CHAPTER XXIII.

FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT.

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 terms abstract and concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says[1], 'the synthetic combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal perish by neglect, build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which, as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,--the abstractions of the mere popular mind--are by certain periods reduced to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities, somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time and place manifested or embodied.

In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense, instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation: it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,--subject as well as object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to call the super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying, controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves, a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities, to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like: to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially subjective--as a complementary idealising activity of ours which ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the discontinuous. Our thought--(it is only _our_ thought)--is but an instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a bridge to connect these two opposing shores--a bridge however which does not really reach the other side, but only an artificial image, which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp thought pure and simple, and instead of reducing the metaphysical antitheses to the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into mere acceptance of a given reality.

In some of these cases the full step into pure thought is never made. The creations of mythology, for example, display an unfinished and baffled attempt to rise from the separation of sense to the unity and organisation of thought. The gods of heathenism are only individuals--and individuals only _meant to be,_ and by the act of faith and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper: but they are individuals in which imagination embodies a unified and centralised system of forces or principles. They _mean_ the powers of nature and of mind, but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power attributed by the believer; and far away, encompassing alike them and him, is the great relentless necessity. In other cases there is a relapse: when the higher stage of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously lost. Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to the level of the things of sense, individualised in some object, which, though it is only a representation or sign, is allowed to usurp the place of the thought which it but partially and by extraneous institution embodies. The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step throws its spells on the products of thought, and turns them into a representative picture, which in popular use and wont occupies the place of the notion. Instead of being retained in their native timelessness, the terms of the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception, under the conditions of space and time.

The term 'representation,' which Hegel employs to name these picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions, corresponds to the facts of their nature. A 'representation' is one of two things: either a particular thing sent out accredited with general functions, or a universal narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has been seen, a general name implies or connotes a universal relation or attribute, but confines it to denote a particular object or class. 'Swift,' for example, was an epithet tied down to express the horse. In the first instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of metaphor: differing only by its simplicity and frequency of suggestion from those endless epithets, which in Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the object which they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the object as an embodiment or representation of the quality, as an eagle is the emblem of strength: only in the latter case we distinguish between the object and its metaphorical signification. In the second place, however, the object of experience is allowed completely to coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective epithet, and we can no longer in ordinary thought separate the imaging object from the general relation which it images forth. This is the level of thought to which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation.' It includes under it the three fallacies of thought already noted and saves the trouble of comprehending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a representation is abstract; because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case to the general notion embodied in it.

The world of representative thought is a world of independent points in juxtaposition, which we arrange as seems best to us. It lies in an undefinable borderland between us and things. It is a would-be, but not an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea--the unity of subjective and objective: but only a make-believe. We have put it there, and yet we credit it with an effective existence. When our mind moves amongst these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case, is interpreted to mean the conjunction of two terms, which at once step into the rank of subject and predicate by means of the copula. A sentence is an arrangement of words _ab extra_ in conscious or unconscious conformity with the rules of grammar. The world of knowledge, or the Idea, as a whole is turned into a plane surface with its typical terms,--the members of the organism of reason,--like dots put in co-ordination and juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected towards each other. Even if they are not embodied and reduced to a sensuous level of existence, they are held to be originally separate and unconnected. How they all came into being, and whether they do not all by gradations and differentiation-proceed from one root, are questions neither asked nor answered.

The level of representative thinking--thinking i. e. which is not the grasp (_Begriff_) of the reality, but only the apprehension of something which stands for and represents it--is the level on which we all come, more or less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It is, in essentials, the realm of what Plato called _δόξα_,--the level of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of essence in the many single goods and beauties, which holds its knowledge (such at is) at the mercy of accidents, not bound by the conclusions of reasoning,--the realm which is not without reality, but an immature and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as what, as opposed to _intellectus_, Spinoza styled _imaginatio._ Imagination, to Spinoza, is an understanding under the bondage of particular passions and temporary interests, which loses sight of the great bond of being or _Substantia_, and fixes its glance on the parts in subordinate and infra-essential relationships: which is always finite, i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in its view, but always limited by a tacit reference to something outside itself. The 'Representation' is the idea, in the loose and inexact use of that word, which goes with the phrase _mere idea_,--i. e. a mere mental image, which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty for and to represent it[2]. Yet it is not a mere thought: rather its whole aim and meaning is to refer to reality, to suggest it, to bring it nearer us. Its fault is that it is an imperfect, partial, one-sided, or even one-pointed idea. It is really an instance and phase of the _ignava ratio_, to which a date or name serves as a ποῦ στῶ of explanation.

'At Kilne there was no weathercock, And that's the reason why.'

Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly, religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the inner peace, the absolute harmony of the true reality. _Pectus facit theologum._ The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the sense of absolute independence in God--that strength of faith is the very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs a risk of falling into the fallacy of _Post hoc_, _ergo propter hoc._ She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only a parable,--they are but

'Flesh and blood To which she links a truth divine.'

Hegel--in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion--is reported to have given the following characteristics of 'representation,' (_a_) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative thought divest itself:--the eternally living idea is chained to the transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (_b_) Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names, incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical and philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (_c_) The terms by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective arrangement[3].

The thing--the so-called _subject_ of the properties, of which it is really no more than the _substratum_--affords no sufficient ground for the unity of the properties attached to it. The substratum or subject of the proposition is given, and we then look around to see what other properties accompany the primary characteristic for which the name was applied. But the term of popular language is not a real unity capable of supporting differences; it is only one aspect of a thing, a single point fixed and isolated in the process of language by the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the properties are related to the thing, is to ask how one aspect, taken out of its setting, is related to another isolated aspect: which is evidently an unanswerable question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing' of popular conception. If _a_ is _a,_ and nothing more, as the law of Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible to get on to _b, c, d_, and the rest. The union between the thing divided or defined, and its divided or defining members, is what is termed extra-logical; in other words, it is not evident from what is given or stated in the popular conception. That union must be sought elsewhere, and deeper.

And when _we_ step in to overcome the repugnance which the point of conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting a diversity of predicates,--when _we_ force it into union with these properties: or when we try to remove the separation which leaves the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought, as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts as each solid and independent,--the world of external objects or conceptions, and the world of self,--meet and coincide in the free agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold' or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension of it. _Our_ action, as we incline to call it, which mends the inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account. To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,--of the organic and self-developing system of thought.

The difference between a representative conception and a thought proper may be illustrated by the case of the term 'Money.' Money may be either a materialised thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or a Notion Proper. In the former case, money is identified with a piece of money. It is probably, in the first instance, embodied in coins of gold, silver, and bronze. In the second place, a wide gulf is placed between it and the other articles for which it is given in exchange. If other things are regarded as money, they are generally treated on the assumption that they can in case of need be reduced to coinage. The conception of money by the unscientific vulgar considers it separately from other commodities: and the laws which forbade its exportation gave a vigorous expression to the belief that it was something _sui generis_, and subject to conditions of its own. The scientific notion of money modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of money. Science does so historically, when it can point to a time and a race where money in our sense of the word does not exist, and where barter takes the place of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically, when it expounds what may be called the _process_ of money,--the inter-action or meeting of conditions to which the existence of money is due. The notion of money, as given in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, says that it is the common measure of utility or demand. When we leave out of sight the specific quality of an object, and consider only its capacity of satisfying human wants, we have what is called its worth or value. This value of the thing,--the psychological fact which is left, when all the qualities marking the objective thing are reduced to their social efficiency--is the notion, of which the currency is the representation, reducing thought to the level of the senses, and embodying the 'ideality' of value in a tangible and visible object. So long as this 'idea' of value is kept in view, the currency is comprehended: but when the perception of the notion disappears, money is left a mere piece of currency, the general notion being narrowed down to the coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions in their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things merely: it is what from a minor point of view, when we and the things are regarded under the head of want or need, may be called the _truth_ of both, the unity of the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its proper place in the order of things.

[Footnote 1: _Werke,_ ii. 529, 555.]

[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Werke_, ii. 431: '_Wobei das Selbst nur repräsentirt_ und vorgestellt ist, da ist es nicht wirklich: we es vertreten ist, ist es nicht.' Cf. _ib._ 416.]

[Footnote 3: _Philosophie der Religion,_ i. p. 137 seqq.]