CHAPTER V.

PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI.

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 works made and deeds done behind them, it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a philosophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,--nothing on which you can put your finger, and say definitely: Here it is. The spirit of a philosophy always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of the principle or tendency of a philosophical system tells not what that system is, but what it is not. It marks off the position from contiguous points of view; and on that account never gets beyond the borderland, which separates that system from something else. The method and process of reasoning is as essential in knowledge, as the result to which it leads: and the method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, therefore, or a mere record of the purpose and outcome of the system, would be, the one as well as the other, a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words. Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in a few sentences and in large outlines seems foreclosed. The theory of Hegel has an abhorrence of mere generalities, of abstractions with no life in them, and no growth out of them. His principle has to prove and verify itself to be true and adequate: and that verification fills up the whole circle of circles, of which philosophy is said to consist.

It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which the world--the outside observer--rarely sees except in separation. On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds, with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract from the one thing needful--who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the year,'--those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect, with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit. Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence of all that is prosaic, both outside and in[1].' Yet, seen from other points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general unfathomableness of his doctrine,--all seem to support such a charge. Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be a philosopher[2]. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism, and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And, perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,' or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.

His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage to expand and lose itself in its explication[3]. It must prove its profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.

The purpose of philosophy--as has been pointed out--is, for Hegel--to know God, which is to know things in their Truth--to see all things in God--to comprehend the world in its eternal significance. Supposing the purpose capable of being achieved, what method is open to its attainment? There is on one hand the method of ordinary science in dealing with its objects. These are _things,_ found as it were projected into space before the observer, lying outside one another in _prima facie_ independence, though connected (by a further finding) with each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities and relations. Among the objects of knowledge, there are included, by the somewhat naïve intellect that accepts tradition like a physical fact, certain 'things' of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God: the others, which a historical criticism has subjoined, are the Soul and the World. And whatever may be said of the thinghood, reality, or existence of the World, there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure, and figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race as entities, differing probably in many respects from other things, but still possessed of certain fundamental features in common, and thus playing a part as distinct realities amongst other realities.

Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind to attempt to make out a science of God and a science of the Soul, just as of other 'things.' And to these, a system-loving philosopher might add a science of the world (Cosmology)[4]. It was felt, indeed, that these objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example, as regards God, it was held necessary by the logician who saw tradition in its true light to prove His existence': and various arguments to that end were at different times devised. With regard to the human Soul, similarly, it was considered essential to establish its independent reality as a thing really separate from the bodily organism with which its phenomena were obviously connected,--to prove, in short, its substantial existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of dissolution and decay. With reference to the World, the problem was rather different: it was felt that the name suggested problems for thought rather than denoted reality. How can we predicate of the whole what is predicable of its parts? This or that may have a beginning and a cause, may have a limit and an end: but can the totality be presented under these aspects, without leading to self-contradiction? And the result of these questions in the case of 'Cosmology' was to shed in the long run similar doubts on 'Rational' Theology and 'Rational' Psychology.

Practically this metaphysical science--which is so called as dealing with a province or provinces of being _beyond_ the ordinary or natural _(physical)_ realities--treated God and the Soul by the same terms (or _categories_) as it used in dealing with 'material' objects. God e. g. was a force, a cause, a being; so, too, was the Soul. The main butt of Kant's destructive _Criticism of pare Reason_ is to challenge the justice of including God and the Soul among the objects of science,--among the things we can know as we may know plants or stars. To make an object of knowledge (in the strict sense), to make a thing, the prerequisite, Kant urges, is perception in space and time. Without a sensation--and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and duration--an object of science is impossible. No mere demonstration will conjure it into existence. And with that requirement the old theology and psychology, which professed to expound the object-God and the object-soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the sciences, therefore, does not lead beyond the conditioned,' beyond the regions of space and time. It has nothing to say of a 'first cause' or of an ultimate end.

Such was the result that might fairly be read from Kant's _Criticism of pare Reason_,--especially if read without its supplementary sequels, and, above all, if read by those in whom feeling was stronger than thought, or who were by nature more endowed with the craving for faith than with the mind of philosophy. Such a personality appeared in J. H. Jacobi, the younger brother of a poet not undistinguished in his day. Amid the duties of public office and the cares of business, he found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch moralists, and above all to follow with interest the development of Kant from the year 1763 onwards. His house at Düsseldorf was the scene of many literary reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar intercourse with the leaders of the literary and intellectual world, such as Lessing, Hamann, Goethe. His first considerable works were two novels, in letters,--Allwill, begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar, begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued as complete works in 1781. Both turn on a moral antithesis, and both leave the antithesis as they found it. _Here_ pleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the heart which alone and directly tells man what is good': 'virtue is a fundamental instinct of human nature': the true basis of morals is an immediate certainty; and the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius' which as it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount authority in those exceptional situations in life when the 'grammar of virtue' fails to supply adequate rules, and where, therefore, the immediate voice of conscience must in a 'licence of sublime poesy[5]' dare, as Burke says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own principles.' _There_, on the other hand, is the champion of reason, who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of antinomianism and a quietism of immorality[6]': 'To humanity,' he says, 'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some system of principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.'

In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at Wolfenbüttel[7]. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's work _Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza_ (it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in nature: he was the leader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and utilitarianism.

With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of theology Jacobi had in one way no fault to find. That reasoning by its demonstration cannot find out God, was to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling' felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Königsberg man of logic. He seemed to see the world of men and things passing under Kant's manipulation into a mere collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind. Still more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That surrogate of an argument for theism which Kant seemed to offer in the implications of the Moral Law did not give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold and mechanical principle--he thinks--compared with that infinite life and love which we deem we have in God. The son of man, he felt, was, in virtue of an indwelling genius of conscience, supreme over the moral law: how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a higher grade of being than its mechanical regularities!

If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the Absolute, still less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes to reach) to God, there must be another way: for something in him, which may be called Faith or Feeling, Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain of the reality both of God and Nature. There _is_ an objective reality--outside and beyond him--yet somehow to be reached by a daring leap,--whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.

'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances[8] 'to an imperative, an invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy and all religion,--to a feeling which lets man become aware of and alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls _Vernunft_ (Reason) and distinguishes from _Verstand_ (Understanding). 'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in English) in the _Friend,_ 'is an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding' in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which it affirms and even _is._ It apprehends the _me_ and the _thee,_ it apprehends above all the great _Thee,_ God: apprehends, and we may even say appropriates[9]. And it apprehends them at one bound--in one _salto mortale_--because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle[10].'

And yet the asseveration rings false--it shows a womanish wilfulness and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.' He yearns with passionate longing to find the living and true: he feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute': the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage--a pre-supposition--of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it: 'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains, 'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows--and Coleridge repeats--'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only possible in an understanding.'

'There seem to be one or two motives acting upon Jacobi. The 'plain man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity, has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'--the calm pursuit of truth at all costs, so characteristic of Lessing--is inferior to the 'enthusiasm of life,'--a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of self, and sets personality--our human personality--in the throne of the Eternal. He will be all that is noble and good, if only he be not asked utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God--or Absolute (for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as to use both names), is rather the final aim of a grand, overpowering yearning, than a calm, self-centred, self-expanding life which carries man along with it. It would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there were no God to meet us--to find the throne of the universe vacant. Avaunt philosophy, therefore! Let us cling to the faith of our nature and our childhood, and refuse her treacherous consolations! With the central proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for one, is not inclined to quarrel. He too, as he asks and answers the question as to the issues of this and of the better life, might say

'Question, answer presuppose Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,--_is,_ it knows; As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, Unaffected by its end,--that this thing likewise needs must be; Call this--God, then, call that--Soul, and both the only facts for me. Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves them such: Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'

But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'--meaning thereby that, given the feeling, he has only to

'Define it well For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'

Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the perception--the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception--of faith, a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once, something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head. It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed conversion--a new birth--becoming a new man. But though such a change always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,--as if the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history and a preparation. Of that pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the record: a record which Hegel has written both in the _Phenomenology of Mind_, and, more methodically, in his _Encyclopaedia._ The passage from nature to God--or from man's limitations to the divine fullness--must be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].'

'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:--as a fixed invincible finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature, which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy--as if the delineation of eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too Philosophy--on this view--must not portray the Idea of man, but the abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible, and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.

'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it. The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real) may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible. So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole: that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to consist in the temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain, should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'

Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher has been drawn by Hegel[13] in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi touched hands--though not in a sympathetic spirit--with a somewhat motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates, but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing stages, in which we are not ourselves,--whereby we also lose the true perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of spiritual being. We have grown into _verständige Leute_--people of practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come--if it could come--as the great breath of life--of 'reason' (_Vernunft_) which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and knowledge. But to this band--which has been styled the Romantic School of Germany--the liberation came in ways more analogous to that craved for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh, ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,--free in the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princely _jus aggratiandi,_ the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, as well as in England, was a period of effervescence:--there was a good deal of fire, and naturally there was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom. The Romantic School, which had grown up under the stimulus of Fichte's resolve to enact thought, and had for a time been closely allied with Schelling, counted amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels, of Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world, as that generation dreamed, was to be made young again,--first by drinking, where Wordsworth led, from the fresh springs of nature,--afterwards when, as often has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was really to be found, by an elixir distilled from the withered flowers of medieval Catholicism and chivalry,

'Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time'

and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. The good old times of faith and harmonious beauty were to be brought back again by the joint labours of ideas and poetry.--

'So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it, This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'

To that period of incipient and darkling energy Hegel stands in very much the same position as Luther did to the pre-Reformation mystics, to Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the 'German Theology.' It was from this side, from the school of Genius and Romance in philosophy, that Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer re-action, but into system, development, and science.

To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can not, as Jacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy the things of God[14]. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.

'For those,' he says, 'who ask for a royal road to science, no more convenient directions can be given than to trust to their own sound common sense, and, if they wish to keep up with the age and with philosophy, to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in these works themselves. The introductory remarks state the general and fundamental principles; and the reviews, besides their historical information, contain a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is the road of ordinary men: and it may be traversed in a dressing-gown. The other way is the way of intuition. It requires you to don the vestments of the high-priest. Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call "this a road. These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being, and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar vagueness and scantiness of common sense, that universality is a fully-formed and rounded intellect; and, contrasted with the un-vulgar generality of the natural gift of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its native form, and thus rendered the possible property of every self-conscious reason[15].'

These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily, perhaps) by the patron of the _Intellectual Intuition_ rung the knell to the friendship of Hegel with his great contemporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying is also the keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In Hegel we need expect no brilliant _apergus_ of genius, no intellectual legerdemain, but only the patient unraveling of the clue of thought through all knots and intricacies: a deliberate tracing and working-out of the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the contradiction and the mystery disappear. Perseverance is the secret of Hegel.

This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the _V_ endeavour to clear up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial lectures.

Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed, accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in thought,--the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example, study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon. Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten, and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole, as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea is all-embracing as the universe,--illusions, from which the mind is time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete truth.

Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel. One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception, the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being, where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].'

[Footnote 1: Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.]

[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 377.]

[Footnote 3: _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 9.]

[Footnote 4: Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter iii. of the _Logic._]

[Footnote 5: Jacobi's _Werke_, v. 79, III, 115, 417.]

[Footnote 6: Ibid., i. 178.]

[Footnote 7: Jacobi's _Werke,_ iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.]

[Footnote 8: Jacobi's _Werke_, iv. i, p. xxi.]

[Footnote 9: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel,_ i. 330.]

[Footnote 10: Jacobi's _Werke_, iii. 53.]

[Footnote 11: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel_, ii. 468.]

[Footnote 12: Hegel's _Werke,_ i. 15.]

[Footnote 13: Hegel's _Vermischte Schriften,_ i. 50.]

[Footnote 14: Compare pages 121-142 of the _Logic._]

[Footnote 15: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 54 (_Werke_, ii).]

[Footnote 16: _Practical Essays,_ p. 43.]