CHAPTER IV

HEGEL

In the preceding Chapters I have attempted to trace the history of the scattered protests raised against the abstract treatment of Political Philosophy, during the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. The attack was delivered from two sides. By Kant and Fichte it was made in the name of Philosophy; by Montesquieu and Vico in the name of History. Each wing of the attacking force invoked, doubtless, to some extent, the aid of the other. Kant and Fichte appealed in some measure to History. Montesquieu and Vico were guided the latter especially-by an instinct for Philosophy. But on the whole, the two lines of attack were pushed without concert; and the force of the assault was proportionately weakened. A man was needed who to the keen historical sense of Vico should join the philosophic genius of Kant and Fichte. And such a man was found in Hegel.

The contrast between Hegel and the greatest of his precursors was at least as marked as the resemblance. Like Kant, he based his system upon a spiritual idea; but in handling that idea he pursued a totally different method. Kant started from the individual consciousness; Hegel from the world of externalised knowledge and of organised institutions. Kant had striven to break thought into its elements; Hegel-and in this he followed, while he bettered, the example of Fichte-attempted to unfold it from its germs. Analysis, criticism,' is the dominant idea of Kant; the keynote to Hegel's achievement is evolution.

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The conception of evolution was already in the air. It had been applied to biological science by Oken and Goethe [as well as by some French and English writers]; it had been applied, though with less system, to the history of human thought and Art by Herder. But Hegel was the first writer to grasp the universal significance of what others had seized only in fragments. He was the first to interpret the whole range both of knowledge and action by the idea of development. And in no direction were the results more fruitful than in what concerned the less speculative

side of human energy; than in his works on Art, on History, on Political Philosophy. It was in the region of what, in a very special sense, he called spirit'-it was in interpreting the efforts of man to give outward expression to the spiritual instincts within himthat the genius of Hegel found fullest scope. It was here that his penetrative imagination and subtle sympathy enabled him to give freest play to the idea of evolution.

At this point, however, the student of recent thought needs to stand carefully on his guard. Since Hegel's time, the principle of evolution has been adopted largely both in natural and in mental science. But there could be no greater mistake than to confound Hegel's construction of it with that familiar to us from the writings of Darwin and his disciples. To them evolution is, in the first instance, a key to the mysteries of a world which lies outside of and apart from man; which human reason has no share in constituting; in relation to which, the only function of reason is to apprehend and to interpret it. In this sense, the part of evolution is to simplify the endless diversity of organic-and to some extent also of inorganic-nature; to trace the stages by which the higher forms of life, or being, have through countless ages been elaborated from the lower.

Evolution has, no doubt, also been applied to the facts of consciousness, as distinguished from an external world known to consciousness. But here too, as commonly understood, it is something very different from what it was to Hegel. It is either a principle which-assuming certain data, as fixed points-explains how the facts, as we know them, have historically been developed from those first beginnings; how, for instance-assuming sensation our sensitive experience has gradually come to group itself into an ordered world of sensible objects. Or it is a principle which, attempting to get behind the data, as assumed aboveattempting to resolve them into data still more elementary—is irresistibly led to regard mind as a development of matter, the organic as an outgrowth from the inorganic forms of being. The last word of evolution, so understood, on the ultimate problems of consciousness is thus either agnostic or frankly materialist. It pronounces the spiritual to be either unknowable; or, if knowable, to be a subtler form of the material.

In all these directions Hegel presents many points of contact with later, and more familiar, writers. Like them, he regards evolution as of vital importance in the interpretation of the world of nature. Like them, he traces the development of human thought from its first, which are to him its most abstract, beginnings to its latest outcome in a concrete system of ordered experience. Like them, he probes the instinctive assumptions of thought, in its

most primitive stages, and strives to pierce behind assumption to the intelligible principle that underlies it. On the first point he is as convinced as they; on the two others he is not less, but more, consistent. And it is just because he is more consistent that, both in conclusion and in spirit, his argument is so different from theirs. An agnostic, however cautious-a materialist, however positive -cannot avoid introducing reason, the spiritual principle, at some stage, late or early, in the chain of argument and the process of development. The latter may indefinitely multiply the 'moments' through which matter has passed in giving birth to mind; but to mind he must needs come at last. The former may draw a sharp line between the material and the spiritual, between the known and the unknown. But, in the very act of drawing it, he has to admit that the unknown is present in every operation of knowledge, that the material is recognised, and can only be recognised, by the spiritual. Each therefore is involved in a contradiction of his own making. And from that contradiction he can only escape by a frank admission of the spiritual principle from the first.

And this is what Hegel does. In his view, the distinction between spirit and nature, between reason as knowing and the world as known, is not a final and absolute but a partial and relative distinction. They are the terms of a process, each of which is inseparable from, is necessary to the existence of, the other. Nature could not exist unless it were gathered into unity, and so far as it is organic-quickened into life, by spirit. Reason cannot operate unless it throws itself outwards into a world of organised and related objects. Thus, in one sense, reason and matter, nature and spirit, are co-ordinate elements in the world of our experience. In another, and a fuller, sense reason is all in all. To escape from the circle of reason, even for a single instant, is impossible. Matter itself, the world that we call external, lies within that circle. It is the creation of reason. It exists only in and for reasonthe divine reason, in the first instance; the human reason, so far as it reflects or partakes in the divine.

Indeed, if either of the two terms-matter and spirit-can fitly be described as the 'unknown,' it is matter. For matter, as such, is a pure abstraction, a term which only stands for the unqualified, and therefore the unknown. It signifies nothing more than the negation of spirit. It is known, only so far as it is qualified: and each successive qualification is the work of spirit or reason.

More than this. Each such qualification, each advance in knowledge, implies a fuller absorption of nature in spirit, a closer incorporation of reason with the world outside' it. For not only does reason, at each step, stamp itself more indelibly upon the world of nature; but, at the same time, it sees its own face more clearly

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reflected from the world of nature. As the laws of each science are apprehended—as relations, before unsuspected, are discovered -analogies between the less adequate forms of being and the more adequate, between the lower types of organic-and even of inorganic-being, on the one hand, and the essential workings of reason itself, upon the other hand, are constantly brought to light. Advance in knowledge is, in fact, nothing more nor less than the perception of such analogies. It is the rediscovery of reason by herself in a world from which she had supposed herself to be banished. It is the continuous overthrow of barriers which, in the struggle to unfold her own energies, she had herself originally set up.

The rhythmic movement of thought from the abstract to the concrete, from the universal through the particular to the individual which includes and gives new meaning to both-the 'dialectic which from a one-sided unity passes through diversity to a new unity that holds both elements in solution-this, the vital law of thought, is reproduced, though under a less adequate form, in the world outside' thought, in the world of nature. It appears, according to an ascending scale, in the world revealed to man by Physics, by Chemistry, by Biology. Philosophy,' to quote Hegel's own words, is not the only idealist. Nature also (at any rate in the form of Life) works out under the guise of fact what the Philosophy of the idea brings to full realisation in the region of spirit.''

Thus, while insisting at every turn upon the idea of evolution, Hegel gives to that idea a wholly new significance. In his hands it ceases to be a mechanical, it becomes a spiritual, law. It is the evolution not of mind from matter, but of matter from mind. It is to be conceived not as a straight line, at one extremity of which stands nature, and reason at the other; but as a circular movement, which begins with the outgoing of spirit into nature, and ends with the return of nature into spirit. Its upshot is not to materialise reason, but to spiritualise nature.

But nature, though one of the forms taken by reason, is by no means the only, or the highest, form. However thoroughly the reason of man may penetrate nature, however completely it may come to spiritualise nature and to recognise its own work in nature, it is not in nature that reason, either human or divine, can ever

1 'Denn nicht nur die Philosophie etwa ist idealistisch, sondern die Natur schon thut als Leben factisch dasselbe was die idealistische Philosophie in ihrem geistigem Felde vollbringt' (Ästhetik, i. p. 153). Compare the following: Das Interesse des Geistes ist nun dass die als äusserlich gesetzte Bestimmung als eine innerliche sei, dass natürliche und geistige Welt als innere, der Intelligenz angehörige, bestimmt werden, wodurch überhaupt die Einheit der Subjectivität und des Seyns, oder der Idealismus des Daseyns, gesetzt wird' (Phil. der Geschichte, p. 170).

find its fullest and most adequate expression. The limitations which matter imposes upon reason can never, even when they are seen to be imposed in the last resort by reason itself, altogether cease to be limitations. As a mode of being, nature exhibits reason on a lower plane of energy-as an object of judgement, it calls for more rigid, and consequently less vital, categories-than can ever be adequate to the full measure of the stature of the free spirit. It is only in itself that the soul of man, to the full extent, can find itself. It is only in its direct working, only when unfettered by elements foreign to itself, only in the world which it creates out of and for itself, that reason, as a creative force, can be truly manifested; it is only in self-judgement that its highest powers, as a reflective principle, are called into play.

The distinction between the creative and the reflective powers of reason, obvious enough in itself, necessarily plays a considerable part in the system of Hegel. This is an inevitable result of the wide scope which he gives to the definition of reason. It corresponds to the ordinary distinction between experience and the active or artistic instincts of man on the one hand, and his speculative faculties upon the other. With this difference, however; that, while in ordinary life we are apt to regard the former merely as instincts-as faculties in which reason has no appreciable partto Hegel they are as truly, though assuredly not in so high a sense, the work of reason as the latter. As a creative power, reason builds up the world of sensation, art, conduct and religion in which man habitually lives and moves. As a reflective power, it reconstructs in thought, and by a conscious effort of thought, the fabric which, blinded by the very force of its creative power, it has ceased to recognise as its own. It reviews with open eyes the ground which it had originally traversed blindfold, retracing the whole circle of its progress and marking how each step necessarily follows from those that had gone before.

Between these two faculties, the creative and the speculative, the various sciences may be said to mediate; breaking up the raw material furnished by instinct, distinguishing the various elements that compose it; and, by destroying their primitive unity, preparing the way for the higher, because more comprehensive and more clearly realised, unity of speculation. In the development of 'the idea that is, of the world conceived as the spontaneous development of thought-the sciences thus play a double part. On the one hand, they supply much, though by no means all, of the negative element which is necessary to the full life of reason and which, though one-sided in itself, prevents the natural intellect from becoming fossilised in a still more one-sided affirmation. In this capacity the function of the sciences is critical and destructive.