The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
pause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
it, not by it.
{272}
Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpass! Data! facts that say,
"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have
all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world.
The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once
get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the
necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is in
temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A
Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an
_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is
there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with
its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
over the whole?
I confess I can see no _à priori_ reason for the exception. He who
claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by
them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
see how he can make the two match.
The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time,
space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the
shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being
comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain
hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.
But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not
jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a
chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why
seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to
disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could
not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany,
where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon
the chastity of thought.
And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The
old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
and all its terror. The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
with evil. _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your
lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy. So of the
unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than
that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus
Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death." Of
these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classical
expression. Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not
as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.
{275}
And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not
entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few
of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
break down, so must the system which they prop.
First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
partaking business he so much loathes. He will not call contradiction
the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an
ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no
longer any need of a solvent. To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very
difference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachment
the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.
Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we used
above. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of
its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all? The
hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
static appearance by which your sense is fooled."
But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and how
its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him
the space itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_." In other words, instead of
the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to
be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and
must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence. Surely,
such a system of explaining _notum per ignotum_, of {277} making the
_explicans_ borrow credentials from the _explicand_, and of creating
paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange
candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.
The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of
contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system. But what
probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the
combination in which its author works it with another principle which
is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a
better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.' This
principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you
know of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegel
loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennyson
says,--
"Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or
remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter,
we do not know all _about_ the thing.
And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an
acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and
remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience
alone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in a
world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully
known. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an
integral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehend
the passing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep,--not grow
dispassionate the more they stretched their view? Did the 'law of
sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity of
contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Out
upon the idea!
Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which
empiricism may use the principle of totality. We call something a
cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell
what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is
something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
attributes are there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. The
thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its
relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known
too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large