hegelian philosophy which has been
revealed in the latter days. The great metaphysician, like a prophet of
old, was naturally inclined to believe that his own thoughts were divine
realities. We may almost say that whatever came into his head seemed
to him to be a necessary truth. He never appears to have criticized
himself, or to have subjected his own ideas to the process of analysis
which he applies to every other philosopher.
Hegel would have insisted that his philosophy should be accepted as a
whole or not at all. He would have urged that the parts derived their
meaning from one another and from the whole. He thought that he had
supplied an outline large enough to contain all future knowledge, and a
method to which all future philosophies must conform. His metaphysical
genius is especially shown in the construction of the categories--a work
which was only begun by Kant, and elaborated to the utmost by himself.
But is it really true that the part has no meaning when separated from
the whole, or that knowledge to be knowledge at all must be universal?
Do all abstractions shine only by the reflected light of other
abstractions? May they not also find a nearer explanation in their
relation to phenomena? If many of them are correlatives they are not
all so, and the relations which subsist between them vary from a mere
association up to a necessary connexion. Nor is it easy to determine
how far the unknown element affects the known, whether, for example, new
discoveries may not one day supersede our most elementary notions about
nature. To a certain extent all our knowledge is conditional upon
what may be known in future ages of the world. We must admit this
hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that
we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must
conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract,
in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the
philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well
satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is
unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are
plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in
the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is
omniscient, or at least has all the elements of knowledge under his
hand.
Hegelianism may be said to be a transcendental defence of the world
as it is. There is no room for aspiration and no need of any: 'What is
actual is rational, what is rational is actual.' But a good man will not
readily acquiesce in this aphorism. He knows of course that all things
proceed according to law whether for good or evil. But when he sees
the misery and ignorance of mankind he is convinced that without any
interruption of the uniformity of nature the condition of the world may
be indefinitely improved by human effort. There is also an adaptation
of persons to times and countries, but this is very far from being the
fulfilment of their higher natures. The man of the seventeenth century
is unfitted for the eighteenth, and the man of the eighteenth for the
nineteenth, and most of us would be out of place in the world of a
hundred years hence. But all higher minds are much more akin than
they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more
uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences
of mankind--Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More--meet in a higher sphere
above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from
afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the
spectators of all time and of all existence;' their works live for
ever; and there is nothing to prevent the force of their individuality
breaking through the uniformity which surrounds them. But such
disturbers of the order of thought Hegel is reluctant to acknowledge.
The doctrine of Hegel will to many seem the expression of an indolent
conservatism, and will at any rate be made an excuse for it. The mind of
the patriot rebels when he is told that the worst tyranny and oppression
has a natural fitness: he cannot be persuaded, for example, that the
conquest of Prussia by Napoleon I. was either natural or necessary,
or that any similar calamity befalling a nation should be a matter of
indifference to the poet or philosopher. We may need such a philosophy
or religion to console us under evils which are irremediable, but we see
that it is fatal to the higher life of man. It seems to say to us, 'The
world is a vast system or machine which can be conceived under the forms
of logic, but in which no single man can do any great good or any great
harm. Even if it were a thousand times worse than it is, it could be
arranged in categories and explained by philosophers. And what more do
we want?'
The philosophy of Hegel appeals to an historical criterion: the ideas
of men have a succession in time as well as an order of thought. But
the assumption that there is a correspondence between the succession of
ideas in history and the natural order of philosophy is hardly true even
of the beginnings of thought. And in later systems forms of thought
are too numerous and complex to admit of our tracing in them a regular
succession. They seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it
is difficult to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed.
Doubtless they have a relation to one another--the transition from
Descartes to Spinoza or from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of
chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or
figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle
and Plato, rightly understood, we cannot trace this law of action and
reaction. They are both idealists, although to the one the idea is
actual and immanent,--to the other only potential and transcendent, as
Hegel himself has pointed out (Wallace's Hegel). The true meaning of
Aristotle has been disguised from us by his own appeal to fact and the
opinions of mankind in his more popular works, and by the use made of
his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except the Scriptures,
has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-Socratic
philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them; but is
there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number, seem
to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and we
have no difficulty in constructing them out of one another--we can see
that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change
or Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again,
the Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into
the Megarian school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no
necessary connexion between them. Nor is there any indication that the
deficiency which was felt in one school was supplemented or compensated
by another. They were all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks
began to feel at the beginning of the sixth century before Christ,--the
want of abstract ideas. Nor must we forget the uncertainty of
chronology;--if, as Aristotle says, there were Atomists before
Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and perhaps 'patrons of the
flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought in the history
of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of religious
thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.
Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the
earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not
refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they
are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive
than their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have
certainly sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an
influence which will never pass away; but can we say that they have
the same meaning in modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as
for example the words 'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either
have become obsolete, or are used in new senses, whereas 'individual,'
'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired an exaggerated importance. Is the
manner in which the logical determinations of thought, or 'categories'
as they may be termed, have been handed down to us, really different
from that in which other words have come down to us? Have they not
been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel
himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their
original inventors--as for example, when he speaks of the 'ground' of
Leibnitz ('Everything has a sufficient ground') as identical with
his own doctrine of the 'notion' (Wallace's Hegel), or the 'Being and
Not-being' of Heracleitus as the same with his own 'Becoming'?
As the historical order of thought has been adapted to the logical, so
we have reason for suspecting that the Hegelian logic has been in
some degree adapted to the order of thought in history. There is
unfortunately no criterion to which either of them can be subjected, and
not much forcing was required to bring either into near relations with
the other. We may fairly doubt whether the division of the first and
second parts of logic in the Hegelian system has not really arisen from
a desire to make them accord with the first and second stages of the
early Greek philosophy. Is there any reason why the conception of
measure in the first part, which is formed by the union of quality and
quantity, should not have been equally placed in the second division of
mediate or reflected ideas? The more we analyze them the less exact does
the coincidence of philosophy and the history of philosophy appear. Many
terms which were used absolutely in the beginning of philosophy, such
as 'Being,' 'matter,' 'cause,' and the like, became relative in
the subsequent history of thought. But Hegel employs some of them
absolutely, some relatively, seemingly without any principle and without
any regard to their original significance.
The divisions of the Hegelian logic bear a superficial resemblance to
the divisions of the scholastic logic. The first part answers to the
term, the second to the proposition, the third to the syllogism. These
are the grades of thought under which we conceive the world, first, in
the general terms of quality, quantity, measure; secondly, under the
relative forms of 'ground' and existence, substance and accidents, and
the like; thirdly in syllogistic forms of the individual mediated with
the universal by the help of the particular. Of syllogisms there are
various kinds,--qualitative, quantitative, inductive, mechanical,
teleological,--which are developed out of one another. But is there any
meaning in reintroducing the forms of the old logic? Who ever thinks
of the world as a syllogism? What connexion is there between the
proposition and our ideas of reciprocity, cause and effect, and similar
relations? It is difficult enough to conceive all the powers of nature
and mind gathered up in one. The difficulty is greatly increased
when the new is confused with the old, and the common logic is the
Procrustes' bed into which they are forced.