REESE LIBRARY 
 
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 -V<<. . 85408 Class ^, 
 
WORKS 
 
 BY 
 
 DR. J. HUTCHISON STIRLING. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. T. T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. 
 
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 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY. The First Edinburgh 
 
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 WHAT /S THOUGHT? or, The Problem of Philosophy 
 by Way of a General Conclusion so Far. 
 
 EDINBURGH : T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT ? 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 OR 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY WAY OF 
 
 A GENERAL CONCLUSION 
 SO FAR 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING 
 
 LL.D. EDIX. 
 
 Foreign Member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin 
 First-Appointed Gi/onl Lecturer (Edinburgh University, 1888-90) 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 
 1900 
 
SB 
 
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 MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, 
 
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PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THERE really was intended a not inconsiderable preface 
 in this place, preliminarily introductive of the work as 
 though it were thought to involve, perhaps, something 
 of a Orise I But casting one's eyes on the book itself, 
 one seems to think that it is unnecessary. 
 
 85408 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 1. Introductory .... PAO ? 
 
 2. Difference and Identity ... 
 
 3. The Question of a Substantial First 
 
 4. God as such First ...''.'. 7 
 
 5. Aristotle here . 
 
 6. NOUS ....:::; * 
 
 7. The Question Remains 
 
 . y 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 1. The Ontological Proof Schelling Descartes 
 
 2. Leibnitz .... ^ 
 
 3. The Argument ' 
 
 4. Leibnitz Again . 
 
 5. The "N.B. If". ' 
 
 6. Schelling himself here 
 
 22 
 
 7. Schelling's own Argument ..... 26 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 1. The Problem of a First 
 
 2. The Ratio .....' 
 
 3. The Ratio continued . \ \ 
 
 4. The Ratio continued ...'.'] 40 
 
 5. Self-Consciousness 
 
 43 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS the Ego 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 1. Philosophy and Science . 
 
 2. The "Voice" 
 
 ' Vii -52 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PAGK 
 
 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION] 55 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE QUANTIFICATION OF THE PREDICATE 65 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE QUESTION RECURS 78 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY * . .87 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE GERMAN REFERENCE Kant 109 
 
 1. Hume and Causality 109 
 
 2. Kant's Theory of Perception . . . . .110 
 
 3. Schemata Ill 
 
 4. Certain Schemata Fail 112 
 
 5. An Insufficient Remedy the Rules . . . . .114 
 
 6. Kant's Causality a mere Fiasco 116 
 
 7. Closer Explanations Sense ...... 117 
 
 8. Categories Construction and Connection .... 119 
 
 9. The Second Analogy Categories . . . . .121 
 
 10. Reference to the Prolegomena 125 
 
 11. A Category not required . . . . . . .129 
 
 12. Categories in Two Classes 133 
 
 13. A most Critical Point Doubles in Sense . . . .138 
 
 14. Kant on Hume ......... 142 
 
 15. The Categories Again ....... 144 
 
 16. Hume Speaks 149 
 
 17. The Critical Point Again 150 
 
 18. Analogy 152 
 
 19. Conclusion so far Kant and Hume ..... 156 
 
 20. Philosophy Strange at Times 160 
 
 21. Time and Space 165 
 
 22. The Categories Again 166 
 
 23. Causality at Last 172 
 
 24. Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact Necessity . . 188 
 
 25. Kant's Theory Again The Mill 200 
 
 26. Noack on the Ego 203 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FlCHTE 215 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 SCHELLING 221 
 
 1. Schelling's First Literature 221 
 
 2. The Two Fichtian Essays 227 
 
 3. Noack on the Ego of Fichte and Schelling .... 235 
 
 4. Kant according to Noack here ...... 239 
 
 THE LECTURE (THE QUARREL OF SCHELLING AND HEGEL) . . 246 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SCHELLING continued ......... 264 
 
 1. The General Course 264 
 
 2. The Mythology 268 
 
 3. Revelation 274 
 
 4. The Positive Philosophy 277 
 
 5. The Negative Philosophy 286 
 
 6. The Bearing on Hegel 288 
 
 7. Schelling in Conclusion 307 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 HEGEL 327 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 CONCLUSION 416 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 1. INTRODUCTORY 
 
 OF histories of philosophy there are so many nowadays 
 
 " they grow like mushrooms from the ground " that 
 a general idea of what philosophy is may be assumed as 
 
 - even ecumenically current ; with warrant of the further 
 assumption, therefore, that it is to thinking or thought 
 ' that philosophy as a whole is conceived to be due. We 
 see this to be illustratively so at least among those who, 
 in so many words, directly claim, as regards philosophy 
 in these days, " to be the keepers of the sacred fire, even 
 as it was given to the Eumolpidae at Athens to care for 
 the Eleusinian Mysteries, or to the island dwellers on 
 Samothrace to preserve for the gods a higher worship " 
 
 among the Germans, namely, Deriken is the word that, 
 specially in the reference, is alone determinative. 
 Denken, and again Denken, and ever and continually 
 Denken, that to them is the name for the organ as 
 organ, for the organ proper of philosophy. Further 
 than Denken it is impossible to go. Denken is the 
 whole ; and with Denken all has been completed and 
 concluded, and the last word said. 
 
2 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 But what is Denken ? 
 
 What is it to think ? What is thought ? 
 
 That here evidently is what is alone at stake. For, 
 if philosophy is a product of thought, whatever it is, 
 whatever thought is, that, too, no less, will be specially 
 characteristic of philosophy as philosophy. Let it be 
 thought, Denken, that realises philosophy, then philosophy 
 must be of thought, of Denken. Now, no doubt it 
 occurs to all of us that we know at once, and very 
 well already, what it is to think, what thought is, what 
 thinking is. To think ! why is it not just to consider, 
 to reflect, to deliberate, to follow some subject, or the 
 question of some subject, in a series of ideas ? But, 
 in that point of view according to the subject, namely 
 to think may be understood somewhat to vary in its 
 nature. In the case of numerical quantities, as subject, 
 for example, to think is only as the word is to count. 
 In a general sense, as we would take it, however, and 
 apart any or every particular application, may it not be 
 always said of us when we think that we are then in 
 the exercise of a psychological function, just as when 
 we assimilate we are understood to be then in the 
 exercise of a physiological function ? To assimilate, 
 as we know, is to convert some alien object into the 
 body itself say into blood as blood. That is how it is 
 with the physiological function ; but is it similarly so 
 also with the psychological function ? To think, then, 
 is it to convert some alien object into the mind 
 itself say into the very blood of the mind, thought ? 
 
 Let us take a case let us think the three angles of 
 every triangle to be equal to two right angles. What 
 is it we do then ? The " three " angles are not the 
 " two " angles. The separates cannot be directly united 
 the differents cannot be directly identified. That 
 seems at once an impasse. One pen is not another pen ; 
 
INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 nor is one ink-bottle another ink-bottle. We look 
 around for help. If this union of separates with 
 separates, this identification of differents with differents, 
 is to be at all effected, since it cannot be directly effected, 
 can it, then, possibly, we are naturally led to ask, be 
 indirectly effected ? Even this indirectly we cannot but 
 feel at the first glance, as no more than a reference, or 
 a suggestion, hopeless. What is that but the impossible 
 itself to abolish contradiction in terms, cancel the 
 steepest contrariety, unite the trenchantly sundered, 
 identify the personally different ! The ordinary ex- 
 pedient and resource, mechanically to unite, mechanically 
 to identify, is without a hint in it to succour us here ; 
 for even a bridge such at least as the very state of 
 the case self -evidently demands seems impracticable. 
 Why, for a bridge, it would require to be itself the 
 most extraordinary of hermaphrodites, at once this and 
 at once that, one thing and another. If it is pretty 
 evident that what we want can be only mechanically 
 only bridge-wise accomplished for us by the means and 
 mediation of some third something, it is not so easy to 
 see where such a commodity is to be laid hands on. 
 A middle that is at once either extreme is alone the 
 necessity to suit, and by the very terms it seems alone 
 an impossibility to find. Let the one separate and the 
 one different be A, and let the other be B, then, 
 evidently, a C that is at once A and at once B, is alone 
 the medium in which both A and B can collapse to 
 unity, can collapse to identity. 
 
 That, of course, is really what takes place, for the 
 attainment of the solution in the case of the geometrical 
 problem under regard, a certain complementary outer 
 angle being fallen upon as the tertium quid, the medium 
 required. That the square on the hypotenuse of the 
 right-angled triangle is equal to the squares on the two 
 
4 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 sides of it, affords similar illustration. The two squares 
 are not the third square ; they are quite apart from it, 
 and different ; and yet the truth of the case lies in their 
 union, lies in their identification, parallelograms so and 
 so situated, being the medium, the tertium quid, that 
 respectively serves. 
 
 And so it is that we have an example of what is 
 meant by the word Vermittlung (mediation). In either 
 of the two cases named the result is due to a process of 
 Vermittlung : in both of them we see that what comes 
 out is a Vermitteltes ; it has been vermittelt, mediated or 
 re-mediated, realised, produced, brought about by a 
 Drittes, a tertium quid, a third something. 
 
 Are we to understand, then, that that is the way in 
 which DenJcen, thinking, converts an alien object into 
 the mind itself, or, as we said, into, so to speak, the 
 blood of the mind, thought ? In all cases of such 
 conversion, there must be Vermittlung, mediation, 
 be -mediation, re -mediation, a process of realisation 
 through interposition of what in Latin is a tertium quid, 
 a medium. 
 
 It may be objected here that angles, triangles, squares, 
 and all other things the like, are not the mind, and that 
 it is difficult to see how they can be converted into the 
 mind, or the so-called blood of the mind either. Never- 
 theless, if we refer to what we understand by truth 
 if we refer to the element of truth, we may, through its 
 mediation attain to conviction. The mind is the seat 
 and the sense of truth, as truth itself is thought. Now, 
 in these angles, squares, etc., it is certain relations that 
 are alone in question, and alone the truth ; and it is 
 they as truth that are to be regarded as united to the 
 mind, and as identified with thought. Not but that, 
 in this reference, we may, by and by, be brought to a 
 closer point of view. 
 
DIFFERENCE AND IDENTITY 5 
 
 2. DIFFERENCE AND IDENTITY 
 
 Meantime this, too, is pressed upon us, what so far 
 concerns the relations of identity and difference. As we 
 know, there is a whole party of logicians who express 
 themselves with absolute ferocity against brethren of 
 their own, who, as in relation to the so-called principium 
 contradictions, and that is the contradictio oppositorum, 
 presume to lay stress as well on the contrasting prin- 
 ciple or proposition of the coincidentia oppositorum. In 
 the Annotations to the Schwegler I have said (p. 366) in 
 reference to the horror of any talk of " identity and 
 difference in the same breath," that " it requires simply 
 consideration to see that to explain is not to say identity 
 is identity, but difference is identity." And we have just 
 seen in these angles, and triangles, and squares, and 
 oblongs, an illustration of the truth of this. The three 
 angles were not the two angles and the two squares were 
 not the one square, of which there was respectively 
 question, and yet the whole matter that was in hand 
 was the explanation of the respective differences as but 
 respective identities, and that, too, by the mediation or 
 intermediation of a third something which was refer- 
 entially at once both at once both difference and 
 identity. Nay, if we take the two self-identical things, 
 that are yet different the one from the other apart, and 
 look at them separately so, is not the third something, 
 as compared with them, the interesting something, the 
 important something ? It mediates explanation : it has 
 movement in it, it has reason in it, while they in them- 
 selves are immobile and reasonless. And yet this third 
 something, as the link between, and so including in itself 
 both identity and difference, is so far contradiction. So far, 
 then, is not contradiction, as compared with identity, the 
 deeper, and, as it were, the more living element ? How 
 
6 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 this is -how contradiction is life, and the movement of 
 life, we shall eventually see, indeed. 
 
 3. THE QUESTION OF A SUBSTANTIAL FIRST 
 
 It is no alien consideration here, but one very naturally 
 in place, that it is not the things themselves in their indi- 
 vidual entity it is not the matter, the substratum of 
 them, that is the important element ; no, it is the 
 element of relations that is this, the formal element, the 
 immaterial element ; it is not the TI ecrnv, so to speak, 
 but the TL TIV elvau. Always the meaning it is that is 
 substantial and alive : the symbol, the representation in 
 itself that is, the external thing itself is indifferent, 
 null, idle, useless, dead. Alone the ideality is the true 
 reality. " Learn ever," says Athos to Baoul, " to dis- 
 tinguish between the king and the kingdom. The king 
 is but man, the kingdom is the spirit of God. When 
 you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake 
 the material appearance for the invisible principle, for it 
 is this that is everything." In these latter nineteenth 
 century days, men find everything in the case (the outside) 
 and nothing in the works (in the physical body, and not in 
 the psychical mind). And yet the spore of this universe, 
 the principle from which it grows, and the principle on 
 which it sits, is not a material, but an immaterial one. 
 This, to be sure, is to put on its head the established 
 order of explanation, or what is currently figured for 
 explanation ; but this, for all that, may be only to put 
 it right. The spore of this universe that entity that 
 approves itself as the first entity, the very first thing in 
 existence, the principle from which it grows and on 
 which it sits, as said, what is that ? There are those 
 in this universe who, when explanation is wanted just 
 when there is question of explanation generally or at all 
 
THE QUESTION OF A FIRST 7 
 
 think it enough to go back to the lower animals. 
 Solution of every problem of genesis is easily to be 
 found at once in the beasts beside us. Why is it man's 
 head that comes first into the world ? Oh ! just see 
 how it is with your dog or cat, rabbit or cow, etc., and 
 that will settle the matter. But if so, why so in them ? 
 Why at all ? Why the cosmical problem ? (Ah, well, 
 suppose, in our own way of it, we say pace Aristotle 
 that it is just because thought does come first !) 
 
 4. GOD AS SUCH FIRST 
 
 The common answer to the question of what was the 
 first entity an answer at which the appellants to the 
 lower animals can only scoff is God God is the first 
 entity in this universe, and it is from that entity that 
 all else derives. 
 
 To be serious that is an answer only to be reverenced ; 
 and there are those who would think it little less than 
 profanity to ask further. But is it, then, profanity for 
 
 US \&~tkirik ? Thought iff tbp, r,onfit.it.nt.ivp. fl,p.f, pf a. ma/ii, 
 
 his single function and faculty, his essence. To take it 
 so, it is for that we are sent here we are 4 sent into this 
 world to think. It can really not be impious to think 
 God, then ? 
 
 When one says God, when, in reply to the query 
 of a first, one says God, does not one still say some- 
 thing then that, as a first, requires an explanation ? God 
 so that is only an algebraical x, absolutely unexplained 
 in itself, absolutely unacccounted for as there, if there ! 
 
 Looking at the world, you ask of it an explanation, 
 how <Jid it come ? What is the reason of it ? But, if 
 you just say, Omnipotence caused it, Omnipotence created 
 it, you have just turned your eyes from the world and to 
 a problem that is but the same problem under another 
 
8 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 name, and not a whit easier. You have but transferred 
 your eyes from this world to that world ; and, so far as 
 questions are concerned, that world brings quite as many 
 with it, and quite as hard ones as ever this world brought, 
 or brings, or ever can bring. Of course you have lived 
 your life, say till now, till this very moment with God a 
 very sensible presence, it may be, within you and without 
 you. God, you think, why God is just God, the Being 
 who knows all, and sees all, and has made all, to whom 
 we pray, who is over us, and above us, and never possibly 
 absent from beside us ! Well, yes. But if you take the 
 existence of God just so, is it not absolutely just as 
 reasonable, and legitimate, and inevitable to ask of Him 
 How ? That One Awful Being how can we think of 
 Him, as up there, say, and alone, without the wonder of 
 Him rising as an apparition within us, and the in- 
 voluntary questions, What ? Whence ? and again, 
 How ? In short, it must be apparent to every think- 
 ing mind which will think, that we have not touched 
 the problem itself when we have simply transferred it. 
 
 5. ARISTOTLE HERE 
 
 We see that this is still the case when religion has 
 made the existence of God a certainty to us, an absolute 
 conviction. For, as it is appointed us to think all, so it 
 is appointed us to think that fact too. Nor if the con- 
 viction itself, the certainty of the existence of God, were 
 due to philosophy, would the bare fact of the existence 
 be any way less a problem and any way less a problem 
 that we must think. So far as reason or reasoning is con- 
 cerned, I know not that any man, ancient or modern, can 
 claim an equal authority with Aristotle in the question. 
 God, as that which could not riot-be, as the rigorously 
 inevitable, the absolutely necessary First Mover no 
 
ARISTOTLE WV9 
 
 demonstration of Him in that regard has come from 
 mere man that is grander, truer, more forcible than 
 that of this old Pagan who died three hundred and 
 twenty - two years before Christ lived. " In Him is 
 life," he sings, " for the reality of thinking is life, and 
 that reality is His. Eeality that is absolute that as 
 His life is life best and eternal. So it is we say that 
 God is a Living Being, perfect and eternal. Life eternal 
 and enduring being belong to God. And God is that." 
 
 6. IVoC? 
 
 But even Aristotle, with all such conviction as to 
 the fact of existence, finds himself under a necessity to 
 speculate the fact itself, the existence itself ; and the 
 result of his speculation is that God is IVoO?, that God is 
 Thought. For him what gives form to all things is Z>OL>?; 
 it is vov<$ that moves the all, and is the cause of all ; it 
 is the dpxn T W a>PXW, the principle of principles ; it is 
 the purpose of the universe, it is the apxrf as we lk 
 forward in the beginning, and the reXo? as we look 
 backward in the end : it is impossible for anything to 
 be better or more in power than the soul, and yet to 
 be better or more in power than reason, than 1/01)9, 
 that is still more impossible. 
 
 That, then, is evident so far as Aristotle is con- 
 cerned, Thought is to him the one principle of the 
 universe : Thought is the First. 
 
 7. THE QUESTION EEMAINS 
 
 But it may be objected, if we must have the fast of 
 nature, and if even of God we must have a first, how is 
 it that thought is to be any exception 1 If we are to 
 see thought enthroned there as the first of all things, is 
 
10 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 there not as much cause, and the same cause, for wonder 
 as ever ? How came thought there ? Is it not strange 
 that it should be there ? Is not thought itself to have 
 a first ? Nay, a first at all, a first of any kind how is 
 that possible ? 
 
 To this problem, too, there goes much that is said by 
 Aristotle specially as regards the necessary conditions 
 of a First. Here, however, reference to the eighth 
 chapter of the ninth book of the Metaphysic will 
 probably suffice which chapter is to the effect, Actum 
 priorem esse quam potentiam et cognitione, et tempore 
 et substantia evepyeia irporepov TTJS Bvvdfjiea)s, ^oyw, 
 Xpovy, ovaia. How that applies to what concerns us at 
 present, the principle of a First and Absolute, will 
 appear from this, that what is potential cannot possibly 
 be a first and absolute, for it may as well not be as be, 
 and also, what may as well not be as be is by very 
 idea doomed to be moveless for ever unless, deus intersit, 
 an agency interfere, an agency that is an actuality, namely. 
 So it is that, as I say elsewhere, to Aristotle, " still cos- 
 mologically reasoning, God is an absolutely actual being. 
 And of this reasoning the angle is that what is only 
 potential presupposes a preceding actuality ; for to be 
 potential only is to be such as may quite as well not 
 be as be. In Aristotelian terms, the Trpw-rov KIVOVV, 
 what first gives movement to this world, must in itself 
 also be absolute functioning actuality, absolute evepyeia : 
 for were it only potential, only SiW/u?, there were no 
 reason, so far as it was only that, that it should become 
 actual. What is potential, what is potential only, there 
 is no reason in such quality for any step further." The 
 TTpwTov KLVOVV, therefore, let it be whatever it may, 
 thought, or whatever else, must be an actuality, and 
 never by any possibility a potentiality merely. 
 
CHAPTEK II 1 
 
 1. THE ONTOLOGICAL PROOF SCHELLING DESCARTES 
 
 IN the following out of distinctions, Schelling is always 
 most remarkably incisive ; and specially, in the immediate 
 reference before us, in the problem, namely, of a first, he 
 is to be found again and again, possibly at his relative 
 best. Of this, it will suit in this place to give a sort of 
 preliminary specimen. What we have in mind occurs 
 in the article entitled " Cartesius," which opens the pos- 
 thumously published writing, " Zur Geschichte der neueren 
 Philosophic," in the beginning of the tenth volume of the 
 Works of Schelling. 
 
 What leads him to the subject is one of the proofs 
 for the existence of God. Our problem, of course, is not 
 precisely the existence of God, but how account for it, for 
 thought, for existence at all indeed ! Nevertheless, for any 
 proper sufficiency of view, all here is relevant ; and we 
 can but deal with it as Schelling himself does. He (14) 
 proceeds in this way : 
 
 " Why I have sought to give a general notion of the philosophy 
 of Descartes depends, in the main, on the ontological argument the 
 production of which is proper to him. It is by this, chiefly, that 
 he has come to be determinative for the entire course of modern 
 philosophy. It may be said that philosophy in general is still 
 employed in clearing up the misunderstandings due to this argu- 
 
 1 Chap, ii., though pointing to an excellent metaphysical lesson, 
 
 may very well be passed by a general reader. 
 
 11 
 
12 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 merit. . . . Neither Kant, nor any one of his followers, has hit it 
 right. . . . Descartes' own mode of it is this : The most perfect 
 being can, not contingently, but only necessarily, exist (major 
 premiss) ; God is the most perfect being (minor premiss), and 
 therefore (he ought to conclude) God can only necessarily exist, 
 for that alone lies in the premises ; but instead of that he con- 
 cludes: God exists necessarily, and apparently brings with certainty 
 out in this way that God exists, and seems to have proved the 
 existence of God. But it is one thing to say, God can only necessarily 
 exist, and quite another that God exists necessarily. From the 
 first (God can alone necessarily exist) there follows only : therefore 
 he exists necessarily, N.B., if he exists ; but it by no means follows 
 that he exists." 
 
 Schelling goes on expatiating on this gloss of his, or 
 this reading of his, in regard to the argument. It is 
 the " kind of existence " he will maintain to be alone in 
 question, and not the existence itself as a fact. Even when 
 Descartes declares that he clearly and distinctly under- 
 stands that it belongs to God's nature, " ut semper existat " 
 i.e. " that he always exists," Schelling. can again only 
 have recourse to italics : he italicises the semper ! " From 
 that it follows," he says, " merely again that God, if he 
 exists, only always exists, but it does not follow that he 
 exists. The true sense of the syllogism is always only : 
 either God exists not at all, or, if he exists, he exists 
 always, or he exists necessarily, i.e. not contingently ; 
 but it is clear withal, that his existence is not proved." 
 
 To judge of this peculiar gloss or reading of Schelling's 
 in regard to the argument in question, we must first see 
 how it is in Descartes himself. This occurs in the third 
 and fifth Meditation ; and may be stated (as the latter has 
 it) to run thus : 
 
 " Now, if, from this alone that I can assume from my thought the 
 idea of something, it follows that all that I clearly and distinctly per- 
 ceive to belong to that something, does in effect belong to it, cannot I 
 draw from this an argument and a demonstrative proof for the exist- 
 ence of God 1 It is certain that I do not any less find in me his idea, 
 
THE ONTOLOGICAL PROOF 13 
 
 the idea of a being supremely perfect, than that of any figure or any 
 number whatever ; and I do not know less clearly and distinctly 
 that an actual and eternal existence belongs to his nature, than I 
 know that all that I can demonstrate of some figure or some number 
 veritably belongs to the nature of that figure or of that number. . . . 
 I find manifestly that existence can be no more separated from the 
 essence of God than from the essence of a rectilinear triangle, the 
 sum of its three angles as equal to two right angles, or say from the 
 idea of a mountain the idea of a valley ; so that there is no less 
 contradiction to conceive a God, that is, a being supremely perfect, 
 who lacks existence, who lacks some perfection namely, than 
 to conceive a mountain which is without a valley." 
 
 To Descartes, evidently from this, it all comes to 
 what import is thought in an idea. He holds that 
 whatever he clearly and distinctly conceives to be the 
 import of an idea, that import has a correspondent 
 reality to its source. But he clearly and distinctly 
 conceives such reality of import in the idea of God as 
 can only have its source in the reality of God himself. 
 Clear and distinct conception of import in an idea is 
 the whole and sole consideration. It seems very clear 
 that what reality Descartes has in mind is a reality of 
 fact, and not merely a reality of kind. Schelling, how- 
 ever, in his own support (16) continues thus: 
 
 "In his V. Meditation, Descartes states the argument in this 
 way : I find in me the idea of God not otherwise than, or just as, 
 the idea of some geometrical figure, or of some number, nee, he goes 
 on, nee minus clare et distincte intelligo, ad ejus naturam pertinere, 
 ut semper existat. (Pay attention to this semper [it is Schelling 
 speaks] ; Descartes does not say here, ad ejus naturam pertinere, ut 
 existat, but only, ut semper existat.) From that, now, then, it 
 merely follows that God, if he exists, only always exists, but it 
 does not follow that he exists. The true sense of the argument is 
 always only : either God exists not at all, or, if he exists, then he 
 exists always, or, then he exists necessarily, i.e. not contingently. 
 But with all that it is clear that his existence is not proved." 
 
 It will be observed that the Latin above corresponds 
 (in our translation from the same passage in Meditation 
 
14 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 V. itself) to this English " and I do not know less 
 clearly and distinctly that an actual and eternal existence 
 belongs to his nature " ; but this English, as an accurate 
 rendering (which it is), shows the French of said semper 
 to have been " actuelle et eternelle " (and the French 
 is for Descartes quite as authoritative as the Latin). 
 When one looks again, then, at the burthen of the 
 extract from Schelling, one can only admire his extrica- 
 tion of such vast antithesis as necessity and contingency 
 from such so situated semper ! But he has been anxious 
 here ; and, for what he wanted, necessity and contin- 
 gency, he has given himself the pains to penetrate to 
 another work of Descartes. 
 
 "In an essay which is superscribed, Kationes Dei existentiam, 
 etc., probantes ordine geometrico disposite, the conclusion runs 
 thus : Therefore is it true to say of God, existence is in him 
 a necessary one. . . . Descartes is himself perfectly well aware 
 that, in his notion of the most perfect being there is properly 
 question only of the kind of existence. And so it is that he 
 says in the same connection : In the notion of a limited, finite 
 being, there is implied merely possible or contingent existence, and 
 consequently, therefore, in the notion of the most perfect being, the 
 notion of necessary and perfect existence." 
 
 Now, if Descartes did speak of what " existence " was 
 implied in the finite, he would naturally, again, speak 
 also of what existence and not of what mere " notion " 
 of it was similarly implied in the infinite. It is not 
 Schelling's cue, however, to refer at present to implica- 
 tion in the infinite of existence in fact, but only to 
 implication in the infinite of existence in kind, and so 
 the word " notion I " 
 
 We see in these quotations, however, all the grounds 
 which are the warrant to Schelling to infer that, " in 
 several passages," as his words are, Descartes concludes, 
 " immediately, or in strictness at least only, in the way 
 which has been notified by me." But can it be said 
 
SCHELLING DESCARTES 1 5 
 
 that even the two of them have been sufficient to make 
 good the alleged burthen of the supposititious " several 
 passages " ? To the quotation from Meditation V. we 
 should cheerfully accord all possible authority ; but its 
 single " semper " does indeed sound less of a nature 
 metaphysical than of a nature actual, besides that the 
 very French for it is actuelle et eternelle ; while, as for 
 the other (the Essay, Eationes Dei Existentiam, etc.), it 
 almost seems too distantly or too loosely placed to be 
 allowed any express authority ; at the same time that its 
 burthen as given may be apt too readily to suggest 
 a Schellingian paraphrase as to be accepted in genuine 
 avouchment of important Cartesian principles. At all 
 events this is certain that in Meditation V. itself, the 
 passage referred to by Schelling will be found to be 
 succeeded by a somewhat long and express reasoning to 
 the effect that it is not a necessary kind of existence 
 only, but, as well, a necessary fact of existence that he, 
 Descartes, is minded to prove. It is just possible, 
 indeed, that the two are unadvisedly supposed to go 
 together with Descartes, however it be with Schelling ; 
 for, after all, what is the meaning of " existence " quite as 
 " manifestly " belonging to the " essence " of God as, etc. 
 etc. ? Descartes himself explains it to mean " that it is 
 not in his liberty to conceive a God without existence " 
 even to conceive ! " Is there anything," he asks, " of 
 itself clearer and more manifest than to think that there 
 is a God, that is to say, a sovereign and perfect being, in 
 whose sole idea necessary or eternal existence is com- 
 prised, and who, by consequence, exists." He speaks 
 quite simply and freely of " the necessity of the existence 
 of God," that is, as admits not of doubt, of his actual 
 existence ; he sees " clearly that of necessity God has 
 been before all eternity, and that he is eternally to be." 
 He says again, " the necessity which is in the thing 
 
16 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 itself, that is, of the existence of God, determines me to 
 have this thought " (that he veritably exists). A valley 
 is the necessity of a mountain, and yet neither may exist, 
 he says. But that is not so with God existence, 
 that is, actual existence, is with him necessity. One 
 wonders that Schelling should have been able to bring 
 forward no stronger evidence even for the necessity 
 he wanted than only the two references which are 
 presently at full before us ; namely, the passage quoted 
 by him from the Latin essay and that other from 
 Meditation V. He certainly gets necessity from the one, 
 but only semper from the other. He seems to have pre- 
 ferred the semper of the Latin to the actuelle et tternelle 
 of the French, both being before him ; while, in the 
 latter, it is just this " actuelle et eternelle " that turns 
 up too constantly, it may be, with the necessity as well 
 however abundant this latter may prove all through. 
 In short, generally, in the face of all, one can only 
 conclude that Schelling (led to him possibly by a certain 
 forgetfulness, as may appear) is as inaccurate in failing to 
 see that to Descartes, existence, actual existence, follows, 
 and not illogically follows, from the essence of God, as he 
 is inaccurate in failing to see that, to the same Descartes, 
 Denken, thought or thinking, is the substance of man. 
 In the Quatrieme Par tie of the Discours de la Methode, 
 for example, it is said, " I knew from that that I was a 
 substance whose whole essence or nature is only to 
 think." In the Preface to the Meditations, again, he 
 maintains, at least by implication, " that it follows from 
 this that the human spirit, making reflection on itself, 
 knows itself to be nothing else than a thing that thinks, 
 that its nature or its essence is only to think ; so that 
 the word only excludes all the other things that we 
 might perhaps think also to belong to the nature of the 
 soul." And in Princip. 53, First Part, it is directly 
 
LEIBNITZ 17 
 
 declared that " Thought as much constitutes the nature 
 and essence of the soul, as extension that of the body." 
 That is Descartes for himself ; but here is Schelling for 
 him : " This sum cogitans cannot be understood as though 
 I were nothing but thinking, as though I were existent 
 only in thinking, or as though thinking were the sub- 
 stance of my being. Thinking is only a determination 
 or mode and manner of my being ; nay, the cogitans has 
 even only the meaning : I am in the state (Zustancl) of 
 thinking ! " 
 
 2. LEIBNITZ 
 
 But inaccuracy to Descartes, let its source be where it 
 may, is, strangely again somehow, relevancy to Leibnitz. 
 This is so much so, indeed, that, both references considered, 
 one is almost apt to suspect, if with some compunction for 
 meanness, that this whole deliverance of Schelling's is con- 
 ditioned by the substitution (on what motive so ever) of the 
 wrong name of Descartes for the right name of Leibnitz. 
 
 Let me first here, however, advert a moment to what 
 Schelling, in the same connection, holds of Kant. 
 Kant's main objection to the Cartesian proof, he says 
 (14), "rests on the incorrect conception that the argu- 
 ment runs thus : I find in myself the idea of the most 
 perfect being, but now existence itself is a perfection, 
 and so, consequently, just of itself existence is implied 
 in the idea of the most perfect being." " I have already 
 remarked," Schelling immediately subjoins, " that 
 Descartes does no % t conclude in this wise," and he then 
 repeats (about a " necessary " existence) his gloss or 
 reading in question. Even so far I do not think that, 
 with what we have before us, Kant will appear to have 
 had altogether "an incorrect conception," or wholly to 
 have failed " to hit the right point " ; but it will clear 
 matters to go a little further into what concerns the onto- 
 
 2 
 
18 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 logical argument generally before we turn to the reference 
 to Leibnitz. 
 
 3. THE ARGUMENT 
 
 As we see, so far as Descartes is concerned, it all 
 comes to " a clear and distinct idea in the mind," that 
 an all-perfect being, God, is, exists that existence, 
 actual existence, is the inherent presupposition of his 
 very essence. This is an appeal to an idea simply, and 
 not strictly an argument, not strictly reasoning. Still, 
 there is the inference involved, that existence, as being a 
 perfection, belongs to what is all, or nothing but, 
 perfection. This inference, however, were not the mere 
 innate (i.e. a priori) idea to the same effect, would of 
 itself suffice to rank the Cartesian proof with the proof 
 of Anselm. Schelling is prompt to remark here (14) 
 that Thomas Aquinas " most pointedly," aufs bestimmt- 
 este, " contradicted " Anselm. Anselm, however, is still 
 credited, on the whole rather than, and certainly in 
 precedence of, Descartes with having invented the so- 
 called proof ontological. If Aquinas impugned it, his 
 reason, probably, was like that of Descartes, in exception 
 to the contrasting proof, the proof teleological. Both 
 objections, namely, arose from tenderness to the glory of 
 God. Descartes, as we know, would not, for his part, 
 with his limited faculties, presume, profanely as it were, 
 to enter into the teleological counsels of the Almighty ; 
 while Aquinas would know of nothing earlier certain, or 
 more certainly certain, than the great God Himself : he 
 can turn additionally in that reference, not, like Anselm, 
 to the a priori (in precedence of God), but only to the 
 a posteriori (in derivation from God). l 
 
 1 " Write down that they hope they serve God : and write God 
 first, for God defend but God should go before such villains ! " As 
 one sees, Aquinas only preceded Dogberry ! 
 
THE ARGUMENT 19 
 
 Anselm, then, does turn to the a priori ; and he has in 
 the main just a single thought, and it is this. What is 
 in thought alone must be less than what is both in 
 thought and also in existence ; and the latter must, on 
 the same terms, be greater than the former. Now, our 
 idea of God is that of a being than whom nothing can 
 be greater ; God, then, must exist : for if he did not, a 
 greater than he greater as actually existent might be, 
 so that our idea, as being, in truth, not of the greatest, 
 would contradict itself. As one sees, this, after all, is 
 but the idea of Descartes : the very thought (in us) of 
 God involves the existence of God. The proposition has 
 given rise to strife enough ; and, no doubt, the prevalent 
 opinion is that it involves a fallacy. Impossibly, it is 
 said, can any mere thought in the mind stand for, or be 
 equal to, an actual existence : mere idealities are never 
 realities. Still, what it comes to is this, As human 
 beings, we must think existence into a first and one ; but 
 if truly we must so think, then truly we just think this 
 first and one to be ! Almost innumerable changes have 
 been rung on this single idea ; and they will be found to 
 be pretty fully discussed in one of my Gifford lectures. 
 I allude there to this remark of Bacon's : " The Scripture 
 saith, ' The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.' 
 It is not said, ' The fool hath thought in his heart.' So 
 as he rather saith it by rote to himself, than that he 
 can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it." Now, 
 the common statement, and not an incorrect one, of the 
 ontological argument is, " That it supports itself on this, 
 that in the notion of God as the all-reallest being 
 existence is implied, and that to think the notion of God 
 and deny him existence is a contradiction." But that is 
 just a more explicit way of saying what the fool " saith." 
 The fool says there is no Gfod ; but if he means what he 
 says God, namely, then he simply contradicts himself. 
 
20 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Once again, it all comes to this, If it is true of thought 
 as thought that it thinks the whole of existence into a 
 first and one as its root, then that first and one, that 
 root God is. It does not follow, however, that the 
 level of that thinking is possessed by the innate idea of 
 Descartes, and still less by the scholastic quibble, at 
 least in form, let it be in matter as it may, the too 
 seemingly external quirk of Anselm. 
 
 4. LEIBNITZ AGAIN 
 
 But we have said that Schelling's whole account in 
 this place of the ontological argument was relevant, not 
 at all to Descartes, but certainly to Leibnitz. Leibnitz 
 has conspicuously the references to "major premiss," 
 " minor premiss," and the other such technical terms, 
 which are no less conspicuously absent from Descartes, 
 but which Schelling would quite as conspicuously intrude 
 upon him. Nay, there is, to say so, conspicuously 
 present in Leibnitz precisely such an " if " as one might 
 be almost pardoned if tempted to regard as the suggestive 
 prototype of that very conspicuous " N.B. if " of 
 Schelling's own. Leibnitz, in a letter of 1710 to 
 Bierling, has this : " It is certain, from the argument of 
 Anselm, that God is, if only he is possible ; but the 
 demonstration is not perfect, because it tacitly pre- 
 supposes something, namely, the real possibility of the 
 divine nature " ; and Schelling, as we have seen, has at 
 least a sound of speech on similar lines when he says, 
 " He (God) exists necessarily N.B. if he exists, but it by 
 no means follows that he exists." Still, even if, by some 
 fault (say) of memory, Schelling shall have transferred to 
 Descartes what he could only have found in Leibnitz, 
 and even if even if the " if " of the last (Leibnitz) shall 
 have led in any way to the " if " of the first (Schelling), 
 
LEIBNITZ AGAIN 21 
 
 then this first (Schelling) must very certainly have only 
 misunderstood that last (Leibnitz). A sentence or two 
 will explain. 
 
 Leibnitz gives 45 in his Monadologie thus (I translate): 
 
 " God alone, or the necessary being, enjoys this privilege, that he 
 necessarily exists, if only there is possible a necessary being, and 
 as nothing prevents the possibility of a necessary being (which, as 
 such, is free from limits, involves neither any negation, nor, con- 
 sequently, any contradiction) ; this alone suffices for the a priori 
 cognition of the existence of God." 
 
 We have just seen these words already on the part of 
 Leibnitz : " It is certain, from the argument of Anselm, 
 that God is, if only he is possible ; but the demonstration 
 is not perfect because it tacitly presupposes something, 
 namely, the real possibility of the divine nature." What 
 immediately follows is this : 
 
 " Ens ex cujus essentia sequitur existentia, si est possibile (or just 
 at once to translate) A (or the) being from whose essence there 
 follows existence, if it is possible, i.e. if it has essence, exists. (This 
 is an identical axiom, standing in no need of demonstration.) But 
 God is a (or the) being from whose essence there follows its existence 
 (the definition) ; therefore God, if he is possible, exists (by necessity 
 of the notion itself). Thus you perceive how the argument is 
 brought to a certain primitive syllogism." 
 
 The " si modo est possibile," or " possibilis," is all, 
 then, that, according to Leibnitz, requires to be added to 
 the argument of Anselm in order to render it, as an 
 argument, perfect. But it cannot at the same time 
 escape notice that the addition in question must be only 
 meant by Leibnitz to give to the argument a certain 
 formal syllogistic completeness a completeness, indeed, 
 that is even already implicitly present ; for Leibnitz himself 
 immediately subjoins " ut certe est " (as he certainly is) ; 
 and for his own preceding reasons that bear on matter, 
 on "essentia" freedom, namely, from limitation, nega- 
 tion, contradiction, etc. " Ergo Deus, si est possibilis, ut 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 certe est, hoc ipso existit (conclusio est in optima 
 forma)." And it must be manifest to everyone here 
 how very much the technical expression attributed by 
 Schelling to Descartes really belongs to Leibnitz. It 
 cannot be said, however, that, with the rest, the " si est 
 possibilis " was also transferred from Leibnitz to Des- 
 cartes. No ; for that point there is no special naming 
 of Descartes : the transference, then, can be only repre- 
 sented, if represented at all, by Schelling's own imperious 
 " KB. if." 
 
 5. THE "KB. IF" 
 
 But, even in that respect, perhaps, Schelling is not so 
 original as he may appear, or as he may have thought 
 himself. Not only Nicolaus d'Autricuria, but Dr. 
 Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow as well, seems to have 
 anticipated him, even in as much as that. One of the 
 condemned 'sentences of the former, which he was obliged 
 to retract, ran thus : " Dum Deum concipimus, ut ens 
 realissimum tantum, nescimus certe an tale ens existat 
 (Though we conceive God as the reallest being, we know 
 not certainly whether such a being exists)." It is pre- 
 cisely in regard to Descartes, again, that Hutcheson has 
 this : " Only if there be any all-perfect nature is it to 
 be inferred that it necessarily is ; but it does not follow 
 thence that there is any such nature " (Synops. Metaphys., 
 p. 116). 
 
 Passing so much, and returning to the matter of the 
 gloss itself which Schelling, by his italics, would in- 
 terpolate into his various expressions, " necessary," 
 "semper," etc., it is to be allowed that the distinction 
 which lies in these the distinction according as the two 
 words " necessary existence " are alternately italicised 
 (necessary existence and necessary existence), is not with- 
 out the hall-mark (such as it is) of its source. 
 
THE "N.B. IF" 23 
 
 It is a mean thing only to insinuate ; but it is to be 
 hoped that what we have just seen of Schelling in rela- 
 tion to Descartes and Leibnitz is to be understood as 
 more than insinuation. And yet what is to be pointed 
 to Leibnitz with an If, namely, transferred to Des- 
 cartes without an If (the If, too, being somewhat 
 conspicuously used), this is itself so mean that one 
 must blush at any connection with it. May it not all 
 be but a matter of casual forgetfulness ? Schelling was 
 a man of superior intellect from within, and he was a 
 man of superlative acquirement from without such a 
 man is to be approached only with respect. Neverthe- 
 less, Schelling, his privileges apart, and but as a man 
 among others, was, as every one knows who has followed 
 his history, a very peculiar man, and every man with a 
 call is, independent of his call, but an ordinarily peculiar 
 man. 1 Self - estimation, pride, was deep and intense 
 in him, and yet, like Lear, " he had ever but slenderly 
 known himself " : he could but leap to the goad. So 
 unlike he was in that to Hegel, who was as Heraclitus in 
 this, too, that he could say eSi&a-dfirjv epawrov, and that 
 to him, whose whole life was but the effort to uni- 
 versalise himself, the <yva>0i aeavrov was the mandate of 
 more than Delphic prerogative. Nor is it without a 
 reflection hitherward that Schelling tells us, as we 
 have partly seen already, that "' Descartes, by what he 
 broached besides in regard to the initiatives of philosophy, 
 has been far less determinative, for the entire sequel of 
 modern philosophy, than by his proposition of the 
 ontological proof : we may say that philosophy is still 
 engaged with the attempt to disentangle and resolve the 
 misunderstandings to which this argument gave occasion." 
 Where we are, too (p. 17), we have these words: 
 " This argument is now specially that which has been of 
 1 This matter is itself a peculiar matter, and would take a volume. 
 
24 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 the most determinative significance for the whole future 
 of philosophy." It is so Schelling begins these references 
 to Descartes ; and when one remembers that, in Schel- 
 ling's time, Kant was understood to have put said 
 argumentation so thoroughly to the rout that it had 
 become out of the question even to mention it ; while it 
 is also a remembrance that how Descartes began modern 
 philosophy still determines it with the light of these 
 remembrances, I say, it is not unpardonable to suppose 
 that Schelling is yielding to what is not unusual with 
 him, a mere bias, namely, that suits his intentions for the 
 moment. 
 
 What these intentions are cannot well be mistaken if, 
 with what has gone before, we consider in conclusion so 
 far this : 
 
 " With this critique of the Cartesian '"' (but really Leibnitzian) 
 "argument, we grant notv that, if not the existence, still the 
 necessary existence of God is proved and this Begriff is now pro- 
 perly that which has been of the most marked consequence for the 
 whole future of philosophy." 
 
 That is what Schelling conceives he has brought the 
 & priori argument up to ; and, having once for all estab- 
 lished the failure of Anselm, Descartes, and the rest any 
 further, we are to understand that what we have now to 
 see is his own success his own contrasting success in an 
 ti priori proof not only of a necessary, but also of an actual 
 existence of God. 
 
 6. SCHELLING HIMSELF HERE 
 
 But we may first consider one or two of Schelling's 
 decisions otherwise in regard to Descartes' argument 
 the rather that it is the general interest before us that is 
 concerned. 
 
 The single distinction that animates the " N.B. if it 
 
SCHELLING HIMSELF HERE 25 
 
 exists " of Schelling is that the idea of the necessary 
 constitution of an object is not tantamount to the actual 
 existence of that object. This is the familiar " Dass- 
 Was " of Schelling, as when he says : 
 
 " The ground-thought of Hegel is that reason refers itself to the 
 An-sich, the Wesen of things, whence it immediately follows that 
 philosophy, so far as it holds of reason, only occupies itself with the 
 Was of things, their Wesen. Eeason has to do with the object in 
 its Inhalt, its An-sich ; but it has not to show that it is, for that is no 
 longer the affair of reason, but of experience, . . . and reason, far 
 from excluding experience, rather itself calls for it" (2, 3. 60-61). 
 He had already said (x. 15) in. the same strain, "A triangle gets no 
 increase of perfection from the fact of existence, or if it did, then it 
 must be granted us to conclude of the perfect triangle that it 
 necessarily exists." 
 
 And thus, then, we are to suppose it intimated that, 
 just as it is with the Was, the idea, of the triangle in 
 regard of its Dass, its existence, so it is with the Was, 
 the idea, of God in regard of the Dass, the existence of 
 God. But is that so ? Must an inference that concerns 
 one idea equally concern also another ? Because perfec- 
 tion in the idea of a triangle will not give it existence, 
 must it be just so also with the perfection of the idea 
 and the existence of God ? Schelling himself (2, 1. 262) 
 grants necessary existence to follow from the contingency 
 and design in existence, but still only if it exists God, 
 that is, only exists necessarily if he exists. Is this only 
 " That the contrary of every matter-of-fact," as Hume 
 says, " is still possible, because it can never imply a con- 
 tradiction," etc ? So it is with finites we know ; but 
 must it be so with the infinite ? Either God does, or 
 does not, exist. But if he does not exist, he could never 
 necessarily exist. And so, a necessary existence that 
 does not exist ! surely that implies a contradiction a 
 contradiction that really is simply the result of a wilful 
 turning of the back on the reasoning itself ! At all 
 
26 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 events, it is safe to say that the reasoners themselves con- 
 cerned had conclusively in mind the fact, not the kind, of 
 existence in God ; and so, that the question is of, and the 
 reasoning is to, the fact will bring all to its shortest issue. 
 What Descartes says is only this, that he has no 
 clearer idea of the two right angles in the three angles of 
 a triangle than of that of actual existence in God and 
 God is alone ! There are many triangles, and a million 
 things besides, but there is but one God there is but 
 one being of whom it is clear to us that actual existence 
 in him cannot be separated from his idea in us. But 
 observe if you will look at it to what a length 
 Schelling is hurried in that last reference. Even the 
 contingency of the world and the design of the world are 
 no more for him than the a priori idea what we are to 
 accept is this : What exists infers so much (a) This so 
 much must be granted necessarily to exist (o) If it 
 exists (c) \ I I (That is, both the cosmological and the 
 teleological arguments are to be reduced to Schelling's 
 ontological " If " !) 
 
 7. SCHILLING'S OWN ARGUMENT 
 
 Schelling's object at bottom hitherto, then, has been to 
 establish the fact that, in the hands of others, Anselm, 
 Descartes, the ontological proof, as yet, for the actual 
 existence of God has failed. This is the necessary premiss 
 to the exposition of his own contrasting success. We 
 have seen that Schelling found it advisable to have 
 recourse to an alternate italicising of the two words 
 necessary existence, according as they respectively 
 determined the meaning. We may have reason in the 
 sequel to lament not only that the same laudable 
 practice had so far ceased, but also, and very much, 
 perhaps, especially that it had not been extended to the 
 little word Seyn (being), which, in Schelling's hands 
 
SCHELLING'S OWN AKGUMENT 27 
 
 presently, seems somehow to take on, occasionally, a 
 somewhat perplexingly shot look. Examples in this 
 reference we see at once in the passage (x. 17), with 
 which Schelling elects to set out : 
 
 " We distinguish in every existence (in allem Seyn) 
 " (a) Das was 1st (that that Is), the subject of the Seyn, of the 
 existence, or, as is also said, the Wesen. 
 
 " (b) The Seyn itself [the Esse, qualification], which relates itself 
 as predicate to the what is, of which, indeed, I may say, quite 
 generally, that it is the predicate as such, that which in every pre- 
 dicate, properly, is alone predicated. Nowhere, and in no possible 
 proposition, is there anything else predicated than the Seyn [the 
 qualifying Esse]. If, e.g., I say, Phoedo is well in health, what is 
 predicated is a mode of organic, further of physical, finally of general 
 Seyn ; or, Phsedo is in love, a mode of gemiithlichen, of sensitive 
 Seyn. But it is always das Seyn [the Esse] that is predicated. Now, 
 it is free for me to think das was 1st, too, that that Is, alone or pure, 
 without the Seyn [the Esse] which I may have previously predicated 
 of it. But if I have so thought it, then it is the pure Begriff [the 
 pure notion] that I have so thought that in regard of which there 
 is as yet nothing of a proposition or judgment, but just the mere 
 Begriff (it is absurd to mix up the pure Begriff with the Seyn [the 
 Esse] that is precisely additional to the Begriff, the predicate, 
 namely). The subject is necessarily prior to the predicate (as indeed, 
 in former usual logic, the subject was termed the antecedent, the 
 predicate the consequent). Das was 1st, that that Is, is the Begriff, 
 KO.T* t&xrjv, it is the Begriff of all Begriffs, for in every Begriff I 
 think only that that Is, not the Seyn." 
 
 Why, we may think here, is Seyn to be excluded from 
 the very 1st, Esse from the very est, Being from the very 
 is, precisely at the moment that asserts it ! That Seyn, 
 however, is (as Schelling means it), the predicate Seyn, 
 not the subject Seyn, not the pure Phsedo as himself 
 alone, but only the Phsedo as in health, in love, etc. 
 That is what is meant as a proposition added, a judgment 
 added. Schelling continues : 
 
 " So far, now, as I think that that Is pure, there is nothing that 
 is in addition to the mere Begriff ; my thought is still secluded to 
 
28 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 the pure Begriff ; to that that 7s, I cannot yet assign or attribute 
 any Seyn [any predicate-Seyn] ; I cannot say that it has a Seyn 
 [an esse] ; and yet it is not nothing, but very certainly withal no 
 less something ; it is precisely das Seyn [the being] itself, avrb TO 
 ''ON, ipsum Ens Seyn is still to it or for it in the mere Wesen 
 [inner being], or in the mere Begriff ; it is the Seyn [the being] of 
 the Begriff itself ; or it is the point, where Seyn and Denken [being 
 and thought] are [literally is] one. In this mereness, I must at 
 least a moment think it." 
 
 Here we see that Schelling thinks the pure subject of 
 Seyn, whereas we may remember, looking close, that 
 Hegel in his notorious Seyn und Nichts ist dasselbe 
 meant Seyn as pure predicate. He, then, who knows 
 what Hegel was to Schelling at last, may suspect that 
 " Seyn und Denken eins ist " to signify, with the context, 
 this, That Schelling, subverting his detested rival's Seyn, 
 will set his own in the place of it ! 
 
 We have to understand, then, so far, that, in every 
 proposition, it is the notion itself that is the main thing, 
 that which, whatever may be said of it, is the Is, the 
 thing that, specially and properly, now and always, and 
 in the whole of the matter, Is. It is absurd, he says, to 
 confound the pure Begriff, notion, subject, itself with 
 that, the predicate, that is adventitious to it. In this 
 way, we see that it is alone the pure Begriff, what has 
 been called the subject, the Wesen we see that it is this, 
 the pure subject (not the predicate), that is to be refined 
 away, into disappearance, as it were. Phsedo is to have 
 neither health, love, nor anything else. He is to be the 
 pure Phaedo. As Strato became so thin that, quite un- 
 observedly, he went out ; so we are to figure, Schelling's 
 Phaado to pass mira tenuitate from Seyn into Denken, 
 and yet not to " go out," but to hold of both. Phsedo, 
 so qualified, or rather indeed Phsedo so unqualified 
 that is the point where " Seyn und Denken eins ist." 
 And really, if we will but figure the position closely 
 
SCHILLING'S OWN ARGUMENT 29 
 
 enough, we shall find ourselves pretty free to agree with 
 the conclusion so far. Surely a mere subject for pre- 
 dicates (but itself without any), a mere invisible line 
 without a vestige of breadth, surely that, by a very 
 mira tenuitas, is quite as much thought as being, and 
 quite as much being as thought. But here now comes 
 the close, the coup, the coup-de-thddtre, the consumma- 
 tion, for which all that we have seen as yet has been 
 only preparing : 
 
 " But I cannot maintain it [the Seyn as a moment ago it (see last 
 extract) was left] I cannot maintain it in this abstraction ; it is, 
 namely, impossible that what is (that that is, das was 1st), of which 
 I now know nothing further than that it is the beginning, the title 
 for all that follows but is itself as yet nothing it is impossible that 
 what is the title, the presupposition, the beginning for all Seyn, for 
 all being, that this not also "is" this "is" being taken in the sense of 
 existence, that is to say, of a being that is outside, too, of the Begriff" 
 
 There ! we have it now that is the way, the true 
 way at last, the only way, to prove the actual existence 
 that is wanted ! Schelling himself cries : 
 
 "And therewith the Begriff immediately converts, transforms 
 itself for us into its opposite, its contrary : we find what we had 
 established as the Beent itself, das Seyende selbst, certainly again, 
 now, also as the Beent, the Seyende, but this time the Beent, the 
 Seyende, in a quite other that is to say, expressly in the predica- 
 tive, or, as we may likewise term it, objective sense (gegenstandlichen 
 Sinn) ; whereas we previously thought it as the Beent, as the 
 Seyende, only in the primitive sense (urstandlichen Sinn). Here 
 is the most perfect conversion of the subject into the object as in 
 the pure Begriff it was the mere, pure subject (suppositum, for 
 these two expressions, again, are equivalent), or the pure first of 
 being, pure Urstand des Seyns so it is in immediate consequence of 
 its Begriff (just by virtue of its Begriff to be the Beent itself, the 
 Seyende selbst) so it is immediately before we can look round, the 
 objectively Beent, the objectively existent, the gegenstdndlich Seyende" 
 
 " Here is the most perfect conversion of the subject into 
 the object I " 
 
30 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 On these foundations Schelling now proceeds to build 
 further : 
 
 " But if we look closer at this objective Beent, this gegenstdndlich 
 Seyende, how will it seem to us ? Manifestly as that that can not 
 not-be, and consequently, as the necessarily, the blindly, Beent. 
 The blindly Beent, accurately, is that which no possibility of itself 
 has preceded itself. I act, e.g., blindly when I do something with- 
 out having previously conceived for myself its possibility. If the 
 act foreruns the thought of the act, then this is a blind act, and equally 
 so that existence (Seyn) which no possibility has preceded ; which 
 could never not-l>e, and therefore also never properly be ; which 
 rather forestalls its own possibility as such such an existence is a 
 blind existence (Seyn). It might be objected : but we have first 
 spoken of that that Is, and characterised it as the Prius, as the First 
 (the Urstand), that is, as the possibility of existence, the possibility 
 des Seyns. Quite right ; but we also directly added thereto, there 
 is no keeping of it in this Priority, and therefore, although it is the 
 Prius, still it is never as the Prius ; the transition is an unprevent- 
 able one, it (the what is) is an sich (in itself), consequently there is 
 not a moment's possibility that what is (that that is) should not be, 
 consequently not a moment's possibility to think it as not being. 
 But that now, for which it is impossible not to be (quod non potest 
 non-existere), for it, too, it is never possible to be for every possibility 
 to be implies also the possibility not to be consequently that for 
 which it is impossible not to be is neither ever in the possibility to 
 be, and existence (das Seyn), actuality, precedes the possibility. 
 Here, now, then, we have the idea, the notion, of the necessarily 
 bee'nt, of the necessarily existent Being, and it is at once intelligible 
 from this genesis of it, with what force it (the idea), as it were, 
 throws itself upon consciousness, and takes from it every freedom. 
 It is the idea, the notion, against which thought, the mind, loses all 
 its liberty." 
 
 Since Schelling's words that closed the critique of 
 Descartes in the present reference, what we have had under 
 eye has been the matter of the three pages 17, 18, and 19 
 in the original ; and it is not unworthy of being a little 
 longer dwelt upon. No doubt, all through, there has been 
 a very real lesson for us in metaphysical subtlety. 
 That, in what concerns these so very difficult thoughts, 
 
SCHELLING'S OWN ARGUMENT 31 
 
 must have been so ; while as for difficulty the words that 
 conveyed them were probably found not one whit less 
 vexatious of catch than the thoughts themselves. 
 
 Of the thoughts the course was to this effect, that 
 while there is in all predication a subject of it, it is 
 possible by successive strainings, as it were, to elutriate 
 not only predication itself as predication, but even also 
 the subject of it as the subject, in the one case into a 
 predication ultimate and pure, and, in the other, into a 
 subject ultimate and pure a subject that shall be, that 
 shall simply be, and no more than be pure being, pure 
 Seyn eben das Seyn selbst, just being itself, avro TO 
 "Ov, ipsum Ens. 
 
 The conversion that follows now means that this pure 
 subject, as yet only Begriff, as yet only mental, falls into 
 reality, falls into existence outside of the mind even 
 through its own pure predication, pure predication which 
 it itself involves shall we say, which it itself involves 
 as to say so so much flesh of its own ! 
 
 For the words, it is here perhaps that the chief 
 difficulty comes in in respect to those, namely, that 
 concern this ens necessarium, that concern the con- 
 stitution, as it were, of this ens necessarium. As regards 
 subject and predicate, and the conversion itself, we shall 
 grant it quite possible to think all this. 
 
 This is pure abstraction, and pure abstraction is quite 
 possible for the mind that is, supposititiously, so pre- 
 pared. But then this is not a First. This subject that 
 on terms of the ontological problem is to be a first, 
 is, after all, not, in any respect, possibly a First. All 
 that predication is still before it all that predication 
 has been simply assumed I And with the assumption of 
 predication there has been no less the necessary assump- 
 tion of the subject and predicate of a proposition ; which 
 proposition, let it be even granted absolute, that is, in 
 
32 WHAT T8 THOUGHT? 
 
 its purity absolute, still it is but a residuum from else- 
 where. Its subject, consequently, is not a priori, but 
 just like everything else, a mere a posteriori product. 
 What we have is but a result a result of abstraction. 
 What it all comes to is just that Seyn, existence, has 
 been simply assumed ; and Schelling has no more right 
 in fact, infinitely less right to see in Seyn a subject 
 of it, than Hegel, Nothing. 
 
 But, for the words, we shall, without a doubt, find our 
 best illustration when we draw into consideration what 
 concerns, as said, the constitution of the ens necessarium. 
 
 What comes first here is that Schelling calls that 
 ipsum ens of his a " blind " ens ; and as much as that, 
 on the assumption that Schelling's First is rightly 
 to be regarded as the First, must be allowed to pass as 
 tropically in place. What is concerned, says Schelling, 
 is that " that cannot not-be, and, consequently, the 
 necessarily, the blindly, Bee'nt (das nicht nicht seyn 
 Konnende und demnach das nothwendig, das blind 
 Seyende) " ; for what blindly is means what, unintroduced, 
 unled up to, is just at once, to the fore, there, as it 
 were, blindly. For blindly, and in precisely the same 
 association, we prefer to say abstractly. An absolute 
 First cannot but be abstract. It is, as it were, at once 
 into existence ; there was no other before it, there is no 
 other on any side of it, for it there can be no question 
 of another; it is alone and isolated; reason for its 
 existence, apart from itself, there is none, it is itself its 
 own sole possibility, and its own sole actuality : and all 
 that is to say that it is abstract blind, if you will. 
 
 Now such blind, such abstract, is to be allowed to be 
 a necessarily existent ; and a necessarily existent is what 
 could not but be, what, in Schelling's words, " could not 
 not-\)Q." And that refers, undoubtedly, to the very first 
 prerequisite in place, a being, an existence, for which as 
 
SCHELLING'S OWN ARGUMENT 33 
 
 from elsewhere, cause there is none ; and such a being, 
 such an existence, is, very intelligibly, abstract : it is 
 uupreceded by anything whatever. Such phrases, further, 
 as " That that cannot not-loe" " That for which it is 
 impossible not to be," become presently intelligible to us 
 when we realise their application as to something that 
 always was and never was not. It is just that constitu- 
 tion, however, that necessitates on the part of the words 
 describing it, involuntarily, an apparent contradiction, 
 or a very real grammatical one. What never was not, 
 for example, was never even possible ; for, unpreceded by 
 anything whatever, it was unpreceded by possibility 
 itself. It is so Schelling conceives it. That blind ens 
 of his did undoubtedly forerun and forestall its own 
 possibility. It could never not be ; and neither (so 
 Schelling) could it ever properly be (es nie nicht-seyn 
 und darum auch nie eigentlich seyn konnte). That, 
 namely, for which it is impossible not to be for that it 
 is also never possible to be, and therefore is that for 
 which it is impossible not to be, never also in the 
 possibility to be (dem es ?mmoglich ist nicht zu seyn 
 quod non potest non-existere diesem ist es auch nie 
 moglich zu seyn, also ist das, dem es unmoglich ist nicht 
 zu seyn, auch nie in der moglichkeit zu seyn). These, no 
 doubt, are very extraordinary expressions. Ordinary 
 speech, at all events, seems directly set at nought by 
 them. We have named the reason for them ; but it is a 
 question, for all that, whether they are allowable. We 
 are given to understand, for example, that there is 
 something of which it is possible to say that it " could 
 never not-be" at the same time also that it is equally 
 possible and for that very reason to say of it that it 
 " could never properly be " I What is " in the impossibility 
 ever not to be " is equally also " never in the possibility 
 to le " ! We have not inadvertently, misarranged the 
 3 
 
34 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 phrases : in themselves, and in their order, and in their 
 import, they are Schelling's own. He does, indeed, as 
 though in explanation, add once, " For every possibility 
 to be implies in it likewise the possibility not to be." 
 That is very true, we say, of a thing that is only 
 potential, only possible ; but what of the impossible ? 
 There is certainly an oscillation of alternatives in the 
 possible ; but there is no oscillation in the impossible 
 no parting of the ways in it, no looking right or left in 
 it. What is only possible will remain so till doomsday, 
 or for ever after. Possibility is the eternal oscillation. 
 Its demur of alternatives, however, is, in the impossible, 
 " summarily truncated." Ought not Schelling here to 
 have been less in earnest with these alternatives ? 
 or with the general antithesis of possible and impossible 
 at all ? Abstractly used, both expressions are absolutely 
 meaningless. If, in suggestion of his own possibility, 
 Schelling thought at all of the possibility of Leibnitz 
 (not that he could do so if thinking only of Descartes), 
 it is a pity that he did not think also of Leibnitz's 
 " essentia." Leibnitz knew that such terms possible, 
 impossible would have no relevance to God unless God 
 had an " essentia " that should give them, so to speak, 
 purchase ; and such " essentia " he did find in the nature 
 of God as free from limitation, negation, contradiction, 
 etc. (Of course, we are concerned with the reasoning of 
 Leibnitz only so far.) 
 
 Certainly necessity, not possibility, constitutes the being 
 of the blind ens ; but are we to deny for this ens, even 
 by reason of the necessity of its existence, the very 
 possibility of its existence ? If it was possible to premise 
 for this blind ens, negatively, an impossibility not to be, 
 was it not equally possible and by no more than the 
 force of syntax to premise for it, positively, a literal 
 possibility to be ? impossibility not to be is certainly 
 
SCHELLING'S OWN AKGUMENT 35 
 
 in grammar possibility to be ! Not only its necessity 
 is a fact, but its actuality is a fact : argal, & fortiori, its 
 possibility is a fact. 1 Is it more than an abuse of 
 language to say that a thing, because it has a necessity 
 to be, is at once neither possible to be nor impossible 
 not to be ? Of course, the whole paradox springs from 
 the abstractness of the existence supposed. If it was 
 unpreceded by possibility, it might be permissible to say 
 that it was " never in the possibility to be," or even that 
 it was " never possible for it to be " ; but was it not on 
 the whole " to play it rather low down " to say of what 
 could " never not-\)Q " that, just for that very reason, " it 
 could also never properly be (darum auch nie eigentlich 
 seyn konnte) " ? Surely that at least is an expression 
 that, placed as it is, must be allowed to exceed every 
 possible bound of any equitable possibility an expression 
 that transcends possibility itself. 
 
 At all events, the situation is so peculiar that one 
 would have liked from Schelling a little humour over it 
 rather than that apparent earnest ! Seriously, however, 
 it is also to be said indeed, it has been said already 
 that, in the whole process of that abstract, absolute 
 subject, it may be ours to find an excellent lesson 
 metaphysically to wJiet : nor yet without gains as 
 regards the problem in hand. We have learned, for 
 example, that a First must be abstractly a First ; and 
 it cannot not be : it is necessarily existent ; and it holds 
 of both worlds, the ideal and the real. 
 
 So far, however, the product of demonstration is not 
 yet to Schelling, God not yet God as popularly believed 
 or known. 
 
 1 Why, does not Aristotle himself tell us (23a, 16-18), "that, since 
 the particular follows the universal, the possible follows the 
 necessary." Always, as everybody knows, the greater contains the 
 less. 
 
36 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " The first thing in the idea of the blindly existent," he says, 
 " assuredly is that to what it is, it is without all freedom. . . . But 
 what, as against its own being, is without freedom, that is absolutely 
 unfree. . . . Were he only the blindly existent, God would not be 
 God. . . . As God, he is at the same time that which can cancel its 
 own of its own self independent being, transform its necessary 
 being into a contingent, namely, into a self -set one so that aufond it 
 always remains such necessity, but not so, nevertheless that the 
 effective actual being of God were merely this necessary being. . . . 
 In the idea of God there is absolute freedom of will and act. . . . 
 Otherwise he were unable to move, stir, go out from himself, from 
 his being, in order to set, realise another." 
 
 So, " the question is only," says Schelling, " how this 
 antinomy is to be resolved : to show this is the affair 
 of philosophy itself " ; and it is thus he leaves it. 
 
 In leaving it, too, let Schelling have suggestively 
 expatiated as he may, perhaps he has left more for 
 his reproach than want of humour, and even in regard 
 of that same possible-impossible of his. Was not his 
 conclusion there but a stumble back again into that 
 very potentiality which Aristotle had cogently demon- 
 strated to be impossible as a First ? That " blind ens " 
 of his, it could neither be nor not be ; and so it neither 
 was nor was not ! Necessary actuality itself reduced 
 itself, by an involuntary felo de se, into a mere con- 
 tingent potentiality ! When one reflects, too, that he 
 had before him, for a good half-century, the scroll of 
 a perfect veteran " in the art of converting and trans- 
 forming " categorical (not trigonometrical !) formulas, one 
 wonders that Schelling could have turned for assistance 
 to his own necessary existent one away from the 
 category of science and to the conception of popular 
 belief. Another had a Sesame whereby to open the 
 rock of necessity into the infinitude of free-will and all 
 the treasures of the Begriff ; but Schelling could not even 
 see that what has its necessity within itself is sufficient for 
 itself, is without dependence on any other, and so free ! 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 1. THE PROBLEM OF A FIRST 
 
 BUT now we may remind ourselves that, in regard to 
 our general problem of a First, there was still question 
 of difficulty even with suggestion of Thought, vovs itself, 
 as that first. 
 
 In view, then, of our more immediate general theme, 
 the problem of a First, it is evident that we are beset, 
 in whatever way we take it, on all sides, with the most 
 uncompromising steeps. There are those who, deciding 
 on nature as a First, lead the flock at present ; but they 
 can but envy the faith lavished on them by their own 
 innocent sheep. Marching triumphantly enough, even 
 vain-gloriously enough, some of them, at the head as 
 they do, presently they falter, too, as taken diaphrag- 
 matically at times with the thought But how did all 
 that come there ? They fall suddenly sick, I say, and 
 they falter under the sense even of the natural before 
 them that is the supernatural ; but a shout of the 
 innocents from behind warns them of where they are, 
 and they resume their countenance of the march with 
 a kick, this kick, It is mere " rubbish " thinking of any 
 origin at all ! Of the difficulties of God as a First we have 
 already seen suggestions. The more our wonder grows and 
 glows under the immensity of a God, not the less, but all 
 the more, also, it grows and glows under the incomprehensi- 
 bility of his Whence ? his How ? his Why ? and his What ? 
 
38 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Nor is it different with Thought as Thought. To the 
 vast majority of human beings at present, indeed, the 
 mere proposition, of Thought as a First, is meaningless. 
 Thought where there is nothing to think of Thought 
 before there is anything to think of that is nonsense ! 
 Still, if even with nothing, we cannot get rid of the 
 something from which it is but the reflection, so, with 
 a " blind ens," we can only come to the idea of eyes. 
 
 An object that is not a subject is a null. A creation 
 that does not see itself, know itself, is recreant, miscreant. 
 To see, then, to know, then, is the End ; and the End is 
 the First \ Nay, to a logic itself that is a logic, the 
 first dot is at once also the first thought : not a move 
 on the board that is unaware ! Besides, thought at 
 least is-, thought is an actuality; thought is in rcrum 
 natura: and so we are at least bound to inquire into 
 what it is ; and the what may lead to a how or a why. 
 
 Socrates always insists on us telling what a thing is ; 
 and so it may be well for us to tell what Denken as 
 Denken, what thought as thought, just is. We can tell 
 what sensation, perception, memory, imagination, or 
 even higher, what apprehension, judgment, reasoning, 
 just are ; but can we do the same thing by thought ? 
 Can we really tell what thought just is ? 
 
 2. THE EATIO 
 
 Now, the strange thing is that just what I have got 
 singly and specially to declare here is, that the whole of 
 philosophy, the whole series of philosophies in time, 
 have within them no one question whatever, but this 
 of thought. In simple and good truth philosophy asks, 
 and has, in fact, never at any time asked ought else 
 than what is thought ? 
 
 It may come somewhat as a surprise to a good many 
 
THE RATIO 39 
 
 of us, something of a revelation to not much fewer of us, 
 if I say, Thought is the ratio between "/" and "Me," 
 or, Thought is the ratio that is implicitly within the 
 "/" itself. It is just this proposition, however, that I 
 hope to substantiate and, beyond all cavil, prove. 
 
 I have talked of the world elsewhere as having been 
 " befooled " by the system of Kant, and have asked, 
 " Where, according to this system, is there a single truth 
 in the whole huge universe ? " I am still of the same 
 mind as to what in that reference is concerned. Action 
 apart, or apart what morally and legally is right, and 
 leaving what is cesthetical wholly aside, I know not 
 that there is anywhere any truth accessible to Kant. 
 To him, namely, in consequence of his findings under 
 his three rubrics in regard to (1) Time and Space, 
 (2) the Categories, and (3) the Ideas, the entire world 
 of Knowledge is but as a soap-bubble between two 
 wholly unknown and merely supposititious x's the x 
 of an unknown and supposed Thing-Initself on one 
 side for Sensation, and the x of an unknown and sup- 
 posed Supreme Being (Thing-Initself) on the other 
 s.ide for Belief. Call the second not x but y, then 
 Kant's world is but a soap-bubble a between an x and 
 a y. 
 
 Nevertheless, I say, too, that the whole of philosophy 
 that deserves the name since Kant is so absolutely 
 due to Kant that it can properly and comprehensively 
 receive no other name than his. Fichte has worked, 
 Schelling has worked, Hegel has worked each of them 
 has worked, no one of them has worked but 
 in the quarry of Kant. There is no product in 
 Fichte, there is no product in Schelling, there is 
 no product in Hegel, that is not to be named Kan- 
 tian. Fichte's philosophy, Schelling's philosophy, Hegel's 
 philosophy each of these, in accurate and precise name, 
 
40 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 is Kantian philosophy. And with Kant and these we 
 have in modern times all all that is capital ; grate- 
 fully counting in, as well, an introductory few, and leaving 
 prattle individually to the irresponsible rest. 
 
 We cannot say that there is any particular stratum 
 in the general section of Kant which has not been 
 tapped and turned to service philosophy and science, 
 idealism and realism (the empirical), gnostic and ag- 
 nostic, sobriety and subtlety, or even super-subtlety and 
 the spectral; still, the main stratum that has been so 
 used and what is, in point of fact, the main must be 
 acknowledged to be that which contains the twelve beds 
 of the Categories. Now, what do these twelve beds start 
 from what is the original principle of them to which 
 they all refer ? We have this from Hegel : l 
 
 "The Critical philosophy has it in common witli Empirical 
 science to regard experience as the sole ground of our cognitions ; 
 which cognitions, however, are to it not truths, but only perceptions 
 of appearances. . . . As the special source of the notions of the 
 understanding, this philosophy assigns the orginal identity of 
 the Ego in thought (im Denken) (the transcendental unity of self- 
 consciousness). . . . The complex of sensation and perception, in 
 that the Ego refers it to itself, and unites it within itself, as in a 
 single cognition (pure apperception), is in this way brought into 
 identity, into an original nexus. The particular modes of this 
 nexus are the pure notions of the understanding, the Categories." 
 
 Kant, at first, expresses himself so depreciatingly of 
 the Ego as in any sense an entity that one cannot escape 
 a feeling of distinct and difficult discrepancy, when one 
 finds the same Kant dwelling, with so much breadth of 
 emphasis, on perfectly the same Ego, apparently, but now 
 as the all-indispensable unity of apperception. Nevertheless, 
 when one gives a thorough consideration to the whole sup- 
 plementary deduction of the Categories which the second 
 edition of the Kritik of Pure Reason extends to us, one 
 1 Encyc., i. 85, 89, 90. 
 
THE RATIO 41 
 
 will be apt to conclude that one has not gone very far 
 wrong if one has even named said " modes of nexus," 
 functions of the unity of apperception, and functions 
 therefore of the Ego itself. That is precisely what we 
 wish to bring it to here. To Kant, the Categories are 
 in reality, or at least implicitly, nothing but modes, 
 functions of, or derivations from, the unity of the Ego. 
 That they were such to Fichte is . but the single express 
 declaration of his text. Somewhat of a preliminary 
 light of support may be thus thrown on what is our 
 starting proposition and our cardinal point. Thought is 
 the ratio between " I " and " Me " ; or thought is the 
 ratio that is implicitly within the " I " itself. As such, 
 indeed, we may even say that it is proprio Marte, the 
 Ratio the Eatio the absolute Eatio. Observe, too, 
 that it is a ratio between, a ratio within ; and that 
 already will differentiate it from much. 
 
 3. THE EATIO CONTINUED 
 
 But let it be characterised as it may, still we may 
 ask, the ratio of what ? Why, then, placed where we 
 have placed it, or as we have placed it, it is the Eatio of 
 Subject and Object. 
 
 But this at once grates, this at once almost shocks, 
 repels. One has heard so much in these latter days of 
 subject and object, and of what in this connection is only 
 meaningless or worse, that the impulse of the moment is 
 to turn away in disgust. If one is to hear, again and 
 again, only repetition of that German " clotted nonsense," 
 then one has no hope. And here we have not only 
 " subject and object," but Ratio of subject and object ! 
 How are we to understand that in all the world, how 
 possibly realise that ? Object ! All is an object the 
 word conveys to us only a vacuum, only what is indefinite 
 
42 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 certainly magni nominis umbra! And subject? 
 Subject as subject is not a whit better, it is, again, 
 a word only of an infinite reference. 
 
 Still, the latter word ought easily to have more of 
 individuality and singleness of positive meaning for us. 
 
 The subject that is here meant is simply the " I," and 
 you yourself are " I." You say of yourself " I" and 
 when you say of yourself " I," you mean that you are then 
 and there the subject. But I, too, when I say of myself 
 " I," mean precisely the same thing the same thing 
 that you mean ; and he, too, when he says of himself 
 " I," means precisely the same thing that we both mean. 
 In short, when I say " I," when you say " I," when he 
 says " I," there is but a single / between us. Let us call 
 it x, then this x does not in the slightest differ in 
 either of the three cases : it is absolutely the same in all 
 of them. Every man is " I," and all of us are " I." The 
 question who ? who is it ? so put to any subject to 
 God himself can only be answered by " I." To his 
 own self and we desire to say it without profanity 
 God himself can only be "I." He, indeed, it is who 
 has said, " I AM THAT I AM." 
 
 4. THE EATIO CONTINUED 
 
 What all this may come to in the end we shall not 
 say now. We would only emphasise, so far, what the 
 bare word " I " means certainly, in the first instance, 
 even grammatically so. 
 
 And even so, " I " is the universal subject " I " is the 
 subject, throughout all space and throughout all time 
 there is but one " I." 
 
 This one " I " is as " I " one and the same identical 
 " I " it is one and the same se//-identical " I " it is the 
 self -identical " I." 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 4 3 
 
 But what does that mean ? Is there any " I " that is 
 not the self -identical " I " ? or let us just put it : Is 
 there any " I " that is not a self -identical " I " ? 
 
 But whatever is self-identical is but the same thing 
 twice. When I say to myself " I," I simply confront 
 myself with myself when I say to myself " I," I mean, 
 as it is said, " Me " ; but such Me, grammar apart, is no 
 more than " I." " Grammar apart," we say ; but, in- 
 essential, unsubstantial, as it is, that mere Me of 
 grammar introduces and makes overt the most pene- 
 trating, exhaustive, and ecumenical of distinctions. " I " 
 as " I " is subject ; but " Me " as " Me " is object. When 
 I say " I " to myself, I mean Me. I (subject) mean Me 
 (object). 
 
 Now that is the Ratio ; that is the Eatio. 
 
 And the allegation is that the Eatio is Thought the 
 allegation is that the Eatio is Thought as Thought. 
 
 " My own ratio fills me, which, secerned, 
 Apart from me, is no more me, but mine 
 The world : 
 One absolute proportion is the whole." 1 
 
 5. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 " My own ratio fills me" And what does that mean, 
 but that the filling of self-consciousness (" me ") is pre- 
 cisely, expressly, accurately, the Eatio in question ? 
 What constitutes and makes up self-consciousness its 
 stock, its matter, its exact content is the Eatio of 
 Subject and Object. 
 
 " A fulcrum was found in the nature of self-consciousness. Till 
 self -consciousness acts, no one can have the notion ' I ' no one can 
 
 1 From " I Am That I Am," in Journal of Speculative Philosophy 
 for October 1877 ; reprinted in Saved Leaves. 
 
44 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 be an * I.' In other words, no one knows himself an ' I, ; feels him- 
 self an ' I,' names himself an ' I ' is an ' I, ; until there be an act of 
 self-consciousness. In the very first act of self-consciousness, then, 
 the ' I ' emerges, the ' I ' is born ; and before that it simply was not. 
 But self -consciousness is just the ' I,' self -consciousness can be set 
 identical with the ' I ; : the ' I,' therefore, as product of self- 
 consciousness, is product of the ' I ' itself. The * I ' is self-create, 
 then ! * I ' start into existence, come into life, on the very first act 
 of self -consciousness. ' I,' then (' I,' so to speak, was not an ' I ' 
 before) am the product of my own act, of my own self-con- 
 sciousness. Of course, I am not to figure my body and concrete 
 personality here, but simply the fact that without self-consciousness 
 nothing can be an * I ' to itself, and with the very first act of self- 
 consciousness ' I ' begins. . . . Said self -consciousness is figured, 
 too, not, so to speak, as subjective (as possessed by some one 
 individual), but as objective and general, as substantive and 
 universal." 
 
 That is an extract from the Secret of Hegel (ed. 2, pp. 
 87, 48) ; and the general interest concerned is so much 
 in connection with the subject of that work, that we 
 shall venture to quote from it, still further in illustra- 
 tion, a considerable number of passages of a like relative 
 import. 
 
CHAPTEK IV 
 
 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS THE EGO 
 
 HERE, in this chapter, these passages follow : 
 
 " The Idea is Thought, self-identical Thinking ; self -identical 
 because in its own nature the Idea is two-sided an objective side 
 is, as it were, exposed and offered to a subjective side, and the 
 result is the return, so to speak, of the Idea from its other, which is 
 the objective side, into its self or subjective side, as satisfied, grati- 
 fied, and contented Knowledge " (Secret of Hegel, p. 22). 
 
 " Cogito ergo Sum. That is, Thought is ; it has come to be, it 
 simply is as yet, however, only in itself : there is as yet only 
 blank self-identity it can only say is, rather than am, of itself, or 
 to itself " (37, 38). 
 
 " This is just a description in abstracto of Self -consciousness. The 
 Ego is first unal simplicity, that is, unal or simple negativity ; but 
 just, as it were, for this very reason (that is, to know itself and be 
 no longer negative, or because it finds itself in a state of negativity) 
 it becomes self-separated into duality it becomes a duplication, a 
 duad, the units of which confront each other, in the forms of Ego- 
 subject and Ego-object ; and then, again, this very self-separation, 
 this very self-duplication, becomes its own negation the negation 
 of the duality, inasmuch as its confronting units are seen to be 
 identical, and the antithesis is reduced, the antagonism vanishes. 
 This process of self -consciousness has just to be transferred to the 
 All, the Absolute, the Substance, to enable us to form a conception 
 of unal negativity of Spirit passing into the alienation of external 
 nature, finally to return reconciled, harmonious, and free into its 
 own self. 
 
 " The intermedium is the first step in the divine process (the phase 
 of universality, latent potentiality being first assumed) ; it is re- 
 flection into its ownself, and as such only and no more, it is the 
 awakening of consciousness, the kindling, the lighting, the flashing 
 
 45 
 
46 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 up of the Ego, which is pure negativity as yet. First, the Ego was 
 only in or at itself, everywhere in general and nowhere in 
 particular, that is, latent only, potential only (the formless 
 infinite, indefinite nebula) ; then comes reflection of this into itself 
 or on to itself, and this reflection is a sort of medium, an element 
 of union, a principle of connection between self and self. In this 
 stage the previously indefinite comes to be for itself ; that is to 
 say, in the physical world it is a finite, circumscribed, individual 
 entity, and in the metaphysical a self -consciousness. . . . An Ego 
 in consciousness : Ego is immediate to Ego, focus to focus ; the 
 mediacy then leads only to a condition of immediacy. Process is 
 no prejudice to unity, nor mediacy to immediacy ; it is a one, a 
 whole, an absolute, all the same " (51). 
 
 " From the position that thought is the all and the prius, it follows 
 that thought must contain in itself a principle of progression or 
 movement. Thought's own nature is, first, position ; second, oppo- 
 sition ; and third, composition. It is evident that, however we 
 figure a beginning of thought, in God or ourselves, it must possess 
 a mode of progression, a mode of production, and that is absolutely 
 impossible on a principle of absolutely simple, single unal identity. 
 The first, then, though unal, must have separated into distinctions 
 (opposites, contraries) ; and these by union, followed again by 
 disunion and reunion ad infinitum, must have produced others till 
 thought became the articulated organon which it is now. Reunion, 
 evidently, is a step as necessary as separation " (58). 
 
 " We have been desperately hunting the whole infinite, unreach- 
 able heaven for an absolute, which, folded up within us, smiled in 
 self-complacent security at the infatuation of its very master. Or 
 what we wanted lay at the door ; but to and fro we stepped over 
 it, vainly asking for it, and plunging ourselves bootlessly into the 
 farforest' ; (59). 
 
 " God abstractly is the mere empty word, the infidel God ; he is 
 true only as concrete in Christianity, the God-Man " (64). 
 
 " Every ' I' is just an ' I,' and so we can throw aside the idea of 
 subjectivity, and think of the absolute ' I ' : but the absolute ' I ' is 
 Reason. Reason is ascribed to every man as that which constitutes 
 his Ego ; we can thus conceive Reason as per se } as independent of 
 this particular subject and that particular subject, and as common 
 to all. We can speak of Reason, then, as now not subjective but 
 objective " (88, 89). 
 
 " Subjectivity, however, is the principle of central energy and life : 
 it is the Absolute Form" (112). 
 
THE EGO THE NOTION 47 
 
 "Kant's theory of perception, a theory in which all the three 
 moments of the notion have place : the subsumption of the particular, 
 namely, under the universal to the development of the singular ; 
 (and this is the notion, this is self -consciousness) " (134). 
 
 " The notion, the logical notion, the notion as notion, is itself a 
 reciprocity, and the ultimate reciprocity of universality, particularity, 
 and singularity" (139). 
 
 " Such, indeed, is the inner nature, the inner movement, the 
 rhythm of self -consciousness itself; and self-consciousness is the 
 priusof All" (140). 
 
 " The notion (self-consciousness in its simplest statement) is the 
 one soul, the one spirit which is life vitality itself and the only 
 life the only vitality " (142). 
 
 " The movement of the notion : that, certainly, is the ultimate 
 nerve of thought. This is the nerve of self-consciousness ; and self- 
 consciousness is the absolute. Self-consciousness is now identified 
 with the notion : we must now suppose self-consciousness the 
 absolute. Self-consciousness necessarily, and of its own self, is, and 
 is what is. Self-consciousness is its own foundation of support, and 
 its own prius of origination. Self-consciousness, being but thought, 
 requires evidently no foundation to support it : notions of a founda- 
 tion on which to support it, or of a prius to which to attach it, are 
 manifestly inapplicable to it. It is the necessity. Since there is a 
 universe, something must have been necessary. Now, this some- 
 thing is just self -consciousness. Self -consciousness is the necessity 
 to be. It is in the nature of self -consciousness that it should be its 
 own cause, and its own necessity, and its own world. Thought is a 
 necessity, and the only necessity, and thought is self -consciousness. 
 All that is exhibits in its deepest base the type of self -consciousness, 
 the type of thought. 
 
 " Thought or self-consciousness cannot be impersonal : thought or 
 self -consciousness always implies a subject. Why hesitate to name 
 it God ? The self-consciousness of the universe is the divine self- 
 consciousness and not the human" (160, 161, 163.) 
 
 " The notion, in fact, is the absolute universal of thought, the 
 primal or ultimate nerve, which is the primitive and original form. 
 It is causa sui and prindpium sui. The ego is, firstly, the universal ; 
 it is identity, it is immediacy. The ego, secondly, surveys itself ; 
 that is, it gives itself, or becomes to itself, the particular, the differ- 
 ence, the discernment, the reflection. The ego, thirdly, returns from 
 survey of itself with increase of knowledge ; that is, returning into 
 itself (the universal) from or with the particular, it does not just 
 
48 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 resume its old identity, but is now the singular, which is identity, 
 in diversity, immediacy in reflection, the universal in the particular. 
 This is but the form and movement of self-consciousness as self- 
 consciousness, of the ego as ego " (167, 170, 174, 175). 
 
 " The notion is the a priori synthetic judgment. This is the pulse 
 of self -consciousness ; this is the nerve of the ego " (190). 
 
 "To perceive that Apprehension itself (or Apperception or the Ego), 
 perfectly generally expressed, constitutes the notion" (191). 
 
 " The ultimate principle is the pure negativity ; and even such is 
 ego as ego, or self-consciousness as self-consciousness " (200). 
 
 " The three cognitive faculties are but the three moments of the 
 notion " (204). 
 
 " This evolution of thought's own self to thought's own self, what is 
 it but the universe 1 Thus is it that thought is the pure negativity 
 (as negative of all other), and, to its own self, sets is own negative 
 which is the object" (353). 
 
 " Thought is the prius of all " (356). 
 
 "We can conceive what is as the one identical, infinitesimal spore, 
 whose vibration is its difference and that is the all of thought as 
 exhibited. What is the universe if not the one absolute Voice 
 inflecting itself into its involved voculations the absolute articula- 
 tion of the absolute one and that one is just thought : thought's 
 own native articulations constitute the all of things " (387). 
 
 "The notion is the vital heart of all, and for the notion self- 
 consciousness is but another name " (720). 
 
 " The principle of self-consciousness contains within itself both 
 difference and identity, and a little reflection will make it plain that 
 there can be no possible explanation of this world without a prin- 
 ciple that contains both elements. The origin of difference in 
 identity is the point and focus of the whole problem ; but we have 
 that at once in self-consciousness. ... I, too, like other philosophers, 
 would like to explain existence ; but what does that mean ? Evi- 
 dently, I must find a single principle, a single fact in existence, that 
 is adequate to all the phenomena of existence, to all the variety of 
 existence ; and this principle, while adequate to all the variety of 
 existence, while competent to reduce into its own identity all the 
 difference that is, must bring with it its own reason for its own self, 
 its own necessity, its proof that it is, and it alone is, that which 
 could not not be. . . . The constitutive movement of self-conscious- 
 ness is the idealisation of a particular (the object) through a uni- 
 versal (the thought) into a singular (the subject) ; or it is the 
 realisation of a universal through a particular into a singular. . . . 
 
THE EGO THE NOTION 49 
 
 We would find an explanation of all that is in some actual con- 
 stituent of all that is. ... Self -consciousness is in the world of facts. 
 . . . Self-consciousness is a fact, it is something in rerum natura, a 
 principle actually existing " (Lectures on the Philosophy of Law, 9, 10, 
 11, 13, 14). 
 
CHAPTER V 
 1. PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 
 
 WHAT is alluded to there in the last extracts is an 
 advantage which is generally assumed to be possessed by 
 science alone, and not by philosophy at all. For it is 
 not, possibly, too much to say that the word philosophy, 
 common and current though it be, has still for the most 
 of us but a very vague and indefinite meaning. Science, 
 we know, explains to us all that we see there around us, 
 and hence it is, as I suppose is generally assumed to go 
 without saying, that we possess what is called civilisa- 
 tion, and hence so far at least as that extends in 
 some sort a rational life in a finally inexplicable endless- 
 ness. Science, too, has principles truths that found 
 entire structures of knowledge, but which, for all that, 
 are patent to the plainest. Now, no doubt, it is that 
 which philosophy, in current opinion, has hitherto 
 wanted. And so, one may have been apt to speculate in 
 the past, were philosophy seen to grow from a Fact, to 
 develop a Fact a single principle a single principle in 
 rerum natura, that would give intelligibleness, certainty, 
 and security to every further progress, to every ulterior 
 outcome were philosophy this, and if philosophy did 
 this, would it not be generally seen into at last, and 
 would it not receive at last that confidence on the part 
 of the bulk of mankind which is at present denied it, and 
 which so far is reserved for science alone ? 
 
 Now, it is this which has been at least broached in 
 
 50 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 51 
 
 some of our last citations ; and certainly, if the Ego 
 Ego as Ego can be allowed to constitute a single ground- 
 fact or principle, as, say, heat is, or light is, or gravi- 
 tation is, which fact or principle is capable of being 
 operated on to the extrusion and extraction of a whole 
 system of explanatory and indubitable truth if I say the 
 Ego, Ego as Ego, can be so regarded, is not the thing 
 done is it not now for philosophy itself to regard itself 
 as, at long and last, science, simply science ? 
 
 But now, the absolute self-identity, the single unit 
 that alone founds and grounds that alone forms and 
 composes that alone constitutes the infinite resultant 
 compound of this whole vast universe that single unit 
 is the Ego, simply Ego as Ego. Not that the evolution 
 in proof can be, as those in regard of heat, light, gravita- 
 tion, etc., in its kind physical. The Ego is not itself 
 physical as these are. It certainly is in rerum natura ; 
 but, just as it is in rerum natura, or according to the 
 way in which it is in rerum natura only so is it 
 possible that it can be treated. The necessity is this, 
 that the single principle of the Ego should be so operated 
 on as to develop to reason its situation in the universe. 
 To all philosophy, to all that is truly philosophy, it is 
 the single question of the universe that is alone the 
 interest : the what of it, the why of it, the whence of it, 
 and the whither of it. Man, in that he is of sense, is 
 finite : but man, in that he is of thought, is a spirit and 
 infinite. So it is that, if he has his week-day of work, 
 he has not less his Sabbath-day of religion. And so it 
 is also that, if he has his scientist to minister to the 
 commodity of the finite, he is not without never has 
 been without never will be without his philosopher 
 to minister to the necessity of the infinite. So, then, as 
 it is to the philosopher and not to the scientist that the 
 development of the principle of the Ego falls, the method 
 
52 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 of that development cannot be the physical method of 
 the latter, but can only be the metaphysical method of 
 the former. And yet the Ego as Ego is a principle in 
 rerum natura. It is the ratio of the I and the Me in 
 the Ego that is Thought, and it is Thought that is the 
 foison of the universe. Thought is the business proper 
 of self-consciousness, and the ratio between the I and 
 the Me of self -consciousness it is that that is the bite 
 of the Ego. I as I is the subject, and Me as Me is the 
 object ; but both are identically the same. This, then, 
 is the primitive relation the unit of what is : the unit 
 of what it is to think ; and the unit of what it is to be. 
 But, plainly, this unit, or the whole idea of this unit, is not 
 only a notion in its identity, but it is a judgment in its 
 difference, nay, more, it is a syllogism in its totality, the 
 reflexion (or reflection) of the Me back again into the I, 
 with restoration of the whole, of the All that is. And 
 what is this but Logic ? The conjunct act of Simple 
 Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeason ! And with this 
 before us we may well repeat here from the " I Am That 
 
 I Am." 
 
 " Yea, I am one ; 
 
 But my own ratio fills me, which, secerned 
 Apart from me, is no more me, but mine . . . 
 One absolute proportion is the whole, 
 One sole relation . . . 
 I Am, I Am, I Am That I Am . . . 
 Be thou but Me . . . 
 
 Enjoy 
 
 Thou me, and let my will be thine alone ; 
 The one is many, and the many one. 
 Herein is peace divine and the great life 
 That is the all." 
 
 2. THE "Voics" 
 
 The whole will be found singularly in place here, and 
 singularly illustrative. That of the "Voice," too, is 
 
THE "VOICE" 53 
 
 excellently illustrative. The conception, I have said, 
 " sounds better in German " ; and I have ventured to 
 express myself in a German word or two : " Was ist, 
 ist eine Stimme," etc. What is, is a Voice ; abstract, 
 however, this voice is only in itself; but it must also 
 be for itself or as itself ; and to be for itself or as itself, 
 it must distinguish itself; and that is, give itself, as 
 constitutive of it, its native series and system of notes." 
 Now, that is exactly as the Ego with its movement into 
 a series and system of notes of its own, which are 
 existence as existence, which are the universe. 
 
 And here it suggests itself to consider what is the 
 precise nature of that very peculiar relation which obtains 
 between the voice and its register, or between the Ego 
 and its so-called system of notes. When we see smoke 
 we surmise fire ; and we know that the German Herbart 
 has generalised as much as this into the sentence : So 
 much Schein (appearance), so much Seyn (reality); at 
 the same time that there is the common brocard, de non 
 apparentibus et de non existentibus, eadem est ratio. And 
 there can be no conclusion in the circumstances but that 
 whatever is must also seem : whatever is must double 
 over or out. That is just what we see in the case of 
 the voice and its notes, or in the case of the Ego and its 
 notes. Here it is the voice, the Ego, that is the Seyn, 
 Being ; while, in either case, the notes are but the shine, 
 the show, the seeming. The Germans call this world 
 the Erschcinung, the Appearance, and that comes to the 
 same thing. If we think of it, the notes of the voice 
 are but individual and finite ; and as but transitory, they 
 perish and pass. On the other hand, in such position 
 the voice itself can be figured as infinite : it can go on 
 piping for ever an actual infinitude of notes. The Seyn, 
 then, the foing, that which is, is always the reality ; 
 'whereas the shine, the show, manifest as it may, and 
 
54 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 manifest what it may, is but temporary appearance. No 
 doubt, it manifests ; no doubt, it always manifests. But 
 even so, it is always only secondary and never prime. 
 Let it manifest what it may, it itself (the shine} is but 
 vicarious, and can never be anything else than vicarious. 
 Now, that is a very curious duplication ; and it is a very 
 curious relation that lies between the sides of it. For 
 what is the effect of the one, and what does the other 
 involve ? The effect is this, and what is involved is 
 this that the manifestation, the appearance, the shine, 
 as always only secondary and vicarious, is also always 
 only so far false \ It is always only for another ; it is 
 never for itself: it itself is never the it the it that, 
 as manifested, or not manifested, is alone the it con- 
 cerned, the truth, the reality the truth that is, the 
 reality that is. Another reflexion of the situation is 
 this, that concerns the German word Erscheinung. This 
 word, in ordinary usage, as we have just seen, means 
 simply the world without, simply what is in evidence, 
 in appearance around us, this word, in which, according 
 to the genius of the language, the first part of it, the 
 Er, has the force of denoting that what is in hand is 
 the effecting, the making good of something through the 
 second part of it, the scheinung, namely, this word, I 
 say, so regarded, can only represent a shining through of 
 the it, of the it that is, the truth that is, the reality that 
 is ; and that being so, it itself (the shine) can be no it, 
 no truth, no reality, but only what is no more than 
 representative, figurative, or even, it may be, merely 
 indicative of the it, the truth, the reality. With this 
 commentary, our Erscheinung, then, is but a shine or 
 show from ; and so the from, as only pointing to what 
 shines through, is alone substantial. 
 
CHAPTEK VI 
 
 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION 
 
 WHAT we have brought forward from the Secret of Hegel 
 forms a considerable body of evidence, and it applies to 
 the year 1864 (I presented a friend with an "early 
 copy " of the book on the Christmas Day of that year). 
 One other quotation I should like to add as from a 
 paragraph that must have been one of the last written 
 then. It is from p. xlvi of the Preface, and runs thus : 
 
 " He has been enabled, through Kant, to perceive that the condi- 
 tions of a concrete, and of every concrete, are two opposites : in 
 other words, he has come to see that there exists no concrete which 
 consists not of two antagonistic characters, where, at the same time, 
 strangely somehow, the one is not only through the other, but 
 actually is this other." 
 
 We have seen this very accurately illustrated by the 
 two moments of Quantity. Continuity is impossible 
 without Discretion Continuity implies Discretion 
 Continuity, so far, is Discretion : but, equally again, 
 Discretion is impossible without Continuity Discretion 
 implies Continuity Discretion, so far, is Continuity. 
 Nor is it otherwise with notion and moments in the case 
 of any concrete. Take the abstractest concrete of all 
 simply Genesis simply Becoming. Its moments it 
 itself being pure, pure form that is are pure being and 
 pure nothing. And what are they ? Pure being is the 
 abstraction from every particular being that ever was, is, 
 
 55 
 
56 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 or can be ; and what else is pure nothing ? Pure 
 nothing, equally with pure being, is the abstraction from 
 every particular being that ever was, is, or can be ; and 
 these, the first abstractions, the first either-or, are the 
 moments of the first concrete notion. The German 
 philosopher, then, was not, after all, so very much of a 
 fool when his Anna virumque cano and his Mrjviv aei&e 
 6ed screaked out, raucous in prose, Seyn und Mchts 
 ist dasselbe ! Just think of our own I-Me, at once pure 
 subject and pure object, or at once pure affirmative and 
 pure negative ! Ay, that is the first, and the font, and 
 the source of all ! And what is the / subject as 
 negating into itself the Me object what is that but the 
 " negation of the negation," which, as I think I may take 
 it for granted, has proved but perplexingly a somewhat 
 familiar acquaintance of the most of us ? Nay, what is 
 the answer to the one great problem with which the 
 whole business so solemnly set out what is the reply 
 to the single question which from the lips of Kant 
 inaugurated the whole movement ? " The problem 
 proper of pure reason," says Kant, in one of his earliest 
 pages, " is comprised in the question : How are syn- 
 thetic judgments a priori possible ? " Now, then, the 
 answer to this problem, the reply to this question, is the 
 single word Ego, I-Me ! Ego is the Apprehension that 
 takes up ; Ego is the Judgment that is accurate and 
 parts into an either-or ; Ego is the Eeason that, yet more 
 accurate, resumes both into one. The / that sub- 
 sumes the Me is Thought : the Me that rises into the / 
 is Eeligion. The dividing line between the / and the 
 Me is the contradiction that creates the universe : the 
 uniting line between the / and the Me is the solution that 
 resolves the all of things back again into the sole substance 
 that is, and the sole subject that is, and the sole person 
 that is God, in whom (the infinite) we (the finite) 
 
FURTHER ILLUSTRATION 57 
 
 live, and move, and have our being, but, finite-infinite, 
 are subjects and persons too the droplets in the drop, 
 the Many in the One. And from this we see that, had 
 Kant and Hegel been but clearer or braver in regard to 
 the Ego, both might have placed their philosophies in 
 such grand, rich focus of unity, and power, and light as 
 would have left but small possibility in advance for 
 complaint of darkness, or difficulty, or unintelligibleness. 
 If, then, it was in reference to Fichte that there was 
 that first word from the Secret of Hegel about " a 
 Fulcrum being found in the nature of self-consciousness," 
 we see now that, as regards Kant and Hegel, what a 
 gain it might have been for the philosophies of both had 
 that " fulcrum " been but in the mind and in the will of 
 either. Indeed, as has been already indicated, if we will 
 but pause upon it, and patiently endeavour to exhaust 
 the implication of it (the Ego), it may be that we shall 
 not a little astonish our own selves in the general 
 reference to philosophy at all in short ! If neither a 
 matter as to the lonians, nor a number as to the Pytha- 
 goreans, it (this of the Ego) is still, as to the one, an 
 original unit, and it is still, as to the other, a primitive 
 and prescriptive measure. As to the Eleatics, too, it is 
 what for them alone was, and alone was one. It never 
 began, neither in what was nor in what was not. It 
 always was, and never was not. Through all becoming, 
 in all becoming, it alone is ; and yet, like becoming 
 itself, it is not one but two, or, more properly, it is a one 
 in two, a duplicity in unity. That is the life of the " I," 
 the being and soul of the " I." The " I " cannot say 
 itself once ; it must repeat itself, it must say itself twice. 
 Simply to be, it must double itself, divide itself, and set 
 itself against itself. It unites itself only in that it dis- 
 unites itself. It is Empedoclean love and hate, and 
 strife and peace at once. Anaxagoras said it, and named 
 
58 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 it ; and had Leucippus and Democritus but thought of it, 
 they would have found it their plenum and their vacuum, 
 their affirmative and their negative at once, nor less their 
 primitive atom that was independent of shape, place, 
 position. Curious ! That it was that the Sophists played 
 with ; and it was with that, again, that Socrates was 
 serious. It was the Idea of Plato surely very literally in 
 its express ravrov and Qdrepov, too. And, as for Aristotle, 
 self-consciousness, the Ego, can be very readily seen to 
 come up to and realise the V\TJ and the SiW/u?, the 
 /jLop(j)r} and the evepyeia, the <rvvo\ov and the e 
 which at the same time are all at once in the 
 KIVOVV. 
 
 But, if we may please or surprise ourselves by such 
 analogies in the ancients thus far only illustratively in 
 allusion, we have undoubtedly the same power in regard 
 at least to the best of the moderns, let it be psycho- 
 logically as it may, generally, with these. Of Descartes, 
 for example, the first word and the last is self-conscious- 
 ness ; and Spinosa, if he had but borne this as earnestly 
 in his mind as the Thought and Extension of his master, 
 might very well, supposably, have reflected his own 
 Attributes into a Subject, God, rather than into selfless 
 Substance. In that case he would, in a way, at least 
 formally, have anticipated these, our recent German 
 Coryphaei in philosophy, who, virtually, only followed 
 their great countryman, Leibnitz, in the prosecution of 
 the same problem the production of a Monad that was 
 at once All, Mind and Matter, God and Man. 
 
 With self-consciousness, as we have very clearly seen, 
 at all events, with self-consciousness treated as a proposi- 
 tion, this problem is the Einheit Entgegengesetzter, the 
 unity of contraries, the principium coincident ise the 
 identity of difference. And, after all, there can be but 
 little difficulty in seeing that it is only this last identity, 
 
QUANTIFIED IDENTITY 59 
 
 only the identity of difference, that signifies, whereas the 
 identity of identity is self-evidently null. 
 
 In this present connection, Aristotle was mentioned a 
 moment ago : but, unity of contraries ! is not any such 
 unity in signal discongruity with what was to Aristotle, 
 of all first principles, the {BepaioTdTtj, the most certain, 
 sure, firm, fixed, stable that, namely, of contradiction ? 
 
 Now, no doubt, it is quite true that, when there is 
 question of identity, and nothing but identity, then, of 
 this identity, only this identity can be predicated. That 
 amounts to Sir William Hamilton's quantification of the 
 predicate : but, no less, that amounts also to the 
 untenablest proposal possible that amounts to the 
 abnegation of thought itself. The paper you look at is 
 the paper you look at, the book you hold is the book you 
 hold ; but to decide that the paper you look at is the 
 paper you look at, or that the book you hold is the book 
 you hold, does not, for the one case or the other, involve 
 thought. Kecognition of sense is not the inference of 
 reason : Eecognition has but to look ; it is reason seizes. 
 That is as much as to say : there is but logical judgment ; 
 existential judgment is a phrase false. It is impossible 
 to think without a stir, a move, a step upward in 
 generalisation ; but to quantify predication thought ! 
 is to abjure it, is to strike all into the sterility of a 
 barren self-sameness. 
 
 To reason, to think, is not to determine this as this, 
 but that as this : and there you have at once difference. 
 In a word, through thought, through reason, it is not 
 identity that we bring into identity, but difference. 
 Identity has indeed the name of a relation, but reality 
 of a relation it has none. Difference always goes to a 
 relation ; but in identity nothing of difference is. The 
 relation of identity ! Is repetition, then, by any 
 possibility a relation ? Identity may indeed be com- 
 
60 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 mitted to " Matters of Fact " ; but it is difference that, 
 even as his purse was the soul of the Licenciado Pedro 
 Garcias it is difference that is the soul of the " Relations 
 of Ideas.'' 
 
 It is now a good many years since, in this connection, 
 it was not inapplicably written in the English Schwegler 
 (p. 366): "Mr. Lewes is a great stickler for the 
 principium identitatis, and believes, as Sir William 
 Hamilton does, that logic is confounded when there is 
 talk of identity and difference in the same breath ; but 
 it requires simply consideration to see that to explain is 
 not to say identity is identity, but difference is identity" 
 Schelling himself says (W. W., 2, 3. 40): "From the 
 merely homogeneous there is inference of nothing more ; 
 a and a give no possibility of a syllogism." Dr. Thomas 
 Brown was but eighteen and a boy when, as occurs to be 
 said in his first book, the Observations on Dr. Darwin's 
 Zoonomia, he saw that " To the communication of know- 
 ledge, it is necessary that the predicate be more compre- 
 hensive than its subject." The " communication of 
 knowledge " : that is precisely the interest concerned ; 
 and what knowledge do you communicate when you say 
 this is this and that is that ? Knowledge is the effect of 
 an act : it is something done, and it is something won ; 
 but what is there either done or won with this as this or 
 that as that ? Knowledge is process, progress, acquisi- 
 tion, purpose, movement to an end ; but to be caught 
 in the stagnation of identity is to have your feet in a 
 slough. If a judgment is worth anything, surely it is to 
 do something, surely it is to add something ; but what 
 does " the same is the same " add ? The immature Brown 
 was man enough to see what was the spirit of logic ; but 
 the perfectly ripe Hamilton, crudely eager for a mark, 
 rushed manifestly on another's hint too, rushed to the 
 demonstration of function in a corpse ! And that, plainly, 
 
QUANTIFIED IDENTITY 61 
 
 is what quantification of the predicate can alone result 
 in. Of course, no man, let him be alive as he may to 
 what the unity of contraries really means, has ever a 
 moment's motive to deny that such and such a triangle 
 is a triangle, and that the triangle it is, that identical 
 triangle it will remain so long as it does remain the 
 identical triangle it is ! Still, in that same triangle, if a 
 side of it be produced, the one exterior angle, though 
 totally, and in every way, different from the two interior 
 and remote angles, is really in a relation of equality or 
 identity with them. Now, that is knowledge, and that 
 is the communication of knowledge ; and it is at the 
 same time the identifying of difference. 
 
 In fact, what is a proposition a proposition that is a 
 judgment ? It is, in its ultimate, the declaration of 
 unity or identity, so far, between two that are different. 
 The predicate, whatever its relation, is not the subject, 
 and the subject is not the predicate ; and yet the 
 purpose of the proposition is, in a certain way, to bring 
 these two that are different into one that is the same. 
 There is an explicit difference of two that are to be 
 implicated, so far, into the identity of a one. The whole 
 function of the predicate is to bring difference of a kind 
 into the subject ; and this difference in the subject is 
 there and then alone the meaning of it. Were the 
 predicate to bring into the subject only identity, what 
 advance would there be ? There is, as a matter of fact, 
 really no such predicate unless that special predicate 
 which declares of the subject only its own proprium. 
 That forms the sole exceptional example of a judgment 
 in which the usual major predicate-term and minor 
 subject-term fall together in equality, becoming therefore, 
 as exchangeable, simply convertible. But to declare of 
 a thing only its own self, is that information ? As the 
 case is, we reach quantification only when we name ; and 
 
62 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 what information do you give say of John when you 
 only name him ? This is to make bare nominalism of 
 the very substantiality of existence ; for the logical 
 judgment is the essence of thought. 
 
 And it has not been left us moderns either to see or 
 to say this. The ancients exhausted it for us many 
 hundred years ago. We have express instruction in this 
 reference not only from Plato and Aristotle, but from 
 others as well. Plato glances at those who " do not 
 allow us to say that a man is good, but that good is good, 
 and man man " ; l while Aristotle reflects on Antisthenes 
 absurdly maintaining " that one can only be said of one, 
 only its own notion, namely, whence it follows that it is 
 impossible to contradict or even to lie." CL It is easy to see, 
 however, says Prantl, 3 in immediate reference, " that with 
 said abstract isolation of the notion, the seeing into, or 
 even the existence of, the judgment, would be in the 
 greatest jeopardy." The same lesson, as in reference to 
 Antisthenes, we have also in regard to Stilpo. He, too, 
 would seem to hold by the possibility of identical 
 propositions, maintaining " that he who said man said 
 nobody ; for he said neither this one nor that one, and 
 why, then, rather this one than that one, consequently 
 not this one." 4 As was said afterwards by the Christian 
 Nominalists of the Middle Ages : Qui dicit hominem, 
 dicit neminem, nam qui aliquem dici vult, hunc vel ilium 
 nomine proprio designat. In the same way it is quoted 
 of Stilpo (Prantl, L 37 ; Hegel, H. of P., ii. 126) from 
 Plutarch (adv. Colot, 22) that we must not say, "The 
 man is good, nor the man is a general, nor ten thousand 
 horsemen, nor the courser runs, but only the man is a 
 man, good is good, horsemen are only horsemen, ten 
 thousand only ten thousand, and so on." 
 
 1 Sophist, 251 B. 2 Meta., 10246, 32. 
 
 3 i. 32. 4 Diog. L., ii. 109. 
 
QUANTIFIED IDENTITY 63 
 
 All this, plainly, in that it has to do with identical 
 propositions, has to do even so also with the quanti- 
 fication of the predicate ; for the quantification of the 
 predicate has no object in view, and no purpose to serve, 
 but the reduction of all propositions whatever, be they 
 A, E, I, or 0, to identical ones : and in his first volume 
 Prantl has much that is pertinent and valuable here. 
 His " subjective particularism" that concerns the Sophists 
 (i. 12), has no other reference. In it "individual cer- 
 tainty is held abstractly fast," " so (13) there is no 
 such thing as a false opinion, and neither, consequently, 
 any possibility of refutation or contradiction." This he 
 also calls (15) "a Nominalism that would have its process 
 abstract; but is never competent to reach a higher 
 notion, and only falls back ever into the empirical 
 details." It is the same thing is meant when (17) he 
 speaks of " a particular Eechthaben " (will be in the 
 right) " through means of an abstractum that is held one- 
 sidedly fast " by the " rhetorical Doctrinaire who would 
 insure himself in advance against all contradiction," and 
 where " all scientific presentations of the (logical) judg- 
 ment is abscinded." P. 19, "a like nominalistic 
 Zersplitterung " is referred to as " a splitting up of 
 every more general notion," as (20) "an ostentatiously 
 paraded lip-sharpness without sense for the genuinely 
 higher universal " and as without understanding " of 
 the meaning and nature of the (logical) judgment " ; 
 that "only played with the (25) rhetorically isolated 
 notion, and that organic plurality in which One notion 
 manifoldly makes good its life." 
 
 Prantl continues in the same strain with regard to 
 Antisthenes, the Megarics, and the Stoics, in a like 
 reference. Antistheues shall have fallen off from the 
 true thinking of his last master, Socrates, , and returned 
 to the false rhetoric of his earliest teacher, Gorgias. 
 
64 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " Antisthenes," he says (30), " isolates, namely, notional 
 cognition, with the most one-sided linguistic abstraction, 
 in die zersplitterste Particularity des Einzelnen (into 
 the most piecemeal particularity of the individual)." 
 The general result was (32) a doctrine of the " barrenest 
 nominalism," as " that it was not possible to contradict," 
 etc. 
 
 So it is, he (35) says further: "I hold the so-called 
 ' Ideas ' of the Megarics to be nothing else than the 
 same barren nominalism which we have just seen in 
 the case of Antisthenes." He, with the dvrL\yet,v, 
 rejected (37) the (logical) judgment; and (37) Stilpo 
 " characterised every formation of judgments as precisely 
 an error." "And (38) all the harder the consequence 
 of this nominalism got drawn, quite naturally all the 
 more there must show itself an express polemic against 
 Plato's Ideal doctrine and its Eealism, inasmuch as the 
 naming and saying of anything can be effected only at 
 the moment when it lies before us, and can only refer 
 itself to this certain single individual then and there 
 present to us ; just this rohesten and zersplittersten 
 Empirismus that asserts only the direct momentary fact, 
 we shall see again as in reference to the Stoa." It 
 is in reference to this Stilpo that Diogenes Laertius is 
 quoted with the ascription to him of having held that 
 it is only possible to say " this man is this man," or 
 " this cabbage is this cabbage." " For the rest," says 
 Prantl (453), "it is easy to see that, according to this 
 definition of the true and the false, there specially 
 results, in fullest consequence, as the single utterly true 
 judgment, this, A est A, or A non est non A ; while 
 the contrasting judgment that A est B must, because A 
 non est B, either be immediately pronounced false or 
 else it forfeits any place in logic." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE QUANTIFICATION OF THE PREDICATE 
 
 WE have quite naturally been directly led to this 
 point by these considerations in regard to difference 
 and identity ; and it is only in prosecution, after all, 
 of the general subject Thought, if we particularise 
 this chapter as we do : for the quantification of the 
 predicate is nothing less than the wilful repudiation 
 and forfeiture of thought. The quantification of the 
 predicate, indeed, and all that concerns the one single 
 principle of abstract identity on which it rests, is per- 
 fectly summed up and impliciter contained in the erepov 
 erepov yur) KaTr]<yopeicr6ai of Stilpo, his assertion that 
 those so categorising aiJLaprdveiv ! In good truth, it 
 is fairly comical to think of anyone seriously proposing 
 any such doctrine ; and it is no wonder that Plutarch, 
 who (adv. Colot. t 23) reports as much of Stilpo, adds, 
 " But who is there that hears this, does not know that 
 it is only by way of a clever joke ? " 
 
 It will not be well possible for anyone, however, who 
 knows the references from Prantl, to think otherwise 
 than that the whole matter must have been signally 
 present to him. I know not, indeed, that in his entire 
 gigantic book there is anything more original as pre- 
 cisely his, or more valuable as precisely his, than what, 
 as named " nominalismus" or " particularismus" or 
 " individualismus" or " empirismus" is at least one 
 
 5 
 
66 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 man's testimony against the doctrine of a quantified 
 predicate. One may own to some surprise, then, when 
 one hears it said by a distinguished logician (the late 
 Professor Veitch, in his Instates of Logic, at p. 327) 
 that " neither Prantl nor Ueberweg has given adequate 
 attention to the point in their historical references." 
 Veitch's express chapter (XXV.), entitled " Quantified 
 Predicate Historical Notices," ought, as it appears to 
 me, to have been less perfunctory (say) on Prantl ; and 
 from a friendly letter l in this connection, here oppor- 
 tunely introductory, I quote as follows : 
 
 "There are certainly expressions perhaps rather on the whole 
 incidental in Aristotle, referring to the greater extension of the 
 predicate in relation to the subject, as though with the inference 
 that the one term cannot as such be equated with the other ; but I 
 confess that, for my part, I fail, for all that, to discern any such 
 consciousness in Aristotle as that of a quantification of the predicate, 
 or even of conversion as conversion. The word conversion of 
 course, never possibly a word of a Greek first appears in Apuleius, 
 some five hundred years after Aristotle, and the more critical phrase 
 per accidens is as late as Boethius, three hundred (or more) years 
 again after Apuleius. I say the 'more critical' phrase per accidens ; 
 for I conceive the whole doctrine of the quantification of the pre- 
 dicate not only to be contained, but even, for any value, to be 
 exhausted there. Even in the Aristotelian loci cited at the foot 
 of (your) page 327, I cannot find, at most, more than I have said. 
 
 " In this connection there is, however, an important point which 
 
 I recollect to have signalised to Professor A , fully seven years 
 
 ago. \Vaitz, as is known, did not like the rest pretty well 
 content himself with Bekker for codices or with Brandis for scholia. 
 but, in either respect as regards research, largely supplemented 
 both. The fruit of this he has placed at the beginning of his first 
 volume ; where, at page 40, we find, as among the scholia, this : 
 
 [n-pos TOVTO <f)r)o-iv the Greek follows.] 
 
 " These words I venture to translate thus : 
 
 " ' Theophrastus also says that, in certain propositions, unless there 
 be further determination of the predicate, contradictions will be 
 
 1 To Professor Veitch, of date November 17, 1885, 
 
QUANTIFICATION 67 
 
 both true ; for if we say, " Phsenias has science," " Phaenias has not 
 science," both may be true.' 
 
 " Evidently here, if the master (Aristotle) is, for his part, as I 
 have said, only indirect and incidental, the pupil again Theo- 
 phrastus is direct and express. Nor has the circumstance escaped 
 Prantl, who gives (i. 356) the whole quotation from Waitz in a note, 
 and remarks on it in the text thus : 
 
 " ' A peculiar addition to the logical theory of the judgment is 
 proposed by Theophrastus in this way, that, in his opinion, even 
 the predicate should bring with it its own determination of quantity, 
 inasmuch as a judgment in which the predicate were quantitatively 
 undetermined, might be equivocal and not as much as exclude its 
 own opposite. For example, " Caius has science " may, if unaccom- 
 panied by " all " or " some," be at the same time true with " Caius has 
 not science." We at once see, however, that this demand does not 
 at all touch the essential function of the predicate, but is dragged 
 in only out of a sophistico-rhetorical interest. If we proceed so, we 
 may hunt up an ambiguity always and everywhere, even in what 
 is of the individualest singular, but just thereby run the risk of 
 losing, for arrant TroXXax&s Xeyo/zeva, as well TO. KOIVO. as also TO. 
 KadoXov of human thought. It is just so, too, that the Peripatetics 
 have failed to advance speculation proper in Antiquity.' " 
 
 Now that I re-read this, I know not that it does not 
 exhaust all that can significatively be said in character- 
 isation of what the doctrine of a quantified predicate 
 essentially is. It will only be respectful, however, if, 
 after such introduction, we shall attend further to what 
 considerations Professor Veitch offers in its support. 
 
 Eeading with care, in the first place, all that is given 
 us by way of a history in establishment of the doctrine, 
 we cannot say that it impresses us much. It is the 
 suggestion, however, if there is to be a history at all, of 
 that immense relative omission that bears, as we have 
 just seen, on Theophrastus. An introductory story that 
 only begins with Valla's publication of 1530, and, with 
 no more than a paucity and poverty of names between, 
 scarcely goes further than Ploucquet's book of 1753, 
 cannot be described as more than utterly inauthoritative, 
 
68 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and meagre to despair. Aristotle is really given up, 
 though it was something, as we have seen, and may see 
 further, just to name him, but Theophrastus much 
 might have been made of that, much might have been 
 made of the successor of Aristotle, much might have 
 been made of the date, say, of his death, 287 B.C. ! And 
 yet Theophrastus does not say much not half as much 
 as Prantl, who commits himself to a quite sweeping 
 general assertion, makes him say ; for, after all, he 
 says no more than that, " in certain cases " (eVt rivcov), 
 unless care Ic taken (y /cal), ambiguity may occur: 
 intimation or instruction of any formal quantification 
 of the predicate, there is no hint of that in all this 
 Ambros (17&, 16). Such mere crumb from a scholiast 
 amounts not by any means to a rule ; and Prantl, 
 in treating it almost as that, has really given more than 
 " adequate attention to the point " ! 
 
 Veitch's historical chapter is one of only nine pages, 
 and, with paragraphs on Valla, Coronel, Caramuel, 
 Titius, and a George Bentham, merely mentions five 
 others, Ambrosius Nolanus, Jodoc Trutfeder, Joshua 
 Oldfield, Godfrey Ploucquet, Thynne. Of these latter I 
 can find named elsewhere (in authorities) only Trutfeder 
 and Ploucquet ; and, on the whole, they are all there by 
 mere make-weight. In fact, on the whole, the entire 
 business has but a make-weight look, why mention at 
 all that mere general essay of a Joshua Oldfield for a note 
 or two in another man's book of an unknown Thynne ? 
 
 Nay, the notice to Aristotle is not a bit better 
 qualified, it is nothing if not a make-weight. It runs 
 so : " So far as Aristotle is concerned, the principle of 
 quantifying the predicate was rejected by him when he 
 had the doctrine expressly before him " (that is peremp- 
 tory) ; " on other occasions he may be regarded " (?) " as 
 having proceeded on the legitimacy of the doctrine, ancl 
 
QUANTIFICATION 69 
 
 thus accepted it in practice." These " other occasions " 
 would refer us to Aristotle's practice in Induction. 
 
 No doubt, adherents of a quantified predicate would 
 be glad to support themselves on the analogy which 
 seems to obtain between such predicate and (p. 452) 
 " that form of Induction in which the Universal is 
 constituted through a complete enumeration of the 
 parts." But is that enough to verify the ascription to 
 Aristotle of having " accepted in practice " and " pro- 
 ceeded on " " the legitimacy of the doctrine " ? The two 
 things are expressly contra-distinguished by Aristotle : 
 " the either Syllogism or Epagoge " is with him constant. 
 In short, mdirectly, not less than directly, it is difficult 
 to see any consciousness at all, on the part of Aristotle, of 
 such a doctrine as a quantification of the predicate. 
 
 But now Mr. Veitch admits that " the great body of 
 logicians, since the time of Aristotle, have been content 
 to acquiesce in Aristotle's rejection of a quantified 
 predicate, and generally for the reasons he has given " ; 
 and, accordingly, we are expected to hail the establish- 
 ment of this great new discovery, this great new 
 principle, at the hands of these one or two insignificant, 
 and hitherto unknown, mere make-weights, and in the 
 course of a so-called " History," which is itself not a little 
 meagre and scanty, or also again of a feverish-hasty, 
 mere make-weight nature. 
 
 Mr. Veitch is evidently a little sore that our great 
 authority, Praiitl, refers only to Valla in the history, 
 and one other. That other is poor Jodoc Trutfeder. 
 What Prantl has on him could not have proved com- 
 fortable to Mr. Veitch ; nor even that on Valla a bit 
 more cheering. 
 
 Laurentius Valla's Logic is to Prantl "nothing but 
 rhetoric " ; his writing, generally, popular only ; his 
 work but roh dilettantisch, Ciceronianisch ; and he is 
 
70 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 able to find for it no better a Gewahrsmann than 
 Quintilian. " His doctrine of Judgment contains in the 
 beginning, with other such, the tasteless (fade) simile, 
 that noun and verb are to each other as man and wife " ; 
 further, " Valla, with delicious naivete, defines the affirma- 
 tive judgment as that that is not negative he shows a 
 like superficiality in Conversion, extremely weak, too, 
 are his observations on Negation, what he says further, 
 indeed, shows that for purely logical questions he has no 
 understanding, in the doctrine of Opposition he bears 
 himself which may be just convenient wholly 
 sceptical ; as, by rejection of modal judgments, he extra- 
 ordinarily relieves for himself the matter of Logic, no 
 better is his exposition of the Syllogism, for which his 
 comparison of it with bread-baking seems to him a 
 fitting one, the two premises (see note) are as the meal 
 and the water, the conclusion is the hand that mixes 
 them, and brings them to one, he lets himself be led 
 by the silly propos that just as the second figure is 
 reduced to the first, the first can itself be reduced to the 
 second, the Sorites is regarded only in a rhetorical 
 interest, as are also the Dilemma, the Example, Induc- 
 tion, and the Enthymeme." 
 
 That positively, and pretty well at full more would 
 only make all worse is what account Prantl gives us of 
 Laurentius Valla, who really, after all, poses as the sole 
 authority of any weight before Hamilton for the 
 Quantification of the Predicate. And surely, if there be 
 little or nothing of authority for the doctrine, just as 
 little or nothing can be said for it on its own account. 
 It is only fair, however, to say for Valla himself, that he 
 possessed popularity as a writer in his own day ; with 
 variety, elegance, and wit, he had the charm of style : 
 his, too, were translations of the Iliad, of Herodotus, of 
 Thucydides ; for he was philologically accomplished. 
 
QUANTIFICATION 71 
 
 Living in the very beginning of the Renaissance, he 
 belonged to the enlightened, liberal, humanistic side of it, 
 and may be even said to have led in it. Still, in Logic, all 
 in that regard being as it is named in Prantl, he cannot 
 rank at all as a specialist and an authority generally, 
 while even, on Mr. Veitch's own showing, any support 
 of quantification on his part is, as indirect, indefinite, 
 unconscious, a very small affair. " He cannot be said to 
 have carried out the doctrine with anything like scientific 
 development or precision " ; and " his criticisms of the 
 approved logical doctrines of his day were made chiefly 
 from a grammatical standpoint." These allegations of 
 Mr. Veitch's own being sound, then, Valla cannot be said 
 to have carried out the doctrine at all ; while whatever 
 he recommended in this reference had only a grammatical 
 bearing. And the same bearing is good still. 
 
 The single and sole hook on which the whole doctrine 
 of the Quantification of the Predicate to look at it in 
 itself is declared to hang is a certain postulate. 
 " Hamilton has expressed this in what he calls the 
 Postulate of Logic," says Mr. Veitch ; and then he quotes 
 Hamilton's own definition of this postulate. " The only 
 postulate of Logic which requires an articulate enounce- 
 ment is the demand that, before dealing with a judgment 
 or reasoning expressed in language, the import of its 
 terms should be fully understood." I fancy most people 
 will say here, " That goes without saying ! " It is not 
 easy to see how it can be possible, even so much as to 
 wish Logic to deal with what it does not understand ! 
 Mr. Veitch, however, thinks it necessary to dwell upon 
 the point. " The ambiguities and ellipses of language are 
 thus," he says, " first to be cleared up : neither purely 
 empty terms, nor ambiguous terms can be accepted by 
 Logic." " A proposition," he says again, " may have various 
 meanings, according to intention and emphasis ; it may 
 
72 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 be involved, defective, redundant, obscure " ; and as long 
 as it remains so, he intimates, " it is unfit to be dealt 
 with logically." " Why not, therefore," he asks, " to 
 remove ambiguity, on demand, state expressly in 
 language what we think and mean ? " But is not that a 
 demand for grammar rather than expressly for logic ? 
 It was, as we have seen, from " a grammatical stand- 
 point " that Valla chiefly spoke, and from what other 
 than a grammatical standpoint can we meet the 
 "Postulate " ? Mr. Veitch himself is liberal enough to 
 allow that " It is not necessary as a speaker or writer 
 that one should use the explicit form of thought which 
 logical analysis demands." 
 
 But is it even necessary that logicians themselves 
 should constrain or constrict themselves within any such 
 ligatures ? Why should I, even as a logician, not step 
 forward in my natural habiliments to say, All men are 
 rational ; but should be officially presentable, as it were, 
 only as cedematous in pads. 
 
 All men are some rational : is not that to force a pad 
 upon me a pad, too, that, as something alien and foreign, 
 can only cripple and cramp ? All men are only some 
 rational. With all my heart ! But what, then, are the 
 others ? That is, indeed, the new thought with which 
 you have only displaced and dissipated my own. I, for 
 my part, was only glad to think that we men were 
 rational ; but you, for your part, quite unnecessarily as it 
 seems to me, insist on my thinking on something all 
 un thought of and quite else ! All equilateral triangles 
 are also equiangular. That is what I say and what I 
 mean. But you, when you bid me say all equilateral 
 triangles are all equiangular, only do me violence. 
 That all of the one sort was also all of the other sort 
 was no part of my thought : I was content to think that 
 what was equilateral was also equiangular, and had not 
 
QUANTIFICATION 73 
 
 even a shade of a thought of that " all " of yours. 
 You say, " Logic cannot begin even to exercise its 
 function " unless there " be explicitly stated " " even the 
 shadow of a lurking meaning in the proposition." But 
 when / say All men are rational, or All equilateral 
 triangles are equiangular, you indeed may detect in the 
 proposition " a shadow of some lurking meaning," but I 
 must beg to be allowed to disavow with all humility 
 every shadow of a shade of any such meaning, or of any 
 such detection of meaning on my part ; and I respect- 
 fully claim the right to be permitted to say even 
 logically precisely what I mean, and no more than I 
 mean. You must not put your proposition into my 
 mouth, but, on the contrary, take mine into yours. That 
 " Logic should exercise its function," to that, of course, 
 the way must be cleared for it. But what does that 
 mean ? Simply that Logic, for whatever is to be 
 submitted to its question, shall expect in the first place 
 a perfectly intelligible verbal expression. That for 
 Logic is no more than its right : due preparation before- 
 hand for any required intervention of it. Limitation to 
 that effect is always, as is quoted, to be produced " on 
 demand." Mr. Veitch expressly illustrates this by a 
 good deal of reference to exceptive and other particles in 
 Greek. But preparation for the function is not itself 
 the function. You will prepare the dinner, landlord ! 
 but only for me as guest, says Logic ; as " when my 
 groom has dressed my horse, I can ride him," says 
 Mr. Francis Osbaldistone. And it is extraordinary how 
 incessant is this preliminary need for preparation. " I 
 had to wait to learn this from Mr. A., from America " ; 
 or (as we lately read), So-and-so "are named or actually 
 quoted in the Notes " : here a preparation were neces- 
 sary that Mr. A. was not from America, but only his 
 information, or that it was only the quoting applied to 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
74 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 the Notes. Suppose I say Laurentius Valla, Ambrosius 
 Nolanus, Jodocus Isenacensis, Gottfried Ploucquet, 
 Titius, Ludovicus Coronel, Johannes Caramuel, Joshua 
 Oldfield, Thynne, George Bentham, are all Quantifiers of 
 the Predicate, and are all that go to make up the history 
 of the doctrine, it is really hardly possible to enumerate 
 all the propositions which it would be possible to 
 explicate here, were it required of us to be literal with 
 the injunction, " If there be even the shadow of a lurk- 
 ing meaning in the proposition, that must be explicitly 
 stated." From the general intimation itself, it would 
 never be imagined that there was nothing or little more 
 in it than a make-weight of mere names ! 
 
 It is curious that, in his History, Mr. Veitch makes no 
 mention of Lambert, who, as Kant's correspondent, was 
 well in the public eye, and who, in his New Organon, 
 seemed at least somewhat to favour Quantification. As 
 a writer, too, he was in some degree younger than the 
 Godfrey Ploucquet whom Mr. Veitch does name. 
 
 In regard to Ploucquet, we have this from Hegel 
 iii. 147):- 
 
 " The Calculus of Ploucquet has, without doubt, the most con- 
 sequent expedient whereby the relation of the syllogism can be 
 made capable of being subjected to calculation. It rests on this, 
 that the difference of relation, the difference of singularity, 
 particularity, and generality in a judgment, is abstracted from, and 
 the abstract identity of the subject and the predicate gets insisted on, 
 whereby then they are fixed in mathematical equality ; a relation 
 that reduces reasoning to a completely unsubstantial and tauto- 
 logical formalising of propositions. In the proposition : the rose is 
 red, the predicate is not to denote general red, but only the 
 particular red of the rose ; in the proposition : All Christians are 
 men, the predicate is to mean only those men who are Christians ; 
 from this proposition and the other : Jews are not Christians, there 
 follows then the conclusion, which has been no recommendation of 
 this syllogistic calculus to Mendelssohn, Therefore the Jews are not 
 men (namely, not those men who are Christians)." 
 
QUANTIFICATION 75 
 
 Hegel adds further : 
 
 " Ploucquet names as a consequence of his invention, posse etiam 
 rudes mechanice totam logicam doceri, uti pueri arithmeticam docentnr, 
 ita quidem, ut nulla formidine in ratiociniis suis errandi torqueri, 
 vel fallaciis circumveniri possint, si in calculo non errant. This 
 recommendation, that the whole of logic may be mechanically 
 imparted to the uneducated, is surely the worst thing that can be 
 said of an invention in regard to the exposition of logical science." 
 
 I think there can be little doubt that the whole 
 subject of this quantification has been suggested by what 
 is called " Conversion per accidens." It was quite natural 
 that it should have occurred to early logicians to be 
 curious as to what might take place if the terms were 
 converted, that is, if the subject and predicate were to 
 exchange places. Experiments, accordingly, were 
 doubtlessly made ; and they resulted (with scientific 
 insight into the position) in a rule. While E and /, and 
 as /, could be converted simpliciter, A could only be 
 converted per accidens. This is the rule ; and, as for the 
 insight, that was into the relative distribution of the 
 terms. There could be no difficulty, as Trendelenburg 
 has it, si prsedicatum an subjecto latius pateat attenderis; 
 but that being attended to, then, with Whately, for 
 illative conversion, the distributed predicate (as in A) 
 must be limited, and we have " conversion by limitation, 
 or, as it is commonly called, per accidens." Now, that is 
 Quantification of the Predicate; but really, for strict 
 logical interests, one would think that that should be 
 enough. All that logically concerns a quantification of 
 the predicate seems to lie there. No doubt, in actual 
 speech, if I am to make my proposition of the moment 
 absolutely unexceptionable, I must have at command 
 quite an infinite limitation. Or, as Mr. Veitch himself 
 has it, " we ought to distribute according to meaning, or 
 enounce as we think " ; and that involves, as has already 
 
76 WHAT 'IS THOUGHT? 
 
 been discussed, quite a multitude of modifying or 
 " exceptive " particles. Now that refers to Quantification 
 as a whole to the whole extent or sphere of it as a 
 process proper for the exactitude of meaning. But that 
 is no reason why, for the purpose, I should painfully 
 have ever in thought all those trumpery trumps and 
 trumpets, bugles, bows and arrows, and what not of 
 Hamilton. I must speak as I mean, certainly ; but, as 
 I said before, when I say, All men are rational, and you 
 tell me to say, All men are some rational, I must beg 
 your pardon and excuse myself from saying what I do 
 not mean. 
 
 Perhaps it might seem to some that, if Ploucquet, or 
 another, could in any way supply a means, through a 
 mere table, of indoctrinating mechanically into the whole 
 of a science so difficult and extensive as Logic, even the 
 quite unprepared and uninstructed it might seem to 
 some, I say, that this should be looked to. That it 
 cannot be done is a matter of experience ; but what 
 would result if it could be done ? Why, this that 
 there would be no such a thing as Logic, as a Science of 
 Thought, any longer in the world. Surely it is of 
 importance to investigate the operations of the human 
 mind as they exhibit themselves in reasoning, surely 
 the science that realises as much as that is a science of 
 value ! Now, it is matter of experience that, on the 
 whole, the young, when they have been submitted 
 academically to a course of Logic, issue therefrom as if 
 new made as if new made, too, in the very best of their 
 natural powers. The one question of our writing at 
 present is, What is Thought, and for us, so far, this is 
 quite certain, that whatever is Thought, this Quantifica- 
 tion of the Predicate is not Thought. Would the 
 application of tables like those of multiplication or 
 addition be Thought ? would a merely arithmetical 
 
QUANTIFICATION 77 
 
 method be Thought ? would counting be Thought ? I 
 know not that all the dreadful things suggested by 
 Prantl would result, or do result, from actual acceptance, 
 so far, into general Logic of the subject as a part all 
 that may be, or it may not be ; but it certainly does 
 seem to me that the Quantification of the Predicate, for 
 any use as yet, has been, on the whole, little more than 
 an express plea for exact speech a formal warning to 
 us to stroke our t's and dot our i's ! Further than that, 
 it is more than to be suspected that all that mere 
 formalism of lines, figures, letters, numbers, as in 
 Ploucquet, Lambert, al., is but nauci, flocci, pili, nihili. 
 Elsewhere, it may be only as though a craving vain-glory, 
 sowing where it had not much earth, was followed by 
 growth that suddenly shot up and as suddenly died 
 down. 
 
 No : quantification of the predicate is not thought ; 
 and it is thought alone that is the grand interest nay, 
 at bottom, properly looked at and truly seen into, it is 
 thought alone that is the sole interest. Even for action 
 and the world of practice, will, it is thought that is 
 essentially the interest. The will that would do the 
 right, and rightly the right, must think. Only that is 
 free that is free /row all other, and to itself alone. Free 
 will is : but it is only the will that wills the will. And 
 there can no will will will, but the will that has uni- 
 versalised itself into thought, given itself for element 
 thought, made itself thought. That is " Liberty " ! And 
 that alone is " Liberty " ! 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE QUESTION BECURS 
 
 AND so the question recurs, What is Thought ? Or, 
 more particularly to us now, if the difficulty remains, and 
 is in no ways lessened, when we say God of this that is, 
 God is the First ; what difference does it make, or in 
 what respect is it better for us, that we say Thought 
 Thought is the First ? 
 
 A First The First must be can only be as a 
 First, is Self-Create. That is the one necessity. We 
 may say the universe created itself God created him- 
 self ; but we may only say : we do not understand 
 think ! Will it be any better if we say Thought created 
 itself ? 
 
 That is plain. If we are to explain this universe, we 
 must have a First, and a First can be only Self-Create. 
 If we cannot intelligibly see intelligibly explain to 
 ourselves how the Universe can be a First how God 
 can be a First ; can we discover anything in this whole 
 universe that were more intelligibly a First that were 
 intelligibly at all a First can we discover in this 
 universe a Self-Create that is, that were perfectly 
 intelligibly to us a Self-Create ? 
 
 There is only one thing in the universe, intelligibly, 
 manifestly, self-evidently to us, self-create. 
 
 /never was until it said to itself /; and the moment 
 / said to itself /, / was. 
 
 78 
 
THE EGO 79 
 
 Pooh, nonsense ! That is rubbish you need not 
 attempt to try that on ! Why, we have every 
 opportunity of seeing the very beginning, the very first 
 of your First in every child that is born into the world 
 and reaches the age of three or four or more years. 
 
 This is a thought that must be to every one pretty 
 well inevitable. Nevertheless it need not prove final. 
 Aristotle tells us of the vovs being "alone divine and 
 alone entering from without (Qvpadev) " ; and that is 
 just as it should be as regards the finite subject and its 
 Ego a regard that seems to have been pretty much the 
 same to Kant. He says : " It is remarkable that the 
 child that can already pretty well fluently speak begins 
 first to use / only somewhat later (perhaps a good year 
 later) " ; and this seems, he adds, " as though it were 
 the going up of a light to it." Of the Ego as Ego, too, 
 on the great scale, though we have ere this seen Kant 
 contradictorily at one time in low respect and at another 
 time, as it seemed, in high respect of what was to him 
 the " I think," of the Ego as Ego, too, on the great 
 scale I say, he has here (in the very first words of the 
 Anthropoloyie) only affirmative mention : 
 
 " That man can have Ego in his apprehension exalts him 
 infinitely above all the other living beings on earth. Thereby is 
 he a person, and, by virtue of the unity of consciousness, throughout 
 all mutations that may happen to him, one and the same person, 
 i.e., compared with Things (such as are the reasonless brute beasts, 
 with which it is ours to deal at will), a being, in dignity and rank, 
 altogether different, even when he cannot yet speak the Ego, 
 inasmuch as he still has it implicitly, just as all languages, if using 
 the first person, must at least think it, although indeed they express 
 not this /-ness of it by any special word : for this capability 
 (namely, to think) is the understanding" 
 
 Kant, with all his peculiarities of doctrine, has, no 
 doubt, always the same respect for the Understanding. 
 This faculty he certainly identifies at times with the 
 
80 WHAT /Sf- THOUGHT? 
 
 mind, with consciousness itself ; and, in fact, he will be 
 found at one time or other to speak so that, sense apart, 
 all the terms for faculties of the mind are to him 
 synonymous : Einheit des Bewusstseyns, Einheit der 
 Apperception, Urtheilen, Vernunft, Denken, Selbstden- 
 ken, Verstand, Bewusstseyn. 1 Early in the Kritik of 
 Pure Reason (sec. 25), and later (a propos of the Para- 
 logisms, W. W., ii. 278, 285), Kant regards the Ego as 
 a mere psychological position entirely empty. Ego, for 
 all that, in respect of the Categories, had for Kant, but, 
 in a way, somewhat vaguely, the function which, in 
 Kant's regard, we have seen ascribed to it by Hegel. It 
 was only after Fichte that the Ego received fully and 
 clearly its significance proper ; and to him it was not only 
 selbstgesetzt, self-create, but absolutely selbstthatig, 
 absolutely self-productive. 
 
 - Still, whatever contradiction may seem to show itself 
 anywhere, it must be said that, in its vital function (as 
 seen specially in regard of the Categories), the Ego that 
 was explicit to Fichte was certainly implicit to Kant. 
 In fact, as much as that must be acknowledged to be 
 overt in the close of the quotation which we have just 
 made from the Anthropologie. There it is expressly 
 intimated that the implicating of Ego, unnamed, in the 
 first person of the verb in all languages, is synonymous 
 with Denken, as Denken with Verstand. 
 
 Now, all that being so, the appearance of a sense of 
 Ego only at a certain age in the actual finite individual 
 cannot be admitted to be of any sufficient cogency 
 against the notion of Ego as absolutely regarded. We 
 return, then. 
 
 If we are to explain this universe, we must have a 
 
 First, and a First can be only Self -Create. But is there 
 
 such a requisition, within or without, anywhere discover- 
 
 1 See W. W., ii. 733 n., 69, 70, 79 ; i. 390 n. For Hegel, see p. 40. 
 
THE EGO 81 
 
 able in this universe ? A self-create, and intelligibly a 
 self-create ? 
 
 In this whole universe there is only one thing that is 
 intelligibly self-create. And it is the Ego. 
 
 Until / said / set /, / never was : jfJut on the 
 moment, it was. And this is intelligible to every 
 one. 
 
 But if I set I, that is Thought. This we have already 
 seen : The constituent ratio, the essential ratio of the 
 Ego, that is Thought. But I, in this universe, is what 
 is First and Self -create. Therefore Thought is in this 
 universe First and Self-create. 
 
 But I that sets I that is the I Am, and that 
 
 / Am That I Am ! 
 
 Nature, Thought, God: That is Eternity the 
 " Species ^ternitatis " : 
 
 Die grosse Anschauung des Juden the mighty 
 intuition of the Jew ! 
 
 He had it in the rough : but that is the diamond. 
 Thought, God, Self - create and First : Nature the 
 Emanation, and with it the Finite. 
 
 Is it, then, that Coleridge was, after all, not so far 
 wrong when he dreamt that Kant had raised the veil for 
 him and disclosed the infinite / Am, in whom we live, 
 move, and have our being ? Ah, but that / Am to 
 Coleridge was only the " reine Apperception " to Kant 
 the just mentioned " mere psychological position " that 
 was " entirely empty " ! Nevertheless, Coleridge shall 
 have been as belonged to the seer simply pro- 
 phetic ! 
 
 We have just had the subject generally of a quantifi- 
 cation of the predicate under notice, and it may be only 
 fair to suppose some adherent of the doctrine to object 
 here, And what of this " I " of yours ? what, of your own 
 self-consciousness ? If your self -consciousness is a pro- 
 6 
 
82 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 position, is it not a proposition of identities ? Is not 
 "I" "I," or "I" "Me," or "Me" "I," just the same 
 thing twice ? If your Brown did say, " To the communi- 
 cation of knowledge it is necessary that the predicate 
 be more comprehensive than its subject," how is it 
 with self-consciousness how is it with the proposition 
 on which you are going to found and ground the 
 whole wealth and foison of the universe ? In your 
 " I-Me " now, is your " Me " " more comprehensive " than 
 your " I " ? 
 
 This is a toss back of the ball : the identitists in their 
 turn throw identity at us I But we have still difference, 
 and the last thing for us to do would be to quantify it 
 to quantify it out of existence. Our point is quality, and 
 not at all mere quantity. It is by its quality, the quality 
 of its difference, and not the quantity of it, that the pre- 
 dicate, Me, expands into the whole compass of the Idea, 
 the Internale ; and it is by virtue of an equal quality 
 that the Idea awakes into Nature, the Internale bursts 
 into the Externale. Is not that what predication is, is 
 it not the whole function of the predicate to bring 
 difference into the subject difference into identity- 
 particularity into universality ? and is not that differ- 
 ence in the subject alone the meaning of it ? is not the 
 particular in the universal alone the singular ? 
 
 But, if the singular thus is the result of mediation, 
 does not that indicate the importance of a middle term ? 
 and of what, of all middle terms, is the Middle Term ? 
 I have said in Darwinianism (p. 16): "It is alone the 
 Middle Term that is the entire secret of the universe " ; and 
 again (p. 18): That must remain so "unless we can 
 find the one ultimate middle term that explains all, and is 
 the single principle of the universe." It was this, too, I may 
 acknowledge, that I had in mind when I said some time 
 ago : " It is certain relations that are alone in question, 
 
THE EGO THE MIDDLE TEEM 83 
 
 and alone the truth ; and it is they as truth that are to 
 be regarded as united to the mind, and as identified with 
 thought, not but that, in this reference, we may, by and 
 by, be brought to a closer point of view." 
 
 That middle term and this is that " closer point of 
 view " which I had then in mind that middle term 
 which explains all and is the single principle of the 
 universe, that middle term that is the entire secret of 
 the universe is the Ego. 
 
 And so I repeat, as in place here, what I have said 
 elsewhere. Self-consciousness necessarily, and of its own 
 self, is, and is what is. Self-consciousness is its own 
 foundation of support, and its own prius of origination. 
 Then Thought, Self-consciousness, cannot be impersonal : 
 Thought, Self-consciousness always implies a subject. 
 Why hesitate to name it God ? The self -consciousness 
 of the universe is the Divine Self-consciousness, and not 
 the human ; which is but the necessary finite. 
 
 Descartes tells us (Prin. Phil., i. 51) that he under- 
 stands by substance nothing else than what ita existit, ut 
 nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum ; and when Spinosa 
 defined his substance to be that which has no need of 
 anything else (non indiget conceptu alterius rei), he was, 
 plainly, only repeating his master. Nor is the God of 
 Spinosa, the being absolutely infinite, the substance con- 
 sisting of infinite attributes, each expressing eternal and 
 infinite essence, different from the God of Descartes, who 
 is the only substance quae nulla plane re indigeat. There 
 is support here in such references, and they will not be 
 found irrelevant. Nay, when the very first word of 
 Spinosa is : 
 
 " Per CAUSAM sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit 
 existentiam, sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi nisi 
 existens : 
 
 " By Cause of Itself I understand that whose essence 
 
84 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be con- 
 ceived unless as existing." 
 
 Is there any one, prepared as we may hope him to be 
 now, who reads this, and who does not instantly burst 
 out with the cry, Spinosa, when he wrote that, must have 
 had the Ego in his mind ! 
 
 The causa sui, that that is its own cause : is the /- Me ! 
 
 And what else can Leibnitz's primitive monad, his 
 Monas Monadum, be what but the Infinite Ego ? 
 
 Compare the concrete reach of this with the Quanti- 
 fication of the Predicate ! Yet that (by Veitch) it 
 should be spoken of as glory to be " one of the first to 
 clearly conceive and assert that a proposition was only an 
 equation of the subject and predicate ! " Valla, it is said, 
 " recognises the equivalence of subject and predicate in 
 such expressions as the lion roars (rugit), the horse neighs 
 (hinnit), man laughs (ridet) " ; and one can only applaud 
 the sagacity of the proceeding, with special appreciation of 
 the value of the consequent logical gain as indicated in 
 the next words : " The predicate here " (rugit, hinnit, 
 ridet) "is coextensive with the subject, and precisely 
 convertible." Equally admirable is the erudite precision 
 that decerns, as we have seen, not that the rose is red, 
 but only as strict truth requires, rose-red ; and, similarly, 
 not that All Christians are men, but only that All 
 Christians are Christian men! 
 
 Surely, then, it is not the equation of the subject 
 and predicate, but only the relation of them, the 
 Eatio of the Ego, that is the thing of value, the 
 consideration superlative, when it is Logic, the sub- 
 stantiality of Thought, that is concerned : " that middle 
 term that explains all, and is the single principle 
 of the universe." And, no doubt, this is remarkable : 
 for it is the absolute reversal of all that, at this moment, 
 is believed. The belief now, namely, is that the Ego is 
 
EGO 85 
 
 the outcome of mere material evolution; whereas the 
 truth is that it is of the Ego, and for the Ego, and in the 
 Ego that the universe is : it is of the stuff of the Ego that 
 the universe is built. The Ego, in its identity of subject 
 and object that is at the same time the non-identity of 
 subject and object, is alone the true dialectic, and the 
 true dialectic is alone philosophy. 
 
 So be it, says the materialist, have it all your own 
 way, but you may depend upon this, that for what you 
 mean by dialectic there is no dialectic in what you call 
 the universe but wind and weather ! Suppose there was 
 only one plant upon the earth, mere wind and weather 
 would be quite enough, in millions and millions of years, 
 to turn that one plant into the whole countless Flora 
 and Fauna of the present, mere wind and weather, 
 no lever but wind and weather incredible as it may 
 seem. But of this again. 
 
 Where we are now in regard of our question of What 
 is Thought is no farther than the position of our uni- 
 versal, we have not advanced as yet to the particular or 
 the particularisation of it. We have said, however, that 
 this question, which, explicitly with us, is now the uni- 
 versal we have said that this question implicitly under- 
 lies the whole history of philosophy, and is vital in every 
 period of it. 
 
 Now, on the one hand, to give at full the entire 
 particularisation of our universal would amount to a 
 complete production of the whole system of philosophy 
 thereon relatively founded, and therefrom relatively 
 derived ; as, on the other hand, thoroughly to track and 
 trace our main question the universal throughout all 
 the systems of philosophy as they have appeared in time 
 that, again, would amount to nothing less than the 
 History of Philosophy as such, themes both that self- 
 
86 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 evidently would necessitate volumes, while here we limit 
 ourselves to what we hope may prove at least sufficiently 
 suggestive, if only in the form, so far, of a sketch or 
 sketches. Accordingly, only cursorily and carptim, as 
 intended for no more than illustration, shall be our 
 historical references, until, with Kant, and after him, 
 we shall conceive it our duty to be, at all events 
 less perfunctory. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE KEFERENCE TO HISTORY 
 
 IT is evident from what precedes that, with whatever 
 reference, there can be no contemplation here of a history 
 of philosophy itself. 
 
 Though the out, which is Nature, is but the convexity 
 of the in, which is the concavity, Thought ; still, it is the 
 object, nature, the out, that first impresses the subject, 
 thought, the in : and if, with our question in view, we 
 are to begin in philosophy with a first, we must, as 
 recorded, see that in the Tonics. Turning naturally to 
 Nature, what they saw there was, in the end, simply the 
 four elements, fire and water, earth and air. Still, in a 
 sense, that was the beginning of Thought, and not with- 
 out assonance to the express principle in speech. Any 
 one of the four so conceived is at once the one and 
 the many with involution of the many into one, with 
 evolution of the one into many : a universal, at once 
 identity and difference, ideality and reality, form and 
 matter, thought and thing, and still in rerum natura. 
 And there is here a trine also. For example, identity 
 and difference, ideality and reality are two : but differ- 
 ence is resolved into identity, reality into ideality ; and 
 there is thus a third. We can see from this that the 
 Absolute must be self-constitutive, self -organised : as 
 ultimate truth there is, substantiated, realised, materialised, 
 only the Absolute Form. There was thus, implicitly at 
 
 87 
 
88 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 least, and in what the suggested state of mind involves, 
 if not quite a " great," yet not altogether a " dispropor- 
 tioned" initiation of precisely that organic close which 
 has been ascribed to philosophy. From Diogenes 
 Appolloniates Ueberweg, we may remark in passing, 
 cites what somewhat applies here, that, namely, " the 
 unity of substance is proved by plants assimilating the 
 inorganic, and then animals, plants " ; but the Greek, less 
 modern, says only that, " unless it were so made as to be 
 the same, there could not either plant grow from the 
 earth, or animal, or anything else be produced." 
 
 In water, earth, air, fire, it was still at bottom Quality 
 that was in question matter had only gone into its 
 kinds ; and it is a point -to interest that it is Quantity 
 follows. After the Ionics come the Pythagoreans. But 
 if the Pythagoreans are a certain stage of the purifica- 
 tion of matter into mind, of reality into ideality, it is to 
 be noted as well that quantity, how much, is, in effect, a 
 particularisation of quality, what kind ; for that which 
 modifies quality, intensifies or diminishes it, is quantity. 
 In the whole position of the Pythagoreans there was 
 much that fostered an unusual activity of mind. To 
 search into and record the numerical proportions and 
 relations that were everywhere present in the world, and 
 in the things of the world, was a matter of the richest 
 and most important significance : it made an era. 
 Numbers constituted nature, it was said ; and they were 
 parental of all within it. Nay, the 1 was the single 70^77 
 and the fruitful source of all. Virtue, health, the soul 
 God himself was a harmony, one, and not outside of 
 the world but within it. And yet every one number, 
 isolated to itself, seems an individually single, self- 
 subsistent, fixed, fast, independent abstract: 1 is 1, it is 
 not 2 ; and 2 is 2, it is not 1. Shake all numbers into 
 a bag, and they seem just so many separate, unconnected, 
 
THE KEFERENOE TO HISTORY 89 
 
 discrete discs. Nevertheless, they are all vitally bound, 
 the one to the other, but only from within, through the 
 soul, the soul of the idea. And this we have, to see 
 everywhere in philosophy. If 2 rises from 1, or 3 from 
 2, they do not do so bodily, as it were, but only ideally. 
 Always between numbers as such, corporeally so to 
 speak, there is but an impassable hiatus of a quite 
 indifferent difference ; as has just been said, nevertheless, 
 they are together in the idea they live together in the 
 idea, they live together a single life in the idea. Nor, 
 to illustrate what we have called the common fact, is it 
 different with such differences as, say, mechanism, 
 chemism, vitalism. You will never literally extend the 
 nature of any one of these into the nature of any other 
 of these. Each is itself and different from the rest ; and 
 yet, no doubt, they are all connected organically from 
 within by the idea. That is an evolution ; but what is 
 Darwin's proposal that the one is just manually 
 moulded squeezed into the other from without, as the 
 Bear into the Whale by swimming among insects or a 
 bush into a tree by the weather ! 
 
 Further, it belongs to the Pythagoreans to say that in 
 the Trias the Monas comes to its reality and completion ; 
 as also that the world takes birth, not in time but the 
 idea. Sextus, in this connection, says : " There are thus 
 two principles of things, unity, as first, through partici- 
 pation in which all other unities are unities ; and, simi- 
 larly all duads, duads " ; for the one as the other 
 is an essential moment of the idea, and towards its 
 evolution. 
 
 It is really extraordinary how some of the very 
 earliest propositions seem to be already pregnant with 
 the latest principles. Beginnings, as such, are always 
 fresh, alert, eager, keenly alive and indefatigable : see 
 Hegel himself at his start, say even here in Greek philo- 
 
90 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 sophy, but specially, signally in his great Logik. Why, 
 there his very first section, Quality, contains pretty well 
 his entire battery of means. 
 
 And so, where we are, it is sufficiently noticeable, and 
 not unsuggestive perhaps, that, if the Pythagoreans can be 
 regarded as quantifying the quality, or particularising the 
 universal, of the Ionics, it is equally possible to see 
 singularity or individuality in the Eleatics that follow. 
 What we call the All, they call the One. That is, they 
 are so impressed by the All, that they can only see in it 
 a One a life, Being itself, that which is. So much is 
 this so to them so much are they centred and con- 
 centred in this One, this Is, that for them other (say as 
 multiplicity, movement, change) exists indeed, but is no 
 more than a juggle of the eye. Here, then, there is 
 already almost a modern idealism. 
 
 Arrange it as we may, one can see, on the part of the 
 Eleatics, the advance in the use of the formal faculty, 
 the art of pure thinking. If for the Ionics we should 
 assume a stage of simple apprehension, and for the 
 Pythagoreans a stage of judgment, we might similarly be 
 allowed to assume for the Eleatics at least something of 
 an approach to a stage of reason ; not but that on the 
 part of Zeno (who only set moment against moment) 
 what acted was not reason, but reason-m^, judgment, or 
 rather understanding, the now patent " Verstand" 
 
 As noted elsewhere, that the Eleatic One should have 
 been described as neither infinite without being at the 
 same time finite, nor finite without being at the same 
 time infinite this has not always seemed in reason ; but 
 the absolute voice in the Secret of Hegel that would illus- 
 tratively substantiate, in its continuum of sound and in 
 its discreta of notes, the complete community of finite and 
 infinite, may, not inexcusably perhaps, be here referred to. 
 One finds as much as this, indeed, to be the very theme of 
 
THE EEFERENCE TO HISTORY 91 
 
 the Parmenides of Plato the coincidentia oppositorum, 
 namely, as between one and many, being and non-being, 
 finite and infinite, etc. 
 
 It is in discussing Heraclitus that Hegel gives a 
 general touch or turn to this : 
 
 " Each particular is only in so far as its opposite is implicitly 
 contained in the notion of it. Subjectivity is thus the other of 
 objectivity, not of a piece of paper, which were senseless ; in this, 
 that each is the other of the other as its other, there precisely lies 
 their identity. This is the great principle of Heraclitus. Dark it 
 may seem ; but it is speculative ; and it is that that is always 
 difficult and obscure to him whose understanding is asked to grasp 
 at once being and non-being, subjective and objective, real and 
 ideal." 
 
 And this pretty well names the advance of Heraclitus 
 in the march of thinking to the goal that, to us here, 
 sums it. To dvrl^ovv (rv^epov contrarium identidem 
 diversity in identity, and identity in diversity : that 
 is the sentence of Heraclitus. He told the Eleatics that 
 if the one half of their truth was true, the other half, 
 their false, was true also. What was the whole truth 
 was precisely change, the movement and multiplicity, 
 which they denied. Heraclitus was a man very rich in 
 the social dicta he had derived from life : no doubt fate, 
 fortune, vicissitude, were very familiar to him ; and so 
 there was his philosophy, with fire, as also with time, 
 for symbol of it. It is not strange, then, that in reading 
 his fragments what strikes most, perhaps, is the shrewd 
 experience which might well have entitled him to take 
 up his place, an eighth, not as the lowest of the Seven, 
 beside these, the Wisest of his countrymen. It was 
 only mature sagacity that led him to say : " It is more 
 to quench insolence than to extinguish a fire." " Pre- 
 sumption, conceit, is the sacred malady." " Unless you 
 hope, you will not find." " Most men know not what 
 they do when awake, as they forget what they have 
 
92 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 done when asleep." " The dull are but absent when 
 present." " A people must fight for its law as though 
 it were its wall." " Who have reason must abide by 
 the universal, as a city by the law, and more ; for all 
 human laws rest on the one divine law." 
 
 What was constantly exposed to this concentrated 
 observer was but the transitoriness of all things. Living 
 at the time of the Eleatics, then, it was no wonder that 
 he opposed to their immutable one the ever-changing 
 unrest of all that the world revealed to him. 
 
 Empedocles, for his part, now, seems to have had his 
 consideration claimed by all that preceded him. He is 
 occupied not only with the four elements, but his two 
 forces, which we may now modernise into attraction and 
 repulsion, were really the preceding principles of accord 
 and discord accord with discord, and discord not 
 without accord ; and so it is that his contribution to 
 the common proposition is rather a mechanical one. 
 Mechanical also would seem to have been, on their own 
 part, what the Atomists themselves sought. All, in their 
 way of it, was to be material and positive : there was 
 to be nothing for them either immaterial or negative. 
 And the strange thing was that all that they proposed 
 did, in point of fact, simply turn round and reverse 
 itself. There are particular matters in existence, each 
 for itself and as such ; but matter as matter does not 
 exist : it is, but it is only a universal of thought, an 
 entity in the intellect, or, as the word is, an entitas 
 ratipnis. Then, as for their very positive element of the 
 Atom, where could it be, or what good could it be, but 
 for their own Vacuum the absolutely abstract element 
 of the negative ? Nay, the Atom itself was but a thing 
 of thought, and sensibly in existence nowhere ; as Lord 
 Bacon said, centuries and centuries after them : Atomum 
 nemo unquam vidit. If the Atomists were the first, 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 93 
 
 too, to make the well-known and important distinction 
 of Qualities into Primary and Secondary, their industry 
 there again was in the same ideal direction. While 
 both classes of qualities are in the mind, it would be 
 hard to say, if you took away from any body its primary 
 qualities, extension, etc., what would then be left to it 
 in the guise of body at all ! 
 
 If of the One that, so far, was on the whole common 
 to them all, the Atomists, not unnaturally, would make 
 a physical one, an atom, it was certainly quite in nature, 
 as it was in reason, that Anaxagoras, in further manipula- 
 tion of the general theme, should operate finally on the 
 One its own idealisation proper. The One now is the vovs ; 
 and the vovs (nous) is the Noumenon of the Phenomenon, 
 the Being of Existence, the Principle of the Universe : 
 and the principle of the universe is the principle here 
 that we have generally in mind. 
 
 Our proposition at present, then, is precisely this : 
 Mind is the formative element of all things. 
 
 And it was like the boyish, over-hasty, over-clever 
 forwardness of Greece, that the Sophists took mind, once 
 it was given to them, literally ; and rushed to the front 
 with it, almost as though it were for each of them to 
 make a personal application of it. Against this Socrates 
 saw that principle ethical principle could never be 
 individual, but must be general. And so it was that 
 now under Plato and Aristotle philosophy became, as it 
 were, formal an institute. 
 
 It is to be borne in mind, too, that by this time in 
 Greece another influence had come to bear. Knowledge 
 had advanced : there was now quite a new stage of 
 information, education, of generally informed opinion, 
 generally educated opinion Bildung. The popular gods 
 were seen through, and an Aufklarung was in full force. 
 This acted on the Sophists this acted on Socrates, Plato, 
 
94 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and Aristotle. The vovs of Anaxagoras became the TO 
 6elov. The av-ri^ovv Gv^fyepov, contrarium identidem, 
 of Heraclitus, which implicitly figured or prefigured the 
 Ego, once received into the vow, could, in such circum- 
 stances, quite impossibly escape a theological investment. 
 That is, the secular thought, through all these thinkers, 
 from Thales to Anaxagoras, had now imbued, intenerated, 
 and illumed itself with the feeling, the vision, and the 
 assurance of religion. So that now, with Sophocles and 
 his fellows beside these, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, there 
 was in Greece the cinque-foil of knowledge and will, 
 poetry, philosophy, and religion, even as with us at 
 present in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, in Carlyle, and in 
 Emerson. 
 
 Still, with whatever formal generality, there were the 
 same principles there was the same principle employed 
 and implied. If to each Sophist vovs had become simply 
 his own Ego, no less an Ego had it become for Socrates 
 sub specie ceternitatis ! That, too, was -the scope and 
 the mark whether of Plato or Aristotle. 
 
 To the former of these, to Plato, it was the Idea 
 the universal that held the particular, and as holding 
 the particular was at once the singular ; nor to the latter, 
 to Aristotle, was it different with his Entelcchy; which, 
 too, was the poptyrj that had gone into the vX?/, and 
 as well the I/XT; that had been taken back into the 
 evepyeia (evTe\e%6ia). Neither can we regard for we 
 hasten, so far, to a close now the Stoics, Epicureans, 
 and Skeptics that followed as other than the separated 
 moments of the principle itself. The last, the sceptical 
 moment, did but reduce, negatively, into its own singular, 
 the universal and the particular which, together but 
 apart, confronted it in the others. And what was the 
 Neo-Platonic one here what but the same reduction 
 affirmatively ? Absolutely in the intensity of a one 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 95 
 
 identity the Neo-Platonic mood was sole self-conscious- 
 ness Ego ! the universe in Ego ! 
 
 And the universe in Ego that was Christianity 
 and Neo-Platonism came thence. 
 
 That was the Trinity : that the Father passed into 
 the Son ; and the Son, in the Spirit, returned into the 
 Father. 
 
 " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was 
 with God, and the Word was God. All things were 
 made by him, and without him was not anything made 
 that was made. In him was life, and the life was the 
 light of men." 
 
 " In that God, now, in our finitude exists, or mani- 
 fests himself, he offers himself up, and in us annuls 
 himself ; for we are null. And he has even offered 
 himself, and annulled his null, made dead his death, 
 that we might not remain mere nothings, but might 
 return to him, and in him be. This event of God's 
 self-sacrifice is not an event for mere memory and reflec- 
 tion : it is to be in us lived. And what comes to pass 
 in every one of us, that comes to pass for all mankind 
 in Christ." 1 
 
 These are Solger's words ; and it is so that Solger 
 seeks and finds the Heil of his spirit ; so also that he 
 would " vindicate the creed of Christ for the spirit that 
 thinks!' And Hegel, in regard of just such experiences 
 in Tieck, eloquently and with conviction affirms ( W. W., 
 xvi. 460): "If one is conversant with the nature and 
 movement of thought as thought, then he knows also 
 that, at least on from Plato, not, to say so, not any, 
 nor yet the fewest, but rather most philosophies, have, 
 with reason and understanding, given statement and 
 
 1 Bourne, too, has this : " The true, saving faith in Christ is not 
 cold historical credence, but living, seizing, and grasping of life 
 from the spirit of God." 
 
96 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 account of just such substantial content " that, namely, 
 as in a reference to Christianity by Tieck. 1 
 
 In this matter of the reference to history there is 
 not much to separate us now from the moderns. What 
 concerns thought in the Middle Ages, all, as Schwegler 
 has it, being then " within the presuppositions of a 
 positive religion," there could be nothing but a useless 
 and wooden discussion of equally useless and wooden 
 distinctions that were within the authorised limits only 
 of formal articles and stereotyped dogmata. That is 
 the surface breadth ; nevertheless, there was here and 
 there exceptional depth in the Middle Ages, too. 
 Always and everywhere, God, naturally, all compre- 
 hending, was the one thought ; and on the part of the 
 greatest thinkers, it constituted from time to time the 
 single theme. God, that is, was not thought by them 
 merely indefinitely as the Etre Supreme ; there was 
 truly the attempt to think him concretely to think 
 him. If thought was the one quality, the essential 
 attribute, still it was not to them, so to speak, as a 
 brute impersonal element no ! it was to them as 
 the attribute of spirit, and in such wise also that 
 creation was of thought and still in vital connection with 
 spirit. That in the thought of their thinking any con- 
 sciousness of our proposed principle, of our one form 
 of internal necessity, can be traced, we cannot, of 
 course, expect to recognise ; but again and again there 
 are suggestive phrases. 
 
 Perhaps what first strikes in this connection is an 
 unconscious but irresistible tendency to pantheism. 
 
 1 Once come to a life within, Tieck felt, " That worldly occupa- 
 tions were incompatible with it, and so there were many hours in 
 which he sighed for the seclusion of a cloister that he might live 
 all-in-all to his Bohme, and his Tauler, and the wonders of his 
 emotions." 
 
THE REFERENCE TO PERCEPTION 97 
 
 Nor is this to be wondered at when we think of the 
 nature of the " presupposition " under which thought 
 now is. No thought could now fill and fix the mind 
 of man, but the thought of God. So it is that in all 
 the earliest of these thinkers, Augustin, Erigena, 
 Anselm, Abelard, aL, it is God that, in his possible 
 nature and relations, is almost alone held before us. 
 Now, then, if God was decerned to be, as he was de- 
 cerned to be, the single truth of the universe, how was 
 pantheism, or some measure of pantheism, to be pre- 
 vented ? Deus, already says Erigena, est omne quod 
 vere est, quoniam ipse facit omnia, et fit in omnibus : 
 omne enim quod intelligitur et sentitur, nihil aliud est, 
 nisi non-apparcntis apparitio. God's ideas, too, just as 
 though they were conditioning mental categories, are 
 referred to as the productive forms of all things : the 
 notion of things, even as it appears in the mind of man, 
 is vera substantia, and so, as it was in the divine mind, the 
 substantia incommutabilis of the things of the universe. 
 If intellectus aliquis se ipsum intelligit, profecto Deum 
 intelligit ; for there is but one intellectus omnium. 
 
 The same doctrine is as strong in Anselm : Ubi 
 summa essentia non est, nihil omnino est. Ubique 
 igitur est, et per omnia et in omnibus. Ipsa enim est, 
 qua3 cuncta alia portat et superat, claudit, ambit, et 
 penetrat. That summa essentia is mens summa, vivens, 
 sapiens, potens, vera, justa, beata et seterna. 
 
 We have emphatic utterances to the same effect in 
 Abelard : Omne quod naturaliter existit, aut ceternum 
 est, ut Deus, aut coepit ab illo summo principio quod 
 Deus est. Deum potentem pnedicamus et omnia quae 
 agimus, ejus potentke tribuimus, in quo vivimus, movemur 
 et sumus, quique omnia operatur in omnibus. Patet 
 divinam substantiam omnino individuam, omninoque 
 informem perseverare ; utque ideo eum recte perfectum 
 7 
 
98 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 summumque bonum dici et nulla alia re indigens, et sibi 
 ipsi sufficiens, omniaque a se ipso habens, nee ab alio 
 quidpiam accipiens. 
 
 This doctrine, indeed, seems to have gone on in the 
 Church, and only come, so far, to a certain end in 
 Almarich of Bena and David of Dinant, when at last 
 there met it the dread fulminatiori of Pantheism. What 
 was said by them was hardly stronger than had been 
 already said. Still, such utterances as follow were on 
 the whole, perhaps, fully more overt : 
 
 Omnia sunt Deus et Deus est omnia ; creator et 
 creatura idem Deus. Deus sicut fons est et principiuni, 
 ita finis est omnium, quod omnia reversura sint in ipsum. 
 
 David, indeed, as regards overtness and undeniable 
 literality of expression, would seem to have gone to the 
 very ultimate extreme, or apparently, at least even 
 beyond it. He attempts a formal proof, Deum esse 
 principiuni materiale omnium, and concludes, relinquitur 
 ergo, quod z/oO? et materia prinia sint idem. Nay, he 
 adds, ex hoc videtur relinqui quod Deus et 1/01)9 et materia 
 prima idem sint (italicised so !). 
 
 When one thinks that it could not be denied even 
 to piety the most orthodox both to believe and proclaim : 
 Omnia sunt in Deo, et Deus est in omnibus, imo ipse 
 est causative omnia ; one could not very well expect, 
 on the part of men whose daily business, as it were, 
 forced them to have God perpetually in their thoughts 
 and on their lips, that expressions at least more or less 
 accusably pantheistic would, during the following 
 centuries, cease. The rigour of the Church had its 
 effect, however ; and the speech of the simplest grew 
 to be cautious. Almost we may say that the deeper 
 theosophic views of the Middle Ages were brought to 
 their sum by a poor persecuted shoemaker and rebel 
 from the Church, Bohme. 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 99 
 
 Propositions at intervals, in some degree philosophical, 
 may claim attention amid the theological lucubrations 
 of the Church. When Augustin, for example, discours- 
 ing of the Trinity, declares " that this triplicity in 
 unity, the form of the divine essence, reveals itself in 
 all the things of the world, for everything has in 
 it three something of which it consists, a form by 
 which it is distinguished, and an end we recognise 
 at once an assonance to our general doctrine, nor less 
 its repetition when we come to hear Bohme say, " All 
 the things of the world are made in the likeness of 
 triplicity in unity, that is, in the likeness of God." 
 
 This, again, on the part of Augustin, is somewhat in 
 the same way philosophical : "The divine spirit is the ful- 
 ness of eternal and immutable ideas, which are the forms 
 and types of all things. These things, then, are only 
 through participation in the ideas, as finite reason is 
 itself only through participation in infinite reason." 
 Abelard's follower, Johannes Parvus Sarisberiensis, seems 
 to have participated in the general theistic or pan- 
 theistic tendency of his time, " The creative and 
 life-giving spirit of God," he says, " fills (implet and 
 replet) not only the mind of man, but also every 
 creature which is contained in the universe. For the 
 substance of the creature is not without God ; every- 
 thing that is is what it is only by participation of him." 
 Much later, the theosophical mystic Tauler takes, like 
 Augustin, the Christian Trinity into the triplicity of 
 the notion when for him, " God remains within himself, 
 goes out from himself, and returns again into himself " : 
 so symbolising the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 
 Latter still, Eaymund of Sabunde has it that " No 
 creature is aught but a letter written by the finger of 
 God " ; and that " The universe of things' ought to be 
 believed ordained principally for this, that, through it, 
 
100 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 as though a highway, pathway, or some natural stair 
 provided with steps firm and fixed, a man might pro- 
 ceed and ascend within the sanctuary of his own self, 
 where he may see and know himself, and find, with 
 wonder and surprise, his own infinite value, power, and 
 the inestimable riches hidden within himself." It is 
 the conviction of Bruno, " That all that is is filled with 
 one spirit, and that all that lives is properly only one 
 life that pervades all and is in all." Zorzi of Venice 
 asserts the world, in so many words, to be " an infinite 
 living individual that through a soul is maintained in 
 the power of God." Nay, centuries previously, Aquinas 
 had almost said the same thing : " All creatures stand 
 in certain relations to each other and to God ; and so 
 they belong, then, through this order, to one and the 
 same unity, and constitute, consequently, only one and 
 the same all-world." To Campanella, " The end-aim of 
 Nature is Man the end-aim of Man. God." He be- 
 lieves in knowledge through experience, even outer 
 experience ; but there is for him also " an inner ex- 
 perience not only a natural, but also a supernatural 
 Eevelation truth, as it were, through an inner touch. 1 ' 
 Of the world, Vanini echoes some ancient voices which 
 we may have already heard : " The world is, as God, one 
 and not one, all and not all. It is like to itself and 
 unlike ; immutable and mutable, of birth eternal and 
 of birth in time." These are contraries, and it is re- 
 markable to hear another schoolman (William of 
 Auvergne) giving in his adhesion to as much : " All 
 that is consists of contraries ; and so the world is com- 
 posed not only of corporeal, but also of spiritual beings : 
 for no member of the antithesis were capable of 
 existing without the other if, then, there is, as is un- 
 deniable, what is corporeal, there must be, and just 
 there/or, also what is spiritual ? " We see the same 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 101 
 
 doctrine in Bdhme, as when he speaks of light and of 
 fire : " See ! if light were taken out from the fire (which, 
 of course, cannot be) ; then it would lose, firstly, its 
 essence, whereby it shines and lights up; secondly, 
 it were become impotent and had forfeited its life." 
 An ingenious propos of Aquinas illustrates the involun- 
 tariness of this antithesis in nature : " He who denies 
 that truth is, grants that truth is ; for if truth is not, it 
 is still true that truth is not." Most wonderful are 
 the innumerable expressions of Jacob Bohme that go 
 home to the very deepest depths of such theosophic 
 vision. " Liftest thou thy thoughts to God and truly 
 thinkest thou him, then breakest thou through the 
 heaven of heavens and hast in thy hold God himself by 
 his heart of holiness : The universe is nothing else than 
 the creaturely made substantiality of God himself : God 
 is hid in the centre of the inmost birth of every creature, 
 and is not known unless only in and through the spirit 
 of man as by him enlightened : Sin proper comes from 
 the arrogance of one's self-will : Enterest thou with the 
 spirit of thy will into the love of God, then abidest 
 thou a holy spirit in the will of God : Man with his 
 inmost spirit shall labour solely in the Mysterium of 
 God ; and so, then, the spirit of God helps him to search 
 out and understand likewise all that is without : But 
 the soul has also its own life and a centre of 
 nature in its own power ; God's spirit and the soul's 
 spirit are two persons, then, which have each its own 
 will." 
 
 The assonance of all these passages from the history 
 of ages, even when indirect, is still ready to be seen : 
 I specially quote the last little extract in memory of 
 my own illustration of the water-drop that is to be 
 found in my annotations to Schwegler (p. 442). By 
 way of application, I may conclude here, so far, with a 
 
102 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 reference to Linmeus, who relates it of himself : " All 
 things went unhappily with me so long as I was 
 minded to resent injustice : but when I changed my 
 mind and left all to God, then everything went well 
 with me ever after." Penalty, he says, is the judgment 
 of God from which there is no escape ; and he calls 
 repeatedly to his son, as the very legacy he has to 
 bequeath him, Innocue vivito : Numen adest ! 
 
 What we have last belongs, no doubt, chronologically 
 to the modern world ; still, presumably, it will not really 
 derange its place. To the modern world, indeed, I 
 know not that there can be any lengthened relative 
 reference until we approach Kant and his followers. 
 Descartes, Spinosa, aL, did, in truth, treat philosophy 
 (so to speak) imperially ; but Locke presently deflected 
 it into a mere Erkenntnisslehre, or theory of perception ; 
 and this remained pretty well (even Berkeley and Hume 
 not apart) the whole aspect of philosophy in Great 
 Britain till possibly! 1865, and the Secret of Hegel. 
 In short, there are only four men into whom we 
 have to look for contributions here Bacon, Descartes, 
 Spinosa, and Leibnitz. And from the first of them, 
 Bacon, we have more to acknowledge than at least 
 in England we are usually taught to expect. The 
 sterility of that vestal virgin has been often enough 
 dinned into us Causarum finalium inquisitio sterilis 
 est, et tanquam virgo Deo consecrata, nihil parit : 
 nevertheless, a deliberate consideration will show Bacon 
 not to have been averse to final causes, truly such, in 
 themselves, but to the injury done to true physical 
 causes by the speciosis et umbratilibus causis intro- 
 duced in fanciful, study-chair interpretation of natural 
 phenomena. Bacon is certainly to be given his place 
 at the head of all modern experimental science and 
 of general inductive philosophy ; but that is no reason 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 103 
 
 why his attitude to say at once metaphysic, should be 
 either reversed or ignored. In what he says himself at 
 least there is as much respect for metaphysic as for 
 physic itself : only that the hope of rescuing the latter 
 from neglect (due to a barren Logic) and into profit 
 (refused by the same) has been the means of directing 
 attention, specially, to the investigation, commendation, 
 and encouragement of the one (physical) side rather 
 than the other (metaphysical) side. Nay, there is some 
 reason for saying that, after all, it was the " natural 
 magic " of "forms " that had most power upon him : l 
 qui formas novit, is, etc. For Bacon, too, there was 
 " a triple object of philosophy, God, Nature, Man." 
 
 The very start of Descartes is at once our principle 
 itself ; that is his single TTOV CTTW cogito the self- 
 conscious subject. It is in self-consciousness, too, that 
 for Descartes the single criterion of truth lies. The 
 very definition of substance in Descartes, as well as in 
 Spinosa, actually names, as we have already seen, the 
 Ego. By substance Descartes says he understands rem 
 quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum ; 
 and that is identical with the id of Spinosa, cujus 
 conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei. That is 
 the causa sui, the cause of itself, which, like the Ego, 
 is of " an essence that involves existence or of a nature 
 that cannot be conceived unless existing." Then we 
 have in both the three which for Bacon constitute the 
 universe. For him they were Deus, Natura, Homo ; for 
 Descartes, Deus, extensio and cogitatio ; and for Spinosa 
 we have only to substitute for God, Substance. Later 
 philosophers, as it may occur to us at once here, claim 
 for themselves Geist as the true name of Substance ; and 
 it is the custom of Spinosa at least to call his Substantia, 
 Deus. 
 
 1 But see my Gifford Lectures, pp. 51 sqq. 
 
104 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Spinosa's prescript, To see all sub specie ceternitatis, 
 may be referred to here as an assonance very much 
 in point. It means precisely what, later, the so per- 
 petually recurrent Speculative means : That we are to 
 see all from the standpoint of the eternal necessity, not 
 as in time, but as in the Notion, through which notion 
 is the All, and the All is God's eternal revelation. I 
 am not to see my thought as my thought, not my being 
 as my being, but as the thought and being of God- 
 concrete spirit. The Neo-Platonists, not negatively, 
 like the Skeptics with the Stoics and Epicureans, but 
 affirmatively in their absolutely concentrated Ego, 
 brought themselves into unity with absolutely con- 
 centrated thought itself, a living person, the Absolute. 
 That is the one Eingeschlossenheit. 1 
 
 This Eingeschlossenheit of abstract self-consciousness 
 is what constituted Hamann ; and to see it in him well 
 illustrates the general indication. It is impossible to 
 conceive of anything more singly ingrained than that 
 self-consciousness of his. An abstractly intense ego, 
 centred and concentred in the one point, the very 
 vitality itself of his own pineal gland that was 
 Hamann. So much a self and self-righteous was he 
 that, even when flagrantly wrong, convictedly and self- 
 convictedly wrong a sinner, he would not for a moment 
 hear of a question, he would not for a single moment, 
 for all that, hear of as much as a doubt : he was a 
 saint still, and he had still his patent of commission 
 direct from almighty God. He knew that he was 
 Christianly orthodox. " It seems to me," for example, 
 
 1 Tliis they effect in America, as it seems, by what they call, 
 " The Anaesthetic Revelation." Mr. Benjamin Paul Blood is the 
 authority here ; and there is a letter of Tennyson's to him (but with 
 omission of Mr. Blood's name) in the second volume of Tennyson's 
 Life. 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 105 
 
 he says, " that without the so-called mystery of the 
 Trinity there is no possibility whatever of any teaching 
 of Christianity at all : both beginning and end fail." 
 And so it is that, in the parrhesia of his intense 
 orthodoxy, he calls the pudenda of religion what are to 
 him its most sacred doctrines, at the same time that he 
 reprobates as ultra-piety any syllable of a word to 
 fo-snip (prune) them, and equally as rabidness any 
 syllable of a word to de-snip (castrate) them (Aberglaube 
 selbige zu bescJineiden Raserei sie gar auszusclineidcn) ! 
 Evidently such a man, in ordinary life, could, in the 
 stubbornness of his self-will, only prove strangely 
 double-edged and, whether for the right or the wrong, 
 curiously unsatisfactory ; but still, with all, he was 
 Hamann der Magus aus Norden, the friend of Kant, 
 almost more than friend to Herder and Jacobi, quite a 
 marvel of the most peculiar genius to the demigod 
 Goethe, and even from that intense narrowness, that 
 condensed intellectualness, he drew wealth wealth which 
 was a breadth of subtlety and wit. And so, as it was 
 self-concentration that acted on Plotinus, Proclus, and 
 the rest, similarly, too, though with a difference, it was 
 self-concentration that acted on Hamann. Nay, I know 
 not but that, nearer us, self -concentration was the vital 
 point both in Carlyle and in Emerson, in Carlyle as 
 with the bite of fire, in Emerson as with the caress of 
 light. 
 
 And yet, again, what of the other side ? what of 
 the Aufgcklarters the chosen few in whom alone was 
 knowledge, truth, the precious peculium of eyesight ? 
 Was it not self-concentration that made them too ? 
 Was there one single thought in their whole soul but 
 the one single thought the "lie"? Fire-eyed, mobile- 
 lipped, spasm-breathed, nervous-gestured, agitatedly 
 inarticulate, or, with a pant, only demi-semi-articulate, 
 
106 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 the Aufgeklarter of the adverse Walter Scott period had 
 a crouching look, as though he glared at all in the 
 lurid light of that " lie." Shakespeare was, but too 
 commonly, livid in that light, and Milton. It very 
 visibly brightened on Pope, or on Hume, or on Voltaire 
 and the French generally. Aufgeklarters approved very 
 much of mathematics and political economy ; they were 
 partial to science physical science, and preferably 
 astronomy, as it so contrasted with the " lie " ! What 
 a relief it was to each of them when a few of them got 
 together ! There was a cheerful hum in the air then ; 
 and the room was comfort. No breast but felt relieved 
 as of a Bramah-press. They were erect, and moved 
 easily ; they were self-possessed and ready-worded. So 
 grandly superior they were in the loftiness of their sneer, 
 as, in the grace before meat or the thanks after it, 
 greatly grave, they murmured, God, if there be a God, 
 and in the name of thy son, if thou hast a son 1 Then 
 they were so polite : what Aufgeklarter, when you 
 entered to him, but got up from his seat with a breath 
 and graciously waived you to it ! for did not politesse 
 oblige, and what could be more politesse than to offer 
 what was his, as what could be more his than what you 
 saw was last his -the very chair he sat on ? l 
 
 We pass to Leibnitz : and late illustrations will be 
 excused, we doubt not, in view of the single theme which 
 we would alone present concrete Greistigkett, concrete 
 intellectuality, mind, soul, spirit, self-consciousness, Ego : 
 Idealism true Idealism ! 
 
 Now, the single distinctive scheme of Leibnitz is simply 
 constitutive of all that. 
 
 1 In leaving Spinosa I may remark that Uebervveg (iii. 81) speaks 
 of the natura naturans, etc., as to be found " in the Scholastics " (no 
 one named) as well as in Bruno. Of the Scholastics, I have seen 
 " natura natural " in Lull alone. 
 
THE REFERENCE TO HISTORY 107 
 
 Time and Space are to Leibnitz only confused intel- 
 lection ; and what is real in the world is but a mass of 
 Monads, each incorporeal and each a soul. What can be 
 called real itself, then, is, as in every member immaterial, 
 self-evidently nothing whatever but a single ideal point ; 
 and if my water-drop, as in the Schwegler annotations (p. 
 442), be taken at once as the mass and the point, not 
 only will the general idea come more clearly and closely 
 home, but the relation of God, as the divine monad, to 
 the rest, will, in a flash, leap to the eyes, and with much 
 more ease and satisfaction of intelligence than as it 
 appears in Leibnitz. God, then, will be transparent as 
 the Ego of the egoes. 
 
 The successive degrees in the monads are instructive : 
 
 " Un tel vivant (qui possede, c'est a dire, une perception 
 accompagnee de mernoire) est appele animal [fwov], 
 comme sa monade est appelee une dme ; et quand cette 
 ame est elevee jusq'a la raison, on la compte parmi les 
 csprits " (Principes de la Nature et de la Grace). It is 
 thus we are to understand the distinction between soul 
 and spirit ; at the same time that we are to carry it 
 with us also that there is life everywhere, in all the 
 monads, even before the animal. 
 
 It may be useful to add here as regards immediate when 
 applied in cognition, this from the Nouveaux Essais : 
 " Tout ce que nous connaissons imme'diatement est reduit 
 ou a des premieres experiences de fait ; on a des 
 premieres lumieres de raison ; les unes et les autres sont 
 incapables d'etre prouvees et peuvent etre appellees 
 imme'diates." 
 
 As is known, Leibnitz added to the principle of con- 
 tradiction that of sufficient reason ; and his motive was 
 the necessity of this latter in order to pass from mathe- 
 matics (where the former held good) to physics (where it 
 was insufficient). It was for the dynamical element of 
 
108 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 fact, then, existence, event, that the new principle was 
 added. That is, consequently, this : the old principle 
 being analytic, the new was synthetic. But this latter 
 word was not used then ; it is the result of much later find- 
 ings. Kant will be found to say as much as this when 
 (W. W., i. 479), against Eberhard, he is obliged (with 
 some indignation) to set his own principle (of the a priori 
 conditions of the possibility of experience) in quite 
 another region. It is jetzt, only " now," he says, that the 
 principle added by Leibnitz is seen to be capable of being 
 characterised as, in its application, synthetic. " When 
 his adherent," he adds, " gives out this hint for something 
 that was then a want, as the (now found) principle itself 
 (of synthetic cognition), wherewith Leibnitz shall have 
 been supposed to have made a new discovery, does he 
 not but expose him to derision, while thinking that he 
 was delivering his eulogy." 
 
 There is a sort of doing justice both to Leibnitz and 
 to Kant here, in bringing them together, as we pass from 
 the former to the latter. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE GERMAN EEFERENCE KANT 1 
 1. HUME AND CAUSALITY 
 
 WE may say that Kant, for his part, opens thus : 
 
 " I freely acknowledge that the questionings of David Hume were 
 what, many years ago, first broke my dogmatic slumber and, to my 
 inquiries in the field of speculative philosophy, gave a wholly new 
 course. I was far from giving ear to him in his conclusions, which 
 had only this source, that he did not take up his problem as a whole, 
 but hit only on a part of it, without the possibility, consequently, 
 of a complete resolution. To start from a well-founded thought 
 which a first man shall have left unfinished warrants the hope that 
 another with renewed consideration may go further than the first, 
 though it is to him we owe what lay in the suggestion. 
 
 " I tried, then, first of all, whether Hume's point in view were not 
 capable of being made general, and presently discovered that the 
 idea in the correlation of cause and effect was by a great deal not the 
 only one through which the understanding d priori thinks connec- 
 tions of things, but rather that metaphysic as a whole just consists 
 of such. I sought, then, further, to ascertain their number, and as 
 this succeeded to my wish of finding it to depend on a single 
 principle, I proceeded to the deduction of these ideas themselves, 
 assured now that they were not, as Hume had apprehended, deriva- 
 tives of experience, but primaries of pure understanding. This 
 deduction, which to my acute-thinking predecessor seemed im- 
 possible, which no one but he had ever even thought of (though 
 every one contentedly made use of the ideas themselves, without 
 
 1 As simply the key to all philosophy as such at present, atten- 
 tion is specially invited to this chapter. 
 
 109 
 
110 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 asking on what their objective validity founded), this, I say, was 
 the hardest task that could ever be undertaken for the sake of 
 metaphysic, and, what was worst of all, metaphysic, as much of it 
 as was only anywhere to be found, could not of itself be of the 
 slightest assistance to me, inasmuch as just said deduction was to 
 make it (metaphysic) even first of all possible ! As now it 
 succeeded with me to solve Hume's problem not merely in one 
 particular case, but in respect of the entire faculty of pure reason, I 
 was able to take sure, though always only slow, steps, in order to 
 determine at last the whole compass of pure reason, as well in its 
 limits as in its content, completely and on general principles ; 
 which was precisely what metaphysic required for the completion of 
 its system on a sure plan. I apprehended, however, that it would 
 prove with this, the completion of the problem as a whole (namely, 
 the Kritik of Pure Keason), as it had fared with it when it was first 
 proposed " misapprehension, etc., namely. 
 
 To answer Hume's question, then, was for Kant to 
 complete the entire transcendental philosophy the 
 Kritik of Pure Eeason. And what is the transcendental 
 philosophy ? That is transcendental that is an element 
 of the a priori provision for the possibility of experience. 
 Then experience means our ordinary life leave alone 
 feelings within of perception without. That is, the 
 Transcendental Philosophy, on the whole, is Kant's 
 Theory of Perception. 
 
 2. KANT'S THEORY OF PERCEPTION 
 
 But what is that Theory ? 
 
 We have sensations, impressions of sense. They, so 
 far, are all that we know. With perfect conviction we 
 assume that they are due to things without ; but in 
 knowing only their impressions on us, we know not at 
 all these things themselves. If the impressions, by their 
 presence, so far reveal these Things-in-Themselves, they 
 further also, even by that, their presence, altogether 
 conceal them. We know the bite, but not what bites. 
 
THE SCHEMATA 111 
 
 The skin knows the scratch ; it knows nothing of the 
 thorn. 
 
 But now, Time and Space are not impressions : time 
 is not the impression of an object ; space is not the 
 impression of an object. Nevertheless, objects necessarily 
 and universally presuppose them, not, however, that 
 though necessary and universal, they are not themselves 
 objects, but only merely general notions, merely general 
 ideas. No ; they are still sensibilia, not cogitdbilia, 
 percepta, not concepta. They are general forms of sense, 
 innate, native to the mind, a priori endowments. 
 
 3. SCHEMATA 
 
 So far we have indeed cognitions We have the 
 privilege and the freedom of a whole world of impres- 
 sions in time and space. But that whole world is still 
 within : the Universals of it, Time and Space ; and not 
 less the Impressions, the Particulars of it. Is it so, 
 then, that we are thus cabined, cribbed, confined, bound 
 in to our own internality, restricted to subjectivity alone 
 the subjectivity of ourselves ? Not so : if we are 
 cramped into subjectivity by sense, we shall be enlarged 
 into objectivity by intellect. It is the Categories shall 
 set us free it is to the Categories we shall owe complete 
 Experience, a finished Perception. The Categories, 
 namely, out of the manifold of time the manifold in its 
 series of moments, shall construct so many pure sense- 
 schemata, into which received, as into a priori moulds, 
 the subjectivity of impression will be realised into the 
 objectivity of perception even this perception which is 
 to us the Perception of things, the Experience of a world. 
 
 But how does this apply to the problem of Hume, and 
 how is it that it is the solution of it? We shall 
 presently give Kant's own express, diiect answer here ; 
 
112 WHAT //>' THOUGHT? 
 
 but, for a full understanding, it may be necessary to 
 premise something of his own preliminary explanations. 
 
 The most important of these certainly concern the 
 mentioned pure sense-schemata. 
 
 " It is clear that there must be a tertium quid, wliicli shall be on the 
 one side, homogeneous with the category, and, on the other, homo- 
 geneous with the sensation, and so make possible the application of 
 the former to the latter. This mediating condition must be pure 
 intellectual (i.e., be without anything empirical,) on one side, and, on 
 the other, sensible. Such a condition is the transcendental schema. 
 . . . Thus there will be possible an application of the category to 
 sensations, by means of the transcendental determination of time, 
 which, as the schema of the categories, mediates the subsumption of 
 the latter under the former. . . . The general process of imagination 
 to give a notion its symbol I call this the schema to the notion " 
 (ii. 123, 125). * 
 
 4. CERTAIN SCHEMATA FAIL 
 
 The interest now, then, is for us to see these schemata, 
 but still not more particularly than the reference to 
 causality requires. 
 
 We shall hardly be wrong if we say that, even in this 
 peculiar schematism of his, Kant's general machinery 
 went for a long time smooth. Quantity had come first, 
 and in Quantity it had been manifest at once that con- 
 stitutive categories of unity, plurality, and totality would, 
 as a priori unities (form), have no difficulty in finding for 
 themselves, whether in pure space or pure time, quite an 
 abundance of correspondent a priori manies (matter). 
 There a priori sense and cl priori understanding could be 
 accordant at once. In Quality, too, if it took explana- 
 tion, it did not take a long one to satisfy one's mind, on 
 Kant's own terms, that there as well the constitutive 
 categories (reality, negation, limitation) might quite well 
 
 1 Transcendental determination of time, however Brobdignagian 
 it may look, means here only pure time. 
 
CERTAIN SCHEMATA FAIL 113 
 
 supply themselves with a pure correspondent filling from 
 the pure sense quarries of time and space. Even a 
 seventh Category, inherence and subsistence (substance 
 and accident), was not without its demonstrable parallels 
 whether temporal or spatial : both time and space, that 
 is, were as substance to their own units, inasmuch as 
 these units respectively inhered, subsisted in each as a 
 whole. With the eighth and ninth Categories, however, 
 there surely came a check. As one sees, we name, with 
 time, space; but that is scarcely Kant's own way, who, 
 on the whole, drops space, and confines himself to time. 
 Now, it is impossible to discover any many in time as 
 such that will correspond to the respective unities in de- 
 pendence arid community (causality and reciprocity). 
 The moments of time, as the parts of space, are in an 
 indifferent succession, the one to the other; but it is 
 impossible to see in either any order of constituents that 
 will correspond to the characteristic order, whether in 
 dependence or community. In the one, the order may 
 not, as such, differ ; but in the other it differs out and 
 out. Antecedent does indeed precede Consequent, as 
 moment precedes moment in time ; but still the respect- 
 ive relation is an altogether different one. The ante- 
 cedent determines the consequent ; but one moment 
 of time only follows the other in an all-indifferent 
 continuity. 
 
 And the incongruity, as just said, is still more glaring 
 in the case of reciprocity. There the constituents are 
 all at once and together ; they act and react mutually : 
 you can take them in any order, forwards, backwards, 
 this way, that way ; but the order of the units in time 
 is the most inflexible in the universe. Surely it would 
 be a very vain thing to seek to find a schema of 
 reciprocity in time as time, make it as a priori and as 
 pure as you like ! 
 
114 WHAT Iti THOUGHT? 
 
 5. AN INSUFFICIENT REMEDY THE RULES 
 
 Here, then, there was at once an impasse : to turn 
 one's face from causality and reciprocity to time itself 
 was suddenly to come short up against a dead wall. 
 What was to be done ? Were we to be stopped half- 
 way, and a so happily reached half-way ? Intolerable ! 
 Still, turn it and twist it as we like, there was no help 
 for it. No ingenuity in the world could make anything, 
 in the way we wanted, of pure time ; while as for 
 impure time, to turn for help to it would be so plainly 
 an attempt, as Kant himself says elsewhere, to milk 
 the he-goat, that there were scarcely a possibility of its 
 being ever at any time for a moment thought of. 
 What ! an a priori schema in the a posteriori of time 
 as well set sail to bring home square circles and round 
 squares ! Nevertheless, if schemata were not to be 
 found and thus far on our road, they must be found ! 
 if schemata were not to be found in pure time, it was 
 only in impure time that, at any possible time, they 
 could be found. So, really, it was out of impure time, 
 as alone at least is to be construed from the facts, that 
 Kant did in the end construct, both for causality and 
 reciprocity, his schema. Denied abstract time, he had 
 nothing to fall back upon but concrete time. What of 
 the contents of time could he construct a schema out of 
 them ? Reflection here in the end could only come to 
 this long reflection in the end could only come to this. 
 So long as these contents were impure, the thing was 
 clearly impossible. But what if they were purified, 
 cleansed into an ultimate abstract ? Such ultimate 
 abstract would be an ultimate generale, an ultimate 
 universale. But such fruit of an ultimate generalisation, 
 of an ultimate universalisation, might itself be regarded 
 as an a priori. So far, then, of an a priori validity, it 
 
AN INSUFFICIENT REMEDY 115 
 
 would be perfectly in case to be allowably used as 
 a priori matter for a priori form. This, now, let the 
 heuristic reflection have been, short or long, quite as it 
 might, is precisely what Kant, in effect, did do. I say 
 in effect ; for Kant himself gives no hint of any general- 
 isation, but names at once " a Eule." 
 
 " The schema of the cause and the causality of a thing 
 in general is the Eeale on which, when it is at any time 
 given, something else always follows.. It consists, there- 
 fore, in the succession of the units of the complex, in so 
 far as this succession is under the control of a rule." 
 
 " The schema of the community (reciprocity) or of 
 the mutual causality of substances, in regard of their 
 accidents, is the coexistence of the determinations of 
 the ones with those of the others, under a general rule." 
 
 These are Kant's own words, and they will probably 
 substantiate all that has been said, hypothetically, of 
 Kant's relatively heuristic proceedings. Eule ! a rule ! 
 there could be no such rule in time itself where else, 
 then, could it be but in the contents of time ? The 
 pivot of the schema relatively could no longer be placed 
 in the abstract moments of time, but possibly only in 
 the concrete contents of time, but generalised : a some- 
 thing so and so qualified of itself certainly in time 
 (like everything else !), but not, by one iota, from time. 
 Put shortly, on this understanding, what the schema of 
 causality (with which we have more particularly to do) 
 comes to is this : Something which, when it is, Some- 
 thing else always follows. In fact, Kant himself (iii. 6) 
 puts it iii this short way to Hume : " Because Something 
 is, Something else, also, must necessarily be." It is 
 repeated, indeed, only a little more fully, when he adds : 
 " Hume challenged reason to answer him with what 
 right she thinks to herself that there can be something 
 such that, when it is given, something else is also 
 
116 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 thereby necessarily given ; for that is what the notion of 
 a cause says." 
 
 The challenge, then, specially to Kant, which is our 
 affair at present, is to explain, as we may now name it, 
 How there can be Something such that, when it is, 
 Something else also necessarily is ; " for that is what the 
 notion of a cause says." 
 
 " That is what the notion of a cause says " ! But that 
 is precisely what, at this very moment, Kant says, the 
 schema of a cause says : are we to understand, then, that 
 the two are identical ? It is hardly possible to suppose 
 that Kant himself, if the question were put to him so, 
 would answer, Yes. 
 
 6. KANT'S CAUSALITY A MERE FIASCO 
 
 Still, we see that Kant unconsciously admits here 
 that his schema adds nothing to his category : that is, 
 his category must go at once into the facts, unmediated 
 into them by any tertium quid. 
 
 Now we have to confess that, in what Kant writes as 
 regards causality in his so never-ending pages of the Kritik 
 of Pure Reason to confine ourselves thus, and not to 
 mention reciprocity we seem to have nothing before us 
 but a veritable imbroglio of doubt and difficulty ; and 
 that we cannot help suspecting the cause of this to be, 
 confusion in the mind of Kant himself under an irresist- 
 ible dread of foredoomed failure precisely in that one 
 point in which to fail would bring mere ruin on the whole. 
 
 And surely it was natural that there should be some 
 such horrible sense of impending bale under the con- 
 sciousness or semi-consciousness that must have again 
 and a^ain haunted him, even as he involuntarily 
 
 O / 
 
 expanded and expanded what, as critically determinative, 
 ought, in its decision, to have been critically brief. But 
 
KANT'S CAUSALITY A MERE FIASCO 1 1 7 
 
 be that as it may, it is certainly not well possible, after 
 as we have just seen (in the quotation from ii. 123) 
 the clearness and emphasis with which Kant has 
 asserted the necessity of a tertium quid between the 
 category on the one hand and the things of special sense 
 on the other, not to wonder at the exceptional dispro- 
 portion of length with which he seems unable to cease 
 prosing, this way and that way, and so unsatisfactorily, 
 on causality. And these same few words, be it said, 
 just quoted (p. 112) from ii. 123, completely represent 
 the whole Kantian mechanism by which there is the 
 infusing of necessity and objectivity into the contingency 
 and subjectivity of sense under action on it of categories, 
 through schemata of time as time. That, then, these 
 schemata, we have to recognise as the tertium quid 
 concerned ; and it is precisely because of what concerns 
 that tertium quid of time that Kant fails to satisfy his 
 reader or himself ! Not but that in the end, as we 
 shall presently see, Kant regained, or seems to have 
 regained, complete equanimity, or at least assurance of 
 speech, by simple forge tfulness, it may be, or by a 
 somewhat intentionally blind confidence in time as still 
 adequate to the schematisation of causality after all, the 
 rather that he never failed to repeat to himself that what 
 we had in consciousness were not things in themselves, but 
 only the impressions of such, while it was not causality 
 alone, but the whole general problem, that he had in 
 hand. 
 
 7. CLOSER EXPLANATIONS SENSE 
 
 The general title to the Analogies of Experience runs : 
 " Experience is only possible through the conception of 
 a necessary connection of the perceptions of sense." In 
 the first edition of the Kritik the same' title was thus 
 different : All perceptions of sense, in regard to their 
 
118 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 existence, stand cl priori under rules of the determination 
 of their relation to one another in a time." The later 
 (not the latter) title, I doubt not, will appear the more 
 generally satisfactory, and will be denied by nobody : 
 the empirical objects around us certainly constitute a 
 law-ruled context of experience. The earlier title, duly 
 parsed, is really to the same effect : our sense-perceptions, 
 regarded as existences, stand, mutually relative, under 
 necessary rules. That " necessary " in the one title is 
 a priori in the other, need involve no substantial differ- 
 ence ; but we can ask what does that " in a time " 
 involve ? A time for substance and accident a time 
 for cause and effect a time for community : each of 
 these can only mean that the respective members of 
 relation are together in the same time, and, as may be 
 added, always. Any other sense, as it would seem, one 
 can extract not. One other remark, of a very general 
 application to Kant, is also suggested here. It concerns 
 the phrase " perceptions of sense," and was alluded to 
 a moment ago in reference to " impressions " as con- 
 trasted with " things-in-themselves." That phrase trans- 
 lated the word Walirnehmungen in the case of the one 
 title, and a different word, Erscluimmgen, in that of 
 the other; but the different words are not different 
 objects : both mean, with us, what " impressions " mean. 
 That is, perceptions of sense are not yet perceptions of 
 objects : perception, so far, is only in its subjective stage 
 as feeling, as impression ; it is not yet in its objective 
 stage of cognition, the cognition, or recognition, of things 
 as the formed actualities of experience. 
 
 Perceptions of sense, even as Wahrnehmungen, are 
 always to Kant Ersckeinungcn, appearances mere 
 appearances in sense. Sense, as sense, gives us impres- 
 sions only ; impressions, no doubt, from something that 
 impresses, but what that something is that impresses is 
 
CATEGORIES 119 
 
 wholly unknown to us utterly hidden from us by the 
 veil of its very impressions themselves. As already 
 said, we know the bite, but not what bites : the skin 
 knows the scratch ; it knows nothing of the thorn. So 
 to speak, my general space-and-time sheet within my 
 consciousness is butterflied all over with sensations, 
 impressions ; and it is the single object of my trans- 
 cendental philosophy, of my Kritik of Pure Eeason, to 
 disclose the machinery by which these mere appearances 
 within are converted into the actual things of perception 
 in experience without. This all through is funda- 
 mental with Kant. 
 
 And why it is fundamental with Kant that things 
 should, in the first place, be such mere appearances is 
 plain from this, that were they not so, were they things 
 in themselves and brought with them their own, so to 
 speak, determined and determining concrete, there would 
 be no room for my machinery, there would be no need 
 for my machinery : they would be there a machinery of 
 their own, to which my machinery could not apply. 
 " Things-in- Themselves " he says (ii. 755), "would 
 necessarily, and independently of any understanding that 
 might cognise them bring their own Gesetzmdssigkeit " 
 (their own statutoriness, or constitution on rules of their 
 own). Whereas, so long as they are mere sensations, 
 mere impressions, mere appearances, mere random butter- 
 flies on my white sheet within, from whence I know not, 
 they are in the clutch of my machinery within, into which 
 they are received, and which can thenceforth arrange 
 them as its own laws dictate (see here, too, iii. 53). 
 
 8. CATEGORIES CONSTRUCTION AND CONNECTION 
 
 Passing now, then, at once to the Second Analogy 
 (Causality), and remaining by it, we observe here, too, 
 
120 WHAT 7,S' THOUGHT? 
 
 a difference between the two editions. The second 
 edition calls " Principle of time-sequence according to 
 the law of causality," what was to the first, Principium 
 Generationis (" Grundsatz der Erzeugung ") ; and from 
 this we see very plainly that Kant must have had at 
 first veritably the dynamical (generative) import of a 
 cause very much before his mind, rather than its 
 merely precedent necessity ; which comes forward 
 more prominently later. In fact, in the Prolegomena 
 (iii. 72), of two years' later date, Erzeugung is not 
 only denied of this Analogy, but it is asserted to be 
 the characteristic of the contrasting mathematical 
 category, and so to be the express contradistinction 
 between them. The Analogy, he says there, does 
 not, like the other, concern Erzeugung, Inhalt, but 
 only Yerkniipfung not generation, content, but only 
 connection. Erzeugung, so used, however, can only 
 refer to individual perceptive construction, geometrical 
 construction. 
 
 In the general heading, too, there is this further 
 difference between the two editions. The first runs : 
 " All that happens (begins to be) presupposes something 
 on which it follows according to a rule " ; the second, 
 again, thus : " All changes happen according to the law 
 of the connection of cause and effect." 
 
 Of course, this is quite the reader's belief, too ; and 
 he may be stumbled at first, as though by a simple 
 setting down of the very thing he is waiting to see 
 proved. But we have to understand now that what 
 those special headings convey are the judgments, ultimate 
 or primary, which crown the provision of categories, 
 schemata, etc., for the possibility of experience, and so 
 complete the tale of all pure, a priori, objective cognitions. 
 As such, by way of proof, they admit of no more than 
 rationale and explanation in regard to subjective pre- 
 
THE SECOND ANALOGY 121 
 
 conditions. It is this we have to see as regards the 
 Second Analogy, Causality. 
 
 9. THE SECOND ANALOGY CATEGORIES 
 
 And here the passage with which Kant prefaces, in 
 his second edition, the exposition of his first, begins 
 pretty nearly by saying that the Erscheinungen, the 
 units of sensation (which constitute the first part of 
 the relative consciousness), cannot themselves connect, 
 and if or when connected, must have received connection 
 from elsewhere. That elsewhere, he then says (and it is 
 a recognition on Ms part of the state of the fact on which 
 we lay weight peculiarly as regards time if attempted to 
 be made a constituent of the special categories, or their 
 alleged schemata, of causality and reciprocity), cannot be 
 time itself ; it is not time that shall determine their order \ 
 What, then ? Why, he says, one or other must be 
 determined as first, and one or other must be determined 
 as second ; and that can be attained solely by the action 
 of a pure notion of understanding here the category of 
 cause and effect : only as so determined are the sensations 
 objects of experience. 
 
 That may be ; but where is the rationale ? Hume 
 says custom connects, and Kant says here at least 
 restrictively (i.e., without reference to schemata, etc.) 
 a category connects. So far, does not one feel that there 
 is something of intelligible suggestion in Hume, while 
 Kant even granting him to have made good a whole 
 table of a priori mental categories, of which causality 
 is one has only asserted, in no way reasoned out, any 
 superinduction of the category on to the sensations ? 
 
 After all that he has argued about the necessity of a 
 tertium quid to mediate between notion of understanding 
 (category) and impression of sense, are we to find Kant 
 
122 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 here, possibly elsewhere, and, so far at least, self-con- 
 fessedly, as it would seem, conducting the category into 
 the empirical facts, nakedly at once ? The very next 
 paragraph, indeed, let it be as long as it may, and let it 
 say what it may literally, does it come to anything 
 more than this, that there is the apprehension of passive 
 sense-units, and that only a category can make a one 
 object of them ? Kant reasons on the whole here, and 
 generally elsewhere, that, sensations being no more than 
 contingent impressions subjectively within, they can 
 receive what makes perceived objects of them only from 
 within, too ! As though his reader were necessarily as 
 Kant himself, and quite at his wit's end to get all these 
 poor, naked, shivering wretches of sensation clothed ! 
 And as though only a category from the inside of us 
 could do that ! It is so unmistakably he speaks in a 
 neighbouring paragraph (p. 165): 
 
 " Take it that, before an occurrence, nothing precede on which it 
 would necessarily follow according to a rule, then all sequence of 
 perception were quite in apprehension alone, i.e. merely subjective 
 we should, in such wise, have only a play of impressions " and 
 so more fully further. 
 
 That, plainly, is the reasoning of a man who has taken 
 a mere assumption of his own as a recognised, allowed, 
 and undoubted fact ! 
 
 " But now," says Kant, " let us proceed to business 
 nun lasst uns zu unserer Aufgabe fortgehen ! " and then 
 we have a paragraph that alters the whole position, for 
 it allows or, for the nonce, we decide that it seems to 
 allow the sense-units to bring with them their own 
 order, at least by inference from the eventual concrete 
 state of the case : 
 
 " I see, for example," he says, " a ship driving down stream. My 
 perception of its position down follows my perception of its position 
 up, and it is impossible that, in the apprehension of these appear- 
 ances, the ship should first be seen down stream and then again 
 
THE SECOND ANALOGY 123 
 
 up. The order in the sequence of perceptions in apprehension is 
 here, therefore, fixed, and to this order these perceptions are bound. 
 In the previous example of a house, my perceptions in the appre- 
 hension of it could begin with the top and end with the bottom, or, 
 equally well also, begin here and end there. They might, for that 
 matter, quite as well also follow the complex of the empirical 
 object from right to left, or, again, from left to right. In the series 
 of these perceptions, then, there was no fixed order no order which 
 necessarily prescribed where, in the apprehension, I should make 
 my beginning, in order to convert its complex into the due empirical 
 synthesis. Such necessity of rule, however, is always present in any 
 case of an event [as that of the ship], and the order of the consecutive 
 perceptions (in the apprehension of the sensible facts) is thereby 
 rendered necessary." 
 
 He may be speaking in the above from an objective 
 or from a subjective point of view ; that is so far, after 
 all, indifferent, considering what we have to hear next : 
 
 " I shall therefore, in this case, necessarily derive the subjective 
 consequence of the apprehension from the objective consequence ill the 
 event, because the former, for the rest, is quite undetermined, and 
 distinguishes no affection from the other. Alone it proves nothing 
 of the connection of the affections (the units of complex) in the 
 object, for it is quite indifferent (beliebig). This connection will 
 consist, therefore, in the order of the units of affection, according to 
 which order the apprehension of the one (that happens) follows on 
 that of the other (that precedes) on a rule. Only thereby can I be 
 warranted to say of the event itself, and not merely of my appre- 
 hension : that there is a consequence to be found in that former, 
 which signifies as much as that I cannot otherwise place the appre- 
 hension than precisely in that sequence." 
 
 I cannot blame myself for the translation here. It 
 certainly does not convey a bit more lamely than the 
 original that which it is intended to convey. Elsewhere 
 (Text- Book to Kant, 299 and 502) I interpret the first 
 words of the same passage thus : " In this case, therefore, 
 it is from the objective suite of the facts that I must infer 
 the subjective suite in apprehension ; for this latter suite 
 (of mere units in sense) is, as such, quite undetermined." 
 Evidently, in either rendering I take the meaning to be 
 
124 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 that every full - formed case of causality must, as a 
 consciousness, have had first the mere constituent 
 sensations, and in such 'wise that on their rule the 
 category acted. I do not know that the rest of the 
 passage will be easily found to be in consistency with 
 this interpretation ; and I do not know that many 
 readers will be well satisfied with the general ex- 
 position all about here, involving, as it does, particular 
 reference to most essential details of the whole 
 theory. There is, to call it so, a ragged prolixity for 
 the most part present, which, let its source be, or let 
 it not be, some confusion in the mind of Kant, is, at 
 least, not ill adapted to confuse others. And yet, Kant 
 has just said " but now, fairly to take up the problem 
 before us (nun lasst uns zu unserer Aufgabe fortgehen) " I 
 
 But, be all as it may, I hold Kant's ruling on the 
 point immediately concerned to be precisely as I put 
 it. It seems somewhat of an inversion to be asked to 
 derive what was first, the crude embryo, from what 
 was last, the finished tree. Nevertheless, to proceed so 
 brings out perfectly well the state of the case. Such 
 and such a form of the end necessarily implies such and 
 such a form of the beginning. The suite of the notions 
 guides to the suite of the sensations ; and the latter 
 must have been what was first namely, certain aware- 
 nesses of sense, and in a certain order. But that 
 amounts to Kant's first " rule," the rule in sense, the 
 rule subjective or, in a word, that amounts to the state 
 of the sensory which is precedent to, and wholly deter- 
 minative of, the state of the intellect and the rule of the 
 intellect, the state categorical and the rule categorical. 
 
 But why is not sense enough, where is the necessity 
 of a category at all ? 
 
 To this we have Kant's own answer in the above. 
 " I derive," he says, " the subjective suite (Folge) of 
 
"THE PROLEGOMENA" 125 
 
 apprehension from the objective suite (Folge) of the 
 Erscheinungen, because the former, for the rest, is 
 quite undetermined, and distinguishes no Erscheinung 
 from the other." That the subjective suite of appre- 
 hension is quite undetermined that is the answer I 
 mean, and, no doubt, involves that, only subjective so far, 
 they require a category any further. But I fear that no 
 reader of the German will without assistance at all 
 succeed, within any reasonable limits of time or patience, 
 in making clear to himself what, in all these pages, Kant 
 exactly means by " Erscheinung," or what he exactly 
 means by his " Regel." Again and again this astonish- 
 ing Regel is surely spoken of as only subsequent to the 
 category, and again and again, no less surely if 
 occasionally for nothing but the common sense of the 
 position as precedent to it. In fact, I honestly believe 
 that any final determination of the difficulty would have 
 been quite impossible but for the Prolegomena \ 
 
 10. REFERENCE TO THE "PROLEGOMENA" 
 
 We quote at once, and in Kant's own italics and small 
 capitals : 
 
 " Empirical Judgments, so far as they have objective validity, are 
 JUDGMENTS OF EXPERIENCE ; those, again, which are only subjectively 
 valid, I name mere JUDGMENTS OF SENSE- PERCEPTION. The latter 
 require no pure notion of the understanding, but only the logical 
 connection of the sense-perceptions in a thinking subject. The 
 former, however, always require, in addition to the units presented 
 in sensuous perception, special notions d priori generated in the under- 
 standing, which just make it that the judgment of experience is 
 objectively valid. 
 
 "All our judgments are, in the first instance, simple judgments 
 of sense-perception ; they are valid merely for us, that is, for our 
 subject, and only afterwards do we give them a new reference, 
 namely, to an object. . . . That the room is warm, sugar sweet, 
 wormwood bitter, are judgments merely subjectively valid, I call 
 them judgments of sense-perception. . . . But before a judgment of 
 

 126 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 perception can become a judgment of experience, it is necessary that 
 the sense-perception should be subsumed under a category. . . . The 
 judgment of experience must, to the sense-perception, and its logical 
 connection in a subjective judgment (when, through comparison, it 
 has been made universal allgemein), add something which deter- 
 mines the synthetic judgment as necessarily and universally valid. 
 That something is the category. . . . When I say, experience tells 
 me something, I always mean only the sense-perception which lies 
 in the experience ; e.g., that, on the shining of the sun on a stone, 
 heat always (jederzeit) follows. . . . Logic gives me a priori the 
 form of antecedent and consequent. There may, possibly now, in 
 a perception of sense, be found a rule of relation which declares that 
 on a certain impression of sense another (but not conversely) con- 
 stantly (bestandiy) follows, and this is a case to make use of the 
 judgment of antecedent and consequent, and, for example, say, 
 when a body has been long enough in the sun it becomes warm " 
 (pp. 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67, 71, 75). 
 
 " I may have ever so often, and others may have ever so often, 
 perceived the circumstance [that a stone in the sun warms] : the 
 sense-perceptions, so far, find themselves only usually (gewohnlich) 
 so connected (62). Sense can only show us that often, and, when it 
 rises high, commonly (gemeiniglich), on one state of things another 
 follows " (80). 
 
 It is not difficult to see that the exposition above is 
 to this effect : that causality, that the usual inference in 
 daily life to the universality and necessity of connection 
 between the effect and its cause, rests on two rules : a 
 rule in the understanding (a category), and a rule in 
 sense. Of these two rules the latter, as in nature the 
 actual process is constituted, must precede the former. 
 And we remind here of how it was the exigency of the 
 facts that drove Kant to this rule in sense ; which, really, 
 is matter of positive statement as certainly in the 
 Kritik of Pure Reason, as here in the Prolegomena, though 
 most assuredly in the latter much more distinctly and 
 clearly, much less obscured or effaced by the perturbed 
 involution and disconcerted circumlocution of a suddenly 
 seen and unexpected difficulty. It was a prime necessity 
 
"THE PROLEGOMENA" 127 
 
 witli him that a tertium quid of pure time should mediate 
 the facts of sense into the notion, category, of the under- 
 standing. But, after he had gone on quite triumphantly 
 with pretty well all the other categories, he was all at 
 once pulled short up by those of causality and recipro- 
 city, in regard to which it was absolutely impossible that 
 there could be found anything in pure time that would 
 at all suit. And so lie was forced to feign a rule or 
 rules in the conceivable contents of time. I have said 
 that by strict generalisation it was possible to exhibit an 
 empirical fact, so that it might pass as to that extent a 
 priori that it was general, that it was a universal. By 
 no other way than by such generalisation could Kant 
 come to the rule in the sense-units that would be charac- 
 teristic of either causality or reciprocity. Kant, however, 
 even in declaring the rule, says no more of a possible 
 generalisation than that a logical comparison produces 
 the rule, and afterwards speaks of this rule as that it 
 may possibly be found in a perception of sense. One can 
 only speculate that he may have recoiled even from the 
 mere mention, so far, of a universal in sense, simply 
 because to grant a universal in sense would be to render 
 the use of any category idle would be, in fact, just to 
 stultify his whole enterprise in advance. He may have 
 thought, too, if I grant the possibility of universals even in 
 sense that shall be as good as anything a priori, that shall 
 be substantially a priori, how can I argue that time and 
 space are a priori ? Might not these, too, quite as reason- 
 ably be maintained to be similar empirical universals ? 
 
 In the quotation above, further, we see that it is ruled 
 that the judgments of sense -perception " require no pure 
 notion of the understanding, but only the logical connec- 
 tion of the sense-perceptions in a thinking subject." This 
 gives to think at once, What can this logical element be, 
 that is not to have anything to do with any notion of 
 
128 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 the understanding, and that is still involved in units of 
 sense alone ! Presently, however, we are informed that 
 it is a " logical connection in a subjective judgment 
 when, through comparison, it has been made allgemein 
 (universal)." And then we are directly further informed 
 that the result of this logical connection, this logical 
 comparison, and this logical universality is the rule, the 
 first rule, the rule in sense, the " rule of relation, which 
 declares that on a certain impression of sense another 
 (but not conversely) constantly follows, in which case I 
 have reason to apply the judgment of antecedent and 
 consequent, and, for example, say, when a body has been 
 long enough in the sun it becomes warm." From this it 
 is evident that the judgment of antecedent and conse- 
 quent is the second rule, the second rule that follows the 
 first that is, the second rule depends on the first ; the 
 second rule would act only after the first acted. The 
 second rule would not act at all unless it had a reason 
 to act. The relation implied is given as logical ; it is 
 even by logical comparison given as universal undeni- 
 ably a logical universal therefore. Here, then, there is at 
 once, in the bare situation, a relation of antecedent and 
 consequent. Nay, more ! Here there is at once, in the 
 bare situation, doubly a relation of antecedent and conse- 
 quent ! Even in sense there are two units given, and 
 these two units are given actually given in no other 
 relation than in that of antecedent and consequent. The 
 antecedent always determines the consequent ; and the 
 consequent is always determined by the antecedent. 
 Now, with sense alone, or in the first stage or fact of the 
 situation, it is given that one unit must precede and the 
 other must follow. That must be so, or else there would 
 be an utter absence of the very thing that was wanted, 
 the sine qua non, the single essential, the indispensable 
 necessity of the case the logicality and universality of 
 
A CATEGORY NOT REQUIRED 129 
 
 a connection in sense that determined the logicality 
 and universality of a connection in understanding 
 (through a category). The first unit, therefore, is the 
 necessary and universal, the apodictic antecedent of the 
 second unit, which is the necessary and universal, the 
 apodictic consequent. It is in vain to say no : Units of 
 mere sense in such mutual relation the one to the other 
 that is the absolutely postulated premiss and prim of all. 
 
 11. A CATEGORY NOT EEQUIRED 
 
 Here, then, we have already in sense all that is 
 wanted : what need is there of a category at all ? The 
 first rule, the first judgment namely, that " logical con- 
 nection of the sense-perceptions in a thinking subject " is 
 itself the judgment, and the whole judgment, of causality. 
 
 Concurrent expressions of Kant's may, for opposition, 
 be taken advantage of. And, in all fairness, I really 
 believe myself to have quoted every one of these, and in 
 an exact rendering of Kant's own words. As against 
 the universality and apodictic necessity which we have 
 represented to be involved and implied in the relation or 
 connection of the units even when confined to sense, it 
 may be said that Kant regards this connection or relation 
 not by any means as universally, or necessarily, or apo- 
 dictically, but as only usually, or at most commonly, 
 occurrent. That is true he does say that ; but, again, 
 .he also represents it as "always" occurrent, as "con- 
 stantly " occurrent, as " ly a rule " occurrent ; which 
 rule is the rule of a connection susceptible of being 
 made, by " comparison," " universal" and " logically " so. 
 He also states it as a condition or reason for the expres- 
 sion " rule" as for thosje in addition of " always " and 
 " constantly" that the connection of the mere sense-units 
 should have been " long enough" If the connection 
 9 
 
130 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 has been long enough, then surely all that about " rule," 
 and " always," and " constantly," and " universality " 
 follows, and cannot but follow ! Surely all that is 
 meant ! or what else can be meant ? Surely it is that, 
 and that only, which " determines the synthetic judg- 
 ment " with its further " necessary and universal val- 
 idity " which, as I say, in such circumstances, is a 
 staring surplusage ! (Of course, that there should be the 
 possibility of a rule in mere contingency at all that is 
 Kant's affair !) 
 
 The only possible conclusion is that that " usually " 
 and " commonly," against that " always " and " con- 
 stantly," etc., is but a window into the confusion, and 
 anxiety, and Quen dirai, still present in the mind of 
 Kant, here in the Prolegomena, as much as two years 
 later than the Kritik of Pure Reason. Surely it has 
 come veritably to a Qu'en dirai what, then, am I to 
 say ? in the mind of Kant ! 
 
 But there is the more than this in the situation already 
 spoken of the duplicity, namely. There are in it the two 
 stages ; besides the one in which, as we have just seen, 
 there is question only of the units of sense in the appre- 
 hension of sense, there is the other of the category, 
 which, too, has been partly seen already. Now, if we 
 can prove in this first stage the presence at once, full- 
 fledged, of a relation of antecedent and consequent, there 
 is nothing to hinder us from equally proving the same 
 thing of the second stage. That is the stage where on 
 what concerns the sensation there follows all that con- 
 cerns the notion. The first stage is the antecedent to 
 the second, and the second is the consequent to the first. 
 The first rule is the necessary and universal, the apodictic 
 antecedent of the second rule ; which is the necessary 
 and universal, the apodictic consequent of the first rule. 
 Now, the antecedent always determines the consequent ; 
 
A CATEGORY NOT REQUIRED 131 
 
 and the consequent is always determined by the ante- 
 cedent. It follows from this, then, that the first stage, 
 the stage of sensation, which is given as determinative of 
 the second stage, the stage of notion or category, is even 
 thereby given as antecedent, at the same time that the 
 second stage, the stage of notion, is not less given as 
 consequent. That must be so, or else there would be 
 wanting simply the relation itself that alone constitutes 
 the single question in hand. 
 
 Thus, then, whether we look to the first stage or 
 whether we look to the second, there must be, for the 
 determination of nexus, a necessary antecedent which is 
 wholly of sense. In the first stage a sense-unit neces- 
 sarily determines another sense-unit ; and in the second 
 stage the necessity that is concerned in it depends 
 on a relation of sense ; and it is that relation of sense 
 that is determinative of the relation of the understand- 
 ing, the relation of the notion, the relation of the category. 
 
 Of course, Kant will have the first stage to hold only of 
 sense, and consequently, therefore, to be only contingent 
 and subjective, and never possibly necessary and objective 
 unless through a category ; but even in asserting this to 
 be the state of the case, he is involuntarily compelled 
 latently to admit what he overtly denies. When he 
 says (iii. 75), " but it is possible that there gets found in 
 the perception a rule of relation," etc. ; or again (ii. 186), 
 " but so soon as I perceive or assume that there is in the 
 sequent a reference to the precedent from which it 
 follows on a rule," etc. why, then, in both cases he 
 virtually acknowledges that the first stage is a necessary 
 and indispensable precursor of the second. Nay, more 
 than that, if the first stage or judgment be in itself 
 contingent, it certainly follows that the second stage or 
 judgment, as founding on the first, must share its quality, 
 and convey no authority that is not contingent likewise. 
 
132 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Kant admits, too, the necessity of each category being 
 supplied with a sense-cue of its own. Things, he says 
 (iii. 67), are brought under categories "according to the 
 diverse form of their perception " ; and we read again 
 (iii. 66), that the category determines the perception 
 " according to one form of the judgment rather than 
 another"; and this is only repeated when (iii. 63) it is 
 said that the categories act " according to certain general 
 conditions of the perception." It is evident, indeed, that 
 this must be so, or how should it be possible for a cate- 
 gory to act at all to act only in its own place and at 
 its own time without confusion of categories, and without 
 the possible interference of the one with the other. And 
 that, too, only suggests another wonder, this : how is it 
 possible that only twelve categories can serve without 
 confusion all these innumerable sensations ? If cate- 
 gories are such indispensable necessities of cognition- 
 necessities without which perception itself, w r hat we call 
 perception, would be impossible must not the very 
 number of them follow in some way, and be accordant in 
 some way, to the number of sensations ? Twelve cate- 
 gories, but twelve " one halfpenny worth of bread to 
 all that intolerable deal of sack ! " True, there is a time 
 when Kant speaks of derivatives from the twelve, with a 
 special name or two also ; but will, on his part, any 
 actual naming, or will any possible imagining, ever at all 
 equate the bread to the sack ? And so one wonders 
 what would become of any stray sense-units that might 
 chance to have no categories to meet them poor 
 wandered and forlornly wandering orphans with nobody 
 to take them home ! As one can see, there is at least 
 no guarantee against such a mishap. 
 
 Of course, for all difficulties, or in all difficulties, Kant 
 can, and always does, fall back on this, that sense is only 
 sense, sensations are only sensations, impressions are only 
 
CATEGORIES IN TWO CLASSES 133 
 
 impressions, Erscheinungen are only Erscheinungen, and 
 that with such alone we have only a " Spiel der Vor- 
 stellungen," only " a play of the apprehensions," in regard 
 to which " I cannot say : that in the consciousness two 
 states follow one another, but only : that one apprehension 
 follows another, which is merely something Subjective, and 
 determines no object " (ii. 165). But is that sufficient ? 
 Surely the impression of the stone and the impression of 
 the sunlight are two states of consciousness. Still sub- 
 jective, I grant. But what, then ? Is not the one 
 established as always preceding, and the other as con- 
 stantly following, and this, in both, even by no less a 
 force than the operation of a rule a rule, too, that, let 
 it be as subjective as you will, is still an absolute neces- 
 sity, if there is to be any talk at all of a rule objective, 
 a rule for the admission of a category ; which, again, say 
 what you like of it, is but a consequent a consequent, too, 
 that must of necessity share the very virtue of its ante- 
 cedent; for it is evident that that antecedent itself must be 
 either necessary or contingent, and if it is contingent, then, 
 as already said, its consequent must be contingent also. 
 
 12. CATEGORIES IN Two CLASSES 
 
 And the strange thing is that Kant himself as is not 
 difficult to show was perfectly aware of what all this 
 comes to : take, for instance, his division of his categories 
 into two classes, one mathematical and the other 
 dynamical. And this occurs even in his first edition 
 as see under the section that is headed " Systematic Idea 
 of all the Synthetic Ground-Propositions " (which, by the 
 bye, suggested, six years later, the sec. 1 1 of his second 
 edition !). If Kant, indeed, ever sought an expedient 
 whereby to turn the flank of his difficulties here, then 
 his first step must have been this division of the cate- 
 
134 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 gories into halves : there shall be a half " Mathematical," 
 and there shall be a half " Dynamical" Mathematical 
 suggests, and is no doubt suggested by, the usual figura- 
 tion in space so familiar to us in geometry. Dynamical, 
 in its mere etymological meaning, refers to action, and 
 explains itself. Accordingly, we can accept at once 
 Mathematical for categories of Quantity and Quality, and, 
 with as little difficulty, Dynamical for such categories as 
 Causality and Reciprocity. We may even smile to our- 
 selves in passing, with the thought of Kant's real reason 
 for the step. We have specially to see this, however 
 namely, how he will differentiate, in position and validity, 
 the latter categories from the former ones. The differ- 
 ence in either respect is a very tell-tale one. We are to 
 understand at once, for example, that while the mathe- 
 matical categories are " intuitive," " constitutive," " apo- 
 dictic," the dynamical ones are only " discursive," " regu- 
 lative," and even " contingent." Such a difference as this 
 strikes us at once as ominous for the champion Kant 
 with the glove of Hume in his hand. How, " in all the 
 world," will he be able to replace the subjective custom 
 of Hume by an objective necessity of his own, if his 
 expedient for the purpose is acknowledged at once to be 
 neither intuitive nor constitutive, no, only regulative 
 and, above all contingent ? Why, if causality is only 
 to be contingent, what is the use of the whole huge, 
 extraordinary, and extraordinarily artificial structure ? 
 Is Kant to profess to demonstrate necessity, and to be 
 allowed success, when his own result he can himself only 
 name contingency ? So far for the validity ; and, while 
 referring for full light on the whole matter to all the 
 relative sections of the Kritik of Pure Reason, we may 
 quote from p. 140 to this effect : 
 
 " The mathematical categories will address their syntliesis to the 
 perception [as it were, the visible shape], the latter to the relative 
 
CATEGORIES IN TWO CLASSES 135 
 
 existence [the simple connections], of objects of sense. The d priori 
 conditions of perception are, in regard of a possible experience, out 
 and out necessary ; while those, again, of the relative existence of the 
 objects of a possible empirical perception are in themselves only 
 contingent. Hence the propositions that arise in the mathematical 
 application will be unconditionally necessary, that is, apodictic ; 
 while those that are of dynamical name will bring with them the 
 character, indeed, of an a priori necessity, but only under the con- 
 dition of the empirical thinking that shall be found in an experience 
 of actual facts of sense. These latter, then, will exhibit this char- 
 acter only mediately and indirectly ; and, consequently (without 
 prejudice to the general certainty introduced by them into experi- 
 ence), they will not possess the same immediate evidence which is 
 proper and peculiar to the others. But this will come better to be 
 judged of at the conclusion of this System of Grundsiitze." (The 
 Text-Book to Kant, with its Translation and Commentary, may 
 be profitably consulted here.) 
 
 This quotation will probably suffice as concerns the 
 invalidity of Kant's dynamical categories but " without 
 prejudice to" their effective validity all the same ! 
 Here, too, of what we mean by position in regard of 
 these categories an edge is shown. This edge is of what 
 concerns an " empirical thinking " which is conceived to 
 take place in some experience of actual facts. Now, by 
 this he means his first " Regel " a rule, which is found 
 to present itself in certain ordinary experiences. This 
 " Kegel," as only subjective and so far contingent when 
 presentant in sense, he will, by application of a category, 
 raise at once into necessity and objectivity by the 
 looking-on intellect which receives (or perceives) it. 
 
 But as concerns position. 
 
 In our quotation what is referent is the " empirical 
 thinking," the " empirical thinking " of some certain 
 actual empirical fact which issues in a recognition of a 
 complete failure on the part of the categories of relation 
 (at least of the two of them, causality and , reciprocity) to 
 find for themselves, as required, and even alleged ! any 
 
136 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 schema in the abstract moments of pure time, and of 
 their consequent compulsory resort as it were, on 
 second thoughts to the contents of time. This is the 
 difference of position between the two classes of categories. 
 While both are said to have their schemata in time, and 
 that a pure time ; only in the case of one of them is 
 there any such position, while in that of the other there 
 is none such. Only in empirical rules of the ordinary 
 events in time is there any possibility of finding a schema 
 to suit, whether for the exigencies of causality or for 
 those of reciprocity. Nay, far from taking shame or 
 guilt to himself in such a mess, Kant, even as he keeps 
 company with the difficulty (so far as not yet slurred 
 out of sight by the phrase " without prejudice," etc.), 
 waxes bolder and bolder in his recognition of, and com- 
 placency with, it. As something quite remarkable (noch 
 merkwiirdiger), he notes in his second edition (ii. 778), 
 that, for realisation of the categories, even " external per- 
 ceptions " are necessities say motion for cause, and 
 actual conditions in space for reciprocity. And yet, if 
 he grasps so with his left hand, his right still grasps time 
 still grasps, for every category, time ! 
 
 " One sees from all this that the schema of each category 
 contains and makes manifest e.g., that of Quantity, the genesis 
 (synthesis) of Time itself in the successive apprehension of an 
 object ; that of Quality, the synthesis of sensation (sense-perception) 
 with the concept of Time, or the filling of Time ; that of Kelation, 
 the relativity of the sense-perceptions mutually at all times (i.e. 
 according to a rule of the determination cf Time) ; finally, that of 
 Modality and its categories, Time itself as the correlate of the 
 determination of an object, whether and how it belongs to Time. 
 The schemata are therefore nothing but Time-determinations a priori 
 on rules ; and these relate, in the order of the categories, to the Time- 
 series, the Time-content, the Time-order, finally the Time-iinpkx, in 
 regard of all possible objects " (ii. 128). 
 
 These, then, are the three analogies of experience. They are 
 nothing but principles of determination in regard to the existence of 
 
CATEGORIES IN TWO CLASSES 137 
 
 objects in Time, of which they follow the three modi : the relation to 
 Time itself as a magnitude (the magnitude of existence, i.e. duration); 
 the relation tw Time as a series (succession); and lastly, the relation 
 o/Time as a sum of all actual existence (the simultaneity of things). 
 This unity of Time-determination is wholly dynamical ; i.e. Time is 
 not regarded as something in which experience of the fact directly 
 determines for each existence its own place, which is impossible, 
 inasmuch as absolute time is no object of the perception of sense, 
 whereby things might, as it were, be kept together " (ii. 181). 
 
 There is surely in these sentences the formal, deliberate, 
 and perfectly conscious assertion of Time as Time forming, 
 composing, or being an actual element, a basal element, 
 almost an exclusive element, in the indispensable schemata 
 which must of necessity be within call to mediate the objec- 
 tivity of understanding, through the categories, into the 
 subjectivity of sense ; and thus convert the flies of sensa- 
 tion, which are really only within me, as though, too, in a 
 spectral Time and Space, which are really also only within 
 me and thus convert, I say, my own mere flies of 
 sensation within into all those infinite awful, astounding, 
 and appalling interests and objects of the whole vast and 
 immeasurable universe without. When we think, con- 
 sequently, say, particularly of the categories of causality 
 and reciprocity as not intuitive but only discursive, as 
 not necessary but only contingent, as not constitutive 
 but only regulative, etc. etc. nay more, and a great 
 deal more, when we think of all possible causalities and 
 all possible reciprocities as having absolutely no more to 
 do with time than this page you look at or that chair you 
 sit on that they are in time, that is, only as the page 
 is, and as the chair is, and as everything else is when 
 we think of them, nevertheless, as being actually named 
 essentially dependent on constitutive modi of Time, is it 
 to be wondered at, I say, that we should think further 
 also if you will kindly pardon one expression to escape 
 a worse as it were, of the cheek of Kant in assertion 
 
138 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and reassertion of the very house which he himself, in so 
 many words, has so effectually undermined and removed ? 
 There is, of course, a whole world else to speak of, but it 
 is he himself has told us (ii. 769) that "Time cannot 
 itself be perceived : in such wise, namely, that, in its 
 reference, as it were empirically, what precedes and 
 what succeeds may be determined in the object " (and 
 that means simply that Time does not itself, or of itself, 
 empirically in any way act on objects). Nay, as we see, 
 even this is the literal deliverance of our very last quota- 
 tion in its very last sentence. 
 
 Now, what can be the reason of this stubbornness of 
 persistence in the insistence on the reality of relations 
 which he himself has in so many words declared void, 
 declared null ? What but the simple pedantry of the 
 innocent-minded professor, who, chalk in hand, regards, 
 with infinite self-complacency, on the blackboard before 
 him, that so perfect professional tree of antithetically 
 exhaustive DISTINCTIONS : Time-smes, Time-content, Time- 
 order, Time-implex] and again, Time to, Time in, Time of I 
 
 13. A MOST CRITICAL POINT DOUBLES IN SENSE 
 
 We come now to a point of very special mark, which 
 Kant himself faced, indeed, but faced only, all unwittingly, 
 to turn his back on it, without a thought of what lay in 
 it. It is a point, nevertheless, which even alone might 
 suffice, as is now to be shown, to prove crucially 
 determinative in regard to the whole question which is 
 at present in issue : 
 
 " The object remains in itself always unknown ; but if the con- 
 nection of the impressions, v which are given by it to our senses, is 
 determined as universally valid, then is the object also determined 
 by this relation, and the judgment is an objective one. 
 
 " We will illustrate this : that the room is warm, sugar sweet, 
 
CRITICAL POINT DOUBLES IN SENSE 139 
 
 and wormwood bitter are judgments merely subjectively valid. I 
 do not require that I, or that everybody else as I, should always 
 find it so ; as judgments, they express only a relation of two 
 sensations to the same subject, namely, me myself, and that, too, 
 only in my sensational state for the moment, and are not to be held 
 valid for the object. These I name judgments of impression or appre- 
 hension. Quite otherwise is it situated with a judgment of experi- 
 ence. What experience in certain circumstances teaches me, it must 
 always teach me and as well everybody else, and its validity is not 
 limited to the subject or his state at the time. Therefore I pro- 
 nounce all such judgments objective. For example, if I say the air is 
 elastic, that is, in the first instance, only a judgment of impression : 
 so far I only refer two feelings in my senses, the one to the other. 
 If I desire it to be a judgment of experience, then I require this 
 relation to stand under a condition which makes it universally valid. 
 I desire, therefore, that I, and everybody else, shall always, in the 
 same circumstances, of necessity, so connect the impressions" (iii. 59). 
 " I willingly admit that the above examples (the room, sugar, 
 wormwood) do not represent such impression-judgments as could 
 ever become experience-judgments, even if there were the addition to 
 them of a notion (a category), because they refer themselves merely 
 to feeling, which everybody acknowledges to be merely subjective, 
 and which, therefore, can never be ascribed to the object, and so 
 then also can never be objective. I only wanted (in their case) for the 
 moment to give an example of a judgment that is merely subjective, 
 and without claim to apodictic validity, and thereby objectivity of 
 reference. An example of the impression-judgments ivhich, through 
 addition of a notion, do become experience-judgments (the elasticity 
 of the air, namely), follows " (note to the above on iii. 59). 
 
 Remarking in passing that the first words here define 
 an object, as to Kant, to be, not any alien thing (thing-in- 
 itself) elsewhere, but only categorised sense-impressions 
 (Erscheiimngen) of our own, I desire to call all attention 
 to the examples given by Kant of two contra-opposed 
 sense-impressions, both subjective, but the one capable of 
 becoming objective, while the other, incapable of becom- 
 ing objective, must always remain subjective. Warmth, 
 sweetness, bitterness, are impressions, but they are 
 wholly subjective, and so subjective that they are quite 
 
140 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 incapable of being made objective even by any category. 
 What is meant by the elasticity of the air, again, and 
 Kant is not sufficiently illustrative in that regard, but 
 say, out of many possible illustrations, that in a blown 
 bladder we feel the air to yield to pressure, but to 
 recoil to its remission, is a something that depends on two 
 impressions. These impressions are quite in the same 
 way subjective as the others are, but still, altogether 
 unlike these, they are capable of being made objective. In 
 consequence of the reception of a category, the air (for 
 example) is said to be objectively elastic. 
 
 Kant, not quite satisfied with his illustration so far, 
 adds in a note : 
 
 "As an easier example to understand, take this. When the sun 
 shines on a stone it becomes warm. This judgment is a mere 
 impression's judgment, and contains no necessity, I may luive 
 felt this ever so often, and others may have felt it ever so often, too : 
 the feelings find themselves only usually so connected. But if I 
 say the sun warms the stone, then there conies further to be added 
 to the feeling the category of cause, which, with the idea of the 
 sunshine, necessarily connects that of the warmth, and the synthetic 
 judgment becomes necessarily and universally, consequently object- 
 ively transformed from a mere feeling into an experience" (iii. 62). 
 
 Kant perfectly well understands precisely what is the 
 distinctive difference between these two classes of sub- 
 jective propositions ; but it is evident that it has never 
 once struck him why it is that there is the susceptibility 
 of a category in the one case and not in the other. Just 
 to ask, however, is at once to see, the reason. We have 
 only singles for the warm, the sweet, the bitter ; but for 
 the air and the stone we have doubles. Singles, how- 
 ever, even as singles, do not properly admit of a 
 judgment : to judge is to decide at least one thing of 
 another. A judgment implies comparison ; and com- 
 parison, for its part, again, implies plurality. But the 
 award of a judgment, what a judgment pronounces, is 
 
CRITICAL POINT DOUBLES IN SENSE 141 
 
 always, in point of place, just a category. But another 
 point, and the essential point, is this. The plurality, under 
 comparison, as in the cases of the air and the stone, is 
 already a connected plurality : it consists in a concrete 
 unity; it does not consist of abstract units. Abstract 
 units are independent units, isolated, each by itself : as 
 such, relation, intrinsic relation, there is none between 
 them. But in a concrete unity there already is relation : 
 concretion means by itself simply a relation to say so 
 done ; and just to name, say, speak, a relation done is to 
 judge. Concretion is but judgment in deed ; judgment 
 is but concretion in word. But it is concretion in deed 
 that constitutes. 
 
 Now, in what in the two cases before us (air and stone) 
 does the concretion consist ? In both the concretion 
 consists in a change. A change is a natural concretion ; 
 and a natural concretion is already a natural judgment, 
 and, as said, constitutes such. That is, if we turn to the 
 examples in hand, the judgment concerned is not in me, 
 it is not in that sense subjective, it is a judgment 
 already in the impressions themselves, already in the 
 Erscheinungeii themselves, and let them be Erscheinungen 
 themselves, even so they are still things, for Erschein- 
 ungen are all the things that a Kantian can have. " How 
 is it," says Hume, according 'to Kant (iii. 30), " that when 
 a notion is given me, I can go beyond it, and connect 
 another with it ? " But if it is possible to name this 
 a difficulty in regard to the notion A and the notion B, 
 it is equally possible to speak of the same difficulty in 
 regard of the sensation a and the sensation &. Arid, as 
 we see, no such difficulty exists ! The a and ~b as impres- 
 sions a as yielding air, b as recoiling air ; a as sunshine, 
 & as a stone are not abstract, isolated, independent 
 units : they come in connection, they come in a relation, 
 they come in a judgment. And what else does Kant 
 
142 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 himself say ? What does all that come to that is said 
 about a body " when it has been long enough in the 
 sun," " as I have ever so often, or others ever so often, 
 may have seen," " usually," " commonly," " constantly," 
 " always," and " on a rule," and through " logical com- 
 parison," becoming " warm " : what does all that come 
 to, even for Kant, but a judgment, and a judgment that, 
 even for him, is in no want of a category ? He, indeed, 
 calls it subjective, but it is no more subjective at first 
 than it is subjective at last. It is not, even at first, as 
 bitterness and sweetness are, only in me : it is in the 
 objects, call them impressions as you will, Erscheinungeu 
 as you will : it is in them, I say, and not in me ; and as 
 in them, it is objective, and as not in me, not subjective. 
 Had Kant but made himself aware of the differentia, the 
 distinctive difference between the two classes of judgments 
 which were both to him subjective ! 
 
 14. KANT ON HUME 
 
 We shall return to this; but let us just see now what 
 Kant himself, of his own self, says directly, and in regard, 
 specially and distinctively, to the one problem as it is 
 in Hume : 
 
 " Here is now the place," lie says (iii. 73), "for a definitive removal 
 of the difficulty of Hume. He maintained rightly enough, that 
 we in no wise see through reason the possibility of causality, i.e. of 
 the relation of the existence of one thing to the existence of some- 
 thing else as necessarily implied. . . . Nevertheless, I am far from 
 regarding these notions [the categories] as merely taken from 
 experience, or the necessity they seem to bring as but imputative, 
 and a false show which length of custom plays on us ; I have suffi- 
 ciently made good rather that they, and the axioms from them, 
 stand a priori fast before all experience, and have their undoubted 
 objective truth, but, still, only in regard of experience. . . . 
 Indeed, we a priori know that unless we regard the idea of an object 
 as determined in respect of one or other of these notions, we could 
 
KANT ON HUME 143 
 
 have no knowledge at all which would objectively apply, and it it 
 were a thing-in-itself we thought of, then there were possible not one 
 single character to enable us to perceive the determination of it by 
 the one notion or the other, say substance, or cause, etc. But the 
 question is not of things in themselves, but of things in the 
 experience of sense ; and then it is clear that I perfectly recognise 
 not only the possibility, but the necessity to subsume all impres- 
 sions (Erscheiiiungen) under these notions, i.e. to apply them as 
 principles of the possibility of experience." 
 
 The whole reach of the general Theoretical (not yet 
 Practical or ^Esthetic) scheme of Kant is so clearly and 
 summarily put in the above that its citation was irresist- 
 ible. Causal necessity, a mere customary association to 
 the analysis of Hume, possesses for Kant an a priori 
 rationale in a schema and a category of an apodictic 
 validity. It is the absolutely necessary precondition, 
 however, of the very possibility of this a priori rationale 
 that all the objects or things which we suppose ourselves 
 to perceive and know are not the objects or things that 
 really act on us, but only the effects or impressions of 
 that, their action on us. Indeed, it is just this peculiar 
 and real nature of objects or things which is the very 
 occasion of the rationale in question ; or it is the fact of 
 all objects or things being but, subjectively, effects on us, 
 or appearances to us, or inherences in us, that constitutes 
 the single necessity for said a priori rationale and said 
 a priori apparatus. 1 
 
 1 The date of Hobbes's dedication in his Tripos is "May 9, 
 1640." From p. 5 there we extract this : " Image or colour is but 
 an apparition unto us of the -motion which the object worketh in 
 the brain. As in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from the 
 other senses, the subject of their inherence is not the object, but the 
 sentient" That is sixty-nine years before Berkeley, and more than 
 twice as many before Kant, and it is not a doctrine peculiar to them. 
 We still have it, or something like it, in such sensationists as 
 Mill, Bain, Lewes, to leave out all reference to idealism, ancient or 
 modern. 
 
144 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 To criticise Kant so far, then, it is obviously necessary 
 for us fully to consider : (1) his doctrine of the categories ; 
 (2) his doctrine of objects ; and (3) his doctrine of ex- 
 perience. So much presently. In the meantime we 
 have to finish with Kant on Hume, as follows (75) : 
 
 " In order to make an attempt at Hume's problematical notion 
 (this his crux metaphysicoruni), namely, the notion of cause, there 
 is, firstly, a priori given me, in Logic, the form of a conditioned 
 judgment as such, namely, to apply a given cognition as ground, 
 and another as consequent. It is then possible that there is found 
 in a perception of sense a rule which says : that on a certain 
 impression another (though not conversely) constantly follows, and 
 this is a case for me to apply the hypothetical judgment, and say, 
 e.g., when a body is long enough shone upon by the sun it becomes 
 warm. Here now there is, of course, not yet a necessity of con- 
 nection, not yet a notion of cause. But I go on and say : if the 
 above proposition, which is merely a subjective connection of im- 
 pressions of sense, is to be one of experience, it must be regarded as 
 necessarily and universally valid. But such a proposition would 
 be : The sun, by its light, is the cause of the warmth. The above 
 empirical rule is now then regarded as a law, and that, too, not as 
 good merely for sense-impressions, but for these in behoof of a 
 possible experience, which requires universally, and therefore 
 necessarily, valid rules. 
 
 "This complete solution of the Humian problem, therefore, 
 though a result contrary to the expectation of its originator, rescues 
 for the pure notions of the understanding their d priori source, 
 and for the general laws of nature their validity as laws of the 
 understanding, and yet so that it limits their application only to 
 experience, in this way that their possibility has its ground merely 
 in the relation of the understanding to experience, but still not 
 that it derives from experience, but that experience derives from 
 them, which wholly reverse mode of connection never once came 
 into the head of Hume." 
 
 15. THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 
 
 One wonders ! but one cannot but admire the modest 
 self-complacency of the good old man in this his victory 
 
THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 145 
 
 over den beriihmten Hume ! When one, again, thinks, 
 however, of what, a short time ago, it was only eligible 
 action on his part to rank as " merely contingent," 
 and so seclude from the " absolutely necessary " and 
 " apodictic " ; and that now he has never a misgiving 
 to name it a principle among the rest, a principle as 
 universally, necessarily, apodictically valid as the rest 
 when one sees this and thinks of that, I say, one remem- 
 bers how he, 63 in 1787, laments then of being schon 
 ziemlich tief ins Alter fortgeriickt (of being already 
 somewhat stricken in age), but one remembers also that 
 1781 was some seven years ago, and so one cannot help 
 doubting but that Kant, while still not so very old, must 
 at times have fallen obliviously into maunder ! Surely, 
 when he so very certainly claims conquest, he must have 
 " ^'sremembered " the fourth paragraph of his Systema- 
 tische Vorstellung aller synthetischen Grundsiitze des 
 reinen Verstandes ay, and not less, how he was put to it 
 for a schema to causality as for a schema to reciprocity ! 
 
 Nothing can be clearer than that he fondly fancied 
 pure time would give him a schema for all the categories, 
 to intermediate each of them into its own correspondent 
 sense complex. " There must be a tertium quid, which 
 must be on the one side homogeneous with the category, 
 and on the other with the sensation." This shall be 
 " the transcendental determination of time, on the one 
 side intellectual (pure, unempirical, a priori), and on the 
 other side, sensible." So, then, " without detaining us 
 further with a dry and tiresome scrutiny of what is 
 required for transcendental schemata of the pure notions 
 of the understanding, we will rather just tabulate them in 
 connection with the categories, and following their order!" 
 
 It was all very well to say this, and intend this, and 
 begin this ; but when it came to the turns of causality 
 and reciprocity, there came also a stop, a shock perhaps 
 10 
 
146 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 a cold sweat ! Then it was that he came to see and 
 how long it took him to see, one knows not that 
 if ever he was to find a schema for either causality 
 or reciprocity in time, it was not to time itself that 
 there was any use to apply. But if not to time, to 
 what then ? It would be difficult to see that at once ; 
 but whatever it might be, and wherever it was to be 
 found, it was plain that if it were to correspond to 
 causality, it must be something such that when it was, 
 something else followed ; as again, if it were to correspond 
 to reciprocity, it must be somethings such that the one 
 acted on the other, and the other on the one back 
 again, mutually. The next thing was that these de- 
 siderata, if they were to be at all, must be, or repre- 
 sentably be, a priori. Now, any universal, as being solely 
 in thought, and consequently, therefore, wholly unem- 
 pirical, had all on its side for the title at least, if not 
 quite at full for the quality, of the a priori. Let it be 
 so, then, with these with causality and reciprocity. 
 Let it be so, but we need not say so ! That a universal, 
 simply as a universal, should be held to be a priori 
 that any such faculty, function, or privilege should be 
 granted to generalisation as generalisation that would 
 be dangerous. Why then we might have to part with 
 all the other categories Quantity, Quality, Modality, 
 Substance itself if they were to be called a priori 
 pures ! Nay more, and absolutely out of the question 
 more ! Why then in that case, even Time and Space, 
 the very canvas, frame and all, of our entire panorama 
 might be taken from us, and our whole show ruined, 
 only in its boards ! There is nothing for us but to talk 
 indefinitely of a rule in sense. Impressions themselves 
 shall be feigned such that some must follow, and some 
 must not only follow but follow back. That is, there 
 shall be two feints of rules to that effect ; and as 
 
THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 147 
 
 absolutely general, and said to be in sense in general, 
 they will quite well pass as a priori, the rather that 
 they will be seen in the formal tables of all these other 
 a prioris, quite equally with any of them ! No wonder 
 that Kant, the longer he dwelt here, got freer and freer, 
 bolder and bolder, quietly to smuggle in (einschleichen), 
 once in a while, a trifling article or two of empirical 
 contraband ! No wonder that he could point, without 
 the slightest apprehension, at last, even to actual ex- 
 ternalities (" aussere Anschauungen ") as necessities for 
 the stuffing out (" objective Bealitat ") of the categories ! 
 The lucky thing, too, is this, that we can still speak of 
 them as in time : all things are in time ; and they are 
 in time, too. And so we can still beautifully lay out, 
 beautifully conjugate, as it were, our exhaustive sum of 
 distributed relations and correlations : relations of time- 
 series, time-content, time-implex, and still time-order, too ; 
 and correlations still (of the last) to time, in time, and 
 of time. So beautifully, indeed, does the whole huge 
 structure, with all its complicated, infinite appliances, 
 rise and spread round Kant that he comes, positively, 
 as was said already indeed, utterly to forget how it 
 was with some of his earliest layers. We have no 
 reason whatever to suppose that Kant, long before he 
 had done, was in the least aware that he had been in 
 his proceedings any time at fault. He absolutely believed 
 that all he said was true ; he absolutely believed that he 
 had conquered Hume. Not but that the extraordinary 
 vagueness and tremulous inexactitude of all further dis- 
 cussion of causality and reciprocity may half allow us 
 the suspicion of a haunting sense of something left behind 
 as only suppressed and latent : it is all very well to 
 speak as though something were a matter of fact, 
 again and again, for instance, of time itself being an 
 actual analogue to a relation whether causal or reciprocal, 
 
148 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 when this same something is really known all the 
 time to be utterly impossible. There certainly are such 
 relations of the things in time ; but of time itself in its 
 moments none. The relative discussion in the Pro- 
 legomena, two years later than the Kritik, is undoubtedly, 
 in its very much improved clearness and articulateness, 
 good evidence for some return to tranquillity and confi- 
 dence ; but neither is it satisfactory at last, and the second 
 edition of the Kritik is no better than the first. 
 
 Our perception of the relation of cause and effect is 
 surely instantaneous so instantaneous that Kant's divid- 
 ing of it into two halves, with quite a process between 
 them, strikes one as but an improbability in itself ; and 
 it is this that in the Prolegomena is rather dwelt upon. 
 
 " It is not enough for experience, as is commonly supposed, to 
 compare impressions, and connect them in a consciousness by means 
 of judgment ; thereby there arises no universal validity and 
 necessity of the judgment, on account of which there can alone 
 he objective validity and experience. There still precedes a (juite 
 other judgment before from impression of sense there can be 
 experience. The given impression must be subsumed under a 
 notion, which prescribes the form of judgment in regard of the 
 impression, connects the empirical consciousness in a consciousness 
 generally, and thereby procures for the empirical judgments 
 universality ; such a notion is a pure, a priori notion of under- 
 standing, which does nothing but merely determine for an im- 
 pression the mode in which it is to serve for judgments" (iii. 61). 
 
 This translation, one may be assured, fairly represents 
 the original ; and it is certainly not a bit less clear. 
 Kant, as is usual with him, again and again repeats, 
 and again and again re-repeats, the burden of it. It 
 takes a time to write it ; so that, though certainly habit 
 greatly hastens processes of mind, and the thinking it 
 points to may really bear no proportion to it, we cannot 
 help saying that the writing was long ! 
 
 Altogether with Kant's own statement and acknow- 
 
HUME SPEAKS 149 
 
 ledgment of the facts before us, namely, that, as he 
 might count them, there are two sets of them present 
 in every actual case of causality : For example, there 
 are facts that concern the apprehension, and there are 
 facts that concern the category. There is a relation of 
 facts within the apprehension itself ; and there is a 
 relation of facts between the apprehension and the 
 category. Within the apprehension, that is, there is 
 " usually," or " commonly," or " always " and " constantly," 
 and so, as indeed is about as good as said, universally 
 and necessarily, a " rule," under which the first unit of 
 sense is first, and the second is second, but not " con- 
 versely." In the other regard, again, the rule within 
 is the rule that conditions the rule between. The rule 
 of the units becomes a rule to the apprehension as 
 determinative of the rule of the category Altogether, 
 Kant's long process contrasts with instaneity \ 
 
 16. HUME SPEAKS 
 
 On the whole, as I say, or with every estimation of the 
 particular and all summation of the general, one may 
 be pardoned if one fancies Hume, when, in such circum- 
 stances, he welcomed brother Kant to Hades, taking 
 opportunity, after the usual compliments and initial 
 ceremonials, to remark : It was really very good of you, 
 Herr Kant, to name the problem at all " the Humian 
 Problem "- very good of you to speak at all in my 
 reference when you were able to announce, at last, your 
 perfect solution of it, " contrary to all expectation of 
 its originator," and " in a wholly reverse mode of con- 
 nection which never once struck him in the head." You 
 are quite as I on the units of impression ; but, on the 
 question of the necessity that is imputed to them, while 
 you say it is borrowed from an analogy, I say it is 
 
150 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 borrowed from an in vet era ted custom : For, or against, 
 I shall not pursue argument from the point of view of 
 either ; but I just ask, since the necessity is to neither 
 of us domestic, but to both of us a borrowed one, which 
 of us has the best of it in a reason for it ? l 
 
 17. THE CRITICAL POINT AGAIN 
 
 We return now to the " point of very special remark " 
 which we left behind us at pp. 138-142. We said 
 then of it that, even alone, it might suffice to be cru- 
 cially determinative in regard to the holding of Kant. 
 Kant's own distinction, namely, the force of which he never 
 himself saw, can be made to show the single knuckle 
 that controls. That distinction, as we saw, of two 
 subjective judgments, opposes the one which can be 
 categorised to the other one which can not : and the 
 reason Kant's own reason is that the one is wholly 
 in feeling, while the other is that, and already also some- 
 thing more. It is because of that something more that 
 it is capable of being categorised. It is that something 
 more that invites the category ; that something more 
 is the " cue " to the category. Now, that here is simply 
 all that we have got to say : That, and that alone, has 
 
 1 One recollects here how Schelling once said (W.W., x. 77): 
 "I shall not ask, as I might, was, then, for the refutation of 
 Hume's doubt, such a huge apparatus as the Kritik of Pure Reason 
 precisely necessary?" But one recollects also, as on the part of 
 Schelling himself, author of a complete philosophy of the absolute, 
 such innocent propos as these : " I am persuaded, none of us will 
 be inclined to grant a time when the human race had not judged 
 according to the law of cause and effect. . . . Hume himself would 
 feel that the man from whom he had withdrawn the judgment of 
 cause and effect could never any longer seem to us a man. We 
 may therefore be fully certain that the first man, on the very first 
 day of his existence, judged so. ... Nay, the infant in the cradle," 
 etc. etc. 
 
THE CKTTICAL POINT AGAIN 151 
 
 the virtue of the category ; that, and that alone, 
 renders the category unnecessary ; that, and that alone, 
 if you like, is the category ! That, namely, is already a 
 relation ; and as already a relation it contains the whole. 
 Even to Kant it is already a relation, even to Kant it is 
 already a special and peculiar relation, even to Kant it 
 is already a relation so special and peculiar that it is 
 already independent of the category ; and, at all, with- 
 out the need of it. Kant, that is to say, fairly names 
 the relation as a relation in which " on a certain one 
 unit of sense another constantly follows, and never con- 
 versely " ; and as a relation, too, which it is possible to 
 find given by a "rule" (iii. 75). Or, as he has it other- 
 wise elsewhere (ii. 127), this relation is that of "a reale 
 which, whenever it is, is always followed by something 
 else a succession of units in so far as it is subjected 
 to a rule." This rule now, evidently, must be either 
 contingent or necessary. But if it is contingent, it is 
 impossible for it to be determinative of the necessity of 
 a category ; and if it is necessary, it is already inde- 
 pendent of the device. It is, in fact, expressly declared 
 by the very wording of Kant, necessary. 
 
 And here, of course, if required, all the other argumen- 
 tation comes in that concerns any further opposition of 
 Kant in still holding that the relation can be rescued from 
 the subjectivity of sense only by the objectivity of a cate- 
 gory surely here, with all my heart, one may cry : 
 if a category is necessary, or if a category can do it. 
 
 The counter argumentation of course has been copiously 
 to the effect that the category is, in the very role 
 assigned to it, inapplicable and idle ; while what we 
 have seen latterly has had its whole direction towards 
 the independent necessity of the facts themselves in 
 themselves and at first hand. 
 
 As the case is, it is pretty well Hume's due to be allowed 
 
152 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 summarily to put an end to the discussion even in the 
 manner which we have presumed to suppose ; and we shall 
 venture to intervene only with a word or two in explanation. 
 We have supposed Hume to say that, after all, so 
 far as necessity in the causal relation is concerned, Kant 
 can do no more than he himself does, and that is simply 
 borrow it. If Hume borrows it from custom, namely, 
 Kant only borrows it from analogy. This, as said at 
 once by Kant, can not be denied. The three categories 
 under the general title of Eelation are named Analogies. 
 Even by direct general name, then, the law of causality, 
 so far as necessity is concerned, appeals to, founds on, 
 an analogy ; but we have also these direct words 
 (ii. 156): "We shall, through these principles, be 
 authorised, therefore, to conjoin the units of sense only 
 as in analogy with the logical and general unity of the 
 notions [categories], and in the principle itself indeed 
 employ the category, but in practice (the application to 
 the units of sense) set in its place its schema as the key 
 of its usage." Only to refer, in passing, to this word 
 schema, we would simply remind or remark that it is 
 wholly a " mere matter of words " to talk of a schema 
 at all in connection with causality ; for what is brought 
 forward at all in that reference is a " rule " still called 
 schema certainly which is no more than the fact of 
 causality itself, wholly and solely, in so many words 
 described, and really in so many words described as it 
 only can be described. To take a schema as it is defined 
 by Kant himself, schema he has none in his treatment 
 of causality ! 
 
 18. ANALOGY 
 
 But what we have, as immediately before us, is how 
 Kant himself sums up in a single, word the whole of the 
 rationale which it is his to propose in explanation of 
 
 
ANALOGY 153 
 
 the problem. That single word is, as we see, the word 
 Analogy. It is by an analogy, only an analogy, that he 
 himself professes to decide that single question as re- 
 gards causality, which is our single question, and, at 
 least, as he himself places it, the single question, or the 
 single key question in the whole of his relative industry. 
 That question, or key question, is Necessity. Kant would 
 establish the necessity of causality by the pith of an 
 analogy. But what is that pith? 
 
 Analogy means some similarity or other in respective 
 difference: according to Aristotle (1016&, 34) it con- 
 cerns the reference of a\\o TT/JO? d\\o ; and he ex- 
 emplifies this by describing " intellect in the soul " to 
 be as "sight in the body" (Eth., i. 6, 12). This from 
 Aristotle is the sort of general illustration of analogy that 
 we may be apt to see everywhere. It has also been 
 formally defined to be " a certain relation and agreement 
 between two or more things, which in other respects are 
 entirely different : thus the foot of a mountain bears an 
 analogy to the foot of an animal, although they are two 
 very different things ; and so it may induce to error." 
 Quintilian (i. 6) has a word on analogy in another 
 reference, truly which verbally seems to go against 
 Kant, but with Hume : " It was not sent down from 
 heaven," he says ; " and it is not founded on reason, so 
 that nothing but custom has been its origin ! " 
 
 Now, if Hume gave custom as his reason for the 
 necessity he borrowed, what reason did Kant give for 
 his ? All that, plainly, lay in the particular nature of 
 the apprehensions of sense that preceded the call for 
 the category ; and, as plainly, even as the quality of 
 these varied, so must the quality of the call vary. This 
 concerns what Kant has called the " rule " in the im- 
 pressions of sense ; and that rule referred to an a b, a 
 succession of a first and a second. Accordingly, if that 
 
154 WHAT 7,S' THOUGHT? 
 
 a I was only, as he says once, " usually " a b, or, as at 
 another time he says, only " commonly " a b, then the 
 analogy itself, or whatever had to apply it, must have 
 felt itself in a state of unhappy hesitation. It might 
 feel the call, but if what called only balbutiated "usually," 
 " commonly," it might find itself in a difficulty rather, 
 or even in an impossibility, to make its mind up. Ex- 
 ceptions, many exceptions, any exceptions at all, in the 
 call must have proved a very bogie to the analogy as it 
 looked to the category, which, on receipt of the counter- 
 sign, it was its business to pass. In short, as we say, 
 the quality of the analogy must have been completely at 
 the will of the quality of the call. 
 
 But that being, it follows that, when the a I was an a I 
 fixed, an a b that was " always " an a b, " constantly " an 
 a b and " never " a b a, an a b on a " rule " that by 
 " logical comparison " was logically " universal " - it 
 follows, I say, that then, so far as a call was concerned, 
 the analogy, as an analogy, must have felt itself blessedly 
 relieved from every difficulty. Imperfection must have 
 varied with imperfection ; exceptions must have proved 
 well-nigh fatal ; and perfection alone sufficed. And at 
 the very last it was only perfection that, in order to 
 work, could have been in the head of Kant. He does 
 not, for example, forget the distinction he has drawn 
 between the mathematical and the dynamical categories : 
 that the former are apodictic, or unconditionally neces- 
 sary, while the latter have only indirectly and mediately 
 their reference to evidence and necessity. But he 
 absolutely forgets the/orce of it: he intimates (ii. 140) 
 that the latter categories have still " also " (aucli, and 
 that auch means equally with the former) " the character 
 of a necessity a priori," and " without detriment to their 
 universal certainty when applied to experience." Now 
 that is really as much as to say that, though the 
 
ANALOGY 155 
 
 dynamical categories are " merely contingent," " merely 
 discursive," " merely regulative," etc. etc., they are still, 
 for all that, quite as universal, quite as necessary, quite 
 as apodictic, quite as d priori, as the very best of the 
 mathematical categories themselves ; and we have not 
 the smallest reason to suppose that Kant, having once 
 made the distinction, was not reposefully at ease with 
 himself there/or, or that he ever suffered a moment's 
 anxiety under the contradiction of it ! 
 
 But again, that being, an a b fixed, that is, what need 
 would there be for a category at all, why appeal to, or 
 lug in, an analogy that could only be superfluous or idle ? 
 In fact, that is the peculiarity that comes out here : it 
 would be precisely when the analogy was perfect that 
 an analogy would be useless. And that is as much as 
 to say that the moment there is a " rule " in sense, not 
 only as Kant conditions it, but as Kant must condition 
 it, a category at all is dismissed from service. That, 
 truly, is evident at once ; all that holds of sense is 
 described by Kant on the whole as already necessary, 
 why then should he trouble about a category in any 
 way ? Nay, unless it were necessary, could the category 
 find a cue at all for the compulsion of itself ? Or, if 
 the first half of the relation were contingent, could it 
 assess more than contingency from the second ? Actually 
 in the circumstances surmised there is scarcely a limit to 
 the suggestion of alternatives : First, sense to guarantee 
 understanding ; second, understanding to guarantee 
 sense. But the great point is this What is the good 
 of the mere capping by a category at all ? Can it really 
 do what it is said to do ? It is said to superinduce 
 necessity ; but is that possible to the extrinsicality, the 
 externality of a mere analogy ? Permanent association, 
 the custom of Hume, is really a principle in rerum 
 natura; but Kant's category is something foreign, 
 
156 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 mechanical, artificial a generalisation from another 
 region. Even if necessity could be borrowed from such 
 a principle did one but see one's way to as much as 
 to borrow such necessity were no necessity, it would 
 be only pinchbeck, it would want the hall-mark : it 
 could only be a necessity of fiction, arbitrary conversion, 
 substitution: letters of nobility, patent of nobility, it would 
 bring none. The most we can allow Kant in it is, That 
 he has, of his own will, set an a & of sense and an A B of 
 intellect, not logically, but analogically, beside each other. 
 
 The decisive points, so far, are that, on Kant's own 
 terms, we have, as regards sense, a relation dictated to 
 us, a relation which we have only to receive ; as regards 
 a schema, here in causality, namely, none whatever, 
 but, in its stead, a repetition, or rather, a mere descrip- 
 tion of the same relation ; and, as regards category, 
 nothing nearer than an alien analogy. 
 
 Kant, by his category, would ennoble sense ; but neces- 
 sity is already there and reference to analogy is idle ! 
 
 So, again, the best that can be said for Kant is, that 
 he has before him a private whom, for his good be- 
 haviour, he would make a corporal of but only by 
 brevet, as it were ! 
 
 19. CONCLUSION so FAR KANT AND HUME 
 
 With all before us that has been now said, it is be- 
 yond a doubt that any pretensions of Kant to the credit 
 of having produced a solution of what he calls Hume's 
 problem, the problem of causality, are absolutely and, as 
 Hamilton might say, even " curiously " groundless. All 
 the more charming it is to see the good old man so 
 modestly taking up his stand upon the " spot where the 
 Humian doubt is to be destroyed from the root," and 
 hear him then, so bashfully shy under such a blaze of 
 
CONCLUSION SO FAR KANT AND HUME 157 
 
 glory, only meekly mention " his complete, though 
 strikingly unexpected solution, which would have been 
 a surprise to the very originator of the problem himself, 
 Hume, into whose head the very idea of such a method 
 by reversion never once entered ! " 
 
 Hume, as we know, takes the problem as everybody 
 else does, and simply asks, Why is it that, when we see 
 a cause, or that when, contrariwise, we see an effect, we 
 think of the one as necessary to the other ? appealing 
 for an answer then, as simply to experience, in which he 
 can only find Custom to apply. Whereas, for his part, 
 Kant goes in quite another manner to work. In his 
 own intention, no doubt, his proceedings shall be so 
 thoroughly calculated beforehand that it will be impos- 
 sible to oppose them. He will begin, for example, from 
 the very foundation of experience and cognition sense. 
 That we know not things, but only the impressions of 
 things what he calls Erscheinungen, which we may 
 translate Appearances, reminding that we saw Hobbes 
 name them " Apparitions," this shall be the bed-rock on 
 which his whole stratification shall rest. The general 
 doctrine of the mere subjectivity and contingency of 
 sense as sense he will take to himself in its extremest 
 literality, and make his own in its utmost length, 
 breadth, and depth of detail. Our consciousness within 
 was to be conceived, as we have already seen, only as a 
 white sheet (of Time and Space) butterflied by impres- 
 sions each impression but as a single insect, good for 
 itself, but only for itself, and unconnected with any 
 other ; each, too, such and such as it is, but not such 
 and such that it must be such and such as it is, and 
 cannot be otherwise than it is. Each is a bare fact, once 
 for all there, but why or whence it is, or what further 
 it is than there it is, we know not at all. We simply 
 receive all impressions, and, as they come, they also arc. 
 
158 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Now, this understanding, not so far different from 
 expressions of Hume in regard to impression, simply as 
 impression, being constitutive of our consciousness through 
 sense, gave opportunity to Kant at once to go on the 
 contrary tack to Hume. Hume, namely, said, simply 
 from such a state of the case, it was impossible that 
 these facts of sense themselves could manifest to us the 
 necessity which we attributed to them, arid which, there- 
 fore, could only be an imputed necessity of our own, due, 
 so far as it was possible for general reflection to discover, 
 to custom alone. On the contrary, said Kant, that neces- 
 sity which we attribute to the facts of causality is, as is 
 plain to be seen, of a far other validity than the sub- 
 jectivity of custom can supply ; it is, in reality and 
 truth, of a validity objective. But such validity, again, 
 Kant continued, is not possibly in contributions of sense, 
 as all cases of causality are ; for they are all, as we have 
 abundantly been made to see, subjective in position and 
 a posteriori in source. Anything that comes into my 
 subject a posteriori I can only know in its contingency, 
 not possibly in its necessity : it only so happens ; it only 
 is as it is, and I know no more. Where, in all the world, 
 then, can this strange necessity come from ? Come 
 from whence it may, it cannot come from sense, and it 
 cannot come from the a posteriori ; but besides these 
 besides sense, there is only the understanding, and besides 
 the a posteriori there is only the a priori ! And then, 
 thought Kant, that is precisely what the contingency of 
 sense requires. Were there nothing but that, we should 
 only have a sport of impressions, in a lawless succes- 
 sion of apprehension, without an atom of an objective 
 knowledge, of a knowledge of objects. But we do 
 have an objective knowledge, we do have a knowledge 
 of objects ; and we are forced by the exigencies of the 
 case to ask whether we may not find the elements 
 
CONCLUSION SO FAR KANT AND HUME 159 
 
 of all this objectivity that is required, and of all 
 this objectivity that is whether we may not find 
 them all a priori and in the understanding ? 
 
 So far, then, it is obviously contingency that calls 
 upon the thinking of Kant, with eventual resort to a 
 category of the understanding as sole source of the 
 necessity which what we have called the butterflies of 
 the impression of sense require, in order to objectify 
 them, concrete them, that is, into the quasi-fixed objects 
 of daily life and experience. Thus it was the contingency 
 of sense that, with its call to Kant, gave him also his 
 opportunity. Sense was but so much material rubble- 
 work, it was for him, in the categories, to find for it 
 form. The subjectivity of sense, the contingency of 
 sense, was the very essential, the single sine qua non that 
 lay at the root of the whole general operation of Kant. 
 And how loudly and unintermittedly he proclaims this, 
 we might almost say, every one page of the Kritik and 
 the Prolegomena is there to attest. 
 
 "Were things things in themselves (iii. 53-56, 76), we should 
 never know them, neither a priori nor a posteriori. We have, how- 
 ever, not to do here with things in themselves, but merely with 
 things as objects of a possible experience. The categories are 
 entirely without meaning if, leaving experience, they would refer 
 to things in themselves. They serve, as it were, only to articulate 
 (buchstabiren) impressions, in order to read them as experience. 
 The principles which spring from their reference to the world of 
 the senses are only of use to our understanding in application to 
 experience : any further they are but arbitrary combinations with- 
 out objective reality." 
 
 That constitutes the whole of Kant's doctrine so far : 
 That we have no knowledge, namely, but what regards 
 experience ; and that we have no knowledge of any objects 
 in experience, but what are mere appearances, appari- 
 tions, Erscheinungen, of sense. That, however, relatively 
 determines all ; for that, in Kant's regard, is his 
 
160 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 i^ei)So?. Things are not in any respect the ghosts which 
 Kant would make of them. 
 
 20. PHILOSOPHY STRANGE AT TIMES 
 
 There have been so many strange things from time to 
 time said in what is called philosophy, that the public, 
 possibly, is not always so much in fault when it is heard 
 to mutter that so - called great philosophers are to 
 common folk, now and then, also great fools. 1 And, 
 certainly, the idea of making all these common things 
 we see, touch, and handle to be only ghosts of certain 
 invisible other things within them, or under them, or 
 Heaven knows where else in their neighbourhood, is 
 about the most foolish of all ideas which have been ever, 
 at any time, anywhere, or by anybody, broached. That 
 shoe on your foot, or that hat on your head, is not the 
 real shoe on your foot or the real hat on your head ; the 
 latter is but the ghost of the true hat, as the former is 
 but the ghost of the true shoe. Of either hat or shoe 
 we know the ghost only : what the true hat may be, or 
 what the true shoe may be, we know not. We know 
 this only : That it is the culmination and perfection of 
 knowledge itself to know only what we know not at all. 
 What is the Thing -in- Itself of that boy's marble, or of 
 this pebble I pick up ? 
 
 What can be the Thing -in- Itself of this mere seeming 
 that drops from my pen into this blot on the paper ? 
 Nay, of the paper itself, what can be the thing-in-itself ? 
 The lint has been sown, and grown, and pulled, and 
 steeped, and skutched, and hackled, and spun, and woven, 
 and bleached, and calendered, and boiled, and starched, 
 
 1 Eosenkranz remarks on "the fun which Law, Medicine, Theo- 
 logy, and other professors make of the blunders of philosophy and 
 philosophers to the delight of themselves and their students " ! 
 
PHILOSOPHY STRANGE AT TIMES 161 
 
 and blued, and beetled, and lapped, and pressed, and 
 made a shirt of, and worn by a man into a rag, and 
 ground into pulp, and sieved, and actually converted into 
 this bit of paper which we now touch, and yet, for all 
 that, the thing-in-itself, stubborn through all these pro- 
 cesses and a thousand more, has never once, even for a 
 moment, allowed itself to come to the surface, but, in 
 very truth, has always instead only given its ghost up, 
 its Erscheinung , its apparition ! 
 
 Can it really be that that Greek Testament is not a 
 thing-in-itself, but only the ghost of one ? Nay, if 
 exception be taken to manufactured articles, we have 
 plenty of natural objects to hand, as coals, and wood, 
 and straw, and metal, and salt, and gum, and oil, and 
 water, what of all these, are they, too, all of them, but 
 ghosts that only look to us like things ? Here is an 
 orange in my hand I think I know perfectly well its 
 rind, and its liths, and its seeds, and its juice, and its 
 pith, but it itself, it seems, for all that, I do not know 
 at all ! I do not know my own father ! He, too, has 
 a character in him which I do not know at all ; and 
 yet it is that, in him that, that I believe I know, 
 that I think I know, that I know I know. I am to 
 understand, for all that, that the reality I should know 
 is altogether different from the actuality I do know ! 
 No doubt, circumstances can be conceived in which I do 
 not know how he might have acted, as I do not know 
 what this unknown object which you offer me might do 
 if exposed to fire, or water, or acid, or alkali : nay, the 
 very object most familiarly known to me, I do not know 
 how it might act in circumstances quite strange to me. 
 But what then ? Does it follow that it is but the 
 apparition, the ghost of a Thing-in-itself? 
 
 All that is very sorry stuff, poor skimble-skamble 
 stuff, all that that poses and proses about the impossibility 
 
162 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 of knowing what substance is. Of course, even as used, 
 substance has a meaning, and, of course, even as used, 
 thing-in-itself has a meaning ; but the true meaning of 
 either the one or the other that is common to the whole 
 of us as ordinary human beings, it would seem impossible 
 for us as philosophers at all to recognise ! Now, why 
 should we feign, and figure, and invent all this difficulty ? 
 The simple truth of the matter is this, that there are 
 subjects and that there are objects, and that subjects as 
 subjects know and must know objects, and that objects 
 as objects are known and must be known by subjects. 
 These things that we see, and touch, and handle are 
 really, and in very truth, the things in themselves, and 
 the only things in themselves, that we can ever see, or 
 touch, or handle, that we need ever see, or touch, or 
 handle, that we shall ever see, or touch, or handle. In 
 one word, these things are the things in themselves ; and 
 so much are they the things in themselves that they do 
 act on each other, and do substantially act on each other. 
 They are not appearances ; they are things. Were things 
 really only Erscheinungen, only appearances, only, as said, 
 butterflies on my white sheet within, they would indeed 
 be irrespective the one of the other ; and any action that 
 might be simulated between them would be only an 
 action at second hand, only an action of the subject, and 
 so only an action borrowed. But once for all a creation 
 is just that : an ensemble of the innumerable reciprocal 
 parts of one immense systematic whole, for which there 
 are subjects to give it meaning, as so constituted that 
 they are there to apprehend it itself and not less the 
 parts of it as so many objects in it, which really act and 
 react mutually, and are utterly beyond servitude to any 
 alien influence that has been only borrowed. And this 
 expression brings us back to the side of the categories. 
 I know of no objections, on the part of the Germans 
 
PHILOSOPHY STRANGE AT TIMES 163 
 
 themselves, to this side of the subject, unless what con- 
 cerns possibly their number but particularly their 
 single source of formation and derivation, the received 
 classes of the technical judgments, namely, in School - 
 Logic. As for the Erscheinungen on the other side, 
 they seem, I should say, to have been allowed generally 
 to pass. No doubt that is quite true, that mere school 
 formula are the source of the categories ; but what we 
 have to say here takes another course. 
 
 Kant follows up what we have cited from the Prole- 
 gomena as said of Hume's problem, by a passage, long to 
 excess perhaps, but so decisive as to Kant's belief in his 
 own machinery of sense-appearances and understanding- 
 categories, and so clear as to the whole general holding, 
 that we think it of importance enough to be quoted at 
 full : 
 
 " From this, now, there comes the following result of all the pre- 
 vious investigations : All synthetic a priori ground-propositions are 
 nothing further than principles of possible experience, and can 
 never be referred to things-in-themselves, but only to sense-appear- 
 ances as objects of experience. Hence, too, pure mathematic, as 
 well as pure natural science, can never hold by more than mere 
 sense-appearances ; and only bring forward either what makes 
 experience possible, or what, in that it is derived from such a prin- 
 ciple, must be always capable of being conceived presentant in some 
 possible experience. And so, then, we have once for all something 
 positive which we can grasp to in respect of all metaphysical adven- 
 tures, which hitherto, boldly enough, but always blindly, have 
 applied themselves, without distinction, everywhere to all things. 
 Dogmatic thinkers have never for a moment thought it possible that 
 the goal of their endeavours should ever be so summarily set up for 
 them not even those who, presuming on their own supposed sound 
 reason, ventured, with notions and principles of pure reason, legiti- 
 mate indeed and natural, but intended merely for application in 
 experience, to advance to conclusions and acquisitions of knowledge, 
 for which they neither knew, nor could know, any ascertained 
 limits, because, as regards the nature and even the possibility of any 
 such pure understanding, they had never either reflected or coulcl 
 
164 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 reflect. Many a naturalist l of pure reason (and by this I mean 
 any one who trustsjiimself, without the due relative knowledge, to 
 decide in questions of metaphysic) might, no doubt, pretend that, as 
 regards what has here been brought forward with so much preparation 
 and labour, or, if he will, with so much verbose and pedantic pomp, 
 he has already long ago, merely by the prophetic spirit of his own 
 sound reason, not only guessed, but even seen and understood 
 namely, 'that, with all our reason, we can never transcend the 
 bounds of experience. 3 But yet, whenever he is questioned on 
 his principles of reason, as he must admit that, among them, there 
 are many which he has not taken from experience, and which, 
 therefore, are independent of it and a priori valid, how and with 
 what reasons will he bid the dogmatist or his own self pause in 
 carrying these notions and principles beyond all possible experience, 
 and just because it is independently of experience that they are 
 acquired ? And even he, this adept of sound reason, despite all his 
 self-assumed, cheaply gained wisdom, is not so certain himself not 
 unconsciously to stray beyond the objects of experience into the 
 field of the breed of the brain. Nay, commonly, he is already 
 deeply enough in the thrall of such, though, to be sure, he gives to his 
 groundless pretensions a certain colour of popular phraseology in 
 representing them all as mere probability, reasonable conjecture, or 
 analogy " (iii. 77). 
 
 As we say, there is no mistaking Kant's belief here. 
 He is, all unconsciously, blindly, convinced that what 
 we call experience, or simply life, consists of no more 
 than so many butterflies of impression on slides within 
 us, projected into objects without us, by the light from 
 our own internal machinery. It is the absolute certainty 
 within him of all our possible sensations being nothing 
 but these subjective butterflies it is this that, as it 
 were, has wrung from him the invention of all that 
 wonderful machinery for the conversion of these 
 butterflies of internal sensation into the objects of 
 external perception. Forgetful of all his years of labour, 
 of all his own enormous difficulties, he smiles at the 
 astonishment of his fellows on sight of the definitive 
 
 1 Aristotle, 61 ayv^vaaroi, i'Sta>rat, Meta. i 4 ; Eth. iii. 8, 8. 
 
TIME AND SPACE 165 
 
 finger-post which, as he says, he has at length so 
 summarily reared for them ! Really, we can ourselves 
 but sympathise with him when, with so much bland 
 comity, he good-naturedly condescends to chaff the 
 simple conceit of that unfortunate " naturalist " of 
 reason, to whom it does not offend him to know that 
 his own vast achievement will seem verbosity and 
 pomp ! Ah ! could he have thought, that naturalist 
 or say even that dogmatic thinker, of that erscheinenden 
 subjectivity and these objectivirenden Begriffe ! For 
 that is the whole. There must be for the realising 
 of these appearances some resource found. And it has 
 been found in the foil to sense, the understanding. 
 
 It is to this we have now come the invention of 
 Kant in countervail of subjectivity which he has 
 called "possibility of experience " ; and that is the " pure 
 understanding " as above named, or, as it was afterwards 
 so notoriously echoed and re-echoed, " pure reason." 
 
 21. TIME AND SPACE 
 
 Now here, before we take up the categories themselves, 
 there is an ingenious link of mediation and mediation 
 is a strictly necessary device in all truly logical 
 systematisatioii always that, clasping together with 
 itself sense (the Erscheinungen) 011 the one hand, and 
 the understanding (the categories) 011 the other hand, 
 is in the first place to be carefully and considerately 
 looked to. That link is Time and Space. Imagination, 
 as we have been early taught in the Kritik (sees. 24 
 and 26), holds as much of sense here as it holds of 
 understanding there ; and it is in imagination that for 
 Kant, Time and Space are laid up. In a word, Time and 
 Space are at once sensibilia and intellectualia : at once 
 things and ideas. As schemata, they are so far of 
 
166 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 sense ; but as a priori, they are so far of understanding. 
 As Kant rules, Time and Space are from our birth 
 general mental forms of body, general a priori forms 
 of the a posteriori, within us. And his arguments in 
 proof are excellent so much so that it would be 
 difficult to match them, as arguments, anywhere else. 
 
 As we saw then of things that they are mere 
 appearances, so we are to understand now of Time 
 and Space that they are but appearances also. Will 
 anybody in this world believe that, unless some German 
 philosophers and a few Hindoos ? However it was to 
 Kant or may be to these, it is certain, quite as much 
 to all true philosophy as to common sense, that Time 
 and Space are actual entities without, even as the coat 
 on my back or the shoes on my feet are ; and that, 
 were the race to vanish from the earth, an actual 
 space and an actual time would remain behind, even 
 as these articles of my attire, were I dead to-morrow, 
 would have other people to dispose of them. Kant has 
 an utter horror of Hirngespinnste meaning what shall 
 happen to every man who will think in independence 
 of the Kritical machinery ; but were there ever more 
 genuine Hirngespinnste (brain-weavings) than that spectral 
 space and that spectral time in the head of Kant 
 himself ? 
 
 22. THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 
 
 It is the categories at last that shall be as so much 
 rennet for the curdling of all these thin appearances, 
 Time and Space, and the rest, into the solid realities 
 of fact. But here we have to see at once that, even 
 on Kant's own showing, the curdling is already there, 
 and the operation of the rennet is quite uncalled for. 
 If a category did act, all that it could do would be to 
 convert a subjective succession into an objective relation ; 
 
THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 167 
 
 but, in all cases of cause and effect, even in the 
 Erscheinungen, the appearances, the mere impressions, 
 an objective relation, as we have seen, is already present. 
 The actual facts are always a b ; they are never b a ; and 
 it is a mere matter of nominal ornament and luxe that 
 would convert them into AB. Kant might object here 
 that the " always " is only a so far " always." That 
 is quite true ; but it is not for Kant to object it. 
 Unless the stage of sense were necessary, it could not 
 be necessarily followed by a necessary stage of the 
 understanding. Why, the very analogy would fail. 
 The category can act only when it gets its cue ; and 
 sense can guarantee the understanding only if it is 
 itself complete. An unguaranteed understanding were 
 itself subjective ; and so also any category that only 
 on such terms acted. But no ! Kant himself does not 
 wish any category so to act. Even to him there is first 
 a logical comparison instituted, and then an inference 
 through judgment to a state of the case declared 
 " allgemein " (general or universal) even before the 
 category is called upon, and is in fact the sine qua non 
 for that calling itself. But I need not dilate here, as 
 we have amply seen already (at pp. 12529) Kant's 
 own admissions as to the state of the case, and I have 
 fully discussed (at pp. 138 and 150) how Kant, in 
 failing to see the difference between such judgments as 
 sugar-sweetness and wormwood-bitterness, and such 
 others as sun and stone, room and fire, etc., may be 
 said to have actually missed what was specially vital 
 and essential in the entire problem. In fact, on the 
 whole, just one general consideration (iii. 63) is enough: 
 " The impressions of sense are subsumed under the 
 categories, gemass gewissen allgemeinen Bedingungen 
 der Anschauung." And that means, What would happen 
 were these conditions not there ? which means in turn, 
 
168 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 What precedes the category supersedes the category : 
 there is a relation dictated to us- a relation which we 
 have only to receive. Or say that this is not so, then 
 there follows an irresponsible alternative which is only 
 worse. "When (67) I say experience tells me some- 
 thing, I mean always only the impression, the appre- 
 hension of sense, that lies in it, e.g., that on the 
 lighting of the stone by the sun always warmth ensues, 
 and this, as a proposition of experience, is therefore 
 so far at all times contingent. That this warming 
 necessarily ensues through the lighting by the sun is 
 implied, certainly, in the judgment of experience (by 
 virtue of the notion of cause), but that I do not get 
 to know by experience ; on the contrary, experience 
 is only then first produced through this addition, to 
 the impression or apprehension of sense, of the notion 
 of the understanding (cause)." There is no necessity, 
 no notion of cause, in the facts of sense so long as they 
 are only the facts of sense ; in order that causal 
 necessity may lie in them, the notion of cause must 
 in some way or other be added to them must in some 
 way or other be thrown into them. Now, what can do 
 this, or who can do this ? It is only I that can do this, 
 and I can do this either only with a reason or without 
 a reason. If I act without a reason, I act arbitrarily, 
 and what is there by any possibility in all Kant's 
 machinery to justify this or other arbitrariness of mine ? 
 And if I act with a reason, then this reason must have 
 come to me only from the facts of sense. That is, 
 plainly, there must have been a reason already in the 
 facts of sense, which was the necessary occasion for 
 the call on the category to intervene ; and that being, 
 was there any necessity for any such intervention of the 
 category at all ? 
 
 Surely it follows from this that the appeal to a mere 
 
THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 169 
 
 analogy was something supervacaneous and idle. We 
 have seen, in the last words of our last quotation, Kant 
 himself chaff his opposite, the "naturalist," for seeking 
 refuge for himself in the colour of " analogy," can he in 
 truth vindicate his own resort to the same expedient, 
 though, very certainly, it was thorough conviction and 
 anything but fear that prompted it ? At the same 
 time, no doubt, the admission is due, that Kant may, 
 not without reason, be righteously indignant that two 
 such analogies should be even mentioned in the same 
 breath together ! Still, it is quite true that, if the facts 
 of sense themselves give no authority for the call on 
 the category, then it is / add it it is a mere external 
 annex it is but an arbitrary addition of mine. To 
 categorise, without a reason, the mere feeling of a sense- 
 succession into the grave necessity of antecedent and 
 consequent in the intellect is, for arbitrariness, not to 
 fall far short of the fatuity of categorising the snap of a 
 pop-gun into the thunder of the clouds. 
 
 But, finally now, here, we come to this definitively 
 determinant question, What does Kant demand for his 
 categories, and what are they ? As said, we do not 
 intend to reflect here 011 the number of the categories 
 or on their derivation from mere school logic : we ask 
 this question in another sense. What his categories are : 
 Kant asserts that they are direct notions of the under- 
 standing, a priori and native to the mind of each of us ; 
 and what he demands for them is : a necessary, universal, 
 apodictic validity, capable of being transferred to the 
 contributions of special and general sense. This last 
 consideration of transference, as already abundantly 
 discussed, without further comment, we leave ; and as 
 for validity, that plainly must be contingent on what 
 they are and are not. Now we assert at once here : 
 We have not an understanding that, as Kant supposes, 
 
-170 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 thinks, in a priori pigeon-holes of its own, the connections 
 of things. Such pigeon-holes, under the name of the 
 categories, Kant would fain believe to exist in each of 
 us ; but such physiological endowment of the brain is 
 but a crude invention, let it be worked out with what 
 fond faith, with what interminable pains of ingenuity, 
 it may. Physiological pigeon-holes of such a quality, no 
 man has any. For as to what they are, the categories : 
 they are but so many generalisations from experience ; 
 they are but so many common notions generalised 
 notions. 
 
 Take the category of Quantity, for example, as instanced 
 by Kant himself at iii. 62. After stating that no 
 synthetic judgment can be objective unless it contain a 
 category, he continues : 
 
 " Even the judgments of pure mathematic in its simplest axioms 
 are not exempted from this condition. The proposition : The 
 straight line is the shortest line between any two points, presupposes 
 that the line is subsumed under the notion of Quantity, which 
 certainly is no mere perception, but has its seat solely in the under- 
 standing, and serves to determine the perception (of the line) in 
 respect of the judgments that may be quantitatively pronounced 
 upon it, :j etc. 
 
 Does any man believe this ? Is it not certain that 
 whatever can determine any judgment of a line already 
 lies in the line itself ? Have I really passed the line 
 through any pigeon-hole of my brain whatever, in order 
 to make it, as it were, fire-proof, objectively valid ? 
 
 But in regard to Quantity, Kant again gives us 
 perhaps even a better illustration in sec. 26 (ii. 754). He 
 tells us there, for example, of the synthetic unity of the 
 units in space, that " precisely the same synthetic unity, 
 if I abstract from the form of space, has its seat in the 
 understanding, and is the category of Quantity." Had 
 space been a Thing-in-itself, and only brought its 
 
THE CATEGORIES AGAIN 171 
 
 characters, there is no doubt that Kant would have 
 acknowledged the notion Quantity to be quite obviously, 
 even objectively, derivative from it. But let it (space) 
 be only an appearance, what difference does that make ? 
 The appearance (or what is called the appearance) has 
 precisely the same constitutive characters as the thing - 
 in-itself (or what is called the thing -in-itself), and, than 
 this latter, is not one whit less in consciousness ; 
 why, then, should a notion that is derivable from the 
 latter not be equally derivable from the former? But, 
 this being, we have in the category a superfluous dupli- 
 cate. Space is a priori, and quantity, as a character set 
 in it, must be equally a priori : why, then, the categorical 
 excess ? Is not space enough ? It actually is quantity 
 quantity in bodily form ! Space, says Kant (ii. 126), 
 is " the pure type of all external quantities " ; and so 
 (142) "all objects, as in space, are extensive magni- 
 tudes." 
 
 As for Quality, Kant, to get it, finds himself under a 
 necessity simply to borrow it. " Eeality," a being in 
 time, he says (126), is correspondent to pure "feeling" 
 (and so, Negation is as non -being in time). He did not 
 need this : Time and Space have already separate 
 Qualities ! At least, if it is always a what sort, a qualis, 
 that is determinative of quality, it cannot but be granted 
 that the qualis of quantity is not the gualis of quality. 
 But so, we can ask of Quality as we asked of Quantity : 
 in what pigeon-hole of my brain, then, does Eeality lie, or 
 Negation lie, or Limitation lie ? 
 
 Then the Postulates of Empirical thinking in short, 
 there is not one of these twelve categories of Kant that 
 does not lie in experience and may not be perfectly 
 well generalised, necessity and all, from experience. The 
 innocence of Kant here is quite touching at times, as 
 when he cannot restrain expressions even of wonder at 
 
172 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 actual, supposed " anticipations of experience " ! l Surely 
 an apparatus to such effect in each of us could not fail 
 to be to us of quite 'a magnetic virtue ! Yet surely, also, 
 as said elsewhere, "there is hardly the tip of a feather 
 concerned " ! 
 
 23. CAUSALITY AT LAST 
 
 So, now, then, it stands with the problem of causality. 
 Hume's solution, Custom, we grant to be inapplicable, 
 and for the reason suggested by Kant. Custom, as a 
 principle only subjective, may perfectly well account for 
 associations that are themselves only subjective, only 
 subjective and contingent ; but it cannot, in the least, or 
 in any way, account for others that are objective, objective 
 and necessary. How does a schoolboy lay off to his 
 master of a morning his penna, pennce, dominus, domini, 
 etc., or his amo, amavi, doceo, docui, etc., but by having 
 learnt them overnight ? He has so often repeated the 
 words in their sequence that, in the same sequence, they 
 stick together in his memory. But it is not repetition, 
 it is not custom, that keeps his knife in his pocket, or 
 lets him lose no less than three marbles by a hole in 
 it. When the stone he flings breaks not his enemy's 
 head, but unintentionally a window, he flees. He knows 
 well, however, that the stone has not broken the window 
 by custom ; and he would even turn on his enemy, it 
 may be, if that enemy cried " Coward ! " It is custom 
 that binds together the A B of the alphabet ; but it is 
 not custom that necessitates the A B of causality. And 
 
 1 " All the same, this Anticipation of Perception has, even for one 
 of the transcendentally accustomed and so made cautious inquirers, 
 always something Auffallendes in it, and calls to reflection," etc., 
 etc. (ii. 151). Kant is fain to think that degree (density), in his 
 way of it, dispenses with the usual hypothesis of equal volumes 
 being variously "vacanced" by pores (see Text-Book to Kant, p. 
 279 sq.). 
 
CAUSALITY AT LAST 173 
 
 if it is so with the simple single principle of Hume, it is 
 not otherwise with the complicated plural principles of 
 Kant. I know well that the key that drew my tooth 
 was no mere appearance ; nor yet are appearances the 
 fire that heats the water, the water that scalds, the 
 blanket that comforts, the ice that cools, the food that 
 feeds, the poison that kills -not these, nor thousands 
 and thousands, millions and millions more. Nor if these, 
 and all such, are mere appearances, is it ever once 
 possible for me, by any one category of the twelve, or 
 by the whole twelve together, to solidify them into reals 
 not, in fact, that Kant himself expects as much of me. 
 No ! as Hume can give us no more than a sham 
 necessity through custom, Kant, too, at the last, is quite 
 content if we shall accept from him the no less sham 
 necessity of analogy ! 
 
 But neither custom nor analogy will give true necessity. 
 And so the original question remains Since there is 
 true necessity, what is it that does give it ? 
 
 I have approached this subject, in the course of a 
 number of years, not once, but many times, and from a 
 variety of directions. 1 I do not suppose, therefore, that 
 there are many or any other philosophical crises with 
 which I am, on the whole, more conversant. 
 
 In putting together, logically, as he says, the items or 
 elements which severally occur to constitute in conscious- 
 ness any actual case of causality, Kant expresses him- 
 self at different times thus : " There is, first, the 
 Wahrnehmung (perceptio) which belongs merely to the 
 senses. But, secondly, there belongs also to this the 
 
 1 See Secret of Hegel (new edn.), pp. 105 sqq., and 329 sqq. Schwegler, 
 p. 455. Essays, p. 178. Protoplasm, 61-70. Text-Book to Kant, 
 Index. Gifford Lectures, Index. Darwinianism, 12-19. Articles 
 in Mind ; Journal of Spec. Phil.', Chambers' s Encyclopedia ; Princeton 
 Review for January 1879. 
 
174 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 judging (which pertains merely to the understanding). 
 This judging, now, may be twofold : firstly, in that I 
 merely compare the items perceived in my then con- 
 sciousness ; or, secondly, in that I conjoin them in a one 
 consciousness as such. The first judgment is merely a 
 judgment of sense. . . . The judgment of experience, again, 
 must, to the sense-perception and its logical conjunction 
 (after that, through comparison, it has been made 
 allgemein), add something," etc. (the act of the under- 
 standing or category). " Allgemein," of course, can only 
 be translated by general or universal (the quotations are 
 from ii. 60 and ii. 65, and they will be found repeated 
 again and again in the same neighbourhood). Now, that 
 first judging or judgment of Kant is merely the con- 
 scious perception of the two items that constitute the 
 first and second, the 1, 2, the a I of any case of causality. 
 To Kant it is the cue in sense of the category in the 
 understanding ; but what is it in reality ? That con- 
 sciousness of logical conjunction and comparison in sense 
 is, in reality, the perception of the identity which lies in 
 or between the items which, in its own way, is present 
 in the first as in the second, in 1 as in 2, in a as in & ; 
 and it is that perception, as a perception of identity, 
 which at once prompts, which at once is, the judgment 
 of a necessary antecedent, or cause, and of a necessary 
 consequent, or effect. That is the whole. 
 
 How is it that this perception of identity escaped 
 Kant, and at least seems to have escaped Hume ? Kant 
 says (iii. 30): "Hume asked, How is it possible that, 
 when a notion is given me, I can pass from it, and join 
 to it another which is not at all contained in it ? " That 
 is quite honest in Kant as to a sole and implicit belief 
 on his part. Hume says (Enquiry, iv. pt. 1): 
 
 " Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pro- 
 nounce concerning the effect which will result from it, without 
 
CAUSALITY AT LAST 175 
 
 consulting past observation ; after what manner, I beseech vou, 
 must the mind proceed in this operation 1 ? It must invent or 
 imagine some event which it ascribes to the object as its effect ; 
 and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The 
 mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause 
 by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is 
 totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be dis- 
 covered in it" 
 
 In the words italicised, Hume, doubtless, quite en- 
 dorses what is ascribed to him by Kant ; but is he as 
 honest as Kant in the reason by which he precedes them ? 
 It would, of course, be rather hard to expect a man to tell 
 off-hand all that would follow as effects from any object 
 whatever, isolatedly presented to him as a cause ; and, 
 without disputing Hume's honesty, we may at least allow 
 ourselves to fancy that Hume's sceptical ingenuity would 
 be rather delighted by the idea of posing that single 
 object in the face of any man. But that is not the 
 question : the question is not of any one object, but of 
 two certain known and given ones. And on that sup- 
 position I have no hesitation in affirming that no man 
 who had any usage of thinking and was given time to 
 think, would fail to answer in the great bulk of cases : Why, 
 the effect, in some way or other, only repeats the cause. 
 That is, his answer would be : The secret of the relation 
 and the secret of the inference would be Identity 
 
 If any man will search the passages concerned in the 
 two works, the Kritik of Pure Reason and the Prole- 
 gomena, I think he will find, as illustrations on the 
 part of Kant, no less than nine actual cases of the usual 
 conjunction of a cause and its effect. We have, in the 
 former work, as early as sec. 26 (ii. 754), Frost and Ice. 
 Then, under the " Second Analogy," we have the Ship in 
 the Current, the Eoorn and the Stove, the Bullet and the 
 Cushion, the Glass and the Water, and, much later 
 (under the Methodenlehre), the Sun with Wax and the 
 
176 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Sun with Clay 1 (see respectively, ii. 164, 171, 172, 
 591); while, in the latter work, we have Air and 
 Pressure, and the Sun and the Stone (iii. 61, 62, 67, 
 75). Suppose we take these examples as they come. 
 
 How is it that there is any relation of identity 
 between the general temperature and the formation of 
 ice ? We may say at once here that we are simply in 
 presence of the law that, at 32 Fahrenheit, water 
 freezes. That, however, is, so far, but a fact. We may 
 say that we know that it is so ; but we do not know 
 why. We know that it is simply an experience ; but we 
 know also that it is an experience such that, with full 
 general consent, it may be named a universal experience 
 and a necessary experience ; and that, therefore, it 
 concerns a relation which, as held, is as good as apodicti- 
 cally valid. We even feel this, and have no doubt of 
 this, that the cold congeals the water, quite as much as 
 I compress my handkerchief into a ball in my hand. 
 Hume, no doubt, we can understand very well at the 
 same time, might say, and with perfect truth say : Still, 
 if you come to an ultimate reason for this your under- 
 standing of the fact, you can only say, custom : you have 
 no warrant for asserting that the freezing of water 
 follows 32 Fahrenheit but custom. I grant the 
 universality of the fact, I grant even the universality 
 of the belief in some certain real and perfectly intimate 
 connection between the two facts, I even say as others 
 say, that the freezing of water is the action of the cold on 
 it ; but, with all that granting, and, with all that saying, 
 neither you nor I know more than that the one fact, the 
 freezing of the water, follows the other fact, the quick- 
 silver standing at 32 on the scale Fahrenheit. 
 
 No doubt this is the perfectly reasonable way in 
 1 " Limus ut hie durescit, et hcec ut cera liquescit 
 Uno eodemque igni." Virgil, Ed. viii. 80. 
 
CAUSAL IDENTITY 177 
 
 which Hume would have vis understand his understanding 
 of the general fact. So far, that is, to name what in 
 final analysis the position amounts to, Hume sees only 
 the difference that is present, and has never a thought of 
 identity. And, certainly, there seems only difference 
 between 3 2 degrees of cold and the freezing of water : 
 identity there seems none identity, indeed, there seems 
 not possibly any. Tor all that, there is an identity here ; 
 there is the same identity here, though in another form, 
 that there is between the billiard balls : that identity is 
 motion. It seems certain that what is called latent heat is 
 simply latent motion : degree of heat is degree of motion. 
 All bodies are, just as they are, in intimate motion. When 
 a cannon ball is stopped by a dead wall, it becomes 
 markedly hot : its motion of translation has been trans- 
 formed into a motion of vibration. So at 32 degrees water 
 has not motion enough to preserve its fluidity. Why bodies 
 may be variously solid, fluid, and gas, depends on their heat. 
 The why of the forms themselves we are not asked to be able 
 to tell, simply because all individual forms we must just 
 take as we find them. We see the sun and the moon, and 
 know of Mars, Mercury, and the rest ; and there we stop : 
 we must be just contented to take water and wine, beer 
 and tobacco, as they come to us. There is no final account 
 of personal being in the whole of Natural History. 
 
 How it is identity that has to do with the relation of 
 cause and effect in the case of the ship that drifts in the 
 current, no one will have any difficulty. The current 
 flows down and simply takes the ship with it, as it would 
 a dead leaf, a splinter of wood, or say a bubble of its 
 own. The heat in the room is the same heat that is in 
 the stove. The pressure that is in the compressed 
 cushion is the same pressure that is in the compressing 
 bullet. As for the water and the glass, that concerns 
 the natural law of capillary attraction ; and if in gravi- 
 
 I 2 
 
178 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 tation there was an identity in the case of bullet and 
 cushion, there is a like identity in that of the glass and 
 the water. It is the same with the air as with bullet 
 and cushion, a yielding to pressure, etc. Then, that the 
 heat of the sun should warm the stone, soften the wax, 
 and harden the clay, is, very evidently in all, a matter of 
 identity, as are full shoots after rain. Shadows from the 
 clouds, or eclipses, are no less simple stoppages of light 
 than are window-shutters, or blinds, or curtains. The 
 thunder that follows lightning is but the same effect of 
 vibration that follows the stroke of a hammer. Hume 
 himself would have rather stared if he had been told that 
 the necessary connection between footstep and foot, watch 
 and maker, lay a priori in his own mind ; and I think he 
 would have listened to the suggestion of identity. 
 
 Here, too, I cannot but think of another somewhat 
 starched, man-millinery position which, at least to my 
 mind, would have also made Hume stare, if by any 
 possibility he could have heard of it. I mean that 
 pragmatically all-wise position on the part of the sup- 
 posed, and self -supposed, followers of his own, in regard 
 to which the historian Burton in his Life of Hume (i. 82), 
 as late as 1846, has these astonishing words in a note: 
 " This refers to the notion, which now may be termed 
 obsolete in philosophy, of an inherent power in the cause 
 to produce the effect" ! I spoke once before of common 
 people not being always without an occasion for speaking 
 of great philosophers as great fools ; and here, surely, is 
 another one. Most writers on philosophy in Great 
 Britain since Hume have thought themselves only faith- 
 ful to their master when they denied efficiency of a cause, 
 and asserted of it only customary constancy constancy 
 so far as known. 1 Of course, many names are here 
 
 1 Any possible ambiguity of meaning is to be set aside here. 
 ' Efficiency " must be taken to mean, not volition, but simply action, 
 
CAUSALITY BROWN, MILL 179 
 
 relevant ; but we shall take only Brown's. He, Brown, 
 held that causation means no more than " invariableness 
 of antecedence " ; and power is " only another word for 
 expressing abstractly and briefly the antecedence itself 
 and the invariableness of the relation." Power, that is, 
 so far as it shall be held to be synonymous with 
 " efficiency," is altogether denied by Brown. There is 
 " invariableness," he says, and that is the " efficiency " ; 
 if more or other efficiency is wanted than invariableness, 
 then efficiency there is none : " the feeling that one 
 object will never appear without being followed by 
 another "-that is " the essence of our idea of efficiency." 
 It is even because of these extraordinary conclusions that 
 Dr. Welsh, the biographer of Brown, pronounces him 
 " the first of modern metaphysicians," " and in subtlety of 
 intellect and powers of analysis superior to any metaphy- 
 sician that ever existed," discoverer of principles which 
 " will constitute an era in the history of metaphysical 
 science," " an era in the science to which it belongs, as 
 much as was done by the Prindpia " I Eeally, now, is it 
 not extraordinary the mistakes into which positively very 
 sensible men will sometimes quite innocently tumble ? 
 Certainly Kant, however it may be with him elsewhere, 
 has very much the pas here of all the distinguished 
 Mills, and Buckles, and Grotes, that supposed themselves 
 to follow Hume in regard to what he said on causality. 
 Now that was this : " Having found, in many instances, 
 that two objects have always been conjoined together ; if 
 the former one of them be presented anew to our senses, 
 the mind is carried by custom to expect the latter one of 
 them." So far, then, as there is suggestion of invariablc- 
 
 or say rationale of action. Assertion of constant conjunction, with 
 denial of any mediating reason, is what I call abstract a b ; an 
 abstract a and an abstract ft, abstractly beside each other. Of course, 
 rationale, actual or ultimate, is not always explicit. 
 
180 WHAT IK THOUGHT? 
 
 ness here, it amounts only to an in variableness of custom- 
 ary expectation in the mind. I know not, then, that Mr. 
 Mill can he held to be strictly correct when he asserts 
 cause (as I quote him elsewhere) to mean, with Hume, 
 " the invariable antecedent " : " This is the only part of 
 Mr. Hume's doctrine," he adds, " which was contested by 
 his great adversary, Kant." To say Hume held a cause 
 to be " the invariable antecedent " of an effect is to 
 assume for him a positive peremptoriness as well of 
 judgment as of statement, which his own words are all 
 insufficient to support ; while we, for our part, are at no 
 small loss to understand how it was that Kant, who only 
 saw a want of in variableness (or necessity) in the 
 doctrine of Hume, yet found ^variableness the only part 
 of the doctrine which it was for him to contest ! That 
 a cause was an invariable antecedent, this was the only 
 part of Hume's doctrine which was contested by Kant ! 
 This is so curiously wrong diametrically wrong, that I 
 wonder if I shall be pardoned for being unable to 
 help finding it almost comic even on the part of a 
 Mill! 
 
 It is certainly true that that is the doctrine of Brown : 
 cause means for him " the invariable antecedent " ; and I 
 do not think we shall be wrong if we couple with him, 
 besides those others, the great Frenchman, Comte. 
 
 Now, Kant did have in variableness in his doctrine, 
 and was very far from contesting it ; but he found it 
 necessary to add to it, and it was just by what he added 
 that he had, as a philosopher, very much the better of 
 Brown and the rest. They, for their parts, never got 
 further with their theory than what was to Kant the 
 sense-stage in his. What Kant says in that stage is, e.g., 
 " if a stone is long enough shone upon by the sun, it 
 becomes warm " ; and it is precisely in that stage that 
 they say, the sunshine on a stone is the invariable ante- 
 
KANT ON BROWN ANT) MILL 181 
 
 cedent of the stone becoming warm. But so far, says 
 Kant (iii. 75): 
 
 " There is not here as yet any necessity of connection, and not yet, 
 necessarily, the notion of Cause. But I continue and say further : if 
 the above proposition, which is merely a subjective conjunction of 
 units in sense, is to be a proposition of experience, it must be 
 regarded as necessarily and universally valid. But such a proposi- 
 tion would be : The sun is, through its light, the cause of the 
 warmth. The previous empirical rule is now regarded as a law, and 
 that, too, as holding good not merely of units of sense-impression, 
 but of these in behoof of a possible experience, which requires 
 thoroughly, and by consequence necessarily, valid rules. I perfectly 
 well see, therefore, the notion of cause as a notion necessarily be- 
 longing to the mere form of experience, and its possibility as of 
 a synthetic union of the sense-impressions in a consciousness 
 generally." 
 
 This is just as though we were listening to a critique 
 on the part of Kant that held invariableness to be quite 
 insufficient if conceived to be itself the complete and 
 entire constitutive characteristic of causality, and not 
 merely the preliminary process of sense that simply con- 
 ditioned it. And that is as much as to say that without 
 the necessary and universal validity or efficiency of the 
 notion cause in a word, without seeing and saying in 
 the circumstances cause, these circumstances themselves 
 would be mis-seen, mis- understood, and altogether mis- 
 named. To Kant, all these circumstances being granted, 
 with the perfectly free inclusion of invariableness, there is 
 yet, for all that, no cause at all present. Only when the 
 mind, consciously or unconsciously, is absorbed by the 
 conviction that, in the a 1) of sense, the a is a necessary a, 
 and the & a necessary 5 and this really amounts, in 
 conclusion, to the relation of antecedent and consequent, 
 though not quite as though something called a category 
 had sprung out from its watch-box in the brain (pigeon- 
 hole) and absorbed it then, and then only, is there cause. 
 If Kant, here, indeed, instead of saying, " the sun, through 
 
182 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 its light, is the cause of the warmth in the stone," had 
 only said, " the sun, through its warmth, is the cause of 
 the warmth in the stone," we should certainly then, 
 pretty well at last, have had, all and whole, holus-bolus, 
 the entire case before us ! 
 
 But, surely, that denial of efficiency on the part of a 
 cause is one of the very strangest warps that has ever 
 been witnessed in humanity in educated humanity, and 
 just because of its educatedness ! The water that falls on 
 the mill-wheel is no effective of its motion no, only the 
 invariable antecedent. It is not the current carries the 
 ship, the fire that warms the room, the bullet that indents 
 the cushion, the sun that heats the stone and dries the 
 clay there is no efficacy or efficiency in any one of these 
 agents in fact, there is no agency at all in question ; 
 no, no agency at all, even when we see that agency itself 
 grow, as in moving the mill and the ship, warming the 
 room and the stone, drying the clay, etc. no, oh no ! 
 there is no agency at all, there is only antecedency ! 
 
 A man in a difficulty often turns to look about him 
 for help a pile of stones, a wall, a paling, a tree, a piece 
 of wood, an oar, a rope, a knife, a stone, a pencil, a pen, a 
 piece of chalk, a sponge, a handkerchief, a boat-hook, a 
 boot-jack, an umbrella, a blind, a curtain, a pin, a nail, a 
 hammer, a stick, a cloth, a pail of water, a plank, 
 stepping-stones, spectacles, a string, a thread, a thimble, 
 a glove, a button, a half-brick, a piece of paper, etc. I 
 wonder if it would set him up to be told that he was 
 only philosophically looking out, then, for " invariable 
 antecedents " ! Eazors would hardly be the invariable 
 antecedents for clearing a forest, but axes might. Still, 
 there is no such thing as efficiency in causes, in the flood 
 that breaks up a culvert, or carries off a bridge, in the 
 storm or the sea that brings down a cliff, Shakespeare's, 
 or other ! Flood and bridge, storm or sea and cliff, the 
 
REID ON CAUSALITY 183 
 
 cause and its effect are to be conceived as only abstractly 
 side by side : there is no such thing as action, no such 
 thing as a grip of the one upon the other. Causality is 
 not to become an organic concrete common sense is not 
 to be vindicated your doctrinaire white neckcloth is the 
 only wisdom I 1 
 
 1 I have remarked elsewhere (Text-Bool^ 23): "It is a fact that 
 everybody who in this country has come after Eeid (I do not 
 speak of Beattie or Oswald), namely, Stewart, Brown, etc., have 
 on the whole taken their causality very absurdly from Hume." 
 Reid says once (W. W. t 76) : "Modern philosophers know that we 
 have no ground to ascribe efficiency to natural causes, or even neces- 
 sary connection with the effect : but we still call them causes, 
 including nothing under the name but priority and constant con- 
 junction, ... a kind of abuse of the name, because we know that 
 the thing most essential to causation in its proper meaning to wit, 
 efficiency is wanting. . . . Bacon seems to have thought that there 
 is a latens processus by which natural causes really produce their 
 effects, . . . but Newton, more enlightened, has taught us " to see, 
 in short, such effects as dependent on " laws of nature." No words 
 could more completely than these endorse Burton's allegation that 
 " the notion of an inherent power in the cause to produce the effect 
 is now obsolete in philosophy" an allegation certainly quite to the 
 mind of those who take their causality from Hume. Nevertheless, 
 he who carefully considers all that Reid relatively writes (say W. W., 
 57-59, 65-67, 73-79, 455, 456, 521-27, 603-8), will see that any doubt 
 as to Reid reallyhoklirig precisely the contrasting view wholly depends 
 on expression merely, and in connection with a certain distinction of 
 Reid's own. To Reid there are first causes, active causes, metaphy- 
 sical causes, animate causes, spiritual causes ; and, e contra, there 
 are second, passive, physical, inanimate and material causes. The 
 former are to him the only true causes, while the latter have but 
 the name ; for to Reid it is mind alone can constitute cause the cause, 
 before which, properly, nothing finite can be cause. Still, of what 
 are called finite causes, he has no different view from that which is 
 named of common sense. He certainly would wish to ennoble even 
 finite causality by making it law of nature, and so due only to the 
 one true cause ; but he sees quite clearly, for all that, the iiisubstan- 
 tiality of mere law that itself acts not, but only names how what 
 acts does act : " There must be a real agent to produce the effect 
 
184 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 It is just such wisdom in starch that admires the 
 greatest as but the effect of the smallest. Sarah 
 Jennings spots her cousin Abigail's court-dress, and the 
 effect is a revolution in Europe. But the touch that 
 sends the mightiest warship into the sea is not the vast 
 machinery of the launch. The revolution really had 
 its causality in the weariness of the nations ; as the 
 machinery, it was that no less really was causality to the 
 
 according to the law a malefactor is not hanged by the law, but by 
 the executioner, according to the law." "Laws cannot be the 
 efficient cause of anything ; they are only the rule according to 
 which the efficient cause operates " ; " a law cannot be an agent " 
 (57, 66). So here, in the case of the law of causality, we are entitled 
 to ask for the secondary agent ; and accordingly, that, with Reid's 
 consent, brings at once up to what is in causality the finite agent, 
 not the first agent, but the second agent, the executioner, so to speak. 
 And now, with this question before us, we are in presence of any 
 fact of ordinary, Reid's physical, causality. It is precisely here, 
 however, that we have the unsatisfactory point in Reid. He is so 
 bent on recognising no " proper " efficiency and power unless in a mind 
 and will, that verbally he denies " efficiency " in physical causes. No 
 doubt, also, Hume's analysis of the constituents of causality has had 
 its effect on him. Still, we can but recollect that to him (Reid), 
 too, a cause has its own efficiency, with proviso only that it is an 
 efficiency secondary, an efficiency lent. That every change, every 
 effect, has its cause, and in necessary antecedence to its effect, is to 
 him, as to all of us, a natural first principle. He expressly agrees 
 with Hume as to constant conjunction being essential in causality : 
 the effect is a necessary consequent even in the merely physical and 
 inanimate. " The most accurate thinkers," he says, " apply to 
 physical causes the words agent and action, not less than cause and 
 causation " ; and this is only incorrect to him in so far as the proviso 
 may be omitted that "nothing can be an efficient cause, in the 
 proper sense, but an intelligent being"; as he says, "active power 
 in the inanimate, I know not." I shall not give examples ; but it is 
 really only in consequence of his devotion to his only true cause, 
 mind, that we have from him quite a multitude of expressions that 
 seem more or less incoherent with the actual physical state of the 
 case. Only, by statement of one example, we may refer to the 
 expression (above), as on the part of " modern philosophers" know- 
 
CAUSALITY IN SERIES 185 
 
 launch. It is not so that the identity between the 
 cause and its effect is lost. Neither can the series that 
 obscures, efface in fact the identity that strings. Still, 
 it is not always brute identity that is to meet us. The 
 food that feeds does not simply repeat itself in the 
 veins : the organism itself has made its own of it. The 
 finger of a child may touch a sluice that frees a cataract, 
 and a pin's point may let life itself run through ; but 
 
 ing " no ground to ascribe to natural causes even necessary connec- 
 tion with the effect," that even this is wholly conditioned by his 
 having in his eye at the moment only what to him is a true cause, 
 namely, " intelligent will "; for to him, then, even such " connection " 
 is, directly, due only to said will. 
 
 It is to be acknowledged, so far in conclusion here, that Reid's 
 own prepossessed distinction confuses his criticism of Hume's 
 " doubts " as to causality ; which criticism otherwise, and as in 
 general, may be named too exclusively categorical and peremptory, 
 and quite insufficiently speculative and, as at bottom the matter 
 was in Hume's mind, interrogative. We may refer to such salient 
 examples in this direction as that it would be only correct to shock 
 the vulgar by telling them that "the sun does not shine nor give 
 heat," that " the moon does not cause the tides," and of this more ; 
 meaning by as much that it is only the First Cause that is veritably 
 operant. Wherein, for these days, Reid, alas ! is only too theological 
 days in which, on the doctrine of physical evolution, matter, only 
 as so and so put, successively " evolves " itself, and physical causes are 
 consequently First Causes ; at the same time that, that being, Reid 
 would have to own, what he denied then, knowledge of something 
 " in an unthinking inanimate being that might be called active 
 power " not, however, that even such something could yet exhibit 
 Reid's own test of active power, that " power to produce an effect 
 supposes power not to produce it," which, for its part, clearly is a 
 presupposition of will. "In intelligent causes," says Reid, "the 
 power may be without being exerted, but, in inanimate causes, we 
 conceive no power but what is exerted." Nowadays, of course, 
 unlike Reid, we may say that it is quite possible to see active power 
 in the inanimate, as in a watch mainspring, for example, and even 
 reserved power, as in suppressed action of steam, water, electricity, 
 etc. etc. ; but, in the latter case, the weight suppressing were still 
 a determinable power. That, however, is true : " Nothing external 
 
186 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 the identity that was first in either case was there only 
 to wake a second, and trifles to wake are numberlessly 
 variable. Identity itself must be identity of element : 
 it is perhaps in mechanism alone that identity is brute ; 
 chemism, vitalism, intellect, are all rises of level. It is 
 prodigious what life, what mind, can make of a motive. 
 A cause itself, too, may comprise various identities : the 
 hangman himself may play the flute or beat the drum ; 
 he is only the hangman when he hangs. The poison 
 
 can introduce into the human mind anything further than the 
 general notions of priority and constant conjunction," unless, with 
 Hume, we add necessity, which, with him, means efficacy, power, 
 etc. (see Treatise (ed. 1817), p. 115 and p. 217). But, whether in 
 the animate or the inanimate, causality is to Eeicl " a first or self- 
 evident principle," " a law of thought," " a necessary truth ; ' ; and 
 that, as such, it admits not of logical proof by reasoning. 
 
 Hume, too, to whom Reid refers here, equally holds that (118) 
 " it is impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a cause," instancing 
 such attempts thereto as those of Hobbes, Clarke, and Locke. But 
 if, as is held by us, the solution of causality lies in identity, there is 
 room now for another opinion; and, indeed, it is perhaps possible 
 to find a reference to identity in one or more of the attempts 
 named. It may appear that identity can never suggest an absolute 
 first ; but further thinking will only end in finding, even in this 
 respect, what must solely certiorate the suggestion. When Reid 
 writes to Gregory, " You seem to think that there are different kinds 
 of causes, each having something specific in its relation to the 
 effect," may we not construe that very " specific " in the relation 
 into simple Identity ? aware, too, of essential differences according 
 to the stage on which causality is taken, as mechanical, vital, intel- 
 lectual, etc. Reid himself very properly objects to the applying of 
 the laws of matter to those of mind, as though motive were but 
 impulse, and as though, consequently, the strongest motive, just like 
 the strongest impulse, must prevail ! 
 
 Very curiously, Reid (at p. 199), even when occupied in the denial 
 of " proper causality or efficiency in any natural cause," gives direct 
 expression to the principle of Identity. It is an " axiom," he says, 
 " upon which all our knowledge of nature is built, that effects of the 
 same kind must have the same cause." Was there ever more naively 
 a more complete admission ? 
 
STAGES OF CAUSALITY 187 
 
 that kills is the elixir that cures : the breath that blows 
 in a flame, blows out a candle. The cause that has an 
 x for an x in one effect, may have a y and a z for a y and 
 a z in others. I have seen a cobweb to catch flies stop a 
 clock ; and, by the bye, the truth of invariable ante- 
 cedents is only glaring there the pendulum and the web 
 that caught it time after time till it stop-stop-stopped, 
 were only side by side, they entered not the one into the 
 other ! " The effect," says Hume, " is totally different 
 from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered 
 in it " (Enquiry, sec. iv. pt. i.). No man can beat Hume 
 in power of countenance to put a merely plausible propos 
 as though with the most innocent conviction ; and Kant, 
 quite taken in by Hume (ii. 23, but better in ed. 2), 
 only repeats this. And yet there is no one in this 
 world who would not have seen in the cobweb the 
 necessary stoppage of the clock the moment he had 
 looked into the latter, nay, there is no one in the world 
 who would not have a priori seen the burden of as much 
 on the supposition that a spider was to build in the 
 corner of the case just where it stopped the pendulum. 
 But Kant quite followed Hume when he asked : " How is 
 it possible that, when a notion is given me, I can go 
 beyond it, and connect with it another which is not at all 
 contained in the former ? " It is by Hegel, as I have said 
 elsewhere (and in connection with the Hindoos), that the 
 analogy of Kant, as well as the custom of Hume, some- 
 what casually it may be, is suggestively supplemented 
 by identity. Not that Hegel, for all that, is one whit 
 less serious with the category, and the necessity of it, than 
 Kant ; on the contrary, he is infinitely more so. That, so 
 far, it is proper to say at present, though it would be out 
 of place to expand it. 
 
188 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 24. BELATIONS OF IDEAS AND MATTERS OF FACT 
 NECESSITY 
 
 If consequences are to be spoken of here, it is now in 
 this immediate connection that one of some importance 
 shows. It may be worth while, namely, to turn back 
 one's attention for a little special consideration of that 
 criterion of necessity which, in a propositional regard, is so 
 prominent in Kant. As such, this criterion is a turning- 
 point too in that so prevailingly authoritative, and so 
 universally believed infallible, distinction between Rela- 
 tions of Ideas and Matters of Fact. 
 
 As at once perfectly conspicuously placed and equally 
 explicitly stated in Hume, perhaps we may be allowed to 
 point to his particular notice of it as notably the express 
 locus communis for general reference to the distinction as 
 a distinction. This, indeed, is the rather recommended 
 to us here in that it is with this distinction Hume opens 
 his inquiry into the relation of cause and effect. 
 
 " All the objects of human reason or inquiry," it is so he begins, 
 " may naturally be divided into two kinds, viz. Relations of Ideas and 
 Matters of Fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, 
 Algebra, and Arithmetic ; and, in short, every affirmation which is 
 either intuitively or demonstratively certain. That the square of the 
 hypothenuse is equal to the squares of two sides is a proposition which 
 expresses a relation between these figures. That three times five is 
 equal to the half of thirty expresses a relation between these numbers. 
 Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of 
 thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the 
 universe. Though there never were a true circle or triangle in 
 nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain 
 their certainty and evidence. Matters of Fact, which are the second 
 objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner ; 
 nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature 
 with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still 
 possible ; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is con- 
 ceived by the mind with equal facility and distinctness, as if ever 
 so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no 
 
RELATIONS OF IDEAS AND MATTERS OF FACT 189 
 
 less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction 
 than the affirmative that it will rise. "We should in vain, therefore, 
 attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, 
 it would imply a contradiction, and would never be distinctly con- 
 ceived by the mind. It may, therefore, be a subject worthy curiosity 
 to inquire what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any 
 real existence and matter of fact beyond the present testimony of our 
 senses or the records of our memory. . . . All reasonings concerning 
 matter of fact seem to be founded in the relation of Cause and 
 Effect " (Enquiry, iv. pt. i.). 
 
 Leibnitz preceded Hume, the former dying when the 
 latter was only some five years of age. He, too, 
 distinguished, like Hume, between Ideas and Facts, 
 though hardly with an equally explicit clearness. At 
 least, it is only thus he expresses himself in the 
 Monadologie 
 
 " There are two species of truths : those of a Fact, and those with a 
 Ground. The latter are necessary, and their contrary is impossible j 
 the former are contingent, and their contrary is possible. When a 
 truth is necessary, we can find the ground (reason) for it in analysis 
 by continuing to resolve it into ever simpler ideas and truths, till we 
 reach the ultimate (or first) one. . . . At last we reach simple ideas 
 which can be defined no further. There are axioms, primitive 
 principles, which cannot be proved, nor require any ; these are 
 identical enunciations the contrary of which implies an express con- 
 tradiction. ... A truth is necessary if its contrary implies a contra- 
 diction ; if it is not necessary so, it is called contingent. It is a 
 necessity that God exists, that all right angles are equal to one 
 another, etc. ; whereas, it is a contingent truth that I am in existence, 
 and that there are in nature bodies which have an actual right 
 angle " (Monad., 33, 35, Letter to Coste). 
 
 It is specially interesting in the above that even to 
 Leibnitz, however indefinitely, identity seems to have 
 emerged as ultimate principle ; but for the distinction 
 before us, we find it in Locke as well, e.g. 
 
 " General certainty is never to be found but in our ideas ; when- 
 ever we go to seek it elsewhere in experiment or observations 
 without us, our knowledge goes not beyond particulars. . . . We 
 
190 AVHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 cannot know certainly any two ideas to co-exist any further than 
 experience by our senses informs us. . . . We cannot tell what 
 effects bodies will produce ; nor, when we see those effects, can we 
 so much as guess, much less know, their manner of production. . . . 
 We can go no further than particular experience informs us of 
 matter of fact, and by analogy to guess what effects the like bodies 
 are, upon other trials, like to produce" (iv. 6, 16 ; iv. 3, 14. 26. 29). 
 
 Evidently, from the above, Matters of Fact are to 
 Locke, as they are to Hume, particulars only and incom- 
 petent to universals ; contingent only and inadequate to 
 necessity. Like Hume, too, Locke knows the co-exist- 
 ence of a cause and its effect only by the experience of 
 sense ; and neither can he see, whether before or after 
 experience, the special tie that binds them. Nor is that 
 less remarkable, namely, that, long before Kant, Locke 
 should have held inference beyond the particular case of 
 causality to depend on analogy. 
 
 Before Locke, Hobbes has it in his Tripos (Human 
 Nature, iv. 10) that "Experience concludeth nothing 
 universally." Later than Kant, we have the same doc- 
 trine in Schelling and Hegel; the one saying (x. 76), 
 " Experience can certainly afford nothing universal,"- 
 and the other (Propaed., 9), " Experience tells only how 
 objects are, not how they must be, nor yet how they 
 should be." Lastly, we may crown all so far by the 
 authority of Aristotle, who (Meta. 9815, 913) says, 
 " The senses yield not intellectual knowledge, though 
 express source of that of the particular : they declare 
 not the why of anything, as why the fire is warm, but 
 only that it is warm." 
 
 Now, it is abundantly plain that on this express view 
 of the matter it is that Kant supports himself (ProL, 54) ; 
 he says, " Experience tells me what is, but never that it 
 is necessarily so, and must not be otherwise." And that, 
 involving, as it does, the contingent probability of 
 Matters of Fact, points to the apodictic necessity of 
 
INERTIA, ETC., TO KANT 191 
 
 Relations of Ideas. Kant continues indeed : " We are 
 actually in possession of a pure natural science which, 
 nevertheless, for prescription to nature, contains laws that 
 are a priori and have all that necessity that is required 
 for apodictic principles " ; and then he calls in witness 
 that " Propaedeutik " of General Physics which usually 
 precedes expositions of natural philosophy. But from 
 the Substance, Causality, and Eeciprocity which we know- 
 as there appertinent, he goes on to separate certain prin- 
 ciples, mostly included with them, namely, Motion, 
 Impenetrability, and Inertia, assigning for reason that 
 these latter are " not quite pure and independent of 
 empirical sources." Moreover, they give no example, he 
 adds, of a " universality " psychical as well as physical, 
 but " concern solely objects of the external senses." 
 Now, I do not know that it has ever been pointed out, 
 as certainly, I am disposed to think, it well may, that 
 there is not the difference alleged whether in the one 
 respect or the other. The three latter principles are 
 not different from the three former, either as, first, con- 
 cerns Matters of Fact, or as, second, concerns Ideas of 
 Relations. Impenetrability .- one body cannot occupy 
 the place of another. Inertia : a body, uninterfered 
 with, retains its state of motion or rest. Motion : New- 
 ton's three laws of motion are : (1) Every body must 
 persevere in its state of rest, or of uniform motion 
 in a straight line, unless compelled to change it ; (2) 
 Every change of motion must be proportional, etc. ; 
 (3) To every action there is always opposed an equal 
 reaction. Here this last is evidently, in so many words, 
 Kant's own law of action and reaction ; why, then, should 
 the other two, which are but one with it, be rejected ? 
 Substance, causality, and reciprocity, if they have a 
 validity inwards, have all a look outwards ; and the three 
 latter principles of impenetrability, inertia, and motion 
 
192 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 are in no respect different : why, then, should Kant make 
 them different ? 
 
 Was not his only reason this, that he could not find 
 categories to suit ? 
 
 Extension, Figure, Divisibility, Attraction, are usually 
 enumerated in the same " Propaedeutik," as it is given 
 us ; and might not really a like validity be vindicated 
 for all of them ? 
 
 But more I Might not the general consideration be 
 extended ? 
 
 What of all Relations of Ideas even in Matters of 
 Fact? 
 
 What we have seen in causality, if we will but think 
 of it, may prove to us highly suggestive. What came 
 out there was this. Causes and effects themselves might 
 be, and were, Matters of Fact ; but still the references 
 between them were possibly not of the same nature, and 
 might very well be Kelations of Ideas. And just that 
 was the case. The relation between them was a relation 
 of identity, and to prove identity between any two was 
 to prove a necessity that made them one. In short, it was 
 one thing to refer to existences as existences, and quite 
 another to refer to relations as relations. Existences 
 simply as existences could only be known empirically 
 and a posteriori as just such and such facts that were 
 then and there present ; but a relation, by very necessity 
 of its own proper nature, appealed to the intellect and 
 was discerned by it. Here were differences, and differ- 
 ences even diametrically opposed. Eelations held of 
 intellect ; but existences held only of sense, and what 
 held of sense could not pretend to the same authority 
 as what held of the intellect. What was intellectually 
 seen was surely something naturally a great deal higher 
 than what was only sensuously seen : the last was con- 
 tingent and probable only ; but the first might be neces- 
 
EXISTENCES AND RELATIONS 193 
 
 sary and apodictic. That has been the one error all the 
 time, then, to fix oneself into the existences and so blind 
 oneself to the relations : lost in the belief that as the 
 former were, the latter must be. Kant made much to 
 himself of the happy thought : Was causality the sole 
 example of something that, as known, was only matter 
 of fact and contingent, at the same time that in its 
 authority it was as apodictic, universal, and necessary 
 as any relation of ideas ? were there not others ? But, 
 in the special regard, it was after all only a fiasco for Kant 
 that, failing to distinguish between the existence and the 
 relation (though all these additional examples from the 
 first principles of Physics might have prompted him 
 otherwise), he came forward to the front to proclaim, 
 publicly, his very triumph ! For, in simple and good 
 truth, that is still the fact : it is the categories that are 
 his triumph. 
 
 But, first of all, it seems to have been the mathematics 
 that led him to this. He saw (as he said) that " mathe- 
 matical judgments are all synthetic," at the same time 
 that they are all of " an a priori necessity," and, again, 
 that they are all capable of being " exhibited in per- 
 ception " (Kritik of Pure Reason, Introduction, V.). It 
 rather pleased him, in his own success, to regret (VI.) that 
 Hume's good sense was not led to see in mathematic what 
 he (Kant) saw. The proposition, That the straight line 
 is the shortest, is apodictic ; but it is not more apodictic 
 than that Every change must have a cause. It was these, 
 and other propositions like these, that led Kant to per- 
 ception, and perception of synthesis. Straight concerns 
 quality, but shortest concerns quantity; and, conse- 
 quently, it is incompetent for analysis to derive the one 
 from the other. Hegel makes a somewhat prominent 
 point in rejection of this. He (Log., i. 241), against Kant, 
 holds the transition from quality to quantity to be quite 
 13 
 
194 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 analytic. " The simplest, said of a quantum, is the least, 
 and the least said of a line in space is the shortest." 
 This is Hegel. Nevertheless, the truth is rather with 
 Kant : there is really a synthesis in the case and 
 through perception. We have, here, in fact, an 
 exemplification of Locke's pregnant remark of how the 
 mind may " change the idea of its sensation into that 
 of its judgment." The sensation straight of the line is 
 changed into the judgment shortest. In fact, it is just 
 an instance of what we have been talking about ; we 
 sensuously perceive the existence (line), but we intel- 
 lectually perceive the relation (shortest). Nor, as will 
 be very obvious now, is it in any respect otherwise with 
 the proposition that Every change must have a cause. 
 The change itself we can see only sensuously ; but the cause 
 that is implied we can equally see only intellectually. 
 
 And this brings us to our last consideration here. 
 Mathematics, quite as much as physics, nay, quite as 
 much as experience, depends on an element double on 
 the element double at once of existence (Matter of Fact) 
 and notion (Eelation of Ideas). This amounts to saying 
 that even in mathematics, if, on the one hand, we see 
 intellectually, we also, on the other hand, see only 
 sensuously : even in mathematics there is eyesight 
 sensuous quite as well as eyesight intellectual, and the 
 difference between them is, that while the one is but 
 sight, the other is msight. Still, to sight lines ay, 
 parallel lines, circles, triangles, squares, oblongs, angles, 
 points, are quite as much in sense, and of sense, and 
 sensuously sensible really and at bottom quite as 
 much as any amount of bricks and mortar, a Rome of 
 them, or a whole London of them ! " Though there 
 never were a true circle or triangle in nature, the truths 
 demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their 
 certainty and evidence," says Hume, as Locke had in 
 
EXISTENCES AND KELATIONS 195 
 
 the same way said before him : " Whether there be 
 any square or circle existing in the world or no the 
 demonstrations which depend on their ideas are the 
 same " ; and, no doubt, this has been, and still is, 
 the universal belief, parallel lines, triangles, circles 
 really being always put as a priori beside such empirical 
 things as water and ice, bullet and cushion, ship and 
 stream, sun and stone, etc. etc. But, for all that, lines, 
 triangles, circles, etc., are but abstractions from empirical 
 things are but abstractions from the things of sense, 
 only that and nothing more. Hume and Locke say, 
 were there never a circle or a square in existence, its 
 truths would remain ; but I say, were there never an 
 ordinary thing in existence, such abstracts as squares 
 and circles, lines and triangles, the whole estate of 
 geometry, would still be on the black - board, as it 
 were, blank. No talk of, were there never a square 
 in existence, can make an a priori of it. We have 
 veritably such indefinite vague ideas fixed within us, and 
 we do separate such things as triangles, etc., in the 
 thought that they are a priori and ideal, from all 
 manner of ordinary bricks and paving stones, as though 
 these latter were alone empirical and real. But if we 
 but look at it all in daylight, we shall find it quite 
 otherwise. We do see with eyesight the figures in the 
 book ; they are sensible, and they are sensuous. The 
 conclusion is, therefore, that Mathesis, if it is apodictic 
 and, so to say, a priori in its relations, is in no wise less 
 contingent and a posteriori in its existences : l and that 
 that so being in its case, the same may very well be 
 
 1 This contrasts with Kant's (v. 702) sentence : " Mathematical 
 propositions are always judgments d priori, and not empirical ; for 
 they bring necessity with them, which can not be got from experi- 
 ence. But if you will not grant this, wohlan have it so ! and 
 I limit my proposition to pure mathematics, whose notion just has 
 
196 WHAT J,Sf THOUGHT? 
 
 in the case of whatever ordinary concretes shall, in their 
 existences, imply relations. Kant, with the Persa of 
 Plautus in his head, holds (viii. 116) that "to try to 
 ex-press necessity from a proposition of experience 
 (ex pumice aquam) is an express contradiction." But 
 that is not so certain. Even Kant contradicts himself 
 here, where the " Erfahrungssatz " (the proposition of 
 experience) is elsewhere (iii. 58), as necessary, carefully 
 distinguished from the " Wahrnehmungssatz " (the pro- 
 position of perception) which is only contingent (not 
 but that for Kant the contradiction is only one of 
 expression). At all events, we have seen Kant forcibly 
 exclude such physical categories as Motion, Impenetra- 
 bility, and Inertia from the society of his own physical 
 categories, Substance, Cause, and Eeciprocity, for no 
 other reason, as it seemed to us, but that they did not 
 fit into his Tcible (which he was fain to believe complete 
 with only so many, and no more), and not because they 
 were not equally apodictic in their evidence. Accord- 
 ingly, it is quite in reason to surmise that, if these three 
 or these six physical propositions are of such and such 
 validity, there may very well be others equally valid, 
 and indeed a great many others ; for, not so very long 
 ago, Kant's twelve categories seemed to us but a very 
 poor, allowance of the bread of necessity for all that 
 sack of the immeasurable sense-contingency. There are 
 laws connected with gravity and the centre of gravity, 
 the mechanical powers, optics, etc., which all involve 
 necessity, and a necessity as assured, as evident, and as 
 much referent to an idea as any one of all Kant's 
 
 it that it implies, not empirical, but merely pure perception a 
 priori." That there is distinction here is rather dim ; but what I 
 say in the text is that these lines, circles, squares, etc., rest 011 
 experience at last ; for I deny pure perception : space is to me an 
 empirical perception. 
 
NECESSITY THE CLOVE-HITCH 197 
 
 twelve caii in effect evince. Does any one mean to 
 tell me that the weighing down in the balance of the 
 one pound, or of anything whatever less than itself, by 
 the two pound is not a case that implies necessity and 
 an idea with an insight ? Is not darkness on the earth 
 the necessity of an eclipse of the sun by the moon, as 
 even night is that to call it so of an eclipse by the 
 earth itself ? A turtle on its back might lie for ever, 
 in example of the first law of motion. Buttons with 
 button-holes and hooks with eyes are in very truth 
 relations of necessity. And just consider the clove- 
 hitch. You have seen it on your row-boat when you 
 have taken two half-turns of the painter round a thole- 
 pin ; and the surgeon is glad of it above the elbow of 
 the dislocated shoulder. The two turns are very simple, 
 but the rope-end between them is only the better and 
 the better clinched the more and the more you pull at 
 the other. It is really a system of necessity that is 
 here, and quite as much so as any triangle is such. -If 
 a triangle is a necessity of the Eelations of Ideas, so is 
 the clove-hitch. If a triangle is synthetic, so is the 
 clove-hitch. Nay, even say this, If a triangle is a priori, 
 so is the clove-hitch ! For if the construction of the 
 clove-hitch is a Matter of Fact, and all its lines exist- 
 ences of sense, it is not one whit less so in either respect 
 with the triangle : I have myself constructed it on the 
 black-board or the paper out of lines that are existences. 1 
 Mathematically, as we have heard from both Locke 
 
 1 Of course, a roped line is, so to speak, more coarsely physical 
 than an inked line ; and, of course, also the latter needs not, for its 
 realisation in relation, as the former does, the action of a physical 
 force ; but the relation is notionally due to construction in both, at 
 the same time that the force where it is wanted is given, and hemp 
 is not a bit more physical than ink or chalk. - Sailors' knots, 
 weavers' knots, ordinary double knots, etc., are all similar ; and 
 we have already made reference to mechanical powers, centre of 
 
198 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and Hume, existence, as existence, does not enter into 
 consideration. What alone is mathematically in^ con- 
 sideration are the relations of the figures, let these 
 figures themselves be real, or be they only ideal : " The 
 demonstrations which depend on their ideas are the 
 same," says Locke, " whether they themselves exist or 
 not." We, for our part, suggest only that what is true 
 of relations, ideas, in figures may be true also of relations, 
 ideas in things. But things are matters of fact ; and 
 Hume has but this moment told us that, " The contrary 
 of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can 
 never imply a contradiction!' Matters of fact ! Yes ; but 
 matters of fact just mean existences, and be as it may 
 with them, may it not be altogether different with their 
 relations the ideas they imply ? We have suggested 
 more than one physical object as in place here ; but 
 memories both of work and play combine to make our 
 favourite the clove-hitch. We ask at once of the clove- 
 hitch, would not the contrary of what it is imply a 
 contradiction ? One end of a line is in the bite of a 
 knot on it, and no force whatever in pull at the other 
 end but will make the bite faster ! Would not the 
 contrary of this the bite looser, that is imply a con- 
 tradiction ? Though there were never a true clove- 
 hitch in existence, would not the truth demonstrated of 
 it for ever retain its certainty and evidence ? Or to 
 take it in Locke's way, Were there now no clove-hitch 
 existing anywhere in the world, yet the idea annexed to 
 that name, would it ever at any time cease to be what it 
 is ? And the rationale of this, is it not that to take it 
 otherwise would come to be a denial of identity being 
 identity ? For, in all these constructions, whether by 
 
 gravity, optics, etc. Then the calculus itself admits the physical 
 element of motion, time, etc. ; and neither we nor it have the least 
 wish to say that physical necessity is intellectual necessity. 
 
IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 199 
 
 chalk, by ink, or by rope, the principle of insight is the 
 same : identity still identity. 
 
 And so now, then, we come to this. A category is but 
 a relation ; and if identity is the principle of all relations, 
 and of relations as such, will not this same identity prove 
 to be in the end the principle of the categories likewise ? 
 That not of causality alone, as we have seen with Hegel, 
 and not even, it may be, of categories as such, but that 
 the single virtue, the single nerve of cogency and validity 
 in general even in sense, even in the ordinary affairs of 
 human life and action should be simply identity ! 
 
 No doubt we have left behind us, we ourselves, more 
 than one reference that opposes, or seems to oppose, 
 difference to identity ; and no doubt many others 
 simply difference as such in fact will occur generally in 
 suggestion. But this we have granted : while it is often 
 difference that is alone explicit, we can only trust in the 
 implication of identity. How difference the most palp- 
 able can disappear into identity we see in the triangle 
 in which two angles (the internal and opposite ones), 
 different the one from the other, may collapse into the 
 single outer angle that is itself different from both. The 
 proof there is the abolition of difference, and the abolition 
 of difference is the installation of identity. Analysis itself 
 is synthetic of something in something else ; and so it is 
 we can say the effect is found by analysis in the cause. 
 That water, that ice, can set potassium on fire what 
 difference in nature can be greater than that fire and 
 water, ice and heat ? And yet even there all difference 
 disappears the moment we see the torch of oxygen ; for 
 we still hope that affinities may be explained. There 
 may be all manner of different existences to sense without, 
 and yet all manner of identical ideas to intellect within. 
 It is sense, externality itself, that is the difference ; but 
 it is reason that is the within and identity. 
 
200 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 But what now is the ground of identity itself, even as 
 within, even as in reason, even as in intellect ? But of 
 this later. 
 
 25. KANT'S THEORY AGAIN THE MILL 
 
 With this discussion of an important consequence we 
 return to our main theme in regard to Kant generally. 
 
 And here, we have no doubt, it must have long ago 
 struck the reader that Kant's materials even for the 
 perception of a universe without are all of them 
 emphatically within. The matter, the substance of the 
 things in this universe is, in series, (1) but so much 
 inward Sensation in my own subject; (2) Categories that 
 throw these sensations of my own out into Time and 
 Space categories, too, that are as ideal spiders in pigeon- 
 holes of my own, ideal also and private ; lastly, (3) Time 
 and Space, themselves as much my own, and as much mere 
 subjectivities within as the sensations, and the categories, 
 and the pigeon-holes, and my very subject itself. Nay, 
 G-od himself is relegated to a pigeon-hole not a bit 
 bigger than the others ! In short, how is this to be 
 imaged but by say, a little wooden mill, dipped into a 
 stream that sets its wheels agoing, the motion of which 
 wheels of its own it is that seems, but only seems, to 
 throw up around it this vast universe; and all the time 
 the stream, which alone moves it, is unseen, unknown, and 
 no more than philosophically at the best dreamed of \ 
 
 It is this little mill that to Noack is the supreme 
 result of the sanest and soundest possible knowledge 
 that, namely, that is due to the experience of the senses ; 
 as, after all, it is this little mill that, to Kant himself, 
 and the most devoted of his commentators, is nothing 
 less at last than the achieved explanation of nature and 
 the laws of nature. In Kant himself there is no scarcity 
 of references to his own success in this respect : " There 
 
SCHOPENHAUER 201 
 
 are certain laws, and that a priori, which first make 
 nature possible"; this (ii. 181) is quite a usual refrain 
 of his, he himself being the fortunate discoverer thereof, 
 and so by his commentators lauded in excelsis therefor. 
 It is by him we know how both pure physics and pure 
 mathematics are possible ! " The categories," he tells us, 
 " prescribe laws a priori to nature ; nature, for law and 
 order, depends on the Categories" (77476). 
 
 It is certainly in consequence of this mill that Kant 
 is to Schopenhauer the greatest of philosophers : he has 
 given him the Maya, he has given him pure Idealism, 
 and so he has given him so " much that is great that his 
 spirit (Kant's) might say to him (Schopenhauer), in the 
 words of Homer : ^A^\vv S' av TOI air o<p0a\fjt,wv e\ov, rj 
 Trplv 7rrjev (I have taken the mist from your eyes which 
 was on them before)." l But if Kant, in this way, has 
 made Schopenhauer a pure idealist, he has restored the 
 balance by making Noack quite as pure a realist. And 
 that is strange the number of contradictory merits that 
 Kant is held good for. He is to some the champion of 
 physical science, and equally to others the champion of 
 metaphysical science, to these a spiritualist, as to those 
 a materialist. So, as here, an idealist to Schopenhauer, 
 and a realist to Noack. 
 
 Noack is nothing if not an Aufgeklarter, pure and 
 simple. We shall see this again, and how wroth he is 
 with Eobespierre when, for the consolation of humanity, 
 he (Eobespierre) " decretirt " religion in France anew as 
 well as also, further, in the same way, something of that 
 1 The strange thing about Schopenhauer is, that, notwithstanding 
 all his enthusiasm for his greatest of philosophers, whether in 
 Greek or in German, he does not hesitate, for all that, simply to 
 ruin his greatest of philosopher's philosophy. Not one thing that 
 belongs to the sacred temple of the "system" does he leave stand- 
 ing unless, to be sure, the mist in it the Maya. (See the 
 Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January 1879.) 
 
202 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 other wrath of his (Noack's) against the apparently 
 spiritual proceedings of Fichte and Schelling. But 
 specially now we have in mind what bears on " Erfalirung" 
 that Erfahrung of Kant, that sane and sound sensible 
 experience of Kant, which draws from Noack so many 
 expressions of heartfelt admiration and unlimited 
 applause. Well, now, if no one else in the world can 
 figure it, picture it, name it, better, that sane and 
 sound experience, that experience and perception of the 
 special senses as with the rest of us, that experience of 
 common sense, is all to be seen and understood there in 
 that little mill ! God, Freewill, and Immortality, emotion 
 of the Sublime, emotion of the Beautiful of all these 
 each is but an individual member of the wheelwork that 
 is within ; each category is a wheel within, Time and Space 
 are wheels within, and Sensation is the master wheel that 
 moves all, as moved itself by what it is dipped into 
 the Stream that what, whence, or if wholly unknown, 
 is only feigned in supply of the motion, which is the 
 necessity of supposition for consummation at last. 
 Noack tells us (i. 127) that Kant "took his place from 
 the first on the fruitful terrain of Experience experience 
 that sprang solely from the perception of the senses, 
 and was alone by the perception of the senses to be 
 substantiated " : and this is experience, and the whole 
 experience that is meant, To go to the window, namely, 
 and look out. Now, fancy that the explanation, the 
 philosophy of what you see from the window is that- 
 wonderful little mill ! And this to Noack shall be 
 the ultimate of wisdom ! the extraordinary and never 
 to be expected discovery of a genius and an intellect, 
 which, again and again in his wonder, he cannot but 
 name " gigantic " ! It is really because of its rationale, 
 as accurately typed in our little Mill, that Noack stands 
 by " experience " : to him the sole source and measure 
 
NOACK ON THE EGO 203 
 
 of certainty is the perception of sense ; and it is this 
 that conditions his polemic against the ego of Fichte and 
 Schelling. Reference here to his own pages (i. 119122) 
 will livelily prove this. Noack, it would seem, has con- 
 vinced himself of the non-reality of the ego. " In our 
 self-perception," he says, " we come to know our- 
 selves solely in the manner in which " (as Kant very 
 expressly told him) " we appear to ourselves in 
 inner sense. Only by the way in which our inner 
 feeling is affected by the appearance of our own nature 
 do we get acquaintance with ourselves. Only by this, 
 that the inner sense, with help of imagination, combines 
 inCo the unity of consciousness the complex of our 
 perceptions as concerns our appmrant state only so does 
 understanding get to the judgment / think!' The con- 
 ception of the ego itself is quite empty, he continues 
 (i. 120); "it is something of which, so soon as it is 
 regarded by itself apart, we can form not the least idea ; 
 round which, rather, we turn in a perpetual circle, at the 
 same time, indeed, that we must always make use of it, in 
 order to judge something of it, still without being able 
 all the same to make, in respect of our sense-cognition, 
 any further use of it whatever." If this ego is only 
 " as though " the ground to the appearances of sense 
 only " problematically and hypothetically " so : it itself 
 is nothing "in itself real"; it can be only a mere 
 schema simply regulative from which " not the 
 smallest actuality can be drawn." " The phases of this 
 ego are mere appearances of the inner sense, even as 
 nature is the sum of appearances for outer sense." 
 
 26. NOACK ON THE EGO 
 
 Now, most people will find a good deal that is strange 
 in all that. " To a thought which is in us," Noack says, 
 
204 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 with astonishment (123), "we give an independent 
 actuality " why, what does he himself do with " us " ? 
 Who are the " we," pray ? Who are the " we " who 
 " appear to ourselves " and have " our own nature," who 
 have " our perceptions " and " our self-perceptions," who 
 have " our inner feelings and our outer feelings," " our 
 inner sense and our outer sense," who have " our imagina- 
 tion," " our understanding," " our judgment," " our unity 
 of consciousness," our " us " that says to " us " " I think" ? 
 Who are the " we " that in a perpetual circle turn round 
 and round that funny " I " ? What can this " we " be if 
 not this funny " I " itself this " I " that is only " as 
 though " it were something real, a mere " schema," and 
 " regulative " ? A Tulclian with the Scots is also a mere 
 schema a stuffed calf's skin, namely, and also " regu- 
 lative " to swindle the cow of its milk ! Is this " I " 
 anything more than such regulative Tulclian a mere 
 make-believe to swindle a judgment from us ? And a 
 judgment, we may ask, of what ? Why, we have nothing 
 to judge of but " Appearances " ! Appearances without, 
 Appearances within ; and the " I " itself is a mere Ap- 
 pearance also ! But that is the world these three 
 Appearances together are the world. What an extra- 
 ordinary world this world must have loomed to Noack ! 
 Scepticism ! What scepticism could be more of a 
 " Terror " than this scepticism ? And Noack gives it to 
 Kant ! Scepticism ! " the spectre of a meaningless 
 universe and illusory human nature " ! That is said (by 
 Professor Eraser) of Hume : and we have been innocently 
 thinking that Kant was to refute Hume ! 
 
 "Sind (i. 120) dergleichen verniinftelnde Schllisse nicht 
 die Sophistik der Vernunft selbst ? " 
 
 "Are not such mal-reasoning conclusions but the 
 Sophistik of reason itself ? " 
 
 We toss back to Noack his own ball. 
 
THE EGO 205 
 
 No doubt, as has been said, Noack saw in the " I " 
 generally only, to say so, the physiological result of his 
 concrete existence ; and, 110 doubt, he distinguished 
 between that concrete existence and the " I " as a mere 
 term, so to speak, that in a generalising way named it. 
 But can it be maintained that any such view is at all 
 true to the facts that are ? No doubt, our self-percep- 
 tion as we get up of a morning, or as we lather our chin 
 at the looking-glass, can only be as we find it that is, 
 something empirical and corporeal, and still an I ; but 
 that is not the I -I of our thinking, and the question 
 then is certainly not of how I feel in heart or lungs, in 
 stomach or intestines. It is not to be denied either that 
 this latter I, the thinking I, so far as it can be distin- 
 guished from the empirical I, has a singularity of its 
 own. In one way it is just I, simply I, and no more 
 than I, the complete catholicity of which has been already 
 amply established. So far it looks empty, abstract, ' a 
 mere thought, a mere reflection ; but it is not empty- 
 on the contrary, it is the full, the plenum, the one full, 
 the one plenum ; the one foison and the one virtue : it 
 is the all and it is the one. It is the bend of the bow 
 the nisus ; it is the nerve, and it is the sinew. If, a 
 moment ago, identity proved to us such a pervading 
 principle, that may have struck us as a difficulty How, 
 as in the case of our other firsts, figure identity as a first, 
 and so ask for an instant whence a first identity could 
 be ? Identity of what identity with what, we might 
 mutter ? Why, with what but with itself ? This, the 
 Ego, the identity with itself, the one, single, sole and 
 necessary identity ! If only relation can be incorporated 
 with the brain, and not the thing or things in which it 
 i s then this is the one sovereign relation, the universal 
 solvent, the alcahest, that more than transmutes into 
 gold, that creates rather ! This that has itself within 
 
206 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 itself is all-independent of another : it is freedom's self, 
 freewill's self ; it is negative of any other and so " the 
 pure negativity " ! This, that to Noack is but the corner 
 of an address designatively attached, is the principle of 
 philosophy and the principle of more ! As self -"set" it 
 transcends all difficulty of a beginning, too ; and it is 
 the middle term ! It alone is the middle term that is the 
 entire secret of the universe ! 
 
 How strangely different things are as they are named 
 how strangely different according as they are looked 
 at ! Say to yourself that He says to Himself : 
 
 I Am That I Am ! 
 
 Noack says once (i. 30), "The ego is but the becoming 
 aware or conscious that we think ! " And what, pray, 
 we may ask, would you have more ? Good Heavens ! 
 just suppose it off ! " And in an instant all was 
 
 dark ! "- " The assumption," continues Noack, " that 
 
 this ' thinking ' can only be apprehended as the act of 
 the actually existent unity of a self-subsistent being is 
 utterly incapable of proof." Well now, if ego were not 
 the thinking of ego if I did not think I, where could 
 an I be ? Yet Noack has homage for his intellect who 
 says (Encyc., i. 47) : " Every man is a whole world of 
 ideas which are buried in the night of the ego ! " 
 
 Noack says again (i. 124) : " The subject is determined 
 only by what in the predicate is added to it, ... but we 
 must always go out of our mere idea of the ego to give it 
 existence." Then we have Kant's hundred dollars, which, 
 Though they are thought, not also are. By which we are 
 to understand that, as thinking the dollars adds no predi- 
 cate of actuality to them, so neither does my thinking I 
 actualise I. But the difference is vital. The dollars 
 that I think, are not ; but the I that I think, is. If I 
 exists because I is thought, it is not less true that I is 
 thought because I exists. I think I am because I am : 
 
EGO 207 
 
 when I no longer am, I shall no longer think I am. 
 Noack falls short at his very start ; for if it is by the 
 predicate, the esse, the Was, that the subject is determined, 
 then it is just esse, Was, existence, that the I exhibits as 
 already implied. The I is not only a thought, but a fact. 
 Parallel between the dollars and the I, there is none. 
 The I is not an empty " Tautologie " : it is a concrete 
 and full. 
 
 Tt is really astonishing the very small case that Noack 
 makes of the fact " that I think," dass ich denke 
 (i. 120s.). That I think that is not much! The 
 thoughts that I think are not mine it is not I that 
 think them ! That I of mine is only " an empty I 
 never once even a notion, let alone a perception " ! 
 What, then, is judgment ? what are the categories ? 
 Who or what is it that judges ? To whom or what do 
 the categories belong ? Who or what is it that sees the 
 case, and instantly fixes it with one or other of them ? 
 
 It is very certain that Fichte'" s I is not Noack's I. 
 " An I that through its determination of self is the deter- 
 mination as well of all that is not self " that to Fichte 
 is "the idea of the Godhead"! How different "the 
 founder of the critical philosophy," cries Noack ! He 
 went first, but " how modest and considerate his steps " ! 
 Yet what was the ultimate of that founder himself ? 
 Why, Die reine Apperception ! Fichte's und Schelling's 
 reines Ich ! The unity that was the apperception of 
 Kant is, in simple and good truth, nothing less, and 
 nothing else, than Fichte's and Schelling's Ego ! Why, 
 Fichte, in effect, did take it from Kant ; while Schelling 
 again, still more in effect, took it from Fichte. 
 
 And that is as much as to say that Kant the Kant 
 who to Noack knew only plain, sober, sensible experience 
 itself was quite as extravagant, ay, quite as " Komantik," 
 as ever a Fichte, or as ever a Schelling was ! Noack 
 
208 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 himself quotes from Professor Schulze in testimony of 
 this (i. 99) ; for, "How," Schulze asks, "if we know not 
 things in their reality, and if even our own ego be equally 
 unknown to us, do we know that this ego is the source 
 of that whole body of cognition which is due not to the 
 senses, but to it ? " " Man's mind (i. 100) being for Kant 
 the wonderful sea-deep out of which, unconsciously, all 
 the forms of things arose, so that the revelation of self 
 within is the revelation as well of all that we see 
 without." 
 
 And that is Kant. " No doubt," says Fichte ( W. W, 
 L 15), "it is just the business of the Critical Philosophy 
 to show that it is perfectly from the mind itself that all 
 that is present in it is to be explained and understood." 
 That is not realism, that is the very essence of idealism. 
 And that it was that alone it was that inspired the 
 shout of welcome and acclaim that burst on Kant when 
 he rose. This man has at length proved, it was said, 
 that we do not owe all to what comes from without, but 
 that we do know transcendentally know from within. 
 So it was that Carlyle sang of those " deepest of all 
 illusory Appearances for hiding wonder, Space and Time, 
 which were spun and woven for us from before Birth 
 itself, to clothe our celestial Me for dwelling here, and 
 yet to blind it " ! So it was, too, that Emerson told his 
 audience : " It is well known that the Idealism of the 
 present day acquired the name of Transcendental from 
 Immanuel Kant." The Transcendentalist further, he 
 said, perceives that " the senses are not final ; the senses 
 give us representations of things, but what are the 
 things themselves, we cannot tell : he reckons the world 
 as an appearance." This Transcendentalist of Carlyle 
 and Emerson contrasts rather with that well-advised 
 realist in his sober senses of Noack ! But, as contrasted 
 with simple sense, is not that little wooden mill of the 
 
KANT'S TRANSCENDENTALISM 209 
 
 strange world within, enough ? Emerson, indeed, goes 
 too far. The Transcendentalist, he says, " believes in 
 miracle, in inspiration, in ecstasy." I do not take 
 Immanuel to have believed in miracle, in inspiration, or 
 even in ecstasy poor man ! he was never married. 
 
 When one hears Noack vaunting how it was only by 
 " erfahrungsmassige Beobachtung " that Kant proceeded, 
 one wonders if it was only by " observation " that Kant 
 came to his Time and Space, or his Things-in- themselves ? 
 " Bewahrung, authentication through Erfahrung, experi- 
 ence grounded on perception," that is the whole test, and 
 source, and measure, and fulcrum of truth, and yet with 
 all this experience we never get once to reality \ A 
 wonderful consummation of the thinker who only "con- 
 tinued the experimental philosophy of Bacon, Locke, 
 Berkeley, and Hume " ! They founded on sense, the a 
 posteriori ; and it was just his peculinm that, like Fichte 
 and Schelling after him, he founded on the a priori, on 
 naked intellect, on " pure apperception," which, as said, 
 is but " Fichte's and Schelling's pure Ich." Ay, and 
 that is the foundation. I care not that the empirical 
 ego should be temporary and pass. Pass ! of course it 
 passes. The finite ego passes as every other finite 
 passes ; but every finite that passes bread, water, wine 
 
 still was. Neither do I care that the empirical ego 
 should have fibres in and from atoms of the material. 
 
 This is the truth : The last is the meaning and the 
 purpose of all the rest. All that that is, alone is that / 
 might be, -all that that is, alone is for that / is ! A 
 world at all is only for I the Finite I : a world at all 
 is only ly I the Infinite I. I as I is the first and the 
 last : it is the cachet of creation. 
 
 Kant has an enormous vogue at present. Not a 
 volume appears now that, if it have any pretension 
 whatever to speak of mind, attempts not to give it face 
 14 
 
210 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 by use of the name. From Germany itself for long we 
 have heard no call but to go back to Kant. Kant's 
 great critique, however, was in the main an answer to 
 the questioning of Causality in Hume ; and we cannot 
 so fail in self-respect as to doubt the results of a life- 
 time's reflections at least, in so far as concerns truth. 
 We hope at the same time that, in criticism as lately of 
 Noack, we have not grudged quotation from that strong 
 contrasting testimony of his. Noack was in the position 
 to speak ; and we have no desire unfairly to derogate 
 from either the man or his words. His opinion of Kant 
 is conspicuous on every page, we may say, of the volume 
 we quote from. As regards the quality of Kant's work, 
 we can hear (i. 112), for example, of "his punctual 
 accuracy of anxious inquiry his constant cautious cir- 
 cumspection, that questions every step, that will not 
 entangle itself in any false show of deluding fallacies, 
 that will throw itself into no spurious discovery." And, 
 no doubt, the findings of our own, as above, sufficiently 
 contrast with this: we ask only that they be compared. 
 Of the man Kant himself, Noack can be quoted (i. 22) 
 as speaking thus in the midst of his grief and indignation 
 over the reaction that Fichte and Schelling for a time 
 caused : 
 
 " On the banks of the Saale a reaction began to take form against 
 the principles of the philosophical revolution which the grand old 
 man of Kbnigsberg had originated. In consequence of the new 
 direction which, after Kant's achievement, the spirit of the time had 
 taken, as well as of the predominating vogue of the influences of the 
 day which resisted it, the critical Kant was supplanted and dis- 
 placed. The pure reflex of his world-shattering intellectual deed 
 was blurred ; the clear contours of his critical action had a false 
 transference given them to the foggy region of the dark and im- 
 understood necessities of faith, whose clouds had already withdrawn 
 the brief illumination of that critique from eyes that were too dull 
 to bear the light all-dazzling as it first shone. Against that light 
 
CARLYLE ON KANT 211 
 
 there opposed themselves the dogmatic interests and hazy senti- 
 mental needs of the next generation ; and so it appeared that fate 
 had defrauded not only him himself who brought the light, but 
 even his very age, of the best fruit of this critique. In the first 
 heat of one-sided acceptance and appliance of his ideas, the age 
 caught only to Kant's dressing-gown and slippers, and left lying 
 untouched and unnoticed the robe that should deck his heroic form 
 and constitute the true mantle of fame for the giant-magnitude of 
 this great spirit." 
 
 I know not that I may not without impropriety 
 venture to quote from an unpublished and uncommuni- 
 cated letter of Mr. Carlyle's, written to me " 8th 
 Octr. 1867 " (more than thirty years ago !), which I 
 think is relevant here. What I wish to quote runs 
 thus : 
 
 " Kant, in whose letters, etc. I have been reading lately (with con- 
 siderable weariness for most part), seems to me in spiritual stature 
 too, what he was in bodily, 'not above 5 feet 2'! Essentially a 
 small, most methodical, clear and nimble man, very like that 
 Portrait in Schubert, I sh d think j the fine sharp cheery honest eyes, 
 brow, intellect ; and then those projected (quizzically cautious, etc. 
 etc.) lips, and that weak receding poor chin. Not an Alles-zermal- 
 niender the least in the world, but much rather a Gar-manches- 
 zernagender ! Who was it that first gave him the other epithet ? 
 Will you tell me, too, where is that abt the starry firmament and 
 sense of right and wrong : which has dwelt with me many years but 
 only at second hand 1 " 
 
 My object here, naturally, is simply to contrast the 
 quotations. The gigantic hero of Noack was but an 
 essentially small man to Carlyle ! And surely, at least 
 in the face of what we have come to see, there is some- 
 what of a disproportion, apparently, between what Kant 
 was or did and the values, not by Noack alone, but even 
 quite popularly, assigned to him, assigned, that is, 
 without a glimpse of actual discernment and guided 
 only by some half-heard rumour. We read of him, for 
 example, as tended at the last as any best-tended king 
 
212 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 was never better tended : we read of his poor body lying 
 in state lying in such state as could not have been 
 more real had it indeed been a king's (sixteen days 
 unburied !) ; nay, we read of signs appearing in the 
 heavens at his death, even as we hear of them when 
 great Julius died ! No fautor of philosophy but will 
 be pleased at any honour shown to Kant to him the 
 cheery, good, wise, little soul that passed his innocent 
 little jokes at his chaste little dinner-table to him, 
 above all, who wrote all that. But, when he thinks of 
 all and realises all, he will be unable on the whole not 
 to acknowledge within himself a certain sense of dis- 
 proportion. Kant, he will think, wrote a good deal 
 before the Kritik of Reason ; but he was not great 
 then, while it is not possible to suppose that ever at any 
 time, or ever from any country, there issued a philoso- 
 phical work with one tithe of the acclaim, intelligent or 
 unintelligent, that welcomed the Kritik. Nor have 
 the echoes of that acclaim yet ceased to reverberate 
 whether in the Old World or the New. We are still 
 admonished to go back to Kant. We may bow the knee 
 most thankfully to Kant for all that he has suggested ; 
 but, even because of all that for which we bow the knee 
 in thankfulness, is it well possible for us even from 
 what we have just seen categorically, as it were, to 
 go back to Kant ? 
 
 Nevertheless, I do noi think it will surprise that my 
 answer to the above letter of Carlyle's was in its tone 
 deprecatory. Carlyle, not knowing really anything 
 either of the one or the other of the three Kritiken, I had 
 not to speak of these, but only of Kant generally. I 
 acknowledged that to see into a man, a bit of his own 
 writing was really often the very best loophole ; but I 
 suggested that Kant's letters, as on the whole but pro- 
 ducts of age, and written for the most part to com para- 
 
CARLYLE ON KANT 213 
 
 tive strangers, with no reference but to the writer's 
 work, which had formed the theme of their writing to 
 him I suggested that these letters (and Carlyle seemed 
 to build on them) that these letters could contain, as in 
 point of fact they did contain, little or nothing that was 
 significative of character. I pointed out (at least, so far 
 as I can remember) that the relative works themselves, 
 though called Critical, were not destructive, negative, but 
 indeed constructive. I referred to the extraordinary 
 fertility of Kant, who had no sooner done with one 
 Critique than he turned to another, and yet another 
 turned, in fact, to remarkable work after remarkable 
 work, all freshly, frankly written, and with new and 
 original ideas of his own. The " Alleszermalmender " 
 belonged to Mendelssohn, I said ; and I indicated where 
 the locus of the " starry firmament and sense of right 
 and wrong" was to be found. 
 
 In my answer to Carlyle I had nought to say of 
 bodily size. In drawing a man it is not usual to forget 
 his inches ; but for the character of Kant, his poor little 
 mite of a person was never in account, unless for praise 
 to its occupant even for the justice he dealt it justice 
 that made of infirmity health, and of the expectancy of 
 a life short the certainty of a -life long. 
 
 Carlyle had indeed, for the externality of Kant, text 
 on his side. It is thus Schubert speaks of it : 
 
 " His body seemed to have received from nature the stamp of feeble- 
 ness as characteristic type. Weak in bone and still weaker in muscle, 
 he was scarcely five feet high ; his chest was very flat and almost 
 sunk ; the right shoulder somewhat protruded. His body was so 
 dried up that it excited general astonishment on the part even of 
 the doctors : they thought they had never seen before so emaciated 
 a corpse. Kant himself for years often joked about it, boasting to 
 have attained the minimum of muscular substance." 
 
 In presence of a life, for eighty years, wrung from 
 nature by the power of the mind in presence, too, of 
 
214 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 the vast rich work which that mind accomplished, it is 
 of that mind, plainly, that, in Kant's case, we must alone 
 think. Very specially, too, it is of that mind we must 
 alone think when we turn our regards to the immediate 
 occasion that is now before us. Far and away the most 
 important crisis in the whole movement towards the Ego 
 was, in his Pure Apperception with its Categories, the 
 critical initiation of Kant. 1 
 
 1 I may name here Bessel Hagen's very interesting account of 
 the disinterment of Kant's bones in 1880, when the skull was 
 subjected to quite an extraordinary number of measurements. 
 Jachmann says Kant's head, relatively to the body, was sehr gross. 
 That again would bespeak rickets ; but a measure of scarcely more 
 than 22 inches in girth would give only a medium size ; and Reusch 
 says that, in a certain great picture, "the smallness of the head 
 with its scanty hair makes no pleasant contrast to the other bearded 
 philosophers beside Kant." 
 
 Is it worth adding of these "Singles" and "Doubles," that the 
 former are but as the Matters of Fact, the latter as the Relations 
 of Ideas ? Had Kant but seen this ! 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 FlCHTE 
 
 IT is not the life of Fichte that concerns us at present ; 
 but still I may refer here to what has been suggested 
 elsewhere of the nobleness of the man. Birth, school, 
 university, poverty miserable poverty ; family tutorships, 
 Konigsberg, Kant, Kant's refusal of the loan and Fichte's 
 own perfectly sweet - souled comment ; Jena, Jena and 
 the student troubles, Jena and the university troubles ; 
 Erlangen, Berlin, Berlin and grand patriotism ; his wife 
 and he with his country's soldiers, his wife in the fever 
 of infection and his nursing of her his consequent 
 death : the result from all is that we have his Wissen- 
 schaftslehre ! 
 
 Some starched-neckclothed Britons might, with society 
 conceptions of this and that, fastidiously fancy a certain 
 commonness ! But he was noble a nature's noble 
 gentleman ; and she was noble a nature's noble lady. 
 
 If such Britons, in such mood, should at any time, 
 have Eousseau in mind, I wonder if they would feel that, 
 if he had ever entered to them, say, in a billiard-room, 
 it would have been their duty to kick him out ! And 
 yet this man influenced Kant ; and Kant's countrymen 
 attribute to him " such power over his French as 
 Voltaire himself " never possessed, and Carlyle only 
 calls him " ill-cut serpent of eternity." But where in 
 this world could there possibly be found such intense 
 antithesis as Kousseau and Fichte ? 
 
 215 
 
216 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 There is more owing to Fichte than the Wissenschafts- 
 lehre. There are his popular works, stimulating and en- 
 nobling, excellently translated by the Mr. William Smith 
 to whom Edinburgh is indebted for its Philosophical In- 
 stitution. But it is in the Wissenschaftslehre that we are 
 to look for that element that more especially concerns us 
 here. 
 
 We are even in this element, indeed, when we find, 
 with recognition, that we are in that " streng-philoso- 
 phischen Vortrag" of the Wissenschaftslehre that every 
 one can but name, with IsToack, " a scholastic master- 
 piece." Schelling has it that " it will always remain 
 Fichte's great, not to be forgotten, merit to have been 
 the first to conceive the idea of a completely a, priori 
 science, product of pure thought " ; and Hegel calls it 
 " the first rational attempt in this world " at such pure 
 deduction. To Noack that scholastic masterpiece, the 
 Wissenschaftslehre, "goes forward, with as great logical 
 acuteness and dexterity as inflexible and rigorous conse- 
 quence, from the now once for all presupposed notion." 
 And presupposed notion was the ego. 
 
 Schelling represents Fichte (2. 1. 369s.) to have set 
 up the ego as Principle of the entire presentment of 
 things, as acting according to the irremissible call to 
 deduce from that principle the whole of this world ; and 
 he even intimates that Fichte, failing even so to produce 
 a completely objective deduction, left that achievement 
 to " another," namely himself, for he adds in a note 
 " in the System of the Transcendental Idealism." 
 Schelling to the same effect adds (2. 3. 51): "Fichte 
 found the one universal prius in the ego," etc. 
 
 Similarly, Biese, too, tells us (in his Aristot., i. x.) 
 that the ego was to Fichte, " cause of itself, to itself begin- 
 ning and end, absolute and free, the single true reality." 
 
 Noack, as we have seen, is of a very opposite way 
 
FICHTE 217 
 
 of thinking. He says once (i. 66): "He (Fichte) called 
 his philosophising a developing further of the Kantian 
 philosophy : we call it a throwing away of the entire 
 fruit of Kant's Critique"; and again (127) he has more 
 at length, this : " The originator of the Wissen- 
 schqftslehre might always entertain the belief that, in 
 aiming at a systematic deduction of all human know- 
 ledge from the notion of the ego, he was only develop- 
 ing the Kantian results into a pure system of reason 
 the truth, nevertheless, remains just this, The Wissen- 
 schaftslehre is the manifesto of war which Fichte hurled 
 at Kant." With as much as this before us, we are not 
 allowed to doubt, then, as to what Noack thought, but 
 all the more does it surprise to turn to the very opposite 
 views of Schelling and Hegel. The latter speaks 
 (Hist, of Phil., iii. 553) thus : " Fichte's philosophy is the 
 completion and, specially, a more consequent statement 
 of the Kantian philosophy ; beyond the fundamental 
 content of the philosophy of Kant he does not go, and he 
 himself regarded his philosophy as in effect nothing else 
 than a systematic carrying out of the Kantian." Fichte's 
 own avowal, as referred to by Hegel, is the winding-up 
 conclusion of his own very first Preface, and runs 
 (W. W., i. 89) thus: "Whatever my system properly 
 is, and under whatever class it may be brought, whether 
 genuine, carried-out Kriticismus as / believe, or however 
 otherwise they may please to name it, that does 
 nothing to the business." One, then, is left no doubt 
 in the matter, whether as regards Fichte as author or 
 Hegel as critic. The latter but, after all, not more than 
 the former is quite peremptory. Elsewhere (486) he 
 says : " From Kant's philosophy sprang Fichte's, which 
 took the Wesen of self-consciousness, speculatively, as 
 concrete egoity," and (557) "is a construction from 
 the ego of the determinations of cognition." 
 
218 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Fichte himself names the ego with just such a role in 
 and from the very earliest pages of the Wissenschaftslehre : 
 "this was the aim," says Noack (131), "of the whole 
 circumstantial logical Apparat that occupies almost two- 
 thirds of the entire Wissenschaftslehre" 
 
 Publicly, Kant, -as is known, formally rejected Fichte's 
 supposed following out of his system ; and Noack, when 
 he would make Fichte not Kantian, but simply the front- 
 to-front adversary of Kant, may be allowed, so far, a 
 certain show of countenance from Kant himself. But it 
 seems that the aged Kant had (W. W., xi. 153), " in fear 
 of the suspicion of Atheism and under the representations 
 of others^ been over-persuaded so to express himself. 
 There can be no doubt nowadays of the truth of the 
 affiliation of Fichte to Kant, claimed by Fichte himself 
 and acknowledged by all others. 
 
 Fichte's principle is the Ego, and the whole spectacle 
 of the world is to him but a deduction from it. 
 
 Now, this sounds immense. Worse : it sounds extra- 
 vagant, monstrous, preposterous. Worse still : it sounds 
 ridiculous a farce ! No man of ordinary intelligence 
 in his senses, when he hears this, but laughs, assured 
 that what he hears can never be earnestly intended, but 
 must be mere wit, alone by itself, that will try itself in 
 the air. 
 
 It is earnestly intended, nevertheless. Fichte is a 
 man just terribly in earnest. On this ground, at least, 
 he cannot for an instant laugh not so much as even 
 smile. He believes in himself ; and in what he proposes, 
 he believes absolutely ! 
 
 However that may be, indeed, there can be no ques- 
 tion of the value of the Wissenschaftslehre, if even no 
 more than a discipline. All are agreed about that. 
 Noack, the enemy, is not less sure of the scholastic per- 
 fection of the Wissenschaftslehre, its rigorous logical 
 
FICHTE 219 
 
 consequence, than is Schelling, the instantaneous adopter, 
 adapter, and follower. Hegel, as we know, goes further 
 than that. He may not conceive it to succeed, but the 
 attempt itself seems to him at last just what the world 
 was waiting for. " That is the first reason-attempt in 
 the world to derive the categories " (566), " to develop 
 the differences out from the / think" " to deduce all the 
 determinations (Bestimmungen) from this point of the 
 absolute certainty " (310). 
 
 The student, it may be, for all that, will find in the 
 Schwegler quite a sufficiency of the Wissenschaftslehre to 
 satisfy him. No English reader, when he first comes to 
 this, but must be struck with astonishment at the 
 hitherto unheard-of, unexampled strangeness of it all 
 its utterly absolute, unintelligible unsubstantiality. No 
 wonder, he will think, that it seemed to Kant a sort of 
 spectre, something such that, when a man thinks he has 
 caught it, he finds he has caught nothing, only himself, 
 only the empty hand indeed that is baffled to catch. I 
 say myself in the Schwegler (427), "it is impossible not 
 to wonder at the busy, eager, never-doubting Fichte, who 
 will develop the world from a process, so to speak, of in 
 and in!' 
 
 Our point at present, however, is the fact of the ego 
 having been at last explicitly made the single principle 
 of philosophy. Implicitly, Kant, for all his wondering 
 disapprobation of Fichte, had, with his pure unity of 
 apperception and his categories of judgment, been 
 actually doing quite the same thing as Fichte. And 
 surely it was very much to improve Kant and advance' 
 the problem, to put everything at last above-board and 
 in express name. It was an enormous improvement and 
 advance out and out properly to name the problem, and 
 to fix the ego as the one unity in this world that was 
 sure and single, inderivative and prime. That was not 
 
220 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 his error the One ; and neither was his error the Many. 
 The ego was the one ; and the categories derived from it 
 were the many. Neither was that rigid logical men- 
 struum of his, that moved all and united all, by any 
 means in itself an error. His logic was good, and it was 
 supremely applied. 
 
 Fichte's error was this : his spring of movement was 
 an expedient from without and not a principle from 
 within. He put hand on a solely external dialectic, 
 and had not a dream of the internal dialectic that 
 was vital heart in the thing itself. Limitation of that 
 by this, and of this by that, was the externality of which 
 Fichte would fain have made an internality. 
 
 Of Fichte's Ego as Ego we have to see again what 
 occurs to be said later as in reference to Noack and 
 under Schelling : something of this has been already 
 noticed indeed. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 SCHELLING 
 
 I TURN here from quite a volume in M>. on the Life 
 and Works of Schelling to confine myself, on the whole, 
 so far, only to what of main interest we have in hand. 1 
 
 1. SCHILLING'S FIRST LITERATURE 
 
 Schelling's religious position connects with his philo- 
 sophy ; and, in that regard, his first (non-academical) 
 public production was his essay " On Myths, Historical 
 Sagas, and Philosophem.es." Alert spirit and vivid 
 eagerness as of genuine literature new born that is 
 what gives movement to all the earliest works of Schel- 
 ling : the activity to absorb and assimilate, the re-activity 
 to reproduce and repeat. That, however, cannot be said 
 to be so manifestly and livingly present here as we find 
 it in the (Fichtian) essays that immediately follow. It 
 is present, however ; what the youth had learned in 
 regard to the Myth in Genesis (referring to his academ- 
 ical essay thereon) is still motive of the composition 
 
 1 No doubt, such comprehensive and summarising work on Schel- 
 ling is very much of a want at present and no doubt, also, people 
 who write would like to see what they write published. Still, it 
 may be that, in this particular instance, there is now as indeed 
 there is some room for hesitation. The MS. itself, naturally, 
 may have occasion of further allusion in course. 
 
 221 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 now. Generally, however, we have simply to note any 
 further that Schelling's own son and biographer charac- 
 terises diese bald vergessene Abhandlung as showing not 
 even a dream on the part of Schelling of that reality 
 of which he was convinced later in regard to Mythology 
 and Revelation. 
 
 It is thus in a way suggested that it may be not 
 unusual to assume one belief for Schelling when young, 
 and another belief for Schelling when old. In the 
 general reference, plainly, then, the Myth idea certainly 
 characterises his first belief. 
 
 It is in this connection we hear that, with Schelling's 
 application to the Bible of the Myth idea, the academic 
 authority in place did not allow himself to be quite at 
 one. And so we may say that at Tubingen a critico- 
 theological direction of study, or even say aufkldrende 
 (rational) tendencies, on the part of Schelling, came to be 
 well known. So it is that Hegel, prompted to write his 
 former fellow-student on seeing him in print, is to be 
 quoted as saying that he finds him (Schelling) on his 
 " old way of rationalising important theological ideas, and 
 so helping gradually to set aside the ancient leaven." 
 
 And it is here that Noack (in i. 83 of his " Schelling," 
 etc., Berlin, 1859) breaks in with his, "And a strange 
 fate ruled it that," of these two the same Hegel who 
 writes this, and the same Schelling who receives this, 
 " the one, in scarcely twenty years, is attempting specula- 
 tively to renew the foundations of Theology, while the 
 other proves to have found it advisable in the end to 
 put back into the haven of Revelation." 
 
 As (p. 201) already referred to, we may remark 011 
 Noack as very singular here. He is a German professor 
 perfectly instruit in all that concerns his Fach Greek, 
 Latin, Ancient Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, and he 
 is himself nothing literally nothing if not an Auf- 
 
SCHELLING 223 
 
 gekldrter : Kant is his God, and actually for nothing that 
 he ever did positively, but only for what, to Noack's belief, 
 he did negatively negatively, that is, as regards religion 
 generally and Christianity in particular ! A reference or 
 two will explain. 
 
 Kant, he says once, " acknowledged openly the prin- 
 ciples of the Aufklarung. He continued the empirical 
 philosophy of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and 
 carried it out into its logical completion, in the result, 
 namely, of his irresistible Kritik, that human reason is 
 in no condition to prove even the possibility, let alone 
 the actuality, of Free-will, God, and Immortality." " Men," 
 says Kant, " are not yet of age, but we work now to 
 make them so." "Kant does not conceal his true opinion ; 
 he only, in prudent reserve, leaves it to honourable and 
 intelligent readers to spell out the true Kant from 
 between the lines " (i. 18, 19). 
 
 So much of an Aufgeklarter is Noack, indeed, that 
 (21) he scarcely disguises something of regret that 
 Frenchmen, after having " deposed Christianity by 
 formal decree," after having seen " that it was time to 
 discover the truth and abolish all religions ; for all 
 religions are products of need, mere casual formalities 
 simply understood," - after having " recognised no 
 religion but that of the Law, the apotheosis of the 
 sovereign will that is law to itself, as the thinker of 
 Konigsberg had, ten years previously, announced it "- 
 so much of an Aufgeklarter is Noack, I say, that, after 
 Frenchmen had done all this, he scarcely disguises his 
 regret that Eobespierre, even in another year, should ask 
 in the Convention, " Why should ideas which console and 
 ennoble humanity not also contain truth " ; so that, by his 
 authority, " God and immortality w,ere decretirt anew " ! 
 And from just such a state of matters it is that he 
 (Noack) presently deplores the reaction against Kant, 
 
224 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 which had returned, after his " world-shattering exploit of 
 intellect," into " the cloud-land of the dim and unintelli- 
 gible necessities of belief." " We forget utterly," he says, 
 " in our attempts to prove the existence of an uncondi- 
 tioned necessary Being, whether then it is at all possible 
 even only to think him." And so it is that for Noack, 
 Schelling, " despite his pretensions to complete the 
 critical philosophy, remained by its shell, unable to make 
 himself master of the proper core and inmost motive 
 force of the thinking of Kant." " So also Jacobi failed 
 to see, just as Fichte and Schelling failed to see, that 
 Kant's inferences from practical reason towards Freedom 
 of the Will, God, and Immortality, were for the all-pul- 
 verising thinker himself only fallacies, sophisms, and 
 empty show." " Jacobi, indeed, took, as his (Kant's) own 
 seriously meant opinion, Kant's mere connivance at the 
 form of moral consciousness then once for all in vogue." 
 Noack (i. 21, 22, 32, 36), of course, is to be refuted in 
 this. 
 
 It has been already admitted that Kant did belong to 
 the Aufklarung, even if he belonged to it only as its end. 
 No doubt, he saw in the " discrepancies " the justification 
 for its negative, but where even at these is there in 
 Kant the Aufgeklarter's sneer and jeer ? It is not with 
 a negative at all that Kant comes to Christianity, but 
 only in reverence, in awe with the sincerest affir- 
 mative. 
 
 It is more than a hundred years since Kant wrote, 
 and we are not without evidence, from time to time yet, 
 that there are those in the pulpit even of whom it would 
 be good to think that they were as much turned from the 
 Aufkliirung No. 1, and to the Aufklarung No. 2, as 
 Kant was ! 
 
 Surely it was only ingrained, inveterate Aufkliirung 
 that could bring a Noack to the prodigious supposition 
 
SCHELLING 225 
 
 that it was not in good faith, but only in " irony," that 
 Kant propounded his moral argument for God, Immor- 
 tality, and Free-will a supposition that at least seems 
 altogether at feud with the relative criticism of Jacobi, 
 Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and, just generally, all ! 
 
 Even Schelling's young unorthodoxy, which is presently 
 before us now, is not so certainly to be characterised as 
 such, in any, so to speak, absolute, " death sans phrase " 
 style. In his " Lectures on the Method of Academic 
 Study," which, delivered 1802, published 1803, were 
 twice re-edited " unaltered," first in 1813 and again 
 as late as 1830, he says he "cannot help thinking what 
 a hindrance to Christian completion the so-called Biblical 
 books were, which in true religious import bear no 
 comparison, even from afar, to so many others, earlier 
 and later, especially the Indian." That is, truly, un- 
 orthodox enough, and, quite as truly, unapt, inept, 
 unhappy enough ; and Schelling, when it was last 
 uttered, had no longer the plea of youth, for he was 
 then fifty-five. Let him have returned, then, when he 
 might to the haven of Kevelation, it would seem that, 
 judging from this so very questionable propos on the 
 Bible, he was not orthodox in 1830. Still, for all that, 
 even while as yet at Tubingen, his Aufklarung had 
 measure in it. The preface to the projected " historico- 
 critical essays of the years 179394, with "commen- 
 tary on the childhood of Christ" of the same date, 
 proves this ; and it gives us, says his son, " a clear view 
 of the standpoint which Schelling took up, now that he 
 was in the middle of his study of Theology." l In 
 general, " he would discuss all theological ideas, in their 
 origin and matter, just like every other human idea 
 psychologico-philosophically," namely. We learn, too, 
 from the said " commentary " that he treats " as Sagas " 
 
 1 Schelling's Life, i. 39. 
 15 
 
226 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 all that is said of the early life of Christ. But if 
 Strauss is suggested in these respects, there are insisted 
 on at the same time some most important differences 
 between him and Schelling. " All in the Gospel nar- 
 ratives, namely, that surpasses the ordinary measure of 
 human occurrence, thought, and action, this, openly and 
 without reserve, Strauss makes criterion of the Mythical; 
 he allows nothing whatever factual to remain as concerns 
 the person of Christ, with which the origination of Sagas 
 might have naturally connected itself." "With Schelling, 
 on the contrary, Sagas began from a divine core in the 
 life of Jesus himself, and were to him, therefore, only 
 accessory." This is further explained at some length in 
 Schelling's own words. All is well worth reading here ; 
 we make room for this : 
 
 " Not with dogmas or even moral monitions would the Apostles 
 begin their teaching, but with narrations of what they had seen and 
 heard (1 Joh. i. 1), and among these, only the Resurrection of Jesus 
 would remain for long the main fact. . . . Now first, as suddenly 
 a fact the fact that the crucified Master was again risen in life 
 from the grave, exalted them all as with a single stroke into that 
 loftier enthusiasm which, from now on, shines forth from all that 
 they say or do, now first fell the veil from their eyes, now first 
 appeared to them all that Jesus had done or said, in a new light, 
 now first they learned to interpret his hidden words and deeds. 
 Every word, every sign, every glance of their Master had meaning 
 for them," etc. 
 
 " To Schelling's historical sense, the explaining away 
 of the fact that Jesus was again risen in life from the 
 grave was intolerable." So earnest was Schelling in 
 this that, having, in those Prelections at Jena in 1802, 
 lectured in as we have seen no so very orthodox a 
 vein, he repeated at Wlirzburg, in 1804-5, some other 
 Lectures (specially on Art), belonging to the Jena period, 
 in which we can read of " the unexampled event that 
 Jesus conquered the death of the cross and rose up 
 
THE FICHTIAN ESSAYS 227 
 
 again in life, a fact which, to seek to explain away as 
 though an allegory, and to deny as a fact, is historically 
 insane." In short, as is said, "With Schelling, the 
 historical, as well as the mythical, has its right : the 
 child is not to be washed out with the bath, as is quite 
 specially the case with Strauss." As late as the delivery 
 of the thirty-third lecture of the " Philosophy of Bevela- 
 tion " ( W. W., last vol. of all, page 232), Schelling himself 
 claims for the same view of Christianity which he 
 represents then the early date of 1831 ; and his son 
 (in Pref. to last vol. but one of the W. W.) would seem 
 to more than hint at an earlier date still. The fact is, 
 in short, that it is difficult to decide whether the 
 Christianity of Schelling was not very much the same 
 when he was to Noack a heretic as when he was to 
 Noack orthodox. This, however, we may easily regard 
 as very certainly decided, that at no period of his life 
 was Schelling the Aufgeklarter that Noack was, and at 
 no period of his life did Schelling reject, as Kant was 
 supposed to do, dogmas of Christianity that, as its fulcra, 
 were vital to it. 
 
 2. THE Two FICHTIAN ESSAYS 
 
 This may suffice as to what is to be understood at 
 present on the religious side. 
 
 As we have said, " Alert spirit and vivid eagerness, 
 as of genuine literature new born, that is what gives 
 movement to all the earliest works of Schelling : the 
 activity to absorb and assimilate ; the reactivity to 
 reproduce and repeat." This, it was said too, is what 
 we have to expect to find in the formally philoso- 
 phical first works of Schelling, to which we now come, 
 the two essays, namely, on the Ego. Noack (96) 
 expresses this, in the same reference, thus : 
 
228 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " Schelling's youthfully mobile nature was possessed of a high 
 degree of susceptibility of sense for new scientific directions which 
 might reformatorily crop up eagerly to grasp to such, and pre- 
 cipitately to throw himself forward as competitor for the laurels 
 of renown which were then in sight, without having first, with 
 considerate distrust, assured himself, through scrutiny, of good 
 grounds for the tenableness of the new." 
 
 Now, this perfectly names the position of Schelling to 
 Fichte in these two essays. That is, the whole material 
 discussed is the material of Fichte. Still, it would be 
 only ungracious spleen that would deny the discussion 
 to Schelling. The fuel was Fichte's, and, most assuredly, 
 it stood in need of no fire for its kindling but Fichte's 
 own. Nevertheless, it is to be acknowledged that 
 Schelling did take the fuel to himself, and did in his 
 own way fire it. Fichte's nobility of acceptance to that 
 effect here is, as is usual with him, admirable. He 
 writes to Eeinhold in July 1795 : 
 
 "Schelling's writing, so far as I have been able to read it, is 
 altogether a commentary on mine. Why he does not say this, I do 
 not quite see. Deny it he will neither wish to, nor can. I rather 
 think I have to conclude that he would not like, if it should happen 
 that he has not understood me right, to have his mistakes laid to 
 my account. I am glad of his appearance. He has perfectly hit 
 the matter, and several who have not understood me have found 
 his writing very clear." 
 
 There is in that testimony of Fichte's own to some 
 said specialty of fire on Schelling's part. But for a 
 moment we can see only the magnanimity of Fichte 
 himself. He is ungrudging in his acknowledgment and 
 praise, and ungrudgingly glad of Schelling's appearance 
 and support. So gently he interprets his reserve as to 
 himself, no doubt, Schelling does this, he says, not to 
 commit me ! And what is it really that Schelling does ? 
 Why, in the very first words of his pamphlet, this ! 
 
 "The thoughts which are expressed in this brochure, after the 
 author had for some time borne them in his mind, were lately 
 
THE FICHTIAN ESSAYS 229 
 
 stirred afresh by the newest appearances in the philosophical world 
 [they are not at all Fichte's own express and singularly peculiar 
 thoughts] ! He had been led to them by the study of the Kritik 
 of Pure Reason, in which, on from the beginning, nothing seemed 
 to him more obscure and difficult than the attempt to found a form 
 of all philosophy, without having anywhere laid down a principle, 
 through which not only the one first form underlying all the other 
 forms, but the necessary connection of the former with the latter 
 dependent on it, should have received their support [Fichte shall 
 not have said this first] ! This want was made to him all the more 
 striking by the constant most frequently specially directed to this 
 side attacks of the opponents of the Kantian philosophy, and 
 particularly of ^Enesidemus [and so ! we are to have again all that 
 whicli we have already had from Fichte complete, about ^Enesidemus, 
 and Reinhold, and Solomon Maimon, but generously, nobly, wound 
 up into this magnanimous acknowledgment] : In this judgment, 
 as to what had been still left to be done by the theory of the 
 ' Vorstellung ' for the future completion of the * Elementar- 
 Philosophy,' the author of this brochure received the strongest 
 confirmation yet, through the latest writing des Herrn Professor 
 Fichte ! which all the more agreeably surprised him ! the easier 
 that, with his previous thoughts, it became for him [in short, to 
 enter into it, and he winds up all self-denyingly modest thus] : 
 Made aware by Maimon's latest publication, a work that well 
 merits a more thorough consideration than the author has been yet 
 able to afford it, that the need of a final solution of the entire 
 problem, which has hitherto lain in the way of all attempts at a 
 universally valid philosophy, has come to be more generally felt 
 than seemed to be the case till now. He believed himself to have 
 discovered, through the mere explication of the Begriff of said 
 problem, the only possible way of its solution ; and the thought 
 that a general statement of it might here and there serve by way of 
 preparation for the working out of the whole idea, determined him 
 to submit to the public this attempt thereat ! May those, whom 
 philosophy itself seems to have called to this work, soon, through 
 complete accomplishment of it, render all mere preparation use- 
 less ! " 
 
 All that is said is, after all, so young that I suppose 
 it had better be forgiven to the youth, who was still not 
 twenty ! 
 
 Schelling's second pamphlet, on the Ego, a considerably 
 
230 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 bulkier one, followed its forerunner in only six months ; 
 but, though really at bottom quite as much borrowed 
 from Fichte as the former one, it does not even once 
 name the name Fichte ! The son, indeed (see here the 
 Life, i. 5659), against the natural surprise at this, 
 directly, in so many words, says, " Schelling has named 
 Fichte in the preface " ; and then he quotes : " To bring 
 in this great day for science (when, for all sciences there 
 shall be but one) is reserved for only few perhaps for 
 only one, but to the individual who presages the coining 
 day, may it be vouchsafed him to rejoice in it before- 
 hand" which words "refer," he says, " to nobody but 
 Fichte, by the one Schelling understood him!' Now, 
 unless I have strangely missed it, the name Fichte 
 assuredly does not occur in the preface ; then, as for the 
 words quoted, I do not deny that they may point to 
 Fichte, but I certainly mean to say that this may be 
 disputed. The individual ("der Einzelne") that is to 
 enjoy the presentiment of the great day coming is 
 surely Schelling ; and if he is " der Einzelne," may he 
 not, defensibly, be also " der Eine " ? Nothing more 
 possible than that that so heated young head should have 
 had at least in thought a clutch at such a glory ! But 
 it is also quite possible that Schelling may, with express 
 intention, have suppressed the name Fichte, I do not 
 mean now in the interest of his own glory, but for 
 another very natural reason. Schelling sent his first 
 pamphlet to Fichte, together with a very proper letter. 
 But it is said, " Whether Fichte answered Schelling is 
 not known." Now, if Fichte had taken no notice of 
 Schelling, why should not Schelling have replied by 
 taking, similarly, no notice of him ? 
 
 Of course, even in that case, a good deal may be said 
 on the side of Fichte. The young man's essay must, 
 with its pretensions, have simply shocked him. The 
 
THE FICHTIAN ESSAYS 231 
 
 accompanying letter, as I say, was a very proper one ; 
 but then, even in it there was a tone of the same preten- 
 sions. " Perhaps the annexed tractate has even some 
 right to be communicated to you in this way, that it has 
 been in the main written in relation to your last work 
 (which has opened to the philosophical world great new 
 views), and has been actually in part occasioned by it." 
 That " in part," " zum Theil," was scarcely calculated, in 
 the circumstances, to commend itself to the gizzard of 
 Fichte. Nor even for the same gizzard was it at all 
 likely to be pleasing to hear that in that same work 
 " something still remained dark, but more, and especially 
 what seems to be its main thought, has at the same time 
 become to me, if I do not altogether deceive myself, 
 clearer " ! Then who was it that wrote to him, Fichte, 
 all this ? Why, a mere student, unknown to him, from 
 the Stift at Tubingen ! Surely the state of the case was 
 such that sympathy here must fall entirely on the side 
 of Fichte, even if he were silent. We have already seen 
 the expression of Fichte's mind after appearance of 
 Schelling's second pamphlet. He cannot help giving 
 vent to his surprise, in the midst of praises and mitigat- 
 ing suggestions, at Schelling's non-declaration of the true 
 state of the case relatively : " Why he does not say this, 
 I do not quite see ; deny it he neither will, nor can." 
 As the son (56) points out, however, Fichte, in a second 
 edition, does, in 1798, take up and by implication 
 recognise at least this latter offspring of Schelling. The 
 temptation to signalise and illustrate the stupidity of 
 contemporary prints, so apt, as they are, to be surprised 
 and to laugh at new views, destined as these views may 
 be to future pre-eminence, is too strong for him, the rather 
 that he has to hand an instance that concerns Schelling 
 even more palpable than another that concerns himself. 
 Further, Schelling, indeed, is by and by for Fichte, 
 
232 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " Dearest Schelling " (no matter that somewhat later 
 " Dearest " declines to " Dear "). Nevertheless, we can 
 very well see Fichte's real mind in the whole matter 
 when, in the preface to that same second edition of his 
 little work on the Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, the 
 Beilage of which associates, so far, Schelling with himself, 
 he characterises that same said little work as " till now 
 the only writing in which, on the philosophising in the 
 Wissenschaftslehre t there is itself philosophising, and which 
 therefore serves as an introduction to this system." 
 Here Fichte, with mention of himself, has none of Schel- 
 ling no ; Schelling's little pamphlets, after all, shall not 
 have been introductive to the system ! Till now, intro- 
 duction to the system, there has been none but Fichte's 
 own none but that single little tractlet on the Begriff, 
 etc.! This, too, shall have been said late in 1798, 
 whereas Schelling's pamphlets were published in 1794, 
 or early in 1795 ! 
 
 It is to be observed that, while exposing here the fact 
 of the whole matter of Schelling as having been but an 
 unblushing appropriation from Fichte, we were still, 
 again, not slow to put all its own weight on the discus- 
 sion as, at all events for its part, Schelling's. If very 
 certainly he was a pirate in matter, he was quite as 
 certainly a producer in form. This, too, followed him 
 through life. For inspiration, suggestion, he seems ever 
 to have turned his eyes without, 1 but then, while at work 
 to have had them, on the contrary, ever within. So it 
 is that we are told of his successive debts to Fichte, 
 Spinosa, Plato, Plotinus, Jacob Bohme, and who else ! 
 Still, Schelling, for all that, while a great writer, is also 
 an original writer. Even now, as regards these little 
 pamphlets, it would be difficult to exaggerate the excel- 
 lence of their writing. They do not carry the scholastic 
 1 Even in the Naturphilosophie ! 
 
 *- 
 
THE FICHTIAN ESSAYS 233 
 
 rigour of Fichte ; but they are more generally acceptable. 
 For the more usual mind, they have a more encouraging 
 ease of approach. But more than that, they have all the 
 marks about them that denote an original writer. Power 
 of quotation, power of illustration, power of words, power 
 of sentences, " the phrase " all are his. In short, he has 
 absorbed into himself the whole material ; has re-thought 
 it there ; and has re-issued it alive in flesh and blood 
 of his own, and its own. And that is his excuse. This 
 matter, this Fichtian matter, for example, has proved 
 entrancing to him ; he so delights in it that it enters 
 into his very self and becomes one with him : he must 
 give it body, he must give it voice, and this so livingly 
 that he cannot distinguish it frpm himself ; it appears to 
 him his own, and he thinks it his own. Eeally, when we 
 look at it in that way, we cannot at all take it so ill of the 
 young man of the young man then, of the so susceptible, 
 so re-actively susceptible quasi-young man always. 
 
 Still, as lying there palpably to sight another man's 
 goods in his very shop-window the little that was 
 made of this then is what is fitted to surprise now. 
 The surprise now, in fact, is the want of surprise then. 
 Whatever may be done now, nobody but Fichte himself 
 seems to have expressed surprise then. Schelling's 
 pamphlets seem to have been accepted as equally 
 original, as equally authoritative, as equally instructive 
 or even as more instructive, than Fichte's own books. 
 We are apt to think how different it would have been 
 with us in Britain why, the culprit would have been 
 instantly detected as a culprit, and as a culprit named \ 
 Have we not Professor Ferrier and Sir William Hamilton 
 at once on the traces of the " literary reaver," Coleridge, 
 in whose crib they found the pillage of Schelling, 
 pillaged in his turn who, by the bye, as though 
 in fellow-feeling for the pilferer, is so mild with 
 
 LIBRS 
 
 OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
234 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 him I 1 Schelling, indeed, is so complimentary to Coleridge 
 here that he seems hardly to get vent for all his gratitude 
 to him even as though for the robbery itself. I sup- 
 pose the opium of Coleridge was to Coleridge very much 
 what the first young literary ambition of Schelling was 
 to Schelling, in a sort of spiritual haze for result. 
 At all events, let English literary honesty be what 
 it may, his countrymen would seem, on the whole, 
 to have condoned to Coleridge his larceny, even as 
 the insensibility of the Germans at the time failed, on 
 the whole, to see in Schelling his. The truth at work, 
 however, in the latter case was not improbably this: 
 To us now these matters are all so loud that it gives us 
 a new turn to be told that your Schelling and Fichte 
 literature in Journals, Annals, Year-books, and what not, 
 never sold. 
 
 It is the case of the American " Dial." Half a dozen 
 men seemed to have made a great noise together. But 
 they paid for it rather, just, they paid it ! Germans as 
 Germans, Americans as Americans, knew nothing at all 
 about it. 
 
 Schelling's matter in these pamphlets being really 
 Fichte's is not for criticism here ; but a word in passing 
 may be not out of place, especially the whole subject 
 being in regard, as to its criticism by Noack. The 
 gravamen of that concerns (partly, 202, seen already) the 
 Ego, when proposed as the fulcrum on which to found, 
 
 1 Schelling (2. 1. 196), in borrowing from Coleridge the expression 
 " tautegorical," has a long note upon him. He is extravagantly 
 grateful to the " much-endowed Briton " for having understood, as 
 Germans did not, his " Gods of Samothrace." " I give willingly up 
 to him his borrowings from writings of mine without mention of my 
 name, which have been so sharply, nay, too sharply, animadverted 
 on by his own countrymen. The severity of such censures in 
 England proves, nevertheless, what a weight is put there on literary 
 property, and how strictly the suum cuique in letters is observed." 
 
NOACK ON EGO 235 
 
 or the certiorated point from which to start, in philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 3. NOACK ON THE EGO OF FICHTE AND SCHELLING 
 
 Noack begins his criticism with what, after Kant, first 
 led to this Ego. Reinhold, namely, construed Kant's 
 first and fundamental position, his reasoned basis, into the 
 bare fact of Vorstellung as such, into the fact of a per- 
 ception in Consciousness. A Vorstellung, he said, was 
 between an object, a thing in itself, without, and the 
 subject, consciousness, within. The former was matter 
 passively received ; the latter was form actively bestowed. 
 Reinhold insisted on a " Grundsatz," a first principle, 
 as the necessary first ; and that was it. His Satz that 
 concerned the Vorstellung, his Satz des Bewusstseins, was 
 the Grundsatz ; and that Satz, as self -certain prime, would, 
 he said, be universally allowed. 
 
 Reinhold was still of Kant's mind here that the 
 Vorstellung in the middle was something known, a fact, 
 an a ; but the Thing on the one side, and the Ego on the 
 other, were both unknown and unknowable call the one 
 on the outside an x, then the other on the inside was 
 
 ay- 
 There appeared now the " Aenesidemus " of Schulze, 
 with some objections to the propositions of Reinhold. 
 He accepted the necessity of a first fact of consciousness, 
 but disputed the reference of a to an x, of the Vorstel- 
 lung, the perception within, to an object without. He 
 urged, too, the impossibility of the x without and the y 
 within, of the Thing in itself on the one hand, and the I 
 on the other, both, namely, as constituted by Kant, he 
 urged the powerlessness of either to realise the role 
 assigned to it by Kant. " If our understanding " (so he 
 reasoned as quoted at p. 208), "through its thinking, can 
 not reach the actual reality of the things, and if even our 
 
236 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 own Ego remains in its inner being wholly unknown to 
 us, as Kant maintains, how do we know that this Ego 
 is the source of the veritable existential contribution 
 which our cognitive faculty is to be supposed to derive, 
 not from the perception of sense, but, on the contrary, 
 from its own self ? And yet, it is maintained further 
 wholly without proof, that all our cognition or perception 
 begins with the action of actual things on our senses, 
 which things, for all that, are, for our thought, to be 
 supposed unreachable in their real nature!" (Here 
 Schulze must be acknowledged to bring forward such 
 contradictions and impossibilities as reduce the theory 
 of Kant to a system which is either without truth of 
 fact in itself, or, at best, without any truth in its 
 presentations !) 
 
 After Schulze it is Maimon that is here to be 
 noticed. He, for his part, makes conspicuously obvious 
 that conclusion from the premises of Kant, this, namely, 
 that the Thing in itself, with its maintained operation on 
 our senses, is an arbitrary and unproved assumption, due 
 to our imagination as influenced by the inference from 
 the effect to its cause, and that, consequently, we know 
 only appearances, not things themselves. The remarks 
 of both Schulze and Maimon, if Kant is named, still 
 concern Keinhold. 
 
 We are now quite prepared to see emerge the Ego of 
 Fichte. To him Eeinhold's Grundsatz does not combine 
 or exhibit all the indispensable constituents which a 
 Grundsatz necessarily demands, and he proposes his Ego 
 in its place ; for he, too, demands a Grundsatz. 
 
 Noack reasons or inveighs against this Ego of Fichte's, 
 partly from himself, but mainly from most of the positions 
 of Kant in which, as it would seem, he implicitly believes. 
 The great argument that is his own, we may say and (202) 
 it was said before he derives from what we may call the 
 
NOACK ON EGO 237 
 
 psychology of the Ego; but he expresses his astonishment, 
 just, as it were, beforehand, that any such idea, generally 
 and at all, should have entered the heads of any human 
 beings, especially of men who, like Fichte and Schelling, 
 pretended or intended to continue and complete, as alleged, 
 the philosophy of Kant. " How, in all the world, could 
 the two Titans, Fichte and Schelling, come to set up and 
 deck with the fresh colours of living actuality such a 
 phantasma ! " The mere suggestion of the necessity of a 
 primary Grundsatz is to Noack a phantasma, but still 
 more a phantasma the analysis of it into an entire system 
 of philosophy " through logical abstractions ! " To 
 begin by setting up a problem and then developing the 
 notion of it, that is to Noack the glaring delusion of a 
 false a priori method. How, if the problem, however, 
 were an acknowledged want ? and how better set about 
 finding the object in solution and fulfilment of that want 
 than in considering beforehand the conditions which, in 
 and of itself, it necessarily involved ? Noack forgets 
 that, when (i. 98) he blames Eeinhold, " in the endeavour 
 to find the one which, after Kant's great discovery, was 
 all that was still necessary for philosophy in order to 
 render thinkers perfectly agreed together," - - Noack 
 forgets, I say, that when he blames Eeinhold, in these 
 circumstances, " for forgetting to consider the question, 
 what characters, simply generally, such a primary 
 Grundsatz should of necessity possess in order that 
 there might follow from it something fruitful for actual 
 knowledge" forgets that, precisely because of their 
 observance of such a preliminary, he has no patience 
 with either Fichte or Schelling ! And certainly one 
 does not well see beforehand that either the one or 
 the other of them did wrong when, having preveniently 
 considered the case, he brought forward what appeared 
 to him to suit it the Ego, namely ; while, as for having 
 
238 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 preparatorily considered the case at all, it is just such 
 reflexion that Noack, when he blames Beirihold, does, in 
 point of fact, justify. 
 
 Of course, Noack is still free to except, if it so pleases 
 him, to what is brought forward ; and accordingly he does 
 except to it. An object that to him is so very palpably 
 only psychologically, or even physiologically, situated 
 as Ego is, can never play the Absolute ! " The con- 
 ception," he says, " that the Ego is not an idea that 
 takes birth only in and with man's development is 
 reduced, through later researches, to its empirical ground, 
 where it had been already placed by Kant's great critical 
 achievement." It is, he says further, " really only some- 
 thing that arises and appears in the course of the 
 development of man's being." " It is remarkable," says 
 Kant, " that the child which can already sufficiently 
 fluently speak, still only pretty late (perhaps a good 
 year later) first begins to say I." l Now, one hardly 
 likes the idea of a human being as, in the first instance, 
 so much mere opaque mechanism which can go on 
 working, working, blindly, till suddenly one fine day, 
 one knows not how, the idea " I," like a fly, alights on 
 a wheel without any difference of the working, working, 
 except only this, that, ever after, strangely somehow, this 
 fly becomes the centre the functioning centre of the 
 whole business ! One is tempted to ask, is not this just 
 an instance in its place of the one cosmical fact that a 
 spring becomes at last overt, which, though long latent, 
 had, all along, alone worked ? But properly to canvass 
 this point of view, we should first see, perhaps, what 
 constitutes on Noack's part the bulk of his writing here, 
 namely, his relative references to Kant. 
 
 As we may not inexcusably suppose now, almost a 
 
 1 Noack quite well knows this quotation from Kant. We may see 
 this again ; meantime let the reader consult our own pages 79 and 80. 
 
KANT TO NOACK 239 
 
 mere ipse dixit of Kart will prove to Noack authority 
 enough for pretty wjil any conclusion whatever. His 
 way here is to quote Kant, first, as against any such 
 possible Grundsatz as has been proposed, and second, 
 similarly, as against any such possible use of Ego. 
 
 4. KANT ACCORDING TO NOACK HERE 
 
 The Grundsatz is, as defined (98) : "A highest principle 
 that, certain in itself, and intelligible of itself, stands in 
 need of no other prior ground or proof for itself, and 
 which shall necessarily give foundation to all philosophy, 
 and not less to all science." 
 
 " This idea of such a possible science was for Kant now a merely 
 svstematico-forrnal question, which, with the content of the con- 
 struction itself, had nothing to do : a system is nothing else than a 
 unity of a number of cognitions under an idea. To deduce the 
 content itself from the idea of such unity, in this way, that this 
 idea was not merely a rule and measure, but also a quarry ready 
 beforehand for the obtainment of actual cognitions of experience 
 themselves this, for Kant, came not only not into his mind, but 
 he declared such an attempt to be an unwarranted and adventurous 
 transgression of the right use of reason. Such first Grundsatz was 
 not necessary ; nay, even, it was absolutely impossible unless 
 Kant and the critical philosophy were to be wholly abandoned. Of 
 a highest Grundsatz from which knowledge of experience, in matter 
 and in form, is to be won, Kant knows nothing, and will know 
 nothing. Kant brought the whole force of his intellect to prove 
 that our human understanding is certainly in every way a con- 
 ditioned one, and that for the cognition of the unconditioned our 
 faculties are altogether incompetent. Sole source and sole measure 
 of certainty for us is the perception of sense a consciousness 
 empirically instructed Kant emphatically declares that the idea of 
 the unconditioned has existence and meaning only in our thought 
 as a thought, but not outside of our thought " (Noack, i. 101, 102, 
 113, 114, 116, 117). 
 
 This, truly, has very much the look of faith in an ipse 
 dixit; for Noack himself, however, it is conditioned by 
 
240 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 his apparently prostrate devotion to the whole system of 
 Kant. And that system certainly professes to be founded 
 in fact to be founded and grounded on the empirical 
 facts of sense, which, however, are only appearances I 
 The common faculty of sense has indeed within it the 
 a priori forms or schemata of Time and Space ; but 
 that faculty and those forms are only for the appearances 
 of Sense. Of Understanding, too, as equally of Keason, 
 the acting powers are within ; but these powers, all the 
 same, have no purpose whatever unless to subserve Sense 
 to work up and finish off its appearances into objects 
 and so to complete and round off experience, knowledge, 
 as a whole. Whatever concerns Will, and whatever con- 
 cerns ^Esthetic Judgment all similarly is for no other 
 end than to complement and complete. All that, 
 certainly, is the warrant of Noack (for his shout of ex- 
 perience, experience, in Kant), so far, namely, as there 
 is in all that, and in all that as so put, the least particle 
 it is not much of those actual objects and of that 
 actual external experience in which surely with very 
 few exceptions most people believe. We have already 
 seen the " little wooden mill." That is Kant's experience ; 
 and is there more than a mite of actual experience to be 
 found in it ? But what of Kant's testimony to Noack 
 against the Ego ? 
 
 " The Ego's self, says Kant, is, in the conception of it, quite void 
 of content, the constituents of our state of being itself are not taken 
 up and filled into it ; it is, consequently, not even a notion, let 
 alone a perception, but only the awareness or consciousness that I 
 think, which accompanies all our perceptions and ideas." 
 
 This, no doubt, is Kant's Ego (summarily put) as we 
 
 have it early in the Kritik of Pure Reason (sec. 24), and, 
 
 later, under the " Paralogisms." This Ego " is but a 
 
 logical copula, it is wholly without matter of contents 
 
 it is but a point, but a bare logical idea, that is itself 
 
KANT TO NOACK 241 
 
 void, that has nothing to 'how for itself," that is, in fact, 
 " nothing but a mere reflexion falsely converted into a 
 thing." This, of course, is a very curious finding or con- 
 clusion to come to, but it is really fully expressed here as 
 Kant himself names it. Noack, however, would seem un- 
 able to satisfy himself with any single name, description, 
 or exposition which, with every groping, he can discover 
 in Kant for it (this Ego), or which, with every effort of 
 his own, he can himself construct for it. It is with 
 surprise or even compassion that he comes to remark : 
 
 "For Fichte," in this regard, "the deep-seeing discovery of the 
 paralogisms and fallacies that lay hidden in the notion of the Ego, 
 which constituted one of the most brilliant parts of the Kritik of 
 Pure Reason, was altogether lost from memory, and he himself and 
 his ape, Schelling, wholly entangled themselves in that same net of 
 sophisms whose deceptive glitter their master had, all in vain for 
 them, exposed. The Ego is not a self-existent being. A unity a 
 mere abstraction thought simply in behoof of a possible experience 
 is confounded with, and assumed to be, a reality apart ! Such 
 subtilisations of conclusion are the Sophistic of reason. Very 
 certainly we have in our seeing of self solely a perception of the 
 manner in which we appear to ourselves in inner sense : we get a 
 knowledge of ourselves only in the way in which our inner feeling 
 is affected by the appearance of our own nature. Only in that inner 
 sense, with the help of imagination, combines the particulars of our 
 perceived state into the unity of consciousness only so does our 
 understanding attain to the consciousness, I think. The idea of 
 the Ego is only the act of the referring of the internal perceptions 
 of our own state to their underlying cause. The idea of Ego is 
 something of which, so soon as we take it apart individually in 
 itself, we can have not the least notion, round which, rather, we 
 turn in a perpetual circle, in that, of necessity, we constantly make 
 use of this idea in order to judge something of it, without our being 
 empowered by it, all the same, to make of our experience-cognition 
 any further profit whatsoever. This Ego altogether, consequently, 
 can be taken, not as something really and in itself actual, not, that 
 is, as a self -existent entity, but must be understood solely pro- 
 blematically and hypothetically as a ground, in order that our 
 empirical perceptions in their connection may be regarded as 
 16 
 
242 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 though they bad in this Ego their ground ; that is to say, it can 
 be a mere schema of a solely regulative principle, out of which not 
 the least thing can be actually deduced. As Kant also teaches, 
 philosophy is to be freed from the craze of a dead Sein (esse), 
 external and alien to human cognition, the pretended Thing in 
 itself, which is as an unknowable something behind the appearances 
 of sense : all our knowledge reaches only to appearance ; every 
 Sein withdraws itself into our perception of it : as for objective 
 things in themselves, things more than merely appearant, that 
 remain alien and external to consciousness there are none such : 
 nature is simply the aggregate of sense-appearances. How could 
 both, Fichte and Schelling, if they desired to think consequently 
 as Kant did, believe in a dead Sein as Thing in itself that was the 
 Ego of our appearances to sense ? With what right did they take 
 these perceived by internal observation actings of the Ego, as 
 anything else than as mere appearances to internal sense in the 
 same way as nature is equally the aggregate of appearances to 
 external sense ? With what right could they permit themselves 
 to dissociate the Ego from the series of the Conditioned, and assume, 
 in the Ego conceived in the entire range of inner states, but 
 abstracted from them, an Unconditioned, isolatedly apart? The 
 fallacy of the conclusions of Fichte in regard to this Ego is to a hair 
 the same false show which, as a whole, has by Kant been again and 
 again exposed in reference to the conclusions of reason as concerns 
 the Ideas of the Unconditioned " (119- 122). l 
 
 We have here a goodly number of sentences of Noack 
 in purposed explosion of any reality in the very Ego of 
 our consciousness, in the very Ego of our thoughts in 
 the very Ego with which we think that we think our 
 thoughts in the very Ego of our consciousness which is 
 to us our consciousness, which is to us, us ! A goodly 
 number ! And we have passed more ; and there are 
 more to come. Ego is but a " wretched tautology," he 
 says, and "no thinking of it as actual can make it 
 actual, no thinking it to exist can make it exist " ; " we 
 can think what we like, but reality for what we think 
 in a possible experience for us is another question " ; 
 
 1 Passages quoted before are here together : what Noack says 
 must be fully seen. 
 
KANT TO NOACK 243 
 
 " the Ego that only thinks itself existent, if it should 
 have had no authorisation thereto in the wise of the 
 perception of sense, stands on feeble feet ; the doctors 
 of the Ego have a double Ego ; a finite and conditioned 
 one, the human Ego, and in and over it an unconditioned 
 and absolute one, which cannot be the human one, but 
 still somehow is to be the human one " (ib.). 
 
 But all this, as on the part of Kant, is of such de- 
 terminative importance in its bearing on every side of 
 it, that we cannot but briefly look back upon it again. 
 
 In regard, first, to a necessarily determinative and 
 necessarily systematic Grundsatz, a self-evident first 
 principle, a self-complete primary proposition, what is 
 Kant's own call for " architectonic " procedure anything 
 else than that ? Noack himself refers to it as it stands 
 by itself at the end of the Kritik of Pure Reason (641), 
 and it runs thus : 
 
 "I understand by an Architectonic the art of systems. Under 
 the control of reason our cognitions must not be a Rhapsodic, but a 
 system, in which alone they can support and promote the ends 
 (Zwecke) of reason. I understand, too, by a system the unity of 
 the constitutive cognitive particulars under a single idea ; which is 
 reason's own idea of the form of a whole, so far as through this idea 
 there shall be a priori determined as well the totality of the parti- 
 culars as the place of the parts. Such scientific idea of reason 
 comprehends, therefore, the end (Zweck) and the form of the 
 whole. The unity of the end, to which all the parts (mutually 
 together under its idea) refer themselves, makes it that every part 
 may, in cognition of the rest, be missed, and that there takes place 
 no contingent addition, or indefinite amount of completeness, which 
 has not its a priori determined limits. The idea requires a schema 
 for its realisation; that is, an essential number and order of the 
 parts a priori determined by and from the principle of the end 
 (Zweck). The schema which is not devised according to an idea 
 (the final end of reason), but empirically, according to ends con- 
 tingently presentant (not possibly to be enumerated beforehand), 
 gives technical unity ; whereas that which springs only in conse- 
 quence of an idea (where reason a priori prescribes the ends, and 
 
244 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 not empirically expects) founds architectonic unity. What we call 
 science, the schema of which must, accordant to the idea, i.e. 
 d priori, contain the ground-plan (monogram/ma) and the division of 
 the whole into parts, can arise, not technically, because of the 
 similarity of the particulars, or of the contingent application of the 
 cognition in concreto, to all manner of external ends at will, but 
 architectonically, because of the affinity and the derivation from a 
 single highest and inner end (von einem einzigen obersten und 
 inneren Zwecke), which first of all makes the whole possible." 
 
 Would not one think that here in Kant was the 
 precise receipt from which Reinhold and Fichte had 
 constructed that " obersten Grundstaz " of theirs ! And 
 would not one be surprised at the mere a posteriori 
 externality which Noack had read into its glaring d 
 priori internality ! Noack, namely, has evidently no 
 thought here but of so many alien particulars brought 
 into formal unity and arrangement under an alien idea, 
 or at least an idea that, as only formal, need not 
 be domestic. This, too, as it appears, is to him the 
 doctrine of Kant a systematico -formal idea, which, 
 with the contents to be subsumed under it, " had 
 nothing to do." As one sees, this is to stand by what 
 to Kant is only " technic," and not at all " architectonic." 
 Noack, then, though referring to this very section in 
 the Kritik of Pure Reason, is certainly not in harmony 
 with the words of it. Convenient arrangement of 
 particulars under a convenient unity, and both- 
 arranged many and arranging one quite possibly 
 external and alien the one to the other " ArcJiitcctonisch," 
 is something more than such mere " Technisch." It is 
 internal ; while the subsumed Many in relation to the 
 subsuming One, and not less the ones of the Many 
 reciprocally, are homogeneously, or even, to say so, 
 homogenetically placed. Noack ignores that. 
 
 This may sufficiently dispose of Noack's reference 
 to Kant as in comment of a possible Grundsatz ; while 
 
KANT TO NOACK 245 
 
 a like reference to a possible use of Ego has been al- 
 ready, at pages 203, 235, 239, pretty fully discussed. 
 A note on page 238, again, refers back to pages 79, 80, 
 and concerns Kant's remark on children quite usually 
 fluently speaking a year or more before they get to use 
 "I." At 79 the words immediately preceding this 
 remark of Kant's are also quoted from the Anthropologie, 
 and they are sufficiently remarkable. Noack, too, 
 quotes the passage on children and the Ego, and in 
 support of the latter being a mere development; but 
 he elects to quote it (i. 199) only in a late, distant, 
 summarising paragraph that but refers to the discussion 
 proper of the " Fichte-Schellingian Ego"; where there 
 might have been no wish for even a hint to emerge 
 of the very first paragraph the very first words, indeed, 
 of the Anthropologie, containing, as they do, an opinion 
 of Kant's on the general subject of the Ego. We, for 
 our part, are quite used to Kant's relative contradic- 
 tions ; but Noack, probably, preferred silence on this 
 one. When one thinks of the empty not notion, not 
 perception reflexion merely that elsewhere ego is to 
 Kant, one is rather pleased to think of this passage, 
 and even, as now, one ventures to repeat it : 
 
 " That man can have ego in his apprehension exalts him infinitely 
 above all the other living beings on earth. Thereby is he a person 
 and, by virtue of the unity of consciousness, throughout all muta- 
 tion that may happen to him, one and the same person, i.e., com- 
 pared with Things (such as are the reasonless brute beasts, with 
 which it is ours to deal at will), a being, in dignity and rank, alto- 
 gether different, even when he cannot yet speak the ego, inasmuch 
 as he still has it implicitly, just as all languages, if using the first 
 person, must at least think it, although indeed they express not 
 this I-ness of it by any special word : for this capability (namely, to 
 think) is the understanding." 
 
 But this, critical as it is, will suffice as concerns, 
 specially, the two Fichtian essays of Schelling. They 
 
246 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 have no principle but the single principle, the Ego of 
 Fichte. The fire of young ambition was not to be con- 
 tented, however, with this only ambiguous eminence ; 
 and there were soon Ideen in the air zu einer Philosophic 
 der Natur, " Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature." 
 The greatest work of Schelling's earlier period, neverthe- 
 less, remains his System des transcendentalen Idealismus ; 
 and of that the principle was still the Fichtian Ego. 
 In these days, after Kant, system followed system with 
 unparalleled rapidity ; and that on the Transcendental 
 system there should follow immediately yet another 
 system, the Identity's system, though on the part of the 
 same originator, would only appear natural. Not, how- 
 ever, that it was not, on the whole, perhaps, only Hegel's 
 daring peremptoriness of gratitude in the famous 
 " Differenz " that prompted the claim in advance. 
 
 But as a decisive picture of pretty well all that 
 belongs to this brilliant Jena period and its import 
 generally, I would fain have it excused to me that I 
 interpolate here " Schelling and Hegel : Their Union 
 and Disunion." 1 
 
 THE LECTUEE 
 
 SCHELLING AND HEGEL: THEIR UNION AND DISUNION 
 
 What is meant by the -union of these two men sums 
 itself up in all that is indicated by the publication, in 
 1802 at Jena, of Schelling and Hegel's Critical Journal of 
 Philosophy. Hegel's father, "a decided aristocrat," was 
 Secretary of the Exchequer at the seat of Government in 
 Stuttgart; while the father of Schelling was Cloister 
 Professor and Preacher at Bebenhausen, not far from the 
 University of Tubingen, to the Protestant Seminary of 
 which it was ancillary. It was for the education and 
 
 1 This was a Lecture delivered to the Philosophical Society of the 
 University of St. Andrews, on the 15th of February 1896. 
 
SCHELLING AS BOY 247 
 
 qualification of this Seminary that both Hegel and 
 Schelling were finally intended ; arid both, accordingly, 
 were very similarly disciplined beforehand. At school 
 Hegel had approved himself a quiet, steady lad, simple 
 and naive, but diligent and industrious, who took to his 
 books, and liked to walk with his seniors, from the first. 
 Schelling, again, was precociously quick in learning, 
 almost to the consternation of his teachers; for they 
 naturally scrupled to place him, as was the order of his 
 progress, side by side with hobbledehoys who, years and 
 years older than he, could only look askance upon the 
 boy, though they were to find themselves not seldom very 
 glad in the end to propitiate his help, apt as he might be, 
 iii an instinct of intellectual superiority, to play them 
 tricks at times. For this prcecox ingenium is described 
 to have been, if liilare, also petulans ; and his sister is 
 understood to have admitted that Schelling as a boy 
 was troublesome, and teasing, and mischievous enough. 
 Something strange, at the same time, was the acquire- 
 ment of this boy. He wrote admirable Latin and Greek 
 at twelve, and even at ten years of age ; and it was by 
 special licence, as it were, that he was admitted to the 
 Seminary at Tubingen two years younger than was the 
 rule, after a year's waiting, so to speak, on the outside, 
 too. As he had been at school, so was he in the 
 University quick beyond his years, and, even at risk of a 
 scandal, on the occasion of an examination, slyly helping 
 with a false answer some appealing oldster at times. No 
 doubt, a certain degree of procacity can hardly be with- 
 held from such precocity as was that of Schelling. Over- 
 wise is apt to be overweening ; and overweening can only 
 express itself by being overpert and malapert. Other- 
 wise, so far as conduct is concerned, Schelling's precocity 
 seems to have made itself manifest, on the whole, by a 
 marked tendency, as has been said for Hegel too, to 
 associate preferably with his elders. 
 
 As for Hegel, again, " Hegel," says the biographer and 
 son of Schelling, " by all accounts did not make himself 
 remarkable at Tubingen by the depth of his learning in 
 any branch of knowledge, but, as he had been brought up 
 
248 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 in the Kesidence, so he possessed without doubt a more 
 finished knowledge of the world (indeed there was some- 
 thing G-estandenes something stand-offish naturally in 
 him), which gave him the advantage over Schelling and 
 most of the stipendiaries who had come thither from the 
 seclusion and the innocence of the cloister schools/' This 
 is a valuable testimony on the part of the son of Schelling, 
 whose bias in the circumstances cannot be supposed to lie 
 on the side of Hegel, whose University position, for the 
 rest, he must not be understood to undervalue. There is 
 a word, schwerfdllig, which the general reader will find 
 not unfrequently applied not only to the writing, but to 
 the individuality of Hegel. As for the writing, a certain 
 difficulty which may be so characterised will not be 
 impossible to suggest itself; but how this man, with a 
 knowledge of the world and a natural bearing to suit, 
 should have been also sckwerfdllig (heavy, slow, dull) is 
 something hard to realise. He may have been shy, and 
 even, in a certain way, awkward, both of speech and 
 gesture ; but a well-featured, middle-sized man that looked 
 business, as has been said of him, could not have been a 
 lout. For the rest, socially, he had evidently been a great 
 success at Tubingen. He was a welcome companion at 
 all festive meetings ; and he was to several an intimate, 
 much -valued, and much -loved friend. That was the 
 result of his Rechtsehaffenheit, his BiederJceit, his Lustigkeit, 
 and, applied to a man, it would be difficult to find three 
 finer characteristics ; he was loyal, he was true-blue, he 
 was merry-hearted : he was a good student, too, in class, 
 without effort, third ; and reading variously and greedily 
 out of it. 
 
 It was here, then, at Tubingen, that the two men first 
 met ; and there are one or two things recorded of them 
 which undoubtedly speak to a certain familiarity of 
 friendship between them. Nevertheless, on the whole, 
 it seems that the friendship of Schelling and Hegel at 
 that time must be considered to have depended rather on 
 the professional, so to speak, than on the social interest, for 
 which latter, says Schilling's biographer, Hegel " went else- 
 where." They were at Tubingen together for no less than 
 
LETTERS OF SCHELLING AND HEGEL 249 
 
 three years indeed ; but, academically two years in advance 
 of Schelling, Hegel was also by four years and five months 
 his senior a difference of age that, at that time of life, 
 made the one comparatively old, and the other, similarly, 
 a boy. 
 
 Still, such intimacy can be so readily understood to 
 have been produced between them by their intercourse at 
 Tubingen, that we do not wonder that Hegel should have 
 been moved, some fourteen months after he had left 
 Tubingen, to open a correspondence with Schelling, who 
 had yet nearly another year to remain there. What 
 moved Hegel will, with the state of the case, be apparent 
 from its first words : " Berne, December 24, 1794, Mein 
 Lieber ! My dear friend, I should have been glad long ago 
 to renew with thee the friendly relations in which we 
 formerly stood to one another. This feeling lately awoke 
 again afresh as I happened to read, only the other day, the 
 notice of an article by thee in Paulus's Memordbilien." 
 What moved Hegel, we see, was Schelling's appearance in 
 literature ; and that already says something for what 
 special interests Hegel had latently at heart. And it is 
 really on these interests, religious and philosophical, that 
 the entire correspondence turns, in the course of which, 
 though it (the correspondence) was only of less than a 
 year's duration, Hegel has to speak of some of Schelling's 
 earliest works ; and on these, it must be acknowledged 
 that Hegel does not stint eulogy. In other respects 
 Hegel gives excellent expression to all that Schelling has 
 seriously an interest in ; and Schelling cannot but write 
 to Hegel warmly and encouragingly in return. It is this 
 correspondence, in effect, that goes the furthest to found 
 the friendship between them which, for some time at least, 
 seemed as that of brothers. Hegel must have been satis- 
 fied that it left on Schelling, in his budding authorship, 
 the pleasantest of impressions. 
 
 Hegel's last letter to Schelling so far was dated August 
 30, 1795 ; his next, written to him on the 2nd of 
 November 1800, indicates, on the part of the two men, a 
 silence between them of some five years. And, no doubt, 
 it was only what was felt by Hegel to be dire necessity 
 
250 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 that compelled him at that time to write to Schelling at 
 last, and break then the silence for which, as it seems, the 
 blame was his. 
 
 To explain. Hegel had, since leaving Tubingen in the 
 end of 1793, been for six years occupied in the irksome 
 and undignified position of family tutor to children. Kant, 
 Fichte, Herbart, Hamann, had all been family tutors, not 
 one of them, probably, very much to his own liking ; and, 
 almost certainly, in his case, the least to his liking was the 
 house-experience of Hegel, particularly in Switzerland, 
 where he was when Schelling once wrote him : " Thy 
 present situation is unworthy of thy abilities and just 
 pretensions." Even after Schelling so wrote him, Hegel 
 had still another half of the like penal course to drag 
 through. It is to be assumed as characteristic of Hegel, 
 however, that, though in the beginning of 1799 he came 
 into the possession of the inheritance from his father 
 which, in his own mind, was to alter for him his whole 
 plan of life, it is not till the end of 1800 (nearly two 
 years) that his preparations are ripe for the first move in 
 the new direction. Now, that first move was this same 
 letter to Schelling of the date mentioned (November 2, 
 1800), and which, as said, broke the long silence of five 
 years. During these five years, while Schelling has come 
 still further to the front, Hegel has remained in obscurity. 
 And so it will, presumably, prove somewhat against the 
 grain that Hegel finds himself writing to Schelling. Still, 
 it is not from what situation was even to Schelling then 
 an unworthy one that he (Hegel) applies to the latter now. 
 No ; by this time Hegel, if still without a public, has been 
 more than three years in Frankfort, and in much improved 
 circumstances. They, the circumstances, are not here so 
 lonely and ungrateful, in the house of the merchant, as 
 they were in that of the Swiss Von. Hegel has dear 
 friends now who, gifted and accomplished themselves, can 
 love and admire him as not less gifted, not less accom- 
 plished. He has now both the leisure and the means of 
 study : his " system " grows daily in his hands the system 
 which henceforth he carried by him. Nevertheless, exter- 
 nally, he was as much as ever the mere family tutor. 
 
SCHELLING PROFESSOR 251 
 
 Schelling, for his part, on leaving Tubingen when not 
 yet twenty-one, became almost directly Hofmeister, tutor, 
 to two young barons. Then for the first time in high 
 society, he was made aware, presumably, of any college or 
 cloister deficiencies in his manners, as well as of the 
 necessity to render himself, for intercourse in the new 
 sphere, a fluent Frenchman. That from the exterior was 
 something; but now now when Hegel turned in mind 
 his purpose to write to him there was from the interior, 
 so to speak, more. Schelling was now Schelling, Schelling 
 the professor, Schelling the rival of Fichte, Schelling the 
 friend of Gothe, of Schiller, the Schlegels, all the great. 
 And now Hegel wished to write to him Hegel was come 
 into his property (some 250) Hegel after mature 
 consideration would embark at last and finally on an 
 academical career. But where ? Ah well, where ? 
 Where but there there at Jena the centre of philo- 
 sophy, the centre of literature, the centre of genius, the 
 centre of all the talents ! Who was it that in the 
 reference could advise ? who was it that in the reference 
 could help ? Why, Schelling ; and he was now so great a 
 man and now, too, there was between them the separa- 
 tion of seven long years personally, of five long years 
 epistolarily ! 
 
 There was certainly sufficient matter here to take the 
 breath away in hesitation and doubt. But Hegel, too, 
 was not without confidence in himself. He was not now 
 the man who had addressed, as his superior in knowledge 
 of and contribution to the philosophy of the day, his so 
 much younger University friend, Schelling, in 1794. No ; 
 he had repaired all that. He had behind him these, his theo- 
 logical, his historical, his political studies, as at Berne, 
 so also at Frankfort. And more : in philosophy itself he 
 knew himself a master. To say nothing of the classics, 
 nothing of Plato or Aristotle, he was perfectly at home 
 now with all the men in repute, he had thoroughly 
 studied, thoroughly fathomed them all, Kant and Jacobi, 
 Fichte and Schelling. Nay, he had actually in his desk 
 an accomplished fact his System. He had taken time 
 enough. He had made his preparations, he had studied 
 
252 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 his precautions, his mind was fixed, he had his 250 in 
 his pocket. It was a professor of Philosophy he would 
 be, and it was Jena was the goal. He must write 
 Schelling there was no help for it. Accordingly, he does 
 write Schelling on this 2nd of November 1800 a long 
 enough letter, too but it is with bated breath. He does 
 not alarm Schelling by any directness of attack, whether 
 on Jena or himself, he only asks for an introduction or 
 two to Bamberg, where he knows that Schelling himself, 
 not so very long ago, had some time resided. " I think," 
 he begins, "I think, dear Schelling, a separation of 
 several years should not cause me hesitation in appealing 
 to thy kindness in regard of a particular wish. My 
 petition relates to some addresses in Bamberg, where I 
 should like to stay for a time." He goes on to say that 
 he is now in the circumstances and the mind to apply 
 himself to the completion of his studies. He very 
 delicately and adroitly only alludes to Jena, "before 
 trusting himself to the literary riot and revel of which he 
 would like to strengthen himself elsewhere." " Thy public 
 great career," he tells Schelling, " I have followed with 
 admiration and delight." Then he alludes to that paper 
 in his desk, and the encouragement he would like for it. 
 " Of all men whom I know around me," he continues, " I 
 see only in thee him in whom, even in respect of publica- 
 tion and of influence on the world, I should like to find 
 my friend," and so he throws himself on him "in full 
 confidence," as his words are, " that thou wilt recognise 
 and find a value in my disinterested endeavour, though its 
 sphere were lower." 
 
 Schelling's answer to this most winning letter has not 
 been found ; but what effect it had on him can be under- 
 stood from the fact that, in the course of no more than a 
 month or two, Hegel already stood in Jena. One can 
 quite well conceive, however, what series of considerations 
 might have acted to bring from Schelling an invitation to 
 Hegel to come at once to him at Jena. 
 
 Schelling at Jena, in the end of 1800, was no longer 
 what he had been at the same period in 1798. Two years 
 had been enough to develop against him, publicly as well 
 
AT JENA 253 
 
 as privately, a most harassing opposition : and in January 
 1801 he had only reached the still tender age of twenty- 
 six. His great friend, August-Wilhelm Schlegel, had 
 left ; other such friends might write him, might visit him ; 
 but, in Jena, he stood alone now his flank was turned, 
 his side was unprotected ; he had need of a man that 
 would indeed be a friend. Why should not Hegel be that 
 man ? The correspondence of five years ago was a most 
 agreeable one it left the most pleasant memories of one 
 who was in full accord with himself, and, evidently, so 
 far as that went, not insupportably an attached friend. 
 Hegel was an able man. Schelling could recollect what 
 a prestige personally he had for himself at Tubingen ; for, 
 as Schelling's own son declares, "he (Hegel) was to all 
 who more intimately knew him then one of the sensiblest, 
 widest awake, and most serviceable of heads," a man pro- 
 ficient in classics, extensively read in literature, and 
 already the student of Kant. That in the past, and now 
 in the present, he was a devotee of philosophy itself, and 
 beyond all doubt a most accomplished one. Schelling 
 might have reflected, with some complacency, too, that he 
 was asked to become the patron of a man so much older 
 than himself, who, as brought up at the Eesidence and 
 as the son of a Government official, had had so much the 
 pas of him and other cloister rustics at the University. 
 Nay, he might have cast a thought on that something 
 " Gestandenes " (stand-offish) in Hegel's Wesen, in Hegel's 
 very nature, whereby respect and trust were involuntarily 
 infused into others. 
 
 Still, the credit is due to Schelling of almost un- 
 exampled generosity : he set at once the absolutely 
 unknown Hegel on the very height of heights he gave 
 him at once the elevation he coveted he opened to him 
 at once all the distinction and all the resources, as it 
 were, of his own dwelling-house. Not that Hegel was 
 slow on his side to acknowledge the debt, and offer what 
 compensation for it he could. He gave himself up for six 
 months to the writing of that article on the " Differenz " 
 of the Fichtian and Schellingian Systems, which took 
 Schelling from beneath Fichte and placed him side by 
 
254 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 side with Fichte, a Corypheus in Philosophy, as original 
 as Fichte himself. The Critical Journal of Philosophy, in 
 the name of both, was set up too, and it was largely in 
 the same direction that Hegel wrought even there. And 
 so it continued for some two years and a half, till 
 Schelling, heartily disgusted with Jena, was glad to be 
 able to transfer himself to Wiirzburg. 
 
 After leaving Jena, we find only six letters in four 
 years to have been written by Schelling to Hegel : and 
 the last of the six is, on the part of Schelling, the first of 
 the disunion between the two ; and it is also the last of the 
 correspondence. After the 2nd November 1807, which was 
 the date of it, these two close friends never exchanged a single 
 letter again, and only once met. After the long interval of 
 twenty-two years they were once again unexpectedly and 
 accidentally thrown together at the hot wells of Carlsbad. 
 When we know that, of the five letters preceding this critical 
 last letter, all of them on the part of Schelling are written in 
 the freest, frankest terms of the most unsuspecting friend- 
 ship, then we are aware that a most sudden and violent 
 wrench has taken place, and that the blame of it, in Schel- 
 ling's eyes, has been something done by Hegel. Than Schel- 
 ling's letter to Hegel that immediately preceded the last, a 
 more supremely friendly letter it would be difficult to devise. 
 Its very first sentence is in such terms as these : " How 
 very glad I was to receive thy letter, it were hardly pos- 
 sible for me to tell thee without at the same time express- 
 ing to thee how much I have lamented the being for so long 
 a time out of all intercourse with thee : I was in hopes, 
 by sending thee my Anti-Fichte, of putting myself again 
 in thy remembrance, and, see ! I have succeeded." The 
 letter goes on to say how very much he would like to be 
 of any assistance in getting Hegel placed in some pro- 
 fessorship near him. Of the great forthcoming work, 
 Hegel's Phaenomenologic, Schelling speaks thus : " As 
 regards thy work, now at last about to appear, I am full 
 of the intensest expectation. What must be the end, if 
 thy maturity still takes time to itself to mature its 
 fruits ! I only wish for thee further the peaceful position 
 and leisure requisite for the completion of such solid and, 
 
THE QUARREL 255 
 
 as it were, time-less works." Of course, though these 
 words sound well, one can perfectly well understand how 
 Hegel might see in them the suspicion of a gibe on the part 
 of his more distinguished friend at his own comparative 
 slowness. The letter is continued, however, and at some 
 length, in a vein of perfectly friendly gossip, and winds 
 up with, " Farewell, and don't let the friendly communica- 
 tion between us be again so long interrupted. Be assured 
 of the most inviolable and sincere friendship by thy 
 Schelling." Even allowing a little quip from his own 
 quickness to his friend's slowness, there cannot be the 
 slightest doubt that, so far, in his last letter but one, 
 namely, Schelling is perfectly cordial, perfectly single- 
 minded, towards Hegel. Less than a year brings an utter 
 revolution. His very next letter, that is the last of all, has 
 such expressions as these : " Thou hast for long received 
 no letter from me. In thy last letter thou prornisedst me 
 thy book. After I received it, I wished to read it before 
 writing to thee again. But the many hindrances and dis- 
 tractions of this summer left me neither the time nor the 
 peace which were desirable for the study of such a work. 
 So, till now, I have only read the preface. In so far as 
 thou thyself (in thy letter) makest mention of the pole- 
 mical part of it (the preface), I should, with a justifiable 
 self -measurement of myself, assuredly think too little of 
 myself did I refer that polemic to myself. It may, then, 
 as thou hast declared in the letter, always concern only 
 misapplications and only one's imitators, though in the 
 writing itself this distinction does not appear. Thou 
 canst easily think how glad I should be once for all to get 
 rid of these." Then, after an indifferent sentence or two 
 further, the letter ends politely and friendlily enough, but 
 it was the last. Schelling, as I say, never again wrote 
 Hegel ; but from this time on to the very end of his long 
 life, a period of nearly fifty years, with the death of Hegel 
 in the middle of them, to Schelling Hegel was a name for 
 his bitterest detestation and intensest hate. 
 
 And what had Hegel done to cause really such blind, 
 unreasoning fury ? such lifelong, unmitigated, vindictive 
 rancour ? His Phaenomenologie des Geistes was pub- 
 
256 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 lished in 1807, and in the preface to that work Hegel had 
 taken leave to speak of the Naturphilosophie, and the 
 Naturphilosophie was Schelling. We have gathered from 
 that last letter of Schelling's that Hegel had in the refer- 
 ence felt uneasy, and had sought, in writing him, to excuse 
 himself to Schelling by intimating that it was not Schel- 
 ling, but only the ineptitude of Schelling's imitators, that 
 he presumed to blame. Now, that was a blunder on the 
 part of Hegel. What he had said in his book was either 
 true or false. If it was true, he ought to have stood by 
 it, silently, without the necessity of a single word, very 
 certainly without doing himself the indignity of an 
 apologetic deprecation and stoop in private letters. And 
 no doubt it was true, true, too, not only as against the 
 tag-rag and bobtail of his followers, but as against Schel- 
 ling, as against the Corypheus himself. It is, indeed, 
 against the Naturphilosophie, and as such, that all that 
 grim humour is directed, explosive and annihilative of 
 mere formalism and schematism. " That one perception," 
 says Hegel, " that one perception that, in the absolute, all 
 is alike to oppose that to the cognition in demand of 
 distinction and completion, or to make one's absolute the 
 night in which, as we say, all cows are black, is the very 
 naivete of intellectual vacuity." " What a stupid head 
 that must be in which a quarter of an hour would not fix 
 the theory that there are asthenic, sthenic, and indirect 
 asthenic diseases, and just so many methods of cure, and 
 which, seeing that, not long since, such initiation sufficed, 
 might not itself, in quite as short a time, be transformed 
 from a routinier (an empiric dabbler, a quack) into a 
 theoretic doctor ! " These are but small specimens of the 
 merciless satire with which Hegel scatters to the winds 
 the Schellingian pretension ; and, with a little reflection, 
 one can manage to picture to one's self the effect on 
 Schelling. It was with the meekest complacency that, 
 vis-a-vis of Fichte, he had his rights given him by Hegel. 
 In the Critical Journal he had accepted also, not without 
 an internal chuckle, doubtless, so far as he could read it, 
 the reduction to his feet of all the rest of them that stood 
 near him, Krug, Schulze, Jacobi, Kant ; but that he him- 
 
MME. SCHLEGEL 257 
 
 self, subjected to the same searching and irresistible scoff, 
 should be tossed, as lightly, as surely, and as relentlessly, 
 aside as they, and by him who had been allowed to speak 
 of " our " philosophy, thereby only fixing his place as an 
 humble but favoured second to himself at this, all this ! 
 there were no bounds to his astonishment, indignation, 
 mortification, rage. It was as though the man to whom he 
 had implicitly believed himself a god, had suddenly turned 
 round and, drawing a string, caricatured him into a 
 jumping-jack ! Ay, and there was worse than that there 
 was an open insult. Schelling, in that last letter of his, 
 had told Hegel that their differences might be easily 
 adjusted, " Eines ausgenommen, one thing excepted." 
 Now that one thing might, as referred to, be the insult. 
 
 The Schlegels and the Naturphilosophie, both, had 
 carried Schelling into equivocal positions. 
 
 As for the Schlegels, it was with them, almost exclu- 
 sively, that Schelling, from the first identified himself at 
 Jena. Not very friendly in course of time with Friedrich, 
 he seems always to have been as affectionately related to 
 August- Wilhelm as to a brother. And as for the two 
 ladies of the family, Caroline, August- WUhelm's wife, and 
 Auguste Bohmer, her daughter by her former husband, 
 from whom she (Caroline) was separated by divorce, these 
 two ladies, it seems, quarrelled about him, ugly little man as 
 he was. It is Schelling's own biographer says this : " That 
 there reigned not always full concord in the house itself, 
 was mainly the fault of Schlegel's ladies " ; and this state of 
 the case we readily realise when we are told that " Schel- 
 ling's heart soon turned to the lovely Auguste Bohmer," 
 and know that, after her death, he was consoled by her 
 mother, who became practically his wife till a second 
 divorce enabled her to become also legally such. 
 
 Auguste Bohmer died, then ; but there followed a 
 scandal. Schelling, no doubt with a reference to his 
 Naturphilosophie, strange as it may seem to us, had 
 been made by the University of Landshut, that is, plainly 
 out of nothing but favour, grace, actually an M.D., a 
 Medicinse Doctor. The presentation or award of this 
 diploma or degree was indeed subsequent to the death of 
 
258 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Auguste ; but already, at the date of that event, Schelling 
 had so given himself up to the Brownian theories of 
 disease, sthenic and asthenic, that he did not withhold 
 himself from an actual dabbling in practice, from an 
 actual dabbling in drugs. So it was that he had something 
 to do with the treatment of the illness of Auguste ; and, 
 worse than that, so it was that, after her death, it was 
 rumoured, and eventually in a public Journal printed as 
 a rumour, that, with the improper administration of opium, 
 Schelling had killed Auguste Bohmer. 
 
 Now, with this before us, we may be pardoned for con- 
 sidering it not unlikely that Schelling would take to his 
 own self Hegel's sneering words about quarter of an hour 
 sufficing to teach any blockhead the whole art of medicine, 
 and of no more time being required to make a quack a 
 graduate. A degree in medicine to one who had not been 
 taught medicine that and the Brownian words sthenic, 
 asthenic, etc., were in the said Preface glaring. We can 
 scarcely be wrong in seeing an insult to Schelling in the 
 whole allusion, and in identifying that insult with the 
 significant Eines ausgenommen, the significant one thing, 
 excepted of that last letter of Schelling's. 
 
 And is Hegel to be allowed to go free here ? No, 
 certainly not ! A disinterested judge might now see, or 
 might then have seen, the absurdity of that impromptu 
 medical art and the veritable scandal of that impromptu 
 medical doctor ; but for Hegel, so personally and peculiarly 
 the private friend of Schelling, to do what he did, was to 
 do what no man of honour would have allowed himself 
 to do. 
 
 It is just possible that, all this time, Hegel may have 
 had a secret grudge to Schelling. He could not but 
 recollect their different standings at the University 
 Schelling so much younger than he, three years behind 
 him in class, the country-bred cloister student beside the 
 privileged Bureaucrat's son of the Capital ! Taken with 
 seeing his name in print, and so far with praise, he had 
 corresponded with him from Berne, and again, after a long 
 silence, his occasions had compelled him to sue for his 
 support. It was true that he got it ; but it was true also 
 
AUGUSTE BOHMEK 259 
 
 that he had returned it. I fancy Hegel might have often 
 enough ruminated on this, that, after all, Schelling, in the 
 last resort, was really as a man not so very much to his 
 mind. He was everything that could be desired in know- 
 ledge, and he was certainly quick enough ; but he was light, 
 vain, forward, pert, and then there was no doubt that, 
 though it was only with quiet self-complacency, he yet did 
 take the big over him. He, Schelling, was not to him, 
 Hegel, what Holderlin had been : it had been " Liebster 
 Holderlin," but Schelling had only been a cold " Mem 
 Lieber." Yes, Schelling had taken the big over him 
 look to that letter that ordered him about for Madame 
 Schlegel : " To write thee from Berlin was quite impossible, 
 dear friend. Even here at Leipsic something or other 
 has still come in the way, so that I can start for Jena on 
 my return only to-morrow morning. I shall arrive towards 
 evening with Madame Schlegel. Be so good, if at thy first 
 request, in the name of Madame Schlegel, the furniture 
 and other things have not been got into the house, as soon 
 as possible after receipt of this letter, to beg of Madame 
 Niethammer this promised obligingness, that to-morrow, 
 Monday evening, Madame Schlegel shall find her things, at 
 least on the whole, particularly sofa, chairs, some tables, 
 and specially a bed. To the Erkhards also, to whom the 
 house belongs, send Nelly to tell them that Madame 
 Schlegel will arrive to-morrow evening." 
 
 I really do not think that such a letter as that would 
 have commended itself to Hegel, or that he would have 
 liked to be ordered about in that way, on such affairs, and 
 for a Madame Schlegel, a divorced wife, then living for a 
 second divorce with poor Schelling, who, just in all 
 respects, was led by the nose by these Schlegels. We 
 recollect there was something Gestandenes, something 
 stand-offish, in the very nature of Hegel, and we know, 
 too, that moral principle was the very stalk of carl-hemp 
 in him. To him the family was the prime cell of the State, 
 and purity of the marriage relation its first essential ; he 
 could not but have despised and pitied his friend in such a 
 connection, and resented his own involuntary compromise. 
 Indeed, when Schelling, about a year afterwards, writes 
 
260 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Hegel, from Cannstadt, at the very end of a letter (four 
 printed octavo pages long) : " To thy friendship it will not 
 be indifferent to know that since a short time I have been 
 married to my Freundin " indeed, when Schelling writes 
 Hegel that, I say it is itself almost already a proof of a 
 whole position in the past of reprobation and remonstrance 
 on the part of the latter to the former, on the part of 
 Hegel to Schelling. 
 
 We have here, then, a good deal suggested as to a 
 possible half-heartedness always in the feelings of Hegel 
 for Schelling. That may help to explain, but it will never 
 in the slightest degree justify, the attack of the Phaenom- 
 enologie. Schelling may have felt, and not always hidden, 
 his social superiority to Hegel at Jena ; but there can be 
 no doubt that, the relative position being allowed for, 
 Schelling entertained a most sincere, never-doubting, and 
 all-unsuspicious friendship for Hegel, whose wickedly sug- 
 gestive sneer at all that concerned his medical doctorship 
 in the past was as astounding as a sudden blow in the face 
 from one's own best friend, and seemed all at once to 
 disclose unexpected hatred in a heart that was believed 
 true, but was now proved as false as, self-evidently, it 
 was hard. 
 
 I may say that this aspect of the question, the medical 
 suggestion, with perhaps all the relative psychology, indeed, 
 seems to have escaped the German authorities here. All 
 of them refer, on the whole, only to that picturesque 
 naming of the Naturphilosophie, and rather enjoy the 
 joke of it. But as for Schelling himself, we have now to 
 see at least an example or two that may suffice as evidence 
 of the way he took it. 1 
 
 Some eighteen months after the date of his last letter to 
 
 1 It is still to be said for Hegel, liowever, that if he did give vent 
 to any hidden grudge against Schelling, it could not have been, as 
 yet, from the usual ignoble position of a new and greater relative 
 success. Between the Pliaenoinenoloyie of 1807 and his enthrone- 
 ment, to call it so, at Berlin in 1818, the lot of Hegel one 
 sometimes of poverty and humiliation was always one of compara- 
 tive inferiority. It is to be said, too, that, even at Jena, he was 
 quite free of his own expressions. 
 
SCHELLING'S RAGE 261 
 
 Hegel, he writes to his friend Schubert : " Eight delightful 
 it was to me to see how truly and well you have handled 
 Hegel. The ridiculous side is really the best, though not 
 the only one. Such a pure example of inner and outer 
 prose must, in our hyperpoetic \imes, be held sacred. 
 Sentimentality comes over us all here and there ; and 
 against it such a negative nature as his is a capital 
 corrective, as, on the contrary, it is diverting so soon as it 
 will take its flight above the negative." He tells Cousin, 
 in 1828 : " You have got your information of the system 
 which derives from me, only in the form that it has 
 received in passing through the straitened head of a man 
 who thought to take possession of my ideas, just as the 
 creeping insect may think to appropriate to itself the leaf 
 of a plant which it has entangled in its web." He assures 
 Weisse, an admirer of Hegel, a year after the death of 
 Weisse's master : " The so-called Hegelian philosophy, in 
 what is proper to it, I can regard only as an episode in the 
 history of later philosophy, and only indeed a melancholy 
 one. In order to come again into the line of true progress, 
 we must riot continue it, but wholly break off from it, 
 consider it non-existent." When Weisse talks of the 
 method of Hegel and of its discovery as his immortal 
 merit, Schelling assures him that it was his own special, 
 original invention. He does not hesitate to call the 
 followers of Hegel to Cousin actually assassins : " In order 
 to make their master great, they must make me small. It 
 is the mot d'ordre which has been given to them by their 
 chief, who, like the Old Man of the Mountain, without ever 
 quitting his retreat, knew very well how to call his instru- 
 ments into play ; but the imprudences and indiscretions of 
 these fanatics have betrayed him since his death. You 
 will hear fine things of this if some day I shall speak 
 publicly of it." His system had been only stolen by 
 Hegel, and his followers had only begun to vaunt when he 
 himself, its originator, was long beyond it. As late as 
 1841, ten years after the death of Hegel, he writes to Dorf- 
 miiller : " I do not understand what could be unintelli- 
 gible to you in the words, ' who eat my bread.' In effect, 
 naturally, it is Hegel that is meant, who in all these people 
 
WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 properly speaks. Of course, you cannot know as precisely 
 as I, who have known him from his youth, what, by him- 
 self, and without me, he would have been fit for, though it 
 can be easily seen from his Logic what, left to himself, he 
 would have sunk to. I may safely say, then, of him and 
 his fellows, that they eat my bread." 
 
 We have an interesting little picture at the hands of 
 Eosenkranz of how Schelling and his audience looked in his 
 lecture-room, apparently in the year 1838, at Munich. 
 On that occasion Schelling, he says, spoke with cutting 
 sarcasm against Hegel's philosophy. He said that he 
 (Schelling) had given his hearers an example of the actual 
 speculation which dominates the world and the positive 
 Powers of it, so that they (his hearers) had, in the fact 
 itself, the best measure for that artificial filigree work of 
 the Begriff which now so frequently passed current as 
 true philosophy. But, with a venomously contemptuous 
 glance which went to my soul, he added : " This philosophy 
 is but the product of a hectic consumption wasting away 
 into itself." 
 
 Evidence in the same direction might, to a considerable 
 extent, be accumulated further ; but from what has been 
 already said, perhaps a sufficiently complete idea may be 
 formed of the smouldering hatred which the Preface to 
 the Pkaenomcnologie left, after 1807, in the soul of Schel- 
 ling. After this date, too, as has occurred to be mentioned, 
 only once did these two men meet in life ; and of that 
 meeting each of the two wrote an account to his respective 
 wife. 
 
 Hegel's letter is to this effect : 
 
 " CARLSBAD, Friday, Sept. 4, 1829. 
 
 " YESTERDAY evening, I had a meeting with an old acquaintance 
 Schelling who had, a few days ago, likewise come here, alone, as I, 
 in order to, as I not to, go through the Cure. He is, so far as that 
 goes, very well and strong ; the use of the water is with him only a 
 preservative. We are both glad of this, and are like cordial old 
 friends together. This afternoon we have been together for a walk ; 
 and then to the coffee-house, where we have officially read, in the 
 Austrian Beobachter, the taking of Adrianople, and so passed the 
 evening both. Yesterday, I was initiated into the drinking of the 
 well, dined with Schelling, and ascended the Dreikreuzberg." 
 
LETTERS TO THEIR WIVES 263 
 
 Schelling, again, to his wife, writes thus : 
 
 " CARLSBAD. 
 
 " FIGURE to yourself Yesterday, I am sitting in. my bath, and I 
 hear a somewhat disagreeable, half-familiar voice asking for me. 
 It was Hegel from Berlin, who, passing by, will put up a day or two 
 here. In the afternoon he came a second time with much empresse- 
 ment and uncommonly friendly, just as though there were nothing 
 between us. Since, as yet, however, there has been no professional 
 talk, into which indeed I will not be led, and he, moreover, is a 
 very discreet person, I have sufficiently enjoyed with him the two 
 evening hours. I have not yet called upon him ; it is a little too 
 far for me to the Golden Lion." 
 
 It is in reference to this meeting of the two men that 
 Noack remarks that, during the short interval of it (the 
 meeting), Schelling " forgot all the rancour which fermented 
 for years in his soul, and lost it in old cordial friendship 
 with Hegel." " Cordial " translates at a venture the 
 unusual, un-dictionary word " cordater" Now this word 
 (translated), as we have seen, is said by Hegel ; and 
 Noack, forgetting the state of the case, seems wrong in the 
 way he attributes it to Schelling. Hegel, of course, as he 
 uses the phrase and, evidently glad at heart, he uses it, 
 in his letters, at once, to two of his friends, Daub and 
 Forster speaks for this old friend as well as himself ; 
 but it is difficult to see that this old friend of his, who 
 wrote to his wife the letter which has been quoted last, 
 had such a word as cordater in his mind, or had really 
 either forgotten or lost all the " rancour " that Noack 
 thinks of. In so many words, at least, he intimates that, 
 as for himself and the man with the disagreeable voice, 
 whom it is too far for him to go and see, there is still 
 something " between them " ! 
 
 These biographical details, while episodically some- 
 thing of a relief and a remission, it is possible to hope, 
 may, even philosophically, prove not unillustrative ; but 
 it is to philosophy that we now directly turn. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SCHELLING (continued} 
 1. THE GENERAL COURSE 
 
 WE have seen that Schelling began his campaign in 
 philosophy, so to speak, with the intrepid assumption to 
 himself as his own of the position of Fichte. Once in 
 that position, it came to suggest itself, doubtless, that he 
 was there and then, and that Fichte was, there and then, 
 only in one of the alternatives, the first one, namely, 
 whether of Descartes or Spinosa : he was secluded to 
 ideality only, Thought, with simple exclusion or suppres- 
 sion of its equal or co-equal, as classed, reality, Exten- 
 sion. It was to remedy that that Schelling, stepping 
 hastily to the front with nature, set up the Natur- 
 philosophie. And it certainly held of the situation 
 itself, though Schelling could hardly miss the not im- 
 palpable hint of Hegel thereto which lay in the some- 
 what daring Differenz, that the consummation presently 
 followed of the precipitation of both alternatives both Ex- 
 tension and Thought into the community of the Absolute 
 (with Schelling himself at first only the Indifference). 
 
 So, then, was Schelling. Finishing with his Transcen- 
 dental Philosophy on the one side, he gave himself up 
 to the prosecution of his Natural Philosophy on the 
 other. Not but that there cropped out in the general 
 work slants all between, according as the susceptibility 
 
 264 
 
SCHELLING'S WORKS 265 
 
 of Schelling yielded for the nonce to the lure of Spinosa, 
 or to that of Plotinus, or of Leibnitz, or Bb'hme, or of one 
 or other of the Gnostics, etc. etc. 
 
 Now, be that as it particularly may, the general 
 position of Schelling, from boyhood at Tubingen till the 
 professorship at Berlin ten years after the death of 
 Hegel, will be allowed to stand pretty well before us 
 now, miscellaneously, in sketch; and the course of 
 remark may appear indicated according as successive 
 publications shall require. On the whole, however, we 
 may say that the productions of Schelling fall into three 
 heaps, two for his First philosophy, and one for his 
 Second. Now, of his first philosophy, we conceive our- 
 selves relieved from any further consideration ; and for 
 this reason, that while the time that has passed lies as a 
 pall on the body of the Naturphilosophie, we have 
 already done all for the Transcendental Philosophy that 
 our special purposes require. As regards Schelling, 
 then, there remains now nothing for us to consider but 
 what has been called his second philosophy. 
 
 This second philosophy is contained in the four final 
 volumes of the whole fourteen volumes that constitute the 
 Works of Schelling ; and even as we see it placed, it is a 
 Division by itself. Division seems pitted against Division, 
 indeed ; for the latter bears to the former the relation, 
 on the whole, of counterpart to counterpart, of a positive 
 to a negative. 
 
 The four volumes themselves again constitute, two of 
 them, a " Philosophy of Mythology," and the two latter a 
 " Philosophy of Revelation " : titles, both of them, which 
 seem to be promising enough ; for the one suggests a 
 Philosophy of Religion, and the other a Philosophy of 
 Christianity. Neither of them, however, in itself, leads 
 to any satisfactory result, or is indeed of any really the 
 slightest substantial value. The very occasion of them 
 
266 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 renders them suspect. It was the offer to Schelling, in 
 his rancour to Hegel, of an opportunity to revindicate 
 his own autocracy, as against the pretensions of a traitor. 
 That opportunity lay in the lectures expected from him 
 on his translation, in 1841, from Munich to Berlin ; and 
 Schelling took full advantage of it. These lectures 
 though only in common with every other scrap of 
 writing, whether public or private (as indeed one may 
 almost say), that emanated from Schelling after the 
 death of Hegel may be viewed simply as balistse, 
 engines of offence, hill-placed, for the hurling of stick or 
 stone, of shingle, or sand, or gravel, against that dull 
 thief with " the disagreeable voice," who, after having 
 been nursed in my bosom, conveyed my clothes, and 
 ha ! at his peril ! made game of ME ! I say this 
 deliberately ; for even what seem serious scientific 
 labours, there on no account but their own, have still 
 at the heart of them Hegel. " Pantheism " had been 
 thrown by the ignorant enemy to the herd, and the 
 startled Court took alarm. It was a queer thing to 
 do still, it was done, the Court in its panic appealed 
 to Schelling! whose sentiments, special to the case, 
 were possibly not unknown. 1 The result was these 
 so-called " Philosophies," of Mythology or Eeligion, of 
 Eevelation or Christianity," Philosophies," for all that, 
 which, with their general aim, were, on the whole, as I 
 intimate, but anarchic bombs. 
 
 I proceed, from the considerable MS., as referred to, 
 before me, to characterise, briefly, generally, this remain- 
 ing matter of Schelling's. There is no completion of 
 that matter, however, with the mythology and revelation 
 alone, which must come for consideration first. For 
 
 1 He had already lectured on " Mythology " and " Kevelation," 
 and while at Erlangen he had for some years borne an excellent 
 reputation for Protestant orthodoxy. 
 
THE MYTHOLOGY 267 
 
 example, it is only the second of the four volumes named 
 final of the works of Schelling that bears title " Philosophic 
 der Mythologie " ; while the first, namely, appears but as 
 " Einleitung in die Philosophic der Mythologie." Now, 
 again, this Introduction is divided into two books, with ten 
 chapters to the one book, and fourteen to the other book, 
 which latter, for its part, is not mythological at all. This 
 latter book constitutes, according to Schelling's son and 
 editor, das Jiingste was Schelling geschrieben (the last 
 thing he had written) ; " at which, indeed, it was the 
 will of God that he should break off without having put 
 the last hand to it." " Its content," the son continues, 
 " is the rational philosophy which here truly only 
 subserves the whole, but is a work per se, the pure 
 rational science, the exposition of which, after he had 
 finished with the Positive Philosophy lay very near his 
 heart, carrying him back in his old age to the system of 
 his youth the system which in his eyes was at no time 
 done away with, but was destined rather to rise anew, 
 and only so for the first time find at last its true value 
 as preparatory to the said second philosophy. ... To the 
 completion of it, indeed, was the publication of all the 
 rest postponed." It is well borne in upon us here that 
 this very specially last and peculiar work is very speci- 
 ally and peculiarly recommended to us that very cer- 
 tainly in the first place ; but we are struck also by 
 that mention of a positive philosophy. Ueberweg, for 
 one, takes the word to be but a general name for the 
 two terminal philosophies together. He says (iii. 241): 
 " Positive philosophy, namely, the philosophy of 
 mythology and the philosophy of revelation." Nor, on 
 the whole, do the other authorities differ. Schelling's 
 son and editor, however, tells us (2, 3. vi.) that this 
 Positive Philosophy already referred to in the Philosophy 
 of Mythology, is to be found treated at full in the 
 
268 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Philosophy of Eevelation. The general reasoning 
 involved, we may add, is to be seen, at least partly, in 
 the work on Free-will. 1 So, for result here, we pro- 
 pose to consider what material lies before us now 
 under six heads: 1. Mythology; 2. Eevelation; 3. Posi- 
 tive Philosophy; 4. Negative Philosophy; 5. The 
 Direction of the whole on Hegel ; 6. A concluding word 
 on Schelling. 
 
 2. THE MYTHOLOGY 
 
 And here, as usual, Schelling begins with the work of 
 those that went before him of Heyne, and Hermann, 
 and Hume, ami Voss, and Jones, and Creuzer, etc. 
 I know not, however, that a general reader will at all 
 find here what he may expect something, that is, of an 
 interesting and informing narrative. There may appear, 
 rather, as even ^forming the narrative, something of an 
 uninteresting attempt to philosophise it. The most im- 
 portant result, on the whole, of all is, that the idea of 
 a pure Theism which shall have preceded and given rise 
 to Mythology, even as a corruption of itself, is not an 
 idea that will stand the test of analysis. Generally, it 
 may be objected to Schelling here, indeed, that he quite 
 unnecessarily bestows pages page after page on 
 matters for which paragraphs, or even at times sentences, 
 
 1 " In his Berlin lectures," says Ueberweg, " Sclielling, substantially, 
 only carried further the speculation which had been brought forward 
 in his work on Free-will" The others, historians also, Erdmann, 
 Schwegler, evidently share this view ; and Hegel himself, who, 
 dying in 1831, was separated by ten years from the Berlin lectures, 
 mentions this work as " deeply speculative, but alone in its kind, 
 and confined to the one point." Noack, however, names it a work 
 " which, to speak with Christian Kapp, is out and out a plagiarism 
 from Bbhme, whose name, nevertheless, it never once mentions " 
 (Noack, ii. 177). Both Ueberweg and Erdmann expressly refer 
 also in this connection to Bohme, as very particularly does 
 Schwegler. 
 
THE MYTHOLOGY 269 
 
 might very well have sufficed. But in his own regard, which 
 is the main matter here, and that, too, only relatively, it is 
 enough for us to know that mythology, far from being, 
 under any name and in any form, an invention, is to 
 him, on the contrary, an organic production, of which 
 the special chapters of his first two volumes are to 
 constitute the explanation. 
 
 Now, this explanation may be said to turn on a three- 
 fold pivot : where there is concerned, firstly, an impure 
 or " relative " Monotheism ; and then, secondly, a peculiar 
 " consciousness," realising it in the earliest men ; and at 
 last, thirdly, a very special and singular " crise " of this 
 consciousness, determinative, that is to say, of the 
 dispersion of the tribes. In thus accounting for such an 
 extraordinary manifestation as the whole of pagan 
 Mythology that preceded Revelation, Schelling takes 
 enormous credit to himself at least for the originality 
 and ingenuity of the intricated complexity of the scheme, 
 if hardly, as one must think to oneself, seriously, with 
 any belief of its truth. That, namely, is eminently 
 characteristic of Schelling here how, almost at once, 
 in that glaring personal vanity of his, he must 
 congratulate himself on his own individual and wonder- 
 ful ability. "As the question," he says (2, 1. 128), 
 " How did nations originate ? first made its way from 
 my lecture-room and spread into wider circles, it found 
 a reception which showed plainly how new and 
 unexpected it was for many, and I have had still more 
 occasion to see since," etc., etc. ! In fact, ever after this, 
 as immediately, indeed, in what concerns either his 
 Rational Philosophy or his Philosophy of Revelation, 
 when he has left, that is, Mythology behind him, his 
 pride cannot but exultingly expand at times in the 
 consciousness of a great trick won, as under the feeling 
 of a Victoria Cross upon his chest ! 
 
270 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 As Schelling schemes it, there is first a community of 
 consciousness between man and his God. This is the 
 primal Monotheism ! This is Paradise ! This is the 
 Golden Age ! And as difference there is none, this is 
 eternity : this is the true " hyper-historical " era. Still, 
 this is a relation a relation of two ; and two is differ- 
 ence. (A step somewhat Hegelian, Schelling, eh ?) It 
 is thus, then, that, if Monotheism is ever to pass into 
 Polytheism, the necessity of movement, change, is to be 
 accounted for. The original identity implies difference, 
 and the whole is a process of consciousness a process 
 not subjective, but, as it were, objective a process, not 
 in one man, but in all : a process in the peoples ; and 
 that leads to the Crise determinative of the dispersion 
 after which all is easy. 
 
 Still, there has been another difficulty, another lion in 
 the way. It was a necessity of the beginning that there 
 should be first Monotheism. Now, how was Polytheism 
 to be developed from Monotheism, the plurality of many 
 changeable gods from the unity of one unchangeable 
 God ? Why, the first God should be only a " relative " 
 one ! The first consciousness should not rise, after all, 
 to an absolute God the first consciousness should itself 
 be relative ! And, so now, for the key there is a hole in 
 the lock ! Or how the skein is to ravel out, we see ! 
 The work has been begun ; and, pretty well, also, the 
 work is ended ! It is easy to see that to possess a first 
 God that is only relatively one, is potentialiter to possess 
 once for all, also, the totality of Polytheism. 
 
 Ah, but there is yet another difficulty : it is not to be 
 all relativity and change ; if Paganism, barbarian or 
 classical, is to be accounted for, what of the Je\vs ? 
 Must not prevailing belief be yielded to chaugelessness 
 and an absolute God discovered for them ? 
 
 Conditions remain so there must be a compromise. 
 
THE MYTHOLOGY 271 
 
 A God absolute there must be ; and as well a God 
 relative with reconciliation between them ! 
 
 But the perplexity of the position, the to and fro, the 
 turn here and the turn there in a word, the whole utter 
 failure of every single device and expedient, can only 
 be rendered distinct and clear to any eye that would 
 see by Schelling himself the light of his own expres- 
 sions. To save space, however, I must only refer as 
 under. 1 
 
 Of course, let our feeling in regard to truth of 
 foundation be what it may, we cannot but admire the 
 alert ingenuity of Schelling, and be interested in the 
 happy treatment that concerns his various allusions. 
 There is a great deal here (Z., vii) that at least pleases 
 in connection with the Old Testament, as the Confusion 
 of Tongues, the distinction between the Elohim and 
 Jehovah, Jews and Gentiles, Noah and the Flood, 
 Abraham, etc., with the conclusion (174) : " It is now, then, 
 proved by the oldest document, the received revealed 
 Scripture itself, that mankind began, not with pure 
 or absolute, but with relative, Monotheism " ; as, in the 
 same direction, some pages earlier (147), it had been 
 said : " The usual opinion which ascribes to the first man 
 the perfect knowledge and reverence of the true God as 
 such, we may assume now to be disproved, and disproved 
 by the Mosaic narrative itself." 
 
 Ever and anon, throughout, in season or out of season, 
 Schelling cannot deny himself the luxury of a cross- 
 buttock to Hegel ; and as little can he resist hugging 
 himself to his reader on the originality and ingenuity of 
 his various expedients : he was the first to say this, and 
 
 i (2, 1). 18, 23, 53, 59, 62, 63, 65, 87, 95, 100 : where, for the 
 most part, only clauses are concerned. Add 102, 112, 113, 178, 
 194. More particular moments come to the surface in 141, 175, 
 233, 197, 187, 186, 185, 181, 119, 126, 128, 130, 132. 
 
272 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 the first to say that ; uo one had seen so and so before 
 him, and no one had seen such and such. 
 
 These Gods, too, of Schelling (for to him they are 
 Gods, and not mere gods) are singularly strange : a first 
 God only in an indivisible solid amalgam in the con- 
 sciousness of a first man, which, however, as needs must, 
 becomes presently only quasi-absolute, and .presently, 
 anew and to the full, only relative a God that repents 
 and sends the flood, but only in repentance to dry it up 
 again (and Schelling most gravely details at length his 
 own most satisfactory rationale of these repentances) ; 
 and this, all the time, is not yet the true God Oh no ! the 
 true God now, that is, for us ourselves in these very 
 days has still to come ! So true it is that this Philosophy 
 of Mythology of Schelling's is a Theogony, a making of 
 God : the whole work is but a God-factory I And he 
 got the hint from Bohme. He tells us himself (2, 3. 
 121): "Bohme develops Godhood itself in a natural 
 process -- and positive philosophy wants what his 
 Theosophy wants." 
 
 And can any man any man in his senses follow 
 with faith a single rustle or rush, a single clank or clang 
 of that never-ceasing, but utterly impossible and im- 
 practicable machinery ? Where is the authentication of 
 that dense and condense steppe that was the first co- 
 impenetration of object, God, and subject, consciousness ? 
 How did it come, for all that, to prove only quasi-such, 
 and a God relative to be extricated from it ? Where, in 
 short, is there a single premiss that, first, or last, or 
 intermediate, does not fail ? And if the premises fail, 
 no consequent can succeed, and the entire fabric is 
 simply in the air. The three Mythologies, Egyptian, 
 Indian, Greek, may, though independent, be really 
 " successive " the one to the other, and the group in each 
 form but the many of, and derived from, the one, or, as 
 
GREEK MYSTERIES 273 
 
 Schelling wills it, prove " simultaneous " the distinction 
 is excellent, and Schelling, as usual, may be allowed to 
 put his mark upon it, not, too, that there is not more 
 than the distinction, that Schelling has not been, in the 
 whole scheme, infinitely industrious, infinitely at pains 
 always. But how is all that chaos to be reduced to the 
 unity and consistency . of an understanding ? that popu- 
 lation of the Gods and Goddesses that, in the time of 
 Pliny, was greater than that of human beings, and that, 
 even in the time of Hesiod, almost a thousand years 
 before Pliny, was actually ten thousand strong ? 
 
 When Schelling wants to leave Mythology and pass 
 to Revelation, it is of the Greek Mysteries that he would 
 make a pontoon for himself. But in that, it is to be 
 feared again that Schelling is only following his own 
 self-will, and consulting his own convenience, when, for 
 the step he must take, he can think, for the moment, of 
 only one expedient. 
 
 For, even in the position of nexus and premiss to 
 Christianity, are the Mysteries really of the validity 
 that Schelling would fain assume for them ? Hegel, for 
 his part, has, certainly, no great respect for the 
 Mysteries. " These Mysteries of the Greeks," he says 
 (Phil, of Hist., 301), "are something that, as unknown, 
 have, with the presumption of deep wisdom, attracted to 
 themselves the curiosity of every time," but " it is just 
 as unhistorical as it is silly to expect to find deep 
 philosophies in them." These and a good many other 
 such expressions, both in the locus cited and elsewhere, 
 may, as on the part of Hegel, have only roused the gall 
 and the defiance of Schelling ; but he who consults Zeller 
 will find that later authorities all tend to make Hegel's 
 
 o 
 
 opinion the standard one. Why, Leibnitz (as Zeller 
 
 quotes), long before Hegel, had spoken still more 
 
 depreciatingly of the mysteries. The transactions in 
 18 
 
274 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 them, he says, " were often ridiculous and absurd ; and 
 it was necessary to keep them secret just to save them 
 from contempt." Still, it is not to be denied that 
 Schelling might discover in them all that he wanted to 
 discover, as, for example, his Persephones, Dionysoses, 
 etc. 
 
 3. EEVELATION 
 
 But what Schelling, on the part of Eevelation, really 
 attaches to the nexus of the Mysteries is such a chain of 
 particulars as these : The Serpent, the Goat, the Swine, 
 Circumcision, the Incarnation, Temptation, Flesh of 
 Christ, his Miracles, Death, Eesurrection, Descent into 
 Hell, Ascension, the Devils, the Angels Satan : in 
 regard to which, as they are treated, one must wonder not 
 only at what one is to see there of philosophy, but still 
 more, perhaps and even a great deal more, perhaps 
 at what one is to see there of Eevelation. Satan, for 
 example, he keeps long in front of us, but really, on a 
 matter so deep and interesting, with no result in the 
 end but this that to Satan he assigns a sublimity of 
 function which he by no means finds to his hand else- 
 where. " Milton and Klopstock," he says, " have taken 
 infinite pains to give Satan, according to the usual idea, a 
 certain sublimity, but even the classically trained Milton 
 has been unable to effect it (hat es nicht vermocht) " ! 
 
 Further, on Satan we have still this (2, 4. 276 sqq.) : 
 
 " As sin, falsehood, error, so also disease has come into the world 
 only through Satan. But, as in nature, when one power is excited 
 (e.g. in electricity) immediately also its opposite stands out, so the 
 coming of Christ called forth morbid manifestations of a special 
 kind, in the case of which there is one thing remarkable ; for, if we 
 look close, we shall find that the most of the so-called demoniacs 
 belong to places which were inhabited by heathens Galilee and 
 Samaria marched with Tyre and Sidon. In Jerusalem there appears 
 none, or extremely seldom, any trace of such. This disease is as 
 
REVELATION 275 
 
 the convulsions of moribund heathendom. It has a real meaning. 
 It was natural that the fight which Christ was destined to fight 
 with Satan should be foretokened by external and physical appear- 
 ances. Seeing that it was a struggle for life and death, the Enemy 
 stood up against Christ as will to will." 
 
 But, says Schelling later (314): 
 
 " Human things are not governed by any simple accidents, and 
 whatever instrumental or mere accessory causes which, indeed, are 
 not wanting even to the first rise and spread of Christianity might 
 co-operate, the real causes lie not in these, but in higher laws which 
 a divine will prescribes to every development. All that conies into 
 the world, that realises itself in it and for it, stands in need of a 
 presupposition, a premiss, a beginning that is not itself truth not 
 that which is specially to be. But it is not immediately seen to be 
 no more. There is a higher power required to free the development 
 from that its mere premiss." 
 
 This is a remarkable position, and Schelling further 
 strengthens it. One is pleased to find any truce to a 
 negative with Schelling ; and one cannot help making 
 the quotation, suggesting, as it does, all that false fact 
 it really may be so named which is so much in the 
 ascendant in these days when there is to be no truth 
 but what is physical. Mr. M'Lennan's so triumphantly 
 received Capture in Marriage, for example : it is true 
 in its place then and there as true an occurrence as ever 
 you may like to name it ; but is that, then, the whole 
 marrow, and virtue, and reality of marriage ? Does it in 
 the slightest impugn the final, and vital, and intrinsic truth 
 of marriage being to us humans an Ethical Institute ? 
 
 With all these topics, as specified to be discussed by 
 Schelling in his Philosophy of Eevelation, it is still to 
 be allowed that Schilling's main subject, so far as he 
 would name it, is the Christ. 
 
 By referring to the fabled process of consciousness, we 
 are enabled to give something like unity to our account 
 of the philosophy of Mythology ; and so it might seem 
 
276 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 that reference to Christ would furnish a similar expedient 
 of unity as regards Revelation. But, as one can see 
 from the topics mentioned, no such reference could by 
 any means be so thoroughgoing. Schelling (2, 3. 182) 
 holds that " Christianity was in the world before Christ, 
 nay," he continues, " it is as old as the world." It is 
 curious that Mathew Tindal, the notorious deist, was 
 quite of the same opinion, at least, the very title of 
 his book (published 1730) was, " Christianity as old as 
 the Creation." Still, as we say, we cannot for Schelling 
 (who himself knows all that about Tindal) p give any 
 account of his ideas on Revelation in which Christ shall 
 be the pervading unity in the same way as consciousness 
 might be made for him the pervading unity in his 
 ideas on Mythology. In fact, the edge of the little 
 contradiction here gives a little difficulty at once. If 
 Christianity was as old as the world, why should it 
 have been Mythology, and not Christianity, that was 
 taken first. No doubt, we are to understand that 
 Mythology, even as a process of consciousness, led on 
 to the revelation of Christianity ; but, to say nothing 
 of the untowardness of the whole element of Mythology, 
 there is not, in the entire account of it, one word of 
 Christ. Nay, as we have just seen, it is to the Greek 
 Mysteries that we are expected to look for what, as 
 nexus between Mythology and Christianity, necessarily 
 preceded the latter ! But really, Schelling is, in the 
 whole matter, always so true to his self-will and its 
 own specially characterising twist, that it is impossible 
 to think of anyone beside himself finding any satis- 
 faction in it. Redemption, for example, is to all 
 ordinary views the main idea ; but Schelling of Re- 
 demption has (2, 4. 193 sqq.) his own theory, and it is 
 not at all the common one. 
 
 The one truth is just this, Schelling, in accepting the 
 
POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 277 
 
 call to Berlin in 1841 for Ms ends, put himself in bond 
 to the Court for its ends : he was bound to give himself 
 at least the appearance of orthodoxy ; and already so 
 far easy for him these Philosophies of Mythology and 
 Eevelation, as appearances, passed perfectly well in 
 Germany. One cannot help thinking that its various 
 critical historians must have had, the most of them 
 perhaps, their own difficulties in the reading of this 
 second philosophy of Schelling's : is it but one's fancy 
 that seems not to help to hear them only murmur, with 
 a sigh, at the last in the midst of their darkness 
 " Grandiose " I 
 
 4. THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 By this title we mean here, however, no more than 
 what Schelling opposes as reasoning positive to what 
 again is to him reasoning negative ; and, as concerns the 
 indicated contradistinction itself (which indeed comes to 
 us as the Familiar of Schelling's second philosophy), it 
 will be found sufficiently treated in the first Book of 
 his last volume but one, and more particularly there in 
 chapters 4 and 7. 
 
 It is very specially in the last-named chapter that 
 Schelling moves to his subject with quite characteristic 
 deliberation. He takes stand at his ease upon it, and, 
 looking round him, KepSakeofypwv, quietly surveys the 
 whole field, in the hopes of taking from it what will 
 give him the support and advantage of an already 
 recognised and established historical authority. Nor 
 does it seem that he need look long : there they are, 
 the "systems" he wants, at once to his hand systems (\) 
 which " oppose themselves, all, to the dogmatising 
 rationalism of the earlier metaphysic; so that this 
 latter has never in truth exclusively - ruled." He can 
 claim, and appeal to as it were, in the rubric of Greek 
 
278 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " a Sevrepa fyiKocrofyia " ! There is, and there always 
 has been, says Schelling, the existence of a philosophy 
 positive as against another of name and nature negative. 
 
 This is the same distinction, so common in Schelling, 
 of what is " attributive " and " discursive," as against 
 what is " existential " : it is the " Was " of all other 
 philosophers generally, as against the " Dass " of him 
 alone specially. 
 
 " Was existirt (what exists) " " this (2, 3. 58) is the affair of 
 Kational science, but that (dass) it exists follows not ; for, as far as 
 that goes, there might nothing at all exist." 
 
 " I foresaw very well, as I first threw out this distinction, what 
 would happen. Many, at this simple, altogether unmistakable, but 
 just on that account in the highest degree important, distinction, 
 showed themselves utterly surprised ; for they had heard in a 
 previous philosophy of a falsely understood identity between 
 thought and existence. This identity, rightly understood, I shall, 
 naturally, not dispute, for it hails from me ; but precisely the 
 mistake itself, and the philosophy that comes from it, I must 
 certainly dispute. At the same time, it is not necessary to read 
 very deep into the Encyclopaedia of Hegel in order to find re- 
 peatedly, even on the earliest pages, the expression, that reason is 
 occupied with the An sich of things." 
 
 One can hardly feel surprise, nevertheless, at what 
 surprise is spoken of ; for the expressions (leave out 
 the vanity !) with which Schelling chooses to open his 
 distinction are to all seeming, at least surprising 
 enough. " What it is," he says (58), "gives me insight 
 into the nature of the thing : That it is gives me not 
 the mere notion, but something quite beyond it, existence." 
 Admitting that the general plant has been proved to 
 him, he goes on to say (59), that he "is still not 
 beyond the notion of the plant." Such (general) plant 
 is still " not the actual plant, definitely existent in this 
 point of space, in this moment of time." 
 
 One wonders, I say, that Schelling should think to tell 
 us this, and, above all, as something so unexpected, so 
 
POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 279 
 
 far-reaching, deep, and new that it would take us all 
 by surprise. Is it now, then, that we are for the first 
 time to learn that elephant does not exist, but only- 
 say, Barnum's Jumbo ! Has Schelling been caught by 
 Kant's familiar common-place, " This individual, a priori 
 understood to exist as it may, can never be maintained 
 by reason without experience of sense " that " experience 
 of sense " so perpetual in Kant, and so " betoned " as 
 such by Noack ? But what then ? even so ! is Schelling 
 going to give us experience of sense, an actual Dass 
 written ? That, indeed, would be to get the better of 
 Hegel at last ! He (Hegel) did naively, in point of fact, 
 rather cry off when the sly Dr. Krug only asked him for 
 such a simple sleight-of-hand as the " deduction " of no 
 more than his writing-pen. Schelling seems to remember 
 and to allude to this here ! " The very ground-thought 
 of Hegel," he says (60), "is that reason refers only to 
 the An sick of things, that philosophy can go no further 
 than their Was." That, then, we are to understand 
 here, from page after page, is, as against Hegel, the 
 special and peculiar tuft of Schelling, and of Schelling's 
 own, the Dass ! Not that by any means he seeks to 
 hide or evade that the sole source and initiative of the 
 Dass is the Erfahrung, and Erfahrung (experience of 
 sense) alone. No ; he is even profuse in the acknow- 
 ledgment that actuality, the Dass, " is no longer an 
 affair of reason, but, on the contrary, of Erfahrung "- 
 " of that I must convince myself only from experience." 
 And so, in the midst of it all, one cannot help thinking 
 to oneself, But what of God ? God is the ultimate of 
 all philosophical speculation, is that, too, a matter of 
 Erfahrung ? Nor even from as much as that does 
 Schelling shrink. " We demand from philosophy," he 
 cries (154), "the actual God, not the mere idea of 
 God ! " 
 
280 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 What ! we too cry, the actual God ! empirically \ 
 like a specimen in the hand ! this in a book ! 
 
 Can there be anything empirical whatever in relation 
 to God, but in the proof from the Effect to the Cause ? 
 
 Yes, says Schelling, in the proof from the Cause to 
 the Effect. 
 
 And so he proceeds to open his "Positive Philosophy." 
 
 He begins with what he calls " The systems of the 
 higher (supersensible) Empirismus " ; for there is an 
 Empirism, he declares (115), in which "the super- 
 sensible can become actual object of an experience of 
 sense." But this experience " self-evidently," he adds, 
 " cannot be of merely sensible nature rather, it must 
 have something mysterious in it " ; and he names it, 
 accordingly, "Mystic Empirism." No doubt, simplest 
 examples of this mysticism would have (1) been "calls," 
 as of Joan of Arc, say ; but he passes at once to (2) the 
 "irresistible feeling" of Jacobi, and from him to (3) 
 Jacob Bohme and the Theosophy peculiar to him. And 
 it is in such writing, or bye-writing, that Schelling, with 
 erudition, with information, and with sallies, redeems 
 his book from dulness or from ridicule. Its purport 
 here, as said, is to give itself, in name of second 
 philosophy, a certain basis and breadth of already 
 existent historical position ; not but that, he somewhat 
 self-contradictorily, all the same, will take the credit 
 to himself of a " discovery " ! 
 
 But the conclusion is that there is a " philosophical 
 empirism," a " positive philosophy," which, as peculiar 
 to himself, Schelling now T expounds ; and we are prepared 
 to find demonstrated in it, somehow empirically un- 
 empirically, the dass of an actual God. 
 
 It will not prove satisfactory. It is so beset with 
 suppositions and presuppositions, it so passes and 
 escapes away into such evanescent sinuosities, that it 
 
POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 281 
 
 is a pain, and a penalty, and well-nigh an impossibility 
 to follow it. In a broad way, x shall be a first and an 
 absolute ; creation flows from it ; and by this creation 
 x shall be empirically proved to be God. I really 
 submit seriously that it all comes to that, and that it 
 is but a self-deception and a delusion. Schelling's own 
 words leave no doubt, so far, of the order to be given 
 to the elements in proof : " The absolute prius is what 
 has no prius fr 'mi which it is known"; it is "per 
 postering, througa its consequent, that the prius is 
 known/' 
 
 That, then, is the order. For the things themselves, 
 the elements, in proof, we have to know how each, 
 whether prius or posterius, is constituted, and how each, 
 whether prius or posterius, is made good. 
 
 Naturally, the prius, as that from which all comes 
 and on which all depends, must be the one all-important 
 consideration : all-conditioning, it is, if we may say so, 
 the single TTOV crrew, in fact. There can be no doubt 
 that it is that, and intended to be that ; but nowhere 
 in these chapters is it to be found as anything, but in 
 name ! In name it is the prime beent, and the all- 
 beent, and the sole beent, and in name, or verbally, it is 
 given constitution enough, but otherwise it is a non-ens, 
 a gratuitous presupposition, a fiction in the air, a crude 
 invention ! 
 
 In the said fourth chapter so much seems to be 
 referred to, preparatorily as it were, that one is led to 
 surmise that we are expected to find in the conclusion of 
 the negative philosophy (under Kant and the rest) what 
 deduction we want of a premiss to the positive philosophy. 
 That conclusion is, " That reason is the infinite potence 
 of all knowledge " ; and this, in other words, means 
 that reason as reason has a content, and that content is 
 the unlimited potentiation of all perceptive knowledge 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 (knowledge of things). Then, with an intermediate to 
 and fro, we are brought to a second step, namely, that 
 to all knowledge there must correspond the Seyn, the 
 Being of all knowledge. Again, hy further intermedia- 
 tion, we are required to see that this content has (say) 
 a shot quality. It has one look to the reason (as subject, 
 say), and another look to the Seyn, the Being (say, again, 
 as object). Schelling now dwells on this double nature 
 of the content with a perfect rationale of inferences, as 
 movement, principle of movement, etc., almost, it may 
 be, with eventual extrication of the actual Seyn (Being, 
 Existence) itself ! And it is here, and in all other such 
 speculation as here, that one has it given him to see 
 and to know the acht Schelling that power of inward 
 looking into evanescent (or say, shot) distinctions that is 
 peculiarly his own. 
 
 I think we may not unrighteously assume, however, 
 that it is in the chapter 7 that he completes and 
 finishes and gives us in whole what to him is this 
 Positive of his. 
 
 From the above we know the reason of Schelling's 
 dissatisfaction with the Was of what he calls " rational- 
 ising dogmatism," or " dogmatising rational philosophy " ; 
 and insists on the necessity of a Dass. He freely admits, 
 as said, Dass to be the fruit, the product, of experience 
 (Erfahrung) alone. Nor less freely does he admit that 
 (62) "there conies a point where Erfahrung ceases 
 for, that God exists : in that respect, reference to 
 Erfahrung, special sense, there can be none." And so, 
 as has also been already said, it is solely by a peculiar 
 manipulation of the process of proof that God's existence 
 is to be established not only in the " discursive " or 
 " attributive " Was, but also somehow in the actually 
 empirical Dass ! 
 
 We pass to chapter 7, where, in the one or two 
 
POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 pages 126130, there will be found a complete state- 
 ment of the whole business. 
 
 Positive philosophy, then, as opposed to negative 
 philosophy, is to have an empirical position, but not by 
 any means an empirical first starting-point or direct 
 empirical premiss. This premiss, if a Seyn, existency, 
 is still to be beyond and independent of any one such 
 empirical fact. But more, it is to be also before or 
 beyond all thought. I quote : 
 
 " Positive philosophy cannot deny that it is in some way and in 
 some sense empirism ; but it starts not from any Seyn whatever 
 that is presentant in the experience of sense it starts from the 
 Seyn that is before and beyond all thought. If positive philosophy 
 starts from what is beyond all thought, it cannot start from what 
 is merely relatively beyond thought, but only from the Seyn that 
 is to be found absolutely beyond thought. This Seyn out of all 
 thought is now, too, as much above all experience as it precedes all 
 thought : it is the directly transcendent Seyn." 
 
 This, then, is the all-important Prius in regard to 
 which it is essential that we make no mistake. And, 
 of course, it is a very difficult matter. A Seyn, a being, 
 an existency, a something that is before and beyond 
 both thought and sense : how are we to conceive that ! 
 
 how are we to think that ! For we must still think it, 
 albeit that it is beyond thought we must still think it, 
 give it some presence, even in supposition, if we are to 
 follow our author at all. 
 
 I take it that this Seyn is just Seyn absolutely, that 
 there is being at all, existence at all, just that there is. 
 Such Seyn we can grant to be before all thought and 
 outside of all thought. Such Seyn we can grant, too, to 
 be beyond sense, and yet to be so far empirical 
 empirical in this way, that it is existence as such- 
 total empirismus, as it were the totality of empirism. 
 
 We., at least, say so ; but, for his part, Schelling does 
 not say so. He contents himself with the bare general 
 
284 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 terms, and leaves it to us to make all these glosses in 
 explanation. 
 
 This Seyn, he says, is a Seyn on its own account, 
 " else it would fall back into the negative philosophy." 
 So, then, we have here what is at first hand, and we 
 must not as a first of it refer to anything in the fore- 
 going in what is said from chapter 4. And so 
 
 " The beginning of the positive philosophy cannot be 
 the relative Prius ; it must be the absolute Prius that 
 has no necessity to move into das Seyn." Seyn that is 
 Seyn, but still that is not to move into Seyn, is verbally 
 odd : but the former Seyn means general Seyn, Seyn 
 as Seyn ; the latter, only empirically actual Seyn. 
 
 " Goes it " (the former) " over into the Seyn " (the latter), " then 
 this can only be the consequence of a free act, of an act which then, 
 further, can be itself only something purely empirical, altogether 
 only a posteriori cognisable, as every act is nothing a priori 
 intelligible but only a posteriori intelligible." 
 
 This movement sounds strange ; but we must not 
 think of it as anything yet accomplished : we must 
 think of any movement of a Seyn, such and so situated, 
 as not possibly movement of anything but itself. That, 
 then, to a spectator, is but an abstract act, an abstract 
 act which so far he can only abstractly see. 
 
 " So, then " (Sclielling continues), " the positive philosophy goes 
 not out from the Erfahrung, but nothing hinders that it go to the 
 Erfahrung, and so a, posteriori prove, what it has to prove, that its 
 Prius is God (i.e. the Supereiis). For a priori is that wlierefrom 
 it goes out a priori it is not God, only a posteriori is it God. 
 That it is God is not a res naturse, something of itself clear ; it is 
 a res facti, and can therefore also be only factually proved. It is 
 God. This proposition has not the meaning : the notion (idea) of 
 said Prius is = the notion (idea) God ; its meaning is : said Prius 
 is God, not in idea, but in reality. ... It is not the absolute Prius 
 itself that is to be proved (that is above all proof, it is the absolute 
 beginning, certain of itself), and so it is not itself (the absolute 
 
POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 285 
 
 Prius) that is to be proved ; but the consequent from it, that must 
 be proved as fact, and so the Godhood of said Prius that it is God, 
 and therefore God exists. . . . This factum the existence of such a 
 consequent, shows us that as well the Prius itself exists so as we have 
 apprehended (begriffeti) it, that is, that God exists. You (his students) 
 see that in this mode of argumentation the Prius is always the 
 point of start, i.e. always remains Prius. The Prius is understood 
 from its consequent, but it is not so understood that this con- 
 sequent precede. The preposition a in a posteriori does not mean 
 here the terminus a quo ; a posteriori means here per posterius, 
 through its consequent is the Prius understood. . . . The positive 
 philosophy is empirical a priorism, or it is the empirism of the 
 a priori, in as far as it proves the Prius per posterius as existent 
 God." 
 
 All this is very strange ; but, really, it is pretty well 
 all ; and, really, also, it ought to be quite as intelligible 
 in the translation as in the original. Perhaps, if we 
 will bear in mind that, to Schelling, before there can be 
 anything else (intelligence, say), there must be first an 
 Is, a something that as first of all is no more than Is 
 perhaps if we will bear this in mind it will assist 
 intelligence. But also this, That reason is the Is, reason 
 as yet only with an implicit content, a content that is 
 an implicit all knowledge, and a knowledge to which 
 there corresponds an implicit all Seyn, into which Seyn 
 (existence) it, as Begriff, is im Begriff to pass over ! A 
 passing over which, as said, is an absolute act, with 
 actual Seyn for result as sign and testimony that, as it 
 is, God is. Eeason as " potence of all knowledge "- 
 we might almost say for " potence " nisus, and so almost 
 fancy, then, that this nisus to know all was, just as such, 
 pretty well already all Seyn ! 
 
 But fancy what we may, and say what we may, surely 
 we can neither fancy nor say aught but fatuity of the 
 whole business ! Eeason and the content of reason, 
 are we to grant such mere presupposition as, just so, a 
 solidly given and proved first premiss, or, if not that, 
 
286 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 at least as a clearly self-evident first principle ? All 
 that involves infinite preliminary of search and research 
 into indispensable material of proof. Where do you get 
 that reason ? what do you know of its content ? what 
 but what you know only from looking round you ? 
 Your so certain Prius, that your absolute Prius, is but 
 an x ! In algebra, we say we do not know the answer, 
 but call it x, and then apply the facts : and so you, not 
 knowing the answer, say, call it Prius, but you have not 
 a single fact to apply to it unless from the thought 
 you call negative, or the experience you call positive, 
 but both of which, negative or positive, you will here 
 arbitrarily supersede ! In last resort with you, as with 
 others, it is alone the Postering that is guarantee and 
 source of the Prius. And you, how, from your Prius, 
 do you even feign to draw your Posterius ? 
 
 5. THE NEGATIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 What Schelling means by that is pretty well seen by 
 this time. The whole constitutive assertion is that it is 
 impossible to get at the Dass of actual existence vi 
 rationis by any consideration of its Was. Now, plausible 
 and specious as spoken, that is really pro ludibrio, when 
 honestly looked at in its intention ! Eeason as you may 
 to any fact of experience, it is only idea till stamped 
 
 stamped into reality by sense. And that is only our 
 common sense ! Leverrier reasoned Neptune ; but Galle 
 of Berlin saw it. Schelling, of course, knows this, and 
 says this ; but he takes on him further, as though to 
 generalise it into a universal, all-conclusive principle 
 
 negative of much ! Still, we ask, are there not TRUTHS 
 that cannot be submitted to sense, but must be realised 
 by thought alone truths, then, in reality, utterly insus- 
 C3ptible of the Dass at all ? 
 
NEGATIVE PHILOSOPHY 287 
 
 From an article in Mind (No. xxxvi.) I quote thus : 
 
 " Certain quantitative truths (as Euclid, i. 32, 47) can evidently 
 be regarded in two ways, now sensuously (as " matters of fact ") 
 measured say, and again intellectually (as " relations of ideas "). But 
 there are a great many truths that admit of being regarded only in 
 one way. Some intellectually alone, and some sensuously alone. 
 Suppose I were to establish the truth of the existence of the soul, or 
 of that of God, I could not bring forward, in either case, actual 
 sensible perception of actual sensible fact. I cannot hold up an 
 actual soul I cannot show God. Nay, even in much that is 
 material, we are precisely similarly situated : who, for example, 
 will show me an atom or put an atom into my hands ? Proof in 
 regard to the soul, or in regard to God, consists in argument from 
 facts ; and proof, in regard to atoms, or in regard to sulphur in the 
 sun, or sodium in Sirius, consists, precisely similarly, in argument 
 from facts. I cannot show the sulphur or the sodium." 
 
 Seasoning in regard of facts that is the whole. 
 Whether T reason from facts to, or to facts from that 
 is, in the nomenclature of Schelling, whether I reason 
 from the Was to the Dass, or from the Dass to the Was, 
 neither the one nor the other is apart and alone, but both 
 are together. It is really to the Dass of God, and to the 
 Dass of Substance, that Descartes and Spinosa respec- 
 tively reason. Nor, when they reason, is it, in the dis- 
 tinction, different with either Plato or Aristotle, or any 
 other ! This Dass of Schelling is but a maggot of his 
 own nutrition. In " relations of ideas " there is no 
 direct Dass ; but not the less, for all that, is it present in 
 the core. To explain Man, the World, God, that is the 
 Was : and what else can philosophy attempt ? What 
 else does Schelliug himself attempt ? Where is the Dass 
 of God where is the very article he makes such a 
 clamour to show ? The " distinction " itself is already in 
 Aristotle, who (Dc Ccelo, ii. 13) speaks of seeking 
 \oyovs 7T/905 fyaivofjieva, or fyaivofjieva Trpo? \oyovs : is it 
 just the antichthon, then, which shall have misled 
 Schelling ? 
 
288 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 6. THE BEARING ON HEGEL 
 
 Our great interest all through is, of course, the answer 
 to the single question of our title ; and how Schelling is in 
 that regard, is at once placed beyond a doubt by what 
 understanding he assumes to himself as concerns the 
 principle, the Begriff, the Notion of Hegel. 
 
 Now, that principle, we may say generally, the prin- 
 ciple of Hegel, is to Schelling, by far and away, for the 
 most part, simply Logic : he blames Hegel for that, with 
 no other principle to support him, he actually presumes 
 to go beyond Logic ! Hegel's whole philosophy is to 
 him " attributive " only, " negative " ; he is never done 
 pointing, emphatically express, to the blunder, and the 
 consequent failure of Hegel, in attempting to make 
 existential, positive, what is and can be only attributive, 
 negative. Begriff, by very name, can be to Schelling 
 logical only, and never existential. So far, indeed, as his 
 every direct expression is concerned, it would actually 
 astound Schelling to be told that Hegel's Begriff, Hegel's 
 Notion, was, technically taken, taken in its purity, only 
 a specific one, and solely logical when considered in the 
 dialectic that lay in it, and which was then used as 
 principle of development development to an entire 
 system of philosophy in explanation of the world of God, 
 and in guidance and direction of the world of man. And 
 yet Hegel himself has been, often enough, particular 
 enough in his declarations at times. Take the very last 
 thing he wrote, his Preface to the second edition of his 
 Logic, signed by him, "Berlin, the 7 November 1831," 
 only seven days before his death. There we are told 
 (p. 20) that what is to be made "object" of "logical 
 consideration " is " not the things," but the " content " 
 of things, the " Begriff" of things, the " Sache" the one, 
 single, sole, essential and substantial reality. Of " the 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 289 
 
 Begriff itself (des Begriffes selbst)," we hear (p. 21) that it 
 is " the basis, the foundation, the principle of the definite 
 and particular notions (it is die Grundlage der bestimmten 
 Begriffe) " ; and, so, as in notions generally there is 
 (p. 18) "the distinction of a soul and a body (der 
 Unterschied einer Seele und eines Leibes)," it is the 
 Notion, the Begriff, that is the soul. 
 
 Schelling's general regard of what constitutes the 
 specific nature or element of anything called Begriff, 
 Notion, is just that it is logical, that it belongs to 
 thought as thought. " The notion," he says (2, 1. 565), 
 " is only contemplative (der Begriff ist nur contemplativ) " 
 " in thinking (im Denken) there is nothing practical 
 (nichts Praktisches) " : what concerns etwas Praktisches 
 concerns etwas Gewolltes ; what is practical is an affair 
 of the will. 
 
 Speaking of his own first philosophy, which is to him 
 now the negative one, Vernunftwissenschaft, mere Eational 
 Science, namely, he says (2, 3. 65): 
 
 " This science just in this, that it deduces the content of the 
 existent actual, and so far, therefore, is parallel with experience, 
 there lay for many the misleading idea that it had to do not merely 
 with the actual, but also with actuality, or that the actual arose in 
 this way, that a mere logical process was one also of actual origi- 
 nation." 
 
 There is much more in the same neighbourhood in 
 which Schelling insists on making emphatic the fact that 
 all the notions of his earliest philosophy were only 
 logical ; but if that be the state of the case with himself, 
 much more, he cannot help remarking in passing, is it 
 the state of the case with Hegel : 
 
 " What Rational Science deduces, no doubt, with whatever else, 
 is just that which appears in experience, under the conditions of 
 experience, as a certain individual particular, in space and time, 
 etc.; but it itself, this science, moves only in thoughts, though the 
 
 J 9 
 
290 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 contents of each thought or Becjriff are not again mere Begriffe, as in 
 the Hegelian Logic." 
 
 Any Hegelian product is never existential, but always 
 only attributive to Schelling : 
 
 " Whatever we have in experience, we can produce a priori in 
 mere thought ; but even so it is just only in thought. If we would 
 have, however, something existent out of thought, outside of 
 thought, then we must start from a basis that is absolutely 
 independent of all thought, that, beforehand with all thought, is 
 of all thought anticipant. Of any such existential basis the 
 Hegelian philosophy knows nothing ; for any such Begriff it has 
 no place "(2, 3. 164). 
 
 I daresay we all know pretty well by this time what 
 to Hegel triplicity is what an entirely new place, what 
 an entirely new force and intensity of meaning it has 
 taken on in the hands of Hegel what an apotheosis 
 fell upon it, indeed, when Hegel, from the hands of Kant, 
 took it into his own. Well, here it is fallen fallen into 
 the hands of Schelling : 
 
 " Since Kant introduced in all notions the typus of thesis, anti- 
 thesis, and synthesis, and, subsequent to him, another gave it the 
 widest possible application, what is called trichotomy has become, 
 as it were, a standing form, and there has been no one who did not 
 believe it a matter of necessity to begin in philosophy with three 
 ideas (however ineffective), although now all this counting and 
 calling of three is for the thing in hand quite indifferent " (2, 1. 312). 
 
 It was simply on the mere abstract Begriff, he says, 
 that Hegel founded his dogmatism ; and what he so 
 founded was only a logical dogmatism : 
 
 " The word dogmatism comes to us with an evil sound in it, even 
 from before Kant, indeed, but now altogether so, since that logical 
 dogmatism which Hegel wanted to found later on the mere abstract 
 notion, and which, as the poorest of all, is the most odious of all, 
 whereas the dogmatism of former metaphysic had always something 
 great in it " (2, 3. 82). 
 
 " Hegel, who is so sharp in particulars, was deserted by nothing 
 so much as by the artistic feeling, especially in its bearing as on a 
 
THE BEABING ON HEGEL 291 
 
 whole ; else he would have been sensible of the break in his move- 
 ment that intervened between his Logic and his Philosophy of 
 Nature. From the way in which the latter . is pieced on to the 
 former from that alone he ought to have become aware how far he 
 had strayed from the right direction " (2, 3. 88). 
 
 We know that Hegel describes the transition from 
 Logic to Nature in this way, that the Idea, in the absolute 
 truth of itself, sick entschliesst, as it were, uncloses itself 
 to let go freely, out of itself, as nature, the moment of its 
 particularity (that is, in its first determinateness, other- 
 ness, finiteness, of form). In order to make use of every 
 term that will realise his image, Hegel heaps his words 
 in such a way that it is difficult to make a plain gram- 
 matical meaning out of them. Nevertheless, in the very 
 heaping of his words, and still more in the double senses 
 of his words, the initiated reader can only see in Hegel what 
 is simply and perfectly admirable. The Idea entschliesst 
 sich ; that is, unshuts, uncloses, unlocks itself entschliesst 
 sick, that is also, resolves, takes resolution (say, quasi- 
 re-solves, etc.), to let go from itself nature : but nature, so, 
 is only the second moment of the Idea nature, so, is 
 only the second stroke of the bell. The first stroke of 
 the bell was the Idea in its internality ; and it is only in 
 obedience to its own constitution, rhythm, and law that 
 the second stroke of the bell should be the Idea in its 
 externality. One might easily say more here ; for there 
 are more expressions in the original on which one might 
 or, indeed, ought to dwell ; but perhaps what has 
 been said may, so far, suffice. 
 
 Schelling, then, as we see, finds the transition in 
 question only a blunder, a blot, and a botch. Further, 
 he simply mocks and laughs at it as thus (121) : 
 
 " Hegel looks down upon Bonnie, and declares against the well- 
 known Franz Baader, who had ascribed to the Hegelian philosophy, 
 or accused it, that it made matter immediately emerge from God, 
 and that this eternal emergence of God was for it the condition of 
 
292 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 his eternal re-mime rgence or return into himself as Spirit, against 
 this accusation, then, Hegel, sehr vornehm (much a Varutocrate\ 
 declares that the emergence of things from God is no category of 
 his, that lie does not use it, that it is not a category at all, but only 
 a figurative expression. Hegel, at all events, however, has the 
 wonderful category des Entlassens (of the dismission, discharge, 
 release, of the letting go, the letting go out or away). This Entlassen 
 (this letting out of a thing) is not, surely, a figurative expression ? 
 What it matters with this Entlassen is not said. But to this 
 Entlassen, to this letting out on the part of God, there must 
 necessarily correspond, one would think, an emergence, an issue 
 of what is let out (of that, whatever it is, that God does let out), a 
 letting out, issue, emergence, therefore, of nature, and, consequently, 
 of matter as well, from God : just as if God, according to Hegel, 
 in the Logic, is shut in as yet to his eternity this same God must 
 in actual, extra-logical nature, be there emerged from his eternity." 
 
 No doubt, all this will appear very witty and very 
 telling to many, or to most, people, and the general text 
 or tenor of it has been repeated scores of times. There 
 is a dangerous pass or step in the Alps, it seems, that 
 is called the Mauvais Pas; and Mauvais Pas has been 
 thought a felicitous denomination to apply to this some- 
 what critical step or stride of Hegel's from Logic to 
 Nature. My Lectures on Law, however, were published 
 more than a quarter of a century ago; and, at page 6, I 
 have entered there a Note in which, from its first words 
 " the moment the idea of externality as externality is 
 seized, the great difficulty will be found at an end " I 
 go on to such further explanation as I trusted would 
 prove, on the special point, in a general way, satisfactory. 
 The particular sentence in the text to which the Note is 
 appended runs thus : " Altogether, I must acknowledge 
 myself to find Hegel's plan of externalisation the happiest 
 ever yet proposed a plan necessary even when we say, 
 as we do say, and must say, God made the world ; for it 
 answers the question of how precisely that question 
 how God, how thought, made granite, for example," 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 293 
 
 That is still my opinion that, to no first philosopher 
 that ever lived, to no Plato, no Aristotle, did a happier 
 idea ever occur than this of externalisation that occurred 
 to Hegel. As the Ego involves the Me, so does the 
 internal^, involve the external^. Evolve the I-Me into 
 the whole of its vitals, so to speak, of its intestinary, of 
 its inward organisation ; and it is simply by the necessity 
 of the I-Me, that the I, the subject, being complete 
 within, the Me, the object, should also be similarly com- 
 plete without. The categories being complete, thought as 
 thought is complete ; and thought as thought external- 
 ised the externalisation of the categories that is 
 nature, that is the externality of things. When did 
 Schelling, or whoever else, see as much as this ? 
 
 In his resolution that Hegel shall be only negative, 
 only attributive, only logical, or in his denial, namely, of 
 any principle in Hegel that shall be existential in its 
 nature, Schelling has (2, 3, 164) this : 
 
 " If we want something Seyendes (existential), apart from, inde- 
 pendent of thought, then we must start from a Seyn (an existency) 
 that is absolutely independent of all thought, that precedes all 
 thought. Of this Seyn (existency), the Hegelian philosophy knows 
 nothing, for this notion (Begriff} it has no place." 
 
 Schelling is not a little put about with the ^mreason 
 that he finds in the world. treason is to him an 
 actual factor, actually prevalent, dominant, or at least 
 extant and functioning, in the universe. He expatiates 
 at considerable length (2, 4. 23 sqq.) on this difficulty; 
 and, with equally considerable complacency, allows 
 corners, every now and then, of his own superior 
 wisdom in explanatory reconciliation to extrude 
 
 " If reason is all being (and, reciprocally, all being reason), then 
 it gives not a little difficulty to win admission for the unreason 
 which, for any explanation of the actual world, is still necessary. 
 For everybody sees that that, side by side with a great and 
 
294 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 powerful reason which certainly seems in some way to guide things, 
 there is still present everywhere a vast and most potent unreason. 
 But reason can only eternally be reason ; it can never make itself 
 into another than itself, or into the contrary of itself." Schelling 
 (at greater length) remarks then that "some say God, being of 
 reason, cannot go beyond reason : but that is to give God less than 
 man ; for man, at all events, can go beyond reason. ... If reason is, 
 heroism is not, everybody's affair. To do good to one's enemy, nay, 
 to love him, that is beyond reason. The supreme commands of an 
 exalting moral purity, man could never realise were he unable to 
 exceed reason. And why, then, should not God be privileged 
 over reason 1 It is nowise unreasonable to say, the mysteries of 
 Christianity, or, rather, that one mystery which is the object and, 
 consequently also, the source of Revelation, the will of God in 
 regard to men as alienated from him it is nowise unreasonable 
 to say that that, and these, and all, are beyond reason. . . . Nothing 
 is more pitiable than the business of the rationalists of every 
 description to seek to make rational what gives its own self as 
 beyond all reason. The boldest of the Apostles, in whom there 
 is to be seen also a profound dialectician, speaks plainly of the 
 foolishness of God, of the iveakness of God as his words are, of 
 the foolishness of God that is wiser than men, and the weakness 
 of God that is stronger than men (1 Cor. i. 25). Only he who 
 is strong can or dare be weak. Those tender souls who will 
 absolutely have a reasonable God after their own hearts we 
 might give these the answer of J. G. Hamann : Had they never 
 remarked that God is a genius who does not seek much after what 
 they name reasonable or unreasonable. It is not given to every one 
 to comprehend the deep irony of all God's acts. ... It must 
 surprise that, uno eodemque actu, one and the same personality 
 affirms and denies, in opposition to the principle of contradiction 
 as it is generally understood ; and yet just that is the relation of 
 God in the Creation, that he precisely affirms what he, even 
 immediately, again, as well, denies. . . . The Godhoocl (that is, 
 the absolute freedom) of God just consists in the nerve of this 
 contradiction this absurdity, if you will, to be at once affirmator 
 and negator, and yet not to sunder in twain, but to remain He that 
 He is. Nay, not only in God, but even in man. . . . Not in different 
 moments, but in one and the same moment, to be at once drunk 
 and sober, that is the heart of true poesy. It is by that that 
 the Delphic intoxication distinguishes itself from the Bacchic." 
 Not a little that is Schelling comes to the surface and 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 295 
 
 is seen here ; but our special purpose with it at present 
 is the evidence it offers of ignorance in regard to the 
 philosophical principle before us. " Eeason can only 
 eternally be reason ; it can never make itself into the 
 contrary of itself." Possessed of the I-Me, we know 
 that we have always two we know that we have 
 always the possibility of difference. In a world where 
 there must be subject and object, there cannot but be 
 difference ; but difference is specially in evidence on the 
 part of the object. Schelling would not have been 
 brought to a stand in front of the idea that reason 
 must remain reason, reason cannot give opening 
 and opportunity for unreason, reason cannot become 
 unreason, had he been possessed of the philosophy of 
 contingency which the one basal principle brings with 
 it. Whether personally thinking, or personally living, 
 Hegel has always the contingent in mind ; and not in 
 ignorance, but only in knowledge, of all that, was it 
 possible for Schelling to have access to Hegel. Ignor- 
 ance of externalisation on Schelling's part was, on 
 Schelling's part, ignorance also of what contingency 
 was ; for the latter is but the consequence, the neces- 
 sary result, of the former. We refer again to the same 
 Note in the Lectures on Law (p. 6), which we quoted 
 just in this reference, indeed. There we read : 
 
 "The moment tlie idea of externality as externality is seized, the 
 great difficulty will be found at an end. One ought to ask one's self 
 what must the idea of externality what must externality itself be 1 
 Or, suppose you have internality completed an ego a boundless 
 intussusception of thoughts, all in each other, and through or 
 thorough each other, but all in the same geometrical point, what 
 must its externalisation and its externalisation is accurately ex- 
 ternalisation as externalisation be 1 Its externalisation it being 
 an i?iternalisation must plainly be the opposite of its own self : 
 whatever internalisation is, externalisation will be not ; just as 
 darkness and cold are precisely what light and heat are not. Or, 
 
296 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 taking it from the other end, we see that externality is infinite out 
 and outness, infinite difference, under infinite external necessity (or, 
 what is the same thing here, contingency} ; while internality, again, 
 is, and must be, infinite in and inness, infinite identity, under infinite 
 internal necessity (or, what is the same thing here, reason)" 
 
 One wonders (as one cannot help saying here) when 
 one reads again this note, which one wrote, as has been 
 said, more than a quarter of a century ago one wonders 
 that what we name /car e^o^v Philosophy has proved 
 so unintelligible let us just say to the public that it 
 (the public) seems, on the whole, as one man, to have 
 turned from it. And yet I know not that, for what is 
 to be done, there is very much more required than to 
 realise observe ! to realise this note. 
 
 But be that as it may, what occupies us at present is 
 contingency ; and it is in what is said to be thought in 
 that note that the birth of contingency lies. What is 
 externality as externality ? An infinite out and out of 
 infinite externalities, each external even to its own self, 
 as it were, atomically external even to its own self void, 
 full ethereal, aerial solid, liquid mechanical, chemical 
 magnetic, electric, galvanic metalline, alkaline, acid 
 vegetable, animal vital, psychic : an infinite chaos, 
 that may be so, or otherwise infinitely qualified that 
 is externality \ And there is not a physical atom in it 
 that is not a radiating centre in infinite lines of influence. 
 It requires but the data of any one centre to have the 
 calculable elements of an infinite external necessity so 
 far ! But if the lines of influence, direct enough in them- 
 selves, are infinite, they must also infinitely cross. Now, 
 each cross is a contingency ; for each cross is a tingency con, 
 a touching together of the lines. Now, such contingencies, 
 in an infinite time and space, can only be infinite, and, 
 if infinite, then incalculable. It is absurd, therefore, to 
 talk only of a physical necessity, as though such were 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 297 
 
 monarch of all, and its very will calculable. That, then, 
 is the uniQSLSon of the world, the physical necessity that 
 is at the same time only physical contingency. And 
 physical contingency, in an infinite space and an infinite 
 time, is no more than, is nothing ~but, infinite difference \ 
 Like everything else, man is exposed to this infinite con- 
 tingency, this infinite difference, as to an infinite fate. But 
 is man, therefore, unfree withal ? By no means. Man 
 wills to take a walk. Oh, say you, the pleasure of the 
 walk was the motive that moved him. That is true ; 
 but was he unfree because he acted on motive ? How 
 would it have been had he acted without motive ? Why, 
 so to act, blind action on man's part why, that is but 
 the physical action of things at the will of a mere 
 mechanical necessity wholly from without ! If a man 
 takes a walk for his pleasure, he at least moves for the 
 pleasure of himself '; whereas when a stone moves, it 
 moves at the pleasure of another. That is a difference ; 
 and it is really the difference of Liberty and Necessity. 
 Movement with motive is liberty ; without it, it is neces- 
 sity. An ego can only act from motive. True, one motive 
 is not always as an other motive. To take a walk 
 pleasure may be the motive ; but it may also be health. 
 A man who moves at the call of pleasure is not in the 
 same way free as a man who moves at the call of health. 
 A man may move also at the call of science botany, 
 geology, astronomy, chemistry, etc. Or he may move to 
 an ethical call succour the afflicted, rescue the drowning, 
 feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. Nay, he may 
 even yield to a political motive, and die he may die in 
 battle for his country. These motives are not all alike ; 
 still, in one thing they are not different : they all give 
 freedom. What acts from itself, and for itself, and by 
 itself, is free. Man is a self, and has a self ; but he can 
 be, and he can have, only one true self; and that is 
 
298 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Keason. When a man's motive is of sense, he is bound : 
 but when a man's motive is of reason, he is free. And 
 to man it is given to rise to reason, if he will. Medical 
 motives, scientific, ethical, political motives, may hold of 
 reason ; and, holding of reason, they may give freedom. 
 
 But contingency suggests itself, again, with the question 
 of the possibility of freedom in such a realm in such 
 a welter at once of necessity and accident. Now, does not 
 man himself produce contingencies ? Among the lines 
 of movement that come to him, does he not himself cross 
 many of them, and by reason in his own interest ? 
 Why, a man's life is nothing else than that a daily, 
 hourly crossing of or into contingencies. What are 
 the sanatory measures of the municipality what the 
 swallowing of a dose of iron on the part of the individual? 
 I know not that I have any reason to apologise for these 
 remarks on the fact of free-will, on the rationale of free- 
 will; for it is a subject on which, even in high quarters, 
 much confusion reigns, and it is a subject which is 
 immediately suggested by this of contingency. But for 
 contingency, indeed, there would be no free-will : contin- 
 gency is the possibility, and the condition, and the battle- 
 ground of free-will. It is partly on account of this 
 relation, if for nothing else, that contingency has its 
 extraordinary importance. But it is its cosmical role 
 that is really its true one, and that really gives it its 
 place, and its importance in chief. It is as in that role, 
 and in that place, and in that importance, that here, in 
 respect of Schelling, we propose it in proof of his 
 ignorance of what he pretends, even by his superiority of 
 insight, to refute, confute, expose, and destroy. " Reason 
 can only eternally be reason ; it can never make itself 
 into the contrary of itself." This seems an insuperable 
 difficulty in regard to an omniscient God that is reason, 
 and can only be reason. Schelling's expedient to meet 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 299 
 
 is, in that he assumes unreason as a privilege in man, 
 equally to assume unreason as a privilege in God. God 
 is to him, as he is to Hamann, a very peculiar " genius." 
 It is not given to every one," he says, " to comprehend 
 the deep irony of all God's acts " ! If the unreason that 
 is in the universe is to Hegel, as it ought to be, simply 
 the contingency of externality as externality (which 
 evidently, at least, coheres with the Finite of Leibnitz and 
 the rest), this same unreason is to Schelling but an irony 
 that is a peculiarity in God ! " l 
 
 Had Schelling been really at home with the principle 
 of Hegel, he would also have been at home with the 
 peculiarities of his writing or, at least, so at home with 
 them that he would hardly have mocked his writings 
 
 1 Further on in the same volume (p. 130) Schelling makes very 
 plain, by instances, what he at least includes in what to him is the 
 unreason of God. After having remarked that " the temptation of 
 Abraham, nay, even the temptation to idolatry, is ascribed to the 
 Elohim," he continues : " Revelation itself must permit this prin- 
 ciple and give it free scope, even as in nature it has free scope ; for 
 there are many things which, according to our ideas, are unworthy 
 of God in nature, as equally there is such unworthiness in much 
 that, in the Mosaic writings, we see ascribed to Jehovah, who shall 
 be, on the one side, vindictive, jealous, cruel, pitiless, and, on the 
 other, merciful, long-suffering, all-forgiving. Consider, in the 
 former reference, only such things as are related in the Book of 
 Joshua (chap, vii.), where the children of Israel committed a trespass 
 in the accursed thing, that is, in the portion of the spoils which had 
 been reserved for Jehovah, then the anger of the Lord was kindled 
 against the children of Israel, nor was any victory over the enemy 
 allowed them until he who had sinned (the thief) was discovered, 
 and all Israel had stoned him with stones, and burned him with 
 fire after they had stoned him with stones." (Of course, this is bad, 
 and very bad, and bad as bad can be ; but, still, there is really no 
 reason for all that holy horror of yours, Friend Aufgeklarter ! 
 against that " book of lies " ! What you call lies are susceptible of 
 f[uite another colour ; and, however they be, it is quite certain that 
 that horror of yours is an absolute anachronism, and quite out of 
 place.) 
 
300 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 generally in the blind way that is usual with him. Had 
 he in truth known what they meant, it is impossible to 
 suppose that he would have so spoken of them. This 
 that we refer to obtains throughout the latter Schelling, 
 and a mere illustration must suffice in proof : 
 
 " The True is nowise of that nature that it can be got to only by 
 unnatural struggle and stress. Most men directly baffle for them- 
 selves their entrance into philosophy through the unnatural stretch 
 and strain which they think the right movement of mind whereby 
 to reach it. It is with many in philosophy as with men who have 
 been long used to live with their equals, and so, when they have to 
 appear among their superiors, or in presence of a so-called lord 
 of creation, they conduct themselves awkwardly and unnaturally. 
 Nay, there are those who opine that, for philosophy, such a 
 demeanour is so much the right thing, that at last the very degree 
 of relative mastery is judged by them according to the degree of 
 contortions and distortions into which they find a philosophy to fall. 
 Those who have come to philosophy in a forced, perverted fashion, 
 find precisely what is simple and unforced hard ; just as a man who 
 has been all day on the treadmill is unable, when released from it, 
 to find himself at home in any other step. If I see in philosophy, 
 then, the cure for the disorder of our times, I naturally mean 
 thereby not a weakling philosophy, not a mere artefact ; I mean 
 thereby a strong philosophy" (2, 3. 18, 19, 20, 11). 
 
 Speaking of geniuses, Hegel is certainly a very 
 peculiar genius ; and if it is only by struggle and strain 
 that his ordinary student can contrive to reach him, 
 even let it be no further than what " reach " in each 
 case means, there is still the consolation that, whether 
 he spoke or whether he wrote, struggle and strain was 
 the natural movement of mind for Hegel himself. Still, 
 that Schelling lays so much stress on the outside, goes, 
 it is perhaps fair to say, a long way to prove that he 
 allowed himself to be blind to the inside. That inside 
 was only an artefact and weakling ; while his own was 
 a reality and strong ! Just to think, says Schelling else- 
 where (2, 3. 14) just to think how, after Kant, after 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 301 
 
 Fichte himself, " after, to use an expression of Goethe's, 
 a very heaven of knowledge seemed let down how, after 
 all that, a new darkness fell upon us, and what began 
 so big ended so small " ! " That so much of Germany 
 should have had no anxiety for meal, but should have 
 been quite pleased and satisfied with the clatter of the 
 mill-wheels "! (2, 3. 53). "That, by accident, an arid 
 formalism should, for a time, have struck philosophy 
 into stupor" ! (2, 2. 7). 
 
 Schelling (2, 3. 15) will not even allow Hegel to run 
 off with his notorious fruit-illustration, as though it were a 
 prize : " The difference of philosophical systems is not to 
 be shirked by the mere remark that every kind of philo- 
 sophy is philosophy, just as every kind of fruit is fruit, 
 and that it would be a strange thing to find a man refus- 
 ing grapes, on the plea that it was fruit he wanted, and 
 not grapes " ! And what an unhappy state of mind must 
 have been poor Schelling's, when he cannot help sneering 
 at Hegel's reference to Thomson the chemist, and to the 
 advertisement of the English barber : " That philosophy 
 meant physics in England scarcely required to be proved 
 from the titles of the latest chemical journals or from 
 hairdressers' newspaper advertisements ; directly at hand 
 lay easy reference to England's best known, two hundred 
 years' old periodical work, the Philosophical Transac- 
 tions " ! ( 1 1 1 ). In Hegel, according to Schelling, at most 
 we are just as we were in Fichte ! but it is impossible 
 to quote here all that, relatively, may be quoted. The 
 reader who is curious on the matter may consult for 
 himself as below ; l at the same time, that many other 
 rancorous hits at Hegel are to be found in the Cousin 
 Preface, the History of Later Philosophy, and, not rarely, 
 
 1 2, 1. 77, 232, 312 ; 2, 2. 7, 115, 488, 557, '672 ; 2, 3. 8, 11, 
 14, 15, 19, 20, 26, 38, 59, 65, 82, 88, 106, 111, 121, 163, 164, 173 ; 2, 
 4. 4, 11, 23, 24, 103, 104, 215, 364. 
 
302 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 in the letters of Schelling which occur in his Life. 
 Indeed, almost, it would seem, as though he had called 
 his own philosophy negative and invented a new positive 
 one, simply out of spite to Hegel, and only to have ample 
 room and verge enough to crack for ever his whip at him. 
 
 It is really something very remarkable this rooted 
 rancour with which, after the death of Hegel, Schelling, 
 during the whole of his subsequent twenty-three years, 
 snatches at every slightest chance, remorselessly to 
 deride the ghost of Hegel. It seems to have been the 
 product of an instant. That the two men had been on 
 terms the friendliest at Tubingen, where they first met, 
 is beyond a doubt : their correspondence, taken up in 
 1795, proves that. It is there that, in his very first 
 letter, Schelling cries to Hegel: " Here, my hand, old 
 friend ; we will never be strangers to each other." 
 Then how it was with them at Jena that is well 
 known : they were brothers in battle, and most familiarly 
 united. Parted again, and at a distance from each 
 other, they still remained in friendly communication. 
 " Farewell, thou old, dear friend : go where I may, I 
 shall always from time to time write to thee." Such had 
 been the parting words of Schelling, and his very last letter 
 but one or two to Hegel is as frankly, open-heartedly affec- 
 tionate as any one of all the others that preceded it. Some 
 ten months later, however, the final letter of all of Schel- 
 ling's contains these ominous words to Hegel : " versohnen, 
 lasst sich freilich Alles, Eines ausgenommen, all may be 
 reconciled, One thing excepted ! " What that one thing 
 was I have already, in the Lecture (at p. 258), suggested. 
 
 What Schelling thought of Hegel before that last 
 letter, too, is easily in evidence. Ever, in his earliest 
 correspondence, he stirs him on to effort ; and he has 
 comfort and strength when he is at his side. He 
 chuckles at that Doctor Hegel of his Critical Journal 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 303 
 
 and the consternation of his readers, " just, on the whole, 
 a quite all- too categorical man that will not stand on 
 ceremonies where philosophy is concerned " ! He tells 
 Fichte of him, too : " Only to-day there has appeared a 
 book from a very capable head, that has for title ' Differ- 
 ence of the Fichtian and Schellingian System of Philo- 
 sophy.' '' Hegel, himself, he does not hesitate to tell of 
 how he is on " the tenterhooks of expectation to receive 
 that first of his so solid and, as it were, timeless works." 
 Ah, he cries, " what must result, thy very maturity still 
 taking time to itself to mature its fruits ! " He writes 
 from Wiirzburg pressing Hegel to contribute to a new 
 periodical he is starting, assuring him that " even detached 
 thoughts will be welcome from his hand," and that he 
 can offer him ein betrachtliches Honorar ! Altogether, 
 though, externally, the relation between the two men at 
 Jena was that of the Professor and his Assistant, say, 
 internally, both knew if one only felt unconsciously a 
 shadow that he named not that the reverse was the 
 truth. Schelling could divine the up, over, and above 
 the whole field of these papers, Glauben und Wissen, on 
 Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, aL, even if he could not what it is 
 to understand understand them. Even if he could not 
 understand that " Differenz " on himself, he very well 
 understood what it was to him in the lifting-up of him, 
 young as he was, into the very first rank of the func- 
 tioning philosophers of the day, side by side with Fichte 
 and the rest. Hegel's unceremonious, unhesitating 
 " Liar ! " to the Stuttgart man who had as good (or as 
 bad) as called him Schelling's bully must have given its 
 own startle to the mere tender bookman that almost 
 certainly Schelling was, and greatly strung his respect 
 for him. Still, socially, he was so far under him, and he 
 (Schelling) could almost order him (Hegel) about, as 
 say for the benefit of Mme, 
 
304 WHAT J,S Y THOUGHT? 
 
 As said, it was not till after the death of Hegel that 
 Schelling ventured, as it were, publicly to proclaim him. 
 Even privately, it is only after the death of Hegel that 
 allusions to him in letters of Schelling swarm. Still, 
 there are earlier notices. The first I find chronicled, 
 however, occurs, as already said, in the letter to Schubert, 
 some two years and a half after the final letter to Hegel, 
 and runs thus : " Eight delightful it was to me to see 
 how truly and well you have handled Hegel. The ridicu- 
 lous side is really the best, though not the only one. 
 Such a pure example of inner and outer prosa must, in 
 our hyperpoetic times, be held sacred. Sentimentality 
 comes over us all here and there ; and against it such a 
 negative nature as his is a capital corrective, as, on the 
 contrary, it is diverting so soon as it will take its flight 
 above the negative." And this on that side will suffice ; 
 the rest of these spiteful fleers and flouts I leave to the 
 reader of all these letters. 
 
 The offence of Hegel, as we have seen, is his jeer at the 
 expeditious conversion of some mere unprofessional dabbler 
 in drugs into a regular university Medicines Doctor. I have 
 been explicit enough in blame of Hegel here. But, after all, 
 he had right on his side ; and Schelling, if he forgave the 
 jibe at, formalism (as well he might), might very well too, in 
 the long-run, have seen the whole business in its absurdity, 
 and so rubbed it all out. But, during the career of a lifetime, 
 and after the consecration of a death, too, which usually 
 passes all the poor blacks of time into the one black of 
 eternity, still relentlessly to persecute the Manes of one's 
 friend, and for so peculiar a cause surely that is scarcely 
 human ! Some mitigation, for his part, has been allowed 
 Hegel in consideration of the de haut en las style of his 
 friend, especially in orders as to that Mine. Schlegel ; 
 and, in equal fairness to Schelling, we may suggest these 
 " Slides of Mr. Hegel," who undoubtedly did throw from 
 
THE BEARING ON HEGEL 305 
 
 time to time a shell at Schelling, and so keep up feeling 
 though surely Schelling only speaks from a dream 
 when he writes Cousin : " Pour faire grand leur maitre 
 il faut avant tout, qu'on me fasse petit ; c'est le mot 
 d'ordre, que leur a donne leur chef, qui, semblable au 
 vieux de la montagne, sans jamais sortir de son reduit, 
 sut faire agir ses instruments ! vous en entendrez de 
 belles choses, si un jour j'en parlerai publiquement ! " 
 Schelling surely speaks only from a dream when he 
 writes to Cousin this, in 1834, for then Hegel was three 
 years in his grave ! One would like to have heard these 
 " fine things " which Schelling was one day publicly to 
 tell above all, those orders which the Old Man of the 
 Mountain, Hegel, their chief, had, from his retreat, given 
 his Slides, his Assassins, for the paying out of Schelling ! 
 His Slides, that heard Hegel, in his History of Philosophy, 
 specially lecture on Schelling had they, then, any very 
 dreadful orders, or indeed any very dreadful " mot 
 d'ordre," against the subject of it ? 
 
 But, really, these said prosecutions or persecutions of the 
 Manes of one's friend did pass into such emphatic exiguity ! 
 
 No doubt, that " Hegel " in Schelling's Zur Geschichte 
 der neueren Philosophic is about the meanest thing I 
 know in print ; but just fancy what a small thing these 
 " grapes " were, or the " advertisement " of that " English 
 barber " ! Surely exiguous enough the exiguity of these. 
 And there are others quite as small. Why, he actually 
 opines (2, 3. 26) Hegel's Logic to have begun with 
 Quality rather than Quantity, " perhaps only because it did 
 not know how to begin with Quantity " ! He has read 
 so widely in Hegel as to be able (2, 2. 488) to sneer at his 
 translation Andacht for Yoga (which means, say, absorbed 
 devotion). " A Denk-Andachtiger," he says, " to me 
 almost comes as a so-called Denk-Glaubiger " which 
 means, we may suppose, " Hegel, with his Andacht, has 
 
 20 
 
306 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 of a devotee only made a free-thinker ! " And then 
 (557), in disapproving of Hegel beginning history with 
 China, he cannot help the jibe at a philosophy " which, 
 in its forms, is itself something Chinese-ish I " He scoffs 
 (672) at "a philosophy that, in place of the real connec- 
 tion, sets the mere filigree of the Begriff," and (2, 3. 11) 
 at " a weakling philosophy that is a mere artefact " ; but 
 he only betrays therein the Cimmerian darkness of his 
 own ignorance both as to the evolution of the Begriff 
 and as to the Begriff itself. And is not this small ? 
 Former metaphysic (38) "has been called by Hegel 
 understanding's metaphysic slightingly. It were greatly 
 to be wished that as much could be said of every philo- 
 sophy namely, that there is understanding in it ! " 
 
 Surely, as I say, all these scoffs are unutterably small ! 
 but, here is a smaller : for, with hate, there is in it envy ! 
 Of course, in his knowledge of Greek, Schelling was just 
 known as simply in his rights to quote it ; and of course, 
 too, as we know now, Hegel did quote Greek. Schelling, 
 then, was naturally proud of his Greek; and (2, 1. 322), 
 in that regard, he writes thus : 
 
 "But now in the first place to find the proper expression, we 
 shall look about us among the Ancients. Certain designations of 
 philosophical ideas and methods, as they have been invented by the 
 Ancients, have easily in later times propagated themselves ; but not 
 just as easily has the true sense been received ; and so, then, they 
 stand at the command of every one who extends a hand to them, per- 
 haps to garnish with such illustrious expressions something wherein 
 scarcely even a distorted image of the thing in hand is to be dis- 
 cerned. It would be easy to name more than one usurpation of the kind." 
 
 I hardly suppose any one will doubt the meaning or 
 application of this ; not but that, as it comes, of course, 
 just every one is free to do so if he will. We would 
 only add that, let Schelling's Greek have been as it may, 
 Hegel's Greek was still good enough to enable him to 
 understand Greek philosophers at least, it may be, a 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 307 
 
 little better than Schelling ! In one way, in fact, no- 
 thing can more completely differentiate the two men than 
 their Greek. Schelling has not taken together and 
 realised any one philosopher or any one philosophy in 
 Greek ; he deals only in disconnected fragments of 
 sporadic allusion. The ornament of a mere allusion as 
 such may, here and there, not be wanting in Hegel ; but 
 mastered wholes constitute his quality. 
 
 7. SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 
 
 How Schelling states his case, in connection with 
 Kant and Fichte, for himself, and against Hegel, shows 
 points which are intimately determinative in reference 
 to character. That whole episode freighted with the 
 fatal " distinction " between the philosophies, positive of 
 him, and negative of them, the Dass and the Was, is only 
 there that he may get his story out, his story that will 
 redress his wrong, and restore him to his place, not 
 above Hegel that would be a small matter ! but even, 
 it may be, above Fichte, above Kant, as, in philosophy, 
 the most fecund and conclusive foreman ! (That this is no 
 exaggeration will be immediately seen. 1 ) 
 
 1 Spelling's own words will presently prove this ; but, mean- 
 time, let me quote from Noack (ii. 469) : " Philosophers, for more 
 than two thousand years, have lived, thought, and given to the 
 world of the fruits of their thought and their life ; but, since the 
 times of Thales and Pythagoras, the history of philosophy has not 
 an example to show that ever one of its priests had taken his mouth 
 so full of vainglory and brag as here this the miles gloriosus of 
 modern speculation, trumpeting himself forth as the philoso- 
 phical redeemer of the century, and, in trust of the inability to 
 judge and ignorance of the mass, claiming, with effrontery of un- 
 hesitating common-place and assertion, the admiration of the world, 
 as though all now were intelligible of itself!" - Noack may well 
 see in this the outcome only " of a high-strung self-feeling (eines 
 hochgeschraubten Selbstgefiihles)." 
 
308 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 Men, when caught wrong, may name, or more often 
 silently admit, a casualty that misled : like Othello, 
 they must not " go in " ; they " must be found " ! 
 Women, on the contrary, so caught, have a thousand 
 ambages on this side, and on that, and on all sides, to 
 prove the gross injustice of any blame to them, in act, 
 in word, or in thought ! Womanish men, again, in any 
 such straits, fire up at once at the very name of blame, 
 and, agitatedly eager, breathlessly stuttering, hysteri- 
 cally gloze themselves out of the very tint of guilt. 
 These are men that, unlike Othello, would " go in," and 
 must not be " found " ! Even good men may, through 
 false glory, or pride, or otherwise, be made unduly slow 
 or unduly quick, and so feel it to be theirs, to speak 
 dreamfully, or heatedly at times, like a Coleridge of 
 Schelling, or a Hamilton of Hare. 
 
 Possibly, never was there a story more illustrative of 
 that womanish shallowness, is it ? or depth ? than 
 that story of Schelling's. 
 
 Now, discounting all that is to be said for the annoy- 
 ance to the Court of the cry of Pantheism (or rather, 
 I fancy, of the Halle Year-books !), these last four 
 volumes of Schelling, at least as honestly / think, have 
 nothing at the bottom of them but the one thought 
 Hegel ! Introductorily, no doubt, they quite bristle, we 
 may say, with the names of those that preceded him. 
 Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Bohme, Malebranche, 
 Spinosa, Leibnitz, Jacobi : scarcely a page is dull with- 
 out them. Still, it is what we may call the great 
 German quadrilateral -Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel 
 that constitutes to Schelling the focus of concern, as 
 indeed to us here no less. In fact, it is in the repeated 
 rehearsal of the successive relation of these men, the 
 one to the other, or in the progressive connection of the 
 common material, that the story to which we allude is 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 309 
 
 found. In fact, it is that rehearsal that is the story ; 
 and Schelling himself must be allowed to take good 
 care that we shall not have to complain of any want on 
 his part of the most strenuous exertions to get us to 
 hear it. Nor is it wonderful that this should be so, 
 seeing that it is no more at bottom than a single 
 passionate petition, on the part of the true prince to his 
 people, for restoration and return to his throne, from 
 which he had had the mortification to find himself, he 
 knew not how, extruded, and only that an odious 
 " later comer," who had, after all, but filched his vest- 
 ments, might, for a moment, usurpingly possess it ! 
 
 But we allow Schelling, so far, to tell his own story a 
 story, however, that, as marked, ought to be read at full : 
 
 " Kant (for we willingly refer to him all that has come to be of 
 importance in philosophy since) began a matter that must be 
 carried to its end. Fichte had no aim but to raise this of Kant's 
 into science. He failed, however, to make his exposition objective. 
 This another who followed him did. 1 
 
 " The fault into which philosophy in those latter days fell, is to be 
 ascribed to the want of said distinction [already named] that left all 
 as merely in thought and no more than logical. To Kant, God was 
 only a necessary last notion by way of crowning close to knowledge, 
 but, as that, still a notion only assumed or presupposed. To his 
 followers this notion was a step higher a notion known ; but the 
 result was still the same no more than notion, and without transi- 
 
 1 W. W., 2, 1. 368 sqq. There are here but scattered expressions. 
 Of course, by the " other " that followed Fichte, Schelling means 
 only himself. One ought, very specially, to read at full here ; 
 where there are many expressions, most instructive as regards the 
 proceedings as well of Kant as of those that followed him. " It is 
 the glory of Fichte that he shall have emancipated himself from the 
 mere natural cognition which was basis to Kant, and conceived the 
 thought of a science due to pure thinking alone deductive of the 
 whole world from the Ego demonstrative of the world, as pictured 
 without us, not to exist, but to be, a mere appearance within us." 
 Schelling has it elsewhere that "to Fichte only the human race 
 exists ; all else exists in the necessary ideas of the Ego." 
 
310 WHAT J,S' THOUGHT? 
 
 tioii to actual existence. Here in the non-distinction between the 
 negative and the positive philosophy, and that with a philosophy 
 which, rightly understood, can have only a negative force, we 
 would attain to what is only possible to positive philosophy, in 
 this there lay the ground of the error an error that actually pre- 
 vented said distinction from being better understood. Only the 
 negative philosophy opens the way to the positive ; and the latter, 
 again, is only possible as opposed to the rightly understood negative. 
 Indeed, the negative philosophy, if confined to its limits, first brings 
 the positive to cognition, and then not merely as possible, but as 
 necessary. As first through my public lectures something of the 
 positive philosophy oozed out [when was that oozing, Schelling ! 
 and how much was it ? ], there were several found who believed it 
 obligatory on them to take up the negative philosophy against me, 
 supposing that its entire abolition w r as contemplated, seeing that I 
 certainly spoke of the Hegelian in that sense. This, however, was 
 done on my part, not because I held the Hegelian to be the negative 
 philosophy : I cannot do it that honour ; I cannot by any means 
 allow it to be the negative ; its essential fault, rather, just consists 
 in this, that it will be positive. The difference between Hegel and 
 me is not a whit less in respect of the negative than in respect of 
 the positive philosophy. The philosophy which Hegel presents is, 
 etc. etc. Already, soon after the Kantian Critique, there began talk 
 to be heard of a critical philosophy. But soon, again, it came to be 
 asked, Is, then, this critical philosophy all, besides it, is there 
 no philosophy else 1 For myself, I permit myself to remark that, 
 directly I had completed my study of the Kantian philosophy, it 
 became evident to me that this so-called critical philosophy could 
 not, possibly, be all philosophy I doubted, indeed, if it could be 
 even philosophy proper. In this feeling, already in 1795, I, etc. 
 etc. If already I had, thus early, the clear idea that, behind this 
 Kriticismus, which had destroyed the dogmatising philosophy, 
 there lay another dogmatic philosophy unreached by it, it is easy 
 to think how, there standing before my eyes, said rational system 
 achieved by Kant, but now carried forward into a pure actual 
 system freed from everything contingent, it is easy to think how 
 there must necessarily have appeared to my mind the same idea, 
 but only with increased vividness. The clearer the negative was 
 set up, so much the more clearly must the positive show over 
 against it, and there seemed nothing to be done so long as the latter 
 was not discovered too. Perhaps we can account from this, how, 
 almost immediately after the first appearance of this system (that 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 311 
 
 improved, as I say, on the Kantian), this very philosophy, as though 
 deserted by its originator, was for the time left free to every one 
 who stood ready to turn to it, and (to speak with Plato), lured by 
 the lustre from the spot left empty, to throw himself with greed 
 upon it. For me said philosophy had really been only a medium 
 of transition ; to speak the truth, I had in that philosophy sought 
 just only the next possible step after Kant's, and was in my own 
 mind far no one will ever prove the contrary far from taking it 
 for the whole of philosophy in the sense in which it was afterwards 
 taken ; and if, for the positive philosophy, even after it was dis- 
 covered, I gave notice of it mostly only by hints (among others by 
 the well-known paradoxes of a polemical writing against Jacobi), 
 it is my belief that as well this reserve was rather for praise than 
 blame : for by that means I have, to a movement with which I 
 would have nothing in common, given full time to develop and 
 declare itself, so that now nobody can be any longer in doubt as to 
 it itself and my relation to it, at the same time that it might 
 seem, withal, that I had never left it. All, indeed, that I did do, 
 in the way of precaution against it, was only to leave it to itself, 
 assured in myself that it would go forward so with swift steps to its 
 own ruin and disappearance [how could any one so egregiously 
 deceive himself with such very palpable special pleading, such very 
 shallow stammer ?]. There have been, for the most part, as regards 
 the relations between us, quite false ideas. It has been believed 
 that the one has taken it ill, to have been passed by the other. But 
 just the contrary. The one that was first, who had still much to 
 do, of which in these days there is no longer anything known, and 
 to reduce to order the entire material, which the other found 
 already subjected to the notion he could very well afford to take 
 a correction from the other. However unable I was to conceal 
 from myself, indeed, the elements in the entire way of Hegel which 
 were peculiarly hostile to all that is gifted and genial, I saw, on the 
 other hand, that he stood up against much that was false, etc. etc. 
 But it is not every one that is called to be the creator of a system 
 and of nothing had Hegel less than of artistic feeling [against the 
 clumsy Hegel, that at least would go down !]. The system before 
 his could not set itself up as an unconditioned system like his ; but 
 no one could reproach it as not system. It did not need to be made 
 system, it was a born system; its specialty just was, that it was 
 system. Had he been in earnest with the pure logical nature of 
 the science, he would never have made of logic a Part. That whole 
 philosophy, and as well his predecessor's philosophy of nature and 
 
312 WHAT 18 THOUGHT? 
 
 of mind, must have been to him logical consequently Logic ; 
 and what he specially gave as logic would not have been such a 
 failure as by him it is. Instead of taking true and real logic as 
 ground and basis for further advance, he hypostasises the notion 
 with the intention of giving an objective meaning, nay, even that of 
 a process, to the logical movement, which, however independent of 
 all that is subjective it is taken, can still only be in the element of 
 thought " (2, 3. 71-89). 
 
 Looked at closely enough, Schelling is particularly 
 amusing in his shifts, now on this side and now on that, 
 in order to vindicate and make good both of his 
 philosophies, the first not less than the second, and the 
 second not less than the first, although the one, as is 
 argued, too, is but the contrary of the other, and a failure 
 in consequence. It is as this failure that it is thrown at 
 Hegel and it remains as this failure so long as Hegel 
 is in view. Schelling never forgets to declare that 
 Hegel only borrowed from him everything system and 
 all that he afterwards put his name to. But, on the 
 top of the wave of his wrath, he ever forgets the hollow 
 he has left ; and for the destruction of Hegel he would 
 even sacrifice himself ; but still, when he sees the 
 positive philosophy complete, with its necessarily fatal 
 consequence to the negative, he is struck with rue and 
 regret. Must he, then, lose his own firstling of the 
 brain, his system, his own primal philosophy ? Was he, 
 really, just in the act to commit unwitting suicide ? 
 Yes, death to Hegel, that was all very well ! But there 
 must be life to himself ! We recollect how tenderly his 
 son speaks of it how very close it lay to the heart of 
 his father this first philosophy. And so we see that 
 it was found possible to claim at last both, but the one 
 now only as necessary preparation for the other. There 
 it lies, this new form, in its own place, within that 
 second philosophy ; and naturally we ask, is it still 
 system, for we cannot forget the emphasis of system 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 313 
 
 that lay on its first form ? If it is to be preparatory to 
 a second system, surely it must be even more system 
 than the emphatic system of which it is itself the 
 re-cast. But is there a single trace in it of system at 
 all ? Can we see aught in it but some dozen or more 
 miscellaneous lectures, in which the talk, mostly, seems 
 really to circle round these names that have Plato and 
 Aristotle at the head of them ? Negative or positive 
 system there is none : with whatever remark, there is, 
 strictly speaking, not even exposition. Virtual excursuses 
 ever and anon occur to interrupt whatever continuity 
 there may be not always philosophical, either, but 
 sometimes philological, e.g., with much curiosity, about 
 Greek compounds in Ma I Did the privileged Academi- 
 cians who heard these excursuses first, really contrive to 
 keep awake say, when XL and XII. were concerned ? 
 
 When one knows Hegel, one is surprised to hear 
 Schelling find in him, say, only " an arid formalism 
 that dried up the sources of true knowledge, and struck 
 philosophy for a time into a sort of stupor " (2, 2. 7). 
 One, in one's own knowledge, is surprised, I say ; but 
 still, it is quite evident that Schelling, so little did he 
 understand, really believed this. Hegel, for Schelling 
 (2, 3. 89), only " hypostasised the Begriff in order to 
 give, instead of its own subjective (logical) movement, 
 an objective process " I 
 
 That is the story, then. Kant having done this, and 
 Fichte having done that, he, for his part, gave objectivity 
 to the latter ; but presently, seeing the insufficiency of 
 the whole negative philosophy, he had gone on to the 
 positive philosophy, and with a chuckle ! left the 
 negative as a vacant spot for Hegel to settle himself on 
 and ruin himself on, if he chose ; while he, for his own 
 great part, simply re-modelled and re-made, reconstructed 
 and reconstrued, philosophy itself for them all! And 
 
314 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 yet how much he was behind at last can be seen in a 
 moment from single points, such as Logic and the 
 Begriff, or the Indifference-Point and the Ego, or just 
 Denken alone. We have seen already that thought, 
 which was to Descartes the sulstance of the soul, was to 
 Schelling only a state one state of it among others; 
 and (2, 3. 64) he speaks of Denken as only a function 
 of Vernunft. " Thought," he says, " is the function (or 
 act) of reason when it turns on its own content." 
 Altogether, lie has often at his best in his distinctions, 
 namely, some that are very peculiarly hair-split ; as 
 (1, 7. 357, 358) where he distinguishes between ground 
 of existence and existence itself. The ground as prius 
 precedes existence in God ; but there could not be ground 
 of existence in God unless existence were ; there could 
 not be the first without the second, nor the second without 
 the first. To all intents and purposes the egg and the 
 hen a difficulty which, looked at, as it never is, unless 
 with a laugh, is the easy overthrow of all the physical 
 explanation so much in vogue at present. And yet 
 metaphysically the solution is in front ! 
 
 As is, surely, not by any means disguised in the 
 preceding, it is really very remarkable how, through the 
 whole of Schelling's latter volumes (as 2, 1. 178, 229, 
 230, 232, 337, 245, aL), there seems to lie one single 
 brooding thought under all Hegel ; which, then, for 
 the character of Schelling, is simply a crise. We are 
 without animus in these regards. Even as ministers of 
 justice and servants of truth, we cannot but be soft to 
 excellence wherever we find it ; and there is much that 
 is excellent in Schelling, as well with regard to his 
 excellent original gifts as to his excellent acquired 
 accomplishments. We have already noted the attraction 
 of his bye-writing ; and we find ourselves saying, in the 
 underlying MS. spoken of, that we are not sorry to 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 315 
 
 translate so many passages at full from him; for they 
 always interest through the alert thought and the skilled 
 penmanship. And, as is bare fact, what concerns Hegel 
 can excite no feeling unless one of regret, not for Hegel, 
 but for Schelling alone. His flouts to Hegel are all 
 unworthy of him ; and, happily, they are valueless in 
 themselves casual blacks from the air when a chimney 
 is foul ! 
 
 Still, one wonders how Schelling, after his first 
 instinctive respect almost obedience to Hegel, should 
 have allowed himself to fall into such blind, inconsiderate, 
 unreasoning hate childishly, as it were, because, after 
 all, of only a general expression in a book ! 
 
 We cannot but speculate on the intensity of that self 
 of Schelling ! And I should say we have to do no more 
 than to look back to see at once in long perspective the 
 very genesis of that same said intensity. Suppose now 
 we try to realise this ! 
 
 What we have to strike us first in Schelling is the 
 extraordinary precocity and brilliancy of his talent, not 
 only as student at the university, but even as the mere 
 schoolboy whether at home or abroad. His Latin, his 
 Greek, while still not more than ten, is there in proof ; 
 as are his published philosophies at the university before 
 he was twenty. He was scarcely more than a boy 
 when, as tutor to two young nobles, he was initiated 
 into French, dress, manners, and all the ready ways of 
 formed existence. If not more than a boy then, he was 
 really not yet much more, when, at Jena, he became, as 
 we may say, a professor to men. Then his success, 
 the enthusiasm of his students, the admiring expec- 
 tations, the friendship of the very greatest men at that 
 time, we may almost say, in Europe ^-the Schlegels, 
 Fichte, Steffens, Schiller, Goethe, and quite a host of others. 
 
 It cannot be said that Hegel was at this time much ; 
 
316 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 but still there was that in the birth and bearing of the 
 man, and in his position externally, as, on the whole, 
 mere claque to himself, which must have been source to 
 Schelling of welcome assurance and contented compla- 
 cency. But, " for all this came a ruin " ! That is, on all 
 this a sudden cloud fell. It was still success that carried 
 Schelling to Wiirzburg ; but Hegel sent him there his 
 Phaenomenologie, and he read the Preface \ read, too, the 
 stuttering, stammering blunder of a letter in which 
 Hegel assured him that it was not him he meant, but 
 only his imitators ! 
 
 There is a sad stop here of a kind ; but the perspec- 
 tive of success runs out and on its straight line still. 
 Wiirzburg was but succeeded by Munich, and Erlangen, 
 and Munich again ; and he was overheaped by honours. 
 Professorships, Directorships, Secretaryships, President- 
 ships but followed each other ; and, what was never 
 thought of for a Kant, a Fichte, or a Hegel, the privilege 
 was given him to write before his name Von, he was 
 ennobled ; and, among others, to quote a long German 
 word, he was zum Wirklichen Geheimen, Oberregier- 
 ungsrathe ernannt ! Last of all, among the strangers 
 where he died, a king raised to him a monument of fame. 
 
 I mean to say that such a career as this, and in such 
 a nature, could only result in the production of the 
 single and intense feeling of a single and intense self. 
 This self could feel, and see, and provide for itself ; but 
 it was no more than that : it cast no reflexion from 
 within out, and it took back no reflexion from without 
 in ; whereby it might sanely, and considerately, and 
 circumspectively give others their place, as take to 
 itself its own. It had no ray but Bacon's " direct 
 ray " ; x it could not turn round. So it is that to me 
 Schelling's nature was a simple and linearly direct one : 
 1 This ray can be seen first in (for one) Duns Scotus, by the bye. 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 317 
 
 on and on as he felt straight, on and on straight he 
 remained. And this is my rationale and psychology for 
 the Hegelian hate of Schelling. After the crisis there 
 was scarcely a letter, there was scarcely a work of 
 Schilling's but w r as instinct, as his very soul was with 
 Hegel. And how simply silly, how simply weak 
 (think only of the letters to Cousin !), without a mis- 
 giving, without a single look round, the whole self- 
 exposure was ! 
 
 In point of fact, this simplicity that is in case here, 
 is it not a bottom element in the very nature of 
 Schelling ? In his representations that concern his 
 differences with Fichte, he speaks (1, 7. 116) in this 
 way : 
 
 " Can I possibly be surprised myself that I have been the butt of 
 falsehood, malignity, and personal persecution ? Have I not richly 
 deserved all that ? Have I not, according to occasion and circum- 
 stance, done much hurt to the wicked and worthless, never spared 
 Pharisees and Hypocrites, but stripped off the sheep's clothing and 
 unmasked the baseness of many a one of them ? The man, to whom 
 my ear and my door are closed, may go and openly slander me, and 
 he may know that I know it, and yet be without a call to blush 
 before me. Another, as a crazy author, with words and ideas 
 borrowed from me, may have kept himself, and still keep himself, 
 in existence, and yet, when the time for it seems come, always, for 
 all that, with the same ideas, write a book full of abuse against me ; 
 and this shall bring him no disgrace, nor even ridicule, but do 
 honour rather to his courage and fearlessness of speech. I, for my 
 part, have, to my own knowledge, never troubled the public with 
 my person, seeing that I have been always silent about it ; but just 
 this is another proof of my hardenedness, and so every one must be 
 allowed to think and say the worst of the man who has never made 
 the public a witness of his heart and of his personal feelings, but 
 has always only coldly and dispassionately held speech for or against 
 the matter itself." 
 
 There may be in this whatever there may, but these 
 semi-conscious, semi-deceitful, semi-plausible propos are at 
 least semi-innocent, and not a little womanish. 
 
318 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 But the simple element is not to be denied, we think, 
 as simply eminent in most of his successive stadia. 
 
 What could be more simple than to suppose, as Schelling 
 apparently without doubt did, that these mere Fichtian 
 removes on his part were entries of his own ? But the 
 calenture of his brain continued, and in his Letters on 
 Dogmatism and Criticism the young man sees all through 
 the same fiery vapour of absolute belief in himself, till his 
 very editors, alarmed at his v(3pi?, cannot but for safety 
 interfere in the astonishing chariot-ascent of their rash 
 student-Daedalus to the moon, or the very regions beyond 
 it. But he is not content, this Daedalus, to have whipped 
 his horses beyond Fichte. He casts his eyes around and 
 queries, Is this all ? cannot I do more still ? is there not 
 more in Kant that is to be completed into science ? And 
 so he sees Nature, and compares Nature with the Ego, to 
 which he has been as yet confined. Why, Nature, he 
 thinks, if it has been deduced from the Ego, must so far 
 contain the Ego, must so far be the Ego ! And so there 
 are the two, and the Absolute is equally in each ! There 
 could only suggest itself as a first action now the 
 Nat urphilosopJiie. 
 
 There cannot, then, be the slightest hesitation as to 
 what was the genesis of this philosophy in the mind of 
 Schelling. He has just told us himself, indeed, that, as 
 Fichte, for his part, had no object but to make Kant's 
 work science, so he, again, for his part, was in search of 
 just only the next possible step to Kant's. Now, in what 
 respect did Kant differ from Fichte, or in what respect 
 did Fichte fall short of Kant ? By and by Schelling 
 took advantage of the fact of an Esthetic in Kant ; but, 
 in the meantime, it was to the earlier Metaphysical First 
 Grounds of a Science of Nature that he turned. Alto- 
 gether, in view of what was there on the part of both, it 
 was not difficult to see that what was wanted for. Kant 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 319 
 
 was the supplement of an antitype to Fichte. " The 
 external world lies before us, thrown open, in order that 
 we may find in it the history of our mind." This is said 
 (1, 1. 383) in his early elucidations to Fichte, and even 
 at the word there may have sprung up before him the 
 very vista in point. 
 
 Schelliug, writing this at Leipsig, while as yet but 
 twenty-one, was already in full study for his Naturphilo- 
 sophie ; and, of all his w r orks, it alone, as original to him, 
 is specially to be called his. Nor is that less than the 
 truth, though it was Hegel, doubtless, that opened the 
 eyes of Schelling to all that lay in his work even the 
 reach, through the Indifference-Point, to the Absolute that 
 was Geist, not but that to said opening of the eyes there 
 went actual telling, too, on the part of the eye-opener. 
 Schelling's Naturpliilosophie, to a large extent, certainly 
 was original to him, but it can hardly be said to be in 
 existence now : whole strata have overlapped and over- 
 whelmed it since. Still, the enthusiastic young man was 
 very earnest in his application at Leipsig to the study of 
 mathematics and physics. He was in familiar intercourse, 
 too, with the living masters, there at the time, of science. 
 Nor is it less to be considered how, with excitation still, 
 the very greatest men in Germany then had turned 
 themselves somewhat heatedly to empirical speculation. 
 Such men as Kielmeyer and Eschenmayer may be more 
 particularly regarded as specialists, perhaps ; but still 
 there was actual work at the hands of such men again 
 as Schiller and Goethe. That Schelling had a very real 
 knowledge of the actual facts of science cannot for a 
 moment be doubted ; neither can it be doubted that he 
 threw into them many quick suggestions and brilliant 
 ideas of his own. Still, it is in these that his simplicity 
 shows : for the most part they had not the substantiality 
 of fact in them ; they were but chimeras of the brain, 
 
320 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and with extremes at last which could only provoke 
 reaction and denial. We are here, say in 1796 ; and, 
 positively, we do not hear much of Naturphilosophie in 
 Schelling after 1807 and his quarrel with Hegel. He 
 must still, however, from time to time, cast back a 
 melancholy regard upon it, as in these boasts which we 
 have seen already about discoveries : 
 
 "How, after a time of glad movement (when, with the happy 
 removal of the contradiction between real and ideal world, all the 
 barriers of knowledge hitherto seemed to have fallen), one law was 
 realised throughout the world of nature and of mind, how then 
 nature herself seemed to come forward and meet the new knowledge 
 in that series of brilliant and revealing discoveries which followed 
 the first appearance of galvanism, how then, I say, to use an 
 expression of Goethe's, a very heaven of knowledge seemed to be let 
 down upon us ! " (2, 3. 14). 
 
 These " brilliant discoveries " after that of galvanism 
 may refer to others empirically in galvanism itself (as of 
 a Volta or a Davy) ; but we can scarcely be wrong in 
 thinking, in their regard, more nearly of Schelling himself. 
 J. W. Eitter, who was Schelling's personal friend at 
 Leipsig, had already become famous for his researches in 
 galvanism, and was then and there writing informatively 
 on the subject. So it is, perhaps, that it is to the credit 
 of Schelling that he (Schelling) would have encouraged 
 an alliance between magnetism and electricity, though 
 (unfortunately for himself) his contemporary, the famous 
 Englishman, Thomas Young, as I rather think, somewhat 
 peremptorily forbade the banns. Allowing, then, to 
 Schelling all that can be allowed to him on the merits of 
 his Naturphilosophie, must we not, with whatever else, 
 point to these " brilliant discoveries " as proofs of his 
 simplicity ? 
 
 To the same effect, too, is his rush of hurry and haste 
 always to announce and declare, but with apologies for 
 incompletion through interruption, etc. etc. etc., and 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 321 
 
 promises of speedy reward in prompt and copious sequels ; 
 which remain words only ! Sometimes he prints a first 
 volume, but forgets a second. Or he suddenly throws 
 out a whole volley of rapid sheets, as suddenly to stop the 
 press and recall them again. Ever learning and learning, 
 he is nevertheless always forgetting and forgetting. It 
 would reward a comparison of periods to observe how 
 often the later is all unconscious of an earlier without 
 restriction to the Christian religion either ! Quite 
 generally, there can be no doubt of the truth in that 
 regard ; it was as though, from work to work, oblivion 
 fell upon him. In fact, as with many only in the house 
 then, it was perhaps with him on the stage. Things, 
 ideas, substantialities, were not gone into : there was but 
 a babble of empty catch-words in the air, as Subject, 
 Object, Nature, Geist, God, Begriff, Idee, a Prius, the 
 Absolute, of which the most sacred, probably, as used, 
 was the emptiest. Gaiis does not hesitate to speak of 
 this that we call the house as " that honour-deserving 
 class which, rather through mere instinct than through 
 clear consciousness, feels itself drawn to the great forms 
 of Philosophy, and, without giving itself any further 
 account, just trustfully and willingly remains in its 
 circle." This, as we see, is to the effect that there may 
 be a philosophy which is but a traffic of outsides ; and if 
 Schelling can be imagined to have gone into that, I do 
 not know that it will prove any scathe to his simplicity. 
 Allusions, sallies were natural enough to Schelling ; 
 but he could not originate at least wholes, without a 
 basis first of all ; and we need only suggest here Fichte, 
 Bohme, and the rest. Why, he had even such a basis 
 for his own so very peculiarly proper Positive Philosophy ! 
 To say nothing of Kant and the Erf ah/rung, Jacobi, 
 exposing, on one side, all rational philosophy as negative, 
 had found foothold for himself on the other, only in a 
 
 21 
 
322 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 positive philosophy of feeling. Schelling shall have 
 been, in truth, simply one of those singularly catching 
 natures that instantly take on. He could not help him- 
 self : he caught up from Hegel rapidly, as we know ; and 
 Bardili, his cousin, loudly accused him of possessing more 
 than one of his chief distinctions in philosophy only by 
 theft. And so it was that he was called unscrupulous. 
 These preternaturally quick - articulating natures are 
 always peculiar. I dare say w r e have all met at times 
 young Brontes, brilliant brothers of " Jane Eyre," who 
 know all the short cuts by this or that bye-street in 
 London without having been there ; whose eyes have a 
 brain that is living phosphorus behind them ; who flash 
 up, with the lightning of their speech, the entire table 
 into themselves, but, soured at a word, collapse. It 
 would be an indignity, it would be gross exaggeration, 
 seriously to parallel with a young Bronte, Schelling. We 
 do but suggest what quickness may go hand in hand with 
 a spontaneous straight simplicity that may seem a little 
 wryed at times. If we compare Hegel to the seed that 
 fell on good ground, and came to its fruit duly, we may at 
 least liken Schelling to the seed that, falling where there 
 was not much earth, sprang up at once, and at once was 
 scorched. There goes with the much earth, substantiality. 
 If a fiasco can denote simplicity, what greater sim- 
 plicity can any fiasco denote than the " Positive 
 Philosophy " ? With that, a whole new philosophy, 
 Schelling shall have put his foot on Hegel Schelling 
 shall have risen higher than even Fichte and Kant ! 
 Was there ever such simplicity of a fiasco ? was there 
 ever such simplicity of pride ? And these Lectures ! 
 That Philosophy of Mythology, so much a fiasco is it 
 that it is scarcely credible that any human being should 
 have ever minted it. Nor can more be said for the 
 Philosophy of Eevelation is it, then, a Philosophy, and 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 323 
 
 of what ? More than once, when thwarted or wounded 
 in his sensibility, Schelling broke off his lectures : he 
 broke off these ! His various polemics, too, with Fichte 
 and others, had but a similar etiology. 
 
 Kosenkranz gives us a lively picture of Schelling in 
 his Lecture-Room at Munich in 1838 : 
 
 " A compact figure ; a high forehead ; white hair ; about his 
 mouth and chin, loose, originally soft, features ; the glance sharp 
 rather than warm, rather sanguinely restless than melancholily deep. 
 Elegant toilette, but suitable, without any aff'ectedness ; black 
 cravatte, brown short upper-coat, blue trousers drawn tight by 
 straps. A silver snuff-box, which, with his left hand, Schelling set 
 up and down in frequent movement, was the symbolical decoration 
 of the lecture. This latter I had imagined to myself as the free 
 stream of eloquence represented by Steffens. But it was not like 
 that. Schelling stood in vigorous pose, drew a small note-paper 
 from his breast-pocket, and read from it, but so that we followed 
 him in a full freedom of delivery. He stopped from time to time, 
 too, and gave extemporarily paraphrastic elucidations, in which a 
 poetic colouring was visible. The form of the discourse quite 
 absorbed me: the quietude, assuredness, simpleness, originality, 
 caused one to overlook the presence of the egoism that not unfre- 
 quently showed. The Swabian idiom hung over the pronuncia- 
 tion rather than, as was the case with Hegel, gave it full 
 accentuation, and, for me at least, gave the voice a peculiar charm. 
 He expressed himself with cutting scorn against Hegel's philosophy. 
 He said that he had given his hearers an example of the real 
 speculation which pervaded the world and the positive powers of it, 
 so that they had in the fact itself the best measure for that artificial 
 ' filigree of the notion ' which so often passed now for true philo- 
 sophy. But, he added, with a venomously contemptuous glance 
 that pierced my soul this philosophy is waste product of a ' hectic 
 consumption that dies away into itself.' " 
 
 With this portrait of Rosenkranz, we may contrast 
 Steffens' : 
 
 "Schelling's appearance (1798) was youthful, and there was in 
 the way in which he stood up something very determined, or even 
 defiant : he had broad jaws, wide temples, a high forehead, ener- 
 getically concentrated countenance, somewhat upturned nose ; and 
 in the large, clear eyes there lay an intellectually masterful force." 
 
324 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 We can understand, from what Eosenkranz says of his 
 elegant toilette and trigly strapped trousers, how another 
 might speak of " the gentleman-like, elegant man in 
 gala." There might be a little natural dandyism in 
 this ; but there is in it also the tendency to take on. 
 For the aristocratic society of the guardians of his young- 
 barons, French is necessary ; and he throws himself on 
 French even writes his brother Karl in French, mon 
 cher Carl, and signs himself Frederic ! To take on, he 
 shows himself quite apt elsewhere too. Later in life, 
 as at Munich, among Eoyalties, and Princes, and all 
 manner of Court-mightinesses, he is quite a man of 
 address : He becomes a favourite with them, gets titled 
 himself, is profusely decorated, wealthily promoted, and, 
 as we know, is royally remembered for a monument at 
 last. Address, at times, may even go a little too far 
 with Schelling. He does not hesitate to insinuate 
 himself into the goodwill of the Roman Catholics, for 
 it is with them in Bavaria that the power lies. In 
 this reference, Gorres, in a letter to his daughter, has 
 a word, but preceded by a remarkable portrait in full : 
 " It is peculiar about Sclielling : the natura naturata in him is 
 precisely not pleasant. There is something animal, passionate, 
 unsubdued in it, and yet, with that, again, something slovenly, 
 worn down, loose, passive, and old fashioned, rack in a black- 
 lackered Japanese dish ; but he is sensible, apt, repressed, shrewd, 
 and has an honest blue eye which pleases me best in him. In want 
 of a better, the Protestant party has submitted to him, but only with 
 great hesitations and precautions." 
 
 It must have been peculiar (sonderbar) about Schelling 
 to Gorres ; for he is evidently in great difficulty for 
 words to hit him with : so much so, indeed, that one is 
 never sure about the translation of them ! It was no 
 wonder that the Protestant party was not by any means 
 at ease as regards the Protestantism of Schelling. For 
 when the Catholics would clear the University at Munich 
 
SCHELLING IN CONCLUSION 325 
 
 of Protestants, they made exceptions of him and his 
 friend Schubert, " because both, though Protestants by 
 formal, external confession, they laboured in their 
 sentiments and in the spirit of their teaching to the 
 like end with the True Believers," " Hegel," says 
 Noack (ii. 442), " was at least a Protestant ; but of 
 Schelling there at Munich, one scarcely knew whether 
 he was the more flesh or the more fish. . . . The 
 situation of Protestantism was no trouble to the Geheim- 
 Hofrath Schelling : he philosophised over Peter and Paul 
 away, out into the Utopia of his Johannine Church." 
 
 Of Schelling, Noack has still one thing to say that 
 one likes to hear the least of anything that has been 
 said yet. While Schelling was at Erlangen there was 
 there also a young professor of Philosophy, Christian 
 Kapp by name, who, unfortunately, had printed a good 
 word for several of those with whom Schelling was at 
 that time at feud Fichte, Solger, Jacobi, even Hegel. 
 " That was not the man that spoke in unison with the 
 heart of Schelling," says Noack (ii. 326), "who put 
 Hegel side by side even with Napoleon." " With the 
 energetic, enthralling discourses of his young colleague, 
 the petted master could not in his lectures rivalise ; and 
 so," says Noack further, " he abandoned them : but he 
 could not forgive to his fortunate young rival this 
 success at his side ; he stirred him up to the publication 
 of a fragmentary pamphlet on ' the Church and its 
 Reformation,' whereby his position under King Ludwig 
 was sapped." 
 
 Now, I do not believe this. I do not for a moment 
 credit it that Schelling was ever so wily and unscrupulous 
 a man as to plot and plan such a calculated wickedness 
 as this. I have had enough to bring against Schelling ; 
 but I cannot, for any such incredible delinquency, wholly 
 give up my esteem, or say, just my liking, for him. 
 
326 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Schelling, to me, was but as a student, a bookman, all 
 his life, unmixed, pure ; and never had a second 
 thought. What he was, that he was straight and in 
 straight simplicity. Not but that straight also there 
 must have been the natural movement of his heart 
 when stung. My plea for Schelling is simply his 
 hate to Hegel ! It is impossible to think of anything 
 more weak, or of anything more genuinely single. It 
 was so absolutely indiscriminating, so absolutely un- 
 reasoning, so absolutely unregarding. And so it is that 
 this insinuation of Noack's, against Schelling, and in 
 respect of Kapp, can only be for me a palpable mis- 
 construction. For certainty in this regard, surely, we 
 have only to draw into view his various relations with 
 his kind parents, brothers, wives, children, grand- 
 children, friends. These relations were always warmly 
 affectionate and loyally true. That " he hath ever but 
 slenderly known himself," and that he always leaped to 
 the goad that is Schelling, and that is all Schelling. 
 He must have been a kindly-disposed and single-hearted 
 man. That he, a bookman, when admitted to the great, 
 could bend to please, is not a contradiction, but quite 
 naturally in order. Lastly, as for Hegel, I know not 
 but that he who shall read all Schelling's letters to 
 Hegel, except the last, and shall note the perfectly 
 undoubting naive affection in them I know not but 
 that he will be almost inclined to find that, the hate, 
 in natural order too : the shock of the Phaenomenologie, 
 so absolutely unexpected, so absolutely undreamed to be 
 possible, after all that has been said, and can be said, 
 must have been simply mortal ! 
 
 Of the philosophical four in Germany, that Schelling, 
 whether in himself or in his doctrine, is, it may be, the 
 least known in Britain, may prove an excuse for the 
 length of our statement in either respect. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 HEGEL 
 
 How it is with Hegel iu this connection must, by this 
 time, be pretty well understood. We may name it at 
 once. Kant's Reine Apperception, cleared into Fichte's 
 Ego, is Hegel's Begriff. The Eeine Apperception in Kant 
 is but a focal unit somehow behind the twelve categories. 
 Fichte develops from the Ego these Categories scarcely 
 more in amount, but with much improvement of rigorous 
 consistency and intellectual richness. For principle of 
 movement, however, Fichte has no expedient but a 
 mechanical externality of Limitation. Schelling is not 
 different in this, if with a suggestion in regard to 
 Nature. What is specially HEGELIAN is solely due to 
 what new principle of movement Hegel himself, and of 
 himself, has alone introduced. 
 
 But that is a new world ! Essentially an entire new 
 philosophy (if, from the discoverer of the primitive spore, 
 still to be called Kantian) perhaps the beginning of 
 the end of philosophy at all ! 
 
 Hegel's Begriff (Notion) is the Immanent Dialectic of 
 the Egos own self. He that can realise this in the 
 reading of Hegel will find that he can read : all 
 lies in the I- Me \ And Hegel has this principle 
 just so. 
 
 There is, then, but one principle of explanation in 
 this universe of this universe ; and to this principle, as 
 
 327 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 we have seen, the history of philosophy has been but 
 the rise : That principle is the I-ME. 
 
 This principle, self -evidently, is the principle, the root, 
 of man as man, not that there can be even a moment's 
 dream of men as men being else or more than the 
 perishable finites which, here below, we alone are. No, 
 not of men as men, but of man as man, " God said, Let 
 us make man in our image, after our likeness " ! 
 
 We have already seen numerous declarations of our 
 own in this respect (from the Secret of Hegel, etc.) ; and 
 it only remains for us, in proof, relatively, of the position 
 of Hegel, to adduce on his part declarations from himself. 
 And if we begin with a quotation where the assumed 
 declaration may appear neither literal nor explicit, our 
 purpose is and such purpose may repeat itself else- 
 where not only particularly to report, but, as may also 
 be desirable, generally to explain. From a Lecture of 
 Hegel's immediately before his death (W. W., xii. 546), 
 we quote as follows : 
 
 " In der Sphaere der offenbaren Eeligion ist zuerst der 
 abstracte Begriff Gottes zu betrachten ; der freie, reine, 
 offenbare Begriff ist die Grundlage : seine Manifestation, 
 sein Seyn fitr Anderes, ist sein Daseyn, und der Bodeu 
 seines Daseyns ist der endliche Geist : diess ist das 
 Zweite ; der endliche Geist und das endliche Bewusst- 
 seyn sind concret." 
 
 And this in English runs thus : 
 
 "In the sphere of the revealed religion there is first to be 
 considered the abstract notion of God. The free, pure, open Notion 
 is the ground and basis of it. Its manifestation, its being for other, 
 is its sensible existence ; and the seat of its existence so is the finite 
 Spirit : this is the second point ; finite Spirit and finite Conscious- 
 ness are concrete." 
 
 Such words as these to readers, or even students, of 
 Hegel prove so often, as it were, but syllables iu the 
 
HEGEL 329 
 
 air, that, for the most part, we pass them, if only hazily 
 contented as with a mere snatch at the meaning. Still, 
 a sense of discomfort, of dissatisfaction, even with our 
 own selves, follows us ; and we turn to the rest of the 
 paragraph with the half-conscious hope of (with more 
 light) increased contentment. 
 
 " The main thing in this religion is to come to see this process : 
 namely, that God manifests himself in the finite Spirit, and is 
 therein identical with himself. The identity of the Notion and 
 existence is the third point. Identity is here properly a defective 
 expression, for what is meant is essentially livingness in God." 
 
 With this we have the paragraph complete before us ; 
 and in view of the very importance of the interests that 
 loom through the mist, so tantalisingly bright at times, 
 if only in an instant to fall dark again, we remain 
 unrescued still from a condition of considerable chagrin. 
 
 But let us make up our minds and go quietly to work 
 in order to discover what it all amounts to. 
 
 Well, in the first place, it is evident that in some way 
 or other there are three points concerned : What are 
 they ? 
 
 (1) There is first the abstract idea of God ; (2) there is 
 finite Spirit as the seat of manifestation ; and (3) what 
 is called Notion (Begriff) is identified with existence 
 (meaning by existence mundane or empirical existence as 
 such). 
 
 But, even naming these three points, we are still in 
 very considerable doubt as to what they mean. By 
 " abstract notion of God," we are only to understand what 
 we formally define God as God to be ; but that definition 
 is not yet given us. Then, though we somehow under- 
 stand that the finite Spirit (man) is to be the medium in 
 which the manifestation of God is to be found, it is not, 
 after all, God that is spoken of as manifested. What is 
 so spoken of as manifested is only a certain Notion : but 
 
330 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 that Notion is not God no, only the ground and basis 
 of the notion of God. Now, this Notion, that is the 
 ground of the notion of God, has its being -for-other, its 
 manifestation, its sensible existence in the finite Spirit, 
 an actual man. Then in the conclusion of the paragraph 
 we are told that the main thing to know is this, that God 
 manifests himself in man, and in man is identical with 
 himself ; as, lastly, that there is " Identitat des Begriffs 
 und des Daseyns," identity of notion and actual existential 
 state, this identity when reached being further declared 
 to be a " Livingness in God." 
 
 It must be admitted in general here that, while the 
 clauses are in themselves only very clumsily and con- 
 fusedly expressed, they are also very badly arranged, very 
 badly put in connection. On the whole, however, we 
 may hold the continuity of sense to run somewhat thus. 
 
 The manifestation of God takes place in man ; and in 
 man, God is in identity with himself. But in this con- 
 summation we must also understand that the intermedia- 
 tion of a certain Notion is to be taken into account. 
 This Notion is to be regarded as in all respects the one 
 original ground and basis of all. In immediate connection 
 with the abstract notion of God it is spoken of as its 
 G-rundlage ; and finally, it is referred to as the Grundlage 
 also of sensible existence, and specially of the sensibly 
 existent finite Spirit (man). 
 
 Now, this Notion is " Der freie, reine, offenbare Begriff 
 (the free, pure, open Notion)," and when we come upon it 
 in the midst of the words : " In der Sphiire der offenbaren 
 Eeligion ist zuerst der abstracte Begriff Gottes zu be- 
 trachten ; der freie, reine, offenbare Begriff ist die 
 Grundlage : seine Manifestation, sein Seyn fur Anderes, ist 
 sein Daseyn (in the sphere of the open religion there is 
 first to be considered the abstract notion of God ; the 
 free, pure, open Notion is the ground of it : its manifesta- 
 
HEGEL 331 
 
 tion, its being for other is its sensible existence)," when, 
 in the midst of these words, I say, we come upon this 
 " free, pure, open Notion," we know no more of what it 
 is than the letters that name it do. It is, again, but one 
 of those fine Hegelian phrases that are spoken propheti- 
 cally into the air, only to stumble us. 
 
 Now, for all that, that phrase is the Roc's Egg, the one 
 secret of the entire Mystery ! Der freie, reine, offenbare 
 Begriff, the free, the pure, the open Notion, is the Ego- 
 the " I-Me " ! 
 
 " Der freie, reine, offenbare Begriff ist der Grundlage " 
 Gewiss ! wie immer ! That is it ! The free, pure, open 
 Notion that is the First : very certainly so as always ! 
 It is worth while turning back upon the passage in the 
 new light. Its manifestation that of the Notion is 
 its sensible existence, its externalisation, namely, into 
 empirical existence. Then how truly is a manifestation 
 but a beingness for another on both of its sides ! A 
 manifestation is certainly a beingness ; but it is only a 
 beingness for another only for that, namely, and for no 
 more than that, which it is there to manifest. Still, the 
 manifestation has not only this internality of direction ; 
 but it has also an externality of the same. That, namely, 
 which the manifestation is of, is internal ; but that which 
 the manifestation is to or for, is external. We do per- 
 ceive, and we can only perceive, an internale by an 
 externale. That is, a manifestation, if it is for another 
 its own true self on the inside, is equally for an- 
 other on the outside. 
 
 Now, the Begriff, the Notion, is actually empirically 
 existent in man, and man is the finite Spirit. Man is 
 the only actual existent (i.e. sensible existent) that says I 
 to itself, or can say I to itself. But if every singular 
 self-consciousness is only a particular self-consciousness 
 to the universal self -consciousness, then God is. God is 
 
WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 not sensibly, mortally, finitely is, but absolutely, 
 immortally, infinitely is. Let there not be one single 
 existent " I " within the compass of this whole huge 
 universe, and still there will be absolutely the one 
 I I Am That I Am alpha and omega, the first and 
 the last, Dynamis, Energeia, Entelecheia. 
 
 But it is not of Ego as the Spirit into which if also 
 at the same time not less out of it evolved into which, 
 I say, the whole vast material circumference collapses, 
 that we speak at present, but of the abstract Ego that is 
 existentially present to, or is, each of us in fact ; and if 
 it is the Begriff, the Notion, that is the principle of 
 Hegel, it is that Ego that is the meaning of the Begriff ; 
 it is that Ego that is the Notion ; or, if it is not literally 
 that Ego, it is at least that Ego's exemplar, analogue, 
 and type. 
 
 He who looks into the various volumes of the works 
 of Hegel, as I possess them, will find pencilled on the 
 margin of the leaves occasionally an x, frequently an x 1 , 
 sometimes, but much less frequently, an x 2 -. By x I 
 signalise a " Denken " that is no more than the Denken, 
 Denken, Denken generally of such German writers as are 
 constantly telling us about Denken that Denken is all, 
 and that Denken is the whole. By a? 1 , again, I indicate a 
 passage in which the Ego, as it is peculiarly looked upon 
 by Hegel, is very certainly present, though only less or 
 more letrayingly so. Lastly, by x 2 I distinguish expres- 
 sions which seem at least to approach to mean the 
 cardinal position or proposition of the present writing, 
 namely, that what I call the ratio of the Ego as Ego, 
 the I-Me, is precisely, expressly, literally Thought 
 Thought as Thought, Thinking as Thinking. To speak 
 of x further there is no call. Nor, by speaking of x 2 , 
 would I wish to be supposed to enter at present on the 
 general question of what was to Hegel literally thought. 
 
 
HEGEL 333 
 
 There remains the x l , and I proceed by quotation of 
 certain passages which I find so marked to prove my 
 allegation that Hegel's Begriff means no more than Ego, 
 and just as it is understood, not specially by an expert, 
 Fichte, or another, but by simply, to say so the reader. 
 
 Not following any calculated order, I begin and con- 
 tinue as suggestions occur to me. 
 
 Passages strikingly significant I seem to remember to 
 have observed in the beginning of the Gfeistesphilosophic 
 (say vol. iii. of the Encyklopddie). As thus : 
 
 " The soul is the existing Notion (Begriff), the existence of the 
 Speculative " (of that act, fact, principle, or element that we name 
 speculative) (p. 150). " This relation " (he is speaking of the 
 Foetus) "lias in it something wonderful for an understanding 
 unable to comprehend the Unity of the Differentiated"^. 159). The 
 soul is spoken of as struggling " to make itself that which it is 
 in itself or in its notion, namely, the self to self referent single 
 subjectivity that is existent in the Ego " (p. 148). u Why it is that we 
 have precisely the known five senses, no more and no less, and just 
 these, and just differentiated so, of that, in a philosophical treatise, 
 the rational necessity requires to be demonstrated. This is effected 
 if we take the senses to be so many realisations of the moments of 
 the Notion. These moments are, as we know, only three. But the 
 5 quite naturally reduces itself to 3, with just so many classes 
 of senses in regard," etc. (p. 123). " The three chief forms of the 
 subjective Spirit are (1) tlie Soul ; (2) Consciousness ; (3) the Spirit 
 as such. As Soul, the Spirit has the form of abstract Universality ; 
 as Consciousness, that of Particularity ; as personal Spirit, that of 
 Singularity" (p. 42). 
 
 " In Logic the Categories demonstrate themselves to be nothing 
 else than the series of the successive evolutions of the Begriff 
 (Notion), not of any one indiscriminate Begriff, but of the Begriff 
 in propria persona (an ihm selbst) the development of it into 
 extension at the same time that it deepens its own intension. Logic 
 develops this progression of the Begriff in its necessity ; each step 
 it describes is the rise of a category of finitude into its infinitude ; 
 it equally constitutes, therefore, a metaphysical notion of God, and, 
 as this movement appears in its necessity, a proof of his Being. 
 Logic is, so far, Metaphysical Theology, which considers the evolu- 
 
334 WHAT LS Y THOUGHT? 
 
 tion of the idea of God in the aether of pure thought" (Phil, of Pel, 
 ii. 433 sq.). 
 
 " The difficulty of the philosophical knowledge of the Spirit con- 
 sists in this, that we have thereby no longer to do with the com- 
 paratively abstract, single and simple Logical Idea, but with the 
 concretest, most developed form to which the Idea, in the actualisa- 
 tion of itself, arrives. As well the finite, or subjective Spirit not 
 alone the absolute must be understood to be an actualisation of the 
 Idea. The consideration of the Spirit is only then in truth philoso- 
 phical when the notion of it is seen and known in its living actuali- 
 sation and disenfoldment ; that is, when the Spirit is comprehended 
 as an ectype of the eternal Idea. It belongs to Spirit, however, to 
 know its own notion. And so the summons to self-cognition issued 
 to the Greeks by the Delphian Apollo has not the meaning of a 
 commandment externally given to man by an authority without ; 
 the self -cognition ordaining deity is nothing else, rather, than the 
 absolute law proper of Spirit itself. Every act of Spirit, so, is but 
 a comprehending of itself, and the end and aim of all true science 
 is only this, that, in all that is in heaven or on earth, Spirit shall 
 recognise itself. An out and out other is for Spirit not, in any way, 
 anywhere existent. Even the Oriental does not wholly lose himself 
 in his prostration before the object ; but it is the Greeks who first 
 expressly conceived as Spirit what they set above themselves as the 
 Godhead. Yet not even, they, whether in philosophy or religion, 
 reached knowledge of the absolute infinity of Spirit ; the relation 
 of the human Spirit to the Divine Spirit is with the Greeks, there- 
 fore, not yet an absolutely true one ; it was only Christianity first 
 succeeded, through the doctrine of God become man and of the 
 presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers, to 
 give human consciousness a perfectly true relation to the Infinite, 
 and to make possible thereby the ultimate cognition of Spirit in its 
 absolute infinity" (Encyk., iii. 3). 
 
 This passage may seem to be, and is, rather wide of 
 the special interest that lies for us in the Ego as Ego ; 
 nevertheless, of exact relation to that Ego it is pretty 
 well full, while in regard to Hegel's main position in the 
 general reference it is most instructive. 
 
 To readers generally, Idee, Idea, will appear but 
 another form of what is meant by Begriff, Notion. Idee 
 strictly, however, is to Hegel the realisation intellec- 
 
HEGEL 335 
 
 tually of the Beyriff. The principle of the universe is, 
 as Denkendes (subjective Thinking), Begrijf '; but, as 
 Gedachtes (objective Thought), it is Idee. The logical 
 Idee proper is the system of the categories ; but when 
 used more generally, as underlying, for example, not 
 only Logic, but Nature and Spirit, Idee is then, so to 
 speak, the diamond (intellectual, ideal) net of all the 
 three. Again, really, when quite popularly used, as in 
 poetical wise or prophetical wise, it is best taken to 
 mean that whole spectacle heaven and earth, and land 
 and sea, and man and beast, and what we think into 
 them ! The Idea is what the Son of God saw when the 
 Tempter took him up into an exceeding high mountain, 
 and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the 
 glory of them, only, however, as in its broadest and 
 most figurative sense. To call Spirit an ectype, a copy 
 of the Idea, may seem out of all harmony with Idea in 
 its widest sense ; and even as called an actualisation of 
 the Idea, what we conceive as Spirit may be somewhat 
 difficult to realise. Nevertheless, the Spirit that thinks 
 the Idea may be allowably named actualisation of it 
 when it is logical, and ectype, or copy of it, when it is 
 real. At the same time, Hegel's freedom or looseness of 
 speech at times is not to be denied. The passage trans- 
 lated is the opening paragraph of the Zusatz to the short 
 first section of the Philosophic des Geistes ; and it is 
 eminently characteristic of Hegel that in only twice as 
 many lines he has no fewer than actually seven 
 synonymes for the single thing that is to him Geist. It 
 is Geist it is Wesen it is das Wahrhafte it is das 
 Allgemeine it is das Substantielle. And we have just 
 seen that the same thing has at least two names more : 
 it is not only the Idee, but it is also the Unendliche (the 
 Infinite). Of course, it is to be acknowledged as quite 
 possible for some readers even yet to be honestly 
 
336 WHAT IS THOUGHT 1 ? 
 
 puzzled to comprehend how it is that such a familiar 
 cognition as " I " or as " I-Me " should constitute, in 
 germ, in seed, or in spore, the kernel, and the core, and 
 the substance that is the meaning and the import of all 
 these fine names. We continue our extracts : 
 
 "Zur nahern Vorstellung hiervon" (i.e. In completion of the 
 picture as above), " we will refer to the relation that Nature has to 
 Spirit. Nature is held of the Spirit, created by it, and, despite the 
 appearance of its immediateness, that is, despite its seeming!}' 
 spontaneous, independent self-subsistentness (literally, its indepen- 
 dent actuality), it is in itself only a consequent, a thing created, a 
 thing ideal in the Spirit. When, as we advance in the process of 
 knowledge from nature to Spirit, the former appears to be no more 
 than a moment of the latter, this involves no veritable pluralness, 
 no substantial two, whereof one were nature and the other Spirit, 
 but the Idea, which is the substance of nature, deepened to Spirit, 
 retains in this infinite intensity of ideality said substance within 
 itself, and is richer by the very element of this ideality which is in 
 and for itself Spirit " (Phil, of Eel, ii. 412). 
 
 "This appropriation (absorption, ablation) of the externale, 
 which belongs to the notion of Spirit, is what we have named its 
 ideality. All the faculties of Spirit are nothing but the various 
 modes of the reduction of the outer to the inner, the externale to 
 the internale ; and only through this reduction, this idealisation 
 or assimilation of the outer, the externale, is it that Spirit comes to 
 be and is. If we consider Spirit somewhat closer, we find its first 
 and simplest qualifying character to be this, that it is Ego. Ego 
 is a perfectly simple something, unal something (Einfaches), uni- 
 versal something, generic something, all-common something (All- 
 gemeines) [that is, it is of the nature or element of a general idea] ; 
 inasmuch, however, as every one is Ego, we name by it only 
 something quite general ( Allgemeines). The general nature, generic 
 nature, of the Ego makes (renders it possible) that it can abstract 
 from all and everything, even from its own life. Spirit, however, 
 is not just, like light, this abstract simple singleness, oneness, which 
 it was when we had under consideration the oneness of the soul in 
 contradistinction to the compositeness of the body ; Spirit, rather, 
 despite its oneness, is within itself a distinguishedness ; for Ego 
 sets itself over against itself, makes of itself its object to itself, and, 
 out of this certainly only first abstract, not yet concrete distinc- 
 
HEGEL 337 
 
 tion, difference, returns back into unity with itself. This self- 
 uniteclness of the Ego, even in its distinguishedness within itself, 
 is the infinity or ideality of it. This ideality, however, first realises 
 itself in the reference of the Ego, in the relation of the Ego, to the 
 infinitely manifold matter that is opposed to it. In that the Ego 
 possesses itself of this matter, it (this matter) gets at the same time 
 to be imbued and transmuted by the universality of the Ego, loses 
 its individualised, self-dependent impenetrability, and assumes a 
 spirituality of existency. Hence, by the endless multiplicity of its 
 flitting ideas, Spirit gets so little distracted or dispersed into a 
 space-like disunitedness out of its own oneness, its own self- 
 identifiedness, that, rather, its indiscerptible Self passes over to 
 penetrate and pervade, in untroubled clearness, said multiplicity, 
 and leaves to it nothing of its apparent independent self-subsist- 
 ency " (Encylc., iii. 18 seq.). 
 
 Nature seems a spontaneous, solid independency there 
 on its own account, and, so to speak, a First ; neverthe- 
 less, it is but secondary and an output of the Spirit. 
 However external and isolated, alien and opaque, nature 
 is still held, as it were, in solution of the Spirit. 
 
 No doubt, Hegel's expression must often seem but 
 puerile imbecility, or crude, unaccustomed, inarticulate 
 babble ; nevertheless, that expression is as the very 
 aqua regia that penetrates with irresistible causticity into 
 the very core of metaphysic. That, indeed, is simply the 
 new power that Hegel has brought to us. 
 
 More than any quotation yet, the last probably will 
 tend to convince of the truth of what has been said 
 about the Ego as the one special and peculiar principle 
 of Hegel. And yet, as we shall see, he would turn his 
 back upon it ! 
 
 Hegel's peculiar use of the expressions finite and 
 infinite requires to be signalised. Finite is what it is, 
 because it is not all, because it is not alone, but is only 
 partial, only one amongst others. In such position it is 
 ended, on all sides ended. If, now, infinite is just not 
 what is finite, then evidently it must be simply whole 
 
 22 
 
338 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and sole. Infinite means no more than what is mi ended : 
 and what is unended is, in one word, Totality. That is 
 the word that will most often convey Hegel's Unend- 
 liche or Unendlichkeit. An infinite is totality totality, 
 self-complete within itself, and left to itself. The 
 reference to matter in nature, as confronting the Ego, 
 will seem brought in unexplained ; and as only in an 
 extract it is, so far, no more. Still, it will be seen that 
 there is really some attempt to choose extracts that will 
 more or less suggest Hegel's conjunct survey of his own 
 whole position. Details of Logic, details of either 
 Philosophy of Nature or of Spirit these are avoided ; 
 how we are to look at this entire universe as a whole, 
 that is alone contemplated, and only at the same time in 
 connection with the doctrine proper of the Ego. Even 
 the paragraph of the text that follows next seems, not 
 in any too obscure adumbration, though necessarily 
 briefly, at least to suggest as much : 
 
 " Spirit, however, contents itself not with this As finite Spirit, 
 by means of its inward proper concipient activity, as it were, to 
 transfer the things without into the locale of its internality and 
 take from them their externality only thus in a way that is still 
 itself external ; but, as religious consciousness, it penetrates through 
 the apparently absolute self-dependentness of things even to that, in 
 their own inner movements and force, the all-comprehending, one, 
 infinite power of God, and completes, as philosophical thinking, said 
 idealisation of things in this way that it comprehends the actual 
 manner in which their common principle, the eternal Idea, realises 
 itself in them. Thus the idealistic nature of Spirit, that already 
 acts in the finite Spirit, conies to its completest, concretest form 
 or thus Spirit itself comes to, and becomes, in comprehending its 
 own self, the actual Idea, and so the Absolute Spirit. Already in 
 the finite Spirit the ideality has the import of a movement that 
 returns to its beginning, through which Spirit, proceeding forward 
 out of its undiffereiitiatedness as its first position to another, the 
 negation of this position, and, by means of this negation of the 
 negation, returning to its own self, demonstrates itself as absolute 
 negativity, that is, as absolute affirmation of itself. And, in agree- 
 
HEGEL 339 
 
 ment with this its nature, we have to see finite Spirit, firstly, in its 
 immediate unity with nature ; secondly, in its contrast, contrariety, 
 antithesis to nature ; and lastly, in that, again, its unity with 
 nature, which contains within itself said antithesis as withdrawn, 
 and is, through this withdrawn antithesis, mediated, realised. So 
 taken, finite Spirit comes to be recognised as totality, as Idea, and 
 that as the actual Idea which out of said antithesis returns into 
 itself and is so for itself. But in the finite Spirit this return has 
 only its beginning ; in the absolute Spirit alone is it completed. 
 For only in it the Idea comprehends itself, neither only in the one- 
 sided form of the notion or subjectivity, nor yet in the equally 
 one-sided form of objectivity or actuality, but in the complete 
 unity of these its separate moments, that is, in its absolute 
 truth " (p. 20). 
 
 It is to be confessed that this is meant by Hegel as 
 an adumbration of the whole course of his treatment of 
 the Philosophy of Spirit that is now in hand from 
 Anthropology and Psychology, through Ethics and 
 Politics, to Eeligion and Philosophy ; but it is capable, 
 for all that, of a perfectly general application, and it is 
 in this perfect generality of view that we should wish 
 that the serpent of eternity, which self-consciousness is, 
 should be seen as the underlying, prescriptive, and deter- 
 minative form of all. We confess also that, in all pro- 
 liability, it is only a long familiarity of use that will 
 avail in the - end to recommend, not only to the intelli- 
 gence but even to the admiration of the reader, state- 
 ments so extraordinary as these, couched, too. in a 
 phraseology so unusual, and evidently conveying a 
 meaning at the same time so much more unusual still. 
 To the unaccustomed reader that must be so, and he 
 will find himself quite unable to believe that any man 
 of common sense should ever trouble his head to look at 
 any such things twice. The fact is, however, that 
 precisely such things are so incisively descriptive that it 
 almost requires force to tear oneself away from the 
 translating more of them, of which this Introduction 
 
340 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 (Hegel's) is most temptingly full. But our present busi- 
 ness is with the simple Ego as precisely the principle of 
 Hegel, the constructive principle of his entire system, 
 his Begriff, and what he calls the Begritf. There can be 
 no completer unity than the unity of the Ego ; and yet 
 in the midst of that unity there is an invisible dividing- 
 line. When you say " I," you do not name, as it were, 
 an ace, an abstract oneness, a bare, dry, rigorous unit. 
 An ace is an ace, an x is an x, a dot is a dot, a book is 
 a book ; each of them, ace, x, dot, book, is an absolutely 
 single. But " I " is double ; " I " means " I "-" I," or 
 " I "-" Me." Now, it is the invisible hair-split in that 
 duplicity, or qtcasi-(\.u.plicii,y, that is the centre of move- 
 ment in the universe. The Ego is fabled to feel that 
 dividedness in itself, and, in seeking to remove or level 
 out the contradiction of it, really to create not God- 
 not the Absolute Ego, which never was not and always 
 will be but you and me, and the world within, and the 
 world without. It is that hair-split, too, that is the 
 source of all evil in the universe, evil physical, evil 
 moral, pain, sin but then to this that is, that this be 
 seen and understood, the hair-split, the contradiction, 
 must be suitably dressed. " This determination belongs to 
 Spirit as such ; it holds good of it, therefore, not only so 
 far as it simply relates itself to itself, is Ego that has 
 itself as object, but so far also as it steps out of its 
 abstract Selfness, and sets into itself a determinate 
 difference, another than it is" (27). 
 
 In the article " Glauben und Wissen," in the Critical 
 Journal of 1802, there occurs this (W. W. t i. 13): " The 
 Kantian and Fichtian Philosophies have certainly reached 
 the Notion, but not the Idea." Many years at least a 
 quarter of a century afterwards Hegel will presently 
 appear to have made the same reference. We put a 
 sufficiently telling expression first : 
 
HEGEL 341 
 
 " Ego, as this absolute negativity, is an sich the identity in the 
 other wiseness [of its object] ; Ego is it itself, and grasps over the 
 object [its content] as what is taken up into it, is one side of 
 the relation and the whole relation, the light that manifests itself 
 and at the same time the other " (the object lit). " The Ego must 
 be conceived as the individually determinate universal the uni- 
 versal that, in its determinateness, in its di'f-ference, relates, refers 
 itself only to its own self. In this it already lies that the Ego is 
 immediately negative reference to itself, consequently, as abstracted 
 from all determinateness [as of content], the direct immediate or 
 unmediated counterpart of its universality, and that is therefore 
 the equally abstract, simple (unal) singleness. Not merely we the 
 lookers-on distinguish the Ego in this manner into its opposed 
 moments, but, by force of its own within itself universal 
 (allgemeiiien) consequently, from itself distinguished singleness, 
 the Ego itself is this Self -from- self (listing uishedness ; for as referent 
 of itself to itself, its exclusive singleness excludes itself from itself, 
 from the singleness, then ; and sets (realises) itself thereby as, 
 immediately closed together with it, the contrary of itself, as 
 Universality (Allgemeinheit). The qualification that is essential to 
 the Ego of abstractly all-general singleness [of being the abstractly 
 universal singular] constitutes, however, its beingness [As in reference 
 to universal, particular, and singular, very evidently, the very isness 
 of the Ego is that it is the general, the universal, the all-common 
 Singular']. I and my being [my beingness, my ani-ness, the fact that I 
 am] are therefore inseparably united with each other ; the distinction 
 of my being from me is a distinction that is none. The Ego is 
 therefore being, or has being as moment within it. If I set this 
 being as another to me, and at the same time as identical with me, I 
 am Wissen [knowing, knowledge, cognition], and have the absolute 
 Geivissheit [knownness] of my being." [If the act of me is that I 
 think, and the fact of me is that I am, then act and fact, though 
 different, are also identical.] Only in that I come to know myself as 
 Ego does the other become objective to me, put itself over against 
 ine, and at the same time become ideally set or realised in me, and 
 consequently brought back to unity with me. So it is that Ego has 
 been compared above to light. As light is the manifestation of its 
 self and of its other, the dark, and only thereby can manifest itself, 
 that it manifests its other ; so also the Ego only is in so far as it 
 manifests itself, in so far as to it its other becomes manifest in the 
 shape of a something Independent of it." 
 
 "The Kantian philosophy regards the Ego as a Referring to a 
 
342 WHAT 7,S THOUGHT? 
 
 Something elsewhere that in its abstract designation is termed the 
 Thing- in-itself, and only in the like finiteness does it regard as well 
 intelligence as will. When, indeed, in the notion of the reflecting 
 judgment, it comes to the Idea of Spirit, of subject- objectivity, of a 
 percipient understanding, etc., as also to the Idea of nature, why,' 
 then, this idea itself gets reduced again to a mere supposition, 
 namely, to a subjective maxim. The Fichtian philosophy has the 
 same standpoint, and non-Ego is determined only as object of the 
 Ego, only as in consciousness. Both philosophies show, therefore, 
 that they are not come to the Notion (Begriff) and not to the Spirit 
 (Geist), as it is in and for itself, but only as it is in reference to 
 another. In reference to Spinosism, on the other hand, it is to be 
 observed that, in the judgment whereby it constitutes itself as Ego, 
 as free subjectivity counter determinateness [any determining con- 
 tent], Spirit steps out of Substance ; and Philosophy, in that to it 
 this judgment is absolute determination of Spirit, steps out of 
 Spinosism " (Encyh, iii. 249-254). 
 
 Accentuating the marvellous pregnancy of what is 
 said (triply) here, we remark of the two references to 
 Kant and Fichte, so wide apart in time as they are, 
 that there is a certain difference between them. The 
 last allegation is that neither Kant nor Fichte had 
 reached the Notion, while what we saw first (see 
 p. 340) was the admission that the same philosophers 
 had reached the Notion, but not the Idea. Now, if we 
 assume that, when Hegel admitted for both of them 
 the Notion, he had in mind the start of Kant as well 
 as of Fichte from the Ego, as also that, when again he 
 denied as much, he meant such development from the 
 same principle on his own part as converted it into 
 something different, if, I say, we assume this, we shall 
 see that denial of the Notion as development at last was 
 quite on a par with denial of the Idea, the realised, 
 developed Notion, at first. From the apparent differences 
 of the statements, then, there can be no conclusion as to 
 difference in principle at either period ; while the remark 
 at each throws its own light on two such cardinal and 
 essential terms as Notion and Idea. 
 
HEGEL 343 
 
 It is to be feared, however, that there is not as yet 
 in the passages translated any satisfaction for the un- 
 accustomed reader. There is still this to encourage him, 
 that at least somebody else has thought so much of these 
 extraordinary, almost evanescent, distinctions, as to have 
 spent years and years in the following of them out. Our 
 one object at present, however, is to illustrate the fact 
 that the Notion, the principle of Hegel, is simply the 
 Ego ; and to that we shall draw closer and closer. 
 
 Already, in said early article of 1802, Hegel will be 
 found (as p. 23) to be perfectly aware that it is from 
 " the original unity of apperception," which in other 
 words is the " original unity of self -consciousness " (and 
 that is the Ego) that it is from tin's unity as principle 
 that Kant takes his start ; while a year earlier, in Fichte's 
 reference, he spoke thus (W. W., i. 163): "The pure 
 thinking of one's self, the identity of subject and object, 
 in the form Ego = Ego, is principle of the Fichtian system." 
 
 In respect to earliness of date, we may quote an ex- 
 pression or two from the Phaenomenologie : 
 
 " The understanding is thought (Denken), the pure Ego. It comes 
 all to this, That the truth be recognised and expressed, not exclusively 
 as substance, but equally as subject. The process, the mediation, is 
 nothing else than the self -actuating self-identity with self, or it is 
 the reflection into itself, the moment of the self-dependent Ego, the 
 pure negativity. In such propositions the truth is popularly put as 
 subject, but not expressed as the movement of the self-into-self 
 reflection. The absolute form, the immediate certainty of itself. It 
 is the energy of thought, of the pure Ego. They regarded the 
 principle of movement as the negative indeed, but not as the self. 
 Space is that existency in which the Notion inscribes its differences 
 [its three dimensions]. Time is the Notion itself, sensibly existent " 
 (pp. 11, 14, 16, 17,20,25,28,33,35). 
 
 In general we may say of the celebrated, deep-going 
 Preface to the Phaenomenologie, that it is full of the 
 declaration that the Notion is Ego ; but still this 
 
344 WHAT //>' THOUGHT? 
 
 declaration, in the main, is hardly quite literal or direct. 
 As come to, or personified, in some one or other of its 
 later realisations, the Ego is always, even when named, 
 really only metaphorically put, and that is, misleadingly 
 put. 
 
 In the above quotations, limiting themselves, as they 
 do, to the mere reference to the Notion as Ego, or the 
 Ego as Notion, it will occur to suggest itself that con- 
 sultation of the original will throw a much ampler light. 
 For example, it is said (W. W., i. 23) that the answer to 
 Kant's cardinal question, " How are synthetic judgments 
 a priori possible ? " is this : " They are possible through 
 the original absolute identity of differ ents " and that is 
 simply the Ego. 
 
 " The having a design (an intention, a purpose), just as state of 
 the Subject, is against the Totality [as the Subject's Whole] ; so the 
 Subject will remove this form : it will realise the design. But now 
 the realised design is possession of the Subject ; the Subject has 
 itself in it its own self it has objectified it has given itself remis- 
 sion from its oneness, but yet in the resultant pluralness maintained 
 itself. This is the notion of design." 
 
 " Kant says, this proof exhibits God only as an Architect, not as 
 
 a Creator ; it applies only to the contingency of the forms, not to the 
 
 substance. This quality, says Kant, is only form, and the agency at 
 
 work were one only that dealt in forms, not one that created matter. 
 
 The distinction is of no account. The production of form is utterly 
 
 impossible without the production of matter. Once we have the 
 
 Notion we are far above the difference of form and matter ; we 
 
 know then that absolute form is something real " [namely, the Ego] ! 
 
 " The content of this form is, The world is designful ; particular 
 
 designfulnesses concern us not. Design is the Notion, not as in the 
 
 finite things only it is the absolute determination of the Notion ; it 
 
 is God's Notion, God's quality. God is power, self-determination ; 
 
 and that is, He determines Himself designfully." 
 
 " The Notion is the inmost nature of the Subject." 
 
 " Finitude implies this, That the difference is difference generally." 
 
 " Then is the true universal, when, through the particular, it 
 
 unites itself with itself when it unites itself with itself through 
 
 interposition of the particular, of its determinateness, of its stepping 
 
HEGEL 345 
 
 out of itself, and through suppression of this particularity returns 
 again to itself. This negation of the negation is the absolute form, 
 the veritably infinite subjectivity, the reality in its infinitude." 
 
 "God is this : To distinguish Himself from Himself, to be object 
 to Himself, but in this difference to be absolutely identical with 
 Himself der Geist." 
 
 " This infinite elasticity of that which is, To sunder itself within 
 itself, to make itself object to itself this is the Notion, the Notion 
 of the Idea, the absolute Idea, the reality which is now the Spirit 
 for the Spirit. Self-manifestation belongs to the very being of 
 Spirit. A Spirit that is not manifested, is none. Spirit is just 
 this to appear to or for itself appear. This is its act and its 
 livingness : it is its one act, and Spirit itself is only its own act " 
 (Phil, of Eel, ii. 27, 36, 40, 57, 72, 183, 191, 197, and so on here 
 passim). 
 
 "The world of partialities, temporalities, mutabilities, perish- 
 ablenesses, is not the Truth. That, the Truth, is the infinite, the 
 eternal, the immutable. These, the divine ground-lines, infinity, 
 eternity, immutability, are at least the aether in which God dwells " 
 [such expression as this enables us very vividly to realise what 
 generally is rather perplexing the position of the Eleatics] (427). 
 
 " Speculative unity is where the necessity is concrete, at once 
 through self and another that is self " (470). 
 
 " One's own inner conviction is independent of others agreeing 
 with it. It, conviction be it belief, be it cognition of thought 
 does indeed take its beginning from without, from authority, from 
 instruction and the learning of things ; but it is essentially a self- 
 re-innering, a self-re-MEMBER-ing of Spirit within itself ; that itself be 
 satisfied is formal freedom, and the one moment before which all 
 authority sinks. But that it be satisfied in the thing itself that is 
 real freedom, and the other moment before which equally all 
 authority sinks : these are in truth inseparable " (403). 
 
 " The Notion requires for its actualisation no spur from without. 
 Its own proper nature, in unrest from this that it holds within it 
 the contradiction of unity and disunity (identity and difference) 
 its own proper nature impels it to realise itself, impels it, as regards 
 the difference that is present only idealiter (that is, that is present 
 in it only in the contradictory form of difference-lessness) impels 
 it to explicate this difference into an actual difference, and, through 
 this removal of its oneness as a want, a one-sidedness, actually to 
 make itself the whole, of which, as at first, it only implied the 
 possibility." " In philosophical science the Notion itself sets a 
 
346 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 limit to its self -development in this way, that it gives itself an 
 actuality fully correspondent to it. In the living things without 
 we already see this self-limitation of the Notion. The embryo of 
 the plant this sensibly existent Notion closes its evolution with 
 an actuality that is like to it, with production of the seed. It is 
 the same with the Spirit ; it, too, in its development, has reached 
 its goal when the notion of it has perfectly realised itself, or what 
 is the same thing when the Spirit has attained to complete con- 
 sciousness of its notion. This self drawing together into unity of 
 its beginning with its end this, in its realisation, coming of the 
 Notion to itself appears, nevertheless, in a completer form in the 
 case of Spirit than in that of the mere external living things ; for, 
 while in these the produced seed is not the same with the one from 
 which it was produced, the produced Spirit in the self-cognising 
 Spirit is one and the same with the producing one" (Encyk.,iii. 10). 
 
 " Spirit, despite its oneness, is also within itself difference; for 
 Ego sets itself over against itself, makes itself object for itself, and 
 from this its difference from itself returns again into unity with 
 itself " (19). 
 
 " Only completed philosophy is the cognition and recognition of 
 the universe as within itself an organic whole which, developing 
 itself out of its own notion and, in its self-referent necessity, return- 
 ing to the totality within itself, closes itself with itself as a one 
 world of truth." 
 
 "The general ground is illustrated by this, that the Beautiful 
 has come to be recognised as one of the mediating ideas which 
 resolve and restore to unity the contrariety and contradiction of 
 Spirit and nature as individually apart. It was the Kantian 
 philosophy that had already not only a feeling in regard to this 
 uniting point in its necessity, but had even definitely recognised it 
 and brought it to be currently thought of. Just in general, Kant, 
 as well for intelligence as for will, made the basis to be self-referent 
 reason, freedom (f ree-will), consciousness that knows itself as totality 
 within itself ; and, indeed, this recognition of the absoluteness of reason 
 within itself, which, for philosophy in these days, has constituted 
 the turning-point this absolute starting-point is to be recognised 
 and not rejected, as on the part of the Kantian philosophy however 
 otherwise excepted to. But in that Kant fell back again into the 
 fixed antithesis of subjective thinking here and objective things 
 there, of abstract universality of the will on the one hand, and its 
 sense-singularity on the other, it was specially he who accentuated 
 morality as what was highest, putting generally, indeed, the 
 
HEGEL 347 
 
 practical side of mind before the theoretical . In consequence 
 of this fixedness of the antithesis assumed by the understanding, 
 there was nothing left him but to propose, as well unity only in the 
 form of subjective ideas of reason (for which any adequate reality 
 were incapable of proof), as also postulates which, truly, were to 
 be deduced from practical reason, but whose substantial validity 
 was for him unreachable of thought, and whose practical fulfilment 
 remained a mere should-be and was-to-be perpetually put off into 
 infinity. And so Kant certainly brought the reconciled contradic- 
 tion into view, but could neither scientifically explicate its true 
 principle nor yet demonstrate it as what was alone and in very 
 truth actual. Kant, indeed, pressed still further forward, in so far 
 as lie recovered the desired unity in what he called the intuitive 
 understanding ; but even here, again, he remains standing by the 
 contradiction between the subject and its objectivity in such manner 
 that he certainly mentions the abstract solution of the antithesis 
 between notion and reality, universality and particularity, under- 
 standing and sense, but again treats this solution and reconciliation 
 as merely subjective, and not as in itself absolutely true and real. 
 In this reference his Critique of Judgment, that considers that 
 faculty as aesthetically and teleologically applied, is instructive and 
 remarkable. The beautiful objects of nature and of art, the 
 designful products of nature, through which Kant is brought up 
 to the notion of organisation and life, are considered by him only 
 from the point of view of a Reflection that subjectively regards 
 them. In fact, Kant expressly defines judgment 'as the faculty 
 that thinks the particular as subsumed under the general,' and 
 terms judgment a reflecting one ' when there is only given it a 
 particular for which it has to find the universal.' For this, judg- 
 ment requires a law, a principle, which it has to give itself ; and as 
 tliis law Kant sets up Design. In the case of the notion of free- 
 will in practical reason, fulfilment of the end -aim remains standing 
 in the mere To-be-to ; but in the teleological judgment, again, as in 
 respect of objects animate, Kant comes so to consider the living 
 organism that the notion, the universal, holds under it the 
 particular, and as end-aim, purpose, determines the particular and 
 external, the disposition of the members, not from without, but 
 from within out, and in such wise that the particular of itself shall 
 correspond to the end, the purpose, the design. Still, with such 
 judgment, again, the objective nature of the thing, in regard is not 
 to be supposed realised, but only a state of subjective reflection 
 announced. Similarly, Kant conceives the cesthetic judgment so 
 
348 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 that it proceeds neither from the understanding as such (as faculty 
 of notions), nor from sense-perception and its complex variety as 
 such, but from the free play of understanding and imagination 
 together. In this harmony of the cognitive faculties the object is 
 referred to the subject, and the subject's feeling of pleasure and 
 satisfaction." 
 
 "Der Schein selbst ist dem Wesen wesentlich Appearance, 
 show, is essential to essential being" (Aesthet., L 32, 72-75, 12). 
 
 What regards Kant in the above is so fine in its 
 incisiveness and so complete in its truth that one has 
 a special pleasure in quoting it, and all the more when 
 one considers what is concerned. Several of Hegel's 
 most peculiar ideas are there salient, and with accept- 
 able reference to their source. The necessity of Schein 
 to the Wesen, of the particular to the universal, is 
 genuinely Hegelian. 
 
 " The Infinite Reflection consists in this, that I refer myself, not 
 to anything else, but only to myself, that I am my own self's 
 object. This pure referring of myself to myself is the Ego, the root 
 of the Infinite Being's Self. It is complete abstraction from every- 
 thing that is finite. Ego qua Ego, Ego as such, has no matter of 
 content, that is immediate (sense-immediate, sensibly immediate) 
 that is given by nature : for matter of content it has only itself. 
 This pure form is to its own self at the same time its matter (of 
 content). Every matter of content (object) given by nature is 
 limited ; but the Ego is unlimited. Object of nature is immediate 
 [a thing there directly, as it were, individually and of itself, face to 
 face before sense] ; but the pure Ego has no immediate matter of 
 content, and for this reason, that it only is by means of the 
 abstraction from everything else, from everything that is other" 
 [and so, I may add, is the pure negativity] (Propaedeutik, 20 sq.). 
 
 We saw, a propos of Encyk., 253 sq., the remark of 
 Hegel, that neither Kant nor Fichte had come to the 
 Begriff, though both in effect started from the Ego ; but 
 it would be an error to construe this into a denial on the 
 part of Hegel that the Ego and the Begriff were one : 
 Hegel's Begriff is conditioned, so to speak, by the 
 
HEGEL 349 
 
 personality of the Ego, and neither Kant nor Fichte had 
 ever risen to that. 
 
 From the early pages of the Philosophy of History we 
 may extract as follows :- 
 
 " The deficiency that Socrates saw in the principle of Anaxagoras 
 does not concern the principle itself, but the want in the application 
 of it to nature, that nature was not understood, comprehended from 
 the principle, that the principle remained abstract, that nature was 
 not conceived as a development from it, not as an organisation 
 produced from reason" (16). 
 
 " Reason is thought that in perfect freedom determines its own 
 self "(17). 
 
 "The opinion now, the inveterate prejudice, that it is impossible 
 to know God ! " (19). 
 
 " God has revealed himself in the Christian Religion given us 
 to know what he is : so that he is no longer something secret, some- 
 thing hidden from us. With this possibility to know God, there is 
 now imposed on us the duty to know him" (14). 
 
 " If gravity is the substance of matter, freedom it is that is the 
 substance of Spirit Spirit is just that that has its centre within 
 itself Spirit is within itself and by itself. Matter has its substance 
 outside of it ; Spirit is that which has its dwelling-place in its own 
 self. Precisely that is freedom, and freedom of will ; for if I am 
 dependent, then I relate myself to another than myself, to another 
 which I am not. I am free when I am by and to myself alone " (22). 
 
 " Only in Christianity came we to the consciousness that man as 
 man is free, that the freedom of the Spirit constitutes his inmost, 
 own-most nature. This consciousness first took being in religion, 
 in the innermost sanctuary of the Spirit, but to infuse this principle 
 into the world without, that was an other work which to realise 
 and carry out demanded the long hard schooling of civilisation and 
 culture " (23). 
 
 "Spirit conscious of its freedom, that is the end-aim of the 
 universe. This end-aim is alone what achieves itself and accom- 
 plishes itself, the sole stability in the vicissitude of all events and 
 conditions, as well as what veritably moves in them. This end-aim 
 is what God wills with the world " (24 sq.). 
 
 " Subjectively to know and to will is to think. But if I think- 
 ingly know and thinkingly will, then it is the universal that I will, 
 the substantiality of reason itself " (61). 
 
 " Inasmuch as the metaphysical coherence that is, the coherence 
 
350 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 in the Notion of these forms belongs to Logic, we cannot discuss it 
 here. Only the main moments concerned require mention. 
 
 " In philosophy it is shown that the Idea proceeds to the Infinite 
 Antithesis. This is that, first, to the Idea in its free generality, in 
 which it remains by itself, and, secondly, that of the Idea as purely 
 abstract reflection into itself, which is formal selfness, Ego, formal 
 freedom (free-will), which is only appurtenant to Spirit. The Idea 
 is thus as substantial filling on the one side, and as the abstract 
 moment of self-will on the other side. This reflection into itself is 
 the individual self-consciousness, the other to the Idea, and so in 
 absolute finitude. This other is just so fmitude, determinateness, 
 for the one all-common absolute : it is the side of its empirical 
 existency, the stage of its formal reality, the stage also of the honour 
 of God. To apprehend the absolute plan of this antithesis is the 
 deep task of metaphysic. Further, with this finitude there is 
 implied all particularness. The formal will [will just as the form 
 that will as will is, matter apart] wills its own self ; this Ego shall 
 be in all that it purposes and does. This extreme, existent per se in 
 difference from the absolute, universal "Wesen [call it Ens] is a par- 
 ticular, knows the particular, and wills it ; it is on the standpoint 
 of the appearance, the manifestation. It is here that the particular 
 ends and aims fall, in that the individuals lay themselves into their 
 particularity, full-fill it and realise it. This standpoint, then, is 
 also that of fortune or misfortune. He is fortunate who has his 
 existence in agreement with his particular character, general pur- 
 pose, and personal wish, and so, consequently, in the state appointed 
 him, enjoys himself. History is not the stage of fortune (fortunate- 
 ness). The periods of good fortune (happiness, peace) are blank 
 leaves in it ; for they are the periods of accord, of the failing anti- 
 thesis. The reflection into self, this freedom, is abstractly the 
 formal moment of the action of the absolute Idea. This action 
 [activity, principle that acts] is the middle term of the syllogism, 
 whose one extreme is the universal, the Idea, which rests in the 
 inner adytum of the Spirit ; the other is externality as externality, 
 confronting matter. The principle that so acts is the middle that 
 renders the universal and inner into objectivity " (33 sq.). 
 
 We give this last passage with considerable apprehen- 
 sion and doubt, for one sees in it so many of these 
 phrases that must fail of their mark, and any mark, to 
 any one who is unaccustomed to carry them home to 
 their true import. Nevertheless, as a summating passage, 
 
HEGEL 351 
 
 it is at once full and incisive ; and, what is in place 
 here, it takes its explanation from the Ego. It has 
 been translated literally, but, the reader may depend 
 upon it, meaningly. There shall follow now a number 
 of very striking and unmistakable passages from the 
 History of Philosophy : 
 
 " To take up science as it is there given, and form oneself into it, 
 and just thereby form it further, and so raise it to a higher stand- 
 point that is the position of our and every other age : even in that 
 we make, it for ourselves ours, we make out of it also, or we make 
 just it itself, something new, compared with what it was." 
 
 "What is most essential here, then, is to know that the One 
 Truth is a thought determined within itself, and not merely a blank 
 single one." " The product of thought is thought ; but a thought 
 (Gedanke) is still merely formal ; notion (Begriff) is the more 
 specialised Gedanke ; Idea, again, is the Gedanke, thought in its 
 totality and specific element, and absolute characterisation proper." 
 
 "An act or action is just this, to have in it or within it the 
 opposed moments. These are init self '-ness and /or-ite-self-ness 
 (Ansichseyn and Fiirsichseyn), potentiality and actuality. This 
 unity of opposites is what the concrete is. The whole is concrete ; 
 but this opposite that is the subject, and that other that is the pro- 
 duct they, too, are, each of them, concrete." 
 
 " The Infinite Form is what we name thinking. As this thinking 
 is, as subjective, firstly, mine (seeing I think), and secondly, the 
 universality (Allgemeinheit) as well, which holds in it the intel- 
 lectual substantiality : so it is, thirdly, the forming activity (the 
 principle of determination)." " In that thought is this universality, 
 the element of substantiality, and at the same time Ego (thought is 
 the Initself, and exists as a free subject), so the universal has imme- 
 diate existence and presence." 
 
 " Here it were in place now to consider the speculative idea (of the 
 Universal with the Singular), how it is authenticated as absolute 
 unity ; but this, truly, is not found to have occurred to the Ancients 
 to apprehend the Notion itself (to he-grip the Begriff itself). The 
 understanding, organised as a universe, that realises itself into a 
 system, this pure Notion (Begriff), we have not to expect on their 
 part." 
 
 " With the vovs we have now the principle of the understanding, 
 a self-determining, self-realising principle : that was wanting to 
 
352 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Heraclitus, whose principle Becoming, which is 110 more than pro- 
 cess was as mere destiny, fate, not yet that that self-subsistently 
 determined itself" (vol. i. 14, 32, 36, 163, 164, 354, 355). 
 
 " Thought, as but the vovs of Anaxagoras, had not as yet any 
 filling (matter of content, realisation), seeing that that [the actual 
 world] stood on the other side, . . . but in Philosophy this is im- 
 portant, that, though the Ego is the principle that creates and 
 realises, yet the created and realised content [materialisation] of 
 thought in its process is the absolute object." 
 
 "The notion (Begriff), which reason (in Anaxagoras) had dis- 
 covered as the absolute principle, is the simple (uiial) negative in 
 which all that is determinate, all that is existent and individual, 
 sinks and disappears " [the Ego, namely]. 
 
 " This is the notion of the true universal in its movement : the 
 Genus, which in its own self is its own process, in that, what it becomes 
 for itself, it, beforehand, already, in itself, is ; a movement in which 
 it does not quit itself : this absolute genus is the Geist (Spirit), whose 
 movement is the constant return into itself ; so that there is nothing 
 for it which is not already in it." 
 
 " Just as the body no longer exists if we take from it gravity, so 
 the soul no longer exists if we take from it thought. Thought is 
 the act of the universal, which, however, is not an abstractum, but 
 the reflecting of itself into itself, the setting of itself equal to itself, 
 and this takes place in all our conceptions and general ideas. " 
 
 " The self to self referent negativity, the negation of the negation, 
 and so the infinite affirmation " (vol. ii. 4, 5, 179, 182, 475). 
 
 " Philosophy reaches now the standpoint that self-consciousness in 
 thought knows itself as the absolute. . . . This idea that had come 
 into men, that the Absolute Being is not for self -consciousness any- 
 thing alien, that nothing for it is substantiality in which self-con- 
 sciousness has not its immediate self, this principle we see now 
 appear as the universal principle of the World- Spirit, as the general 
 belief and knowledge of all men ; it alters at once the entire aspect 
 of the world, cancels all that has hitherto been, and brings into 
 being a new birth of the universe. . . . Men abandon the world 
 because they can no longer find anything in it that, reality, they 
 find now only in themselves. As all the gods assemble in a one 
 Pantheon, so all religions precipitate themselves into a one religion, 
 all ways of thinking absorb themselves in one ; it is this, that self- 
 consciousness an actual man is the Absolute Being. . . . The true 
 emancipation of Spirit is realised in Christianity, for in it Spirit 
 comes to its Wesen, to its true inner being. What the Absolute 
 
HEGEL 353 
 
 Being is, is now revealed to men : it is a man, but not yet the man or 
 Self -consciousness as Self -consciousness. . . . This knowledge that 
 self-consciousness is the Absolute, or that the Absolute is self-con- 
 sciousness, is now the World-Spirit. . . . With Aristotle the eWpyeia, 
 as the Thinking that thinks its self, is the Concrete. . . . God now is 
 no longer known as that abstract God, but as concrete within Him- 
 self, and this concrete is precisely Spirit. God lives is the one, 
 and the other, and their unity in their difference ; for what is 
 abstract is isolatedly one ; but a life has within its own self the 
 difference, and yet is one with itself. ... In Christianity the name 
 of God is not restricted to the Supreme Substance ; but the Son is 
 a necessary element in the true being of God. What God is, then, 
 He is only as Spirit ; and that is the unity of the moments named 
 [God, Son, Spirit]. . . . This is not to be understood so that, as is 
 usually said, God is a Spirit that is outside of the world and outside 
 of self-consciousness, but that His existence, in that He is self-con- 
 scious Spirit, is simply the actual self-consciousness itself. . . . The 
 Absolute Being in Thought is Thought itself : God is not outside 
 a Beyond of consciousness. . . . Those who are convinced that the 
 Absolute Being in Thought is not Thought itself, always assert that 
 God is outside a Beyond of consciousness, that the thought of 
 Him is the notion of Him, but that His existence or actuality is 
 quite another thing : just as when we think of or figure to ourselves 
 an animal or a stone, our notion of it, or our current idea of it, is 
 something quite other than the thing itself as if that, the thing 
 itself, were the truth. But the question is not of this sensible 
 animal, but of its true being ; and that is the notion of it. The 
 true being of the animal, its universal, is not present in the animal 
 as its true being, its universal, but only as in union with its sensible 
 individuality, as a mode of the universal : as universal it is our 
 notion that in fact is alone true, while what is of sense is negative. 
 So our notion of the Absolute Being is that Being's self, if it is the 
 notion of the Absolute Being, and not of anything else. But in this 
 Being God is not summed ; for He is not only Wesen, or His notion, 
 but His existence. His existence, as pure Wesen, is our thinking of 
 Him ; but His real existence is nature. In this real existence Ego 
 [is only ego] is only a single thinking individual, appurtenant to 
 this existence as moment of it, but not constitutive of it. Transi- 
 tion must be made from the existence of the Wesen as Wesen to 
 existence, to real existence as such. As such existence God is cer- 
 tainly a Beyond of the individual self-consciousness, and that, first, 
 as Wesen or pure thought, and, again, in so far as He, in respect of 
 
 2 3 
 
354 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 actuality, is nature. . . . The vovs is precisely the finding of its self 
 for its self : it is the pure duad its self and its object ; it contains 
 all that is thought ; it is this differentiatingness, but pure such, that 
 remains at the same time identical with itself [and that is Ego]. 
 . . . That for man, in that he is recipient of the Divine, there must 
 be also as existent fact the identity of human and divine nature 
 that in Christo has been made known to men in sensible-wise ; in 
 Him the divine and the human nature being implicitly One. In 
 the world, then, this itself has taken place, that the Absolute has 
 been revealed as the Concrete : and that, too, not only in thought 
 in universal- wise as intelligible world, but in that it has proceeded 
 to its final intensity within itself: and so it is an absolute Self, 
 Ego the absolute universal, the concrete universal, that God is. 
 . . . This error springs from this, that we think only of a form of 
 the second kind, and not of the necessary, first, and eternal form 
 which is form of all forms, and of all forms source. . . . Ego has 
 here the sense of Thought, not that of the individuality of self- 
 consciousness, . . . and Thought is the absolutely universal, but not 
 merely because I can abstract, but simply because Ego is this unity, 
 this identity with itself. ... In Descartes there was not yet any 
 thought of the need to develop the differences from the ' Ich 
 denke ' ; it was Fichte was the first to go to that out of this 
 punctum of absolute certainty of knowledge to derive all the deter- 
 minations. . . . Development from the Begriff was initiated by 
 Fichte. . . . From it (the Kantian Philosophy) sprang the Fichtian 
 Philosophy, which speculatively conceived the Wesen (the primitive 
 principle) of self-consciousness as concrete Egoity, but never got out 
 of this subjective form of the Absolute. From this Schelling's 
 philosophy starts, then presently throws it out, and sets up the 
 Idea of the Absolute. . . . This want shows itself in Spinosa and 
 Schelling in this way, that the necessity fails to appear, whereby 
 the Notion, as the implicit negative of its unity, sets (realises) its 
 sundering into the differences ; so that from the unal universal the 
 Keal itself gets to be understood. . . . God, then, though only felt 
 and believed, is still the Universal quite abstractly taken, even 
 in His personality the absolutely universal Personality. . . . The 
 unity is still in itself difference and, despite its difference, still 
 unity : like Ego. . . . The absolute Notion, that thinks itself, that 
 goes into itself it is that we see, through the Kantian philosophy, 
 appear in Germany ; and so that all essentiality and truth falls into 
 self-consciousness. . . . Synthetic a priori judgments are nothing 
 else than a union of opposites through themselves, or the Absolute 
 
HEGEL 355 
 
 Notion. In demonstrating that thought has synthetic a priori judg- 
 ments, which are not derived from perceptions of sense, Kant 
 demonstrates thought to be concrete within itself. . . . The first 
 faculty to him is Sense ; the second, Understanding ; the third, 
 Reason. This he just rehearses so ; taking it up quite empirically, 
 without developing it from the Notion, and proceeding only with 
 necessity. . . . The principle of connection is Ego this is a great 
 consciousness, a most important recognition. That I am the unity, 
 and, as thinking, the principle that reduces to unity this, however, 
 is not exactly discussed, rigorously demonstrated by Kant. ... It is 
 a true instinct of the Notion leads Kant to say : The first category 
 is positive ; the second, the negative of the first ; and the third, the 
 synthetic unity of both. Triplicity, this ancient form of the Pytha- 
 goreans, of the Neo-Platonists, and of the Christian Religion, though 
 here a merely external schema, conceals in itself the absolute form, 
 the Notion. Kant, then, takes up the Categories quite empirically, 
 without a thought of developing them with necessity as the differ- 
 ences of the unity. Fichte set up the Ego as absolute principle, and 
 so that from it the whole burthen of the universe was to be developed 
 nowhere does there exist anything further than the Ego, and Ego 
 exists because it exists : what exists is only in the Ego and for the 
 Ego. Still, Fichte has only proposed the Notion : he has not 
 brought it to the realisation of science (knowledge) out of its own 
 self. . . . This concrete Idea is the result of the labours of the 
 Spirit through almost two thousand five hundred years of its most 
 earnest endeavour to become objective to itself, to come to know 
 itself. . . . Self-consciousness thinks itself and attains to the know- 
 ledge that the Absolute Being is self-thinking self -consciousness. . . . 
 The Absolutely Pure, Infinite Form is " declared to be Self-con- 
 sciousness, Ego " (vol. iii. 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 20, 30, 39, 40, 88, 207, 308, 310, 
 328, 349, 412, 486, 502, 506, 508, 513, 514, 555, 557, 618, 620, 621). 
 
 However numerous these citations from the History 
 of Philosophy may appear, they might have been easily, 
 many times, augmented, and quite righteously followed 
 by a passim. So far as evidence is concerned, they will 
 probably prove exhaustively complete, too. Still, we 
 think it right to add, by way of confirmation, some 
 other citations from other works : 
 
 " From the Notion (Begriff) in the speculative sense there is to be 
 distinguished what has been ordinarily named notion (Begriff). . . . 
 
356 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 When I say 7, I mean me as this single, perfectly distinct, one 
 person. In effect, however, I intimate thereby nothing special of 
 myself. ' I ' is equally also everybody else, and even in designating 
 myself as ' /,' though I mean of course me, this single individual, I 
 name, nevertheless, at the same time, what is completely a universal 
 (Allgerneines, All-common). I, Ego, is the pure personality (Fiir- 
 sichseyn) in which every particular is negated and absorbed, this 
 ultimate, singleness, and pure oneness of consciousness. We may 
 say that Ego and Thought are the same, or more precisely that Ego 
 is Thought as the thing that thinks. . . . All things are particulars 
 where each Particular closes itself together as a Universal in unity 
 with the Singular ; but then, the impotence of nature is such that it 
 is unable to represent the logical forms in purity. It is the business 
 of a Philosophy of Nature to enable us to perceive the true forms of 
 the Notion in the things of Nature. We usually fancy that the 
 Absolute must be in a far-away Beyond from us ; but it is precisely 
 that which is just present to us, what, as thinking beings, but without, 
 so to say, any express consciousness of it, we carry with us and 
 apply. . . . God alone is the true agreement of the Notion and the 
 reality ; all finite things have in them an untruth they have a 
 notion and an existence ; but their existence is incommensurable 
 with their notion. So it is that they must perish ; for in their 
 perishing the incongruity of their notion and their existence gets 
 manifested. The animal as an individual has its notion in its 
 genus, and the genus frees itself from individualness by death. . . . 
 Finite, formally expressed, is what has an end (finem), what *s, but 
 ceases there where it comes into touch with another, and so is 
 bound, limited, restricted by it. The finite has being, therefore, in 
 relation to its other, which is its negation, and bears itself as its 
 limit. But thought is by and to itself, relates itself to itself, and 
 has itself for an object. When I have a thought for object, I am 
 by myself (chez moi-meme). I, Ego, Thought, Thinking, is accord- 
 ingly infinite [and that just means totality, while finite correspond - 
 ently means partiality], because, in thinking, it refers itself to an 
 object that is itself. An object as such is an other, a negative, to 
 me. If thought thinks its own self, it has then an object which is 
 at the same time none, that is to say, one which is neutralised and 
 only is ideal- wise. Thought, then, as such, has in its purity no 
 limit within itself. . . . Kant's allegation, then, is that the cate- 
 gories have their source in the Ego, and that, accordingly, it is the 
 Ego gives the forms of universality and necessity. That, then, is 
 what Kant calls Pure Apperception. . . . All finite is this, and only 
 
HEGEL 357 
 
 this, that its existence is different from its notion. It is expressly 
 God that can be thought 'only as existing.' That unity of notion 
 and being it is which constitutes the notion of God. . . . The con- 
 ception of an intuitive understanding, inward design, is the Universal 
 thought at the same time as itself concrete. In these conceptions 
 alone shows itself, therefore, the Kantian Philosophy speculative. 
 Many, for example, Schiller ... As result of Kant's reflections 
 over the various stages of consciousness, it is there intimated that 
 the outcome of what we know is only appearance in manifestation. 
 This result is so far to be agreed with as finite thinking has 
 certainly only to do with appearances, manifestations (of something 
 else). But with this finding of appearance (mere manifestation), 
 all that is to be accomplished is not yet accomplished ; but there is 
 a still higher land, which, however, for the Kantian Philosophy, 
 remains as yet an inaccessible Beyond. Whilst, at best in this 
 philosophy, the principle has been proposed that thought determines 
 itself out of its own self, but the how and the how far of this deter- 
 mination of thought has not yet been demonstrated by Kant ; it is 
 Fichte, on the other hand, who has seen this want, and in speaking 
 out the demand for a deduction of the Categories, has at the same 
 time made the attempt really to accomplish as much. The Fichtian 
 Philosophy makes the Ego the starting-point of the philosophical 
 development, and the categories shall yield themselves as the result 
 of its action. But now the Ego here is not really as free, spon- 
 taneous principle of action, inasmuch as it is considered to be called 
 into action only by an obstacle (Anstoss) from without. Against 
 this obstacle, now, then, the Ego shall be supposed to react, and so, 
 by this reaction, attain to a consciousness over its own self. The 
 nature of this Anstoss remains, withal, an unknown Without, and 
 the Ego is always a conditionedness which has another opposed to 
 it. And so Fichte remains standing by the result of the Kantian 
 philosophy that only the Finite is to be known, while the Infinite 
 is beyond thought. What to Kant is the Thing-in-itself, that is to 
 Fichte the obstacle, the Anstoss, from without, this abstractum of 
 another, of something that is other than the Ego, which has no 
 other province than that of the negative or the non-Ego generally. 
 Ego is in this way considered as standing in relation with the Non- 
 Ego, through which its Self-determination is first awakened into 
 action, and that so that Ego is only the continuous effort of the 
 freeing of itself from the Anstoss, without attaining, nevertheless, 
 to any actual freedom, inasmuch as, with the surcease of the Anstoss, 
 the Ego, which, in fact, in what it is, is no more than its action, 
 
358 WHAT -IS' THOUGHT*? 
 
 would itself surcease. Further, now, the matter of content to which 
 the action of the Ego gives rise is no other than the usual one of 
 experience as such, qnly with the addition that this matter of 
 content is merely Appearance (as in manifestation). . . . When the 
 Singular (individuality) as Ego, Personality that is, so far as it is 
 not an empirical Ego, a particular personality that is understood 
 especially when the Personality of God is before consciousness, the 
 question then is of pure personality, that is, of the (as within its own 
 self) Universal Personality : and that is a thought, and only comes 
 to thought. [Thus Personality to Hegel is here a direct declaration : 
 there is to him an ' in sich allgemeine Personlichkeit,' but necessarily, 
 as not possibly any actual James or John, or who else, only for 
 thought, not for eyesight, not for any literal perception of special 
 sense ; one may add in this reference a citation or two more]. . . . 
 The simple religious consciousness speaks of the eternal and inviol- 
 able decrees of God, His determinate counsels. In his difference 
 from God, man, with his personal opinions and volitions, follows 
 humour arid caprice, and so then it happens to him that there 
 eventuates from his actions something quite different from what he 
 intended or wished, whereas God knows what He wills, is not de- 
 termined in His will by inner or outer chance, and accomplishes 
 what He wills resistlessly. . . . The fullest is the concretest and 
 most subjective, and what withdraws itself into its simplest depth is 
 the mightiest and the most prevailing. The extremest, most pointed 
 of points, is The Pure Personality. ... In all the higher religions, 
 especially in the Christian, God is the Absolute One Substance, but 
 He is at the same time Subject, and that is further. As man has 
 personality, so there is in God the attribute of Subjectivity, Per- 
 sonality. Spirit Absolute Spirit. . . . The eternal life of the 
 Christian is the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God is just this, 
 that He is conscious of Himself as this Spirit. ... In the religion of 
 the Absolute Spirit the form of God is not taken from the human. 
 God Himself, in the true idea, is, as Absolute Self -Consciousness, 
 Spirit, produces Himself" (EncyL, i. 15, 47, 50, 52, 63, 91, 112, 117, 
 124, 129, 294 ; Log., iii. 349 ; Phil, of Rel., i. 392, 394, 452). 
 
 We have just seen it said that " Kant's allegation is 
 that the categories have their source in the Ego, and 
 that it is the Ego gives the forms of universality and 
 necessity " ; and I know not that Hegel has ever said 
 anything else in the same reference. Two pages earlier 
 (at p. 89) he had already expressed himself thus: "This 
 
HEGEL 359 
 
 (Kantian) philosophy specifies the Original Identity of the 
 Ego in Thinking (the Transcendental Unity of Self -conscious- 
 ness) as the special ground proper of the Categories." When, 
 however, one casts a thought back upon that part of the 
 Kritik of Pure Reason that concerns the Psychological Idea, 
 and the Paralogisms of Pure Eeason that are alleged to flow 
 from it, one is apt to feel srmewhat surprised to find so 
 substantial a role, as this is of Ego to Hegel, attributed to 
 what was so airy and evanescent as the mere breathing, 
 the mere dot on the i, of Ego to Kant. Although the 
 Ego, however, is to Kant when he expressly refers to it in 
 the Kritik of Pure Reason, sec. 24, Remark, and afterwards 
 in connection with the Paralogisms no more than is said 
 in the translation of Schwegler (Note), namely, That 
 " the simple reflection, ' I Am ' or ' I think,' " as Kant 
 himself names it, " is neither perception nor notion, but 
 a mere consciousness falsely converted into a thing,"- 
 although this is true, yet, when all is compared, there 
 can be no doubt that it is right to allow Kant to make 
 of the Ego in the particular reference all that Hegel says 
 he makes of it. Every act of judgment, and the cate- 
 gories are all judgments, implies the synthetic function 
 of Apperception. And so, consequently, the categories 
 can be called, if not functions of Apperception, at least 
 functions of judgment under the unity of Apperception. 
 
 " Thus the principle of Selfness fully develops itself. I, as unal, 
 allgemeiii (all-common, universal), as thought, am relation or cor- 
 relation as such ; in that I am for me, self-consciousness, the 
 relations (between) shall also be for me. To the thoughts, concep- 
 tions, which I make to belong to me, to them I give the quality 
 which I myself am. I am this single point ; and that which is for 
 me, I will, in this singleness of unity, distinguish. . . . Speculative 
 philosophy is the consciousness of the Idea in such wise that all is 
 apprehended as Idea ; the Idea, however, is the Truth in Thought, 
 not in mere perception or conception. That truth is this, that it is 
 concrete ; what is is within itself double, and so that the two sides of it 
 
360 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 are opposed categories, as unity of wliich the Idea is to be seen. 
 Speculatively to think is to resolve some actuality, and so to oppose it 
 to its own self that the differences are mutually opposed as en suite 
 of categories, and the object is recognised as unity of both [see the 
 original further]. . . . That, summarily, is the business of specula- 
 tion, that it apprehends all the objects of pure thought, of nature, 
 and of the Spirit, in the form of thought, and so as unity of the 
 difference. . . . Whilst what is finite requires another for its quality, 
 what is true has its quality, the limit [the other, the scission], its 
 end within itself, is not limited by the other, on the contrary, 
 the other falls within it. ... In philosophy the highest is named 
 Absolute, the Idea. ... If we begin, now, with the current mere 
 impression we have of God, it is the business of a philosophy of 
 religion to consider the significance of it that God, namely, is the 
 Idea, the Absolute, in thought and notion the Wesen (Ens verum), 
 and that it has this in common with the logical philosophy. The 
 logical Idea is God as He is in Himself ; but God is this not only 
 to be in Himself (implicit), He is just as essentially for Himself 
 (explicit), the Absolute Spirit, the primal principle that has itself 
 not only in thought, but is that also which appears, by manifestation 
 appears, gives itself existence objectively. In this philosophy, then, 
 that considers the Idea of God, we have at the same time also 
 before us the manner in which He personates His own self ; only for 
 Himself He puts Himself in appearance there. This is the side of 
 existency, of the outwardness of the Absolute. In the philosophy 
 of religion we have thus the absolute for object, but not merely in 
 the form of thought, but also in the form of its manifestation. The 
 universal (allgemeine) Idea is to be taken, then, in the quite con- 
 crete import of essentiality, as also, therefore, of its actuality of action 
 to set itself out, to appear, to reveal itself. We say in a popular 
 way, God is the Lord of the natural world, and as well of the spirit- 
 kingdom ; He is the absolute harmony of both, producing and 
 actuating it ; neither the thought nor the notion failing therein, nor 
 yet the manifestation of it, its existence. This existent side, however, 
 is itself again (inasmuch as we are in philosophy) to be taken in 
 thought. Philosophy considers, then, the Absolute, firstly, as 
 Logical Idea, Idea as it is in thought, as its import [what it holds 
 in solution, as it were] is itself determinations of thought ; further, 
 it shows the Absolute in movement in its productions [Nature and 
 Spirit], and this is the way of the Absolute to become for itself, the 
 way of the Absolute to Spirit ; but God is not to be regarded as 
 but in this way result, result of philosophy, but as what precedes, 
 
HEGEL 361 
 
 and is first, and eternally brings forth itself. The one-sidedness of 
 the result becomes in the result itself negated and removed. . . . 
 God is not blank vacuity, but Spirit ; and this attribute is no 
 mere word or superficial phrase : Spirit uncloses itself in that God 
 is recognised as essential Til-unity. It is so that God is understood 
 as He makes Himself object for Himself ; which object remains 
 still even in this disjunction identical with God, and in it God 
 loves Himself. Without this attribute of Tri-unity, God were not 
 Spirit, and Spirit were an empty word. But God being understood 
 as Spirit, then this notion includes in it the subjective side. . . . 
 The Spirit of God is not a Spirit beyond the stars, without the 
 world, but God is present, all-present, and as Spirit in all Spirits. 
 God is a living God, that moves and acts. Religion is a birth. of the 
 Spirit of God, and not an invention of men. . . . Morality and law 
 are only from this, that I am a thinking being, that I regard my 
 free-will not as that of my empirical person, as coming to me only 
 as this individual, when then I might make a slave of another 
 through fraud or through force, but that I hold free-will to be an 
 Absolute, a Universal. . . . Here knowledge is not the direct sense- 
 knowledge of some corporeal object, but of God, and God is the absol- 
 utely universal object, the Universalest Personality, not, certainly, any 
 one single particular knowledge of God is the thinking of God, for 
 thought is that act for which the universal is. ... I am absolutely 
 concrete Ego, thought that determines itself within itself I am as 
 the Begriff (Notion). . . . That is always what is substantial that 
 I have always in any reference consciousness of the Begriff that I 
 have in it so truth as truth, truth in the form of truth in the form 
 of the absolutely Concrete, and of what is directly and purely coin- 
 cident within itself. . . . Both sides of the relation (the antithesis) 
 disappear into mere moments, and that only which is and abides is 
 Unity of both, which neutralises both. . . . Ego, through its own 
 proper reflection, brings to goal the self-resolving contraries. . . . 
 What is the idea and true is completely so, only as movement. God 
 is this movement within Himself, and alone by that a living God. 
 The moment of the finite, however, is not to be held fixed, but to 
 be absorbed and assimilated : God is the movement to the finite 
 and, through it as sublation of Himself, to Himself. In Ego, as that 
 which is finite sublates itself, God turns back to Himself, and only 
 as this return is God. Without a world, God is not God. The 
 result is that we must rid ourselves of the bug-bear of the antithesis 
 between finite and infinite " (Phil, of ReL, i. 15, 23, 24, 25, 27, 32, 
 34, 62, 117, 149, 150, 180, 181, 194). 
 
362 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " To come to see the negativity immanent in the universal or in 
 the identicalness (im Allgemeineii oder Identischen), as in the Ego, 
 was the further step which the speculative philosophy had to make " 
 (EechtsphiL, p. 39). 
 
 The intention of these quotations, as already said, has 
 been not only to identify the Ego as the Notion, but 
 also to give some idea of the general result of the whole 
 as a philosophy that is explicative of the existent uni- 
 verse. One has only to cast the slightest glance back, 
 however, to become aware of the hopelessness to expect 
 more than one reader here and there to make anything 
 whatever of these uncouth and apparently, perhaps 
 shallow, single words or phrases, and even entire sen- 
 tences. Nevertheless, there is really the possibility to 
 understand from them, at all events, something of what is 
 proposed as the triple concrete, the triple unity of Man 
 and Nature with the Spirit that is God. 
 
 In particular explanation looking back, it may be 
 remarked that what I allude to in the " roc's egg " will, 
 of course, be understood from the Aladdin story, where 
 it (said egg) was the sole unit that controlled the Genii. 
 
 Of the association of the nature of Ego with the Being 
 of God, there is more elsewhere. What is said about 
 the rationale of the five senses will throw light on what 
 is meant by the Notion, as will also the reference to the 
 three dimensions of space. Connection of Notion and 
 Categories will doubtless be understood too, as likewise 
 the respective meanings and relations of Begriff and Idee. 
 Pregnant reference will have been remarked as concerns 
 Christianity. On Hegel's use, which is a constant one, 
 and a peculiar one, of the word immediate, a further 
 remark may profit. All things of the senses are imme- 
 diate to Hegel ; and the reason is that the relation of 
 object to subject is, in special sense, direct, face to face, 
 directly or immediately in contact (in touch !), as it were, 
 
HEGEL 363 
 
 without a vestige of interposition, intervention, mediation, 
 process, between. But that is not so where an act of 
 intellect is concerned ; there can be no such act without 
 process, without mediation. All in the region of thought, 
 not sense (in a way), is vermittelt. And so it is that 
 Vermittluny is a very usual word with Hegel, and a 
 word for which in its full meaning it is impossible to 
 find a correspondent other in English. Vermittlung 
 means, namely, not only mediation, but realisation as 
 well ; the latter, in fact, is the ordinary application of 
 the term, and mediation, or intermediation, as the means 
 of the result has got lost from view : to vermitteln, quite 
 generally, is to bring about. If we will but see Hegel's 
 principle, however, we shall have no difficulty in seeing 
 also what it was that determined for him his use of the 
 word. In the Ego, namely, there are three units, the sub- 
 ject I as one, the object I (or Me) as another, and the con- 
 junct I-I (or I-Me) as a third. Now, each unit by itself 
 is " abstract" but in combination " concrete " ( hence, 
 equally, the use and meaning of these terms, too). Again, 
 it is not in abstraction, but in concretion, that the 
 " I " is "I " the I is fully vermittelt into itself through 
 itself, or the I is fully vermittelt into the I through the I. 
 Hence the I is the Notion ; and the Notion is what the 
 universe is to be, an I vermittelt into an I through an I. 
 In presence of no more than this, we are in presence also 
 at least potentially of quite a mass of terms and quite a 
 mass of ideas which have at last reached their explanation. 
 
 Aufheben, Finite and Infinite, will pretty well be 
 understood now. Bei sich selbst. To say that the Ego 
 is by its own self does not quite convey the intromitting 
 closeness, the pervading, penetrating closeness, \vhich 
 Hegel sees into the conjunction of the -Ego with itself 
 when he talks of Beisichselbstseyn. 
 
 And now we shall proceed to our final extracts here, 
 
364 WHAT 7,9 THOUGHT? 
 
 not without reference to the peculiar reticence of Hegel 
 in regard to his own secret. 
 
 Of date March 22, 1812, it is simply his precise 
 principle that Hegel (Log., i. 7) describes thus (preceding 
 words in footnote) : 1 
 
 " Es kann nur die Natur des Inhalts seyn, welche sich im Wissen- 
 schaftlichen Erkennen bewegt, indeni zugleich diese eigne Reflexion 
 des Inhalts es ist, welche seine Bestimmung selbst erst setzt und 
 erzeugt. It can only be the nature of the content (the thing itself) 
 which is to be recognised by science as the principle in movement, 
 inasmuch as it is this reflection proper of the content (the thing 
 itself) which first sets and produces its distinctive character." 
 
 The proposition here is that if we are to understand 
 anything, we are to watch the thing itself in a supposed 
 movement of its own ; and no doubt it is just so we are 
 accustomed to act when we would see into the rationale 
 of a steam-engine, or of the human body, or of the human 
 mind. Here, however, this is to be applied to Logic, and, 
 so applied, it is characterised by Hegel as " a new prin- 
 ciple (Begriff) of scientific exposition." Understanding, 
 he says, attends to the separate parts, and to each merely 
 separately ; whereas Reason, in regarding only what is in 
 union, dialectically negates the understanding, and pro- 
 duces the concrete universal of the truth. " This," so the 
 words run, " the immanent evolution of the principle 
 itself, is the absolute method of knowledge, the immanent 
 soul of the thing itself : and in this self -constructing 
 method alone do I maintain it to be possible for philo- 
 sophy to become objective, demonstrated science." 
 
 Now, what Hegel is only telling of here is that when 
 
 1 " The essential point of view is, that what is concerned is a new 
 idea of scientific procedure. If philosophy is to be science, it can- 
 not turn for its method to any subordinate science (mathematics), 
 any more than it can satisfy itself with categorical assertions of 
 inner intuition, or trust itself to mere raisonnement from grounds 
 of external reflexion." 
 
HEGEL 365 
 
 you take I-subject and I-object, each separately, you 
 understand ; whereas, when you see the I and the Me, 
 both together into the single concrete I, you have made 
 use of your reason. Further, what you have before you 
 then is simply yourself G-eist : you are Geist to Geist, 
 Spirit to Spirit. Further, too, you have full light on 
 Gesetztseyn. The I, namely, sets the Me, implies it, or 
 rather ex-implies it, states it, posits it, ponates it, flings it, 
 springs it, starts it, stakes it, radiates it and this simply 
 in that the I itself is, simply in that the I states itself, 
 ponates itself. The I sets the me : that is Gesetztseyn ; 
 and what is Gesetztseyn is clear the moment you think 
 of the Me in relation to the I. Nay, the equally con- 
 stantly recurring VersoTinung is capable of being equally 
 easily domesticated to the understanding. In the case 
 of any concrete, where you have always a correlation of 
 sides, if you abstract, if you fix each side apart, you pro- 
 duce the contradictions of the understanding, das 
 Ungliickliche Bewusstseyn ; but if you restore again the 
 sides to the unity, the abstractions to the Concrete, then you 
 have brought about Versohnung. Versohnung differs very 
 widely on the various stages of the Notion ; but it always 
 means, so to speak, return of the estranged object to the 
 reconciled subject return, it may be, of the rebellious 
 Particular into the bosom of the all-accepting Universal. 
 And if we have light here on such difficulties as 
 Gesetztseyn and Versohnung, we can turn in the same 
 direction for similar light on others say at once, for 
 example, on Hegel's very peculiar use of Urtheil, which 
 is to him at once original parting and judgment why ? 
 Because he has in his eye the parting of " I " at once into 
 " I " and " Me," which is also the judging of " Me " by 
 " I." Or say, on the constantly recurrent Unity, Identity 
 of Contradictories, as well as on its companion association 
 of Mediateness and Immediateness (Vermitteltseyn and 
 
366 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Unvermitteltseyn). Ego, glaringly, the moment it is 
 thought of, is at once seen, as regards either alternative 
 in either opposition, to be but the type of both and in 
 both. " Of Being and Nothing there must be said," as 
 the Logic has it, " what has been already said of me- 
 diacy and immediacy (the former of which, as implying 
 the reference of one thing to an other, implies evidently as 
 well negation), namely, that no where, whether in heaven 
 or on earth, is there anything to be found that does not 
 contain both." But these, obviously, are much too 
 important matters to be discussed further at present 
 here. All that we would point to at present is that 
 Hegel, when, as constantly in his Introductions and Pre- 
 faces, he refers to this, that he brings to the treatment 
 of philosophy a perfectly new method, a principle of 
 form (creative and distributive), namely, that is identical 
 with the matter (created and distributed), means only the 
 Ego, as do equally also these other references to the 
 unity of contraries and the omnipresent fact that there 
 is nothing in heaven or on earth that is not at once 
 mediate and immediate. 
 
 It is precisely the same views that condition this : 
 
 "The weighty negative result in which understanding of the 
 general scientific advance finds itself, namely, that, by the way of 
 the finite notion, no junction is possible with the truth, is rather apt 
 to have the opposite result to that which directly lies in it " 
 (Encyk, i. 13). 
 
 The " finite notion " is any one moment, separately and 
 by itself, of the two that constitute the concrete Notion 
 on any stage. The " finite notions," each one by itself, 
 are but " the contradictions of the understanding." Here, 
 plainly, we are told that to get the truth we must always 
 see the objective side and the subjective side of the 
 Notion (Ego) on any of its stages, not apart, but together. 
 The " opposite result " that is meant is that said unsatis- 
 
HEGEL 367 
 
 factoriness of the finite Categories is apt to mislead to 
 neglect of the very thing that is required, comprehensive 
 and all-sided investigation of the Categories as a whole. 
 We may remind here of a citation (Phil, of Eel., 433) 
 which we have already seen (p. 333); where, in the 
 extrication of the Categories from the Notion (Ego), it is 
 said that every new step is the rise of a finite Category 
 into its infinitude, the result then heing but another of 
 the metaphysical notions of God, with proof, even in the 
 necessity of it, necessarily, also, of the existence of God. 
 And these, surely, are pregnant findings, crucially critical, 
 too ; not without a light from them in which what to 
 Hegel was Notion, Category, God all are express. 
 
 Hegel, after all that startling description (Log., i. 7) of a 
 new principle of method that is to revolutionise philo- 
 sophy ; where Understanding fixedly determines, Reason 
 dialectically negates, but positively produces, etc. etc., 
 ends partly thus : " This spiritual movement, which, in its 
 identity, gives itself its difference, and, in its difference, 
 its identity with its own self." Now, what is that ? 
 Why, this ! I, my identity, give myself my Me, my differ- 
 ence ; and in my difference I am still my identity in 
 my Me I am still I ! This " spiritual movement," he says, 
 " is the immanent movement of the Notion," and we cannot 
 well doubt it ! " This spiritual movement which, in its 
 identity, gives itself its difference, and in its difference its 
 identity," which, therefore, is the immanent movement 
 of the Notion, " is the absolute method whereby to know, 
 and at the same time the immanent soul of what is to be 
 known." That is, pretty well, a revelation of the whole ! 
 It is wonderful how often Hegel tells on himself, and 
 needs only to be taken at his word ! In the Encyklopaedie 
 (i. 112) he says this : " In fact, what is finite is just this, 
 and only this, that its existence is different from its notion. 
 But God is expressly determined as that which can only 
 
368 AVHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 be " thought as existing. This unity at once of notion and 
 existence constitutes the Notion of God." What is that 
 which is only because it is thought ? Why, Ego ! What is 
 that where its existence and its notion are not identical ? 
 Why, everything but Ego ! Did any reader, when he 
 read these words at p. 112, even, even for a moment, 
 dream that they meant just simply what they meant ? 
 And Hegel ? Has he done anything to lead ? Or, only 
 smiling grimly, has he done everything to mislead ? 
 " This unity of notion and existence constitutes the 
 Notion of God " the words that directly follow are 
 these. 
 
 " This, truly, is still but a formal definition of God, 
 which, simply for that reason, contains, in point of fact, 
 only the nature of the Notion (des Begriffes, in italics). 
 But that it, already in its quite abstract sense, includes 
 in itself existence, is easy to be seen. For the Notion, 
 however otherwise characterised, is at least the result- 
 ing through suppression of mediation the, consequently, 
 immediate reference to itself ; and being, existence, is 
 nothing else than that." These words, and the whole 
 page of them that follows, are hardly adapted to do more 
 than just shut up for a reader any the least chink of even 
 a possibility of light. The page is worth reading. But 
 we shall presently come to more matter in the same 
 connection. 
 
 So far, we see pretty well the secret of Hegel formally 
 expiscated, and it is under the burthen of that secret 
 that he writes all his Prefaces and Introductions, even 
 the earliest, as at Jena, when he joined Schelling. 
 Writing, in 1812, his Preface to the Logic, for example, 
 he looks back on twenty-five years of an entire revolu- 
 tion in philosophy, with a new and higher standpoint of 
 self-consciousness for result. To his half-dozen students 
 at Jena even, in concluding what, presumably, was then 
 
THE NEW EPOCH 369 
 
 and there (1805-6) his last course, he expresses himself 
 thus : 
 
 " A new epoch has dawned upon the world. The World- 
 Spirit has now succeeded to relieve itself of all alien 
 formations of the past, and at last to recognise its own 
 self as Absolute Spirit, and, not less, what becomes 
 objective to it to develop that out of its own self, and 
 in its own power peacefully retain it. The struggle of 
 finite Self-consciousness with the Absolute Self-conscious- 
 ness that appeared other to it, and away from it, ceases," 
 etc. (Rosen., Life of Hegel, p. 202). 
 
 Of Hegel's implicit faith in this new epoch, as in the 
 discovery that brings it, we cannot for a moment doubt. 
 He has twenty laborious volumes built upon the latter 
 (the discovery) which, too, now we see. It is the 
 Begriff, the Notion ; and the Begriff, the Notion, is no- 
 thing but the Ego. The Begriff is self-consciousness, and 
 the evolution of self -consciousness, the evolution of its 
 own nature, namely, the evolution of its own duplicity 
 that is the absolute method, that is the immanent soul 
 of the thing itself. And philosophy has become at last 
 objective, demonstrated science. That this science is 
 further characterised as " speculative " depends upon that 
 ill the Ego that its one, if a one of identity, is also a one 
 of difference. A stone is a stone, and an " I " is an " I " ; 
 but no " I " is an " I " that is not twice " I," while the 
 stone remains single. Opposition in identity, difference 
 in identity ; that is the law. 1 An eye is an eye only 
 once, but an " I " is an " I " twice ! 
 
 1 The late Professor Veitcli, in his Institutes of Logic, has a chapter 
 011 Hegel in this connection, in which much that is inapposite is 
 almost always remarked, as : " It is said in regard to limit in 
 thought, that the consciousness of limit transcends limit that limit 
 itself is destroyed. My answer to this is, that so far from conscious- 
 ness of limit destroying limit, this consciousness of limit is essential 
 to consciousness itself." Why, this is just what Hegel this very 
 
 24 
 
370 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 If Hegel's principle of method, his unity of contraries, 
 his mediateness and immediateness, his speculativeness, 
 were conditioned by the Ego, so also his freedom or free- 
 will, which is withdrawn from the other of sense into the 
 certainty of one's self, from the that of the particular into 
 the this of the universal, from the limit of partiality into 
 the il-limit of the totality. The objective notion of things 
 is the thing itself. The negative of woof to warp, or 
 of warp to woof and both are threads is the vitality 
 of the unity that is the web. Or, so placed, the 
 negative (the contention) really is the JBestimmung, the 
 species, the quality, the nature of the what that is there 
 and then concerned. The negative that the notion has 
 in itself is the dialectic root-principle. It is this 
 negative is the fount of movement and conditions the pro- 
 gress. Inner negativity is the self-acting soul, the inner 
 immanent principle of all natural and spiritual life. This 
 is what speculative is, this dialectic of opposites that will 
 negate the one the other, and yet affirm themselves, and 
 
 moment has himself said. Can any man transcend limit can any 
 man be conscious beyond limit, without being conscious of limit 1 
 And in a much wider reach, can any man be conscious without a 
 consciousness? Would not the illimitable in consciousness be 
 simply a blank without a limit-ing consciousness ? The infinite 
 itself without a finite would be null. Professor Veitch says again : 
 " The knowledge of opposites is one, but the opposites known are not 
 therefore one. These are two wholly different propositions." Why, 
 if opposites are not opposites, I should like to know where the very 
 proposition would at all be, which he thinks he explodes by the 
 simple device of repeating Hegel's own words that opposites are 
 opposites ! Only by this, that they are opposites, is it that their 
 unity is not abstract, dead, motionless, but concrete and alive. I 
 think we may depend upon it that Hegel had for his wear both 
 right shoes and left shoes, and that he knew perfectly well the one 
 from the other. Good Veitch was wonderfully poetic, the amphi- 
 theatre of the Manor was stereotyped on his brain, nevertheless, he 
 was absolutely prosaic. 
 
SPECIFIC VIRTUE 371 
 
 so both. Simple Apprehension, Judgment, Syllogism. 
 Unity, Parting (the Parting Ur-theil), Eeunity. Nature, 
 Man, God. Hegel's own expressions, for felicity of nam- 
 ing, are about the best possible. " This Begriff," he says 
 (Log., i. 68), may be regarded as the first, purest, i.e. 
 abstractest, definition of the Absolute." But what is that 
 Begriff ? It is, he says, " die Einheit des Unterschieden- 
 und des Nichtunterschieden-seyns, oder der Identitat und 
 der Mchtidentitat (the unity of the distinguishedness 
 and of the undistinguishedness, or of the identity and 
 the non-identity)." And where is it to be found, this 
 Begriff that is at once unity and disunity ? Why, the 
 Ego is that at once unity and disunity, at once subject 
 and object, at once I-Me. 
 
 It is certainly quite in order, then, that Hegel should 
 make use of that exclamation, " Dass es nichts giebt, 
 nichts im Himmel oder in der Natur oder im Geiste oder 
 wo es sey, was nicht ebenso die Unmittelbarkeit 
 enthalt, als die Vermittelung, so dass sich diese beiden 
 Bestimmungen als ungetrennt und untrennbar und jener 
 Gegensatz sich als ein Nichtiges zeigt. There is nothing 
 in heaven, or in earth, or in the Spirit, or be it wherever 
 it may, that does not equally imply both mediateness 
 and iminediateness, so that these two distinctions are 
 unseparated and unseparaMe, and their antithesis shows 
 itself as null." This duplicity may suggest itself to 
 entail a certain little difficulty of its own. " A such," 
 says Hegel (Log., i. 70), " that within itself is a one and 
 an other, implies at once a certain gone-forward-ness." 
 But just so constituted is every concrete ; no concrete, 
 consequently, can supply a beginning. For the relation 
 already existent within it is tantamount to a pre- 
 supposition of a brought-about-ness, of a process that 
 has been effected, of a beginning that is past. " It is 
 thoughtlessness" as we have it in the Encyklopacdie 
 
372 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 (i. 138), "not to see that the unity of opposites is no 
 mere purely immediate, i.e. quite unqualified and bare 
 oneness, but that it is just presupposed thereby that 
 the distinctions mediate the one the other, or that each 
 mediates the other into the truth of the term. It is 
 only an ordinary, abstract understanding takes mediacy 
 and immediacy each apart and by itself, as though fixedly 
 secure not to be mixed. So it only raises to its own self 
 the insurmountable difficulty of conceiving them united 
 at all a difficulty which exists neither in fact nor for 
 the speculative notion." 
 
 We remark in passing, that here light is thrown upon 
 that other constant crux of Hegel, the unaufgeloste 
 Widerspruch, the unresolved contradiction. Why, that 
 again is but the work of the understanding that will 
 hold apart the abstract differences of the concrete 
 identity ; whereas reason would unite them. Of course, 
 the type again is the Ego. Take the woof apart and the 
 warp apart where is the web ? 
 
 But not so much this as what concerns a beginning, 
 as a beginning is it that we have in mind at present. It 
 follows from what has been said that a bare beginning 
 cannot be begun with any concrete. There is no con- 
 crete that does not imply so much gone-forward-ness. 
 But that being so, and so much emphasis being laid on 
 this, that everything in heaven or in earth is a concrete, 
 a Vermitteltes, how is it possible to conceive the very 
 possibility of a beginning ? In ultimate generalisation ; 
 all is an amalgam at last of thought on the one side 
 and matter on the other. There is no example in the 
 universe of either the one pure or the other pure. Die 
 Einheit der Idee mit dem Seyn that is alone the 
 truth. Evidently, then, a beginning being impossible 
 with a concrete, there is no resource but to question the 
 abstract. And this is what Hegel does. 
 
HEGEL'S BEGINNINGS 373 
 
 Of his concrete he had either of his two abstract 
 sides to make choice of. Shall I begin, he could say to 
 himself, with the subject - side, the " I " ? or shall 
 I begin with the object-side, the " Me " ? In the first 
 instance he began with the latter, and he produced the 
 Phaenomenologic. Beginning with Seyn, Esse, Being, 
 Existence, he naturally turned first to the first in the 
 cognition of it the sinnliche Gewissheit, the conviction 
 of knowledge which is given us by sense. This know- 
 ledge it was his cue to develop and develop, cleanse and 
 cleanse, purify and purify, till it was the reine Wissen, 
 pure knowing, the crystalline Wesen (/). The initial 
 position hene was that of everyday consciousness, where 
 the two sides of consciousness (subject and object) were in- 
 dependently in opposition the one to the other. It is im- 
 portant to know the application here of the terms Scheinen 
 and Erscheinen, etc. Here Hegel says the Geist is as 
 erscheinend : it shines, it shows, it appears, it manifests 
 itself ; but it is not in itself, what we have is only its mani- 
 festation not itself. It shines, it shows, it appears ; but 
 as it only shines, and shows, and appears, it only also seems. 
 
 Its object, all its own pebbles in its bed, only appear 
 with the shine of the Ego on them. This is the 
 force of the German Schein. Have you a passport, have 
 you a receipt, have you a something with the shine, the 
 reflection, of authority, of attestation, and validity on it ? 
 That is what a German means, in regard to a passport, 
 a receipt, etc., when he asks you, Have you a Schein ? 
 The Phaenomenologie has to do with the Spirit, then, 
 only as it is in its Schein, and not as it is purely in 
 itself. To erscheinen, then, is very intelligibly, to make 
 itself good by shining, to come out into view, into sight, 
 to show, to appear ; but also, as what is concerned is 
 only vicarious, to seem. Geist, Spirit, as erscheinend, is 
 Geist, Spirit, referring itself as subject to another, an 
 
374 WHAT 7fl THOUGHT? 
 
 object Geist, then, as it operates on, as it is in, the 
 Erscheinung. And so the proper name of the world, of 
 what we see around us, is the Erscheinung. 
 
 The position, as we see, Spirit and Erscheinung (mani- 
 festing show), subject and object in common consciousness, 
 is one of relation. The relation, too, in a way, is that only 
 of substance and shadow. The object is but the reflection 
 of the subject, and we see the former only as the reflection, 
 only as the shine of, the latter, only as its image back. 
 
 One fancies to oneself that Emerson would like to 
 have said, The world is the reflection of the soul, or, in 
 the world, the soul sees itself in reflection. Still, it is a 
 relation that is before us ; and it is the subject and the 
 object, the I and the Me, that are in relation. They are 
 two, and they mutually refer : they are two together in 
 consciousness, and they are so there as reflected, the one 
 into the other. Mind, to generalise the position, is here 
 as it is in reflection, and, consequently, in relation. The 
 relation, too, can only become more and more complex, 
 the more and the more, between the two, the consequent 
 comparison proceeds. There is here reality and there 
 ideality, for example. So in an equilateral triangle there 
 is implicit, to call it so, the ideality of the equal angles. 
 Little is implicit in great, short in long, light in heavy, 
 cold in hot, effect in cause, father in son, etc. etc. 
 Eeferring to this, as he calls it, " absolute method " of 
 allowing the situation, by its own movement, to develop 
 itself, Hegel says (Log., i. 8) : 
 
 " In this way I have attempted to expound consciousness in the 
 Phaenomenologie des Geistes. Consciousness is der Geist, the Spirit, 
 as concrete Wissen (knowing, knowledge, cognising, cognition), so, 
 too, as caught in, committed to, externality ; but the movement- 
 form of this object rests alone, as does the development of all natural 
 and spiritual life, on the nature of the pure essentialities which 
 constitute the matter of Logic. Consciousness, as the erscheinende 
 Spirit, which in its progression frees itself from its immediacy 
 
"THE PHAENOMENOLOGIE " 375 
 
 and external concretion, attains to the pure knowing (cognition, 
 cognisingness) that gives itself for pure object said p ure essentialities 
 as they in themselves absolutely are. They are the pure thoughts of 
 Spirit thinking its Being. Their self -movement is their spiritual 
 life that whereby science constitutes itself, and of which it is the 
 exposition and the statement." 
 
 " In the Phaenomenologie des Geistes I have delineated con- 
 sciousness, in its movement from the first immediate antithesis of 
 itself and the object, on or up to the absolute knowledge. This 
 progression proceeds through all the forms of the relation of con- 
 sciousness in respect of its object, and has the Notion of Science for its 
 result. This Notion, therefore (apart from this, that it issues in the 
 Logic itself), requires no other deduction," etc. 
 
 " Absolute knowing or knowledge is the Truth of all the forms 
 of consciousness, because, as produced by said procedure, only in 
 the absolute knowledge it is that the separation of the object from 
 the certainty of itself has completely accomplished itself, and the 
 truth has become identical with this certainty, as this certainty with 
 the truth. Pure science, consequently, presupposes the elimination 
 of the antithesis of consciousness" (Log., i. 33-35). 
 
 " In this science (the Phaenomenologie} the beginning is made 
 with empirical, sensible consciousness ; and that consciousness is 
 das eigentliche unmittelbare Wissen, immediate knowing proper. 
 This idea has for result determined itself to be the Gewissheit 
 become the Wahrheit, certainty of knowledge become truth, 
 knowledge to self, which, on the one side, is not now opposed to the 
 object, but has made it inward, knows it as its self, and which, on 
 the other side , has given up the knowledge of itself as of what is . 
 opposed to the object and is only its negation, has renounced this 
 subjectivity, and is unity with its renunciation (its Entausserung 
 its renunciation being, in effect, an externalising of itself). There 
 is only pure immediacy in presence. This pure immediacy is pure 
 being (das reine Seyny (Log., i. 61 sq.). 
 
 We surely have adduced now ample evidence that the 
 Notion, the Begriff, of Hegel is the Ego, and nothing 
 but the Ego. Nevertheless, this has not been at all 
 seen ; and that it should not have been at all seen 
 the reason is that Hegel himself has done his best to 
 render any sight of it impossible. He has done his best 
 to efface his own footsteps, to cancel his vitality, to 
 
376 WHAT /tf THOUGHT? 
 
 obliterate himself. If any one will have the patience to 
 look carefully into the whole introductory section with 
 which Hegel commences his Logic, I am confident that 
 he will have little difficulty, with his eyes open, of coming 
 to discover this. The very drift of this section, every 
 foundation that is brought forward in initiation of the 
 subject, just, in fact, the very plan and purpose of the 
 writing, is towards concealment of the one special 
 principle that is alone in petto. Why, listen to this: 
 " An original beginning of philosophy can, however, not be 
 left altogether unnoticed, which in recent times has made 
 itself famous the beginning with the Ego ! " (Log.,i. 70). 
 And this is followed up by three or four pages of 
 objections which are precisely meant to shatter what we 
 have in Fichte, his beginning with the Ego. Hegel's 
 own reine Wissen shall not be the Ego oh, no, 
 something quite else ! Of this peculiar wile, that may 
 plausibly assume just to have spoken to lead, but, as we 
 see in the case of Fichte, only avails to mislead, let 
 us quote this other example from the Logic (iii. 13): 
 
 " I confine myself here to a remark which may assist the under- 
 standing of these notions, and facilitate the putting of oneself at 
 home in them. The Notion, Begriff, so far as it has progressed 
 into such an existence as is itself free, is nothing else than Ego, or 
 pure self-consciousness. I indeed have notions, that is to say, such 
 and such particular notions ; but * I,' Ego, is the pure Notion, 
 Begriff, itself, which, even as notion, has come actually to exist. If, 
 therefore, we would exemplify the special quality that distinguishes 
 the nature of the Ego, no doubt it is allowable to take for granted 
 that we can use in that regard what as familiar will be easy to be 
 conceived" [to wit, the ordinary Ego]. 
 
 But then, we are given to understand that between 
 the Ego that we know, and the Ego that he knows, 
 the Begriff, there is all the world of difference ; and then 
 there follow the usual abstruse, recondite particulars that 
 go to make up that mystical object of all objects, the 
 
HEGEL ox FTCHTE'S EGO 377 
 
 reine Wesen. " Ego is pure, self-to-self-referent Unity, that 
 is not in immediacy, however, but in abstraction, rather, 
 from all particularity and content, and withdrawn, as it 
 were, into the free play of measureless equality with itself. 
 As such, this unity is Allgemeinheit that, in negativity 
 and abstraction, is unity with itself, and implies thereby 
 all determinateness as resolved into it. Again, it is 
 equally immediate, as the self-to-self-referent negativity, 
 Einzelnheit, absolutes Bestimmtseyn, indimduelle Persbnlicli- 
 keit" etc. etc. The general misleading that is present is 
 brought to its point, perhaps, by an allusion to Kant. 
 " Kant, too, referred to the Ego. It belongs to the 
 deepest and truest insights which are to be found in 
 the Kritik of Pure Reason, that the Unity which 
 constitutes the principle of the Beg-riff is recognised as 
 the original synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity 
 of the ' / think,' or self-consciousness." 
 
 Surely all this is sufficiently strange and misleading 
 surely, again to say it, it is sufficiently strange and 
 misleading only casually and by the bye, as it were, 
 to be reminded to mention a certain "original beginning," 
 that, namely, " with the Ego," seeing that it is with the 
 Ego that he himself begins, that it is with the Ego that 
 he himself ends, and that it is with the Ego, very 
 certainly, that he himself mediates. It is as if he said : 
 I am engaged on the difficulty of a beginning as a 
 beginning, and on the various ways in which only it 
 can be realised, or at least attempted to be realised ; 
 and so, just before quitting the question, charity brings 
 me with a smile to extend to that ridiculed beginning 
 of Fichte's, the dole of a word ! l And, after all, one 
 
 1 " Ridiculed beginning " : " Man hat sich dariiber aufgehalten " ; 
 and Fichte's Preface to his Grundlage, pp. x, xi, is noted. This 
 shows that how Fichte's beginning was commonly looked at was 
 well in Hegel's mind (W. W., 15-557). 
 
378 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 would like to know in what respect the Ego of Fichte, 
 even as described by Hegel himself, is not Hegel's own. 
 
 "Ficlite has made good the defect of the Kantian philosophy, the 
 unthinking inconsequence through which the whole system fails of 
 speculative unity. It is the absolute form Fichte has taken posses- 
 sion of, the absolute personality, the absolute negativity, not the 
 singular, but the notion of the singular, and withal the notion of 
 actuality ; Fichte's philosophy, accordingly, is the completion of the 
 form within its own self. He set up the Ego as absolute principle, 
 and so that from it, as that which immediately to its own self was at 
 the same time certainty and knowledge, the whole burthen of the 
 universe must be represented as product. Nowhere does there exist 
 anything further than the Ego, and Ego exists because it exists : 
 what exists is only in the Ego and for the Ego " (Hist, of Phil., iii. 
 555-557). 
 
 We have only to look honestly into and fairly realise 
 every member of that description to wonder where the 
 want can be where the want can be, that is, if we 
 compare it with any similar exposition in his own 
 regard of Hegel's own. The reference to Kant's 
 original unity of apperception which we saw, had a 
 similar stringency of consequence ; and here is another, 
 at least more thoroughgoing, if not more stringent still. 
 Hegel (Phil, of Hist., 531) is speaking in it of free-will : 
 
 " It (free-will) has been made theoretically good in Germany by 
 the Kantian philosophy. For to it the single unity of self-con- 
 sciousness, Ego, is the irrefragable, directly independent free-will 
 and the source of all the categorising thought-terms (theoretic 
 reason), and equally, as well, the highest of all practical prescripts 
 (practical reason, as free and pure will) ; and the rationality of will 
 is just to maintain itself in pure freedom, in every particular only 
 to will it (freedom), right only for right's sake, duty only for duty's 
 sake." 
 
 That, surely, is no more than the assignment to Ego 
 of the universal role which is alone here the matter 
 of our argument, and it must have been one of the 
 things that, as said where it is, Hegel was heard last 
 to say. 
 
HEGEL ON FICHTE AND KANT 379 
 
 Further, we get sight here of another very important 
 point, this, That Hegel may be held to have given in 
 the end the name of Kantian Philosophy to the whole 
 general movement that culminated in himself. And that 
 is the truth. What Kant did, what was the node and 
 nodus of his action, was to develop the categories under 
 the unity of apperception ; and not one of the three 
 who came after him but followed his example in this 
 with this difference only, that they developed not 
 simply under that unity, but from it, substantially 
 from it. This we have seen Hegel to say of Fichte, 
 and pretty well of Schelling also, with this addition 
 only, that the latter by and by left the common stand- 
 point in chase, through Nature, of the Idea of the 
 Absolute. It is not to be denied, however, that every 
 one of the three and perhaps Hegel especially stood 
 up for his own originality, and, said originality being 
 in question, not always without injustice to Kant. 
 Fichte was provoked, as we know, to dub Kant " a 
 three-quarters head " ; Schelling can be found ( W. W., 
 v. 13, p. 14) to speak of the Kantian Criticism as 
 " by experts in philosophy, hardly known and still less 
 understood, and, in particular, as having lost all influence 
 on the great questions of life"; while Hegel, in his 
 Logic (i. 52), remarks of his frequent mention of Kant, 
 that, " to many it may appear superfluous," and, in his 
 Proofs for the Existence of G-od (p. 437), talks of the 
 Kantian Philosophy but only on the Proofs as being 
 considered " something that has been long done with, 
 and something, consequently, that is not again to be 
 named." How it is with all such cries, nevertheless, 
 one is not without ample occasion to know : periodic 
 occultation, that gives rise to them, is the law of every 
 brightest associate of the sun, be his name Plato, or 
 Aristotle, or Kant, or Hegel. But this we have to 
 
380 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 carry with us now, that, of the whole of philosophy in 
 Germany from Kant to Hegel, inclusively, the true name 
 is Kantian. 
 
 Hegel's only excuse for himself in regard to the Ego, 
 is the intimation which we read in the passage quoted 
 (p. 376) from the Logic (iii. 13). This is to the effect 
 that, by way of illustration, when " erinnert wird " 
 (reference is made) " an die Grundbestimmungen " (to 
 the basal characteristics) " welche die Natur des Ich 
 ausmachen " (which constitute the nature of the Ego), 
 then it is allowable to refer also to ("zu erinnern auch an") 
 our own so current and familiar conception " I " ; but 
 even then we must recollect the signal measures that 
 require to be taken before there can be any possibility 
 of the profane conception being apotheosed into the sacred 
 Notion \ And so, as said, there is, in this place itself, 
 evasion of any such impious confusion ; but the 
 paragraph which immediately leads to, and ushers in, 
 this doubtful and questionable suggestion at all, of 
 you and me, say ! is so strikingly in point that even duty 
 compels us to make use of it. It runs thus : 
 
 " What lias been just propounded is to be regarded as the notion 
 of the Notion. If it appear to differ from what is generally under- 
 stood by notion, explanation may be desirable of how what is here 
 notion may be found to comport itself elsewhere. For one thing, 
 there cannot be reference made to any support that founds only on 
 the authority of what is customary understanding : in the science of 
 the Notion, immanent deduction is alone the necessity. For another 
 thing, what has been here deduced as the notion must certainly be 
 recognised as identical with what has been considered such by 
 others. But it is not so easy to discover what others have said of 
 the nature of the notion. For they mostly occupy themselves with 
 no such object at all, and just suppose that every one will of himself 
 perfectly well understand when it is the notion that happens to be 
 spoken of. Lately, indeed, one might conceive oneself dispensed 
 from any trouble with the notion, the rather that even as it was 
 long tone to say every possible disparagement of imagination and 
 
HEGEL EVASIVE 381 
 
 again of memory it has been the custom in philosophy, for a 
 considerable time now, and partly still is, to heap all bad language 
 upon the notion, to traduce it it, which is what is paramount in 
 thought ! and to set up in its stead, as the highest height, as well 
 scientific as moral, das Unbegreifliche und das Nichtbegreifen (the 
 unintelligible and the non-intelligence)." 
 
 It is hardly possible to suppose that any reader will 
 require exegesis of the true meaning of all that so far 
 as the throwing of dust into the air is concerned dust, 
 too, capable of a species of defence on the part of Hegel 
 for the hiding or the justifying of himself. 
 
 It is true that Hegel does abstract and abstract, refine 
 and refine, to the production at last of what is in name 
 the reine Wissen and the reine Wesen ; but is not that 
 still the Ego ? Or divest it of the Ego, and what then 
 is it ? We have light upon this in the Introduction to 
 the Phaenomenologie. The final result of that work is 
 " pure essentiality," " pure immediacy," " das reine Seyn," 
 " the elimination of the antithesis of consciousness," of 
 " the separation of the object from the self-assurance of 
 Self," " the ultimate of thought, the absolute concern, the 
 Logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of that 
 which bears the name of things." Now this, as pure 
 essentiality, is at least objectless object, ideal objectivity, 
 so to speak, or . objective ideality, what Hegel himself 
 says he would name " if the word matter were at all 
 allowed him, die wahrhafte materie, veritable matter." 
 Now, if it be said that Spinosa's result is pure materiality, 
 while that of Hegel, on the contrary, is at least so far 
 pure ideality, one would like to know in what the one 
 differs from the other, or how the ideality of the one is 
 to be saved from the materiality of the other. 
 
 That, then, if it is the conclusion of the Phaenomcno- 
 logie, is on that understanding not quite satisfactory 
 for the book itself. And this is one reason why I object 
 to the Phaenomenologie being considered as in any way 
 
382 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 a necessary integrant of the System. No doubt Hegel 
 himself has a word to say in his Logic to the advantage 
 of his earlier work, with careful naming of its title, 
 publishers, etc. ; but what author is ever indifferent to 
 the sale of his own books ? He himself, moreover, in 
 saying (Log., i. 34) that the Phaenomenologie has "den 
 Begriff der Wissenschaft zu seinem Kesultate," adds of 
 this Begriff that " it produces itself within the Logic 
 itself." In which case, so far as the System is concerned, 
 even as a preliminary, the Phaenomenologie is evidently 
 unnecessary. No doubt it is from their own experience 
 that Erdmann and Eosenkranz, Hegelians par excellence 
 both, declare their belief in the superiority of the student 
 who issues from the Phaenomenologie ; but that does not 
 hinder the latter of them from the groan over how 
 " sehr schwer " the book is, at the same time that he 
 intimates the burden of it to have a place within the 
 System itself. And that is the truth. All that the 
 Phaenomenologie is specially good for reappears early in 
 the Philosophic des Geistes, at the same time, too, that 
 there is another abstract of it in the Propaedeutik. If 
 one considers that both the historical and philosophical 
 expansions within the volume itself await the reader in 
 the formally full and express works on the State, History, 
 Aesthetics, Eeligion, etc., I have no hesitation in asserting 
 the Phaenomenologie to be even much worse than super- 
 fluous so far as the student of the system is concerned. 
 During generations, as is the testimony of Hayrn, readers, 
 or attempting readers, of the book were only " zermartyrt," 
 martyred piecemeal. " Hegel is impenetrable, almost 
 throughout, as a mountain of adamant " : these words of 
 
 o 
 
 Professor Ferrier would be perfectly in place, for me at 
 all events, as regards the Phaenomenologie. Indeed, 
 I am used to warn all students against both of the first 
 two volumes of the works of Hegel. Absolutely, the 
 
"THE PHAENOMENOLOGIE 383 
 
 matter of both of them is to be found elsewhere in the 
 complete collection of the relative writings, and in an 
 infinitely more accessible form. Ah me, it is pitiable ! 
 There are students who, after years and years consumed 
 in these two volumes, or only in one of them, have 
 written books that even in what they reported from that 
 one were unreadable failures. It is not meant that the 
 one volume or the two volumes are never to be read ; but 
 let them be read only when, say, the three volumes of the 
 Encyclopaedic can be currently read and understood 
 everywhere at a glance. 
 
 So currently well known, as it is, that the writing of 
 Hegel, just as the writing of Hegel, is something out of 
 all measure difficult, it will not be readily credited that, 
 even in that regard, the Phaenomenologie is a signal 
 exception, and cannot, for difficulty, by any other work 
 of Hegel be surpassed. If any one, however, will but 
 take up the Propaedeutik, he will, if only capable of 
 comparing the two books, find, perhaps to his surprise, 
 that he actually can read, and actually admire in reading, 
 a veritable example of the writing of Hegel's. There is 
 some temptation, indeed, to go further here, and to 
 sketch out a plan of arranging the works of Hegel in 
 such wise that ability to read them would be best 
 attained. But for that this is not the place. 
 
 What, as regards the interest in hand, is the example 
 of Hegel himself ? 
 
 If ever he expected to have produced, as is not an 
 uncommon opinion, a complete statement of philosophy 
 in the Phaenomenologie, he must have been led to 
 think, probably by the particulars of its reception, that 
 he had failed. Considering the embarrassed circum- 
 stances in which he remained for some considerable time 
 after the Jena catastrophe, it is evident that it could 
 not have been long before he turned to another 
 
384 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and a very different statement of himself in his 
 Logic. 
 
 We had already (pp. 371 sqq.) occasion to see how it 
 was situated with the question of a beginning, That a 
 beginning, for instance, was impossible with a concrete, 
 and that there was no resource, consequently, but to turn 
 to the abstract. That Hegel did this, we saw also ; for 
 he produced the Phacnomenologie, and to that the pre- 
 miss was that in the concrete Ego of the ' I ' and the 
 ' Me,' it was the latter he selected to begin with. 
 
 If ever he had any hope that by so doing he was 
 securing for himself a chance at once of the praise of 
 originality and of the prestige of success : success in that 
 he followed the method of the day, which was induction 
 and generalisation ; originality in that his method was 
 the a posteriori, while that of his predecessors, all three 
 of them, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, had, very purely and 
 perfectly, been the a priori solely, if ever, I say, he 
 had nourished the hope of any such chance, he must 
 have been forced by the result to confess to himself that 
 he had been altogether mistaken. 
 
 So he began now from the other strand, the abstract 
 " I " : he returned to the a priori method of his prede- 
 cessors, and would deduce, as they the heart of the 
 enterprise the categories from the Ego. This was the 
 Logic. 
 
 Of the reine Wissen, or the reine Wesen, we have 
 asked, Is not that still the Ego ? And truly, that still 
 is the Ego ; but in the Phaenomenologie the Geist is 
 only the vehicle and the interest in and for which the 
 " pure essentialities," which are the reine Wissen and the 
 reine Wesen, are produced. They have a movement of 
 their own, these essentialities (Log., i. 8) : " Ihre selbst- 
 bewegung ist ihr geistiges Leben (their self-movement is 
 their spiritual life), and is that through which Wissen- 
 
ROSENKRANZ, ETC. 385 
 
 schaft, science, constitutes itself, and of which (life) it is 
 the expression." But, certainly, at the same time, it is 
 only true and "is not that still the Ego !" that these 
 essentialities " are the pure thoughts der sein Wesen 
 denkende Geist (Spirit thinking its own inner being)." 
 But then there is a directness in the Logic ; the cate- 
 gories are to be supposed to be developed straight from 
 the Ego. "Pure science, consequently (Log., i. 35), pre- 
 supposes enfranchisement from the antithesis of con- 
 sciousness. It contains den Gedanken (the Thought), in 
 so far as it is equally the thing itself, or the thing itself 
 in so far as it is equally the pure Thought. As science, 
 the truth is the pure self-developing self-consciousness, 
 and has the form of Self, that what in absolute truth is, is 
 conscious Notion, and that the Notion as such is what in 
 absolute truth is. ... Logic, accordingly, is to be under- 
 stood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of the 
 pure Thought. This realm is the truth as, without veil, 
 it in and for itself is. And so it can be said that this 
 matter of content is die Darstellung Gottes (the expres- 
 sion of God) as he is in his eternal essence before the 
 creation of nature or a single finite Spirit." 
 
 Eosenkranz is known as " the Hegelianer par excel- 
 lence " ; and I fancy that, if I were to assert that 
 Erdmann had at least the next claim to the same, or no 
 less a distinction, no one would dispute it with me. 
 Now, Kosenkranz is unwilling to take quite literally, and 
 feels it necessary to make a modifying explanation of, 
 this, so far as words go, express deification of Logic : he 
 even calls it figurative, as I remark elsewhere (Secret of 
 Hegel, p. 52). Nor is it different with the other of the 
 Arcadian or Hegelian twain. Erdmann, in the Preface 
 to the second edition of his Logic, decides, in regard to 
 Hegel's expression in the case, that it is only " meta- 
 phorical, and not even very happily chosen." The con- 
 2 5 
 
386 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 sensus of two such authorities is pretty well definitive ; 
 but still I, for my part, feel compelled, as it were, by the 
 directness of the language, to give more heed to a literal 
 interpretation than either of them. Of course, Logic as 
 Logic is not Ego as Ego ; but Logic is in vital relation- 
 ship with Ego : and Ego as Ego, the Absolute Ego, is 
 the everlasting God. I think the whole of this Note on 
 Hegel can only tend to recommend to the reader a some- 
 what more literal meaning of what is in question than 
 either the one or the other of them, Kosenkranz or 
 Erdrnann, could allow 7 his master. After all the many 
 extracts which we have seen from the works of Hegel 
 in accentuation as indeed we may say of the very 
 absoluteness of the Ego, it is impossible for us to doubt 
 of his belief, not only in Logic as its vital development, 
 its essential explication and expression, but in other 
 capital interests and functions as belonging to it as well. 
 In his criticism of Ohlert's Idealrealism (xvii. 242), 
 for example, after having quoted this author to remark 
 of Fichte's proposition, Ego sets itself : " And so it 
 knows that it is Ego of itself it knows nothing a dead, 
 wholly fruitless knowledge, this, that Ego knows only of 
 itself that it exists" he (Hegel) adds : " If the Herr Ver- 
 fasser (author) had reflected that this abstract cognition 
 of the Ego of itself, this wholly abstract existence of the 
 cognition into which the Ego can set itself, constitutes 
 the basis and foundation of personality and free-will, and 
 of all that thereon depends, as of the, immortality of the 
 soul, then this proposition would certainly not have con- 
 tinued to appear to him only dead and fruitless." And 
 surely there is here on Hegel's part what cannot be 
 called inexplicit ! As surely this (from the Phil, of Eel., 
 ii. 191) is even categorically or peremptorily explicit 
 
 " God is this : to distinguish Himself from Himself, to 
 be for Himself object, but, in this difference, to be absolutely 
 
WHAT WAS TO HEGEL THOUGHT AS THOUGHT? 387 
 
 identical with Himself Spirit (der Geist)." And what is 
 that but Ego ? 
 
 It is still a question, however, in what manner Hegel 
 conceived thought to belong to the Ego. That he identi- 
 fied Ego and thought there cannot be a doubt of that. 
 We have seen expressions to that effect already. In 
 the Propacdeutik (p. 93) we have this: " Ich heisst 
 iiberhaupt Denken Ego is Thought. If I say, I think, 
 then that is some thing identical Ego is always the 
 simple identity with itself, and that is thought. So far 
 as an object is thought, it gets the form of thought ; it 
 is made gleich (equal, like), to the Ego ; that is, it is 
 thought." Still, thought takes to Hegel generally, even 
 as with any of us, the form of a function. I hold that 
 Hegel cannot be affirmed to have either seen or said that 
 the ratio implied in, or constitutive of, the triplicity of 
 the Ego, was, just as such, and at once, thought. We 
 say thought, thought, thinking, thinking, and we think 
 only of a peculiar operation, as to add or subtract, to 
 count, might be it is an act and an action, really just 
 as much as to cut with a knife is. To see or say that the 
 triple strand of the Ego, just as the triple strand it is 
 just that the ratio of that triplicity just that that 
 triplicity, is thought : it will be difficult to make out 
 that Hegel ever explicitly came to that. And yet I 
 have marked an x 2 all through my copy of his works 
 wherever I have seen a meaning that seemed relatively 
 to approach to this. Eosenkranz, whom by Christmas 
 1864 we saw, in the Secret of Hegel, to talk of "the 
 obscurities and incongruities which the Hegelian Logic 
 has generated through its doctrine of the notion, has certainly 
 come to a much better relative consciousness when in 
 1870 he edits and writes Elucidations to v. Kirch - 
 mann's re-issue of Hegel's Encyldopaedie. Nevertheless, 
 for the greater part of his life, and in his more important 
 
388 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 works, he may be said to have always regarded to use 
 his own words in his Preface to the Propaedeutik at 
 p. xv thinking or a notion " als einen Act des Geistes." 
 In short, a notion, just as a conception, may be considered 
 to have been generally understood as that mental unity 
 in which the perceptive many of an object are ideally 
 held. That, doubtless, was the general understanding of 
 Kant ; and that is precisely the understanding of the 
 term which Hegel (Log., iii. 24) specially describes as 
 Kant's. Nay, when (Log., i. 21) Hegel himself talks of 
 the Begriff itself as " only object, product, and content of 
 thought," not only a notion, but the notion, he has come 
 to say no more than what Kant and everybody else 
 thought in the case of it. But if the Begriff is only 
 product of thought as a function des Geistes, a function 
 of the mind, then it is not different with the Ego itself. 
 It, too, is no more than a product of thought as a function 
 of mind. Indeed, here is a passage (Log., i. 53) where 
 Hegel seems actually to say so : 
 
 " If, as regards the determination of an object by the Ego, certain 
 Kantians have expressed themselves in this way, that the objectivis- 
 ing of the Ego is to be considered as an original and necessary act 
 of consciousness, but so that in this original act there is not yet the 
 idea of the Ego itself which were a consciousness of said conscious- 
 ness, or just an objectivising of said consciousness then this objec- 
 tivising act, in its freedom from the antithesis of consciousness, is, 
 being more closely defined, that which may be taken for thought as 
 such. This act, however, is not any longer to be named conscious- 
 ness ; consciousness implies the antithesis of the Ego and its object, 
 which antithesis is not existent in said original act." 
 
 Here, plainly, Hegel conceives the possibility of an 
 act of thought in which there were no presence of the 
 Ego to be got. When, therefore, we find him in another 
 work (Hist, of Phil, iii. 436), saying, " An die Stelle des 
 Denkens sehen wir den Begriff eintreten (in place of 
 thought we see the Notion enter)," we may hold that so 
 
THOUGHT THE RATIO 389 
 
 far we have another proof of a certain generalness and 
 laxity on the part of Hegel in the way in which he 
 regarded the relation between the Ego as Ego and 
 Thought as Thought. We can hardly suppose, with all 
 the circumstances before us, any reality of perception, that 
 that wonderful thing which we call thought was due to, 
 and constituted by, the ratio of " I-Me " in the single 
 self-consciousness, " I." Of course this may surprise. 
 Any thing more frail, and flitting, and unsubstantial than 
 this " I " of any one of us is not possible to be conceived, 
 and yet it, and it alone, shall be what it all comes to 
 it, and it alone, shall be the ultimate of the universe ! 
 It, and it alone, as it is the last of induction, shall be the 
 first of deduction \ And what, then, is God ? 
 
 On that head, shall it be said that we have already 
 seen enough to give, not less, but more, definiteness to the 
 idea of God ? God shall be the Absolute I / Am That I 
 Am and all the rest His ! But more of this elsewhere. 
 
 Absolutely, quite generally, why should this absolute 
 soap-bubble of a universe be an " I," or why should an 
 " I " be the first of it, and, all through, the principle 
 and secret of it ? Why, too, nay how, should an " I " 
 " constitute the wonderful thing we name Thought " ? 
 
 Has any one ever thought of what it is to be deter- 
 minate ? That there should be a determinate is the very 
 condition that there be. And now there cannot be a 
 determinate unless what shall be such as is at once affir- 
 mative and negative. Now, that is precisely what deter- 
 mination, Bestimmung, is. It is the expansion, the body, 
 so to speak, between affirmation and negation, the web 
 between the opposing warp and woof. That is the 
 source of, that is what is the constant Bestimmung of 
 Hegel. It, too, is the determinateness that lies in the 
 negation of the " I " to the " Me," and of the " Me " to 
 the " I," in the single " I." 
 
390 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 It is so, then, we may see that the principle of deter- 
 mination lies in the " I-Me," as also this, that it is in the 
 affirmative-negative determination of the " I-Me " that 
 we have the principle of thought. And now the last 
 question of all Why is it that there is ? That is just 
 the one dvaytcr} : existence as existence must be ! If 
 you explain the existence of the world by God, how do 
 you explain Him ? 
 
 As regards Hegel himself, we may ask finally : Why 
 did he conceal himself why did he refuse to speak ? 
 One reason may have been, that he grudged to show him- 
 self conditioned, like the rest, and in the same way as 
 the rest. Another reason may have lain in his own 
 success, why interfere with it ? he may have thought. 
 A third motive may have been a doubt of the result, 
 were all revealed : it was quite possible that this Ego of 
 his might prove anything but satisfactory, and be even 
 laughed at. This last suggestion, however, cannot for a 
 moment be entertained, in face of the fact that convic- 
 tion in the principle is the vitality in every page. 
 
 That, then, is the state of the case, and the whole of 
 that vast movement called German Philosophy from 
 Kant, through Fichte and Schelling, to Hegel is this. 
 There was but one movement, and every one of the four 
 accepted it literally, accepted it, and knew no other. 
 This movement is to be called Kantian, and Kantian 
 alone ; for it was Kant began it, and throughout its 
 whole course the one, simple, and single pivot of it was 
 expressly and exclusively Kant's. That pivot was this : 
 The synthesis of cause and effect has for the principle of 
 it, apodictic necessity. Apodictic necessity is no possible 
 quality of a posteriori matter. That virtue, therefore, 
 even when ti posteriori present, must be a priori come to. 
 Causal necessity, which cannot have its source in sen- 
 sation, must have it in intellection. It is a category. 
 
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY WHAT? 391 
 
 There is a whole system of categories ; and their single 
 originating point is primary apperception, the unity of 
 self-consciousness. This is, at least virtually, Kant ; it 
 is explicitly Fichte ; it is, for long (in his Fichtian era, 
 to wit), no less explicitly, Schelling ; l and, as we know 
 now, it is absolutely Hegel. From first to last not one 
 of the four but substantially developed with whatever 
 further consequence the many of the categories from 
 the unity of self - consciousness. That is German 
 Philosophy, and the whole of German Philosophy. And 
 so we are not left in any difficulty as to the order of 
 sequence in the relative operations. Hume stated his 
 problem so that Kant was driven to the a priori. 
 Kant, in turn, with his Pure Apperception and his artige 
 Betrachtungeri ueber diese Tafel der Categorien, drove 
 Fichte to his Ego and his Dialectic. Fichte, again, with 
 his one-sidedness that developed Nature from the Ego, 
 drove Schelling, who had otherwise absorbed him, to the 
 natural vice versd of a development of the latter from the 
 former. Hegel completed all, as the student of all, by 
 converting Ego, and the Dialectic of the Ego, into the 
 Begriff and the Dialectic of the Begriff. 
 
 But what I should like to add here is a most 
 interesting point : how and where Hegel himself first 
 caught sight of this Notion or Begriff! 
 
 Well, I have to confess that I am disposed to find the 
 very first initiative and source of what, as regards 
 principle and dialectic, is most vital and essential in 
 Hegel, I am disposed, I say, to find that already 
 implicitly within view as early as certain of the very 
 earliest philosophical words of Schelling. 
 
 1 We have seen tliat Hegel himself notes Schilling's deviation. 
 We, too, may note his apparent abandonment even of the Natur- 
 philosophie (after Hegel's in the EncyUopaedie !), and his final 
 deviation to his second, so-called positive philosophy. 
 
392 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Now, such words a letter apart, as we shall see 
 presently - - can only refer to Schelling's very first 
 philosophical pamphlet, Of the Possibility of a General 
 Form of Philosophy ; and we may take them to concern 
 a philosophy in which the Matter would determine the 
 Form, and, equally, the Form the Matter, in that the 
 very Ground of this should be a Principle in the human 
 mind itself. 
 
 Of course this proposition is not Schelling's, but 
 Fichte's. As much as that is not difficult to find. It 
 occurs again and again in Fichte's earliest writings, 
 his Recension of Aenesidemus, his Ueber den Begriff der 
 Wissenschaftslehre, etc. In the latter (W. W., i. 49) 
 there is expressly mentioned the necessity of the single 
 " G-rundsatz," as also the necessity that " the Matter 
 should determine the Form and, reciprocally, the Form 
 the Matter: this Form can only suit that Matter, and 
 this Matter only that Form." Nay, in a general 
 reference here, Fichte himself puts the special stone of 
 foundation further back still back even to the " Satz 
 des Bewusstseyns," which is the property of Eeinhold. 
 "After Kant," says Fichte (i. 20), "Eeinhold has done 
 himself the immortal merit to demonstrate that entire 
 philosophy must be founded on a single Grundsatz." 
 
 On that showing, evidently, it would seem, so far as 
 the special words referred to go, more correct to assign 
 any question that concerns a suggestion to Hegel rather 
 to Fichte than to Schelling, who was only a borrower. 
 It so happens, however, that when, from Tubingen on 
 the 4th of February 1795, Schelling's words were sent 
 to him, Hegel knew referentially only his Kant. In his 
 first letter to Schelling he can, indeed, name Keinhold 
 and Fichte, and in his second, January 1795, he can 
 speak, and speak well, of Fichte's Kritik der Offen- 
 barung, as well as tell of Holderlin writing him from 
 
HEGEL KNOWS ONLY KANT 393 
 
 Jena of Fichte as " a Titan who fights for humanity, and 
 whose arena will certainly not remain within the walls 
 of the Auditorium " ; but, for the rest, he reports him- 
 self as only situated thus : 
 
 " Since some time I have taken up again the study of the Kantian 
 philosophy, in order to learn to apply its important results to many 
 an idea still current with us, and work up the latter in accordance 
 with the former. With the more recent strivings to penetrate into 
 deeper deeps, I am as little acquainted still as I am with those of 
 Reinhold, for these speculations only seem to me of more conse- 
 quence for theoretical reason, than of greater applicability to more 
 general, useful notions. So it is that I do not so well know these 
 attempts in their precise aim ; I only uncertainly guess at it." 
 
 Schelling dates his pamphlet concerned, " September 
 9, 1794," and it is only in said letter of January 1795 
 that Hegel regrets to Schelling that he (Schelling) has 
 not communicated it to him (Hegel) ; while, again, it is 
 only in his letter from Tubingen, of Feb. 4, 1795, his 
 second in the correspondence, that Schelling writes : " I 
 send thee the desired sheets, and beg a strict judgment 
 thereon." That letter and that pamphlet, then, were 
 the first intimations to Hegel of that whole loud, and 
 long, and changeful sequel to Kant which, in rapid 
 alternation, rang with the names of Jacobi, Reinhold, 
 Schulze, Maimon, Beck, Fichte, Schelling, al. Here, 
 then, also, was it that Hegel got his first word of the 
 whole Fichtian element ; and it was from now on that 
 he developed himself in succession to Kant (all these 
 others, supposably, lying suggestively before him) 
 gradually, at least, and from time to time as the event 
 pretty well proved. 
 
 Just a word on this development before I return to 
 what I had specially in mind, not that Hegel himself, 
 indeed, allows us, in this reference, even, a word ! 
 
 Hegel, then, we are to understand, gets his first hint 
 of the Fichtian afterpiece to Kant, to call it so, only in 
 
394 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 and through letter and pamphlet of Schelling's early in 
 February 1795. 
 
 Let Hegel be always as reticent as he may, and 
 conceal what he may, he is on this occasion (April 
 1795) even gushing in his thanks and almost flattery to 
 Schelling, in return. Having given one excuse for the 
 retardation of his answer, he continues, for example, 
 thus : 
 
 " But to answer sooner I was still more hindered by the wish to 
 write thee an adequate judgment on the writing which I thank 
 thee very much for sending me so to show thee at least that I had 
 quite caught thy ideas. But to a thorough study of it I had not 
 time. Only, so far as I have understood the main ideas, I see in it 
 a completion of science, which will yield us the most fruitful results. 
 I see in it the work of a mind, of whose friendship I may well be 
 proud, who to the mighty revolution of the system of ideas through- 
 out Germany will add his own great contribution. To call to thee 
 to carry out thy system in full would be an insult : the faculty 
 that has seized such an object has no need of that." 
 
 This, which concerns the first pamphlet, is no less 
 flatteringly followed by what concerns the second (sent 
 July 21, 1795):- 
 
 " The gifts thou hast sent me have, with thy letter, afforded me 
 the liveliest pleasure and yielded me the richest enjoyment, and I 
 am exceedingly obliged to thee therefor. It is impossible for me to 
 write thee all that I felt and thought thereby. . . . What floated dark 
 and undeveloped before me, thy writing has cleared up most per- 
 spicuously and most satisfactorily. Thanks to thee, therefore, for 
 myself; and every one who has at heart the welfare of the sciences and 
 the good of the world, will, if not just yet, still in time, thank thee. 
 . . . The troubled outlook for philosophy which thou findest in thy 
 letter has filled me with melancholy. As for the consequences 
 which misunderstanding of thy teaching may have for thee, thou art 
 above them. . . . Thy system will have the fate of the systems of all 
 those men whose spirit has outgone the beliefs and prejudices of 
 their times. ... As was said to me, thou art only too far ahead for 
 this century in the next, it may be, thy ideas will be in place. . . . 
 Kemarks on thy writing, thou canst not expect from me I am only 
 an apprentice. . . . Before all, for the sake of thy friends, spare thy 
 
HEGEL TO SCHELLING 395 
 
 liealth. Be not too greedy with the time that thou hast for 
 recreation." 
 
 He who knows that Schelling's two pamphlets in 
 allusion are, on the whole, to be regarded but as simply 
 repetitions from Fichte, will be astonished that such 
 extravagance of praise should have been heaped on them 
 by such a man as Hegel ; but, than such praise to Schel- 
 ling, there cannot be a more glaring proof of Hegel's then 
 ignorance of Fichte, as of all in the general relation here 
 that Fichte stands for. We see, however, the enormous 
 start that has been given to Hegel by these revelations of 
 Fichte and the rest in the pamphlets of Schelling; and 
 it is not difficult to realise to ourselves how, from this 
 start in 1795, Hegel continued to develop himself till, in 
 his early appearances of 1801 at Jena, he seems pretty 
 well to have reached his own. 1 
 
 In his acknowledgment of the effect on him of Schel- 
 ling's first pamphlet, he refers to Fichte as but suggested 
 to him there : " In the study of the postulates of 
 Practical Eeason I had already had dawnings of what 
 thou distinctly settest out in thy last letter, of what I 
 found in thy essay, and of what the Wissenschafts- 
 lehre of Fichte will fully disclose to me." In his next 
 letter to Schelling he notes it twice over, that he is 
 engaged in the attempt to study the Grundlage of Fichte. 
 
 Evidently, the impulse to put himself at home with 
 what we may call the Kantian sequel, on from Keinhold 
 to Fichte and further, comes to him from Schelling. 
 
 1 Coming back here, I find I have not said half enough of the 
 effect which the pamphlets and letters of Schelling must have had 
 on Hegel. Hegel knows Kant he knows nothing of Reinhold, 
 nothing of Aenesidemus, nothing of Maimon, nothing of Fichte 
 and here suddenly he is told of all that, here suddenly he sees the 
 Absolute opened to his astonished eyes by what to him is the thril- 
 lingly original panorama, cosmorama, of his friend ; no wonder he 
 gushed ! I say, it made him ! 
 
396 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Nay, Hegel must have derived his whole first knowledge 
 of that sequel exclusively, we may almost say from 
 these two first pamphlets of Schelling. We see their 
 effect upon him that he seems suddenly and all at once, 
 as I say, to have had his eyes opened, as it were, to a new, 
 and a startlingly new, turn of the Camera. 
 
 It does not follow, however, that this new and start- 
 lingly new removes for him Kant. We have it from 
 Eosenkranz that he had repeatedly occupied himself in 
 Switzerland with the Kritik of Practical Reason. When 
 Kant, again, in 1797, published his Rechtslehre and Tug- 
 endlehre, Hegel subjected both works, along with the 
 Metapliysic der Sitten, to a rigorous study. Behind all 
 that is new, then, we have to bear in mind, with a Hegel- 
 ianly profound study of religion and politics, a no less 
 Hegelianly exhaustive study of the philosophy that 
 preceded it. That is, under whatever may be new, and 
 startlingly new, there is still in Hegel a Hegelianly 
 assimilated content of Kant. 
 
 The new, then, came to Hegel in his solitary Patmos 
 at Berne, first of all, and altogether, from the two 
 Fichtian pamphlets of Schelling. No wonder that he 
 was struck, and no wonder that he received them with 
 such homage of words so lavish and so gratifying to 
 personal vanity that till the shock came they remained 
 determinative of Hegel to the mind of Schelling. No 
 doubt, in the pamphlets themselves, there was much, as 
 the Grundsatz of Identical Form and Matter, that must 
 and did influence Hegel ; but it was in the accompanying 
 letter of Schelling that I seem to see words which, as 
 there and then, and so placed, are infinitely more im- 
 portant than any words in the pamphlets themselves, and 
 constitute, perhaps, the fruitful root and the foundation, 
 really, of all that Hegel afterwards did. What par- 
 ticular words I mean are (Schelling's Life, i. 76) these : 
 
SCHELLING TO HEGEL 397 
 
 " And now an answer to thy question, if I believe that we do not, 
 with the moral argument [Kant's is meant], attain to a personal 
 God ? I confess, the question has surprised me ; I should not, from 
 an intimate of Lessing's, have expected it but, no doubt, thou hast 
 put it only to learn, whether it is with me a quite decided one : with 
 thee, very certainly, it is long ago decided. For us, too, the ortho- 
 dox conceptions of God no longer exist. My answer is : We do go 
 still further than a personal God. I have become a Spinosist 
 meanwhile. Do not be surprised. I will tell thee, how? To 
 Spinosa, the world (the Object, as in express opposition to the 
 Subject) was All : to me it is the Ego. The special difference 
 between critical and dogmatical philosophy seems to me to lie in 
 this that the former begins with the absolute (not yet by any 
 object conditioned) Ego, the latter with the absolute Objector Non- 
 Ego. The one, in its ultimate consequence, leads to the system of 
 Spinosa, the other to that of Kant. From the Unconditioned, philo- 
 sophy must start. So the only question is, Where does this 
 unconditioned lie in the Ego, or in the Non-Ego ? If this question 
 is decided, then All is decided. To me the highest principle of all 
 philosophy is the pure, absolute Ego, that is, Ego so far as it is mere 
 Ego, unconditioned as yet by any object, but of itself existent /aci. 
 The alpha and omega of all philosophy is [in such sense] freedom 
 [self-action]. The absolute Ego embraces an absolute sphere of 
 absolute being. In this sphere there form finite spheres, which arise 
 through Limitation of the absolute sphere by an object (spheres of 
 the finite, theoretical philosophy). In these is mere coniditioned- 
 ness, and the Unconditioned leads to contradictions. But we are 
 bound to break through these conditions ; that is, we are bound to 
 come out from the finite sphere and into the infinite one practical 
 philosophy. This, then, demands extinction of the Finite, and 
 thereby leads us into the supersensible world. (What was impos- 
 sible to theoretical reason, as precluded by the object, is realised by 
 practical reason.) But in this latter we can find nothing but our 
 absolute Ego, for only it has described the infinite sphere. There 
 is no supersensible world for us but that of the absolute Ego. God 
 is nothing else than the absolute Ego, the Ego in so far as it has 
 theoretically abolished all : that is, in theoretical philosophy, this 
 Ego is = 0. Personality comes through unity of consciousness. 
 But consciousness is impossible without an object, and for God, that 
 is, for the absolute Ego, object at all there is none, for this Ego 
 would cease thereby to be absolute. Consequently, there is not a 
 personal God, and our highest task is destruction of our personality, 
 
398 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 entrance into the sphere of absolute being, which, however, in 
 eternity, is not possible hence only practical approach to the 
 absolute, and hence Immortality. I must stop. Lebe wohl. 
 Answer soon Thy Schelling." 
 
 Of course, in a way, there is no more here than what 
 we are accustomed to everywhere in Fichte. Still, the 
 where, and the when, and the by whom it is said, must be 
 allowed to give to it a most impressive peculiarity for the 
 to whom it is said. And there is more than that. The 
 what is said has in itself a most peculiar character. It 
 is Fichte yes ! but it is an altogether concentrated 
 Fichte. It is a Fichte, moreover, that is spoken out in 
 the first familiar expressions that come naturally to the 
 lips. It is the short outside hint in a word of all that 
 has been going so long on inside. If ever there were 
 utterances that could bring the Ego home to Hegel, these 
 were they. It is not necessary to suppose either that all 
 that took place at once. It was only after having come 
 to a full knowledge of Fichte in the usual way that they 
 could take on meaning for Hegel. To him, only knowing 
 Kant, they would prove unintelligible at first. But they 
 were not lost : they exist now ; and so they must have 
 remained with Hegel always. Let us figure him as read- 
 ing them from day to day, or from week to week, or from 
 month to month, or from year to year, and so acquiring 
 from them, even as he read, ever new and newer light. 
 A comment will perhaps support this. 
 
 And first, before the Ego itself is come to, of Schel- 
 ling's surprise at a question of Hegel's. Now to thy 
 question, says Schelling, whether we get with the moral 
 argument to a personal God. I confess, he continues, 
 that the question has surprised me ; I should never have 
 expected it on the part of an intimate of Lessing's, but, I 
 suppose, thou art only trying me as to whether I ha've 
 yet come to be decided on a point on which, no doubt, 
 
HEGEL'S STUDIES 399 
 
 tliou hast long been decided ; so my answer is at once 
 this : We do not get so far as a personal God : we, too, 
 are beyond the orthodox ideas of God. 
 
 To examine Hegel's letter, however, is not to find one- 
 self precisely in Schelling's state of surprise. Neither the 
 letter itself nor the circumstances in which it was written 
 will at all warrant any such feeling. Hegel puts his 
 question so, cursorily as it were, at the very end of his 
 letter. The words that immediately precede the question 
 are : " May the Kingdom of God come, and our hands not 
 lie idle on our lap." Those, again, that immediately 
 follow run thus : " Lebe wohl ! May reason and free-will 
 remain our watchword our rallying-point the invisible 
 Church." In the body of the letter, too, he had already 
 said : " Had I time, I would seek more closely to determine 
 it, how far we, after establishment of moral belief, might 
 allowably use regressively the so legitimated idea of God, 
 e.g., in demonstration of the relation of design, etc., and 
 so, in full assurance, carry it over with us from ethico- to 
 physico-theology, finally now to dispose and determine in 
 accordance with it there." 
 
 With that peitsclien passage 1 before him, we can scarcely 
 blame Schelling if nothing led him to divine another 
 reach in Hegel, however cursorily and however correla- 
 tively his question was put. Nor, situated so as to the 
 letter itself, was he any way better situated as to the 
 circumstances in which Hegel's letter was written: he 
 knew, and could know, nothing at all about them. There 
 was no biographer's information for him, as there is 
 abundantly for us. 
 
 Eosenkranz, namely, spares no detail in his communi- 
 cation of Hegel's daily studies at the time. We have, 
 for example, no less than five-and-twenty pages named 
 
 1 Where (Schelling's Life, i. p. 67) Hegel would have certain 
 theologians " flogged," See here also at p. 222, 
 
400 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 " Fragments of Theological Studies " in the Appendix to his 
 Life of Hegel, whilst in the text these Fragments receive 
 actually fifteen pages of comment. Now, if we say that 
 the titles of these Fragments run thus: " 1. The History 
 of the Jews ; 2. Fate and its Reconcilement ; 3. Love 
 and Shame ; 4. Son of God and Son of Man ; 5. The 
 Last Supper ; 6. Miracle ; 7. Baptism," will it not 
 occur to the most of us to say to ourselves, Surely this 
 is a somewhat reflective Aufgeklarter ? The person of 
 Christ would seem to have entered into the very inmost 
 of the thought of Hegel. It is in that reference that he 
 recalls a saying of Plato's this, namely, " That were 
 Virtue ever to appear personally, all men would of simple 
 necessity love it." So Hegel is not contented with him- 
 self till he has written for himself a whole life of Christ : 
 "In the end, from 9th May to 24th July 1795, he 
 worked out, nineteen sheets long, a Life of Jesus, which is 
 still entire, and in which a multitude of previous efforts 
 were at last united." Hegel, as we learn here, saw the 
 absolute idea of love in Christ as the " God-Man." 
 What for Hegel was proper and peculiar in the fate of 
 Christ was " his elevation above all fate, the sin of sin- 
 lessness." " The group of ideas," w r e hear, " guilt and 
 penalty, law and destiny, sin and the forgiveness of sin, 
 occupied him on all sides most earnestly." " He could 
 not escape the problem, attainment of unity of thought in 
 both reason and faith at once : it is the necessity of mind 
 to suffer no dualism between its religion and its philo- 
 sophy the individual must have the assurance of being 
 reconciled with God." 
 
 No doubt there is, in a certain sense, Aufklarung in 
 all that ; but it is an Aufklarung that would find a 
 positive, and is already w T eary and sick of the negative. 
 It is not the Aufklarung of a Thomas Buckle or a Thomas 
 Paine : not the Aufklarung No. 1 , but the Aufklarung 
 
HEGEL AND THE EGO 401 
 
 No. 2. Even of the student Hegel at twenty-three, 
 Rosenkranz chronicles it, that " he carefully studied the 
 New Testament," but that the " Eomantik of Orthodoxy, 
 in its dead literality, as little satisfied him as the moral 
 narrow-mindedness of the Aufkliirmig." That narrow- 
 mindedness alone is most admirably significant of the 
 whole general position of the Aufklarung even as we 
 have it still. No starched white neckcloth signalises a 
 smaller man than ah well, let the reader say ! 
 
 Schelling cries : " Oh, these moral Kantians ; they pull 
 the string, and the deus ex mackina jumps up, that sits 
 aloft in the sky ! " Hegel asks quietly : " Do you be- 
 lieve, then, that we do not go so far ? " And Schelling 
 answers : " I am surprised at this, and would never have 
 expected it of an intimate of Lessing's." When, how- 
 ever, we know what the Moral Argument was at that 
 very moment to the student of Kant, it is impossible for 
 us to sympathise with surprise at his question, even if, 
 at the same time, he was an intimate as well of the eye- 
 opened but thinking, and in every way kindred, Lessing. 
 
 A main point in this present writing has been this, 
 that the Ego is the Absolute, the Ego is the Uncondi- 
 tioned, and its own internality is the dialectic to which 
 all thought is due, and its own internality, by conse- 
 quence, not less, is the spring to which creation itself is 
 due. People will hold up their hands at this people 
 will be astonished that any man of common sense, Hegel 
 or other, should have been misled into such extravagance 
 should have been so rash, misguided, and imprudent 
 as to have staked himself and his whole reputation in 
 the future himself, and with himself Philosophy on 
 such a venture on anything so forced and far-fetched, 
 on anything so inconceivable and incredible, on anything 
 so debile and out of all proportion ! 
 
 And yet how the man is spoken of 1 It is on his 
 26 
 
402 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 understanding expressly on his understanding, that his 
 very enemies never weary of heaping compliments. 
 Why ; to them, and quite seriously too, his understanding 
 is not simply a mighty one, but, actually, an " all-mighty " 
 one, " behind which there stood a solid knowledge and 
 a sober sense ! " Others, too, quite as hostile, put him in 
 the best of companies, and for the sensiblest of purposes. 
 For so grave a care as philosophising before the public, 
 there was, they say, to Kant, to Aristotle, to Hegel, the 
 necessity, first of all, " of a wealth of knowledge find 
 experience, and of a critical discipline of thought itself." 
 
 But to the difficulty of complimenting so grand a 
 faculty with so trumpery a propos, there comes the 
 further difficulty that this so grand faculty was so very 
 serious so very much in earnest with this same so 
 incredible with this same so very trumpery propos I 
 It was on this propos that Hegel rose from the mere 
 commonness of simple sensation an odour, a savour, a 
 touch, a sound, a colour (green, yellow, red) through 
 perception and understanding, through consciousness, and 
 self-consciousness, and reason, up, up in cognition, to the 
 absolute itself surely with PAINS enough ! Was there 
 ever in this world a vaster mountain of pains for Hegel 
 to raise, or for us to level, than that single volume, Die 
 Phacnomenologie des Geistes ? And what of the Logic, 
 and the Encyklopaedie, and the Philosophy of Lavs, Morals, 
 and the State, -the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy 
 of Religion, the Philosophy of Art, and, too, the History 
 of Philosophy ? Surely, there be pains enow ! It may 
 be a fog-bank ; but we cannot deny it to be real, if to 
 be earnest, if to be serious, if to spare oneself not one 
 single, conceivably possible, pain if that is to be real. 
 
 But it is just possible that a little further considera- 
 tion of our extract itself the extract from Schelling 
 may lighten the weight here, or even enable us to exalt 
 
HEGEL AT TUBINGEN 403 
 
 into the empyrean as though a Crab into the Zodiac 
 the trumpery propos itself ! 
 
 Schelling, when he writes his letter, is still a student 
 at Tubingen, and at the date (Feb. 4, 1795) is only 
 eight days more than twenty years of age. How aufge- 
 kliirt the lad is ! He is not to be caught not he ! He 
 was surprised for a moment by the question ; but he is 
 awake now, and sees it to be but a try-on ! He will let 
 this Lessing's man know that his eyes are quite open to 
 the truth and the trick too ! This Lessing's man, how- 
 ever, has in reality not yet got his eyes opened that width. 
 He was twenty-four and five months old when Schelling 
 was twenty : and almost that whole difference of age 
 was expended by him in the deepest brooding, boring, 
 and burrowing of studies, political partly, but greatly 
 more theological, with the Old and New Testaments con- 
 stantly in his hands. Even at the same age, at Tubingen, 
 as Schelling was volatile, Hegel was, in his Aufklarung, 
 grave : " if he quite acknowledged the right of the 
 Aufklarung to subjective freedom, he still had objectively 
 no satisfaction at all in the actuality it dominated." It 
 was so he bade farewell to Tubingen ; and, when three 
 years younger, he wrote there his Dissertation pro magis- 
 terio, if sterner than Kant himself for the authority of 
 duty in itself and as such, he showed, for all that, " that 
 its fulfilment had quite another motive when it was 
 thought as the expression of the necessity of a supreme 
 will for only on the presupposition of an infinitely 
 powerful, wise, and good God, who manifests himself in 
 the order and laws of nature, and guides all that happens 
 with the exactest knowledge only on this presupposition 
 can man regard All as a completed whole, and himself as a 
 subject in the kingdom of the best and greatest sovereign." 
 
 But Schelling knew nothing of " the theological 
 studies," nothing, most probably, of the contents of the 
 
404 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 Pass-Dissertations ; he knew only, by recollection say, 
 of an admirer of Lessing's, and so he was surprised. 
 And then he tells him of his own " advance " through 
 Spinosa and through Kant, specially in regard of a 
 personal God. " God is nothing but the absolute Ego " ; 
 " consciousness is not possible without an object " ; " for 
 God, i.e. for the absolute Ego, there can be no object, in- 
 asmuch as it would cease thereby to be absolute." He 
 has become a Spinosist. " To Spinosa the world (the 
 object as directly counter the subject) was All to me 
 it is the Ego." The special difference between the critical 
 and dogmatical philosophies lay for him in this, " that the 
 former starts from the absolute Ego, unconditioned as yet 
 by any object, while the latter, again, takes its start 
 from the absolute object or Non-Ego : the latter, in its 
 ultimate consequence, leads to the system of Spinosa : 
 the former, similarly, to that of Kant. From the uncon- 
 ditioned, philosophy must start. The question, then, is 
 only this, Wherein does the Unconditioned lie in the 
 Ego, or in the Non-Ego ? Is this question answered, 
 then All is answered." Then Schelling goes on to say 
 that for him the Answer is Ego. 
 
 There is no doubt a great deal of philosophy in the 
 above. If philosophy is to be absolute if a man is 
 absolutely to explain existence, then he must start with 
 an unconditioned] which unconditioned, plainly, can lie 
 only either in the object or in the subject. It is quite 
 certain that Spinosa does start with the object ; and it 
 is not, in the least, less certain that Kant, seen through 
 to the very principle of his base, does, on the contrary, 
 begin with, or start from, the subject. All that is 
 certain. 
 
 But what, then, of this subject what, then, of this 
 Ego, in which Schelling finds his answer and conclusion ? 
 As it is there described, with such conviction, by Schel- 
 
EGO WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS 405 
 
 ling himself, is it, after all, such an Ego as will commend 
 itself to Hegel to the deeply brooding, boring, burrow- 
 ing, lonesome, secluded, stranger-man that beside the 
 Bears at Berne taught the boys of Herr Steiger von 
 Tschugg ? Hardly. The recluse is already too logical 
 for that : he must have his own ideas of what an Ego 
 should be of what an Ego only can be. An Ego that, 
 though an Ego, is an unconscious Ego ! an Ego that, 
 though an Ego, is without the consciousness of an Ego ! 
 Schelliug was surprised at Hegel in what he mooted for 
 his God ; but if Schelling's own God were no more than 
 that Ego, was there not vastly more reason why Hegel, 
 because of such a God, should be surprised at Schelling ? 
 One cannot help thinking, indeed, that Hegel must have 
 felt not only a little surprised, but even not a little 
 puzzled. Could there be an Ego without consciousness ? 
 What was an Ego ? What was consciousness ? If God 
 as an Ego said / to himself, he must have thought Me. 
 I was subject, but Me was object. And / and Me, 
 subject and object, in any Ego, in any 7, in any Me, were 
 one one and the same. Was God, then, though an 
 Ego, not to be his own object ? Consciousness depends 
 on an object, and there can be no object beside an 
 absolute, Ergo, God, as an absolute, is without con- 
 sciousness ! No object ! no object for an absolute ! no 
 object for God ! Why, a God without a consciousness 
 would be at once all object, nothing but an object ! 
 Not a shred of subjectivity would be left him he would 
 be nothing but a thing possessed only of the objec- 
 tivity of a stone at best, as more general than that, 
 but the Substance of Spinosa ! Simply and solely, a 
 thing literally, the Substance of Spinosa surely that 
 was peculiar ! At the very moment that he actually 
 made believe to reject substance, Schelling actually, 
 at that very moment, was proclaiming it ! And Kant ! 
 
406 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 At the very moment that Kant was set as the diamet- 
 rical opposite to Spinosa, at that very moment he was 
 set also as the same with him, at the very moment 
 that they were absolutely differentiated, at that very 
 moment they were absolutely identified ! x 
 
 I contend that for a Hegel, even in 1795 at Berne, 
 such a course of thinking as I have figured was alone 
 natural why, as late as February 1823, Hegel tells the 
 Minister of Education that " in his twelfth year he had 
 learned the Wolfian definitions of the so-called Idea 
 clara, and, in his fourteenth, all the various figures and 
 rules of the syllogism, and that even now (when he 
 is fifty-three) he still knows them as from then." It is 
 not at all likely that Logic failed him when he came to 
 consider these Schellingian ideas as to an Ego and con- 
 sciousness, an absolute and God. At the same time, it is 
 not for a moment to be supposed that I conceive Hegel 
 to have seen all this at once. That letter of Schelling's 
 remained with Hegel from its date on to his last ; and I 
 only figure to myself what is natural when I see Hegel 
 as he gathers more and more light from his study of 
 Fichte, say discern also more and more light in these 
 propos of Schelling's, with all the meaning and the 
 relations that they bear to Kant, Spinosa, or simply 
 philosophy. 
 
 And now, let it be considered what the thoughts 
 which we have figured above were, in time, likely to 
 
 1 Since writing the above, and having Noack in hand for Schel- 
 ling, I was glad to find that the former, in his book on the latter 
 (i. 143-45), had come to quite a similar understanding: "An Ego 
 without consciousness is in truth not an Ego at all, and Schelling's 
 pure, absolute, or unconditioned Ego is only the Christian baptismal 
 name for Spinosa's Substance." Of course, Noack has no object be- 
 fore him no thought of any one but Schelling here : ray bringing 
 in of Hegel is quite another matter it is Schelling's look that 
 Noack has alone before him, and not in any way the letter to Hegel 
 
SCHELLING'S EGO THEN 407 
 
 have issued into, as concerns, say, firstly for Hegel, his 
 dialectic. But at once in this respect, what thoughts 
 more than these, suppose Hegel to have had them, could 
 have tended to suggest a concrete interior in the Ego 
 itself a concrete matter, filling, almost, as it were, an 
 organisation within it ? Schelling would have the absolute 
 Ego, necessarily, as absolute, without an object, that is, 
 wholly alone abstract : Hegel, on the contrary, or we 
 for him, would have it concrete. With him, as we put 
 it, there would be the / Me I, in full force an 
 absolutely concrete subject-object at once, an absolute 
 concrete of difference and identity at once, and at the 
 same time an absolute actuality, a reality, a reality 
 actually in existence. In comparison, think of poor 
 Schelling here, with his misfortune of an Ego without 
 an object, a monstrosity, a non-ens, an impossibility ! 
 " God is the Ego, in so far as it has annihilated all that 
 is theoretic" all that exists fpr perception, cognition 
 " And so far, therefore, is = ! " " For God, for the 
 absolute Ego, aber, giebt es gar Jcein Oject, denn dadurch 
 horte es auf absolut zu sein Mithin giebt es keinen 
 personlichen Gott ! " 
 
 For this that concerns the dialectic, there is yet to be 
 signalised, in this extract from the letter of Schelling, 
 another side, or another vein of suggestion. " The 
 absolute Ego embraces an absolute sphere of absolute 
 being. In this sphere there form finite spheres which 
 arise through Limitation of the absolute sphere by an 
 object ( spheres of the finite, theoretical philosophy). 
 In these is mere conditionedness ; and the unconditioned 
 leads to contradictions." 
 
 This that is meant here is simply the movement of 
 Fichte in deduction of his categories, which are the 
 " finite spheres " named. When Hegel got at length to the 
 study of Fichte, he could not have been long of observ- 
 
408 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 iiig with his profound inquest into Kant in his head 
 that the former had given the Idcter but a simple 
 modification of form. Kant's Unity of pure Appercep- 
 tion, Self-consciousness, was not at all definitely put, 
 rather more or less miscellaneously and at random, as it 
 were, more or less as though in a by-the-bye mention. 
 His categories, too, notwithstanding his " artige Betracht- 
 ungen " over their Table, were more or less unconnected 
 and irrelative the one to the other. Quantity, Quality, 
 Relation, and Modality Universal, Affirmative, Cate- 
 gorical, Problematic, etc. etc. they stand beside each 
 other, undeduced the one from the other. To this 
 matter now, in its more or less of miscellaneousness, 
 Fichte would, in unity of the whole and in connection of 
 the parts, give the logical rigour of form. Hegel, per- 
 ceiving this, must have perceived also that Fichte had 
 no expedient for the effecting of all that he contemplated, 
 but Limitation, Limit. Kant's Apperception should be 
 Fichte's Ego, and Kant's Categories should, as Fichte's 
 Categories, ravel out from the Ego, mutually connected, 
 organically together, by Limit, the principle of Limit. 
 Probably, then, it was only after an independent study 
 of Fichte that Hegel's eye fell with relevance on that 
 word Limitation, Eirischrankung, as used above by 
 Schelling. " In the absolute sphere of absolute being, 
 finite spheres of finite existence form (themselves) form 
 through limitation of the original infinite limitation 
 through an object." Studying Fichte, Hegel, year after 
 year, month after month, week after week, at least in 
 all likelihood, we should say, must have deeply, deeply 
 pondered, nearly, nearly looked into, all this. How if 
 he ended by saying to himself and his thoughts could 
 have been only all the clearer when to the Wissenscliafts- 
 lehre of Fichte he added the Transcendentale Idealismus 
 of his friend Schelling, where, too. Limit is the spring 
 
LIMIT IN FICHTE AND SCHELLING 409 
 
 how if he ended by saying to himself, what is there not 
 from the outside in all this, from the outside and 
 merely external ; Limit is but as a screw from the outside, 
 and put into external application or this Object, this 
 Non-Ego, which has been feigned, and figured, and 
 fancied to act, what is it but an artificial lever, invented 
 from without, and applied from without : there is no 
 natural logic that takes from an Ego to a Non-Ego, 
 because there is a God, it does not follow that there is 
 no God. In the setting up of the Non-Ego there is, 
 even to Fichte, no possibility of proof : the act that sets 
 it up is an absolute and so an arbitrary act. In short, 
 in the whole procedure of Fichte, with his three proposi- 
 tions, which have to do with Identity, Difference, and 
 the Union of both, there is nothing at work but artifice 
 and externality nothing but external artifice. 
 
 If Hegel thought thus, he must have thought also, how 
 remedy this, how reverse the spell, change externality 
 into internality, transform the artificiality of make into 
 the naturality of growth ? It is at bottom, after all, 
 with the problem of difference and identity that Eichte 
 has really to do. And must that problem be only ex- 
 ternal is it impossible to make it internal ? In Fichte, 
 the Ego and the Non-Ego are wholly external. Each is 
 wholly external, the one to the other. Is it impossible 
 to make them internal ay, and internal, quite as much 
 also, the one to the other ? According to Schelling, 
 God, the Ego, is to have no object. But what if God 
 what if the Ego is to have its own object ? What if 
 subject and object are to be in one ? difference and 
 identity, two, each one a separate, independent, ab- 
 stract one, each but still, each with the other, both 
 together, and so together a concrete one both ? And 
 what is that but the Ego, call it you, call it me, call it 
 him call it God ? In God, as in the Ego, subject and 
 
410 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 object are together, then ? Even so as it has always 
 been ! There is but God and his Universe. The Uni- 
 verse is but He ; and He is but the Universe ! Properly 
 in essential speech, in substantial speech, in true speech, 
 there is but God ! There is but one etymon, in this 
 world, one cteon, but one that OI/TW? is EPMI', I Am 
 I AM THAT I AM. 
 
 Now, that that is, is not an abstract : it is a concrete 
 the concrete. It is an /, but an / of the Me a 
 Subject, but a Subject OF the Object. That is, there is 
 here a two and a one a two which is the one, and a 
 one which is the two. Both are a relation, then. There 
 is a ratio between them both a ratio that binds the one 
 to the other. God is the principle that creates the 
 universe, and that ratio is the law according to which 
 the universe is created. 
 
 It is so, then, that we would feign the brooding of 
 Hegel over the words of Schelling to have in the end 
 issued to have in the end kindled these words them- 
 selves into the life of the Notion and into the movement 
 of his Dialectic, which, united with the whole laborious 
 Concrete of History, Science, and Experience, issued in 
 his System ! Schelling, indeed, could turn to his own 
 profit Schelling, indeed, could make his own, or did 
 make his own whatever he took up ; but whatever he 
 took up, lie kept as he found it. So in him$ too, for 
 movement, no principle of movement, but, as in Fichte 
 himself, " Einschrankung." Had Hegel fallen into this, 
 and remained in it, and, like Schelling, never escaped 
 from it, why, then, Hegel would never have been Hegel. 
 But Hegel saw that if movement were to be given to the 
 Ego, it must be by its own nature from within, and not 
 by an artifice from without ; it must be really a principle, 
 and not an expedient, an mternality and not an externality. 
 The Ego was a one ; just so much transparent elemental 
 
HEGEL'S LIBERTY, AND MILL'S 411 
 
 water, but even into its own depths there fell the 
 shadow of its own self Me. The object was already 
 there darkening up upon the subject : and it was their 
 embrace that was to make thinking ; and it was that 
 thinking that, by its own necessary reverse, in its own 
 necessary dialectic, was to make things. I I-Me I. 
 That might not have been to Hegel just in so many 
 words Thinking] but potentially so- that was to 
 Hegel his Dialectic. Ego was the Notion ; and its con- 
 stitutive Eatio was the Dialectic. 
 
 It is thus thus as explained that we find in this 
 remarkable extract from that early boyish letter of 
 Schelling's, the spore that, though with much else, may 
 have been struck by Hegel into his entire philosophy. 
 Nay, are there not even nearer words in the extract that 
 have still also a nearer place in the philosophy ? " The 
 alpha and omega of all philosophy is Freiheit the Ego 
 is to be durch Freiheit gesetzt ! " Freiheit is all that to 
 Hegel also Liberty : but a very different Liberty from 
 John Stuart Mill's a Liberty that is self-action certainly, 
 a self-action, however, that is the self-action not of the 
 particular as the particular, but, on the contrary, of the 
 particular only as the universal. 
 
 These " finite spheres " in Schelling's infinite sphere 
 are still in Hegel, too. If for Schelling there is in these 
 spheres the mere Conditioned, and if the Unconditioned 
 leads to contradictious, there is still some analogy to 
 Hegel there, though to him it is the Conditioned brings 
 the contradictions, and the Unconditioned solves them. 
 The duty, however, that is here for Hegel is still here 
 also for Schelling : " we are to come from the finite 
 sphere to the infinite one." And here we are in 
 the " practical " world. " For the -supersensible, the 
 finite is to be destroyed." " It is the sensible gives 
 the hindrance." " There must be transition into the 
 
412 WHAT /,<? THOUGHT? 
 
 absolute sphere of being destruction so far of our 
 personality " the finite one. 
 
 These latter words of Schelling, so put, have taken on 
 the purgation of all colour as in the highest Etliik of 
 Hegel. I know not that any mere man in this world 
 did ever so deeply and persistently labour to abolish in 
 himself the finite as Hegel did : it was the universal 
 always, the universal alone, that was in his eye. For to 
 him there was quite another conclusion than the conclu- 
 sion of Schelling. " Consequently," says Schelling, " there 
 is no personal God " : on the contrary, says Hegel, " there 
 is a personal God " ! And of this God, Hegel made all : 
 throughout his whole philosophy it is the mighty limbs 
 of this God stretch. 
 
 And, on this level, where now is the " trumpery 
 propos " 1 May we not conceive it as Schelling's now, as 
 Fichte's now, even as Kant's now, but not as Hegel's ? 
 Kant owned a thing-in-itself, which certainly had its 
 own privilege of as Jacobi said wittily an otium cum 
 dignitate, but which, like some other such dignities, was, 
 for the rest, null. Fichte has but so much externality 
 of a Non-Ego and Ego as of a blackboard and chalk. 
 And Schelling has a subject that is impossibly a subject, 
 and only a thing. These may be trumpery propos. But 
 an Ego that was a living Ego a dialectic that was the 
 living internality of an Ego : That was no trumpery 
 propos', and that was Hegel's. 
 
 And then the life the living labour of the man the 
 work, the thought the little else in life than work- 
 the little else in life than thought ! How staunch he 
 was, how silent, and how he held on held on in the 
 dark ! " The planful working out of a design, the 
 thorough finishing of an idea, the development and 
 resolution of a theme," that, says Kosenkranz, was 
 " the quality proper " of the man. 
 
HEGEL AS A MAN 413 
 
 Hegel, without a thought that was unctuous, without 
 a word that was patelin, lived indeed we may say it 
 in God and to God. 
 
 I Am That I Am I Am That I Am I Am That 
 I am : 
 
 That to Hegel was all. 
 
 Men of genius are personally double. They are at 
 once genius and ordinary man ; and it is in the latter 
 respect mainly that their differences of character lie. 
 Hegel, if admirable as genius, was perfectly estimable as 
 man. Anstand, order and propriety, from all in that 
 well-placed, official family, must have been reflected on 
 him from the first ; and so it was a diligent reflective 
 schoolboy that, in the Gymnasium, walked with the 
 Masters. At the University he had what has often 
 the most promise in it the respectable place of third ; 
 which, too, as little fervid, being threatened to lose it 
 in his ^^-indifference, he had, under his nightly lamp, 
 to fight for. Still, out of doors, he could be a merry and 
 even a genial boon companion, true-blue, and a lad of 
 mense, nor less of grit, to be respected and relied on. 
 He carried himself through life with vigorous self-trust 
 and a perfect sense of duty. He knew his place, and 
 could present himself, hat in hand, quite respectfully to 
 his Excellency the Minister von Altenstein. Not quite 
 unsubdued in manner, he could keep on the best of terms 
 with the enshrined and ennobled Goethe ; but he knew 
 his man, and could speak quite meaningly of " our 
 eighty years' old Jiingling." All that comes to this, that, 
 in his social intercourse, he was never less than man to 
 man with his fellows. He shows, as we exhibit him, 
 only questionably by Scholling ; whom, no doubt, for his 
 
414 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 own interest, he first courted, and then, at last, yielding 
 somewhat perhaps to a little latent grudge, though, of 
 course, that of him is neither said nor seen, he pretty 
 well turned his back upon him in the Phaenomenoloyie. 
 There are his letters, however, and these all show him to 
 have been the friendliest and the realest of men espe- 
 cially those to his wife when on his travels to and fro 
 Vienna, Paris, etc. These latter are very valuable, so 
 affectionate as they are, and unintermittingly minute and 
 full : it is only a most excellent man always, and perfect 
 father of a family, that we see there. In short, what 
 Schwegler says just gives the man : " The relaxation of 
 social intercourse he sought rather among plain and 
 unofficial people than in the company of the great ; he 
 had no liking to shine in salons" (In his Tour in the 
 Netherlands, read what he says of his " Englander.) 
 
 Schwegler, to these words, adds another suggestion. 
 " In the year 1830 " just a year before his death, but 
 when he was, at sixty, still not old " Hegel was made 
 rector of the university, and (says Schwegler) fulfilled 
 the duties of the office in a more practical manner than 
 previously Fichte." That of " fulfilling duties in a prac- 
 tical manner " is what we desire to accentuate, and that, 
 too, as in opposition to some few who smile at Hegel as 
 an old dreamer, and really believe their smile. Now, 
 there are such things as " dreamers " and " old dreamers " 
 too. Others may recollect, as I do, of gaunt old angular 
 students from the hills who talked in Essays in Moral 
 Philosophy class-rooms of " confluxes and refluxes " that 
 made the class laugh. These were dreamers, simply un- 
 fortunates in mists of their own misconceiving. But 
 Hegel was really the most practical of men ; he only 
 grubelt in those Swiss theological studies of his. There 
 ivas the dialect, but it came legitimately from him, just 
 as it had come legitimately to him from Kant and the 
 
HEGEL AS A MAN 415 
 
 rest. The dialect itself is, as a dialect, legitimate enough ; 
 it only wants to be learned. No one will read these 
 letters of his to his wife, or see him as rector in the 
 academy at Niirnberg, without having in front of him, 
 very obviously and clearly, a man of nous, wide awake, 
 and with his eyes open a man who could see and at 
 once act. Understanding, in fact, as all that speak of 
 him cry, was emphatically the man. 1 
 
 1 Asked why Hegel said never Ego, always Begriff ? I say this : 
 Tm Begriff suggests at once the Begriff as of the Begriffe (Categories), 
 and the beginning not that he meant to mislead ; but he died 
 suddenly of the cholera. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 EXPLANATION of the universe, that that, in all these 
 chapters, has been assumed as the aim of philosophy, 
 must have been plain throughout. 
 
 Science, 110 doubt, has also attempted the problem, 
 but always only with such presuppositions as at once to 
 negate the enterprise. If we have always not only Time 
 and Space, but, in whatever tenuity of form, Matter 
 itself, might we not just as well begin with all quite as 
 it is there before us : suns, planets, satellites in an infinite 
 void, with an infinite past behind, an infinite present 
 around, and, correspondently, an infinite future in front ? 
 
 The ancients tried their best with thickenings and 
 thinnings : the moderns have scarcely done more with 
 eddy ings and swirlings, heatings and coolings. There are 
 those, of course, who cry, It is mere rubbish to attempt 
 to account for either matter or life ; but then their faith 
 is That, out of an accidental proteine compound, where 
 or when one knows not, wind and weather have, in 
 course of time, sufficed to form all the infinitely con- 
 certed complexity and all the variegated beauty, as well 
 of our fauna as of our flora ! 
 
 Metaphysicians, with a similar purpose, may not have 
 done perfectly or even well ; but have they not done 
 better ? 
 
 They have a First, a First that is in rerum natiira> 
 
 416 
 
THE VISTA 417 
 
 and so constituted also that, by virtue of its own ratio, 
 it develops into an entire internale ; which, in turn, and 
 by virtue of the same ratio continued (but necessarily 
 only implicitly), is an entire externaU. The virtue within 
 is the necessity of reason : the virtue without is the 
 necessity, necessarily, of its own contingency. 
 
 Man is the living centre, but, as without, he is in the 
 element of contingency. So it is that he finds himself 
 in such a mere out-of-the-way planet, under such a mere 
 out-of-the-way sun. All that infinitude of externalia 
 around is but the Necessity and Contingency of Exter- 
 nality in Quantity (which is itself but a direct necessity 
 of externality) there, however, for man to make his own 
 of it. We cannot further follow here a Philosophy of 
 Nature in the Particular and in the Singular. 
 
 But God, we say at once, is, necessarily to us, alone 
 in all this, the actually, livingly, and personally beent 
 UNIVERSAL. 
 
 For to philosophise through the Ego is not to presume 
 to measure the infinitude of God. 
 
 It is in this way rather : 
 
 There can no Supreme Being be, but that must to 
 Himself say /: I AM THAT I AM. 
 
 Man, again, it is said, is made " after the likeness " of 
 God : " a man is the image and glory of God." 
 
 It is the very heart of the Christian Keligion that the 
 Infinite God, become Finite, is a Man. 
 
 And Man is /. Even by the privilege of having been 
 made like unto God, Man is I. 
 
 It is that that he has of God in him. 
 
 So, then, even to realise the privilege even to realise 
 the / for that it is, that he is here. 
 
 We are sent here to think. 
 
 To realise / that is the purpose, and that is the 
 history of the universe. 
 27 
 
418 AVHAT 7tf THOUGHT? 
 
 Thus, as it were in a dew-drop, is a vista of the 
 universe : a Kosmorama Ouranothen, a Kosmorama 
 Theiothen the Kosmorama of God. 
 
 If it were but something motionless a picture on the 
 wall! 
 
 But just look at it through that Kent's Hole ! 
 
 That slowly forming lime-drop that falters to its fall 
 through thousands, and thousands, and thousands of 
 years ! And so with long perspective, interminably in 
 the light of it such shapes, in mist, of lands and seas, 
 and men and beasts ! 
 
 What philosophy what mere thinking can stand 
 against that ? 
 
 That is the infinitude of Time. And in it every 
 highest height or deepest depth every mightiest name 
 of empire or of man (every book) perishes ! 
 
 Well now, Space is given quite as infinite as Time 
 Say, then, can we not set the one against the other 
 abolish both ? 
 
 Has any one, at any time, by any chance, been minded 
 to take his Pasear in Space ? Has he wandered among 
 the stars outgone Aldebaran or, in the spangles of 
 Orion, stumbled ? 
 
 Here is an extract made (W. W., 4. 401 sq.) by Kant 
 from a book : 
 
 " One evening, by my lamp, as I made up accounts and scored 
 off profits, sleep overtook nie. . . . Methouglit an irresistible hand 
 took me, and bore me suddenly aloft, into, and through the shining 
 stretches of Creation. With inconceivable speed I left uncounted 
 worlds behind me on, and on ! Soon, I drew near the utmost 
 verge of nature, and saw .the shadows of the illimitable voids sink 
 into the depths before me. Eternal stillness, loneliness, and the 
 dark ! Inexpressible terror seized me ! One by one, I lost the 
 stars from sight, till at length the last glimmering spark, in the 
 utter gloom, died out. The mortal agony of despair, with every 
 moment, grew upon me, even as every moment added more and 
 
THE PASEAR 419 
 
 more of distance to my separation from the world of \vorlds. With 
 keener and keener anguish of heart the dread thought pierced me 
 then that, when thousands and thousands of years had borne me 
 beyond the bounds of all createdness, I should, for ever, still be 
 plunging forward into the immeasurable inane, without a help 
 as without a hope of the possibility of return ! " 
 
 Well now, even such your Pasear shall be ! You are 
 in infinite space. That is, space never ceases. You 
 proceed and proceed, and still there is space : You go on 
 for ever, and still you cannot exhaust it. Go on as you 
 may, slow or swift, or swifter and swifter, still there is 
 space, space after space, interminably space spaces, 
 spaces, countless. Bethink you now ! Would there be 
 one after the other in all these spaces, ceaselessly 
 suck a sky as this above you ? Is there such a sky now, 
 with stars, away, away stars, stars, stars, endlessly ? 
 
 Are we to conceive the externality of creation so ? 
 
 We can talk, but, let us talk as we may, we can not 
 always conceive. We can not conceive an everlasting 
 space, with stars, stars, still stars, interminably. 
 
 And Time, then ? Shall it be otherwise with time ? 
 Shall we not rather say this As, even by its own 
 excess, an infinite space is inconceivable ; so, too, even by 
 its own excess, an infinite time is equally inconceivable ? 
 
 Dates, and dates, and dates for ever are as inconceiv- 
 able in time, as stars, and stars, and stars for ever are 
 inconceivable in space. 
 
 Can we verify our dates ? 
 
 I read, not long ago, an admirable book on geology ; 
 and, in these perpetual wearings down and heavings up, 
 that seem really intimated there to go on and on, and 
 round and round for ever, I had a most vivid picture of 
 an eternal life even on the part of this little Earth of 
 ours. Yet how, in their estimates that would describe 
 or prescribe periods, our very best, whom we admire and 
 
420 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 honour in excelsis differ ! They separate themselves, 
 the one from the other, by millions and millions by 
 tens of millions by hundreds of millions of years : 
 they might quite as well separate themselves by infini- 
 tude ! It is just to be said here, as it is said elsewhere, 
 De non apparentibus et de non existentibus, eadem est 
 ratio. It all comes to that. 
 
 What we want, we humans, is the repose of an eternal 
 now. And it is that that our religion guarantees to us : 
 An Eternal Now. 
 
 In this position that one of our clearest could only 
 see a " dilemma " a dilemma that, even self-confessedly, 
 was, as against religion, to make him untrue to what in 
 science he himself owned was there ever a more 
 inveterate bigotry in religion than this bigotry that 
 named itself science ? 
 
 But what, by any possibility, was it that could have 
 made such a man prefer it was really that sciolism to 
 science ? 
 
 Well, in one word, as it was not difficult to see, it was 
 the discrepancies, and that is the Aufklarung ! l 
 
 Under either term there lies, in truth, that collision 
 between faith on the one side and thought on the other 
 which is simply a rending agony in the depths of the 
 soul. Outside of the Church men have sought refuge 
 from it in suicide ; and by suicide men have sought 
 refuge from it within the Church. But the position is 
 still human, and surely it is possible for it to yield itself 
 to reflection reflection that is human. And just here 
 and so it is that the Aufklarung No. 2 presents itself. 
 
 1 See explanations almost passim in the Secret of Hegel, especially, 
 perhaps, at pp. Ixiii, 165, 176, 177, 728, 747. There are other 
 passages sufficiently in place, as at pp. xxii, xxviii, xxxi-v, lii-viii, 
 Ixi, 74, 100, 194, 589 sq., 692 sq., 732 sq. ; Darwinianism, p. 185 ; 
 and other works, just generally. 
 
NOS. 1 AND 2 421 
 
 If we owe the Aufklarung No. 1 to French infidelity, 
 and as well the continuance of it to the critical protest- 
 antism of Germany, I have no hesitation in saying that 
 it is to the great German Quadrilateral in philosophy that 
 we owe the Aufklarung No. 2. For even Kant, how- 
 ever he may have regarded the negative, was a Kant of 
 depth, and not a Kant of shallowness ; while, after him, 
 not one of the three that followed but did bring reflec- 
 tion to the front. Schelling mocked at the ^w/klarung 
 as the Auskl&T\ing at the clearing up as the emptying 
 out. With the frank, open-souled Fichte there is no 
 difficulty 111 knowing either what he thought or what he 
 said ; and for testimony the sacramental sermon he 
 preached at Warsaw, very much, as it appears, to the 
 satisfaction of his evangelical audience, will probably 
 suffice. Poor Fichte, when on that occasion he mounted 
 the pulpit stairs, book in hand, had never a thought that 
 what he knew as a Peoples Book was only a " lie." 
 After the various express discussions in the Secret of 
 Hegel there is no call to speak again of Hegel. In his 
 Philosophy of Religion the attitude he took up to his 
 critical countrymen is again and again very decisively to 
 be seen. Nay, in these pages alone that are there, before 
 us the evidence is ample. We may remember, too, that 
 he positively declares himself " a Lutheran, and always 
 will remain one." But he has an open sense, and is 
 loyal to speak. Of the life of Pythagoras, I quote him 
 to say, for example, that it is written " in early century 
 manner, more or less in the style in which the Life of 
 Christ is narrated to us, from the point of view, namely, 
 of common reality." Now, that refers to the popular 
 style of the New Testament, which, with all its advan- 
 tages in a wide sense, is the seat of the discrepancies. 
 But the discrepancies were nought to Hegel, and they 
 ought to be nought to us. It is the person of Christ 
 
422 WHAT IS THOUGHT? 
 
 concerns us, and the Eevelation that that involved how 
 Christianity opened so the higher concrete truth to us, 
 and even so, in that higher truth, made for us a new 
 world. Mr. Gladstone said : " I build upon historical 
 Christianity, the great world-fact of 1800 years " ; and 
 that position of Mr. Gladstone is precisely the position 
 of the Aufklarung No. 2 as it is precisely the posi- 
 tion which No. 1 never knows I To No. 2, namely, the 
 popular statement disappears in the light that overflows 
 from it. The material body imports to it not, but alone 
 the living spirit. It is the ointment itself that is the 
 salve, and not the fly in it. 
 
 There is nothing in this world more simply silly than 
 that, because of the discrepancies, science itself should 
 become sciolism, and then believe, and inculcate the 
 belief, that that sciolism is the " advance " that nothing 
 can be " advanced " unless it sees, proclaims, placards the 
 " discrepancies." 
 
 I know not that I have anything to say more here as 
 regards the contents of the foregoing. Perhaps I might 
 desire to chronicle, what bears on its main theme, this 
 word of Tennyson's : 
 
 " You never, never can convince me this 7 is not an 
 eternal Keality." 
 
 For the rest, I need not, I think, add anything now to 
 what has been said of Fichte, or Schelling, or Hegel ; at 
 the same time that I may be a little disappointed if 
 nothing new should be found, at least in the latter 
 references. 
 
 But it appears to me, that with what has been all, 
 somewhat amply, put before us, we can not " return to 
 Kant." 
 
 Can we return to this, for example, that any ordinary 
 thing a shoe has an extraordinary unseen doullc of 
 itself in a Thing-in-Itself ? Or that the time that the 
 
NO RETURN TO KANT 423 
 
 one-o'clock gim fires in, and the space Andre's balloon 
 mounts in, are, neither the one nor the other of them, 
 there where we think they are, outside of us, but both, 
 on the contrary, inside ? Or that cause, with each of its 
 other fellow-categories, is not, by any means, a something 
 on its own account without, but, really, a simple secretion 
 of the cells or pigeon-holes of our own brains ? Or that 
 the I whatever I may possibly think the I I am I 
 am not at all that I hardly even an i only the dot 
 on it ? 
 
 All that being, and all that is surely, if we must 
 return foundationally and do return to his Appercep- 
 tion and his Categories we can not return to his theoretical 
 philosophy as a whole, much as we may rise to the truths 
 in his practical philosophy. Nor do I know that we can 
 return to his religious philosophy, though I do know that 
 we can return to his spirit of religion, whether catholic 
 or Christian. Whatever there was of the Aufklarung 
 in Kant, he was not the Aufgeklarter that only sneers 
 and jeers. 
 
 And so, finally, now, I may take to myself these words 
 of Schelling's son : 
 
 " I conclude this last word of the entire work with the 
 noble two letters which Schelling was accustomed to set 
 at the end of his manuscripts: &. 2. (@eo? crcocroz/) ; in 
 German 
 
 Das Walte Gott ! " 
 
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