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Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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Title: Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Release Date: March 5, 2012 [Ebook #39064]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND***

Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

By

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

 Translated From

The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences

With

Five Introductory Essays

By

William Wallace, M.A., LL.D.

Fellow of Merton College, and Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy in
the University of Oxford

Oxford

Clarendon Press

1894
Contents

Preface.
Five Introductory Essays In Psychology And Ethics.
Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.
Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.
Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.
Introduction.
Section I. Mind Subjective.
Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.
Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness.
Sub-Section C. Psychology. Mind.
Section II. Mind Objective.
Distribution.
Sub-Section A. Law.
Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience.
Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics.
Section III. Absolute Mind.
Sub-Section A. Art.
Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion.
Sub-Section C. Philosophy.
Index.
Footnotes
[pg v]
Preface.

I here offer a translation of the third or last part of Hegel's encyclopaedic

sketch of philosophy,—the Philosophy of Mind. The volume, like its
subject, stands complete in itself. But it may also be regarded as a
supplement or continuation of the work begun in my version of his Logic. I
have not ventured upon the Philosophy of Nature which lies between these
two. That is a province, to penetrate into which would require an equipment
of learning I make no claim to,—a province, also, of which the present-day
interest would be largely historical, or at least bound up with historical
circumstances.

The translation is made from the German text given in the Second Part of
the Seventh Volume of Hegel's Collected Works, occasionally corrected by
comparison with that found in the second and third editions (of 1827 and
1830) published by the author. I have reproduced only Hegel's own
paragraphs, and entirely omitted the Zusätze of the editors. These addenda
—which are in origin lecture-notes—to the paragraphs are, in the text of the
Collected Works, given for the first section only. The psychological part
which they accompany has been barely treated elsewhere by Hegel: but a
good popular [pg vi] exposition of it will be found in Erdmann's
Psychologische Briefe. The second section was dealt with at greater length
by Hegel himself in his Philosophy of Law (1820). The topics of the third
section are largely covered by his lectures on Art, Religion, and History of
Philosophy.

I do not conceal from myself that the text offers a hard nut to crack. Yet
here and there, even through the medium of the translation, I think some
light cannot fail to come to an earnest student. Occasionally, too, as, for
instance, in §§ 406, 459, 549, and still more in §§ 552, 573, at the close of
which might stand the words Liberavi animam meam, the writer really “lets
himself go,” and gives his mind freely on questions where speculation
comes closely in touch with life.

In the Five Introductory Essays I have tried sometimes to put together, and
sometimes to provide with collateral elucidation, some points in the Mental
Philosophy. I shall not attempt to justify the selection of subjects for special
treatment further than to hope that they form a more or less connected
group, and to refer for a study of some general questions of system and
method to my Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy which
appear almost simultaneously with this volume.

OXFORD,
December, 1893.

[pg xi]
Five Introductory Essays In Psychology
And Ethics.

[pg xiii]
Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.

The art of finding titles, and of striking out headings which catch the eye or
ear, and lead the mind by easy paths of association to the subject under
exposition, was not one of Hegel's gifts. A stirring phrase, a vivid or
picturesque turn of words, he often has. But his lists of contents, when they
cease to be commonplace, are apt to run into the bizarre and the grotesque.
Generally, indeed, his rubrics are the old and (as we may be tempted to call
them) insignificant terms of the text-books. But, in Hegel's use of them,
these conventional designations are charged with a highly individualised
meaning. They may mean more—they may mean less—than they habitually
pass for: but they unquestionably specify their meaning with a unique and
almost personal flavour. And this can hardly fail to create and to disappoint
undue expectations.

(i.) Philosophy and its Parts.

Even the main divisions of his system show this conservatism in

terminology. The names of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia are, we may
say, non-significant [pg xiv] of their peculiar contents. And that for a good
reason. What Hegel proposes to give is no novel or special doctrine, but the
universal philosophy which has passed on from age to age, here narrowed
and there widened, but still essentially the same. It is conscious of its
continuity and proud of its identity with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.

The earliest attempts of the Greek philosophers to present philosophy in a

complete and articulated order—attempts generally attributed to the Stoics,
the schoolmen of antiquity—made it a tripartite whole. These three parts
were Logic, Physics, and Ethics. In their entirety they were meant to form a
cycle of unified knowledge, satisfying the needs of theory as well as
practice. As time went on, however, the situation changed: and if the old
names remained, their scope and value suffered many changes. New
interests and curiosities, due to altered circumstances, brought other
departments of reality under the focus of investigation besides those which
had been primarily discussed under the old names. Inquiries became more
specialised, and each tended to segregate itself from the rest as an
independent field of science. The result was that in modern times the
territory still marked by the ancient titles had shrunk to a mere phantom of
its former bulk. Almost indeed things had come to such a pass that the time-
honoured figures had sunk into the misery of rois fainéants; while the real
business of knowledge was discharged by the younger and less
conventional lines of research which the needs and fashions of the time had
called up. Thus Logic, in the narrow formal sense, was turned into an “art”
of argumentation and a system of technical rules for the analysis and
synthesis of academical discussion. Physics or Natural Philosophy restricted
itself to the elaboration of some metaphysical [pg xv] postulates or
hypotheses regarding the general modes of physical operation. And Ethics
came to be a very unpractical discussion of subtleties regarding moral
faculty and moral standard. Meanwhile a theory of scientific method and of
the laws governing the growth of intelligence and formation of ideas grew
up, and left the older logic to perish of formality and inanition. The
successive departments of physical science, each in turn asserting its
independence, finally left Natural Philosophy no alternative between
clinging to its outworn hypotheses and abstract generalities, or identifying
itself (as Newton in his great book put it) with the Principia Mathematica
of the physical sciences. Ethics, in its turn, saw itself, on one hand, replaced
by psychological inquiries into the relations between the feelings and the
will and the intelligence; while, on the other hand, a host of social,
historical, economical, and other researches cut it off from the real facts of
human life, and left it no more than the endless debates on the logical and
metaphysical issues involved in free-will and conscience, duty and merit.

It has sometimes been said that Kant settled this controversy between the
old departments of philosophy and the new branches of science. And the
settlement, it is implied, consisted in assigning to the philosopher a sort of
police and patrol duty in the commonwealth of science. He was to see that
boundaries were duly respected, and that each science kept strictly to its
own business. For this purpose each branch of philosophy was bound to
convert itself into a department of criticism—an examination of first
principles in the several provinces of reality or experience—with a view to
get a distinct conception of what they were, and thus define exactly the
lines on which the structures of more detailed science could be put up
solidly and safely. [pg xvi] This plan offered tempting lines to research, and
sounded well. But on further reflection there emerge one or two difficulties,
hard to get over. Paradoxical though it may seem, one cannot rightly
estimate the capacity and range of foundations, before one has had some
familiarity with the buildings erected upon them. Thus you are involved in a
circle: a circle which is probably inevitable, but which for that reason it is
well to recognise at once. Then—what is only another way of saying the
same thing—it is impossible to draw an inflexible line between premises of
principle and conclusions of detail. There is no spot at which criticism can
stop, and, having done its business well, hand on the remaining task to
dogmatic system. It was an instinctive feeling of this implication of system
in what professed only to be criticism which led the aged Kant to ignore his
own previous professions that he offered as yet no system, and when Fichte
maintained himself to be erecting the fabric for which Kant had prepared
the ground, to reply by the counter-declaration that the criticism was the
system—that “the curtain was the picture.”

The Hegelian philosophy is an attempt to combine criticism with system,

and thus realise what Kant had at least foretold. It is a system which is self-
critical, and systematic only through the absoluteness of its criticism. In
Hegel's own phrase, it is an immanent and an incessant dialectic, which
from first to last allows finality to no dogmatic rest, but carries out Kant's
description of an Age of Criticism, in which nothing, however majestic and
sacred its authority, can plead for exception from the all-testing Elenchus.
Then, on the other hand, Hegel refuses to restrict philosophy and its
branches to anything short of the totality. He takes in its full sense that
often-used phrase—the Unity [pg xvii] of Knowledge. Logic becomes the
all-embracing research of “first principles,”—the principles which regulate
physics and ethics. The old divisions between logic and metaphysic,
between induction and deduction, between theory of reasoning and theory
of knowledge,—divisions which those who most employed them were
never able to show the reason and purpose of—because indeed they had
grown up at various times and by “natural selection” through a vast mass of
incidents: these are superseded and merged in one continuous theory of real
knowledge considered under its abstract or formal aspect,—of organised
and known reality in its underlying thought-system. But these first
principles were only an abstraction from complete reality—the reality
which nature has when unified by mind—and they presuppose the total
from which they are derived. The realm of pure thought is only the ghost of
the Idea—of the unity and reality of knowledge, and it must be reindued
with its flesh and blood. The logical world is (in Kantian phrase) only the
possibility of Nature and Mind. It comes first—because it is a system of
First Principles: but these first principles could only be elicited by a
philosophy which has realised the meaning of a mental experience, gathered
by interpreting the facts of Nature.

Natural Philosophy is no longer—according to Hegel's view of it—merely a

scheme of mathematical ground-work. That may be its first step. But its
scope is a complete unity (which is not a mere aggregate) of the branches of
natural knowledge, exploring both the inorganic and the organic world. In
dealing with this endless problem, philosophy seems to be baulked by an
impregnable obstacle to its progress. Every day the advance of
specialisation renders any comprehensive or synoptic view of the totality of
science more and more [pg xviii] impossible. No doubt we talk readily
enough of Science. But here, if anywhere, we may say there is no Science,
but only sciences. The generality of science is a proud fiction or a gorgeous
dream, variously told and interpreted according to the varying interest and
proclivity of the scientist. The sciences, or those who specially expound
them, know of no unity, no philosophy of science. They are content to
remark that in these days the thing is impossible, and to pick out the faults
in any attempts in that direction that are made outside their pale.
Unfortunately for this contention, the thing is done by us all, and, indeed,
has to be done. If not as men of science, yet as men—as human beings—we
have to put together things and form some total estimate of the drift of
development, of the unity of nature. To get a notion, not merely of the
general methods and principles of the sciences, but of their results and
teachings, and to get this not as a mere lot of fragments, but with a
systematic unity, is indispensable in some degree for all rational life. The
life not founded on science is not the life of man. But he will not find what
he wants in the text-books of the specialist, who is obliged to treat his
subject, as Plato says, “under the pressure of necessity,” and who dare not
look on it in its quality “to draw the soul towards truth, and to form the
philosophic intellect so as to uplift what we now unduly keep down1.” If the
philosopher in this province does his work but badly, he may plead the
novelty of the task to which he comes as a pioneer or even an architect. He
finds little that he can directly utilise. The materials have been gathered and
prepared for very special aims; and the great aim of science—that human
life may be made a higher, an ampler, and [pg xix] happier thing,—has
hardly been kept in view at all, except in its more materialistic aspects. To
the philosopher the supreme interest of the physical sciences is that man
also belongs to the physical universe, or that Mind and Matter as we know
them are (in Mr. Spencer's language) “at once antithetical and inseparable.”
He wants to find the place of Man,—but of Man as Mind—in Nature.

If the scope of Natural Philosophy be thus expanded to make it the unity

and more than the synthetic aggregate of the several physical sciences—to
make it the whole which surpasses the addition of all their fragments, the
purpose of Ethics has not less to be deepened and widened. Ethics, under
that title, Hegel knows not. And for those who cannot recognise anything
unless it be clearly labelled, it comes natural to record their censure of
Hegelianism for ignoring or disparaging ethical studies. But if we take the
word in that wide sense which common usage rather justifies than adopts,
we may say that the whole philosophy of Mind is a moral philosophy. Its
subject is the moral as opposed to the physical aspect of reality: the inner
and ideal life as opposed to the merely external and real materials of it: the
world of intelligence and of humanity. It displays Man in the several stages
of that process by which he expresses the full meaning of nature, or
discharges the burden of that task which is implicit in him from the first. It
traces the steps of that growth by which what was no better than a fragment
of nature—an intelligence located (as it seemed) in one piece of matter—
comes to realise the truth of it and of himself. That truth is his ideal and his
obligation: but it is also—such is the mystery of his birthright—his idea and
possession. He—like the natural universe—is (as the Logic has shown) a
principle of unification, organisation, [pg xx] idealisation: and his history
(in its ideal completeness) is the history of the process by which he, the
typical man, works the fragments of reality (and such mere reality must be
always a collection of fragments) into the perfect unity of a many-sided
character. Thus the philosophy of mind, beginning with man as a sentient
organism, the focus in which the universe gets its first dim confused
expression through mere feeling, shows how he “erects himself above
himself” and realises what ancient thinkers called his kindred with the
divine.

In that total process of the mind's liberation and self-realisation the portion
specially called Morals is but one, though a necessary, stage. There are, said
Porphyry and the later Platonists, four degrees in the path of perfection and
self-accomplishment. And first, there is the career of honesty and worldly
prudence, which makes the duty of the citizen. Secondly, there is the
progress in purity which casts earthly things behind, and reaches the angelic
height of passionless serenity. And the third step is the divine life which by
intellectual energy is turned to behold the truth of things. Lastly, in the
fourth grade, the mind, free and sublime in self-sustaining wisdom, makes
itself an “exemplar” of virtue, and is even a “father of Gods.” Even so, it
may be said, the human mind is the subject of a complicated Teleology,—
the field ruled by a multifarious Ought, psychological, aesthetical, social
and religious. To adjust their several claims cannot be the object of any
science, if adjustment means to supply a guide in practice. But it is the
purpose of such a teleology to show that social requirements and moral duty
as ordinarily conceived do not exhaust the range of obligation,—of the
supreme ethical Ought. How that can best be done is however a question of
some difficulty. For the ends under examination do not [pg xxi] fall
completely into a serial order, nor does one involve others in such a way as
to destroy their independence. You cannot absolve psychology as if it stood
independent of ethics or religion, nor can aesthetic considerations merely
supervene on moral. Still, it may be said, the order followed by Hegel
seems on the whole liable to fewer objections than others.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, the only English philosopher who has even attempted
a System of Philosophy, may in this point be compared with Hegel. He also
begins with a First Principles,—a work which, like Hegel's Logic, starts by
presenting Philosophy as the supreme arbiter between the subordinate
principles of Religion and Science, which are in it “necessary correlatives.”
The positive task of philosophy is (with some inconsistency or vagueness)
presented, in the next place, as a “unification of knowledge.” Such a
unification has to make explicit the implicit unity of known reality: because
“every thought involves a whole system of thoughts.” And such a
programme might again suggest the Logic. But unfortunately Mr. Spencer
does not (and he has Francis Bacon to justify him here) think it worth his
while to toil up the weary, but necessary, mount of Purgatory which is
known to us as Logic. With a naïve realism, he builds on Cause and Power,
and above all on Force, that “Ultimate of Ultimates,” which seems to be,
however marvellously, a denizen both of the Known and the Unknowable
world. In the known world this Ultimate appears under two forms, matter
and motion, and the problem of science and philosophy is to lay down in
detail and in general the law of their continuous redistribution, of the
segregation of motion from matter, and the inclusion of motion into matter.

Of this process, which has no beginning and no end,—the rhythm of

generation and corruption, attraction [pg xxii] and repulsion, it may be said
that it is properly not a first principle of all knowledge, but the general or
fundamental portion of Natural Philosophy to which Mr. Spencer next
proceeds. Such a philosophy, however, he gives only in part: viz. as a
Biology, dealing with organic (and at a further stage and under other names,
with supra-organic) life. And that the Philosophy of Nature should take this
form, and carry both the First Principles and the later portions of the system
with it, as parts of a philosophy of evolution, is what we should have
expected from the contemporaneous interests of science2. Even a one-sided
attempt to give speculative unity to those researches, which get—for
reasons the scientific specialist seldom asks—the title of biological, is
however worth noting as a recognition of the necessity of a Natur-
philosophie,—a speculative science of Nature.

The third part of the Hegelian System corresponds to what in the Synthetic
Philosophy is known as Psychology, Ethics, and Sociology. And here Mr.
Spencer recognises that something new has turned up. Psychology is
“unique” as a science: it is a “double science,” and as a whole quite sui
generis. Whether perhaps all these epithets would not, mutatis mutandis,
have to be applied also to Ethics and Sociology, if these are to do their full
work, he does not say. In what this doubleness consists he even finds it
somewhat difficult to show. For, as his fundamental philosophy does not on
this point go beyond noting some pairs of verbal antitheses, and has no
sense of unity except in the imperfect shape of a “relation3” between two
things which are “antithetical [pg xxiii] and inseparable,” he is perplexed by
phrases such as “in” and “out of” consciousness, and stumbles over the
equivocal use of “inner” to denote both mental (or non-spatial) in general,
and locally sub-cuticular in special. Still, he gets so far as to see that the law
of consciousness is that in it neither feelings nor relations have independent
subsistence, and that the unit of mind does not begin till what he calls two
feelings are made one. The phraseology may be faulty, but it shows an
inkling of the a priori. Unfortunately it is apparently forgotten; and the
language too often reverts into the habit of what he calls the “objective,” i.e.
purely physical, sciences.

Mr. Spencer's conception of Psychology restricts it to the more general

physics of the mind. For its more concrete life he refers us to Sociology.
But his Sociology is yet unfinished: and from the plan of its inception, and
the imperfect conception of the ends and means of its investigation, hardly
admits of completion in any systematic sense. To that incipiency is no doubt
due its excess in historical or anecdotal detail—detail, however, too much
segregated from its social context, and in general its tendency to neglect
normal and central theory for incidental and peripheral facts. Here, too,
there is a weakness in First Principles and a love of catchwords, which goes
along with the fallacy that illustration is proof. Above all, it is evident that
the great fact of religion overhangs Mr. Spencer with the attraction of an
unsolved and unacceptable problem. He cannot get the religious ideas of
men into co-ordination with their scientific, aesthetic, and moral doctrines;
and only betrays his sense of the high importance of the former by placing
them in the forefront of inquiry, as due to the inexperience and limitations
of the so-called primitive man. That is hardly adequate recognition of [pg
xxiv] the religious principle: and the defect will make itself seriously felt,
should he ever come to carry out the further stage of his prospectus dealing
with “the growth and correlation of language, knowledge, morals, and
aesthetics.”

(ii.) Mind and Morals.

A Mental Philosophy—if we so put what might also be rendered a Spiritual
Philosophy, or Philosophy of Spirit—may to an English reader suggest
something much narrower than it actually contains. A Philosophy of the
Human Mind—if we consult English specimens—would not imply much
more than a psychology, and probably what is called an inductive
psychology. But as Hegel understands it, it covers an unexpectedly wide
range of topics, the whole range from Nature to Spirit. Besides Subjective
Mind, which would seem on first thoughts to exhaust the topics of
psychology, it goes on to Mind as Objective, and finally to Absolute mind.
And such combinations of words may sound either self-contradictory or
meaningless.

The first Section deals with the range of what is usually termed Psychology.
That term indeed is employed by Hegel, in a restricted sense, to denote the
last of the three sub-sections in the discussion of Subjective Mind. The
Mind, which is the topic of psychology proper, cannot be assumed as a
ready-made object, or datum. A Self, a self-consciousness, an intelligent
and volitional agent, if it be the birthright of man, is a birthright which he
has to realise for himself, to earn and to make his own. To trace the steps by
which [pg xxv] mind in its stricter acceptation, as will and intelligence,
emerges from the general animal sensibility which is the crowning phase of
organic life, and the final problem of biology, is the work of two
preliminary sub-sections—the first entitled Anthropology, the second the
Phenomenology of Mind.

The subject of Anthropology, as Hegel understands it, is the Soul—the raw

material of consciousness, the basis of all higher mental life. This is a
borderland, where the ground is still debateable between Nature and Mind:
it is the region of feeling, where the sensibility has not yet been
differentiated to intelligence. Soul and body are here, as the phrase goes, in
communion: the inward life is still imperfectly disengaged from its natural
co-physical setting. Still one with nature, it submits to natural influences
and natural vicissitudes: is not as yet master of itself, but the half-passive
receptacle of a foreign life, of a general vitality, of a common soul not yet
fully differentiated into individuality. But it is awaking to self-activity: it is
emerging to Consciousness,—to distinguish itself, as aware and conscious,
from the facts of life and sentiency of which it is aware.
From this region of psychical physiology or physiological psychology,
Hegel in the second sub-section of his first part takes us to the
“Phenomenology of Mind,”—to Consciousness. The sentient soul is also
conscious—but in a looser sense of that word4: it has feelings, but can
scarcely be said itself to know that it has them. As consciousness, the Soul
has come to separate what it is from what it feels. The distinction emerges
of a subject which is conscious, and an object of which it [pg xxvi] is
conscious. And the main thing is obviously the relationship between the
two, or the Consciousness itself, as tending to distinguish itself alike from
its subject and its object. Hence, perhaps, may be gathered why it is called
Phenomenology of Mind. Mind as yet is not yet more than emergent or
apparent: nor yet self-possessed and self-certified. No longer, however, one
with the circumambient nature which it feels, it sees itself set against it, but
only as a passive recipient of it, a tabula rasa on which external nature is
reflected, or to which phenomena are presented. No longer, on the other
hand, a mere passive instrument of suggestion from without, its instinct of
life, its nisus of self-assertion is developed, through antagonism to a like
nisus, into the consciousness of self-hood, of a Me and Mine as set against a
Thee and Thine. But just in proportion as it is so developed in opposition to
and recognition of other equally self-centred selves, it has passed beyond
the narrower characteristic of Consciousness proper. It is no longer mere
intelligent perception or reproduction of a world, but it is life, with
perception (or apperception) of that life. It has returned in a way to its
original unity with nature, but it is now the sense of its self-hood—the
consciousness of itself as the focus in which subjective and objective are at
one. Or, to put it in the language of the great champion of Realism5, the
standpoint of Reason or full-grown Mind is this: “The world which appears
to us is our percept, therefore in us. The real world, out of which we explain
the phenomenon, is our thought: therefore in us.”

The third sub-section of the theory of Subjective Mind—the Psychology

proper—deals with Mind. This is the real, independent Psyché—hence the
special [pg xxvii] appropriation of the term Psychology. “The Soul,” says
Herbart, “no doubt dwells in a body: there are, moreover, corresponding
states of the one and the other: but nothing corporeal occurs in the Soul,
nothing purely mental, which we could reckon to our Ego, occurs in the
body: the affections of the body are no representations of the Ego, and our
pleasant and unpleasant feelings do not immediately lie in the organic life
they favour or hinder.” Such a Soul, so conceived, is an intelligent and
volitional self, a being of intellectual and “active” powers or phenomena: it
is a Mind. And “Mind,” adds Hegel6, “is just this elevation above Nature
and physical modes and above the complication with an external object.”
Nothing is external to it: it is rather the internalising of all externality. In
this psychology proper, we are out of any immediate connexion with
physiology. “Psychology as such,” remarks Herbart, “has its questions
common to it with Idealism”—with the doctrine that all reality is mental
reality. It traces, in Hegel's exposition of it, the steps of the way by which
mind realises that independence which is its characteristic stand-point. On
the intellectual side that independence is assured in language,—the system
of signs by which the intelligence stamps external objects as its own, made
part of its inner world. A science, some one has said, is after all only une
langue bien faite. So, reversing the saying, we may note that a language is
an inwardised and mind-appropriated world. On the active side, the
independence of mind is seen in self-enjoyment, in happiness, or self-
content, where impulse and volition have attained satisfaction in
equilibrium, and the soul possesses itself in fullness. Such a mind7, which
has made the world its certified [pg xxviii] possession in language, and
which enjoys itself in self-possession of soul, called happiness, is a free
Mind. And that is the highest which Subjective Mind can reach.

At this point, perhaps, having rounded off by a liberal sweep the scope of
psychology, the ordinary mental philosophy would stop. Hegel, instead of
finishing, now goes on to the field of what he calls Objective Mind. For as
yet it has been only the story of a preparation, an inward adorning and
equipment, and we have yet to see what is to come of it in actuality. Or
rather, we have yet to consider the social forms on which this preparation
rests. The mind, self-possessed and sure of itself or free, is so only through
the objective shape which its main development runs parallel with. An
intelligent Will, or a practical reason, was the last word of the psychological
development. But a reason which is practical, or a volition which is
intelligent, is realised by action which takes regular shapes, and by practice
which transforms the world. The theory of Objective Mind delineates the
new form which nature assumes under the sway of intelligence and will.
That intellectual world realises itself by transforming the physical into a
social and political world, the given natural conditions of existence into a
freely-instituted system of life, the primitive struggle of kinds for
subsistence into the ordinances of the social state. Given man as a being
possessed of will and intelligence, this inward faculty, whatever be its
degree, will try to impress itself on nature and to reproduce itself in a legal,
a moral, and social world. The kingdom of deed replaces, or rises on the
foundation of, the kingdom of word: and instead of the equilibrium of a
well-adjusted soul comes the harmonious life of a social organism. We are,
in short, in the sphere of Ethics and Politics, of Jurisprudence and Morals,
of Law and Conscience.

[pg xxix]
Here,—as always in Hegel's system—there is a triad of steps. First the
province of Law or Right. But if we call it Law, we must keep out of sight
the idea of a special law-giver, of a conscious imposition of laws, above all
by a political superior. And if we call it Right, we must remember that it is
neutral, inhuman, abstract right: the right whose principle is impartial and
impassive uniformity, equality, order;—not moral right, or the equity which
takes cognisance of circumstances, of personal claims, and provides against
its own hardness. The intelligent will of Man, throwing itself upon the mere
gifts of nature as their appointed master, creates the world of Property—of
things instrumental, and regarded as adjectival, to the human personality.
But the autonomy of Reason (which is latent in the will) carries with it
certain consequences. As it acts, it also, by its inherent quality of uniformity
or universality, enacts for itself a law and laws, and creates the realm of
formal equality or order-giving law. But this is a mere equality: which is not
inconsistent with what in other respects may be excess of inequality. What
one does, if it is really to be treated as done, others may or even must do:
each act creates an expectation of continuance and uniformity of behaviour.
The doer is bound by it, and others are entitled to do the like. The material
which the person appropriates creates a system of obligation. Thus is
constituted—in the natural give and take of rational Wills—in the inevitable
course of human action and reaction,—a system of rights and duties. This
law of equality—the basis of justice, and the seed of benevolence—is the
scaffolding or perhaps rather the rudimentary framework of society and
moral life. Or it is the bare skeleton which is to be clothed upon by the
softer and fuller outlines of the social tissues and the ethical organs.
[pg xxx]
And thus the first range of Objective Mind postulates the second, which
Hegel calls “Morality.” The word is to be taken in its strict sense as a
protest against the quasi-physical order of law. It is the morality of
conscience and of the good will, of the inner rectitude of soul and purpose,
as all-sufficient and supreme. Here is brought out the complementary factor
in social life: the element of liberty, spontaneity, self-consciousness. The
motto of mere inward morality (as opposed to the spirit of legality) is (in
Kant's words): “There is nothing without qualification good, in heaven or
earth, but only a good will.” The essential condition of goodness is that the
action be done with purpose and intelligence, and in full persuasion of its
goodness by the conscience of the agent. The characteristic of Morality thus
described is its essential inwardness, and the sovereignty of the conscience
over all heteronomy. Its justification is that it protests against the authority
of a mere external or objective order, subsisting and ruling in separation
from the subjectivity. Its defect is the turn it gives to this assertion of the
rights of subjective conscience: briefly in the circumstance that it tends to
set up a mere individualism against a mere universalism, instead of
realising the unity and essential interdependence of the two.

The third sub-section of the theory of Objective Mind describes a state of

affairs in which this antithesis is explicitly overcome. This is the moral life
in a social community. Here law and usage prevail and provide the fixed
permanent scheme of life: but the law and the usage are, in their true or
ideal conception, only the unforced expression of the mind and will of those
who live under them. And, on the other hand, the mind and will of the
individual members of such a community are pervaded and animated by its
[pg xxxi] universal spirit. In such a community, and so constituting it, the
individual is at once free and equal, and that because of the spirit of
fraternity, which forms its spiritual link. In the world supposed to be
governed by mere legality the idea of right is exclusively prominent; and
when that is the case, it may often happen that summum jus summa injuria.
In mere morality, the stress falls exclusively on the idea of inward freedom,
or the necessity of the harmony of the judgment and the will, or the
dependence of conduct upon conscience. In the union of the two, in the
moral community as normally constituted, the mere idea of right is
replaced, or controlled and modified, by the idea of equity—a balance as it
were between the two preceding, inasmuch as motive and purpose are
employed to modify and interpret strict right. But this effect—this
harmonisation—is brought about by the predominance of a new idea—the
principle of benevolence,—a principle however which is itself modified by
the fundamental idea of right or law8 into a wise or regulated kindliness.

But what Hegel chiefly deals with under this head is the interdependence of
form and content, of social order and personal progress. In the picture of an
ethical organisation or harmoniously-alive moral community he shows us
partly the underlying idea which gave room for the antithesis between law
and conscience, and partly the outlines of the ideal in which that conflict
becomes only the instrument of progress. This organisation [pg xxxii] has
three grades or three typical aspects. These are the Family, Civil Society,
and the State. The first of these, the Family, must be taken to include those
primary unities of human life where the natural affinity of sex and the
natural ties of parentage are the preponderant influence in forming and
maintaining the social group. This, as it were, is the soul-nucleus of social
organisation: where the principle of unity is an instinct, a feeling, an
absorbing solidarity. Next comes what Hegel has called Civil Society,—
meaning however by civil the antithesis to political, the society of those
who may be styled bourgeois, not citoyens:—and meaning by society the
antithesis to community. There are other natural influences binding men
together besides those which form the close unities of the family, gens,
tribe, or clan. Economical needs associate human beings within a much
larger radius—in ways capable of almost indefinite expansion—but also in
a way much less intense and deep. Civil Society is the more or less loosely
organised aggregate of such associations, which, if, on one hand, they keep
human life from stagnating in the mere family, on another, accentuate more
sharply the tendency to competition and the struggle for life. Lastly, in the
Political State comes the synthesis of family and society. Of the family; in
so far as the State tends to develope itself on the nature-given unit of the
Nation (an extended family, supplementing as need arises real descent by
fictitious incorporations), and has apparently never permanently maintained
itself except on the basis of a predominant common nationality. Of society;
in so far as the extension and dispersion of family ties have left free room
for the differentiation of many other sides of human interest and action, and
given ground for the full development of individuality. In consequence of
[pg xxxiii] this, the State (and such a state as Hegel describes is essentially
the idea or ideal of the modern State)9 has a certain artificial air about it. It
can only be maintained by the free action of intelligence: it must make its
laws public: it must bring to consciousness the principles of its constitution,
and create agencies for keeping up unity of organisation through the several
separate provinces or contending social interests, each of which is inclined
to insist on the right of home mis-rule.

The State—which in its actuality must always be a quasi-national state—is

thus the supreme unity of Nature and Mind. Its natural basis in land,
language, blood, and the many ties which spring therefrom, has to be
constantly raised into an intelligent unity through universal interests. But
the elements of race and of culture have no essential connexion, and they
perpetually incline to wrench themselves asunder. Blood and judgment are
for ever at war in the state as in the individual10: the cosmopolitan interest,
to which the maxim is Ubi bene, ibi patria, resists the national, which
adopts the patriotic watchword of Hector11. The State however has another
source of danger in the very principle that gave it birth. It arose through
antagonism: it was baptised on the battlefield, and it only lives as it is able
to assert itself against a foreign foe. And this circumstance tends to
intensify and even pervert its natural basis of nationality:—tends to give the
very conception of the political a negative and [pg xxxiv] superficial look.
But, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, the State in its Idea is entitled to
the name Hobbes gave it,—the Mortal God. Here in a way culminates the
obviously objective,—we may almost say, visible and tangible—
development of Man and Mind. Here it attains a certain completeness—a
union of reality and of ideality: a quasi-immortality, a quasi-universality.
What the individual person could not do unaided, he can do in the strength
of his commonwealth. Much that in the solitary was but implicit or
potential, is in the State actualised.

But the God of the State is a mortal God. It is but a national and a limited
mind. To be actual, one must at least begin by restricting oneself. Or, rather
actuality is rational, but always with a conditioned and a relative
rationality12: it is in the realm of action and re-action,—in the realm of
change and nature. It has warring forces outside it,—warring forces inside
it. Its unity is never perfect: because it never produces a true identity of
interests within, or maintains an absolute independence without. Thus the
true and real State—the State in its Idea—the realisation of concrete
humanity,—of Mind as the fullness and unity of nature—is not reached in
any single or historical State: but floats away, when we try to seize it, into
the endless progress of history. Always indeed the State, the historical and
objective, points beyond itself. It does so first in the succession of times.
Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.13 And in that doom of the world the
eternal blast sweeps along the successive generations of the temporal, one
expelling another from the stage of time—each because it is inadequate to
the Idea which it tried to express, and has succumbed to an [pg xxxv]
enemy from without because it was not a real and true unity within.

But if temporal flees away before another temporal, it abides in so far as it

has, however inadequately, given expression and visible reality—as it
points inward and upward—to the eternal. The earthly state is also the city
of God; and if the republic of Plato seems to find scant admission into the
reality of flesh and blood, it stands eternal as a witness in the heaven of
idea. Behind the fleeting succession of consulates and dictatures, of
aristocracy and empire, feuds of plebeian with patrician, in that apparent
anarchy of powers which the so-called Roman constitution is to the
superficial observer, there is the eternal Rome, one, strong, victorious,
semper eadem: the Rome of Virgil and Justinian, the ghost whereof still
haunts with memories the seven-hilled city, but which with full spiritual
presence lives in the law, the literature, the manners of the modern world.
To find fitter expression for this Absolute Mind than it has in the Ethical
community—to reach that reality of which the moral world is but one-
sidedly representative—is the work of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. And
to deal with these efforts to find the truth and the unity of Mind and Nature
is the subject of Hegel's third Section.

(iii.) Religion and Philosophy.

It may be well at this point to guard against a misconception of this serial

order of exposition14. As stage is seen to follow stage, the historical
imagination, which [pg xxxvi] governs our ordinary current of ideas, turns
the logical dependence into a time-sequence. But it is of course not meant
that the later stage follows the earlier in history. The later is the more real,
and therefore the more fundamental. But we can only understand by
abstracting and then transcending our abstractions, or rather by showing
how the abstraction implies relations which force us to go further and
beyond our arbitrary arrest. Each stage therefore either stands to that
preceding it as an antithesis, which inevitably dogs its steps as an accusing
spirit, or it is the conjunction of the original thesis with the antithesis, in a
union which should not be called synthesis because it is a closer fusion and
true marriage of minds. A truth and reality, though fundamental, is only
appreciated at its true value and seen in all its force where it appears as the
reconciliation and reunion of partial and opposing points of view. Thus,
e.g., the full significance of the State does not emerge so long as we view it
in isolation as a supposed single state, but only as it is seen in the conflict of
history, in its actual “energy” as a world-power among powers, always
pointing beyond itself to a something universal which it fain would be, and
yet cannot be. Or, again, there never was a civil or economic society which
existed save under the wing of a state, or in one-sided assumption of state
powers to itself: and a family is no isolated and independent unit belonging
to a supposed patriarchal age, but was always mixed up with, and in
manifold dependence upon, political and civil combinations. The true
family, indeed, far from preceding the state in time, presupposes the
political power to give it its precise sphere and its social stability: as is well
illustrated by that typical form of it presented in the Roman state.

So, again, religion does not supervene upon an [pg xxxvii] already existing
political and moral system and invest it with an additional sanction. The
true order would be better described as the reverse. The real basis of social
life, and even of intelligence, is religion. As some thinkers quaintly put it,
the known rests and lives on the bosom of the Unknowable. But when we
say that, we must at once guard against a misconception. There are religions
of all sorts; and some of them which are most heard of in the modern world
only exist or survive in the shape of a traditional name and venerated creed
which has lost its power. Nor is a religion necessarily committed to a
definite conception of a supernatural—of a personal power outside the
order of Nature. But in all cases, religion is a faith and a theory which gives
unity to the facts of life, and gives it, not because the unity is in detail
proved or detected, but because life and experience in their deepest reality
inexorably demand and evince such a unity to the heart. The religion of a
time is not its nominal creed, but its dominant conviction of the meaning of
reality, the principle which animates all its being and all its striving, the
faith it has in the laws of nature and the purpose of life. Dimly or clearly
felt and perceived, religion has for its principle (one cannot well say, its
object) not the unknowable, but the inner unity of life and knowledge, of act
and consciousness, a unity which is certified in its every knowledge, but is
never fully demonstrable by the summation of all its ascertained items. As
such a felt and believed synthesis of the world and life, religion is the unity
which gives stability and harmony to the social sphere; just as morality in
its turn gives a partial and practical realisation to the ideal of religion. But
religion does not merely establish and sanction morality; it also frees it
from a certain narrowness it [pg xxxviii] always has, as of the earth. Or,
otherwise put, morality has to the keener inspection something in it which is
more than the mere moral injunction at first indicates. Beyond the moral, in
its stricter sense, as the obligatory duty and the obedience to law, rises and
expands the beautiful and the good: a beautiful which is disinterestedly
loved, and a goodness which has thrown off all utilitarian relativity, and
become a free self-enhancing joy. The true spirit of religion sees in the
divine judgment not a mere final sanction to human morality which has
failed of its earthly close, not the re-adjustment of social and political
judgments in accordance with our more conscientious inner standards, but a
certain, though, for our part-by-part vision, incalculable proportion between
what is done and suffered. And in this liberation of the moral from its
restrictions, Art renders no slight aid. Thus in different ways, religion
presupposes morality to fill up its vacant form, and morality presupposes
religion to give its laws an ultimate sanction, which at the same time points
beyond their limitations.

But art, religion, and philosophy still rest on the national culture and on the
individual mind. However much they rise in the heights of the ideal world,
they never leave the reality of life and circumstance behind, and float in the
free empyrean. Yet there are degrees of universality, degrees in which they
reach what they promised. As the various psychical nuclei of an individual
consciousness tend through the course of experience to gather round a
central idea and by fusion and assimilation form a complete mental
organisation; so, through the march of history, there grows up a
complication and a fusion of national ideas and aspirations, which, though
still retaining the individuality and restriction of a concrete national life,
ultimately present [pg xxxix] an organisation social, aesthetic, and religious
which is a type of humanity in its universality and completeness. Always
moving in the measure and on the lines of the real development of its social
organisation, the art and religion of a nation tend to give expression to what
social and political actuality at its best but imperfectly sets in existence.
They come more and more to be, not mere competing fragments as set side
by side with those of others, but comparatively equal and complete
representations of the many-sided and many-voiced reality of man and the
world. Yet always they live and flourish in reciprocity with the fullness of
practical institutions and individual character. An abstractly universal art
and religion is a delusion—until all diversities of geography and climate, of
language and temperament, have been made to disappear. If these energies
are in power and reality and not merely in name, they cannot be applied like
a panacea or put on like a suit of ready-made clothes. If alive, they grow
with individualised type out of the social situation: and they can only attain
a vulgar and visible universality, so far as they attach themselves to some
simple and uniform aspects,—a part tolerably identical everywhere—in
human nature in all times and races.

Art, according to Hegel's account, is the first of the three expressions of

Absolute Mind. But the key-note to the whole is to be found in Religion15:
or Religion is the generic description of that phase of mind which has found
rest in the fullness of attainment and is no longer a struggle and a warfare,
but a fruition. “It is the conviction of all nations,” he says16, “that in the [pg
xl] religious consciousness they hold their truth; and they have always
regarded religion as their dignity and as the Sunday of their life. Whatever
excites our doubts and alarms, all grief and all anxiety, all that the petty
fields of finitude can offer to attract us, we leave behind on the shoals of
time: and as the traveller on the highest peak of a mountain range, removed
from every distinct view of the earth's surface, quietly lets his vision neglect
all the restrictions of the landscape and the world; so in this pure region of
faith man, lifted above the hard and inflexible reality, sees it with his mind's
eye reflected in the rays of the mental sun to an image where its discords,
its lights and shades, are softened to eternal calm. In this region of mind
flow the waters of forgetfulness, from which Psyche drinks, and in which
she drowns all her pain: and the darknesses of this life are here softened to a
dream-image, and transfigured into a mere setting for the splendours of the
Eternal.'”

If we take Religion, in this extended sense, we find it is the sense, the

vision, the faith, the certainty of the eternal in the changeable, of the infinite
in the finite, of the reality in appearance, of the truth in error. It is freedom
from the distractions and pre-occupations of the particular details of life; it
is the sense of permanence, repose, certainty, rounding off, toning down and
absorbing the vicissitude, the restlessness, the doubts of actual life. Such a
victory over palpable reality has no doubt its origin—its embryology—in
phases of mind which have been already discussed in the first section.
Religion will vary enormously according to the grade of national mood of
mind and social development in which it emerges. But whatever be the
peculiarities of its original swaddling-clothes, its cardinal note will be a
sense of dependence on, and independence [pg xli] in, something more
permanent, more august, more of a surety and stay than visible and variable
nature and man,—something also which whether God or devil, or both in
one, holds the keys of life and death, of weal and woe, and holds them from
some safe vantage-ground above the lower realms of change. By this
central being the outward and the inward, past and present and to come, are
made one. And as already indicated, Religion, emerging, as it does, from
social man, from mind ethical, will retain traces of the two foci in society:
the individual subjectivity and the objective community. Retain them
however only as traces, which still show in the actually envisaged
reconciliation. For that is what religion does to morality. It carries a step
higher the unity or rather combination gained in the State: it is the fuller
harmony of the individual and the collectivity. The moral conscience rests
in certainty and fixity on the religious.

But Religion (thus widely understood as the faith in sempiternal and all-
explaining reality) at first appears under a guise of Art. The poem and the
pyramid, the temple-image and the painting, the drama and the fairy legend,
these are religion: but they are, perhaps, religion as Art. And that means
that they present the eternal under sensible representations, the work of an
artist, and in a perishable material of limited range. Yet even the carvers of
a long-past day whose works have been disinterred from the plateaux of
Auvergne knew that they gave to the perishable life around them a quasi-
immortality: and the myth-teller of a savage tribe elevated the incident of a
season into a perennial power of love and fear. The cynic may remind us
that from the finest picture of the artist, readily

“We turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn.”

[pg xlii]
And yet it may be said in reply to the cynic that, had it not been for the
deep-imprinted lesson of the artist, it would have been but a brutal instinct
that would have drawn our eyes. The artist, the poet, the musician, reveal
the meaning, the truth, the reality of the world: they teach us, they help us,
backward younger brothers, to see, to hear, to feel what our rude senses had
failed to detect. They enact the miracle of the loaves and fishes, again and
again: out of the common limited things of every day they produce a bread
of life in which the generations continue to find nourishment.

But if Art embodies for us the unseen and the eternal, it embodies it in the
stone, the colour, the tone, and the word: and these are by themselves only
dead matter. To the untutored eye and taste the finest picture-gallery is only
a weariness: when the national life has drifted away, the sacred book and
the image are but idols and enigmas. “The statues are now corpses from
which the vivifying soul has fled, and the hymns are words whence faith
has departed: the tables of the Gods are without spiritual meat and drink,
and games and feasts no longer afford the mind its joyful union with the
being of being. The works of the Muse lack that intellectual force which
knew itself strong and real by crushing gods and men in its winepress. They
are now (in this iron age) what they are for us,—fair fruits broken from the
tree, and handed to us by a kindly destiny. But the gift is like the fruits
which the girl in the picture presents: she does not give the real life of their
existence, not the tree which bore them, not the earth and the elements
which entered into their substance, nor the climate which formed their
quality, nor the change of seasons which governed the process of their
growth. Like her, Destiny in giving us the works of ancient art does not give
us their world, [pg xliii] not the spring and summer of the ethical life in
which they blossomed and ripened, but solely a memory and a suggestion
of this actuality. Our act in enjoying them, therefore, is not a Divine service:
were it so, our mind would achieve its perfect and satisfying truth. All that
we do is a mere externalism, which from these fruits wipes off some rain-
drop, some speck of dust, and which, in place of the inward elements of
moral actuality that created and inspired them, tries from the dead elements
of their external reality, such as language and historical allusion, to set up a
tedious mass of scaffolding, not in order to live ourselves into them, but
only to form a picture of them in our minds. But as the girl who proffers the
plucked fruits is more and nobler than the natural element with all its details
of tree, air, light, &c. which first yielded them, because she gathers all this
together, in a nobler way, into the glance of the conscious eye and the
gesture which proffers them; so the spirit of destiny which offers us those
works of art is more than the ethical life and actuality of the ancient people:
for it is the inwardising of that mind which in them was still self-estranged
and self-dispossessed:—it is the spirit of tragic destiny, the destiny which
collects all those individualised gods and attributes of substance into the
one Pantheon. And that temple of all the gods is Mind conscious of itself as
mind17.”

Religion enters into its more adequate form when it ceases to appear in the
guise of Art and realises that the kingdom of God is within, that the truth
must be felt, the eternal inwardly revealed, the holy one apprehended by
faith18, not by outward vision. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things of
God. They cannot [pg xliv] be presented, or delineated: they come only in
the witness of the spirit. The human soul itself is the only worthy temple of
the Most High, whom heaven, and the heaven of heavens, cannot contain.
Here in truth God has come down to dwell with men; and the Son of Man,
caught up in the effusion of the Spirit, can in all assurance and all humility
claim that he is divinified. Here apparently Absolute Mind is reached: the
soul knows no limitation, no struggle: in time it is already eternal. Yet, there
is, according to Hegel, a flaw,—not in the essence and the matter, but in the
manner and mode in which the ordinary religious consciousness represents
to itself, or pictures that unification which it feels and experiences.
“In religion then this unification of ultimate Being with the Self is
implicitly reached. But the religious consciousness, if it has this symbolic
idea of its reconciliation, still has it as a mere symbol or representation. It
attains the satisfaction by tacking on to its pure negativity, and that
externally, the positive signification of its unity with the ultimate Being: its
satisfaction remains therefore tainted by the antithesis of another world. Its
own reconciliation, therefore, is presented to its consciousness as something
far away, something far away in the future: just as the reconciliation which
the other Self accomplished appears as a far-away thing in the past. The one
Divine Man had but an implicit father and only an actual mother;
conversely the universal divine man, the community, has its own deed and
knowledge for its father, but for its mother only the eternal Love, which it
only feels, but does not behold in its consciousness as an actual immediate
object. Its reconciliation therefore is in its heart, but still at variance with its
consciousness, and its actuality still has a flaw. In its field of consciousness
the place of [pg xlv] implicit reality or side of pure mediation is taken by
the reconciliation that lies far away behind: the place of the actually present,
or the side of immediacy and existence, is filled by the world which has still
to wait for its transfiguration to glory. Implicitly no doubt the world is
reconciled with the eternal Being; and that Being, it is well known, no
longer looks upon the object as alien to it, but in its love sees it as like itself.
But for self-consciousness this immediate presence is not yet set in the full
light of mind. In its immediate consciousness accordingly the spirit of the
community is parted from its religious: for while the religious
consciousness declares that they are implicitly not parted, this implicitness
is not raised to reality and not yet grown to absolute self-certainty19.”

Religion therefore, which as it first appeared in art-worship had yet to

realise its essential inwardness or spirituality, so has now to overcome the
antithesis in which its (the religious) consciousness stands to the secular.
For the peculiarly religious type of mind is distinguished by an indifference
and even hostility, more or less veiled, to art, to morality and the civil state,
to science and to nature. Strong in the certainty of faith, or of its implicit
rest in God, it resents too curious inquiry into the central mystery of its
union, and in its distincter consciousness sets the foundation of faith on the
evidence of a fact, which, however, it in the same breath declares to be
unique and miraculous, the central event of the ages, pointing back in its
reference to the first days of humanity, and forward in the future to the
winding-up of the business of terrestrial life. Philosophy, according to
Hegel's conception of it, does but [pg xlvi] draw the conclusion supplied by
the premisses of religion: it supplements and rounds off into coherence the
religious implications. The unique events in Judea nearly nineteen centuries
ago are for it also the first step in a new revelation of man's relationship to
God: but while it acknowledges the transcendent interest of that age, it lays
main stress on the permanent truth then revealed, and it insists on the duty
of carrying out the principle there awakened to all the depth and breadth of
its explication. Its task—its supreme task—is to explicate religion. But to
do so is to show that religion is no exotic, and no mere revelation from an
external source. It is to show that religion is the truth, the complete reality,
of the mind that lived in Art, that founded the state and sought to be dutiful
and upright: the truth, the crowning fruit of all scientific knowledge, of all
human affections, of all secular consciousness. Its lesson ultimately is that
there is nothing essentially common or unclean: that the holy is not parted
off from the true and the good and the beautiful.

Religion thus expanded descends from its abstract or “intelligible” world, to

which it had retired from art and science, and the affairs of ordinary life. Its
God—as a true God—is not of the dead alone, but also of the living: not a
far-off supreme and ultimate Being, but also a man among men. Philosophy
thus has to break down the middle partition-wall of life, the fence between
secular and sacred. It is but religion come to its maturity, made at home in
the world, and no longer a stranger and a wonder. Religion has pronounced
in its inmost heart and faith of faith, that the earth is the Lord's, and that day
unto day shows forth the divine handiwork. But the heart of unbelief, of
little faith, has hardly uttered the word, than it forgets its assurance and
leans to the conviction that the prince of this world [pg xlvii] is the Spirit of
Evil. The mood of Théodicée is also—but with a difference—the mood of
philosophy. It asserts the ways of Providence: but its providence is not the
God of the Moralist, or the ideal of the Artist, or rather is not these only, but
also the Law of Nature, and more than that. Its aim is the Unity of History.
The words have sometimes been lightly used to mean that events run on in
one continuous flow, and that there are no abrupt, no ultimate beginnings,
parting age from age. But the Unity of History in its full sense is beyond
history: it is history “reduced” from the expanses of time to the eternal
present: its thousand years made one day,—made even the glance of a
moment. The theme of the Unity of History—in the full depth of unity and
the full expanse of history—is the theme of Hegelian philosophy. It traces
the process in which Mind has to be all-inclusive, self-upholding, one with
the Eternal reality.

“That process of the mind's self-realisation” says Hegel in the close of his
Phenomenology, “exhibits a lingering movement and succession of minds, a
gallery of images, each of which, equipped with the complete wealth of
mind, only seems to linger because the Self has to penetrate and to digest
this wealth of its Substance. As its perfection consists in coming completely
to know what it is (its substance), this knowledge is its self-involution in
which it deserts its outward existence and surrenders its shape to
recollection. Thus self-involved, it is sunk in the night of its self-
consciousness: but in that night its vanished being is preserved, and that
being, thus in idea preserved,—old, but now new-born of the spirit,—is the
new sphere of being, a new world, a new phase of mind. In this new phase
it has again to begin afresh and from the beginning, and again nurture itself
to maturity from its [pg xlviii] own resources, as if for it all that preceded
were lost, and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier
minds. Yet is that recollection a preservation of experience: it is the
quintessence, and in fact a higher form, of the substance. If therefore this
new mind appears only to count on its own resources, and to start quite
fresh and blank, it is at the same time on a higher grade that it starts. The
intellectual and spiritual realm, which is thus constructed in actuality, forms
a succession in time, where one mind relieved another of its watch, and
each took over the kingdom of the world from the preceding. The purpose
of that succession is to reveal the depth, and that depth is the absolute
comprehension of mind: this revelation is therefore to uplift its depth, to
spread it out in breadth, so negativing this self-involved Ego, wherein it is
self-dispossessed or reduced to substance. But it is also its time: the course
of time shows this dispossession itself dispossessed, and thus in its
extension it is no less in its depth, the self. The way to that goal,—absolute
self-certainty—or the mind knowing itself as mind—is the inwardising of
the minds, as they severally are in themselves, and as they accomplish the
organisation of their realm. Their conservation,—regarded on the side of its
free and apparently contingent succession of fact—is history: on the side of
their comprehended organisation, again, it is the science of mental
phenomenology: the two together, comprehended history, form at once the
recollection and the grave-yard of the absolute Mind, the actuality, truth,
and certitude of his throne, apart from which he were lifeless and alone.”

Such in brief outline—lingering most on the points where Hegel has here
been briefest—is the range of the Philosophy of Mind. Its aim is to
comprehend, not to explain: to put together in intelligent unity, [pg xlix] not
to analyse into a series of elements. For it psychology is not an analysis or
description of mental phenomena, of laws of association, of the growth of
certain powers and ideas, but a “comprehended history” of the formation of
subjective mind, of the intelligent, feeling, willing self or ego. For it Ethics
is part and only part of the great scheme or system of self-development; but
continuing into greater concreteness the normal endowment of the
individual mind, and but preparing the ground on which religion may be
most effectively cultivated. And finally Religion itself, released from its
isolation and other-world sacrosanctity, is shown to be only the crown of
life, the ripest growth of actuality, and shown to be so by philosophy, whilst
it is made clear that religion is the basis of philosophy, or that a philosophy
can only go as far as the religious stand-point allows. The hierarchy, if so it
be called, of the spiritual forces is one where none can stand alone, or claim
an abstract and independent supremacy. The truth of egoism is the truth of
altruism: the truly moral is the truly religious: and each is not what it
professes to be unless it anticipate the later, or include the earlier.

(iv.) Mind or Spirit.

It may be said, however, that for such a range of subjects the term Mind is
wretchedly inadequate and common-place, and that the better rendering of
the title would be Philosophy of Spirit. It may be admitted that Mind is not
all that could be wished. But neither is Spirit blameless. And, it may be
added, Hegel's [pg l] own term Geist has to be unduly strained to cover so
wide a region. It serves—and was no doubt meant to serve—as a sign of the
conformity of his system with the religion which sees in God no other-
world being, but our very self and mind, and which worships him in spirit
and in truth. And if the use of a word like this could allay the “ancient
variance” between the religious and the philosophic mood, it would be but
churlish perhaps to refuse the sign of compliance and compromise. But
whatever may be the case in German,—and even there the new wine was
dangerous to the old wine-skin—it is certain that to average English ears
the word Spiritual would carry us over the medium line into the proper land
of religiosity. And to do that, as we have seen, is to sin against the central
idea: the idea that religion is of one blood with the whole mental family,
though the most graciously complete of all the sisters. Yet, however the
word may be chosen, the philosophy of Hegel, like the august lady who
appeared in vision to the emprisoned Boëthius, has on her garment a sign
which “signifies the life which is on earth,” as also a sign which signifies
the “right law of heaven”; if her right-hand holds the “book of the justice of
the King omnipotent,” the sceptre in her left is “corporal judgment against
sin20.”

There is indeed no sufficient reason for contemning the term Mind. If

Inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind has—perhaps to a dainty taste—
made the word unsavoury, that is no reason for refusing to give it all the
wealth of soul and heart, of intellect and will. The mens aeterna which, if
we hear Tacitus, expressed the Hebrew conception of the spirituality of
God, and the Νοῦς which Aristotelianism set supreme in the Soul, are not
the mere or abstract intelligence, which late-acquired [pg li] habits of
abstraction have made out of them. If the reader will adopt the term (in
want of a better) in its widest scope, we may shelter ourselves under the
example of Wordsworth. His theme is—as he describes it in the Recluse
—“the Mind and Man”: his

“voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted;—and how exquisitely too
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish.”
The verse which expounds that “high argument” speaks

“Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope

And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith.”

And the poet adds:

“As we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song;
Beauty—a living Presence of the earth
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms
... waits upon my steps.”

The reality duly seen in the spiritual vision

“That inspires
The human Soul of universal earth
Dreaming of things to come”

will be a greater glory than the ideals of imaginative fiction ever fancied:

“For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.”

[pg lii]
If Wordsworth, thus, as it were, echoing the great conception of Francis
Bacon,

“Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse

Of this great consummation,”
perhaps the poet and the essayist may help us with Hegel to rate the Mind—
the Mind of Man—at its highest value.

[pg liii]
Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.

It is not going too far to say that in common estimation psychology has as
yet hardly reached what Kant has called the steady walk of science—der
sichere Gang der Wissenschaft. To assert this is not, of course, to throw any
doubts on the importance of the problems, or on the intrinsic value of the
results, in the studies which have been prosecuted under that name. It is
only to note the obvious fact that a number of inquiries of somewhat
discrepant tone, method, and tendency have all at different times covered
themselves under the common title of psychological, and that the work of
orientation is as yet incomplete. Such a destiny seems inevitable, when a
name is coined rather as the title of an unexplored territory, than fixed on to
describe an accomplished fact.

(i.) Psychology as a Science and as a Part of Philosophy.

The De Anima of Aristotle, gathering up into one the work of Plato and his
predecessors, may be said to lay the foundation of psychology. But even in
it, we can already see that there are two elements or aspects struggling for
mastery: two elements not unrelated or [pg liv] independent, but hard to
keep fairly and fully in unity. On one hand there is the conception of Soul
as a part of Nature, as a grade of existence in the physical or natural
universe,—in the universe of things which suffer growth and change, which
are never entirely “without matter,” and are always attached to or present in
body. From this point of view Aristotle urged that a sound and realistic
psychology must, e.g. in its definition of a passion, give the prominent
place to its physical (or material) expression, and not to its mental form or
significance. It must remember, he said, that the phenomena or “accidents”
are what really throw light on the nature or the “substance” of the Soul. On
the other hand, there are two points to be considered. There is, first of all,
the counterpoising remark that the conception of Soul as such, as a unity
and common characteristic, will be determinative of the phenomena or
“accidents,”—will settle, as it were, what we are to observe and look for,
and how we are to describe our observations. And by the conception of
Soul, is meant not a soul, as a thing or agent (subject) which has properties
attaching to it; but soul, as the generic feature, the universal, which is set as
a stamp on everything that claims to be psychical. In other words, Soul is
one, not as a single thing contrasted with its attributes, activities, or
exercises of force (such single thing will be shown by logic to be a
metaphysical fiction); but as the unity of form and character, the
comprehensive and identical feature, which is present in all its
manifestations and exercises. But there is a second consideration. The
question is asked by Aristotle whether it is completely and strictly accurate
to put Soul under the category of natural objects. There is in it, or of it,
perhaps, something, and something essential to it, which belongs to the
order of the eternal and self-active: [pg lv] something which is “form” and
“energy” quite unaffected by and separate from “matter.” How this is
related to the realm of the perishable and changeable is a problem on which
Aristotle has been often (and with some reason) believed to be obscure, if
not even inconsistent21.

In these divergent elements which come to the fore in Aristotle's treatment

we have the appearance of a radical difference of conception and purpose as
to psychology. He himself does a good deal to keep them both in view. But
it is evident that here already we have the contrast between a purely
physical or (in the narrower sense) “scientific” psychology, empirical and
realistic in treatment, and a more philosophical—what in certain quarters
would be called a speculative or metaphysical—conception of the problem.
There is also in Aristotle the antithesis of a popular or superficial, and an
accurate or analytic, psychology. The former is of a certain use in dealing,
say, with questions of practical ethics and education: the latter is of more
strictly scientific interest. Both of these distinctions—that between a
speculative and an empirical, and that between a scientific and a popular
treatment—affect the subsequent history of the study. Psychology is
sometimes understood to mean the results of casual observation of our own
minds by what is termed introspection, and by the interpretation of what we
may observe in others. Such observations are in the first place carried on
under the guidance of distinctions or points of view supplied by the names
in common use. We interrogate our own consciousness as to what facts or
relations of facts correspond to the terms of our national language. Or we
attempt—what is really an inexhaustible quest—to get definite divisions
between them, and clear-cut [pg lvi] definitions. Inquiries like these which
start from popular distinctions fall a long way short of science: and the
inquirer will find that accidental and essential properties are given in the
same handful of conclusions. Yet there is always much value in these
attempts to get our minds cleared: and it is indispensable for all inquiries
that all alleged or reported facts of mind should be realised and reproduced
in our own mental experience. And this is especially the case in psychology,
just because here we cannot get the object outside us, we cannot get or
make a diagram, and unless we give it reality by re-constructing it,—by re-
interrogating our own experience, our knowledge of it will be but wooden
and mechanical. And the term introspection need not be too seriously taken:
it means much more than watching passively an internal drama; and is quite
as well describable as mental projection, setting out what was within, and
so as it were hidden and involved, before ourselves in the field of mental
vision. Here, as always, the essential point is to get ourselves well out of the
way of the object observed, and to stand, figuratively speaking, quite on one
side.

But even at the best, such a popular or empirical psychology has no special
claim to be ranked as science. It may no doubt be said that at least it
collects, describes, or notes down facts. But even this is not so certain as it
seems. Its so-called facts are very largely fictions, or so largely interpolated
with error, that they cannot be safely used for construction. If psychology is
to accomplish anything valuable, it must go more radically to work. It must
—at least in a measure—discard from its preliminary view the data of
common and current distinctions, and try to get at something more primary
or ultimate as its starting-point. And this it may do in [pg lvii] two ways. It
may, in the one case, follow the example of the physical sciences. In these it
is the universal practice to assume that the explanation of complex and
concrete facts is to be attained by (a) postulating certain simple elements
(which we may call atoms, molecules, and perhaps units or monads), which
are supposed to be clearly conceivable and to justify themselves by intrinsic
intelligibility, and by (b) assuming that these elements are compounded and
combined according to laws which again are in the last resort self-evident,
or such that they seem to have an obvious and palpable lucidity. Further,
such laws being always axioms or plain postulates of mechanics (for these
alone possess this feature of self-evident intelligibility), they are subject to
and invite all the aids and refinements of the higher mathematical calculus.
What the primary and self-explicative bits of psychical reality may be, is a
further question on which there may be some dispute. They may be, so to
say, taken in a more physical or in a more metaphysical way: i.e. more as
units of nerve-function or more as elements of ideative-function. And there
may be differences as to how far and in what provinces the mathematical
calculus may be applicable. But, in any case, there will be a strong tendency
in psychology, worked on this plan, to follow, mutatis mutandis, and at
some distance perhaps, the analogy of material physics. In both the
justification of the postulated units and laws will be their ability to describe
and systematise the observed phenomena in a uniform and consistent way.

The other way in which psychology gets a foundation and ulterior certainty
is different, and goes deeper. After all, the “scientific” method is only a way
in which the facts of a given sphere are presented in thoroughgoing
interconnexion, each reduced to an exact multiple [pg lviii] or fraction of
some other, by an inimitably continued subtraction and addition of an
assumed homogeneous element, found or assumed to be perfectly
imaginable (conceivable). But we may also consider the province in relation
to the whole sphere of reality, may ask what is its place and meaning in the
whole, what reality is in the end driving at or coming to be, and how far this
special province contributes to that end. If we do this, we attach psychology
to philosophy, or, if we prefer so to call it, to metaphysics, as in the former
way we established it on the principles generally received as governing the
method of the physical sciences.

This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question

which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those
engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the
intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with
them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can,
up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called empirical (or, to use
the more English phrase, inductive) sciences. On many hands they are
actually so treated: and not without result. Considering the tendency of
metaphysical inquiries, it may be urged that it is well to avoid preliminary
criticism of the current conceptions and beliefs about reality which these
sciences imply. Yet such beliefs are undoubtedly present and effective.
Schopenhauer has popularised the principle that the pure empiricist is a
fiction, that man is a radically metaphysical animal, and that he inevitably
turns what he receives into a part of a dogmatic creed—a conviction how
things ought to be. Almost without effort there grows up in him, or flows in
upon him, a belief and a system of beliefs as to the order and values of
things. Every judgment, even in logic, rests on such an order [pg lix] of
truth. He need not be able to formulate his creed: it will influence him none
the less: nay, his faith will probably seem more a part of the solid earth and
common reality, the less it has been reduced to a determinate creed or to a
code of principles. For such formulation presupposes doubt and scepticism,
which it beats back by mere assertion. Each human being has such a
background of convictions which govern his actions and conceptions, and
of which it so startles him to suggest the possibility of a doubt, that he turns
away in dogmatic horror. Such ruling ideas vary, from man to man, and
from man to woman—if we consider them in all their minuteness. But
above all they constitute themselves in a differently organised system or
aggregate according to the social and educational stratum to which an
individual belongs. Each group, engaged in a common task, it may be in the
study of a part of nature, is ideally bound and obliged by a common
language, and special standards of truth and reality for its own. Such a
group of ideas is what Bacon would have called a scientific fetich or idolum
theatri. A scientific idolum is a traditional belief or dogma as to principles,
values, and methods, which has so thoroughly pervaded the minds of those
engaged in a branch of inquiry, that they no longer recognise its
hypothetical character,—its relation of means to the main end of their
function.

Such a collected and united theory of reality (it is what Hegel has
designated the Idea) is what is understood by a natural metaphysic. It has
nothing necessarily to do with a supersensible or a supernatural, if these
words mean a ghostly, materialised, but super-finely-materialised nature,
above and beyond the present. But that there is a persistent tendency to
conceive the unity and coherence, the theoretic idea of reality, [pg lx] in this
pseudo-sensuous (i.e. super-sensuous) form, is of course a well-known fact.
For the present, however, this aberration—this idol of the tribe—may be left
out of sight. By a metaphysic or fundamental philosophy, is, in the present
instance, meant a system of first principles—a secular and cosmic creed: a
belief in ends and values, a belief in truth—again premising that the system
in question is, for most, a rudely organised and almost inarticulate mass of
belief and hope, conviction and impression. It is, in short, a natural
metaphysic: a metaphysic, that is, which has but an imperfect coherence,
which imperfectly realises both its nature and its limits.

In certain parts, however, it is more and better than this crude background
of belief. Each science—or at least every group of sciences—has a more
definite system or aggregate of first principles, axioms, and conceptions
belonging to it. It has, that is,—and here in a much distincter way—its
special standard of reality, its peculiar forms of conceiving things, its
distinctions between the actual and the apparent, &c. Here again it will
probably be found that the scientific specialist is hardly conscious that these
are principles and concepts: on the contrary, they will be supposed self-
evident and ultimate facts, foundations of being. Instead of being treated as
modes of conception, more or less justified by their use and their results,
these categories will be regarded as fundamental facts, essential conditions
of all reality. Like popular thought in its ingrained categories, the specialist
cannot understand the possibility of any limitation to his radical ideas of
reality. To him they are not hypotheses, but principles. The scientific
specialist may be as convinced of the universal application of his peculiar
categories, as the Chinese or the Eskimo that his standards are natural and
final.

[pg lxi]
Under such metaphysical or extra-empirical presuppositions all
investigation, whether it be crudely empirical or (in the physical sense)
scientific, is carried on. And when so carried on, it is said to be prosecuted
apart from any interference from metaphysic. Such a naïve or natural
metaphysic, not raised to explicit consciousness, not followed as an
imposed rule, but governing with the strength of an immanent faith, does
not count for those who live under it as a metaphysic at all. M. Jourdain was
amazed suddenly to learn he had been speaking prose for forty years
without knowing it. But in the present case there is something worse than
amazement sure to be excited by the news. For the critic who thus reveals
the secrets of the scientist's heart is pretty sure to go on to say that a good
deal of this naïve unconscious metaphysic is incoherent, contradictory, even
bad: that it requires correction, revision, and readjustment, and has by
criticism to be made one and harmonious. That readjustment or criticism
which shall eliminate contradiction and produce unity, is the aim of the
science of metaphysic—the science of the meta-physical element in
physical knowledge: what Hegel has chosen to call the Science of Logic (in
the wide sense of the term). This higher Logic, this science of metaphysic,
is the process to revise and harmonise in systematic completeness the
imperfect or misleading and partial estimates of reality which are to be
found in popular and scientific thought.

In the case of the run of physical sciences this revision is less necessary;
and for no very recondite reason. Every science by its very nature deals
with a special, a limited topic. It is confined to a part or aspect of reality. Its
propositions are not complete truths; they apply to an artificial world, to a
part expressly cut off from the concrete reality. Its principles [pg lxii] are
generally cut according to their cloth,—according to the range in which
they apply. The only danger that can well arise is if these categories are
transplanted without due reservations, and made of universal application,
i.e. if the scientist elects on his speciality to pronounce de omnibus rebus.
But in the case of psychology and ethics the harmlessness of natural
metaphysics will be less certain. Here a general human or universal interest
is almost an inevitable coefficient: especially if they really rise to the full
sweep of the subject. For as such they both seem to deal not with a part of
reality, but with the very centre and purpose of all reality. In them we are
not dealing with topics of secondary interest, but with the very heart of the
human problem. Here the questions of reality and ideals, of unity and
diversity, and of the evaluation of existence, come distinctly to the fore. If
psychology is to answer the question, What am I? and ethics the question,
What ought I to do? they can hardly work without some formulated creed of
metaphysical character, without some preliminary criticisms of current first
principles.
(ii.) Herbart.

The German thinker, who has given perhaps the most fruitful stimulus to
the scientific study of psychology in modern times—Johann Friedrich
Herbart—is after all essentially a philosopher, and not a mere scientist, even
in his psychology. His psychological inquiry, that is, stands in intimate
connexion with the last questions of all intelligence, with metaphysics and
[pg lxiii] ethics. The business of philosophy, says Herbart, is to touch up
and finish off conceptions (Bearbeitung der Begriffe)22. It finds, as it
supervenes upon the unphilosophical world, that mere and pure facts (if
there ever are or were such purisms) have been enveloped in a cloud of
theory, have been construed into some form of unity, but have been
imperfectly, inadequately construed: and that the existing concepts in
current use need to be corrected, supplemented and readjusted. It has,
accordingly, for its work to “reconcile experience with itself23,” and to elicit
“the hidden pre-suppositions without which the fact of experience is
unthinkable.” Psychology, then, as a branch of this philosophic enterprise,
has to readjust the facts discovered in inner experience. For mere uncritical
experience or merely empirical knowledge only offers problems; it suggests
gaps, which indeed further reflection serves at first only to deepen into
contradictions. Such a psychology is “speculative”: i.e. it is not content to
accept the mere given, but goes forward and backward to find something
that will make the fact intelligible. It employs totally different methods
from the “classification, induction, analogy” familiar to the logic of the
empirical sciences. Its “principles,” therefore, are not given facts: but facts
which have been manipulated and adjusted so as to lose their self-
contradictory quality: they are facts “reduced,” by introducing the omitted
relationships which they postulate if they are to be true and self-consistent24.
While it is far from rejecting or ignoring experience, therefore, psychology
cannot strictly be said to build upon it alone. It uses experimental fact as an
unfinished datum,—or it sees in [pg lxiv] experience a torso which betrays
its imperfection, and suggests completing.

The starting-point, it may be said, of Herbart's psychology is a question

which to the ordinary psychologist (and to the so-called scientific
psychologist) has a secondary, if it have any interest. It was, he says, the
problem of Personality, the problem of the Self or Ego, which first led to his
characteristic conception of psychological method. “My first discovery,” he
tells us25, “was that the Self was neither primitive nor independent, but must
be the most dependent and most conditioned thing one can imagine. The
second was that the elementary ideas of an intelligent being, if they were
ever to reach the pitch of self-consciousness, must be either all, or at least in
part, opposed to each other, and that they must check or block one another
in consequence of this opposition. Though held in check, however, these
ideas were not to be supposed lost: they subsist as endeavours or tendencies
to return into the position of actual idea, as soon as the check became, for
any reason, either in whole or in part inoperative. This check could and
must be calculated, and thus it was clear that psychology required a
mathematical as well as a metaphysical foundation.”

The place of the conception of the Ego in Kant's and Fichte's theory of
knowledge is well known. Equally well known is Kant's treatment of the
soul-reality or soul-substance in his examination of Rational Psychology.
Whereas the (logical) unity of consciousness, or “synthetic unity of
apperception,” is assumed as a fundamental starting-point in explanation of
our objective judgments, or of our knowledge of objective existence, its real
(as opposed to its formal) foundation in a “substantial” soul is set aside as
an illegitimate [pg lxv] interpretation of, or inference from, the facts of
inner experience. The belief in the separate unity and persistence of the
soul, said Kant, is not a scientifically-warranted conclusion. Its true place is
as an ineffaceable postulate of the faith which inspires human life and
action. Herbart did not rest content with either of these—as he believed—
dogmatic assumptions of his master. He did not fall in cheerfully with the
idealism which seemed ready to dispense with a soul, or which justified its
acceptance of empirical reality by referring to the fundamental unity of the
function of judgment. With a strong bent towards fully-differentiated and
individualised experience Herbart conjoined a conviction of the need of
logical analysis to prevent us being carried away by the first-come and
inadequate generalities. The Ego which, in its extremest abstraction, he
found defined as the unity of subject and object, did not seem to him to
offer the proper guarantees of reality: it was itself a problem, full of
contradictions, waiting for solution. On the other hand, the real Ego, or self
of concrete experience, is very much more than this logical abstract, and
differs widely from individual to individual, and apparently from time to
time even in the same individual. Our self, of which we talk so fluently, as
one and the self-same—how far does it really possess the continuity and
identity with which we credit it? Does it not rather seem to be an ideal
which we gradually form and set before ourselves as the standard for
measuring our attainments of the moment,—the perfect fulfilment of that
oneness of being and purpose and knowledge which we never reach?
Sometimes even it seems no better than a name which we move along the
varying phenomena of our inner life, at one time identifying it with the
power which has gained the victory in a moral struggle, at another with that
which [pg lxvi] has been defeated26, according as the attitude of the moment
makes us throw now one, now another, aspect of mental activity in the
foreground.

The other—or logical Ego—the mere identity of subject and object,—when

taken in its utter abstractness and simplicity, shrivels up to something very
small indeed—to a something which is little better than nothing. The mere I
which is not contra-distinguished by a Thou and a He—which is without all
definiteness of predication (the I=I of Fichte and Schelling)—is only as it
were a point of being cut off from all its connexions in reality, and treated
as if it were or could be entirely independent. It is an identity in which
subject and object have not yet appeared: it is not a real I, though we may
still retain the name. It is—as Hegel's Logic will tell us—exactly definable
as Being, which is as yet Nothing: the impossible edge of abstraction on
which we try—and in vain—to steady ourselves at the initial point of
thought. And to reach or stand at that intangible, ungraspable point, which
slips away as we approach, and transmutes itself as we hold it, is not the
natural beginning, but the result of introspection and reflection on the
concrete self. But with this aspect of the question we are not now
concerned.

That the unity of the Self as an intelligent and moral being, that the Ego of
self-consciousness was an ideal and a product of development, was what
Herbart soon became convinced of. The unity of Self is even as given in
mature experience an imperfect fact. It is a fact, that is, which does not
come up to what it promised, and which requires to be supplemented, or
philosophically justified. Here and everywhere the custom of life carries us
over gaps which yawn deep to the eye of [pg lxvii] philosophic reflection:
even though accident and illness force them not unfrequently even upon the
blindest. To trace the process of unification towards this unity—to trace, if
you like, even the formation of the concept of such unity, as a governing
and guiding principle in life and conduct, comes to be the problem of the
psychologist, in the largest sense of that problem. From Soul (Seele) to
Mind or Spirit (Geist) is for Herbart, as for Hegel, the course of
psychology27. The growth and development of mind, the formation of a self,
the realisation of a personality, is for both the theme which psychology has
to expound. And Herbart, not less than Hegel, had to bear the censure that
such a conception of mental reality as a growth would destroy personality28.

But with so much common in the general plan, the two thinkers differ
profoundly in their special mode of carrying out the task. Or, rather, they
turn their strength on different departments of the whole. Herbart's great
practical interest had been the theory of education: “paedagogic” is the
subject of his first important writings. The inner history of ideas—the
processes which are based on the interaction of elements in the individual
soul—are what he specially traces. Hegel's interests, on the contrary, are
more towards the greater process, the unities of historical life, and the
correlations of the powers of art, religion, and philosophy that work therein.
He turns to the macrocosm, almost as naturally as Herbart does to the
microcosm. Thus, even in Ethics, while Herbart gives a delicate analysis of
the distinct aspects or elements in the Ethical idea,—the diverse headings
under which the disinterested spectator within the breast measures with
purely aesthetic [pg lxviii] eye his approach to unity and strength of
purpose, Hegel seems to hurry away from the field of moral sense or
conscience to throw himself on the social and political organisation of the
moral life. The General Paedagogic of Herbart has its pendant in Hegel's
Philosophy of Law and of History.

At an early period Herbart had become impressed with the necessity of

applying mathematics to psychology29. To the usual objection, that psychical
facts do not admit of measurement, he had a ready reply. We can calculate
even on hypothetical assumptions: indeed, could we measure, we should
scarcely take the trouble to calculate30. To calculate (i.e. to deduce
mathematically) is to perform a general experiment, and to perform it in the
medium where there is least likelihood of error or disturbance. There may
be anomalies enough apparent in the mental life: there may be the great
anomalies of Genius and of Freedom of Will; but the Newton and the
Kepler of psychology will show by calculation on assumed conditions of
psychic nature that these aberrations can be explained by mechanical laws.
“The human Soul is no puppet-theatre: our wishes and resolutions are no
marionettes: no juggler stands behind; but our true and proper life lies in
our volition, and this life has its rule not outside, but in itself: it has its own
purely mental rule, by no means borrowed from the material world. But this
rule is in it sure and fixed; and on account of this its fixed quality it has
more similarity to (what is otherwise heterogeneous) the laws of impact and
pressure than to the marvels of an alleged inexplicable freedom31.”

Psychology then deals with a real, which exhibits [pg lxix] phenomena
analogous in several respects to those discussed by statics and mechanics.
Its foundation is a statics and mechanics of the Soul,—as this real is called.
We begin by presupposing as the ultimate reality, underlying the factitious
and generally imperfect unity of self-consciousness and mind, an essential
and primary unity—the unity of an absolutely simple or individual point of
being—a real point which amongst other points asserts itself, maintains
itself. It has a character of its own, but that character it only shows in and
through a development conditioned by external influences. The specific
nature of the soul-reality is to be representative, to produce, or manifest
itself in, ideas (Vorstellungen). But the character only emerges into actuality
in the conflict of the soul-atom with other ultimate realities in the
congregation of things. A soul per se or isolated is not possessed of ideas. It
is merely blank, undeveloped, formal unity, of which nothing can be said.
But like other realities it defines and characterises itself by antithesis, by
resistance: it shows what it is by its behaviour in the struggle for existence.
It acts in self-defence: and its peculiar style or weapon of self-defence is an
idea or representation. The way the Soul maintains itself is by turning the
assailant into an idea32: and each idea is therefore a Selbsterhaltung of the
Soul. The Soul is thus enriched—to appearance or incidentally: and the
assailant is annexed. In this way the one Soul may develop or evolve or
express an innumerable variety of ideas: for in response to whatever it
meets, the living and active Soul ideates, or gives rise to a representation.
Thus, while the soul is [pg lxx] one, its ideas or representations are many.
Taken separately, they each express the psychic self-conservation. But
brought in relation with each other, as so many acts or self-affirmations of
the one soul, they behave as forces, and tend to thwart or check each other.
It is as forces, as reciprocally arresting or fostering each other, that ideas are
objects of science. When a representation is thus held in check, it is reduced
to a mere endeavour or active tendency to represent. Thus there arises a
distinction between representations proper, and those imperfect states or
acts which are partly or wholly held in abeyance. But the latent phase of an
idea is as essential to a thorough understanding of it as what appears. It is
the great blunder of empirical psychology to ignore what is sunk below the
surface of consciousness. And to Herbart consciousness is not the condition
but rather the product of ideas, which are primarily forces.

But representations are not merely in opposition,—impinging and resisting.

The same reason which makes them resist, viz. that they are or would fain
be acts of the one soul, but are more or less incompatible, leads them in
other circumstances to form combinations with each other. These
combinations are of two sorts. They are, first, complications, or
“complexions”: a number of ideas combine by quasi-addition and
juxtaposition to form a total. Second, there is fusion: ideas presenting
certain degrees of contrast enter into a union where the parts are no longer
separately perceptible. It is easy to see how the problems of psychology
now assume the form of a statics and mechanics of the mind. Quantitative
data are to be sought in the strength of each separate single idea, and the
degree in which two or more ideas block each other: in the degree of
combination between ideas, and the number of ideas in [pg lxxi] a
combination: and in the terms of relation between the members of a series
of ideas. A statical theory has to show the conditions required for what we
may call the ideal state of equilibrium of the “idea-forces”: to determine,
that is, the ultimate degree of obscuration suffered by any two ideas of
different strength, and the conditions of their permanent combination or
fusion. A mechanics of the mind will, on the contrary, deal with the rate at
which these processes are brought about, the velocity with which in the
movement of mind ideas are obscured or reawakened, &c.

It is fortunately unnecessary, here, to go further into details. What Herbart

proposes is not a method for the mathematical measurement of psychic
facts: it is a theory of mechanics and statics specially adapted to the
peculiarities of psychical phenomena, where the forces are given with no
sine or cosine, where instead of gravitation we have the constant effort (as it
were elasticity) of each idea to revert to its unchecked state. He claims—in
short—practically to be a Kepler and Newton of the mind, and in so doing
to justify the vague professions of more than one writer on mind—above
all, perhaps of David Hume, who goes beyond mere professions—to make
mental science follow the example of physics. And a main argument in
favour of his enterprise is the declaration of Kant that no body of
knowledge can claim to be a science except in such proportion as it is
mathematical. And the peculiarity of this enterprise is that self-
consciousness, the Ego, is not allowed to interfere with the free play of
psychic forces. The Ego is—psychologically—the result, the product, and
the varying product of that play. The play of forces is no doubt a unity: but
its unity lies not in the synthesis of consciousness, but in the essential unity
of Soul. And Soul is in its essence neither [pg lxxii] consciousness, nor self-
consciousness, nor mind: but something on the basis of whose unity these
are built up and developed33. The mere “representation” does not include the
further supervenience of consciousness: it represents, but it is not as yet
necessary that we should also be conscious that there is representation. It is,
in the phrase of Leibniz, perception: but not apperception. It is mere
straight-out, not as yet reflected, representation. Gradually there emerges
through the operation of mechanical psychics a nucleus, a floating unity, a
fixed or definite central aggregate.

The suggestion of mathematical method has been taken up by subsequent

inquirers (as it was pursued even before Herbart's time), but not in the sense
he meant. Experimentation has now taken a prominent place in psychology.
But in proportion as it has done so, psychology has lost its native character,
and thrown itself into the arms of physiology. What Herbart calculated were
actions and reactions of idea-forces: what the modern experimental school
proposes to measure are to a large extent the velocities of certain
physiological processes, the numerical specification of certain facts. Such
ascertainments are unquestionably useful; as numerical precision is in other
departments. But, taken in themselves, they do not carry us one bit further
on the way to science. As experiments, further,—to note a point discussed
elsewhere34—their value depends on the point of view, on the theory which
has led to them, on the value of the general scheme for which they are
intended to provide a special new [pg lxxiii] determination. In many cases
they serve to give a vivid reality to what was veiled under a general phrase.
The truth looks so much more real when it is put in figures: as the size of a
huge tree when set against a rock; or as when Milton bodies out his fallen
angel by setting forth the ratio between his spear and the tallest Norway
pine. But until the general relationship between soul and body is more
clearly formulated, such statistics will have but a value of curiosity.

(iii.) The Faculty-Psychology and its Critics.

What Herbart (as well as Hegel) finds perpetual ground for objecting to is
the talk about mental faculties. This objection is part of a general
characteristic of all the higher philosophy; and the recurrence of it gives an
illustration of how hard it is for any class of men to see themselves as others
see them. If there be anything the vulgar believe to be true of philosophy, it
is that it deals in distant and abstruse generalities, that it neglects the shades
of individuality and reality, and launches out into unsubstantial general
ideas. But it would be easy to gather from the great thinkers an anthology of
passages in which they hold it forth as the great work of philosophy to
rescue our conceptions from the indefiniteness and generality of popular
conception, and to give them real, as opposed to a merely nominal,
individuality.

The Wolffian school, which Herbart (not less than Kant) found in
possession of the field, and which in Germany may be taken to represent
only a slight variant of the half-and-half attitude of vulgar thought, [pg
lxxiv] was entrenched in the psychology of faculties. Empirical psychology,
said Wolff35, tells the number and character of the soul's faculties: rational
psychology will tell what they “properly” are, and how they subsist in soul.
It is assumed that there are general receptacles or tendencies of mental
operation which in course of time get filled or qualified in a certain way:
and that when this question is disposed of, it still remains to fix on the
metaphysical bases of these facts.
That a doctrine of faculties should fix itself in psychology is not so
wonderful. In the non-psychical world objects are easily discriminated in
space, and the individual thing lasts through a time. But a phase of mind is
as such fleeting and indeterminate: its individual features which come from
its “object” tend soon to vanish in memory: all freshness of definite
characters wears off, and there is left behind only a vague “recept” of the
one and same in many, a sort of hypostatised representative, faint but
persistent, of what in experience was an ever-varying succession. We
generalise here as elsewhere: but elsewhere the many singulars remain to
confront us more effectually. But in Mind the immense variety of real
imagination, memory, judgment is forgotten, and the name in each case
reduced to a meagre abstract. Thus the identity in character and operation,
having been cut off from the changing elements in its real action, is
transmuted into a substantial somewhat, a subsistent faculty. The
relationship of one to another of the powers thus by abstraction and fancy
created becomes a problem of considerable moment, their causal relations
in particular: till in the end they stand outside and independent of each
other, engaged, as Herbart says, in a veritable bellum omnium contra omnes.

[pg lxxv]
But this hypostatising of faculties becomes a source of still further
difficulties when it is taken in connexion with the hypostasis of the Soul or
Self or Ego. To Aristotle the Soul in its general aspect is Energy or Essence;
and its individual phases are energies. But in the hands of the untrained
these conceptions came to be considerably displaced. Essence or Substance
came to be understood (as may be seen in Locke, and still more in loose
talk) as a something,—a substratum,—or peculiar nature—(of which in
itself nothing further could be said36 but which notwithstanding was
permanent and perhaps imperishable): this something subsistent exhibited
certain properties or activities. There thus arose, on one hand, the Soul-
thing,—a substance misunderstood and sensualised with a supernatural
sensuousness,—a denizen of the transcendental or even of the transcendent
world: and, on the other hand, stood the actual manifestations, the several
exhibitions of this force, the assignable and describable psychic facts. We
are accordingly brought before the problem of how this one substance or
essence stands to the several entities or hypostases known as faculties. And
we still have in the rear the further problem of how these abstract entities
stand to the real and concrete single acts and states of soul and mind.

This hypostatising of faculties, and this distinction of the “Substantial” soul

from its “accidentia” or phenomena, had grown—through the materialistic
proclivities of popular conception—from the indications found in Aristotle.
It attained its climax, perhaps in the Wolffian school in Germany, but it has
been the resort of superficial psychology in all ages. For while it, on one
hand, seemed to save the substantial Soul on whose incorruptibility great
issues were believed to [pg lxxvi] hinge, it held out, on the other, an open
hand to the experimental inquirer, whom it bade freely to search amongst
the phenomena. But if it was the refuge of pusillanimity, it was also the
perpetual object of censure from all the greater and bolder spirits. Thus, the
psychology of Hobbes may be hasty and crude, but it is at least animated by
a belief that the mental life is continuous, and not cut off by abrupt
divisions severing the mental faculties. The “image” (according to his
materialistically coloured psychology) which, when it is a strong motion, is
called sense, passes, as it becomes weaker or decays, into imagination, and
gives rise, by its various complications and associations with others, to
reminiscence, experience, expectation. Similarly, the voluntary motion
which is an effect or a phase of imagination, beginning at first in small
motions—called by themselves “endeavours,” and in relation to their cause
“appetites” or “desires37”—leads on cumulatively to Will, which is the “last
appetite in deliberating.” Spinoza, his contemporary, speaks in the same
strain38. “Faculties of intellect, desire, love, &c., are either utterly fictitious,
or nothing but metaphysical entities, or universals which we are in the habit
of forming from particulars. Will and intellect are thus supposed to stand to
this or that idea, this or that volition, in the same way as stoniness to this or
that stone, or as man to Peter or Paul.” They are supposed to be a general
something which gets defined and detached. But, in the mind, or in the
cogitant soul, there are no such things. There are only ideas: and [pg lxxvii]
by an “idea” we are to understand not an image on the retina or in the brain,
not a “dumb something, like a painting on a panel39,” but a mode of
thinking, or even the act of intellection itself. The ideas are the mind: mind
does not have ideas. Further, every “idea,” as such, “involves affirmation or
negation,”—is not an image, but an act of judgment—contains, as we
should say, an implicit reference to actuality,—a reference which in volition
is made explicit. Thus (concludes the corollary of Eth. ii. 49) “Will and
Intellect are one and the same.” But in any case the “faculties” as such are
no better than entia rationis (i.e. auxiliary modes of representing facts).

Leibniz speaks no less distinctly and sanely in this direction. “True powers
are never mere possibilities: they are always tendency and action.” The
“Monad”—that is the quasi-intelligent unit of existence,—is essentially
activity, and its actions are perceptions and appetitions, i.e. tendencies to
pass from one perceptive state or act to another. It is out of the variety, the
complication, and relations of these miniature or little perceptions and
appetitions, that the conspicuous phenomena of consciousness are to be
explained, and not by supposing them due to one or other faculty. The soul
is a unity, a self-developing unity, a unity which at each stage of its
existence shows itself in a perception or idea,—each such perception
however being, to repeat the oft quoted phrase, plein de l'avenir et chargé
du passé:—each, in other words, is not stationary, but active and urgent, a
progressive force, as well as a representative element. Above all, Leibniz
has the view that the soul gives rise to all its ideas from itself: that its life is
its own production, not a mere inheritance of ideas which it has from birth
and nature, nor [pg lxxviii] a mere importation into an empty room from
without, but a necessary result of its own constitution acting in necessary
(predetermined) reciprocity and harmony with the rest of the universe.

But Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, were most attentively heard in the
passages where they favoured or combatted the dominant social and
theological prepossessions. Their glimpses of truer insight and even their
palpable contributions in the line of a true psychology were ignored or
forgotten. More attention, perhaps, was attracted by an attempt of a very
different style. This was the system of Condillac, who, as Hegel says (p.
61), made an unmistakable attempt to show the necessary interconnexion of
the several modes of mental activity. In his Traité des Sensations (1754),
following on his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746), he
tried to carry out systematically the deduction or derivation of all our ideas
from sense, or to trace the filiation of all our faculties from sensation. Given
a mind with no other power than sensibility, the problem is to show how it
acquires all its other faculties. Let us then suppose a sentient animal to
which is offered a single sensation, or one sensation standing out above the
others. In such circumstances the sensation “becomes” (devient) attention:
or a sensation “is” (est) attention, either because it is alone, or because it is
more lively than all the rest. Again: before such a being, let us set two
sensations: to perceive or feel (apercevoir ou sentir) the two sensations is
the same thing (c'est la même chose). If one of the sensations is not present,
but a sensation made already, then to perceive it is memory. Memory, then,
is only “transformed sensation” (sensation transformée). Further, suppose
we attend to both ideas, this is “the same thing” as to compare them. [pg
lxxix] And to compare them we must see difference or resemblance. This is
judgment. “Thus sensation becomes successively attention, comparison,
judgment.” And—by further steps of the equating process—it appears that
sensation again “becomes” an act of reflection. And the same may be said
of imagination and reasoning: all are transformed sensations.

If this is so with the intelligence, it is equally the case with the Will. To feel
and not feel well or ill is impossible. Coupling then this feeling of pleasure
or pain with the sensation and its transformations, we get the series of
phases ranging from desire, to passion, hope, will. “Desire is only the action
of the same faculties as are attributed to the understanding.” A lively desire
is a passion: a desire, accompanied with a belief that nothing stands in its
way, is a volition. But combine these affective with the intellectual
processes already noticed, and you have thinking (penser)40. Thus thought in
its entirety is, only and always, transformed sensation.

Something not unlike this, though scarcely so simply and directly

doctrinaire, is familiar to us in some English psychology, notably James
Mill's41. Taken in their literal baldness, these identifications may sound
strained,—or trifling. But if we look beyond the words, we can detect a
genuine instinct for maintaining and displaying the unity and continuity of
mental life through all its modifications,—coupled unfortunately with a bias
sometimes in favour of reducing higher or more complex states of mind to a
mere prolongation [pg lxxx] of lower and beggarly rudiments. But
otherwise such analyses are useful as aids against the tendency of inert
thought to take every name in this department as a distinguishable reality:
the tendency to part will from thought—ideas from emotion—and even
imagination from reason, as if either could be what it professed without the
other.
(iv.) Methods and Problems of Psychology.

The difficulties of modern psychology perhaps lie in other directions, but

they are not less worth guarding against. They proceed mainly from failure
or inability to grasp the central problem of psychology, and a disposition to
let the pen (if it be a book on the subject) wander freely through the almost
illimitable range of instance, illustration, and application. Though it is true
that the proper study of mankind is man, it is hardly possible to say what
might not be brought under this head. Homo sum, nihil a me alienum puto,
it might be urged. Placed in a sort of middle ground between physiology
(summing up all the results of physical science) and general history
(including the contributions of all the branches of sociology), the
psychologist need not want for material. He can wander into ethics,
aesthetic, and logic, into epistemology and metaphysics. And it cannot be
said with any conviction that he is actually trespassing, so long as the
ground remains so ill-fenced and vaguely enclosed. A desultory collection
of observations on traits of character, anecdotes of mental events, mixed up
with hypothetical descriptions of how a normal human being may be
supposed [pg lxxxi] to develop his so-called faculties, and including some
dictionary-like verbal distinctions, may make a not uninteresting and
possibly bulky work entitled Psychology.

It is partly a desire of keeping up to date which is responsible for the

copious extracts or abstracts from treatises on the anatomy and functions of
the nerve-system, which, accompanied perhaps by a diagram of the brain,
often form the opening chapter of a work on psychology. Even if these
researches had achieved a larger number of authenticated results than they
as yet have, they would only form an appendix and an illustration to the
proper subject42. As they stand, and so long as they remain largely
hypothetical, the use of them in psychology only fosters the common
delusion that, when we can picture out in material outlines a theory
otherwise unsupported, it has gained some further witness in its favour. It is
quite arguable indeed that it may be useful to cut out a section from general
human biology which should include the parts of it that were specially
interesting in connexion with the expression or generation of thought,
emotion, and desire. But in that case, there is a blunder in singling out the
brain alone, and especially the organs of sense and voluntary motion,—
except for the reason that this province of psycho-physics alone has been
fairly mapped out. The preponderant half of the soul's life is linked to other
parts of the physical system. Emotion and volition, and the general tone of
the train of ideas, if they are to be connected with their expression and
physical accompaniment (or aspect), would require a sketch of the heart and
lungs, as well as the digestive [pg lxxxii] system in general. Nor these
alone. Nerve analysis (especially confined to the larger system), though
most modern, is not alone important, as Plato and Aristotle well saw. So
that if biology is to be adapted for psychological use (and if psychology
deals with more than cognitive processes), a liberal amount of physiological
information seems required.

Experimental psychology is a term used with a considerable laxity of

content; and so too is that of physiological psychology, or psycho-physics.
And the laxity mainly arises because there is an uncertainty as to what is
principal and what secondary in the inquiry. Experiment is obviously a help
to observation: and so far as the latter is practicable, the former would seem
to have a chance of introduction. But in any case, experiment is only a
means to an end and only practicable under the guidance of hypothesis and
theory. Its main value would be in case the sphere of psychology were
completely paralleled with one province of physiology. It was long ago
maintained by Spinoza and (in a way by) Leibniz, that there is no mental
phenomenon without its bodily equivalent, pendant, or correspondent. The
ordo rerum (the molecular system of movements) is, he held, the same as
the order of ideas. But it is only at intervals, under special conditions, or
when they reach a certain magnitude, that ideas emerge into full
consciousness. As consciousness presents them, they are often
discontinuous, and abrupt: and they do not always carry with them their
own explanation. Hence if we are confined to the larger phenomena of
consciousness alone, our science is imperfect: many things seem
anomalous; above all, perhaps, will, attention, and the like. We have seen
how Herbart (partly following the hints of Leibniz), attempted to get over
this difficulty by the hypothesis of idea-forces which [pg lxxxiii] generate
the forms and matter of consciousness by their mutual impact and
resistance. Physiological psychology substitutes for Herbart's reals and his
idea-forces a more materialistic sort of reality; perhaps functions of nerve-
cells, or other analogous entities. There, it hopes one day to discover the
underlying continuity of event which in the upper range of consciousness is
often obscured, and then the process would be, as the phrase goes,
explained: we should be able to picture it out without a gap.

These large hopes may have a certain fulfilment. They may lead to the
withdrawal of some of the fictitious mental processes which are still
described in works of psychology. But on the whole they can only have a
negative and auxiliary value. The value, that is, of helping to confute
feigned connexions and to suggest truer. They will be valid against the
mode of thought which, when Psyché fails us for an explanation, turns to
body, and interpolates soul between the states of body: the mode which, in
an older phraseology, jumps from final causes to physical, and from
physical (or efficient) to final. Here, as elsewhere, the physical has its place:
and here, more than in many places, the physical has been unfairly treated.
But the whole subject requires a discussion of the so-called “relations” of
soul and body: a subject on which popular conceptions and so-called
science are radically obscure.

“But the danger which threatens experimental psychology,” says

Münsterberg, “is that, in investigating details, the connexion with questions
of principle may be so lost sight of that the investigation finally lands at
objects scientifically quite worthless43. Psychology [pg lxxxiv] forgets only
too easily that all those numerical statistics which experiment allows us to
form are only means for psychological analysis and interpretation, not ends
in themselves. It piles up numbers and numbers, and fails to ask whether the
results so formed have any theoretical value whatever: it seeks answers
before a question has been clearly and distinctly framed; whereas the value
of experimental answers always depends on the exactitude with which the
question is put. Let me remind the reader, how one inquirer after another
made many thousand experiments on the estimation of small intervals of
time, without a single one of them raising the question what the precise
point was which these experiments sought to measure, what was the
psychological occurrence in the case, or what psychological phenomena
were employed as the standard of time-intervals. And so each had his own
arbitrary standard of measurement, each of them piled up mountains of
numbers, each demonstrated that his predecessor was wrong; but neither
Estel nor Mehner have carried the problem of the time-sense a single step
further.

“This must be all changed, if we are not to drift into the barrenest
scholastic.... Everywhere out of the correct perception that problems of
principle demand the investigation of detailed phenomena, and that the
latter investigation must proceed in comparative independence of the
question of principles, there has grown the false belief that the description
of detail phenomena is the ultimate aim of science. And so, side by side
with details which are of importance to principles, we have others, utterly
indifferent and theoretically worthless, treated with the same zeal. To the
solution of their barren problems the old Schoolmen applied a certain
acuteness; but in order to turn out [pg lxxxv] masses of numbers from
barren experiments, all that is needed is a certain insensibility to fits of
ennui. Let numbers be less collected for their own sake: and instead, let the
problems be so brought to a point that the answers may possess the
character of principles. Let each experiment be founded on far more
theoretical considerations, then the number of the experiments may be
largely diminished44.”

What is thus said of a special group of inquiries by one of the foremost of

the younger psychologists, is not without its bearings on all the departments
in which psychology can learn. For physiological, or what is technically
called psychological, experiment, is co-ordinate with many other sources of
information. Much, for instance, is to be learnt by a careful study of
language by those who combine sound linguistic knowledge with
psychological training. It is in language, spoken and written, that we find at
once the great instrument and the great document of the distinctively human
progress from a mere Psyche to a mature Nous, from Soul to Mind.
Whether we look at the varieties of its structure under different ethnological
influences, or at the stages of its growth in a nation and an individual, we
get light from language on the differentiation and consolidation of ideas.
But here again it is easy to lose oneself in the world of etymology, or to be
carried away into the enticing questions of real and ideal philology.

“The human being of the psychologist,” says Herbart45, “is the social and
civilised human being who stands on the apex of the whole history through
which his race has passed. In him is found visibly together all the
multiplicity of elements, which, under the name of [pg lxxxvi] mental
faculties, are regarded as a universal inheritance of humanity. Whether they
are originally in conjunction, whether they are originally a multiplicity, is a
point on which the facts are silent. The savage and the new-born child give
us far less occasion to admire the range of their mind than do the nobler
animals. But the psychologists get out of this difficulty by the unwarranted
assumption that all the higher mental activities exist potentially in children
and savages—though not in the animals—as a rudimentary predisposition
or psychical endowment. Of such a nascent intellect, a nascent reason, and
nascent moral sense, they find recognisable traces in the scanty similarities
which the behaviour of child or savage offers to those of civilised man. We
cannot fail to note that in their descriptions they have before them a special
state of man, and one which, far from accurately defined, merely follows
the general impression made upon us by those beings we name civilised. An
extremely fluctuating character inevitably marks this total impression. For
there are no general facts:—the genuine psychological documents lie in the
momentary states of individuals: and there is an immeasurably long way
from these to the height of the universal concept of man in general.”

And yet Man in general,—Man as man and therefore as mind—the concept

of Man—normal and ideal man—the complete and adequate Idea of man—
is the true terminus of the psychological process; and whatever be the
difficulties in the way, it is the only proper goal of the science. Only it has
to be built up, constructed, evolved, developed,—and not assumed as a
datum of popular imagination. We want a concept, concrete and real, of
Man and of Mind, which shall give its proper place to each of the elements
that, in the several examples open to detailed observation, are presented [pg
lxxxvii] with unfair or exaggerated prominence. The savage and the child
are not to be left out as free from contributing to form the ideal: virtues here
are not more important than vices, and are certainly not likely to be so
informing: even the insane and the idiot show us what human intelligence is
and requires: and the animals are also within the sweep of psychology. Man
is not its theatre to the exclusion of woman; if it records the results of
introspection of the Me, it will find vast and copious quarries in the various
modes in which an individual identifies himself with others as We. And
even the social and civilised man gets his designation, as usual, a potiori.
He is more civilised and social than others: perhaps rather more civilised
than not. But always, in some measure, he is at the same time unsocial or
anti-social, and uncivilised. Each unit in the society of civilisation has to the
outside observer—and sometimes even to his own self-detached and
impartial survey—a certain oddity or fixity, a gleam of irrationality, which
shows him to fall short of complete sanity or limpid and mobile
intelligence. He has not wholly put off the savage,—least of all, says the
cynic, in his relations with the other sex. He carries with him even to the
grave some grains of the recklessness and petulance of childhood. And
rarely, if ever, can it be said of him that he has completely let the ape and
tiger die.

But that is only one way of looking at the matter—and one which, perhaps,
is more becoming to the pathologist and the cynic, than to the psychologist.
Each of these stages of psychical development, even if that development be
obviously describable as degeneration, has something which, duly adjusted,
has its place and function in the theory of the normally-complete human
mind. The animal, the savage, and [pg lxxxviii] the child,—each has its part
there. It is a mutilated, one-sided and superficial advance in socialisation
which cuts off the civilised creature from the natural stem of his ancestry,
from the large freedom, the immense insouciance, the childlikeness of his
first estate. There is something, again, wanting in the man who utterly lacks
the individualising realism and tenderness of the woman, as in the woman
who can show no comprehension of view or bravery of enterprise. Even
pathological states of mind are not mere anomalies and mere degenerations.
Nature perhaps knows no proper degenerations, but only by-ways and
intricacies in the course of development. Still less is the vast enormity or
irregularity of genius to be ignored. It is all—to the philosophic mind—a
question of degree and proportion,—though often the proportion seems to
exceed the scale of our customary denominators. If an element is latent or
quiescent (in arrest), that is no index to its absolute amount: “we know not
what's resisted.” Let us by all means keep proudly to our happy mediocrity
of faculty, and step clear of insanity or idiotcy on one hand, and from
genius or heroism on the other. But the careful observer will
notwithstanding note how delicately graded and how intricately combined
are the steps which connect extremes so terribly disparate. It is only vulgar
ignorance which turns away in hostility or contempt from the imbecile and
the deranged, and only a worse than vulgar sciolism which sees in genius
and the hero nothing but an aberration from its much-prized average.
Criminalistic anthropology, or the psychology of the criminal, may have
indulged in much frantic exaggeration as to the doom which nature and
heredity have pronounced over the fruit of the womb even before it entered
the shores of light: yet they have at least [pg lxxxix] served to discredit the
free and easy assumption of the abstract averagist, and shown how little the
penalties of an unbending law meet the requirements of social well-being.

Yet, if psychology be willing to learn in all these and other provinces of the
estate of man, it must remember that, once it goes beyond the narrow range
in which the interpretations of symbol and expression have become
familiar, it is constantly liable to blunder in the inevitable effort to translate
observation into theory. The happy mean between making too much of
palpable differences and hurrying on to a similar rendering of similar signs
is the rarest of gifts. Or, perhaps, it were truer to say it is the latest and most
hardly won of acquirements. To learn to observe—observe with mind—is
not a small thing. There are rules for it—both rules of general scope and,
above all, rules in each special department. But like all “major premisses”
in practice, everything depends on the power of judgment, the tact, the skill,
the “gift” of applying them. They work not as mere rules to be conned by
rote, but as principles assimilated into constituents of the mental life-blood:
rules which serve only as condensed reminders and hints of habits of
thought and methods of research which have grown up in action and
reflection. To observe we must comprehend: yet we can only comprehend
by observing. We all know how unintelligible—save for epochs of ampler
reciprocity, and it may be even of acquired unity of interest—the two sexes
are for each other. Parents can remember how mysteriously minded they
found their own elders; and in most cases they have to experience the depth
of the gulf which in certain directions parts them from their children's
hearts. Even in civilised Europe, the ordinary member of each nation has an
underlying [pg xc] conviction (which at moments of passion or surprise will
rise and find harsh utterance) that the foreigner is queer, irrational, and
absurd. If the foreigner, further, be so far removed as a Chinaman (or an
Australian “black”), there is hardly anything too vile, meaningless, or
inhuman which the European will not readily believe in the case of one
who, it may be, in turn describes him as a “foreign devil.” It can only be in
a fit of noble chivalry that the British rank and file can so far temporise with
its insular prejudice as to admit of “Fuzzy-wuzzy” that

“He's a poor benighted 'eathen—but a first-class fightin' man.”

Not every one is an observer who chooses to dub himself so, nor is it in a
short lapse of time and with condescension for foreign habits, that any
observer whatever can become a trustworthy reporter of the ideas some
barbarian tribe holds concerning the things of earth and air, and the hidden
things of spirits and gods. The “interviewer” no doubt is a useful being
when it is necessary to find “copy,” or when sharp-drawn characters and
picturesque incidents are needed to stimulate an inert public, ever open to
be interested in some new thing. But he is a poor contributor to the stored
materials of science.

It is of other stuff that true science is made. And if even years of nominal
intercourse and spatial juxtaposition sometimes leave human beings, as
regards their inner selves, in the position of strangers still, what shall be
said of the attempt to discern the psychic life of animals? Will the touch of
curiosity which prompts us to watch the proceedings of the strange
creatures,—will a course of experimentation on their behaviour under
artificial conditions,—justify us in drawing liberal conclusions as to why
they so behaved, [pg xci] and what they thought and felt about it? It is
necessary in the first place to know what to observe, and how, and above all
what for. But that presumed, we must further live with the animals not only
as their masters and their examiners, but as their friends and fellow-
creatures; we must be able—and so lightly that no effort is discernable—to
lay aside the burden and garb of civilisation; we must possess that stamp of
sympathy and similarity which invites confidence, and breaks down the
reserve which our poor relations, whether human or others, offer to the first
approaches of a strange superior. It is probable that in that case we should
have less occasion to wonder at their oddities or to admire their sagacity.
But a higher and more philosophical wonder might, as in other cases when
we get inside the heart of our subject, take the place of the cheap and
childish love of marvels, or of the vulgar straining after comic traits.
Of all this mass of materials the psychologist proper can directly make only
a sparing use. Even as illustrations, his data must not be presented too often
in all their crude and undigested individuality, or he runs the risk of leaving
one-sided impressions. Every single instance, individualised and historical,
—unless it be exhibited by that true art of genius which we cannot expect in
the average psychologist—narrows, even though it be but slightly, the
complete and all-sided truth. Anecdotes are good, and to the wise they
convey a world of meaning, but to lesser minds they sometimes suggest
anything but the points they should accentuate. Without the detail of
individual realistic study there is no psychology worth the name. History,
story, we must have: but at the same time, with the philosopher, we must
say, I don't give much weight to stories. And this is what will always—
except in rare instances where [pg xcii] something like genius is conjoined
with it—make esoteric science hard and unpopular. It dare not—if it is true
to its idea—rest on any amount of mere instances, as isolated, unreduced
facts. Yet it can only have real power so far as it concentrates into itself the
life-blood of many instances, and indeed extracts the pith and unity of all
instances.

Nor, on the other hand, can it turn itself too directly and intently towards
practical applications. All this theory of mental progress from the animate
soul to the fullness of religion and science deals solely with the universal
process of education: “the education of humanity” we may call it: the way
in which mind is made true and real46. It is therefore a question of intricacy
and of time how to carry over this general theory into the arena of education
as artificially directed and planned. To try to do so at a single step would be
to repeat the mistake of Plato, if Plato may be taken to suppose (which
seems incredible) that a theoretical study of the dialectics of truth and
goodness would enable his rulers, without the training of special
experience, to undertake the supreme tasks of legislation or administration.
All politics, like all education, rests on these principles of the means and
conditions of mental growth: but the schooling of concrete life, though it
may not develop the faculty of formulating general laws, will often train
better for the management of the relative than a mere logical Scholastic in
first or absolute principles.
In conclusion, there are one or two points which seem of cardinal
importance for the progress of psychology. (1) Its difference from the
physical sciences has to be set out: in other words, the peculiarity of
psychical fact. It will not do merely to say that experience marks [pg xciii]
out these boundaries with sufficient clearness. On the contrary, the terms
consciousness, feeling, mind, &c., are evidently to many psychologists
mere names. In particular, the habits of physical research when introduced
into mental study lead to a good deal of what can only be called mythology.
(2) There should be a clearer recognition of the problem of the relations of
mental unity to mental elements. But to get that, a more thorough logical
and metaphysical preparation is needed than is usually supposed necessary.
The doctrine of identity and necessity, of universal and individual, has to be
faced, however tedious. (3) The distinction between first-grade and second-
grade elements and factors in the mental life has to be realised. The mere
idea as presentative or immediate has to be kept clear of the more logico-
reflective, or normative ideas, which belong to judgment and reasoning.
And the number of these grades in mental development seems endless. (4)
But, also, a separation is required—were it but temporary—between what
may be called principles, and what is detail. At present, in psychology,
“principles” is a word almost without meaning. A complete all-explaining
system is of course impossible at present and may always be so. Yet if an
effort of thought could be concentrated on cardinal issues, and less padding
of conventional and traditional detail were foisted in, much might thereby
be done to make detailed research fruitful. (5) And finally, perhaps, if
psychology be a philosophical study, some hint as to its purpose and
problem would be desirable. If it is only an abstract branch of science, of
course, no such hint is in place.

[pg xciv]
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.

Allusion has already been made to the question of the boundaries between
logic and psychology, between logic and ethics, ethics and psychology, and
psychology and epistemology. Each of these occasionally comes to cover
ground that seems more appropriate to the others. Logic is sometimes
restricted to denote the study of the conditions of derivative knowledge, of
the canons of inference and the modes of proof. If taken more widely as the
science of thought-form, it is supposed to imply a world of fixed or
stereotyped relations between ideas, a system of stable thoughts governed
by inflexible laws in an absolute order of immemorial or eternal truth. As
against such fixity, psychology is supposed to deal with these same ideas as
products—as growing out of a living process of thought—having a history
behind them and perhaps a prospect of further change. The genesis so given
may be either a mere chronicle-history, or it may be a philosophical
development. In the former case, it would note the occasions of incident
and circumstance, the reactions of mind and environment, under which the
ideas were formed. Such [pg xcv] a psychological genesis of several ideas
is found in the Second Book of Locke's Essay. In the latter case, the account
would be more concerned with the inner movement, the action and reaction
in ideas themselves, considered not as due to casual occurrences, but as
self-developing by an organic growth. But in either case, ideas would be
shown not to be ready-made and independently existing kinds in a world of
idea-things, and not to form an unchanging diagram or framework, but to be
a growth, to have a history, and a development. Psychology in this sense
would be a dynamical, as opposed to the supposed statical, treatment of
ideas and concepts in logic. But it may be doubted how far it is well to call
this psychology: unless psychology deals with the contents of the mental
life, in their meaning and purpose, instead of, as seems proper, merely in
their character of psychic events. Such psychology is rather an evolutionist
logic,—a dialectic process more than an analytic of a datum.
In the same way, ethics may be brought into one kind of contact with
psychology. Ethics, like logic, may be supposed to presuppose and to deal
with a certain inflexible scheme of requirements, a world of moral order
governed by invariable or universal law; an eternal kingdom of right,
existing independently of human wills, but to be learned and followed out
in uncompromising obedience. As against this supposed absolute order,
psychology may be said to show the genesis of the idea of obligation and
duty, the growth of the authority of conscience, the formation of ideals, the
relativity of moral ideas. Here also it may reach this conclusion, by a more
external or a more internal mode of argument. It may try to show, in other
words, that circumstances give rise to these forms of estimating conduct, or
it may argue that they are a necessary [pg xcvi] development in the human
being, constituted as he is. It may again be doubted whether this is properly
called psychology. Yet its purport seems ultimately to be that the objective
order is misconceived when it is regarded as an external or quasi-physical
order: as a law written up and sanctioned with an external authority—as, in
Kant's words, a heteronomy. If that order is objective, it is so because it is
also in a sense subjective: if it is above the mere individuality of the
individual, it is still in a way identical with his true or universal self-hood.
Thus “psychological” here means the recognition that the logical and the
moral law is an autonomy: that it is not given, but though necessary,
necessary by the inward movement of the mind. The metaphor of law is, in
brief, misleading. For, according to a common, though probably an
erroneous, analysis of that term, the essence of a law in the political sphere
is to be a species of command. And that is rather a one-sidedly practical or
aesthetic way of looking at it. The essence of law in general, and the
precondition of every law in special, is rather uniformity and universality,
self-consistency and absence of contradiction: or, in other words,
rationality. Its essential opposite—or its contradiction in essence—is a
privilege, an attempt at isolating a case from others. It need not indeed
always require bare uniformity—require i.e. the same act to be done by
different people: but it must always require that every thing within its
operation shall be treated on principles of utter and thorough harmony and
consistency. It requires each thing to be treated on public principles and
with publicity: nothing apart and mere singular, as a mere incident or as a
world by itself. Differently it may be treated, but always on grounds of
common well-being, as part of an embracing system.
There is probably another sense, however, in which [pg xcvii] psychology
comes into close relation with ethics. If we look on man as a microcosm,
his inner system will more or less reproduce the system of the larger world.
The older psychology used to distinguish an upper or superior order of
faculties from a lower or inferior. Thus in the intellectual sphere, the
intellect, judgment, and reason were set above the senses, imagination, and
memory. Among the active powers, reasonable will, practical reason and
conscience were ranked as paramount over the appetites and desires and
emotions. And this use of the word “faculty” is as old as Plato, who regards
science as a superior faculty to opinion or imagination. But this application
—which seems a perfectly legitimate one—does not, in the first instance,
belong to psychology at all. No doubt it is psychically presented: but it has
an other source. It springs from an appreciation, a judgment of the
comparative truth or reality of what the so-called psychical act means or
expresses. Such faculties are powers in a hierarchy of means and ends and
presuppose a normative or critical function which has classified reality.
Psychically, the elements which enter into knowledge are not other than
those which belong to opinion: but they are nearer an adequate rendering of
reality, they are truer, or nearer the Idea. And in the main we may say, that
is truer or more real which succeeds in more completely organising and
unifying elements—which rises more and more above the selfish or isolated
part into the thorough unity of all parts.

The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that

which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary
and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs off
no less abruptly into the unknown. Knowledge, on the contrary, is unified:
and its unity gives it its [pg xcviii] strength and superiority. The powers
which thus exist are the subjective counterparts of objectively valuable
products. Thus, reason is the subjective counterpart of a world in which all
the constituents are harmonised and fall into due relationship. It is a product
or result, which is not psychologically, but logically or morally important. It
is a faculty, because it means that actually its possessor has ordered and
systematised his life or his ideas of things. Psychologically, it, like
unreason, is a compound of elements: but in the case of reason the
composition is unendingly and infinitely consistent; it is knowledge
completely unified. The distinction then is not in the strictest sense
psychological: for it has an aesthetic or normative character; it is logical or
ethical: it denotes that the idea or the act is an approach to truth or
goodness. And so, when Butler or Plato distinguishes reason or reflection
from appetites and affections, and even from self-love or from the heart
which loves and hates, this is not exactly a psychological division in the
narrower sense. That is to say: these are, in Plato's words, not merely
“parts,” but quite as much “kinds” and “forms” of soul. They denote
degrees in that harmonisation of mind and soul which reproduces the
permanent and complete truth of things. For example, self-love, as Butler
describes it, has but a partial and narrowed view of the worth of acts: it is
engrossing and self-involved: it cannot take in the full dependence of the
narrower interest on the larger and eternal self. So, in Plato, the man of
heart is but a nature which by fits and starts, or with steady but limited
vision, realises the larger life. These parts or kinds are not separate and co-
existent faculties: but grades in the co-ordination and unification of the
same one human nature.

[pg xcix]

(i.) Psychology and Epistemology.

Psychology however in the strict sense is extremely difficult to define.

Those who describe it as the “science of mind,” the “phenomenology of
consciousness,” seem to give it a wider scope than they really mean. The
psychologist of the straiter sect tends, on the other hand, to carry us beyond
mind and consciousness altogether. His, it has been said, is a psychology
without a Psyché. For him Mind, Soul, and Consciousness are only current
and convenient names to designate the field, the ground on which the
phenomena he observes are supposed to transact themselves. But they must
not on any account interfere with the operations; any more than Nature in
general may interfere with strictly physical inquiries, or Life and vital force
with the theories of biology. The so-called Mind is only to be regarded as a
stage on which certain events represent themselves. In this field, or on this
stage, there are certain relatively ultimate elements, variously called ideas,
presentations, feelings, or states of consciousness. But these elements,
though called ideas, must not be supposed more than mechanical or
dynamical elements; consciousness is rather their product, a product which
presupposes certain operations and relations between them. If we are to be
strictly scientific, we must, it is urged, treat the factors of consciousness as
not themselves conscious: we must regard them as quasi-objective, or in
abstraction from the consciousness which surveys them. The Ego must sink
into a mere receptacle or arena of psychic event; its independent meaning or
purport is to be ignored, as beside the question.

When this line is once fixed upon, it seems inevitable to go farther. Comte
was inclined to treat psychology [pg c] as falling between two stools: it
must, he thought, draw all its content either from physiology on the one
hand, or from social factors on the other. The dominant or experimental
psychology of the present day seems inclined, without however formulating
any very definite statement, to pronounce for the former alternative. It does
not indeed adopt the materialistic view that mind is only a function of
matter. Its standpoint rather is that the psychical presents itself even to
unskilled observation as dependent on (i.e. not independent of) or as
concomitant with certain physical or corporeal facts. It adds that the more
accurately trained the observer becomes, the more he comes to discover a
corporeal aspect even where originally he had not surmised its existence,
and to conclude that the two cycles of psychical and physical event never
interfere with each other: that soul does not intervene in bodily process, nor
body take up and carry on psychical. If it is said that the will moves the
limbs, he replies that the will which moves is really certain formerly
unnoticed movements of nerve and muscle which are felt or interpreted as a
discharge of power. If the ocular impression is said to cause an impression
on the mind, he replies that any fact hidden under that phrase refers to a
change in the molecules of the brain. He will therefore conclude that for the
study of psychical phenomena the physical basis, as it may be called, is all
important. Only so can observation really deal with fact capable of
description and measurement. Thus psychology, it may be said, tends to
become a department of physiology. From another standpoint, biology may
be said to receive its completion in psychology. How much either phrase
means, however, will depend on the estimate we form of biology. If biology
is only the study of mechanical and chemical phenomena on the peculiar
field known as [pg ci] an organism, and if that organism is only treated as
an environment which may be ignored, then psychology, put on the same
level, is not the full science of mind, any more than the other is the full
study of life. They both have narrowed their subject to suit the abstract
scheme of the laboratory, where the victim of experiment is either altered
by mutilation and artificial restrictions, or is dead. If, on the contrary,
biology has a substantial unity of its own to which mechanical and chemical
considerations are subordinate and instrumental, psychology may even take
part with physiology without losing its essential rank. But in that case, we
must, as Spinoza said47, think less mechanically of the animal frame, and
recognise (after the example of Schelling) something truly inward (i.e. not
merely locally inside the skin) as the supreme phase or characteristic of life.
We must, in short, recognise sensibility as the culmination of the
physiological and the beginning of the psychological.

To the strictly scientific psychologist, as has been noted—or to the

psychology which imitates optical and electrical science—ideas are only
psychical events: they are not ideas of anything, relative, i.e. to something
else; they have no meaning, and no reference to a reality beyond
themselves. They are presentations;—not representations of something
outside consciousness. They are appearances: but not appearances of
something: they do not reveal anything beyond themselves. They are, we
may almost say, a unique kind of physical phenomena. If we say they are
presentations of something, we only mean that in the presented something,
in the felt something, the wished something, we separate the quality or form
or aspect of presentativeness, of [pg cii] feltness, of wishedness, and
consider this aspect by itself. There are grades, relations, complications, of
such presentations or in such presentedness: and with the description and
explanation of these, psychology is concerned. They are fainter or stronger,
more or less correlated and antithetical. Presentation (or ideation), in short,
is the name of a train of event, which has its peculiarities, its laws, its
systems, its history.

All reality, it may be said, subsists in such presentation; it is for a

consciousness, or in a consciousness. All esse, in its widest sense, is
percipi. And yet, it seems but the commonest of experiences to say that all
that is presented is not reality. It is, it has a sort of being,—is somehow
presumed to exist: but it is not reality. And this reference and antithesis to
what is presented is implied in all such terms as “ideas,” “feelings,” “states
of consciousness”: they are distinguished from and related to objects of
sense or external facts, to something, as it is called, outside consciousness.
Thoughts and ideas are set against things and realities. In their primitive
stage both the child and the savage seem to recognise no such difference.
What they imagine is, as we might say, on the same plane with what they
touch and feel. They do not, as we reproachfully remark, recognise the
difference between fact and fiction. All of us indeed are liable to lapses into
the same condition. A strong passion, a keen hope or fear, as we say, invests
its objects with reality: even a sanguine moment presents as fact what
calmer reflection disallows as fancy. With natural and sane intelligences,
however, the recrudescence of barbarous imagination is soon dispelled, and
the difference between hallucinations and realities is established. With the
utterly wrecked in mind, the reality of hallucinations becomes a permanent
or habitual state. With the child and the untrained it [pg ciii] is a recurrent
and a disturbing influence: and it need hardly be added that the circle of
these decepti deceptores—people with the “lie in the Soul”—is a large one.
There thus emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and
falsehood, of reality and unreality, or between representation and reality.
There arise two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it
is supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly.

With this distinction we are brought across the problem sometimes called
Epistemological. Strictly speaking, it is really part of a larger problem: the
problem of what—if Greek compounds must be used—may be styled
Aletheiology—the theory of truth and reality: what Hegel called Logic, and
what many others have called Metaphysics. As it is ordinarily taken up,
“ideas” are believed to be something in us which is representative or
symbolical of something truly real outside us. This inward something is
said to be the first and immediate object of knowledge48, and gives us—in a
mysterious way we need not here discuss—the mediate knowledge of the
reality, which is sometimes said to cause it. Ideas in the Mind, or in the
Subject, or in us, bear witness to something outside the mind,—trans-
subjective—beyond us. The Mind, Subject, or Ego, in this parallelism is
evidently in some way identified with our corporeal organism: perhaps even
located, and provided with a “seat,” in some defined space of that [pg civ]
organism. It is, however, the starting-point of the whole distinction that
ideas do not, no less than they do, conform or correspond to this supra-
conscious or extra-conscious world of real things. Truth or falsehood arises,
according to these assumptions, according as psychical image or idea
corresponds or not to physical fact. But how, unless by some miraculous
second-sight, where the supreme consciousness, directly contemplating by
intuition the true and independent reality, turns to compare with this
immediate vision the results of the mediate processes conducted along the
organs of sense,—how this agreement or disagreement of copy and original,
of idea and reality, can be detected, it is impossible to say.

As has been already noted, the mischief lies in the hypostatisation of ideas
as something existing in abstraction from things—and, of things, in
abstraction from ideas. They are two abstractions, the first by the realist, the
second by the idealist called subjective and psychological. To the realist,
things exist by themselves, and they manage to produce a copy of
themselves (more or less exact, or symbolical) in our mind, i.e. in a
materialistically-spiritual or a spiritualistically-material locus which holds
“images” and ideas. To the psychological idealist, ideas have a substantive
and primary right to existence, them alone do we really know, and from
them we more or less legitimately are said (but probably no one takes this
seriously) to infer or postulate a world of permanent things. Now ideas have
no substantive existence as a sort of things, or even images of things
anywhere. All this is pure mythology. It is said by comparative
mythologists that in some cases the epithet or quality of some deity has
been substantialised (hypostatised) into a separate god, who, however (so
still to keep up the unity), is regarded [pg cv] as a relative, a son, or
daughter, of the original. So the phrase “ideas of things” has been taken
literally as if it was double. But to have an idea of a thing merely means that
we know it, or think it. An idea is not given: it is a thing which is given in
the idea. An idea is not an additional and intervening object of our
knowledge or supposed knowledge. That a thing is our object of thought is
another word for its being our idea, and that means we know it.

The distinction between truth and falsehood, between reality and

appearance, is not arrived at by comparing what we have before us in our
mind with some inaccessible reality beyond. It is a distinction that grows up
with the growth and organisation of our presentations—with their gradual
systematisation and unification in one consciousness. But this
consciousness which thinks, i.e. judges and reasons, is something superior
to the contrast of physical and psychical: superior, i.e. in so far as it includes
and surveys the antithesis, without superseding it. It is the “transcendental
unity of consciousness” of Kant—his synthetic unity of apperception. It
means that all ideas ultimately derive their reality from their coherence with
each other in an all-embracing or infinite idea. Real in a sense ideas always
are, but with an imperfect reality. Thus the education to truth is not—such a
thing would be meaningless—ended by a rough and ready recommendation
to compare our ideas with facts: it must teach the art which discovers facts.
And the teaching may have to go through many grades or provinces: in each
of which it is possible to acquire a certain virtuosoship without being
necessarily an adept in another. It is through what is called the development
of intellect, judgment, and reasoning that the faculty of truth-detecting or
truth-selecting comes. And the common feature of all [pg cvi] of these is, so
to say, their superiority to the psychological mechanism, not in the sense of
working without it and directly, but of being the organising unity or unifier
and controller and judge of that mechanism. The certainty and necessity of
truth and knowledge do not come from a constraint from the external thing
which forces the inner idea into submission; they come from the inner
necessity of conformity and coherence in the organism of experience. We in
fact had better speak of ideas as experience—as felt reality: a reality
however which has its degrees and perhaps even its provinces. All truth
comes with the reasoned judgment, i.e. the syllogism—i.e. with the
institution or discovery of relations of fact or element to fact or element,
immediate or derivative, partial and less partial, up to its ideal coherence in
one Idea. It is because this coherence is so imperfectly established in many
human beings that their knowledge is so indistinguishable from opinion,
and that they separate so loosely truth from error. They have not worked
their way into a definitely articulated system, where there are no gaps, no
abrupt transitions: their mental order is so loosely put together that
divergences and contradictions which vex another drop off ineffectual from
them.

(ii.) Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

This was the idealism which Kant taught and Fichte promoted. Of the other
idealism there are no doubt abundant traces in the language of Kant: and
they were greedily fastened on by Schopenhauer. To him the doctrine, that
the world is my idea, is adequately represented when it is translated into the
phrase that [pg cvii] the world is a phantasmagoria of my brain; and escape
from the subjective idealism thus initiated is found by him only through a
supposed revelation of immediate being communicated in the experience of
will. But according to the more consistently interpreted Kant, the problem
of philosophy consists in laying bare the supreme law or conditions of
consciousness on which depend the validity of our knowledge, our
estimates of conduct, and our aesthetic standards. And these roots of reality
are for Kant in the mind—or, should we rather say—in mind—in
“Consciousness in General.” In the Criticism of Pure Reason the general
drift of his examination is to show that the great things or final realities
which are popularly supposed to stand in self-subsistent being, as ultimate
and all-comprehensive objects set up for knowledge, are not “things” as
popularly supposed, but imperative and inevitable ideas. They are not
objects to be known—(these are always finite): but rather the unification,
the basis, or condition, and the completion of all knowledge. To know them
—in the ordinary petty sense of knowledge—is as absurd and impossible as
it would be, in the Platonic scheme of reality, to know the idea of good
which is “on the further side of knowledge and being.” God and the Soul—
and the same would be true of the World (though modern speculators
sometimes talk as if they had it at least within their grasp)—are not mere
objects of knowledge. It would be truer to say they are that by which we
know, and they are what in us knows: they make knowledge possible, and
actual. Kant has sometimes spoken of them as the objects of a faith of
reason. What he means is that reason only issues in knowledge because of
and through this inevitable law of reason bidding us go on for ever in our
search, because there can be nothing isolated and nowhere [pg cviii] any ne
plus ultra in science, which is infinite and yet only justified as it postulates
or commands unity.

Kant's central idea is that truth, beauty, goodness, are not dependent on
some qualities of the object, but on the universal nature or law of
consciousness. Beauty is not an attribute of things in their abstractness: but
of things as ideas of a subject, and depends on the proportion and symmetry
in the play of human faculty. Goodness is not conformity to an outward law,
but is obligatory on us through that higher nature which is our truer being.
Truth is not conformity of ideas with supposed trans-subjective things, but
coherence and stability in the system of ideas. The really infinite world is
not out there, but in here—in consciousness in general, which is the denial
of all limitation, of all finality, of all isolation. God is the essential and
inherent unity and unifier of spirit and nature—the surety that the world in
all its differentiations is one. The Soul is not an essential entity, but the
infinite fruitfulness and freshness of mental life, which forbids us stopping
at anything short of complete continuity and unity. The Kingdom of God—
the Soul—the moral law—is within us: within us, as supreme, supra-
personal and infinite intelligences, even amid all our littleness and finitude.
Even happiness which we stretch our arms after is not really beyond us, but
is the essential self which indeed we can only reach in detail. It is so both in
knowledge and in action. Each knowledge and enjoyment in reality is
limited and partial, but it is made stable, and it gets a touch of infinitude, by
the larger idea which it helps to realise. Only indeed in that antithesis
between the finite and the infinite does the real live. Every piece of
knowledge is real, only because it assumes pro tempore certain premisses
which are given: every actual beauty is set in some defect of aesthetic [pg
cix] completeness: every actually good deed has to get its foil in
surrounding badness. The real is always partial and incomplete. But it has
the basis or condition of its reality in an idea—in a transcendental unity of
consciousness, which is so to say a law, or a system and an order, which
imposes upon it the condition of conformity and coherence; but a
conformity which is essential and implicit in it.

Fichte has called his system a Wissenschaftslehre—a theory of knowledge.

Modern German used the word Wissenschaft, as modern English uses the
word Science, to denote the certified knowledge of piecemeal fact, the
partial unification of elements still kept asunder. But by Wissen, as opposed
to Erkennen, is meant the I know, am aware and sure, am in contact with
reality, as opposed to the derivative and conditional reference of something
to something else which explains it. The former is a wider term: it denotes
all consciousness of objective truth, the certainty which claims to be
necessary and universal, which pledges its whole self for its assertion.
Fichte thus unifies and accentuates the common element in the Kantian
criticisms. In the first of these Kant had begun by explaining the nature and
limitation of empirical science. It was essentially conditioned by the given
sensation—dependent i.e. on an unexplained and preliminary element. This
is what makes it science in the strict or narrow sense of the term: its being
set, as it were, in the unknown, the felt, the sense-datum. The side of reality
is thus the side of limitation and of presupposition. But what makes it truth
and knowledge in general, on the other hand,—as distinct from a truth (i.e.
partial truth) and a knowledge,—is the ideal element—the mathematical,
the logical, the rational law,—or in one word, the universal and formal
character. So too every real action is on one hand the product of an [pg cx]
impulse, a dark, merely given, immediate tendency to be, and without that
would be nothing: but on the other hand it is only an intelligent and moral
action in so far as it has its constitution from an intelligence, a formal
system, which determine its place and function.

It is on the latter or ideal element that Kant makes the emphasis

increasingly turn. Not truths, duties, beauties, but truth, duty, beauty, form
his theme. The formal element—the logical or epistemological condition of
knowledge and morality and of beauty—is what he (and still more Fichte)
considers the prime question of fundamental philosophy. His philosophy is
an attempt to get at the organism of our fundamental belief—the
construction, from the very base, of our conception of reality, of our
primary certainty. In technical language, he describes our essential nature as
a Subject-object. It is the unity of an I am which is also I know that I am: an
I will which is also I am conscious of my will49. Here there is a radical
disunion and a supersession of that disunion. Action and contemplation are
continually outrunning each other. The I will rests upon one I know, and
works up to another: the I know reflects upon an I will, and includes it as an
element in its idea.

Kant had brought into use the term Deduction, and Fichte follows him. The
term leads to some confusion: for in English, by its modern antithesis to
induction, it suggests a priori methods in all their iniquity. It means a kind
of jugglery which brings an endless series [pg cxi] out of one small term.
Kant has explained that he uses it in the lawyer's sense in which a claim is
justified by being traced step by step back to some acknowledged and
accepted right50. It is a regressive method which shows us that if the original
datum is to be accepted it carries along with it the legitimation of the
consequence. This method Fichte applies to psychology. Begin, he says like
Condillac, with the barest nucleus of soul-life; the mere sentiency, or
feeling: the contact, as it were, with being, at a single point. But such a
mere point is unthinkable. You find, as Mr. Spencer says, that “Thought”
(or Consciousness) “cannot be framed out of one term only.” “Every
sensation to be known as one must be perceived.” Such is the nature of the
Ego—a subject which insists on each part being qualified by the whole and
so transformed. As Mr. Spencer, again, puts it, the mind not merely tends to
revive, to associate, to assimilate, to represent its own presentations, but it
carries on this process infinitely and in ever higher multiples. Ideas as it
were are growing in complexity by re-presenting: i.e. by embracing and
enveloping elements which cannot be found existing in separation. In the
mind there is no mere presentation, no bare sensation. Such a unit is a
fiction or hypothesis we employ, like the atom, for purposes of explanation.
The pure sensation therefore—which you admit because you must have
something to begin with, not a mere nothing, but something so simple that it
seems to stand out clear and indisputable—this pure sensation, when you
think of it, forces you to go a good deal further. Even to be itself, it must be
more than itself. It is like the pure or mere being of the logicians. Admit the
simple [pg cxii] sensation—and you have admitted everything which is
required to make sensation a possible reality. But you do not—in the sense
of vulgar logic—deduce what follows out of the beginning. From that,
taken by itself, you will get only itself: mere being will give you only
nothing, to the end of the chapter. But, as the phrase is, sensation is an
element in a consciousness: it is, when you think of it, always more than
you called it: there is a curious “continuity” about the phenomena, which
makes real isolation impossible.

Of course this “deduction” is not history: it is logic. It says, if you posit

sensation, then in doing so, you posit a good deal more. You have
imagination, reason, and many more, all involved in your original
assumption. And there is a further point to be noted. You cannot really stop
even at reason, at intelligence and will, if you take these in the full sense.
You must realise that these only exist as part and parcel of a reasonable
world. An individual intelligence presupposes a society of intelligences.
The successive steps in this argument are presented by Fichte in the chief
works of his earlier period (1794-98). The works of that period form a kind
of trilogy of philosophy, by which the faint outlines of the absolute selfhood
is shown acquiring definite consistency in the moral organisation of society.
First comes the “Foundation for the collective philosophy.” It shows how
our conception of reality and our psychical organisation are inevitably
presupposed in the barest function of intelligence, in the abstractest forms
of logical law. Begin where you like, with the most abstract and formal
point of consciousness, you are forced, as you dwell upon it (you
identifying yourself with the thought you realise), to go step by step on till
you accept as a self-consistent and self-explanatory unity all that your
cognitive and [pg cxiii] volitional nature claims to own as its birthright.
Only in such an intelligent will is perception and sensation possible. Next
came the “Foundation of Natural Law, on the principles of the general
theory.” Here the process of deduction is carried a step further. If man is to
realise himself as an intelligence with an inherent bent to action, then he
must be conceived as a person among persons, as possessed of rights, as
incapable of acting without at the same moment claiming for his acts
recognition, generality, and logical consecution. The reference, which in the
conception of a practical intelligence was implicit,—the reference to
fellow-agents, to a world in which law rules—is thus, by the explicit
recognition of these references, made a fact patent and positive—gesetzt,—
expressly instituted in the way that the nature and condition of things
postulates. But this is not all: we step from the formal and absolute into the
material and relative. If man is to be a real intelligence, he must be an
intelligence served by organs. “The rational being cannot realise its efficient
individuality, unless it ascribes to itself a material body”: a body, moreover,
in which Fichte believes he can show that the details of structure and organs
are equally with the general corporeity predetermined by reason51. In the
same way it is shown that the social and political organisation is required
for the realisation—the making positive and yet coherent—of the rights of
all individuals. You deduce society by showing it is required to make a
genuine individual man. Thirdly came the “System of Ethics.” Here it is
further argued that, at least in a certain respect52, in spite of my absolute
reason and my absolute freedom, I can only be fully real as a part of Nature:
[pg cxiv] that my reason is realised in a creature of appetite and impulse.
From first to last this deduction is one process which may be said to have
for its object to determine “the conditions of self-hood or egoity.” It is the
deduction of the concrete and empirical moral agent—the actual ego of
actual life—from the abstract, unconditioned ego, which in order to be
actual must condescend to be at once determining and determined.

In all of this Fichte makes—especially formally—a decided advance upon

Kant. In Ethics Kant in particular, (—especially for readers who never got
beyond the beginning of his moral treatise and were overpowered by the
categorical imperative of duty) had found the moral initiative or dynamic
apparently in the other world. The voice of duty seemed to speak from a
region outside and beyond the individual conscience. In a sense it must do
so: but it comes from a consciousness which is, and yet is more than, the
individual. It is indeed true that appearances here are deceptive: and that the
idea of autonomy, the self-legislation of reason, is trying to become the
central conception of Kant's Ethics. Still it is Fichte's merit to have seen this
clearly, to have held it in view unfalteringly, and to have carried it out in
undeviating system or deduction. Man, intelligent, social, ethical, is a being
all of one piece and to be explained entirely immanently, or from himself.
Law and ethics are no accident either to sense or to intelligence—nothing
imposed by mere external or supernal authority53. Society is not a brand-new
order of things supervening upon and superseding a state of nature, where
the individual was entirely self-supporting. Morals, law, society, are all
necessary steps (necessary i.e. in logic, and hence in the long run [pg cxv]
also inevitable in course of time) to complete the full evolution or
realisation of a human being. The same conditions as make man intelligent
make him social and moral. He does not proceed so far as to become
intelligent and practical, under terms of natural and logical development,
then to fall into the hands of a foreign influence, an accident ab extra,
which causes him to become social and moral. Rather he is intelligent,
because he is a social agent.

Hence, in Fichte, the absence of the ascetic element so often stamping its
character on ethics, and representing the moral life as the enemy of the
natural, or as mainly a struggle to subdue the sensibility and the flesh. With
Kant,—as becomes his position of mere inquirer—the sensibility has the
place of a predominant and permanent foreground. Reason, to his way of
talking, is always something of an intruder, a stranger from a far-off world,
to be feared even when obeyed: sublime, rather than beautiful. From the
land of sense which we habitually occupy, the land of reason is a country
we can only behold from afar: or if we can be said to have a standpoint in it,
that is only a figurative way of saying that though it is really over the
border, we can act—it would sometimes seem by a sort of make-believe—
as if we were already there. But these moments of high enthusiasm are rare;
and Kant commends sobriety and warns against high-minded Schwärmerei,
or over-strained Mysticism. For us it is reserved to struggle with a
recalcitrant selfhood, a grovelling sensibility: it were only fantastic
extravagance, fit for “fair souls” who unfortunately often lapse into “fair
sinners,” should we fancy ourselves already anchored in the haven of
untempted rest and peace.

When we come to Fichte, we find another spirit [pg cxvi] breathing. We

have passed from the age of Frederick the Great to the age of the French
Revolution; and the breeze that burst in the War of Liberation is already
beginning to freshen the air. Boldly he pronounces the primacy of that faith
of reason whereby not merely the just but all shall live. Your will shall show
you what you really are. You are essentially a rational will, or a will-reason.
Your sensuous nature, of impulse and appetite, far from being the given and
found obstacle to the realisation of reason,—which Kant strictly interpreted
might sometimes seem to imply—(and in this point Schopenhauer carries
out the implications of Kant)—is really the condition or mode of being
which reason assumes, or rises up to, in order to be a practical or moral
being. Far from the body and the sensible needs being a stumbling-block to
hamper the free fullness of rationality and morality, the truth rather is that it
is only by body and sense, by flesh and blood, that the full moral and
rational life can be realised54. Or, to put it otherwise, if human reason
(intelligence and will) is to be more than a mere and empty inner
possibility, if man is to be a real and concrete cognitive and volitional
being, he must be a member of an ethical and actual society, which lives by
bread, and which marries and has children.

(iii.) Psychology in Ethics.

In this way, for Fichte, and through Fichte still more decidedly for Hegel,
both psychology and ethics [pg cxvii] breathe an opener and ampler air than
they often enjoy. Psychology ceases to be a mere description of psychic
events, and becomes the history of the self-organising process of human
reason. Ethics loses its cloistered, negative, unnatural aspect, and becomes a
name for some further conditions of the same development, essentially
postulated to complete or supplement its shortcomings. Psychology—taken
in this high philosophical acceptation—thus leads on to Ethics; and Ethics
is parted by no impassable line from Psychology. That, at least, is what
must happen if they are still to retain a place in philosophy: for, as Kant
says55, “under the government of reason our cognitions cannot form a
rhapsody, but must constitute a system, in which alone can they support and
further its essential aims.” As parts of such a system, they carry out their
special work in subordination to, and in the realisation of, a single Idea—
and therefore in essential interconnexion. From that interconnecting band
we may however in detail-enquiry dispense ourselves; and then we have the
empirical or inductive sciences of psychology and ethics. But even with
these, the necessity of the situation is such that it is only a question of
degree how far we lose sight of the philosophical horizon, and entrench
ourselves in special enquiry. Something of the philosophic largeness must
always guide us; even when, to further the interests of the whole, it is
necessary for the special enquirer to bury himself entirely in his part. So
long as each part is sincerely and thoroughly pursued, and no part is
neglected, there is an indwelling reason in the parts which will in the long
run tend to constitute the total.

A philosophical psychology will show us how the [pg cxviii] sane

intelligence and the rational will are, at least approximately, built up out of
elements, and through stages and processes, which modify and
complement, as they may also arrest and perplex, each other. The unity,
coherence, and completeness of the intelligent self is not, as vulgar
irreflectiveness supposes and somewhat angrily maintains, a full-grown
thing or agent, of whose actions and modes of behaviour the psychologist
has to narrate the history,—a history which is too apt to degenerate into the
anecdotal and the merely interesting. This unity of self has to be “deduced,”
as Fichte would say: it has to be shown as the necessary result which certain
elements in a certain order will lead to56. A normal mind, self-possessed,
developed and articulated, yet thoroughly one, a real microcosm, or true
and full monad, which under the mode of its individuality still represents
the universe: that is, what psychology has to show as the product of factors
and processes. And it is clearly something great and good, something
valuable, and already possessing, by implication we may say, an ethical
character.

In philosophy, at least, it is difficult, or rather impossible to draw a hard and

fast line which shall demarcate ethical from non-ethical characters,—to
separate them from other intellectual and reasonable motives. Kant, as we
know, attempted to do so: but with the result that he was forced to add a
doubt whether a purely moral act could ever be said to exist57; or rather to
express the certainty that if it did it was for ever inaccessible to observation.
All such designations of [pg cxix] the several “factors” or “moments” in
reality, as has been hinted, are only a potiori. But they are misused when it
is supposed that they connote abrupt and total discontinuity. And Kant, after
all, only repeated in his own terminology an old and inveterate habit of
thought:—the habit which in Stoicism seemed to see sage and foolish
utterly separated, and which in the straiter sects of Christendom fenced off
saint absolutely from sinner. It is a habit to which Hegel, and even his
immediate predecessors, are radically opposed. With Herder, he might say,
“Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind58.” This—the truth in Spinozism
—no doubt demands some emphasis on the word “higher”: and it requires
us to read ethics (or something like it) into physics; but it is a step on the
right road,—the step which Utilitarianism and Evolutionism had (however
awkwardly) got their foot upon, and which “transcendent” ethics seems
unduly afraid of committing itself to. Let us say, if we like, that the mind is
more than mere nature, and that it is no proper object of a merely natural
science. But let us remember that a merely natural science is only a
fragment of science: let us add that the merely natural is an abstraction
which in part denaturalises and mutilates the larger nature—a nature which
includes the natural mind, and cannot altogether exclude the ethical.

What have been called “formal duties59” seem to fall under this range—the
province of a philosophical psychology which unveils the conditions of
personality. Under that heading may be put self-control, consistency,
resolution, energy, forethought, prudence, and the like. The due proportion
of faculty, the correspondence of head and heart, the vivacity and quickness
of sympathy, [pg cxx] the ease and simplicity of mental tone, the due vigour
of memory and the grace of imagination, sweetness of temper, and the like,
are parts of the same group60. They are lovely, and of good report: they are
praise and virtue. If it be urged that they are only natural gifts and graces,
that objection cuts two ways. The objector may of course be reminded that
religion tones down the self-complacency of morality. Yet, first, even apart
from that, it may be said that of virtues, which stand independent of natural
conditions—of external supply of means (as Aristotle would say)—nothing
can be known and nothing need be said. And secondly, none of these
qualities are mere gifts;—all require exercise, habituation, energising, to get
and keep them. How much and how little in each case is nature's and how
much ours is a problem which has some personal interest—due perhaps to a
rather selfish and envious curiosity. But on the broad field of experience
and history we may perhaps accept the—apparently one-sided—proverb
that “Each man is the architect of his own fortune.” Be this as it may, it will
not do to deny the ethical character of these “formal duties” on the ground
e.g. that self-control, prudence, and even sweetness of temper may be used
for evil ends,—that one may smile and smile, and yet be a villain. That—let
us reply,—on one hand, is a fault (if fault it be) incidental to all virtues in
detail (for every single quality has its defect): nay it may be a limitation
attaching to the whole ethical sphere: and, secondly, its inevitable limitation
does not render the virtue in any case one whit less genuine so far as it goes.
And yet of such virtues it may be said, as Hume61 would say (who calls
them “natural,” as opposed to the more artificial merits [pg cxxi] of justice
and its kin), that they please in themselves, or in the mere contemplation,
and without any regard to their social effects. But they please as entering
into our idea of complete human nature, of mind and spirit as will and
intellect.

The moralists of last century sometimes divided the field of ethics by

assigning to man three grades or kinds of duty: duties to himself, duties to
society, and duties to God. For the distinction there is a good deal to be
said: there are also faults to be found with it. It may be said, amongst other
things, that to speak of duties to self is a metaphorical way of talking, and
that God lies out of the range of human duty altogether, except in so far as
religious service forms a part of social obligation. It may be urged that man
is essentially a social being, and that it is only in his relations to other such
beings that his morality can find a sphere. The sphere of morality, according
to Dr. Bain, embraces whatever “society has seen fit to enforce with all the
rigour of positive inflictions. Positive good deeds and self-sacrifice ...
transcend the region of morality proper and occupy a sphere of their own62.”
And there is little doubt that this restriction is in accordance with a main
current of usage. It may even be said that there are tendencies towards a
narrower usage still, which would restrict the term to questions affecting the
relations of the sexes. But, without going so far, we may accept the
standpoint which finds in the phrase “popular or social” sanction, as
equivalent to the moral sanction, a description of the average level of
common opinion on the topic. The morality of an age or country thus
denotes, first, the average requirement in act and behaviour imposed by
general consent on the members of a community, and secondly, the average
performance of the [pg cxxii] members in response to these requirements.
Generally speaking the two will be pretty much the same. If the society is in
a state of equilibrium, there will be a palpable agreement between what all
severally expect and what all severally perform. On the other hand, as no
society is ever in complete equilibrium, this harmony will never be perfect
and may often be widely departed from. In what is called a single
community, if it reach a considerable bulk, there are (in other words) often a
number of minor societies, more or less thwarting and modifying each
other; and different observers, who belong in the main to one or other of
these subordinate groups, may elicit from the facts before them a somewhat
different social code, and a different grade of social observance. Still, with
whatever diversity of detail, the important feature of such social ethics is
that the stress is laid on the performance of certain acts, in accordance with
the organisation of society. So long as the required compliance is given,
public opinion is satisfied, and morality has got its due.

But in two directions this conception of morality needs to be

supplementing. There is, on one hand, what is called duty to God. The
phrase is not altogether appropriate: for it follows too closely the analogy of
social requirement, and treats Deity as an additional and social authority,—
a lord paramount over merely human sovereigns. But though there may be
some use in the analogy, to press the conception is seriously to narrow the
divine character and the scope of religion. As in similar cases, we cannot
change one term without altering its correlative. And therefore to describe
our relation to God under the name of duty is to narrow and falsify that
relation. The word is no longer applicable in this connexion without a
strain, and where it exists it indicates the survival of a conception of
theocracy: [pg cxxiii] of God regarded as a glorification of the magistrate,
as king of kings and lord of lords. It is the social world—and indeed we
may say the outside of the social world—that is the sphere of duties. Duty is
still with these reductions a great august name: but in literal strictness it
only rules over the medial sphere of life, the sphere which lies between the
individual as such and his universal humanity63. Beyond duty, lies the sphere
of conscience and of religion. And that is not the mere insistence by the
individual to have a voice and a vote in determining the social order. It is
the sense that the social order, however omnipotent it may seem, is limited
and finite, and that man has in him a kindred with the Eternal.

It is not very satisfactory, either, as Aristotle and others have pointed out, to
speak of man's duties to himself. The phrase is analogical, like the other.
But it has the merit, like that of duty to God, of reminding us that the
ordinary latitude occupied by morality is not all that comes under the larger
scope of ethics. The “ethics of individual life” is a subject which Mr.
Spencer has touched upon: and by this title, he means that, besides his
general relationship to others, a human being has to mind his own health,
food, and amusement, and has duties as husband and parent. But, after all,
these are not matters of peculiarly individual interest. They rather refer to
points which society at certain epochs leaves to the common sense of the
agent,—apparently on an assumption that he is the person chiefly
interested. And these points—as the Greeks taught long ago—are of
fundamental importance: they are the very bases of life. Yet the
comparative neglect [pg cxxiv] in which so-called civilised societies64 hold
the precepts of wisdom in relation to bodily health and vigour, in regard to
marriage and progeny, serve to illustrate the doctrine of the ancient Stoics
that πάντα ὑπόληψις, or the modern idealist utterance that the World is my
idea. More and more as civilisation succeeds in its disruption of man from
nature, it shows him governed not by bare facts and isolated experiences,
but by the systematic idea under which all things are subsumed. He loses
the naïveté of the natural man, which takes each fact as it came, all alike
good: he becomes sentimental, and artificial, sees things under a
conventional point of view, and would rather die than not be in the fashion.
And this tendency is apparently irresistible. Yet the mistake lies in the one-
sidedness of sentiment and convention. Not the domination of the idea is
evil; but the domination of a partial and fragmentary idea: and this is what
constitutes the evil of artificiality. And the correction must lie not in a
return to nature, but in the reconstruction of a wider and more
comprehensive idea: an idea which shall be the unity and system of all
nature; not a fantastic idealism, but an attempt to do justice to the more
realist as well as the idealist sides of life.

There is however another side of individualist ethics which needs even

more especial enforcement. It is the formation of

“The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength and skill:”

the healthy mind in a healthy body. Ethics is only too apt to suppose that
will and intelligence are assumptions which need no special justification.
But the truth is that they vary from individual to individual in degree and
[pg cxxv] structure. It is the business of ethical psychology to give to these
vague attributions the definiteness of a normal standard: to show what
proportions are required to justify the proper title of reason and will—to
show what reason and will really are if they do what they are encouraged or
expected to do. It talks of the diseases of will and personality: it must also
set forth their educational ideal. The first problem of Ethics, it may be said,
is the question of the will and its freedom. But to say this is of course not to
say that, unless freedom of will be understood in some special sense, ethics
becomes impossible. If the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom,
then must our conception of morality and of freedom hang together. And it
will clearly be indispensable to begin by some attempt to discover in what
sense man may be in the most general way described as a moral agent—as
an intelligent will, or (more briefly, yet synonymously) as a will. “The soil
of law and morality,” says Hegel65, “is the intelligent life: and its more
precise place and starting-point the will, which is free, in the sense that
freedom is its substance and characteristic, and the system of law the realm
of freedom realised, the world of intelligence produced out of itself as a
second nature.” Such a freedom is a freedom made and acquired, the work
of the mind's self-realisation, not to be taken as a given fact of
consciousness which must be believed66. To have a will—in other words, to
have freedom, is the consummation—and let us add, only the formal or
ideal consummation—of a process by which man raises himself out of his
absorption in sensation and impulse, establishes within himself a mental
realm, an organism of ideas, a self-consciousness, and a self.

[pg cxxvi]
The vulgar apprehension of these things seems to assume that we have by
nature, or are born with, a general faculty or set of general faculties, which
we subsequently fill up and embody by the aid of experience. We possess—
they seem to imply—so many “forms” and “categories” latent in our minds
ready to hold and contain the raw materials supplied from without.
According to this view we have all a will and an intelligence: the difference
only is that some put more into them, and some put less. But such a
separation of the general form from its contents is a piece of pure
mythology. It is perhaps true and safe to say that the human being is of such
a character that will and intelligence are in the ordinary course inevitably
produced. But the forms which grow up are the more and more definite and
systematic organisation of a graded experience, of series of ideas, working
themselves up again and again in representative and re-representative
degree, till they constitute a mental or inner world of their own. The will is
thus the title appropriate to the final stage of a process, by which sensation
and impulse have polished and perfected themselves by union and
opposition, by differentiation and accompanying redintegration, till they
assume characters quite unsurmised in their earliest aspects, and yet only
the consolidation or self-realisation of implications. Thus the mental
faculties are essentially acquired powers,—acquired not from without, but
by action which generates the faculties it seems to imply. The process of
mind is a process which creates individual centres, raises them to completer
independence;—which produces an inner life more and more self-centered
and also more and more equal to the universe which it has embodied. And
will and intelligence are an important stage in that process.

Herbart (as was briefly hinted at in the first essay) [pg cxxvii] has analysed
ethical appreciation (which may or may not be accompanied by
approbation) into five distinct standard ideas. These are the ideas of inward
liberty, of perfection, of right, benevolence, and equity. Like Hume, he
regards the moral judgment as in its purity a kind of aesthetic
pronouncement on the agreement or proportion of certain activities in
relations to each other. Two of these standard ideas,—that of inward liberty
and of perfection—seem to belong to the sphere at present under review.
They emerge as conditions determining the normal development of human
nature to an intelligent and matured personality. By inward freedom Herbart
means the harmony between the will and the intellect: what Aristotle has
named “practical truth or reality,” and what he describes in his conception
of wisdom or moral intelligence,—the power of discerning the right path
and of pursuing it with will and temper: the unity, clear but indissoluble, of
will and discernment. By the idea of perfection Herbart means the sense of
proportion and of propriety which is awakened by comparing a progress in
development or an increase in strength with its earlier stages of promise and
imperfection. The pleasure such perception affords works in two ways: it is
a satisfaction in achievement past, and a stimulus to achievement yet to
come.

Such ideas of inward liberty and of growth in ability or in performance

govern (at least in part) our judgment of the individual, and have an ethical
significance. Indeed, if the cardinal feature of the ethical sentiment be the
inwardness and independence of its approbation and obligation, these ideas
lie at the root of all true morality. Inward harmony and inward progress,
lucidity of conscience and the resolution which knows no finality of effort,
are the very essence of moral life. Yet, if ethics is to include in the first
instance social relationships [pg cxxviii] and external utilities and sanctions,
these conditions of true life must rather be described as pre-ethical. The
truth seems to be that here we get to a range of ethics which is far wider
than what is ordinarily called practice and conduct. At this stage logic,
aesthetic, and ethic, are yet one: the true, the good, and the beautiful are still
held in their fundamental unity. An ethics of wide principle precedes its
narrower social application; and whereas in ordinary usage the social
provinciality is allowed to prevail, here the higher ethics emerge clear and
imperial above the limitations of local and temporal duty.
And though it is easy to step into exaggeration, it is still well to emphasise
this larger conception of ethics. The moral principle of the “maximising of
life,” as it has been called67, may be open to misconception (—so,
unfortunately are all moral principles when stated in the effrontery of
isolation): but it has its truth in the conviction that all moral evil is marked
by a tendency to lower or lessen the total vitality. So too Friedrich
Nietzsche's maxim, Sei vornehm68, ensue distinction, and above all things be
not common or vulgar (gemein), will easily lend itself to distortion. But it is
good advice for all that, even though it may be difficult to define in a
general formula wherein distinction consists, to mark the boundary between
self-respect and vanity or obstinacy, or to say wherein lies the beauty and
dignity of human nature. Kant has laid it down as the principle of duty to
ask ourselves if in our act we are prepared to universalise the maxim
implied by our conduct. And that this—which essentially bids us look at an
act in the whole of its relations and context—is a safeguard against some
forms of moral evil, is certain. But there is an [pg cxxix] opposite—or
rather an apparently opposite—principle which bids us be individual, be
true to our own selves, and never allow ourselves to be dismayed from our
own unique responsibility. Perhaps the two principles are not so far apart as
they seem. In any case true individuality is the last word and the first word
in ethics; though, it may be added, there is a good deal to be said between
the two termini.
(iv.) An Excursus on Greek Ethics.

It is in these regions that Greek ethics loves to linger; on the duty of the
individual to himself, to be perfectly lucid and true, and to rise to ever
higher heights of achievement. Ceteris paribus, there is felt to be something
meritorious in superiority, something good:—even were it that you are
master, and another is slave. Thus naïvely speaks Aristotle69. To a modern,
set amid so many conflicting ideals, perhaps, the immense possibilities of
yet further growth might suggest themselves with overpowering force. To
him the idea of perfection takes the form of an idea of perfectibility: and
sometimes it smites down his conceit in what he has actually done, and
impresses a sense of humility in comparison with what yet remains
unaccomplished. An ancient Greek apparently was little haunted by these
vistas of possibilities of progress through worlds beyond worlds. A
comparatively simple environment, a fixed and definite mental horizon, had
its plain and definite standards, or at least seemed to have such. There were
fewer cases of the man, unattached or faintly attached to any [pg cxxx]
definite profession—moving about in worlds half realised—who has grown
so common in a more developed civilisation. The ideals of the Greek were
clearly descried: each man had his definite function or work to perform: and
to do it better than the average, or than he himself habitually had done, that
was perfection, excellence, virtue. For virtue to the Greek is essentially
ability and respectability: promise of excellent performance: capacity to do
better than others. Virtue is praiseworthy or meritorious character and
quality: it is achievement at a higher rate, as set against one's past and
against others' average.

The Greek moralists sometimes distinguish and sometimes combine moral

virtue and wisdom, ἀρετή and φρόνησις: capacity to perform, and wisdom
to guide that capacity. To the ordinary Greek perhaps the emphasis fell on
the former, on the attainment of all recognised good quality which became a
man, all that was beautiful and honourable, all that was appropriate,
glorious, and fame-giving; and that not for any special reference to its
utilitarian qualities. Useful, of course, such qualities were: but that was not
in question at the time. In the more liberal commonwealths of ancient
Greece there was little or no anxious care to control the education of its
citizens, so as to get direct service, overt contribution to the public good. A
suspicious Spartan legislation might claim to do that. But in the free air of
Athens all that was required was loyalty, good-will—εὔνοια—to the
common weal; it might be even a sentiment of human kindliness, of
fraternity of spirit and purpose. Everything beyond and upon that basis was
left to free development. Let each carry out to the full the development of
his powers in the line which national estimation points out. He is—nature
and history alike emphasise that fact beyond the reach [pg cxxxi] of doubt,
for all except the outlaw and the casual stranger—a member of a
community, and as such has a governing instinct and ideal which animates
him. But he is also a self-centered individual, with special endowments of
nature, in his own person and in the material objects which are his. A purely
individualist or selfish use of them is not—to the normal Greek—even
dreamed of. He is too deeply rooted in the substance of his community for
that: or it is on the ground and in the atmosphere of an assured community
that his individuality is to be made to flourish. Nature has secured that his
individuality shall rest securely in the presupposition of his citizenship. It
seems, therefore, as if he were left free and independent in his personal
search for perfection, for distinction. His place is fixed for him: Spartam
nactus es; hanc orna: his duty is his virtue. That duty, as Plato expresses it,
is to do his own deeds—and not meddle with others. Nature and history
have arranged that others, in other posts, shall do theirs: that all severally
shall energise their function. The very word “duty” seems out of place; if, at
least, duty suggests external obligation, an order imposed and a debt to be
discharged. If there be a task-master and a creditor, it is the inflexible order
of nature and history:—or, to be more accurate, of nature, the indwelling
and permanent reality of things. But the obligation to follow nature is
scarcely felt as a yoke of constraint. A man's virtue is to perform his work
and to perform it well: to do what he is specially capable of doing, and
therefore specially charged to do.
Nowhere has this character of Greek ethics received more classical
expression than in the Republic of Plato. In the prelude to his subject—
which is the nature of Right and Morality—Plato has touched briefly on
certain popular and inadequate views. There is the view [pg cxxxii] that
Right has its province in performance of certain single and external acts—in
business honesty and commercial straightforwardness. There is the view
that it is rendering to each what is due to him; that it consists in the proper
reciprocity of services, in the balance of social give and take. There is the
critical or hyper-critical view which, from seeing so much that is called
justice to be in harmony with the interest of the predominant social order,
bluntly identifies mere force or strength as the ground of right. And there
are views which regard it as due to social conventions and artifices, to the
influence of education, to political arrangements and the operation of
irrational prejudices. To all these views Plato objects: not because they are
false—for they are all in part, often in large part, true—but because they are
inadequate and do not go to the root of the matter. The foundations of right
lie, he says, not in external act, but in the inner man: not in convention, but
in nature: not in relation to others, but in the constitution of the soul itself.
That ethical idea—the idea of right—which seems most obviously to have
its centre outside the individual, to live and grow only in the relations
between individuals, Plato selects in order to show the independent royalty
of the single human soul. The world, as Hume afterwards, called justice
artificial: Plato will prove it natural. In a way he joins company with those
who bid us drive out the spectre of duty, of obligation coming upon the soul
from social authority, from traditional idea, from religious sanctions. He
preaches—or he is about to preach—the autonomy of the will.

The four cardinal virtues of Plato's list are the qualities which go to make a
healthy, normal, natural human soul, fit for all activity, equipped with all
arms for the battle of life. They tell us what such a soul is, not [pg cxxxiii]
what it does. They are the qualities which unless a soul has, and has them
each perfect, yet all co-operant, its mere outward and single acts have no
virtue or merit, but are only lucky accidents at the best. On the other hand,
if a man has these constitutive qualities, he will act in the social world, and
act well. Plato has said scornful things of mere outward and verbal
truthfulness, and has set at the very lowest pitch of degradation the “lie in
the soul.” His “temperance” or “self-restraint,” if it be far from breathing
any suggestion of self-suppression or self-assertion, is still farther from any
suspicion of asceticism, or war against the flesh. It is the noble harmony of
the ruling and the ruled, which makes the latter a partner of the sovereign,
and takes from the dictates of the ruler any touch of coercion. It is literally
sanity of soul, integrity and purity of spirit; it is what has been sometimes
called the beautiful soul—the indiscerptible unity of reason and impulse.
Plato's bravery, again, is fortitude and consistency of soul, the full-blooded
heart which is fixed in reason, the zeal which is according to knowledge,
unflinching loyalty to the idea, the spirit which burns in the martyrs to truth
and humanity: yet withal with gentleness and courtesy and noble urbanity in
its immediate train. And his truthfulness is that inner lucidity which cannot
be self-deceived, the spirit which is a safeguard against fanaticism and
hypocrisy, the sunlike warmth of intelligence without which the heart is a
darkness full of unclean things.

The full development and crowning grace of such a manly nature Aristotle
has tried to present in the character of the Great-souled man—him whom
Plato has called the true king by divine right, or the autocrat by the patent of
nature. Like all such attempts to delineate a type in the terms necessarily
single and [pg cxxxiv] successive of abstract analysis, it tends occasionally
to run into caricature, and to give partial aspects an absurd prominency.
Only the greatest of artists could cope with such a task, though that artist
may be found perhaps classed among the historians. Yet it is possible to
form some conception of the ideal which Aristotle would set before us. The
Great-souled man is great, and he dare not deny the witness of his spirit. He
is one who does not quail before the anger and seek the applause of popular
opinion: he holds his head as his own, and as high as his undimmed self-
consciousness shows it is worth. There has been said to him by the reason
within him the word that Virgil erewhile addressed to Dante:

“Libero, dritto, e sano è il tuo arbitrio

E fallo fora non fare a suo cenno;
Per ch' io te sopra te corono e mitrio.”

He is his own Emperor and his own Pope. He is the perfected man, in
whom is no darkness, whose soul is utter clearness, and complete harmony.
Calm in self-possessed majesty, he stands, if need be, contra mundum: but
rather, with the world beneath his feet. The chatter of personality has no
interest for him. Bent upon the best, lesser competitions for distinction have
no attraction for him. To the vulgar he will seem cold, self-confined: in his
apartness and distinction they will see the signs of a “prig.” His look will be
that of one who pities men—rather than loves them: and should he speak ill
of a foe, it is rather out of pride of heart and unbroken spirit than because
these things touch him. Such an one, in many ways, was the Florentine poet
himself.

If the Greek world in general thus conceived ἀρετή as the full bloom of
manly excellence (we all know how slightly—witness the remarks in the
Periclean oration—Greeks, [pg cxxxv] in their public and official
utterances, rated womanliness), the philosophers had a further point to
emphasise. That was what they variously called knowledge, prudence,
reason, insight, intelligence, wisdom, truth. From Socrates to Aristotle,
from Aristotle to the Stoics and Epicureans, and from the Stoics to the Neo-
Platonists, this is the common theme: the supremacy of knowledge, its
central and essential relation to virtue. They may differ—perhaps not so
widely as current prejudice would suppose—as to how this knowledge is to
be defined, what kind of knowledge it is, how acquired and maintained, and
so on. But in essentials they are at one. None of them, of course, mean that
in order to right conduct nothing more is needed than to learn and
remember what is right, the precepts and commandments of ordinary
morality. Memory is not knowledge, especially when it is out of mind. Even
an ancient philosopher was not wholly devoid of common sense. They held
—what they supposed was a fact of observation and reflection—that all
action was prompted by feelings of the values of things, by a desire of
something good or pleasing to self, and aimed at self-satisfaction and self-
realisation, but that there was great mistake in what thus afforded
satisfaction. People chose to act wrongly or erroneously, because they were,
first, mistaken about themselves and what they wanted, and, secondly,
mistaken in the means which would give them satisfaction. But this second
point was secondary. The main thing was to know yourself, what you really
were; in Plato's words, to “see the soul as it is, and know whether it have
one form only or many, or what its nature is; to look upon it with the eye of
reason in its original purity.” Self-deception, confusion, that worst
ignorance which is unaware of itself, false estimation—these are the radical
[pg cxxxvi] evils of the natural man. To these critics the testimony of
consciousness was worthless, unless corroborated. To cure this mental
confusion, this blindness of will and judgment, is the task set for
philosophy: to give inward light, to teach true self-measurement. In one
passage, much misunderstood, Plato has called this philosophic art the due
measurement of pleasures and pains. It should scarcely have been possible
to mistake the meaning. But, with the catchwords of Utilitarianism ringing
in their ears, the commentators ran straight contrary to the true teaching of
the Protagoras, consentient as it is with that of the Phaedo and the
Philebus. To measure, one must have a standard: and if Plato has one lesson
always for us, it is that a sure standard the multitude have not, but only
confusion. The so-called pleasures and pains of the world's experiences are
so entitled for different reasons, for contrary aims, and with no unity or
harmony of judgment. They are—not a fact to be accepted, but—a problem
for investigation: their reality is in question, their genuineness, solidity and
purity: and till you have settled that, you cannot measure, for you may be
measuring vacuity under the idea that there is substance. You have still to
get at the unit—i.e. the reality of pleasure. It was not Plato's view that
pleasure was a separate and independent entity: that it was exactly as it was
felt. Each pleasure is dependent for its pleasurable quality on the
consciousness it belongs to, and has only a relative truth and reality.
Bentham has written about computing the value of a “lot” of pleasures and
pains. But Plato had his mind on an earlier and more fundamental problem,
what is the truth and reality of pleasure; and his fullest but not his only
essay towards determining the value or estimating the meaning of pleasure
in the scale of being is that given in the Philebus.

[pg cxxxvii]
This then is the knowledge which Greek philosophy meant: not mere
intellect—though, of course, there is always a danger of theoretical inquiry
degenerating into abstract and formal dogma. But of the meaning there can
be no serious doubt. It is a knowledge, says Plato, to which the method of
mathematical science—the most perfect he can find acknowledged—is only
an ouverture, or perhaps, only the preliminary tuning of the strings. It is a
knowledge not eternally hypothetical—a system of sequences which have
no sure foundation. It is a knowledge which rests upon the conviction and
belief of the “idea of good”: a kind of knowledge which does not come by
direct teaching, which is not mere theory, but implies a lively conviction, a
personal apprehension, a crisis which is a kind of “conversion,” or
“inspiration.” It is as it were the prize of a great contest, in which the sword
that conquers is the sword of dialectic: a sword whereof the property is, like
that of Ithuriel's spear, to lay bare all deceptions and illusions of life. Or, to
vary the metaphor: the son of man is like the prince in the fairy tale who
goes forth to win the true queen; but there are many false pretenders decked
out to deceive his unwary eyes and foolish heart. Yet in himself there is a
power of discernment: there is something kindred with the truth:—the
witness of the Spirit—and all that education and discipline can do is to
remove obstacles, especially the obstacles within the self which perturb the
sight and mislead the judgment. Were not the soul originally possessed of
and dominated by the idea of good, it could never discern it elsewhere. On
this original kindred depends all the process of education; the influence of
which therefore is primarily negative or auxiliary. Thus the process of
history and experience,—which the work of education only reproduces in
an accelerated tempo—serves but to bring out [pg cxxxviii] the implicit
reason within into explicit conformity with the rationality of the world.

Knowledge, then, in this ethical sphere means the harmony of will,

emotion, intellect: it means the clear light which has no illusions and no
deceptions. And to those who feel that much of their life and of the
common life is founded on prejudice and illusion, such white light will
occasionally seem hard and steely. At its approach they fear the loss of the
charm of that twilight hour ere the day has yet begun, or before the darkness
has fully settled down. Thus the heart and feelings look upon the intellect as
an enemy of sentiment. And Plato himself is not without anticipations of
such an issue. Yet perhaps we may add that the danger is in part an
imaginary one, and only arises because intelligence takes its task too lightly,
and encroaches beyond its proper ground. Philosophy, in other words,
mistakes its place when it sets itself up as a dogmatic system of life. Its
function is to comprehend, and from comprehension to criticise, and
through criticising to unify. It has no positive and additional teaching of its
own: no addition to the burden of life and experience. And experience it
must respect. Its work is to maintain the organic or super-organic
interconnexion between all the spheres of life and all the forms of reality. It
has to prevent stagnation and absorption of departments—to keep each in
its proper place, but not more than its place, and yet to show how each is
not independent of the others. And this is what the philosopher or ancient
sage would be. If he is passionless, it is not that he has no passions, but that
they no longer perturb and mislead. If his controlling spirit be reason, it is
not the reason of the so-called “rationalist,” but the reason which seeks in
patience to comprehend, and to be at home in, a world it at first finds
strange. And if [pg cxxxix] he is critical of others, he is still more critical of
himself: critical however not for criticism's sake (which is but a poor thing),
but because through criticism the faith of reason may be more fully
justified. To the last, if he is true to his mission and faithful to his loyalty to
reality, he will have the simplicity of the child.

Whether therefore we agree or not with Plato's reduction of Right and Duty
to self-actualisation, we may at least admit that in the idea of perfection or
excellence, combined with the idea of knowledge or inward lucidity, he has
got the fundamental ideas on which further ethical development must build.
Self-control, self-knowledge, internal harmony, are good: and so are the
development of our several faculties and of the totality of them to the fullest
pitch of excellence. But their value does not lie entirely in themselves, or
rather there is implicit in them a reference to something beyond themselves.
They take for granted something which, because it is so taken, may also be
ignored and neglected, just because it seems so obvious. And that
implication is the social humanity in which they are the spirits of light and
leading.

To lay the stress on ἀρετή or excellence tends to leave out of sight the force
of duty; and to emphasise knowledge is allowed to disparage the heart and
feelings. The mind—even of a philosopher—finds a difficulty in holding
very different points of view in one, and where it is forced from one to
another, tends to forget the earlier altogether. Thus when the ethical
philosopher, presupposing as an absolute or unquestionable fact that man
the individual was rooted in the community, proceeded to discuss the
problem of the best and completest individual estate, he was easily led to
lose sight of the fundamental and governing condition altogether. [pg cxl]
From the moment that Aristotle lays down the thesis that man is naturally
social, to the moment when he asks how the bare ideal of excellence in
character and life can become an actuality, the community in which man
lives has retired out of sight away into the background. And it only comes
in, as it first appears, as the paedagogue to bring us to morality. And Plato,
though professedly he is speaking of the community, and is well aware that
the individual can only be saved by the salvation of the community, is
constantly falling back into another problem—the development of an
individual soul. He feels the strength of the egoistic effort after perfection,
and his essay in the end tends to lose sight altogether of its second theme.
Instead of a man he gives us a mere philosopher, a man, that is, not living
with his country's life, instinct with the heart and feeling of humanity,
inspired by art and religion, but a being set apart and exalted above his
fellows,—charged no doubt in theory with the duty of saving them, of
acting vicariously as the mediator between them and the absolute truth—but
really tending more and more to seclude himself on the edita templa of the
world, on the high-towers of speculation.

And what Plato and Aristotle did, so to speak, against their express purpose
and effort, yet did, because the force of contemporary tendency was
irresistible—that the Stoa and Epicurus did more openly and professedly.
With a difference in theory, it is true, owing to the difference in the
surroundings. Virtue in the older day of the free and glorious
commonwealth had meant physical and intellectual achievement, acts done
in the public eye, and of course for the public good—a good with which the
agent was identified at least in heart and soul, if not in his explicit
consciousness. In later and worse days, when the political [pg cxli] world,
with the world divine, had withdrawn from actual identity with the central
heart of the individual, and stood over-against him as a strange power and
little better than a nuisance, virtue came to be counted as endurance,
indifference, negative independence against a cold and a perplexing world.
But even still, virtue is excellence: it is to rise above the ignoble level: to
assert self-liberty against accident and circumstance—to attain self-
controlled, self-satisfying independence—and to become God-like in its
seclusion. Yet in two directions even it had to acknowledge something
beyond the individual. The Epicurean—following out a suggestion of
Aristotle—recognised the help which the free society of friends gave to the
full development of the single seeker after a self-satisfying and complete
life. The Stoic, not altogether refusing such help, tended rather to rest his
single self on a fellowship of ideal sort, on the great city of gods and men,
the civitas Dei. Thus, in separate halves, the two schools, into which Greek
ethics was divided, gave expression to the sense that a new and higher
community was needed—to the sense that the visible actual community no
longer realised its latent idea. The Stoic emphasised the all-embracing
necessity, the absolute comprehensiveness of the moral kingdom. The
Epicurean saw more clearly that, if the everlasting city came from heaven,
it could only visibly arise by initiation upon the earth. Christianity—in its
best work—was a conjunction of the liberty with the necessity, of the
human with the divine.

More interesting, perhaps, it is to note the misconception of reason and

knowledge which grew up. Knowledge came more and more to be
identified with the reflective and critical consciousness, which is outside
reality and life, and judges it from a standpoint of its own. It came to be
esteemed only in its formal and [pg cxlii] abstract shape, and at the expense
of the heart and feelings. The antithesis of philosophy (or knowledge
strictly so called) according to Plato was mere opinion, accidental and
imperfect knowledge. The knowledge which is truly valuable is a
knowledge which presupposes the full reality of life, and is the more and
more completely articulated theory of it as a whole. It is—abstractly taken
—a mere form of unity which has no value except in uniting: it is—taken
concretely—the matter, we may say, in complete unity. It is ideal and
perfect harmony of thought, appetite, and emotion: or putting it otherwise,
the philosopher is one who is not merely a creature of appetite and
production, not merely a creature of feeling and practical energy, but a
creature, who to both of these superadds an intelligence which sets eyes in
the blind forehead of these other powers, and thus, far from superseding
them altogether, only raises them into completeness, and realises all that is
worthy in their implicit natures. Always these two impulsive tendencies of
our nature are guided by some sort of ideas and intelligence, by beliefs and
opinions. But they, like their guides, are sporadically emergent,
unconnected, and therefore apt to be contradictory. It is to such erratic and
occasional ideas, half-truths and deceptions, that philosophy is opposed.
Unfortunately for all parties, the antithesis is carried farther. Philosophy and
the philosopher are further set in opposition to the faith of the heart, the
intimacy and intensity of feeling, the depth of love and trust, which in
practice often go along with imperfect ideas. The philosopher is made one
who has emancipated himself from the heart and feelings,—a pure
intelligence, who is set above all creeds, contemplating all, and holding
none. Consistency and clearness become his idol, to be worshipped at any
cost, save one sacrifice: and that one sacrifice is [pg cxliii] the sacrifice of
his own self-conceit. For consistency generally means that all is made to
harmonise with one assumed standpoint, and that whatever presents
discrepancies with this alleged standard is ruthlessly thrown away. Such a
philosophy mistakes its function, which is not, as Heine scoffs, to make an
intelligible system by rejecting the discordant fragments of life, but to
follow reverently, if slowly, in the wake of experience. Such a “perfect
sage,” with his parade of reasonableness, may often assume the post of a
dictator.

And, above all, intelligence is only half itself when it is not also will. And
both are more than mere consciousness. Plato—whom we refer to, because
he is the coryphaeus of all the diverse host of Greek philosophy—seems to
overestimate or rather to misconceive the place of knowledge. That it is the
supreme and crowning grace of the soul, he sees. But he tends to identify it
with the supreme or higher soul:—as Aristotle did after him, to be followed
by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists. For them the supreme, or almost supreme
reality is the intelligence or reason: the soul is only on a second grade of
reality, on the borders of the natural or physical world. When Plato takes
that line, he turns towards the path of asceticism, and treats the philosophic
life as a preparation for that truer life when intelligence shall be all in all,
for that better land where “divine dialogues” shall form the staple and
substance of spiritual existence. Aristotle,—who less often treads these
solitudes,—still extols the theoretic life, when the body and its needs
trouble no more, when the activity of reason—the theory of theory—is
attained at least as entirely as mortal conditions allow man to be deified. Of
the “apathy” and the reasonable conformity of the Stoics, or of the purely
negative character of Epicurean happiness (the excision of all that pained)
[pg cxliv] we need not here speak. And in Plotinus and Proclus the
deification of mere reason is at any rate the dominant note; whatever
protests the larger Greek nature in the former may from time to time offer.
The truth which philosophy should have taught was that Mind or
intelligence was the element where the inner life culminated and expanded
and flourished: the error which it often tended to spread was that
intelligence was the higher life of which all other was a degenerate
shortcoming, and something valuable on its own account.

It may be that thus to interpret Plato is to do him an injustice. It has been

sometimes said that his division of parts or kinds of soul—or his distinction
between its fighting horses—tends to destroy the unity of mental life. But
perhaps this was exactly what he wanted to convey. There are—we may
paraphrase his meaning—three kinds of human being, three types of human
life. There is the man or the life of appetite and the flesh: there is the man of
noble emotion and energetic depth of soul: there is the life of reasonable
pursuits and organised principle. Or, we may take his meaning to be that
there are three elements or provinces of mental life, which in all except a
few are but imperfectly coherent and do not reach a true or complete unity.
Some unity there always is: but in the life of mere appetite and impulse,
even when these impulses are our nobler sentiments of love and hatred, the
unity falls very far short. Or, as he puts the theme elsewhere, the soul has a
passion for self-completion, a love of beauty, which in most is but a
misleading lust. It is the business of the philosophic life to re-create or to
foster this unity: or philosophy is the persistent search of the soul for its lost
unity, the search to see that unity which is always its animating principle, its
inner faith. [pg cxlv] When the soul has reached this ideal—if it can be
supposed to attain it (and of this the strong-souled ancient philosophers feel
no doubt),—then a change must take place. The love of beauty is not
suppressed; it is only made self-assured and its object freed from all
imperfection. It is not that passion has ceased; but its nature is so
transfigured, that it seems worthy of a nobler name, which yet we cannot
give. To such a life, where battle and conflict are as such unknown, we
cannot longer give the title of life: and we say that philosophy is in life a
rehearsal of death70. And yet if there be no battle, there is not for that reason
mere inaction. Hence, as the Republic concludes, the true philosopher is the
complete man. He is the truth and reality which the appetitive and
emotional man were seeking after and failed to realise. It is true they at first
will not see this. But the whole long process of philosophy is the means to
induce this conviction. And for Plato it remains clear that through
experience, through wisdom, and through abstract deduction, the
philosopher will justify his claim to him who hath ears to hear and heart to
understand. If that be so, the asceticism of Plato is not a mere war upon
flesh and sense as such, but upon flesh and sense as imperfect truth,
fragmentary reality, which suppose themselves complete, though they are
again and again confuted by experience, by wisdom, and by mere
calculation,—a war against their blindness and shortsightedness.
[pg cxlvi]
Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.

“The key,” says Carus, “for the ascertainment of the nature of the conscious
psychical life lies in the region of the unconscious71.” The view which these
words take is at least as old as the days of Leibniz. It means that the mental
world does not abruptly emerge a full-grown intelligence, but has a genesis,
and follows a law of development: that its life may be described as the
differentiation (with integration) of a simple or indifferentiated mass. The
terms conscious and unconscious, indeed, with their lax popular uses, leave
the door wide open for misconception. But they may serve to mark that the
mind is to be understood only in a certain relation (partly of antithesis) to
nature, and the soul only in reference to the body. The so-called “superior
faculties”—specially characteristic of humanity—are founded upon, and do
not abruptly supersede, the lower powers which are supposed to be
specially obvious in the animals72. The individual and specific phenomena
of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed to study,
rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of sensibility, which
in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into something
irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life.

[pg cxlvii]
And yet the moment we attempt to leave the daylight of consciousness for
the darker sides of sub-conscious life, the risks of misinterpretation
multiply. The problem is to some extent the same as confronts the student
of the ideas and principles of primitive races. There, the temptation of
seeing things through the “spectacles of civilisation” is almost irresistible.
So in psychology we are apt to import into the life of sensation and feeling
the distinctions and relations of subsequent intellection. Nor is the difficulty
lessened by Hegel's method which deals with soul, sentiency, and
consciousness as grades or general characteristics in a developmental
advance. He borrows his illustrations from many quarters, from morbid and
anomalous states of consciousness,—less from the cases of savages,
children and animals. These illustrations may be called a loose induction.
But it requires a much more powerful instrument than mere induction to
build up a scientific system; a framework of general principle or theory is
the only basis on which to build theory by the allegation of facts, however
numerous. Yet in philosophic science, which is systematised knowledge, all
facts strictly so described will find their place and be estimated at their
proper value.

(i.) Primitive Sensibility.

Psychology (with Hegel) takes up the work of science from biology. The
mind comes before it as the supreme product of the natural world, the finest
flower of organic life, the “truth” of the physical process. As such it is
called by the time-honoured name of Soul. If we further go on to say that
the soul is the principle of life, [pg cxlviii] we must not understand this vital
principle to be something over and above the life of which it is the
principle. Such a locally-separable principle is an addition which is due to
the analogy of mechanical movement, where a detached agent sets in
motion and directs the machinery. But in the organism the principle is not
thus detachable as a thing or agent. By calling Soul the principle of life we
rather mean that in the vital organism, so far as it lives, all the real variety,
separation, and discontinuity of parts must be reduced to unity and identity,
or as Hegel would say, to ideality. To live is thus to keep all differences
fluid and permeable in the fire of the life-process. Or to use a familiar term
of logic, the Soul is the concept or intelligible unity of the organic body. But
to call it a concept might suggest that it is only the conception through
which we represent to ourselves the variety in unity of the organism. The
soul, however, is more than a mere concept: and life is more than a mere
mode of description for a group of movements forming an objective unity.
It is a unity, subjective and objective. The organism is one life, controlling
difference: and it is also one by our effort to comprehend it. The Soul
therefore is in Hegelian language described as the Idea rather than the
concept of the organic body. Life is the generic title for this subject-object:
but the life may be merely physical, or it may be intellectual and practical,
or it may be absolute, i.e. will and know all that it is, and be all that it
knows and wills.
Up to this point the world is what is called an external, which is here taken
to mean (not a world external to the individual, but) a self-externalised
world. That is to say, it is the observer who has hitherto by his interpretation
of his perceptions supplied the “Spirit in Nature.” In itself the external
world has no inside, [pg cxlix] no centre: it is we who read into it the
conception of a life-history. We are led to believe that a principle of unity is
always at work throughout the physical world—even in the mathematical
laws of natural operation. It is only intelligible and credible to us as a
system, a continuous and regular development. But that system is only a
hypothetical idea, though it is held to be a conclusion to which all the
evidence seems unequivocally to point. And, even in organic life, the unity,
though more perfect and palpable than in the mechanical and inorganic
world, is only a perception, a vision,—a necessary mode of realising the
unity of the facts. The phenomenon of life reveals as in a picture and an
ocular demonstration the conformity of inward and outward, the identity of
whole and parts, of power and utterance. But it is still outside the observer.
In the function of sensibility and sentiency, however, we stand as it were on
the border-line between biology and psychology. At one step we have been
brought within the harmony, and are no longer mere observers and
reflecters. The sentient not merely is, but is aware that it is. Hitherto as life,
it only is the unity in diversity, and diversity in unity, for the outsider, i.e.
only implicitly: now it is so for itself, or consciously. And in the first stage
it does not know, but feels or is sentient. Here, for the first time, is created
the distinction of inward and outward. Loosely indeed we may, like Mr.
Spencer, speak of outward and inward in physiology: but strictly speaking,
what Goethe says is true, Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale73. Nature in
the narrower sense knows no distinction of the inward and outward in its
phenomena: it is a purely superficial order and succession of appearance
and event. The Idea which has been visible to an intelligent [pg cl]
percipient in the types and laws of the natural world, now is, actually is—is
in and for itself—but at first in a minimum of content, a mere point of light,
or rather the dawn which has yet to expand into the full day.

Spinoza has asserted that “all individual bodies are animate, though in
different degrees74.” Now it is to a great extent this diversity of degree on
which the main interest turns. Yet it is well to remember that the abrupt and
trenchant separations which popular practice loves are overridden to a
deeper view by an essential unity of idea, reducing them to indifference. If,
that is, we take seriously the Spinozist unity of Substance, and the continual
correlation (to call it no more) of extension and consciousness therein, we
cannot avoid the conclusion which even Bacon would admit of something
describable as attraction and perception, something subduing diversity to
unity. But whether it be well to name this soul or life is a different matter. It
may indeed only be taken to mean that all true being must be looked on as a
real unity and individuality, must, that is, be conceived as manifesting itself
in organisation, must be referred to a self-centred and self-developing
activity. But this—which is the fundamental thesis of idealism—is hardly
all that is meant. Rather Spinoza would imply that all things which form a
real unity must have life—must have inner principle and unifying reality:
and what he teaches is closely akin to the Leibnitian doctrine that every
substantial existence reposes upon a monad, a unity which is at once both a
force and a cognition, a “representation” and an appetite or nisus to act. [pg
cli] When Fechner in a series of works75 expounds and defends the
hypothesis that plants and planets are not destitute of soul, any more than
man and animals, he only gives a more pronounced expression to this
idealisation or spiritualisation of the natural world. But for the moment the
point to be noted is that all of this idealistic doctrine is an inference, or a
development which finds its point d'appui in the fact of sensation. And the
problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby a
mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception and a faith in the
goodness, beauty and intelligence of the world.

Schopenhauer has put the point with his usual picturesqueness. Outward
nature presents nothing but a play of forces. At first, however, this force
shows merely the mechanical phenomena of pressure and impact, and its
theory is sufficiently described by mathematical physics. But in the process
of nature force assumes higher types, types where it loses a certain amount
of its externality76, till in the organic world it acquires a peculiar phase
which Schopenhauer calls Will, meaning by that, however, an organising
and controlling power, a tendency or nisus to be and live, which is
persistent and potent, but without consciousness. This blind force, which
however has a certain coherence and purposiveness, is in the animal
organism endowed with a new character, in consequence of the emergence
of a new organ. This organ, the brain and nervous system, causes the
evolution into clear day of an element which has been growing more and
more urgent. The gathering tendency of force to return into itself is now
complete: the cycle of operation is [pg clii] formed: and the junction of the
two currents issues in the spark of sensation. The blind force now becomes
seeing.

But at first—and this is the point we have to emphasise—its powers of

vision are limited. Sensibility is either a local and restricted phenomenon:
or, in so far as it is not local, it is vague and indefinite, and hardly entitled to
the name of sensibility. Either it is a dim, but far-reaching, sympathy with
environing existence, and in that case only so-called blind will or feeling: or
if it is clear, is locally confined, and at first within very narrow limits.
Neither of these points must be lost sight of. On the one hand feeling has to
be regarded as the dull and confused stirring of an almost infinite sympathy
with the world—a pulse which has come from the far-distant movements of
the universe, and bears with it, if but as a possibility, the wealth of an
infinite message. On the other hand, feeling at first only becomes real, in
this boundless ideality to which its possibilities extend, by restricting itself
to one little point and from several points organising itself to a unity of
bodily feeling, till it can go on from thence to embrace the universe in
distinct and articulate comprehension.

Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and above
the rest of nature: it is rather nature's “'universal immaterialism, and simple
ideal life77.” There were ancient philosophers who spoke of the soul as a
self-adjusting number,—as a harmony, or equilibrium78—and the moderns
have added considerably to the list of these analogical definitions. As
definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things give, as it were, by
anticipation, an image of soul, as the “ideality,” which reduces the manifold
to [pg cliii] unity. The adhesions and cohesions of matter, its gravitating
attractions, its chemical affinities and electrical polarities, the intricate out-
and-in of organic structure, are all preludes to the true incorporating unity
which is the ever-immanent supersession of the endless self-externalism
and successionalism of physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or
sensibility, the unity which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly
present. It is implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,—which has no
doors and no windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it
has nothing outside it, because it “expresses” and “envelopes” (however
confusedly at first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising
phraseology, we may describe mind, where it appears emerging in the
natural world, as a mere feeble and incidental outburst,—a rebellion
breaking out as in some petty province or isolated region against the great
law of the physical realm—we are in so speaking taking only an external
standpoint. But with the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is
implicitly overcome. To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside,
nothing transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only
outside a localised and limited mind—outside a mind which is imperfectly
and abstractly realised—not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute
negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may
be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To
accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and
externality of things into the unity and identity of one Idea, is the process of
development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic knowledge,
from appetite to art,—the process of culture through the social state under
the influence of religion.

Sentiency or psychic matter (mind-stuff), to begin [pg cliv] with, is in some

respects like the tabula rasa of the empiricists. It is the possibility—but the
real possibility—of intelligence rather than intelligence itself. It is the
monotonous undifferentiated inwardness—a faint self-awareness and self-
realisation of the material world, but at first a mere vague psychical
protoplasm and without defined nucleus, without perceptible organisation
or separation of structures. If there is self-awareness, it is not yet
discriminated into a distinct and unified self, not yet differentiated and
integrated,—soul in the condition of a mere “Is,” which, however, is
nothing determinate. It is very much in the situation of Condillac's statue-
man—une statue organisée intérieurement comme nous, et animée d'un
esprit privé de toute espèce d'idées: alike at least so far that the rigid
uniformity of the latter's envelope prevents all articulated organisation of its
faculties. The foundation under all the diversity and individuality in the
concrete intelligent and volitional life is a common feeling,—a sensus
communis—a general and indeterminate susceptibility to influence, a
sympathy responsive, but responsive vaguely and equivocally, to all the
stimuli of the physical environment. There was once a time, according to
primitive legend, when man understood the language of beast and bird, and
even surprised the secret converse of trees and flowers. Such fancies are but
the exaggeration of a solidarity of conscious life which seems to spread far
in the sub-conscious realm, and to narrow the individual's soul into limited
channels as it rises into clear self-perception,

“As thro' the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.”

It may be a mere dream that, as Goethe feigns of Makaria in his romance79,

there are men and women in [pg clv] sympathy with the vicissitudes of the
starry regions: and hypotheses of lunar influence, or dogmas of astrological
destiny, may count to the present guardians of the sciences as visionary
superstitions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to be dogmatic; her
function hitherto can only be critical; and even for that, her data are scanty
and her principles extremely general. The influences on the mental mood
and faculty, produced by climate and seasons, by local environment and
national type, by individual peculiarities, by the differences of age and sex,
and by the alternation of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less
questionable. It is easy no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark
how indefinable and incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their
radical and inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character.
“The sum of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but
always leaves a marvellous remainder80.” Irrational this residue is, in the
sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known
quantities of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific
psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never
lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the more
advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in
indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is
remembered, it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting
psychology for the application to education, and how dependent the
solution of that problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of
individual and national temperament and character.
The first stage in mental development is the establishment of regular and
uniform relations between soul and [pg clvi] body: it is the differentiation of
organs and the integration of function: the balance between sensation and
movement, between the afferent and efferent processes of sensitivity. Given
a potential soul, the problem is to make it actual in an individual body. It is
the business of a physical psychology to describe in detail the steps by
which the body we are attached to is made inward as our idea through the
several organs and their nervous appurtenances: whereas a psychical
physiology would conversely explain the corresponding processes for the
expression of the emotions and for the objectification of the volitions. Thus
soul inwardises (erinnert) or envelops body: which body “expresses” or
develops soul. The actual soul is the unity of both, is the percipient
individual. The solidarity or “communion” of body and soul is here the
dominant fact: the soul sentient of changes in its peripheral organs, and
transmitting emotion and volition into physical effect. It is on this psychical
unity,—the unity which is the soul of the diversity of body—that all the
subsequent developments of mind rest. Sensation is thus the prius—or basis
—of all mental life: the organisation of soul in body and of body in soul. It
is the process which historically has been prepared in the evolution of
animal life from those undifferentiated forms where specialised organs are
yet unknown, and which each individual has further to realise and complete
for himself, by learning to see and hear, and use his limbs. At first,
moreover, it begins from many separate centres and only through much
collision and mutual compliance arrives at comparative uniformity and
centralisation. The common basis of united sensibility supplied by the one
organism has to be made real and effective, and it is so at first by sporadic
and comparatively independent developments. If self-hood means reference
[pg clvii] to self of what is prima facie not self, and projection of self
therein, there is in primitive sensibility only the germ or possibility of self-
hood. In the early phases of psychic development the centre is fluctuating
and ill-defined, and it takes time and trouble to co-ordinate or unify the
various starting-points of sensibility81.

This consolidation of inward life may be looked at either formally or

concretely. Under the first head, it means the growth of a central unity of
apperception. In the second case, it means a peculiar aggregate of ideas and
sentiments. There is growing up within him what we may call the
individuality of the individual,—an irrational, i.e. not consciously
intelligent, nether-self or inner soul, a firm aggregation of hopes and
wishes, of views and feelings, or rather of tendencies and temperament, of
character hereditary and acquired. It is the law of the natural will or
character which from an inaccessible background dominates our action,—
which, because it is not realised and formulated in consciousness, behaves
like a guardian spirit, or genius, or destiny within us. This genius is the sub-
conscious unity of the sensitive life—the manner of man which unknown to
ourselves we are,—and which influences us against our nominal or formal
purposes. So far as this predominates, our ends, rough hew them how we
will, are given by a force which is not really, i.e. with full consciousness,
ours: by a mass of ingrained prejudice and unreasoned sympathies, of
instincts and passions, of fancies and feelings, which have condensed and
organised themselves into a natural power. As the child in the mother's
womb is responsive to her psychic influences, so the development of a
man's psychic life is guided by feelings centred in objects and agents [pg
clviii] external to him, who form the genius presiding over his development.
His soul, to that extent, is really in another: he himself is selfless, and when
his stay is removed the principle of his life is gone82. He is but a bundle of
impressions, held together by influences and ties which in years before
consciousness proper began made him what he is. Such is the involuntary
adaptation to example and environment, which establishes in the depths
below personality a self which becomes hereafter the determinant of action.
Early years, in which the human being is naturally susceptible, build up by
imitation, by pliant obedience, an image, a system, reproducing the
immediate surroundings. The soul, as yet selfless, and ready to accept any
imprint, readily moulds itself into the likeness of an authoritative influence.

The step by which the universality or unity of the self is realised in the
variety of its sensation is Habit. Habit gives us a definite standing-ground in
the flux of single impressions: it is the identification of ourselves with what
is most customary and familiar: an identification which takes place by
practice and repetition. If it circumscribes us to one little province of being,
it on the other frees us from the vague indeterminateness where we are at
the mercy of every passing mood. It makes thus much of our potential
selves our very own, our acquisition and permanent possession. It, above
all, makes us free and at one with our bodily part, so that henceforth we
start as a subjective unit of body and soul. We have now as the result of the
anthropological process a self or ego, an individual consciousness able to
reflect and compare, setting itself on one side (a soul [pg clix] in bodily
organisation), and on the other setting an object of consciousness, or
external world, a world of other things. All this presupposes that the soul
has actualised itself by appropriating and acquiring as its expression and
organ the physical sensibility which is its body. By restricting and
establishing itself, it has gained a fixed standpoint. No doubt it has localised
and confined itself, but it is no longer at the disposal of externals and
accident: it has laid the foundation for higher developments.

(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.

Psychology, as we have seen, goes for information regarding the earlier

stages of mental growth to the child and the animal,—perhaps also to the
savage. So too sociology founds certain conclusions upon the observations
of savage customs and institutions, or on the earlier records of the race. In
both cases with a limitation caused by the externality and fragmentariness
of the facts and the need of interpreting them through our own conscious
experiences. There is however another direction in which corresponding
inquiries may be pursued; and where the danger of the conclusions arrived
at, though not perhaps less real, is certainly of a different kind. In sociology
we can observe—and almost experiment upon—the phenomena of the
lapsed, degenerate and criminal classes. The advantage of such observation
is that the object of study can be made to throw greater light on his own
inner states. He is a little of the child and a little of the savage, but these
aspects co-exist with other features which put him more on a level with the
intelligent observer. Similar pathological [pg clx] regions are open to us in
the case of psychology. There the anomalous and morbid conditions of
mind co-exist with a certain amount of mature consciousness. So presented,
they are thrown out into relief. They form the negative instances which
serve to corroborate our positive inductions. The regularly concatenated and
solid structure of normal mind is under abnormal and deranged conditions
thrown into disorder, and its constituents are presented in their several
isolation. Such phenomena are relapses into more rudimentary grades: but
with the difference that they are set in the midst of a more advanced phase
of intellectual life.

Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a

certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the mental
range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the
Unconscious seemed—and to many still seems—a region in which the
charlatan and the dupe can and must play into each other's hands. Once in
the whirl of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how
far you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type.
Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and
observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract
observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe;
scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience
against what Bacon has called “monodical” phenomena, phenomena i.e.
which claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private
and privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a
determination to treat all instances which oppose its hitherto ascertained
laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent
observation, confusions of memory, and superstitions of ignorance. Above
all, [pg clxi] great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect
themselves with these revelations—interests, at any rate, to which our
common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the
customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something
of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much was
at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispassionate observation.

The philosophers were found—as might have been expected—amongst

those most strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been
fascinated by the spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned
away sceptical. At least as early as 1806 Schelling had been interested by
Ritter's researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human
will to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a
distance. He was looking forward to the rise of a Physica coelestis, or New
Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date
his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel
phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in
the range of the physical powers, especially of the physical powers of the
human psyche as a natural agent. The divining-rod was revived.
Clairvoyance and somnambulism were carefully studied, and the curative
powers of animal magnetism found many advocates83.

Interest in these questions went naturally with the new conception of the
place of Man in Nature, and of Nature as the matrix of mind84. But it had
been acutely stimulated by the performances and professions of Mesmer at
Vienna and Paris in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. These—
though by no means [pg clxii] really novel—had forced the artificial world
of science and fashion to discuss the claim advanced for a new force which,
amongst other things, could cure ailments that baffled the ordinary
practitioner. This new force—mainly because of the recent interest in the
remarkable advances of magnetic and electrical research—was conceived
as a fluid, and called Animal Magnetism. At one time indeed Mesmer
actually employed a magnet in the manipulation by which he induced the
peculiar condition in his patients. The accompaniments of his procedure
were in many respects those of the quack-doctor; and with the quack indeed
he was often classed. A French commission of inquiry appointed to
examine into his performances reported in 1784 that, while there was no
doubt as to the reality of many of the phenomena, and even of the cures,
there was no evidence for the alleged new physical force, and declared the
effects to be mainly attributable to the influence of imagination. And with
the mention of this familiar phrase, further explanation was supposed to be
rendered superfluous.

In France political excitement allowed the mesmeric theory and practice to

drop out of notice till the fall of the first Empire. But in Germany there was
a considerable amount of investigations and hypotheses into these mystical
phenomena, though rarely by the ordinary routine workers in the scientific
field. The phenomena where they were discussed were studied and
interpreted in two directions. Some theorists, like Jung-Stilling,
Eschenmayer, Schubert, and Kerner, took the more metaphysicist and
spiritualistic view: they saw in them the witness to a higher truth, to the
presence and operation in this lower world of a higher and spiritual matter,
a so-called ether. Thus Animal Magnetism supplied a sort of physical
theory of the other world and the other life. Jung-Stilling, e.g. in his
“Theory of Spirit-lore.” [pg clxiii] (1808), regarded the spiritualistic
phenomena as a justification of—what he believed to be—the Kantian
doctrine that in the truly real and persistent world space and time are no
more. The other direction of inquiry kept more to the physical field. Ritter
(whose researches interested both Schelling and Hegel) supposed he had
detected the new force underlying mesmerism and the like, and gave to it
the name of Siderism (1808); while Amoretti of Milan named the object of
his experiments Animal Electrometry (1816). Kieser85, again (1826) spoke
of Tellurism, and connected animal magnetism with the play of general
terrestrial forces in the human being.

At a later date (1857) Schindler, in his “Magical Spirit-life,” expounded a

theory of mental polarity. The psychical life has two poles or centres,—its
day-pole, around which revolves our ordinary and superficial current of
ideas, and its night-pole, round which gathers the sub-conscious and deeper
group of beliefs and sentiments. Either life has a memory, a consciousness,
a world of its own: and they flourish to a large extent inversely to each
other. The day-world has for its organs of receiving information the
ordinary senses. But the magical or night-world of the soul has its feelers
also, which set men directly in telepathic rapport with influences, however
distant, exerted by the whole world: and through this “inner sense” which
serves to concentrate in itself all the telluric forces (—a sense which in its
various aspects we name instinct, presentiment, conscience) is constructed
the fabric of our sub-conscious system. Through it man is a sort of résumé
of all the cosmic life, in secret affinity and sympathy with all natural
processes; and by the will which stands in response therewith he can
exercise [pg clxiv] a directly creative action on external nature. In normal
and healthy conditions the two currents of psychic life run on harmonious
but independent. But in the phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance,
and delirium, the magic region becomes preponderant, and comes into
collision with the other. The dark-world emerges into the realm of day as a
portentous power: and there is the feeling of a double personality, or of an
indwelling genius, familiar spirit, or demon.

To the ordinary physicist the so-called Actio in distans was a hopeless

stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called)
of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly
familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience.
It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: “We
are so far from knowing all the agents of nature, that it would be very
unphilosophical to deny the existence of phenomena solely because they are
inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.” Accordingly
mesmerism and its allied manifestations were generally abandoned to the
bohemians of science, and to investigators with dogmatic bias. It was still
employed as a treatment for certain ailments: and philosophers, as different
as Fichte and Schopenhauer86, watched its fate with attention. But the herd
of professional scientists fought shy of it. The experiments of Braid at
Manchester in 1841 gradually helped to give research into the subject a new
character. Under the name of Hypnotism (or, rather at first Neuro-
hypnotism) he described the phenomena of the magnetic sleep (induced
through prolonged staring at [pg clxv] a bright object), such as abnormal
rigidity of body, perverted sensibility, and the remarkable obedience of the
subject to the command or suggestions of the operator. Thirty years
afterwards, the matter became an object of considerable experimental and
theoretic work in France, at the rival schools of Paris and Nancy; and the
question, mainly under the title of hypnotism, though the older name is still
occasionally heard, has been for several years brought prominently under
public notice.

It cannot be said that the net results of these observations and hypotheses
are of a very definitive character. While a large amount of controversy has
been waged on the comparative importance of the several methods and
instruments by which the hypnotic or mesmeric trance may be induced, and
a scarcely less wide range of divergence prevails with regard to the
physiological and pathological conditions in connexion with which it has
been most conspicuously manifested, there has been less anxiety shown to
determine its precise psychical nature, or its significance in mental
development. And yet the better understanding of these aspects may throw
light on several points connected with primitive religion and the history of
early civilisation, indeed over the whole range of what is called
Völkerpsychologie. Indeed this is one of the points which may be said to
emerge out of the confusion of dispute. Phenomena at least analogous to
those styled hypnotic have a wide range in the anthropological sphere87: and
the proper characters which belong to them will only be caught by an
observer who examines them in the widest variety of examples. Another
feature which has been put in prominence is what has been called
“psychological automatism.” And in this name two points [pg clxvi] seem
to deserve note. The first is the spontaneous and as it were mechanical
consecution of mental states in the soul whence the interfering effect of
voluntary consciousness has been removed. And the second is the unfailing
or accurate regularity, so contrary to the hesitating and uncertain procedure
of our conscious and reasoned action, which so often is seen in the
unreflecting and unreasoned movements. To this invariable sequence of
psychical movement the superior control and direction by the intelligent
self has to adapt itself, just as it respects the order of physical laws.

But, perhaps, the chief conclusion to be derived from hypnotic experience is

the value of suggestion or suggestibility. Even cool thinkers like Kant have
recognised how much mere mental control has to do with bodily state,—
how each of us, in this way, is often for good or for ill his own physician.
An idea is a force, and is only inactive in so far as it is held in check by
other ideas. “There is no such thing as hypnotism,” says one: “there are
only different degrees of suggestibility.” This may be to exaggerate: yet it
serves to impress the comparatively secondary character of many of the
circumstances on which the specially mesmeric or hypnotic experimentalist
is apt to lay exclusive stress. The methods may probably vary according to
circumstances. But the essence of them all is to get the patient out of the
general frame and system of ideas and perceptions in which his ordinary
individuality is encased. Considering how for all of us the reality of
concrete life is bound up with our visual perceptions, how largely our sanity
depends upon the spatial idea, and how that depends on free ocular range,
we can understand that darkness and temporary loss of vision are powerful
auxiliaries in the hypnotic process, as in magical and superstitious rites. But
[pg clxvii] a great deal short of this may serve to establish influence. The
mind of the majority of human beings, but especially of the young, may be
compared to a vacant seat waiting for some one to fill it.

In Hegel's view hypnotic phenomena produce a kind of temporary and

artificial atavism. Mechanical or chemical means, or morbid conditions of
body, may cause even for the intelligent adult a relapse into states of mind
closely resembling those exhibited by the primitive or the infantile
sensibility. The intelligent personality, where powers are bound up with
limitations and operate through a chain of means and ends, is reduced to its
primitively undifferentiated condition. Not that it is restored to its infantile
simplicity; but that all subsequent acquirements operate only as a
concentrated individuality, or mass of will and character, released from the
control of the self-possessed mind, and invested (by the latter's withdrawal)
with a new quasi-personality of their own. With the loss of the world of
outward things, there may go, it is supposed, a clearer perception of the
inward and particularly of the organic life. The Soul contains the form of
unity which other experiences had impressed upon it: but this form avails in
its subterranean existence where it creates a sort of inner self. And this
inner self is no longer, like the embodied self of ordinary consciousness, an
intelligence served by organs, and proceeding by induction and inference.
Its knowledge is not mediated or carried along specific channels: it does not
build up, piecemeal, by successive steps of synthesis and analysis, by
gradual idealisation, the organised totality of its intellectual world. The
somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their vision
directly into regions where the waking consciousness of orderly intelligence
cannot enter. [pg clxviii] But that region is not the world of our higher
ideas,—of art, religion, and philosophy. It is still the sensitivity—that realm
of sensitivity which is ordinarily covered by unconsciousness. Such
sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were, hear themselves growing; they may
discern the hidden quivers and pulses of blood and tissue, the seats of secret
pain and all the unrevealed workings in the dark chambers of the flesh. But
always their vision seems confined to that region, and will fall short of the
world of light and ideal truth. It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive
solidarity with earth, and flowers, and trees, the life that “rolls through all
things,” not towards the spiritual unity which broods over the world and
“impels all thinking things,” that these immersions in the selfless universe
lead us.

What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on the
natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the work of
intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the fully-developed
mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute Mind which in our
highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate to. But mind, as it
tends towards the higher end to “merge itself in light,” to identify itself yet
not wholly lost, but retained, in the fullness of undivided intellectual being,
so at the lower end it springs from a natural and underlying unity, the
immense solidarity of nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature—the
“Substance” which is to be raised into the “Subject” which is true divinity.
Between these two unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won
over-soul, lies the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which
narrows and of redintegration which enlarges,—which alternately builds up
an isolated personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and
sympathy. It is because [pg clxix] mental or tacit “suggestion”88 (i.e. will-
influence exercised without word or sign, or other sensible mode of
connexion), thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than
dexterous apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or
transposition of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive,
clairvoyance (i.e. the power of describing, as if from direct perception,
objects or events removed in space beyond the recognised limits of
sensation), and somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed
eyes,—it is because these things seem to show the essential ideality of
matter, that Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of
consciousness and even of practical life in society are a derivative and
secondary state; a product of processes of individualism, which however are
never completed, and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to
fulfil. From a state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than
can be described as personality—lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too,
had regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world
underlying the development of egoity and self-consciousness89: “the merely
sensuous man is still in somnambulism,” only a somnambulism of waking
hours: “the true waking is the life in God, to be free in him, all else is sleep
and dream.” “Egoity,” he adds, “is a merely formal principle, utterly, and
never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force).” For Schopenhauer,
too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove the [pg clxx]
absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to the
intellectual categories of space, time, and causal sequence: to prove the
reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious divisions.

(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.

The result of the first range in the process of psycho-genesis was to make
the body a sign and utterance of the Soul, with a fixed and determinate type.
The “anthropological process” has defined and settled the mere general
sentiency of soul into an individualised shape, a localised and limited self, a
bundle of habits. It has made the soul an Ego or self: a power which looks
out upon the world as a spectator, lifted above immanence in the general
tide of being, but only so lifted because it has made itself one in the world
of objects, a thing among things. The Mind has reached the point of view of
reflection. Instead of a general identifiability with all nature, it has encased
itself in a limited range, from which it looks forth on what is now other than
itself. If previously it was mere inward sensibility, it is now sense,
perceptive of an object here and now, of an external world. The step has
involved some price: and that price is, that it has attained independence and
self-hood at the cost of surrendering the content it had hitherto held in one
with itself. It is now a blank receptivity, open to the impressions of an
outside world: and the changes which take place in its process of
apprehension seem to it to be given from outside. The world it perceives is
a world of isolated and independent objects: and it takes them as they [pg
clxxi] are given. But a closer insistance on the perception develops the
implicit intelligence, which makes it possible. The percipient mind is no
mere recipiency or susceptibility with its forms of time and space: it is
spontaneously active, it is the source of categories, or is an apperceptive
power,—an understanding. Consciousness, thus discovered to be a creative
or constructive faculty, is strictly speaking self-consciousness90.

Self-consciousness appears at first in the selfish or narrowly egoistic form

of appetite and impulse. The intelligence which claims to mould and
construe the world of objects—which, in Kant's phrase, professes to give us
nature—is implicitly the lord of that world. And that supremacy it carries
out as appetite—as destruction. The self is but a bundle of wants—its
supremacy over things is really subjection to them: the satisfaction of
appetite is baffled by a new desire which leaves it as it was before. The
development of self-consciousness to a more adequate shape is represented
by Hegel as taking place through the social struggle for existence. Human
beings, too, are in the first instance to the uninstructed appetite or the
primitive self-consciousness (which is simply a succession of individual
desires for satisfaction of natural want) only things,—adjectival to that self's
individual existence. To them, too, his primary relation is to appropriate and
master them. Might precedes right. But the social struggle for existence
forces him to recognise something other which is kindred to himself,—a
limiting principle, another self which has to form an element in his
calculations, not to be neglected. And gradually, [pg clxxii] we may
suppose, the result is the division of humanity into two levels, a ruling
lordly class, and a class of slaves,—a state of inequality in which each
knows that his appetite is in some measure checked by a more or less
permanent other. Lastly, perhaps soonest in the inferior order, there is
fashioned the perception that its self-seeking in its isolated appetites is
subject to an abiding authority, a continuing consciousness. There grows up
a social self—a sense of general humanity and solidarity with other beings
—a larger self with which each identifies himself, a common ground.
Understanding was selfish intelligence: practical in the egoistic sense. In the
altruistic or universal sense practical, a principle social and unifying
character, intelligence is Reason.

Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single

objects in space and time, and as an appetitive self bent upon single
gratifications, has ended as a rational being,—a consciousness purged of its
selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on the
universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal,
swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only
in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for
existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has
erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because
he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer
purely antithetical and exclusive91. He has reached what is really the moral
standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal self-
consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the antitheses of
individualities and of outward [pg clxxiii] and inward have ceased to
trouble. “The natural man,” says Hegel92, “sees in the woman flesh of his
flesh: the moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and
spiritual being and by its means.” Hitherto we have been dealing with
something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate
sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and
secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the third
part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a being
who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general truth, and
carries out ideal purposes.

Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence and
rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by which
reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or
autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in
theoretical and practical mind, is feeling—or immediate knowledge and
immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate perception
—a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the idea of a
general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the outward existence
conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent perception or intuition the
important factor is attention, which raises it above mere passive acceptance
and awareness of a given fact. Attention thus involves on one hand the
externality of its object, and on the other affirms its dependence on the act
of the subject: it sets the objects before and out of itself, in space and time,
but yet in so doing it shows itself master of the objects. If perception
presuppose attention, in short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make
them ours, and the space and time they fill are projected by us. So attended
to, they are appropriated, [pg clxxiv] inwardised and recollected: they take
their place in a mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-
individualised character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental
property, but retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived.
Such revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of
association. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and recollected
by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not really fully
master of them until it has been able to give them a certain objectivity, by
replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible sign. By means of
words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations into quasi-realities: it
creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world of language, where ideas
live a potential, which is also an actual, life. Words are sensibles, but they
are sensibles which completely lose themselves in their meaning. As
sensibles, they render possible that verbal memory which is the handmaid
of thought: but which also as merely mechanical can leave thought
altogether out of account. It is through words that thought is made possible:
for it alone permits the movement through ideas without being distracted
through a multitude of associations. In them thought has an instrument
completely at its own level, but still only a machine, and in memory the
working of that machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in
terms which only serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.

It is as such a thinking being—a being who can use language, and

manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a
rational will. A concept of something to be done—a feeling even of some
end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what can
be called will. At first [pg clxxv] indeed its material may be found as
immediately given and all its volitionality may lie in the circumstance that
the intelligent being sets this forward as a governing and controlling Ought.
Its vehicle, in short, may be mere impulse, or inclination, and even passion:
but it is the choice and the purposive adoption of means to the given end.
Gradually it attains to the idea of a general satisfaction, or of happiness.
And this end seems positive and definite. It soon turns out however to be
little but a prudent and self-denying superiority to particular passions and
inclinations in the interest of a comprehensive ideal. The free will or
intelligence has so far only a negative and formal value: it is the perfection
of an autonomous and freely self-developing mind. Such a mind, which in
language has acquired the means of realising an intellectual system of
things superior to the restrictions of sense, and which has emancipated
reason from the position of slave to inclination, is endued with the formal
conditions of moral conduct. Such a mind will transform its own primarily
physical dependence into an image of the law of reason and create the
ethical life: and in the strength of that establishment will go forth to conquer
the world into a more and more adequate realisation of the eternal Idea.

[pg clxxvi]
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.

“In dealing,” says Hegel, “with the Idea of the State, we must not have
before our eyes a particular state, or a particular institution: we must rather
study the Idea, this actual God, on his own account. Every State, however
bad we may find it according to our principles, however defective we may
discover this or that feature to be, still contains, particularly if it belongs to
the mature states of our time, all the essential factors of its existence. But as
it is easier to discover faults than to comprehend the affirmative, people
easily fall into the mistake of letting individual aspects obscure the intrinsic
organism of the State itself. The State is no ideal work of art: it stands in the
everyday world, in the sphere, that is, of arbitrary act, accident, and error,
and a variety of faults may mar the regularity of its traits. But the ugliest
man, the criminal, a sick man and a cripple, is after all a living man; the
affirmative, Life, subsists in spite of the defect: and this affirmative is here
the theme93.” “It is the theme of philosophy,” he adds, “to ascertain the
substance which is immanent in the show of the temporal and transient, and
the eternal which is present.”

[pg clxxvii]

(i.) Hegel as a Political Critic.

But if this is true, it is also to be remembered that the philosopher is, like
other men, the son of his age, and estimates the value of reality from
preconceptions and aspirations due to his generation. The historical
circumstances of his nation as well as the personal experiences of his life
help to determine his horizon, even in the effort to discover the hidden pulse
and movement of the social organism. This is specially obvious in political
philosophy. The conception of ethics and politics which is presented in the
Encyclopaedia was in 1820 produced with more detail as the Grundlinien
der Philosophie des Rechts. Appearing, as it did, two years after his
appointment to a professorship at Berlin, and in the midst of a political
struggle between the various revolutionary and conservative powers and
parties of Germany, the book became, and long remained, a target for
embittered criticism. The so-called War of Liberation or national movement
to shake off the French yoke was due to a coalition of parties, and had
naturally been in part supported by tendencies and aims which went far
beyond the ostensive purpose either of leaders or of combatants.
Aspirations after a freer state were entwined with radical and socialistic
designs to reform the political hierarchy of the Fatherland: high ideals and
low vulgarities were closely intermixed: and the noble enthusiasm of youth
was occasionally played on by criminal and anarchic intriguers. In a strong
and wise and united Germany some of these schemes might have been
tolerated. But strength, wisdom, and unity were absent. In the existing
tension between Austria and Prussia for the leadership, in the ill-adapted
and effete constitutions of the several principalities which were yet
expected to realise the [pg clxxviii] advance which had taken place in
society and ideas during the last thirty years, the outlook on every hand
seemed darker and more threatening than it might have otherwise done.
Governments, which had lost touch with their peoples, suspected
conspiracy and treason: and a party in the nation credited their rulers with
gratuitous designs against private liberty and rights. There was a vast but
ill-defined enthusiasm in the breasts of the younger world, and it was shared
by many of their teachers. It seemed to their immense aspirations that the
war of liberation had failed of its true object and left things much as they
were. The volunteers had not fought for the political systems of Austria or
Prussia, or for the three-and-thirty princes of Germany: but for ideas, vague,
beautiful, stimulating. To such a mood the continuance of the old system
was felt as a cruel deception and a reaction. The governments on their part
had not realised the full importance of the spirit that had been aroused, and
could not at a moment's notice set their house in order, even had there been
a clearer outlook for reform than was offered. They too had suffered, and
had realised their insecurity: and were hardly in a mood to open their gates
to the enemy.
Coming on such a situation of affairs, Hegel's book would have been likely
in any case to provoke criticism. For it took up a line of political theory
which was little in accord with the temper of the age. The conception of the
state which it expounded is not far removed in essentials from the
conception which now dominates the political life of the chief European
nations. But in his own time it came upon ears which were naturally
disposed to misconceive it. It was unacceptable to the adherents of the
ancien régime, as much as to the liberals. It was declared by one party to be
a glorification [pg clxxix] of the Prussian state: by another to rationalise the
sanctities of authority. It was pointed out that the new professor was a
favourite of the leading minister, that his influence was dominant in
scholastic appointments, and that occasional gratuities from the crown
proved his acceptability. A contemporary professor, Fries, remarked that
Hegel's theory of the state had grown “not in the gardens of science but on
the dung-hill of servility.” Hegel himself was aware that he had planted a
blow in the face of a “shallow and pretentious sect,” and that his book had
“given great offence to the demagogic folk.” Alike in religious and political
life he was impatient of sentimentalism, of rhetorical feeling, of wordy
enthusiasm. A positive storm of scorn burst from him at much-promising
and little-containing declamation that appealed to the pathos of ideas,
without sense of the complex work of construction and the system of
principles which were needed to give them reality. His impatience of
demagogic gush led him (in the preface) into a tactless attack on Fries, who
was at the moment in disgrace for his participation in the demonstration at
the Wartburg. It led him to an attack on the bumptiousness of those who
held that conscientious conviction was ample justification for any
proceeding:—an attack which opponents were not unwilling to represent as
directed against the principle of conscience itself.

Yet Hegel's views on the nature of political unity were not new. Their
nucleus had been formed nearly twenty years before. In the years that
immediately followed the French revolution he had gone through the usual
anarchic stage of intelligent youth. He had wondered whether humanity
might not have had a nobler destiny, had fate given supremacy to some
heresy rather than the orthodox creed of Christendom. He had [pg clxxx]
seen religion in the past “teaching what despotism wished,—contempt of
the human race, its incapacity for anything good94.” But his earliest
reflections on political power belong to a later date, and are inspired, not so
much by the vague ideals of humanitarianism, as by the spirit of national
patriotism. They are found in a “Criticism of the German Constitution”
apparently dating from the year 180295. It is written after the peace of
Lunéville had sealed for Germany the loss of her provinces west of the
Rhine, and subsequent to the disasters of the German arms at Hohenlinden
and Marengo. It is almost contemporaneous with the measures of 1803 and
1804, which affirmed the dissolution of the “Holy Roman Empire” of
German name. The writer of this unpublished pamphlet sees his country in
a situation almost identical with that which Macchiavelli saw around him in
Italy. It is abused by petty despots, distracted by mean particularist
ambitions, at the mercy of every foreign power. It was such a scene which,
as Hegel recalls, had prompted and justified the drastic measures proposed
in the Prince,—measures which have been ill-judged by the closet moralist,
but evince the high statesmanship of the Florentine. In the Prince, an
intelligent reader can see “the enthusiasm of patriotism underlying the cold
and dispassionate doctrines.” Macchiavelli dared to declare that Italy must
become a state, and to assert that “there is no higher duty for a state than to
maintain itself, and to punish relentlessly every author of anarchy,—the
supreme, and perhaps sole political crime.” And [pg clxxxi] like teaching,
Hegel adds, is needed for Germany. Only, he concludes, no mere
demonstration of the insanity of utter separation of the particular from his
kin will ever succeed in converting the particularists from their conviction
of the absoluteness of personal and private rights. “Insight and intelligence
always excite so much distrust that force alone avails to justify them; then
man yields them obedience96.”

“The German political edifice,” says the writer, “is nothing else but the sum
of the rights which the single parts have withdrawn from the whole; and this
justice, which is ever on the watch to prevent the state having any power
left, is the essence of the constitution.” The Peace of Westphalia had but
served to constitute or stereotype anarchy: the German empire had by that
instrument divested itself of all rights of political unity, and thrown itself on
the goodwill of its members. What then, it may be asked, is, in Hegel's
view, the indispensable minimum essential to a state? And the answer will
be, organised strength,—a central and united force. “The strength of a
country lies neither in the multitude of its inhabitants and fighting men, nor
in its fertility, nor in its size, but solely in the way its parts are by reasonable
combination made a single political force enabling everything to be used for
the common defence.” Hegel speaks scornfully of “the philanthropists and
moralists who decry politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private
utility at the cost of right”: he tells them that “it is foolish to oppose the
interest or (as it is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the
utility of the state to its right”: that the “rights of a state are the utility of the
state as established and recognised by compacts”: and that “war” (which
they [pg clxxxii] would fain abolish or moralise) “has to decide not which
of the rights asserted by either party is the true right (—for both parties
have a true right), but which right has to give way to the other.”

It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of political
supremacy which has been associated with the name of Hobbes. But his
views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, “who can rule and dare not
lie.” “All states,” he declares, “are founded by the sublime force of great
men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his features
which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against their will.
Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is otherwise.... This
is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to express the absolute
will. All gather round his banner. He is their God.” “The state,” he says
again, “is the self-certain absolute mind which recognises no definite
authority but its own: which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and
bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception.” So also Hobbes describes the
prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But the Hegelian God immanent in
the state is a higher power than Hobbes knows: he is no mortal, but in his
truth an immortal God. He speaks by (what in this early essay is called) the
Absolute Government97: the government of the Law—the true impersonal
sovereign,—distinct alike from the single ruler and the multitude of the
ruled. “It is absolutely only universality as against particular. As this
absolute, ideal, universal, compared to which everything else is a particular,
it is the phenomenon of God. Its words are his decision, and it can appear
[pg clxxxiii] and exist under no other form.... The Absolute government is
divine, self-sanctioned and not made98.” The real strength—the real
connecting-mean which gives life to sovereign and to subject—is
intelligence free and entire, independent both of what individuals feel and
believe and of the quality of the ruler. “The spiritual bond,” he says in a
lower form of speech, “is public opinion: it is the true legislative body,
national assembly, declaration of the universal will which lives in the
execution of all commands.” This still small voice of public opinion is the
true and real parliament: not literally making laws, but revealing them. If
we ask, where does this public opinion appear and how does it disengage
itself from the masses of partisan judgment? Hegel answers,—and to the
surprise of those who have not entered into the spirit of his age99—it is
embodied in the Aged and the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in
the real world: they are by nature and function disengaged from the
struggles of particular existence, have risen above the divergencies of social
classes. They breathe the ether of pure contemplation. “The sunset of life
gives them mystical lore,” or at least removes from old age the distraction
of selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions of
human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel's view is that the real
voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained indifference
to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see life steadily and
whole.

If this utterance shows the little belief Hegel had in the ordinary methods of
legislation through “representative” bodies, and hints that the real substance
of political [pg clxxxiv] life is deeper than the overt machinery of political
operation, it is evident that this theory of “divine right” is of a different
stamp from what used to go under that name. And, again, though the power
of the central state is indispensable, he is far from agreeing with the so-
called bureaucratic view that “a state is a machine with a single spring
which sets in motion all the rest of the machinery.” “Everything,” he says,
“which is not directly required to organise and maintain the force for giving
security without and within must be left by the central government to the
freedom of the citizens. Nothing ought to be so sacred in the eyes of a
government as to leave alone and to protect, without regard to utilities, the
free action of the citizens in such matters as do not affect its fundamental
aim: for this freedom is itself sacred100.” He is no friend of paternal
bureaucracy. “The pedantic craving to settle every detail, the mean jealousy
against estates and corporations administrating and directing their own
affairs, the base fault-finding with all independent action on the part of the
citizens, even when it has no immediate bearing on the main political
interest, has been decked out with reasons to show that no penny of public
expenditure, made for a country of twenty or thirty millions' population, can
be laid out, without first being, not permitted, but commanded, controlled
and revised by the supreme government.” You can see, he remarks, in the
first village after you enter Prussian territory the lifeless and wooden
routine which prevails. The whole country suffers also from the way
religion has been mixed up with political rights, and a particular creed
pronounced by law indispensable both for sovereign and full-privileged
subject. In a word, the unity and vigour of the state is quite compatible with
considerable latitude [pg clxxxv] and divergence in laws and judicature, in
the imposition and levying of taxes, in language, manners, civilisation and
religion. Equality in all these points is desirable for social unity: but it is not
indispensable for political strength.

This decided preference for the unity of the state against the system of
checks and counterchecks, which sometimes goes by the name of a
constitution, came out clearly in Hegel's attitude in discussing the dispute
between the Würtembergers and their sovereign in 1815-16. Würtemberg,
with its complicated aggregation of local laws, had always been a paradise
of lawyers, and the feudal rights or privileges of the local oligarchies—the
so-called “good old law”—were the boast of the country. All this had
however been aggravated by the increase of territory received in 1805: and
the king, following the examples set by France and even by Bavaria,
promulgated of his own grace a “constitution” remodelling the electoral
system of the country. Immediately an outcry burst out against the attempt
to destroy the ancient liberties. Uhland tuned his lyre to the popular cry:
Rückert sang on the king's side. To Hegel the contest presented itself as a
struggle between the attachment to traditional rights, merely because they
are old, and the resolution to carry out reasonable reform whether it be
agreeable to the reformed or not: or rather he saw in it resistance of
particularism, of separation, clinging to use and wont, and basing itself on
formal pettifogging objections, against the spirit of organisation. Anything
more he declined to see. And probably he was right in ascribing a large part
of the opposition to inertia, to vanity and self-interest, combined with the
want of political perception of the needs of Würtemberg and Germany. But
on the other hand, he failed to remember the insecurity and danger of such
[pg clxxxvi] “gifts of the Danai”: he forgot the sense of free-born men that a
constitution is not something to be granted (octroyé) as a grace, but
something that must come by the spontaneous act of the innermost self of
the community. He dealt rather with the formal arguments which were used
to refuse progress, than with the underlying spirit which prompted the
opposition101.

The philosopher lives (as Plato has well reminded us) too exclusively
within the ideal. Bent on the essential nucleus of institutions, he attaches
but slight importance to the variety of externals, and fails to realise the
practice of the law-courts. He forgets that what weighs lightly in logic, may
turn the scale in real life and experience. For feeling and sentiment he has
but scant respect: he is brusque and uncompromising: and cannot realise all
the difficulties and dangers that beset the Idea in the mazes of the world,
and may ultimately quite alter a plan which at first seemed independent of
petty details. Better than other men perhaps he recognises in theory how the
mere universal only exists complete in an individual shape: but more than
other men he forgets these truths of insight, when the business of life calls
for action or for judgment. He cannot at a moment's notice remember that
he is, if not, as Cicero says, in faece Romuli, the member of a degenerate
commonwealth, at least living in a world where good and evil are not, as
logic presupposes, sharply divided but intricately intertwined.

[pg clxxxvii]

(ii.) The Ethics and Religion of the State.

This idealism of political theory is illustrated by the sketch of the Ethical

Life which he drew up about 1802. Under the name of “Ethical System” it
presents in concentrated or undeveloped shape the doctrine which
subsequently swelled into the “Philosophy of Mind.” At a later date he
worked out more carefully as introduction the psychological genesis of
moral and intelligent man, and he separated out more distinctly as a sequel
the universal powers which give to social life its higher characters. In the
earlier sketch the Ethical Part stands by itself, with the consequence that
Ethics bears a meaning far exceeding all that had been lately called moral.
The word “moral” itself he avoids102. It savours of excessive subjectivity, of
struggle, of duty and conscience. It has an ascetic ring about it—an aspect
of negation, which seeks for abstract holiness, and turns its back on human
nature. Kant's words opposing duty to inclination, and implying that moral
goodness involves a struggle, an antagonism, a victory, seem to him (and to
his time) one-sided. That aspect of negation accordingly which Kant
certainly began with, and which Schopenhauer magnified until it became
the all-in-all of Ethics, Hegel entirely subordinates. Equally little does he
like the emphasis on the supremacy of insight, intention, conscience: they
lead, he thinks, to a view which holds the mere fact of conviction to be all-
important, as if it mattered not what we thought and believed and did, so
long as we were sincere in our belief. All this emphasis on the good-will, on
the imperative of duty, on the rights of conscience, has, he admits, its
justification in certain circumstances, as [pg clxxxviii] against mere legality,
or mere natural instinctive goodness; but it has been overdone. Above all, it
errs by an excess of individualism. It springs from an attitude of reflection,
—in which the individual, isolated in his conscious and superficial
individuality, yet tries—but probably tries in vain—to get somewhat in
touch with a universal which he has allowed to slip outside him, forgetting
that it is the heart and substance of his life. Kant, indeed, hardly falls under
this condemnation. For he aims at showing that the rational will inevitably
creates as rational a law or universal; that the individual act becomes self-
regulative, and takes its part in constituting a system or realm of duty.

Still, on the whole, “morality” in this narrower sense belongs to an age of

reflection, and is formal or nominal goodness rather than the genuine and
full reality. It is the protest against mere instinctive or customary virtue,
which is but compliance with traditional authority, and compliance with it
as if it were a sort of quasi-natural law. Moralising reflection is the
awakening of subjectivity and of a deeper personality. The age which thus
precedes morality is not an age in which kindness, or love, or generosity is
unknown. And if Hegel says that “Morality,” strictly so called, began with
Socrates, he does not thereby accuse the pre-Socratic Greeks of inhumanity.
But what he does say is that such ethical life as existed was in the main a
thing of custom and law: of law, moreover, which was not set objectively
forward, but left still in the stage of uncontradicted usage, a custom which
was a second nature, part of the essential and quasi-physical ordinance of
life. The individual had not yet learned to set his self-consciousness against
these usages and ask for their justification. These are like the so-called law
of the Medes and Persians which alters not: customs [pg clxxxix] of
immemorial antiquity and unquestionable sway. They are part of a system
of things with which for good or evil the individual is utterly identified,
bound as it were hand and foot. These are, as a traveller says103, “oral and
unwritten traditions which teach that certain rules of conduct are to be
observed under certain penalties; and without the aid of fixed records, or the
intervention of a succession of authorised depositaries and expounders,
these laws have been transmitted to father and son, through unknown
generations, and are fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and
unalterable.”

The antithesis then in Hegel, as in Kant, is between Law and Morality, or

rather Legality and Morality,—two abstractions to which human
development is alternately prone to attach supreme importance. The first
stage in the objectivation of intelligence or in the evolution of personality is
the constitution of mere, abstract, or strict right. It is the creation of
institutions and uniformities, i.e. of laws, or rights, which express definite
and stereotyped modes of behaviour. Or, if we look at it from the
individual's standpoint, we may say his consciousness awakes to find the
world parcelled out under certain rules and divisions, which have objective
validity, and govern him with the same absolute authority as do the
circumstances of physical nature. Under their influence every rank and
individual is alike forced to bow: to each his place and function is assigned
by an order or system which claims an inviolable and eternal supremacy. It
is not the same place and function for each: but for each the position and
duties are predetermined in this metaphysically-physical order. The
situation and its duties [pg cxc] have been created by super-human and
natural ordinance. As the Platonic myth puts it, each order in the social
hierarchy has been framed underground by powers that turned out men of
gold, and silver, and baser metal: or as the Norse legend tells, they are the
successive offspring of the white God, Heimdal, in his dealings with
womankind.
The central idea of the earlier social world is the supremacy of rights—but
not of right. The sum (for it cannot be properly called a system) of rights is
a self-subsistent world, to which man is but a servant; and a second
peculiarity of it is its inequality. If all are equal before the laws, this only
means here that the laws, with their absolute and thorough inequality, are
indifferent to the real and personal diversities of individuals. Even the so-
called equality of primitive law is of the “Eye-for-eye, Tooth-for-tooth”
kind; it takes no note of special circumstances; it looks abstractly and
rudely at facts, and maintains a hard and fast uniformity, which seems the
height of unfairness. Rule stands by rule, usage beside usage,—a mere
aggregate or multitude of petty tyrants, reduced to no unity or system, and
each pressing with all the weight of an absolute mandate. The pettiest bit of
ceremonial law is here of equal dignity with the most far-reaching principle
of political obligation.

In the essay already referred to, Hegel has designated something analogous
to this as Natural or Physical Ethics, or as Ethics in its relative or
comparative stage. Here Man first shows his superiority to nature, or enters
on his properly ethical function, by transforming the physical world into his
possession. He makes himself the lord of natural objects—stamping them as
his, and not their own, making them his permanent property, his tools, his
instruments of exchange [pg cxci] and production. The fundamental ethical
act is appropriation by labour, and the first ethical world is the creation of
an economic system, the institution of property. For property, or at least
possession and appropriation, is the dominant idea, with its collateral and
sequent principles. And at first, even human beings are treated on the same
method as other things: as objects in a world of objects or aggregate of
things: as things to be used and acquired, as means and instruments,—not in
any sense as ends in themselves. It is a world in which the relation of
master and slave is dominant,—where owner and employer is set in
antithesis against his tools and chattels. But the Nemesis of his act issues in
making the individual the servant of his so-called property. He has become
an objective power by submitting himself to objectivity: he has literally put
himself into the object he has wrought, and is now a thing among things: for
what he owns, what he has appropriated, determines what he is. The real
powers in the world thus established are the laws of possession-holding: the
laws dominate man: and he is only freed from dependence on casual
externals, by making himself thoroughly the servant of his possessions.

The only salvation, and it is but imperfect, that can be reached on this stage
is by the family union. The sexual tie, is at first entirely on a level with the
other arrangements of the sphere. The man or woman is but a chattel and a
tool; a casual appropriation which gradually is transformed into a
permanent possession and a permanent bond104. But, as the family
constituted itself, it helped to afford a promise of better things. An ideal
interest—the religion of the household—extending [pg cxcii] beyond the
individual, and beyond the moment,—binding past and present, and parents
to offspring, gave a new character to the relation of property. Parents and
children form a unity, which overrides and essentially permeates their
“difference” from each other: there is no exchange, no contract, nor, in the
stricter sense, property between the members. In the property-idea they are
lifted out of their isolation, and in the continuity of family life there is a
certain analogue of immortality. But, says Hegel, “though the family be the
highest totality of which Nature is capable, the absolute identity is in it still
inward, and is not instituted in absolute form; and hence, too, the
reproduction of the totality is an appearance, the appearance of the
children105.” “The power and the intelligence, the ‘difference’ of the parents,
stands in inverse proportion to the youth and vigour of the child: and these
two sides of life flee from and are sequent on each other, and are
reciprocally external106.” Or, as we may put it, the god of the family is a
departed ancestor, a ghost in the land of the dead: it has not really a
continuous and unified life. In such a state of society—a state of nature—
and in its supreme form, the family, there is no adequate principle which
though real shall still give ideality and unity to the self-isolating aspects of
life. There is wanted something which shall give expression to its
“indifference,” which shall control the tendency of this partial moralisation
to sink at every moment into individuality, and lift it from its immersion in
nature. Family life and economic groups (—for these two, which Hegel
subsequently separates, are here kept close together) need an ampler and
wider [pg cxciii] life to keep them from stagnating in their several
selfishnesses.
This freshening and corrective influence they get in the first instance from
deeds of violence and crime. Here is the “negative unsettling” of the narrow
fixities, of the determinate conditions or relationships into which the
preceding processes of labour and acquisition have tended to stereotype life.
The harsh restriction brings about its own undoing. Man may subject
natural objects to his formative power, but the wild rage of senseless
devastation again and again bursts forth to restore the original formlessness.
He may build up his own pile of wealth, store up his private goods, but the
thief and the robber with the instincts of barbarian socialism tread on his
steps: and every stage of appropriation has for its sequel a crop of acts of
dispossession. He may secure by accumulation his future life; but the
murderer for gain's sake cuts it short. And out of all this as a necessary
consequence stands avenging justice. And in the natural world of ethics—
where true moral life has not yet arisen—this is mere retaliation or the lex
talionis;—the beginning of an endless series of vengeance and counter-
vengeance, the blood-feud. Punishment, in the stricter sense of the term,—
which looks both to antecedents and effects in character—cannot yet come
into existence; for to punish there must be something superior to
individualities, an ethical idea embodied in an institution, to which the
injurer and the injured alike belong. But as yet punishment is only
vengeance, the personal and natural equivalent, the physical reaction
against injury, perhaps regulated and formulated by custom and usage, but
not essentially altered from its purely retaliatory character. These crimes—
or transgressions—are thus by Hegel quaintly conceived as storms which
clear the air—which shake the individualist [pg cxciv] out of his slumber.
The scene in which transgression thus acts is that of the so-called state of
nature, where particularism was rampant: where moral right was not, but
only the right of nature, of pre-occupation, of the stronger, of the first maker
and discoverer. Crime is thus the “dialectic” which shakes the fixity of
practical arrangements, and calls for something in which the idea of a
higher unity, a permanent substance of life, shall find realisation.

The “positive supersession107” of individualism and naturalism in ethics is

by Hegel called “Absolute Ethics.” Under this title he describes the ethics
and religion of the state—a religion which is immanent in the community,
and an ethics which rises superior to particularity. The picture he draws is a
romance fashioned upon the model of the Greek commonwealth as that had
been idealised by Greek literature and by the longings of later ages for a
freer life. It is but one of the many modes in which Helena—to quote
Goethe—has fascinated the German Faust. He dreams himself away from
the prosaic worldliness of a German municipality to the unfading splendour
of the Greek city with its imagined coincidence of individual will with
universal purpose. There is in such a commonwealth no pain of surrender
and of sacrifice, and no subsequent compensation: for, at the very moment
of resigning self-will to common aims, he enjoys it retained with the added
zest of self-expansion. He is not so left to himself as to feel from beyond
the restraint of a law which controls—even if it wisely and well controls—
individual effort. There is for his happy circumstances no possibility of
doing otherwise. Or, it may be, Hegel has reminiscences from the ideals of
other nations than the Greek. He recalls the Israelite depicted by the Law-
adoring [pg cxcv] psalmist, whose delight is to do the will of the Lord,
whom the zeal of God's house has consumed, whose whole being runs on in
one pellucid stream with the universal and eternal stream of divine
commandment. Such a frame of spirit, where the empirical consciousness
with all its soul and strength and mind identifies its mission into conformity
with the absolute order, is the mood of absolute Ethics. It is what some have
spoken of as the True life, as the Eternal life; in it, says Hegel, the
individual exists auf ewige Weise108, as it were sub specie aeternitatis: his
life is hid with his fellows in the common life of his people. His every act,
and thought, and will, get their being and significance from a reality which
is established in him as a permanent spirit. It is there that he, in the fuller
sense, attains αὐτάρκεια, or finds himself no longer a mere part, but an
ideal totality. This totality is realised under the particular form of a Nation
(Volk), which in the visible sphere represents (or rather is, as a particular)
the absolute and infinite. Such a unity is neither the mere sum of isolated
individuals, nor a mere majority ruling by numbers: but the fraternal and
organic commonwealth which brings all classes and all rights from their
particularistic independence into an ideal identity and indifference109. Here
all are not merely equal before the laws: but the law itself is a living and
organic unity, self-correcting, subordinating and organising, and no longer
merely defining individual privileges and so-called liberties. “In such
conjunction of the universal with the particularity lies the divinity of a
nation: or, if we give this universal a separate place in our ideas, [pg cxcvi]
it is the God of the nation.” But in this complete accordance between
concept and intuition, between visible and invisible, where symbol and
significate are one, religion and ethics are indistinguishable. It is the old
conception (and in its highest sense) of Theocracy110. God is the national
head and the national life: and in him all individuals have their “difference”
rendered “indifferent.” “Such an ethical life is absolute truth, for untruth is
only in the fixture of a single mode: but in the everlasting being of the
nation all singleness is superseded. It is absolute culture; for in the eternal is
the real and empirical annihilation and prescription of all limited modality.
It is absolute disinterestedness: for in the eternal there is nothing private and
personal. It, and each of its movements, is the highest beauty: for beauty is
but the eternal made actual and given concrete shape. It is without pain, and
blessed: for in it all difference and all pain is superseded. It is the divine,
absolute, real, existing and being, under no veil; nor need one first raise it
up into the ideality of divinity, and extract it from the appearance and
empirical intuition; but it is, and immediately, absolute intuition111.”

If we compare this language with the statement of the Encyclopaedia we

can see how for the moment Hegel's eye is engrossed with the glory of the
ideal nation. In it, the moral life embraces and is co-extensive with religion,
art and science: practice and theory are at one: life in the idea knows none
of those differences which, in the un-ideal world, make art and morality
often antithetical, and set religion at variance with science. It is, as we have
said, a memory of Greek and perhaps Hebrew ideals. Or rather it is by the
help of such [pg cxcvii] memories the affirmation of the essential unity of
life—the true, complete, many-sided life—which is the presupposition and
idea that culture and morals rest upon and from which they get their
supreme sanction, i.e. their constitutive principle and unity. Even in the
Encyclopaedia112 Hegel endeavours to guard against the severance of
morality and art and philosophy which may be rashly inferred in
consequence of his serial order of treatment. “Religion,” he remarks, “is the
very substance of the moral life itself and of the state.... The ethical life is
the divine spirit indwelling in consciousness, as it is actually present in a
nation and its individual members.” Yet, as we see, there is a distinction.
The process of history carries out a judgment on nation after nation, and
reveals the divine as not only immanent in the ethical life but as ever
expanding the limited national spirit till it become a spirit of universal
humanity. Still—and this is perhaps for each time always the more
important—the national unity—not indeed as a multitude, nor as a majority
—is the supreme real appearance of the Eternal and Absolute.

Having thus described the nation as an organic totality, he goes on to point

out that the political constitution shows this character by forming a triplicity
of political orders. In one of these there is but a silent, practical identity, in
faith and trust, with the totality: in the second there is a thorough disruption
of interest into particularity: and in the third, there is a living and
intellectual identity or indifference, which combines the widest range of
individual development with the completest unity of political loyalty. This
last order is that which lives in conscious identification of private with
public duty: all that it does has a universal and public function. Such a body
is the ideal Nobility—the [pg cxcviii] nobility which is the servus servorum
Dei, the supreme servant of humanity. Its function is to maintain general
interests, to give the other orders (peasantry and industrials) security,—
receiving in return from these others the means of subsistence. Noblesse
oblige gives the death-blow to particular interests, and imposes the duty of
exhibiting, in the clearest form, the supreme reality of absolute morality,
and of being to the rest an unperturbed ideal of aesthetic, ethical, religious,
and philosophical completeness.

It is here alone, in this estate which is absolutely disinterested, that the

virtues appear in their true light. To the ordinary moralising standpoint they
seem severally to be, in their separation, charged with independent value.
But from the higher point of view the existence, and still more the
accentuation of single virtues, is a mark of incompleteness. Even quality, it
has been said, involves its defects: it can only shine by eclipsing or
reflecting something else. The completely moral is not the sum of the
several virtues, but the reduction of them to indifference. It is thus that
when Plato tries to get at the unity of virtue, their aspect of difference tends
to be subordinated. “The movement of absolute morality runs through all
the virtues, but settles fixedly in none.” It is more than love to fatherland,
and nation, and laws:—that still implies a relation to something and
involves a difference. For love—the mortal passion, where “self is not
annulled”—is the process of approximation, while unity is not yet attained,
but wished and aimed at: and when it is complete—and become “such love
as spirits know113”—it gives place to a calmer rest and an active immanence.
The absolute morality is life in the fatherland and for the nation. In the
individual however it is the process upward and inward [pg cxcix] that we
see, not the consummation. Then the identity appears as an ideal, as a
tendency not yet accomplished to its end, a possibility not yet made fully
actual. At bottom—in the divine substance in which the individual inheres
—the identity is present: but in the appearance, we have only the passage
from possible to actual, a passage which has the aspect of a struggle. Hence
the moral act appears as a virtue, with merit or desert. It is accordingly the
very characteristic of virtue to signalise its own incompleteness: it emerges
into actuality only through antagonism, and with a taint of imperfection
clinging to it. Thus, in the field of absolute morality, if the virtues appear, it
is only in their transiency. If they were undisputedly real in morality, they
would not separately show. To feel that you have done well implies that you
have not done wholly well: self-gratulation in meritorious deed is the re-
action from the shudder at feeling that the self was not wholly good.

The essential unity of virtue—its negative character as regards all the

empirical variety of virtues—is seen in the excellences required by the
needs of war. These military requirements demonstrate the mere relativity
and therefore non-virtuousness of the special virtues. They equally protest
against the common beliefs in the supreme dignity of labour and its utilities.
But if bravery or soldierlike virtue be essentially a virtue of virtues, it is
only a negative virtue after all. It is the blast of the universal sweeping away
all the habitations and fixed structures of particularist life. If it is a unity of
virtue, it is only a negative unity—an indifference. If it avoid the parcelling
of virtue into a number of imperfect and sometimes contradictory parts, it
does so only to present a bare negation. The soldier, therefore, if in
potentiality the unity of all the virtues, may [pg cc] tend in practice to
represent the ability to do without any of them114.

The home of these “relative” virtues—of morality in the ordinary sense—is

the life of the second order in the commonwealth: the order of industry and
commerce. In this sphere the idea of the universal is gradually lost to view:
it becomes, says Hegel, only a thought or a creature of the mind, which
does not affect practice. The materialistic worker of civilisation does not see
further than the empirical existence of individuals: his horizon is limited by
the family, and his final ideal is a competency of comfort in possessions and
revenues. The supreme universal to which he attains as the climax of his
evolution is only money. But it is only with the vaster development of
commerce that this terrible consequence ensues. At first as a mere
individual, he has higher aims, though not the highest. He has a limited
ideal determined by his special sphere of work. To win respect—the
character for a limited truthfulness and honesty and skilful work—is his
ambition. He lives in a conceit of his performance—his utility—the esteem
of his special circle. To his commercial soul the military order is a
scarecrow and a nuisance: military honour is but trash. Yet if his range of
idea is narrow and engrossing in details, his aim is to get worship, to be
recognised as the best in his little sphere. But with the growth of the trading
spirit his character changes: he becomes the mere capitalist, is
denationalised, has no definite work and can claim no individualised
function. Money now measures all things: it is the sole ultimate reality. It
[pg cci] transforms everything into a relation of contract: even vengeance is
equated in terms of money. Its motto is, The Exchanges must be honoured,
though honour and morality may go to the dogs. So far as it is concerned,
there is no nation, but a federation of shopkeepers. Such an one is the
bourgeois (the Bürger, as distinct from the peasant or Bauer and the Adel).
As an artisan—i.e. a mere industrial, he knows no country, but at best the
reputation and interest of his own guild-union with its partial object. He is
narrow, but honest and respectable. As a mere commercial agent, he knows
no country: his field is the world, but the world not in its concreteness and
variety, but in the abstract aspect of a money-bag and an exchange. The
larger totality is indeed not altogether out of sight. But if he contribute to
the needy, either his sacrifice is lifeless in proportion as it becomes general,
or loses generality as it becomes lively. As regards his general services to
the great life of his national state115, they are unintelligently and perhaps
grudgingly rendered.

Of the peasant order Hegel has less to say. On one side the “country” as
opposed to the “town” has a closer natural sympathy with the common and
general interest: and the peasantry is the undifferentiated, solid and sound,
basis of the national life. It forms the submerged mass, out of which the best
soldiers are made, and which out of the depths of earth brings forward
nourishment as well as all the materials of elementary necessity.
Faithfulness and loyalty are its virtues: but it is personal allegiance to a
commanding superior,—not to a law or a general view—for the peasant is
[pg ccii] weak in comprehensive intelligence, though shrewd in detailed
observation.

Of the purely political function of the state Hegel in this sketch says almost
nothing. But under the head of the general government of the state he deals
with its social functions. For a moment he refers to the well-known
distinction of the legislative, judicial and executive powers. But it is only to
remark that “in every governmental act all three are conjoined. They are
abstractions, none of which can get a reality of its own,—which, in other
words, cannot be constituted and organised as powers. Legislation,
judicature, and executive are something completely formal, empty, and
contentless.... Whether the others are or are not bare abstractions, empty
activities, depends entirely on the executive power; and this is absolutely
the government116.” Treating government as the organic movement by which
the universal and the particular in the commonwealth come into relations,
he finds that it presents three forms, or gives rise to three systems. The
highest and last of these is the “educational” system. By this he understands
all that activity by which the intelligence of the state tries directly to mould
and guide the character and fortunes of its members: all the means of
culture and discipline, whether in general or for individuals, all training to
public function, to truthfulness, to good manners. Under the same head
come conquest and colonisation as state agencies. The second system is the
judicial, which instead of, like the former, aiming at the formation or
reformation of its members is satisfied by subjecting individual
transgression to a process of rectification by the general principle. With
regard to the system of judicature, Hegel argues for a variety of procedure
to suit different ranks, and for a corresponding [pg cciii] modification of
penalties. “Formal rigid equality is just what does not spare the character.
The same penalty which in one estate brings no infamy causes in another a
deep and irremediable hurt.” And with regard to the after life of the
transgressor who has borne his penalty: “Punishment is the reconciliation of
the law with itself. No further reproach for his crime can be addressed to the
person who has undergone his punishment. He is restored to membership of
his estate117.”
In the first of the three systems, the economic system, or “System of
wants,” the state seems at first hardly to appear in its universal and
controlling function at all. Here the individual depends for the satisfaction
of his physical needs on a blind, unconscious destiny, on the obscure and
incalculable properties of supply and demand in the whole interconnexion
of commodities. But even this is not all. With the accumulation of wealth in
inequality, and the growth of vast capitals, there is substituted for the
dependence of the individual on the general resultant of a vast number of
agencies a dependence on one enormously rich individual, who can control
the physical destinies of a nation. But a nation, truly speaking, is there no
more. The industrial order has parted into a mere abstract workman on one
hand, and the grande richesse on the other. “It has lost its capacity of an
organic absolute intuition and of respect for the divine—external though its
divinity be: and there sets in the bestiality of contempt for all that is noble.
The mere wisdomless universal, the mass of wealth, is the essential: and the
ethical principle, the absolute bond of the nation, is vanished; and the nation
is dissolved118.”

It would be a long and complicated task to sift, in [pg cciv] these ill-
digested but profound suggestions, the real meaning from the formal
statement. They are, like Utopia, beyond the range of practical politics. The
modern reader, whose political conceptions are limited by contemporary
circumstance, may find them archaic, medieval, quixotic. But for those who
behind the words and forms can see the substance and the idea, they will
perhaps come nearer the conception of ideal commonwealth than many
reforming programmes. Compared with the maturer statements of the
Philosophy of Law, they have the faults of the Romantic age to which their
inception belongs. Yet even in that later exposition there is upheld the
doctrine of the supremacy of the eternal State against everything particular,
class-like, and temporary; a doctrine which has made Hegel—as it made
Fichte—a voice in that “professorial socialism” which is at least as old as
Plato.
[pg 003]
Introduction.

§ 377. The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is
the most “concrete” of sciences. The significance of that “absolute”
commandment, Know thyself—whether we look at it in itself or under the
historical circumstances of its first utterance—is not to promote mere self-
knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities,
and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of
man's genuine reality—of what is essentially and ultimately true and real—
of mind as the true and essential being. Equally little is it the purport of
mental philosophy to teach what is called knowledge of men—the
knowledge whose aim is to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of
other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart.
Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unless on the
assumption that we know the universal—man as man, and, that always
must be, as mind. And for another, being only engaged with casual,
insignificant and untrue aspects of mental life, it fails to reach the
underlying essence of them all—the mind itself.

[pg 004]
§ 378. Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has
been already alluded to in the Introduction to the Logic as an abstract and
generalising metaphysic of the subject. Empirical (or inductive)
psychology, on the other hand, deals with the “concrete” mind: and, after
the revival of the sciences, when observation and experience had been made
the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, such psychology
was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about
that the metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and so
prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the
same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common-sense
metaphysic, with its analysis into forces, various activities, &c., and
rejected any attempt at a “speculative” treatment.
The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special
aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most admirable,
perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic. The main
aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to re-introduce unity of idea and
principle into the theory of mind, and so re-interpret the lesson of those
Aristotelian books.

§ 379. Even our own sense of the mind's living unity naturally protests
against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what
comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each other.
But the craving for a comprehension of the unity is still further stimulated,
as we soon come across distinctions between mental freedom and mental
determinism, antitheses between free psychic agency and the corporeity that
lies external to it, whilst we equally note the intimate interdependence of
the one upon the [pg 005] other. In modern times especially the phenomena
of animal magnetism have given, even in experience, a lively and visible
confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power of its
“ideality.” Before these facts, the rigid distinctions of practical common
sense were struck with confusion; and the necessity of a “speculative”
examination with a view to the removal of difficulties was more directly
forced upon the student.

§ 380. The “concrete” nature of mind involves for the observer the peculiar
difficulty that the several grades and special types which develop its
intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many separate
existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise in external
nature. There, matter and movement, for example, have a manifestation all
their own—it is the solar system; and similarly the differentiae of sense-
perception have a sort of earlier existence in the properties of bodies, and
still more independently in the four elements. The species and grades of
mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their separate existence and become
factors, states and features in the higher grades of development. As a
consequence of this, a lower and more abstract aspect of mind betrays the
presence in it, even to experience, of a higher grade. Under the guise of
sensation, e.g., we may find the very highest mental life as its modification
or its embodiment. And so sensation, which is but a mere form and vehicle,
may to the superficial glance seem to be the proper seat and, as it were, the
source of those moral and religious principles with which it is charged; and
the moral and religious principles thus modified may seem to call for
treatment as species of sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades
of mental life are under examination, it becomes necessary, if we desire [pg
006] to point to actual cases of them in experience, to direct attention to
more advanced grades for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects
will be treated of by anticipation which properly belong to later stages of
development (e.g. in dealing with natural awaking from sleep we speak by
anticipation of consciousness, or in dealing with mental derangement we
must speak of intellect).
What Mind (or Spirit) is.

§ 381. From our point of view Mind has for its presupposition Nature, of
which it is the truth, and for that reason its absolute prius. In this its truth
Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the “Idea” entered on
possession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are one—either
is the intelligent unity, the notion. This identity is absolute negativity—for
whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its objectivity perfect but
externalised, this self-externalisation has been nullified and the unity in that
way been made one and the same with itself. Thus at the same time it is this
identity only so far as it is a return out of nature.

§ 382. For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of mind
is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion's absolute negativity or self-identity.
Considered as this formal aspect, it may withdraw itself from everything
external and from its own externality, its very existence; it can thus submit
to infinite pain, the negation of its individual immediacy: in other words, it
can keep itself affirmative in this negativity and possess its own identity.
All this is possible so long as it is considered in its abstract self-contained
universality.

§ 383. This universality is also its determinate sphere [pg 007] of being.
Having a being of its own, the universal is self-particularising, whilst it still
remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is
“manifestation.” The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds
utterance or externality only in a form distinct from itself: it does not
manifest or reveal something, but its very mode and meaning is this
revelation. And thus in its mere possibility Mind is at the same moment an
infinite, “absolute,” actuality.

§ 384. Revelation, taken to mean the revelation of the abstract Idea, is an

unmediated transition to Nature which comes to be. As Mind is free, its
manifestation is to set forth Nature as its world; but because it is reflection,
it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same time presupposes the world as
a nature independently existing. In the intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to
create a world as its being—a being in which the mind procures the
affirmation and truth of its freedom.

The Absolute is Mind (Spirit)—this is the supreme definition of the

Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen was,
we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was
the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science: and it is
this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The word “Mind”
(Spirit)—and some glimpse of its meaning—was found at an early period:
and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It remains for
philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was
thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality:
and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational methods, solved so long
as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme and the soul of philosophy.

[pg 008]
Subdivision.

§ 385. The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:—

(1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the ideal totality of the Idea
—i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is to be self-
contained and free. This is Mind Subjective.

(2) In the form of reality: realised, i.e. in a world produced and to be

produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of
necessity. This is Mind Objective.

(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and, of mind as ideality and concept,
which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself, mind in its
absolute truth. This is Mind Absolute.

§ 386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind.
Mind is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the disproportion
between the concept and the reality—but with the qualification that it is a
shadow cast by the mind's own light—a show or illusion which the mind
implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to
realise and become conscious of freedom as its very being, i.e. to be fully
manifested. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their
semblance of being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger, and
through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of
that liberation is given the identification of the three stages—finding a
world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and
gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show
purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.

A rigid application of the category of finitude by [pg 009] the abstract

logician is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a
mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern,
to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is
reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in fact
such a modesty of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed
and absolute, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no
sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory. The category of
finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explained at its place in
the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though
still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the
concrete forms, has merely to show that the finite is not, i.e. is not the truth,
but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitude
of the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its
cessation by another and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the
implicit Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which
nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to
is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it is itself
therefore vanity. In the course of the mind's development we shall see this
vanity appear as wickedness at that turning-point at which mind has reached
its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.

[pg 010]
Section I. Mind Subjective.

§ 387. Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as cognitive:

Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical category of
the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the concrete mind.

Subjective mind is:—

(A) Immediate or implicit: a soul—the Spirit in Nature—the object treated

by Anthropology.

(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other
things: mind in correlation or particularisation: consciousness—the object
treated by the Phenomenology of Mind.

(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject—the object

treated by Psychology.

In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as

Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this
Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the
consciousness of its intelligent unity.

For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification it

presents is an advance of development: and so in mind every character
under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and
development, a step forward towards its goal, in order [pg 011] to make
itself into, and to realise in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again, is
itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was implicitly at
the beginning (and so for the observer) it is for itself—for the special form,
viz. which the mind has in that step. The ordinary method of psychology is
to narrate what the mind or soul is, what happens to it, what it does. The
soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as
its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of
faculties and powers it possesses—all without being aware that the act and
utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our
conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had
before.

We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here
studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is
the individual's only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind to exist in
them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as self-
instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and utterances
are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself, links it in unity
with itself, and so makes it actual mind.

[pg 012]
Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.

§ 388. Spirit (Mind) came into being as the truth of Nature. But not merely
is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first of what went before:
this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion the special
meaning of “free judgment.” Mind, thus come into being, means therefore
that Nature in its own self realises its untruth and sets itself aside: it means
that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the universality which in corporal
individuality is always self-externalised, but as a universality which in its
concretion and totality is one and simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind,
but soul.

§ 389. The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is Nature,

the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple “ideal” life. Soul is the
substance or “absolute” basis of all the particularising and individualising
of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on which its character
is wrought, and the soul remains the pervading, identical ideality of it all.
But as it is still conceived thus abstractly, the soul is only the sleep of mind
—the passive νοῦς of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.

The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where,
on the one hand, matter is [pg 013] regarded as something true, and mind
conceived as a thing, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists
have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon
imponderable matters, like heat, light, &c., to which they might perhaps
add space and time. These “imponderables,” which have lost the property
(peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering
resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to
part; whereas the “vital” matter, which may also be found enumerated
among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of
existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The fact is that in the
Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is implicitly at an end:
subjectivity is the very substance and conception of life—with this proviso,
however, that its existence or objectivity is still at the same time forfeited to
the sway of self-externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the
intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as
the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the
intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the
fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and
transmuted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual
unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter—the truth that matter itself has no
truth.

A cognate question is that of the community of soul and body. This

community (interdependence) was assumed as a fact, and the only problem
was how to comprehend it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an
incomprehensible mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely
antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each
other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed [pg 014] to be
found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not: whence
Epicurus, when attributing to the gods a residence in the pores, was
consistent in not imposing on them any connexion with the world. A
somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this
relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza,
and Leibnitz have all indicated God as this nexus. They meant that the
finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and, so
holding, these philosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely as
another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true identity of
finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the case of Spinoza, is
too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibnitz, though his Monad of monads
brings things into being, it does so only by an act of judgment or choice.
Hence, with Leibnitz, the result is a distinction between soul and the
corporeal (or material), and the identity is only like the copula of a
judgment, and does not rise or develop into system, into the absolute
syllogism.

§ 390. The Soul is at first—

(a) In its immediate natural mode—the natural soul, which only is.
(b) Secondly, it is a soul which feels, as individualised, enters into
correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modes of that being, retains
an abstract independence.

(c) Thirdly, its immediate being—or corporeity—is moulded into it, and
with that corporeity it exists as actual soul.

(a) The Physical Soul . 119

§ 391. The soul universal, described, it may be, as an anima mundi, a

world-soul, must not be fixed on that [pg 015] account as a single subject; it
is rather the universal substance which has its actual truth only in
individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single
soul, it is a single soul which is merely: its only modes are modes of natural
life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free existence: i.e. they
are natural objects for consciousness, but objects to which the soul as such
does not behave as to something external. These features rather are physical
qualities of which it finds itself possessed.

(α) Physical Qualities120.

§ 392. While still a “substance” (i.e. a physical soul) the mind (1) takes part
in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the changes of
the seasons and the periods of the day, &c. This life of nature for the main
shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of mental tone.

In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and
telluric life of man. In such a sympathy with nature the animals essentially
live: their specific characters and their particular phases of growth depend,
in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it. In the case of
man these points of dependence lose importance, just in proportion to his
civilisation, and the more his whole frame of soul is based upon a
substructure of mental freedom. The history of the world is not bound up
with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the destinies of
individuals with the positions of the planets.

The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the
response to the changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only in
faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the [pg 016] fore only in
morbid states (including insanity) and at periods when the self-conscious
life suffers depression.

In nations less intellectually emancipated, which therefore live more in

harmony with nature, we find amid their superstitions and aberrations of
imbecility a few real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundation what
seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of events
arising therefrom. But as mental freedom gets a deeper hold, even these few
and slight susceptibilities, based upon participation in the common life of
nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary, remain for ever
subject to such influences.

§ 393. (2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial globe, the
general planetary life of the nature-governed mind specialises itself and
breaks up into the several nature-governed minds which, on the whole, give
expression to the nature of the geographical continents and constitute the
diversities of race.

The contrast between the earth's poles, the land towards the north pole
being more aggregated and preponderant over sea, whereas in the southern
hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant from each other,
introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which
Treviranus (Biology, Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and fauna.

§ 394. This diversity descends into specialities, that may be termed local
minds—shown in the outward modes of life and occupation, bodily
structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency and capacity
of the intellectual and moral character of the several peoples.

Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations
each possessing a persistent type of its own.
[pg 017]
§ 395. (3) The soul is further de-universalised into the individualised
subject. But this subjectivity is here only considered as a differentiation and
singling out of the modes which nature gives; we find it as the special
temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other disposition and
idiosyncrasy, of families or single individuals.

(β) Physical Alterations.

§ 396. Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as alterations

in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its development. As they
are at once physical and mental diversities, a more concrete definition or
description of them would require us to anticipate an acquaintance with the
formed and matured mind.

The (1) first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man's life. He begins
with Childhood—mind wrapt up in itself. His next step is the fully-
developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality which is still
subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his
immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the world
which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the position of
the individual himself, who is still short of independence and not fully
equipped for the part he has to play (Youth). Thirdly, we see man in his true
relation to his environment, recognising the objective necessity and
reasonableness of the world as he finds it,—a world no longer incomplete,
but able in the work which it collectively achieves to afford the individual a
place and a security for his performance. By his share in this collective
work he first is really somebody, gaining an effective existence and an
objective value (Manhood). Last of all comes the finishing touch to [pg
018] this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while on its realist side it
passes into the inertia of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains freedom
from the limited interests and entanglements of the outward present (Old
Age).

§ 397. (2) Next we find the individual subject to a real antithesis, leading it
to seek and find itself in another individual. This—the sexual relation—on
a physical basis, shows, on its one side, subjectivity remaining in an
instinctive and emotional harmony of moral life and love, and not pushing
these tendencies to an extreme universal phase, in purposes political,
scientific or artistic; and on the other, shows an active half, where the
individual is the vehicle of a struggle of universal and objective interests
with the given conditions (both of his own existence and of that of the
external world), carrying out these universal principles into a unity with the
world which is his own work. The sexual tie acquires its moral and spiritual
significance and function in the family.

§ 398. (3) When the individuality, or self-centralised being, distinguishes

itself from its mere being, this immediate judgment is the waking of the
soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life, in the first instance, as
one natural quality and state confronts another state, viz. sleep.—The
waking is not merely for the observer, or externally distinct from the sleep:
it is itself the judgment (primary partition) of the individual soul—which is
self-existing only as it relates its self-existence to its mere existence,
distinguishing itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking
state includes generally all self-conscious and rational activity in which the
mind realises its own distinct self.—Sleep is an invigoration of this activity
—not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from the world
of [pg 019] specialisation, from dispersion into phases where it has grown
hard and stiff,—a return into the general nature of subjectivity, which is the
substance of those specialised energies and their absolute master.

The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those posers, as they
may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy:—Napoleon, e.g.,
on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class of
ideology. The characterisation given in the section is abstract; it primarily
treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental element
implicite but not yet as invested with a special being of its own. If we are to
speak more concretely of this distinction (in fundamentals it remains the
same), we must take the self-existence of the individual soul in its higher
aspects as the Ego of consciousness and as intelligent mind. The difficulty
raised anent the distinction of the two states properly arises, only when we
also take into account the dreams in sleep and describe these dreams, as
well as the mental representations in the sober waking consciousness, under
one and the same title of mental representations. Thus superficially
classified as states of mental representation the two coincide, because we
have lost sight of the difference; and in the case of any assignable
distinction of waking consciousness, we can always return to the trivial
remark that all this is nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete
theory of the waking soul in its realised being views it as consciousness and
intellect: and the world of intelligent consciousness is something quite
different from a picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main
only externally conjoined, in an unintelligent way, by the laws of the so-
called Association of Ideas; though here and there of course logical
principles may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves [pg
020] essentially as a concrete ego, an intelligence: and because of this
intelligence his sense-perception stands before him as a concrete totality of
features in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the same
time determined through and with all the rest. Thus the facts embodied in
his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjective representation
and distinction of the facts as something external from the person, but by
virtue of the concrete interconnexion in which each part stands with all
parts of this complex. The waking state is the concrete consciousness of this
mutual corroboration of each single factor of its content by all the others in
the picture as perceived. The consciousness of this interdependence need
not be explicit and distinct. Still this general setting to all sensations is
implicitly present in the concrete feeling of self.—In order to see the
difference of dreaming and waking we need only keep in view the Kantian
distinction between subjectivity and objectivity of mental representation
(the latter depending upon determination through categories): remembering,
as already noted, that what is actually present in mind need not be therefore
explicitly realised in consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the
intellectual sense to God need stand before consciousness in the shape of
proofs of God's existence, although, as before explained, these proofs only
serve to express the net worth and content of that feeling.

(γ) Sensibility121.

§ 399. Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere alterations, but
alternating conditions (a progression in infinitum). This is their formal and
negative relationship: but in it the affirmative relationship [pg 021] is also
involved. In the self-certified existence of waking soul its mere existence is
implicit as an “ideal” factor: the features which make up its sleeping nature,
where they are implicitly as in their substance, are found by the waking
soul, in its own self, and, be it noted, for itself. The fact that these
particulars, though as a mode of mind they are distinguished from the self-
identity of our self-centred being, are yet simply contained in its simplicity,
is what we call sensibility.

§ 400. Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the inarticulate
breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and unintelligent
individuality, where every definite feature is still “immediate,”—neither
specially developed in its content nor set in distinction as objective to
subject, but treated as belonging to its most special, its natural peculiarity.
The content of sensation is thus limited and transient, belonging as it does
to natural, immediate being,—to what is therefore qualitative and finite.

Everything is in sensation (feeling): if you will, everything that emerges in

conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin in sensation;
for source and origin just means the first immediate manner in which a
thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and religion only in
the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling. What we merely
have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the facts of it are
objective—set over against consciousness, so that as it is put in me (my
abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me (from my concrete
subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a mode of my
individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a form: it is thus
treated as my very own. My own is something inseparate from the actual
concrete self: and this [pg 022] immediate unity of the soul with its
underlying self in all its definite content is just this inseparability; which
however yet falls short of the ego of developed consciousness, and still
more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is with a quite different
intensity and permanency that the will, the conscience, and the character,
are our very own, than can ever be true of feeling and of the group of
feelings (the heart): and this we need no philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is
correct to say that above everything the heart must be good. But feeling and
heart is not the form by which anything is legitimated as religious, moral,
true, just, &c., and an appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or
means something bad. This should hardly need enforcing. Can any
experience be more trite than that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil,
godless, mean, &c.? That the heart is the source only of such feelings is
stated in the words: “From the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder,
adultery, fornication, blasphemy, &c.” In such times when “scientific”
theology and philosophy make the heart and feeling the criterion of what is
good, moral, and religious, it is necessary to remind them of these trite
experiences; just as it is nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the
characteristic property by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and
that he has feeling in common with them.

§ 401. What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the naturally
immediate, as “ideally” in it and made its own. On the other hand and
conversely, what originally belongs to the central individuality (which as
further deepened and enlarged is the conscious ego and free mind) get the
features of the natural corporeity, and is so felt. In this way we have two
spheres of feeling. One, where what at first is a corporeal affection (e.g. of
the eye or of any bodily part whatever) is made [pg 023] feeling (sensation)
by being driven inward, memorised in the soul's self-centred part. Another,
where affections originating in the mind and belonging to it, are in order to
be felt, and to be as if found, invested with corporeity. Thus the mode or
affection gets a place in the subject: it is felt in the soul. The detailed
specification of the former branch of sensibility is seen in the system of the
senses. But the other or inwardly originated modes of feeling no less
necessarily systematise themselves; and their corporisation, as put in the
living and concretely developed natural being, works itself out, following
the special character of the mental mode, in a special system of bodily
organs.

Sensibility in general is the healthy fellowship of the individual mind in the

life of its bodily part. The senses form the simple system of corporeity
specified. (a) The “ideal” side of physical things breaks up into two—
because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality, distinction
appears as mere variety—the senses of definite light, § 287—and of sound,
§ 300. The “real” aspect similarly is with its difference double: (b) the
senses of smell and taste, §§ 321, 322; (c) the sense of solid reality, of
heavy matter, of heat and shape. Around the centre of the sentient
individuality these specifications arrange themselves more simply than
when they are developed in the natural corporeity.

The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific
bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science—a
psychical physiology. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in the
feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate
sensation to the persistent tone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and
unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underlies the
symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. [pg
024] But the most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in
studying not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily form
adopted by certain mental modifications, especially the passions or
emotions. We should have, e.g., to explain the line of connexion by which
anger and courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the “irritable” system,
just as thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the
'sensible' system. We should want a more satisfactory explanation than
hitherto of the most familiar connexions by which tears, and voice in
general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other
specialisations lying in the line of pathognomy and physiognomy, are
formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and the organs
are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they
form at the same time a physical system for the expression of mental states,
and in this way they get quite another interpretation.

§ 402. Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found existing,
are single and transient aspects of psychic life,—alterations in the
substantiality of the soul, set in its self-centred life, with which that
substance is one. But this self-centred being is not merely a formal factor of
sensation: the soul is virtually a reflected totality of sensations—it feels in
itself the total substantiality which it virtually is—it is a soul which feels.

In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly
distinguished: still we do not speak of the sensation,—but of the feeling
(sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected with
sensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasises rather the side of
passivity—the fact that we find ourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of
mode in [pg 025] feeling—whereas feeling at the same time rather notes the
fact that it is we ourselves who feel.

(b) The Feeling Soul.—(Soul as Sentiency.) 122

§ 403. The feeling or sentient individual is the simple “ideality” or

subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise its
substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the character of subjectivity, to
take possession of it, to realise its mastery over its own. As sentient, the
soul is no longer a mere natural, but an inward, individuality: the
individuality which in the merely substantial totality was only formal to it
has to be liberated and made independent.

Nowhere so much as in the case of the soul (and still more of the mind) if
we are to understand it, must that feature of “ideality” be kept in view,
which represents it as the negation of the real, but a negation, where the real
is put past, virtually retained, although it does not exist. The feature is one
with which we are familiar in regard to our mental ideas or to memory.
Every individual is an infinite treasury of sensations, ideas, acquired lore,
thoughts, &c.; and yet the ego is one and uncompounded, a deep featureless
characterless mine, in which all this is stored up, without existing. It is only
when I call to mind an idea, that I bring it out of that interior to existence
before consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, ideas and information,
supposed to have been forgotten years ago, because for so long they had not
been brought into consciousness, once more come to light. They were not in
our possession, nor by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for
the future come into our possession; and yet they [pg 026] were in us and
continue to be in us still. Thus a person can never know how much of things
he once learned he really has in him, should he have once forgotten them:
they belong not to his actuality or subjectivity as such, but only to his
implicit self. And under all the superstructure of specialised and
instrumental consciousness that may subsequently be added to it, the
individuality always remains this single-souled inner life. At the present
stage this singleness is, primarily, to be defined as one of feeling—as
embracing the corporeal in itself: thus denying the view that this body is
something material, with parts outside parts and outside the soul. Just as the
number and variety of mental representations is no argument for an
extended and real multeity in the ego; so the “real” outness of parts in the
body has no truth for the sentient soul. As sentient, the soul is characterised
as immediate, and so as natural and corporeal: but the outness of parts and
sensible multiplicity of this corporeal counts for the soul (as it counts for
the intelligible unity) not as anything real, and therefore not as a barrier: the
soul is this intelligible unity in existence,—the existent speculative
principle. Thus in the body it is one simple, omnipresent unity. As to the
representative faculty the body is but one representation, and the infinite
variety of its material structure and organisation is reduced to the simplicity
of one definite conception: so in the sentient soul, the corporeity, and all
that outness of parts to parts which belongs to it, is reduced to ideality (the
truth of the natural multiplicity). The soul is virtually the totality of nature:
as an individual soul it is a monad: it is itself the explicitly put totality of its
particular world,—that world being included in it and filling it up; and to
that world it stands but as to itself.

§ 404. As individual, the soul is exclusive and always [pg 027] exclusive:
any difference there is, it brings within itself. What is differentiated from it
is as yet no external object (as in consciousness), but only the aspects of its
own sentient totality, &c. In this partition (judgment) of itself it is always
subject: its object is its substance, which is at the same time its predicate.
This substance is still the content of its natural life, but turned into the
content of the individual sensation-laden soul; yet as the soul is in that
content still particular, the content is its particular world, so far as that is, in
an implicit mode, included in the ideality of the subject.

By itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its features are not
developed to conscious and intelligent content: so far it is formal and only
formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in cases where it is as a form and
appears as a special state of mind (§ 350), to which the soul, which has
already advanced to consciousness and intelligence, may again sink down.
But when a truer phase of mind thus exists in a more subordinate and
abstract one, it implies a want of adaptation, which is disease. In the present
stage we must treat, first, of the abstract psychical modifications by
themselves, secondly, as morbid states of mind: the latter being only
explicable by means of the former.

(α) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy.

§ 405. (αα) Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic

individual, it is because immediate, not yet as its self not a true subject
reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the individuality of its
true self is a different subject from it—a subject which may even exist as
another individual. By the self-hood of the latter it—a substance, [pg 028]
which is only a non-independent predicate—is then set in vibration and
controlled without the least resistance on its part. This other subject by
which it is so controlled may be called its genius.

In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its
mother's womb:—a condition neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but
psychical—a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in
undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no self, as yet nothing impenetrable,
incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject, the single self of
the two. The mother is the genius of the child; for by genius we commonly
mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence of its own, and
constitutes the subjective substantiality of some one else who is only
externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal independence.
The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of existence, of life,
and of character, not as a mere possibility, or capacity, or virtuality, but as
efficiency and realised activity, as concrete subjectivity.

If we look only to the spatial and material aspects of the child's existence as
an embryo in its special integuments, and as connected with the mother by
means of umbilical cord, placenta, &c., all that is presented to the senses
and reflection are certain anatomical and physiological facts—externalities
and instrumentalities in the sensible and material which are insignificant as
regards the main point, the psychical relationship. What ought to be noted
as regards this psychical tie are not merely the striking effects
communicated to and stamped upon the child by violent emotions, injuries,
&c. of the mother, but the whole psychical judgment (partition) of the
underlying nature, by which the female (like the monocotyledons among
vegetables) can suffer disruption in twain, so that the child has not [pg 029]
merely got communicated to it, but has originally received morbid
dispositions as well as other pre-dispositions of shape, temper, character,
talent, idiosyncrasies, &c.

Sporadic examples and traces of this magic tie appear elsewhere in the
range of self-possessed conscious life, say between friends, especially
female friends with delicate nerves (a tie which may go so far as to show
“magnetic” phenomena), between husband and wife and between members
of the same family.

The total sensitivity has its self here in a separate subjectivity, which, in the
case cited of this sentient life in the ordinary course of nature, is visibly
present as another and a different individual. But this sensitive totality is
meant to elevate its self-hood out of itself to subjectivity in one and the
same individual: which is then its indwelling consciousness, self-possessed,
intelligent, and reasonable. For such a consciousness the merely sentient
life serves as an underlying and only implicitly existent material; and the
self-possessed subjectivity is the rational, self-conscious, controlling genius
thereof. But this sensitive nucleus includes not merely the purely
unconscious, congenital disposition and temperament, but within its
enveloping simplicity it acquires and retains also (in habit, as to which see
later) all further ties and essential relationships, fortunes, principles—
everything in short belonging to the character, and in whose elaboration
self-conscious activity has most effectively participated. The sensitivity is
thus a soul in which the whole mental life is condensed. The total individual
under this concentrated aspect is distinct from the existing and actual play
of his consciousness, his secular ideas, developed interests, inclinations,
&c. As contrasted with this looser aggregate of means and methods the
more intensive form of [pg 030] individuality is termed the genius, whose
decision is ultimate whatever may be the show of reasons, intentions,
means, of which the more public consciousness is so liberal. This
concentrated individuality also reveals itself under the aspect of what is
called the heart and soul of feeling. A man is said to be heartless and
unfeeling when he looks at things with self-possession and acts according to
his permanent purposes, be they great substantial aims or petty and unjust
interests: a good-hearted man, on the other hand, means rather one who is at
the mercy of his individual sentiment, even when it is of narrow range and
is wholly made up of particularities. Of such good nature or goodness of
heart it may be said that it is less the genius itself than the indulgere genio.

§ 406. (ββ) The sensitive life, when it becomes a form or state of the self-
conscious, educated, self-possessed human being is a disease. The
individual in such a morbid state stands in direct contact with the concrete
contents of his own self, whilst he keeps his self-possessed consciousness
of self and of the causal order of things apart as a distinct state of mind.
This morbid condition is seen in magnetic somnambulism and cognate
states.

In this summary encyclopaedic account it is impossible to supply a

demonstration of what the paragraph states as the nature of the remarkable
condition produced chiefly by animal magnetism—to show, in other words,
that it is in harmony with the facts. To that end the phenomena, so complex
in their nature and so very different one from another, would have first of
all to be brought under their general points of view. The facts, it might
seem, first of all call for verification. But such a verification would, it must
be added, be superfluous for those on whose account it was called for: for
they [pg 031] facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring the
narratives—infinitely numerous though they be and accredited by the
education and character of the witnesses—to be mere deception and
imposture. The a priori conceptions of these inquirers are so rooted that no
testimony can avail against them, and they have even denied what they had
seen with their own eyes. In order to believe in this department even what
one sees with these eyes, and still more to understand it, the first requisite is
not to be in bondage to the hard and fast categories of the practical intellect.
The chief points on which the discussion turns may here be given:

(α) To the concrete existence of the individual belongs the aggregate of his
fundamental interests, both the essential and the particular empirical ties
which connect him with other men and the world at large. This totality
forms his actuality, in the sense that it lies in fact immanent in him; it has
already been called his genius. This genius is not the free mind which wills
and thinks: the form of sensitivity, in which the individual here appears
immersed, is, on the contrary, a surrender of his self-possessed intelligent
existence. The first conclusion to which these considerations lead, with
reference to the contents of consciousness in the somnambulist stage, is that
it is only the range of his individually moulded world (of his private
interests and narrow relationships) which appear there. Scientific theories
and philosophic conceptions or general truths require a different soil,—
require an intelligence which has risen out of the inarticulate mass of mere
sensitivity to free consciousness. It is foolish therefore to expect revelations
about the higher ideas from the somnambulist state.

(β) Where a human being's senses and intellect are [pg 032] sound, he is
fully and intelligently alive to that reality of his which gives concrete filling
to his individuality: but he is awake to it in the form of interconnexion
between himself and the features of that reality conceived as an external
and a separate world, and he is aware that this world is in itself also a
complex of interconnexions of a practically intelligible kind. In his
subjective ideas and plans he has also before him this causally connected
scheme of things he calls his world and the series of means which bring his
ideas and his purposes into adjustment with the objective existences, which
are also means and ends to each other. At the same time, this world which is
outside him has its threads in him to such a degree that it is these threads
which make him what he really is: he too would become extinct if these
externalities were to disappear, unless by the aid of religion, subjective
reason, and character, he is in a remarkable degree self-supporting and
independent of them. But, then, in the latter case he is less susceptible of the
psychical state here spoken of.—As an illustration of that identity with the
surroundings may be noted the effect produced by the death of beloved
relatives, friends, &c. on those left behind, so that the one dies or pines
away with the loss of the other. (Thus Cato, after the downfall of the Roman
republic, could live no longer: his inner reality was neither wider than
higher than it.) Compare home-sickness, and the like.

(γ) But when all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside
it and its relationship to that world is under a veil, and the soul is thus sunk
in sleep (in magnetic sleep, in catalepsy, and other diseases, e.g. those
connected with female development, or at the approach of death, &c.), then
that immanent actuality of the individual remains the same substantial total
[pg 033] as before, but now as a purely sensitive life with an inward vision
and an inward consciousness. And because it is the adult, formed, and
developed consciousness which is degraded into this state of sensitivity, it
retains along with its content a certain nominal self-hood, a formal vision
and awareness, which however does not go so far as the conscious
judgment or discernment by which its contents, when it is healthy and
awake, exist for it as an outward objectivity. The individual is thus a monad
which is inwardly aware of its actuality—a genius which beholds itself. The
characteristic point in such knowledge is that the very same facts (which for
the healthy consciousness are an objective practical reality, and to know
which, in its sober moods, it needs the intelligent chain of means and
conditions in all their real expansion) are now immediately known and
perceived in this immanence. This perception is a sort of clairvoyance; for
it is a consciousness living in the undivided substantiality of the genius, and
finding itself in the very heart of the interconnexion, and so can dispense
with the series of conditions, external one to another, which lead up to the
result,—conditions which cool reflection has in succession to traverse and
in so doing feels the limits of its own individual externality. But such
clairvoyance—just because its dim and turbid vision does not present the
facts in a rational interconnexion—is for that very reason at the mercy of
every private contingency of feeling and fancy, &c.—not to mention that
foreign suggestions (see later) intrude into its vision. It is thus impossible to
make out whether what the clairvoyants really see preponderates over what
they deceive themselves in.—But it is absurd to treat this visionary state as
a sublime mental phase and as a truer state, capable of conveying general
truths123.

[pg 034]
(δ) An essential feature of this sensitivity, with its absence of intelligent and
volitional personality, is this, that it is a state of passivity, like that of the
child in the womb. The patient in this condition is accordingly made, and
continues to be, subject to the power of another person, the magnetiser; so
that when the two are thus in psychical rapport, the selfless individual, not
really a “person,” has for his subjective consciousness the consciousness of
the other. This latter self-possessed individual is thus the effective
subjective soul of the former, and the genius which may even supply him
with a train of ideas. That the somnambulist perceives in himself tastes and
smells which are present in the person with whom he stands en rapport, and
that he is aware of the other inner ideas and present perceptions of the latter
as if they were his own, shows the substantial identity which the soul
(which even in its concreteness is also truly immaterial) is capable of
holding with another. When the substance of both is thus made one, there is
only one subjectivity of consciousness: the patient has a sort of
individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual: and this nominal
self accordingly derives its whole stock of ideas [pg 035] from the
sensations and ideas of the other, in whom it sees, smells, tastes, reads, and
hears. It is further to be noted on this point that the somnambulist is thus
brought into rapport with two genii and a twofold set of ideas, his own and
that of the magnetiser. But it is impossible to say precisely which sensations
and which visions he, in this nominal perception, receives, beholds and
brings to knowledge from his own inward self, and which from the
suggestions of the person with whom he stands in relation. This uncertainty
may be the source of many deceptions, and accounts among other things for
the diversity that inevitably shows itself among somnambulists from
different countries and under rapport with persons of different education, as
regards their views on morbid states and the methods of cure, or medicines
for them, as well as on scientific and intellectual topics.

(ε) As in this sensitive substantiality there is no contrast to external

objectivity, so within itself the subject is so entirely one that all varieties of
sensation have disappeared, and hence, when the activity of the sense-
organs is asleep, the “common sense,” or “general feeling” specifies itself
to several functions; one sees and hears with the fingers, and especially with
the pit of the stomach, &c.

To comprehend a thing means in the language of practical intelligence to be

able to trace the series of means intervening between a phenomenon and
some other existence on which it depends,—to discover what is called the
ordinary course of nature, in compliance with the laws and relations of the
intellect, e.g. causality, reasons, &c. The purely sensitive life, on the
contrary, even when it retains that mere nominal consciousness, as in the
morbid state alluded to, is just this form of immediacy, without any
distinctions between subjective [pg 036] and objective, between intelligent
personality and objective world, and without the aforementioned finite ties
between them. Hence to understand this intimate conjunction, which,
though all-embracing, is without any definite points of attachment, is
impossible, so long as we assume independent personalities, independent
one of another and of the objective world which is their content—so long as
we assume the absolute spatial and material externality of one part of being
to another.

(β) Self-feeling (Sense of Self)124.

§ 407. (αα) The sensitive totality is, in its capacity of individual, essentially
the tendency to distinguish itself in itself, and to wake up to the judgment in
itself, in virtue of which it has particular feelings and stands as a subject in
respect of these aspects of itself. The subject as such gives these feelings a
place as its own in itself. In these private and personal sensations it is
immersed, and at the same time, because of the “ideality” of the particulars,
it combines itself in them with itself as a subjective unit. In this way it is
self-feeling, and is so at the same time only in the particular feeling.

§ 408. (ββ) In consequence of the immediacy, which still marks the self-
feeling, i.e. in consequence of the element of corporeality which is still
undetached from the mental life, and as the feeling too is itself particular
and bound up with a special corporeal form, it follows that although the
subject has been brought to acquire intelligent consciousness, it is still
susceptible of disease, so far as to remain fast in a special phase of its self-
feeling, unable to refine it to “ideality” and get the better of it. The fully-
furnished self of intelligent consciousness is a conscious subject, which is
consistent in itself [pg 037] according to an order and behaviour which
follows from its individual position and its connexion with the external
world, which is no less a world of law. But when it is engrossed with a
single phase of feeling, it fails to assign that phase its proper place and due
subordination in the individual system of the world which a conscious
subject is. In this way the subject finds itself in contradiction between the
totality systematised in its consciousness, and the single phase or fixed idea
which is not reduced to its proper place and rank. This is Insanity or mental
Derangement.
In considering insanity we must, as in other cases, anticipate the full-grown
and intelligent conscious subject, which is at the same time the natural self
of self-feeling. In such a phase the self can be liable to the contradiction
between its own free subjectivity and a particularity which, instead of being
“idealised” in the former, remains as a fixed element in self-feeling. Mind
as such is free, and therefore not susceptible of this malady. But in older
metaphysics mind was treated as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing,
i.e. as something natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity—the settled
fixture of some finite element in it. Insanity is therefore a psychical disease,
i.e. a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement may appear to
start from one more than other, and so also may the cure.

The self-possessed and healthy subject has an active and present

consciousness of the ordered whole of his individual world, into the system
of which he subsumes each special content of sensation, idea, desire,
inclination, &c., as it arises, so as to insert them in their proper place. He is
the dominant genius over these particularities. Between this and insanity the
difference is like that between waking and dreaming: only that in [pg 038]
insanity the dream falls within the waking limits, and so makes part of the
actual self-feeling. Error and that sort of thing is a proposition consistently
admitted to a place in the objective interconnexion of things. In the
concrete, however, it is often difficult to say where it begins to become
derangement. A violent, but groundless and senseless outburst of hatred,
&c., may, in contrast to a presupposed higher self-possession and stability
of character, make its victim seem to be beside himself with frenzy. But the
main point in derangement is the contradiction which a feeling with a fixed
corporeal embodiment sets up against the whole mass of adjustments
forming the concrete consciousness. The mind which is in a condition of
mere being, and where such being is not rendered fluid in its consciousness,
is diseased. The contents which are set free in this reversion to mere nature
are the self-seeking affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest
of the passions—fancies and hopes—merely personal love and hatred.
When the influence of self-possession and of general principles, moral and
theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the natural temper under lock and
key, the earthly elements are set free—that evil which is always latent in the
heart, because the heart as immediate is natural and selfish. It is the evil
genius of man which gains the upper hand in insanity, but in distinction
from and contrast to the better and more intelligent part, which is there also.
Hence this state is mental derangement and distress. The right psychical
treatment therefore keeps in view the truth that insanity is not an abstract
loss of reason (neither in the point of intelligence nor of will and its
responsibility), but only derangement, only a contradiction in a still
subsisting reason;—just as physical disease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and
total, loss of health (if it were that, it [pg 039] would be death), but a
contradiction in it. This humane treatment, no less benevolent than
reasonable (the services of Pinel towards which deserve the highest
acknowledgment), presupposes the patient's rationality, and in that
assumption has the sound basis for dealing with him on this side—just as in
the case of bodily disease the physician bases his treatment on the vitality
which as such still contains health.

(γ) Habit125.

§ 409. Self-feeling, immersed in the detail of the feelings (in simple

sensations, and also desires, instincts, passions, and their gratification), is
undistinguished from them. But in the self there is latent a simple self-
relation of ideality, a nominal universality (which is the truth of these
details): and as so universal, the self is to be stamped upon, and made
appear in, this life of feeling, yet so as to distinguish itself from the
particular details, and be a realised universality. But this universality is not
the full and sterling truth of the specific feelings and desires; what they
specifically contain is as yet left out of account. And so too the particularity
is, as now regarded, equally formal; it counts only as the particular being or
immediacy of the soul in opposition to its equally formal and abstract
realisation. This particular being of the soul is the factor of its corporeity;
here we have it breaking with this corporeity, distinguishing it from itself,—
itself a simple being,—and becoming the “ideal,” subjective substantiality
of it,—just as in its latent notion (§ 359) it was the substance, and the mere
substance, of it.

But this abstract realisation of the soul in its corporeal vehicle is not yet the
self—not the existence of the [pg 040] universal which is for the universal.
It is the corporeity reduced to its mere ideality; and so far only does
corporeity belong to the soul as such. That is to say, as space and time—the
abstract one-outside-another, as, in short, empty space and empty time—are
only subjective form—pure act of intuition; so that pure being (which
through the supersession in it of the particularity of the corporeity, or of the
immediate corporeity as such has realised itself) is mere intuition and no
more, lacking consciousness, but the basis of consciousness. And
consciousness it becomes, when the corporeity, of which it is the subjective
substance, and which still continues to exist, and that as a barrier for it, has
been absorbed by it, and it has been invested with the character of self-
centred subject.

§ 410. The soul's making itself an abstract universal being, and reducing the
particulars of feelings (and of consciousness) to a mere feature of its being
is Habit. In this manner the soul has the contents in possession, and contains
them in such manner that in these features it is not as sentient, nor does it
stand in relationship with them as distinguishing itself from them, nor is
absorbed in them, but has them and moves in them, without feeling or
consciousness of the fact. The soul is freed from them, so far as it is not
interested in or occupied with them: and whilst existing in these forms as its
possession, it is at the same time open to be otherwise occupied and
engaged—say with feeling and with mental consciousness in general.

This process of building up the particular and corporeal expressions of

feeling into the being of the soul appears as a repetition of them, and the
generation of habit as practice. For, this being of the soul, if in respect of
the natural particular phase it be called an abstract universality to which the
former is transmuted, [pg 041] is a reflexive universality (§ 175); i.e. the
one and the same, that recurs in a series of units of sensation, is reduced to
unity, and this abstract unity expressly stated.

Habit, like memory, is a difficult point in mental organisation: habit is the

mechanism of self-feeling, as memory is the mechanism of intelligence.
The natural qualities and alterations of age, sleep and waking, are
“immediately” natural: habit, on the contrary, is the mode of feeling (as well
as intelligence, will, &c., so far as they belong to self-feeling) made into a
natural and mechanical existence. Habit is rightly called a second nature;
nature, because it is an immediate being of the soul; a second nature,
because it is an immediacy created by the soul, impressing and moulding
the corporeality which enters into the modes of feeling as such and into the
representations and volitions so far as they have taken corporeal form (§
401).

In habit the human being's mode of existence is “natural,” and for that
reason not free; but still free, so far as the merely natural phase of feeling is
by habit reduced to a mere being of his, and he is no longer involuntarily
attracted or repelled by it, and so no longer interested, occupied, or
dependent in regard to it. The want of freedom in habit is partly merely
formal, as habit merely attaches to the being of the soul; partly only
relative, so far as it strictly speaking arises only in the case of bad habits, or
so far as a habit is opposed by another purpose: whereas the habit of right
and goodness is an embodiment of liberty. The main point about Habit is
that by its means man gets emancipated from the feelings, even in being
affected by them. The different forms of this may be described as follows:
(α) The immediate feeling is negated and treated as indifferent. One who
gets inured against external sensations (frost, heat, weariness of the limbs,
[pg 042] &c., sweet tastes, &c.), and who hardens the heart against
misfortune, acquires a strength which consists in this, that although the
frost, &c.—or the misfortune—is felt, the affection is deposed to a mere
externality and immediacy; the universal psychical life keeps its own
abstract independence in it, and the self-feeling as such, consciousness,
reflection, and any other purposes and activity, are no longer bothered with
it. (β) There is indifference towards the satisfaction: the desires and
impulses are by the habit of their satisfaction deadened. This is the rational
liberation from them; whereas monastic renunciation and forcible
interference do not free from them, nor are they in conception rational. Of
course in all this it is assumed that the impulses are kept as the finite modes
they naturally are, and that they, like their satisfaction, are subordinated as
partial factors to the reasonable will. (γ) In habit regarded as aptitude, or
skill, not merely has the abstract psychical life to be kept intact per se, but it
has to be imposed as a subjective aim, to be made a power in the bodily
part, which is rendered subject and thoroughly pervious to it. Conceived as
having the inward purpose of the subjective soul thus imposed upon it, the
body is treated as an immediate externality and a barrier. Thus comes out
the more decided rupture between the soul as simple self-concentration, and
its earlier naturalness and immediacy; it has lost its original and immediate
identity with the bodily nature, and as external has first to be reduced to that
position. Specific feelings can only get bodily shape in a perfectly specific
way (§ 401); and the immediate portion of body is a particular possibility
for a specific aim (a particular aspect of its differentiated structure, a
particular organ of its organic system). To mould such an aim in the organic
body is to bring out and express the “ideality” [pg 043] which is implicit in
matter always, and especially so in the specific bodily part, and thus to
enable the soul, under its volitional and conceptual characters, to exist as
substance in its corporeity. In this way an aptitude shows the corporeity
rendered completely pervious, made into an instrument, so that when the
conception (e.g. a series of musical notes) is in me, then without resistance
and with ease the body gives them correct utterance.

The form of habit applies to all kinds and grades of mental action. The most
external of them, i.e. the spatial direction of an individual, viz. his upright
posture, has been by will made a habit—a position taken without
adjustment and without consciousness—which continues to be an affair of
his persistent will; for the man stands only because and in so far as he wills
to stand, and only so long as he wills it without consciousness. Similarly
our eyesight is the concrete habit which, without an express adjustment,
combines in a single act the several modifications of sensation,
consciousness, intuition, intelligence, &c., which make it up. Thinking, too,
however free and active in its own pure element it becomes, no less requires
habit and familiarity (this impromptuity or form of immediacy), by which it
is the property of my single self where I can freely and in all directions
range. It is through this habit that I come to realise my existence as a
thinking being. Even here, in this spontaneity of self-centred thought, there
is a partnership of soul and body (hence, want of habit and too-long-
continued thinking cause headache); habit diminishes this feeling, by
making the natural function an immediacy of the soul. Habit on an ampler
scale, and carried out in the strictly intellectual range, is recollection and
memory, whereof we shall speak later.

[pg 044]
Habit is often spoken of disparagingly and called lifeless, casual and
particular. And it is true that the form of habit, like any other, is open to
anything we chance to put into it; and it is habit of living which brings on
death, or, if quite abstract, is death itself: and yet habit is indispensable for
the existence of all intellectual life in the individual, enabling the subject to
be a concrete immediacy, an “ideality” of soul—enabling the matter of
consciousness, religious, moral, &c., to be his as this self, this soul, and no
other, and be neither a mere latent possibility, nor a transient emotion or
idea, nor an abstract inwardness, cut off from action and reality, but part and
parcel of his being. In scientific studies of the soul and the mind, habit is
usually passed over—either as something contemptible—or rather for the
further reason that it is one of the most difficult questions of psychology.

(c) The Actual Soul. 126

§ 411. The Soul, when its corporeity has been moulded and made
thoroughly its own, finds itself there a single subject; and the corporeity is
an externality which stands as a predicate, in being related to which, it is
related to itself. This externality, in other words, represents not itself, but
the soul, of which it is the sign. In this identity of interior and exterior, the
latter subject to the former, the soul is actual: in its corporeity it has its free
shape, in which it feels itself and makes itself felt, and which as the Soul's
work of art has human pathognomic and physiognomic expression.

Under the head of human expression are included, e.g., the upright figure in
general, and the formation of the limbs, especially the hand, as the absolute
instrument, [pg 045] of the mouth—laughter, weeping, &c., and the note of
mentality diffused over the whole, which at once announces the body at the
externality of a higher nature. This note is so slight, indefinite, and
inexpressible a modification, because the figure in its externality is
something immediate and natural, and can therefore only be an indefinite
and quite imperfect sign for the mind, unable to represent it in its actual
universality. Seen from the animal world, the human figure is the supreme
phase in which mind makes an appearance. But for the mind it is only its
first appearance, while language is its perfect expression. And the human
figure, though its proximate phase of existence, is at the same time in its
physiognomic and pathognomic quality something contingent to it. To try to
raise physiognomy and above all cranioscopy (phrenology) to the rank of
sciences, was therefore one of the vainest fancies, still vainer than a
signatura rerum, which supposed the shape of a plant to afford indication of
its medicinal virtue.

§ 412. Implicitly the soul shows the untruth and unreality of matter; for the
soul, in its concentrated self, cuts itself off from its immediate being,
placing the latter over against it as a corporeity incapable of offering
resistance to its moulding influence. The soul, thus setting in opposition its
being to its (conscious) self, absorbing it, and making it its own, has lost the
meaning of mere soul, or the “immediacy” of mind. The actual soul with its
sensation and its concrete self-feeling turned into habit, has implicitly
realised the 'ideality' of its qualities; in this externality it has recollected and
inwardised itself, and is infinite self-relation. This free universality thus
made explicit shows the soul awaking to the higher stage of the ego, or
abstract universality in so far as it is for the abstract universality. In this [pg
046] way it gains the position of thinker and subject—specially a subject of
the judgment in which the ego excludes from itself the sum total of its
merely natural features as an object, a world external to it,—but with such
respect to that object that in it it is immediately reflected into itself. Thus
soul rises to become Consciousness.

[pg 047]
Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind.
Consciousness.

§ 413. Consciousness constitutes the reflected or correlational grade of

mind: the grade of mind as appearance. Ego is infinite self-relation of
mind, but as subjective or as self-certainty. The immediate identity of the
natural soul has been raised to this pure “ideal” self-identity; and what the
former contained is for this self-subsistent reflection set forth as an object.
The pure abstract freedom of mind lets go from it its specific qualities,—the
soul's natural life—to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of
this latter, as external to it, that the ego is in the first instance aware
(conscious), and as such it is Consciousness. Ego, as this absolute
negativity, is implicitly the identity in the otherness: the ego is itself that
other and stretches over the object (as if that object were implicitly
cancelled)—it is one side of the relationship and the whole relationship—
the light, which manifests itself and something else too.

§ 414. The self-identity of the mind, thus first made [pg 048] explicit as the
Ego, is only its abstract formal identity. As soul it was under the phase of
substantial universality; now, as subjective reflection in itself, it is referred
to this substantiality as to its negative, something dark and beyond it. Hence
consciousness, like reciprocal dependence in general, is the contradiction
between the independence of the two sides and their identity in which they
are merged into one. The mind as ego is essence; but since reality, in the
sphere of essence, is represented as in immediate being and at the same
time as “ideal,” it is as consciousness only the appearance (phenomenon)
of mind.

§ 415. As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the dialectical

movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. the successive steps in further
specification of consciousness, does not to it seem to be its own activity, but
is implicit, and to the ego it seems an alteration of the object. Consciousness
consequently appears differently modified according to the difference of the
given object; and the gradual specification of consciousness appears as a
variation in the characteristics of its objects. Ego, the subject of
consciousness, is thinking: the logical process of modifying the object is
what is identical in subject and object, their absolute interdependence, what
makes the object the subject's own.

The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described as having

viewed the mind as consciousness, and as containing the propositions only
of a phenomenology (not of a philosophy) of mind. The Ego Kant regards as
reference to something away and beyond (which in its abstract description
is termed the thing-at-itself); and it is only from this finite point of view that
he treats both intellect and will. Though in the notion of a power of
reflective judgment he touches upon the Idea of mind—a subject-
objectivity, an intuitive intellect, [pg 049] &c., and even the Idea of Nature,
still this Idea is again deposed to an appearance, i.e. to a subjective maxim
(§ 58). Reinhold may therefore be said to have correctly appreciated
Kantism when he treated it as a theory of consciousness (under the name of
“faculty of ideation”). Fichte kept to the same point of view: his non-ego is
only something set over against the ego, only defined as in consciousness: it
is made no more than an infinite “shock,” i.e. a thing-in-itself. Both systems
therefore have clearly not reached the intelligible unity or the mind as it
actually and essentially is, but only as it is in reference to something else.

As against Spinozism, again, it is to be noted that the mind in the judgment

by which it “constitutes” itself an ego (a free subject contrasted with its
qualitative affection) has emerged from substance, and that the philosophy,
which gives this judgment as the absolute characteristic of mind, has
emerged from Spinozism.

§ 416. The aim of conscious mind is to make its appearance identical with
its essence, to raise its self-certainty to truth. The existence of mind in the
stage of consciousness is finite, because it is merely a nominal self-relation,
or mere certainty. The object is only abstractly characterised as its; in other
words, in the object it is only as an abstract ego that the mind is reflected
into itself: hence its existence there has still a content, which is not as its
own.
§ 417. The grades of this elevation of certainty to truth are three in number:
first (a) consciousness in general, with an object set against it; (b) self-
consciousness, for which ego is the object; (c) unity of consciousness and
self-consciousness, where the mind sees itself embodied in the object and
sees itself as implicitly and explicitly determinate, as Reason, the notion of
mind.

[pg 050]

(a) Consciousness Proper . 127

(α) Sensuous consciousness.

§ 418. Consciousness is, first, immediate consciousness, and its reference to

the object accordingly the simple and underived certainty of it. The object
similarly, being immediate, an existent, reflected in itself, is further
characterised as immediately singular. This is sense-consciousness.

Consciousness—as a case of correlation—comprises only the categories

belonging to the abstract ego or formal thinking; and these it treats as
features of the object (§ 415). Sense-consciousness therefore is aware of the
object as an existent, a something, an existing thing, a singular, and so on. It
appears as wealthiest in matter, but as poorest in thought. That wealth of
matter is made out of sensations: they are the material of consciousness (§
414), the substantial and qualitative, what the soul in its anthropological
sphere is and finds in itself. This material the ego (the reflection of the soul
in itself) separates from itself, and puts it first under the category of being.
Spatial and temporal Singularness, here and now (the terms by which in the
Phenomenology of the Mind (W. II. p. 73), I described the object of sense-
consciousness) strictly belongs to intuition. At present the object is at first
to be viewed only in its correlation to consciousness, i.e. a something
external to it, and not yet as external on its own part, or as being beside and
out of itself.
§ 419. The sensible as somewhat becomes an other: the reflection in itself
of this somewhat, the thing, has many properties; and as a single (thing) in
its immediacy has several predicates. The muchness of the sense-singular
[pg 051] thus becomes a breadth—a variety of relations, reflectional
attributes, and universalities. These are logical terms introduced by the
thinking principle, i.e. in this case by the Ego, to describe the sensible. But
the Ego as itself apparent sees in all this characterisation a change in the
object; and self-consciousness, so construing the object, is sense-perception.

(β) Sense-perception128.

§ 420. Consciousness, having passed beyond the sensibility, wants to take

the object in its truth, not as merely immediate, but as mediated, reflected in
itself, and universal. Such an object is a combination of sense qualities with
attributes of wider range by which thought defines concrete relations and
connexions. Hence the identity of consciousness with the object passes
from the abstract identity of “I am sure” to the definite identity of “I know,
and am aware.”

The particular grade of consciousness on which Kantism conceives the

mind is perception: which is also the general point of view taken by
ordinary consciousness, and more or less by the sciences. The sensuous
certitudes of single apperceptions or observations form the starting-point:
these are supposed to be elevated to truth, by being regarded in their
bearings, reflected upon, and on the lines of definite categories turned at the
same time into something necessary and universal, viz. experiences.

§ 421. This conjunction of individual and universal is admixture—the

individual remains at the bottom hard and unaffected by the universal, to
which however it is related. It is therefore a tissue of contradictions—
between the single things of sense apperception, which form the alleged
ground of general experience, and the [pg 052] universality which has a
higher claim to be the essence and ground—between the individuality of a
thing which, taken in its concrete content, constitutes its independence and
the various properties which, free from this negative link and from one
another, are independent universal matters (§ 123). This contradiction of the
finite which runs through all forms of the logical spheres turns out most
concrete, when the somewhat is defined as object (§ 194 seqq.).

(γ) The Intellect129.

§ 422. The proximate truth of perception is that it is the object which is an

appearance, and that the object's reflection in self is on the contrary a self-
subsistent inward and universal. The consciousness of such an object is
intellect. This inward, as we called it, of the thing is on one hand the
suppression of the multiplicity of the sensible, and, in that manner, an
abstract identity: on the other hand, however, it also for that reason contains
the multiplicity, but as an interior “simple” difference, which remains self-
identical in the vicissitudes of appearance. This simple difference is the
realm of the laws of the phenomena—a copy of the phenomenon, but
brought to rest and universality.

§ 423. The law, at first stating the mutual dependence of universal,

permanent terms, has, in so far as its distinction is the inward one, its
necessity on its own part; the one of the terms, as not externally different
from the other, lies immediately in the other. But in this manner the interior
distinction is, what it is in truth, the distinction on its own part, or the
distinction which is none. With this new form-characteristic, on the whole,
consciousness implicitly vanishes: for consciousness as such implies the
reciprocal independence [pg 053] of subject and object. The ego in its
judgment has an object which is not distinct from it,—it has itself.
Consciousness has passed into self-consciousness.

(b) Self-consciousness . 130

§ 424. Self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness: the latter is a

consequence of the former, all consciousness of an other object being as a
matter of fact also self-consciousness. The object is my idea: I am aware of
the object as mine; and thus in it I am aware of me. The formula of self-
consciousness is I = I:—abstract freedom, pure “ideality.” In so far it lacks
“reality”: for as it is its own object, there is strictly speaking no object,
because there is no distinction between it and the object.

§ 425. Abstract self-consciousness is the first negation of consciousness,

and for that reason it is burdened with an external object, or, nominally,
with the negation of it. Thus it is at the same time the antecedent stage,
consciousness: it is the contradiction of itself as self-consciousness and as
consciousness. But the latter aspect and the negation in general is in I = I
potentially suppressed; and hence as this certitude of self against the object
it is the impulse to realise its implicit nature, by giving its abstract self-
awareness content and objectivity, and in the other direction to free itself
from its sensuousness, to set aside the given objectivity and identify it with
itself. The two processes are one and the same, the identification of its
consciousness and self-consciousness.

(α) Appetite or Instinctive Desire131.

§ 426. Self-consciousness, in its immediacy, is a singular, and a desire

(appetite),—the contradiction implied [pg 054] in its abstraction which
should yet be objective,—or in its immediacy which has the shape of an
external object and should be subjective. The certitude of one's self, which
issues from the suppression of mere consciousness, pronounces the object
null: and the outlook of self-consciousness towards the object equally
qualifies the abstract ideality of such self-consciousness as null.

§ 427. Self-consciousness, therefore, knows itself implicit in the object,

which in this outlook is conformable to the appetite. In the negation of the
two one-sided moments by the ego's own activity, this identity comes to be
for the ego. To this activity the object, which implicitly and for self-
consciousness is self-less, can make no resistance: the dialectic, implicit in
it, towards self-suppression exists in this case as that activity of the ego.
Thus while the given object is rendered subjective, the subjectivity divests
itself of its one-sidedness and becomes objective to itself.
§ 428. The product of this process is the fast conjunction of the ego with
itself, its satisfaction realised, and itself made actual. On the external side it
continues, in this return upon itself, primarily describable as an individual,
and maintains itself as such; because its bearing upon the self-less object is
purely negative, the latter, therefore, being merely consumed. Thus appetite
in its satisfaction is always destructive, and in its content selfish: and as the
satisfaction has only happened in the individual (and that is transient) the
appetite is again generated in the very act of satisfaction.

§ 429. But on the inner side, or implicitly, the sense of self which the ego
gets in the satisfaction does not remain in abstract self-concentration or in
mere individuality; on the contrary,—as negation of immediacy and
individuality the result involves a character of universality and of the
identity of self-consciousness [pg 055] with its object. The judgment or
diremption of this self-consciousness is the consciousness of a “free”
object, in which ego is aware of itself as an ego, which however is also still
outside it.

(β) Self-consciousness Recognitive132.

§ 430. Here there is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness, at first

immediately as one of two things for another. In that other as ego I behold
myself, and yet also an immediately existing object, another ego absolutely
independent of me and opposed to me. (The suppression of the singleness
of self-consciousness was only a first step in the suppression, and it merely
led to the characterisation of it as particular.) This contradiction gives
either self-consciousness the impulse to show itself as a free self, and to
exist as such for the other:—the process of recognition.

§ 431. The process is a battle. I cannot be aware of me as myself in another

individual, so long as I see in that other an other and an immediate
existence: and I am consequently bent upon the suppression of this
immediacy of his. But in like measure I cannot be recognised as immediate,
except so far as I overcome the mere immediacy on my own part, and thus
give existence to my freedom. But this immediacy is at the same time the
corporeity of self-consciousness, in which as in its sign and tool the latter
has its own sense of self, and its being for others, and the means for entering
into relation with them.

§ 432. The fight of recognition is a life and death struggle: either self-
consciousness imperils the other's like, and incurs a like peril for its own—
but only peril, for either is no less bent on maintaining his life, as the
existence of his freedom. Thus the death of one, [pg 056] though by the
abstract, therefore rude, negation of immediacy, it, from one point of view,
solves the contradiction, is yet, from the essential point of view (i.e. the
outward and visible recognition), a new contradiction (for that recognition
is at the same time undone by the other's death) and a greater than the other.

§ 433. But because life is as requisite as liberty to the solution, the fight
ends in the first instance as a one-sided negation with inequality. While the
one combatant prefers life, retains his single self-consciousness, but
surrenders his claim for recognition, the other holds fast to his self-assertion
and is recognised by the former as his superior. Thus arises the status of
master and slave.

In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see, on
their phenomenal side, the emergence of man's social life and the
commencement of political union. Force, which is the basis of this
phenomenon, is not on that account a basis of right, but only the necessary
and legitimate factor in the passage from the state of self-consciousness
sunk in appetite and selfish isolation into the state of universal self-
consciousness. Force, then, is the external or phenomenal commencement
of states, not their underlying and essential principle.

§ 434. This status, in the first place, implies common wants and common
concern for their satisfaction,—for the means of mastery, the slave, must
likewise be kept in life. In place of the rude destruction of the immediate
object there ensues acquisition, preservation, and formation of it, as the
instrumentality in which the two extremes of independence and non-
independence are welded together. The form of universality thus arising in
satisfying the want, creates a permanent means and a provision which takes
care for and secures the future.

[pg 057]
§ 435. But secondly, when we look to the distinction of the two, the master
beholds in the slave and his servitude the supremacy of his single self-hood,
and that by the suppression of immediate self-hood, a suppression,
however, which falls on another. This other, the slave, however, in the
service of the master, works off his individualist self-will, overcomes the
inner immediacy of appetite, and in this divestment of self and in “the fear
of his lord” makes “the beginning of wisdom”—the passage to universal
self-consciousness.

(γ) Universal Self-consciousness.

§ 436. Universal self-consciousness is the affirmative awareness of self in

an other self: each self as a free individuality has his own “absolute”
independence, yet in virtue of the negation of its immediacy or appetite
without distinguishing itself from that other. Each is thus universal self-
conscious and objective; each has “real” universality in the shape of
reciprocity, so far as each knows itself recognised in the other freeman, and
is aware of this in so far as it recognises the other and knows him to be free.

This universal re-appearance of self-consciousness—the notion which is

aware of itself in its objectivity as a subjectivity identical with itself and for
that reason universal—is the form of consciousness which lies at the root of
all true mental or spiritual life—in family, fatherland, state, and of all
virtues, love, friendship, valour, honour, fame. But this appearance of the
underlying essence may be severed from that essential, and be maintained
apart in worthless honour, idle fame, &c.

§ 437. This unity of consciousness and self-consciousness implies in the

first instance the individuals mutually [pg 058] throwing light upon each
other. But the difference between those who are thus identified is mere
vague diversity—or rather it is a difference which is none. Hence its truth is
the fully and really existent universality and objectivity of self-
consciousness,—which is Reason.

Reason, as the Idea (§ 213) as it here appears, is to be taken as meaning that

the distinction between notion and reality which it unifies has the special
aspect of a distinction between the self-concentrated notion or
consciousness, and the object subsisting external and opposed to it.

(c) Reason .133

§ 438. The essential and actual truth which reason is, lies in the simple
identity of the subjectivity of the notion, with its objectivity and
universality. The universality of reason, therefore, whilst it signifies that the
object, which was only given in consciousness quâ consciousness, is now
itself universal, permeating and encompassing the ego, also signifies that
the pure ego is the pure form which overlaps the object, and encompasses it
without it.

§ 439. Self-consciousness, thus certified that its determinations are no less

objective, or determinations of the very being of things, than they are its
own thoughts, is Reason, which as such an identity is not only the absolute
substance, but the truth that knows it. For truth here has, as its peculiar
mode and immanent form, the self-centred pure notion, ego, the certitude of
self as infinite universality. Truth, aware of what it is, is mind (spirit).

[pg 059]
Sub-Section C. Psychology. Mind . 134

§ 440. Mind has defined itself as the truth of soul and consciousness,—the
former a simple immediate totality, the latter now an infinite form which is
not, like consciousness, restricted by that content, and does not stand in
mere correlation to it as to its object, but is an awareness of this substantial
totality, neither subjective nor objective. Mind, therefore, starts only from
its own being and is in correlation only with its own features.

Psychology accordingly studies the faculties or general modes of mental

activity quâ mental—mental vision, ideation, remembering, &c., desires,
&c.—apart both from the content, which on the phenomenal side is found
in empirical ideation, in thinking also and in desire and will, and from the
two forms in which these modes exist, viz. in the soul as a physical mode,
and in consciousness itself as a separately existent object of that
consciousness. This, however, is not an arbitrary abstraction by the
psychologist. Mind is just this elevation above nature and physical modes,
and above the [pg 060] complication with an external object—in one word,
above the material, as its concept has just shown. All it has now to do is to
realise this notion of its freedom, and get rid of the form of immediacy with
which it once more begins. The content which is elevated to intuitions is its
sensations: it is its intuitions also which are transmuted into representations,
and its representations which are transmuted again into thoughts, &c.

§ 441. The soul is finite, so far as its features are immediate or con-natural.
Consciousness is finite, in so far as it has an object. Mind is finite, in so far
as, though it no longer has an object, it has a mode in its knowledge; i.e., it
is finite by means of its immediacy, or, what is the same thing, by being
subjective or only a notion. And it is a matter of no consequence, which is
defined as its notion, and which as the reality of that notion. Say that its
notion is the utterly infinite objective reason, then its reality is knowledge
or intelligence: say that knowledge is its notion, then its reality is that
reason, and the realisation of knowledge consists in appropriating reason.
Hence the finitude of mind is to be placed in the (temporary) failure of
knowledge to get hold of the full reality of its reason, or, equally, in the
(temporary) failure of reason to attain full manifestation in knowledge.
Reason at the same time is only infinite so far as it is “absolute” freedom;
so far, that is, as presupposing itself for its knowledge to work upon, it
thereby reduces itself to finitude, and appears as everlasting movement of
superseding this immediacy, of comprehending itself, and being a rational
knowledge.

§ 442. The progress of mind is development, in so far as its existent phase,

viz. knowledge, involves as its intrinsic purpose and burden that utter and
complete autonomy which is rationality; in which case the action of
translating this purpose into reality is strictly only [pg 061] a nominal
passage over into manifestation, and is even there a return into itself. So far
as knowledge which has not shaken off its original quality of mere
knowledge is only abstract or formal, the goal of mind is to give it objective
fulfilment, and thus at the same time produce its freedom.

The development here meant is not that of the individual (which has a
certain anthropological character), where faculties and forces are regarded
as successively emerging and presenting themselves in external existence—
a series of steps, on the ascertainment on which there was for a long time
great stress laid (by the system of Condillac), as if a conjectural natural
emergence could exhibit the origin of these faculties and explain them. In
Condillac's method there is an unmistakable intention to show how the
several modes of mental activity could be made intelligible without losing
sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their necessary interconnexion. But the
categories employed in doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling
principle is that the sensible is taken (and with justice) as the prius or the
initial basis, but that the later phases that follow this starting-point present
themselves as emerging in a solely affirmative manner, and the negative
aspect of mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind
and destroyed as a sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As the theory
of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is
left as if it were the true and essential foundation.
Similarly, if the activities of mind are treated as mere manifestations, forces,
perhaps in terms stating their utility or suitability for some other interest of
head or heart, there is no indication of the true final aim of the whole
business. That can only be the intelligible unity of mind, and its activity can
only have itself as aim; i.e. [pg 062] its aim can only be to get rid of the
form of immediacy or subjectivity, to reach and get hold of itself, and to
liberate itself to itself. In this way the so-called faculties of mind as thus
distinguished are only to be treated as steps of this liberation. And this is the
only rational mode of studying the mind and its various activities.

§ 443. As consciousness has for its object the stage which preceded it, viz.
the natural soul (§ 413), so mind has or rather makes consciousness its
object: i.e. whereas consciousness is only the virtual identity of the ego with
its other (§ 415), the mind realises that identity as the concrete unity which
it and it only knows. Its productions are governed by the principle of all
reason that the contents are at once potentially existent, and are the mind's
own, in freedom. Thus, if we consider the initial aspect of mind, that aspect
is twofold—as being and as its own: by the one, the mind finds in itself
something which is, by the other it affirms it to be only its own. The way of
mind is therefore

(a) to be theoretical: it has to do with the rational as its immediate affection

which it must render its own: or it has to free knowledge from its pre-
supposedness and therefore from its abstractness, and make the affection
subjective. When the affection has been rendered its own, and the
knowledge consequently characterised as free intelligence, i.e. as having its
full and free characterisation in itself, it is

(b) Will: practical mind, which in the first place is likewise formal—i.e. its
content is at first only its own, and is immediately willed; and it proceeds
next to liberate its volition from its subjectivity, which is the one-sided form
of its contents, so that it

(c) confronts itself as free mind and thus gets rid of both its defects of one-
sidedness.

[pg 063]
§ 444. The theoretical as well as the practical mind still fall under the
general range of Mind Subjective. They are not to be distinguished as active
and passive. Subjective mind is productive: but it is a merely nominal
productivity. Inwards, the theoretical mind produces only its “ideal” world,
and gains abstract autonomy within; while the practical, while it has to do
with autonomous products, with a material which is its own, has a material
which is only nominally such, and therefore a restricted content, for which
it gains the form of universality. Outwards, the subjective mind (which as a
unity of soul and consciousness, is thus also a reality,—a reality at once
anthropological and conformable to consciousness) has for its products, in
the theoretical range, the word, and in the practical (not yet deed and action,
but) enjoyment.

Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in modern times have
yet derived least profit from the more general mental culture and the deeper
conception of reason. It is still extremely ill off. The turn which the Kantian
philosophy has taken has given it greater importance: it has, and that in its
empirical condition, been claimed as the basis of metaphysics, which is to
consist of nothing but the empirical apprehension and the analysis of the
facts of human consciousness, merely as facts, just as they are given. This
position of psychology, mixing it up with forms belonging to the range of
consciousness and with anthropology, has led to no improvement in its own
condition: but it has had the further effect that, both for the mind as such,
and for metaphysics and philosophy generally, all attempts have been
abandoned to ascertain the necessity of essential and actual reality, to get at
the notion and the truth.

[pg 064]

(a) Theoretical mind.

§ 445. Intelligence135 finds itself determined: this is its apparent aspect from
which in its immediacy it starts. But as knowledge, intelligence consists in
treating what is found as its own. Its activity has to do with the empty form
—the pretence of finding reason: and its aim is to realise its concept or to be
reason actual, along with which the content is realised as rational. This
activity is cognition. The nominal knowledge, which is only certitude,
elevates itself, as reason is concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge.
The course of this elevation is itself rational, and consists in a necessary
passage (governed by the concept) of one grade or term of intelligent
activity (a so-called faculty of mind) into another. The refutation which
such cognition gives of the semblance that the rational is found, starts from
the certitude or the faith of intelligence in its capability of rational
knowledge, and in the possibility of being able to appropriate the reason,
which it and the content virtually is.

The distinction of Intelligence from Will is often incorrectly taken to mean

that each has a fixed and separate existence of its own, as if volition could
be without intelligence, or the activity of intelligence could be without will.
The possibility of a culture of the intellect which leaves the heart
untouched, as it is said, and of the heart without the intellect—of hearts
which in one-sided way want intellect, and heartless intellects—only proves
at most that bad and radically untrue existences occur. But it is not
philosophy which should take such untruths of existence and of mere
imagining for truth—take the worthless for the essential nature. A host of
other phrases used of intelligence, e.g. that it [pg 065] receives and accepts
impressions from outside, that ideas arise through the causal operations of
external things upon it, &c., belong to a point of view utterly alien to the
mental level or to the position of philosophic study.

A favourite reflectional form is that of powers and faculties of soul,

intelligence, or mind. Faculty, like power or force, is the fixed quality of
any object of thought, conceived as reflected into self. Force (§ 136) is no
doubt the infinity of form—of the inward and the outward: but its essential
finitude involves the indifference of content to form (ib. note). In this lies
the want of organic unity which by this reflectional form, treating mind as a
“lot” of forces, is brought into mind, as it is by the same method brought
into nature. Any aspect which can be distinguished in mental action is
stereotyped as an independent entity, and the mind thus made a skeleton-
like mechanical collection. It makes absolutely no difference if we
substitute the expression “activities” for powers and faculties. Isolate the
activities and you similarly make the mind a mere aggregate, and treat their
essential correlation as an external incident.

The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called cognition

(knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence inter alia knows,—besides
which it also intuites, conceives, remembers, imagines, &c. To take up such
a position is in the first instance part and parcel of that isolating of mental
activity just censured; but it is also in addition connected with the great
question of modern times, as to whether true knowledge or the knowledge
of truth is possible,—which, if answered in the negative, must lead to
abandoning the effort. The numerous aspects and reasons and modes of
phrase with which external reflection swells [pg 066] the bulk of this
question are cleared up in their place: the more external the attitude of
understanding in the question, the more diffuse it makes a simple object. At
the present place the simple concept of cognition is what confronts the quite
general assumption taken up by the question, viz. the assumption that the
possibility of true knowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption
that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecute or to abandon
cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as
intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is
therefore the actuality of intelligence. It follows from this that it is absurd to
speak of intelligence and yet at the same time of the possibility or choice of
knowing or not. But cognition is genuine, just so far as it realises itself, or
makes the concept its own. This nominal description has its concrete
meaning exactly where cognition has it. The stages of its realising activity
are intuition, conception, memory, &c.: these activities have no other
immanent meaning: their aim is solely the concept of cognition (§ 445
note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that they
are useful for something else than cognition, or that they severally procure a
cognitive satisfaction of their own; and that leads to a glorification of the
delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It is true that even as
isolated (i.e. as non-intelligent), intuition, imagination, &c. can afford a
certain satisfaction: what physical nature succeeds in doing by its
fundamental quality—its out-of-selfness,—exhibiting the elements or
factors of immanent reason external to each other,—that the intelligence can
do by voluntary act, but the same result may happen where the intelligence
is itself only natural and untrained. But the true satisfaction, it is admitted,
is only afforded by an intuition [pg 067] permeated by intellect and mind,
by rational conception, by products of imagination which are permeated by
reason and exhibit ideas—in a word, by cognitive intuition, cognitive
conception, &c. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that
intuition, conception, &c. are not isolated, and exist only as “moments” in
the totality of cognition itself.

(α) Intuition (Intelligent Perception)136.

§ 446. The mind which as soul is physically conditioned,—which as

consciousness stands to this condition on the same terms as to an outward
object,—but which as intelligence finds itself so characterised—is (1) an
inarticulate embryonic life, in which it is to itself as it were palpable and
has the whole material of its knowledge. In consequence of the immediacy
in which it is thus originally, it is in this stage only as an individual and
possesses a vulgar subjectivity. It thus appears as mind in the guise of
feeling.

If feeling formerly turned up (§ 399) as a mode of the soul's existence, the

finding of it or its immediacy was in that case essentially to be conceived as
a congenital or corporeal condition; whereas at present it is only to be taken
abstractly in the general sense of immediacy.

§ 447. The characteristic form of feeling is that though it is a mode of some

“affection,” this mode is simple. Hence feeling, even should its import be
most sterling and true, has the form of casual particularity,—not to mention
that its import may also be the most scanty and most untrue.

It is commonly enough assumed that mind has in its feeling the material of
its ideas, but the statement [pg 068] is more usually understood in a sense
the opposite of that which it has here. In contrast with the simplicity of
feeling it is usual rather to assume that the primary mental phase is
judgment generally, or the distinction of consciousness into subject and
object; and the special quality of sensation is derived from an independent
object, external or internal. With us, in the truth of mind, the mere
consciousness point of view, as opposed to true mental “idealism,” is
swallowed up, and the matter of feeling has rather been supposed already as
immanent in the mind.—It is commonly taken for granted that as regards
content there is more in feeling than in thought: this being specially
affirmed of moral and religious feelings. Now the material, which the mind
as it feels is to itself, is here the result and the mature result of a fully
organised reason: hence under the head of feeling is comprised all rational
and indeed all spiritual content whatever. But the form of selfish singleness
to which feeling reduces the mind is the lowest and worst vehicle it can
have—one in which it is not found as a free and infinitely universal
principle, but rather as subjective and private, in content and value entirely
contingent. Trained and sterling feeling is the feeling of an educated mind
which has acquired the consciousness of the true differences of things, of
their essential relationships and real characters; and it is with such a mind
that this rectified material enters into its feeling and receives this form.
Feeling is the immediate, as it were the closest, contact in which the
thinking subject can stand to a given content. Against that content the
subject re-acts first of all with its particular self-feeling, which though it
may be of more sterling value and of wider range than a onesided
intellectual standpoint, may just as likely be narrow and poor; and in any
case is the form of the particular [pg 069] and subjective. If a man on any
topic appeals not to the nature and notion of the thing, or at least to reasons
—to the generalities of common sense—but to his feeling, the only thing to
do is to let him alone, because by his behaviour he refuses to have any lot or
part in common rationality, and shuts himself up in his own isolated
subjectivity—his private and particular self.

§ 448. (2) As this immediate finding is broken up into elements, we have

the one factor in Attention—the abstract identical direction of mind (in
feeling, as also in all other more advanced developments of it)—an active
self-collection—the factor of fixing it as our own, but with an as yet only
nominal autonomy of intelligence. Apart from such attention there is
nothing for the mind. The other factor is to invest the special quality of
feeling, as contrasted with this inwardness of mind, with the character of
something existent, but as a negative or as the abstract otherness of itself.
Intelligence thus defines the content of sensation as something that is out of
itself, projects it into time and space, which are the forms in which it is
intuitive. To the view of consciousness the material is only an object of
consciousness, a relative other: from mind it receives the rational
characteristic of being its very other (§§ 147, 254).

§ 449. (3) When intelligence reaches a concrete unity of the two factors,
that is to say, when it is at once self-collected in this externally existing
material, and yet in this self-collectedness sunk in the out-of-selfness, it is
Intuition or Mental Vision.

§ 450. At and towards this its own out-of-selfness, intelligence no less

essentially directs its attention. In this its immediacy it is an awaking to
itself, a recollection of itself. Thus intuition becomes a concretion of the
material with the intelligence, which makes it its [pg 070] own, so that it no
longer needs this immediacy, no longer needs to find the content.

(β) Representation (or Mental Idea)137.

§ 451. Representation is this recollected or inwardised intuition, and as such

is the middle between that stage of intelligence where it finds itself
immediately subject to modification and that where intelligence is in its
freedom, or, as thought. The representation is the property of intelligence;
with a preponderating subjectivity, however, as its right of property is still
conditioned by contrast with the immediacy, and the representation cannot
as it stands be said to be. The path of intelligence in representations is to
render the immediacy inward, to invest itself with intuitive action in itself,
and at the same time to get rid of the subjectivity of the inwardness, and
inwardly divest itself of it; so as to be in itself in an externality of its own.
But as representation begins from intuition and the ready-found material of
intuition, the intuitional contrast still continues to affect its activity, and
makes its concrete products still “syntheses,” which do not grow to the
concrete immanence of the notion till they reach the stage of thought.

(αα) Recollection138.
§ 452. Intelligence, as it at first recollects the intuition, places the content of
feeling in its own inwardness—in a space and a time of its own. In this way
that content is (1) an image or picture, liberated from its original immediacy
and abstract singleness amongst other things, and received into the
universality of the ego. The [pg 071] image loses the full complement of
features proper to intuition, and is arbitrary or contingent, isolated, we may
say, from the external place, time, and immediate context in which the
intuition stood.

§ 453. (2) The image is of itself transient, and intelligence itself is as

attention its time and also its place, its when and where. But intelligence is
not only consciousness and actual existence, but quâ intelligence is the
subject and the potentiality of its own specialisations. The image when thus
kept in mind is no longer existent, but stored up out of consciousness.

To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world

of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in
consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which
bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat e.g. the germ as
affirmatively containing, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that come
into existence in the subsequent development of the tree. Inability to grasp a
universal like this, which, though intrinsically concrete, still continues
simple, is what has led people to talk about special fibres and areas as
receptacles of particular ideas. It was felt that what was diverse should in
the nature of things have a local habitation peculiar to itself. But whereas
the reversion of the germ from its existing specialisations to its simplicity in
a purely potential existence takes place only in another germ,—the germ of
the fruit; intelligence quâ intelligence shows the potential coming to free
existence in its development, and yet at the same time collecting itself in its
inwardness. Hence from the other point of view intelligence is to be
conceived as this sub-conscious mine, i.e. as the existent universal in which
the different has not yet been realised in its separations. And it is indeed this
potentiality which [pg 072] is the first form of universality offered in mental
representation.

§ 454. (3) An image thus abstractly treasured up needs, if it is to exist, an

actual intuition: and what is strictly called Remembrance is the reference of
the image to an intuition,—and that as a subsumption of the immediate
single intuition (impression) under what is in point of form universal, under
the representation (idea) with the same content. Thus intelligence
recognises the specific sensation and the intuition of it as what is already its
own,—in them it is still within itself: at the same time it is aware that what
is only its (primarily) internal image is also an immediate object of
intuition, by which it is authenticated. The image, which in the mine of
intelligence was only its property, now that it has been endued with
externality, comes actually into its possession. And so the image is at once
rendered distinguishable from the intuition and separable from the blank
night in which it was originally submerged. Intelligence is thus the force
which can give forth its property, and dispense with external intuition for its
existence in it. This “synthesis” of the internal image with the recollected
existence is representation proper: by this synthesis the internal now has the
qualification of being able to be presented before intelligence and to have
its existence in it.

(ββ) Imagination139.

§ 455. (1) The intelligence which is active in this possession is the

reproductive imagination, where the images issue from the inward world
belonging to the ego, which is now the power over them. The images are in
the first instance referred to this external, immediate [pg 073] time and
space which is treasured up along with them. But it is solely in the
conscious subject, where it is treasured up, that the image has the
individuality in which the features composing it are conjoined: whereas
their original concretion, i.e. at first only in space and time, as a unit of
intuition, has been broken up. The content reproduced, belonging as it does
to the self-identical unity of intelligence, and an out-put from its universal
mine, has a general idea (representation) to supply the link of association
for the images which according to circumstances are more abstract or more
concrete ideas.

The so-called laws of the association of ideas were objects of great interest,
especially during that outburst of empirical psychology which was
contemporaneous with the decline of philosophy. In the first place, it is not
Ideas (properly so called) which are associated. Secondly, these modes of
relation are not laws, just for the reason that there are so many laws about
the same thing, as to suggest a caprice and a contingency opposed to the
very nature of law. It is a matter of chance whether the link of association is
something pictorial, or an intellectual category, such as likeness and
contrast, reason and consequence. The train of images and representations
suggested by association is the sport of vacant-minded ideation, where,
though intelligence shows itself by a certain formal universality, the matter
is entirely pictorial.—Image and idea, if we leave out of account the more
precise definition of those forms given above, present also a distinction in
content. The former is the more consciously-concrete idea, whereas the idea
(representation), whatever be its content (from image, notion, or idea), has
always the peculiarity, though belonging to intelligence, of being in respect
of its content given and immediate. It is still [pg 074] true of this idea or
representation, as of all intelligence, that it finds its material, as a matter of
fact, to be so and so; and the universality which the aforesaid material
receives by ideation is still abstract. Mental representation is the mean in
the syllogism of the elevation of intelligence, the link between the two
significations of self-relatedness—viz. being and universality, which in
consciousness receive the title of object and subject. Intelligence
complements what is merely found by the attribution of universality, and
the internal and its own by the attribution of being, but a being of its own
institution. (On the distinction of representations and thoughts, see Introd.
to the Logic, § 20 note.)

Abstraction, which occurs in the ideational activity by which general ideas

are produced (and ideas quâ ideas virtually have the form of generality), is
frequently explained as the incidence of many similar images one upon
another and is supposed to be thus made intelligible. If this super-imposing
is to be no mere accident and without principle, a force of attraction in like
images must be assumed, or something of the sort, which at the same time
would have the negative power of rubbing off the dissimilar elements
against each other. This force is really intelligence itself,—the self-identical
ego which by its internalising recollection gives the images ipso facto
generality, and subsumes the single intuition under the already internalised
image (§ 453).
§ 456. Thus even the association of ideas is to be treated as a subsumption
of the individual under the universal, which forms their connecting link. But
here intelligence is more than merely a general form: its inwardness is an
internally definite, concrete subjectivity with a substance and value of its
own, derived from some interest, some latent concept or Ideal principle, so
far as we may by anticipation speak of such. Intelligence [pg 075] is the
power which wields the stores of images and ideas belonging to it, and
which thus (2) freely combines and subsumes these stores in obedience to
its peculiar tenor. Such is creative imagination140—symbolic, allegoric, or
poetical imagination—where the intelligence gets a definite embodiment in
this store of ideas and informs them with its general tone. These more or
less concrete, individualised creations are still “syntheses”: for the material,
in which the subjective principles and ideas get a mentally pictorial
existence, is derived from the data of intuition.

§ 457. In creative imagination intelligence has been so far perfected as to

need no helps for intuition. Its self-sprung ideas have pictorial existence.
This pictorial creation of its intuitive spontaneity is subjective—still lacks
the side of existence. But as the creation unites the internal idea with the
vehicle of materialisation, intelligence has therein implicitly returned both
to identical self-relation and to immediacy. As reason, its first start was to
appropriate the immediate datum in itself (§§ 445, 455), i.e. to universalise
it; and now its action as reason (§ 458) is from the present point directed
towards giving the character of an existent to what in it has been perfected
to concrete auto-intuition. In other words, it aims at making itself be and be
a fact. Acting on this view, it is self-uttering, intuition-producing: the
imagination which creates signs.

Productive imagination is the centre in which the universal and being, one's
own and what is picked up, internal and external, are completely welded
into one. The preceding “syntheses” of intuition, recollection, &c., are
unifications of the same factors, but they are “syntheses”; it is not till
creative imagination that intelligence ceases to be the vague mine and the
universal, [pg 076] and becomes an individuality, a concrete subjectivity, in
which the self-reference is defined both to being and to universality. The
creations of imagination are on all hands recognised as such combinations
of the mind's own and inward with the matter of intuition; what further and
more definite aspects they have is a matter for other departments. For the
present this internal studio of intelligence is only to be looked at in these
abstract aspects.—Imagination, when regarded as the agency of this
unification, is reason, but only a nominal reason, because the matter or
theme it embodies is to imagination quâ imagination a matter of
indifference; whilst reason quâ reason also insists upon the truth of its
content.

Another point calling for special notice is that, when imagination elevates
the internal meaning to an image and intuition, and this is expressed by
saying that it gives the former the character of an existent, the phrase must
not seem surprising that intelligence makes itself be as a thing; for its ideal
import is itself, and so is the aspect which it imposes upon it. The image
produced by imagination of an object is a bare mental or subjective
intuition: in the sign or symbol it adds intuitability proper; and in
mechanical memory it completes, so far as it is concerned, this form of
being.

§ 458. In this unity (initiated by intelligence) of an independent

representation with an intuition, the matter of the latter is, in the first
instance, something accepted, somewhat immediate or given (e.g. the
colour of the cockade, &c.). But in the fusion of the two elements, the
intuition does not count positively or as representing itself, but as
representative of something else. It is an image, which has received as its
soul and meaning an independent mental representation. This intuition is
the Sign.

[pg 077]
The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different import
from what naturally belongs to it; it is the pyramid into which a foreign soul
has been conveyed, and where it is conserved. The sign is different from the
symbol: for in the symbol the original characters (in essence and
conception) of the visible object are more or less identical with the import
which it bears as symbol; whereas in the sign, strictly so-called, the natural
attributes of the intuition, and the connotation of which it is a sign, have
nothing to do with each other. Intelligence therefore gives proof of wider
choice and ampler authority in the use of intuitions when it treats them as
designatory (significative) rather than as symbolical.

In logic and psychology, signs and language are usually foisted in

somewhere as an appendix, without any trouble being taken to display their
necessity and systematic place in the economy of intelligence. The right
place for the sign is that just given: where intelligence—which as intuiting
generates the form of time and space, but is apparently recipient of sensible
matter, out of which it forms ideas—now gives its own original ideas a
definite existence from itself, treating the intuition (or time and space as
filled full) as its own property, deleting the connotation which properly and
naturally belongs to it, and conferring on it an other connotation as its soul
and import. This sign-creating activity may be distinctively named
“productive” Memory (the primarily abstract “Mnemosyne”); since
memory, which in ordinary life is often used as interchangeable and
synonymous with remembrance (recollection), and even with conception
and imagination, has always to do with signs only.

§ 459. The intuition—in its natural phase a something given and given in
space—acquires, when employed as [pg 078] a sign, the peculiar
characteristic of existing only as superseded and sublimated. Such is the
negativity of intelligence; and thus the truer phase of the intuition used as a
sign is existence in time (but its existence vanishes in the moment of being),
and if we consider the rest of its external psychical quality, its institution by
intelligence, but an institution growing out of its (anthropological) own
naturalness. This institution of the natural is the vocal note, where the
inward idea manifests itself in adequate utterance. The vocal note which
receives further articulation to express specific ideas—speech and, its
system, language—gives to sensations, intuitions, conceptions, a second
and higher existence than they naturally possess,—invests them with the
right of existence in the ideational realm.

Language here comes under discussion only in the special aspect of a

product of intelligence for manifesting its ideas in an external medium. If
language had to be treated in its concrete nature, it would be necessary for
its vocabulary or material part to recall the anthropological or psycho-
physiological point of view (§ 401), and for the grammar or formal portion
to anticipate the standpoint of analytic understanding. With regard to the
elementary material of language, while on one hand the theory of mere
accident has disappeared, on the other the principle of imitation has been
restricted to the slight range it actually covers—that of vocal objects. Yet
one may still hear the German language praised for its wealth—that wealth
consisting in its special expression for special sounds—Rauschen, Sausen,
Knarren, &c.;—there have been collected more than a hundred such words,
perhaps: the humour of the moment creates fresh ones when it pleases. Such
superabundance in the realm of sense and of triviality contributes nothing to
form the real wealth of a cultivated [pg 079] language. The strictly raw
material of language itself depends more upon an inward symbolism than a
symbolism referring to external objects; it depends, i.e. on anthropological
articulation, as it were the posture in the corporeal act of oral utterance. For
each vowel and consonant accordingly, as well as for their more abstract
elements (the posture of lips, palate, tongue in each) and for their
combinations, people have tried to find the appropriate signification. But
these dull sub-conscious beginnings are deprived of their original
importance and prominence by new influences, it may be by external
agencies or by the needs of civilisation. Having been originally sensuous
intuitions, they are reduced to signs, and thus have only traces left of their
original meaning, if it be not altogether extinguished. As to the formal
element, again, it is the work of analytic intellect which informs language
with its categories: it is this logical instinct which gives rise to grammar.
The study of languages still in their original state, which we have first really
begun to make acquaintance with in modern times, has shown on this point
that they contain a very elaborate grammar and express distinctions which
are lost or have been largely obliterated in the languages of more civilised
nations. It seems as if the language of the most civilised nations has the
most imperfect grammar, and that the same language has a more perfect
grammar when the nation is in a more uncivilised state than when it reaches
a higher civilisation. (Cf. W. von Humboldt's Essay on the Dual.)

In speaking of vocal (which is the original) language, we may touch, only in

passing, upon written language,—a further development in the particular
sphere of language which borrows the help of an externally practical
activity. It is from the province of immediate [pg 080] spatial intuition to
which written language proceeds that it takes and produces the signs (§
454). In particular, hieroglyphics uses spatial figures to designate ideas;
alphabetical writing, on the other hand, uses them to designate vocal notes
which are already signs. Alphabetical writing thus consists of signs of signs,
—the words or concrete signs of vocal language being analysed into their
simple elements, which severally receive designation.—Leibnitz's practical
mind misled him to exaggerate the advantages which a complete written
language, formed on the hieroglyphic method (and hieroglyphics are used
even where there is alphabetic writing, as in our signs for the numbers, the
planets, the chemical elements, &c.), would have as a universal language
for the intercourse of nations and especially of scholars. But we may be
sure that it was rather the intercourse of nations (as was probably the case in
Phoenicia, and still takes place in Canton—see Macartney's Travels by
Staunton) which occasioned the need of alphabetical writing and led to its
formation. At any rate a comprehensive hieroglyphic language for ever
completed is impracticable. Sensible objects no doubt admit of permanent
signs; but, as regards signs for mental objects, the progress of thought and
the continual development of logic lead to changes in the views of their
internal relations and thus also of their nature; and this would involve the
rise of a new hieroglyphical denotation. Even in the case of sense-objects it
happens that their names, i.e. their signs in vocal language, are frequently
changed, as e.g. in chemistry and mineralogy. Now that it has been
forgotten what names properly are, viz. externalities which of themselves
have no sense, and only get signification as signs, and now that, instead of
names proper, people ask for terms expressing a sort of definition, which is
[pg 081] frequently changed capriciously and fortuitously, the
denomination, i.e. the composite name formed of signs of their generic
characters or other supposed characteristic properties, is altered in
accordance with the differences of view with regard to the genus or other
supposed specific property. It is only a stationary civilisation, like the
Chinese, which admits of the hieroglyphic language of that nation; and its
method of writing moreover can only be the lot of that small part of a nation
which is in exclusive possession of mental culture.—The progress of the
vocal language depends most closely on the habit of alphabetical writing;
by means of which only does vocal language acquire the precision and
purity of its articulation. The imperfection of the Chinese vocal language is
notorious: numbers of its words possess several utterly different meanings,
as many as ten and twenty, so that, in speaking, the distinction is made
perceptible merely by accent and intensity, by speaking low and soft or
crying out. The European, learning to speak Chinese, falls into the most
ridiculous blunders before he has mastered these absurd refinements of
accentuation. Perfection here consists in the opposite of that parler sans
accent which in Europe is justly required of an educated speaker. The
hieroglyphic mode of writing keeps the Chinese vocal language from
reaching that objective precision which is gained in articulation by
alphabetic writing.

Alphabetic writing is on all accounts the more intelligent: in it the word—

the mode, peculiar to the intellect, of uttering its ideas most worthily—is
brought to consciousness and made an object of reflection. Engaging the
attention of intelligence, as it does, it is analysed; the work of sign-making
is reduced to its few simple elements (the primary postures of articulation)
in which the sense-factor in speech is brought to [pg 082] the form of
universality, at the same time that in this elementary phase it acquires
complete precision and purity. Thus alphabetic writing retains at the same
time the advantage of vocal language, that the ideas have names strictly so
called: the name is the simple sign for the exact idea, i.e. the simple plain
idea, not decomposed into its features and compounded out of them.
Hieroglyphics, instead of springing from the direct analysis of sensible
signs, like alphabetic writing, arise from an antecedent analysis of ideas.
Thus a theory readily arises that all ideas may be reduced to their elements,
or simple logical terms, so that from the elementary signs chosen to express
these (as, in the case of the Chinese Koua, the simple straight stroke, and
the stroke broken into two parts) a hieroglyphic system would be generated
by their composition. This feature of hieroglyphic—the analytical
designations of ideas—which misled Leibnitz to regard it as preferable to
alphabetic writing is rather in antagonism with the fundamental desideratum
of language,—the name. To want a name means that for the immediate idea
(which, however ample a connotation it may include, is still for the mind
simple in the name), we require a simple immediate sign which for its own
sake does not suggest anything, and has for its sole function to signify and
represent sensibly the simple idea as such. It is not merely the image-loving
and image-limited intelligence that lingers over the simplicity of ideas and
redintegrates them from the more abstract factors into which they have been
analysed: thought too reduces to the form of a simple thought the concrete
connotation which it “resumes” and reunites from the mere aggregate of
attributes to which analysis has reduced it. Both alike require such signs,
simple in respect of their meaning: signs, which though consisting of
several [pg 083] letters or syllables and even decomposed into such, yet do
not exhibit a combination of several ideas.—What has been stated is the
principle for settling the value of these written languages. It also follows
that in hieroglyphics the relations of concrete mental ideas to one another
must necessarily be tangled and perplexed, and that the analysis of these
(and the proximate results of such analysis must again be analysed) appears
to be possible in the most various and divergent ways. Every divergence in
analysis would give rise to another formation of the written name; just as in
modern times (as already noted, even in the region of sense) muriatic acid
has undergone several changes of name. A hieroglyphic written language
would require a philosophy as stationary as is the civilisation of the
Chinese.

What has been said shows the inestimable and not sufficiently appreciated
educational value of learning to read and write an alphabetic character. It
leads the mind from the sensibly concrete image to attend to the more
formal structure of the vocal word and its abstract elements, and contributes
much to give stability and independence to the inward realm of mental life.
Acquired habit subsequently effaces the peculiarity by which alphabetic
writing appears, in the interest of vision, as a roundabout way to ideas by
means of audibility; it makes them a sort of hieroglyphic to us, so that in
using them we need not consciously realise them by means of tones,
whereas people unpractised in reading utter aloud what they read in order to
catch its meaning in the sound. Thus, while (with the faculty which
transformed alphabetic writing into hieroglyphics) the capacity of
abstraction gained by the first practice remains, hieroglyphic reading is of
itself a deaf reading and a dumb writing. It is true that the audible (which
[pg 084] is in time) and the visible (which is in space), each have their own
basis, one no less authoritative than the other. But in the case of alphabetic
writing there is only a single basis: the two aspects occupy their rightful
relation to each other: the visible language is related to the vocal only as a
sign, and intelligence expresses itself immediately and unconditionally by
speaking.—The instrumental function of the comparatively non-sensuous
element of tone for all ideational work shows itself further as peculiarly
important in memory which forms the passage from representation to
thought.

§ 460. The name, combining the intuition (an intellectual production) with
its signification, is primarily a single transient product; and conjunction of
the idea (which is inward) with the intuition (which is outward) is itself
outward. The reduction of this outwardness to inwardness is (verbal)
Memory.

(γγ) Memory141.

§ 461. Under the shape of memory the course of intelligence passes through
the same inwardising (recollecting) functions, as regards the intuition of the
word, as representation in general does in dealing with the first immediate
intuition (§ 451). (1) Making its own the synthesis achieved in the sign,
intelligence, by this inwardising (memorising) elevates the single synthesis
to a universal, i.e. permanent, synthesis, in which name and meaning are for
it objectively united, and renders the intuition (which the name originally
is) a representation. Thus the import (connotation) and sign, being
identified, form one representation: the representation in its inwardness is
rendered concrete and gets existence for its import: all this being the work
of memory which retains names (retentive Memory).

[pg 085]
§ 462. The name is thus the thing so far as it exists and counts in the
ideational realm. (2) In the name, Reproductive memory has and recognises
the thing, and with the thing it has the name, apart from intuition and image.
The name, as giving an existence to the content in intelligence, is the
externality of intelligence to itself; and the inwardising or recollection of
the name, i.e. of an intuition of intellectual origin, is at the same time a self-
externalisation to which intelligence reduces itself on its own ground. The
association of the particular names lies in the meaning of the features
sensitive, representative, or cogitant,—series of which the intelligence
traverses as it feels, represents, or thinks.
Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its
image even: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimaged simple
representation. We think in names.

The recent attempts—already, as they deserved, forgotten—to rehabilitate

the Mnemonic of the ancients, consist in transforming names into images,
and thus again deposing memory to the level of imagination. The place of
the power of memory is taken by a permanent tableau of a series of images,
fixed in the imagination, to which is then attached the series of ideas
forming the composition to be learned by rote. Considering the
heterogeneity between the import of these ideas and those permanent
images, and the speed with which the attachment has to be made, the
attachment cannot be made otherwise than by shallow, silly, and utterly
accidental links. Not merely is the mind put to the torture of being worried
by idiotic stuff, but what is thus learnt by rote is just as quickly forgotten,
seeing that the same tableau is used for getting by rote every other series of
ideas, and so those previously attached to it are effaced. What is
mnemonically [pg 086] impressed is not like what is retained in memory
really got by heart, i.e. strictly produced from within outwards, from the
deep pit of the ego, and thus recited, but is, so to speak, read off the tableau
of fancy.—Mnemonic is connected with the common prepossession about
memory, in comparison with fancy and imagination; as if the latter were a
higher and more intellectual activity than memory. On the contrary, memory
has ceased to deal with an image derived from intuition,—the immediate
and incomplete mode of intelligence; it has rather to do with an object
which is the product of intelligence itself,—such a without book142 as
remains locked up in the within-book143 of intelligence, and is, within
intelligence, only its outward and existing side.

§ 463. (3) As the interconnexion of the names lies in the meaning, the
conjunction of their meaning with the reality as names is still an (external)
synthesis; and intelligence in this its externality has not made a complete
and simple return into self. But intelligence is the universal,—the single
plain truth of its particular self-divestments; and its consummated
appropriation of them abolishes that distinction between meaning and
name. This extreme inwardising of representation is the supreme self-
divestment of intelligence, in which it renders itself the mere being, the
universal space of names as such, i.e. of meaningless words. The ego,
which is this abstract being, is, because subjectivity, at the same time the
power over the different names,—the link which, having nothing in itself,
fixes in itself series of them and keeps them in stable order. So far as they
merely are, and intelligence is here itself this being of theirs, its power is a
merely abstract subjectivity,—memory; which, on account of the complete
[pg 087] externality in which the members of such series stand to one
another, and because it is itself this externality (subjective though that be),
is called mechanical (§ 195).

A composition is, as we know, not thoroughly conned by rote, until one

attaches no meaning to the words. The recitation of what has been thus got
by heart is therefore of course accentless. The correct accent, if it is
introduced, suggests the meaning: but this introduction of the signification
of an idea disturbs the mechanical nexus and therefore easily throws out the
reciter. The faculty of conning by rote series of words, with no principle
governing their succession, or which are separately meaningless, e.g. a
series of proper names, is so supremely marvellous, because it is the very
essence of mind to have its wits about it; whereas in this case the mind is
estranged in itself, and its action is like machinery. But it is only as uniting
subjectivity with objectivity that the mind has its wits about it. Whereas in
the case before us, after it has in intuition been at first so external as to pick
up its facts ready-made, and in representation inwardises or recollects this
datum and makes it its own,—it proceeds as memory to make itself external
in itself, so that what is its own assumes the guise of something found. Thus
one of the two dynamic factors of thought, viz. objectivity, is here put in
intelligence itself as a quality of it.—It is only a step further to treat
memory as mechanical—the act implying no intelligence—in which case it
is only justified by its uses, its indispensability perhaps for other purposes
and functions of mind. But by so doing we overlook the proper signification
it has in the mind.

§ 464. If it is to be the fact and true objectivity, the mere name as an

existent requires something else,—to be interpreted by the representing
intellect. Now in the shape of mechanical memory, intelligence is at once
[pg 088] that external objectivity and the meaning. In this way intelligence
is explicitly made an existence of this identity, i.e. it is explicitly active as
such an identity which as reason it is implicitly. Memory is in this manner
the passage into the function of thought, which no longer has a meaning, i.e.
its objectivity is no longer severed from the subjective, and its inwardness
does not need to go outside for its existence.

The German language has etymologically assigned memory (Gedächtniß),

of which it has become a foregone conclusion to speak contemptuously, the
high position of direct kindred with thought (Gedanke).—It is not matter of
chance that the young have a better memory than the old, nor is their
memory solely exercised for the sake of utility. The young have a good
memory because they have not yet reached the stage of reflection; their
memory is exercised with or without design so as to level the ground of
their inner life to pure being or to pure space in which the fact, the implicit
content, may reign and unfold itself with no antithesis to a subjective
inwardness. Genuine ability is in youth generally combined with a good
memory. But empirical statements of this sort help little towards a
knowledge of what memory intrinsically is. To comprehend the position
and meaning of memory and to understand its organic interconnexion with
thought is one of the hardest points, and hitherto one quite unregarded in
the theory of mind. Memory quâ memory is itself the merely external
mode, or merely existential aspect of thought, and thus needs a
complementary element. The passage from it to thought is to our view and
implicitly the identity of reason with this existential mode: an identity from
which it follows that reason only exists in a subject, and as the function of
that subject. Thus active reason is Thinking.

[pg 089]

(γ) Thinking144.

§ 465. Intelligence is recognitive: it cognises an intuition, but only because

that intuition is already its own (§ 454); and in the name it re-discovers the
fact (§ 462): but now it finds its universal in the double signification of the
universal as such, and of the universal as immediate or as being,—finds i.e.
the genuine universal which is its own unity overlapping and including its
other, viz. being. Thus intelligence is explicitly, and on its own part
cognitive: virtually it is the universal,—its product (the thought) is the
thing: it is a plain identity of subjective and objective. It knows that what is
thought, is, and that what is, only is in so far as it is a thought (§ 521); the
thinking of intelligence is to have thoughts: these are as its content and
object.

§ 466. But cognition by thought is still in the first instance formal: the
universality and its being is the plain subjectivity of intelligence. The
thoughts therefore are not yet fully and freely determinate, and the
representations which have been inwardised to thoughts are so far still the
given content.

§ 467. As dealing with this given content, thought is (α) understanding with
its formal identity, working up the representations, that have been
memorised, into species, genera, laws, forces, &c., in short into categories,
—thus indicating that the raw material does not get the truth of its being
save in these thought-forms. As intrinsically infinite negativity, thought is
(β) essentially an act of partition,—judgment, which however does not
break up the concept again into the old antithesis of universality and being,
but distinguishes on the lines supplied by the interconnexions peculiar to
the concept. Thirdly (γ), thought supersedes the formal distinction and [pg
090] institutes at the same time an identity of the differences,—thus being
nominal reason or inferential understanding. Intelligence, as the act of
thought, cognises. And (α) understanding out of its generalities (the
categories) explains the individual, and is then said to comprehend or
understand itself: (β) in the judgment it explains the individual to be an
universal (species, genus). In these forms the content appears as given: (γ)
but in inference (syllogism) it characterises a content from itself, by
superseding that form-difference. With the perception of the necessity, the
last immediacy still attaching to formal thought has vanished.

In Logic there was thought, but in its implicitness, and as reason develops
itself in this distinction-lacking medium. So in consciousness thought
occurs as a stage (§ 437 note). Here reason is as the truth of the antithetical
distinction, as it had taken shape within the mind's own limits. Thought thus
recurs again and again in these different parts of philosophy, because these
parts are different only through the medium they are in and the antithesis
they imply; while thought is this one and the same centre, to which as to
their truth the antithesis return.

§ 468. Intelligence which as theoretical appropriates an immediate mode of

being, is, now that it has completed taking possession, in its own property:
the last negation of immediacy has implicitly required that the intelligence
shall itself determine its content. Thus thought, as free notion, is now also
free in point of content. But when intelligence is aware that it is
determinative of the content, which is its mode no less than it is a mode of
being, it is Will.

[pg 091]
(b) Mind Practical . 145

§ 469. As will, the mind is aware that it is the author of its own conclusions,
the origin of its self-fulfilment. Thus fulfilled, this independency or
individuality form the side of existence or of reality for the Idea of mind.
As will, the mind steps into actuality; whereas as cognition it is on the soil
of notional generality. Supplying its own content, the will is self-possessed,
and in the widest sense free: this is its characteristic trait. Its finitude lies in
the formalism that the spontaneity of its self-fulfilment means no more than
a general and abstract ownness, not yet identified with matured reason. It is
the function of the essential will to bring liberty to exist in the formal will,
and it is therefore the aim of that formal will to fill itself with its essential
nature, i.e. to make liberty its pervading character, content, and aim, as well
as its sphere of existence. The essential freedom of will is, and must always
be, a thought: hence the way by which will can make itself objective mind
is to rise to be a thinking will,—to give itself the content which it can only
have as it thinks itself.

True liberty, in the shape of moral life, consists in the will finding its
purpose in a universal content, not in subjective or selfish interests. But
such a content is only possible in thought and through thought: it is nothing
short of absurd to seek to banish thought from the moral, religious, and law-
abiding life.

§ 470. Practical mind, considered at first as formal or immediate will,

contains a double ought—(1) in the contrast which the new mode of being
projected outward by the will offers to the immediate positivity of its old
existence and condition,—an antagonism which in [pg 092] consciousness
grows to correlation with external objects. (2) That first self-determination,
being itself immediate, is not at once elevated into a thinking universality:
the latter, therefore, virtually constitutes an obligation on the former in point
of form, as it may also constitute it in point of matter;—a distinction which
only exists for the observer.

(α) Practical Sense or Feeling146.

§ 471. The autonomy of the practical mind at first is immediate and

therefore formal, i.e. it finds itself as an individuality determined in its
inward nature. It is thus “practical feeling,” or instinct of action. In this
phase, as it is at bottom a subjectivity simply identical with reason, it has no
doubt a rational content, but a content which as it stands is individual, and
for that reason also natural, contingent and subjective,—a content which
may be determined quite as much by mere personalities of want and
opinion, &c., and by the subjectivity which selfishly sets itself against the
universal, as it may be virtually in conformity with reason.

An appeal is sometimes made to the sense (feeling) of right and morality, as

well as of religion, which man is alleged to possess,—to his benevolent
dispositions,—and even to his heart generally,—i.e. to the subject so far as
the various practical feelings are in it all combined. So far as this appeal
implies (1) that these ideas are immanent in his own self, and (2) that when
feeling is opposed to the logical understanding, it, and not the partial
abstractions of the latter, may be the totality—the appeal has a legitimate
meaning. But on the other hand feeling too may be onesided, unessential
and bad. The rational, which exists in the shape of rationality when it is
apprehended by thought, is the same content [pg 093] as the good practical
feeling has, but presented in its universality and necessity, in its objectivity
and truth.

Thus it is on the one hand silly to suppose that in the passage from feeling
to law and duty there is any loss of import and excellence; it is this passage
which lets feeling first reach its truth. It is equally silly to consider intellect
as superfluous or even harmful to feeling, heart, and will; the truth and,
what is the same thing, the actual rationality of the heart and will can only
be at home in the universality of intellect, and not in the singleness of
feeling as feeling. If feelings are of the right sort, it is because of their
quality or content,—which is right only so far as it is intrinsically universal
or has its source in the thinking mind. The difficulty for the logical intellect
consists in throwing off the separation it has arbitrarily imposed between
the several faculties of feeling and thinking mind, and coming to see that in
the human being there is only one reason, in feeling, volition, and thought.
Another difficulty connected with this is found in the fact that the Ideas
which are the special property of the thinking mind, viz. God, law and
morality, can also be felt. But feeling is only the form of the immediate and
peculiar individuality of the subject, in which these facts, like any other
objective facts (which consciousness also sets over against itself), may be
placed.

On the other hand, it is suspicious or even worse to cling to feeling and

heart in place of the intelligent rationality of law, right and duty; because all
that the former holds more than the latter is only the particular subjectivity
with its vanity and caprice. For the same reason it is out of place in a
scientific treatment of the feelings to deal with anything beyond their form,
and to discuss their content; for the latter, when thought, is precisely what
constitutes, in their universality and [pg 094] necessity, the rights and duties
which are the true works of mental autonomy. So long as we study practical
feelings and dispositions specially, we have only to deal with the selfish,
bad, and evil; it is these alone which belong to the individuality which
retains its opposition to the universal: their content is the reverse of rights
and duties, and precisely in that way do they—but only in antithesis to the
latter—retain a speciality of their own.

§ 472. The “Ought” of practical feeling is the claim of its essential

autonomy to control some existing mode of fact—which is assumed to be
worth nothing save as adapted to that claim. But as both, in their
immediacy, lack objective determination, this relation of the requirement to
existent fact is the utterly subjective and superficial feeling of pleasant or
unpleasant.

Delight, joy, grief, &c., shame, repentance, contentment, &c., are partly
only modifications of the formal “practical feeling” in general, but are
partly different in the features that give the special tone and character mode
to their “Ought.”
The celebrated question as to the origin of evil in the world, so far at least
as evil is understood to mean what is disagreeable and painful merely, arises
on this stage of the formal practical feeling. Evil is nothing but the
incompatibility between what is and what ought to be. “Ought” is an
ambiguous term,—indeed infinitely so, considering that casual aims may
also come under the form of Ought. But where the objects sought are thus
casual, evil only executes what is rightfully due to the vanity and nullity of
their planning: for they themselves were radically evil. The finitude of life
and mind is seen in their judgment: the contrary which is separated from
them they also have as a negative in them, and thus they are the
contradiction called evil. In the dead there is neither evil nor pain: for in
inorganic [pg 095] nature the intelligible unity (concept) does not confront
its existence and does not in the difference at the same time remain its
permanent subject. Whereas in life, and still more in mind, we have this
immanent distinction present: hence arises the Ought: and this negativity,
subjectivity, ego, freedom are the principles of evil and pain. Jacob Böhme
viewed egoity (selfhood) as pain and torment, and as the fountain of nature
and of spirit.

(β) The Impulses and Choice147.

§ 473. The practical ought is a “real” judgment. Will, which is essentially

self-determination, finds in the conformity—as immediate and merely
found to hand—of the existing mode to its requirement a negation, and
something inappropriate to it. If the will is to satisfy itself, if the implicit
unity of the universality and the special mode is to be realised, the
conformity of its inner requirement and of the existent thing ought to be its
act and institution. The will, as regards the form of its content, is at first still
a natural will, directly identical with its specific mode:—natural impulse
and inclination. Should, however, the totality of the practical spirit throw
itself into a single one of the many restricted forms of impulse, each being
always in conflict to another, it is passion.

§ 474. Inclinations and passions embody the same constituent features as

the practical feeling. Thus, while on one hand they are based on the rational
nature of the mind; they on the other, as part and parcel of the still
subjective and single will, are infected with contingency, and appear as
particular to stand to the individual and to each other in an external relation
and with a necessity which creates bondage.

[pg 096]
The special note in passion is its restriction to one special mode of volition,
in which the whole subjectivity of the individual is merged, be the value of
that mode what it may. In consequence of this formalism, passion is neither
good nor bad; the title only states that a subject has thrown his whole soul,
—his interests of intellect, talent, character, enjoyment,—on one aim and
object. Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished
without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocritical
moralising which inveighs against the form of passion as such.

But with regard to the inclinations, the question is directly raised, Which
are good and bad?—Up to what degree the good continue good;—and (as
there are many, each with its private range) In what way have they, being all
in one subject and hardly all, as experience shows, admitting of
gratification, to suffer at least reciprocal restriction? And, first of all, as
regards the numbers of these impulses and propensities, the case is much
the same as with the psychical powers, whose aggregate is to form the mind
theoretical,—an aggregate which is now increased by the host of impulses.
The nominal rationality of impulse and propensity lies merely in their
general impulse not to be subjective merely, but to get realised, overcoming
the subjectivity by the subject's own agency. Their genuine rationality
cannot reveal its secret to a method of outer reflection which pre-supposes a
number of independent innate tendencies and immediate instincts, and
therefore is wanting in a single principle and final purpose for them. But the
immanent “reflection” of mind itself carries it beyond their particularity and
their natural immediacy, and gives their contents a rationality and
objectivity, in which they exist as necessary ties of social relation, as rights
and duties. It is this objectification which [pg 097] evinces their real value,
their mutual connexions, and their truth. And thus it was a true perception
when Plato (especially including as he did the mind's whole nature under its
right) showed that the full reality of justice could be exhibited only in the
objective phase of justice, viz. in the construction of the State as the ethical
life.
The answer to the question, therefore, What are the good and rational
propensities, and how they are to be co-ordinated with each other? resolves
itself into an exposition of the laws and forms of common life produced by
the mind when developing itself as objective mind—a development in
which the content of autonomous action loses its contingency and
optionality. The discussion of the true intrinsic worth of the impulses,
inclinations, and passions is thus essentially the theory of legal, moral, and
social duties.

§ 475. The subject is the act of satisfying impulses, an act of (at least)
formal rationality, as it translates them from the subjectivity of content
(which so far is purpose) into objectivity, where the subject is made to close
with itself. If the content of the impulse is distinguished as the thing or
business from this act of carrying it out, and we regard the thing which has
been brought to pass as containing the element of subjective individuality
and its action, this is what is called the interest. Nothing therefore is
brought about without interest.

An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which executes
this aim: unless the subject were in this way in the most disinterested
action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be no action at all.—
The impulses and inclinations are sometimes depreciated by being
contrasted with the baseless chimera of a happiness, the free gift of nature,
where [pg 098] wants are supposed to find their satisfaction without the
agent doing anything to produce a conformity between immediate existence
and his own inner requirements. They are sometimes contrasted, on the
whole to their disadvantage, with the morality of duty for duty's sake. But
impulse and passion are the very life-blood of all action: they are needed if
the agent is really to be in his aim and the execution thereof. The morality
concerns the content of the aim, which as such is the universal, an inactive
thing, that finds its actualising in the agent; and finds it only when the aim
is immanent in the agent, is his interest and—should it claim to engross his
whole efficient subjectivity—his passion.

§ 476. The will, as thinking and implicitly free, distinguishes itself from the
particularity of the impulses, and places itself as simple subjectivity of
thought above their diversified content. It is thus “reflecting” will.
§ 477. Such a particularity of impulse has thus ceased to be a mere datum:
the reflective will now sees it as its own, because it closes with it and thus
gives itself specific individuality and actuality. It is now on the standpoint
of choosing between inclinations, and is option or choice.

§ 478. Will as choice claims to be free, reflected into itself as the negativity
of its merely immediate autonomy. However, as the content, in which its
former universality concludes itself to actuality, is nothing but the content
of the impulses and appetites, it is actual only as a subjective and contingent
will. It realises itself in a particularity, which it regards at the same time as a
nullity, and finds a satisfaction in what it has at the same time emerged
from. As thus contradictory, it is the process of distracting and suspending
[pg 099] one desire or enjoyment by another,—and one satisfaction, which
is just as much no satisfaction, by another, without end. But the truth of the
particular satisfactions is the universal, which under the name of happiness
the thinking will makes its aim.

(γ) Happiness148.

§ 479. In this idea, which reflection and comparison have educed, of a

universal satisfaction, the impulses, so far as their particularity goes, are
reduced to a mere negative; and it is held that in part they are to be
sacrificed to each other for the behoof that aim, partly sacrificed to that aim
directly, either altogether or in part. Their mutual limitation, on one hand,
proceeds from a mixture of qualitative and quantitative considerations: on
the other hand, as happiness has its sole affirmative contents in the springs
of action, it is on them that the decision turns, and it is the subjective feeling
and good pleasure which must have the casting vote as to where happiness
is to be placed.

§ 480. Happiness is the mere abstract and merely imagined universality of

things desired,—a universality which only ought to be. But the particularity
of the satisfaction which just as much is as it is abolished, and the abstract
singleness, the option which gives or does not give itself (as it pleases) an
aim in happiness, find their truth in the intrinsic universality of the will, i.e.
its very autonomy or freedom. In this way choice is will only as pure
subjectivity, which is pure and concrete at once, by having for its contents
and aim only that infinite mode of being—freedom itself. In this truth of its
autonomy, where concept and object are one, the will is an actually free
will.

[pg 100]

Free Mind . 149

§ 481. Actual free will is the unity of theoretical and practical mind: a free
will, which realises its own freedom of will now that the formalism,
fortuitousness, and contractedness of the practical content up to this point
have been superseded. By superseding the adjustments of means therein
contained, the will is the immediate individuality self-instituted,—an
individuality, however, also purified of all that interferes with its
universalism, i.e. with freedom itself. This universalism the will has as its
object and aim, only so far as it thinks itself, knows this its concept, and is
will as free intelligence.

§ 482. The mind which knows itself as free and wills itself as this its object,
i.e. which has its true being for characteristic and aim, is in the first instance
the rational will in general, or implicit Idea, and because implicit only the
notion of absolute mind. As abstract Idea again, it is existent only in the
immediate will—it is the existential side of reason,—the single will as
aware of this its universality constituting its contents and aim, and of which
it is only the formal activity. If the will, therefore, in which the Idea thus
appears is only finite, that will is also the act of developing the Idea, and of
investing its self-unfolding content with an existence which, as realising the
idea, is actuality. It is thus “Objective” Mind.

No Idea is so generally recognised as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the

greatest misconceptions (to which therefore it actually falls a victim) as the
idea of Liberty: none in common currency with so little appreciation of its
meaning. Remembering that free mind is actual mind, we can see how
misconceptions about it are of tremendous consequence in practice. When
individuals and nations have once got in their heads [pg 101] the abstract
concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable
strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very
actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this idea,
and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even
the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth
(as e.g. an Athenian or Spartan citizen), or by strength of character,
education, or philosophy (—the sage is free even as a slave and in chains)
that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this
idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such
has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind
to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind
dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom. If, in
religion as such, man is aware of this relationship to the absolute mind as
his true being, he has also, even when he steps into the sphere of secular
existence, the divine mind present with him, as the substance of the state of
the family, &c. These institutions are due to the guidance of that spirit, and
are constituted after its measure; whilst by their existence the moral temper
comes to be indwelling in the individual, so that in this sphere of particular
existence, of present sensation and volition, he is actually free.

If to be aware of the idea—to be aware, i.e. that men are aware of freedom
as their essence, aim, and object—is matter of speculation, still this very
idea itself is the actuality of men—not something which they have, as men,
but which they are. Christianity in its adherents has realised an ever-present
sense that they are not and cannot be slaves; if they are made slaves, if the
decision as regards their property rests with an arbitrary [pg 102] will, not
with laws or courts of justice, they would find the very substance of their
life outraged. This will to liberty is no longer an impulse which demands its
satisfaction, but the permanent character—the spiritual consciousness
grown into a non-impulsive nature. But this freedom, which the content and
aim of freedom has, is itself only a notion—a principle of the mind and
heart, intended to develope into an objective phase, into legal, moral,
religious, and not less into scientific actuality.
[pg 103]
Section II. Mind Objective.

§ 483. The objective Mind is the absolute Idea, but only existing in posse:
and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual rationality retains the
aspect of external apparency. The free will finds itself immediately
confronted by differences which arise from the circumstance that freedom is
its inward function and aim, and is in relation to an external and already
subsisting objectivity, which splits up into different heads: viz.
anthropological data (i.e. private and personal needs), external things of
nature which exist for consciousness, and the ties of relation between
individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity.
These aspects constitute the external material for the embodiment of the
will.

§ 484. But the purposive action of this will is to realise its concept, Liberty,
in these externally-objective aspects, making the latter a world moulded by
the former, which in it is thus at home with itself, locked together with it:
the concept accordingly perfected to the Idea. Liberty, shaped into the
actuality of a world, receives the form of Necessity the deeper substantial
nexus of which is the system or organisation of the principles of liberty,
whilst its phenomenal nexus is power or authority, [pg 104] and the
sentiment of obedience awakened in consciousness.

§ 485. This unity of the rational will with the single will (this being the
peculiar and immediate medium in which the former is actualised)
constitutes the simple actuality of liberty. As it (and its content) belongs to
thought, and is the virtual universal, the content has its right and true
character only in the form of universality. When invested with this character
for the intelligent consciousness, or instituted as an authoritative power, it is
a Law150. When, on the other hand, the content is freed from the mixedness
and fortuitousness, attaching to it in the practical feeling and in impulse,
and is set and grafted in the individual will, not in the form of impulse, but
in its universality, so as to become its habit, temper and character, it exists
as manner and custom, or Usage151.

§ 486. This “reality,” in general, where free will has existence, is the Law
(Right),—the term being taken in a comprehensive sense not merely as the
limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions of freedom.
These conditions, in relation to the subjective will, where they, being
universal, ought to have and can only have their existence, are its Duties;
whereas as its temper and habit they are Manners. What is a right is also a
duty, and what is a duty, is also a right. For a mode of existence is a right,
only as a consequence of the free substantial will: and the same content of
fact, when referred to the will distinguished as subjective and individual, is
a duty. It is the same content which the subjective consciousness recognises
as a duty, and brings into existence in these several wills. The finitude of
the objective will thus creates the semblance of a distinction between rights
and duties.

[pg 105]
In the phenomenal range right and duty are correlata, at least in the sense
that to a right on my part corresponds a duty in some one else. But, in the
light of the concept, my right to a thing is not merely possession, but as
possession by a person it is property, or legal possession, and it is a duty to
possess things as property, i.e. to be as a person. Translated into the
phenomenal relationship, viz. relation to another person—this grows into
the duty of some one else to respect my right. In the morality of the
conscience, duty in general is in me—a free subject—at the same time a
right of my subjective will or disposition. But in this individualist moral
sphere, there arises the division between what is only inward purpose
(disposition or intention), which only has its being in me and is merely
subjective duty, and the actualisation of that purpose: and with this division
a contingency and imperfection which makes the inadequacy of mere
individualistic morality. In social ethics these two parts have reached their
truth, their absolute unity; although even right and duty return to one
another and combine by means of certain adjustments and under the guise
of necessity. The rights of the father of the family over its members are
equally duties towards them; just as the children's duty of obedience is their
right to be educated to the liberty of manhood. The penal judicature of a
government, its rights of administration, &c., are no less its duties to
punish, to administer, &c.; as the services of the members of the State in
dues, military services, &c., are duties and yet their right to the protection
of their private property and of the general substantial life in which they
have their root. All the aims of society and the State are the private aim of
the individuals. But the set of adjustments, by which their duties come back
to them as the exercise and enjoyment of right, [pg 106] produces an
appearance of diversity: and this diversity is increased by the variety of
shapes which value assumes in the course of exchange, though it remains
intrinsically the same. Still it holds fundamentally good that he who has no
rights has no duties and vice versa.
Distribution.

§ 487. The free will is

A. itself at first immediate, and hence as a single being—the person: the

existence which the person gives to its liberty is property. The Right as
right (law) is formal, abstract right.

B. When the will is reflected into self, so as to have its existence inside it,
and to be thus at the same time characterised as a particular, it is the right
of the subjective will, morality of the individual conscience.

C. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject and
conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is the
ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state.

[pg 107]
Sub-Section A. Law. 152

(a) Property.

§ 488. Mind, in the immediacy of its self-secured liberty, is an individual,

but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free will: it is a person,
in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in itself still abstract and
empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet on its own part, but on an
external thing. This thing, as something devoid of will, has no rights against
the subjectivity of intelligence and volition, and is by that subjectivity made
adjectival to it, the external sphere of its liberty;—possession.

§ 489. By the judgment of possession, at first in the outward appropriation,

the thing acquires the predicate of “mine.” But this predicate, on its own
account merely “practical,” has here the signification that I import my
personal will into the thing. As so characterised, possession is property,
which as possession is a means, but as existence of the personality is an
end.

§ 490. In his property the person is brought into union with itself. But the
thing is an abstractly external thing, and the I in it is abstractly external. The
concrete return of me into me in the externality is [pg 108] that I, the
infinite self-relation, am as a person the repulsion of me from myself, and
have the existence of my personality in the being of other persons, in my
relation to them and in my recognition by them, which is thus mutual.

§ 491. The thing is the mean by which the extremes meet in one. These
extremes are the persons who, in the knowledge of their identity as free, are
simultaneously mutually independent. For them my will has its definite
recognisable existence in the thing by the immediate bodily act of taking
possession, or by the formation of the thing or, it may be, by mere
designation of it.
§ 492. The casual aspect of property is that I place my will in this thing: so
far my will is arbitrary, I can just as well put it in it as not,—just as well
withdraw it as not. But so far as my will lies in a thing, it is only I who can
withdraw it: it is only with my will that the thing can pass to another, whose
property it similarly becomes only with his will:—Contract.

(b) Contract.

§ 493. The two wills and their agreement in the contract are as an internal
state of mind different from its realisation in the performance. The
comparatively “ideal” utterance (of contract) in the stipulation contains the
actual surrender of a property by the one, its changing hands, and its
acceptance by the other will. The contract is thus thoroughly binding: it
does not need the performance of the one or the other to become so—
otherwise we should have an infinite regress or infinite division of thing,
labour, and time. The utterance in the stipulation is complete and
exhaustive. The inwardness of the will which surrenders and the will which
accepts the property is in the realm of ideation, [pg 109] and in that realm
the word is deed and thing (§ 462)—the full and complete deed, since here
the conscientiousness of the will does not come under consideration (as to
whether the thing is meant in earnest or is a deception), and the will refers
only to the external thing.

§ 494. Thus in the stipulation we have the substantial being of the contract
standing out in distinction from its real utterance in the performance, which
is brought down to a mere sequel. In this way there is put into the thing or
performance a distinction between its immediate specific quality and its
substantial being or value, meaning by value the quantitative terms into
which that qualitative feature has been translated. One piece of property is
thus made comparable with another, and may be made equivalent to a thing
which is (in quality) wholly heterogeneous. It is thus treated in general as
an abstract, universal thing or commodity.

§ 495. The contract, as an agreement which has a voluntary origin and deals
with a casual commodity, involves at the same time the giving to this
“accidental” will a positive fixity. This will may just as well not be
conformable to law (right), and, in that case, produces a wrong: by which
however the absolute law (right) is not superseded, but only a relationship
originated of right to wrong.

(c) Right versus Wrong.

§ 496. Law (right) considered as the realisation of liberty in externals,

breaks up into a multiplicity of relations to this external sphere and to other
persons (§§ 491, 493 seqq.). In this way there are (1) several titles or
grounds at law, of which (seeing that property both on the personal and the
real side is exclusively individual) only one is the right, but which, because
they face each other, each and all are invested with a show [pg 110] of right,
against which the former is defined as the intrinsically right.

§ 497. Now so long as (compared against this show) the one intrinsically
right, still presumed identical with the several titles, is affirmed, willed, and
recognised, the only diversity lies in this, that the special thing is subsumed
under the one law or right by the particular will of these several persons.
This is naïve, non-malicious wrong. Such wrong in the several claimants is
a simple negative judgment, expressing the civil suit. To settle it there is
required a third judgment, which, as the judgment of the intrinsically right,
is disinterested, and a power of giving the one right existence as against that
semblance.

§ 498. But (2) if the semblance of right is willed as such against right
intrinsical by the particular will, which thus becomes wicked, then the
external recognition of right is separated from the right's true value; and
while the former only is respected, the latter is violated. This gives the
wrong of fraud—the infinite judgment as identical (§ 173),—where the
nominal relation is retained, but the sterling value is let slip.

§ 499. (3) Finally, the particular will sets itself in opposition to the intrinsic
right by negating that right itself as well as its recognition or semblance.
[Here there is a negatively infinite judgment (§ 173) in which there is
denied the class as a whole, and not merely the particular mode—in this
case the apparent recognition.] Thus the will is violently wicked, and
commits a crime.

§ 500. As an outrage on right, such an action is essentially and actually null.

In it the agent, as a volitional and intelligent being, sets up a law—a law
however which is nominal and recognised by him only—a universal which
holds good for him, and under which [pg 111] he has at the same time
subsumed himself by his action. To display the nullity of such an act, to
carry out simultaneously this nominal law and the intrinsic right, in the first
instance by means of a subjective individual will, is the work of Revenge.
But, revenge, starting from the interest of an immediate particular
personality, is at the same time only a new outrage; and so on without end.
This progression, like the last, abolishes itself in a third judgment, which is
disinterested—punishment.

§ 501. The instrumentality by which authority is given to intrinsic right is

(α) that a particular will, that of the judge, being conformable to the right,
has an interest to turn against the crime (—which in the first instance, in
revenge, is a matter of chance), and (β) that an executive power (also in the
first instance casual) negates the negation of right that was created by the
criminal. This negation of right has its existence in the will of the criminal;
and consequently revenge or punishment directs itself against the person or
property of the criminal and exercises coercion upon him. It is in this legal
sphere that coercion in general has possible scope,—compulsion against the
thing, in seizing and maintaining it against another's seizure: for in this
sphere the will has its existence immediately in externals as such, or in
corporeity, and can be seized only in this quarter. But more than possible
compulsion is not, so long as I can withdraw myself as free from every
mode of existence, even from the range of all existence, i.e. from life. It is
legal only as abolishing a first and original compulsion.

§ 502. A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and the
subjective will. The “reality” of right, which the personal will in the first
instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to the [pg 112]
instrumentality of the subjective will,—whose influence as on one hand it
gives existence to the essential right, so may on the other cut itself off from
and oppose itself to it. Conversely, the claim of the subjective will to be in
this abstraction a power over the law of right is null and empty of itself: it
gets truth and reality essentially only so far as that will in itself realises the
reasonable will. As such it is morality153 proper.

The phrase “Law of Nature,” or Natural Right154, in use for the philosophy
of law involves the ambiguity that it may mean either right as something
existing ready-formed in nature, or right as governed by the nature of
things, i.e. by the notion. The former used to be the common meaning,
accompanied with the fiction of a state of nature, in which the law of nature
should hold sway; whereas the social and political state rather required and
implied a restriction of liberty and a sacrifice of natural rights. The real fact
is that the whole law and its every article are based on free personality
alone,—on self-determination or autonomy, which is the very contrary of
determination by nature. The law of nature—strictly so called—is for that
reason the predominance of the strong and the reign of force, and a state of
nature a state of violence and wrong, of which nothing truer can be said
than that one ought to depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, is
the condition in which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted
and sacrificed is just the wilfulness and violence of the state of nature.

[pg 113]
Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience . 155

§ 503. The free individual, who, in mere law, counts only as a person, is
now characterised as a subject, a will reflected into itself so that, be its
affection what it may, it is distinguished (as existing in it) as its own from
the existence of freedom in an external thing. Because the affection of the
will is thus inwardised, the will is at the same time made a particular, and
there arise further particularisations of it and relations of these to one
another. This affection is partly the essential and implicit will, the reason of
the will, the essential basis of law and moral life: partly it is the existent
volition, which is before us and throws itself into actual deeds, and thus
comes into relationship with the former. The subjective will is morally free,
so far as these features are its inward institution, its own, and willed by it.
Its utterance in deed with this freedom is an action, in the externality of
which it only admits as its own, and allows to be imputed to it, so much as
it has consciously willed.

This subjective or “moral” freedom is what a European especially calls

freedom. In virtue of the right thereto a man must possess a personal
knowledge of the distinction between good and evil in general: ethical and
[pg 114] religious principles shall not merely lay their claim on him as
external laws and precepts of authority to be obeyed, but have their assent,
recognition, or even justification in his heart, sentiment, conscience,
intelligence, &c. The subjectivity of the will in itself is its supreme aim and
absolutely essential to it.

The “moral” must be taken in the wider sense in which it does not signify
the morally good merely. In French le moral is opposed to le physique, and
means the mental or intellectual in general. But here the moral signifies
volitional mode, so far as it is in the interior of the will in general; it thus
includes purpose and intention,—and also moral wickedness.
a. Purpose .156

§ 504. So far as the action comes into immediate touch with existence, my
part in it is to this extent formal, that external existence is also independent
of the agent. This externality can pervert his action and bring to light
something else than lay in it. Now, though any alteration as such, which is
set on foot by the subject's action, is its deed157, still the subject does not for
that reason recognise it as its action158, but only admits as its own that
existence in the deed which lay in its knowledge and will, which was its
purpose. Only for that does it hold itself responsible.

b. Intention and Welfare . 159

§ 505. As regards its empirically concrete content (1) the action has a
variety of particular aspects and connexions. In point of form, the agent
must have known and willed the action in its essential feature, embracing
these individual points. This is the right of [pg 115] intention. While
purpose affects only the immediate fact of existence, intention regards the
underlying essence and aim thereof. (2) The agent has no less the right to
see that the particularity of content in the action, in point of its matter, is not
something external to him, but is a particularity of his own,—that it
contains his needs, interests, and aims. These aims, when similarly
comprehended in a single aim, as in happiness (§ 479), constitute his well-
being. This is the right to well-being. Happiness (good fortune) is
distinguished from well-being only in this, that happiness implies no more
than some sort of immediate existence, whereas well-being regards it as
also justified as regards morality.

§ 506. But the essentiality of the intention is in the first instance the abstract
form of generality. Reflection can put in this form this and that particular
aspect in the empirically-concrete action, thus making it essential to the
intention or restricting the intention to it. In this way the supposed
essentiality of the intention and the real essentiality of the action may be
brought into the greatest contradiction—e.g. a good intention in case of a
crime. Similarly well-being is abstract and may be set on this or that: as
appertaining to this single agent, it is always something particular.

c. Goodness and Wickedness . 160

§ 507. The truth of these particularities and the concrete unity of their
formalism is the content of the universal, essential and actual, will,—the
law and underlying essence of every phase of volition, the essential and
actual good. It is thus the absolute final aim of the world, and duty for the
agent who ought [pg 116] to have insight into the good, make it his
intention and bring it about by his activity.

§ 508. But though the good is the universal of will—a universal determined
in itself,—and thus including in it particularity,—still so far as this
particularity is in the first instance still abstract, there is no principle at hand
to determine it. Such determination therefore starts up also outside that
universal; and as heteronomy or determinance of a will which is free and
has rights of its own, there awakes here the deepest contradiction. (α) In
consequence of the indeterminate determinism of the good, there are always
several sorts of good and many kinds of duties, the variety of which is a
dialectic of one against another and brings them into collision. At the same
time because good is one, they ought to stand in harmony; and yet each of
them, though it is a particular duty, is as good and as duty absolute. It falls
upon the agent to be the dialectic which, superseding this absolute claim of
each, concludes such a combination of them as excludes the rest.

§ 509. (β) To the agent, who in his existent sphere of liberty is essentially as
a particular, his interest and welfare must, on account of that existent
sphere of liberty, be essentially an aim and therefore a duty. But at the same
time in aiming at the good, which is the not-particular but only universal of
the will, the particular interest ought not to be a constituent motive. On
account of this independency of the two principles of action, it is likewise
an accident whether they harmonise. And yet they ought to harmonise,
because the agent, as individual and universal, is always fundamentally one
identity.
(γ) But the agent is not only a mere particular in his existence; it is also a
form of his existence to be an abstract self-certainty, an abstract reflection
of freedom [pg 117] into himself. He is thus distinct from the reason in the
will, and capable of making the universal itself a particular and in that way
a semblance. The good is thus reduced to the level of a mere “may happen”
for the agent, who can therefore resolve itself to somewhat opposite to the
good, can be wicked.

§ 510. (δ) The external objectivity, following the distinction which has
arisen in the subjective will (§ 503), constitutes a peculiar world of its own,
—another extreme which stands in no rapport with the internal will-
determination. It is thus a matter of chance, whether it harmonises with the
subjective aims, whether the good is realised, and the wicked, an aim
essentially and actually null, nullified in it: it is no less matter of chance
whether the agent finds in it his well-being, and more precisely whether in
the world the good agent is happy and the wicked unhappy. But at the same
time the world ought to allow the good action, the essential thing, to be
carried out in it; it ought to grant the good agent the satisfaction of his
particular interest, and refuse it to the wicked; just as it ought also to make
the wicked itself null and void.

§ 511. The all-round contradiction, expressed by this repeated ought, with

its absoluteness which yet at the same time is not—contains the most
abstract 'analysis' of the mind in itself, its deepest descent into itself. The
only relation the self-contradictory principles have to one another is in the
abstract certainty of self; and for this infinitude of subjectivity the universal
will, good, right, and duty, no more exist than not. The subjectivity alone is
aware of itself as choosing and deciding. This pure self-certitude, rising to
its pitch, appears in the two directly inter-changing forms—of Conscience
and Wickedness. The former is the will of goodness; but a goodness which
to this pure subjectivity is the [pg 118] non-objective, non-universal, the
unutterable; and over which the agent is conscious that he in his
individuality has the decision. Wickedness is the same awareness that the
single self possesses the decision, so far as the single self does not merely
remain in this abstraction, but takes up the content of a subjective interest
contrary to the good.
§ 512. This supreme pitch of the “phenomenon” of will,—sublimating itself
to this absolute vanity—to a goodness, which has no objectivity, but is only
sure of itself, and a self-assurance which involves the nullification of the
universal—collapses by its own force. Wickedness, as the most intimate
reflection of subjectivity itself, in opposition to the objective and universal,
(which it treats as mere sham,) is the same as the good sentiment of abstract
goodness, which reserves to the subjectivity the determination thereof:—the
utterly abstract semblance, the bare perversion and annihilation of itself.
The result, the truth of this semblance, is, on its negative side, the absolute
nullity of this volition which would fain hold its own against the good, and
of the good, which would only be abstract. On the affirmative side, in the
notion, this semblance thus collapsing is the same simple universality of the
will, which is the good. The subjectivity, in this its identity with the good, is
only the infinite form, which actualises and developes it. In this way the
standpoint of bare reciprocity between two independent sides,—the
standpoint of the ought, is abandoned, and we have passed into the field of
ethical life.

[pg 119]
Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics . 161

§ 513. The moral life is the perfection of spirit objective—the truth of the
subjective and objective spirit itself. The failure of the latter consists—
partly in having its freedom immediately in reality, in something external
therefore, in a thing,—partly in the abstract universality of its goodness.
The failure of spirit subjective similarly consists in this, that it is, as against
the universal, abstractly self-determinant in its inward individuality. When
these two imperfections are suppressed, subjective freedom exists as the
covertly and overtly universal rational will, which is sensible of itself and
actively disposed in the consciousness of the individual subject, whilst its
practical operation and immediate universal actuality at the same time exist
as moral usage, manner and custom,—where self-conscious liberty has
become nature.

§ 514. The consciously free substance, in which the absolute “ought” is no

less an “is,” has actuality as the spirit of a nation. The abstract disruption of
this spirit singles it out into persons, whose independence it however
controls and entirely dominates from within. But the person, as an
intelligent being, feels that underlying essence to be his own very being—
ceases when so minded to be a mere accident of it—looks upon [pg 120] it
as his absolute final aim. In its actuality he sees not less an achieved
present, than somewhat he brings it about by his action,—yet somewhat
which without all question is. Thus, without any selective reflection, the
person performs its duty as his own and as something which is; and in this
necessity he has himself and his actual freedom.

§ 515. Because the substance is the absolute unity of individuality and

universality of freedom, it follows that the actuality and action of each
individual to keep and to take care of his own being, while it is on one hand
conditioned by the pre-supposed total in whose complex alone he exists, is
on the other a transition into a universal product.—The social disposition of
the individuals is their sense of the substance, and of the identity of all their
interests with the total; and that the other individuals mutually know each
other and are actual only in this identity, is confidence (trust)—the genuine
ethical temper.

§ 516. The relations between individuals in the several situations to which

the substance is particularised form their ethical duties. The ethical
personality, i.e. the subjectivity which is permeated by the substantial life, is
virtue. In relation to the bare facts of external being, to destiny, virtue does
not treat them as a mere negation, and is thus a quiet repose in itself: in
relation to substantial objectivity, to the total of ethical actuality, it exists as
confidence, as deliberate work for the community, and the capacity of
sacrificing self thereto; whilst in relation to the incidental relations of social
circumstance, it is in the first instance justice and then benevolence. In the
latter sphere, and in its attitude to its own visible being and corporeity, the
individuality expresses its special character, temperament, &c. as personal
virtues.

[pg 121]
§ 517. The ethical substance is

AA. as “immediate” or natural mind,—the Family.

BB. The “relative” totality of the “relative” relations of the individuals as

independent persons to one another in a formal universality—Civil Society.

CC. The self-conscious substance, as the mind developed to an organic

actuality—the Political Constitution.

AA. The Family.

§ 518. The ethical spirit, in its immediacy, contains the natural factor that
the individual has its substantial existence in its natural universal, i.e. in its
kind. This is the sexual tie, elevated however to a spiritual significance,—
the unanimity of love and the temper of trust. In the shape of the family,
mind appears as feeling.
§ 519. (1) The physical difference of sex thus appears at the same time as a
difference of intellectual and moral type. With their exclusive
individualities these personalities combine to form a single person: the
subjective union of hearts, becoming a “substantial” unity, makes this union
an ethical tie—Marriage. The 'substantial' union of hearts makes marriage
an indivisible personal bond—monogamic marriage: the bodily conjunction
is a sequel to the moral attachment. A further sequel is community of
personal and private interests.

§ 520. (2) By the community in which the various members constituting the
family stand in reference to property, that property of the one person
(representing the family) acquires an ethical interest, as do also its industry,
labour, and care for the future.

§ 521. The ethical principle which is conjoined with the natural generation
of the children, and which was assumed to have primary importance in first
forming the marriage union, is actually realised in the second or [pg 122]
spiritual birth of the children,—in educating them to independent
personality.

§ 522. (3) The children, thus invested with independence, leave the concrete
life and action of the family to which they primarily belong, acquire an
existence of their own, destined however to found anew such an actual
family. Marriage is of course broken up by the natural element contained in
it, the death of husband and wife: but even their union of hearts, as it is a
mere “substantiality” of feeling, contains the germ of liability to chance and
decay. In virtue of such fortuitousness, the members of the family take up to
each other the status of persons; and it is thus that the family finds
introduced into it for the first time the element, originally foreign to it, of
legal regulation.

BB. Civil Society . 162

§ 523. As the substance, being an intelligent substance, particularises itself

abstractly into many persons (the family is only a single person), into
families or individuals, who exist independent and free, as private persons,
it loses its ethical character: for these persons as such have in their
consciousness and as their aim not the absolute unity, but their own petty
selves and particular interests. Thus arises the system of atomistic: by
which the substance is reduced to a general system of adjustments to
connect self-subsisting extremes and their particular interests. The
developed totality of this connective system is the state as civil society, or
state external.

a. The System of Wants163.

§ 524. (α) The particularity of the persons includes in [pg 123] the first
instance their wants. The possibility of satisfying these wants is here laid on
the social fabric, the general stock from which all derive their satisfaction.
In the condition of things in which this method of satisfaction by indirect
adjustment is realised, immediate seizure (§ 488) of external objects as
means thereto exists barely or not at all: the objects are already property. To
acquire them is only possible by the intervention, on one hand, of the
possessors' will, which as particular has in view the satisfaction of their
variously defined interests; while on the other hand it is conditioned by the
ever continued production of fresh means of exchange by the exchangers'
own labour. This instrument, by which the labour of all facilitates
satisfaction of wants, constitutes the general stock.

§ 525. (β) The glimmer of universal principle in this particularity of wants

is found in the way intellect creates differences in them, and thus causes an
indefinite multiplication both of wants and of means for their different
phases. Both are thus rendered more and more abstract. This
“morcellement” of their content by abstraction gives rise to the division of
labour. The habit of this abstraction in enjoyment, information, feeling and
demeanour, constitutes training in this sphere, or nominal culture in general.

§ 526. The labour which thus becomes more abstract tends on one hand by
its uniformity to make labour easier and to increase production,—on
another to limit each person to a single kind of technical skill, and thus
produce more unconditional dependence on the social system. The skill
itself becomes in this way mechanical, and gets the capability of letting the
machine take the place of human labour.

§ 527. (γ) But the concrete division of the general [pg 124] stock—which is
also a general business (of the whole society)—into particular masses
determined by the factors of the notion,—masses each of which possesses
its own basis of subsistence, and a corresponding mode of labour, of needs,
and of means for satisfying them, besides of aims and interests, as well as
of mental culture and habit—constitutes the difference of Estates (orders or
ranks). Individuals apportion themselves to these according to natural
talent, skill, option and accident. As belonging to such a definite and stable
sphere, they have their actual existence, which as existence is essentially a
particular; and in it they have their social morality, which is honesty, their
recognition and their honour.

Where civil society, and with it the State, exists, there arise the several
estates in their difference: for the universal substance, as vital, exists only so
far as it organically particularises itself. The history of constitutions is the
history of the growth of these estates, of the legal relationships of
individuals to them, and of these estates to one another and to their centre.

§ 528. To the “substantial,” natural estate the fruitful soil and ground supply
a natural and stable capital; its action gets direction and content through
natural features, and its moral life is founded on faith and trust. The second,
the “reflected” estate has as its allotment the social capital, the medium
created by the action of middlemen, of mere agents, and an ensemble of
contingencies, where the individual has to depend on his subjective skill,
talent, intelligence and industry. The third, “thinking” estate has for its
business the general interests; like the second it has a subsistence procured
by means of its own skill, and like the first a certain subsistence, certain
however because guaranteed through the whole society.

[pg 125]

b. Administration of Justice164.
§ 529. When matured through the operation of natural need and free option
into a system of universal relationships and a regular course of external
necessity, the principle of casual particularity gets that stable articulation
which liberty requires in the shape of formal right. (1) The actualisation
which right gets in this sphere of mere practical intelligence is that it be
brought to consciousness as the stable universal, that it be known and stated
in its specificality with the voice of authority—the Law165.

The positive element in laws concerns only their form of publicity and
authority—which makes it possible for them to be known by all in a
customary and external way. Their content per se may be reasonable—or it
may be unreasonable and so wrong. But when right, in the course of
definite manifestation, is developed in detail, and its content analyses itself
to gain definiteness, this analysis, because of the finitude of its materials,
falls into the falsely infinite progress: the final definiteness, which is
absolutely essential and causes a break in this progress of unreality, can in
this sphere of finitude be attained only in a way that savours of contingency
and arbitrariness. Thus whether three years, ten thalers, or only 2-1/2, 2-3/4,
2-4/5 years, and so on ad infinitum, be the right and just thing, can by no
means be decided on intelligible principles,—and yet it should be decided.
Hence, though of course only at the final points of deciding, on the side of
external existence, the “positive” principle naturally enters law as
contingency and arbitrariness. This happens and has from of old happened
in all legislations: [pg 126] the only thing wanted is clearly to be aware of
it, and not be misled by the talk and the pretence as if the ideal of law were,
or could be, to be, at every point, determined through reason or legal
intelligence, on purely reasonable and intelligent grounds. It is a futile
perfectionism to have such expectations and to make such requirements in
the sphere of the finite.

There are some who look upon laws as an evil and a profanity, and who
regard governing and being governed from natural love, hereditary, divinity
or nobility, by faith and trust, as the genuine order of life, while the reign of
law is held an order of corruption and injustice. These people forget that the
stars—and the cattle too—are governed and well governed too by laws;—
laws however which are only internally in these objects, not for them, not as
laws set to them:—whereas it is man's privilege to know his law. They
forget therefore that he can truly obey only such known law,—even as his
law can only be a just law, as it is a known law;—though in other respects it
must be in its essential content contingency and caprice, or at least be
mixed and polluted with such elements.

The same empty requirement of perfection is employed for an opposite

thesis—viz. to support the opinion that a code is impossible or
impracticable. In this case there comes in the additional absurdity of putting
essential and universal provisions in one class with the particular detail. The
finite material is definable on and on to the false infinite: but this advance is
not, as in the mental images of space, a generation of new spatial
characteristics of the same quality as those preceding them, but an advance
into greater and ever greater speciality by the acumen of the analytic
intellect, which discovers new distinctions, which again make new
decisions necessary. To provisions of this sort one may [pg 127] give the
name of new decisions or new laws; but in proportion to the gradual
advance in specialisation the interest and value of these provisions declines.
They fall within the already subsisting “substantial,” general laws, like
improvements on a floor or a door, within the house—which though
something new, are not a new house. But there is a contrary case. If the
legislation of a rude age began with single provisos, which go on by their
very nature always increasing their number, there arises, with the advance
in multitude, the need of a simpler code,—the need i.e. of embracing that
lot of singulars in their general features. To find and be able to express these
principles well beseems an intelligent and civilised nation. Such a gathering
up of single rules into general forms, first really deserving the name of
laws, has lately been begun in some directions by the English Minister Peel,
who has by so doing gained the gratitude, even the admiration, of his
countrymen.

§ 530. (2) The positive form of Laws—to be promulgated and made known
as laws—is a condition of the external obligation to obey them; inasmuch
as, being laws of strict right, they touch only the abstract will,—itself at
bottom external—not the moral or ethical will. The subjectivity to which
the will has in this direction a right is here only publicity. This subjective
existence is as existence of the essential and developed truth in this sphere
of Right at the same time an externally objective existence, as universal
authority and necessity.

The legality of property and of private transactions concerned therewith—in

consideration of the principle that all law must be promulgated, recognised,
and thus become authoritative—gets its universal guarantee through
formalities.

§ 531. (3) Legal forms get the necessity, to which objective existence
determines itself, in the judicial [pg 128]system. Abstract right has to
exhibit itself to the court—to the individualised right—as proven:—a
process in which there may be a difference between what is abstractly right
and what is provably right. The court takes cognisance and action in the
interest of right as such, deprives the existence of right of its contingency,
and in particular transforms this existence,—as this exists as revenge—into
punishment (§ 500).

The comparison of the two species, or rather two elements in the judicial
conviction, bearing on the actual state of the case in relation to the accused,
—(1) according as that conviction is based on mere circumstances and other
people's witness alone,—or (2) in addition requires the confession of the
accused, constitutes the main point in the question of the so-called jury-
courts. It is an essential point that the two ingredients of a judicial
cognisance, the judgment as to the state of the fact, and the judgment as
application of the law to it, should, as at bottom different sides, be exercised
as different functions. By the said institution they are allotted even to bodies
differently qualified,—from the one of which individuals belonging to the
official judiciary are expressly excluded. To carry this separation of
functions up to this separation in the courts rests rather on extra-essential
considerations: the main point remains only the separate performance of
these essentially different functions.—It is a more important point whether
the confession of the accused is or is not to be made a condition of penal
judgment. The institution of the jury-court loses sight of this condition. The
point is that on this ground certainty is completely inseparable from truth:
but the confession is to be regarded as the very acmé of certainty-giving
which in its nature is subjective. The final decision therefore lies with the
confession. To this therefore the accused [pg 129] has an absolute right, if
the proof is to be made final and the judges to be convinced. No doubt this
factor is incomplete, because it is only one factor; but still more incomplete
is the other when no less abstractly taken,—viz. mere circumstantial
evidence. The jurors are essentially judges and pronounce a judgment. In so
far, then, as all they have to go on are such objective proofs, whilst at the
same time their defect of certainty (incomplete in so far as it is only in
them) is admitted, the jury-court shows traces of its barbaric origin in a
confusion and admixture between objective proofs and subjective or so-
called “moral” conviction.—It is easy to call extraordinary punishments an
absurdity; but the fault lies rather with the shallowness which takes offence
at a mere name. Materially the principle involves the difference of objective
probation according as it goes with or without the factor of absolute
certification which lies in confession.

§ 532. The function of judicial administration is only to actualise to

necessity the abstract side of personal liberty in civil society. But this
actualisation rests at first on the particular subjectivity of the judge, since
here as yet there is not found the necessary unity of it with right in the
abstract. Conversely, the blind necessity of the system of wants is not lifted
up into the consciousness of the universal, and worked from that period of
view.

c. Police and Corporation166.

§ 533. Judicial administration naturally has no concern with such part of

actions and interests as belongs only to particularity, and leaves to chance
not only the occurrence of crimes but also the care for public weal. In civil
society the sole end is to satisfy want—and that, [pg 130] because it is
man's want, in a uniform general way, so as to secure this satisfaction. But
the machinery of social necessity leaves in many ways a casualness about
this satisfaction. This is due to the variability of the wants themselves, in
which opinion and subjective good-pleasure play a great part. It results also
from circumstances of locality, from the connexions between nation and
nation, from errors and deceptions which can be foisted upon single
members of the social circulation and are capable of creating disorder in it,
—as also and especially from the unequal capacity of individuals to take
advantage of that general stock. The onward march of this necessity also
sacrifices the very particularities by which it is brought about, and does not
itself contain the affirmative aim of securing the satisfaction of individuals.
So far as concerns them, it may be far from beneficial: yet here the
individuals are the morally-justifiable end.

§ 534. To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the
powers composing that social necessity act, and their variable ingredients,
and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the work of an
institution which assumes on one hand, to the concrete of civil society, the
position of an external universality. Such an order acts with the power of an
external state, which, in so far as it is rooted in the higher or substantial
state, appears as state “police.” On the other hand, in this sphere of
particularity the only recognition of the aim of substantial universality and
the only carrying of it out is restricted to the business of particular branches
and interests. Thus we have the corporation, in which the particular citizen
in his private capacity finds the securing of his stock, whilst at the same
time he in it emerges from his single private interest, and has a conscious
[pg 131] activity for a comparatively universal end, just as in his legal and
professional duties he has his social morality.
CC. The State.

§ 535. The State is the self-conscious ethical substance, the unification of

the family principle with that of civil society. The same unity, which is in
the family as a feeling of love, is its essence, receiving however at the same
time through the second principle of conscious and spontaneously active
volition the form of conscious universality. This universal principle, with all
its evolution in detail, is the absolute aim and content of the knowing
subject, which thus identifies itself in its volition with the system of
reasonableness.

§ 536. The state is (α) its inward structure as a self-relating development—

constitutional (inner-state) law: (β) a particular individual, and therefore in
connexion with other particular individuals,—international (outer-state)
law; (γ) but these particular minds are only stages in the general
development of mind in its actuality: universal history.

α. Constitutional Law167.

§ 537. The essence of the state is the universal, self-originated and self-
developed,—the reasonable spirit of will; but, as self-knowing and self-
actualising, sheer subjectivity, and—as an actuality—one individual. Its
work generally—in relation to the extreme of individuality as the multitude
of individuals—consists in a double function. First it maintains them as
persons, thus making right a necessary actuality, then it promotes their
welfare, which each originally takes care of for himself, but which has a
thoroughly general side; it protects the [pg 132] family and guides civil
society. Secondly, it carries back both, and the whole disposition and action
of the individual—whose tendency is to become a centre of his own—into
the life of the universal substance; and, in this direction, as a free power it
interferes with those subordinate spheres and retains them in substantial
immanence.

§ 538. The laws express the special provisions for objective freedom. First,
to the immediate agent, his independent self-will and particular interest,
they are restrictions. But, secondly, they are an absolute final end and the
universal work: hence they are a product of the “functions” of the various
orders which parcel themselves more and more out of the general
particularising, and are a fruit of all the acts and private concerns of
individuals. Thirdly, they are the substance of the volition of individuals—
which volition is thereby free—and of their disposition: being as such
exhibited as current usage.

§ 539. As a living mind, the state only is as an organised whole,

differentiated into particular agencies, which, proceeding from the one
notion (though not known as notion) of the reasonable will, continually
produce it as their result. The constitution is this articulation or organisation
of state-power. It provides for the reasonable will,—in so far as it is in the
individuals only implicitly the universal will,—coming to a consciousness
and an understanding of itself and being found; also for that will being put
in actuality, through the action of the government and its several branches,
and not left to perish, but protected both against their casual subjectivity
and against that of the individuals. The constitution is existent justice,—the
actuality of liberty in the development all its reasonable provisions.

[pg 133]
Liberty and Equality are the simple rubrics into which is frequently
concentrated what should form the fundamental principle, the final aim and
result of the constitution. However true this is, the defect of these terms is
their utter abstractness: if stuck to in this abstract form, they are principles
which either prevent the rise of the concreteness of the state, i.e. its
articulation into a constitution and a government in general, or destroy
them. With the state there arises inequality, the difference of governing
powers and of governed, magistracies, authorities, directories, &c. The
principle of equality, logically carried out, rejects all differences, and thus
allows no sort of political condition to exist. Liberty and equality are indeed
the foundation of the state, but as the most abstract also the most
superficial, and for that very reason naturally the most familiar. It is
important therefore to study them closer.

As regards, first, Equality, the familiar proposition, All men are by nature
equal, blunders by confusing the “natural” with the “notion.” It ought rather
to read: By nature men are only unequal. But the notion of liberty, as it
exists as such, without further specification and development, is abstract
subjectivity, as a person capable of property (§ 488). This single abstract
feature of personality constitutes the actual equality of human beings. But
that this freedom should exist, that it should be man (and not as in Greece,
Rome, &c. some men) that is recognised and legally regarded as a person, is
so little by nature, that it is rather only a result and product of the
consciousness of the deepest principle of mind, and of the universality and
expansion of this consciousness. That the citizens are equal before the law
contains a great truth, but which so expressed is a tautology: it only states
that the legal status in general exists, that the laws rule. But, as [pg 134]
regards the concrete, the citizens—besides their personality—are equal
before the law only in these points when they are otherwise equal outside
the law. Only that equality which (in whatever way it be) they, as it
happens, otherwise have in property, age, physical strength, talent, skill, &c.
—or even in crime, can and ought to make them deserve equal treatment
before the law:—only it can make them—as regards taxation, military
service, eligibility to office, &c.—punishment, &c.—equal in the concrete.
The laws themselves, except in so far as they concern that narrow circle of
personality, presuppose unequal conditions, and provide for the unequal
legal duties and appurtenances resulting therefrom.

As regards Liberty, it is originally taken partly in a negative sense against

arbitrary intolerance and lawless treatment, partly in the affirmative sense
of subjective freedom; but this freedom is allowed great latitude both as
regards the agent's self-will and action for his particular ends, and as
regards his claim to have a personal intelligence and a personal share in
general affairs. Formerly the legally defined rights, private as well as public
rights of a nation, town, &c. were called its “liberties.” Really, every
genuine law is a liberty: it contains a reasonable principle of objective
mind; in other words, it embodies a liberty. Nothing has become, on the
contrary, more familiar than the idea that each must restrict his liberty in
relation to the liberty of others: that the state is a condition of such
reciprocal restriction, and that the laws are restrictions. To such habits of
mind liberty is viewed as only casual good-pleasure and self-will. Hence it
has also been said that “modern” nations are only susceptible of equality, or
of equality more than liberty: and that for no other reason than that, with an
assumed [pg 135] definition of liberty (chiefly the participation of all in
political affairs and actions), it was impossible to make ends meet in
actuality—which is at once more reasonable and more powerful than
abstract presuppositions. On the contrary, it should be said that it is just the
great development and maturity of form in modern states which produces
the supreme concrete inequality of individuals in actuality: while, through
the deeper reasonableness of laws and the greater stability of the legal state,
it gives rise to greater and more stable liberty, which it can without
incompatibility allow. Even the superficial distinction of the words liberty
and equality points to the fact that the former tends to inequality: whereas,
on the contrary, the current notions of liberty only carry us back to equality.
But the more we fortify liberty,—as security of property, as possibility for
each to develop and make the best of his talents and good qualities, the
more it gets taken for granted: and then the sense and appreciation of liberty
especially turns in a subjective direction. By this is meant the liberty to
attempt action on every side, and to throw oneself at pleasure in action for
particular and for general intellectual interests, the removal of all checks on
the individual particularity, as well as the inward liberty in which the
subject has principles, has an insight and conviction of his own, and thus
gains moral independence. But this liberty itself on one hand implies that
supreme differentiation in which men are unequal and make themselves
more unequal by education; and on another it only grows up under
conditions of that objective liberty, and is and could grow to such height
only in modern states. If, with this development of particularity, there be
simultaneous and endless increase of the number of wants, and of the
difficulty of satisfying them, of the lust of argument and the fancy of
detecting faults, [pg 136] with its insatiate vanity, it is all but part of that
indiscriminating relaxation of individuality in this sphere which generates
all possible complications, and must deal with them as it can. Such a sphere
is of course also the field of restrictions, because liberty is there under the
taint of natural self-will and self-pleasing, and has therefore to restrict itself:
and that, not merely with regard to the naturalness, self-will and self-
conceit, of others, but especially and essentially with regard to reasonable
liberty.

The term political liberty, however, is often used to mean formal

participation in the public affairs of state by the will and action even of
those individuals who otherwise find their chief function in the particular
aims and business of civil society. And it has in part become usual to give
the title constitution only to the side of the state which concerns such
participation of these individuals in general affairs, and to regard a state, in
which this is not formally done, as a state without a constitution. On this
use of the term, the only thing to remark is that by constitution must be
understood the determination of rights, i.e. of liberties in general, and the
organisation of the actualisation of them; and that political freedom in the
above sense can in any case only constitute a part of it. Of it the following
paragraphs will speak.

§ 540. The guarantee of a constitution (i.e. the necessity that the laws be
reasonable, and their actualisation secured) lies in the collective spirit of the
nation,—especially in the specific way in which it is itself conscious of its
reason. (Religion is that consciousness in its absolute substantiality.) But
the guarantee lies also at the same time in the actual organisation or
development of that principle in suitable institutions. The constitution
presupposes that consciousness [pg 137] of the collective spirit, and
conversely that spirit presupposes the constitution: for the actual spirit only
has a definite consciousness of its principles, in so far as it has them
actually existent before it.

The question—To whom (to what authority and how organised) belongs the
power to make a constitution? is the same as the question, Who has to make
the spirit of a nation? Separate our idea of a constitution from that of the
collective spirit, as if the latter exists or has existed without a constitution,
and your fancy only proves how superficially you have apprehended the
nexus between the spirit in its self-consciousness and in its actuality. What
is thus called “making” a “constitution,” is—just because of this
inseparability—a thing that has never happened in history, just as little as
the making of a code of laws. A constitution only develops from the
national spirit identically with that spirit's own development, and runs
through at the same time with it the grades of formation and the alterations
required by its concept. It is the indwelling spirit and the history of the
nation (and, be it added, the history is only that spirit's history) by which
constitutions have been and are made.

§ 541. The really living totality,—that which preserves, in other words

continually produces the state in general and its constitution, is the
government. The organisation which natural necessity gives is seen in the
rise of the family and of the 'estates' of civil society. The government is the
universal part of the constitution, i.e. the part which intentionally aims at
preserving those parts, but at the same time gets hold of and carries out
those general aims of the whole which rise above the function of the family
and of civil society. The organisation of the government is likewise its
differentiation into powers, as their peculiarities have a basis in principle;
yet [pg 138] without that difference losing touch with the actual unity they
have in the notion's subjectivity.

As the most obvious categories of the notion are those of universality and
individuality and their relationship that of subsumption of individual under
universal, it has come about that in the state the legislative and executive
power have been so distinguished as to make the former exist apart as the
absolute superior, and to subdivide the latter again into administrative
(government) power and judicial power, according as the laws are applied
to public or private affairs. The division of these powers has been treated as
the condition of political equilibrium, meaning by division their
independence one of another in existence,—subject always however to the
above-mentioned subsumption of the powers of the individual under the
power of the general. The theory of such “division” unmistakably implies
the elements of the notion, but so combined by “understanding” as to result
in an absurd collocation, instead of the self-redintegration of the living
spirit. The one essential canon to make liberty deep and real is to give every
business belonging to the general interests of the state a separate
organisation wherever they are essentially distinct. Such real division must
be: for liberty is only deep when it is differentiated in all its fullness and
these differences manifested in existence. But to make the business of
legislation an independent power—to make it the first power, with the
further proviso that all citizens shall have part therein, and the government
be merely executive and dependent, presupposes ignorance that the true
idea, and therefore the living and spiritual actuality, is the self-
redintegrating notion, in other words, the subjectivity which contains in it
universality as only one of its moments. (A mistake still greater, if it goes
with the fancy that the constitution and the fundamental [pg 139] laws were
still one day to make,—in a state of society, which includes an already
existing development of differences.) Individuality is the first and supreme
principle which makes itself fall through the state's organisation. Only
through the government, and by its embracing in itself the particular
businesses (including the abstract legislative business, which taken apart is
also particular), is the state one. These, as always, are the terms on which
the different elements essentially and alone truly stand towards each other
in the logic of “reason,” as opposed to the external footing they stand on in
'understanding,' which never gets beyond subsuming the individual and
particular under the universal. What disorganises the unity of logical reason,
equally disorganises actuality.

§ 542. In the government—regarded as organic totality—the sovereign

power (principate) is (a) subjectivity as the infinite self-unity of the notion
in its development;—the all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the state, its
highest peak and all-pervasive unity. In the perfect form of the state, in
which each and every element of the notion has reached free existence, this
subjectivity is not a so-called “moral person,” or a decree issuing from a
majority (forms in which the unity of the decreeing will has not an actual
existence), but an actual individual,—the will of a decreeing individual,—
monarchy. The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of
developed reason: all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the
development and realisation of reason.

The unification of all concrete state-powers into one existence, as in the

patriarchal society,—or, as in a democratic constitution, the participation of
all in all affairs—impugns the principle of the division of powers, i.e. the
developed liberty of the constituent factors of [pg 140] the Idea. But no
whit less must the division (the working out of these factors each to a free
totality) be reduced to “ideal” unity, i.e. to subjectivity. The mature
differentiation or realisation of the Idea means, essentially, that this
subjectivity should grow to be a real “moment,” an actual existence; and
this actuality is not otherwise than as the individuality of the monarch—the
subjectivity of abstract and final decision existent in one person. All those
forms of collective decreeing and willing,—a common will which shall be
the sum and the resultant (on aristocratical or democratical principles) of
the atomistic of single wills, have on them the mark of the unreality of an
abstraction. Two points only are all-important, first to see the necessity of
each of the notional factors, and secondly the form in which it is actualised.
It is only the nature of the speculative notion which can really give light on
the matter. That subjectivity—being the “moment” which emphasises the
need of abstract deciding in general—partly leads on to the proviso that the
name of the monarch appear as the bond and sanction under which
everything is done in the government;—partly, being simple self-relation,
has attached to it the characteristic of immediacy, and then of nature—
whereby the destination of individuals for the dignity of the princely power
is fixed by inheritance.

§ 543. (b) In the particular government-power there emerges, first, the

division of state-business into its branches (otherwise defined), legislative
power, administration of justice or judicial power, administration and
police, and its consequent distribution between particular boards or offices,
which having their business appointed by law, to that end and for that
reason, possess independence of action, without at the same time ceasing to
stand under higher supervision. Secondly, too, there [pg 141] arises the
participation of several in state-business, who together constitute the
“general order” (§ 528) in so far as they take on themselves the charge of
universal ends as the essential function of their particular life;—the further
condition for being able to take individually part in this business being a
certain training, aptitude, and skill for such ends.

§ 544. The estates-collegium or provincial council is an institution by which

all such as belong to civil society in general, and are to that degree private
persons, participate in the governmental power, especially in legislation—
viz. such legislation as concerns the universal scope of those interests which
do not, like peace and war, involve the, as it were, personal interference and
action of the State as one man, and therefore do not belong specially to the
province of the sovereign power. By virtue of this participation subjective
liberty and conceit, with their general opinion, can show themselves
palpably efficacious and enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to
count for something.

The division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, is

still the most definite statement of their difference in relation to sovereignty.
They must at the same time be regarded as necessary structures in the path
of development,—in short, in the history of the State. Hence it is superficial
and absurd to represent them as an object of choice. The pure forms—
necessary to the process of evolution—are, in so far as they are finite and in
course of change, conjoined both with forms of their degeneration,—such
as ochlocracy, &c., and with earlier transition-forms. These two forms are
not to be confused with those legitimate structures. Thus, it may be—if we
look only to the fact that the will of one individual stands at the head of the
state—oriental despotism is included [pg 142] under the vague name
monarchy,—as also feudal monarchy, to which indeed even the favourite
name of “constitutional monarchy” cannot be refused. The true difference
of these forms from genuine monarchy depends on the true value of those
principles of right which are in vogue and have their actuality and guarantee
in the state-power. These principles are those expounded earlier, liberty of
property, and above all personal liberty, civil society, with its industry and
its communities, and the regulated efficiency of the particular bureaux in
subordination to the laws.

The question which is most discussed is in what sense we are to understand

the participation of private persons in state affairs. For it is as private
persons that the members of bodies of estates are primarily to be taken, be
they treated as mere individuals, or as representatives of a number of people
or of the nation. The aggregate of private persons is often spoken of as the
nation: but as such an aggregate it is vulgus, not populus: and in this
direction, it is the one sole aim of the state that a nation should not come to
existence, to power and action, as such an aggregate. Such a condition of a
nation is a condition of lawlessness, demoralisation, brutishness: in it the
nation would only be a shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy,
elemental sea, which however is not self-destructive, as the nation—a
spiritual element—would be. Yet such a condition may be often heard
described as that of true freedom. If there is to be any sense in embarking
upon the question of the participation of private persons in public affairs, it
is not a brutish mass, but an already organised nation—one in which a
governmental power exists—which should be presupposed. The desirability
of such participation however is not to be put in the superiority of particular
intelligence, which private [pg 143] persons are supposed to have over state
officials—the contrary may be the case—nor in the superiority of their good
will for the general best. The members of civil society as such are rather
people who find their nearest duty in their private interest and (as especially
in the feudal society) in the interest of their privileged corporation. Take the
case of England which, because private persons have a predominant share
in public affairs, has been regarded as having the freest of all constitutions.
Experience shows that that country—as compared with the other civilised
states of Europe—is the most backward in civil and criminal legislation, in
the law and liberty of property, in arrangements for art and science, and that
objective freedom or rational right is rather sacrificed to formal right and
particular private interest; and that this happens even in the institutions and
possessions supposed to be dedicated to religion. The desirability of private
persons taking part in public affairs is partly to be put in their concrete, and
therefore more urgent, sense of general wants. But the true motive is the
right of the collective spirit to appear as an externally universal will, acting
with orderly and express efficacy for the public concerns. By this
satisfaction of this right it gets its own life quickened, and at the same time
breathes fresh life in the administrative officials; who thus have it brought
home to them that not merely have they to enforce duties but also to have
regard to rights. Private citizens are in the state the incomparably greater
number, and form the multitude of such as are recognised as persons. Hence
the will-reason exhibits its existence in them as a preponderating majority
of freemen, or in its “reflectional” universality, which has its actuality
vouchsafed it as a participation in the sovereignty. But it has already been
noted as a “moment” [pg 144] of civil society (§§ 527, 534) that the
individuals rise from external into substantial universality, and form a
particular kind,—the Estates: and it is not in the inorganic form of mere
individuals as such (after the democratic fashion of election), but as organic
factors, as estates, that they enter upon that participation. In the state a
power or agency must never appear and act as a formless, inorganic shape,
i.e. basing itself on the principle of multeity and mere numbers.
Assemblies of Estates have been wrongly designated as the legislative
power, so far as they form only one branch of that power,—a branch in
which the special government-officials have an ex officio share, while the
sovereign power has the privilege of final decision. In a civilised state
moreover legislation can only be a further modification of existing law, and
so-called new laws can only deal with minutiae of detail and particularities
(cf. § 529, note), the main drift of which has been already prepared or
preliminarily settled by the practice of the law-courts. The so-called
financial law, in so far as it requires the assent of the estates, is really a
government affair: it is only improperly called a law, in the general sense of
embracing a wide, indeed the whole, range of the external means of
government. The finances deal with what in their nature are only particular
needs, ever newly recurring, even if they touch on the sum total of such
needs. If the main part of the requirement were—as it very likely is—
regarded as permanent, the provision for it would have more the nature of a
law: but to be a law, it would have to be made once for all, and not be made
yearly, or every few years, afresh. The part which varies according to time
and circumstances concerns in reality the smallest part of the amount, and
the provisions with regard to it have even less the character of a law: and
yet it is and may [pg 145] be only this slight variable part which is matter of
dispute, and can be subjected to a varying yearly estimate. It is this last then
which falsely bears the high-sounding name of the “Grant” of the Budget,
i.e. of the whole of the finances. A law for one year and made each year has
even to the plain man something palpably absurd: for he distinguishes the
essential and developed universal, as content of a true law, from the
reflectional universality which only externally embraces what in its nature
is many. To give the name of a law to the annual fixing of financial
requirements only serves—with the presupposed separation of legislative
from executive—to keep up the illusion of that separation having real
existence, and to conceal the fact that the legislative power, when it makes a
decree about finance, is really engaged with strict executive business. But
the importance attached to the power of from time to time granting
“supply,” on the ground that the assembly of estates possesses in it a check
on the government, and thus a guarantee against injustice and violence,—
this importance is in one way rather plausible than real. The financial
measures necessary for the state's subsistence cannot be made conditional
on any other circumstances, nor can the state's subsistence be put yearly in
doubt. It would be a parallel absurdity if the government were e.g. to grant
and arrange the judicial institutions always for a limited time merely; and
thus, by the threat of suspending the activity of such an institution and the
fear of a consequent state of brigandage, reserve for itself a means of
coercing private individuals. Then again, the pictures of a condition of
affairs, in which it might be useful and necessary to have in hand means of
compulsion, are partly based on the false conception of a contract between
rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the [pg 146] possibility of such a
divergence in spirit between these two parties as would make constitution
and government quite out of the question. If we suppose the empty
possibility of getting help by such compulsive means brought into
existence, such help would rather be the derangement and dissolution of the
state, in which there would no longer be a government, but only parties, and
the violence and oppression of one party would only be helped away by the
other. To fit together the several parts of the state into a constitution after
the fashion of mere understanding—i.e. to adjust within it the machinery of
a balance of powers external to each other—is to contravene the
fundamental idea of what a state is.

§ 545. The final aspect of the state is to appear in immediate actuality as a

single nation marked by physical conditions. As a single individual it is
exclusive against other like individuals. In their mutual relations,
waywardness and chance have a place; for each person in the aggregate is
autonomous: the universal of law is only postulated between them, and not
actually existent. This independence of a central authority reduces disputes
between them to terms of mutual violence, a state of war, to meet which the
general estate in the community assumes the particular function of
maintaining the state's independence against other states, and becomes the
estate of bravery.

§ 546. This state of war shows the omnipotence of the state in its
individuality—an individuality that goes even to abstract negativity.
Country and fatherland then appear as the power by which the particular
independence of individuals and their absorption in the external existence
of possession and in natural life is convicted of its own nullity,—as the
power which procures the maintenance of the general substance by the [pg
147] patriotic sacrifice on the part of these individuals of this natural and
particular existence,—so making nugatory the nugatoriness that confronts
it.

β. External Public Law168.

§ 547. In the game of war the independence of States is at stake. In one case
the result may be the mutual recognition of free national individualities (§
430): and by peace-conventions supposed to be for ever, both this general
recognition, and the special claims of nations on one another, are settled and
fixed. External state-rights rest partly on these positive treaties, but to that
extent contain only rights falling short of true actuality (§ 545): partly on
so-called international law, the general principle of which is its
presupposed recognition by the several States. It thus restricts their
otherwise unchecked action against one another in such a way that the
possibility of peace is left; and distinguishes individuals as private persons
(non-belligerents) from the state. In general, international law rests on
social usage.

γ. Universal History169.

§ 548. As the mind of a special nation is actual and its liberty is under
natural conditions, it admits on this nature-side the influence of
geographical and climatic qualities. It is in time; and as regards its range
and scope, has essentially a particular principle on the lines of which it
must run through a development of its consciousness and its actuality. It
has, in short, a history of its own. But as a restricted mind its independence
is something secondary; it passes into universal world-history, the events of
which exhibit the dialectic of the several national minds,—the judgment of
the world.

[pg 148]
§ 549. This movement is the path of liberation for the spiritual substance,
the deed by which the absolute final aim of the world is realised in it, and
the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness and self-consciousness. It
is thus the revelation and actuality of its essential and completed essence,
whereby it becomes to the outward eye a universal spirit—a world-mind.
As this development is in time and in real existence, as it is a history, its
several stages and steps are the national minds, each of which, as single and
endued by nature with a specific character, is appointed to occupy only one
grade, and accomplish one task in the whole deed.

The presupposition that history has an essential and actual end, from the
principles of which certain characteristic results logically flow, is called an
a priori view of it, and philosophy is reproached with a priori history-
writing. On this point, and on history-writing in general, this note must go
into further detail. That history, and above all universal history, is founded
on an essential and actual aim, which actually is and will be realised in it—
the plan of Providence; that, in short, there is Reason in history, must be
decided on strictly philosophical ground, and thus shown to be essentially
and in fact necessary. To presuppose such aim is blameworthy only when
the assumed conceptions or thoughts are arbitrarily adopted, and when a
determined attempt is made to force events and actions into conformity with
such conceptions. For such a priori methods of treatment at the present day,
however, those are chiefly to blame who profess to be purely historical, and
who at the same time take opportunity expressly to raise their voice against
the habit of philosophising, first in general, and then in history. Philosophy
is to them a troublesome neighbour: for it is an enemy of all arbitrariness
and hasty suggestions. Such a priori [pg 149] history-writing has
sometimes burst out in quarters where one would least have expected it,
especially on the philological side, and in Germany more than in France and
England, where the art of historical writing has gone through a process of
purification to a firmer and maturer character. Fictions, like that of a
primitive age and its primitive people, possessed from the first of the true
knowledge of God and all the sciences,—of sacerdotal races,—and, when
we come to minutiae, of a Roman epic, supposed to be the source of the
legends which pass current for the history of ancient Rome, &c., have taken
the place of the pragmatising which detected psychological motives and
associations. There is a wide circle of persons who seem to consider it
incumbent on a learned and ingenious historian drawing from the original
sources to concoct such baseless fancies, and form bold combinations of
them from a learned rubbish-heap of out-of-the-way and trivial facts, in
defiance of the best-accredited history.

Setting aside this subjective treatment of history, we find what is properly

the opposite view forbidding us to import into history an objective purpose.
This is after all synonymous with what seems to be the still more legitimate
demand that the historian should proceed with impartiality. This is a
requirement often and especially made on the history of philosophy: where
it is insisted there should be no prepossession in favour of an idea or
opinion, just as a judge should have no special sympathy for one of the
contending parties. In the case of the judge it is at the same time assumed
that he would administer his office ill and foolishly, if he had not an
interest, and an exclusive interest in justice, if he had not that for his aim
and one sole aim, or if he declined to judge at all. This requirement which
we may make upon the judge may be called [pg 150] partiality for justice;
and there is no difficulty here in distinguishing it from subjective partiality.
But in speaking of the impartiality required from the historian, this self-
satisfied insipid chatter lets the distinction disappear, and rejects both kinds
of interest. It demands that the historian shall bring with him no definite
aim and view by which he may sort out, state and criticise events, but shall
narrate them exactly in the casual mode he finds them, in their incoherent
and unintelligent particularity. Now it is at least admitted that a history must
have an object, e.g. Rome and its fortunes, or the Decline of the grandeur of
the Roman empire. But little reflection is needed to discover that this is the
presupposed end which lies at the basis of the events themselves, as of the
critical examination into their comparative importance, i.e. their nearer or
more remote relation to it. A history without such aim and such criticism
would be only an imbecile mental divagation, not as good as a fairy tale, for
even children expect a motif in their stories, a purpose at least dimly
surmiseable with which events and actions are put in relation.

In the existence of a nation the substantial aim is to be a state and preserve

itself as such. A nation with no state formation, (a mere nation), has strictly
speaking no history,—like the nations which existed before the rise of states
and others which still exist in a condition of savagery. What happens to a
nation, and takes place within it, has its essential significance in relation to
the state: whereas the mere particularities of individuals are at the greatest
distance from the true object of history. It is true that the general spirit of an
age leaves its imprint in the character of its celebrated individuals, and even
their particularities are but the very distant and the dim media through
which the [pg 151] collective light still plays in fainter colours. Ay, even
such singularities as a petty occurrence, a word, express not a subjective
particularity, but an age, a nation, a civilisation, in striking portraiture and
brevity; and to select such trifles shows the hand of a historian of genius.
But, on the other hand, the main mass of singularities is a futile and useless
mass, by the painstaking accumulation of which the objects of real
historical value are overwhelmed and obscured. The essential characteristic
of the spirit and its age is always contained in the great events. It was a
correct instinct which sought to banish such portraiture of the particular and
the gleaning of insignificant traits, into the Novel (as in the celebrated
romances of Walter Scott, &c.). Where the picture presents an unessential
aspect of life it is certainly in good taste to conjoin it with an unessential
material, such as the romance takes from private events and subjective
passions. But to take the individual pettinesses of an age and of the persons
in it, and, in the interest of so-called truth, weave them into the picture of
general interests, is not only against taste and judgment, but violates the
principles of objective truth. The only truth for mind is the substantial and
underlying essence, and not the trivialities of external existence and
contingency. It is therefore completely indifferent whether such
insignificancies are duly vouched for by documents, or, as in the romance,
invented to suit the character and ascribed to this or that name and
circumstances.

The point of interest of Biography—to say a word on that here—appears to

run directly counter to any universal scope and aim. But biography too has
for its background the historical world, with which the individual is
intimately bound up: even purely personal originality, the freak of humour,
&c. suggests by allusion [pg 152] that central reality and has its interest
heightened by the suggestion. The mere play of sentiment, on the contrary,
has another ground and interest than history.

The requirement of impartiality addressed to the history of philosophy (and

also, we may add, to the history of religion, first in general, and secondly, to
church history) generally implies an even more decided bar against
presupposition of any objective aim. As the State was already called the
point to which in political history criticism had to refer all events, so here
the “Truth” must be the object to which the several deeds and events of the
spirit would have to be referred. What is actually done is rather to make the
contrary presupposition. Histories with such an object as religion or
philosophy are understood to have only subjective aims for their theme, i.e.
only opinions and mere ideas, not an essential and realised object like the
truth. And that with the mere excuse that there is no truth. On this
assumption the sympathy with truth appears as only a partiality of the usual
sort, a partiality for opinion and mere ideas, which all alike have no stuff in
them, and are all treated as indifferent. In that way historical truth means
but correctness—an accurate report of externals, without critical treatment
save as regards this correctness—admitting, in this case, only qualitative
and quantitative judgments, no judgments of necessity or notion (cf. notes
to §§ 172 and 175). But, really, if Rome or the German empire, &c. are an
actual and genuine object of political history, and the aim to which the
phenomena are to be related and by which they are to be judged; then in
universal history the genuine spirit, the consciousness of it and of its
essence, is even in a higher degree a true and actual object and theme, and
an aim to which all other phenomena are essentially and actually [pg 153]
subservient. Only therefore through their relationship to it, i.e. through the
judgment in which they are subsumed under it, while it inheres in them,
have they their value and even their existence. It is the spirit which not
merely broods over history as over the waters, but lives in it and is alone its
principle of movement: and in the path of that spirit, liberty, i.e. a
development determined by the notion of spirit, is the guiding principle and
only its notion its final aim, i.e. truth. For Spirit is consciousness. Such a
doctrine—or in other words that Reason is in history—will be partly at least
a plausible faith, partly it is a cognition of philosophy.

§ 550. This liberation of mind, in which it proceeds to come to itself and to

realise its truth, and the business of so doing, is the supreme right, the
absolute Law. The self-consciousness of a particular nation is a vehicle for
the contemporary development of the collective spirit in its actual
existence: it is the objective actuality in which that spirit for the time invests
its will. Against this absolute will the other particular natural minds have no
rights: that nation dominates the world: but yet the universal will steps
onward over its property for the time being, as over a special grade, and
then delivers it over to its chance and doom.

§ 551. To such extent as this business of actuality appears as an action, and

therefore as a work of individuals, these individuals, as regards the
substantial issue of their labour, are instruments, and their subjectivity,
which is what is peculiar to them, is the empty form of activity. What they
personally have gained therefore through the individual share they took in
the substantial business (prepared and appointed independently of them) is
a formal universality or subjective mental idea—Fame, which is their
reward.

[pg 154]
§ 552. The national spirit contains nature-necessity, and stands in external
existence (§ 423): the ethical substance, potentially infinite, is actually a
particular and limited substance (§§ 549, 550); on its subjective side it
labours under contingency, in the shape of its unreflective natural usages,
and its content is presented to it as something existing in time and tied to an
external nature and external world. The spirit, however, (which thinks in
this moral organism) overrides and absorbs within itself the finitude
attaching to it as national spirit in its state and the state's temporal interests,
in the system of laws and usages. It rises to apprehend itself in its
essentiality. Such apprehension, however, still has the immanent limitedness
of the national spirit. But the spirit which thinks in universal history,
stripping off at the same time those limitations of the several national minds
and its own temporal restrictions, lays hold of its concrete universality, and
rises to apprehend the absolute mind, as the eternally actual truth in which
the contemplative reason enjoys freedom, while the necessity of nature and
the necessity of history are only ministrant to its revelation and the vessels
of its honour.

The strictly technical aspects of the Mind's elevation to God have been
spoken of in the Introduction to the Logic (cf. especially § 51, note). As
regards the starting-point of that elevation, Kant has on the whole adopted
the most correct, when he treats belief in God as proceeding from the
practical Reason. For that starting-point contains the material or content
which constitutes the content of the notion of God. But the true concrete
material is neither Being (as in the cosmological) nor mere action by design
(as in the physico-theological proof) but the Mind, the absolute
characteristic and function of which is effective reason, i.e. the self-
determining [pg 155] and self-realising notion itself,—Liberty. That the
elevation of subjective mind to God which these considerations give is by
Kant again deposed to a postulate—a mere “ought”—is the peculiar
perversity, formerly noticed, of calmly and simply reinstating as true and
valid that very antithesis of finitude, the supersession of which into truth is
the essence of that elevation.

As regards the “mediation” which, as it has been already shown (§ 192, cf.
§ 204 note), that elevation to God really involves, the point specially calling
for note is the “moment” of negation through which the essential content of
the starting-point is purged of its finitude so as to come forth free. This
factor, abstract in the formal treatment of logic, now gets its most concrete
interpretation. The finite, from which the start is now made, is the real
ethical self-consciousness. The negation through which that consciousness
raises its spirit to its truth, is the purification, actually accomplished in the
ethical world, whereby its conscience is purged of subjective opinion and its
will freed from the selfishness of desire. Genuine religion and genuine
religiosity only issue from the moral life: religion is that life rising to think,
i.e. becoming aware of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only
from the moral life and by the moral life is the Idea of God seen to be free
spirit: outside the ethical spirit therefore it is vain to seek for true religion
and religiosity.

But—as is the case with all speculative process—this development of one

thing out of another means that what appears as sequel and derivative is
rather the absolute prius of what it appears to be mediated by, and what is
here in mind known as its truth.

Here then is the place to go more deeply into the reciprocal relations
between the state and religion, and [pg 156] in doing so to elucidate the
terminology which is familiar and current on the topic. It is evident and
apparent from what has preceded that moral life is the state retracted into its
inner heart and substance, while the state is the organisation and
actualisation of moral life; and that religion is the very substance of the
moral life itself and of the state. At this rate, the state rests on the ethical
sentiment, and that on the religious. If religion then is the consciousness of
“absolute” truth, then whatever is to rank as right and justice, as law and
duty, i.e. as true in the world of free will, can be so esteemed only as it is
participant in that truth, as it is subsumed under it and is its sequel. But if
the truly moral life is to be a sequel of religion, then perforce religion must
have the genuine content; i.e. the idea of God it knows must be the true and
real. The ethical life is the divine spirit as indwelling in self-consciousness,
as it is actually present in a nation and its individual members. This self-
consciousness retiring upon itself out of its empirical actuality and bringing
its truth to consciousness, has in its faith and in its conscience only what it
has consciously secured in its spiritual actuality. The two are inseparable:
there cannot be two kinds of conscience, one religious and another ethical,
differing from the former in body and value of truth. But in point of form,
i.e. for thought and knowledge—(and religion and ethical life belong to
intelligence and are a thinking and knowing)—the body of religious truth,
as the pure self-subsisting and therefore supreme truth, exercises a sanction
over the moral life which lies in empirical actuality. Thus for self-
consciousness religion is the “basis” of moral life and of the state. It has
been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these
inseparables as separable from one another, and even as mutually [pg 157]
indifferent. The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state has
been that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own,
springing from some force and power, religion was a later addition,
something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but
purely subjective in individuals:—or it may be, religion is treated as
something without effect on the moral life of the state, i.e. its reasonable
law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own.

As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth
while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is
primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to the
body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or
indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then self-
consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is free. But if
this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be created, in
point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though the implicit
content of religion is absolute spirit. This great difference (to cite a specific
case) comes out within the Christian religion itself, even though here it is
not the nature-element in which the idea of God is embodied, and though
nothing of the sort even enters as a factor into its central dogma and sole
theme of a God who is known in spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism
this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-
conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the “host” presented to religious
adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the
host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e.
in the annihilation of its externality, and in the act of faith, i.e. in the free
self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted [pg 158] to be
present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalisation flows
every other phase of externality,—of bondage, non-spirituality, and
superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as
well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from
another order—which order again does not get possession of that
knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an
external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying—partly
as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject foregoes his
right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray—addressing his
devotion to miracle-working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles
from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit
which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being
transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which
the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and
law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are
corrupted at their root.

Along with this principle of spiritual bondage, and these applications of it in

the religious life, there can only go in the legislative and constitutional
system a legal and moral bondage, and a state of lawlessness and
immorality in political life. Catholicism has been loudly praised and is still
often praised—logically enough—as the one religion which secures the
stability of governments. But in reality this applies only to governments
which are bound up with institutions founded on the bondage of the spirit
(of that spirit which should have legal and moral liberty), i.e. with
institutions that embody injustice and with a morally corrupt and barbaric
state of society. But these governments are not aware that in fanaticism they
[pg 159] have a terrible power, which does not rise in hostility against them,
only so long as and only on condition that they remain sunk in the thraldom
of injustice and immorality. But in mind there is a very different power
available against that externalism and dismemberment induced by a false
religion. Mind collects itself into its inward free actuality. Philosophy
awakes in the spirit of governments and nations the wisdom to discern what
is essentially and actually right and reasonable in the real world. It was well
to call these products of thought, and in a special sense Philosophy, the
wisdom of the world170; for thought makes the spirit's truth an actual present,
leads it into the real world, and thus liberates it in its actuality and in its
own self.

Thus set free, the content of religion assumes quite another shape. So long
as the form, i.e. our consciousness and subjectivity, lacked liberty, it
followed necessarily that self-consciousness was conceived as not
immanent in the ethical principles which religion embodies, and these
principles were set at such a distance as to seem to have true being only as
negative to actual self-consciousness. In this unreality ethical content gets
the name of Holiness. But once the divine spirit introduces itself into
actuality, and actuality emancipates itself to spirit, then what in the world
was a postulate of holiness is supplanted by the actuality of moral life.
Instead of the vow of chastity, marriage now ranks as the ethical relation;
and, therefore, as the highest on this side of humanity stands the family.
Instead of the vow of poverty (muddled up into a contradiction of assigning
merit to whosoever gives away goods to the poor, i.e. whosoever enriches
them) is the precept of action to acquire goods through one's own
intelligence [pg 160] and industry,—of honesty in commercial dealing, and
in the use of property,—in short moral life in the socio-economic sphere.
And instead of the vow of obedience, true religion sanctions obedience to
the law and the legal arrangements of the state—an obedience which is
itself the true freedom, because the state is a self-possessed, self-realising
reason—in short, moral life in the state. Thus, and thus only, can law and
morality exist. The precept of religion, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and
to God what is God's” is not enough: the question is to settle what is
Caesar's, what belongs to the secular authority: and it is sufficiently
notorious that the secular no less than the ecclesiastical authority have
claimed almost everything as their own. The divine spirit must
interpenetrate the entire secular life: whereby wisdom is concrete within it,
and it carries the terms of its own justification. But that concrete indwelling
is only the aforesaid ethical organisations. It is the morality of marriage as
against the sanctity of a celibate order;—the morality of economic and
industrial action against the sanctity of poverty and its indolence;—the
morality of an obedience dedicated to the law of the state as against the
sanctity of an obedience from which law and duty are absent and where
conscience is enslaved. With the growing need for law and morality and the
sense of the spirit's essential liberty, there sets in a conflict of spirit with the
religion of unfreedom. It is no use to organise political laws and
arrangements on principles of equity and reason, so long as in religion the
principle of unfreedom is not abandoned. A free state and a slavish religion
are incompatible. It is silly to suppose that we may try to allot them separate
spheres, under the impression that their diverse natures will maintain an
attitude of tranquillity one to another [pg 161] and not break out in
contradiction and battle. Principles of civil freedom can be but abstract and
superficial, and political institutions deduced from them must be, if taken
alone, untenable, so long as those principles in their wisdom mistake
religion so much as not to know that the maxims of the reason in actuality
have their last and supreme sanction in the religious conscience in
subsumption under the consciousness of “absolute” truth. Let us suppose
even that, no matter how, a code of law should arise, so to speak a priori,
founded on principles of reason, but in contradiction with an established
religion based on principles of spiritual unfreedom; still, as the duty of
carrying out the laws lies in the hands of individual members of the
government, and of the various classes of the administrative personnel, it is
vain to delude ourselves with the abstract and empty assumption that the
individuals will act only according to the letter or meaning of the law, and
not in the spirit of their religion where their inmost conscience and supreme
obligation lies. Opposed to what religion pronounces holy, the laws appear
something made by human hands: even though backed by penalties and
externally introduced, they could offer no lasting resistance to the
contradiction and attacks of the religious spirit. Such laws, however sound
their provisions may be, thus founder on the conscience, whose spirit is
different from the spirit of the laws and refuses to sanction them. It is
nothing but a modern folly to try to alter a corrupt moral organisation by
altering its political constitution and code of laws without changing the
religion,—to make a revolution without having made a reformation, to
suppose that a political constitution opposed to the old religion could live in
peace and harmony with it and its sanctities, and that stability could be
procured for the laws by external guarantees, [pg 162] e.g. so-called
“chambers,” and the power given them to fix the budget, &c. (cf. § 544
note). At best it is only a temporary expedient—when it is obviously too
great a task to descend into the depths of the religious spirit and to raise that
same spirit to its truth—to seek to separate law and justice from religion.
Those guarantees are but rotten bulwarks against the consciences of the
persons charged with administering the laws—among which laws these
guarantees are included. It is indeed the height and profanity of
contradiction to seek to bind and subject to the secular code the religious
conscience to which mere human law is a thing profane.

The perception had dawned upon Plato with great clearness of the gulf
which in his day had commenced to divide the established religion and the
political constitution, on one hand, from those deeper requirements which,
on the other hand, were made upon religion and politics by liberty which
had learnt to recognise its inner life. Plato gets hold of the thought that a
genuine constitution and a sound political life have their deeper foundation
on the Idea,—on the essentially and actually universal and genuine
principles of eternal righteousness. Now to see and ascertain what these are
is certainly the function and the business of philosophy. It is from this point
of view that Plato breaks out into the celebrated or notorious passage where
he makes Socrates emphatically state that philosophy and political power
must coincide, that the Idea must be regent, if the distress of nations is to
see its end. What Plato thus definitely set before his mind was that the Idea
—which implicitly indeed is the free self-determining thought—could not
get into consciousness save only in the form of a thought; that the substance
of the thought could only be true when set forth as a universal, and [pg 163]
as such brought to consciousness under its most abstract form.

To compare the Platonic standpoint in all its definiteness with the point of
view from which the relationship of state and religion is here regarded, the
notional differences on which everything turns must be recalled to mind.
The first of these is that in natural things their substance or genus is
different from their existence in which that substance is as subject: further
that this subjective existence of the genus is distinct from that which it gets,
when specially set in relief as genus, or, to put it simply, as the universal in
a mental concept or idea. This additional “individuality”—the soil on which
the universal and underlying principle freely and expressly exists,—is the
intellectual and thinking self. In the case of natural things their truth and
reality does not get the form of universality and essentiality through
themselves, and their “individuality” is not itself the form: the form is only
found in subjective thinking, which in philosophy gives that universal truth
and reality an existence of its own. In man's case it is otherwise: his truth
and reality is the free mind itself, and it comes to existence in his self-
consciousness. This absolute nucleus of man—mind intrinsically concrete
—is just this—to have the form (to have thinking) itself for a content. To
the height of the thinking consciousness of this principle Aristotle ascended
in his notion of the entelechy of thought, (which is νοῆσις τῆς νοήσεως),
thus surmounting the Platonic Idea (the genus, or essential being). But
thought always—and that on account of this very principle—contains the
immediate self-subsistence of subjectivity no less than it contains
universality; the genuine Idea of the intrinsically concrete mind is just as
essentially under the one of its terms (subjective consciousness) as under
the other [pg 164] (universality): and in the one as in the other it is the same
substantial content. Under the subjective form, however, fall feeling,
intuition, pictorial representation: and it is in fact necessary that in point of
time the consciousness of the absolute Idea should be first reached and
apprehended in this form: in other words, it must exist in its immediate
reality as religion, earlier than it does as philosophy. Philosophy is a later
development from this basis (just as Greek philosophy itself is later than
Greek religion), and in fact reaches its completion by catching and
comprehending in all its definite essentiality that principle of spirit which
first manifests itself in religion. But Greek philosophy could set itself up
only in opposition to Greek religion: the unity of thought and the
substantiality of the Idea could take up none but a hostile attitude to an
imaginative polytheism, and to the gladsome and frivolous humours of its
poetic creations. The form in its infinite truth, the subjectivity of mind,
broke forth at first only as a subjective free thinking, which was not yet
identical with the substantiality itself,—and thus this underlying principle
was not yet apprehended as absolute mind. Thus religion might appear as
first purified only through philosophy,—through pure self-existent thought:
but the form pervading this underlying principle—the form which
philosophy attacked—was that creative imagination.

Political power, which is developed similarly, but earlier than philosophy,

from religion, exhibits the onesidedness, which in the actual world may
infect its implicitly true Idea, as demoralisation. Plato, in common with all
his thinking contemporaries, perceived this demoralisation of democracy
and the defectiveness even of its principle; he set in relief accordingly the
underlying principle of the state, but could not work [pg 165] into his idea
of it the infinite form of subjectivity, which still escaped his intelligence.
His state is therefore, on its own showing, wanting in subjective liberty (§
503 note, § 513, &c.). The truth which should be immanent in the state,
should knit it together and control it, he, for these reasons, got hold of only
the form of thought-out truth, of philosophy; and hence he makes that
utterance that “so long as philosophers do not rule in the states, or those
who are now called kings and rulers do not soundly and comprehensively
philosophise, so long neither the state nor the race of men can be liberated
from evils,—so long will the idea of the political constitution fall short of
possibility and not see the light of the sun.” It was not vouchsafed to Plato
to go on so far as to say that so long as true religion did not spring up in the
world and hold sway in political life, so long the genuine principle of the
state had not come into actuality. But so long too this principle could not
emerge even in thought, nor could thought lay hold of the genuine idea of
the state,—the idea of the substantial moral life, with which is identical the
liberty of an independent self-consciousness. Only in the principle of mind,
which is aware of its own essence, is implicitly in absolute liberty, and has
its actuality in the act of self-liberation, does the absolute possibility and
necessity exist for political power, religion, and the principles of philosophy
coinciding in one, and for accomplishing the reconciliation of actuality in
general with the mind, of the state with the religious conscience as well as
with the philosophical consciousness. Self-realising subjectivity is in this
case absolutely identical with substantial universality. Hence religion as
such, and the state as such,—both as forms in which the principle exists—
each contain the absolute truth: so that the truth, in its philosophic phase, is
after all only in one of its forms. [pg 166] But even religion, as it grows and
expands, lets other aspects of the Idea of humanity grow and expand also (§
500 sqq.). As it is left therefore behind, in its first immediate, and so also
one-sided phase, Religion may, or rather must, appear in its existence
degraded to sensuous externality, and thus in the sequel become an
influence to oppress liberty of spirit and to deprave political life. Still the
principle has in it the infinite “elasticity” of the “absolute” form, so as to
overcome this depraving of the form-determination (and of the content by
these means), and to bring about the reconciliation of the spirit in itself.
Thus ultimately, in the Protestant conscience the principles of the religious
and of the ethical conscience come to be one and the same: the free spirit
learning to see itself in its reasonableness and truth. In the Protestant state,
the constitution and the code, as well as their several applications, embody
the principle and the development of the moral life, which proceeds and can
only proceed from the truth of religion, when reinstated in its original
principle and in that way as such first become actual. The moral life of the
state and the religious spirituality of the state are thus reciprocal guarantees
of strength.
[pg 167]
Section III. Absolute Mind . 171

§ 553. The notion of mind has its reality in the mind. If this reality in
identity with that notion is to exist as the consciousness of the absolute
Idea, then the necessary aspect is that the implicitly free intelligence be in
its actuality liberated to its notion, if that actuality is to be a vehicle worthy
of it. The subjective and the objective spirit are to be looked on as the road
on which this aspect of reality or existence rises to maturity.

§ 554. The absolute mind, while it is self-centred identity, is always also

identity returning and ever returned into itself: if it is the one and universal
substance it is so as a spirit, discerning itself into a self and a
consciousness, for which it is as substance. Religion, as this supreme sphere
may be in general designated, if it has on one hand to be studied as issuing
from the subject and having its home in the subject, must no less be
regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute spirit which as spirit is in
its community.

That here, as always, belief or faith is not opposite [pg 168] to

consciousness or knowledge, but rather to a sort of knowledge, and that
belief is only a particular form of the latter, has been remarked already (§ 63
note). If nowadays there is so little consciousness of God, and his objective
essence is so little dwelt upon, while people speak so much more of the
subjective side of religion, i.e. of God's indwelling in us, and if that and not
the truth as such is called for,—in this there is at least the correct principle
that God must be apprehended as spirit in his community.

§ 555. The subjective consciousness of the absolute spirit is essentially and

intrinsically a process, the immediate and substantial unity of which is the
Belief in the witness of the spirit as the certainty of objective truth. Belief,
at once this immediate unity and containing it as a reciprocal dependence of
these different terms, has in devotion—the implicit or more explicit act of
worship (cultus)—passed over into the process of superseding the contrast
till it becomes spiritual liberation, the process of authenticating that first
certainty by this intermediation, and of gaining its concrete determination,
viz. reconciliation, the actuality of the spirit.

[pg 169]
Sub-Section A. Art.

§ 556. As this consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape, its

immediacy produces the factor of finitude in Art. On one hand that is, it
breaks up into a work of external common existence, into the subject which
produces that work, and the subject which contemplates and worships it.
But, on the other hand, it is the concrete contemplation and mental picture
of implicitly absolute spirit as the Ideal. In this ideal, or the concrete shape
born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a sign of
the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the
Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone:—the shape or form of Beauty.

§ 557. The sensuous externality attaching to the beautiful,—the form of

immediacy as such,—at the same time qualifies what it embodies: and the
God (of art) has with his spirituality at the same time the stamp upon him of
a natural medium or natural phase of existence—He contains the so-called
unity of nature and spirit—i.e. the immediate unity in sensuously intuitional
form—hence not the spiritual unity, in which the natural would be put only
as “ideal,” as superseded in spirit, and the spiritual content would be only in
self-relation. It is not the absolute spirit which enters this consciousness. On
the subjective side the community has of course an [pg 170] ethical life,
aware, as it is, of the spirituality of its essence: and its self-consciousness
and actuality are in it elevated to substantial liberty. But with the stigma of
immediacy upon it, the subject's liberty is only a manner of life, without the
infinite self-reflection and the subjective inwardness of conscience. These
considerations govern in their further developments the devotion and the
worship in the religion of fine art.

§ 558. For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not
only an external given material—(under which are also included subjective
images and ideas), but—for the expression of spiritual truth—must use the
given forms of nature with a significance which art must divine and possess
(cf. § 411). Of all such forms the human is the highest and the true, because
only in it can the spirit have its corporeity and thus its visible expression.

This disposes of the principle of the imitation of nature in art: a point on

which it is impossible to come to an understanding while a distinction is left
thus abstract,—in other words, so long as the natural is only taken in its
externality, not as the “characteristic” meaningful nature-form which is
significant of spirit.

§ 559. In such single shapes the “absolute” mind cannot be made explicit:
in and to art therefore the spirit is a limited natural spirit whose implicit
universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in detail, breaks up
into an indeterminate polytheism. With the essential restrictedness of its
content, Beauty in general goes no further than a penetration of the vision
or image by the spiritual principle,—something formal, so that the thought
embodied, or the idea, can, like the material which it uses to work in, be of
the most diverse and unessential kind, and still the work be something
beautiful and a work of art.

[pg 171]
§ 560. The one-sidedness of immediacy on the part of the Ideal involves the
opposite one-sidedness (§ 556) that it is something made by the artist. The
subject or agent is the mere technical activity: and the work of art is only
then an expression of the God, when there is no sign of subjective
particularity in it, and the net power of the indwelling spirit is conceived
and born into the world, without admixture and unspotted from its
contingency. But as liberty only goes as far as there is thought, the action
inspired with the fullness of this indwelling power, the artist's enthusiasm,
is like a foreign force under which he is bound and passive; the artistic
production has on its part the form of natural immediacy, it belongs to the
genius or particular endowment of the artist,—and is at the same time a
labour concerned with technical cleverness and mechanical externalities.
The work of art therefore is just as much a work due to free option, and the
artist is the master of the God.

§ 561. In work so inspired the reconciliation appears so obvious in its initial

stage that it is without more ado accomplished in the subjective self-
consciousness, which is thus self-confident and of good cheer, without the
depth and without the sense of its antithesis to the absolute essence. On the
further side of the perfection (which is reached in such reconciliation, in the
beauty of classical art) lies the art of sublimity,—symbolic art, in which the
figuration suitable to the Idea is not yet found, and the thought as going
forth and wrestling with the figure is exhibited as a negative attitude to it,
and yet all the while toiling to work itself into it. The meaning or theme
thus shows it has not yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet
conscious of itself, as free spirit. The artist's theme only is as the abstract
God of pure thought, or an effort towards him,—a restless and unappeased
effort which [pg 172] throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to
find its goal.

§ 562. In another way the Idea and the sensuous figure it appears in are
incompatible; and that is where the infinite form, subjectivity, is not as in
the first extreme a mere superficial personality, but its inmost depth, and
God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an
external form, but as only finding himself in himself, and thus giving
himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone. Romantic art gives
up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of
beauty: it presents him as only condescending to appearance, and the divine
as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it always disengages
itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its
significance.

The Philosophy of Religion has to discover the logical necessity in the

progress by which the Being, known as the Absolute, assumes fuller and
firmer features; it has to note to what particular feature the kind of cultus
corresponds,—and then to see how the secular self-consciousness, the
consciousness of what is the supreme vocation of man,—in short how the
nature of a nation's moral life, the principle of its law, of its actual liberty,
and of its constitution, as well as of its art and science, corresponds to the
principle which constitutes the substance of a religion. That all these
elements of a nation's actuality constitute one systematic totality, that one
spirit creates and informs them, is a truth on which follows the further truth
that the history of religions coincides with the world-history.
As regards the close connexion of art with the various religions it may be
specially noted that beautiful art can only belong to those religions in which
the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not [pg 173]
yet absolute. In religions where the Idea has not yet been revealed and
known in its free character, though the craving for art is felt in order to
bring in imaginative visibility to consciousness the idea of the supreme
being, and though art is the sole organ in which the abstract and radically
indistinct content,—a mixture from natural and spiritual sources,—can try
to bring itself to consciousness;—still this art is defective; its form is
defective because its subject-matter and theme is so,—for the defect in
subject-matter comes from the form not being immanent in it. The
representations of this symbolic art keep a certain tastelessness and stolidity
—for the principle it embodies is itself stolid and dull, and hence has not
the power freely to transmute the external to significance and shape.
Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self-consciousness of
the free spirit,—the consciousness that compared with it the natural and
sensuous has no standing of its own: it makes the natural wholly into the
mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that gives utterance
to itself alone.

But with a further and deeper study, we see that the advent of art, in a
religion still in the bonds of sensuous externality, shows that such religion is
on the decline. At the very time it seems to give religion the supreme
glorification, expression and brilliancy, it has lifted the religion away over
its limitation. In the sublime divinity to which the work of art succeeds in
giving expression the artistic genius and the spectator find themselves at
home, with their personal sense and feeling, satisfied and liberated: to them
the vision and the consciousness of free spirit has been vouchsafed and
attained. Beautiful art, from its side, has thus performed the same service as
philosophy: it has purified the spirit from its thraldom. The older religion in
which the [pg 174] need of fine art, and just for that reason, is first
generated, looks up in its principle to an other-world which is sensuous and
unmeaning: the images adored by its devotees are hideous idols regarded as
wonder-working talismans, which point to the unspiritual objectivity of that
other world,—and bones perform a similar or even a better service than
such images. But even fine art is only a grade of liberation, not the supreme
liberation itself.—The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of
thought,—the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and
where the liberation is accompanied with reverence,—is still absent in the
sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful
sensuousness.

§ 563. Beautiful Art, like the religion peculiar to it, has its future in true
religion. The restricted value of the Idea passes utterly and naturally into the
universality identical with the infinite form;—the vision in which
consciousness has to depend upon the senses passes into a self-mediating
knowledge, into an existence which is itself knowledge,—into revelation.
Thus the principle which gives the Idea its content is that it embody free
intelligence, and as “absolute” spirit it is for the spirit.

[pg 175]
Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion . 172

§ 564. It lies essentially in the notion of religion,—the religion i.e. whose

content is absolute mind—that it be revealed, and, what is more, revealed
by God. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is mind) is a self-
determining principle, as infinite self-realising form,—it therefore is
manifestation out and out. The spirit is only spirit in so far as it is for the
spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the absolute spirit which manifests
no longer abstract elements of its being but itself.

The old conception—due to a one-sided survey of human life—of Nemesis,

which made the divinity and its action in the world only a levelling power,
dashing to pieces everything high and great,—was confronted by Plato and
Aristotle with the doctrine that God is not envious. The same answer may
be given to the modern assertions that man cannot ascertain God. These
assertions (and more than assertions they are not) are the more illogical,
because made within a religion which is expressly called the revealed; for
according to them it would rather be the religion in which nothing of God
was revealed, in which he had not revealed himself, and those belonging to
it would be the heathen “who know not God.” If the word of God [pg 176]
is taken in earnest in religion at all, it is from Him, the theme and centre of
religion, that the method of divine knowledge may and must begin: and if
self-revelation is refused Him, then the only thing left to constitute His
nature would be to ascribe envy to Him. But clearly if the word Mind is to
have a meaning, it implies the revelation of Him.

If we recollect how intricate is the knowledge of the divine Mind for those
who are not content with the homely pictures of faith but proceed to
thought,—at first only “rationalising” reflection, but afterwards, as in duty
bound, to speculative comprehension, it may almost create surprise that so
many, and especially theologians whose vocation it is to deal with these
Ideas, have tried to get off their task by gladly accepting anything offered
them for this behoof. And nothing serves better to shirk it than to adopt the
conclusion that man knows nothing of God. To know what God as spirit is
—to apprehend this accurately and distinctly in thoughts—requires careful
and thorough speculation. It includes, in its fore-front, the propositions:
God is God only so far as he knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further,
his self-consciousness in man, and man's knowledge of God, which
proceeds to man's self-knowledge in God.—See the profound elucidation of
these propositions in the work from which they are taken: Aphorisms on
Knowing and Not-knowing, &c., by C. F. G—l.: Berlin 1829.

§ 565. When the immediacy and sensuousness of shape and knowledge is

superseded, God is, in point of content, the essential and actual spirit of
nature and spirit, while in point of form he is, first of all, presented to
consciousness as a mental representation. This quasi-pictorial
representation gives to the elements of his content, on one hand, a separate
being, making them [pg 177] presuppositions towards each other, and
phenomena which succeed each other; their relationship it makes a series of
events according to finite reflective categories. But, on the other hand, such
a form of finite representationalism is also overcome and superseded in the
faith which realises one spirit and in the devotion of worship.

§ 566. In this separating, the form parts from the content: and in the form
the different functions of the notion part off into special spheres or media,
in each of which the absolute spirit exhibits itself; (α) as eternal content,
abiding self-centred, even in its manifestation; (β) as distinction of the
eternal essence from its manifestation, which by this difference becomes the
phenomenal world into which the content enters; (γ) as infinite return, and
reconciliation with the eternal being, of the world it gave away—the
withdrawal of the eternal from the phenomenal into the unity of its fullness.

§ 567. (α) Under the “moment” of Universality,—the sphere of pure

thought or the abstract medium of essence,—it is therefore the absolute
spirit, which is at first the presupposed principle, not however staying aloof
and inert, but (as underlying and essential power under the reflective
category of causality) creator of heaven and earth: but yet in this eternal
sphere rather only begetting himself as his son, with whom, though
different, he still remains in original identity,—just as, again, this
differentiation of him from the universal essence eternally supersedes itself,
and, though this mediating of a self-superseding mediation, the first
substance is essentially as concrete individuality and subjectivity,—is the
Spirit.

§ 568. (β) Under the “moment” of particularity, or of judgment, it is this

concrete eternal being which is presupposed: its movement is the creation
of the phenomenal [pg 178] world. The eternal “moment” of mediation—of
the only Son—divides itself to become the antithesis of two separate
worlds. On one hand is heaven and earth, the elemental and the concrete
nature,—on the other hand, standing in action and reaction with such
nature, the spirit, which therefore is finite. That spirit, as the extreme of
inherent negativity, completes its independence till it becomes wickedness,
and is that extreme through its connexion with a confronting nature and
through its own naturalness thereby investing it. Yet, amid that naturalness,
it is, when it thinks, directed towards the Eternal, though, for that reason,
only standing to it in an external connexion.

§ 569. (γ) Under the “moment” of individuality as such,—of subjectivity

and the notion itself, in which the contrast of universal and particular has
sunk to its identical ground, the place of presupposition (1) is taken by the
universal substance, as actualised out of its abstraction into an individual
self-consciousness. This individual, who as such is identified with the
essence,—(in the Eternal sphere he is called the Son)—is transplanted into
the world of time, and in him wickedness is implicitly overcome. Further,
this immediate, and thus sensuous, existence of the absolutely concrete is
represented as putting himself in judgment and expiring in the pain of
negativity, in which he, as infinite subjectivity, keeps himself unchanged,
and thus, as absolute return from that negativity and as universal unity of
universal and individual essentiality, has realised his being as the Idea of the
spirit, eternal, but alive and present in the world.

§ 570. (2) This objective totality of the divine man who is the Idea of the
spirit is the implicit presupposition for the finite immediacy of the single
subject. For such subject therefore it is at first an Other, an object [pg 179]
of contemplating vision,—but the vision of implicit truth, through which
witness of the spirit in him, he, on account of his immediate nature, at first
characterised himself as nought and wicked. But, secondly, after the
example of his truth, by means of the faith on the unity (in that example
implicitly accomplished) of universal and individual essence, he is also the
movement to throw off his immediacy, his natural man and self-will, to
close himself in unity with that example (who is his implicit life) in the pain
of negativity, and thus to know himself made one with the essential Being.
Thus the Being of Beings (3) through this mediation brings about its own
indwelling in self-consciousness, and is the actual presence of the essential
and self-subsisting spirit who is all in all.

§ 571. These three syllogisms, constituting the one syllogism of the

absolute self-mediation of spirit, are the revelation of that spirit whose life
is set out as a cycle of concrete shapes in pictorial thought. From this its
separation into parts, with a temporal and external sequence, the unfolding
of the mediation contracts itself in the result,—where the spirit closes in
unity with itself,—not merely to the simplicity of faith and devotional
feeling, but even to thought. In the immanent simplicity of thought the
unfolding still has its expansion, yet is all the while known as an indivisible
coherence of the universal, simple, and eternal spirit in itself. In this form of
truth, truth is the object of philosophy.

If the result—the realised Spirit in which all meditation has superseded

itself—is taken in a merely formal, contentless sense, so that the spirit is not
also at the same time known as implicitly existent and objectively self-
unfolding;—then that infinite subjectivity is the merely formal self-
consciousness, knowing itself in itself as absolute,—Irony. Irony, which can
make every [pg 180] objective reality nought and vain, is itself the
emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its
own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master over
it, is not bound by it,—and, with the assertion that it stands on the very
summit of religion and philosophy, falls rather back into the vanity of
wilfulness. It is only in proportion as the pure infinite form, the self-centred
manifestation, throws off the one-sidedness of subjectivity in which it is the
vanity of thought, that it is the free thought which has its infinite
characteristic at the same time as essential and actual content, and has that
content as an object in which it is also free. Thinking, so far, is only the
formal aspect of the absolute content.
[pg 181]
Sub-Section C. Philosophy.

§ 572. This science is the unity of Art and Religion. Whereas the vision-
method of Art, external in point of form, is but subjective production and
shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes, and whereas
Religion, with its separation into parts, opens it out in mental picture, and
mediates what is thus opened out; Philosophy not merely keeps them
together to make a total, but even unifies them into the simple spiritual
vision, and then in that raises them to self-conscious thought. Such
consciousness is thus the intelligible unity (cognised by thought) of art and
religion, in which the diverse elements in the content are cognised as
necessary, and this necessary as free.

§ 573. Philosophy thus characterises itself as a cognition of the necessity in

the content of the absolute picture-idea, as also of the necessity in the two
forms—on one hand, immediate vision and its poetry, and the objective and
external revelation presupposed by representation,—on the other hand, first
the subjective retreat inwards, then the subjective movement of faith and its
final identification with the presupposed object. This cognition is thus the
recognition of this content and its form; it is the liberation from the one-
sidedness of the forms, elevation of them into the absolute form, [pg 182]
which determines itself to content, remains identical with it, and is in that
the cognition of that essential and actual necessity. This movement, which
philosophy is, finds itself already accomplished, when at the close it seizes
its own notion,—i.e. only looks back on its knowledge.

Here might seem to be the place to treat in a definite exposition of the

reciprocal relations of philosophy and religion. The whole question turns
entirely on the difference of the forms of speculative thought from the
forms of mental representation and “reflecting” intellect. But it is the whole
cycle of philosophy, and of logic in particular, which has not merely taught
and made known this difference, but also criticised it, or rather has let its
nature develop and judge itself by these very categories. It is only by an
insight into the value of these forms that the true and needful conviction can
be gained, that the content of religion and philosophy is the same,—leaving
out, of course, the further details of external nature and finite mind which
fall outside the range of religion. But religion is the truth for all men: faith
rests on the witness of the spirit, which as witnessing is the spirit in man.
This witness—the underlying essence in all humanity—takes, when driven
to expound itself, its first definite form under those acquired habits of
thought which his secular consciousness and intellect otherwise employs. In
this way the truth becomes liable to the terms and conditions of finitude in
general. This does not prevent the spirit, even in employing sensuous ideas
and finite categories of thought, from retaining its content (which as
religion is essentially speculative,) with a tenacity which does violence to
them, and acts inconsistently towards them. By this inconsistency it corrects
their defects. Nothing easier therefore for the “Rationalist” than to point out
[pg 183] contradictions in the exposition of the faith, and then to prepare
triumphs for its principle of formal identity. If the spirit yields to this finite
reflection, which has usurped the title of reason and philosophy—
(“Rationalism”)—it strips religious truth of its infinity and makes it in
reality nought. Religion in that case is completely in the right in guarding
herself against such reason and philosophy and treating them as enemies.
But it is another thing when religion sets herself against comprehending
reason, and against philosophy in general, and specially against a
philosophy of which the doctrine is speculative, and so religious. Such an
opposition proceeds from failure to appreciate the difference indicated and
the value of spiritual form in general, and particularly of the logical form;
or, to be more precise, still from failure to note the distinction of the content
—which may be in both the same—from these forms. It is on the ground of
form that philosophy has been reproached and accused by the religious
party; just as conversely its speculative content has brought the same
charges upon it from a self-styled philosophy—and from a pithless
orthodoxy. It had too little of God in it for the former; too much for the
latter.

The charge of Atheism, which used often to be brought against philosophy

(that it has too little of God), has grown rare: the more wide-spread grows
the charge of Pantheism, that it has too much of him:—so much so, that it is
treated not so much as an imputation, but as a proved fact, or a sheer fact
which needs no proof. Piety, in particular, which with its pious airs of
superiority fancies itself free to dispense with proof, goes hand in hand with
empty rationalism—(which means to be so much opposed to it, though both
repose really on the same habit of mind)—in the wanton assertion, almost
as if it merely mentioned a notorious fact, that [pg 184] Philosophy is the
All-one doctrine, or Pantheism. It must be said that it was more to the credit
of piety and theology when they accused a philosophical system (e.g.
Spinozism) of Atheism than of Pantheism, though the former imputation at
the first glance looks more cruel and insidious (cf. § 71 note). The
imputation of Atheism presupposes a definite idea of a full and real God,
and arises because the popular idea does not detect in the philosophical
notion the peculiar form to which it is attached. Philosophy indeed can
recognise its own forms in the categories of religious consciousness, and
even its own teaching in the doctrine of religion—which therefore it does
not disparage. But the converse is not true: the religious consciousness does
not apply the criticism of thought to itself, does not comprehend itself, and
is therefore, as it stands, exclusive. To impute Pantheism instead of Atheism
to Philosophy is part of the modern habit of mind—of the new piety and
new theology. For them philosophy has too much of God:—so much so,
that, if we believe them, it asserts that God is everything and everything is
God. This new theology, which makes religion only a subjective feeling and
denies the knowledge of the divine nature, thus retains nothing more than a
God in general without objective characteristics. Without interest of its own
for the concrete, fulfilled notion of God, it treats it only as an interest which
others once had, and hence treats what belongs to the doctrine of God's
concrete nature as something merely historical. The indeterminate God is to
be found in all religions; every kind of piety (§ 72)—that of the Hindoo to
asses, cows,—or to dalai-lamas,—that of the Egyptians to the ox—is
always adoration of an object which, with all its absurdities, also contains
the generic abstract, God in General. If this theory needs no more than such
a God, so as to [pg 185] find God in everything called religion, it must at
least find such a God recognised even in philosophy, and can no longer
accuse it of Atheism. The mitigation of the reproach of Atheism into that of
Pantheism has its ground therefore in the superficial idea to which this
mildness has attenuated and emptied God. As that popular idea clings to its
abstract universality, from which all definite quality is excluded, all such
definiteness is only the non-divine, the secularity of things, thus left
standing in fixed undisturbed substantiality. On such a presupposition, even
after philosophy has maintained God's absolute universality, and the
consequent untruth of the being of external things, the hearer clings as he
did before to his belief that secular things still keep their being, and form all
that is definite in the divine universality. He thus changes that universality
into what he calls the pantheistic:—Everything is—(empirical things,
without distinction, whether higher or lower in the scale, are)—all possess
substantiality; and so—thus he understands philosophy—each and every
secular thing is God. It is only his own stupidity, and the falsifications due
to such misconception, which generate the imagination and the allegation of
such pantheism.

But if those who give out that a certain philosophy is Pantheism, are unable
and unwilling to see this—for it is just to see the notion that they refuse—
they should before everything have verified the alleged fact that any one
philosopher, or any one man, had really ascribed substantial or objective
and inherent reality to all things and regarded them as God:—that such an
idea had ever come into the hand of any body but themselves. This
allegation I will further elucidate in this exoteric discussion: and the only
way to do so is to set down the evidence. If we want to take so-called
Pantheism [pg 186] in its most poetical, most sublime, or if you will, its
grossest shape, we must, as is well known, consult the oriental poets: and
the most copious delineations of it are found in Hindoo literature. Amongst
the abundant resources open to our disposal on this topic, I select—as the
most authentic statement accessible—the Bhagavat-Gita, and amongst its
effusions, prolix and reiterative ad nauseam, some of the most telling
passages. In the 10th Lesson (in Schlegel, p. 162) Krishna says of himself173:
—“I am the self, seated in the hearts of all beings. I am the beginning and
the middle and the end also of all beings ... I am the beaming sun amongst
the shining ones, and the moon among the lunar mansions.... Amongst the
Vedas I am the Sâma-Veda: I am mind amongst the senses: I am
consciousness in living beings. And I am Sankara (Siva) among the Rudras,
... Meru among the high-topped mountains, ... the Himalaya among the
firmly-fixed (mountains).... Among beasts I am the lord of beasts.... Among
letters I am the letter A.... I am the spring among the seasons.... I am also
that which is the seed of all things: there is nothing moveable or
immoveable which can exist without me.”
Even in these totally sensuous delineations, Krishna (and we must not
suppose there is, besides Krishna, still God, or a God besides; as he said
before he was Siva, or Indra, so it is afterwards said that Brahma too is in
him) makes himself out to be—not everything, but only—the most
excellent of everything. Everywhere there is a distinction drawn between
external, unessential existences, and one essential amongst them, which he
is. Even when, at the beginning [pg 187] of the passage, he is said to be the
beginning, middle, and end of living things, this totality is distinguished
from the living things themselves as single existences. Even such a picture
which extends deity far and wide in its existence cannot be called
pantheism: we must rather say that in the infinitely multiple empirical
world, everything is reduced to a limited number of essential existences, to
a polytheism. But even what has been quoted shows that these very
substantialities of the externally-existent do not retain the independence
entitling them to be named Gods; even Siva, Indra, &c. melt into the one
Krishna.

This reduction is more expressly made in the following scene (7th Lesson,
p. 7 sqq.). Krishna says: “I am the producer and the destroyer of the whole
universe. There is nothing else higher than myself; all this is woven upon
me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread. I am the taste in water;... I am the
light of the sun and the moon; I am ‘Om’ in all the Vedas.... I am life in all
beings.... I am the discernment of the discerning ones.... I am also the
strength of the strong.” Then he adds: “The whole universe deluded by
these three states of mind developed from the qualities [sc. goodness,
passion, darkness] does not know me who am beyond them and
inexhaustible: for this delusion of mine,” [even the Maya is his, nothing
independent], “developed from the qualities is divine and difficult to
transcend. Those cross beyond this delusion who resort to me alone.” Then
the picture gathers itself up in a simple expression: “At the end of many
lives, the man possessed of knowledge approaches me, (believing) that
Vasudeva is everything. Such a high-souled mind is very hard to find.
Those who are deprived of knowledge by various desires approach other
divinities... Whichever form of deity one worships with [pg 188] faith, from
it he obtains the beneficial things he desires really given by me. But the
fruit thus obtained by those of little judgment is perishable.... The
undiscerning ones, not knowing my transcendent and inexhaustible essence,
than which there is nothing higher, think me who am unperceived to have
become perceptible.”

This “All,” which Krishna calls himself, is not, any more than the Eleatic
One, and the Spinozan Substance, the Every-thing. This every-thing, rather,
the infinitely-manifold sensuous manifold of the finite is in all these
pictures, but defined as the “accidental,” without essential being of its very
own, but having its truth in the substance, the One which, as different from
that accidental, is alone the divine and God. Hindooism however has the
higher conception of Brahma, the pure unity of thought in itself, where the
empirical everything of the world, as also those proximate substantialities,
called Gods, vanish. On that account Colebrooke and many others have
described the Hindoo religion as at bottom a Monotheism. That this
description is not incorrect is clear from these short citations. But so little
concrete is this divine unity—spiritual as its idea of God is—so powerless
its grip, so to speak—that Hindooism, with a monstrous inconsistency, is
also the maddest of polytheisms. But the idolatry of the wretched Hindoo,
when he adores the ape, or other creature, is still a long way from that
wretched fancy of a Pantheism, to which everything is God, and God
everything. Hindoo monotheism moreover is itself an example how little
comes of mere monotheism, if the Idea of God is not deeply determinate in
itself. For that unity, if it be intrinsically abstract and therefore empty, tends
of itself to let whatever is concrete, outside it—be it as a lot of Gods or as
secular, empirical individuals—keep its independence. That pantheism [pg
189] indeed—on the shallow conception of it—might with a show of logic
as well be called a monotheism: for if God, as it says, is identical with the
world, then as there is only one world there would be in that pantheism only
one God. Perhaps the empty numerical unity must be predicated of the
world: but such abstract predication of it has no further special interest; on
the contrary, a mere numerical unity just means that its content is an infinite
multeity and variety of finitudes. But it is that delusion with the empty
unity, which alone makes possible and induces the wrong idea of
pantheism. It is only the picture—floating in the indefinite blue—of the
world as one thing, the all, that could ever be considered capable of
combining with God: only on that assumption could philosophy be
supposed to teach that God is the world: for if the world were taken as it is,
as everything, as the endless lot of empirical existence, then it would hardly
have been even held possible to suppose a pantheism which asserted of
such stuff that it is God.

But to go back again to the question of fact. If we want to see the

consciousness of the One—not as with the Hindoos split between the
featureless unity of abstract thought, on one hand, and on the other, the
long-winded weary story of its particular detail, but—in its finest purity and
sublimity, we must consult the Mohammedans. If e.g. in the excellent
Jelaleddin-Rumi in particular, we find the unity of the soul with the One set
forth, and that unity described as love, this spiritual unity is an exaltation
above the finite and vulgar, a transfiguration of the natural and the spiritual,
in which the externalism and transitoriness of immediate nature, and of
empirical secular spirit, is discarded and absorbed174.

[pg 190]
I refrain from accumulating further examples of the religious and poetic
conceptions which it is customary to call pantheistic. Of the philosophies to
which that name is given, the Eleatic, or Spinozist, it has been [pg 191]
remarked earlier (§ 50, note) that so far are they from identifying God with
the world and making him finite, that in these systems this “everything” has
no truth, and that we should rather call them monotheistic, or, in relation to
the popular idea of the world, acosmical. [pg 192] They are most accurately
called systems which apprehend the Absolute only as substance. Of the
oriental, especially the Mohammedan, modes of envisaging God, we may
rather say that they represent the Absolute as the utterly universal genus
which dwells in the species or existences, but dwells so potently that these
existences have no actual reality. The fault of all these modes of thought
and systems is that they stop short of defining substance as subject and as
mind.

These systems and modes of pictorial conception originate from the one
need common to all philosophies and all religions of getting an idea of God,
and, secondly, of the relationship of God and the world. (In philosophy it is
specially made out that the determination of God's nature determines his
relations with the world.) The “reflective” understanding begins by
rejecting all systems and modes of conception, which, whether they spring
from heart, imagination or speculation, express the interconnexion of God
and the world: and in order to have God pure in faith or consciousness, he is
as essence parted from appearance, as infinite from the finite. But, after this
partition, the conviction arises also that the appearance has a relation to the
essence, the finite to the infinite, and so on: and thus arises the question of
reflection as to the nature of this relation. It is in the reflective form that the
whole difficulty of the affair lies, and that causes this relation to be called
incomprehensible by the agnostic. The close of philosophy is not the place,
even in a general exoteric discussion, to waste a word on what a “notion”
means. But as the view taken of this relation is closely connected with the
view taken of philosophy generally and with all imputations against it, we
may still add the remark that though philosophy certainly has to do with
unity in general, it is not however [pg 193] with abstract unity, mere
identity, and the empty absolute, but with concrete unity (the notion), and
that in its whole course it has to do with nothing else;—that each step in its
advance is a peculiar term or phase of this concrete unity, and that the
deepest and last expression of unity is the unity of absolute mind itself.
Would-be judges and critics of philosophy might be recommended to
familiarise themselves with these phases of unity and to take the trouble to
get acquainted with them, at least to know so much that of these terms there
are a great many, and that amongst them there is great variety. But they
show so little acquaintance with them—and still less take trouble about it—
that, when they hear of unity—and relation ipso facto implies unity—they
rather stick fast at quite abstract indeterminate unity, and lose sight of the
chief point of interest—the special mode in which the unity is qualified.
Hence all they can say about philosophy is that dry identity is its principle
and result, and that it is the system of identity. Sticking fast to the
undigested thought of identity, they have laid hands on, not the concrete
unity, the notion and content of philosophy, but rather its reverse. In the
philosophical field they proceed, as in the physical field the physicist; who
also is well aware that he has before him a variety of sensuous properties
and matters—or usually matters alone, (for the properties get transformed
into matters also for the physicist)—and that these matters (elements) also
stand in relation to one another. But the question is, Of what kind is this
relation? Every peculiarity and the whole difference of natural things,
inorganic and living, depend solely on the different modes of this unity. But
instead of ascertaining these different modes, the ordinary physicist
(chemist included) takes up only one, the most external and the worst, viz.
[pg 194] composition, applies only it in the whole range of natural
structures, which he thus renders for ever inexplicable.

The aforesaid shallow pantheism is an equally obvious inference from this

shallow identity. All that those who employ this invention of their own to
accuse philosophy gather from the study of God's relation to the world is
that the one, but only the one factor of this category of relation—and that
the factor of indeterminateness—is identity. Thereupon they stick fast in
this half-perception, and assert—falsely as a fact—that philosophy teaches
the identity of God and the world. And as in their judgment either of the
two,—the world as much as God—has the same solid substantiality as the
other, they infer that in the philosophic Idea God is composed of God and
the world. Such then is the idea they form of pantheism, and which they
ascribe to philosophy. Unaccustomed in their own thinking and
apprehending of thoughts to go beyond such categories, they import them
into philosophy, where they are utterly unknown; they thus infect it with the
disease against which they subsequently raise an outcry. If any difficulty
emerge in comprehending God's relation to the world, they at once and very
easily escape it by admitting that this relation contains for them an
inexplicable contradiction; and that hence, they must stop at the vague
conception of such relation, perhaps under the more familiar names of, e.g.
omnipresence, providence, &c. Faith in their use of the term means no more
than a refusal to define the conception, or to enter on a closer discussion of
the problem. That men and classes of untrained intellect are satisfied with
such indefiniteness, is what one expects; but when a trained intellect and an
interest for reflective study is satisfied, in matters admitted to be of
superior, if not even of supreme interest, with indefinite ideas, it is hard to
decide whether the thinker is really in earnest [pg 195] with the subject. But
if those who cling to this crude “rationalism” were in earnest, e.g. with
God's omnipresence, so far as to realise their faith thereon in a definite
mental idea, in what difficulties would they be involved by their belief in
the true reality of the things of sense! They would hardly like, as Epicurus
does, to let God dwell in the interspaces of things, i.e. in the pores of the
physicists,—said pores being the negative, something supposed to exist
beside the material reality. This very “Beside” would give their pantheism
its spatiality,—their everything, conceived as the mutual exclusion of parts
in space. But in ascribing to God, in his relation to the world, an action on
and in the space thus filled on the world and in it, they would endlessly split
up the divine actuality into infinite materiality. They would really thus have
the misconception they call pantheism or all-one-doctrine, only as the
necessary sequel of their misconceptions of God and the world. But to put
that sort of thing, this stale gossip of oneness or identity, on the shoulders of
philosophy, shows such recklessness about justice and truth that it can only
be explained through the difficulty of getting into the head thoughts and
notions, i.e. not abstract unity, but the many-shaped modes specified. If
statements as to facts are put forward, and the facts in question are thoughts
and notions, it is indispensable to get hold of their meaning. But even the
fulfilment of this requirement has been rendered superfluous, now that it
has long been a foregone conclusion that philosophy is pantheism, a system
of identity, an All-one doctrine, and that the person therefore who might be
unaware of this fact is treated either as merely unaware of a matter of
common notoriety, or as prevaricating for a purpose. On account of this
chorus of assertions, then, I have believed myself obliged to speak at more
length and exoterically on the outward and [pg 196] inward untruth of this
alleged fact: for exoteric discussion is the only method available in dealing
with the external apprehension of notions as mere facts,—by which notions
are perverted into their opposite. The esoteric study of God and identity, as
of cognitions and notions, is philosophy itself.

§ 574. This notion of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the truth aware of
itself (§ 236),—the logical system, but with the signification that it is
universality approved and certified in concrete content as in its actuality. In
this way the science has gone back to its beginning: its result is the logical
system but as a spiritual principle: out of the presupposing judgment, in
which the notion was only implicit and the beginning an immediate,—and
thus out of the appearance which it had there—it has risen into its pure
principle and thus also into its proper medium.

§ 575. It is this appearing which originally gives the motive of the further
development. The first appearance is formed by the syllogism, which is
based on the Logical system as starting-point, with Nature for the middle
term which couples the Mind with it. The Logical principle turns to Nature
and Nature to Mind. Nature, standing between the Mind and its essence,
sunders itself, not indeed to extremes of finite abstraction, nor itself to
something away from them and independent,—which, as other than they,
only serves as a link between them: for the syllogism is in the Idea and
Nature is essentially defined as a transition-point and negative factor, and as
implicitly the Idea. Still the mediation of the notion has the external form of
transition, and the science of Nature presents itself as the course of
necessity, so that it is only in the one extreme that the liberty of the notion is
explicit as a self-amalgamation.

§ 576. In the second syllogism this appearance is so [pg 197] far

superseded, that that syllogism is the standpoint of the Mind itself, which—
as the mediating agent in the process—presupposes Nature and couples it
with the Logical principle. It is the syllogism where Mind reflects on itself
in the Idea: philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty is
the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it.

§ 577. The third syllogism is the Idea of philosophy, which has self-
knowing reason, the absolutely-universal, for its middle term: a middle,
which divides itself into Mind and Nature, making the former its
presupposition, as process of the Idea's subjective activity, and the latter its
universal extreme, as process of the objectively and implicitly existing Idea.
The self-judging of the Idea into its two appearances (§§ 575, 576)
characterises both as its (the self-knowing reason's) manifestations: and in it
there is a unification of the two aspects:—it is the nature of the fact, the
notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same
movement is equally the action of cognition. The eternal Idea, in full
fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys
itself as absolute Mind.

Ἡ δὲ νόησις ἡ καθ᾽ αὑτὴν τοῦ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ ἀρίστου, καὶ ἡ μάλιστα τοῦ μάλιστα.
Αὑτὸν δὲ νοεῖ ὁ νοῦς κατὰ μετάληψιν τοῦ νοητοῦ νοητὸς γὰρ γίγνεται θιγγάνων καὶ
νοῶν, ὥστε ταὐτὸν νοῦς καὶ νοητόν. Τὸ γὰρ δεκτικὸν τοῦ νοητοῦ καὶ τῆς οὐσίας
νοῦς. Ἐνεργεῖ δὲ ἔχων. Ὥστ᾽ ἐκεῖνο μᾶλλον τούτου ὂ δοκεῖ ὁ νοῦς θεῖον ἔχειν, καὶ
ἡ θεωρία τὸ ἥδιστον καὶ ἄριστον. Εἰ οὖν οὕτως εὖ ἔχει, ὡς ἡμεῖς ποτέ, ὁ θεὸς ἀεί,
θαυμαστόν; εἰ δὲ μᾶλλον, ἔτι θαυμασιώτερον. Ἔχει δὲ ὡδί. Καὶ ζωὴ δέ γε ὑπάρχει; ἡ
γὰρ νοῦ ἐνέργεια ζωή, ἐκεῖνος δὲ ἡ ἐνέργεια; ἐνέργεια δὲ ἡ καθ᾽ αὑτὴν ἐκείνου ζωὴ
ἀρίστη καὶ ἀΐδιος. Φαμὲν δὲ τὸν θεὸν εἶναι ζῷον ἀΐδιον ἄριστον, ὥστε ζωὴ αἰὼν
συνεχὴς καὶ ἀΐδιος ὑπάρχει τῷ θεῷ; τοῦτο γὰρ ὁ θεός. (ARIST. Met. XI. 7.)
[pg 199]
Index.

Absolute (the), xlviii, 7.

Abstraction, 74.

Accent, 81, 87.

Ages of man, 17.

Alphabets, 81.

Altruism, 57.

Animal magnetism, clxi, 5, 29 seqq.

Anthropology, xxv, lxxxviii, 12 seqq.

Appetite, 53.

Aristotle, liii, cxxxiii, 4, 63, 163.

Art, xxxix seqq., 169 seqq.

Asceticism, cxv, cxliii, clxxxvii, 159.

Association of ideas, 73.

Atheism, 183.

Athens, cxxx.

Attention, clxxiii, 69.

Automatism (psychological), clxv.

Bacon (Fr.), xxi, lii, lix, clx.

Bain (A.), cxxi.

Beauty, 169.

Bhagavat-Gita, 186 seqq.

Biography, 151.

Body and Soul (relations of), lxxxii, cxvi, clvi, 13.

Boëthius, l.

Böhme (J.), 95.

Braid (J.), clxiv.

Bravery, cxcix.

Budget, 144.

Capitalism, cci seqq.

Cardinal virtues, cxxxii.

Categories, lx.

Catholicism, 157.

Children, lxxxvii, cii.

Chinese language, 81 seqq.

Choice, 98.

Christianity, xliv, cxli, clxxix, 7, 101, 157.

Clairvoyance, clviii, clxi, 33.

Cognition, 64.

Commercial morality, cci.

Comte (C.), xcix.

Condillac, lxxviii, 61.

Conscience, xxx, cxxii, clxxxvii, 117, 156, 161.

Consciousness, xxv, xcix, 47 seqq.

Constitution of the State, 132.

Contract, 108.

Corporation, 130.

Crime, cxciii, 109.

Criticism, xvi, cxxxviii, 149.

Custom, clxxxix, 104.

Dante, cxxxiv.

Deduction (Kantian and Fichtean), cx seqq.

Democracy, 141.

Development, 60.

Disease (mental), 27, 37.

Duty, cxiv, cxix, cxxi seqq., cxxxi, cxxxix, 97, 104, 116.

Economics, 122.
Education, xcii, cxxxvii, 11.

Ego (the), lxiv seqq., 47 seqq.

Egoism, 55.

Eleaticism, 190.

England, 143.

Epicureanism, cxli, 195.

Epistemology, ciii.

Equality (political and social), cxc, 133.

Equity, xxxi.

[pg 200]

Estates, 123.

Ethics, xv, xix, xxx seqq., xcv, cxiii seqq., cxc seqq., 113 seqq.

Experience, 51.

Experimental psychology, lxxxi seqq., c.

Expression (mental), 23, 45.

Faculties of Mind, lxxiii seqq., xcvii, cxxvi, 58, 65.

Faith, cvii.

Faith-cure, clxi, 35.

Fame, 153.

Family, xxxii, cxcii, 121.

Fechner (G. T.), cli.

Feeling, 22, 68, 92.

Fichte (J. G.), cvi, cix seqq., clxiv, clxix, 49.

Finance, 144.

Finitude, 8.

Fraud, 110.

Freedom, cxxv seqq., clxxv, 6, 99, 113, 133 seqq.

Fries, clxxix.

Genius (the), clvii, 28.

German language, 78, 88:

politics, clxxvii;
empire, clxxxi.

God, xxxiv, xli, cxxii, 20, 154, 176.

Goethe, cliv, clxix.

Goodness, 115.

Government, 137;
forms of, 141.

Greek ethics, cxxix seqq., cxciv;

religion, 164.

Habit, clviii, 39.

Happiness, 99.

Herbart, lxii seqq., lxxxv, cxxvii.

Hieroglyphics, 80.

History, xxxiv, xlvii, xci, 147 seqq.

Hobbes, lxxvi, clxxxii.

Holiness, 159.

Honour, 124.

Humboldt (W. v.), 79.

Hume, lxxi, cxx.

Hypnotism, clxiv seqq., 31 seqq.

Idea (Platonic), 163.

Idealism, civ; political, clxxxvi.

Ideality, clxviii, 25.

Ideas, lxix seqq., ci seqq.

Imagination, 72.
Immaterialism, clii, 12, 45.

Impulse, 95.

Individualist ethics, cxx seqq.

Individuality in the State, 139.

Industrialism, cc, 123.

Insanity, 37.

Intention, 114.

International Law, 147.

Intuition, 67.

Irony, 179.

Jelaleddin-Rumi, 189.

Judgment, 89.

Judicial system, 127.

Jung-Stilling, clxii.

Juries, 128.

Kant (I.), xv, lxiv, lxxi, xcvi, cvii, cxxviii, clxxxviii, 20, 48, 51, 63, 154.

Kieser, clxiii.
Knowledge, cv, cxxxv, cxli, 64.

Krishna, 186 seqq.

Labour, 123.

Language, clxxiv, 79 seqq.

Laplace, clxiv.

Law, xxix, xcvi, cxc, 104, 125.

Legality, xxx, clxxxix.

Legislation, 125.

Leibniz, lxxii, lxxvii, cxlvi, 14, 80, 82.

Liberty, see Freedom.

Life, 13.

Logic, xiv, xvii, lxi, xcv, 196.

Lutheranism, 157.

Macchiavelli, clxxx.

Magic, clxi, 29.

Manifestation, 7.

Manners, 104.

Marriage, 121, 159.

Master and slave, 56.

Mathematics in psychology, lxviii.

Medium, 34.

Memory, clxxiv, 70, 84.

Mesmer, clxi.

Metaphysic, lviii seqq.

Mill (James), lxxix.

[pg 201]

Mind (= Spirit), xlix seqq., 58, 196.

Mnemonics, 85.

Monarchy, 139.

Monasticism, 159.

Monotheism, 188.

Morality, xxx, xxxviii, cxxi, clxxxviii seqq., cxcviii, 113 seqq.

Münsterberg (H.), lxxxiii.

Napoleon, 19.

Nationality, 142, 150, 154, cxcv.

Natural Philosophy, xv, xvii, xxii.

Natural rights, 112.

Nature, cxx, cxxiv, 12, 133, 196.

Nemesis, 174.

Nietzsche (F.), cxxviii.

Nobility, cxcvii.

Observation, lxxxix.

Orders (social), cxcvii seqq., 124.

Ought, clxxv, 94, 116.

Pain, 6, 94.

Pantheism, 184, 194.

Parliament, 142.

Passion, 95.

Peasantry, cci.

Peel (Sir R.), 127.

Perception, 67.

Perfection, cxxvii, cxxix.

Person, 107, 119.

Personality, lxiv, clxvii.

Philosophy, xiv, cxvii, cxxxviii, 159 seqq., 179 seqq.

Phrenology, 35.

Physiology, lxxxi, c.

Pinel, 39.

Plato, xcviii, cxxxi, cxxxv, 33, 97, 102, 162.

Pleasure, cxxxvi, 94.

Plotinus, cxliv.

Police, 130.

Porphyry, xx.

Positivity of laws, 125.

Powers (political), ccii, 138.

Practice, 92.

Property, xxix, cxcii, 107.

Protestantism, 166.

Prussia, clxxviii, clxxxiv.

Psychiatry, 33.

Psychology, xxii, xxiv, lii seqq., lxiii, lxxxvi, xcv, cxvii, 4, 58, 63.

Psycho-physics, clvi, 23.

Punishment, cxciii, cciii, 111.

Purpose, 97, 114.

Races, 16.

Rationalism, clxv, 183.

Reason, cxv, cxliii, clxxii, 58.

Recollection, 70.

Reinhold, 49.

Religion, xxxvii seqq., cxcvi, 155 seqq., 167 seqq.

Representation, cxi, 70;
political, clxxxiii, 142.

Responsibility, 114.

Revelation, 7, 175.

Right, xxix, 104 (see Law).

Ritter, clxi, clxiii.

Romances, 151:
romantic art, 172.

Savages, lxxxvii, cii.

Schelling, clxi.

Schindler, clxiii.

Schopenhauer, cvi, cxvi, cli, clxiv, clxix, clxxxvii.

Science, xviii.

Scott (Sir W.), 151.

Self-consciousness, clxxi, 53 seqq.

Sensibility and sensation, 20, 50.

Sex, 18.

Siderism, clxiii, 15.

Signs (in language), 76.

Skill (acquired), 42.

Slavery, 56, 101.

Sleep, 18.

Society, xxxii, 56.

Sociology, xxiii.

Somnambulism, 30.

Soul, liv, lxix, lxxv, 26.

Spencer (H.), xxi seqq., cxi, cxxiii, cxliv.

Spinoza, lxxvi, ci, cxix, cl, 14, 49, 188.

Spiritualism, clxii.
State, xxxii seqq., clxxvi, clxxxiii, 131 seqq.

Stoicism, cxix, cxxiv, cxi, cxliii.

Suggestion, clxv seqq., 33.

[pg 202]

Superstition, 158.

Syllogism, 90.

Symbol, 77, 171.

Sympathy, clv.

Telepathy, clxi, 34.

Tellurism, clxiii, 15.

Theology, 155.

Thinking, clxxiv, 89.

Tholuck, 191.

Trinity, 177 seqq.

Truth, cv, 182.

Unconscious (the), cxlvi.

Understanding, 52, 89.

Universalising, cxxviii.

Utilitarianism, cxxxvi.

Value, 109.
Virtues, cxxxi, cxcviii, 120.

War, cxcix, 146.

Wartburg, clxxix.

Welfare, 114.

Wickedness, 9, 94, 117.

Will, xxviii, cxxv, clxxv, 62, 90.

Wolff, lxxiii.

Words, clxxiv, 79.

Wordsworth, li, clxviii.

Written language, 81 seqq.

Wrong, 109.

Würtemberg, clxxxv.
Footnotes

1.
Plato, Rep. 527.
2.
The prospectus of the System of Synthetic Philosophy is dated
1860. Darwin's Origin of Species is 1859. But such ideas, both in
Mr. Spencer and others, are earlier than Darwin's book.
3.
Hegel's Verhältniss, the supreme category of what is called
actuality: where object is necessitated by outside object.
4.
Cf. Herbart, Werke (ed. Kehrbach), iv. 372. This consciousness
proper is what Leibniz called « Apperception, » la connaissance
réflexive de l'état intérieur (Nouveaux Essais).
5.
Herbart, Werke, vi. 55 (ed. Kehrbach).
6.
p. 59 (§ 440).
7.
p. 63 (§ 440).
8.
These remarks refer to four out of the five Herbartian ethical
ideas. See also Leibniz, who (in 1693, De Notionibus juris et
justitiae) had given the following definitions: “Caritas est
benevolentia universalis. Justitia est caritas sapientis. Sapientia
est scientia felicitatis.” The jus naturae has three grades: the
lowest, jus strictum; the second, aequitas (or caritas, in the
narrower sense); and the highest, pietas, which is honeste, i.e. pie
vivere.
9.
To which the Greek πόλις, the Latin civitas or respublica, were
only approximations. Hegel is not writing a history. If he were, it
would be necessary for him to point out how far the individual
instance, e.g. Rome, or Prussia, corresponded to its Idea.
10.
Shakespeare's phrase, as in Othello, iii. 2; Lover's Complaint, v.
24.
11.
Iliad, xii. 243.
12.
See Hegel's Logic, pp. 257 seq.
13.
See p. 153 (§ 550).
14.
Cf. Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel, chaps. xviii, xxvi.
15.
As stated in p. 167 (Encycl. § 554). Cf. Phenom. d. Geistes, cap.
vii, which includes the Religion of Art, and the same point of
view is explicit in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia.
16.
Philosophie der Religion (Werke, xi. 5).
17.
Hegel, Phenomenologie des Geistes (Werke, ii. 545). The
meeting-ground of the Greek spirit, as it passed through Rome,
with Christianity.
18.
Ib., p. 584.
19.
Phenomenologie des Geistes (Werke, ii. 572). Thus Hegelian
idealism claims to be the philosophical counterpart of the central
dogma of Christianity.
20.
From the old Provençal Lay of Boëthius.
21.
It is the doctrine of the intellectus agens, or in actu; the actus
purus of the Schoolmen.
22.
Einleitung in die Philosophie, §§ 1, 2.
23.
Psychologie als Wissenschaft, Vorrede.
24.
Einleitung in die Philosophie, §§ 11, 12.
25.
Einleitung in die Philosophie, § 18: cf. Werke, ed. Kehrbach, v.
108.
26.
Cf. Plato's remarks on the problem in the word Self-control.
Republ. 430-1.
27.
Lehrbuch der Psychologie, §§ 202, 203.
28.
Allgemeine Metaphysik, Vorrede.
29.
Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik (1806), § 13.
30.
Werke, ed. Kehrbach (Ueber die Möglichkeit, &c), v. 96.
31.
Ibid., p. 100.
32.
One might almost fancy Herbart was translating into a general
philosophic thesis the words in which Goethe has described how
he overcame a real trouble by transmuting it into an ideal shape,
e.g. Wahrheit und Dichtung, cap. xii.
33.
Herbart's language is almost identical with Hegel's: Encycl. § 389
(p. 12). Cf. Spencer, Psychology, i. 192. “Feelings are in all cases
the materials out of which the superior tracts of consciousness
and intellect are evolved.”
34.
Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel, ch. xvii.
35.
Psychologia Empirica, § 29.
36.
As is also the case with Herbart's metaphysical reality of the Soul.
37.
Human Nature, vii. 2. “Pleasure, Love, and appetite, which is also
called desire, are divers names for divers considerations of the
same thing....” Deliberation is (ch. xii. 1) the “alternate succession
of appetite and fears.”
38.
Eth. ii. 48 Schol.
39.
Eth. ii. 43 Schol.: cf. 49 Schol.
40.
This wide scope of thinking (cogitatio, penser) is at least as old as
the Cartesian school: and should be kept in view, as against a
tendency to narrow its range to the mere intellect.
41.
e.g. Analysis of the Human Mind, ch. xxiv. “Attention is but
another name for the interesting character of the idea;” ch. xix.
“Desire and the idea of a pleasurable sensation are convertible
terms.”
 42.
As Mr. Spencer says (Psychology, i. 141), “Objective psychology
can have no existence as such without borrowing its data from
subjective psychology.”
43.
The same failure to note that experiment is valuable only where
general points of view are defined, is a common fault in biology.
44.
Münsterberg, Aufgaben und Methoden der Psychologie, p. 144.
45.
Lehrbuch der Psychologie, § 54 (2nd ed.), or § 11 (1st ed.).
46.
See p. 11 (§ 387).
47.
Cf. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, i. 43. “There is more
reason in thy body than in thy best wisdom.”
48.
This language is very characteristic of the physicists who dabble
in psychology and imagine they are treading in the steps of Kant,
if not even verifying what they call his guesswork: cf. Ziehen,
Physiol. Psychologie, 2nd ed. p. 212. “In every case there is given
us only the psychical series of sensations and their memory-
images, and it is only a universal hypothesis if we assume beside
this psychical series a material series standing in causal relation to
it.... The material series is not given equally originally with the
psychical.”
49.
It is the same radical feature of consciousness which is thus noted
by Mr. Spencer, Psychology, i. 475. “Perception and sensation are
ever tending to exclude each other but never succeed.”
“Cognition and feeling are antithetical and inseparable.”
“Consciousness continues only in virtue of this conflict.” Cf.
Plato's resolution in the Philebus of the contest between
intelligence and feeling (pleasure).
 50.
It is the quasi-Aristotelian ἀπαγωγή, defined as the step from one
proposition to another, the knowledge of which will set the first
proposition in a full light.
51.
Grundlage des Naturrechts, § 5.
52.
System der Sittenlehre, § 8, iv.
53.
Even though religion (according to Kant) conceive them as divine
commands.
54.
Cf. Hegel's Werke, vii. 2, p. 236 (Lecture-note on § 410). “We
must treat as utterly empty the fancy of those who suppose that
properly man should have no organic body,” &c.; and see p. 159
of the present work.
55.
Criticism of Pure Reason, Architectonic.
56.
Spencer, Psychology, i. 291: “Mind can be understood only by
observing how mind is evolved.”
57.
Cf. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, i. 339: “The ethical sentiment
proper is, in the great mass of cases, scarcely discernible.”
58.
Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel, p. 143.
59.
Windelband (W.), Präludien (1884), p. 288.
60.
Cf. Plato, Republic, p. 486.
61.
Human Nature: Morals, Part III.
 62.
Emotion and Will, ch. xv. § 23.
63.
It is characteristic of the Kantian doctrine to absolutise the
conception of Duty and make it express the essence of the whole
ethical idea.
64.
Which are still, as the Socialist Fourier says, states of social
incoherence, specially favourable to falsehood.
65.
Rechtsphilosophie, § 4.
66.
Cf. Schelling, ii. 12: “There are no born sons of freedom.”
67.
Simmel (G.), Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, i. 184.
68.
Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 225.
69.
Aristot. Polit. i. 6.
70.
Plato, Phaedo.
71.
Carus, Psyche, p. 1.
72.
See Arist., Anal. Post. ii. 19 (ed. Berl. 100, a. 10).
73.
Cf. The Logic of Hegel, notes &c., p. 421.
74.
“Omnia individua corpora quamvis diversis gradibus animata
sunt.” Eth. ii. 13. schol.
75.
Nanna (1848): Zendavesta (1851): Ueber die Seelenfrage (1861).
76.
Described by S. as the rise from mere physical cause to
physiological stimulus (Reiz), to psychical motive.
77.
Infra, p. 12.
78.
Aristot., De Anima, i. c. 4, 5.
79.
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, i. 10.
80.
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, iv. 18.
81.
Works like Preyer's Seele des Kindes illustrate this aspect of
mental evolution; its acquirement of definite and correlated
functions.
82.
Cf. the end of Caleb Balderstone (in The Bride of Lammermoor):
“With a fidelity sometimes displayed by the canine race, but
seldom by human beings, he pined and died.”
83.
See Windischmann's letters in Briefe von und an Hegel.
84.
Cf. Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel, chaps. xii-xiv.
85.
Kieser's Tellurismus is, according to Schopenhauer, “the fullest
and most thorough text-book of Animal Magnetism.”
86.
Cf. Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke, iii. 295 (Tagebuch über den
animalischen Magnetismus, 1813), and Schopenhauer, Der Wille
in der Natur.
87.
Bernheim: La suggestion domine toute l'histoire de l'humanité.
88.
An instance from an unexpected quarter, in Eckermann's
conversations with Goethe: “In my young days I have
experienced cases enough, where on lonely walks there came
over me a powerful yearning for a beloved girl, and I thought of
her so long till she actually came to meet me.” (Conversation of
Oct. 7, 1827.)
89.
Gleichsam in einer Vorwelt, einer diese Welt schaffenden Welt
(Nachgelassene Werke, iii. 321).
90.
Selbst-bewusstsein is not self-consciousness, in the vulgar sense
of brooding over feelings and self: but consciousness which is
active and outgoing, rather than receptive and passive. It is
practical, as opposed to theoretical.
91.
The more detailed exposition of this Phenomenology of Mind is
given in the book with that title: Hegel's Werke, ii. pp. 71-316.
92.
System der Sittlichkeit, p. 15 (see Essay V).
93.
Hegel's Werke, viii. 313, and cf. the passage quoted in my Logic
of Hegel, notes, pp. 384, 385.
94.
Hegel's Briefe, i. 15.
95.
Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands, edited by G. Mollat (1893).
Parts of this were already given by Haym and Rosenkranz. The
same editor has also in this year published, though not quite in
full, Hegel's System der Sittlichkeit, to which reference is made in
what follows.
96.
In which some may find a prophecy of the effects of “blood and
iron” in 1866.
97.
Die Absolute Regierung: in the System der Sittlichkeit, p. 32: cf.
p. 55. Hegel himself compares it to Fichte's Ephorate.
98.
Die Absolute Regierung, l.c. pp. 37, 38.
99.
Some idea of his meaning may perhaps be gathered by
comparison with passages in Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, ii.
1, 2.
100.
Kritik der Verfassung, p. 20.
101.
In some respects Bacon's attitude in the struggle between royalty
and parliament may be compared.
102.
Just as Schopenhauer, on the contrary, always says moralisch—
never sittlich.
103.
Grey (G.), Journals of two Expeditions of Discovery in North-
West and Western Australia, ii. 220.
104.
With some variation of ownership, perhaps, according to the
prevalence of so-called matriarchal or patriarchal households.
105.
Cf. the custom in certain tribes which names the father after his
child: as if the son first gave his father legitimate position in
society.
106.
System der Sittlichkeit, p. 8.
107.
Aufhebung (positive) as given in absolute Sittlichkeit.
108.
System der Sittlichkeit, p. 15.
109.
This phraseology shows the influence of Schelling, with whom he
was at this epoch associated. See Prolegomena to the Study of
Hegel, ch. xiv.
110.
Cf. the intermediate function assigned (see above, p. clxxxiii) to
the priests and the aged.
111.
System der Sittlichkeit, p. 19.
112.
See infra, p. 156.
113.
Wordsworth's Laodamia.
114.
“For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ‘Chuck him out, the
brute!’
But it's ‘Saviour of 'is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.”

115.
“I can assure you,” said Werner (the merchant), “that I never
reflected on the State in my life. My tolls, charges and dues I have
paid for no other reason than that it was established usage.” (Wilh.
Meisters Lehrjahre, viii. 2.)
116.
System der Sittlichkeit, p. 40.
117.
System der Sittlichkeit, p. 65.
118.
Ibid. p. 46.
 119.
Natürliche Seele.
120.
Natürliche Qualitäten.
121.
Empfindung.
122.
Die fühlende Seele.
123.
Plato had a better idea of the relation of prophecy generally to the
state of sober consciousness than many moderns, who supposed
that the Platonic language on the subject of enthusiasm authorised
their belief in the sublimity of the revelations of somnambulistic
vision. Plato says in the Timaeus (p. 71), “The author of our being
so ordered our inferior parts that they too might obtain a measure
of truth, and in the liver placed their oracle (the power of
divination by dreams). And herein is a proof that God has given
the art of divination, not to the wisdom, but, to the foolishness of
man; for no man when in his wits attains prophetic truth and
inspiration; but when he receives the inspired word, either his
intelligence is enthralled by sleep, or he is demented by some
distemper or possession (enthusiasm).” Plato very correctly notes
not merely the bodily conditions on which such visionary
knowledge depends, and the possibility of the truth of the dreams,
but also the inferiority of them to the reasonable frame of mind.
124.
Selbstgefühl.
125.
Gewohnheit.
126.
Die wirkliche Seele.
127.
Das Bewußtsein als solches: (a) Das sinnliche Bewußtsein.
 128.
Wahrnehmung.
129.
Der Verstand.
130.
Selbstbewußtsein.
131.
Die Begierde.
132.
Das anerkennende Selbstbewußtsein.
133.
Die Vernunft.
134.
Der Geist.
135.
Die Intelligenz.
136.
Anschauung.
137.
Vorstellung.
138.
Die Erinnerung.
139.
Die Einbildungskraft.
140.
Phantasie.
141.
Gedächtniß.
142.
Auswendiges.
 143.
Inwendiges.
144.
Das Denken.
145.
Der praktische Geist.
146.
Der praktische Gefühl.
147.
Der Triebe und die Willkühr.
148.
Die Glückseligkeit.
149.
Der freie Geist.
150.
Gesess.
151.
Sitte.
152.
Das Recht.
153.
Moralität.
154.
Naturrecht.
155.
Moralität.
156.
Der Vorsatz.
157.
That.
 158.
Handlung.
159.
Die Absicht und das Wohl.
160.
Das Gute und das Böse.
161.
Die Sittlichkeit.
162.
Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft.
163.
Das System der Bedürfnisse.
164.
Die Rechtspflege.
165.
Geseß.
166.
Die Polizei und die Corporation.
167.
Inneres Staatsrecht.
168.
Das äußere Staatsrecht.
169.
Die Weltgeschichte.
170.
Weltweisheit.
171.
Der absolute Geist.
172.
Die geoffenbarte Religion.
 173.
[The citation given by Hegel from Schlegel's translation is here
replaced by the version (in one or two points different) in the
Sacred Books of the East, vol. viii.]
174.
In order to give a clearer impression of it, I cannot refrain from
quoting a few passages, which may at the same time give some
indication of the marvellous skill of Rückert, from whom they are
taken, as a translator. [For Rückert's verses a version is here
substituted in which I have been kindly helped by Miss May
Kendall.]

III.

I saw but One through all heaven's starry spaces gleaming:

I saw but One in all sea billows wildly streaming.
I looked into the heart, a waste of worlds, a sea,—
I saw a thousand dreams,—yet One amid all dreaming.
And earth, air, water, fire, when thy decree is given,
Are molten into One: against thee none hath striven.
There is no living heart but beats unfailingly
In the one song of praise to thee, from earth and heaven.

V.

As one ray of thy light appears the noonday sun,

But yet thy light and mine eternally are one.
As dust beneath thy feet the heaven that rolls on high:
Yet only one, and one for ever, thou and I.
The dust may turn to heaven, and heaven to dust decay;
Yet art thou one with me, and shalt be one for aye.
How may the words of life that fill heaven's utmost part
Rest in the narrow casket of one poor human heart?
How can the sun's own rays, a fairer gleam to fling,
Hide in a lowly husk, the jewel's covering?
How may the rose-grove all its glorious bloom unfold,
Drinking in mire and slime, and feeding on the mould?
How can the darksome shell that sips the salt sea stream
Fashion a shining pearl, the sunlight's joyous beam?
Oh, heart! should warm winds fan thee, should'st thou floods
endure,
One element are wind and flood; but be thou pure.

IX.

I'll tell thee how from out the dust God moulded man,—
Because the breath of Love He breathed into his clay:
I'll tell thee why the spheres their whirling paths began,—
They mirror to God's throne Love's glory day by day:
I'll tell thee why the morning winds blow o'er the grove,—
It is to bid Love's roses bloom abundantly:
I'll tell thee why the night broods deep the earth above,—
Love's bridal tent to deck with sacred canopy:
All riddles of the earth dost thou desire to prove?—
To every earthly riddle is Love alone the key.

XV.

Life shrinks from Death in woe and fear,

Though Death ends well Life's bitter need:
So shrinks the heart when Love draws near,
As though 'twere Death in very deed:
For wheresoever Love finds room,
There Self, the sullen tyrant, dies.
So let him perish in the gloom,—
Thou to the dawn of freedom rise.

In this poetry, which soars over all that is external and sensuous,
who would recognise the prosaic ideas current about so-called
pantheism—ideas which let the divine sink to the external and the
sensuous? The copious extracts which Tholuck, in his work
Anthology from the Eastern Mystics, gives us from the poems of
Jelaleddin and others, are made from the very point of view now
under discussion. In his Introduction, Herr Tholuck proves how
profoundly his soul has caught the note of mysticism; and there,
too, he points out the characteristic traits of its oriental phase, in
distinction from that of the West and Christendom. With all their
divergence, however, they have in common the mystical
character. The conjunction of Mysticism with so-called
Pantheism, as he says (p. 53), implies that inward quickening of
soul and spirit which inevitably tends to annihilate that external
Everything, which Pantheism is usually held to adore. But beyond
that, Herr Tholuck leaves matters standing at the usual indistinct
conception of Pantheism; a profounder discussion of it would
have had, for the author's emotional Christianity, no direct
interest; but we see that personally he is carried away by
remarkable enthusiasm for a mysticism which, in the ordinary
phrase, entirely deserves the epithet Pantheistic. Where, however,
he tries philosophising (p. 12), he does not get beyond the
standpoint of the “rationalist” metaphysic with its uncritical
categories.
***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND***
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 Table of Contents
Contents
Preface.
Five Introductory Essays In Psychology And Ethics.
Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.
(i.) Philosophy and its Parts.
(ii.) Mind and Morals.
(iii.) Religion and Philosophy.
(iv.) Mind or Spirit.
Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.
(i.) Psychology as a Science and as a Part of Philosophy.
(ii.) Herbart.
(iii.) The Faculty-Psychology and its Critics.
(iv.) Methods and Problems of Psychology.
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.
(i.) Psychology and Epistemology.
(ii.) Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
(iii.) Psychology in Ethics.
(iv.) An Excursus on Greek Ethics.
Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.
(i.) Primitive Sensibility.
(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.
(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.
(i.) Hegel as a Political Critic.
(ii.) The Ethics and Religion of the State.
Introduction.
What Mind (or Spirit) is.
Subdivision.
Section I. Mind Subjective.
Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.
(a) The Physical Soul119.
(α) Physical Qualities120.
(β) Physical Alterations.
 (γ) Sensibility121.
(b) The Feeling Soul.—(Soul as Sentiency.)122
(α) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy.
(β) Self-feeling (Sense of Self)124.
(γ) Habit125.
(c) The Actual Soul.126
Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness.
(a) Consciousness Proper127.
(α) Sensuous consciousness.
(β) Sense-perception128.
(γ) The Intellect129.
(b) Self-consciousness130.
(α) Appetite or Instinctive Desire131.
(β) Self-consciousness Recognitive132.
(γ) Universal Self-consciousness.
(c) Reason133.
Sub-Section C. Psychology. Mind134.
(a) Theoretical mind.
(α) Intuition (Intelligent Perception)136.
(β) Representation (or Mental Idea)137.
(γ) Thinking144.
(b) Mind Practical145.
(α) Practical Sense or Feeling146.
(β) The Impulses and Choice147.
(γ) Happiness148.
Free Mind149.
Section II. Mind Objective.
Distribution.
Sub-Section A. Law.152
(a) Property.
(b) Contract.
(c) Right versus Wrong.
Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience155.
a. Purpose156.
b. Intention and Welfare159.
c. Goodness and Wickedness160.
Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics161.
 AA. The Family.
BB. Civil Society162.
a. The System of Wants163.
b. Administration of Justice164.
c. Police and Corporation166.
CC. The State.
α. Constitutional Law167.
β. External Public Law168.
γ. Universal History169.
Section III. Absolute Mind171.
Sub-Section A. Art.
Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion172.
Sub-Section C. Philosophy.
Index.
Footnotes
Credits
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