Sophist
thought, and the difference in kind which seems to divide them may also
be regarded as a difference of degree. One is to the other as the real
to the ideal, and both may be conceived together under the higher form
of the notion. (ii) Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense
and knowledge as stages of thought which have always existed implicitly
and unconsciously, and to which the mind of the world, gradually
disengaged from sense, has become awakened. The present has been the
past. The succession in time of human ideas is also the eternal 'now';
it is historical and also a divine ideal. The history of philosophy
stripped of personality and of the other accidents of time and place
is gathered up into philosophy, and again philosophy clothed in
circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether regarded as present or
past, under the form of time or of eternity, the spirit of dialectic
is always moving onwards from one determination of thought to another,
receiving each successive system of philosophy and subordinating it to
that which follows--impelled by an irresistible necessity from one idea
to another until the cycle of human thought and existence is complete.
It follows from this that all previous philosophies which are worthy of
the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but stages or moments of
thought which have a necessary place in the world of mind. They are
no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and another has
succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the language of
the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not old.'
(iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience. At
each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and
ears' and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its
own consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that
no philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true
facts.
The Hegelian dialectic may be also described as a movement from the
simple to the complex. Beginning with the generalizations of sense, (1)
passing through ideas of quality, quantity, measure, number, and the
like, (2) ascending from presentations, that is pictorial forms of
sense, to representations in which the picture vanishes and the essence
is detached in thought from the outward form, (3) combining the I and
the not-I, or the subject and object, the natural order of thought is at
last found to include the leading ideas of the sciences and to arrange
them in relation to one another. Abstractions grow together and
again become concrete in a new and higher sense. They also admit
of development from within their own spheres. Everywhere there is
a movement of attraction and repulsion going on--an attraction or
repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon described under a
similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind and matter, the
continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are perpetually being
severed from one another in thought, only to be perpetually reunited.
The finite and infinite, the absolute and relative are not really
opposed; the finite and the negation of the finite are alike lost in a
higher or positive infinity, and the absolute is the sum or correlation
of all relatives. When this reconciliation of opposites is finally
completed in all its stages, the mind may come back again and review the
things of sense, the opinions of philosophers, the strife of theology
and politics, without being disturbed by them. Whatever is, if not
the very best--and what is the best, who can tell?--is, at any rate,
historical and rational, suitable to its own age, unsuitable to any
other. Nor can any efforts of speculative thinkers or of soldiers and
statesmen materially quicken the 'process of the suns.'
Hegel was quite sensible how great would be the difficulty of presenting
philosophy to mankind under the form of opposites. Most of us live
in the one-sided truth which the understanding offers to us, and
if occasionally we come across difficulties like the time-honoured
controversy of necessity and free-will, or the Eleatic puzzle of
Achilles and the tortoise, we relegate some of them to the sphere of
mystery, others to the book of riddles, and go on our way rejoicing.
Most men (like Aristotle) have been accustomed to regard a contradiction
in terms as the end of strife; to be told that contradiction is the life
and mainspring of the intellectual world is indeed a paradox to them.
Every abstraction is at first the enemy of every other, yet they are
linked together, each with all, in the chain of Being. The struggle for
existence is not confined to the animals, but appears in the kingdom of
thought. The divisions which arise in thought between the physical and
moral and between the moral and intellectual, and the like, are deepened
and widened by the formal logic which elevates the defects of the human
faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of the mind which
makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions become so
familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as absolutely
fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which Hegel
delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
the growth of 'what we are pleased to call our minds,' by reverting to
a time when our present distinctions of thought and language had no
existence.
Of the great dislike and childish impatience of his system which would
be aroused among his opponents, he was fully aware, and would often
anticipate the jests which the rest of the world, 'in the superfluity
of their wits,' were likely to make upon him. Men are annoyed at what
puzzles them; they think what they cannot easily understand to be full
of danger. Many a sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in
the categories of the understanding which Hegel resolves into their
original nothingness. For, like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned'
in the intellectual world. Nor can we deny that he is unnecessarily
difficult, or that his own mind, like that of all metaphysicians, was
too much under the dominion of his system and unable to see beyond:
or that the study of philosophy, if made a serious business (compare
Republic), involves grave results to the mind and life of the student.
For it may encumber him without enlightening his path; and it may weaken
his natural faculties of thought and expression without increasing
his philosophical power. The mind easily becomes entangled among
abstractions, and loses hold of facts. The glass which is adapted to
distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and present to us.
To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can
scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped
to revive or supplant the old traditional faith by an unintelligible
abstraction: or how he could have imagined that philosophy consisted
only or chiefly in the categories of logic. For abstractions, though
combined by him in the notion, seem to be never really concrete; they
are a metaphysical anatomy, not a living and thinking substance. Though
we are reminded by him again and again that we are gathering up the
world in ideas, we feel after all that we have not really spanned the
gulf which separates phainomena from onta.
Having in view some of these difficulties, he seeks--and we may follow
his example--to make the understanding of his system easier (a)
by illustrations, and (b) by pointing out the coincidence of the
speculative idea and the historical order of thought.
(a) If we ask how opposites can coexist, we are told that many different
qualities inhere in a flower or a tree or in any other concrete object,
and that any conception of space or matter or time involves the two
contradictory attributes of divisibility and continuousness. We may
ponder over the thought of number, reminding ourselves that every unit
both implies and denies the existence of every other, and that the one
is many--a sum of fractions, and the many one--a sum of units. We may be
reminded that in nature there is a centripetal as well as a centrifugal
force, a regulator as well as a spring, a law of attraction as well as
of repulsion. The way to the West is the way also to the East; the north
pole of the magnet cannot be divided from the south pole; two minus
signs make a plus in Arithmetic and Algebra. Again, we may liken the
successive layers of thought to the deposits of geological strata which
were once fluid and are now solid, which were at one time uppermost in
the series and are now hidden in the earth; or to the successive rinds
or barks of trees which year by year pass inward; or to the ripple of
water which appears and reappears in an ever-widening circle. Or our
attention may be drawn to ideas which the moment we analyze them involve
a contradiction, such as 'beginning' or 'becoming,' or to the opposite
poles, as they are sometimes termed, of necessity and freedom, of idea
and fact. We may be told to observe that every negative is a positive,
that differences of kind are resolvable into differences of degree, and
that differences of degree may be heightened into differences of kind.
We may remember the common remark that there is much to be said on both
sides of a question. We may be recommended to look within and to explain
how opposite ideas can coexist in our own minds; and we may be told to
imagine the minds of all mankind as one mind in which the true ideas of
all ages and countries inhere. In our conception of God in his relation
to man or of any union of the divine and human nature, a contradiction
appears to be unavoidable. Is not the reconciliation of mind and body
a necessity, not only of speculation but of practical life? Reflections
such as these will furnish the best preparation and give the right
attitude of mind for understanding the Hegelian philosophy.
(b) Hegel's treatment of the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest
illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form
of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought.
Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological
fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon
the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form
which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and
colourless and universal which could be found. But soon the human mind
became dissatisfied with the emblem, and after ringing the changes
on one element after another, demanded a more abstract and perfect
conception, such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the
positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being,
the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the
pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes
to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into
space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until
the Atomists, the abstraction of the individual did not exist; in the
philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind, whether human or divine,
was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave another swing, from the