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HEGELIANISM AND PERSONALITY

Balfout

of

HEGELIAN ISM AND
PEESONALITY

BY

ANDEEW SETH, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF LOGIC, RHETORIC, AND METAPHYSICS
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

SECOND SERIES OF BALFOUR LECTURES

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXXXVII

3
55

PBEFATOKY NOTE,

THE following Lectures, forming the second series
of Balfour Philosophical Lectures, were delivered
in the University of Edinburgh at the close of
last winter session. They take up the questions
which were suggested by the concluding lecture
of the previous course on Scottish Philosophy;
but they will be found to depend for intelligi
bility on nothing beyond themselves. In pre
paring for publication, I have adhered to the
lecture form; but in what now stands as the
third and fourth lectures, I have found it desir
able to alter the arrangement of topics which
was adopted in delivery. I have also endeavoured,
by occasional changes and additions, and by the
help of Appendices and fuller references, to bring
1}

vi Prefatory Note.

into relief the chief points on which my criti
cism turns, and at the same time, by more
careful definition, to avoid the possibility of
misconception.

ST ANDREWS, October 1887.

CONTENTS,

LECTUKE I.

KANT AND NEO-KANTIANISM.

PAGE

Relation of these Lectures to the previous course on
Scotch Philosophy — English Neo- Kantianism or Neo- ^-***
Hegelianism — Green's Spiritual Principle — Source of
the conception in German philosophy — Sketch of the
following Lectures — Results of the Kantian philosophy
— Refutation of the sensational atomism of Hume — '
Time, space, and the categories — The Self or Subject
— The terms synthetic and transcendental as applied
to the Ego — The transcendental and the empirical Self
— The transcendental method — Kant unfaithful to his
own principles — Legitimate outcome of the transcen
dental method — Mr Shadworth Hodgson's statement
of the position — Neo-Kantianism transforms Kant's ,
theory of knowledge into a metaphysic of existence —
Green's account of the Spiritual Principle — It repre
sents merely the formal unity of the universe — Kant's
insistence on the abstract character of his inquiry —
Neo-Kantianism illegitimately converts " consciousness »^
in general " into " a universal consciousness " — Ferrier's
more cautious argument — Negative or critical attitude
of the theory of knowledge — Kant's own position, . 1

APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. Leibnitian elements in Kant's

doctrine of things-in-themselves, .... 36

viii Contents.

LECTUKE II.

FICHTE.

Fichte the first to transform Kant's theory of knowledge
into an absolute metaphysic — His constitutionally syn
thetic mind — Every philosophy must be a Monism —
Dogmatism and Idealism as the only two possible types
of philosophy — Impossibility of explaining the Self by
action ab extra — Fichte's distinction between the Abso
lute Ego and the empirical self — His speculative ex
planation of the given element in knowledge — The Non-
Ego and the origin of consciousness — A series of me
chanical metaphors — Fichte disclaims this interpreta
tion of his theory — Exclusively practical character of his
idealism at this period — It leaves no permanent reality
in the universe — Later forms of his theory — Disuse
of the term Ego — Schilling's Absolute a relapse into
Spinozism — The inevitable result of substantiating the
logical unity of thought as a creative Self — Fascina
tion of the conception — Taken as a metaphysic, it de
prives both God and man of real existence — Fichte's
later developments — Life or Nature as the prius of
individuals — Knowledge as independent and self-ex
istent — Existence of God out of and beyond the pro
cess of evolution, 39

APPENDIX TO LECTURE II. Green's account of feeling, . 74
LECTURE III.

THE RELATION OF HEGEI/S LOGIC TO EXPERIENCE.

Hegel's relation to Fichte and Schelling — The notion of

— \ development in Hegel — Hegel's relation to Kant —

The Logic as the centre of the system — An immanent

criticism of categories — Hegel's Anthropomorphism

Contents. ix

defended — Dependence of the dialectic on experience <-"
— Trendelenburg's criticisms — Order of exposition re
verses the order of thought by which the results were
reached — True explanation of the onward impulse in
the Method — The Absolute Idea derived by Hegel
from the human self-consciousness, . . . .79

LECTUKE IV.

LOGIC AS METAPHYSIC : THOUGHT AND REALITY.

Relation of Hegel's Logic to his Philosophy of Nature and
Philosophy of Spirit — The Absolute Idea and the Ab
solute Spirit — Identification of Logic with Metaphysics v^
— The transition from Logic to Nature — Impossibility
of such deduction — An absolute philosophy must con
struct everything as a necessity of thought — Compari
son between Hegel and Plato — The endeavour to con- ^
struct existence out of abstract thought — Hegel's scorn
for " Being " involves a fallacy — Nature as the other "
of thought — Things merely exemplifications of logical
notions — Hegel's statements only true as metaphors —
Identity of Knowing and Being in this sense impossible t^*""
— Illustration from Schelling — True conclusion from
Hegel's own admissions — Hegel's account of Nature
as a system of types — Non-rational character of Nature
as a mere collocation — Hegel's use of the term Con
tingency, 101

APPENDIX TO LECTURE IV. Kant and Fichte on the ques
tion of real existence, 141

LECTURE V.
HEGEL'S DOCTRINE OF GOD AND MAN.

Hegel evades the questions of the divine existence and
human immortality — Ambiguity of the terms Spirit

x Contents.

and Absolute Spirit — The system deals throughout
only with generals — Hegel's scheme of reconciliation
peculiarly grand — Spirit intended to be the concrete
unity of God and man — What the system yields is
alternation, not union — Two lines of thought in Hegel
— Relation of the Absolute to the world-process — If

I the Absolute exists as completed self -consciousness.

' there is no room for Nature or finite selves — Illus
trated from the Philosophy of Religion — The Son and
the "World — Recourse to mythical explanation of the
real world — Second line of thought starts with the
real world— Hegel's interpretation of history — Identi
fication of human history with the divine life — De
velopment in time — Outline of Hegel's conception — \/^
The Absolute as the one Subject of the historical pro
cess — Misapplication of the philosophical notion of
development, 149

LECTUKE VI.

HEGELIANISM AS AN ABSOLUTE SYSTEM.

Identification of the Absolute with the last term of
human achievement — Hegel's own position — The
Hegelians of the Left — Human persons as foci of an
impersonal system of thought — Idealism and Rational
ism pass into Materialism and Sensualism — Feuerbach
and Strauss — Self -existence of thoughts unmeaning —
, The Absolute not to be identified with the historical
process — Hegel's Absolutism exemplified in Ethics and
Politics — The Philosophy of Law : the real is the
rational — Hegel's explanations : the real and the
truly real — His use of the term "truth" — Unwilling
confession of failure — Absolutism destructive of ethical
endeavour and historical progress — Hegel's own con
demnation of this attitude of finality, . . .185

Contents. xi

CONCLUSION.

The unification of consciousness in a single Self the radical
error of Hegelianism and Neo-Kantianism — Uniqueness
and exclusiveness of every self as such — The universal
Self is rooted in the fallacy of Scholastic Realism —
Traceable to a confusion between logic orepistemologyi^
and metaphysic or ontology — The doctrine sacrifices
the personality of God — Ambiguity as to human im
mortality — These two positions complementary sides
of the same view of existence, ..... 214

HEGEUANISM AND PERSONALITY,

LECTUKE I.

KANT AND NEO-KANTIANISM.

IN beginning a second course of these Lectures,
I may be permitted to refer very shortly to the
argument of the former course, with the view of
indicating a certain continuity of thought between
the two. The first course was devoted to a com
parison and contrast of Scottish and German
philosophy ; and, amid much unlikeness, there
still seemed to be justification for pointing to
certain broad lines of similarity. These lines
of similarity were determined by the opposition
of both to a common foe — namely, to Empiricism,
as that appeared historically in the sensational
atomism of Hume, which still remains, and must
A

2 Hegelianism and Personality.

continue to remain, the classical form of that
theory. Certain contentions of Eeid were in
stanced which, if construed liberally, might fairly
be compared with positions taken up by Kant
against the Humian Empiricism. After the ex
hibition of these points of unanimity, certain
other aspects of the Kantian theory were ex
amined, which have made it, in my opinion, as
fruitful of harm in one direction as it has been
of good in another. I mean Kant's view of the
subjectivity of the categories and forms of thought,
and his doctrine of the relativity of knowledge,
based as that is upon the notion of the thing-in-
itself. In the last lecture, there was little oppor
tunity for more than general considerations as
to the possibility of philosophy as a completed
system of the universe ; but in the last paragraph
I pointed out several important questions to
which the answer of Hegelianism (which was
taken as the type of such a system) seems, on the
surface at all events, vague, if not unsatisfactory.
These questions centred in the question of the
nature of the individual, and it is here that we
have to resume the subject.

There will be nothing further said in these
lectures of Scottish Philosophy. The object of
this second course will be critically to test the

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 3

Idealism reared upon Kant's foundations by his
successors in Germany, and now represented in
this country by a number of writers often classed
together as Neo-Kantians or English Hegelians.
Neither of these terms, perhaps, is unobjection
able, for the English followers of Hegel do not
profess to bind themselves to any of the details,
or even to many of the characteristic doctrines, of
the master ; while, if we use the former term, we
must bear in mind that the doctrine of the Eng
lish Neo-Kantians is to the full as different from
Kant as that of the Neo-Platonists from Plato.
But it is useless to quarrel over a name whose
denotation, at all events, is sufficiently understood.
It is enough for our present purpose if we know
who are the thinkers referred to, and what are
their characteristic doctrines. I need only name,
therefore, the late Professor Green of Oxford as
the most eminent of the writers referred to, and
one to whose utterances, more especially since his
lamented death, a certain authority has been ac
corded, as to those of a leader and accredited
exponent of this mode of thought.

Now the most superficial acquaintance with
Green's writings is enough to tell us that his
whole system centres in the assertion of a Self or
Spiritual Principle as necessary to the existence

4 Hegelianism and Personality.

alike of knowledge and morality. The presence
of this principle of connection and unity to the
particulars of sense alone renders possible a cos
mos or intelligible world, and is likewise the sole
explanation of ethics as a system of precepts.
The impressive assertion of this one position con
stitutes Green's continually repeated criticism
upon Locke and Hume, and upon current English
Empiricism. It may almost be said to constitute
his entire system. As regards the critical part
of Green's work, there has been of late, I think, a
growing admission of its victorious and, indeed,
conclusive character. But as regards the nature
of the Self or Spiritual Principle which is, in his
hands, the instrument of victory, the candid reader
of Green is forced to admit that almost everything
is left vague. It was only in the ' Prolegomena
to Ethics,' in fact, that any definite indication
was given that the principle was to be interpreted
as a universal or divine Self, somehow present and
active in each individual. And even there this
conception is little more than hinted at, and the
possibility of such a relation between the divine
and the human, as well as the evidence for the
identification of the two selves, is nowhere ex
plained. What is meant in such a relation by
the divine Self, and what by the human self ?

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 5

Here Green seems to fail us. The Self which he
uses with such effect as a weapon of critical
warfare is nowhere precisely denned by him, so
as to be capable of employment constructively as
a metaphysical reality.

The ambiguity which thus clings to Green's
central conception is incident, I propose to show,
to the source from which he derived it. That
source, as is well known, was the Kantian philo
sophy read in the light of the Hegelian system.
Green's view of the Self — which means his view of
the universe — cannot be properly understood or
fairly judged without some insight into the genesis
and growth of this conception in the thought of
Kant and his successors. Instead, therefore, ofy
confining myself to a criticism of Green's state
ments, I propose to trace the development of his
central doctrine. The manner in which what we
may call broadly the Hegelian conception was
reached, will be itself, to a certain extent, the best
criticism of the system which we are asked to
accept. For, while leaving much of Hegel on one
side, Green and the English Hegelians reproduce
his fundamental position in their own doctrine of
the Self. Consequently, should examination de
tect any radical flaw in the doctrine of German
idealism in reference to the self and God, the same

-

6 Hegelianism and Personality.

criticism will be found to apply to the English
idealism of to-day in the same reference. It may
also be said in favour of this method of procedure,
that the constructive efforts of English idealism
consist as yet more of hints and references to the
German writers than of independently elaborated
statements. In carrying out this programme,
however, it will be desirable, as far as possible,
to avoid entangling ourselves in the historical
paraphernalia of successive systems. I will rather
endeavour to disengage leading principles, dwell
ing with this view chiefly upon the final form of
German idealism in Hegel's system, and treating
of Kant and Fichte only so far as they either
lead up to Hegel's positions, or illustrate them
effectively by contrast.

The remainder of this first lecture will accord
ingly deal with those features of the Kantian
theory which have an immediate bearing on the
later Idealism, and will criticise the position
taken up by Green, so far as that directly depends
upon a manipulation of Kantian doctrines. The
second will be devoted to Fichte, because the step
taken by Fichte in transforming Kant's theory of
knowledge into a metaphysic of the universe is
all -important in the present connection ; and,
moreover, the progress of Fichte's thought through

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 7

its different stages appears to me to throw an
instructive light upon some positions afterwards
taken up by Hegel. The three following lectures
will criticise somewhat closely the leading de
terminations of the Hegelian system. This criti
cism will be found to turn mainly on Hegel's
treatment of existent reality, or, what turns out '
to be the same thing, of the individual. The
question is as wide as existence, and concerns the
individual being wherever found ; as such it will
be first discussed. But it will not be amiss to
examine still more in detail the implications of
this Idealism in regard to the divine existence,
the human person, and the questions which are
of most intimate concern to us as men. If these
implications are unsatisfactory or inadmissible, it
will then be comparatively easy to determine how
far the English version of the theory is open to
the same objections, and how far these invalidate
its claim to be an intelligible and consistent
metaphysical system.

The Kantian theory supplies, at the very least,
a conclusive refutation of the sensational atomism
into which Empiricism had at last resolved itself
in Hume. Or, as it was formerly put,1 Hume's

1 Scottish Philosophy, p. 66.

8 Hegelianism and Personality.

| own system is the self -refutation of the fallacy of
:the abstract particular. If we start with such
isolated particulars, all synthesis or connection
must of necessity be illusory. Even the illusion
of connection is, however, demonstrably impos
sible, unless through the suppressed presence of
certain principles of real synthesis. As a matter
of fact, we nowhere do start with the mere par
ticular, the isolated atom of sense; on the con
trary, such perception is altogether impossible to
the mind. We cannot look at anything "in
itself "; everything is indissolubly connected with
other things, and its very existence consists in
this reference — or rather in multitudinous refer
ences — beyond itself. In place of amplifying
this point here, I may be allowed to refer to
what was said in the second lecture of the pre
vious course on " The Philosophical Scepticism of
David Hume."

Kant's system, then, contains the demonstra
tion that from sense as sense knowledge can
never by any possibility arise. And this demon
stration is not merely negative; it has also its
positive side, inasmuch as Kant exhibits to us
some of the chief principles of synthesis or
rational connectedness which are essentially in
volved in knowledge. All events, Hume had

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 9

said, are "entirely loose and separate," and
knowledge, he had contended, is resolvable into
such events. But this is so far from being true,
that an event, if it be known, is knowable at all
only by reference to the background of the past
against which it stands out, as it were, in relief.
Impressions or sensations must, at least, be known
as successive ; or, in other words, time is a uni
versal form of synthesis, weaving them together
in spite of their qualitative differences, and thus
rendering an isolated particularity impossible.
The notion of substance — that is to say, of per
manence and change — and the closely allied
notion of causality, are involved in the perception
of succession from the first, for they are simply
transcripts of the essential nature of an existence
in time.

But existence merely in time, Kant goes on to
argue, is impossible to realise. Time implies as
its correlate Space. The very notions or cate
gories which have just been described as tran
scripts of the essential nature of time carry with
them this reference to space. Consciousness of
time can arise only through the perception of
change, and change implies the perception of a
permanent which is changed — a background, as
it was expressed above, against which the fleeting

io Hegelianism and Personality.

moments of time, as filled out by subjective
feeling, may be apprehended as appearing and
vanishing. Space, or rather space with its filling
of matter — existence in space — furnishes the
perception which serves as this necessary back
ground. Change is perceivable and dates are
possible, just because the world exists as a per
manent object in space.

Now whether or not the absolute necessity of
space to time be accepted as thus expressed, the
correlation and mutual reference of the two in our
experience is not open to doubt. Space is a basal
element of our knowledge as ineradicable as time,
and as incapable of derivation from units of sense
as such. Kant's categories of quantity, relation,
and modality may be regarded simply as an an
alysis of the nature of space and time. They
are the principles of connection and coherence in
a world laid out in these two elements; they con
stitute, in short, the abstract or intellectual, ex
pression of what is perceptively present in space
and time.1 Kant's proof may be accepted, then,
so far as it asserts that these forms, and with

1 The categories of quality refer to what has been called the
material element in experience — to the actuality or reality of
existence, without reference to the nature of that existence as
temporal or spatial.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 1

them these categories or principles of mutual re
lation and explanation, are necessarily involved
in our experience of the known world, and that
without them no knowledge would be possible at
all. Accordingly, a sensationalism which begins
by denying the presence of these principles must
be impotent to evolve them, though the appear
ance of success may sometimes be obtained by
the covert assumption of the very principles in
question.

Going further, however, or rather retracing our
footsteps and bringing to light the fundamental
but hitherto unobserved assumption, we reach the
central position of Kantian and subsequent ideal
ism — the necessity of a permanent subject of
knowledge. A knowledge of sequent states is
only possible when each is accompanied by the
" I think " of an identical apperception. Or, as
it has been otherwise expressed, there is all the
difference in the world between succession and
consciousness of succession, between change and
consciousness of change. Mere change or mere
succession, if such a thing were possible, would
be, as Kant points out, first A, then B, then C,
each filling out existence for the time being and
constituting its sum, then vanishing tracelessly
to give place to its successor — to a successor

1 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

which yet would not be a successor, seeing that
no record of its predecessor would remain. The
change, the succession, the series can only be
known to a consciousness or subject which is not
identical with any one member of the series, but
is present equally to every member, and identical
with itself throughout. Connection or related-
ness of any sort — even Hume's association — is
possible only through the presence of such a
unity to each term of the relation. Hence, while
it is quite true, as Hume said, that when we enter
into what we call ourselves, we cannot point to
any particular perception of Self, as we can point
to particular perceptions of heat or cold, love or
hatred, it is as undoubted that the very condition
of all these particular perceptions, given along
with each of them and essential to the connecting
of one with another, is precisely the Self or Sub
ject which Hume could not find — which he could
not find because he looked for it not in its proper
character, as the subject or correlate of all per
ceptions or objects, but as itself, in some fashion,
a perception or object added to the other contents
of consciousness.

All knowable existence, then, is existence for a
Self. The Self thus unearthed Kant terms " the
highest principle of all exercise of the understand-

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 3

ing," and he names it, somewhat cumbrously, the
synthetic unity of apperception or the transcen
dental unity of self-consciousness. The adjectives
indicate its nature and function. The unity is
synthetic, because it binds together, as related
members of one whole, what would otherwise fall
apart as unrelated particulars ; and moreover, it
is only through this synthesis that the unity of
the Self or Ego exists. It is the unity of the
synthesis, and apart from its synthetic activity
would no more be real than the particulars of
sense would be real without its action. A unity
is impossible without a manifold of which it is
the unity; or, in other words, the Self can be
conscious of its own identity, that is, can be
conscious of itself— can be a Self— only through
the elements which it unites, /fou cannot have
thoughts without a thinker, but it is equally true
that you cannot have a thinker without thoughts.
Any attempt to separate the two sides is a de
parture from reality, and the substantiation of an
abstraction. In short, the ultimate fact of know
ledge is neither pure subject nor pure object,
neither a mere sensation nor a mere Ego, but an
Ego or Subject conscious of sensations. It is not
a mere unity, but a unity in duality. This duality
belongs to the very essence of self-consciousness,

14 Hegelianism and Personality.

and cannot be banished by any philosophy which
is faithful to facts.

The term transcendental, applied to the unity
of apperception, has a similar implication. It
does not mean, as is sometimes supposed, that the
Ego is an entity beyond experience ; it means, on
the contrary, that the " identical self " is deduced
or proved solely with reference to experience, as
a necessary condition of knowledge. Out of that
reference it has no meaning, and consequently no
assertions can be made about it. The term also
serves to keep before us the contrast repeatedly
emphasised by Kant between the Self in question
and the empirical Ego. The empirical self is the
matter of the internal sense in its form of time ;
in other words, it is the succession of mental
states — the thoughts, feelings, and actions — upon
which a man may look back as constituting the
record of his experience, his life. The empirical
self is thus an object among other objects ; it is
part of the process of experience. As Kant says,
it is the object treated by empirical psychology,
which he describes as a kind of physiology of the
internal sense. It is with reference to the
empirical ego that man is said to have the power
of making himself his own object. When we do
so — when we turn our attention inwards, as the

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 5

saying is — it is this empirical consciousness which
lies spread out before us, not, of course, the whole
history, but the mingling feelings and desires, the
thoughts, intentions, and resolves which fill out
our present consciousness, and which are them
selves in their dominant moods and directions the
outcome of the mental actions and circumstances
that went before them. This consciousness of
certain present experiences upon a background of
dominant modes of thought and courses of action
constitutes the present existence of the empirical
self. In the language of recent psychology, the
empirical self is a complex presentation to con
sciousness; it is "continuously, but at no one
moment completely, presented." 1 From such a
presentation or object, the transcendental self or
the unity of apperception is carefully distin
guished by Kant. Without going back upon
ground already traversed, it is sufficient to re
member that the empirical self is serial ; and
a series, if it is to be known as such, implies a
consciousness present to each of its members,
and self-identical throughout their change. To
the transcendental Ego alone belong such predi-

1 Ward, article " Psychology " in the ninth edition of the
' Encyclopaedia Britannica. '

1 6 Hegelianism and Personality.

cates as "static," "permanent," "unchangeable,"
"identical."1

The term transcendental is also applied by
Kant in a wider but precisely similar sense to
characterise his whole method of philosophic
proof. The transcendental proof, as he is never
weary of telling us, is the proof by reference to
the possibility of experience. It is the analysis of
experience or, as we may say here, of knowledge,
with a view to discover its indispensable consti
tutive elements. Taking the fact of knowledge
as it finds it, it does not inquire how that fact
was realised or came into being — an inquiry
which is in truth, from the philosophical point of
view, impossible — but, moving always within the
fact, it asks what are the conditions of its being
f what it is, what, in other words, are its essential
V elements. As Mr Shadworth Hodgson says, it is
An analysis of the nature of knowledge, not of its
fuenesis. The transcendental method is a proof,
/ consequently, which can never overstep ex
perience, which can never be justified in detach-
\ ing the conditions of knowledge from the synthesis
\ in which it finds them. Neither the particulars
of sense, on the one hand, nor the universal of the
Ego, on the other, can be so detached. If the

1 Stehend, bleibend, unwandelbar, identisch.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 7

isolation of the former gave rise to the fallacy
which was traced to its culmination in Hume —
the fallacy of the abstract particular — the isola
tion of the latter involves the no less dangerous
fallacy of the abstract or empty universal. Par
ticulars exist only as a manifold referred through
the categorised forms of time and space to the
unity of the subject ; and the subject exists only as
the unity of the manifold whose central principle
of connection it is. In a word, the procedure of
a transcendental philosophy which would be con
sistent with itself must be immanent throughout.
But if this is so, then it is evident that many
of Kant's own statements will require revision.
It is manifestly inadmissible, for example, to
speak of the categories and the forms of space
and time as belonging especially to the subject,
and as imposed by it upon an alien matter. As
soon as we so speak, we have deserted the im
manent point of view ; we have hypostatised the
Ego apart from the synthesis in which alone it
exists, and by way of concealing the nakedness
of our abstraction have clothed it with certain
forms of thought. So conceived, these forms are
no better than innate ideas of the crudest type,
lodged somehow in the individual mind. Kant's
whole distinction between matter and form, which
B

[ 8 Hegelianism and Personality.

treats the former as the contribution of the ob
ject and the latter as specially due to the subject,
is quite untenable on his own transcendental
principles. "What, indeed, could offend more
flagrantly against these principles than such an
attempt to transcend the bounds of possible ex
perience, and to treat subject and object as two
causally related entities, outside of knowledge,
which by their interaction give rise to know
ledge ? This subject-in -itself and object-in-itself,
each contributing its share to the composite
whole of knowledge, are the very chimeras which
Criticism and the transcendental method went
out to slay. There is certainly interaction be
tween the human organism and its environment ;
and the human subject, when his organism is
affected, is able to refer that affection to an ex
ternal object. But this whole process takes place
within the world of knowledge, or in Kantian
language within the realm of phenomena. It is
a phenomenal object — the organism — which is
affected, and it is another phenomenal object —
say, the sun — to which the affection is referred.
There is no reference whatever to a noumenal
background, in which the causes of knowledge
existed before knowledge was ; and the metaphor
of impression, while intelligible in the physio-

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 9

logical sphere indicated, is entirely out of place,
and, in truth, unmeaning, when applied to the
subject of knowledge. Subject and object are
terms, in short, that have a meaning only within
the world of knowledge ; they are not to be taken
as two transcendent things-in-themselves. And
as soon as we cease to regard them as such, and
cease to treat experience as the result of their
interaction, all ground for Kant's view of the
subjectivity and relativity of our knowledge dis
appears. Knowledge is like a seamless garment
which cannot be divided and have its parts
assigned in this fashion. There is one intellig
ible world, all the elements of which are mutu
ally complementary and equally necessary. We
cannot have form without matter, or matter
without form; but the two are not brought to
gether. The form is the form of the matter, and
the matter is, as it were, simply the exhibition of
the form. This necessity of correlation may be
treated without injustice as the fundamental
feature of the transcendental method. And if
now we ask what is to be said of the self, we
may most correctly reply that " so far is it from
being a figure of speech that the self exists only
through the world and the world through the
self, that we might say with equal truth the self

2O Hegelianism and Personality.

is the world and the world is the self. The self
and the world are only two sides of the same
reality ; they are the same intelligible world
looked at from two opposite points of view." 1 It
is, of course, only from the point of view of the
self or subject that this identity can be grasped,
but this does not confer upon the self a separate
existence. The transcendental self, as the impli
cate of all experience, is, for a theory of know
ledge, simply the necessary point of view from
which the universe can be unified, that is, from
which it becomes a universe. For the rest, the
mind and the world, subject and object, are con
vertible terms ; we may talk indifferently of the
one or of the other: the content of our notion
remains the same in both cases. -

Such, it seems to me, is the legitimate outcome
of the transcendental method, when it is con
sistently applied, and when the results are stated
in their most exact and unadorned form. If I
am not mistaken, Mr Shadworth Hodgson's
Philosophy of Eeflection is, as regards the au
thor's main contention, the most clear-sighted

1 Essays in Philosophical Criticism, p. 38. The first essay
of this volume, on "Philosophy as Criticism of Categories," is
in the main an attempt to expound the view here indicated,
though perhaps without sufficient recognition of its necessary
limitations.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 2 1

and thoroughgoing application of the Kantian
method; and the doctrine of subjective and ob
jective " aspects " there developed seems to coin
cide with the result reached above. Mr Hodgson
maintains most jealously the immanent nature of
the inquiry, and consequently refuses (rightly as
it seems to me) to attribute causal activity to the
Subject. To do so would be, in his language, to
relapse into the Dogmatic or causal-entity view
from which it is the special function of the
Critical theory of knowledge to set us free. He
recognises at the same time the limitations of the
inquiry, and does not put forward the theory of
knowledge as a ready-made ontology ; he does not
claim, on the strength of it, to possess an abso
lute theory of the universe. In this he differs
markedly from Neo-Kantians like Green. Green
also claims to follow out the transcendental
method to its legitimate issue, and to make
Kant consistent with himself ; but in so doing he
avowedly transforms Kant's theory of knowledge
into a metaphysic of existence, an absolute phil
osophy.

This transformation forms the core of the Neo-
Kantian position, and it raises afresh the ques
tion of the nature of the transcendental self — a
question not sufficiently answered even by all

22 Hegelianism and Personality.

that has been already said. What is the tran
scendental self which plays so great a part in
this analysis ? Kant calls it on occasion the
" pure " or " primitive " Ego, and speaks of it as
"the highest principle of the exercise of the
understanding." It lies at the basis of the cate
gories, he tells us, and forms " the ground of their
possibility"; it is "the vehicle of all conceptions
whatever."1 "The static and permanent Ego,"
he says in one place, "constitutes the correlate
of all my ideas " ; 2 " all objects vwhich can occupy
me are determinations of my identical self," 3 and
hence the transcendental Ego may be spoken of,
with strict propriety, as " the correlate of all ex
istence."4 Expressions such as these, coupled
with the sharp distinction drawn between the
transcendental and the empirical self, perhaps
first suggested to Kant's successors their meta
physical transformation of his conception. This
self which seems to have no predicates of mor
tality about it — which seems to be the presup
position of all else, while itself presuppositionless

1 Werke, iii. 274 (ed. Hartenstein, 1868), Meiklejohn, 237.

2 Ibid., iii. 581 (from the version of the Deduction of the
Categories in the first edition).

3 Ibid., iii. 585.

4 Ibid., iii. 617 (from the Paralogism of Pure Reason in the
first edition).

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 23

— has been taken by later thinkers, and mark
edly- by the English Neo-Kantians, as a universal
or absolute self-consciousness, or in plainer terms
as the one eternal divine Subject to which the
universe is relative. This identification, though
it may not be found in Kant himself, is dictated,
they contend, by the consistent tenor of the
whole system. In so far, therefore, as they
present this doctrine as the direct outcome of
the Kantian System, the soundness of their
philosophical conclusion may fitly be considered
here, without unduly anticipating the argument
of the following lectures.

Green, then, explicitly identifies the self which
the theory of knowledge reveals — the " single
active self-conscious principle, by whatever name
it may be called,"1 — with the universal or divine
self-consciousness. He calls it himself most fre
quently a " spiritual principle." It is " the eter
nally complete consciousness " which, according to
his view, makes the animal organism of man a
vehicle for the reproduction of itself. Numberless
references to this eternal self might be quoted
from the ' Prolegomena to Ethics/ with only verbal
variations in statement. It is the punctum stans,
to which all order in time is relative. Its con-

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 40.

24 Hegelianism and Personality.

stant presence to the relations which constitute
the content of the universe communicates to
these relations their permanence and objectivity.
It is their "medium and sustainer";1 the objec
tivity of the universe just means its existence for
such a consciousness. It will be observed, fur
ther, that Green habitually attributes to this
eternal Self a constitutive activity which is tanta
mount to creation. It is said to "make nature";
nature is said to " result from the activity of the
spiritual principle." But if we consider the char
acter of the method by which the result was
reached, such predicates will appear more than
questionable, for the Self is nothing apart from
the world. If it is necessary as the sustainer of
relations, it is nothing apart from the relations
which it sustains. They exist together, or not at
all ; they exist, as was said above, as two aspects
of the same fact. Accordingly, as Mr Balfour
pointed out in a criticism of Green's metaphysics,
published in ' Mind ' a few years ago, if we speak
of activity at all, " we must allow that it is as
correct to say that nature makes mind as that
mind makes nature ; that the World created God
as that God created the World."2 This is so far
from being a travesty of the Neo-Kantian position

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 68. 2 Mind, ix. 80.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 25

that it seems the only possible way of stating it
when we aim at perfect frankness and scientific
explicitness of expression. And, indeed, in dis
cussing the applicability of the term '"cause" to
describe the relation between God and the world,
Green himself warns us that " there is no separate
particularity in the agent, on the one side, and
the determined world as a whole, on the other,
such as characterises any agent or patient, any
cause and effect, within the phenomenal world."
"That the unifying principle should distinguish
itself from the manifold which it unifies is indeed
a condition of the unification, but it must not be
supposed that the manifold has a nature of its
own apart from the unifying principle, or this
principle another nature of its own apart from
what it does in relation to the manifold world."1
Indeed, " the concrete whole," he says in another
place, " may be described indifferently as an eter
nal intelligence realised in the related facts of
the world, or as a system of related facts ren
dered possible by such an intelligence." 2 Apart
from the metaphysical bearing given to it, this
is almost in so many words the result which we
reached a little ago by the aid of the transcen
dental method.

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 80, 81. - Ibid., 38.

26 Hegelianism and Personality.

The self or unifying principle has then, ac
cording to Green, no nature of its own apart
from what it does in relation to the manifold
world. But what the unifying principle does
in relation to the manifold world is simply to
unify it. Green himself tells us in one place
that we know the spiritual principle only as
" a principle of unity in relation."1 That, cer
tainly, is all that the transcendental analysis
of knowledge tells us about it. The eternal
Self which we reach along this path is no more
than a focus imaginarius into which the multi
plex relations which constitute the intelligible
world return. Such a focus or principle of unity
enables us to round off our theory with an ap
pearance of personality, but it does not satisfy
in any real sense the requirements of Theism.
7 Adapting a phrase used by Hegel in another con-
• nection, we may say that this Self is like a consti-
1 tutional monarch who reigns but does not govern
I — whose signature is the necessary completion of
/every document, but is affixed impartially to each
as it is laid before him. Such a monarch, says
Hegel, may aptly be compared to the dot on the
i ; he represents the unity of the State, and gives
the formal imprimatur of his " I will " to its

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 72.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 2 7

actions. In like manner, the transcendental Ego,
as revealed by the theory of knowledge, represents
merely the formal unity of the universe ; and
unless we have other data, and approach the
question along a different road, we are still far
from anything like spirituality or freedom in the
ordinary sense of these words. Green's use of the'
term "spiritual principle" is almost inevitably
open to misinterpretation, and by its associations
leads even himself to make assertions which are
not warranted by his own proof — which are indeed
inconsistent with it.

In this respect, Kant saw his way more clearly
than many of those who make bold to teach him
consistency. It was not merely his entanglement
in " psychological " prejudices that held him back
from such conclusions. He understood the nature
of his own inquiry, and knew what it could yield
him and what it could not. In this connection
Kant has received perhaps less than justice at
the hands of his critics. It may be that he
mingles psychology with his theory of knowledge ;
but the consequences may be quite as fatal, if
we confound the boundaries of epistemology and
metaphysics. In point of fact, however he may
nod at times, Kant is in general sufficiently awake
to the distinction between his transcendental in-

28 Hegelianism and Personality.

vestigation and an investigation into psychological
matter of fact. He enforces in various passages
the perfectly general character of his inquiry.
He is dealing, he says, not with any individual
mind or consciousness, but with consciousness in
general, with "the conditions of possible ex
perience,"1 "the unity of possible consciousness,"2
or, as he calls it in another place, with "the
logical form of all cognition,"3 with the ultimate
nature, as we might say, of knowledge as know
ledge. The transcendental logic, in a word, is a
study of knowledge in abstraoto. But just because
of this perfectly general or abstract character
which belongs to the investigation, the results of
the investigation must also be perfectly general
or abstract. They will be abstract conditions, not
concrete facts or metaphysical realities. The
analysis reveals to us, according to its own claims,
certain conditions which must be fulfilled in every
instance of actual knowledge — certain categories
or fundamental modes of connection, and, as a
supreme condition, the unity of the pure Ego —
but it deals itself with no actual knower, whether

1 Werke, iii. 575. 2 Ibid., iii. 585.

3 Ibid., iii. 578. The recurrent use of the term " possible"
is characteristic of Kant — possible experience, possible con
sciousness, possible cognition ; so also the phrase uberhaupt—
thought in general, experience in general, &c.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 29

human or divine. It deals, in a word, with pos
sible consciousness, or consciousness in general,
which, so long as it remains a "general," is of
course a pure abstraction.

But if this is so, it must be in the highest
degree improper to convert consciousness in gene
ral without more ado into a universal conscious
ness. Surely it does not follow that, because we
are professedly abstracting from any particular
self of experience, we are therefore analysing the V
absolute or divine self-consciousness. The tran
scendental theory of knowledge, because it is
an abstract inquiry, necessarily speaks of a single
Self or logical subject ; but this singularity is ]
the singularity which belongs to every abstract
notion, and decides nothing as to the singularity j
or plurality of existing intelligences. We can \
have absolutely no right to transform this logical
identity of type into a numerical identity of ex
istence. The theory of knowledge, at least, can
give us no such right. Yet this seems to be
precisely the step which Neo-Kantianism takes.
It takes the notion of knowledge as equivalent
to a real Knower; and, the form of knowledge
being one, it leaps to the conclusion that what
we have before us is the One Subject who sus
tains the world, and is the real Knower in all

30 Hegeli&nism and Personality.

finite intelligences. It seems a hard thing to
say, but to do this is neither more nor less
than to hypostatise an abstraction. It is of a
piece with the Scholastic Realism which hyposta-
tised humanitas or homo as a universal substance,
of which individual men were, in a manner,
the accidents. Similarly here, the notion of
knowledge in general — the pure Ego — which is
reached by abstraction from the individual human
knower, is erected into a self-existent reality —
" an eternally complete self-consciousness " — of
which the individual is an imperfect reproduc
tion or mode. There no doubt may be an
eternally complete self-consciousness which holds
a creative relation to our own, and much of
Green's theory of the universe may be substan
tially true; but if so, its truth must be estab
lished upon other lines. It is resting on a fallacy
to believe that the eternally complete self-con
sciousness is proved in this fashion by the theory
of knowledge.

Terrier's argument in his ' Institutes of Meta-
physic,' in many respects so similar, appears to
me to be much more cautious than Green's, and
more consonant with the conditions of the theory
of knowledge. A short reference to it may eluci
date the point at issue. Terrier proves in his

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 3 1

Epistemology and Agnoiology the impossibility
of matter per se or mind per se, and thus lays
down certain fundamental conditions to which
all cognition must conform. That is to say, he
too analyses the notion of knowledge ; but he
does not proceed to hypostatise it, as we have
seen Neo- Kantianism do. The concluding pro
positions of the Ontology simply apply the no
tion to the elimination from existence of what
has been proved to be contradictory and incon
ceivable. " The only true and real and inde
pendent existences* are minds-together-with-that
which they apprehend." So runs the second last
proposition, and the last says : " All absolute
existences are contingent except one ; in other
words, there is one but only one absolute exist
ence which is strictly necessary, and that existence
is a supreme and infinite and everlasting Mind
in synthesis with all things." Even this is more
than is strictly warranted by the theory of know
ledge alone ; it depends rather on general meta
physical considerations. But at least neither
here nor in the working out of the propositions
is there any identification of the necessary exist
ence and the contingent existences. There is no
statement whatever as to the relation between
them, for the theory of knowledge affords no

32 Hegelianism and Personality.

data for determining that relation. The real
service of the theory of knowledge in this con
nection is, that it eliminates the thing-in-itself
and the Ego-in-itself — the mere object and the
mere subject — and therefore legitimates the asser
tion that all existence to which we can attach
a meaning must be existence-for-a-self, or, as it
may perhaps be otherwise expressed, the only
real existences are selves — i.e., beings who possess
either in higher or lower fashion an analogue of
what we call self-consciousness in ourselves. But
whether there be one Self or many selves, and,
if there be both, what is the relation between
the One and the many — these are questions of
metaphysics or ontology, not to be settled out
of hand by the perfectly general result to which
the theory of knowledge leads us.

Unquestionably the results of the epistemologi-
cal investigation must have an important bearing
upon the metaphysical problem ; but the office of
the theory of knowledge must, in the main, be
negative or indirect, ruling out certain solutions
as inadmissible rather than itself supplying us
with a ready-made solution. In a word, the
theory of knowledge, even in its amended form,
must maintain the critical attitude at first assigned
to it by Kant. Though we may disagree with

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 33

many of the arguments by which he supports his
position, it cannot, I think, be doubted that
Kant was methodically correct in the view he
took of his own inquiry. There is nothing in
it, as I conceive, to preclude us from the attempt
to construct a metaphysical system ; but it can
not stand itself as a dogmatic theory.

Kant himself, it is almost superfluous to point
out, would never have acquiesced in the deduc
tions which his Neo-Kantian followers have
drawn from his premisses. Nothing, of course,
was further from his thoughts than an identifi
cation of the transcendental Ego with the divine
self - consciousness, as is sufficiently proved by
his constant references to the latter as a per
ceptive, that is, a non-discursive understanding,
the very possibility of which we are unable to
comprehend.1 But Kant further refuses to re-

1 As if anticipating that the attempt would be made to rep
resent the difference between the human consciousness and
the divine as essentially one of degree, Kant expressly declared
himself on this point in an important letter to Marcus Herz
in 1789. It will be found, he says, " that we cannot assume
the human understanding to be specifically the same as the
divine, and only distinguished from it by limitation — i.e., in
degree. The human understanding is not, like the divine, a
faculty of immediate perception, but one of thought, which, if
it is to produce knowledge, requires alongside of it — or rather
requires as its material — a second quite different faculty, a

C

34 Hegelianism and Personality.

cognise the transcendental Ego as constituting the
real self even of the individual human knower.
This is, in fact, the text of his whole contention
in the well-known argument headed " The Paral
ogism of Pure Eeason." Kant is there attacking
the old metaphysical psychology for reasoning,
not indeed to the same conclusion, but on pre
cisely similar lines to those on which the Neo-
Kantian proof of the universal Self has been seen
to run. The metaphysical psychologists also
started with the abstract Ego, which forms the
presupposition of knowledge ; and as this unity
of consciousness is one, eternal (or out of time),
and indivisible, they proceeded to prove by its
means the necessary immortality of the human
soul. This is the Paralogism which Kant at
tacks, and in the course of his attack we get a
collection of predicates applied to the pure Ego
which serve as a wholesome corrective to some
of the proud names heaped upon it before. The
Ego, he says, is " a merely logical qualitative

faculty or receptivity of perception." — Werke, viii. 719.
As further emphasising the complete distinction existing in
Kant's mind between the consciousness of the individual and
the divine self-consciousness, reference need only he made to
the thoroughly transcendent conception of God with which the
Kantian ethics end — a being apart, whose function it is to mete
out happiness in accordance with desert.

Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 3 5

unity of self -consciousness in thought generally ; "
it is in itself a perfectly empty or contentless
idea — a perfectly empty expression which I can
apply to every thinking subject — nay, it is actu
ally " the poorest of all our ideas." No doubt the
argument here is overlaid in parts by extraneous
considerations, and infected by Kant's relativistic
prejudice ; but in pointing out the merely logical
character of the self reached by the analysis of
knowledge, he is not only guided by a sounder
instinct, but shows also a keener insight than his
speculative followers. " The logical exposition of
thought in general is mistaken," he says, " for a
metaphysical determination of the object." The
words are spoken of the metaphysical psycholo
gists, but it would be impossible to characterise
more aptly the fallacy which underlies the Neo-
Kantian deification of the abstract unity of
thought.

36 Hegelianism and Personality.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE I.

Though it is hardly, perhaps, an integral part of the
present argument, it seems natural to connect Kant's
refusal to substitute for the real self a purely logical
or formal unity with his refusal to identify the
reality of the external world with mere relations.
Kant's doctrine of things-in-themselves, as ordinarily
understood, I cannot but hold to be fundamentally
false, and a fruitful source of error ; * but it does not
/therefore follow that the whole external world is
nothing more than a complex of thought-relations.
'There seems no reason why, if we resolve the rest of
the external world in this way, we should not reduce
our fellow-men also to mere complexes of relations,
which have no existence on their own account. For
our fellow-men are given to us, in the first instance,
as part of the external world ; and it would seem as
if the same reasons which make us assign to them
an existence on their own account, and not as mere
objects either of our own or of a supposed universal
consciousness, should lead us to attribute an (at least
analogously) independent existence to the external
world, or at any rate to certain existences in it.
' Kant himself, after the promulgation of his Critical
j system, was resolutely averse to speculation beyond
/ certain limits ; but there are indications in his writ
ings that, if indulged, his speculations would have led
him in a Leibnitian direction, as was indeed natural
in the case of one who had been reared and had passed

1 The fifth lecture of the previous course was chiefly devoted
to combating the doctrine of the unknowable thing per se, as it
appears in Kant and Hamilton.

Appendix to Lediire I. 37

a great part of his life within that school. If this be
taken as the idea underlying his assertion of things-
in-themselves, it may be readily admitted that much
of the objectionableness of that doctrine would dis
appear.

Kant's position in regard to the real existence of
the self, and his doctrine of an independent existence
of things as more than relations, do in fact form part
of a tolerably coherent realistic metaphysic, which was
overshadowed but never displaced in Kant's mind by
his Critical idealism. This realistic groundwork has
been more and more lost sight of in certain circles, as
the idealistic deductions from the Kantian theory
have come more and more into prominence. But
when this is the case, Kant's own position is inevit
ably misunderstood. It is not without interest to
note that the isolated passages in which Kant suggests
a Leibnitian interpretation of things-in-themselves are
precisely those which have been seized upon by later
writers as anticipations of the Fichtian theory. This
has been conclusively proved by Ueberweg,1 in regard
to one of these " asides " of Kant, which occurs at the
end of the section on the Paralogism of Pure Reason,
and is therefore connected with the present subject.
Kant is speaking of the supposed difficulty of explain
ing an interaction between mind and matter, between
the non-spatial and the spatial. They appear to be
separated, as Hamilton was fond of saying, by the whole
diameter of being. But, in point of fact, Kant argues,
the "transcendental object which underlies external
phenomena, as well as that which underlies internal
perception, is in itself neither matter nor a thinking
being, but a to-us-unknown ground of phenomena.

1 History of Philosophy, ii. 175.

38 Hegelianism and Personality.

... I can very well suppose that the substance which
in respect of our external sense possesses extension is
in itself the subject of thought which can be con
sciously represented by its own inner sense. Thus
that which in one aspect is called material would at
the same time, in another aspect, be a thinking being
— a being whose thoughts, it is true, we cannot per
ceive, but the signs of whose thoughts in phenomena
we can perceive." ]

1 In first edition. Werke, iii. 694.

39

LECTUEE II.

F I C H T E.

IN the philosophical development with which we
are here concerned, Fichte is an important figure.
As was mentioned in the previous lecture, he was
the first to transform Kant's theory of knowledge
into an absolute metaphysic, and in so doing he
laid the corner-stone of the whole fabric of German
idealism. Fichte is interesting and instructive
alike in his general mode of procedure, in the
difficulties he encounters, and in the admissions
to which these difficulties drive him. Moreover,
being immediately based upon Kant, his construc
tions have in some ways a closer resemblance in
form to those of Neo-Kantians like Green than is
the case with the later and less accessible system
of Hegel.

But though building immediately upon Kant,

4O Hegelianism and Personality.

Fichte represents a totally different type of mind.
Kant is patient and analytic, Fichte is boldly
synthetic ; his system is essentially, as it has just
been termed, a construction. It is a construction
to explain the duality of sense and reason — of
receptivity and spontaneity — which Kant either
left standing as an 'ultimate fact, or simply referred
to the accepted psychological opposition of mind
and things. Fichte claims to present us with a
« metaphysical explanation of this psychological
appearance. He begins by scornfully dismissing
things-in-themselves as in no sense a philosophical
explanation. To explain sensation or " the given "
by referring to the action of a thing-in-itself of
which we know nothing, is to darken counsel by
words without knowledge. Fichte stoutly refused
to believe that Kant could ever have intended
the thing-in-itself to be so interpreted. " Should
he make such a declaration," said the impetuous
philosopher, " I shall consider the ' Critique of
Pure Eeason ' to be the offspring of the strangest
chance rather than the work of a mind." When
Kant soon afterwards published the declaration
in question, his disappointed disciple was driven
to reflect that the Holy Spirit in Kant had
thought more in accordance with truth than
Kant in his individual capacity had done. To

Fichte. 41

Fichte himself it was an axiom that philo
sophy, if it is to be philosophy at all, must
be in one piece. Its explanation must be a de
duction of the apparently disparate elements of
existence from a single principle; to rest in an
unexplained dualism means to despair of philo
sophy.

But if every genuine philosophy is thus a
Monism of some sort, there are, Fichte proceeds,
only two possible systems or types of philosophy
between which we have to choose. The one of
these he calls Dogmatism, a mode of thought
which, when consistent with itself, most com
monly takes the form of Materialism, though
Spinozism is also cited as being, on a higher
plane, the typical example of a rigorous Dog
matism. The system or type of thought opposed
to Dogmatism Fichte calls sometimes Criticism,
sometimes Idealism. The opposition of the two
systems consists in this, that Dogmatism starts
with the absolute or independent existence of
" things," and is therefore inevitably led, in the /
last resort, to explain the conscious intelligence
as their product; while Idealism, on the other
hand, refuses to start otherwise than with the
Ego, and ends by explaining " things " as forms
of the Ego's productive activity. By Dogmatism

42 Hegelianism and Personality.

the Ego is treated as a thing among things, from
whose combinations it results by the ordinary
process of causation ; in Fichte's own phrase, the
\ Ego becomes in such systems " an accident of the
world." And if such an attitude be once adopted,
it is of comparatively little importance whether
the substance of which it is an accident be the
divine essence, as with Spinoza, or cosmic atoms,
as with the Materialists. In either case our
philosophy becomes transcendent, because we go
(or rather try to go) behind the Ego, and make
it an accident or appendage of something else.
Criticism, on the other hand, says Fichte, char
acterising his own philosophy, is throughout im
manent in its procedure. The Ego takes the
place, as it were, of the universal substance of
\ Dogmatism; and instead of the Ego's being an
outcome of " things," all " things " have their
existence within the circle of the Ego. The Ego
is the one primary and indubitable fact ; or
rather, in Fichte's language, it is the eternal act
or energising through which we live, and within
which all existence is contained.

Moreover, Idealism alone furnishes a real solu
tion of the problem. The explanation which
Dogmatism offers of the genesis of self-conscious
ness or the Ego is completely illusory. It leaves

Fichte. 43

unexplained the essential feature of self-conscious
ness — the duality or doubleness, if it may be so
expressed, which lies in knowledge and reflec
tion. The Ego is not a mere fact, which exists
as the Dogmatist conceives a " thing " to exist ;
it is existence and knowledge of existence in one.
Intelligence not only is ; it looks on at its own
existence. It is for itself, whereas the very notion
of a thing is that it does not exist for itself, but
only for another — that is, for some intelligence.
" In intelligence, accordingly," says Fichte, " there
is, If I may express myself metaphorically, a
double series of being and looking on, of the real
and the ideal. The thing, on the other hand,
represents only a single or simple series, that of
the real — mere position or objective existence.
. . . The two lie, therefore, in two worlds be
tween which there is no bridge." 1 Things pro
duce things in a chain of mechanically determined
causality, but this causal action is all within the
real series ; there is no bridge from a thing to the
idea of a thing, no passage from a world of mere
things to a consciousness which knows the things.
Every attempt to bridge this chasm turns out,
says Fichte, to be " a few empty words, which
may, indeed, be learned by heart and repeated,

i Werke, i. 436.

44 Hegelianism and Personality.

but which have never conveyed a thought to any
man, and never will." x Unless, therefore, we
accept the Ego with its duality as an ultimate
fact, or rather the ultimate world-constituting
fact, we can never reach it along the lines of
Dogmatism. Accordingly, as the existence of
the self-conscious Ego is not a more or less pro
bable hypothesis, but an ever-present fact of our
own experience, we are shut up to the rival system
oi- Idealism. It is, in fact, of the very essence of
the Ego that it cannot be produced by anything
external to itself ; it is self-centred, self -creative,
and its life is the perpetual re-affirmation of itself.
In Fichte's language, it is the Absolute Thesis,
self-position or self-affirmation.

This forcible statement will probably be ac
cepted as a sufficient refutation of the stand
point against which it is directed. Jt is funda
mentally impossible to explainjhe existence of., a
^self as a_result of action ab extra ; _.it_ exists only
through its own activity. As Fichte says, " I am
altogether my own creation. Through no law of
nature, or any consequence of nature's laws, but
through absolute freedom, not by a transition but
by a leap, do we raise ourselves to rationality." 2
The contradiction which any one may detect in
1 Werke, i. 438. 2 ibid., i. 298.

Fichte. 45

such a statement is involved in every account of
the origin of a self-conscious life ; for surely it lies
in the very nature of the case that our own
existence forms our necessary presupposition.
We abut here upon an impenetrable mystery, for
to conceive our own origin would mean to tran
scend altogether the conditions of our being. If
the conception were possible, we should be loosed
at once from our individual moorings. It may
be that we should then be as God ; but the
human reason totters on the verge of such a
problem.

Apart, however, from any attempt to solve a pro
blem which they do but suggest, Fichte's words ap
peal to us as a true rendering of the characteristic
feature of the concrete Ego — its self-centred activ
ity, which excludes the idea of mechanical causal
ity, and forbids us to treat the self as a retainer of
any thing or system of things. But Fichte goes
further than this, and we are but entering upon the
most characteristic portions of his system. Great
part of his philosophy is, indeed, little more than
an attempt to overcome or rationalise the contra
diction contained in his own words quoted above.
The attempt is made by means of a distinction
within the concrete self between the pure or
Absolute Ego and the self of the individual as

46 Hegelianism and Personality.

such. It is not, we are told, to the concrete
personality of the individual as such that this
absolute position or self-creation in strictness
refers, but to " the Ego as absolute subject," to
"pure consciousness." This pure Ego is not a
fact that we can discover or verify within our
empirical consciousness, Fichte tells us ; it is
rather an act which "lies at the basis of all
^consciousness and alone makes consciousness
* possible."1 The burden of the contradiction
seems somehow lighter, if we can divide the rdles
in this fashion, assigning creative function to the
pure Ego and the part of creature to the empirical
self. Nor is the device a new one in the annals
of philosophy ; for we find a very similar division
of labour in Aristotle between the vovs iroi^riKo^
and the z^oO? TraOrjTi/cbs, the Active and the Pas-
, sive Eeason. But in Fichte's case the distinction
is drawn directly from the Kantian scheme.
The Absolute Ego is simply Kant's transcendental
unity of apperception; but the identification of
that unity with the central creative thought of
the universe has now been made. Instead of
being, as with Kant, the function of human
thought, which generates the form, and the form
only, of a phenomenal world, the pure Ego has
1 Werke, i. 91.

Fichte. 47

become for Fichte the absolute creator of an
absolute world.

The working out of this distinction between
the absolute and the empirical Ego is found to
include, in Fichte's hands, an explanation of the
apparently " given " element in knowledge, which
was referred to at the outset as the underlying
motive of his philosophy. For Fichte does not
deny, any more than Kant did, that the ordinary
consciousness seems to itself to be filled from an
alien source. He acknowledges that the objective
world is to the individual, in the first instance,
simply a given material, in relation to which he
is receptive ; the individual may be said, in the
strictest sense, to find it presented to him.
Fichte calls this objective aspect of conscious
ness the Non-Ego, and is thus far from denying
the fact which Kant formulated in his assertion
of a given element in knowledge. But, as already
remarked, he seeks a speculative explanation of
this fact or appearance — an explanation which
Kant can hardly be said to have attempted.1

Fichte's explanation is not found, however, in
the theoretical sphere, that is, in the domain of
knowledge as knowledge. Kant, it is well known,
considered that only in dealing with the practical

1 See Appendix, p. 74.

48 Hegelianism and Personality.

or moral reason had he penetrated to the noumenal
reality of the Self ; and it was here that the in
tense ethical fervour of Fichte's nature attached
itself most closely to the Kantian philosophy.
In practical reason or will, we find, according to
him, the reality of the world-process, the reality
of which knowledge gives only a picture, a repre
sentation, a rendering. In the idea of duty or
moral destiny is to be found the ultimate explan
ation or meaning of existence. From this point
of view, then, we first come to perceive the
necessity of the object as Non-Ego — that is, as
something seemingly foreign and alien. Only
through the Non-Ego, as an obstacle of this sort,
can the practical activity of the Ego be realised.
The creation or " positing " of the Non-Ego is thus
the device of the Absolute Ego itself, in order to
attain self-realisation. "The Absolute Ego," he
says, " is absolutely identical with itself ; every
thing in it is one and the same Ego, and belongs
(if so inapt an expression may be allowed) to one
and the same Ego ; there is nothing here to dis
tinguish, no multiplicity. The Ego is everything
and is nothing, because it is nothing for itself.
. . . In virtue of its essence it strives (though
even this is not strictly true except with reference
to the future) to maintain itself in this condition.

Fichte. 49

There arises in it a difference, consequently some
thing alien or foreign." 1 By the finite or prac
tical Ego which results, the difference whose
emergence is thus enigmatically expressed must
be simply accepted as a fact ; and trie Non-Ego
which impedes its activity keeps therefore a
character of foreignness. Nevertheless, as the
thing-in-itself may be taken as an exploded
fiction, and the Non-Ego exists only for the Ego,
the appearance of opposition must be held, from
the speculative point of view, to be due to the
nature and action of the Ego itself. It is, as we
may say, its own activity taking a roundabout
way.

This is, in effect, Fichte's celebrated theory of
the Anstqss or shock of opposition in which con
sciousness arises. In working out the idea,
Fichte is dangerously lavish in his use of mechan
ical metaphors. The fundamental conception,
however, is that the Absolute Ego may be com
pared to an infinite outgoing activity, which, so
conceived, is formless and characterless. It re
quires to break itself against some obstacle, and
thus, as it were, be reflected back upon itself, in
order that it may come to self -consciousness —
in order that we may be able to distinguish any-
1 Werke, i. 264.
D

50 Hegelianism and Personality.

thing in it, or to apply any predicate intelligently
to it. For Eichte says, quite unequivocally, that it
is only the limited Ego, whose striving is met by
a counter-striving, that is conscious. " Only by
means of such a Non-Ego is the Ego intelligence/' *
Where this is not the case, where the Ego is all
in all, "it is for that very reason nothing at
all." 2

Taken in any literal or mechanical sense, the
objections to such a construction are tolerably
obvious. The whole excursion into the void pre
ceding consciousness is an attempt to transcend
self-consciousness and construct it out of an
tecedent existences, and that after emphatically
denouncing the futility of such experiments. The
Anstoss is entirely a metaphor taken from ,the
struggles of the embodied Ego against material
obstacles, and as such is quite inapplicable to the
action of intelligence and its relation to its objects.
Moreover, the Absolute Ego cannot receive the
Anstoss, because it is either subject and object at
once and therefore all -containing, with nothing
beyond it on which it could impinge, or, as devoid
of self-consciousness, it is, as we found Eichte
himself saying, " nothing at all." And above all,
it may be asked, What do we mean by speaking

1 Werke, i. 248. 2 Ibid., i. 281.

Fichte. 5 1

of an Ego, when what we have is admittedly no
more than a formless and aimless activity ?

But perhaps it is hardly fair to Fichte to say
that he consciously intended to give a mechanical
explanation of the kind just indicated. At all
events, the objections made to his theory, and the
manifold misunderstandings to which it gave rise,
drew from him an indignant disclaimer that he
had ever dreamt of giving an actual construction
of consciousness before all consciousness.1 He
brands such an interpretation as a gross misun
derstanding of his meaning — as if he had set about
to write the biography of a man before his birth.
" Consciousness exists," he declares, " with all its
determinations at a stroke, just as the universe is
an organic whole, no part of which can exist with
out all the rest — something, therefore, which can
not have come gradually into being, but must
necessarily have been there in its completeness
at any period when it existed at all." In other
words, he would tell us that he is not narrating
what ever took place, but is analysing an eternal
fact or process — analysing consciousness, in short,
into its different moments, though these are in
separable, though they are, indeed, mere abstrac
tions, if supposed to exist separately. We can-

1 Cf. Werke, ii. 379 and 399.

5 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

not refuse to accept a declaration so explicit. It
would actually seem to be the case that, at this
stage of his philosophy, Fichte did not contem
plate any self-consciousness as existent except the
self -consciousness of finite individuals. Being,
existence, and suchlike terms, always had a flavour
of grossness about them for Fichte. He would
have readily allowed, therefore, that the empirical
individuals were the only existences or real beings
in the world, though contending at the same time
that their existence derived its meaning from a
moral order of the universe. Fichte did not,
therefore, at this stage, attribute to the Absolute
Ego any existence on its own account ; it was to
him simply one aspect of the self -consciousness of
the empirical individual. Hence he could not
but vehemently repudiate an interpretation of his
theory which turned it, in his own contemptuous
phrase, into a story or tale.

We get accordingly, at this period of Fichte's
life, what is perhaps the most characteristic form
of his idealism — an idealism which he loved to
describe as not dogmatic but practical. It looks
not behind to a source from which things pro
ceed, but forward to their goal or destiny, deter
mining not what is, but what is to be.1 It is
1 Cf. Werke, i. 156.

Fichte. 53

worth our while to look somewhat closely at the
appearance which the universe presents on this
theory, in order to see how far the theory is ten
able, and at the same time how far Fichte con
sistently maintains the position which he claims
to occupy in regard to the Absolute Ego.

He disclaims, as has been said, anything like a
primitive reality or source of things. The finite,
striving Egos constitute the sum of actual exist
ence, the external world being simply the material
or sphere of their moral action. The striving of
the finite Egos is due, certainly, to the ideal of a
moral destiny present to each. This ideal is the
motive-power of the whole struggle with its eter
nal or never-ending advance. We are drawn for
ward by " the idea of our absolute existence," or,
as it is sometimes called, " the Idea of the Ego,"
— that is to say, by the idea of an absolute or un
impeded activity. Just as in the case of Aris
totle's re'Xo? or End, this idea of the Ego and the
eternal Sollen, or Ought-to-be, involved in it, con
tains the explanation of the whole evolution.
But the Idea of the Ego is not, so far as can be
gathered from Fichte, an eternal prius, and in this
respect it differs from the Aristotelian reXo?. It
is merely an idea, and will never be actual. It
cannot be realised, for the very sufficient reason

54 Hegelianism and Personality.

that the extinction of opposition would signify
the cessation of the strife on which consciousness
depends.

It was doubtless the intensity of Eichte's moral
earnestness, and his somewhat exclusive attention
to that side of experience, which led to such a
formulation of his philosophy. But even as a
metaphysic of ethics, such a theory is insufficient.
Morality becomes illusory, if it is represented as
the pursuit of a goal whose winning would be
suicidal to morality itself, and to all conscious
life. This consummation is unequivocally ex
pressed by Schelling in his youthful work, ' On
the Ego' — a work which was commended by
Fichte himself as an unexceptionable presentation
of the doctrine of the ' Wissenschaf tslehre.' " The
ultimate goal of the finite Ego," says Schelling, " is
enlargement of its sphere till the attainment of
identity with the infinite Ego. But the infinite
Ego knows no object, and possesses, therefore,
no consciousness or unity of consciousness, such
as we mean by personality. Consequently the
ultimate goal of all endeavour may also be repre
sented as enlargement of the personality to infin
ity — that is to say, as its annihilation. The ulti
mate goal of the finite Ego, and not only of it but
also of the Non-Ego— the final goal, therefore, of

Fichte. 55

the world — is its annihilation as a world." l We
may well, then, withdraw our eyes from the goal,
if we are not to lose heart for the race. Fichte's
account, in short, leaves no permanent reality
in the universe whatever. The world is hung,
as it were, between two vacuities — between the
pure or Absolute Ego, on the one hand, which is
completely empty apart from the finite individ
uals whom it constitutes, and "the Idea of the
Ego," on the other, which is admittedly unattain
able, and, if attainable, would be a total blank,
the collapse of all conscious life.

But it was impossible that such an exclusively
practical point of view could be maintained for any
length of time as a metaphysic of the universe.
The manifold empirical Egos could neither be
taken as metaphysically self-explaining, nor could
they be explained by reference to a re'Xo? or End,
which is a mere idea. There is evidence that
Fichte himself — though at one time, as has been
. said, he might, if challenged, have acquiesced in
the statement that the reality of the universe
consisted simply of striving finite Egos — was at
no time completely satisfied with this conclusion.
And, in spite of disclaimers in regard to any ex
istence of the Absolute Ego prior to and apart

1 Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophic, § 14.

56 Hegelianism and Personality.

from its finite realisations, it is hardly possible to
explain satisfactorily the extreme elaboration be
stowed upon this theory of the Absolute Ego and
the Anstoss, without believing that Fichte was at
least half - consciously impelled by the need of
some prius, which should not be merely logical
— some metaphysical prius or ultimate Eeality
from which the origin of finite Egos might be
explained.

This conviction is confirmed when we turn to
the later forms of his theory. He first denied, as
we have seen, that he meant to speak of a real
prius at all; but almost immediately he seems
to have begun to feel the impossibility of doing
without an ultimate reality of some sort. At the
same time he was quick to recognise the inappli
cability of the term Ego, with its implication of
self-consciousness to such a prius as the theory
led to. Accordingly, we find the two processes
going on side by side ; he gradually disuses the
term Ego, and at the same time embraces more
distinctly the idea of a metaphysical ground or
source. Thus, in 1800, in the ' Destiny of Man/
speaking of the Absolute Ego as identity of sub
ject and object, he defines it as " that which is
neither subject nor object, but the ground of both,
and that out of which both come into being," and

Fichte. 5 7

refers immediately afterwards to " the incompre
hensible One " which " separates itself into these
two."1 And as early as 1801, we find him drop
ping the term Absolute Ego, and adopting the
more general designation of the Absolute. The
same course was taken by Eichte's youthful
disciple Schelling. When Schelling proceeds to
define the Absolute as the indifference-point of
subject and object — "pure identity in which
nothing is distinguishable " — it cannot any longer
be doubted that we are being offered a meta
physical ground or source of the actual world,
but neither can it be pretended that these
terms indicate an Ego, an intelligent or spiritual
principle. Eichte described his own system as an
inverted Spinozism, in which the Absolute Ego
stands in place of Substance, thus conserving the
rights of the self-conscious life, and justifying the
name Idealism. But here it is proved by the self-
development of the system that, when thought out,
it falls back into Spinozism pure and simple. The
Absolute Ego passes into the Absolute, and turns
out to be no better than an absolute Substance
from which all determinations are absent. It is
on the same footing with negations like the Un
conscious, or the Unknown and Unknowable.

1 Werke, ii. 225.

58 Hegelianism and Personality.

This result, however, is not accidental to the
theory ; it is the natural and inevitable result of
the mode of reasoning pursued. In considering
the Kantian philosophy in the first lecture, we
dwelt at considerable length on the impossibility
of separating the transcendental unity from the
empirical consciousness which it unifies. To
suppose it existing on its own account is as if we
supposed that one end of a stick could exist with
out the other. Kant was under no temptation to
separate the transcendental and the empirical
self, because the former was for him simply the
logical unity of thought in general, and he had
never thought of identifying it with a divine or
creative Self. But in Fichte (and this constitutes
his interest and importance) this step — the step
which is repeated in Green, and which forms the
central tenet of Neo-Kantianism — has been defin
itely taken. And as soon as this identification is
made — as soon as we begin to speak of the Ab
solute Ego, or the universal consciousness — the
temptation to separate becomes irresistible. We
can hardly avoid substantiating this " eternal
Self," and ascribing to it a creative function in
respect of the manifold human individualities,
which look so little self-dependent and self-
explaining. Green, as we saw, repeatedly ascribes

Fichte. 59

such creative action to his spiritual principle. It
is, indeed, I believe, the need of some permanent
principle on which these manifold individual
selves might be seen to depend, combined with
the perception that no self can be explained
materialistically, or quasi - materialistically, by
action from without, that prompts the identifi
cation in question. Unless the two selves can
be so far separated as to supply the metaphysical
explanation required, the charm of the identifica
tion is lost.

Probably no one who has really lived in this
phase of thought can fail to remember the thrill
with which the meaning of the new principle first
flashed upon him, and the light which it seemed
to throw upon old difficulties. It had become
impossible, with due regard to the unity of things,
to conceive God as an object, as something quite
external to ourselves; and, on the other hand,
there seemed nothing but a relapse into ordin
ary Pantheism, with its submergence of self-
consciousness, and all that hangs thereby, in a
general life, which reason and conscience alike
declare to be inferior to our own. But, in this
dilemma, the universal consciousness seemed to
rise upon us as a creative power which was not
without us, but within, — which did not create a

60 Hegelianism and Personality.

world of objects and leave it in dead independ
ence, but perpetually unrolled, as it were, in each
of us the universal spectacle of the world. The
world was thus perpetually created anew in each
finite spirit, revelation to intelligence being the
only admissible meaning of that much -abused
term creation. We had here a new and better
Berkeleyanism, for God in this system (so it
seemed), was not an unknown Spirit, hidden, as
it were, behind the screen of phenomena; God
was not far from any one of us, nay, He was
within us, He was in a sense our very Self. Here,
too, we had a principle which seemed to satisfy
as well as Pantheism the imperative need of
unity, but did so without sacrificing the claims of
self-consciousness. For Self, as the eternal sus
taining Subject of the universe, formed the be
ginning, middle, and end of the system.

I do not think I can be wrong in attributing
to considerations like these the remarkable hold
which this conception has exercised over many
minds. It flashes upon them like a wholly new
point of view, and seems to deliver them from a
host of difficulties. The deliverance may be in
part illusory, but it is not therefore a mark of
speculative weakness to have embraced the con
ception. On the contrary, it is a conception

Fickle. 61

which only a speculative mind could have origin
ated, and for whose intelligent apprehension a
genuine speculative effort is likewise demanded.
None the less, however, is the supposed solution
wrapped in fatal ambiguity. When the rush of
feeling subsides which first bore conviction in
upon our minds, we are reluctantly forced to ad
mit that, whatever adumbrations of the truth
such a conception may contain, it is, as it
stands, a play of abstractions which is essen
tially impossible and unmeaning, but which,
if taken seriously as a metaphysic, would de
prive both God and man of real existence. Tor
surely, if we do not mean to pay ourselves with
words, it is essential to the coherence of the
above account that this divine, creative Self
should really exist as something more than the
individuals whom it constitutes, and in whom it
creatively works. If the account is to have any
meaning as a satisfaction of our metaphysical and
religious needs, the Absolute Ego must really be
an Ego. If it is to fill the metaphysical place
assigned to it by the system, and to justify, for
example, the appellation of spiritual principle, it
must exist for itself, with a self-consciousness of
its own. Indeed it would be easy to show that
many of those who have espoused this theory

62 Hegelianism and Personality.

have explicitly attributed such a self-conscious
ness to the Absolute Ego; while many more,
without making the matter clear to themselves,
are habitually swayed by the same associations.
It cannot, however, in the interests of clear think
ing, be too plainly pointed out that, whatever
other warrant there may be for such a conception
of the divine Self and its creative relation to the
human consciousness, there is absolutely none in
the theory under consideration. The theory not
only does not show the Absolute Ego to be self-
conscious and creative, but it becomes unmeaning
to make such assertions about it, if it is in a strict
sense " nothing at all " when separated from the
individual consciousness whose unity it is. The
process of hypostatisation by which this divine
Self is reached is somehow thus. It is as if we
took the concrete personality of the individual —
which may be described in certain of its aspects
as an instance of unity in multiplicity or perma
nence in change — and separated the unity from
the multiplicity, assigning the unity to a universal
or divine Self, and treating the multiplicity, or the
changing " states of consciousness," as the empiri
cal self or the individual qud individual. Thinkers
like Fichte or Green fully admit, when questioned,
that a real self-conscious being, in the ordinary

Fichte. 63

sense of the word, comes to pass only when these
two sides are united. Nevertheless it is made to
appear as if this real self-consciousness were the
result of activity on the part of the universal
Self, as if the latter supplied itself somehow with
matter in the shape of empirical states of con
sciousness, which it then proceeds to unify. But
this is to seek to produce a reality from the union
of two abstractions. Distinguishing two insepar
able aspects of any concrete self, we substantiate
one of them, and make it do duty for God ; the
other — what is left of us — we do not exactly sub
stantiate, but we think of it as an effect of our first
abstraction. But the true result of this course is,
as I have said, to deprive both God and man of
real existence. This is manifest in the case of
God, but it is not less true of the individual.
The empirical self is not the real self, it is not
the whole man ; for half the man has been taken
away to be made into a god. The empirical self
is merely, so to speak, the objective side of the
man's consciousness. He is left without a self of
his own to which his " states of consciousness "
could be object, and the divine Self — a Self iden
tical in all men — is brought in to perform that
function for him. The individual seems thus to
become no more than an object of the divine Self,

64 Hegelianism and Personality.

a series of phenomena threaded together and re
viewed by it — an office which it performs in pre
cisely the same fashion for any number of such
so-called individuals. Such a representation, in
truth, wipes out the selfhood and independence
of the individual with a completeness which few
systems of Pantheism can rival. But when the
issue is thus made plain, it must be apparent that
the representation cannot be a true one. The
real self is one and indivisible, and is unique in
each individual. This is the unequivocal testi
mony of consciousness. The argument which
seeks to undermine it is converting an identity of
type into a numerical unity of existence, and then
treating the real individuals as accidental forms
of this hypostatised abstraction. But the fact that
we all speak of ourselves in the first person, using
the same term "I," surely does not imply that
this logical subject exhausts the reality of that
which it symbolises; still less does the identity
of the symbol imply that all these different selves
are numerically one and the same Self. On the
contrary, whatever resemblance there may be,
they are absolutely and for ever exclusive.

When the first step has been taken, the pro
gress of thought in regard to this hypostatised

Fichte. 65

abstraction is as we have just traced it in Fichte,
so far as we have followed him, and in Schelling.
It is discovered that the so-called Absolute Ego
is not an Ego at all; the term Ego is dropped,
therefore, and there remains the Absolute with
out further designation, as the womb out of which
all things proceed. This is a solution which settles
everything in an easy fashion, but which seems
to give up everything for which " Idealism " was
supposed to strive. The Absolute, so conceived,
is simply a predicateless ground of existence in
general; or, in Hegel's well-known phrase, it is
the night in which all cows are black. This is a
consummation, therefore, which need not detain
us further. Fichte's own later developments are
more interesting, because they soon abandon this
path, and show an endeavour to cope more con
scientiously with the difficulties of the question.1
It has already been pointed out how he began

1 In referring to these developments, I have restricted my
self to his more academic utterances where regard is had to
scientific accuracy of expression, and have not entered upon his
more popular and semi-religious lectures. The manifold (often
unfinished) forms in which Fichte presents his views, and the
varying terminology in which he clothes them, make it a very
difficult task to disentangle his later positions. It is permis
sible to doubt whether, on certain points, they had taken defin
ite shape in his own mind. The quotations that follow are all
taken from the "Thatsachen des Bewusstseins."

66 Hegelianism and Personality.

to disuse the term Absolute Ego, embracing at
the same time more definitely the idea of a causal
prius of individual intelligences. The term which
he afterwards used most frequently to designate
this prius — the term which he used, for example,
in his Berlin lectures, and in the important work
called ' Facts of Consciousness,' which was care
fully prepared by him for publication — is Life
(Leben), or "the universal Life." And it pres
ently appears that what he is speaking of is not
the abstraction of the transcendental unity, but
Nature, the elemental and unconscious existence
out of which, as a matter of historical fact, the
human individual seems to arise. The world,
as we perceive it apart from the free action of
conscious beings, is, he says, "a mere objective
being, a mere streaming out (Ausstromen), pure
externality without any inner core.1 If free
activity is to be realised "—and this is, of course,
for Fichte the only worthy end of existence —
" the One Life must first of all gather itself to
gether out of that universality and dispersedness
into a single point. ... In such a contraction,

1 Werke, ii. 639. This Life, he says a few pages further on,
is itself neither in space nor time ; it is a mere force, pure force
without substrate, which is not itself a phenomenon at all, and
which cannot therefore be perceived, but which lies at the basis
of all possible phenomenal or perceived existence.

Fichte. 67

the power which contracts itself is evidently the
One Life, for except it nothing exists. The indi
vidual only comes into existence thereby, the
self-contraction of the One being the original
actus individuationis" He is evidently anxious
to be as explicit as possible, for he goes on to
repeat — " What is it, then, that makes and pro
duces the individual ? Evidently the One Life,
through the contraction of itself. ... It is
unconditionally necessary that Life assume in
dividual form, if it is to act. There can be no
action except in individual form, seeing that only
thereby does Life concentrate itself into the point
of unity from which all action must start. Only
in the individual is Life a practical principle." l
" Would it be strictly correct," he reiterates, " to
say that the individual becomes conscious of him
self ? By no means, for the individual does not
as yet exist at all; how, then, could he become
anything ? On the contrary, we ought to say
Life (das Leberi) becomes conscious of itself in
individual form and as individual."2 Moreover,
we may go further and say, " The universal Life
creates the individual anew at every moment,
though it is permissible, when we are not speak
ing strictly, to use the static form of Life in the
1 Werke, ii. 640, 641. 2 Ibid., 647.

68 Hegelianism and Personality.

individual in question as a logical subject, and to
say the individual creates himself afresh with ab
solute freedom at every moment."1 The indi
vidual, however, it must always be remembered,
is not an existence by himself, " but only a con
tingent form " of the One Life.2 " The One does
not lose itself in the various and opposite forms
of itself, but remains permanent in all their
change, and is therefore in strictness that which
exists for or by itself in Life" (das eigentlich
fur sich Seyende am Leben). It is not, as will
be seen, the Absolute, taken as equivalent to
God, but it is, he says, "the Absolute in life
(das Absolute am und im Leben) as contrasted with
its mere appearances." 3

This is ample evidence that the prius from
which the individual emerges is not an Ego in
the ordinary sense of that term. It is Nature,
which is treated by Fichte as the visible appear
ance of the universal Life or Force 4 of which he
speaks. But, it may be rejoined, the terms he
now uses all seem to imply that very origin of
consciousness from the unconscious, of the ideal
from the real, which Fichte before declared to
be inconceivable. This, however, was an incon-

1 Werke, ii. 649. 2 Ibid., 640. 3 Ibid., 642.

4 He sometimes varies " Leben " by " Kraft."

Fichte. 69

sequence too gross for Fichte to be guilty of ; and
on looking more closely we find him speaking of
" Life " as " the life of Knowledge," 1 and at other
times expressly identifying Knowledge and Life.2
Sometimes, instead of Knowledge, he uses the
phrase " universal and absolute Thought." " Uni
versal and absolute Thought," he says, "thinks
the other Egos, and me myself among them — that
is, it produces them by its thought." 3 " In the
first unreflective act of perception, for example,
it is not I who think ; we must rather say thought
itself, as an independent life, thinks of its own
prompting and through its own powers." This is
plainly the exact parallel of what was said above
of the relation of " the universal Life " to the in
dividual thinker ; and similarly he speaks in this
connection of individuals as simply the points in
which knowledge comes to self-perception. And
again, condemning the popular prejudice or mis
representation that according to his system the
world is made a product of the individual's
thought, he says, with a slight variation of
phraseology, "Not the individual but the one
immediate spiritual Life itself is the creator of
all phenomena, and therefore of the phenomenal

1 Werke, ii. 555. 2 Cf. Werke, ii. 685, &c.

3 Ibid., 603.

70 Hegelianisin and Personality.

individuals themselves. Hence it is that the
' Wissenschaftslehre ' insists so strongly on think
ing this One Life pure and without substrate.
Beason, universal thought, knowledge as such, is
higher and more than the individual. To be able
to conceive no reason save such an one as the
individual possesses as an accident of himself, is
tantamount to being unable to conceive reason
at all." 1 The contempt which is here just indi
cated finds full expression towards the end of the
book. Fichte there asserts roundly that " Know
ledge has a truly independent existence. It exists
by itself as a free and independent Life, and we
require no bearer of knowledge." The inability
to do without such a bearer, he brands as " the
absolute annihilation of philosophy." " Man does
not possess knowledge, but Knowledge, so God
will, is to possess man."2

Those who are conversant with the Hegelian
system and its developments will not fail to note
how closely this result of Fichte's later specula
tion resembles the impersonal system of thought
which is put forward by some Hegelians as the
ultimate reality of the universe, and the only God
for which the system can find room. Fichte,
however, as already hinted, does not identify this

1 Werke, ii. 607, 608. " Ibid., 688.

Fichte. 71

independent self-existing Knowledge with God.
His statement on this subject comes almost at
the end of the treatise we have been consider
ing. Knowledge, he seems to say, must have an
object ; if it were simply knowledge of knowledge,
it would collapse into nonentity. The object of
knowledge is God, and knowledge is accordingly
described as the image or perception of God.
More strictly, however, it may be said that God
is never known purely as He is, and Knowledge
or Life (which are perfectly identical terms)
might therefore be better described as "the in
finite striving to become in reality the image of
God." God Himself is "the absolute, the self-
subsistent, that which does not enter into pro
cess, and has never come into being: of which
one can say absolutely nothing else than just —
it is."1

This doctrine of God is peculiar to Fichte's
later thought, and is so obscurely enunciated
(besides being so entirely biographical in its
interest) that it would be out of place to dwell
upon it longer here. But it is at least apparent
that he now ascribes to God an existence out of
and beyond the process of evolution which for
merly constituted his entire universe. He had
1 Cf. Werke, ii. 680-87.

72 Hegelianism and Personality.

felt, it would seem, the necessity of bringing per
manence and metaphysical reality into his sys
tem by the assertion of this Absolute Being as
the last term of explanation and the object of
all knowledge. Fichte has thus at least the
merit of having faced the question of the mode
of existence we are to attribute to the Divine
Being and the relation in which he stands to
the process of world-evolution. This is a ques
tion which we shall find it by no means easy to
determine in the Hegelian system. Meanwhile,
Fichte's conclusion on the subject — his assertion
of an Absolute Being who does not enter into
process — is worth noting as the outcome of the
prolonged criticisms and modifications to which
he subjected his earlier system.

The second point in this new version of his
theory which demands a passing word (also
in connection with Hegel) is the transforma
tion of the Absolute Ego into the notion of
" absolute knowledge " or " universal thought "
as self-supporting, depending upon God, it is
true, for its object, but requiring no subject or
bearer, itself giving rise to individual subjects
by a process of self-concentration. The final dis
appearance of the empty Ego is hardly a cause
for wonder or regret; but, in spite of Fichte's

Fichte. 73

imperious tone, and his warning that we are
merely setting the seal to our own philosophic
incompetency, we must summon up all our hardi
hood and openly confess that to speak of thought
as self-existent, without any conscious being whose
the thought is, conveys no meaning to our minds.
Thought exists only as the thought of a thinker ;
it must be centred somewhere. To thought per
se we can attribute neither existence nor causal
activity; and this being so, it can have no place in
metaphysics as a theory of Being.

This is a point which will receive abundant
exemplification in the system of Hegel, which we
now pass to consider.

74 Hegelianism and Personality

APPENDIX TO LECTURE II.

It is worth noting that in dealing with the material
or given element in knowledge (cf. p. 47, supra), Fichte
is more conscientiously thoroughgoing than Green. In
fact, though the Neo-Kantians dismiss Kant's explana
tion of sensation as unphilosophical and irrelevant,
they seldom volunteer an explanation of their own;
jand it is evident that, to Green at least, the facts
'of sense — the sense-qualities of things — constitute
' a serious embarrassment. He constantly assumes a
' stream of sensations as the material upon which the
pause -giving and rationally constitutive activity of
thought is exercised. These fleeting sensations form,
as it were, the straw out of which his bricks are made,
and it is difficult to see how he could commence opera
tions without them. It is the equivocation between
'feeling and felt thing (between mere sensation and sen-
'sation transformed by the presence of the permanent
Ego and qualified by manifold rational relations) that
/ furnishes him with his recurring criticism upon Em
pirical thinkers. The whole aim of idealism, he says,
"is to articulate coherently the conviction of there being
a world of abiding realities other than, and determin
ing the endless flow of, our feelings " (' Prolegomena,'
39). But though Green is successful in showing that
the thinkers he criticises have imported into sensation
or feeling much more than they are willing to acknow
ledge, his very mode of stating the question seems to
involve the existence of mere feeling in some fashion
as that which thought transforms into a system of
stable facts. He sees this himself, and endeavours
('Prolegomena/ 46 et seq.) to treat it as an illusion

Appendix to Lecture II. 75

necessarily incident to our point of view. " There is a
point at which the individual's retrospective analysis
of the knowledge which he finds himself to possess
necessarily stops. Antecedently to any of the forma
tive intellectual processes which he can trace, it would
seem that something must have been given for those
processes to begin upon. This something is taken to
be feeling pure and simple. When all accretions of
form due to the intellectual establishment of relations
have been stripped off, there seem to remain the mere
sensations, without which the intellectual activity
would have had nothing to deal with or operate upon.
These then must be in an absolute sense the matter
— the matter excluding all form — of experience."
The statement is warrantable, if at all, he says, " only
as a statement in regard to the mental history of the
individual," and of course it is easy to show that sensa
tion, as a 7r/3ooT?7 ^7 of this sort, is something of which
no assertions can be made, inasmuch as it lies outside
" the cosmos of possible experience." " Mere sensation
is in truth a phrase that represents no reality. . . .
Thought is the necessary condition of the existence of
sensible facts, and mere sensation, in the sense sup
posed, is not a possible constituent of the realm of
facts " (pp. 48, 49). But this appears, after all, rather
to overstate the case ; for " this does not mean," Green
goes on to say, " that no being can feel which does
not also think. "We are not called upon here to in
quire whether there are really animals which feel but
have not the capacity of thinking. All that the
present argument would lead us to maintain would be
that, so far as they feel without thinking, their feel
ings are not facts for them, — for their consciousness.
Their feelings are facts; but they are facts only so

76 Hegelianism and Personality.

far as determined by relations, which exist only for
a thinking consciousness and otherwise could not exist.
And in like manner, that large part of our own sensitive
life which goes on without being affected by concep
tions, is a series of facts with the determination of
* which, indeed, thought, as ours or in us, has nothing
to do, but which not the less depends for its exist
ence as a series of facts on the action of the same
subject which, in another mode of its action, enables
us to know them." " Just so far as we feel without
thinking, no world of phenomena exists for us. The
suspension of thought in us means also the suspension
of fact or reality for us. We do not cease to be
facts, but facts cease to exist for our consciousness."
The feelings exist as facts, it is implied, for the uni
versal consciousness — " the consciousness which con
stitutes reality and makes the world one." But,
according to Green's own showing, the real world
\ present to such a consciousness would consist of the
' objective conditions of the successive feelings ; it
would be the totality of the conditions of sensation
minus the sensitive experience itself. But surely in
the case of feeling it is the latter — the existence of
^the feeling for the feeling consciousness — which is
'the real fact to be explained. Without absolutely
I denying this aspect of feeling, Green's explanation
seems arbitrarily to rule such experience out of the
category of reality or fact, and to identify feeling
with its conditions in a way which dangerously re
sembles the cruder dicta of Materialism. In his
posthumous 'Lectures on Logic' he deals with the
same question, and suggests that "the notion that
an event in the way of sensation is something over
and above its conditions," may be " a mistake of ours

Appendix to Lecture II. 77

arising from the fact that we feel before we know
what the reality of the feeling is" (Works, ii. 190).
" For the only sort of consciousness for which there is
reality," he says roundly, " the conceived conditions
are the reality" (191). "For a subject perfectly in
telligent, reality would be the fact that a sensation
shall occur or has occurred just as much as that it is
now occurring, because such a subject would not be a
subject of the sensation" (185). To this I can only
reply, that such a statement seems to me to substitute
for the moving world of actual events in time the
static knowledge-picture of a conjectured eternal con
sciousness, and thus to wipe out the whole subjective
experience of the sensitive creatures known to us,
human and otherwise.

How impossible it is to get to work without feeling
is well seen from this hypothetical case of a subject
perfectly intelligent but not itself the subject of sen
sation. " Admitting an eternally thinking subject as
the correlatum of nature," Green asks in another
place, " what is nature for such a subject ? " (Works,
ii. 74). "Mature is really," he answers, "or for the
eternal thinking subject, for God, what it is for our
reason." But " when we come to say what it is for
our reason, we cannot get beyond the mere formal
conditions of there being a nature at all." " For
reason, nature is a system of becoming which rests
on unchangeable conditions." In other words, we
get the general conception of orderly change — the
schematised categories of substance and cause — and
no account whatever is given of the content or
"matter" of nature. And even so much, it after
wards appears, is possible only for a sensitive con
sciousness, for such a scheme involves the experience

78 Hegelianism and Personality.

of existence in time. " Sensibility," Green says, " is
the condition of existence in time, of there being
events related to each other as past, present, and
future ; " and he therefore postulates " an eternal sen
sibility " as " the eternal condition of time " (Works,
ii. 79, 80). But how this is to be interpreted I fail
to understand. And when he elsewhere traces the
whole difficulty to " a process of abstraction," and
assures us that " feeling and thought are inseparable
and mutually dependent, in the consciousness for which
the world of experience exists," that " each in its full
reality includes the other" ('Prolegomena to Ethics,'
51), I am fain to confess, with Hume, that our line
is too short to fathom such immense abysses. It is a
seductive but unsatisfactory method of surmounting
actual difficulties to refer us for their solution to a
possible divine experience which we cannot even con
ceive. At all events, Green's imbroglio in regard to
sensation and time is significant as an index of the
difficulties which attend the post-Kantian idealism in
its attempt to account on its own principles for Kant's
" natura materialiter spectata."

79

LECTURE III.

THE RELATION OF HEGEL'S LOGIC TO EXPERIENCE.

As we should expect, the form of Hegel's system
was conditioned by the form which philosophy
had taken in the theories of his immediate pre
decessors. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stand
upon the common basis of the Idealism which
they developed out of the Kantian system. But
Schelling, as we have seen, in developing Fichte's
earlier views, had drifted into a position hardly
distinguishable from Spinozism. A philosophy,
however, whose Absolute is described as " total
indifference " or " pure identity in which nothing
is distinguishable," has its face turned the wrong
way. Schelling, like Spinoza, cannot avoid speak
ing as if the developed system of differences which
constitutes the intelligible world were unreal in
comparison with this pure identity, and existed

8o Hegelianism and Personality.

only in the " imagination " of the individual. It
is against this submergence of difference, and con
sequent extinction of the life of the universe, that
some of Hegel's sharpest sayings are directed in
the famous Preface to the ' Phenomenology of
Spirit.' According to the mot already quoted,
I such an Absolute is no better than the night in
/ which all cows are black. The " truth," or ulti
mate reality, of the universe cannot be a pure,
/ " original," or " immediate " identity ; it must be
/ an identity that mediates or restores itself — in
f /other words, an identity which is realised through
difference. The type of such an identity is found
v in the self - conscious life, and " everything in
philosophy depends on the insight that the Abso
lute is to be apprehended not as Substance but
as Subject." So Hegel sums up his contention,
making a return, as it were, to Eichte's position
to re-emphasise the central principle of Idealism,
which Schelling had been in danger of forgetting.
But the principle reappears in a form consider
ably changed. This is largely traceable to the
strong hold which the notion of development had
on Hegel. In the same Preface, Hegel blames
Fichte for taking the Subject as a motionless
ready-made form into which, as it were, we stuff
all the facts of the universe, and imagine that

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 81

everything is then comfortably explained. It is
true that Fichte described the Ego as not so much
a fact but an act — a continual energising or self-
realisation, and might, therefore, have readily
adopted Hegel's account of the Subject as essen
tially the process of its own becoming (SicJiselbst-
werden) ; but he did not connect the process with
the facts of nature and history. It remained, for
the most part, an abstract construction in vacuo,
as we saw in examining the account of the
Anstoss. Hegel refuses to take Self-conscious
ness, Subject, or Spirit, either as a ready-made
fact or as an abstract construction, and insists on
connecting it with the process of cosmic develop
ment, which is thus viewed as the process of
the development or " becoming " of Spirit. Only
then, he says, is Spirit the True, the Whole, or
the Absolute. And if our demonstration is to be
complete, we must be able to draw all the facts
of nature and history within this process, and
exhibit them as stages or elements in the self-
development of Spirit. If we separate the Abso
lute from this process our idea becomes a mere
abstraction ; the Absolute, according to his ex
pression, is essentially result, or rather it is " the
result together with its becoming." It is only
putting the position slightly otherwise to say that

8 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

this process of evolution, as crowned and con
summated in Spirit, is itself the ultimately real.
The beginning is the same as the end, for both
are united in the notion of End, Purpose, or Final
Cause (Ziueck). In a development so conceived
the End is in the beginning, or the real beginning
is the End ; the first stage is implicitly the last.

By this conception of development, Hegel not
only transforms the abstract Ego of Eichte, but
also makes a distinct advance upon Schelling,
though Schelling uses the idea of development
freely enough. This advance has often been com
pared to that made by Aristotle upon Plato. The
dominating conception of the Aristotelian philo
sophy is the notion of End or Final Cause ; and
Aristotle's advance upon Plato lay chiefly in the
clearness with which he grasped the truth that
the ultimate metaphysical explanation of exist
ence must be sought not so much in a prius out
of which things emerge as in the goal towards
which they move. Not that the notion of End
does not appear in Plato ; it may be traced very
plainly in the account of the Idea of the Good,
and in the quest of Perfect Beauty as set forth in
the ' Symposium.' But it is a frequent character
istic of Plato's thought to look back to the be
ginning rather than forward to the End, and to

Hegel 's Logic and Experience. 83

lose itself, accordingly, in cosmological construc
tions. And in this Schelling resembled or fol
lowed Plato, forgetting that, as soon as the
beginning is separated from the End, it becomes
something perfectly formless and indefinable — a
source or womb to which things are referred, but
which contributes nothing to their explanation.
It cannot be doubted that Hegel owes to his pro
found study of Aristotle much of the advantage
which he has over his predecessors — his firmer
grasp of reality and the less arbitrary character
of its constructions. And in particular, so far as
he consistently maintains the Aristotelian doc
trine of the evep^eia as philosophically prior to
the Svvafjiis or potentiality out of which it appears
to be evolved — the doctrine of the reXo? or End
as the explanatory cause of the whole develop
ment — so far it may be cordially allowed that
Hegel represents what is profoundest and best in
modern philosophy. This thought was, I believe,
the inspiration and motive-power of his philo
sophy. It is more doubtful whether the system
which he elaborated is ultimately consistent
with it.

Hegel's relation to Kant is even more import
ant for the proper understanding of the specific
features of his system than those relations to

84 Hegelianism and Personality.

Fichte and Schelling which have just been ad
verted to. Fichte's system has its centre in
Ethics, Schelling's in the Philosophy of Nature ;
Logic is the centre of the Hegelian system. In
this peculiarity we may trace the more imme
diate influence of Kant and of the Transcendental
Logic which formed the core of Kant's first great
' Critique.' Hegel's Logic is neither more nor less
than an expansion, a completion and rectifica
tion of Kant's table of the categories. In other
words, it is a systematic grammar of thought —
an analysis of- the nature of our general concep
tions and of their relations to one another. The
special result of the analysis is, indeed, just to
make explicit the mutual relations of these con
ceptions, and to assign, therefore, to each its
proper sphere of explanation, its proper place and
function in the organism of knowledge. The
points of view from which Kant and Hegel re
spectively undertake the analysis of our general
notions are different. Hegel often blames his
predecessor for undertaking his criticism of know
ledge solely with reference to the question whether
the conceptions examined are subjective or objec
tive, a priori or a posteriori, in their origin. He
maintains (rightly, as it appears to me) that in
trying to determine such a question we are essay-

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 85

ing an impossible task. Thought cannot ulti
mately criticise its own validity. To do so would
require a second species of thought to sit in judg- /
ment upon our first or actual thought, and a j
third thought to test the validity of the verdict
thus obtained, and so on ad infinitum — a species
of never-ending appeal as wearisome as fruit
less. The trustworthiness or objective validity of t x
our thought is, and must be, an assumption. Such
an assumption may, if it is desired, be styled the
trust or faith of reason in itself ; such faith, at
all events, is the only reasonable attitude, and
from the nature of the case no arguments can be
advanced in support of a distrust which is tan- {
tamount to absolute scepticism. Hegel justly,]
therefore, sets aside the subjective prejudice which
infects Kant's investigation, and insists upon the
necessity of a perfectly disinterested investiga
tion of our conceptions. His Logic is to be an
analysis of the nature of thought undertaken
without any preconceptions — an examination of
our conceptions or categories on their own account,
with a view to define them precisely and fix
their mutual relations.

The result is, as I have tried to show on another
occasion,1 that instead of an impossible criticism

1 Essays in Philosophical Criticism, Essay I. Philosophy as
Criticism of Categories.

86 Hegelianism and Personality.

y ab extra of thought as such, we get an immanent
^ criticism of one conception by another. The
whole theory of knowledge resolves itself, indeed,
into this immanent criticism of categories. That
is to say, a systematic survey of our conceptions
enables us to estimate the significance of each
single conception aright, and prevents us from
putting it to work for which it is inadequate
or unfit. It enables us to see which are the
poorer, less determinate, or more abstract concep
tions, and which are, in comparison, richer, more
determinate, more concrete. With this insight,
we perceive that the latter are, in Hegel's phrase,
the " truer " categories — that is to say, they give
a more adequate account of the ultimate reality
of things. We cease, therefore, to put forward
the more elementary determinations of thought,
as if they were pre-eminently adapted to express
the nature of that reality. We do not define
God as Being, with the Eleatics, nor, with Spinoza,
as Infinite Substance, nor even as the Great First
Cause. Such determinations, though in a sense
true so far as they go, are recognised by a system
atic criticism of thought to be wholly inadequate
as expressions of the divine nature. They are
inadequate, not merely as all human conceptions
must be inadequate to such an object, by reason

Hegel 's Logic and Experience. 87

of our ignorance ; they are inadequate even with
reference to what we know. We know them
to be inadequate by reference to other concep
tions which we possess — by reference, in brief,
to a conception like self-consciousness, which we
may draw from our own experience. In general,
such a review enables us to do justice to our
conceptions all round — to allow to each its rela
tive justification, and, on the other hand, to
repel the extravagant claims put forward on
behalf of some to embody the only objective or
scientifically accurate account of the universe.
Some men of science are fond of advancing this
claim on behalf of the categories of mechanism.
The ideas of matter and motion are so clear and
simple, that it seems as if all explanation must
consist in reducing phenomena to terms of matter
in motion ; so at least it is often contended from
the scientific side. But such explanation is often
a practical suppressio veri ; it is a suppression
of part of the fact to be explained. Nothing is
more essential than to be on our guard against
the seductive simplification of facts which con
sists in their reduction to simpler categories. It
is, of course, possible to treat any fact more or
less abstractly — that is, to take account only of
certain of its aspects, not of the full concrete fact.

88 Hegelianism and Personality.

The explanation by reduction to simpler cate
gories is such an abstract account — an account
true so far as it goes, but not the whole truth,
and consequently false if put forward as such.

Hegel's analysis and systematisation of the
categories is therefore of the highest importance
both for science and for a sound philosophy. By
its means, according to his own expression, we
become master of our conceptions instead of being
mastered by them. And by bringing to light the
different threads of meaning which sometimes
mingle in a single term, he has frequently laid
bare the motives of many an old dispute, and set
tled it thereby in the only way in which settlement
was possible. Moreover, coming to the work, as
we have seen, without any of Kant's preconcep
tions, Hegel was in a position not only immensely
to amplify and improve the Kantian scheme, but
also to avoid the arbitrary distinction which Kant
had drawn between certain categories as objective
ly valid and others as merely regulative ideas.
Hegel passes from Mechanism to Chemism, and
from Chemism to Teleology, and the notion of the
organism, recognising in all alike an objective
validity. So far from being a mere subjective
gloss upon the lower, the higher categories are
a more accurate and adequate rendering of the

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 89

nature of things. Pre-eminently is this the case
with the category or notion to which all the rest
lead up, the notion of self-consciousness, or, as
Hegel calls it when it attains the form of specu
lative insight, the Absolute Idea. Instead of being
dealt with as an unexplained excrescence upon
the universe, the self-conscious knower is treated
by Hegel as the ultimate fact, to which all other
facts — if we may even speak of them provisionally
as independent facts — are relative, and in which \
they find their explanation. Instead of shrinking \
from what is called Anthropomorphism, he accepts |
this Ultimate category of thought as the only one
we can use in seeking to give an adequate account
of the great Fact of existence. And here it seems
to me that Hegel is unquestionably correct. No
thing can be more certain than that all philo
sophical explanation must be explanation of the
lower by the higher, and not vice versd; and if
self-consciousness is the highest fact we know,
then we are justified in using the conception of
self-consciousness as our best key to the ultimate
nature of existence as a whole.

Hegel, however, has the air of saying a good
deal more than this, and hence it becomes neces
sary to consider somewhat carefully the relation
of Hegel's Logic to experience, and the nature of

go Hegelianism and Personality.

the proof which he professes to give of the " de
velopment" of conceptions there expounded, and
of the supreme conception in which, as he would
say, the whole development returns to itself.
Hegel apparently wishes us to believe that his
procedure is entirely presuppositionless, and that
it is guided by an unerring dialectic wholly free
from subjective admixture, and representing, as
he says, the march of the object itself (der G-ang
der Sadie selbst). And as the Logic advances
from its beginning in the most abstract datum of
thought to its consummation in the notion of self-
consciousness or speculative knowledge, this latter
notion is represented as proved by the same pas
sionless and unerring dialectic to be the ultimately
True. But if we aim at soberness, we may correct
a number of seemingly extravagant statements by
other utterances of Hegel himself. Here as else
where, in the exposition of his system, Hegel has
suppressed the reference to experience. He pre
sents everything synthetically, though it must
first have been got analytically by an ordinary
process of reflection upon the facts which are the
common property of every thinker. Thus the
notions with which the Logic deals admittedly
form part and parcel of the apparatus of every
day thought, and the development which Hegel

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 91

gives of them is simply their systematic placing.
The very abstraction of " Being," with which the
Method starts, is the starting-point merely because
it is the baldest abstraction that we can make
from the complex fulness of actuality ; it is the
barest statement that can be made about the
actual. And once got by this process of abstrac
tion, it is not to be supposed that Being gives
birth, as it were, out of itself to the more concrete
conceptions which follow. It may be fairly
granted, I think, to critics of the Method like
Trendelenburg and Von Hartmann, that every
step of the advance is empirically conditioned.
The celebrated dialectical opposition which is the
nerve of the process is not the contradictory
opposition of the logician. Mere contradiction
yields nothing new, — nothing, therefore, which,
by synthesis or fusion with the original datum,
could yield a third product different from either.
The opposition which Hegel makes his fulcrum
is contrary or real opposition ; the second is not
simply tEe negative^of the first, but both ZXQ,/
real determinations of things. But if this is so,
then the first does not of itself strike round into
its opposite. The opposite arises only for a sub
jective reflection which has had the advantage of
acquaintance with the real world.^Such a reflec-

92 Hegelianism and Personality.

tion, playing upon the empty abstraction, perceives
its need of supplement by reference to the fuller
reality from which it is an abstraction. Only in
this way is the path to be traversed determined.

/The forward movement is in reality a progress
//backwards : it is a retracing of our steps to the
' /world as we know it in the fulness of its real

' determinations.

This view of the Method is well expressed by
Trendelenburg, perhaps the acutest of Hegel's
logical critics, in a passage which I cannot do
better than quote. " The dialectic," says Trendel
enburg, " begins according to its own declaration
with abstraction ; for if ' pure being ' is repre
sented as equivalent to 'nothing,' thought has
reduced the fulness of the world to the merest
emptiness. But it is the essence of abstraction
that the elements of thought which in their
original form are intimately united are violently
held apart. What is thus isolated by abstraction,
however, cannot but strive to escape from this
forced position. Inasmuch as it is a part torn from
a whole, it cannot but bear upon it the traces that
it is only a part ; it must crave to be completed.
When this completion takes place, there will
arise a conception which contains the former in
itself, But inasmuch as only one step of the

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 93

original abstraction has been retraced, the new
conception will repeat the process ; and this will
go on until the full reality of perception has been
restored. . . . Plainly a whole world may de
velop itself in this fashion, and, if we look more
narrowly, we have discovered here the secret of
the dialectic method. That method is simply the
act by which we undo or retrace our original
abstraction. The first ideas, because they are the
products of abstraction, are recognised on their
first appearance as mere parts or elements of a
higher conception, and the merit of the dialectic
really lies in the comprehensive survey of these
parts from every side, and the thereby increased
certainty we gain of their necessary connection
with one another." 1

1 Logische Untersuchungen, i. 94, 95. As an example of
the general criticisms made in the text, it is sufficient to take
the very first triplet, ' Being, Non-being or Nothing, and Be
coming,' and here we may again conveniently follow Trendelen-
burg. " If Becoming is clear to us through perception, there
may easily be distinguished in it the moments of Being and
Non-being. Thus, while day is dawning, we may say ' it is
already day,' and also ' it is not yet day.' We separate or dis
tinguish these moments in Becoming as actually observed, hit
without in the least understanding logically the characteristic
of real existence in virtue of ivhich they are present together.
. . . Pure Being, identical with self, is rest ; Nothing, like
wise identical with itself, is also rest. How does the movement
of Becoming arise out of the union of these two motionless

*v

y r>

94 HegeKanism and Personality.

Totally damaging as this may appear, at first
sight, to the claims of the Method, it is not diffi
cult to see that it is a perfectly true account of

ideas ? ... It could not do so unless the idea of Becoming
were presupposed. From pure Being, an admitted abstraction,
and Nothing, again an admitted abstraction, it is impossible
that there should suddenly arise Becoming, this concrete per
ception which presides over life and death." — (Logische Unter-
suchungen, i. 38.)

The constant presence of such concrete phantasmata — in other
words, the essential dependence of the Logic on temporal and
spatial metaphors — is evidently fatal, it may be added, to its
claim to be, in any special sense, pure thought. Trendelenburg
proves conclusively how the images of physical motion and
physical processes cling to, and really dominate, the account of
transitions which are supposed to take place in the ether of
pure thought. Trendelenburg is followed here by Haym (Hegel
und seine Zeit, p. 318). As the Method will not engage our
attention further, this may be the most convenient place for
remarking that a detailed criticism of the Logic would only
reveal how great is the part played by subjective reflection
in its construction ; almost at any point Hegel might have
engineered his path otherwise than he did. Nor are examples
wanting of purely arbitrary and illusory transitions, as, for ex
ample, that in the Psychology signalised by Trendelenburg,
where we are supposed to pass by the necessity of the notion
from the ages of man to the difference of the sexes, and thence
to sleeping and waking ! In general, it may be said that the
Method is more or less of an artifice to introduce system ; and
when reduced to a mechanism, it leads to forced constructions.
What is valuable in the Logic is its matter, not its form ; and
the profound philosophical criticisms embedded in it would
retain their value in any setting. Cf. Dr Stirling's remarks in
the last note to Schwegler (p. 475), where he seems to approxi
mate to this view.

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 95

Hegel's method of going to work. What is more,
Hegel himself, though he might "hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down," will be found
fully admitting that the dialectical advance really
depends upon the fuller knowledge which the
subject brings with him from his experience.
" As a matter of fact," he says, " we bring the
Notion and the whole nature of thought with us ;
and so we may very well say that every begin
ning must be made with the Absolute, and that/
all advance is only its exposition."1 And 'again,
" It must be allowed that there is an important
truth in the representation that the movement
forwards is a movement backwards to the ground
of the whole, to the original and the true, on
which that with which we made a beginning
depends." 2 In fact, we come here upon a stand
ing characteristic of Hegel's thought, namely
that the order of exposition always reverses th
real order of thought by which the results were
arrived at. Consequently, we have to look for
the real fact from which he started, the real
explanation of the whole process, in the result
which he apparently reaches by means of it.
He really lets down the ladder only in order to
mount again by it to his original starting-point.

1 Werke, v. 334. 2 Ibid., iii. 64.

96 Hegelianism and Personality.

The result is, therefore, not proved, in the or
dinary sense, by the dialectical evolution which
we go through to reach it ; it was the underlying
assumption of the whole. Thus (to take an ex
ample) it is, in a manner, true to point out that
the different conceptions, as they pass in review,
are so many imperfect modes of expressing the
Idea, which impel us onwards, therefore, to the
perfect form. Hegel habitually speaks in this
way. " Being," he tells us, " is the first definition
of the Absolute, but it is also the most abstract
and sterile." " Being-for-self," or the One, the
last stage of Quality in the Logic, also " finds its
readiest instance in the Ego." Similarly with
Essence, the Thing and its properties, Substance
and its accidents. "Though an essential stage
in the evolution of the Idea, Substance is not the
same with the Absolute Idea. It is the Idea under
the still limited form of necessity ; it is not the
final Idea." Hence, on reaching the end, he is
able to say, " Each of the stages hitherto reviewed
is an image or adumbration of the Absolute, but
at first in a limited mode ; and thus it is forced
onwards to the Whole, the evolution of which we
have termed Method." * But the true explanation
of this onward impulse in the lower conceptions

1 Wallace's Logic of Hegel, 325 (Werke, vi. 410).

Hegel's Logic and Experience. 97

lies, as has been said, in their apparent goal.
They are all anticipations of that goal, because
we are anthropomorphic, and necessarily so, to
the inmost fibre of our thinking. Every category,
that is, every description of existence or relation,
is necessarily a transcript from our own nature
and our own experience. Into some of our con
ceptions we put more, into others less, of our
selves ; but all modes of existence and forms of
action are necessarily construed by us in terms
of our own life. Everything, down to the atom,
is constructed upon the scheme of the conscious
self, with its multiplicity of states and its cen
tral interpenetrating unity. We cannot rid our
thought of its inevitable presupposition. Nor,
it may be remarked, is there any reason why we
should look upon this necessity as an irksome
bondage and a source of illusion. This is what
we usually associate with the term anthropo
morphism ; and undoubtedly there is a rude and
uncritical anthropomorphism, applied both to
nature and God, which amply deserves all the
reprobation it has received. We must not, like
the savage, transfer the fulness of our personal
life to the forces of nature, nor, as we are too apt
to do, must we make God altogether in our own
image. Our anthropomorphism must be critical. :
G

98 Hegelianism and Personality.

'But to seek to escape from it altogether is as

I futile and, it may be added, as gratuitous as the
attempt already mentioned to criticise the validity
of thought as such.

It must not be supposed, therefore, that I am
finding fault with Hegel's acceptance of self-
consciousness as the ultimate category of thought
— that through which we think everything else,
and through which alone the universe is intelli
gible to us. On this point I am quite at one with
him. I merely wish to make it plain that this
notion is not really reached by any " high priori
road," but is simply derived by Hegel from the
fact of his own self-conscious experience. We
need not be misled in this respect by the grandiose
title of the Absolute Idea. The Absolute Idea,
speculative knowledge, pure knowledge, the pure
Ego, as it is variously termed, is simply the notion
"of knowledge as such, the relation described by
Aristotle, when he said that in a sense the thinker
V and his thoughts are one. In its essence, the re
lation of knower and known is, as it were, a
transparent relation, in which the difference
of subject and object may be said to be over
come. Of the human consciousness this cannot,
in strictness, be asserted, seeing that both in
knowledge and practice we seem to be dependent

Hegel 's Logic and Experience. 99

upon what is not ourselves. If, however, we
suppose cognition and volition, as finite activities,
to have done their work, then the matter, which
at first has the appearance of being extraneously
received, will have been thoroughly intelligised
and reduced to law; while, on the other hand,
through volition, it will have become, in all its
parts, the vehicle or expression of rational ends.
In that case, it may be argued, the self-conscious
knower would recognise in the object nothing
foreign, but only, as it were, the realisation of
his own personality. This is Hegel's idea of per
fected knowledge, or rather of an eternally com
plete self-consciousness, as reached at the end of
the Logic. There is a passage in which Fichte
describes what he calls " the Idea of the Ego " in
almost identical terms. But Fichte, as we saw,
treated this Idea as an ideal incapable of realisa-'
tion, and Hegel is constantly taunting the Fichtian
Idealism with its mere Ought-to-be. In one sense
Hegel is plainly right, for it is an impossible
speculative position to found upon an ideal which
is nowhere real. But if Fichte merely meant to\
say that this speculative ideal is not, and never
will be, realised in the progress of human ex
perience, then Hegel is as plainly in the wrong if
he intended to call this position in question. It

ioo Hegelianism and Personality.

may be granted to Hegel, as against Fichte, that
the idea must be realised in the divine self-con
sciousness — that, so far, it is not a mere Ought-to-
be. But to us such realisation remains a belief
or faith, not something which is attained in actual
knowledge, even in the reflective knowledge of the
absolute philosopher. It is one thing to assert the
metaphysical necessity of an Absolute Self-con-

. sciousness, another to assert the present realisa
tion of absolute knowledge in a philosophical

*" system. But it will be seen in the sequel that
it is a characteristic of the Hegelian system to
bind up these two essentially different positions
in such a way that it becomes impossible to say
which is intended. At this stage it is enough to
repeat that, however the Logic may seem in its
conclusion to overleap the human consciousness
altogether and transport us directly to the specular

/outlook of Deity, it comes no nearer converting
faith into sight than any other system has done.
The Absolute Idea is no more than an ideal drawn
by Hegel from his sole datum, the human self-
consciousnesss, and does not of itself lift us
beyond our starting-point.

101

LECTURE IV.

LOGIC AS METAPHYSIC: THOUGHT AND REALITY.

HAVING thus indicated the relation in which the
Hegelian Logic stands to experience, we must
next consider the place it holds in the system.
Although, as I have said, the centre of Hegel's
philosophising, it forms only the first part of the
fully articulated theory. What, then, is its rela
tion to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philo
sophy of Spirit which follow it ?

This is a point of no little importance to realise
clearly, first in understanding, and secondly in
passing judgment upon the Hegelian system. For,
at first sight, it is difficult to see any difference
between the Absolute Idea in which the ' Logic '
culminates and the Absolute Spirit with which
Hegel closes the record of Philosophy in general.
The Absolute Idea is defined as " the unity of the

1O2 Hegelianism and Personality.

Notion and its reality," "the unity of the sub
jective and the objective Idea," " the Idea which
thinks itself," " the Idea which is object to itself,"
" the eternal perception of itself in the other, the
Notion which has achieved itself in its objec
tivity." It is "both in itself and for itself; it
is the vorfcn^ vorjcreo)? which Aristotle long ago
termed the supreme form of the Idea." These
designations — all in Hegel's own words — seem
essentially identical with what is afterwards said
of Mind, Self-consciousness, or Absolute Spirit,
on its return out of Nature, when it gains " clear
prospect o'er its being's whole." And the relation
between the two is not made quite plain by
Hegel's manner of treatment. A key will be
found, however, if we remember that throughout
the Logic (in spite of the experiential basis which
we have claimed for it) Hegel has been nowhere
in direct contact with facts or factual existences.
The Logic moves, as he tells us himself, in a
realm of shades — that is, in less metaphorical
language, it deals from beginning to end with
abstractions, with general notions, or, to use a
technical term, with abstract universals. In
place of Kant's summary table, it professes to be
an exhaustive system of the categories. But this
is literally all. In following the advance of

Logic as MetapJiysic. 103

thought it deals with the notion or conception of
Being and the notion or conception of Becoming,
but with no actual beings or processes. It con
siders the categories of substance and cause, but
apart from any actual instance of substantial
existence or causal agency. And finally, to come
to the decisive point, it considers the notion of .
knowledge and the relative opposition of subject
and object which it involves ; but as yet there is,
and can be, no question of any real knower who
might serve as a concrete example of the notion
or type. Here, then, we touch the difference
between the Absolute Idea and the Absolute
Spirit. As the ' Logic ' deals only with categories
or logical abstractions, the Absolute Idea is merely
the scheme or form of self-consciousness. In the
other case — in the Philosophy of Spirit — we are
dealing, or are supposed to be dealing, with
realities, facts of existence. Hence the Absolute
Spirit is, in the Hegelian system, the one ulti
mately real existence of which the supreme
category of the Logic was a description or defini
tion. The Logic, in short, is ostensibly a logic
and nothing more; but in the Philosophy of
Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit we are
offered a metaphysic or ontology — a theory of
the ultimate nature of existence. It must, one

IO4 Hegelianism and Personality.

would think, be of fundamental importance to
clear thinking to keep these two inquiries distinct,
and that no matter how intimate their mutual
relations may be. But so far is Hegel from doing
this that, as I propose to show, he systematically
and in the most subtle fashion confounds these
two points of view, and ends by offering us a
> logic as a metapJiysic. Nor is this merely an
implication of his views; for the identification
of Logic with Metaphysics is often presented by
Hegelians as the gist and outcome of the system.
The Hegelian logic, it is said, is not a logic of
subjective thought; it is an absolute logic, and
constitutes, therefore, at the same time the only
possible metaphysic. We have first, then, to
consider the path by which Hegel would lead us
to a position, on the surface at all events, so
extraordinary. After making the nature of the
position clear to ourselves in this way, we shall
have the materials for forming a judgment as to
its philosophical tenability.

With this view, let us turn back to the end of
the ' Logic ' and examine the step which follows.
The transition from Logic to Nature has long
been celebrated as the mauvais pas of the Hegel
ian system. It is, indeed, so remarkable, and
so essentially incomprehensible to our habits of

Logic as Metaphysic. 105

thought, that it will be best to keep close to
Hegel's own language in formulating it. The
Absolute Idea, he says in the larger 'Logic,' is
" still logical, still confined to the element of pure
thoughts. . . . But inasmuch as the pure idea of
knowledge is thus, so far, shut up in a species of
subjectivity, it is impelled to remove this limita
tion ; and thus the pure truth, the last result of
the Logic, becomes also the beginning of another
sphere and science." The Idea, he recalls to us,
has been defined as "the absolute unity of the
pure notion and its reality" — "the pure notion
which is related only to itself ; " but if this is so,
the two sides of this relation are one, and they
collapse, as it were, "into the immediacy of
Being." " The Idea as the totality in this form
is Nature. This determining of itself, however, is
not a process of becoming or a transition " such
as we have from stage to stage in the Logic.
" The passing over is rather to be understood thusj
— that the Idea freely lets itself go, being ab
solutely sure of itself and at rest in itself. On
account of this freedom, the form of its deter
mination is likewise absolutely free — namely, the
externality of space and time existing absolutely
for itself without subjectivity." A few lines
lower he speaks of the "resolve (Entschluss) of

io6 Hegelianism and Personality.

the pure Idea to determine itself as external
Idea." l Turning to the ' Encyclopaedia ' we find,
at the end of the smaller Logic, a more concise
but substantially similar statement. "The Idea
which exists for itself, looked at from the point of
view of this unity with itself, is Perception ; and
the Idea as it exists for perception is Nature. . . .
jThe absolute freedom of the Idea consists in this,
j^hat in the absolute truth of itself [i.e., according
to Hegel's usage, when it has attained the full
perfection of the form which belongs to it], it re
solves to let the element of its particularity — the
immediate Idea as its own reflection — go forth
freely from itself as Nature." 2 And in the lec
ture-note which follows we read, as in the larger
Logic — " We have now returned to the notion of
the Idea with which we began. This return to
the beginning is also an advance. That with
which we began was Being, abstract Being, and
now we have the Idea as Being ; but this existent
Idea is Nature." In the beginning of the Philo
sophy of Nature — the " new sphere and science "
which he referred to as thus inaugurated — no
further light is vouchsafed; it is simply stated

1 Werke, v. 352, 353.

2 Werke, vi. 413, 414 ; Wallace, 328. The italics are Hegel's
own throughout.

Logic as Metaphysic. 107

that Nature has shown itself to be the Idea in
the form of otherness.1

What are we to say of the deliberate attempt
made in these passages to deduce Nature from the
logical Idea ? Simply, I think, that there is no
real deduction in the case. The phrases used are
metaphors which, in the circumstances, convey no
meaning whatever. As Schelling afterwards said,
they merely indicate a resolute leap on Hegel's
part across "the ugly broad ditch" which dia
lectic is powerless to bridge. On this point, few
English thinkers are likely to have much diffi
culty in making up their mind. But if our con
demnation is so prompt and decisive — if we con
demn the attempt not so much because it has
failed as because it was ever made — how are we
to account for the form of rigorous deduction
which Hegel adopts ? Is there no sympathetic
explanation to be given of his procedure ? To
some extent I think there is, if it be remembered
that Hegel's true meaning is reached, as I re
marked before, by reading him backward rather
than forward. He would certainly have pro-

1 A third account in some detail is given in the Philosophy
of Religion (Werke, xii. 206-208), and forms in some respects a
useful gloss upon the more authoritative and would-be scien
tific statements quoted in the text. This account is referred to
in Lecture V., p. 163 ct seq.

io8 Hegelianism and Personality.

Rested against the idea that he was here describ
ing any real process — anything that ever took
*|place; just as he would have protested against
the idea that he ever meant to assert a factual ex
istence of the logical Idea by itself, antecedently
to the existence of Nature and Spirit. Nature
itself, we can hear him saying, is an abstraction
that cannot exist, if by existence is meant inde
pendent factual existence on its own account ; it
exists only relatively to, or within, the life of
Spirit, which is therefore in strictness the only
existence or fact. But if this is true of Nature,
it is still more manifestly true of Logic or the
system of thought -determinations which sums
itself in the Absolute Idea ; such a system is
admittedly an abstraction, and was never affirmed
to exist in rerum naturd. Here again, then, as
throughout the ' Logic,' it might be said we are
merely undoing the work of abstraction and retrac-
ing our steps towards concrete fact. This, as we
jhave seen, implies the admission that it is our ex-
Iperiential knowledge of actual fact which is the
jreal motive-force impelling us onward — impelling
us here from the abstract determinations of the
' Logic ' to the quasi-reolity of Nature, and thence
to the full reality of Spirit. It is because we
ourselves are spirits, that we cannot stop short of

Logic as Metaphysic. 109

that consummation. In this sense, we can under
stand the feeling of "limitation" or incompleteness
of which Hegel speaks at the end of the ' Logic.'
The pure form craves, as it were, for its concrete
realisation. But it need hardly be added that
the craving or feeling of incompleteness exists
in our subjective thought alone, and belongs in
no sense to the chain of thought-determinations
itself.

Such, it seems to me, is the explanation which
a conciliatory and sober-minded Hegelian would
give of Hegel's remarkable tour de force. In
treating of Hegel on other occasions,1 I have been
fain to avail myself of this interpretation, being
unable otherwise to put an intelligible meaning
into his statements on the subject. For those who
accept this reading, Hegel's clumsy stride from
Logic to Nature will appear only an objection
able mode of presentation incident to the syn
thetic and impersonal form in which he had, once
for all, cast his system. Otherwise they will lay
as little stress as possible upon the so-called
deduction. Further reflection has convinced me,
however, that Hegel's contention here is of more
fundamental import to his system than such a

1 In the Development from Kant to Hegel, and in Mind, vi.
513 et scq.

1 1 o Hegelianism and Personality.

representation allows. Perhaps it may even be
said that, when we surrender this deduction,
though we may retain much that is valuable in
Hegel's thought, we surrender the system as a
system. For, however readily he may admit,
when pressed, that in the ordo ad indimduum
experience is the quarry from which all the
materials are derived, it must not be forgotten
that he professes to offer us an absolute philoso-
jphy. And it is the characteristic of an absolute
philosophy that everything must be deduced or
constructed as a necessity of thought. Hegel's
system, accordingly, is so framed as to elude the
necessity of resting anywhere on mere fact. It is
not enough for him to take self-conscious intel
ligence as an existent fact, by reflection upon
whose action in his own conscious experience and
in the history of the race certain categories are
disclosed, reducible by philosophic insight to a
system of mutually connected notions, which
may then be viewed as constituting the essence
or formal structure of reason. He apparently
t /thinks it incumbent upon him to prove that spirit
exists by a necessity of thought. The concrete
existence of the categories (in Nature and Spirit)
is to be deduced from their essence or thought-
nature ; it is to be shown that they cannot not

Logic as Metaphysic. 1 1 1

be. When we have mounted to the Absolute
Idea, it is contended, we cannot help going
further. The nisus of thought itself projects
thought out of the sphere of thought altogether
into that of actual existence. In fact, strive
against the idea as we may, it seems indubitable
that there is here once more repeated in Hegel
the extraordinary but apparently fascinating
attempt to construct the world out of abstract
thought or mere universals. The whole form
and structure of the system, and the express
declarations of its author at points of critical im
portance, combine to force this conviction upon
us. The language used can only be interpreted
to mean that thought out of its own abstract
nature gives birth to the reality of things.

Hegel's procedure here cannot but recall to
our minds the similar reasonings of Plato. There*
is a difference, no doubt, between categories and
class-names; but, otherwise, the resemblance is
striking between the abstract chain of the Logic
and Plato's system of general notions or Ideas,
rising from stage to stage and culminating in the
Idea of the Good. The Platonic world of Ideas
was not an abstract One, like the principle of the
Eleatics; it was itself multiplicity in unity — a
system of Ideas, each of which was connected

1 1 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

with, or, according to the Platonic phrase, par
ticipated in, all the rest, the whole series being
summed, as it were, in the Idea of the Good. So
far we have almost an exact parallel to Hegel's
Logic. But for Plato also there arose the neces
sity of passing beyond this world of pure Ideas.
The sensible world — the world of real multi
plicity and change — pressed itself upon his notice.
The sensible world presents us, not with a single
changeless type, but with a multitude of ever-
changing individuals, which may be said more or
less perfectly to exemplify the abstract type, but
the determinations of whose real existence are
not exhausted by that formal definition. Here
Plato also has recourse to a species of " passing
over " on the part of the Ideas. Every one must
have felt how difficult it is at this point, I do
not say, to yield assent to what Plato says, but
to put any intelligible meaning upon his words.
"We cannot doubt," says Zeller, "that Plato
meant to set forth in Ideas not merely the arche
types and essence of all true existence, but ener
getic powers ; that he regarded them as living
and active, intelligent and reasonable."1 They
are represented as of themselves creative and as
the efficient causes of the manifold and transient

1 Plato and the Older Academy, 267.

Logic as Metapkysic. 1 1 3

shadows of themselves which we call real things.
But even if we grant Plato the self-subsistent
existence of his pure forms, and try, per im-
possibile, to follow him in the dynamic efficiency
which he ascribes to them, he still fails to give
any satisfactory explanation of the indefinite
reduplication by the Idea of its own exemplifi
cations, not to speak of other essential features
of the sensible world. He is obliged to call
in a second principle, the Platonic matter, as it
has been called — the unlimited element of space,
he would appear to mean — as the condition of
separation, division, motion, and unlimited re
petition. A break-down very similar in this-
respect will be observed when we come to close,
quarters with Hegel. /

But, it will be said, surely it is impossible to
ascribe such crude mythological conceptions to
Hegel, who lived, after all, in the nineteenth ';_/"
century. How can we credit him with a point
of view which we have even a certain shame-
facedness in attributing to Plato ? This is un
doubtedly an important consideration, and one
which may well make us hesitate. But it is not
the mythological detail which determines the fun
damental similarity of two doctrines ; though, to
my mind, Hegel's passage from Logic to Nature
H

1 14 Hegelianism and Personality.

s is to the full as mythological as anything we find

in Plato.1 Even the creative agency assigned to

I

1 Perhaps, too, we in England, and at the present day,
hardly realise the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in
which the Hegelian system was produced. A time of philoso
phical zymosis or seething, Dr Stirling has styled the period :
it was a time in which system chased system, and in which
men ran riot in the most imaginative conceptions. Without
leaving the ranks of the dii majores, who were also compara
tively the saner spirits of the movement, I may quote a passage
from Schelling's ' Lectures on the Method of Academic Study/
which illustrates to some extent the intellectual tone of the
time. The passage occurs at the beginning of the eleventh
lecture, in a discussion of the very point adverted to in the text
— the relation of Nature to the Ideas, as he calls them after
Plato. "God's mode of producing or creating," he says, "is
a pouring of His whole universality and essentiality into par
ticular forms, whereby the latter, though special or particular,
are yet universa, what the philosophers have called Monads or
Ideas. . . . Now, though the Ideas in God are pure and ab
solutely ideal, yet they are not dead but living, the first organisms
of the divine self-perception, which, on that very account, par
ticipate in all the qualities of His nature, and in spite of their
particular form share in His undivided and absolute reality.
In virtue of this participation they are, like God, productive,
and work according to the same law and in a similar fashion.
That is, they infuse their essence, as it were, into particular
forms and reveal it through individual and particular things,
though themselves timeless, and only from the standpoint of
individual things, and for such individual things, existing in
time. The Ideas are related to things as their souls ; the things
are their bodies. "

Even if what is here asserted of the Ideas is a delegated life
and activity, inasmuch as it is said to belong to the conceptions
as elements in the divine life, yet there is still the same personifi
cation of abstract conceptions as with Plato, and a real activity

Logic as Metaphysic. \ 1 5

the Ideas is rather a necessary consequence of
Plato's doctrine than its distinguishing charac
teristic. The distinctive feature of the Platonic
theory of Ideas, in which it is the type of a whole
family of systems, Hegel's among the rest, I take
to be its endeavour to construct existence or life
out of pure form or abstract thought. Plato's
whole account of sensible things is to name the
general idea of which they are particular ex
amples ; Hegel's whole account of Nature is that
it is a reflection or realisation of the abstract
categories of the Logic. If the reality of natural
things consists only in this, then creative agency
must be attributed, more or less explicitly, to the
thought-determinations. In them, at all events,
lies the ultimate explanation of so-called exist
ence. If this be admitted, the rest is for the
most part matter of expression.

If further corroboration is wanted of the view
here taken of the relation of logic and reality in

is similarly attributed to them. If, then, we bear in mind that
Schelling was Hegel's philosophical associate, or senior partner,
so to speak, for several years — in fact, up to the very year
(1803) in which this passage was published — and if we re
member that, as regards the Philosophy of Nature in particular,
Hegel did little more than adapt the ideas so prodigally thrown
out by Schelling, I cannot but think that such a passage forms
rather a sinister gloss upon some of Hegel's own expressions.

1 1 6 Hegelianism and Personality.

the Hegelian scheme, there are many incidental
remarks, besides the official passages already
quoted, which present the same idea in a dif
ferent connection, and in a slightly different form.
Nothing, for example, can exceed the scorn which
Hegel pours upon " Being " — which he rarely in
troduces without pausing to tell us that it is the
very poorest and most abstract of notions. " Cer
tainly," he says, " it would be strange if the Notion,
the very heart of the mind, the Ego, or in one word
the concrete totality we call God, were not rich
enough to embrace so poor a category as Being,
the very poorest and most abstract of all." * Every
reader of Hegel must be familiar with this snort of
contempt, which is heard most frequently, it may
be noted, when the Ontological argument and
modern criticisms upon it are under considera
tion. But we are apt to be taken in here by
Hegel's superior air, under cover of which he
evades the real point at issue. He is certainly
correct in saying that the category of Being is
the poorest arid most abstract of all; it is the
very least that can be said of a thing. Conse
quently, if any one were to suppose that he had
done with things, when he had simply affirmed
their existence, he would undoubtedly be making

i Wallace's Logic of Hegel, 92.

Logic as Metaphysic. 1 1 7

a great mistake. Instead of being at the end of
his task, he is only at the beginning. He must
proceed to determine the mode of their existence
in a thousand ways before he can be said, even
approximately, to give a true account of their
nature. In short, the progress of knowledge may
very well be described as a continual advance to
wards greater determinateness. And if we apply
this reasoning to the supreme object of thought —
in Hegel's language here, to " the concrete totality
we call God " — it is again very evident, as was
pointed out in last lecture, that if we are content
simply with an assertion of God's existence, we
leave the whole question of the divine nature
dark. Because Being is the last result of ab
straction, people are apt to imagine that, when
they have reached it, they have reached the
grandest and most dignified title they can apply ;
whereas, as Hegel says, it is the most meagre
assertion that can be made. Hegel deserves all
praise for the persistency with which he has
attacked this vicious tendency of thought, and
of the scholastic logic in particular, to hark back
upon its first abstractions. But when all this is
thankfully admitted, the real point at issue re
mains untouched. When we say that a thing
exists or possesses being, we may be saying very

1 1 8 Hegelianism and Personality.

little about it ; yet that is, on the other hand, the
all -important assertion upon which all the rest
are based. When we are assured that we are
dealing with a reality, we can go on from the
elementary statement of its existence to a more
elaborate description of its nature. But that ele
mentary statement must be originally made in
virtue of some immediate assurance, some im
mediate datum of experience. We must touch
reality somewhere ; otherwise our whole con
struction is in the air. Whether we rest con
tent, as the ordinary consciousness apparently
does, with the immediacy we seem to have in
external perception, or restrict such immediacy
to the perception of our own existence — whether
we look with some schools at the senses as the
type of such assurance or include also the higher
feelings and what are called the dictates of the
heart — in short, whatever view we may take as
to the precise locus and scope of such immediate
certainty, no sophistry can permanently obscure
our perception that the real must be given.
Thought cannot make it ; thought only describes
what it finds. That there is a world at all, we
know only through the immediate assurance, per
ception, or feeling of our own existence, and
through ourselves of other persons and things.

Logic as Metaphysic. 1 19

Kant may have unduly narrowed the meaning of
the term experience, but there is no circumvent
ing his classical criticism of the Ontological argu
ment. There is no evolution possible of a fact
from a conception. The existence of God must
either be an immediate certainty, or it must be
involved in facts of experience which do possess
that certainty.

If, in the light of what has been said, we look
once more at Hegel's disparaging reference to
" Being," we see at once the fallacy which it in
volves, if it is intended to apply to the question
before us. "It would be strange," he says, "if
the Notion, the very heart of the mind, the Ego,
or in one word, the concrete totality we call God,
were not rich enough to embrace so poor a cate
gory as Being." Most assuredly the Notion con
tains the category of Being ; so does the Ego, that
is to say, the Idea of the Ego, and the Idea of
God, both of which are simply the Notion under
another name. The category of Being is con
tained in the Ego, and may be disengaged from
it, much as, in the old logic of the schools, the
notion "man" could be made to yield up suc
cessively the notion "animal," "substance," and
the rest, and eventually the very notion in ques
tion — Being. But when we ask for real bread,

1 20 Hegelianism and Personality.

why put us off with a logical stone like this ? It
is not the category " Being," of which we are in
quest, but that reality of which all categories are
only descriptions, and which itself can only be
experienced, immediately known, or lived. To
such reality or factual existence there is no lo
gical bridge ; and thoughts or categories have
meaning only if we assume, as somehow given,
a real world to which they refer.

But even if we waive objections which, I think,
are insuperable, and allow Hegel to take this im
possible leap from Logic to Nature, there remains
the essential further question, What account does
he give of the Nature thus boldly deduced ? Is
it an. account at once credible and sufficient ?

Nature, Hegel tells us, is the Idea or thought
in the form of otherness, in the form of exter
nality to itself. Or again, more metaphorically,
he quotes Schelling's saying that Nature is a
petrified intelligence, or as others have said, a
frozen intelligence ; * or it might be described, he
says again, as the corpse of the understanding.
Still more poetically he says : " Nature is spirit
in alienation from itself. Hence the study of
nature is the liberation of spirit in nature or the

1 Werke, vi. 46 ; Wallace, 39.

Logic as Metaphysic. 1 2 1

liberation of nature itself; for nature is poten
tially reason, but only through the spirit does this
inherent rationality become actual and apparent.
Spirit has the certainty which Adam had when
he saw Eve. This is flesh of my flesh and bone
of my bone. For Nature is in like manner the
bride to which Spirit is wedded. . . The inner
heart of nature (das Innere der Natur) is nothing
but the universal ; hence, when we have thoughts,
we recognise in nature's inner heart only our own
reason and feel ourselves at home there." l But
we must not be carried away by the poetry of
passages which recall the rich metaphors of
Bacon and Wordsworth. For when we inquire
more narrowly into the Self or Spirit, which we
recognise in nature under its form of estrange
ment, it is found to be neither more nor less than
the logical categories — the Notion. This is im
plied, indeed, in the very passage quoted, by the
introduction of the phrase " the universal " ; and
it is made more explicit in a passage of the c En
cyclopaedia,' which conveys the same thought:
" The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective
world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness,
and, as the phrase is, to find ourselves at home
in it — which means no more than to trace the

1 Werke, vii. 22.

122 Hegelianism and Personality.

objective world back to the Notion, which is our
inmost self."1 And in another passage he ex
pressly gives this explanation of his phrases
about thought as the kernel of the world, and
nature as a system of unconscious thought : " In
stead of using the term Thought (G-edanken), it
would be better, in order to avoid misconception,
to say category, or thought-determination (Denk-
bestimmung). For logic [which he has a few
lines before identified with metaphysic] is the
search for a system of thought-determinations in
which the opposition between subjective and
objective, in its usual sense, vanishes."2 This
system is, of course, the chain of categories un
rolled in the ' Logic,' which, forming, as it were,
the common basis of nature and mind, is spoken
of by Hegel as " the absolute and self-existent
ground of the universe."3 Indeed, in his own
words in the same connection, "the Philosophy
of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind take
the place, as it were, of an Applied Logic, and
Logic is the soul which animates them both.
Their problem is only to recognise the logical forms
under the shapes they assume in Nature and Mind

1 Werke, vi. 367. 2 Ibid., vi. 46 ; Wallace, 39.

3 Ibid., vi. 51 ; Wallace, 42.

Logic as Met apky sic. 123

— shapes which are only a particular mode of expres
sion for the forms of pure thought" l

But if men and things are merely types or
exemplifications of logical notions, what consti
tutes the difference, we may ask, between the
category, as such, in the Logic and the category,
as thing, in nature ? 2 If nature is " the other "
of thought, thought in estrangement or alienation
from itself, what is it that makes the otherness,
the alienation ? What is the nature of the
" petrifaction " that thought experiences ? Hegel
is fain to speak of it in many places as materi-
ature.3 Similarly, Dr Stirling says that Hegel
" demonstrates the presence of the notion in the
most crass, refractory, extreme externality — de
monstrates all to be but a concretion of the
notion." 4 Now I maintain that the whole prob
lem of reality as such is wrapped up in these
metaphorical phrases — otherness, petrifaction,
materiature, concretion — and that by evading
the question, Hegel virtually declines to take /
account of anything but logical abstractions. He '

1 Wallace, 41, 42.

2 Restricting ourselves for the present to the case of nature,
though the assertion is made by Hegel equally of "the Philo
sophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit."

3 Materiatur.

4 Secret of Hegel, i. 177. The italics are mine.

\

124 Hegelianism and Personality.

offers us, in a word, a logic in place of a meta-
physic; and it may be unhesitatingly asserted
that such a proposal, if taken literally, is not only
untenable, it is absurd. "Neither gods nor men,"
as Dr Stirling says, when speaking in his own
person, " are in very truth logical categories," x —
and the same may be said of every natural thing.
A living dog is better than a dead lion, and even
an atom is more than a category. It at least
exists as a reality, whereas a category is an
abstract ghost, which may have a meaning for
intelligent beings, but which, divorced from such
real beings and their experience, is the very type
of a non-ens.

I am far from denying that we may truly speak
of the categories as realised in nature, just as we
speak, in a wider way, of the world as the reali
sation or manifestation of reason. But we must
recognise the ^^si-metaphorical nature of the
language used, which simply means that the
world gives evidence of being constructed on
a rational plan. To discover the categories in
nature means no more than to understand nature
by their means; from which it is a legitimate
inference that nature is laid out, as we may say,
according to these conceptions. Hegel apparently

1 Schwegler, 476.

Logic as Metaphysic. 1 2 5

says, on one occasion, that his own elaborate phras
eology means no more than the ancient position
that z/oO? rules the world, or the modern phrase,
there is Eeason in the world.1 If the system is
reducible to this very general proposition, our
objections would certainly fall to the ground ; but
Hegel's own expressions go a long way further.
His language would justify us in believing that
the categories actually take flesh and blood and
walk into the air, and that the whole frame of
nature is no more than a duplicate or reflection
of the thought-determinations of the Logic. Nor
is this merely a forced interpretation put upon
his words. It is, as will be more fully seen in
the following lecture, if not his deliberate mean
ing, still a real tendency of his thought. When
he speaks, therefore, of the categories as the heart
or kernel of nature, we require to be on our guard
against the idea that logical abstractions can
thicken, as it were, into real existences. Cate
gories are not the skeleton round which an in
definite " materiature " gathers to form a thing.
The meanest thing that exists has a life of its
own, absolutely unique and individual, which we
can partly understand by terms borrowed from our

1 Werke, vi. 46 ; Wallace, 39 ; in the context of some of the
passages already quoted.

126 Hcgelianism and Personality.

own experience, but which is no more identical
with, or in any way like, the description we give
of it, than our own inner life is identical with the
description we give of it in a book of philosophy.
Existence is one thing, knowledge is another.
But the logical bias of the Hegelian philosophy
tends, as I have said, to make this essential dis
tinction disappear, and to reduce things to mere
types or " concretions " of abstract formulae.
" Hegel is so complete," says Dr Stirling in the
context of the passage previously quoted, "that
he leaves existential reality at the last as a mere
abstraction, as nothing when opposed to the work
of the notion." x That is just what I complain of.
The result of Hegel's procedure would really be
to sweep " existential reality " off the board alto
gether, under the persuasion, apparently, that a
full statement of all the thought-relations that
constitute our knowledge of the thing is equi
valent to the existent thing itself. On the con
trary, it may be confidently asserted that there
is no more identity of Knowing and Being with
an infinity of such relations than there was with
one.

Hegel's position, or the tendency of his thought,
may again be aptly illustrated, I think, by two

1 Secret of Hegel, i. 177.

Logic as Metaphy sic. 127

passages from Schelling. "In the highest per
fection of natural science," he tells us in the
'Transcendental Idealism/ "the phenomenal or]
material element must disappear entirely, an<
only the laws, or the formal element, remain. . .
The more law becomes apparent in nature, the
more the hull or wrapping disappears ; the pheno
mena themselves become more spiritual, and at
last cease altogether (zuletzt vollig auf horen). Op
tical phenomena are nothing more than a system
of geometry whose lines are drawn by the light,
and the material nature of this light itself is
already doubtful. In the phenomena of magnet
ism all trace of matter has already vanished, and
of the phenomena of gravitation nothing remains
but their law, the carrying out of which on a
great scale constitutes the mechanism of the
heavenly movements." 1 And in another place
we read : " The Philosophy of Nature gives an
account of what is immediately positive in nature,
without attending to space, for example, and the
rest of such nullities (den Raum und das ubrige
Niehtige). It sees in the magnet nothing but
the living law of Identity, and in matter only the
unfolded copula in the shape of gravitation, co-

1 Werke, I. iii. 340.

128 Hegelianism and Personality.

hesion, &c." x Surely, on reading a passage like
this, we instinctively feel that the reality or quali
tative existence of things is being spirited away
from us under a metaphor. It may be very well
for a philosophy so conceived to " abstract " from
what it cannot explain ; but for all that, the
magnet is neither the law of Identity, as Schelling
sets it down, nor the Syllogism, as Hegel would
have it to be.2 In short, whatever truth such
passages 3 may have as accounts of the progress
of knowledge, they leave the metaphysical ques
tion of existence untouched. Whatever import
ance we attach, and rightly attach, in philosophy
to the universal or the formal, the individual
alone is the real.

It cannot be supposed that Hegel was blind to
a plain truth like this, and accordingly passages
might easily be quoted which apparently admit
all that has been said. But the form which such
admissions take in Hegel is characteristic. While
not denying the individual character of existence,
he yet adroitly contrives to insinuate that, because
it is indefinable, the individual is therefore a

1 " Darlegung des wahren Verhaltnisses der Naturphilosophie
zu der verbesserten Fichte'schen Lehre," Werke, I. vii. 64.

2 See Wallace, p. 42.

3 For a very similar passage in Hegel himself, see Wallace,
35, 36.

Logic as Met apky sic. 129

valueless abstraction. "Sensible existence/' he
says, for example, " has been characterised by the
attributes of individuality and a mutual exclusion
of its members. It is well to remember that
these very attributes are thoughts and general
terms. . . . Language is the work of thought;
and hence all that is expressed in language must
be universal. . . . And what cannot be uttered,
feeling or sensation, far from being the highest
truth, is the most unimportant or untrue. If I
say ' the unit,' ' this unit,' ' here,' ' now,' all these
are universal terms. Everything and anything
is an individual, a ' this,' or if it be sensible, is
here and now. Similarly, when I say ' I,' I mean
my single self, to the exclusion of all others ; but
what I say, viz., ' I,' is just every other ' I,' which
in like manner excludes all others from itself.
. . . All other men have it in common with me
to be ' I.' " 1 This demonstration of the universal,
or, to put it perhaps more plainly, the abstract,
nature of thought, even in the case of those terms
which seem to lay most immediate hold upon
reality, is both true and useful in its own place.
But the legitimate conclusion from it in the pre
sent connection is not Hegel's insinuated dispar
agement of the individual, but rather that which

1 Wallace, 32.

I

1 30 Hegelianism and Personality.

Trendelenburg draws from the very same consider
ations, that the individual, as such, is incommen
surable or unapproachable by thought.1 Or, as
Mr Bradley puts it still more roundly and tren
chantly, " The real is inaccessible by way of ideas.
. . We escape from ideas, and from mere uni-
versals, by a reference to the real which appears
in perception." 2

If there is an approach to disingenuousness in
Hegel's manner of turning the tables upon reality
here, his treatment of the most characteristic
feature of nature, and real existence in general,
displays a much more unmistakable infusion of
the same quality.

Nature has been defined as "the other" of
reason ; that is, it is in some way the duplicate
or reflection of the thought-determinations of the
' Logic.' Conceptions which were there regarded
in their abstract nature are now exhibited as
realised in actual existences. In Hegel's own
formal definition, towards the beginning of the
' Naturphilosophie,' " Nature is to be regarded
as a system of grades, the one of which proceeds

1 "Das Einzelne 1st an sich. das dem Denken Incommensur
able." — Logische Untersuchungen, ii. 230.

2 Principles of Logic, 63, 69.

Logic as Met aphy sic. 131

necessarily from the other, and constitutes its
proximate truth; not, however, in such a way
that the one is actually produced out of the other,
but in the inner idea which is the ground of
nature."1 In other words, the Philosophy of
Nature gives us a system or ascending series of
types, in which we pass from space and gravita
tion, at the one end of the scale, to the animal
organism at the other. Speaking with some lati
tude, we may be said to pass, in such a progress,
from the most abstract and imperfect analogue of
self-conscious existence to the very brink of the
appearance of consciousness in the world. The
course of the exposition is swelled and distorted
by the mass of empirical matter which Hegel
takes from the special sciences, and forces, often
violently enough, into the forms of his system ;
but the method followed is intended to be sub
stantially similar to that of the 'Logic.' The
whole system of types, moreover, is to be taken as
an ideal development. It has nothing to do with
the possible evolution of the planetary system
out of a simpler state of mutually attracted va
porous particles, with the origin of life from the
non-living, or with the evolution of one animal
type from another, as set forth in the Darwinian

1 Werke, vii. 32.

132 Hegelianism and Personality.

theory. With these questions of scientific evolu
tion philosophy does not deal, according to Hegel's
statement above ; his own evolution is, as he would
say, a timeless evolution like that of the logical
categories. That is to say, he contemplates the
system of types as existing eternally side by side,
all being necessary to the entirety of the system.
"The notion," he says, "thrusts all its particu
larity at once into existence. It is perfectly
empty to represent the species as evolving them
selves gradually in time ; the time-difference has
absolutely no interest for thought."1 This em
bodies a profound truth, as I conceive, with regard
to the philosophy of evolution, but we are not
concerned with that aspect of the position here.
What is evident from these quotations is, that
nature is, in a manner, reduced by Hegel to a
static system of abstract types.

But a mere glance at nature suffices to show
that its leading feature, as contrasted with the
logical necessity which links the different parts of
a rational system together, is its pure matter-of-
f actness — I will not say its irrational, but its non-
rational or alogical character. Things lie side by
side in space, or succeed one another in time, with
perfect indifference ; there is no logical passage

1 Werke, vii. 33

Logic as Metaphy sic. 133

from the one to the other. Why should there
be just so many planets in our system, and no
more ? and why should their respective sizes be
just as they are ? Why should one of them have
been rent into fragments and not the rest ? Why
should the silver streak cut England off from
Continental Europe ? Why should any island
rise in ocean precisely where it does ? Why
should there be an island there at all, and if an
island, why not a mile to eastward or to westward ?
No doubt, in many cases, we may be able to give
what is called a reason for these facts — i.e., we may
be able to point to a certain previous distribution
of things from which they necessarily resulted.
It is conceivable that if our knowledge were per
fect, we should be able to account in this way
for the exact position of each minutest grain of
sand. But the ultimate collocation to which we
traced the present arrangement would be as far
removed as ever from logical or rational neces
sity: it would be a mere collocation, something
wholly alogical, to be accepted as a matter of fact.
The same thing might be further exemplified by
appeal to another aspect of the world — an aspect
which is coextensive with our whole experience
of external nature. What logical connection is
there between the different qualities of things —

134 Hegelianism and Personality.

between the smell of a rose, for example, and its
shape ; or between the taste of an orange and its
colour? These qualities are found together, as
matter of fact, but no process of reasoning could .
possibly lead us from the one to the other. Then,
to go back to Hegel's idea of a system of types,
what are we to say of the indefinite multi
plicity of individuals in which the type is realised ?
Why should there be more than one perfect ex
ample of each ? Of all this there is no account
in Hegel ; yet it is the most characteristic feature
of real existence. As Professor James of Har
vard says — " The parts seem to be shot out of a
pistol at us. Each asserts itself as a simple brute
fact, uncalled for by the rest, which, so far as we
can see, might even make a better system without
it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous — are
the adjectives by which we are tempted to de
scribe it."1

It was not possible for Hegel altogether to ig
nore the aspect of existence emphasised in the last
paragraph, but he seems to think that by naming
the difficulty he has got rid of it. He calls it
Contingency, and opposes it to the necessity of
the Notion : " The contradiction of the Idea in
its state of externality to itself as nature, is, more

1 Mind, vii. 187.

Logic as Metaphy sic. 135

particularly, the contradiction between the neces
sity infused by the Notion into nature's forma
tions (and their consequent rational determination
as members of an organic totality), and, on the
other hand, their indifferent contingency arid in
determinate lawlessness. Contingency and lia
bility to determination from without have their
right within the sphere of nature."1 But then
follows the audacious stroke by which Hegel
endeavours to turn the tables upon reality. It
is nature's fault, not the philosopher's, he says
in effect, that facts behave in this alogical way.
" It is the impotence of nature that it maintains
the determinations of the Notion only in an, ab
stract or general fashion, and leaves the execution
of the particular exposed to determination from
without." Again, he says : " Nature is Spirit in
alienation from itself, which, as released out of
itself, is full of freaks, a bacchantic god; who does
not rein himself in and keep himself in hand ; in
nature the unity of the notion is concealed."2
He expresses the same idea more prosaically, but
not less strongly, in the introduction to the ' En-

1 Werke, vii. 36.

2 Ibid., vii. 24. There is a play in the original upon the
word "ausgelassen," which means both " released " or "let
out," and full of freaks or riotous mirth.

1 36 Hegelianism and Personality.

cyclopedia ' : " The Idea of nature, when it is in
dividualised, loses itself in contingencies. Natural
history, geography, medicine, &c., have to deal
with determinations of existence, with species
and distinctions which are determined not by
reason, but by sport and external accident."1
Finally, when the point comes up in connection
with the category of Contingency in the Logic,
Hegel takes occasion to make a disparaging re
mark upon the admiration sometimes lavished
upon nature for its richness and variety : " In its
vast variety of structures, organic and inorganic,
nature affords us only the spectacle of a contin
gency that runs riot into endless detail. At any
rate, the checkered scene presented by the several
varieties of animals and plants, conditioned as it
is by outward circumstances, the complex changes
in the figuration and grouping of clouds, and the
like, ought not to be set above the equally casual
fancies of the mind which surrenders itself to
its own caprices."2 " Contingency, however," he

1 " Die von ausserlichem Zufall und vom Spiele, nicht durch
Vernunft bestimmt sind."— Werke, vi. 24 ; Wallace, 21.

2 It is perhaps worth remarking that Hegel's instances, being
of an especially unimportant nature, tend to disguise the fact
that what he calls contingency is coextensive with the whole
range of existence as such. Thus, it is not merely my " casual
fancies " that display contingency, but the whole course of my

Logic as Metaphysic. 1 3 7

proceeds, " has, no less than other forms of the Idea,
its due office in the world of objects. This is
seen, in the first instance, in nature, on whose
surface, so to speak, contingency ranges unchecked
— a fact which must simply be recognised with
out the pretension which is sometimes, but er
roneously, ascribed to philosophy of seeking to
find in it something which can only be as it is,
and not otherwise."1

These passages, more particularly the last, con
tain a curious combination of two points of view,
one of which is wholly untenable, while the other
is not open to a system like Hegel's. The first is
that Contingency is itself a category, a form of
the Idea which, when the Idea is realised, must
be represented and have its scope as well as the
other categories. By calling a thing contingent,
therefore, we seem to be making an assertion
about it which brings it within the range of our
rational system. But this is surely the most
transparent fallacy. For, to say that a thing is
contingent or accidental, is to say, in so many
words, that we can give no rational account of
why it is as it is, and not otherwise. It is hard

thoughts looked at as a process of events in time, that is to say,
my whole subjective or individual experience.
1 Werke, vi. 288, 290 ; Wallace, 227, 228.

1 38 Hegelianism and Personality.

to see how the saying that we have no explana
tion to give can be interpreted as itself the very
explanation wanted. A system of rationalism
which talks of what is " determined not by reason
but by sport and external accident," must fairly be
held to acknowledge a breakdown in its attempt to
grasp the whole of existence. Hegel makes this
acknowledgment, after a fashion, in what may
be distinguished as a second point of view. He
says that we must not pretend to reduce this
contingency to reason, or, as he expresses it in
the ' Naturphilosophie ' — " The impotence of na
ture sets limits to philosophy, and it is most un
seemly to demand of the Notion that it shall
comprehend such contingencies, and, as it is
called, construct or deduce them/' But he throws
the blame on Nature. If we cannot rationalise
the facts, that is merely because the facts are of
no interest or importance to reason. Now, in a
sense, this is a position which no one would think
of disputing. So far as the meaning of the uni
verse is concerned, it may be said that it does not
matter whether such details are arranged in this
way or in that way. And to expound the mean
ing of the universe constitutes, it may be argued,
the essential task of philosophy. Philosophy has
to show that the world embodies a rationally satisfy-

Logic as Met aphy sic. 139

ing End, which does not fail of realisation ; but it
is of necessity precluded from taking any notice
of the individual facts, whether persons or things,
in which this meaning, End, or Idea is realised.
There is a certain amount of truth in this conten
tion, though I venture to think that such a phil
osophy would remain seriously incomplete on its
metaphysical side. But however that may be,
Hegel, as the propounder of an absolute system, is
not entitled to hold such language. It might be
intelligible on the part of a philosophy which, pro
fessedly starting with the tangled facts of experi
ence, endeavoured to trace in them a thread of ra
tional purpose, and thus work its way to the more
or less confident assertion of a rational harmony
or system. But it is otherwise with a philosophy
which sets out from a completed system of thought,
and professes to explain the factual world to its
inmost fibre out of reason. Because it starts from
the contingent individual facts of experience, the
first system is in no danger of abolishing its own
standing-ground. But for a system like Hegel's
to waive aside all consideration of mere matter-
of-fact, means not so much that the matter-of-fact
basis is taken for granted, as that it is systemati
cally ignored. And an important practical result
will be that the End in which the meaning of the

1 40 Hegelianism and Personality.

world is found will be the realisation of some
abstract idea, without any regard for the indi
viduals for whom alone it can be realised, and
whose existence is, after all, the only reality.
The universe will tend to shrink together into a
logical process, of which individuals are merely
the foci.

It will be seen in the next lecture that this is
a special danger of the Hegelian system.

Appendix to Lecture IV. 141

APPENDIX TO LECTURE IV.

It may be instructive and not without interest to
place on record the expressed opinions of Kant and
Fichte on the question of real existence. They will
be found (what we should hardly expect in the case
of Fichte) to form an effective contrast to the tendency
of Hegelian thought as indicated above. The com
parison is the more easily made since Hegel in his
' Logic ' is going over essentially the same ground as
Kant in the ' Transcendental Logic ' and Fichte in the
theoretical part of the ' Wissenschaftslehre.'

Of Kant not much requires to be said. To him,
of course, the categories are mere empty forms without
the matter of sense. For the rest, his position has
been indicated above. Every existential proposition,
he says, is synthetical. Its truth can only be ascer
tained a posteriori, or by a reference to experience.
Hence existence is something which no notion or
system of notions can give us. This is the line of
thought which he brings to bear with conclusive force
upon the ontological argument for the existence of
God ; and Hegel's persistent attempts to rehabilitate
that argument are not without significance for a final
estimate of his own system.

Kant, as is well known, criticised Fichte's system
(in his public declaration on the subject) as " neither
more nor less than a mere logic, whose principles do
not reach the material element in knowledge, but
which, on the contrary, as pure logic, abstracts from
the content of cognition. To extract from pure logic
a real object is a futile task, and hence one which has

142 Hegelianism and Personality.

never been essayed." x But though there is much in
the form of the ' Wissenschaftslehre ' to justify this
censure, it is less than just to Fichte. It is, however,
by anticipation, a very apt description of Hegel's pro
cedure. Fichte expressly guards himself against the
imputation in question. The theoretical part of the
* Wissenschaftslehre ' corresponds, as has been said,
to Hegel's ' Logic ' ; 2 and at the end of this analysis
Fichte tells us that the whole inquiry has been moving
hitherto in a world of unrealities. We have been talk
ing of the Ego, he says, but, so far, we have been talking
" of a mere relation without anything that stands in
relation — from which something, indeed, complete
abstraction is made in the whole theoretical part of
the ' Wissenschaftslehre.' " 3 In other words, we
have been talking of the notion of the Ego, but not
of any real Ego ; we have been dealing throughout
with abstractions, not with real existences. Similarly,
on coming to the second part of his investigation, he
says : " In the theoretical ' Wissenschaftslehre ' we
have to do solely with knowledge; here, in the
practical part, with what is known. In the former
case, the question is, How is anything posited, per
ceived, or thought [i.e., what are the formal conditions
of knowledge, — what is the notion of knowledge in
general] 1 in the present case it is, What is posited 1
If, therefore, the ; Wissenschaftslehre ' is to be taken

1 Werke, viii. 600.

2 It is, of course, far from being so exhaustive, and the order
of the deduction is the reverse of Hegel's, beginning with the
notion of the Ego as a synthesis of subject and object, and
deducing a variety of categories from that relation. But
differences of procedure do not affect the correspondence in
aim of the two undertakings.

3 Werke, i. 207.

Appendix to Lectiire IV. 143

as a metaphysic, it must refer the inquirer to its
practical part, for this alone speaks of a primitive
reality." ] A little later, he is speaking of feeling,
which ordinary consciousness attributes to the action
of a thing, but which Fichte maintains to be due to
the Ego itself, and he adds this emphatic statement :
" Here lies the ground of all reality. Solely through
the reference of feeling to the Ego is reality possible
for the Ego, whether it be the reality of the Ego itself
or of the Non-Ego. . . . Our attitude to reality in
general, whether of the Ego or the Non-Ego, is one of
belief and nothing more." 2 " To forget this original
feeling," he says elsewhere, " leads to a baseless tran
scendent Idealism and an incomplete philosophy which
cannot explain the merely sensible predicates of ob
jects." 3 It is true that Eichte does not leave this
feeling a mere fact, as Kant did ; he refers it to the
needs of the moral life, thus seeking, as it were, to
rationalise it and bring it within the compass of his
Monism. But what we are here concerned with, is
his insistence upon feeling as the only point where
we touch solid ground and get a basis for our whole
structure. The same point of view is still more im
pressively urged in the eloquent ' Bestimmung des
Menschen,' which he wrote in 1800 for use outside
the schools ; it forms, indeed, the turning-point of the
whole discussion.

This treatise is divided into three books, the
first of which, entitled ' Doubt,' portrays the misery

1 Werke, i. 285.

2 Ibid., i. 301. "An Realitat iiberhaupt . . . findet
lediglich ein Glaube statt."

3 Ibid., i. 490. This passage is from the Second Introduc
tion to the Wissenschaftslehre, published in 1797 ; the previous
passages are from the Wissenschaftslehre itself.

144 Hegelianism and Personality.

of a man entangled in Materialism and Fatalism,
through viewing himself simply as a natural thing
among other things — a mere wheel in the vast
machine of the universe. The second book, entitled
* Knowledge,' describes his deliverance from such fears
by the Kantio-Fichtian theory of knowledge. He is
made to recognise the inner impossibility of the posi
tion which Fichte designates Dogmatism — the impos
sibility, that is to say, that a system of mere things
should give rise to the unique fact of self-consciousness.
On the contrary, he finds that the mere object is an
unrealisable abstraction, and that the whole of the
natural world, in which he seemed to be imprisoned
as an insignificant part, exists only as a phenomenon
— that is, relatively to the consciousness which it
threatened at first to engulf. But in the midst of
his exultation there is suddenly borne in upon him
the conviction that such a deliverance is, after all,
purely illusory. For the demonstration has simply
fehown that all objects must, as such, be brought

/ Under the form of the knowing self. But such a self
has no predicates of reality about it ; it is simply a

, formal point of unity for the process of knowledge.
If the system of things is reduced to ideas or
objects in consciousness, he himself is likewise re
solved into a mere Vorstellen or process of ideas
without significance or aim, because without self-
initiated activity.1 When this insight is reached,

1 Ich selbst weiss iiberhaupt nicht, und bin nicht. Bilder
sind ; sie sind das Einzige was da ist, und sie wissen von sich
nach Weise der Bilder : Bilder die voriiberschweben, ohne dass
etwas sei, dem sie voriiberschweben. . . . Bilder ohne etwas in
ihnen Abgebildetes, ohne Bedeutung und Zweck. . . . Alle
Realitat verwandelt sich in einen wunderbaren Traum, ohne
ein Leben von welchem getraumt wird, und ohne einen Geist,
dem da traumt." — Werke, ii. 245.

Appendix to Lecture IV. 145

Fichte turns upon his anxious inquirer and upbraids
him for supposing that this theory — which represents
the theoretical ' Wissenschaftslehre ' — was to be taken
as a complete system of the human spirit. "Didst
thou imagine," he says, " that these results were not
as well known to me as to thee I . . , Thou askedst
to know of thy knowledge. Dost thou wonder, then,
that upon this path nothing more is to be found than
just what thou desiredst to know — thy knowledge 1
. . . What arises through knowledge and out of
knowledge is only a knowing. But all knowing is
only representation or picture, and there always arises
the demand for something which shall correspond to
the picture. This demand no knowledge can satisfy.
. . . But, at least, the reality whose slave thou
fearedst to be — the reality of an independent sen
sible world — has vanished. For this whole sensible
world arises only through knowledge, and is itself
part of our knowledge. . . . This is the sole merit
of which I boast in the system which we have but
now discovered together. It destroys and annihilates
error; truth it cannot give, because in itself it is
absolutely empty."

Only in the third book, entitled ' Belief ' or ' Faith,'
does Fichte proceed at last to satisfy the demand of
his disciple for reality, and to communicate his own
final position. " There is something in me," he says,
" which impels to absolute, independent, self-originated
activity. ... I ascribe to myself the power of form
ing an idea or plan, and likewise the power, through a
real action, of embodying this idea beyond the world
of ideas (ausser dem Begriffe). I ascribe to myself,
in other words, a real active force — a force which
produces being, and which is quite different from the

1 46 Hegelianism and Personality.

' mere faculty of ideas. The ideas or plans spoken of
I above, usually called ends or purposes, are not to be
considered, like the ideas of cognition, as after-pictures
of something given ; they are rather fore-pictures, or
exemplars of something which is to be produced. The
real force, however, does not lie in them ; it exists on
its own account, and receives from them only its
determinate direction, knowledge looking on, as it
were, as a spectator of its action. Such indepen
dence, in fact, I ascribe to myself in virtue of the
afore-mentioned impulse." "Here," he proceeds,
"lies the point to which the consciousness of all
reality is attached. This point is the real activity
of my idea, and the real power of action which I am
obliged, in consequence, to attribute to myself. How
ever it may be with the reality of a sensible world
external to me, I myself am real; I take hold on
reality here ; it lies in me, and is there at home.
This real power of action of mine may doubtless be
made an object of thought or knowledge, but at the
f basis of such thought lies the immediate feeling of my
.. impulse to self-originated activity. Thought does
nothing but picture or represent this feeling, and
take it up into its own form of thought." Actual
existence, in brief, or the consciousness of reality, is
reached, according to Fichte, only in Will, or in the
immediate feeling of my own activity. Even in
opposition to the sceptical doubts which the under
standing may subsequently raise as to a possible self-
deception, this feeling must be accepted as our only
firm standing-gronnd ; it must be believed. Belief is
" the organ with which I lay hold upon reality."

These quotations have run almost to undue length.
But Fichte's testimony is especially important in view

Appendix to Lecture IV. 147

of his constitutionally deductive mind and his fondness
of construction whenever an opening for it could be
found. The passages quoted show him laying stress, <
even in his earliest writings, upon the essentially given (
character of reality. It must be lived or experienced, j
if we are to know of its existence at all ; our relation
to it must be that of immediate consciousness or
feeling. Knowledge may afterwards take up this
datum into its own forms, but knowledge stands always
in this dependent or parasitical relation to reality.
It is the picture or representation, the symbol of
what is real; but as Fichte says, "Knowledge just
because it is knowledge is not reality." It comes not
first but second. As Schelling put it in his later writ
ings — " Not because there is thought is there existence,
but because there is existence is there thought." Or
as we might express the same thing, connecting it with
our parallel between Hegel and Plato, real things are
not the shadows of intellectual conceptions, but intel
lectual conceptions are themselves the shadows of a
real world. ]S"or is it allowable to reply that this is
true only of human thought, and that the real world
must still be admitted to be but the shadow of a
divine or absolute thought. For, in the first place,
God is included in the real world when that term is
taken in its fullest extent, and the divine thoughts
evidently presuppose the divine existence — a divine
being whose thoughts they are. And, secondly, though
we may perhaps speak of the real world in the nar
rower sense, as shadows or effects of the creative
thoughts of God, the thoughts in that case are not
active of themselves. " The real force," as Fichte says
above, " does not lie in them " : it lies in the divine
Being as living active Will.

148 Hegelianism and Personality.

But here again Hegel parts company with Fichte.
Just as he apparently makes a systematic attempt to
deduce existence from pure or abstract thought, so
the divine existence itself tends to shrink in his hands
into a priority of certain logical notions, to which, as
we have seen in the foregoing lecture, a dynamic or
creative efficiency is attributed. This fact — which
will be fully discussed in the lectures that follow —
appears to be a striking confirmation of the view
taken above of Hegel's real meaning.

149

LECTUEE V.

HEGEL'S DOCTRINE OF GOD AND MAN.

IN the last lecture, Hegel's attempt to construct
the world out of mere universals has been some
what fully dealt with, and we have now to con
sider more particularly the account which the
system gives of God and man. Does it provide
for their concrete reality, or is the general criti
cism of the last lecture applicable here too ? Do
we recognise the same tendency to sublimate
reality into abstract universals ?

The first thing that strikes an attentive stu
dent is the way in which Hegel manages to evade
giving any definite answer to the world-old ques
tions which lie at the root of all philosophy — the
questions as to the nature of God and His relation
to man. This may seem a strange assertion to
make regarding a system in which there is so

150 Hegelianism and Personality.

much talk of the Absolute, so much talk of God,
even under that more homely name. Yet I think
it must be admitted that at the end Hegel leaves
us in grave doubt both as to the mode of existence
which he means to attribute to the Divine Being,
and as to his deliverance on the question of im
mortality, which is after all the most pressing
problem of human destiny. I need appeal no
further than to the example of Dr Stirling, than
whom no man has studied Hegel more profoundly
or more honestly. Dr Stirling, as is well known,
gives his ruling on the side of a personal God and
human immortality. But whence the need of
this laborious assurance, if Hegel's statements had
been forthright, and the inevitable consequence
of his system ? Whence those waverings in the
' Secret ' before the final deliverance ; whence, even
after that deliverance, the hesitation that leavens
the last notes to Schwegler ? " Very obscure,
certainly, in many respects," — so we read in the
' Secret ' * — " is the system of Hegel, and in none,
perhaps, obscurer than in how we are to conceive
God as a Subjective Spirit and man as a Subjec
tive Spirit, and God and Man in mutual relation."
If further evidence of this ambiguity were neces
sary, it would be sufficient to refer to the history

1 I. 244.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 5 1

of the Hegelian school in Germany, which shows
us Christian Theist and logical Atheist alike ap
pealing to the Master's words and claiming to be
the true inheritor of his doctrine.

Such ambiguity was possible just because the
question, which Dr Stirling formulates as the
question of " God as a Subjective Spirit and man
as a Subjective Spirit " is one of concrete exist
ences, whereas it is the peculiarity of the He
gelian system that it deals throughout only with
generals. Hegel speaks in strictness, from begin
ning to end of his system, neither of the divine
Self-consciousness nor of human self-conscious
ness, but of Self-consciousness in general — neither
of the divine Spirit nor of human spirits, but
simply of "Spirit." The process of the world is'
viewed, for example, as the realisation of spirit
or self-conscious intelligence. But spirit is an
abstraction ; intelligence is an abstraction, — only
spirits or intelligences are real. It is the same
even when we come to absolute spirit — a case
which might seem at first sight to leave no loop
hole for doubt. The forms of the German lan
guage itself seem to abet Hegel in his evasion ;
for though he talks (and by the idiom of the lan
guage cannot avoid talking) of "der absolute
Geist" (the absolute spirit), that by no means

1 5 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

implies, as the literal English translation does,
that he is speaking of God as a Subjective Spirit,
a singular intelligence. It no more implies this
than the statement, " Man is mortal " (in German,
"the man is mortal") implies a reference to a
specific individual. The article goes with the noun
in any case, according to German usage ; and
" absolute spirit " has no more necessary reference
to a concrete Subject than the simple " spirit " or
intelligence which preceded it. Absolute spirit
is said to be realised in art, in religion, in phil
osophy ; but of the real Spirit or spirits in whom
and for whom the realisation takes place we are
not told, and are ultimately left to choose between
two sharply opposed and irreconcilable positions.
This, however, is precisely what was to be
expected from a philosophy which treats notions
as the ultimately real, and things or real beings
as their exemplifications. Hegel has taken the
notion or conception of self-consciousness — Sub
ject, as he calls it in his earlier writings,
Spirit in his later — and he conceives the whole
process of existence as the evolution, and ulti
mately the full realisation of this notion. But it
is evident that if we start thus with an abstract
conception, our results will remain abstract
throughout. Spirit, when it reappears at the end

Hegel 's Doctrine of God and Man. 153

of the development, will reappear, certainly, in a
singular form, and we may imagine, therefore,
that the reference is to the Divine Spirit ; but as
a matter of fact it is the abstract singular with
which we started, which means no more than
" there is intelligence or spirit " — " the form is
realised." But where or in whom the realisation
takes place, of this nothing is said, or can be said,
along these lines. For an answer we are forced
to fall back upon ordinary experience ; and there
it may be said that the action is realised in our
personal existence and in the products of human
civilisation. But as to any further and more
perfect realisation in a divine Spirit, recourse
must be had, I fear, to more homely methods of
inference than Hegel patronises.

Spirit, or " the concrete Idea," was beyond doubt
intended by Hegel to be the unity in which God
and man shall both be comprehended in a more
intimate union or living interpenetration than any ^

previous philosophy had succeeded in reaching. \s
And this unity or interpenetration is to be asserted
without prejudice to the play of difference —
without, therefore, falling back into a pantheistic
identity of substance. It was an aim and task
worthy of a philosopher, for both philosophy and
religion bear ample testimony to the almost in-

154 Hegelianism and Personality.

superable difficulty of finding room in the universe
for God and man. When speculation busies it
self with the relation of these two, each in turn
tends to swallow up the other. The pendulum of
human thought swings continually between the
two extremes of Individualism, leading to Athe
ism, and Universalism, leading to Pantheism or
Akosmisin. This insight into the history of the
past makes it all the more the imperative task of
further philosophising to seek a statement of their
relations which can be accepted as true by the
speculative and the moral consciousness alike.
Hegel was fully alive to this obligation, and his
scheme of reconciliation is in its conception a
peculiarly grand one. It is no less than to ex
hibit the whole process of the universe as so
many necessary moments or stages in the tri
umphant and all-embracing life of God. Nor
need there be any hesitation in allowing that the
execution of the conception, too, will always
remain one of the great monuments of the human
mind. Even in its error, the Hegelian system is
one of those " splendid faults " which may serve
for the instruction of generations. But it cannot
be accepted as a solution of the problem. Spirit
is not the real unity of the two sides which it is
intended to be, and is put forward as being.

Hegel 's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 5 5

Though it is called " the concrete Idea, " 1 we have
no evidence that it is really concrete in the sense /
of designating an actual existence ; it is concrete ,
only with reference to the " logical Idea " which
preceded it. Spirit or Absolute Spirit is the
ultimate product of that self -creative projection
of the Idea into existence which has been already
criticised ; and it may therefore be denominated
the Idea as real. It is the real duplicate of the
Idea, the notion of knowledge hypostatised. But
we have abundantly seen the impossibility of reach
ing a real existence by such means. " The con
crete Idea " remains abstract, and unites God and
man only by eviscerating the real content of both.
Both disappear or are sublimated into it, but
simply because it represents what is common to
both, the notion of intelligence as such. They
disappear, not indeed in a pantheistic substance,

1 Werke, xv. 685, at the end of the 'History of Philoso
phy,' where it is also " die sich wissende Idee" "derGedanke der
sich selbst fasst." Similarly, at the end of the 'Encyclopaedia'
(Werke, vii. 2, 468-469), Absolute Spirit is spoken of as "die
sich wissende Vernunft," "die sich denkende Idee"; and it is
said in the concluding sentence that " die ewig an und fiir sich
seyende Idee sich ewig als absoluter Geist bethatigt, erzeugt und
geniesst." Hence the term "the Idea" is often used, in a wider
sense, to designate not the logical Idea specifically, but what
Hegel would call " the concrete totality" of which his system is
the explication.

156 Hegelianism and Personality.

but in a logical concept. If we scrutinise the
system narrowly, we find Spirit or the Absolute
doing duty at one time for God, and at another
/time for man; but when we have hold of the
* divine end we have lost our grasp of the human
end, and vice versd. We never have the two
together, but sometimes the one and sometimes
the other — a constant alternation, which really
represents two different lines of thought in the
system, and two different conclusions to which it
leads. But the alternation is so skilfully managed
by Hegel himself that it appears to be not alter
nation but union.

The truth of this statement will be best seen
by pressing the question of the relation of God
or the Absolute to the development sketched by
Hegel in the ' Encyclopaedia.' That ' development
proceeds from Logic to Nature, from Nature to
Spirit, and in Spirit through all the grades of the
slowly - opening individual intelligence to the
Objective Spirit of society and the State, and
further still to the Absolute Spirit, as existent
and known in art, religion, and philosophy. The
crucial question, therefore, comes to be, what is
the Subject here developed, and in what sense are
we to take the term development ? According to
Hegel's usage, the Subject of the development is

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 5 7

spoken of in the singular number, as " a universal /
individual," and is expressly styled the Absolute.
The Absolute is said in this development to come
to itself or to realise its own nature. This seems,
therefore, the answer to our question, and the
existence of God (to go no further) would appear
to be placed beyond dispute by such a statement.
Nor is there any lack of explicit assertions of the
divine existence on Hegel's part. It is as if he
was conscious of the misleading effect liable to be
produced by the form in which he had cast his
system, and was desirous of counteracting such
mistaken impressions. He reminds us, therefore,
ever and anon, that what appears as the end of
the development is in reality also the beginning —
the living presupposition of the whole. Thought
does not exist first as Logic, then as Nature, and
finally in its completed form as Spirit ; it exists
only as Spirit, which is thus the one res completa,
or completed Fact, from which Logic and Nature
are alike abstractions. Accordingly this triple ;
development has been, after all, only an ideal
analysis, a logical separation of elements which
are never really separate, but exist only within
the concrete life of Spirit. This is abundantly
plain in the enigmatical but striking sayings that
form the bulk of the Preface to the ' Phaenomen-

I

> -^

1 58 Hegelianism and Personality.

ology,' some of which were quoted in a former
lecture.1 We meet the same thing in the larger
' Logic ' ; 2 and in the ' Philosophy of Religion,'
where he is applying or carrying over the results
of the ' Logic,' he takes even more pains to avoid
misconception. In consequence of the logical
evolution, he says, " We may have the misleading
idea that God is represented there as result ; but
if we are better acquainted with the subject, we
know that result in this connection has the sense
of absolute Truth. Hence that which appears as
result, just because it is the absolute Truth, ceases
to be something which results or draws its exist
ence from anything else. . . . ' God is the
absolutely True,' is equivalent to saying that the
absolutely True, in so far as it is the last, is just
as much the first. It is, in fact, the True, only
so far as it is not only beginning, but also end or

1 At the beginning of the Third Lecture, pp. 80, 81 supra.
Among other passages which might be quoted are such as the fol
lowing : " The True is the becoming of itself, the circle which
presupposes its end as its aim, and thus has its end for its begin
ning " (Werke, ii. 15). " The Absolute is essentially result, i.e.,

-,y only at the end does it exist as what it truly is ; " but " the
result is for that very reason the same as the beginning, for the
beginning is to be taken as aim or purpose " (Ibid., pp. 16-17).

2 E.g., in the passage formerly quoted : " We may very well
say that every beginning must be made with the Absolute, just
as all advance (that is, all dialectical development) is only its
exposition."

Hegel ' s Doctrine of God and Man. 1 59

result — in so far, namely, as it results from itself." x
This is a point on which references might be in
definitely multiplied. It is enough, therefore, in
the meantime to accept Hegel's reiterated assur
ance that the Absolute — " absolute self-conscious
Spirit" — is eternally self-existent, the only Fact
in the strict and full sense of that term.

How, then, is this completed self-consciousness
related to the development which constitutes the
world-process ? If we look closely at the account
Hegel gives, we find, I think, that there is no real
connection between the two, and that the appear-^
ance of connection is maintained by the use of } .
the term development in a double sense. Irufehfe
first place, the term is used with the associations
derived from its use in the ' Logic.' We may, if we
will, call the systematic placing of conceptions in
the 'Logic' a process or development ; and if we do
so, it is perfectly apparent that there is nothing
here analogous to a development in time. There
is a system of abstract notions mutually connec
ted, which permit us therefore to pass from one
to another by logically___necessary but altogether
timeless transitions. In fact, the whole system,

1 Werke, xi. 48. So again (p. 132), "The result casts off
its character of result. . . . Absolute Spirit, conscious of
itself, is thus the First and the Last." Cf. also xii. 178.

1 60 Hegelianism and Personality.

as a system of abstractions, may be said to be out
of time ; and the process of development, if we
persist in calling it so, may also be spoken of as
a timeless or eternal process. Now Hegel extends
this idea of logically necessary and timeless trans
ition to the process by which, in his own language,
thought externalises itself in Nature, and returns
to itself in Spirit. It is with logical necessity, we
are told, that the logical Idea determines itself to
be more than logic, and the same necessity drives
it back upon itself out of its temporary alienation.
Hence Hegel speaks of this also as an eternal
process. Expressed in the language of religion,
" God is the creator of the world ; it belongs to
His being, to His essence, to be creator. . . .
Creation is not an act undertaken once upon a
time. What belongs to the Idea belongs to it as
an eternal moment or determination." 1 " God is as
Spirit essentially this revelation of Himself. He
does not create the world once ; He is the eternal
creator — this eternal self -revelation, this actus.
This is his notion, his definition. . . . God posits the
other and sublates it in His eternal movement." 2
" Without the world God would not be God." 3

These expressions are all taken from the ' Phil
osophy of Keligion/ but the doctrine is one which
1 Werke, xii. 181. 2 Ibid., xii. 157. 3 Ibid., xi. 122.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 6 1

meets us throughout Hegel's works. The terms
used are intended to convey the impression that
the life of the world is included within the pro
cess of the absolute self-consciousness, and that
everything is thereby satisfactorily comprehended
within the all-containing walls of the divine unity.
But it is impossible at one and the same time
to describe this process as necessary and eternal,
and to include within it the real course of the
world — nature and history. If we choose the
first alternative, then Hegel's Nature — his sec
ond stage — is in no way different from Fichte's
Non-Ego ; it is, indeed, as he himself describes
it, simply the necessary negative or opposite in
volved in self -consciousness. An opposition or
duplicity of some sort may readily be deduced as
necessary to the existence of self-consciousness as
such; but that is very far from constituting a
deduction of nature or the world as an infinitely
varied concrete fact. Fichte's construction, as he
himself admitted, was an ideal construction of the
notion of self-consciousness, not an account of any
real process or real existence; and it is exactly
the same with Hegel's. This eternal process of
creation or self-revelation is simply the general
notion of self-consciousness as such. To treat the
divine life as the perfect example of this was per-
L

1 62 Hegelianism and Personality.

haps not extraordinary ; certainly Hegel was not
the first to do so. But it is simply matter of
assertion on Hegel's part to draw Nature with its
real processes and living forms within the circle,
and to treat it all as simply the objective side of the
divine Self-consciousness. And even if we were
inclined to let that pass, his construction leaves
' no room for any other self besides the divine
*f Spectator. In short, as we have had so often to
remark in Hegel, there has been a daring but un
justifiable stride from an ideal or notional analysis
to real facts. Every Ego carries in itself a Non-
Ego, but that does not justify us in sweeping all
existence without more ado into the circle of a
single Self-consciousness, identifying Nature with
the Non-Ego of God, and simplifying the problem
by extruding our own self -consciousness altogether.
And it cannot be said that this is a misrepresenta
tion of Hegel. If we are consistent with his posi
tion here, there is room only for one Self-conscious-
I ness ; finite selves are wiped out, and nature, de-
[ prived of any life of its own, becomes, as it were,
' the still mirror in which the one Self -conscious
ness contemplates itself. Such is the scheme of
the universe contemplated from the divine point
of view. But I must repeat that it is reached by
hypostatising the notion of self-consciousness and

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 63

not by any progress from reality. There is, in
fact, no bridge between this hypostatised concep
tion and the world of real things and real men.

This comes out very plainly in Hegel's own
account in the ' Philosophy of Eeligion/ where he
begins, contrary to his usual practice, with the
Absolute in the completed perfection of its
notion. Adopting religious terminology, Hegel
speaks here successively of the kingdom of the
Father, the kingdom of the Son, and the kingdom
of the Spirit. The kingdom of the Father is
further described in the heading as " God in his
eternal idea, in and for himself." He begins by
arguing that God, thus contemplated in his eternal
idea, is still in the abstract element of thought ;
the idea is not yet posited in its reality. But
he goes on, under this same head, to speak of the
absolute diremption or distinction which must
take place within this pure thought ; and thirdly,
still under the same head, of God as Spirit, or the
Holy Trinity. This " still mystery," as he calls
it, is " the eternal truth " of philosophy ; it is " the
pure idea of God." In fact, it just brings to light
the essential nature of Mind or Spirit, as seen in
the act of knowledge. " God, who eternally exists
in and for Himself, eternally distinguishes Him
self from Himself — that is to say, eternally begets

1 64 Hegelianism and Personality.

Himself as His Son. But what thus distinguishes
itself from itself has not the form of otherness
or alien being; on the contrary, that which is
distinguished is immediately identical with that
from which it has been separated. God is Spirit ;
no darkness, no tinge of foreign colour, passes into
this pure light."1 In this separation, the first
' — that which distinguishes — may be called the
universal ; and the second — that which is distin
guished — the particular : but the two determina-
Vtions _are the same. The distinction is at once
laid down and removed ; it is laid down as a dis
tinction which is no real difference. "The fact
that it is so constitutes the nature of Spirit, or,
/ if we express it in the form of feeling, eternal
' Love. The Holy Ghost is this eternal Love. . . .
Love is a distinction between two who are yet for
one another absolutely without distinction. . . .
God is Love — i.e., he is this distinction and the
nullity of this distinction — a play of distinction
in which there is no seriousness." 2 In spite,
therefore, of what is said at the outset — that God
is contemplated here as still in the abstract ele
ment of thought — it does not seem possible to
understand this elaborate construction as any
thing else than an account of the divine Self-con-

1 Werke, xii. 185. 2 Ibid., 187.

Hegel 's Doctrine of God and Man. 165

sciousness as that really exists for God Himself.
As Hegel does not fail to tell us himself, it is a
speculative construction of the Trinity; and on
Hegelian principles, the Trinity, so conceived,
must undoubtedly be held to exist for itself and
on its own account.

The construction itself is not peculiar to Hegel.
He traces what he calls anticipations of the doc
trine not only in Aristotle's statements about
knowledge, and in what he says of the vo^cns
vorjo-ea)?, but more particularly in the Neo-Platonic
doctrine of the Logos. Hegel's speculative Trin
ity is, in fact, simply the rehabilitation of that an
cient philosopheme which, at the end of the pro
saic age of the Enlightenment, Lessing had laid
his vivifying hand upon,1 and made a present of
to the new German philosophy. But whatever
be its value as a speculative construction of the
divine nature, what we have to observe here is
that Hegel's object is to represent the life of the
universe as a whole under the form of this per
fect self-consciousness. It is essential to his pur
pose, therefore, that the second stage of the pro
cess — what is here called the Son — should be
understood as equivalent to the world. The pas
sages, indeed, asserting an eternal creation of the

1 In his Education of the Human Race.

1 66 Hegelianism and Personality.

world as an essential element of the divine nature,
are taken from this very section ; so that the in
tention of identifying the Son and the world is
obvious. But it is eventually found impossible
to carry out this identification. The religious
consciousness itself is the first to revolt against
the representation of the world-process as a play
of love with itself — a play of distinction in which
;there is no difference. If that were so, what
would become of the consciousness of alienation,
of sin, and the need of reconciliation, which Hegel
accepts as the most fundamental feature of reli
gious experience ? This points to a real differ
ence which is not covered by such phrases as those
quoted above. And accordingly, when he comes
to treat, in the second place, of the kingdom of
the Son, Hegel has to admit, though it fits in
, badly with the preceding, that the Son and the
world are not quite the same. In order to pass
from the one to the other, the ideal difference
must become real. " The Son must receive the
determination of the other as such; he must exist
as something free and on his own account, and
must appear as something actual, beyond and
without God, — something existent." x And then
we fall back upon a set of phrases almost identi-

1 Werke, xii. 206.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 167

cal with those which met us before at the end of
the ' Logic/ as an explanation of how real exist
ence came to be. These need not be repeated
here.1 If we compare the world with the Son,
Hegel proceeds, " the finite world is the side of
difference emphasised against the side of unity ;
it is a world which is outside of the truth — a
world in which the other has the form of being."2
But how is this accentuation of the otherness to
be explained ? Whence this relative freedom and
independence which makes the world so much
more than the mere reflex of a theoretic con
sciousness ? This is the very problem of the real
world — the very crux of the difficulty in Hegel's
system. But, at the critical point, Hegel has
nothing to offer us except the phrases from the
' Logic,' and a quotation from Jacob Boehme.
" This passing over into difference in the element
of the Son has been expressed by Jacob Boehme
in this wise : The first-begotten was Lucifer, the
light-bearer, the bright, the clear one ; but he lost
himself in his own imaginings; he asserted his
independence, and fell." 3 This was not merely a
casual figure, for it was repeated in the lectures
on the ' Philosophy of Nature.' 4 But in refer-

1 Cf. supra, pp. 105, 106. 2 Werke, xii. 208.

3 Ibid., xii. 207. 4 Ibid., vii. 1, 31.

1 68 Hegelianism and Personality.

ence to it, it is surely sufficient to say that, if
Plato's myths indicate the break-down of scien
tific explanation, there is a break-down much
more complete in this borrowed myth of Hegel's.1
The apostasy and fall of Lucifer is, of course,
a mythical explanation that explains nothing;
but the figure seems at all events to embody the
acknowledgment that the world-process and the
eternal process described above as constituting
the divine life are not one and the same. The
latter is an eternal or timeless process, in which
we do not work from point to point of time at
all, but analyse the different elements of one
conception. The former — the world-process — is
a real process in time, in which one stage labo
riously prepares the way for another and gives
place to it. In short, to sum up what I have
been urging, the self-consciousness of God here

1 It is worth noting how closely the figure approaches to
Schilling's explanation of the finite world, when he was at the
turning-point of his philosophical career — namely, as the result
of an act of primal apostasy or revolt from God. In the trea
tise where he first makes use of this idea — ' Philosophy and
Religion ' (1804)— Schelling treats the world-process as a pro
cess towards the culmination of this apostasy and separation
in the independent self-assertion of the Ego. The world-
process is thus definitely placed outside the inner circle of the
divine Self-consciousness — outside the life of God as a Subjec
tive Spirit.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 169

constructed is simply the construction of the
notion of self-consciousness as such ; and no evi
dence is adduced of the existence of a Being-
corresponding to the notion. If, however, we
assume such a Being to exist, it offers no point
of transition at which we might pass from it to
the real world we know. We can describe its
connection with that world in none but the old-
fashioned figurative way, which it was the boast
of the Hegelian philosophy to have stated at last \
in terms of pure reason. Strictly, indeed, if we
start with this conception, as Hegel does in the
' Philosophy of Eeligion,' the conception carries
with it no hint of the existence of a finite world
at all ; there is no escape from the charmed cirCte
of the perfect Self, unless per saltum. -We fall
back suddenly on our empirical knowledge, re
versing henceforth our whole procedure, taking
our stand on the facts of difference and imper
fection, and treating the conception of God as
the ideal of human effort. Hegel, then, either
gives us no demonstration of the existence of
God in the ordinary sense — of His existence,
that is to say, as a self-conscious being, a Sub
jective Spirit ; or if, following the persistent bent
of the system, we take the construction of the
notion of self - consciousness for such a proof,

1 70 Hegelianism and Personality.

then such a construction is all-inclusive, and
eliminates the time -process of the finite world

altogether.

But the time-process of the finite world is, after
all, the reality with which we are immediately
acquainted ; and, to do Hegel justice, it is here
that his real strength lies. He grapples like a
giant with the real matter of experience, in his
determination to reduce it from a merely empir
ical chaos to something in which the action of
reason may be traced. It may be said with
truth that it was Hegel's interpretation of his
tory that made the success of his system, and
gave it its wonderful hold over a full generation.
It is here, and not in mere Neo-Platonic play with
an abstract notion, that we have to seek his actual
achievements. History lived in his hands anew,
— the past being no longer indifferent to the
present, but linked to it indissolubly in one great
process of development. It is enough for the
present to indicate that this process is conceived
as the realisation of self - conscious life in the
widest sense — the realisation of the external con
ditions of such a life in society and the State,
and the attainment through religion and philo
sophy of that subjective satisfaction which comes

Hegel 's Doctrine of God and Man. 171

from the insight into the rationality and self-
centred completeness of the whole process. Such
a perfect demonstration may be, in the nature of
the case, a task too great for human powers.
Doubtless, too, Hegel's interpretations and se
quences may at times be arbitrary. The tend
ency to construct history in accordance with a fore
gone conclusion, rather than faithfully to construe
the refractory facts, can hardly fail to be some
times too strong for a man in whom ideas are
much alive. But when Hegel is at his best, he
is beyond such cavilling ; his profound knowledge
of the past is matched by the sympathetic insight
which enables him to go straight to the heart of
the matter in hand and lay bare its inner signifi
cance. So important is the historical side to
Hegel, that it may almost be said that history is
elevated in his hands into a philosophy. If the i
side of Hegel's thought that we have been con
sidering up till now exhibits him divorced from
reality altogether, we see here the counter-tend
ency — so at least it seems at first, — the tendency
to merge philosophy in history, and to take the
results of the historical process, just as they are,
for philosophic truth. The absolute philosophy
becomes in this way an absolute empiricism. The
actual is the rational, the real is the ideal ; and

172 Hegelianism and Personality.

the absolute takes up its abode among men in
the most unequivocal fashion. But this identi
fication of human history with the divine life
springs, as I propose to show, from the very same
attempt to bring together the real process in
time and the so - called eternal process of the
absolute self -consciousness. The attempt has just
been seen to collapse when made from the other
side. We have now to test its success when
made from the side of human history and finite
reality.

Here it is all-important to note at the outset
that, from the moment we touch Nature — the
perceptual elements of time and space — we are no
longer on logical ground "We are in the realm of
facts, and are dealing with the infinitely varied
particulars of concrete reality. It is no longer,
therefore, a logical or timeless evolution that we
I have before us, but a process of real development
/ in time. In view of the double sense of the term
development already adverted to, we should be at
pains to make this point clear ; for the conversion
of history into inetaphysic seems to depend upon
a subtle confusion of theVtwo senses. In the
first sense, as has been seen, development means
(- simply logical implication. This sense we have
in the ' Logic ' and in the construction of the Trin-

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 73

ity as given above : Ego logically implies non-Ego.
The second sense is the ordinary one, in which the
presence of the element of time is essential. In
a development so conceived the stages are sue-
cessive, each stage preparing the way for the next,
and then yielding place to it. Now it appears to
me that, just as Hegel tries to embrace within
logic the transition from logic to what is not
logic, so he contrives, though not in so many
words, to carry over into the real development
the associations of the first or logical sense of the
term. An impression is thus created that it is
permissible to treat time as an unessential factor,
which virtually disappears when the necessity of
the evolution has been grasped. And accordingly,
the way is prepared for identifying the long series
of events in time with a single perfect and time-
lessly existing Form. But even if we allow to
Hegel that, in the Philosophy of Nature and the
Philosophy of Spirit, we get not an actual history
but a philosophised history — that is to say, a state
ment of the essential or necessary moments in the
evolution freed from their time- vesture of detail-
it must still be maintained that the original, the
actual process, was one in which real being passed
from phase to phase in time. Indeed we may
go further and say that if we give up time we move

1 74 Hegelianism and Personality.

out of reality altogether. Nor need it be supposed
that ample acknowledgment of the time-nature
of the process is wanting in Hegel himself.
" History in general," he says, " is the develop
ment of Spirit in time." 1 And it is hardly
necessary to refer to his impressive and often-
quoted utterances in regard to the labour and the

1 Philosophy of History, 75 (Sibree's translation). Such
acknowledgments in Hegel will be found — and this is intelli
gible enough — to refer to history as opposed to nature. In this
passage he opposes history as the development of Spirit in time
to Nature as the " development of the idea in space" Space,
with the individuation and multiplicity to which it gives rise,
seems, rather than time, to be the outstanding feature of
Nature. Moreover, though Nature is undoubtedly in a pro
cess of perpetual change, and so subject to the dominion of
time, still change in Nature does not seem to carry with it the
notion of progress or real development. The system of things
seems to resolve itself into a few physical constants, which form
the permanent basis of all Nature's transformations ; and thus
change tends to take the form of cycles in which we recur at
the end to our first starting-point. This, at least, was Hegel's
view. "In Nature," he says, "there is nothing new under
the sun, and the multiform play of its phenomena so far only
induces a feeling of ennui. Only in those changes which take
place within the realm of Spirit does anything new take place."
—(Phil, of History, 65.) " The world of mind and the world of
matter," he says elsewhere, " continue to have this distinction,
that the latter moves only in a recurring cycle, while in the
former an advance or progress (Fortschreiten) certainly takes
place."— (Encyclopaedia, Wallace, 323.) This difference, em
bodied in the current opposition between the natural and the
historical sciences, does not, however, affect the character of
natural changes as events in time.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 175

pain — the slow travail, as one might say — under
taken by the spirit of the world — " the tremendous
labour of world-history," " the sacrifices that have
ever and anon been laid on the mighty altar of
the earth through the vast lapse of ages." x What
becomes of the whole Philosophy of History if we
deny a real development in time ? Or where shall
we find a place, in that case, for the History of
Philosophy and for the historical development of
Art and Eeligion, so fully treated by Hegel ? All
these disciplines necessarily assume that we are
dealing not with a logical process but with a real
development in time. And it is implied in all
real development that, though the less perfect is
destined to give place to the more perfect, yet the
less perfect exists in its own time and place no
less than the more perfect to which it leads up.2
Accepting, then, these characteristics of history

1 See the prefaces to the Phenomenology and the Philosophy
of History.

2 Every form except the highest must, of course, according
to Hegel's phraseology, be "untrue," — that is to say, in
adequate to its notion. But in spite of that it is none the
less actual, and to be reckoned with as such. It may either co
exist with the more perfect form, as often happens, or, if it has
disappeared, still it did exist, and formed the real condition of
the present existence of that which has supplanted it. This
pretension, as Hamilton would have called it — this stretching
out of the contents of reality in time — makes it impossible to
resume all existence in one perfect form, as Hegel tends to do,

1 76 Hegelianism and Personality.

as a real development, let us look shortly at
Hegel's philosophical conclusions. Nature is a
process towards spirit: it is the becoming of
spirit, and is only intelligible when related to its
end or outcome, which is, therefore, at the same
time its immanent or indwelling purpose. Spirit
appears at first as the sensuous or merely natural
consciousness — a centre of sensation and desire,
but otherwise hardly separated, as it were, from
the nature in which it is rooted. History — that
is, the history of humanity, of civilisation — is the
record of the gradual unfolding of the potential
ities of reason that lay concealed within this
insignificant and unpromising beginning.1 " The
destiny of the spiritual world and the final cause
of the world at large," Hegel declares to be, " the
consciousness of its own freedom on the part of
spirit, and, ipso facto, the reality of that free
dom."2 Out of the conflicting passions and in
terests of men there is built up — built up ~by

when he dismisses this and the other phenomenon from con
sideration on the plea that they are " untrue."

1 "History constitutes the rational necessary course of the
World-spirit — that spirit whose nature is always one and the
same, but which unfolds this one nature in the phenomena of
the world's existence." " History exhibits spirit in the pro
cess of working out the knowledge of that which it is poten
tially." — Philosophy of History, 11 and 18.

2 Philosophy of History, 20.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 77

them, acting as the unconscious instruments of
reason — that stable system of law and custom
which sets bounds to individual lawlessness and
caprice. This edifice of institutions, laws, and
customs goes by the name of the Objective Spirit ;
in it spirit is, as it were, externalised, and takes
visible shape before us. The perfect form of this
edifice is the rationally organised state. Only
within the bounds of ordinance thus set can the
true destiny of spirit be realised; that is, only
here can it come to full consciousness of itself.
Universal history traces the rise and fall of states
— i.e., of the different national forms in which the
Ideal of Freedom has been approximately realised,
leading us eventually to the culminating, and, as
it would seem, perfect realisation of the Idea in
the modern German constitution. The succes
sive forms pass away, being judged, as it were,
and superseded by the further progress of history ;
but the whole process is "the unfolding and
realisation of the universal spirit : " 1 or, as it is
expressed in the ' Phenomenology,' " the World-
spirit had the patience to traverse these forms
in the long extent of time, and to undertake the
tremendous labour of world-history, in the course
of which he infused into each form all of his own

1 "VVerke, viii. 431 (from the Philosophy of Law).
M

1 78 Hegelianism and Personality.

content which it was capable of holding ; and
he did so because by no less a labour could he
attain to a consciousness of his own nature." x
This consciousness is practically realised in the
state which Hegel terms the divine Idea as it
exists on earth.2 In it, he says, " the true atone
ment or reconciliation is made objective — the
atonement which unfolds the State as the image
and reality of reason, in which self-consciousness
finds in organic development the reality of its
own inmost knowing and willing."3 The same
atonement or reconciliation is realised in the
subjective sphere of feeling, through religion, and
in the element of knowledge through philosophy.
In the Hegelian philosophy, Spirit at last reaches
complete insight into its own nature — complete
self - consciousness. This perfect self-knowledge
it is which supplies us with the key to the past,
enabling us to trace an orderly progress in what
were otherwise an aimless succession of mutu
ally contradictory views. Unrolled in the light
of consummation, the history of philosophy ap
pears as " the history of thought finding itself." 4

1 Werke, ii. 24. 2 Philosophy of History, 41.

3 Werke, viii. 440 (Philosophy of Law).

4 Die Geschichte von dem Sichselbstfinden des Gedankens. —
"Werke, xiii. 15.

Hegel 's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 79

" The time is certainly long which Spirit requires
to work out philosophy for itself. But as regards
the slowness of the World-spirit, we must reflect
that he is not pressed. He has no need of hurry,
and has time enough : a thousand years are be
fore Thee as one day." x

The substitution of the obviously more con
venient term "Weltgeist," or World - spirit, in
several of these passages, need not obscure the
fact that Hegel knows but one subject of the
development. The real development here traced
is a development of what he calls in the ' Phae-
nomenology ' " the universal individual " or " the
universal self ; " 2 it is the Absolute itself which
arrives at full self-consciousness in the absolute
philosophy. The Absolute is this process and
its culmination. And it will be noted that just
as this view of the Absolute comes into prom
inence, the other view of it as existing timelessly
in static perfection recedes into the background,
and becomes unreal. It is, however, the very
gist and heart of the Hegelian philosophy that
these two are one. The Absolute of the system
is professedly a reconciliation of the divine and
the human, the infinite and the finite, aspects
of existence ; and in order to achieve this unity,

1 Werke, xiii. 49. 2 Ibid., ii. 22 and 25.

1 80 Hegelianism and Personality.

(Hegel is bound to represent the subject of the
, development and the perfect subject which

V forms the presupposition of the whole develop
ment as one and the same subject. He turns
round, therefore, to assure us that what thus
appears under the form of time exists really in
an eternal present. For example, he adds to the
quotation made above : " A thousand years are
before Thee as one day: He has time enough,
just because He is Himself out of time ; because
He is eternal."

The appearance of unity is thus gained by
pressing the philosophical or Aristotelian view of
evolution, which implies the presence of the End
in the beginning. The Idea, Hegel would seem to
say, is the eternal, which possesses itself equally
in each of its forms — to which, therefore, the time-

- / evolution is in a sense indifferent. But, in point
of fact, this application of the philosophical notion
I of development does not give a true rendering of
the doctrine. Hegel's view practically identifies
the different stages ; to be implicit and to be ex
plicit makes no real difference to what may be
called the developing subject. In the real world,
however, this does constitute a difference to the
developing subject, and without this real difference
the notion of development would disappear alto-

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 8 1

gether. The oak-subject is different when it is an
acorn from what it is when it is a full-grown oak ;
the human subject is different as a child from the
same subject as the full-grown philosopher. And
what is more, only one stage is real at a time.1
The subject of these transformations does not
exist as the perfect form while it is still strug
gling towards it ; it does not exist as the evepyeia,
while it is still in the 5iW/u9, and when it has
attained the evGpyeia, it exists no longer as the
Suva/us. The acorn does not exist as the oak-tree
while it is still the acorn, but only afterwards
when it has grown into the oak ; and then it no
longer exists as the acorn. If we apply the same
idea to the process of the universe, and treat it as
the evolution of a single subject or Universal
Self, we must, if the process is to be a real one
and to correspond to the notion of development,
have a self which grows from less to more — a self,
at least, which is somehow different at A from
what it is at B, and still more different from what
it is at its culmination in Z. We must either

1 This is quite consistent with saying that nothing of the
past is lost. As Hegel puts it, " The grades which spirit seems
to have left behind, it still possesses in the depth of its present."
But they do not exist now in the same sense in which they
existed then ; their present existence is only in the form of
memory, conscious or organic.

1 8 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

admit a growing Absolute of this description, or
say that the Absolute exists only in eternal per
fection at Z, and that A, B, C, D, and the rest
are the result of something very like subjective
' illusion. Passages might be quoted from Hegel
which apparently make for the latter view. Per
haps the strongest of these is in the 'Encyclopedia/
where he says : " Objectivity is, as it were, only a
hull or wrapping under which the Notion lies con
cealed. . . . The consummation of the infinite End
or Aim consists, therefore, merely in removing the
illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished.
. . . This illusion it is under which we live, and
it alone supplies the actualising force on which
our interest in the world depends. In the course
of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion by
setting up an antithesis to confront itself, and its
action consists in getting rid of the illusion which
it has created."1 But such a passage does not
fairly represent the general tenor of his thought :
this morally paralysing view of existence repre
sents rather a rebound on Hegel's part from the
opposite extreme of a growing God. For, as he
insists himself so strongly in his criticisms of
Fichte, it is absurd to place the reality of the

1 Wallace, 304.

Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 183

universe in an End which is nowhere as yet
realised. On precisely the same grounds, it is a
perversion of the notion of immanent develop
ment to argue as if a development could be ex
plained by a principle which, at the outset of the
development, existed, as the saying is, only poten
tially. If the completed self-consciousness is £o
be in truth the actuality — the moving and direct- .,
ing power — of the whole process, then it must'''
exist as such throughout the process. But in
that case it cannot be identified, as Hegel iden
tifies it, with the subject which undergoes devel
opment, and which distinctly does not exist in
completeness except at the end of the process, if,
indeed, then. In other words, we have not onejx-
subject, but two. To fall back upon one simple
instance — which, of course, is only an analogue —
the full-grown oak gives rise to the fresh acorn,
but the oak-subject is not therefore to be iden
tified with the acorn-subject which passes from
stage to stage, and eventually becomes an oak
itself. Similarly, although we may assume a
divine Subject as in some, to us incomprehensible,
way, the author and inspirer of the time-develop
ment which is for us the immediately real, it no
wise follows that the divine Subject is to be iden-

1 84 Hegelianism and Personality.

tified with the Subject which undergoes this de
velopment — or rather, we should say, with the
'innumerable subjects of this development, for there
;is no one Subject of history, and to speak of the

(World-spirit as such is at most a pardonable
figure of speech.

LECTUEE VI.

HEGELIANISM AS AN ABSOLUTE SYSTEM.

I ENDEAVOURED in the preceding Lecture to point
out two lines of thought in Hegel. The one starts
from the idea of God, which is Neo-Platonically
constructed as Trinity in unity, but which is
simply the idea of knowledge as such, treated as
a real being. There is no passage from this w
hypostatised conception to the facts of the finite
world. The second line of thought starts with
these facts, and treats the historical development
of humanity as the process in which the Absolute
comes to itself. These two lines of thought, I
argued, are not successfully brought together by
Hegel, and the attempt to bring them together
involves a violation of the true notion of develop
ment. One of these views was bound to give way
to the other; and it was only natural that the

1 86 Hegelianism and Personality.

strength which the second view derived from its
contact with reality should enable it to triumph
over the first. This is observable in Hegel him
self, and still more in the history of the school.
In spite of a certain mystic or Platonic vein,
there never lived a man more wedded to hard
fact than Hegel ; and he had an instinctive aver
sion to seeking the Divine in some ideal beyond
the confines of the world that now is. God must
be found here, he argued, or not at all. Hence
he came more and more strongly to insist upon
the fact that the revelation and the reality of the
Divine existence is contained in history. He
undoubtedly insists in this connection on much
that is true ; but when the position is trans
formed by some of his ablest followers into a
frank identification of the Absolute with man,
we are face to face with a consequence of the
Hegelian argument to which attention has not
yet been called.

This is, that if we identify the Absolute with
the subject of the development, we are unable to
rise higher than man's actual achievement, and
are therefore inevitably led to put man in the
place of God. God or the Absolute is represented
in the system as the last term of a development
into which we have a perfect insight ; we our-

Hegelianism as an A bsolute System. 187

selves, indeed, as absolute philosophers, are equally
the last term of the development. It is impos
sible, therefore, to discriminate in the account
given between the absolute philosopher and God.
The philosopher's knowledge is God's knowledge
of himself ; and, with some reservations as to par
ticularity and contingency, this knowledge is
apparently put forward as perfectly adequate.
No provision is made, no room seemingly is left,
for any further knowledge of himself on God's
part. The Philosophy of Law, of History, of
^Esthetics, of Eeligion, and the History of Philo
sophy itself, all conclude in the same style. The
Absolute is attained in each of these spheres,
being simply man's record and ultimate attain
ment along these various lines. " God is not a .
Spirit beyond the stars," says Hegel. " He is
Spirit in all spirits " * — a true thought finely j
expressed. But if the system leaves us without '
any self-conscious existence in the universe be
yond that realised in the self-consciousness of
individual philosophers, the saying means that
God, in any ordinary acceptation of the word, is
eliminated from our philosophy altogether. Thus
translated, it is no longer fine and no longer true.
The same tendency is observable throughout the
1 Werke, xi. 24.

1 88 Hegelianism and Personality.

' Philosophy of Keligion/ where we should natu
rally expect to meet it least. The self-existence
i of God, if I may so speak, seems to disappear;
I God is begotten, and has His only reality in the
I consciousness of the worshipping community.
Evidently this is to renounce the idea of any
thing like a separate personality or self-conscious
ness in the Divine Being. Whether Hegel had
himself explicitly renounced the idea, it is perhaps
impossible to say with certainty. Many students
from his own day till now have refused to draw
this conclusion from his writings, finding in them,
as I am far from denying, numerous passages
which seem to support their view. But to me
most of these utterances have a doubtful ring.
The drift of Hegel's mind appears to me, on the
whole, to be in the opposite direction ; and the
religious or theological form into which he often
/throws his thought I cannot regard as other than
I a metaphorical expression of positions which, in
j themselves, have no affinity with the dogmas in
/ question. In a notable passage in the ' Philosophy
of Eeligion,' he frankly compares his own treat
ment of the Christian dogmas to the procedure of
the Neo-Platonists in infusing a philosophic mean
ing into the popular mythology which preceding
thinkers of a rationalistic turn had altogether cast

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 189

aside.1 But whatever may have been Hegel's
personal position in the matter, the negative view
taken by his most daring and perhaps his ablest
followers — the Hegelians of the Left, as they
were called — would appear to be the only one for
which, in consistency, the system has room. For
as water cannot rise higher than its source, so the
development cannot go further than the philo
sopher himself. As long as we claim to have an
absolute philosophy in the Hegelian sense, so long
must we identify our own thought with the
divine, and treat the Absolute as a mere ex
pression for human achievement in its different
spheres.

This consequence was frankly avowed by the
Hegelians of the Left. The Absolute realises
itself, they declared, only in the human indi
vidual. Behind or beside the individuals, there
exists only the logical Idea, in which we are
asked to recognise the ultimate self-sustaining
reality of the universe.2 The Absolute, accord
ingly, is not a complete and eternally existent

1 Werke, xi. 95.

2 Hegel himself, it may be remarked, had spoken of the
logical Idea as "the realm of truth as it is without hull or
wrapping in and for itself" — "the exposition of God as he is
in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature or any
finite spirit." — Ibid., iii. 36.

J

1 90 Hegelianism and Personality.

self-consciousness, but an impersonal system of
thought. This is the only thing permanent in
phenomena ; from it the phenomenal world
arises, and into it it returns. In man this im
personal Absolute — this eternal system of ab
stract thoughts — comes to consciousness of itself.
Human persons are, as it were, the foci in which
the impersonal life, of thought momentarily con
centrates itself, in order to take stock of its own
contents. These foci appear only to disappear in
. the perpetual process of this realisation.

The independent existence here attributed to
abstract thoughts or categories makes this result
one of the most remarkable theories on record.
The categories not only exist of themselves, but
they creatively give rise to the phenomenal world
of men and things. In comparison with this
apotheosis of logic, materialism itself seems
mildly reasonable. Yet these Hegelians of the
Left — men like Feuerbach, Euge, Strauss, Bruno
Bauer, and others — were only taking literally
Hegel's own statements about the Logic, and
abolishing that supreme Spirit, for whom, so long
as the Absolute is identified with the subject of
the process, there is really no room in the system.
Indeed we may go further, and say that this is
the natural outcome of a theory which endeav-

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 191

ours to construct reality out of the logical Idea.
What other result could we expect than that
both God and man, as real beings, would vanish
back into their source, leaving us with the logi
cal Idea itself as the sole reality ? This is as
serted in so many words of God. Man, of course,
as a phenomenal existence, is in evidence, and
cannot be simply denied ; but he, too, is robbed
of all true personality, and appears only as the
vanishing centre of a system of knowledge, an
exemplification of the form of consciousness in
general. The Idea is all in all. Truly, as Dr
Stirling says, the Idea so conceived is " a blind, ,|
dumb, invisible idol," and the theory is " the jf.
most hopeless theory that has ever been offered /
to humanity."1 And it is instructive to notice'
how the most absolute Idealism and Eationalism
historically transformed itself into its diametrical
opposite — into the most thoroughgoing Material
ism and Sensualism. The process may be traced
in Feuerbach, Strauss, and others. For if the
Idea realises itself in man alone, then man, as
this sensuous individual, is the only reality which
in any wise concerns us. The metaphysical pri
ority assigned to the logical system pales before
the imperative reality of the senses. " The new

1 Schwegler, 474 and 435.

1 92 Hegelianism and Personality.

philosophy," says Feuerbach, laying down the
lines of the ' Philosophic der Zukunft,' " has for
its subject not the Ego, not absolute, that is,
abstract, Spirit, in short not Eeason in dbstracto,
but the actual and whole essence of man. The
reality, the subject of reason, is only man. Man
thinks, not the Ego, not Eeason. The new phil
osophy rests therefore on the divinity (Gfottheit),
that is, the truth, of the whole man. If the old
philosophy said, 'Only the rational is the true
and the real/ the new philosophy says, on the
other hand, only the human is the true and the
real ; for only the human is the rational. Man
is the measure of reason." x A personal God to
this philosophy is no more than man's projection
of his own image upon the screen of his imagina
tion. Immortality is likewise a delusion ; to the
individual belongs only the sensuous present.
As Idealism does not recognise the distinction of
popular philosophy between the body and the
soul, the reality of man is thus, practically,
identified with his bodily existence, and we pass
to a consistent Sensationalism and an essentially
materialistic view of the universe.2 A similar

1 Philosophic der Zukunft, § 51, quoted by Harms.

2 A logical Idealism of the Hegelian stamp lies, in truth, in
some respects very near to Materialism. The categories, it is no

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 193

transition to Materialism, or something indis
tinguishable from it, achieved itself more slowly
in Strauss. Strauss began his career as one of
the ablest and clearest of Hegel's followers. His
last book, ' The Old Faith and the New ' — a very
interesting personal record — is to all intents and
purposes a confession of Materialism. But, in
deed, what is the difference between Idealism
and Materialism, if in the one case human existj
ence is the outcome of an unconscious system of
logical conceptions, and in the other the outcome *"
of unconscious matter ? In the latter case, mai
is the chance result of mechanical laws ; in the
former, the process is said to be controlled by a
logical necessity. But in both cases the evolu
tion is for us — and for us alone it exists — in a ,
true sense aimless. It is a spectacle constantly /
repeated, but it discards and tramples under foot /
those conscious ends which alone are to be/
deemed worthy of attainment. If we take awa'y
from Idealism personality, and the ideals that
belong to personality, it ceases to be Idealism in
the historic sense of that word. To call it so is

doubt asserted, form the immanent reality of the material uni
verse ; and therefore, when man arises out of Nature, it is as
if thought came to itself. But the frank derivation of man
from Nature holds its own, while the unsubstantial basis of
categories falls altogether into the background.

N

194 Hegelianism and Personality.

merely confusing the issues, for it has joined
hands with the enemy, and fights on the other
side of the field.

A very simple reflection, however, suffices to
deliver us from these results. We have only to
remember that to speak of the self-existence of
thoughts, without a thinker whose they are, is to
use words without a meaning; and the whole
fabric of this Hegelianism of the Left collapses.
Nevertheless, as has been contended, it has the
consistency of the system on its side, so long as
we identify the Absolute with our knowledge of
the Absolute, and take the process of human
development as in very truth the evolution of
God. Hegel's determination to have one process
and one subject was the original fountain of
error. This identification, therefore, is what we
must begin by denying. The development we
can trace is not the development of God, but of
man's thoughts about God — a development, there
fore, which does not affect the existence of their
object. In the history of philosophy, for ex
ample, who can believe that we have the suc
cessive stages by which God arrived at a know
ledge of Himself, complete knowledge being dated
from the beginning of the present century ?
What we really have is the history of man's

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 195

repeated efforts to solve the problem of the uni
verse — a history which, even from this point of
view, we might not unreasonably expect to show
marks of progress and increasing insight ; though
even at the end, if we are honest with ourselves,
the insight is so dim that the title of absolute
knowledge applied to it has the sound of Mephis-
tophelian mockery. It is, if possible, even more
plainly so in the case of religion. What is re
ligion, if not an attitude of the subjective spirit
of man ? We are here altogether on human
ground. And the same is true of art, and of
history itself — the history of civilisation, of states
and empires. Is it not effrontery to narrow
down the Spirit of the universe to a series of
events upon this planet ? Can we believe, as
Lotze puts it, "that the creative cause of the
universe issued from its darkness into the light
of manifestation only by the narrow path of
earthly nature, and after having formed man and
human life again retreated into infinity, as if
with all its ends accomplished ? For this dia
lectical idyll we must substitute an outlook into
the boundlessness of other worlds, not with the
vain effort to know the unknowable, but with the
view of letting the boundlessness of this back
ground mark out the narrow limits of the realm

1 96 Hegelianism and Personality.

of existence actually knowable by us." 1 It seems
strange, he adds, in the ' Metaphysic,' that these
Idealists, though fully aware of the Copernican
discoveries and living under their influence,
"should yet be able to persuade themselves
that the spiritual development of their Abso
lute was confined to the shores of the Mediter
ranean." 2 Surely the explicit statement of such
results is sufficient to discredit them. Only
under cover of an ambiguous phrase can they
have been believed.

It is perhaps in ethics and politics, which are
essentially sciences of the ideal — the ought-to-be
— that the malign influences of Hegel's attitude
are most clearly seen. I am fully aware while
saying this, that it is precisely in these spheres
that some of Hegel's best work was done. But
while recognising the solidity and strength of his
writing on these subjects, it is impossible to shut
our eyes to the assumption of finality made here
as elsewhere. And it is natural that in this more
concrete sphere the assumption should appear
more grossly at variance with the facts of the
case. There are few more constantly recurring
polemics in Hegel than that which he carries on

1 Lotze, Microcosmus I. 458 (English translation).

2 Metaphysic, 379 (Clarendon Press).

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 197

against Fichte's Sollen, the attempt, that is, to
interpret the universe entirely through the notion
of duty, something that is not, but is to be. As
against this conception Hegel repeatedly tells us
that " the Idea is not so feeble as merely to have
a right or an obligation to exist without actually
existing."1 And he is fond of justifying his
position by reference to the religious conscious
ness. " The religious mind," he says, " views the
world as ruled by Divine Providence, and there
fore as corresponding with what it ought to be ; "
or in more technical language, the Will must re
turn to the point of view of Intelligence or cogni
tion, which " apprehends the world as the notion
actual." 2 " It is easier," he says in the 'Philosophy
of History,' "to discover a deficiency in individuals,
in states, and in Providence, than to see their real
import. This subjective fault-finding is easy. . . .
Age generally makes men more tolerant ; youth
is always discontented. . . . The insight, then, ;
to which philosophy is to lead us is, that the real
world is as it ought to be." 3

Now there is no difficulty in admitting that
when we try speculatively to comprehend all
existence within our view, it is impossible to rest

1 Wallace, 9. - Ibid., 322, 323.

3 English translation, 38.

198 Hegelianism and Personality.

in Fichte's position. This has been already urged
in a former lecture, and it was eventually admit
ted by Fichte himself in the emphasis which he
laid in his later writings upon the actuality of
God as distinct from the process of becoming.
Both this later position of Fichte's, therefore, and
the religious point of view to which Hegel ap
peals, affirm the reality of the Ideal ; but there
seems to be a not unimportant difference between
the sense in which they do so and that in which
Hegel asserts it. Hegel's invocation of " the reli
gious mind " here is perhaps hardly fair. It is
quite true that the religious man views the world
as ruled by Divine Providence, but this view is
surely to be interpreted as a faith or belief — a
faith which he clings to, may one not say, often
with a species of desperation in the face of anom
alies and difficulties which he cannot pretend to
solve. This faith is his last refuge against com
plete moral scepticism ; but he does not profess to
see the plan of the Divine government. Still less
does he make any assertion of the perfection of
the actual world, such as Hegel puts in his
mouth. On the contrary, the religious man is
almost always found painting the present state of
things in the darkest colours ; and, if his religion
be real, this is the source of his energy as a

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 199

practical reformer. Hegel's position is essentially
different. His whole theory leads him up to the
assertion that here too, just as in knowledge, the
circle is closed, finality is attained; the ideal is
real, and we see that it is so.

This position is most clearly expressed in the
' Philosophic des Eechts/ published in 1820. But
the acceptance, nay, the worship, of mere fact
which it consistently involves is so destructive of
all ethical ideals, and the air of almost brutal
Actualism so fatal to further progress, that, when
Hegel slipped into the unqualified assertion of it
in the Preface to this work, the utterance roused
something like a storm of obloquy. It is here
that the famous saying occurs — " What is
rational is real, and what is real is rational ; "
and it is followed by other passages equally
strong. " This treatise is intended to be nothing
else than an attempt to comprehend and to exhibit
the State as an existence essentially rational.
As a philosophical work, it must most carefully
avoid all construction of a State as it ought to be.
The instruction which it may contain does not lie
in instructing the State as to the form in which
it ought to be, but simply in teaching how the
State, the moral universe, is to be cognised. The
task of philosophy is to understand the ' what is,'

2OO Hegelianism and Personality.

for ' what is ' is reason." x Thus on his recon
struction or transcript of man's creation, Hegel
echoes the verdict of the Divine Workman, when
He saw everything He had made, and, behold, it
was very good. The resemblance is striking, and
was dictated by the whole tenor of his philos
ophy. But such praise applied to the Prussian
State in the year 1820 seems to have almost too
strong an infusion of the tolerance of age which
he commends as the insight of true philosophy.
We can scarcely wonder that his enemies at
tributed such utterances to no loftier source than
the optimistic conservatism of the man with
whom the world has dealt liberally and who sees
his own life -purpose achieved. Hegel was
branded as a reactionary, as the " official " phil
osopher of the Prussian State, whose business it
was to rehabilitate the actual by decking it out
in the trappings of rational necessity. In this
his enemies were certainly unjust. The state
ments in question are not insincere opportunisms ;
they are the genuine outcome of one whole side
of Hegel's thought. That side was uppermost
when he wrote the ' Philosophy of Law,' and they
seem to have slipped from him almost uncon
sciously in this strong and unqualified form.
1 Werke, viii. 18.

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 201

The clamour, however, to which this Preface
gave rise, roused Hegel to a sense of his im
prudence, and to an acknowledgment that his
statements were not to be taken in their frank
literal meaning. In the Introduction to the
' Encyclopaedia ' x he expressly replied to his
critics in a passage which reads very like a
palinode. He begins by sheltering himself be
hind the religious doctrine already referred to,
and then proceeds as follows : " Existence is in
part mere appearance, and only in part reality.
In common life, any freak or error, evil and
everything of the nature of evil, as well as every
miserable and transient existence whatever, gets
in a careless way, and as it were by accident, the
name of reality. But even our ordinary feelings
are enough to forbid an accidental existence get
ting the emphatic name of a reality. When I
spoke of the real, it might have been understood
in what sense I used the term, seeing that in a
detailed Logic I had treated among other things
of Reality, and had accurately distinguished it
not only from the contingent, which, after all, has
also existence, but even from the ordinary cate
gories of mere existence (Dasein, Existenz und

1 A second edition of the ' Encyclopaedia ' appeared in 1827,
a third in 1830.

202 Hegelianism and Personality.

andern Bestimmungeri)." " The understanding
prides itself/' he proceeds, " upon its ' Ought/
which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing on
the field of politics ; . . . for who is not acute
enough to see a great deal in his own surround
ings which is really far from being what it ought
to be ? But such acuteness is mistaken in the
conceit that when it examines these objects, and
pronounces what they ought to be, it is dealing
with the interests of philosophical science. Phil
osophy has to do only with the Idea — with a
reality, therefore, of which those objects, institu
tions, and conditions represent only the outward
and superficial side." x

The Preface does not mean, therefore, that
"whatever is is right." Not the real in the
ordinary sense of that word is the rational, but
only the truly real — that which reason justifies
as such. The Idea realises itself, but still the
external fabric cannot be taken as its complete
or even consistent realisation. In short, the real,
so far as it is rational, is rational; the rest we
leave out of account. We deny the term real of
that which is not rational. Surely this is to
reduce the position to an empty tautology.

This equivocation between " the real " and " the

1 Werke, vi. 10, 11 ; Wallace, 8, 9.

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 203

truly real" is more, however, than an isolated quib
ble on Hegel's part to extricate himself from an
uncomfortable position. It is not a piece of con
scious insincerity ; for we can hardly impute to
him the stony-hearted optimism and the pecu
liarly gross empiricism which a literal rendering
of his words would imply. He probably meant
to say substantially what he afterwards explained
that he had meant — namely, that on the whole a
purpose of reason is visible in the social and legal
structures of mankind. Philosophy, working on
the great scale, can afford to neglect exceptions,
misgrowths, positive evils. In itself, this is per
haps an intelligible and justifiable position, but
is it one which is open to an absolute philosophy ?
The old difficulty of the contingent, of reality as
such, is upon us again, and again Hegel tries to
wave it contemptuously aside. The embarrassing
facts are not " truly real," or, more concisely still,
they are not " true." Hegel's use of this con
stantly recurring term is little more than an index
to the difficulty in question. In the ' Logic '
every higher category is looked upon as the
" truth " of the lower, and the Absolute Idea is
the full truth of which all the preceding forms
of thought were imperfect expressions. Used
thus of categories or abstract definitions, the term

204 Hegelianism and Personality.

is sufficiently in place, and might be rendered by
a phrase like " adequate expression." But it re
ceives from Hegel a much wider extension, being
applied to existences as well as to conceptions.
Here the ambiguity begins, for an existence is
properly said to have "reality," truth being a
term properly applicable to conceptions alone,
and signifying their correspondence with reality.
We have, however, the advantage of an express
declaration by Hegel as to the sense to be at
tached to the term in this new connection. He
distinguishes " truth " in his usage from mere
correctness or " formal truth," as he calls it.
" Truth in the deeper sense consists in the iden
tity between objectivity and the notion. It is in
this deeper sense that truth is understood when
we speak of a true State or a true work of art.
These objects are true, if they are as they ought
to be — i.e., if their reality corresponds to their
notion. When thus viewed, to ~be untrue means
much the same as to be bad. A bad man is an
untrue man, one who does not behave as his
notion or vocation requires of him." 1 Hegel
has the grace to say in another place that " when
the term untrue occurs in a philosophical dis
cussion, it does not signify that the thing to
1 Wallace, 306.

Hegelianism as an Absohite System. 205

which it is applied does not exist. A bad State
or a sick body may certainly exist ; but these
objects are untrue, because their notion and their
reality are out of harmony." x Nevertheless, he
seems to say, such existences do not count; we
may exclude them from our reckoning altogether,
Would that we could believe this comfortable
saying! That these facts have no place in an
absolute system — that they " ought not " to be
there — is plain enough. They are the standing-
refutation of its claims. But dismissed in this
fashion they cannot be.

The distinction which Hegel here attempts to
draw marks the reappearance of the other line of
thought which runs through the system. This
Platonising strain, as it has been aptly named,2
predominates in the 'Logic,' and appears more
or less in other works, but is markedly absent in
the ' Philosophy of Law.' Under its influence, as
we have seen, Hegel, like Plato, seeks reality not
in the actual world, but in the eternal realm of
an absolute and self-guaranteeing thought. The
world of timeless forms is the real world, not the
world of existing things and persons. To this

1 Ibid., 211.

2 By Hay in in his ' Hegel und seine Zeit,' a book a good deal
marred by its rhetorical strain and a semi-popular looseness of
treatment, but often containing suggestive criticisms.

206 Hegelianism and Personality.

latter world Hegel (when following out this train
of thought) accords, like Plato, only as it were
a quasi- reality. He even speaks, as we have
seen, of the whole course of finite development
as a species of illusion — "only a hull or wrap
ping under which the notion lies concealed."
But, on the other hand, the identity of the real
and the ideal is to an absolute system the very
breath of its life. " The real is rational " is the
necessary complement of "the rational is real."
Hence Hegel's apparent rebound from his Plato-
rising strain to the opposite extreme of Empiri-
ism or Actualism. His philosophy can justify
tself only as the union of its Platonism with its
Empiricism, or as the exhibition of the one in the
>ther. Divorced from the world of facts, the
latonism or Idealism is all in the air. The
eality of the rational is ultimately the proof
f its rationality ; for unless it asserts itself in
existence, the circle of the system is not closed.
Just so far indeed as the real does not correspond
to the rational, the system itself falls to the
ground, and its statements as to the nature of
the rational take the character of undemonstrated
assertions. Sweeping, therefore, though the state
ments in the ' Philosophy of Law ' and the ' Philo
sophy of History ' are, they seem to me to repre-

Hegelianism as an A b so hit e System. 207

sent the attitude which an absolute philosophy must
necessarily assume so long as it is animated by a
confident belief in itself. Strictly speaking, we can
have no standing-ground in a system like Hegel's
from which to criticise the actual. None the less,
however, is this attitude one which will not bear
examination. It only requires to be openly avowed,
as here by Hegel, and it is at once seen to be un
tenable. The explanations or apologies to which
Hegel has recourse do but acknowledge with a bad
grace that the brave words formerly used will not
bear to be pressed. The real and the ideal do
not coincide or interpenetrate, and the two sides
of the system are therefore not really brought
together. Nature or existence, says Hegel, is the
home of Contingency, and so it fails of truth —
fails, that is, to body forth the notion. Necessity,
says Plato, is mingled with Eeason in the origin
of the world, and Eeason cannot quite subdue
Necessity to itself. The very form of words is
almost the same, in which the two thinkers
record their own failure in the attempt to con
ceal it.

If we turn to the ' Philosophy of Law/ it will
be found that, in spite of Hegel's subsequent at
tempts to guard his meaning, the descriptions of
it in the Preface were essentially correct. It is

208 Hegelianism and Personality.

a transcript of what is — of existing institutions
and customs, and of the existent State. There
is throughout the book none of the enthusiasm
of moral progress which meets us, for example,
in Kant and Fichte. Indeed the inner side of
actions — that which constitutes their whole moral
significance — is hurriedly passed over, in order
to arrive at a consideration of those bonds of
social observance which keep the individual right,
as it were, without his thinking about it.1 The
conscientious or self-questioning habit of mind is
studiously depreciated, and no higher standard is
set up than that of the society in which a man
lives. Do as others do ; perform the duties of your
station ; be a good father and a good citizen,
and get rid of windy enthusiasms. Such is the
temper of the book from first to last. It is, as
it were, the externalisation of morality. For the
inner fact of duty there is substituted an auto
matic adaptation to an external mechanism of
observance and respectability. Unquestionably
there is a great deal of massive common-sense in
all this ; and Hegel is never happier than when
administering a slap in the face to some superfine

1 It need hardly be pointed out that though the title of the
book is the 'Philosophy of Law' (Philosophic des Rechts), it
is a complete treatise on Hegelian ethics.

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 209

feeling. But it is also true that it is the justifi
cation of the existing standard. It is the mood
of satisfied acquiescence in things as they are,
which the years bring to the man of the world
— a mood as far removed as possible from the
atmosphere of moral endeavour. There is in it
no impulse onwards, no impulse upwards. It is
an atmosphere fatal to moral progress, and ulti
mately fatal to morality itself. Green is not slow
to point out that the habit of conscientiousness —
of moral self -interrogation — is the very main
spring of morality, essential even for preventing
the deterioration of moral practice, much more
so for the elevation of the existing standard.
" The standard of respectability," he says, " could
never have been attained, if the temper which
acquiesces in it had been universal — if no one
had been lifted above that acquiescence — in the
past. It has been reached through the action
of men who, each in his time and turn, have
refused to accept the way of living which they
found about them."1 Hence when he comes to
treat of ethics, Green is forced to desert the
Hegelian Absolutism, and to insist upon " an
ideal of virtue " as " the spring from which moral
ity perpetually renews its life." He philosophises

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 324.
0

2 io Hegelianism and Personality.

here more in the spirit of Kant and Fichte than of
Hegel. Fichte is in a manner the typical moral
ist; for the moral man can never tell himself
that he has already attained. In the character
of logical necessity which he imparts to the
historical process, and in his contention that the
goal is reached and the long march of the Spirit
ended, Hegel's attitude is as typically non-ethical.
This attitude of attainment and finality is also
curiously observable in the ' Philosophy of History.'
As Haym observes, the Hegelian philosophy of
history has no future. From youth in Greece
and manhood in Eome, Spirit has advanced in
the German or Teutonic world to the stadium of
old age. It is true, Hegel adds that while the
old age of nature is weakness that of Spirit is its
perfect maturity and strength ; but he fully
accepts the finality of the comparison.1 Yet, as
the same writer acutely points out, this would-
be absolute and final philosophy naively supplies
us with its own condemnation. All readers of
Hegel will remember the finely inspired passage
in which he compares philosophy to the owl of
Minerva. It forms the conclusion of the Preface
to the ' Philosophy of Law,' and breathes at its
outset the same spirit as the passages formerly

1 Philosophy of History, 115 (English translation).

Hegelianism as an A bsolute System. 211

quoted : " If it were the purpose of philosophy to
reform and improve the existing state of things,
it comes a little too late for such a task. It is
only when the actual world has reached its full
fruition that the ideal rises to confront the reality,
and builds up, in the shape of an intellectual
realm, that same world grasped in its substan
tial being. When philosophy paints its grey
in grey, some one shape of life has meanwhile
grown old : and grey in grey, though it brings
it into knowledge, cannot make it young again.
The owl of Minerva does not start upon its flight
until the evening twilight has begun to fall."
" Just as each individual," he says a little before,
" is the son of his own time, so philosophy is its
own time formulated or reduced to thoughts (in
Gedanken erfasst) ; it is as foolish to imagine
that a philosophy can go beyond the world pres
ent to it, as that an individual can overleap his
own time."1 This is an idea deeply rooted in
Hegel, and it forms the staple of most Hegelian
histories of philosophy. But how are we to
reconcile this acknowledgment of thoroughgoing

1 "Werke, viii. 18. Cf. the emphatic assertion of the same
position in the ' Philosophy of History ' — " Each individual is
the son of his nation and of his age. None remains behind it,
still less advances before it " (English translation, 55).

2 1 2 Hegelianism and Personality.

relativity with the absolute claims made for his
own philosophy ? Is the future to be an absolute
monotony, bringing us no new lessons, and yield
ing us no deeper insight ? Not for a moment
can we entertain such an idea.1 The " horologue
of the universe" did not run down and come
to a standstill with the dawn of the nineteenth
century. In truth, this golden age of philosophy,
with its absolute knowledge and its rational state,
strikes at last upon the spirit with a sense of
intolerable ennui. We feel instinctively with
Lessing that the search for truth is a nobler thing,
and better for our spirits' health, than the truth
here offered for our acceptance. It might be
otherwise if the truth were really ours, but that,
we may well believe, is reserved for God alone.
The perfect knowledge and the perfect State of
Hegelianism ring alike hollow, when brought face
to face with the riddle of the painful earth —
with the always solemn and often terrible mys
tery that environs us. Let us be honest with

1 The idea, however, is naturally suggested to the student
who has lived himself into the Hegelian system, and it was
not uncommon among Hegel's earlier and more confident
followers. " Jenes Pathos und jene Ueberzeugtheit der Hegel -
ianer vom Jahre 1830 muss man sich vergegenwartigen, welche
im vollen bitteren Ernste die Frage ventilirten, was wohl den
ferneren Inhalt der Weltgeschichte bilden werde, nachdem doch
in der Hegel'schen Philosophic der Weltgeist an sein Ziel, an
das Wissen seiner selbst hindurchgedrungen sei." — Haym, p. o.

Hegelianism as an Absolute System. 213

ourselves, and let us be shy of demonstrations
which prove too much. We are men and not gods;
the ultimate synthesis is not ours. The universe
is not plain to us, save by a supreme effort of faith
— of faith in reason and faith in goodness. It is
the splendid faith of Hegel in reason which gives
such massive proportions to his thought, and makes
it like the opening up of a new world to him
who enters upon it. But if this faith be reduced
to system, and put forward as a demonstration,
I feel equally certain that the effect is as harm
ful as it was at first beneficial. It saps the
springs both of speculative interest and of moral
endeavour. No, we may rest assured that fin
ality is not for the race of man ; we cannot lift
ourselves out of the stream of ever-flowing time
in which our lives are passed. Hegelianism is
one more great attempt satisfactorily to name the
Whole, and to find room within it for all the
different sides of existence. But Time is still
the god who devours his own children, and the
Hegelian system will be no exception. It will
remain as the system of Aristotle or as the
system of Spinoza remains, and men will draw
from its rich materials for their own intellectual
structures. They will draw inspiration and guid
ance from its successes ; they will take warning
by its mistakes.

CONCLUSION.

IF any justification be needed of this prolonged
criticism of Hegel, it must be found in the con
siderations which I adduced at the outset. The
truth of the Hegelian system, or of some essential
ly similar scheme, is presupposed in the doctrine
of English JSTeo-Kantians or Neo-Hegelians as to
the universal Self and its relation to the world.
There may be no mention of Hegel in their writ
ings, and the doctrine itself may be explicitly
derived by them from a development and criti
cism of the Kantian philosophy ; but the nerve of
such development and criticism is supplied by
Hegel's professed exhibition of existence as the
process of such a Self. Hegel also exemplifies on
a great scale the same mode of reasoning which
was animadverted upon in the first lecture as the
fallacy of Neo-Kantianism ; and a study of his
system enables us, better than anything else, to

Conclusion. 215

see the results to which this line of thought con
ducts us.

The radical error both of Hegelianism and of
the allied English doctrine I take to be the iden
tification of the human and the divine self-con
sciousness, or, to put it more broadly, the uni
fication of consciousness in a single Self. The
exposure of this may be said to have been, in a
manner, the thesis of these lectures. This iden
tification or unification depends throughout, it
has been argued, upon the tendency to take a
mere form for a real being — to takfi..an identity
of type for a unily of existence. Each of us is
a Self : that is to say, in the technical language of
recent philosophy, we exist for ourselves or are
objects to ourselves. We are not mere objects
existing only for others, but, as it were, subject
and object in one. Selfhood may also be said t to
imply that, in one aspect of my existence, I am
universal, seeing that I distinguish.jnxjndividual
existence from that of other beings, while embrac
ing both within a 'common world. Irrespective
of metaphysical theory, every Self is universal in
this sense, and by all means let this characteristic
be embodied in the definition of the Self. If d
mere individual, as we are often told, would ba
a being without consciousness of its own limita-j

2 1 6 Hegelianism and Personality.

being, therefore, which could not know
itself as an individual — then no Self is a mere
individual. We may even safely say that the
mere individual is a fiction of philosophic thought.
There could be no interaction between individuals,
unless they were all embraced within one Eeality ;
still less could there be any knowledge by one in
dividual of others, if they did not all form parts
of one system of things. But it is a great step
further to say that this universal attitude of the
Self, as such, is due to the fact that it is one uni
versal Self that thinks in all so-called thinkers.
This is, to say the least, an extremely unfortunate
way of stating the necessities of the case. For
though selfhood, as was seen in the earlier
lectures, involves a duality in unity, and is de-
scribable as subject-object, it is none the less true
that each Self is a unique existence, which is
perfectly impervious, if I may so speak, to other
selves — impervious in a fashion of which the im
penetrability of matter is a faint analogue. The
self, accordingly, resists invasion ; in its character
of self it refuses to admit another self within
itself, and thus be made, as it were, a mere
retainer of something else. The unity of things
(which is not denied) cannot be properly ex
pressed by making it depend upon a unity of

Conclusion. 2 1 7

the Self in all thinkers ; for the very character
istic of a self is this exclusiveness. So far from
a principle of union in the sense desired, the self
is in truth the very apex of separation and dif-
ferentiation. It is none the less true, of course,
that only through selfhood am I able to recognise
the unity of the world and my own union with
the source of all, and this is the incentive to the
metaphysical use of the idea of a universal Self
which I am criticising. But though the self is
thus, in knowledge, a principle of unification, it
is, in existence or metaphysically, a principle of
isolation. And the unification which proceeds
in the one case is, to the end, without prejudice
to the exclusive self-assertion in the other. There
is no deliverance of consciousness which is more
unequivocal than that which testifies to this in
dependence and exclusiveness. I have a centre
of my own — a will of my own — which no one
shares with me or can share — a centre which I
maintain even in my dealings with God Himself.
For it is eminently false to say that I put off, or
can put off, my personality here. The religious
consciousness lends no countenance whatever to
the representation of the human soul as a mere
mode or efflux of the divine. On the contrary,
only in a person, in a relatively independent or

2 1 8 Hegelianism and Personality.

self-centred being is religious approach to God
possible. Eeligion is the self-surrender of the
human will to the divine. " Our wills are ours to
make them Thine." But this is a se//-surrender, a
surrender which only self, only will, can make.

The doctrine of the universal Self is reached by
a process of reasoning which I have already com
pared to the procedure of Scholastic Realism in
dealing with individuals and " universals." Real
ism also treated the individual as merely the
vehicle of a universal form. It took the species
as a real existence apart from its individuals ;
more real than they, and prior to them, for they
are regarded as in effect its creatures. The indi
vidual man stands in this secondary and depen
dent relation to the species " humanitas," and that
universal inheres in turn in a higher genus, till
we reach the ultimate abstraction of a universal
, Being or substance of which all existing things
are accidents. For the ultimate goal of Realism
is a thorough-going Pantheism. Any student of
the Scholastic period may see that only inconsis
tent reservations and the compromises necessi
tated by their churchly position restrained the
Realists from this conclusion. It was widely
drawn, however, in the heresies of the time, and
the greater the speculative ability and consistency

Conclusion. 219

of the Kealistic thinker, the nearer he approached
it. And beyond the pale of Christendom alto
gether, in the system of Averroes, the typical in
fidel of the middle ages, the same Eealism meets
us in the doctrine of the identity of the human
intellect in all individual men — identity not in
the sense of essential similarity, but of existential
unity..- Though this universal intellect is re
garded by Averroes as an inferior emanation of
the Divine Being, and not as immediately identi
cal with the divine intellect, the striking similar
ity of the doctrine to the JSTeo-Kantian theory of!
the universal Self cannot fail to be remarked/
It does not affect the character of Eealism
whether the universal is actually separated from
the individuals and assigned a transcendent exist
ence, or whether it is said to exist only in the
individuals. This difference between the so-called
Platonic and Aristotelian forms of Eealism does
not touch the fundamental doctrine common to
both — the doctrine of the species as an entity in
the individuals common to all and identical in
each, an entity to which individual differences
adhere as accidents. As against this view we
may set Cousin's rendering of Abelard's doctrine
— " Only individuals exist, and in the individual
nothing but the individual." Similarity of essence

22O Hegetianism and Personality.

or nature is one thing, existence is another. When
existence is in question, it is the individual, not
the universal, that is real ; and the real individual
is not a composite of species and accidents, but is
individual to the inmost fibre of his being.

In the last resort this realistic fallacy, whether
in the Schoolmen or in Hegel and the Neo-
Kantians, may be traced, as I suggested in the
end of the first lecture, to a confusion between
logic or epistemology and metaphysic or ontology.
The imaginary subject (Bevmsstsein liberliaupt) of
the theory of knowledge is hypostatised by the
Neo-Kantians as the one ultimately real Thinker.
Hegel's metaphysical logic may be taken without
injustice as the culmination of this tendency.
AKant ridiculed Fichte's system (not unnaturally,
• but, as we have seen, not quite fairly) as an at
tempt to extract existence from mere logic, and
^saidjt looked to him like a kind of ghost.1 This
criticism would have been more applicable to
Hegel's attempt to construct the universe out of
mere universals. And even if we decline to take
such Hegelian statements literally, the vice of
the position still clings to the system; for the
existence of things, however explained, is still re-

1 Wie eine Art Gespenst : in a letter dated April 1798
(\Verke, viii. 812).

Conclusion. 2 2 1

garded as serving only for the exemplification of
these abstract notions. This holds true of the
whole course of development, even in the case of
spirit. If we examine Hegel's statements as to
the nature of spirit, they are all cast in the same
mould. Spirit is that which has returned out of
otherness to be at home with itself ; spirit is that
which restores itself ; it is not an immediate but
a mediated or restored unity ; it is an identity
which is not blank but constitutes the negation
of the negation. Such are the constantly recur
ring phrases that meet us, and they all express
the same thing — namely, that unity in duplicity
(or trinity in unity, as Hegel might have called
it) which characterises self-conscious life. They
give us simply the abstract scheme of intelligence
which Fichte constructs for us in the ' Wissen-
schaftslehre.' But there is no virtue in this ab
stract form as such, and if the goal of the de
velopment is represented as the realisation of the
mere form of knowledge, it ceases to be anything
of real value. It is this idealism of logical
formuLne with its sacrifice of the true goods of
the spirit, which Lotze censures so severely in
the Hegelian system.

My contention throughout these lectures has
been that the attempt of the Hegelian and Neo-

222 Hegelianisin and Personality.

Hegelian schools to unify the divine and the human
subject is ultimately destructive of the reality of
both. If, as has been argued above,1 the theory
deprives man of his proper self, by reducing him,
as it were, to an object of a universal Thinker, it
leaves this universal Thinker also without any
true personality. We cannot rightly conceive
either the divine or the human Self in this im
possible union, nor is this wonderful, seeing that
they are merely two inseparable aspects of our
own conscious life isolated and hypostatised. As
for the divine Self, if per impossibile we figure this
abstraction to ourselves as the permanent counter
part or sustainer of an objective world, such a
purely objective consciousness is not in any true
sense of the word a Self ; it is no more than an
imaginary focus into which an objective system
of relations returns. We have learned — and this
is well — to be chary of attributing to the Divine
Spirit a subjectivity like our own. But it must
not be forgotten that if we are to keep the name
rod at all, or any equivalent term, subjectivity —
an existence of God for Himself, analogous to our
own personal existence, though doubtless tran
scending it infinitely in innumerable ways — is an
essential element in the conception. If it is said

1 Cf., for example, pp. 62-64.

Conclusion. 223

that this is abstract thinking, and illegitimately
separates God's being from His manifestation or
working in the universe, the charge does not ap
pear to be borne out by the logical doctrine of
Essence as we know it in its application to man.
A pan may be said to be for others what his acts
and words are ; and if we know these, we rightly
say that we know the man. Similarly we may be
said to know God as manifested in nature and
history. Knowledge of the manifestation is in
both cases knowledge of the essence ; it does not
cut us off from knowledge of the essence, as the
Kelativists would have us believe. But just as
the man has a centre of his own, which we cannot
occupy, and from which he looks, as it were, upon
the inner side of his acts and words (as well as
upon a private world of thoughts and feelings,
many of which do not take shape in the common
or general world at all), so, if we speak of God
at all, there must be a divine centre of thought,
activity, and enjoyment, to which no mortal can
penetrate. In this sense every man's being is
different for himself from what it is as exhibited
to others, and God's being may infinitely transcend
His manifestation as known by us.

Moreover, the admission of a real self-conscious-"
ness in God seems demanded of us if we are not

224 Hegelianism and Personality.

to be unfaithful to the fundamental principle of
the theory of knowledge — interpretation by means
of the highest category within our reach. The
self-conscious life is that highest, and we should
be false to ourselves, if we denied in God what we
recognise as the source of dignity and worth in
ourselves. Only, as was said in a previous lecture,
though we must be anthropomorphic, our anthro
pomorphism must be critical. Just as we do not
read our full selves into life of lower forms, so —
or rather much more so — must we avoid trans
ferring to God all the features of our own self-
consciousness. God may, nay must, be infinitely
more — we are at least certain that He cannot be
less — than we know ourselves to be.

The Hegelian system is as ambiguous on the
question of man's immortality as on that of the
personality of God, and for precisely the same
reason — namely, because the Self of which asser
tions are made in the theory is not a real but a
logical self. Hence, although passages may be
quoted which seem direct assertions of immor
tality, they are found, on closer examination, to
resolve themselves into statements about the
Absolute Ego, or the unity of self-consciousness
as such. Thus, we are told, Time is but a form
of the Ego's own life — a form in which it knows

Conclusion. 225

objects — but the Subject itself is not bound by
time - determinations. It is present to all the
moments of time alike, being, in fact, the bond
which unites the several moments in one Time.
The Ego, it is argued, is, in a strict sense, timeless
or out of time, and it becomes absurd, therefore,
to apply time-predicates to it and to speak of its
origin or decease.1 As applied to the immor
tality of the individual self, however, this argu
ment proves nothing. It only proves that the
Ego must have coexisted with, or been present to,
all its experience in the past ; it does not prove
that that experience may not come to an end,
and the Ego along with it. Or again, we are told
that the Ego is the absolutely necessary presup
position of thought and existence. We cannot
strip off the Self ; we cannot even conceive our
own annihilation. But this is one of the demon
strations which prove too much. It applies as
much to the times before our birth as to the times
after our death. If we think at all, we cannot

1 This argument involves, it may be remarked, the subtle
confusion between the logical and the metaphysical criticised in
a former lecture. Only an abstraction can properly be spoken
of as out of time ; so far as the Ego is real, it is not out of time,
but abides or persists through time. Even in speaking of the
Divine Being, that is the only sense which the term "eternal"
can bear to us.

226 Hegelianism and Personality.

abstract from self-consciousness. But if, as Lucre
tius says, the future is to be of no more import to
us than the days of old when the Pceni flocked
together to battle, and the empire of the world was
at stake, then surely the immortality thus guar-

j anteed can be of no concrete concern to us. It
rests, indeed, again, upon the conversion of a
logical necessity into a metaphysical existence.
This logical necessity under which we lie is said
to be due to the presence in each of us of an un-
originated and unending Self. Even if we take
the argument at its own valuation, therefore, it is
the immortality of this Absolute Self which it
proves. In like manner Aristotle maintained the

\ eternity of the Active Eeason,1 and Averroes the
immortality of the intellect identical in all men.
Spinoza, too, spoke of the pars ceterna nostri. In
no other sense does Hegel speak of the immor
tality of "man as spirit" — an immortality or
eternity which he is at pains to designate as a
" present quality," an actual possession.2 Hegel's

1 Aristotle's theory of the Active Reason has already been
compared to the doctrine of the universal Self. The history of
the Peripatetic school, it may be added, forms an interesting
parallel to the development of the Hegelian school as indicated
in the sixth lecture. The Active Reason speedily disappeared
in the purely naturalistic system of Strato of Lampsacus.

2 Werke, xii. 219.

Conclusion. 227

utterances on this subject are all pervaded, to my
mind, by this double entendre, and virtually amount
to a shelving of the question. For it has been
abundantly seen that the Absolute Ego or the
Active Keason. is in itself a pure abstraction ;
and to be told that we survive in that form is no
whit more consoling than to be told that the
chemical elements of our body will survive in
new transformations.

The two positions — the divine personality and
human dignity and immortality — are two comple
mentary sides of the same view of existence. If
we can believe, with the Hegelians of the Left,
that there is no permanent Intelligence and Will
at the heart of things, then the self-conscious life
is degraded from its central position, and becomes
merely an incident in the universe. In that case
we may well believe that human self-conscious
ness is but like a spark struck in the dark to die
away presently upon the darkness whence it has
arisen. For, according to this theory, the universe
consists essentially .in the evolution and reabsorp-
tion of transitory forms — forms that are filled
with knowledge and shaped by experience, only
to be emptied and broken by death. But it is a
mockery to speak as if the universe had any real
or worthy End, if it is merely the eternal repe-

228 Hegelianism and Personality.

tition of this Danaid labour. And an account
which contradicts our best-founded standards of
value, and fails to satisfy our deepest needs,
stands condemned as inherently unreasonable and
incredible. I do not think that immortality can
be demonstrated by philosophy ; but certainly to a
philosophy founding upon self-consciousness, and
especially upon the moral consciousness, it must
seem incredible that the successive generations
should be used up and cast aside — as if character
were not the only lasting -product and the only
valuable result of time, ii may be said that
morality is independent of the belief in immortal
ity — that its true foundation is goodness for the
sake of goodness, virtue for virtue's sake — and I
willingly admit the nobility of temper that often
underlies this representation. As against the
theory which would base morality upon selfish re
wards and punishments in a future state, it is pro
foundly true. But immortality is claimed by our
moral instincts in no sense as a reward, but sim
ply as " the wages of going on and not to die."
And the denial of immortality seems so much at
variance with our notions of the moral reason
ableness of the world, that I believe it must ulti
mately act as a corrosive scepticism upon morality
itself.

Conclusion. 229

•' Gone for ever ! Ever ? No ; for since our dying race began,
Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of man.

Those that in barbarian burials killed the slave and slew the

wife,
Felt within themselves the sacred passion of the second life.

Truth for truth, and good for good ! The Good, the True, the

Pure, the Just,
Take the charm * for ever ' from them, and they crumble into

dust."1

One word by way of conclusion and epilogue.
It is possible that to some these lectures may
appear to contain only unmitigated condemnation
of Hegel and his system. That is an impression
which I should much regret. I should regret it,
not only because of my own great personal obliga
tions to Hegel, which would make such a condem
nation savour of ingratitude, but also on account
of the great debt which philosophy in general
owes to Hegel, and the speculative outlook which
is got by studying him. I would dissuade no one
from the study of Hegel. His aim is so great that
the mere effort to keep pace with him strengthens
the thews of the mind. Moreover, there is much
in Hegel of the highest philosophical importance
and truth. His services to the phenomenology
or philosophical history of consciousness in all
its forms have been simply immense. His ' Logic/

1 Locksley Hall : Sixty Years After.

'

230 Hegelianism and Personality.

looked at as a criticism of categories, with its in
sistence on self -consciousness as the ultimate prin-;.
ciple of explanation, is also an imperishable gift. I
have already defended his anthropomorphism in
this respect, and am ready to do battle for it again.
Nothing can be more unphilosophical than the
attempt to crush man's spirit by thrusting upon
it the immensities of the material universe. In
this respect, Hegel's superb contempt for nature
as nature has a justification of its own. In fact,
we might adopt Fichte's strong expression, and
say, that if matter alone existed, it would be
equivalent to saying that nothing existed at all.
In all this, Hegel is the protagonist of Idealism
in the historic sense of that word, and champions
the best interests of humanity. It is Hegelianism
as a system, and not Hegel, that I have attacked.
The point of my criticism has been that in its
execution the system breaks down, and ultimately
sacrifices these very interests to a logical abstrac
tion styled the Idea, in which both God and man
disappear. Nor are these interests better con
served by the Neo-Kantianism or Neo-Hegeli-
anism, which erects into a god the mere form of
self-consciousness in general.

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