Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic

The difference between the conceptions of reality held by Aristotle and Plato respectively is that where Plato said Being, Essence or Substance (οὐσία), Aristotle said Activity...

When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,--be their othe...

The antithesis between thought and being, between idea and actuality, between notion and object, is almost a commonplace of criticism. Between the ideas of the subject and objec...

It is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a philosophy in a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle separated the pure 'energy' of philosophy from the activities which leave wo...

The distinction between the psychical or psychological idea and the logical concept has been more than once alluded to. The idea or representation is under psychical form exactl...

The coherence and consistency of being was, it appeared in the last chapter, only to be maintained by assuming it to fall into two planes, or orders, always however relative to...

The English reader may probably be taken to be familiar with the conception of Logic as the Science of the _Form_ of Thought. He may also have heard this explained as equivalent...

Induction and Experience are names to which is often assigned the honour of being the source of all our knowledge. But what induction and experience consist in, is what we are s...

Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that the mind was nothing before it exercised itself[1]. The mind,--and the same will turn out true of many thi...

What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,' says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in which it appears immersed,--to inspire...

The psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance given the mere intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it has not even treated it as man's essential self. Whether the appearance...

'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as the order and concatenation of things[1].' The objective world at least of acts and institutions develops p...

By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel the truth, with our eyes as it were closed,...

Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted and developed in their consequences. Bec...

The ordinary logic-books have made us all familiar with the popular distinction between Abstract and Concrete. By a concrete term they mean the name of an existence or reality w...

The eighteenth century--it has been often said--was a rationalising, unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared to be _par excellence_ the founder and...

The _Criticism of Pure Reason_ has been described by its author as a generalisation of Hume's problem. Hume, he thought, had treated his question on the 'relations of ideas' in...

This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the 'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellect...

'It is, in my view, all important,' says Hegel[1], 'to apprehend and express the True not as _Substance,_ but equally much as _Subject_.' Substance, as Spinoza defines it, is th...

To get the full effect of a new doctrine it must be brought into contact with a mind unshackled by those traditional prepossessions which clung to its original author. Kant, ess...

The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes itself observed even in the popular use of the t...

Kant's answer to his question was briefly this. Intelligence is essentially synthetic, always supplementing the given by something beyond, instituting relationships, unifying th...

If there be one thing which, more than another, distinguishes Modern Philosophers from the Ancient Philosophy of Athens, it is the desire to discover a First Principle of certai...

'The condemnation,' says Hegel, 'which a great man lays upon the world, is to force it to explain him[1].' The greatness of Hegel, if it be measured by this standard, must be so...

Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where, besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly of the springs of thought Lessing had se...

According to the strict reasonings of Kant in his _Criticism of Pure Reason_, and the somewhat looser discussions of Mr. Spencer in his _First Principles_ a science of Metaphysi...

We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect and set in relation,--to connect, it may be erroneously, or without proper scrutiny, or under the influence...

Logic, as it is understood in these pages, is the critical history of the terms of thought by which reality, the sum of experience, the world, is described or expressed. It is t...

Thus far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two sides of philosophy had been alternately presented as complementary to each other; and now the task lay before him to publis...

Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol. ii. p. 13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be admitted that, by the dominant school of English thoug...

Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to discover the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the discussion of matters not generally touched upon, unless...

'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of foreign thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though we should not for ever entrench ourselves in our...