CHAPTER XXXII.

LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM: THE NOTION.

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 exactly equivalent to the undigested and passively accepted thing to which we give the title of physical or external. It is the ideal, in the sense of the psychical, pendant to the real: and hangs up in the mental view in the same way as the real object to the physical perception. It is in brief the crude object, considered not as existing, but as a state of consciousness--it is a reduplication in inner space of the thing in outer space. If we cannot say it is altogether mythological, we must however note that it is simply a psychical reflex, which has an existence only through abstraction, and is neither more or less than the object apprehended without comprehension.

The concept or notion is more than an image, and less than an image. An idea-image is symbolical of the unanalysed totality of the thing. But the notion is in the first instance due to an analysis, and secondly, a reconstruction of the thing. It takes up the thing in its relations: it thinks it, i. e. it abstracts and mutilates it, and artificially recombines. It implies analysis and synthesis. It produces a sort of manufactured thing: a mental construction. But the construction--as contrasted with the passivity that says first A and then B and a connexion of them--has the traces of subjective or mental violence about it: for violence there is in the act of comprehension. We have however got together in unity what actuality in the process of history let fall asunder, and could only, at the best, show as independent reals held against their will in ubiquitous relations of reciprocity. But the unity in which the individual sets the universal and the particular is an imported unity, which though it gives place and explanation to the elements of reality, seems to impose its synthesis upon reality. So far the concept is subjective only. It is an ample explanation including the facts, but not quite self-explanatory. _We_ conceive, and judge, and reason: but all this is alien to the object.

But there is a counterpart almost in antagonism to this. There is a concept, i. e. a grouping of existence into totals mediated by necessary links, which presents itself as embodied in things: and this embodied concept is the objective world. That world, apart from our interpretation and conception, offers itself as a synthesis of universal, particular and individual. It groups itself into systems, mechanical, chemical, and teleological. But in all of these there is lacking the evidence of the inward and subjective principle of unification. The unity is external, the members are held in a vice: their unity is given as a fact: it follows through certain laws and does not reveal itself. There is a want of perspicuity of connexion: logic--the need of inner explanation--in short, is not satisfied by this logic of facts. It is rather a realm of necessity than of freedom. It wants life; wants true self-activity. As in the subjective notion, the facts resented the hand of the logician (for here is the sphere of logic proper in the old Aristotelian sense), and refused to show themselves in the simple and transparent transitions of his argument: so the objective synthesis of the members of a mechanical system, or of a kingdom of means and ends, lacks the freedom and lucidity of inner movement which logical insight demands. Objectivity--the logic of fact--is a syllogism of necessity, so hardened and fixed that the necessity of the conclusion is more obvious than the self-determination by the syllogism.

The third stage of the Notion shows the union of the pellucidity and ideality of the syllogistic progress with the necessity and reality of the objective order. Here actuality and the concept are at one. At first as a mere fact--or more fact than idea. Life, organic life, is no doubt development: a totality which is in all its parts, and where parts have their being in the total. But life as such, the so-called vital principle, does not emancipate itself to a true universal: it is immersed in its particulars. Intellectual life, on the contrary,--the form of consciousness--rises independent and distinct from the totality of life. Psychology follows Biology. But as such--under the form of intellect and will--it has an antithesis no less fatal to its absoluteness than the opposite one-sidedness of life. There is--to put it in language more familiar to the present day--there is an analogue of life in all nature; and all reality, even the rock and the crystal, has its life-history. There is, properly speaking, no mere inorganic reality: organic life is universal. And then, going a step further, we attribute to all reality something analogous to a soul, or a consciousness. We talk, in rash moods, of mind-stuff and feelings, even in molecules. But as Spinoza has reminded us, terms like Will and Intellect have about them something finite, because they imply an antagonism to an object: they are predominantly subjective. The reality in its final truth must be a subject-object: the adequacy of thought and being, the equation of real and ideal, the intellection which is life. And this is called Absolute Idea. It is natural to translate such an equation, when made a result, into a mere blank. And a blank it would be, if we suppose all that has gone before obliterated, and only the result left. Then, in the coincidence of opposites, we have only a zero of a gulf of negation. A life which _is_ consciousness may seem to fade away like a vague ideal with no reality. A consciousness which _is_ life can be no consciousness at all. The _is_ and the _is known_ dare not coincide or they perish both.

A categorical proposition, says Hegel, can never express a speculative truth. That is to say: the subject over-rides the predicate, or the predicate makes you ignore the subject. The affirmation keeps out of sight the negation. To say that life _is_ consciousness makes us forget that the very assertion would not and could not be made, unless also life were other than consciousness. In its full proportion of meaning, therefore, the proposition must imply a return to unity through difference, to identity through otherness. Affirmation, fully realised, is re-affirmation through negation. Cognition is but recognition deepened by contrast. This law which governs--or rather which is--logic; the principle of identity through contradiction--must not be lost sight of in the supreme struggle of thought. The Idea is the unity of life and consciousness: but it is a unity in which they are (_aufgehoben_)--not a zero in which they utterly collapse.

We may illustrate in two ways. In the first we may compare the 'Ενεργεια of Aristotle. That is his formula of reality. Nominally it only means activity and actuality: and sums up the metaphysical formula for what really is,--the hard fact of being. But through it there glimmers the meaning of consciousness. It not merely is, but it means what it is. Energy of Soul is the end of life--the supreme fulfilling of desire, and consummation of tendency. As such it is, and feels that it is. It is the virtuous deed, which is its own reward. But Aristotle seems sometimes to fall from that identification of being and consciousness. The world of _praxis_ parts from the world of _Theoria._ In that case the activity is a mere activity--the outward shell of action: and then, as a supplement or complement to the abstract result of the activity the consciousness of achievement gets a distinct position as Pleasure: and the activity, now no consummation, but only a means to an end, get its completion from this arbitrarily abstracted shadow of reality.[1]

The second illustration may come from Mr. Spencer.

'We can think of Matter only in terms of Mind. We can think of Mind only in terms of Matter. When we have pushed our explorations of the first to the uttermost limit we are referred to the second for a final answer: and when we have got the final answer of the second we are referred back to the first for an interpretation of it.' Beyond this see-saw indeed we cannot go, so as to leave it behind: but in reality we transcend it. The Mind that is in terms of Matter is partly the region of psychic event, partly the world of science, art and religion. And psychic event is always antithetical to physical reality. But the spiritual world already includes the antithesis of psychical and physical, and including it keeps it as a principle of life and consciousness. The supreme or absolute mind does not indeed rise above Physis and Psyche so as to have no antagonism: but it is the unity of antitheses.

What those who crave for something higher than this rest in unrest, this life in consciousness and consciousness in life, want, would destroy the very condition of reality. Still philosophising, they would be above philosophy. They want an objective reality in which they may still their beating hearts,--a 'repose which ever is the same' and yet is not annihilation:--to sink into the great sea of being, and leave consciousness with its radical division behind. Such a craving philosophy, in Hegers hands, has no power of satisfying. It cannot, in the sense in which Jacobi and Schelling used the words, reveal Being. It cannot get at the _That_ except by means of the _What,_ and is the eternal antithesis and correlation of these two. It will always be rational and logical--for it is its function to think being: and it will re-affirm that an unthought and a-logical being is a mere name, which in the language of humanity at least has no meaning, whatever it may stand for in the Volapük of imagined gods. To go beyond this correlation of Being and Thought is therefore no advance, but a relapse into the _Natura Naturans_, which, in its abstract completeness, _is,_ but dare not be anything. Philosophy therefore in its supreme Idea is still the 'Ενεργεια of θεωρία, and not bare Οὐσία. For it mere Being is always Nothing. And to be actual it must live in antithesis and live victorious over antithesis. It follows the law of humanity _(Und das heisst ein Kämpfer sein_)--which can only exist in warfare as a church militant, but for continuous existence must also be a church triumphant. Like religion and art, it sometimes craves for utter union in the fullness of Being. Such a fullness is the unspeakable and the vain,--which we may picture as the apathy of Nirvana; but which is the absorption of Art, Religion and Philosophy,--the cease of consciousness and an abyss. We may call it--it matters not--Being.

These stages of the Notion must be examined in somewhat fuller detail. The subjective notion is the effort at the comprehension (at first subjective) of the two correlated elements into which actuality as such has been seen to fall--and to fall again and again without end. It brings out, or explicates (and with some opposition to the divisions of reality) the unity which was presupposed by the antagonist and inseparable reals. Hitherto we have had two things or aspects in relation and move from one to the other by an act of reflection. But to get two points in relation, they must belong to or exist in a unity. The divided reality of cause and effect must, if it is to be intelligible, submit to a unification of its elements. It is comparatively easy to get on if we are always allowed to have one foot on solid ground, and can move the other. Give us a standing-point, and explanation is simplified. But to get a notion of things is, it may seem, to transcend them, or get beneath them, and take a stand-point outside actuality which shall unify them. If we added to immediate being a further element to explain it, it may be said we now superadd a third to explain the two others. Over and above the different and related elements, there is assumed to be a unity. And at first it is certainly such a superimposed element, added to the facts, and regarded as our way of looking at them, as a subjective notion or grasp, holding together what is in itself reluctant to be unified.

The three aspects or factors in a Concept are the Universal, the Particular, and the Individual. These are what Hegel calls the 'moments' or 'vanishing factors' of the notion. They are 'vanishing,' because in their logical mobility they form a pellucid union: if they are distinct, yet they refuse to be independent of one another. Or, we may say, each in its truth is the meeting-ground and unification of the two others, thus forming a sort of cycle of perpetual movement. And in this way we may see that the addition of the third has really been a simplification: it has made two one. For the Unit which welds together is not a _tertium quid_, but simply the explicit statement and assertion of the truth implied in the antithesis, which was yet inseparability, of the two others. And for the same reason, neither mere universal nor mere particular nor mere individual are full reality, when taken apart. One can understand how Hegel could speak of the 'Bacchantelike intoxication' of the concept. It may be illustrated by the following utterances in which a modern psychologist labours to express the complex unity of mental fact. First we are told that a 'nervous shock,' e. g. the awakening caused by a sudden blow, or a simple sensation (so-called), is the ultimate unit of consciousness. And if this were all, it would correspond to the qualities of immediate being, which we can suppose measurable: we should get a science of purely empirical psychology based on psychical atoms. But, immediately after, it appears that the 'relational element' is never absent from the lowest stage of consciousness. Accordingly, besides feelings, there _must be_ relations between feelings. And that means a good deal: especially if we also note the proposition that, in truth, 'neither a feeling nor a relation is an independent element of consciousness,' Evidently you cannot have either without both, and it seems difficult to have both when neither is independent. Nor does it mend matters to learn that 'a relation is a momentary feeling': for that only seems a way of implying that it is, and yet is not, a feeling. Such are the difficulties that beset the sincere attempt to comprehend. The fixed points of explanation stagger under the burden of truth; and their unsteadiness shows that they lack the full foundation. Yet that foundation--it must be repeated--is not something extra: it is the underlying unity which gives life to the relativity of the separates.

For the peculiarity of the Notional stand-point is that it insists on thorough comprehension. The usual explanation refers us from a later to an earlier, from a strange to a familiar, from a complex to a simple, from compound to elements. It keeps analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction apart. To comprehend is, on the other hand, to light up earlier by later and later by earlier, and carry both into their unity. It does not merely refer existence to its ground, phenomenon to law, or effect to cause; because beyond these it has still to reveal the unity of nature which carries on one of these into the other. Thus, the explanatory method in Social Science may either refer us to the simple elements or parts out of which the total is composed, or to an earlier stage in the same institution's life. The analytical sociologist does the former: the historical the latter. Neither really faces the problem. For if the whole is made up of parts, it is made up of parts which have been characterised by the whole. If the later has come from the earlier, that only shows that the nature of the earlier was inadequately ascertained. Development--which implies a permanent which changes, an identity which is also different,--is thus more than mere reference to an antecedent; because the antecedent must also figure as a simultaneous. _Cessante causa, cessat et effectus._ But here, in the concept (or λόγος) or syllogism, the permanent exists as the--may we call it--consciousness which binds together the elements of reality, as the life and the history, which is ideally continuous through real changes, and is a real unity through the distinctions of appearance.

Such a comprehension e. g. of the State would show that though it must have a universal aspect, a particular, and an individual, yet these are not severally identifiable with the divisions of sovereign, executive, and people, but that in each of the latter the three moments of the notion must appear, and that e. g. the people is not mere people, but also executive and sovereign, just as the sovereign is no mere sovereign, but also executive and of the people. The same may be illustrated in the so-called individual. A man in his special department and sphere of action may very likely lose the sense of his wholeness and his integrity,--perhaps in more senses than one! He may reduce himself to the limits of his profession. But in so doing he becomes untrue, or, in Hegelian parlance, abstract: he fails to recognise the universality of his position. All work, however petty, which is done in the right spirit, is holy.

'One place performs, like any other place, The proper service every place on earth Was framed to furnish man with: serves alike To give him note, that through the place he sees A place is signified he never saw.'

It is a false patriotism, for example, which is inconsistent with the spirit of universal brotherhood: and there is something radically wrong with the religion, on the other hand, which cannot be carried into act amid the pettiness of ordinary practical interests. The universal, again, is not a world beyond this world of sense and individuals: if it were so, it would itself be a mere particular. It is rather the world of sense unified, organised, and, if we may say so, spiritualised. And an individual which is merely and simply individual is an utter abstraction, which is quite meaningless, and in the real world impossible. Or, if we prefer to express the same thing in connexion with the mind, sensation apart from thought is an inconceivable abstraction. Sensation is always alloyed with thought, and we can at the most _suppose_ pure sensation to exist amongst the brutes. The mere individual opens out and expands: and in that expansion we see the universal: (sensation is thought in embryo). But, on the other hand, the developed universal concentrates itself into a point: (thought returns into the centre of feeling).

The same process of particular, individual and universal, which thus goes on under the apparent point of the notion, is more distinctly and explicitly seen, with due emphasis on the several members, in the evolution of the notion into the Judgment and the Syllogism. The judgment is the statement of what each individual notion implicitly is, viz. a universal or inward nature in itself, or that it is a universal which individualises itself. The judgment may, therefore, in its simplest terms be formulated as: The Individual is the Universal. The connective link,--the copula 'is,' expresses however at first no more than a mere point-like contact of the two terms, not their complete identity. By a graduated series of judgments this identity between the two terms is drawn closer, until in the three terms and propositions of a syllogism the unity of the three factors of the notion finds its most adequate expression in (subjective) thought.

It may be a question how far syllogisms as they are ordinarily found are calculated to impress this synthesis of the three elements upon the observer. The three elements there tend to bid each other good-bye, and are only kept together by the awkward means of the middle term, and the conjunction 'therefore.' In these circumstances it becomes easy to show, that the major premiss is a superfluity, not adding anything to the cogency of the argument. But under the prominence of this criticism of form, we are apt to let slip the real question touching the nature of the syllogism. And that nature is to give their due place to the three elements in the notion: which in the syllogism have each a quasi-independence and difference as separate terms, while they are also reduced to unity. The syllogism expresses in definite outlines that everything which we think, or the comprehension which constitutes an object, is a particular which is individualised by means of its universal nature. As always, thought refers to reality; and a notion has to be carried out into objectivity. But as Aristotle complained, matter is recalcitrant to form. The objective appears at first only as an opposite, and instead of revealing, it rather obscures and condenses the features of subjectivity.

Objectivity, or the thought which has forgotten its origin and stands out as a world, may be taken in three aspects: Mechanical, Chemical, and Teleological. That is to say, the mode in which groups or systems naturally present themselves in the objective world, is threefold. The contradiction which stands in the way of comprehending objectivity comes from the fact that it contains subjectivity absorbed in it. In other words, the object is at once active and passive; as thought and subjectivity it should be its own synthetiser, as objectivity it is necessitated to interdependence, and the subjectivity, at this stage, is in abeyance. Consequently, either the two attributes co-exist, or they cancel each other, or they are in mutual connexion.

(1) In the first case the objects are independent, and yet are connected with one another. Such connexion is an external one, due to force, impulse, and outward authority. The principle of union is implied: but the objects are mutually determined from without. The more, for example, an object acts upon the imagination, the more vehement is the reaction of the mind towards it.--(2) But if the object is independent, as has been allowed, then the determination from without must really come from within. Thus desire is a turning or bent towards the object which draws it. The desiring soul leans out of itself. It gravitates towards a centre: and it is its own nature to be thus centripetal. The lesser objects of themselves draw closer around the more prominent object.--(3) But if this gravitation were absolute, the objects would lose their independence altogether, and sink into their centre. Accordingly if the independence of these objects is to remain, there must be, as it were, a double centre, the relative centre of each object, and the absolute centre of the system to which it belongs. In each of these three forms of mechanical combination, the objects continue external and independent. A mechanical theory of the state regards classes as independent, seeks to produce a balance between them, separates individuals and associations from the state, and, in short, conceives the state as one large centralising force with a number of minor spheres depending upon it, but with a greater or less amount of self-centred action in each of them.

The fact is that an object cannot really be thought as thus independently subsistent. Its real nature is rather affinity,--a tendency to combine with another: it requires to receive its complement. Every object is naturally in a state of unstable equilibrium, with a tendency to quit its isolation and form a union. This theory, which is called the Chemical theory of an object, regards it as the reverse of indifferent: as in a permanent state of susceptibility. When objects thus open and eager for foreign influences combine, there results a new product, in which both the constituents are lost, so far as their qualities go. The qualities of the constituents are neutralised. A man's mind, for example, prepared by certain culture, meets a new stimulus in some strange doctrine, and the result is a new form of intellectual life. But at this point the process, which such a form of objectivity represents, is closed: all that remains is for the product to break up one day into its constituent factors. There is no provision made for carrying it on further. Hence if we are to have a self-regulating system of objectivity, we must rise above the Chemical theory of objects. And to do that, the first course is to look at the objective world as _regulated_ (though not immanently constituted) by the Notion.

The Notion as regulative of objectivity,--as independent and self-subsistent, but as in necessary connexion with Objectivity,--is the End, Aim, or Final Cause. According to this, the Teleological and practical theory of the Universe[2], the object is considered as bound to reproduce and carry out the notion, and the notion is looked upon as meant to execute itself in reality. The two sides, subjective and objective, are, in other words, in necessary connexion with each other, but not identical. This is the contrast of the End and the Means. By the 'Means' is meant an object _which is determined by an End_, and which operates upon other objects.--(1) The End is originally subjective: an instinct or desire after something-- a feeling of want and the wish to remedy it. It is confronted by an objective mass, which is indifferent to these wishes: and manifests itself as a tendency outwards,--an appetite towards action. It seizes and uses up the objective world.--(2) But the End in the second place reduces this indifferent mass to be an instrument or Means: makes it the middle term between itself and the object.--(3) But the means is only valuable as a preparation to the End regarded as Realised, which thus counts as the truth of the thing. These are the three terms of the Syllogism of Teleology: the Subjective End, the Means, and the End Realised. It is the process of adaptation by which each thing is conceived as the means to some end, and which actively transforms the thing into something by which that end is realised. In the last resort it presents us with an objective world in which utility or design is the principle of systematisation: and in which therefore there is an endless series of ends which become means to other and higher ends. After all is done, the object remains foreign to the notion, and is only subsumed under it, and adapted to it. We want a notion which shall be identifiable with objectivity--which shall permeate it through and through, as soul does body. Such a unity of Subjective and Objective--the Motion in (and not merely in relation to) Objectivity--is what Hegel terms the Idea.

The first form of the Idea is Life, taking that as a logical category, or as equivalent to self-organisation. The living, as organisms, are contrasted with mere mechanisms. The essential progress of modern science lies in its emphasis on this aspect of the Idea: which includes all that the teleological period taught about adaptation, and only sets aside the externality of means to ends there found. The savant of the last century and the beginning of the present dealt with the object of his inquiries as a mechanical, chemical, or teleological object. The modern theorist tends to see the world as one self-evolving Life. According to the naturalist of last century, kinds of animals and plants were viewed as convenient, and perhaps arbitrary arrangements: according to the moderns, these kinds represent the grades or steps in the life of the natural world.

What, then, is the nature of the process which we call Life? Is it adequately or definitely defined as 'a continuous adjustment of internal to external relations'? Or is it a good deal more than anything the word 'correspondence' implies? According to Hegel it is nothing so simple, but a syllogism with three terms, and a syllogism moreover which permutates its terms and premisses. There is, in the first place, the term, which is also a process, of self-production. The living must articulate itself, create for itself limbs and members, and keep up a perpetual re-creation of morphological and structural system of parts. Secondly, there is the assimilation of what is external to the living individual. If there is to be life, spiritual or bodily, there must be a physiological intus-susception of foreign elements. Without this the first term or process is impossible. Thirdly, there must be a term or process of Reproduction or generation by which the living being passes itself on as a new unit. All life, mental or bodily, involves Reproduction.--These are the three terms of the process of vitality.

But such a life, considered as merely organic, the life studied in Biology, is only a fragment. The truer life is in the genus, not in the individual: the consciousness, the sensation which inwardly unifies the diversity of organic processes. The universal has become the medium in which the Idea exists: it exists no longer in immediacy. The mere natural life gives place to the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit has the double form of Cognition and Will:--the theoretical and the practical action of the Idea: or Truth and Goodness. In short, the Idea divides into two halves, which yet remain the same at bottom: Reason and the World: but yet there is reason in the world. The action of the Idea, or its process at this stage, is to bring these two terms into connexion, and show their ideal unity. Beginning with Reason, it goes on to discover reason in the World. Truth consists in the adequacy of object to notion. Such adequacy is the Idea: and an object which thus corresponds with its notion is an ideal object. The ideal man is the True Man. Truth is the revelation of rationality from the objective world: and Cognition is the name for that process. On the other hand, Goodness is the realisation of rationality in the objective world: and the Will is the name for that process. Truth proceeds from the Objectivity: Goodness from the Subjectivity. But truth can only proceed (analytically) from the objective world, in so far as it is produced (synthetically) by the subjectivity. And, on the other hand, when the good is realised in objectivity, it is submitted to the process of Cognition.

With the unity of Life and Consciousness, the Absolute Idea, we reach the supreme effort of Logic. In Bacon's words, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one' (cf. p. 224). That is the absolute condition of comprehending reality: the principle of Absolute Idealism, so far apart from its psychological wraith, and yet compelled to employ the same language. But after all it is Logic, i. e., only the supreme logical condition of the reality of the physical and psychical world. And it gains reality at the cost of the disruption of its elements: it lets the Is slip from the Is known-- the _est_ from the _cogitatur_--Being from consciousness. Or, in less mysterious language, fundamental philosophy, or Logic, gives place to the concreter system of Philosophy--the Philosophy of the Outward and of the Inward actuality,--of Nature and Mind.

The reader of the _Divina Commedia_ may hardly need to be reminded that, at each of the grander changes of scene and grade in his pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds himself without obvious means transported into a new region of experience. There are catastrophes in the process of development: not unprepared, but summing up, as in a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived process of growth. There is birth and death in the spiritual world: and such are moments of sudden lapse, abrupt conversion, when the waters of Lethe close around, and thereafter all things are new. There are such moments of accumulated and abnormal intensity also in the Hegelian philosophy when a new cycle of idea suddenly appears. Such are the epochs of change at the great crises from Being to Essence, and from Essence to Notion. There is a revulsion, a sharp turn of the path which dialectic can enforce but cannot smooth away,--on that path which dialectic indeed, as opposed to the old logic of identity, shows not to be a mere smooth continuity. All development is by breaks, and yet makes for continuity.

This is again exemplified in the passage from Logic to Physics. The reality which presents itself to the philosopher as Nature is a world of reason--but, as it stands, it only lives as some speechless work of art. It is, so to speak, the picture on the wall--the reflection that is cast by the fuller reality of experience. Reason here is in the garb of sense-perception. Nature is the silent image--the _tableau vivant_--which becomes intelligent, speaking, and real, in the observing and comprehending mind. It is the statue of Condillac, not yet invested with the minimum of sensibility and consciousness. Nature is or shows all that the Idea contained, but contained only in possibility, as a logical condition of reality. It shows it in reality--and that is a reality spread through endless times and spaces. Its unity, its meaning, its continuity are broken up into fragments. Yet as Nature, i. e. in its structural unity, and not in the dispersion of things and elements, it is all a unity of development and has a life-history written in its organism for intelligence to read and to reconstitute, on the assumption that all its accident and irregularity is but the inevitable imperfection of reality as given in parts and successions.