CHAPTER XXV.

REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING.

Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted and developed in their consequences. Because they are so accepted, as given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only institute relations between them. Its business as thus conceived is progressive unification, comparing objects with one another, demonstrating the similarities which exist between them, and combining them with each other. The exercise of thought which deals with such objects is limited by their existence: it is only formal. It is finite thought, because it is only subjective: it begins at a given point and stops somewhere, and never gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems to be outside of it, and independent of it. Each point of fact, again, when it is carried out to its utmost, meets with other thoughts which limit it, and claim to be equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from point to point. To this thinking German philosophy from the time of Kant and Jacobi applied a name, which since the days of Coleridge has been translated by 'Understanding'[1]. This degree or mode of thinking --not a faculty of thought--is the systematised and thorough exercise of what in England is called 'Common Sense.' In the first place, it is synonymous with practical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts, or things, as given, and aims only at arranging and combining them and drawing from them counsels of prudence or rules of art. Seeing things on a superficies, as it were so many unconnected points, here itself and there the various things of the world, it tries to bring them into connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks to render them more precise by pointing out and sifting the elements of sameness. Its greatest merit is an abhorrence of vagueness, inconsistency, and what it stigmatises as mysticism: it wishes to be clear, distinct, and practical. In its proper sphere,--and it has an indispensable function to perform even in philosophy: wherever, that is, it is unnecessary to go into the essential truth of things, and one has only to do good work in a clearly defined sphere,--the understanding has an independent value of its own[2] Nor is this true merely of practical life, where a man must accommodate himself to facts: it is equally applicable in the higher theoretic life,--in art, religion, and philosophy. If intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in these, there is something wrong about them.

It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded as a _ne plus ultra,_ and its mandates to restrict investigation by the limits of foregone conclusions find obedience, that understanding deserves the reproachful language which was lavished upon it by the German philosophers at the close of the last century. The understanding is abstract: this sums up its offences in one word. Its objects, that is the things it deals with and believes utterly real, are only partly so, and when that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only abstractions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and common sense, and in its systematic form, the logical or narrowly-consistent intellect, it is partial and liable to be tenacious of half-truths. Only that whereas in feeling and common-sense there is often a great deal which they cannot express,--whereas the heart is often more liberal than its interpreting mind will allow--the reverse is true of the logically-consistent intellect. The narrowness of the latter is, in its own opinion, exactly equal to the truth of things: and whatever it expresses is asserted without qualification to be the absolute fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which is assumed to be certain and perspicuous), to see all which that point will necessarily involve or lead to. For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent arguer (without wasting time on abstruse inquiries as to what Order is or means, and what sort of Order we want), to what consequences and institutions this conception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the State is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms of organisation will this hypothesis (also assumed a self-evident conception) lead? Or we may go a step further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty. How are we to proceed--what laws and ordinances will be necessary, to secure the proper equilibrium of these two principles? The two must be blended, and each have its legitimate influence.

These are examples of the operation of Understanding. It can only reach a synthesis (or conjunction), never a real unity, because it believes in the omnipotence of the abstractions with which it began: but must either carry out one partial principle to its consequences, or allow an alternate and combined force to two opposite principles. Its canon is identity: given something, let us see what follows when we keep the same point always in view, and compare other points with the one which we are supposed to know. Its method is analytic: given a conception in which popular thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all the elements of truth which can be deduced from it. Its statements are abstract and narrow: or, in the words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut off from another with a hatchet[3]. In its excess it degenerates into dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or naturalistic.

The fact is that the Understanding, as this analytic, abstract, and finite action of mind is called,--the thought which holds objective ideas distinct from one another, and from the subjective faculties of thought as a whole,--that this Understanding is, when it claims to be heard and obeyed in science, not sufficiently thorough-going. It begins at a point which is not so isolated as it seems, but is a member of a body of thought: nor is it aware that the whole of this body of thought is in organic, and even more than organic, union. It errs in taking too much for granted: and in not seeing how this given point is the result of a process,--that in it, in any thought or idea, several tendencies or elements converge and are held in union, but with the possibility of working their way into a new independence. In other words, the Understanding requires, as the organon and method of philosophy, to be replaced by the Reason[4],--by infinite thought, concrete, at once analytic and synthetic. How then, it may be asked, can we make the passage from the inadequate to the adequate? To that question the answer may be given that it is our act of arbitrary arrest which halts at the inadequate: that in complete Reason, which is the constituent nature both of us and of things, the Understanding is only a grade which points beyond itself, and therefore presupposes and struggles up to the adequate thought. In other words, it is Reason which creates or lays down for behoof of its own organisation the aims, conditions, and fixed entities,--the objects, by which it is bound and limited in its analytic exercise as understanding. Reason, therefore, is the implicit tendency to correct its own inadequacy: and we have only to check self-will and prejudice so far that the process may be accomplished.

The movement is not at one step: it has a middle term or mean which often seems as if it were a step backward. Progress in knowledge is usually described as produced by the mode of demonstration or the mode of experience. Formal Logic prefers the first mode of describing it: Applied Logic prefers the second. Either mode may serve, if we properly comprehend what demonstration and experience mean. And that will not be done unless we keep equally before us the affirmative and the negative element in the process. The law of rational progress in knowledge, of the dialectical movement of consciousness, or in one word of experience, is not simple movement in a straight line, but movement by negation and absorption of the premisses. The conclusion or the new object of knowledge is a product into which the preceding object is reduced or absorbed. Thus the movement from faith (which is concentrated and wholly personal knowledge) to open and universal knowledge, which is capable of becoming the possession of a community,--truth and not merely conviction, must pass through doubt. The premisses from which we start, and the original object with which we begin, are not left _in statu quo_: they are destroyed in their own shape, and become only materials to build up a new object and a conclusion. It is on the stepping-stones of discarded ideas that we rise to higher truth: and it is on the abrogation of the old objects of knowledge that the new objects are founded. Not merely does a new object come in to supplement the old, and correct its inadequacies by the new presence: not merely do _we_ add new ranges to _our_ powers of vision, retaining the old faculties and subjoining others. The whole world--alike inward and outward,--the consciousness and its object--is subjected to a thorough renovation: every feature is modified, and the system re-created. The old perishes: but in perishing contributes to constitute the new. Thus the new is at once the affirmation and negation of the old. And such is the invariable nature of intelligent progress, of which the old and not a few modern logicians failed to render a right account, because they missed the negative element, and did not see that the immediate premisses must be abolished in order to secure a conclusion,--even as the grapes must be crushed before the wine can be obtained.

This is the real meaning of Experience, when it is called the teacher of humanity: and it was for this reason that Bacon described it as 'far the best demonstration.'[5] Experience is that absolute process, embracing both us and things, which displays the nullity of what is immediately given, or baldly and nakedly accepted, and completes it by the rough remedy of contradiction. The change comes over both us and the things: neither the one side nor the other is left as it was before. And it is here that the advantage of Experience over demonstration consists. Demonstration tends to be looked upon as subjective only (_constringit assensum, non res_): whereas Experience is also objective. But Experience is more than merely objective: it is the absolute process of thought pure and entire; and as such it is described by Hegel as Dialectic, or Dialectical movement. This Dialectic covers the ground of demonstration,--a fragment of it especially described and emphasised in the Formal Logic,--and of Experience,--under which name it is better known in actual life, and in the philosophy of the sciences[6].

Dialectic is the negative or destructive aspect of reason, as preparatory to its affirmative or constructive aspect. It is the spirit of dissent and criticism: the outgoing as opposed to the indwelling: the restless as distinguished from the quiet: the reproductive as opposed to the nutritive instinct: the centrifugal as opposed to the centripetal force: the radical and progressive tendency as opposed to the conservative. But no one of these examples sufficiently or accurately describes it. For it is the utterance of an implicit contradiction,--the recognition of an existing and felt, but hitherto unrecognised and unformulated want. Dialectic does not supervene from without upon the fixed ideas of understanding: it is the evidence of the higher nature which lies behind them, of the dependence on a larger unity which understanding implicitly or explicitly denies. That higher nature, the notion or grasp of reasonable thought, comes forward, and has at first, in opposition to the one-sided products of understanding, the look of a destructive agent. If we regard the understanding and its object, as ultimate and final,--and they are so regarded in the ordinary estimation of the world,--then this negative action of reason seems utterly pernicious, and tends to end in the subversion of all fixity whatever, of everything definite. In this light Dialectic is what is commonly known as Scepticism; just as the understanding in its excess is known as Dogmatism. But in the total grasp of the rational or speculative notion, Dialectic ceases to be Scepticism, and Understanding ceases to be Dogmatism.

Still there can be no doubt that the Dialectic of reason is dangerous, if taken abstractly and as if it were a whole truth. For the thoughts of ordinary men tend to be more abstract than their materials warrant. Men seek to formulate their feelings, faith, and conduct: but the _rationale_ of their inmost belief,--their creed,--is generally narrower than it might be. Out of the undecomposed and massive 'substance,' on which their life and conduct is founded, they extract one or two ingredients: they emphasise with undue stress one or two features in their world, and attach to these partial formulae a value which would be deserved only if they really represented the whole facts. Hence when the narrow outlines of their creed are submitted to dialectic,--when the inlying contradictions are exposed, men feel as if the system of the world had sunk beneath them. But it is not the massive structure of their world, the organic unity in which they live, that is struck by dialectic: it is only those luminous points, the representative terms of material thought, which float before their consciousness, and which have been formulated in hard and fast outlines by the understanding. These points, as so defined and exaggerated, are what dialectic shakes. Not an alien force, but the inherent power of thought, destroys the temporary constructions of the understanding. The infinite comes to show the inadequacy of the finite which it has made.

In philosophy this second stage is as essential as the first. The one-sidedness of the first abstraction is corrected by the one-sidedness of the other. In the Philosophy of Plato, as has been noted, the dialectical energy of thought is sometimes spoken of under the analogy of sexual passion--the Love which, in the words of Sophocles, 'falls upon possessions' and makes all fixed ordinance of no account, and finds no obstacles insuperable to its strong desire. But Love, as the speaker explains, is a child of Wealth and Want: he is never poor, and never rich: he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge[7]. Thus is described the active unrest of growth, the '_inquietude poussante_,' as Leibniz called it,--the quickening force of the negative and of contradiction.

At the word 'contradiction' there is heard a murmur of objection, partly on technical, partly on material grounds. There are, it is said, other ways of getting from one idea to another than by contradiction: and it is not right to give the title to mere cases of contrast and correlation. Now it may be the case that the relations of ideas are many and various. In particular there is to many people a decided pleasure in the mere accumulation of bits of knowledge. In their mental stock there are only aggregates,--conjunctions due to accidents of time and place,--associations and fusions which do not reach organised unity. In all of us, perhaps, there are more or less miscellaneous collections of beliefs, perceptions, hopes, and wishes, in no very obvious connexion with one another. An united self, one, harmonious, and complete, is probably rather an ideal of development than a fact realised. There are in each two or three discordant selves,--among which it might sometimes be difficult to select the right and true one (for that will depend on the momentary point of view). The deeper consciousness may go on entirely independent of the train of the more superficial ideas: the world of reality may glide past without touching the world of dream or of fiction: our business part may live in a region parted off from our religion by gulfs inscrutable. In all these cases there cannot be said to be any contradiction.

But Hegel speaks of the essential progress of knowledge, and of that true self or real mind which has attained complete harmony--the self and mind that is implicitly or explicitly Absolute. In such a mind where the finite has passed or is passing into the infinite, in a mind that is really becoming one and total, its parts must meet and modify each other. At each phase, if that phase is earnest, self-certain, and real, it claims to be complete, and can brook no rival. The bringer of new things must appear as an enemy: for the old system, however imperfect as a mere form, has behind it the strength of an infinite and perfect content: it is more than it has explicated: but as it (from its imperfection and honesty) identifies itself with its form, it is resolved to resist change. Progress then must be by antagonism: it cannot be real progress otherwise, but only the mere shifting of dilettante doubt and dilettante toleration. Both new and old are worth something, and they must prove their value by neither being lost, but both recognised, in a completer scheme of things.

Yet there is a difference in the measure of contradiction at different stages of thought. It is always greatest when there is least to be opposed about. The more meagre an idea, a creed, a term of thought, the more violent the antitheses to it. The more abstractly we hold a doctrine, the more readily are we disposed to sniff opposition. And as in more concrete belief, so in the more abstract terms of thought. They seem so wide apart--like 'Is' and 'Is not'--and yet, taken alone, they are really so ready to recoil into one another. As thought deepens, contradiction takes a more modified form. The relativity of things becomes apparent: and what were erewhile opposed as contradictory, turn out as pairs of correlatives, neither of which is fully what it professed to be, unless it also is all that seemed reserved for the other. Lastly, and in the full truth of development, progress is seen to be not merely a sudden recoil from one abstraction to another, nor merely a continual reference to an underlying correlative, but the movement of one totality which advances by self-opposition, self-reconciliation, and self-reconstruction. In this stage, the weight and bulk of unity keeps the contradiction in its place of due subordination. But both elements are equally essential, and if the unity is less palpable in the abstract beginnings, and the divergence less wide at the close, at neither beginning nor close can either be absent.

But if we merely look at the differentiation or negation involved in the action of reason, we miss the half of its meaning: and the new statement is as one-sided as the old. We have not grasped the full meaning until we see that what, as understanding, affirmed a finite, denies, as dialectic, the absoluteness or adequacy of that finite. Both the partial views have a right to exist, because each gives its contribution to the science of truth.[8] If we penetrate behind the surface,--if we do not look at the two steps in the process abstractly and in separation,--it will be seen that these two elements coincide and unite. But we must be careful here. This coincidence or identification of opposites has not annihilated their opposition or difference. That difference subsists, but in abeyance, reduced to an element or 'moment' in the unity. Each of the two elements has been modified by the union: and thus when each issues from the unity it has a richer significance than it had before. This unity, in which difference is lost and found, is the rational notion,--the speculative grasp of thought. It is the product of experience,--the ampler affirmative which is founded upon an inclusion of negatives.

We began with the bare unit, or simple and unanalysed point, which satisfied popular language and popular imagination as its _nucleus_:--the representation which had caught and half-idealised a point, moment, or aspect in the range of feeling and sensation. In this stage the notion or thought proper is yet latent. In the first place, the _nucleus_ of imagination was analysed, defined, and, as we may surmise, narrowed in the Intellect. And this grade of thought is known as the Understanding. In the second place, the definite and precise term, as understanding supposes it, was subjected to criticism: its contradictions displayed; and the very opposite of the first definition established in its place. This is the action of Dialectic. In the third place, by means of this second stage, the real nature or truth was seen to lie in a union where the opposites interpenetrate and mould each other. Thus we have as a conscious unity,--conscious because it, as unity, yet embraces a difference as difference--what we started with as an unconscious unity, the truth of feeling, faith, and inspiration. The first was an immediate unity:--that is to say, we were in the midst of the unity, sunk in it, and making a part of it: the second is a mediated unity, which has been reached by a process of reflection, and which as a conscious unity involves that process.

Reason, then, is infinite, as opposed to understanding, which is finite thinking. The limits which are found and accepted by the analytic intellect, are limits which reason has imposed, and which it can take away: the limits are in it, and not over it. The larger reason has been laying down those limits, which our little minds at first tend to suppose absolute. Let us put the same law in more concrete terms. It is reason,--the Idea,--or, to give it an inadequate and abstract name, Natural Selection--which has created the several forms of the animal and vegetable world: it is reason, again, which in the struggle for existence contradicts the very inadequacies which it has brought into being: and it is reason, finally, which affirms both these actions,--the hereditary descent, and the adaptation--in the provisionally permanent and adequate forms which result from the struggle.

The three stages thus enumerated are therefore not merely stages in our human reason as subjective. They state the law of rational development in pure thought, in Nature, and in the world of Mind,--the world of Art, Morals, and Science. They represent the law of thought or reason in its most general or abstract terms. They state, mainly in reference to the method or form of thought, that Triplicity, which will be seen in those real formations or phases to which thought moulds itself,--the typical species of reason. They reappear hundreds of times, in different multiples, in the system of philosophy. The abstract point of the Notion which parts asunder in the Judgment, and returns to a unity including difference in the Syllogism:--the mere generality of the Universal, which, by a disruption into Particulars and detail, gives rise to the real and actual Individual:--the Identity which has to be combined with Difference in order to furnish a possible Ground for Existence:--the baldness and nakedness of an Immediate belief, which comes to the full and direct certainty of itself, to true immediacy, only by gathering up the full sense of the antithesis which can separate conviction from truth, or by realising the Mediation connecting them:--all these are illustrations of the same law really applied which has been formally stated as the necessity for a defining, a dialectical, and a speculative element in thought. The three parts of Logic are an instance of the same thing: and when the Idea, or organism of thought, appears developed in the series of Natural forms, it is only to prepare the kingdom of reason actualised in the world of Mind. The Understanding, on the field of the world, corresponds, says Hegel[9], to the conception of Divine Goodness. The life of nature goes on in the independence and self-possession of all its parts, each as fixed and proud of its own, as if its share of earth were for ever assured. The finite being then has his season of self-satisfied ease: while the gods live in quiet, away from the sight of man's doings. The dialectical stage, again, corresponds to the conception of God as an omnipotent Lord: when the Power of the universe waxes terrific, destroying the complacency of the creatures and making them feel their insufficiency,--when the once beneficent appears jealous and cruel, and the joyous equanimity of human life is oppressed by the terrors of the inscrutable hand of fate. The easy-minded Greek lived for the most part in the former world: the uneasy Hebrew to a great extent in the latter. But the truth lay neither in the placid wisdom of Zeus, leaving the world to its own devices, nor in the jealous Jehovah of Mount Sinai: the true speculative union is found in the mystical unity of Godhead with human nature. In this comprehensive spirit did Hegel treat Logic.

This Triplicity runs through Hegel's works. If you open one, the main divisions are marked with the capitals A, B, C. One of these, it may be, is broken up into chapters headed by the Roman numerals I, II, III. Under one or more of these probably come severally the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3. Any one of these again may be subdivided, and gives rise to sections, headed by the small letters a, b, c. And, lastly, any one of these may be treated to a distribution under the three titles α, β, γ. Of course the division is not in each case carried equally far: nor does the subject always permit it: nor is Hegel's knowledge alike vigorous, or his interest in all directions the same.

[Footnote 1: 'Verstand,']

[Footnote 2: 'Die Vernunft ohne Verstand ist Nichts; der Verstand doch Etwas ohne Vernunft.' Hegel's _Leben_, p. 546.]

[Footnote 3: Ὃτι οὐ κεχώρισται ἀλλήλων τὰ ἐv τῷ ἑvi κόσμῳ ἀὐδὲ ἀποκέκοπται πελέκεϊ. Simplic. Phys. fol. 38 a (ed. Diels, p. 176).]

[Footnote 4: 'Vernunft.']

[Footnote 5: _Novum Organum_, Book I. 70.]

[Footnote 6: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 67.]

[Footnote 7: Plato, _Symposion,_ 203.]

[Footnote 8: Cf. Dante, _Parad._ iv. 130.]

[Footnote 9: See in the _Logic_ (vol. ii. p. 145).]

PROLEGOMENA