REESE LIBRARY 
 
 OK THK. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Deceived 
 I ^cession No. 7faJ,/) t ') . Class No. 
 
 ] 
 
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 1 1 " H 
 
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 1. The Secret of Hegel. New Edition, i6s. 
 
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 3. Address on Materialism. Out of print. 
 
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THE HEGELIAN SYSTEM 
 
?} lijrijpa KO.KUV - 
 - Ofiroi yap K\-rjroi ye fipoTuv tV aireipova yaiav. 
 
 ' The Hidden Secret of the Universe is powerless to resist the might of thought ; it must 
 unclose itself before it, revealing to sight and bringing to enjoyment its riches and its 
 depths.' HEGEL. 
 
THE 
 
 SECRET OF HEGEL 
 
 BEING THE HEGELIAN SYSTEM IN 
 
 ORIGIN, PRINCIPLE, FORM 
 
 AND MATTER 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING 
 
 LL.D. Edin. Foreign Member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin 
 First- Appointed Gifford Lecturer (Edinburgh University, 1888-90) 
 
 NEW EDITION, CAREFULLY REVISED 
 
 EDINBURGH: OLIVER & BOYD 
 
 LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO., LTD. 
 
 NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 MDCCCXCVIII 
 
2- 
 
 76 X 
 
REFERENCES TO THIS WORK 
 
 In La Dottrina Dello Stato (pp. 8, 25, 30, 111, 125), by Dr G. Levi, Professore 
 nella R. Universita di Catania. 
 
 Delle opere, che abbiamo avuto occasione di citare nel corso del nostro ragionamento 
 ricordiamo qui semplicemente il norae degli autori, cioe : lo Stirling, lo Spaventa, 
 il Miraglia, il Kostlin, il Rosenkranz, il Michelet, lo Zeller, il Noak, il Krug, il 
 Chalybaus, il Haym, lo Schubart, il Lewes, il Vacherot, il Willm, il Carle. 
 
 Stirling, uno di quelli che piu hanno approfondito il pensiero di Hegel. 
 
 Parecchi fra i piu illustri seguaci o diremo meglio illustratori e fecondatori dei 
 principi di Hegel, come un Gans, un Michelet, un Rosenkranz, un Stirling. 
 
 Stirling, in qualche parte del suo bellissimo lavoro. 
 
 Lo Stirling, il quale, quando pure non si voglia mettere innanzi a tutti i com- 
 mentatori e illustratori di Hegel, certissimamente a niuno e secondo, nell' occasione 
 che ribatte le obbiezioni del Haym, a pag. 490, II. vol. della sua limpidissima e 
 penetratissima esposizione della dottrina hegeliana, alia qual opera egli diede il 
 titolo "the Secret of Hegel" cita e seg. 
 
 In Hegel als Deutscher Nationalphilosoph (p. ,296), by Professor Rosenkranz :-^ 
 
 Mit Welcher Tiefe und Selbstandigkeit der englische Geist sich der speculation 
 Hegels zu vermachtigen im Stande sein wird, ersehen wir jetzt schon aus schriften, 
 wie die von Stirling: "The Secret of Hegel," die em wahrhaft erstaunliehes 
 PhJinomen ist. 
 
 In AusFruherer Zeit (pp. 11, 149), by Arnold Ruge : 
 
 Das Buch des Schotten Stirling uber Hegel ist ein grosser Fortschritt in der 
 englischen Philosophischen Literatur ein Buch, welches Hegel's Philosophic 
 wirklich verdaut hat. 
 
FKOM EMEESON AND CAELYLE. 
 
 EMERSON. 
 
 * I have never seen any modern British book (refers to " Secret of Hegel ") 
 which appears to me to show such competence to analyse the most abstruse 
 problems of the science, and, much more, such singular vigour and breadth of 
 view in treating the matter in relation to literature and humanity. It exhibits 
 a general power of dealing with the subject, which, I think, must compel the 
 attention of readers in proportion to their strength and subtlety. One of the 
 high merits of the book is its healthy moral perceptions. ... If there can be 
 any question when such an incumbent can be found, I shall be glad to believe 
 that Intellectual and Moral Science is richer in masters than I have had 
 opportunity to know. . . . Schwegler came at last. I found on trial that I too 
 could read it, and with growing appetite. I could at least appreciate well 
 enough the insight and sovereignty of the annotations, and the consummate 
 address with which the contemporary critics and contestants are disposed of 
 with perfect comity, yet with effect. . . . The essays I have carefully read. 
 The analysis of Macaulay is excellent. The "Coleridge" painful, though, I 
 fear, irrefutable. . . . The " Tennyson " is a magnificent statue the first 
 adequate work of its kind his real traits and superiorities rightly shown. . . . 
 I never lose the hope that you will come to us at no distant day, and be our 
 king in philosophy.' 
 
 CARLYLE. 
 
 'To whatever I have said of you already, therefore, I now volunteer to add, 
 that I think you not only the one man in Britain capable of bringing Meta- 
 physical Philosophy, in the ultimate, German or European, and highest actual 
 form of it, distinctly home to the understanding of British men who wish to 
 understand it, but that I notice in you further, on the moral side, a sound 
 strength of intellectual discernment, a noble valour and reverence of mind, 
 which seems to me to mark you out as the man capable of doing us the highest 
 service in ethical science too ; that of restoring, or of decisively beginning to 
 restore, the Doctrine of Morals to what I must ever reckon its one true and 
 everlasting basis (namely, the divine or swpra-sensual one), and thus of vic- 
 toriously reconciling and rendering identical the latest dictates of modern 
 science with the earliest dawnings of wisdom among the race of men. This is 
 truly my opinion.' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE TO NEW EDITION xvii 
 
 PRELIMINARY NOTICE. 
 
 Mode of Perusal ....... xxi 
 
 The Secret '........ xxii 
 
 Kant and Hegel not the ' German Party ' xxii 
 
 PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 Prepossessions and Prejudices . . . ... . xxiii 
 
 German Philosophy obsolete and bad ..... xxiii 
 
 Schelling in judgment of Hegel ..... xxv 
 
 Friends and Foes of German Philosophy .... xxvii 
 
 Dilemma of opposing View ...... xxviii 
 
 Scepticism an Anachronism . . . . . . xxviii 
 
 Schelling's sentence not accepted ..... xxix 
 
 Evidence of Friends and Foes invalid ..... xxxiv 
 
 Materialism and ' Advanced Thinkers ' xxxv 
 
 The intellectual lead of Germany ..... xxxvii 
 
 Advantages of the Study ...... xxxix 
 
 Difficulties . . . . ^ . . . xl 
 
 Terms ......... xl 
 
 Vorstellung ........ xli 
 
 Abstractions of Understanding ..... xlv 
 
 Kant and Hegel generally ...... xlix 
 
 The Illumination and its Correction ..... liii 
 
 German Politics ....... lix 
 
 Principles and the Pabulum . . . . . . Ixi 
 
 The three partial Reactions ...... Ixii 
 
 The present Revulsion ....... Ixii 
 
 Conclusion . . . Ixii 
 
 I. 
 
 PROLEGOMENA. THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Preliminaries of the Struggle to Hegel .... 1 
 
 Difficulty of Hegel .... .3 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Those that succumb and those that triumph in regard to it .3 
 
 These Notes on occasion of this difficulty . . . . .4 
 
 First Impressions of the System, and of German Philosophy in general . 5 
 The Encyclopaedia ....... 7 
 
 Eosenkranz's Life of Hegel . . . . . .8 
 
 Kant ......... 9 
 
 Eeinhold and other Commentators . . . . .9 
 
 The Literature of the Subject . . . . . .11 
 
 Zymoses ......... 13 
 
 History, Principles, and Outcome of these . . . .14 
 
 Kelative Places of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel . . .15 
 
 Elimination of Fichte and Schelling . . . . .15 
 
 Hegel and Schelling at Jena . . . . . .17 
 
 Coleridge ......... 19 
 
 What Works of Kant and Hegel are specially studied . . .21 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 A. 1. A Beginning, &c. . . . . . .23 
 
 2. Plato's ravrbv and edrepov . . . . . .27 
 
 B. Purpose of the Logic, and a Summary of its early Portions . . 27 
 
 C. 1. A Beginning again . . . . . . .36 
 
 2. The Strangeness of the System . . . . .39 
 
 3. Wesen ........ 41 
 
 4. Objections to Kant and the rest . . . . .43 
 
 D. 1. Objections to Hegel continued . . . . .45 
 
 2. The Process of Self-consciousness, &c. . . . .51 
 
 3. The General Idea, &c. .53 
 
 4. Knowledge and the All . . . . . .59 
 
 5. Kant and the rest ....... -61 
 
 Origin of Hegel . . . . . . .63 
 
 6. Objections to Hegel ...... .65 
 
 E. 1. Explanations ..... .67 
 
 2. A Hegelian Dictum historically put . . . .74 
 
 Remark general on these Notes and the Value of Hegel . . .74 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A. The Secret of Hegel ..... .79 
 
 B. Affirmation ...... .101 
 
 C. Difficulty and Suspicion . . . . . .105 
 
 Causality . . . . . . . .106 
 
 The System of Kant .... .108 
 
 Hegel on Causality, and Hegel's System . . . .109 
 
 D. The Rationale of Generalisation . . . . .112 
 
 E. Hegel in earnest with Kant . . . . . .119 
 
 F. The Notion in itself and for itself . .121 
 
 G. Finite Things and their Notion . . . . . 1 22 
 H. The absolute Affirmation, &c. . 123 
 
CONTENTS. XI 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A. Idealism and Materialism . . . . . .124 
 
 B. Reciprocity ........ 134" 
 
 C. The Notion . . . . . . . .138 
 
 D. Genesis of the Notion . . . . . . .147 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 A. Special Origin and peculiar Nature of the Hegelian Principle . 156 
 
 B. Same Subject .... ... 174 
 
 C. More particular Derivation ...... 180 
 
 D. A short Formula ....... 204 
 
 E. Further Explanations ....... 205 
 
 F. Additional Illustration ........ 210 
 
 Remark 214 
 
 II. 
 
 A TRANSLATION FROM THE COMPLETE LOGIC OF 
 THE WHOLE FIRST SECTION, QUALITY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Being 218 
 
 A. Being . . . . . . . .218 
 
 B. Nothing . /. .... 218 
 
 C. Becoming ]S . 219 
 
 1. Unity of Being and Nothing . . . . .219 
 Remark 1. The Antithesis of Being and Nothing in Conception . 219 
 
 2. Defectiveness of the Expression Unity, Identity of 
 
 Being and Nothing ..... 226 
 
 3. The isolating of these Abstractions . . . 229 
 
 4. The Incomprehensibleness of the Beginning . . 240 
 
 2. Moments of Becoming ...... 241 
 
 3. Sublation of Becoming ...... 242 
 
 Remark. The Expression Sublation ..... 243 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 There-being ........ 245 
 
 A. There-being as such ....... 245 
 
 a. There-being in general ...... 246 
 
 b. Quality . . . . . . . .247 
 
 Remark. Reality and Negation ..... 248 
 
 c. Something ........ 251 
 
 B. Finitude ........ 253 
 
 a. Something and Another ...... 253 
 
Xll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 b. Qualification, Talification, and Limit .... 259 
 
 c. Finitude . . . . . . . .265 
 
 (a) The Immediacy of Finitude . . . . .266 
 
 (/3) Limitation and To-be-to . . . . .268 
 
 Eemark. To-be-to ...... 270 
 
 (7) Transition of Finitude into Infinitude .... 273 
 
 C. Infinitude ........ 273 
 
 a. The Infinite in general ...... 274 
 
 b. Alternation of Finite and Infinite ..... 275 
 
 c. Affirmative Infinitude ...... 280 
 
 Transition ......... 287 
 
 Kemark 1. The Infinite Progress ...... 287 
 
 2. Idealism . . . . . . .291 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Being-for-self ........ 294 
 
 A. Being-for-self as such ....... 295 
 
 a. There -being and Being-for-self ..... 296 
 
 b. Being-for-One . . . . . . .296 
 
 Remark. The Expression Was fur eines 1 . .297 
 
 c. One ........ 300 
 
 B. One and Many ........ 301 
 
 a. The One in itself ....... 302 
 
 b. The One and the Void .... .302 
 Remark. Atomistic ...... 303 
 
 c. Many Ones. Repulsion ...... 304 
 
 Remark. The Leibnitzian Monad .... 306 
 
 C. Repulsion and Attraction ...... 307 
 
 a. Exclusion of the One ...... 307 
 
 Remark. The Unity of the One and the Many . . . 309 
 
 b. The one One of Attraction . . . . .310 
 
 c. The Reference of Repulsion and Attraction . . .312 
 Remark. The Kantian Construction of Matter from Forces of 
 
 Attraction and Repulsion. ..... 316 
 
 III. 
 
 THE SECTION, QUALITY, AS TRANSLATED IN II., HERE 
 COMMENTED AND INTERPRETED. 
 
 Definiteness (Quality) . . . . . . .322 
 
 (Bestimmen, Seyn, Daseyn, and other terms explained a general 
 
 expression given) ....... 323 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Being ......... 328 
 
 A. Being ......... 328 
 
 B. Nothing ..... . 328 
 
CONTENTS. xii 
 
 C. Becoming ........ 328 
 
 (Detailed explanations of what has led Hegel to begin thus) . 328 
 
 1. Unity of Being and Nothing ..... 328 
 Remark 1. The Antithesis of Being and Nothing in Conception . 3U5 " 
 
 2. Defectiveiiess of the Expression Unity, Identity of 
 
 Being and Nothing ..... 370 
 
 3. The isolating of these Abstractions . . .371 
 
 4. The Incomprehensibleness of the Beginning . . 372 
 
 2. Moments of Becoming ...... 374 
 
 3. Sublation of Becoming ...... 374 
 
 Eemark. The Expression Sublation . 374 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 There-being ........ 332 
 
 A. There-being as such ....... 332 
 
 a. There-being in general ..... 332 
 
 b. Quality . . . . .384 
 Remark, Reality and Negation . . . 334 
 
 c. Something ........ 337 
 
 B. Finitude ........ 393 
 
 a. Something and Another ..... 395 
 
 b. Qualification, Talification, and Limit .... 398 
 
 c. Finitude. ........ 411 
 
 (a) The Immediacy of Finitude .... 412 
 
 ()3) Limitation and To -be- to . . . . . 412 
 
 Remark, To-be-to ...... 414 
 
 (7) Transition of Finitude into Infinitude . . . .416 
 
 C. Infinitude . . . ^ . . .421 
 
 a. The Infinite in General . 422 
 
 b. Alternation of Finite and Infinite ..... 422 
 
 c. Affirmative Infinitude ...... 424 
 
 Remark 1. The Infinite Progress . . . . .427 
 
 2. Idealism ....... 435 
 
 Transition ......... 453 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Being-for-self ....... 454 
 
 A. Being-for-self as such ....... 457 
 
 a. There-being and Being-for-self ..... 457 
 
 b. Being-for-One . . . . . . .457 
 
 Remark. The Expression Was fur eines ? 458 
 
 c. One . . .... 560 
 
 B. One and Many . . . . . . 4gj 
 
 a. The One in itself ..... 463 
 
 b. The One and the Void ...... 466 
 
 Remark. Atomistic ..... 4(57 
 
 c. Many Ones. Repulsion ...... 4^8 
 
 Remark. The Leibnitzian Monad . . . 473 
 
XIV CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 C. Kepnlsion and Attraction ...... 474 
 
 a. Exclusion of the One ...... 474 
 
 Remark. The Unity of the One and the Many . . . 476 
 
 b. The one One of Attraction ...... 478 
 
 c. The Keference of Kepulsion and Attraction . . . 479 
 Remark. The Kantian Construction of Matter from Forces of 
 
 Attraction and Repulsion ...... 482 
 
 IV. 
 
 TRANSITION FROM QUALITY TO QUANTITY. 485 
 
 V. 
 
 A SUMMARY OR TRANSLATION, COMMENTED AND IN- 
 TERPRETED, OF THE SECOND SECTION OF THE 
 COMPLETE LOGIC, QUANTITY . . . .503 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Quantity . . . . . . . . .505 
 
 A. Pure Quantity . . . . . . . .505 
 
 Remark 1. Conception of Pure Quantity . . . 506 
 
 2. Kantian Antinomy of the Indivisibility and of the 
 
 Infinite Divisibility of Time, of'Space, of Matter . 507 
 
 B. Continuous and Discrete Magnitude . . . . .510 
 Remark. The usual Separation of these Magnitudes . . .513 
 
 C. Limitation of Quantity . . . . . . .514 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Quantum ......... 519 
 
 A. Number . . . . . . . . 519 
 
 Remark 1. The Arithmetical Operations, &c. . . . . 525 
 
 2. Application of Numerical Distinctions in expression of 
 
 Philosophical Notions ..... 528 
 
 B. Extensive and Intensive Quantum ..... 532 
 
 a. Difference of these ....... 532 
 
 b. Identity of Extensive and Intensive Magnitude . ' . . 535 
 Remark 1. Examples of this Identity .... 537 
 
 2. Kant's Application of Degree to the Being of the 
 
 Soul . . . . . . .539 
 
 c. Alteration of the Quantum ...... 540 
 
 C. The Quantitative Infinite . ... 541 
 
 a. Notion of the same ....... 541 
 
 b. The Quantitative Infinite Progress ..... 542 
 Remark 1. The High Repute of the Progressus in Infinitum . . 544 
 
CONTENTS. XV 
 
 c. The Infinitude of Quantum ...... 549 
 
 Remark 1. The precise Nature of the Notion of the Mathematical 
 
 Infinite ...... 557 
 
 B. Quantity 
 
 a. Pure Quantity .... . 595 
 
 b. Quantum ........ 596 
 
 c. Degree ........ 597 
 
 Explanatory Remarks ...... 597 
 
 Quantity from the Encyclopaedic ..... 597 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE COMMENTATORS OF HEGEL SCHWEGLER, ROSEN- 
 
 KRANZ, HAYM 599 
 
 Schwegler ........ 600 
 
 Rosenkranz ......... 608 
 
 Haym ......... 624 
 
 VII. 
 CONCLUSION: LAST WORD ON 'THE SECRET,' &c. 676 
 
PKEFACE TO NEW EDITION. 
 
 THERE has been a desire expressed that this book should not be 
 altered in the fear that alteration would spoil it ! My regret is 
 that, in the way of alteration, where so much was required, so 
 little was possible. There certainly has been the attempt a 
 most anxious and painful one to mitigate for the reader, in 
 translation and commentary, the uncouth unintelligibleness of 
 that extraordinary new German which it has been my fate to 
 deal in. The melancholy fact remains, however, that all these 
 Beings Being-for-self, Being-for-other, Being-for-one, Being-for-a, 
 &c. are hopeless : like a child that first reads, one has been 
 obliged to syllabify. Still there have been explanations altera- 
 tions, for meaning or in- taste, there have been freely put to 
 use many. Nevertheless, with all the foot-notes and all the 
 modifications in text, it is to be acknowledged or professed, that, 
 be it a good or be it not so good, the pile itself characteristic 
 faults and all remains essentially the same, if only, as a pile, 
 it may be hoped, somewhat sharper-edged or clearer-surfaced. 
 
 It may seem in place now to say a word or two as to the origin 
 of the book itself. Of my nine years' consecutive university 
 winter sessions, the five in Arts left such deep and decided mark 
 on me that I was glad to return to the relative studies when I 
 could ; and for this purpose I was for six years in France and 
 Germany. Then, again, if in Classics and Mathematics, it could 
 hardly be said that I was not distinguished, it was certainly in 
 philosophy that I was most so ; and in that connexion I could 
 
 2 
 
Xviii PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. 
 
 not but vividly recollect these, till then academically unheard of, 
 instantaneous three rounds of unrestrainable and unrestrained 
 applause, that crowned the reading of that essay of mine, and 
 filled the old class-room to the roof with dust the sweetest 
 that, ever in life, I did taste, or shall ! 
 
 No wonder, then, that my literary leisure went all but wholly 
 to philosophy, and, in the end, specially to that philosophy to 
 which in Germany, as it were, the eyes of all Europe seemed 
 turned. As for Hegel, it was somewhat strange that seeing the 
 name while still at home and even without a dream of Germany 
 with surprise, for the first time, in a Eeview, I was some- 
 how very peculiarly impressed by it. But the special magic 
 lay for me in this, that, supping with two students of 
 German before I was in German as deep as they, I heard this 
 Hegel talked of with awe as, by universal repute, the deepest 
 of all philosophers, but as equally, also, the darkest. The one 
 had been asked to translate bits of him for the press ; and the 
 other had come to the belief that there was something beyond 
 usual remarkable in him: it was understood that he had not 
 only completed philosophy, but, above all, reconciled to philosophy 
 Christianity itsell That struck ! 
 
 Probably this will suffice as to the rationale of the appearance 
 of the Secret of Hegel, but, perhaps, the reader would like to know 
 the main biographical facts of Hegel himself. 
 
 Hegel was born at Stuttgart on the 27th of August 1770. 
 His father was a government Bureaucrat, and the family one 
 of upper middle-rank. An industrious and zealous student, he 
 was long and variously trained in private and in the Gym- 
 nasium at Stuttgart. For five years at the University of Tubin- 
 gen he was an eminently good student, and of a recognised 
 unofficious, but markedly genial and solid bearing. Thereafter 
 for some years a family-tutor, he habilitated himself at Jena, 
 in 1801, as a Docent in Philosophy. There he was appointed 
 to a Professorship shortly before the political catastrophe ousted 
 him from it again. For two years he edited at Bamberg a political 
 journal. He was then Eector of the Academy at Nurnberg till 
 
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. XIX 
 
 called in 1816 to a Professorship at Heidelberg. In 1818 he was 
 translated to Berlin, and speedily became there the master of a 
 widely influential school that was not unfavoured by the Gov- 
 ernment. He died of cholera on the 14th November 1830. He 
 had been thoroughly educated. He knew French and English, 
 and something of Italian. He was a passed master in 
 Classics, and in knowledge of Aristotle, for example, even led 
 the way. Grounded to the full in Mathematics and the Physical 
 sciences, it was wonderful what he gained for himself by industry 
 outside as it were -say in . Art, Painting, Music. His works, as 
 they appear on the shelves, are in a score of volumes. His char- 
 acter was integrity, judgment, and goodwill themselves as 
 husband, father, teacher, man. He was plain, unpretentious, 
 real ; as it was said, Biederkeit characterised him, but not less 
 Liistigkeit : he enjoyed society and very much the excursion of 
 remission, whether lengthened or short. His life has been ad- 
 mirably written by Eosenkranz, himself a most accomplished man 
 of an attractive and susceptible endowment, and of Philosophy 
 an illustrious and most popular Professor. 
 
PRELIMINARY NOTICE. 
 
 THIS is the last fruit, though first published, of a long and earnest 
 labour devoted, in the main, to two men only Kant and Hegel, 
 and more closely, in the main also, to the three principal works 
 (the Kritiken) of the one, and the two principal works (the Logic 
 and the Encyclopaedia) of the other. This study has been the 
 writer's chief not just to say sole occupation during a greater 
 number of years, and for a greater number of hours in each day of 
 these years, than it is perhaps prudent to avow at present. The 
 reader, then, has a good right to expect something mature from 
 so long, unintermitted, and concentrated an endeavour ; it is 
 to be feared, however, that the irregularity of the very first look of 
 the thing will lead him to believe, on the contrary, that he is only 
 deceived. The truth is, that, after a considerable amount of time 
 and trouble had been employed on an exposition of Kant and a 
 general introduction to the whole subject of German Philosophy, 
 it was suddenly perceived that, perhaps, the most peculiar and 
 important elements to which the study had led, were those that 
 concerned Hegel, while, at the same time, the reflection arose that 
 it was to Hegel the public probably looked with the greatest 
 amount of expectant interest, if also of baffled irritation. This indi- 
 cates the considerations which led to the hope that the importance 
 of the matter might, in such a case, obtain excuse for a certain 
 extemporaneousness that lay in the form that, in short, the 
 matter of years might compensate the manner of months. 
 
 I do not think it worth while to make any observations on 
 the different sections or parts contained in these pages ; I remark 
 
XX11 PRELIMINARY NOTICE. 
 
 only that if the reader who probably, nevertheless, will take 
 his own way would read this book in the order and manner 
 its own composer would prescribe, he will begin with the part 
 marked ' II., A Translation from the Complete Logic of the whole 
 First Section, Quality' and force himself to dwell there the very 
 longest that he can. Only so will he realise at the vividest the 
 incredulity with which one first meets the strangeness and unin- 
 telligibleness of Hegel. Again, in reading the chapters of the 
 ' Struggle to Hegel,' which he will take next, he ought to retain 
 this translation still in his hands. The various portions of this 
 struggle will, in fact, be fully intelligible only to him who endea- 
 vours, repeatedly, to advance as far as ' Limit/ either in the trans- 
 lation or in Hegel's own Logic. Finally, after such preliminaries, 
 the translation II., or the correspondent original, should, in com- 
 pany with the commentary and interpretation III., be rigorously, 
 radically, completely studied, and then the rest taken as it stands.* 
 
 The secret of Hegel may be indicated at shortest thus : As 
 Aristotle with considerable assistance from Plato made explicit 
 the abstract Universal that was implicit in Socrates, so Hegel 
 with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling made 
 explicit the concrete Universal that was implicit in Kant. 
 
 Further, to preclude at once an entire sphere of objections, 
 I remark that Kant and Hegel are the very reverse of the 
 so-called ' German Party ' with which in England they are very 
 generally confounded. It is the express mission of Kant and 
 Hegel, in effect, to replace the negative of that party, by an affirma- 
 tive : or Kant and Hegel all but wholly directly both, and one of 
 them quite wholly directly have no object but to restore Faith 
 Faith in G-od Faith in the immortality of the Soul and the 
 Freedom of the Will nay, Faith in Christianity as the Kevealed 
 Religion and that, too, in perfect harmony with the Eight of 
 Private Judgment, and the Eights, or Lights, or Mights of Intelli- 
 gence in general. 
 
 * This need not alarm the most perfunctory reader, however, who will find three- 
 fourths of the work as Preface, Conclusion, Commentators, Struggle, and much of 
 the Commentary sufficiently exoteric and easy. 
 
PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 IN intruding on the Public with a work on Hegel, the first duty 
 that seems to offer, is, to come to an understanding with it (the 
 public) as regards the prepossessions which commonly obtain, it is 
 to be feared, not only as against the particular writer named, but 
 as against the whole body of what is called German Philosophy. It 
 will be readily admitted, to be sure, by all from whom the admis- 
 sion is of any value, that just in proportion to the relative know- 
 ledge of the individual is his perception as well of the relative 
 ignorance of the community. But this general ignorance, to wit 
 were no dispensation from the duty indicated : for just in such 
 circumstances is it that there are prepossessions, that there are 
 in the strict sense of the word prejudices ; and prejudices consti- 
 tute, here as everywhere else, that preliminary obstacle of natural 
 error which requires removal before^ any settlement of rational 
 truth can possibly be effected. We cannot pretend, however, to 
 reach all the prejudices concerned ; for, thought in this connexion 
 being still so incomplete, the variety of opinion, as usual, passes 
 into the indefinite; night reigns a night peopled by our own 
 fancies and distinct enumeration becomes impossible. 
 
 Nevertheless, restricting ourselves to what is either actually or 
 virtually prominent in the one case by public rumour, and in 
 the other by private validity perhaps we shall accomplish a 
 sufficiently exhaustive discussion by considering the whole ques- 
 tion of objections as reduced to the two main assertions, that 
 German Philosophy is, firstly, obsolete and, secondly, bad. The 
 latter category, indeed, is so comprehensive, that there is little 
 reason to fear but that we shall be able to include under it (with 
 its fellow) all of any consequence that has been anywhere said on 
 the subject. Of these two assertions in their order, then. 
 
 Of the First, certain proceedings of Schelling constitute the 
 angle ; but to understand these proceedings, and the influence they 
 
XXIV PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 exerted, a word is first of all necessary in regard to what, at the 
 date in question, was universally held to be the historical progress 
 of German Philosophy. The sum of general opinion in that regard 
 we may state at once, in fact, to have been this : Kant was sup- 
 planted by Fichte, Fichte by Schelling, and Schelling by Hegel. 
 Any dissension, indeed, as to the sequent signification of this series 
 was, as is natural, only to be found among the terms or members 
 to it themselves. Kant, for example, publicly declined the affilia- 
 tion which Fichte claimed from him. But then this was still 
 settled by the remark of Keinhold, that, though Kant's belief could 
 no longer be doubted, it yet by no means followed that Fichte was 
 wrong. As for Fichte and Schelling, they had had their differences 
 certainly, the master and the pupil, for the latter had gone to school 
 to other masters, and had insisted on the addition to the original 
 common property of a considerable amount of materials from with- 
 out : nevertheless, it may be taken for granted that they themselves, 
 though not without reluctance on the part of one of them perhaps, 
 acquiesced in the universal understanding of their mutual relations. 
 Hegel again, who had at first fought for Schelling, who had pro- 
 duced the bulk of that Critical Journal which had on the face of 
 it no origin and no object but polemically to stand by Schelling 
 who, in particular, had written that Dissertatio which demonstrated 
 the advance of Schelling over all his predecessors, and the conse- 
 quent truth of the Identitdtssystem who, in a word, seemed to 
 have publicly adopted this system and openly declared himself an 
 adherent of Schelling, Hegel, it is true, had afterwards declared off, 
 or, as the Germans have it, said himself loose, from Schelling. But 
 here, too, it was not necessary to take Hegel at his own word ; for 
 who does not know what every such mere declaration, such mere 
 saying, is worth ? Every man, in view of the special nick which 
 he himself seems to have effected in the end, would fain see elimi- 
 nated before it all the nicks of his predecessors, but not the less on 
 that account is that former but the product of these latter. On the 
 whole, then, despite some little natural interior dissension, it was 
 certain that Fichte was the outcome of Kant more certain, 
 perhaps, that Schelling was the outcome of Fichte, and even 
 on the whole more certain still that Hegel was the outcome of 
 Schelling. 
 
 Such we may assume to have been the universal belief at the 
 death of Hegel in 1831. But now it was the fortune of Schelling 
 to survive Hegel, and for a period of no less than twenty-three 
 
SCHELLING IN JUDGMENT OF HEGEL. XXV 
 
 years, during part of which it became his cue to overbid Hegel, 
 and pass him in his turn. During what we may call the reign 
 of Hegel, which may be taken to have commenced, though at 
 first feebly, with the appearance of the Phaenomenologie in 180-7,- 
 Schelling had preserved an almost unbroken and very remarkable 
 silence. No sooner was Hegel dead, however, than Schelling let 
 hints escape him this was as early as 1832 of the speedy 
 appearance on his part of yet another Philosophy, and, this time, 
 of transcendent and unirnagined import. No publication followed 
 these hints, nevertheless, till 1834, when, in reference to a certain 
 translation of Cousin, he gave vent to 'a very sharp and depreciatory 
 estimate of the Hegelian Philosophy,' and on grounds that were 
 equally hostile to his own, from which that of Hegel was supposed 
 to have sprung. Lastly, at Berlin in 1841, he publicly declared his 
 previous Philosophy and, of course, the Philosophy of Hegel 
 seemed no less involved to have been a poem, ' a mere poem/ 
 and he now offered in its place his ' Philosophy of Revelation/ 
 Now, with these facts before it, at the same time that all Germany 
 united to reject this last Philosophy as certainly for its part a 
 poem whatever its predecessor might have been, how could the 
 general public be expected to feel ? Worn out with the two 
 generations of fever that had followed the Kritik of Kant, would 
 not the natural impulse be to take the remaining philosopher of 
 the series at his word, and believe with him that the whole matter 
 had been in truth a poem, a futile striving of mere imagination in 
 the empty air of an unreal and false abstraction ? This same 
 public, moreover, found itself, on trial, compelled to forego the 
 hope of judging Hegel for itself, and, while the very difficulty 
 that produced this result would seem to it to throw an anterior 
 probability on the judgment of Schelling, it had every reason to 
 feel convinced that he, of all men, was the one who, in a super- 
 eminent degree, was the best qualified to judge for it. He, by uni- 
 versal acknowledgment, had thoroughly understood and thoroughly 
 summed both Kant and Fichte ; by an acknowledgment equally 
 universal, it was his system that had given origin to the system of 
 Hegel : moreover, he had lived longer than Hegel, and had enjoyed, 
 counting from the Critical Journal, the ample advantage of more 
 than fifty years of the study of the works of Hegel. If any man, 
 then,possessed the necessary ability, the necessary acquirements, the 
 necessary presuppositions every way, to enable him to understand 
 Hegel, that man was Schelling, and there could, therefore, be no 
 
XXVI PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 hesitation whatever in accepting the judgment of Schelling as what, 
 in reference to the Philosophy of Hegel, was to be universally 
 considered the absolutely definitive conclusion, the absolutely 
 definitive, sentence. If Schelling were inadequate to understand 
 Hegel, what other German could hope success ? and, the door being 
 shut on Germany, was it possible to expect an ' open sesame ' from 
 the lips of any foreigner ? Eosenkranz remarks of the Times, that 
 ' it ridiculed the attention which we devoted to the conflict of Schel- 
 ling with the School of Hegel, and opined that we were abstruse 
 enthusiasts, for the whole difference between Hegel and Schelling 
 came at last to this, that the first was very obscure, and the second 
 obscurer still.' But surely, in the circumstances described, the 
 Times was not only entitled to say as much as that, but, more 
 still, that the whole thing had been but an intellectual fever, and 
 was now at an end, self-stultified by the admission of its own 
 dream. In fact, as has been said, the declaration of Schelling 
 amounted to a sentence. And so the general public took it we 
 may say not only in Germany, but throughout Europe. Thence- 
 forth, accordingly, stronger natures turned themselves to more 
 hopeful issues, and German Philosophy was universally aban- 
 doned, unless, as it were, for the accidental studies of a few ex- 
 ceptional spirits. Since then, indeed, and especially since the 
 failure of political hopes in 1848, Germany on the whole has, by 
 a complete reaction, devoted to the crass concretes of empirical 
 science the same ardour which she previously exhibited in the 
 abstract atmosphere of the pure Idea. 
 
 This will probably be allowed to suffice as regards the case of the 
 affirmative in reference to the first assertion that German Philo- 
 sophy is obsolete. What may be said for the negative, will be 
 considered later. Meanwhile, we shall proceed to state the case 
 of the affirmative of the second assertion that German Philosophy 
 is bad. 
 
 The proof of this assertion, current opinion usually rests, 
 firstly, on the indirect evidence of the reputed friends of German 
 Philosophy, and, secondly, on the direct findings of its intelligent 
 foes. 
 
 Are not the friends of the German Philosophers, we are asked, 
 for example, just all these people who occupy themselves nowa- 
 days with Feuerbach and with Strauss ; and do not they belong, 
 almost all of them, to an inferior Atheistico-Materialistic set, or, 
 at all events, to those remnants of the Aufklarung, of Eighteenth 
 
TESTIMONY AGAINST GERMAN PHILOSOPHY XXVii 
 
 Century Illumination, which still exist among us ? Then, are not 
 Essayists and Eeviewers, with Bishop Colenso, generally spoken 
 of as ' the German Party ' ; while, as for Strauss and Eenan, are 
 they not, by universal assertion and express name, the pupils of 
 Hegel; and is not the one aim of the whole of these writers to 
 establish a negative as regards the special inspiration of the Chris- 
 tian Scriptures, and shake Faith ? There was Mr Buckle, too, 
 who, as is very clearly to be seen, though, to be sure, his mind 
 was not very well made up, and he vacillated curiously between 
 the Deism with an Immortality (say) of Hume and the Atheism 
 without an Immortality of Comte there was Mr Buckle, who 
 still knew nothing and would know nothing but the Illumination, 
 and did not he round his tumid but vacant periods with allusions 
 to the German Philosophers as ' advanced thinkers ' of the most 
 exemplary type ? By their fruits you shall know them, and shall 
 we not judge of Kant and Hegel by these their self-proclaimed 
 friends, which are the fruits they produced ? Nor so judging, 
 and in view of the very superfluous extension in an age like the 
 present of scepticism and misery (which is the sole vocation of 
 such friends), shall we hesitate to declare the whole movement 
 bad? 
 
 But, besides this indirect evidence of the reputed friends, there 
 is the direct testimony of the intelligent foes of the philosophy 
 and philosophers in question : we possess writers of the highest 
 ability in themselves, and of consummate accomplishment as to 
 all learning requisite Sir William Hamilton, Coleridge, De 
 Quincey, for example who have instituted each of them his own 
 special inquest into the matter, and who all agree in assuring us 
 of the Atheistic, Pantheistic, and, for the rest, self- contradictory, 
 and indeed nugatory, nature of the entire industry, from Kant, 
 who began it, to Hegel and Schelling, who terminated it. Surely, 
 then, a clear case here, if ever anywhere, has been made out 
 against the whole body of German Philosophy, which really, 
 besides, directly refutes itself, even in the eyes of the simplest, 
 by its own uncouth, outre, bizarre, and unintelligible jargon. 
 Beyond a doubt the thing is bad, radically bad, and deservedly at 
 an end. ' Advanced thinkers ' come themselves to see, more and 
 more clearly daily, the nullity of its idealism, as well as its 
 obstructiveness generally to the legitimate progress of all sensible 
 speculation, and Mr Lockhart (if we mistake not) had perfect 
 reason, if not in the words, at least in the thoughts, when he 
 
XXVlil PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 exclaimed to a would-be translator of German Philosophy, ' What ! 
 would you introduce that d d nonsense into this country ? ' 
 
 It would seem, then, that the affirmative possesses an exceed- 
 ingly strong case as regards both assertions, and that the negative 
 has imposed on it a very awkward dilemma in each. Either grant 
 German Philosophy obsolete, or prefer yourself to Schelling : this 
 is the dilemma on one side. Then on the other it cries : Either 
 grant German Philosophy bad, or justify Scepticism. 
 
 Now, to take the latter alternative of the first dilemma would 
 be ridiculous. To take that of the second, again, would be to 
 advance in the teeth of our own deepest convictions. 
 
 Scepticism has done its work, and it were an anachronism on 
 our part, should we, like Mr Buckle, pat Scepticism on the back 
 and urge it still farther forward. Scepticism is the necessary 
 servant of Illuminations, and Illuminations are themselves very 
 necessary things ; but Scepticism and Illuminations are no longer 
 to be continued when Scepticism and Illuminations have accom- 
 plished their mission, fulfilled their function. It is all very well, 
 when the new light breaks in on us, to take delight in it, and to 
 doubt every nook and corner of our old darkness. It is very 
 exhilarating then, too, though it breed but wind and conceit, to 
 crow over our neighbours, and to be eager to convince them of the 
 excellence of our position and of the wretchedness of theirs. But 
 when, in Schelling's phrase, Aufklarung has passed into Aus- 
 Jcldrung when the Light-up has become a Light-out, the Clear- 
 ing-up a Clearing-out when we are cleared, that is, of every 
 article of our stowage, of our Inhalt, of our Substance things are 
 very different. As we shiver then for hunger and cold in a crank 
 bark that will not sail, all the clearing and clearness, all the light 
 and lightness in the world, will not recompense or console us. 
 The vanity of being better informed, of being superior to the pre- 
 judices of the vulgar, even of being superior to the ' superstition ' 
 of the vulgar, will no longer support us. We too have souls to 
 be saved. We too would believe in God. We too have an 
 interest in the freedom of the will. We too would wish to share 
 the assurance of the humble pious Christian who takes all thank- 
 fully, carrying it in perfect trust of the future to the other side. 
 
 To maintain the negative, then, as regards the two assertions 
 at issue, will demand on our part some care. Would we main- 
 tain, as regards the first, that German Philosophy is not obsolete, 
 we must so present what we maintain as not in any way offen- 
 
SCHELLING'S SENTENCE NOT ACCEPTED. xxix 
 
 sively to derogate from the dignity and authority of the intellect 
 and position of Schelling. On the other hand, would we maintain, 
 as regards the second, that German Philosophy is not bad, this too 
 must be so managed that Scepticism, or, more accurately, the con- 
 tinuance of Scepticism, shall not be justified rather so that 
 German Philosophy shall appear not bad just for this reason, that 
 it demonstrates a necessary end to Scepticism and this, too, with- 
 out being untrue to the Aufklaruug, without being untrue to the 
 one principle of the Aufklarung, its single outcome the Right of 
 Private Judgment. 
 
 With reference to the first assertion, then, that German Philo- 
 sophy is obsolete, we hold the negative, and we rest our position 
 simply on the present historical truth, that the sentence of Schel- 
 ling, however infallible its apparent authority, has not, in point of 
 fact, been accepted. The several considerations which go to prove 
 this follow here together. 
 
 Many other Germans, for example, of good ability, of great 
 accomplishment, and thoroughly versed in Schelling himself, have, 
 despite the ban of the latter, continued to study Hegel, and have 
 even claimed for him a superior significance, not only as regards 
 Schelling or Fichte, but even as regards Kant. As concerns other 
 countries, the same state of the case has been attested by the trans- 
 lations which have appeared. Translations are public matters, 
 and call for no express enumeration ; and as regards the German 
 writers to whom we allude, perhaps general statement will suffice 
 as well. We shall appeal only, by way of instance, to one friend and 
 to one foe of Hegel. The former is Schwegler, whose premature 
 death has been universally deplored, and whom we have to thank, 
 as well for a most exhaustive and laborious investigation of the 
 Metaphysic of Aristotle, as for what it is, perhaps, not rash to 
 name the most perfect epitome of general philosophy at present in 
 existence.* This latter work is easily accessible, and the summaries 
 it contains are of such a nature generally, and as respects Schel- 
 ling and Hegel in particular, though drawbacks are not wanting, 
 as to relieve us of the fear that its authority in the question will 
 be readily impugned. The foe (i.e. of Hegel) whom we would adduce 
 here is Haym, who applies to Schelling's estimate of Hegel such 
 epithets as * spiteful ' and ' envious/ and asserts it to contain ' ran- 
 cour/ ' misintelligence/ and ' a good deal of distortion. '-f The same 
 
 * Englished, three years later, by the author, 
 t Vide Haym : Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 23. 
 
XXX PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 evidence, both of friend and foe, is illustrated and made good by 
 the present state, not only in Germany, but everywhere in Europe, 
 of the study of the four writers who represent the philosophy in 
 question. As regards Schelling himself, for example, that study 
 may be almost named null, and his writings are probably never read 
 now unless for purposes of an historic and business nature. Eeading, 
 indeed, seems unnecessary in the case of what was life-long incon- 
 sistency, stained too by the malice, and infected by the ineptitude, 
 of the end. Of Fichte, much of the philosophical framework has 
 fallen to the ground, and what works of his are still current, at the 
 same time that they are in their nature exoteric, interest rather by 
 their literary merits and the intrinsic nobleness of the man. But 
 the hopes that were founded on Kant and Hegel have not yet 
 withered down, and the works of both are still fondled in the 
 hands with however longing a sigh over the strange spell of diffi- 
 culty that clasps them from the sight. With reference to the 
 former, Germany, at this very moment, loudly declares that with 
 him is a beginning again to be made, and openly confesses that 
 she has been too fast that aspiration and enthusiasm have out- 
 stripped intelligence. As for Hegel, the case is thus put by an 
 accomplished English metaphysician : * ' Who has ever yet uttered 
 one intelligible word about Hegel ? Not any of his countrymen 
 not any foreigner seldom even himself. With peaks here and 
 there more lucent than the sun, his intervals are filled with a sea 
 of darkness, unnavigable by the aid of any compass, and an atmo- 
 sphere, or rather vacuum, in which no human intellect can breathe. 
 . . . Hegel is impenetrable, almost throughout, as a mountain of 
 adamant.' This is the truth, and it would have been well had 
 other writers but manifested an equal courage of honest avowal. 
 But it is with very mixed feelings that one watches the allures of 
 those who decorate their pages with long passages from the Delian 
 German of this modern Heraclitus, as if these passages were perti- 
 nent to their pages and intelligible to themselves this at the very 
 moment that they declare the utter impossibility of extracting any 
 meaning from what they quote unless by a process of distillation ! 
 Hegelian iron, Hegelianly tempered into Hegelian steel the 
 absolute adamant this is to be distilled ! Bah ! take heart, hang 
 out, sew on your panni purpurei all the same ! 
 
 The verdict of Schelling, then, seems practically set aside by the 
 mere progress of time ; and there appears to lie no wish nearer to 
 * Professor Ferrier, whose recent death (1864) we are now mourning. 
 
KANT AND HEGEL HOW ACTUALLY REGARDED. XXXi 
 
 the hearts of all honest students nowadays, than that Hegel (and 
 with him Kant is usually united) should be made permeable. And 
 justification of this wish, on the part of students who are con- 
 fessedly only on the outside, is to be found in this that, evea 
 from this position, the works of both these writers, however 
 impenetrable in the main, afford intimations of the richest promise 
 on all the deeper interests of man. The Kritik of Pure Eeason 
 and the Kritik of Judgment remain still vast blocks of immovable 
 opacity; and even the Kritik of Practical Keason has not yet (1864) 
 been represented with any approach to entirety in England : never- 
 theless, from this last work there have shone, even on British 
 breasts, some of those rays which filled the soul of Eichter with 
 divine joy with divine tranquillity as regards the freedom of the 
 will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. Hegel 
 is more impervious than Kant ; yet still, despite the exasperation, 
 the positive offence which attends the reading of such exoteric 
 works of his as have been attempted to be conveyed to the public 
 in French or English, we see cropping occasionally to the surface 
 in these, a rneaningness of speech, a facility of manipulating, and 
 of reducing into ready proportion, a vast number of interests which 
 to the bulk of readers are as yet only in a state of instinctive chaos, 
 and, just on every subject that is approached, a general over- 
 mastering grasp of thought to which no other writer exhibits a 
 parallel. In short, we may say that, as regards these great Ger- 
 mans, the general public carries ift its heart a strange secret 
 conviction, and that it seems even to its own self to wait on them 
 with a dumb but fixed expectation of infinite and essential result. 
 On this head, then, the conclusion forced upon us seems to be, that 
 German Philosophy is indeed not understood, but not, on that 
 account, by any means obsolete. 
 
 We come now to the negative of the second assertion, that 
 German Philosophy is lad, and have to consider, first of all, what, 
 on the opposite side, has been said for the affirmative, and under 
 the two heads of the indirect evidence of reputed friends, and the 
 direct testimony of intelligent foes. Under the first head, the 
 plea began by alluding to a certain small Atheistico-Materialistic 
 Party; but to this it is sufficient reply to point out that the 
 adherents of a Strauss and a Feuerbach must be widely discrimi- 
 nated from those of a Kant and a Hegel. Further, what the plea 
 states next, that Strauss and Renan are par excellence named the 
 pupils of Hegel, is, as mere ascription, of small moment before the 
 
XXX11 PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 fact that their supposed master would have found the industry of 
 both, in view of what he had done himself, not only superfluous, 
 but obstructive, contradictory, and even, in a certain point of view, 
 contemptible. Much the same thing can be said as regards the 
 English writers who seem to follow a similar bent : whatever may 
 be the inner motives of these writers (Essayists and Eeviewers, 
 &c.), their activity belongs to that sphere of Rationalism against 
 which Hegel directly opposed himself. Still to spread the negative 
 a negative the spreading of which has long reached ultimate tenuity 
 and in those days when it is not the negative but the affirmative 
 we need this would have seemed to a Hegel of all things the 
 most unnecessary, of all things the most absurd. 
 
 Mr Buckle -who comes next certainly praises Kant as, per- 
 haps, the greatest thinker of his century; and, though he does 
 not name Hegel, he seems to speak of the philosophers of Ger- 
 many in general as something very exalted. But, observe, there 
 is always in all this the air of a man who is speaking by antici- 
 pation, and who only counts on verifying the same. Nor beyond 
 anticipation can any broader basis of support be extended to 
 those generous promises he so kindly advanced, of supplying us 
 with definitive light at length on German Philosophy, and on the 
 causes of the special accumulation of Thought and Knowledge 
 in that great country ! It is, indeed, to be feared that those 
 promises rested only on faith in his own invincible intellect, 
 and not on any knowledge as yet of the subject itself. He had 
 a theory, had Mr Buckle, or, rather, a theory had him a theory, 
 it is true, small rather, but still a theory that to him loomed huge 
 as the universe, at the same time that it was the single drop of 
 vitality in his whole soul. Now, that such redoubted thinkers 
 as Kant and Hegel, who, in especial, had been suspected or accused 
 of Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms dear to 
 Enlightenment, but hateful to Prejudice (or vice versa) that 
 these should be found not to fit his theory such doubt 
 never for a moment crossed even the most casual dream of 
 Buckle ! 
 
 We hold, then, that Mr Buckle spoke in undoubted anticipa- 
 tion, and in absence of any actual knowledge. His book, at all 
 events, would argue absolute destitution of any such knowledge, 
 despite a certain amount of the usual tumid pretension ; and it 
 was just when he found himself brought by his own programme 
 face to face with the Germans, that, it appears, he felt induced 
 

 MR BUCKLE AS A REPUTED FRIEND. XXX111 
 
 to take that voyage of recreation, the melancholy result of which 
 we still deplore. The dilemma is this : once arrived at the actual 
 study of the Germans, either Mr Buckle penetrated the Germans, 
 or he did not. Now, on the one horn, if he did, he surely i'oundy 
 to his amazement, consternation, horror a spirit, a thought the 
 very reverse of his theory the very reverse of that superiority 
 to established prejudice and constituted superstition which his own 
 unhesitating conviction had led him so innocently to expect. In 
 other words, if Mr Buckle did penetrate the Germans, he found 
 that there was nothing left him but to burn every vestige of that 
 shallow Enlightenment which, supported on such semi-information, 
 on such weak personal vanity, amid such hollow raisonnement, and 
 with such contradictory results, he had been tempted, so boyishly 
 ardent, so vaingloriously pompous, to communicate to a world 
 in many of its members so ignorant, that it hailed a crude, con- 
 ceited boy (of formal ability, quick conscientiousness, and the pang 
 of Illumination inherited probably from antecedents somewhere) 
 as a ' Vast Genius,' and his work a bundle of excerpts of mere 
 Illumination, from a bundle of books of mere Illumination, dis- 
 posed around a ready-made presupposition of mere Illumination 
 as a ' Magnificent Contribution,' fruit of ' Vast Learning,' and even 
 ' Philosophy.' * 
 
 Such would have been the case if Mr Buckle had penetrated 
 the Germans : he would have been injhaste to hide out of the way 
 all traces of the blunder (and of the blundering manner of the 
 blunder) which had pretentiously brought forward as new and 
 great what had received its coup de grace at the hands and there- 
 after been duly ticketed and shelved as Aufklarung by the in- 
 dustryof an entire generation of Germans, and at least not less 
 than half a century previously. 
 
 On the other horn, if Mr Buckle had not penetrated and could 
 not penetrate the Germans a supposition not incompatible with 
 the formal ability of even Mr Buckle vexation the most intense 
 
 * The theory entertained in explanation of Mr Buckle here, has not his particular 
 age in regard when he wrote his work, but a youthful ideal, whose burthen was 
 Aufklarung, which had been kindled in him probably from early communication 
 with some to him hero or heroes of Aufklarung, and which was filled up by what 
 quotations he was able to make from a miscellaneous and mere reading in the direc- 
 tion of the Aufklarung. In a certain way, there is not much said here as against 
 Mr Buckle : while his talent and love of truth are both acknowledged, his matter is 
 identified with the Aufklarung, and this last consideration is not likely to be taken 
 ill by the friends of the Aufklarung. 
 
 3 
 
XXXIV PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 would replace the boyish anticipations, the conceited promises, 
 which had been with so much confidence announced. A certain 
 amount of matter was here indispensable ; mere hollow, swash- 
 buckler peroration about superstition, fanaticism, and the like, 
 would no longer serve : his own programme forced him to show 
 some of the knowledge which had been here as he had himself 
 declared so pre-eminently accumulated, as well as to demon- 
 strate something of the peculiar means and influences which had 
 brought about so remarkable a result. The Theme was Civilisa- 
 tion, and to him civilisation was knowledge, the accumulation 
 of knowledge, therefore, was necessarily to him the very first and 
 fundamental condition, and of this condition Germany had been 
 publicly proclaimed by himself the type and the exemplar. Mere 
 generalities would no longer suffice, then the type itself would 
 require to be produced the Germans must be penetrated ! But 
 how if they could not be penetrated ? 
 
 Thus, choosing for Mr Buckle which horn we may, the dilemma 
 is such as to truncate or reverse any influence of his praise on the 
 German Philosophers. Mr Buckle's sanguine expectations, in- 
 deed, to find there but mirrors of the same small Enlightenment 
 and Illumination which he himself worshipped, are to be applied, 
 not in determination of Kant and Hegel, but of Mr Buckle 
 himself. 
 
 On the general consideration at present before us, then, we are 
 left with the conclusion that the German Philosophers are un- 
 affected by the indirect evidence of their reputed friends. 
 
 On the other issue, as regards what weight is to be attached to 
 the verdict of the supposed intelligent foes of the Germans, there 
 were required a special analysis at least of the relative acquire- 
 ments of each of these; and this would lead to an inquest and 
 discussion of greater length than to adapt it for insertion here. 
 This, then, though on our part an actual accomplishment, will be 
 carried over to another work. We remark only, that if Sir 
 William Hamilton, Coleridge, and others have averred this and 
 that of the Germans, whatever they aver is something quite in- 
 different, for the ignorance of all such, in the field before us, is 
 utter, and considering the pretensions which accompany it, dis- 
 graceful.* As for Mr Lockhart, it will be presently seen, per- 
 
 * The pretensions of Coleridge have been already made notorious by Professor 
 Terrier in Blackwood's Magazine for March, 1840. Those of others, though less 
 simple, are equally demonstrable. 
 
EVIDENCE INVALID. * ADVANCED THINKERS/ XXXV 
 
 haps, that he only made a mistake when he anathematised German 
 Philosophy as 'nonsense/ and that it is to that 'nonsense' we 
 have probably to attribute some very important results. 
 
 As regards the ^mfriendly ' advanced thinkers ' who denounce 
 the idealism and jargon of German Philosophy, this is as it 
 should be : for German Philosophy, while it considers the general 
 movement concerned as the one evil of the present, cannot but 
 feel amused with the simple ways of this odd thing which calls 
 itself an ' advanced thinker ' nowadays. ' There was a time,' says 
 He^el, ' when a man who did not believe in Ghosts or the Devil 
 
 O * 
 
 was named a Philosopher ! ' But an ' advanced thinker,' to these 
 distinctions negative of the unseen, adds what is positive of the 
 seen an enlightened pride in his father the monkey ! He may 
 enjoy, perhaps, a well-informed satisfaction in contemplating mere 
 material phenomena that vary to conditions as the all of this 
 universe or he may even experience an elevation into the moral 
 sublime when he points to his future in the rock in the form of 
 those bones and other remains of a Pithecus Intelligens, which, in 
 all probability (he reflects), no subsequent intelligence will ever 
 handle but monkey is the pass-word! Sink your pedigree as 
 man, and adopt for family-tree a procession of the skeletons of 
 monkeys then superior enlightenment radiates from your very 
 person, and your place is fixed a place of honour in the accla- 
 mant brotherhood that names itself ' advanced ! ' So it (still) is in 
 England at present ; this is the acknowledged pinnacle of English 
 thought and English science now. Just point in these days to 
 the picture of some huge baboon, and suddenly before such 
 enlightenment superstition is disarmed, priests confess their 
 imposture, and the Church sinks beneath the Hippocampus of a 
 Gorilla ! 
 
 And this is but "me example of the present general truth, that 
 Spiritualism seems flying out in England, and that more and 
 more numerous voices daily cry hail to the new God, Matter 
 matter, too, independent of any law (even law-loving Mr Buckle 
 left behind !) matter, even when organised, pliant only to the 
 moulding influence of contingent conditions ! This, surely, may 
 be legitimately named the beginning of the end ! 
 
 In Germany, indeed, despite a general apathy as under stun of 
 expectations shocked, matters are not yet quite so bad ; and that 
 they are not yet quite so bad may, perhaps, be attributed to some 
 glimmering influence, or to some glimmering hope of its philo- 
 
XX XVI PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 sophy yet. Germany is certainly not without Materialism at 
 present ; but still even now, perhaps, it cannot be said to be so 
 widely spread there as in either France or England. This we may 
 ascribe to the ' nonsense ' anathematised by Mr Lockhart. 
 
 Be this as it may, we shall take leave to ascribe to this ' non- 
 sense' another difference between England and Germany which, 
 let it be ascribed to what it may, will as a fact be denied by none. 
 This difference or this fact is, that this country is at this present 
 moment far outstripped by Germany in regard to everything that 
 holds of the intellect with the sole exception, perhaps, of Poetry 
 and Fiction. Even as regards these, Germany has it still in her 
 power to say a strong word for herself; but, these apart, in 
 what department of literature are we not now surpassed by the 
 Germans ? From whom have we received that ' more penetra- 
 tive spirit ' of criticism and biography that obtains at present ? 
 Who sets us an example of completed research, of thorough 
 accuracy, of absolutely impartial representation ? Who reads the 
 Classics for us, and corrects and makes them plain to us plain 
 in the minutest allusion to the concrete life from which they 
 sprang ? Who gathers information for us, and refers us to the 
 sources of the same, on every subject in which it may occur to us 
 to take an interest ? But literature is not the strong point here : 
 what of science ? and no one will dispute the value of that is 
 there any department of science in which at this moment the 
 Germans are not far in advance of the rest of Europe ? 
 
 Now, all this activity which gives to Germany the intellectual 
 lead in Europe is subsequent to her philosophies, and is, in all 
 probability, just to be attributed to her philosophies. It is quite 
 possible, at the same time, that the scientific men of Germany 
 are no students of what is called the philosophy of their country 
 nay, it appears to the present writer a matter of certainty that 
 that philosophy is not yet essentially understood anywhere: it by 
 no means follows, on that account, however, that this philosophy 
 is not the motive spring to that science. If the essential secret 
 of philosophy has not been won, still much of the mass has been 
 invaded from without, has been broken up externally, and has 
 fallen down and resolved itself into the general current. Its 
 language, its distinctions have passed into the vernacular, and 
 work there with their own life. Hence it is that Germany seems 
 to possess at present, not only a language of its own, but, as it 
 were, a system of thought-counters of its own for which no other 
 
THE INTELLECTUAL LEAD OF GERMANY TO WHAT OWING. XXXV11 
 
 , 
 
 language can find equivalents. Let anyone take up the Anzeige 
 der Vorlesungen, the notice of lectures at any German University, 
 and he will find much matter of speculation presented to him ; 
 for everything will seem there to him sui generis, and quite dis- 
 similar to anything of which he may have experience in Great 
 Britain or in France. Haym* remarks, as regards this vast 
 difference between the spirit of Germany and that of England, 
 that to compare the books that issue from the press of the one 
 country with those that issue from that of the other, one is 
 tempted to suppose that the two nations move on wholly different 
 courses. Now, mere difference would be a matter of no moment ; 
 but what if the difference point to retrogression on one side, and 
 progression on the other ? It is very certain that we are behind 
 the Germans now, and it is also certain that these latter continue 
 to rush forward with a speed in every branch of science which 
 threatens to leave us in the end completely in the lee. 
 
 Associating this difference of progress with that difference of 
 the language used for the purposes of thought, it does seem not 
 unreasonable to conclude that the former is but a corollary of the 
 latter. In other words, it appears probable that that ' nonsense ' of 
 Mr Lockhart has been the means of introducing into the German 
 mind such series of new and marvellously penetrant terms and 
 distinctions as has carried it with ease into the solution of a 
 variety of problems impossible to the English, despite the in- 
 duction of Bacon, the good sense of Locke, and even Adam 
 Smith's politico-economical revelations. 
 
 The denunciations of German Philosophy, then, emitted by 
 ' advanced thinkers,' would seem powerless beside the superiority 
 of German Science to that of the rest of Europe when collated 
 with the terms and distinctions of the Philosophy which preceded 
 it. These advanced thinkers, in fact, are the logical contradictory 
 of German Philosophy, and, if they denounce it, it in turn not 
 denounces, but, lifting the drapery, simply names them. 
 
 It is, perhaps, now justifiable to conclude on the whole, then, 
 
 * ' Let us compare, to go no further, tlie scientific works of the English with 
 those of our own country, and we shall very soon perceive that the type of English 
 thought is essentially different from that of the German ; that the scientific faculty 
 of the countrymen of Bacon and Locke moves in quite other paths, and makes 
 quite other stadia; that its combinations proceed by quite other notions, both 
 principal and accessory, than is the case, in the same respect, with the countrymen 
 of Kant and Hegel.' Haym : Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 309. 
 
XXXV111 PREFACE TO OKIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 that, as regards the negative of the assertions that German Philo- 
 sophy is obsolete or lad, a case has been led of sufficient validity to 
 set aside the opposing plea of the affirmative. It is not to be in- 
 ferred, however, that the case is now closed, and all said that can 
 be said in support of the Germans. We have spoken of the benefits 
 which seem to have been derived from the very terms ; but these 
 surely are not restricted to the mere words, and others, both greater 
 in number and more important in kind, may be expected to flow from 
 the thoughts which these words or terms only represent. It were 
 desirable, then, to know these latter benefits, which, if they really 
 exist, ought to prove infinitely more recommendatory of the study 
 we advocate than any interest which has yet been adduced. It is 
 this consideration which shall form the theme, on the whole, of 
 what we think it right yet prefatorily to add. 
 
 The misfortune is, however, that, as regards the benefits in ques- 
 tion, they as yet only ' may be expected : ' it cannot be said 
 that, from German Philosophy, so far as the thoughts are con- 
 cerned, any adequate harvest has yet been reaped. Nevertheless, 
 this harvest is still potentially there, and, perhaps, it is not quite 
 impossible to find a word or two that shall prefigure something of 
 its general nature and extent. It is evident, however, that, if it is 
 true, be it as it may with the terms, that the thoughts of German 
 Philosophy are not^ yet adequately turned to account, but remain 
 as yet almost, as it were, beyond the reach whether of friend or 
 foe, there must exist some unusual difficulty of intelligence in the 
 case ; and it may be worth while to look to this first. For the duty 
 of a Preface though necessarily for the most part in a merely 
 cursory manner is no less to relieve difficulty than to meet 
 objections, explain connexions, and induce a hearing. The diffi- 
 culty we have at present before us, however, must be supposed to 
 concern Hegel only; what concerns Kant must be placed else- 
 where. Nor, even as regards Hegel, is it to be considered possible 
 to enumerate at present all the sources of his difficulty, and for 
 this reason, that a certain knowledge of the matter involved must 
 be presupposed before any adequate understanding can be expected 
 to result. The great source of difficulty, for example, if our in- 
 most conviction be correct, is that an exhaustive study of Kant 
 has been universally neglected a neglect, as Hegel himself (we 
 may say) chuckles, 'not unrevenged,' and the key-note of this 
 same Hegel has thus remained inaccessible. Now this plainly 
 concerns a point for which a preface can offer no sufficient 
 
ADVANTAGES OF THE STUDY. XXXIX 
 
 breadth. We shall confine ourselves, therefore, to one or two 
 sources of difficulty which may contain auxiliary matter in 
 themselves, and may prove, on the whole, not quite insusceptible 
 of intelligible discussion at once. 
 
 What is called the Jargon of German Philosophy, for example, 
 and has been denounced as Barlarisch by a multitude of Germans 
 themselves (Haym among them), though, under the name of terms 
 and distinctions, it has just been defended, may not unprofitably 
 receive another word. Now, we may say at once, that if on one 
 side this Jargon is to be admitted, it is to be denied on the other. 
 The truth is, that if on one side it looks like jargon and sounds 
 like jargon, on the other it is not jargon, but a philosophical 
 nomenclature and express system of terms. The scandal of philo- 
 sophy hitherto has been its logomachies, its mere verbal disputes. 
 Now, with terms that float loosely on the lips of the public, and 
 vary daily, misunderstandings and disputes in consequence of a 
 multiplicity of meanings were hardly to be avoided ; but here it 
 is that we have one of the most peculiar and admirable of the 
 excellences of Hegel : his words are such and so that they must be 
 understood as he understands them, and difference there can be 
 none. In Hegel, thing and word arise together, and must be com- 
 prehended together. A true definition, as we know, is that which 
 predicates both the proximum genus and the differentia : now the 
 peculiarity of the Hegelian terms is just this that their very 
 birth is nothing but the reflexion" of the differentia into the 
 proximum genus that at their very birth, then, they arise in a 
 perfect definition. This is why we find no dictionary and so little 
 explanation of terms in Hegel ; for the book itself is that diction- 
 ary ; and how each term comes, that is the explanation ; each 
 comes forward, indeed, as it is wanted, and where it is wanted, 
 and just so, in short, that it is no mere term, but the thought 
 itself. It is useless to offer examples of this, for every paragraph 
 of the Logic is an example in point. If the words, then, were an 
 absolutely new coinage, this would be their justification, and the 
 nickname of jargon would fall to the ground. But what we have 
 here is no new coinage, Hegel has carefully chosen for his terms 
 those words which are the known and familiar names of the 
 current Vorstellungen, of the current figurate conceptions which 
 correspond to his Begriffe, to his pure notions, and are as the 
 metaphors and externalisations of these Begriffe, of these pure 
 notions. They have thus no mere arbitrary and artificial sense, 
 
Xl PKEFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 but a living and natural one, and their attachment through the 
 Yorstellung to the Begriff, through the figurate conception to 
 the pure notion, converts an instinctive and blind, into a con- 
 scious and perceptive use, to the infinite improvement both of 
 thought and speech even in their commonest daily applications. 
 The reproach of jargon, then, concerns one of the greatest merits 
 of Hegel a merit which distinguishes him above all other philo- 
 sophers, and which, while it extends to us means of the most 
 assured movement, secures himself from those misunderstandings 
 which have hitherto sapped philosophy, and rendered it univer- 
 sally suspect. Jargon is an objection, then, which will indeed 
 remove itself, so soon as the objector shall have given himself 
 the trouble to understand it. 
 
 Another difficulty turns on this word Vorstellung which we 
 have just used. A Vorstellung is a sort of sensuous thought; 
 it is a symbol, a metaphor, as it were an externalisation of 
 thought: or Vorstellung, as a whole, is what we commonly 
 mean by Conception, Imagination, the Association of Ideas, &c. 
 Hegel pointedly declares of this Association of Ideas, that it is 
 not astrict to the three ordinary laws only which, since Hume, 
 have been named Contiguity, Similitude, and Contrast, but that 
 it floats on a prey to a thousand-fold contingency. Now, it is 
 this Association of Ideas that constitutes thought to most of us, 
 a blind, instinctive secution of a miscellaneous multitude of un- 
 verified individuals. These individuals are Vorstellungen, figurate 
 conceptions ideas crass, emblematic bodies of thoughts rather 
 than thoughts themselves. Then, the process itself, as a whole, 
 is also nameable Vorstellung in general. An example, perhaps, 
 will illustrate this an example which by anticipation may be 
 used here, though it will be found elsewhere. ' God might have 
 thrown into space a single germ-cell from which alf that we see 
 now might have developed itself.' We take these words from a 
 periodical which presumes itself and justly to be in the van 
 at present: the particular writer also to whom they are due, 
 speaks with the tone of a man who knows and justly that he 
 is at least not behind his fellows. What is involved in this 
 writing, however, is not thought, but Vorstellung. In the quo- 
 tation, indeed, there are mainly three Vorstellungen God, Space, 
 and a Germ-cell. Now, with these elements the writer of this 
 particular sentence conceives himself to think a beginning. To 
 take all back to God, Space, and a single Germ-cell, that is 
 
VORSTELLUNG. V xli 
 
 . 
 
 enough for him and his necessities of thought; that to him is 
 to look at the thought beginning, sufficiently closely. But all 
 these three elements are already complete and self-dependent. 
 God, one Yorstellung, finished, ready-made, complete by itself, 
 takes up a Germ-cell, another Vorstellung, finished, ready-made, 
 complete by itself, and drops it into Space, a third Vorstellung, 
 finished, ready-made, complete by itself. This done without 
 transition, without explanation, the rest (by the way, another 
 Vorstellung) follows ; arid thus we have three elements with no 
 beginning at the same time that we have four with no transition 
 but the fiat of the writer. This, then, is not thought, but an 
 idle mis-spending of the time with empty pictures which, while 
 they infect the mind of the reader only with other pictures equally 
 empty, tend to infect that of the writer also with wind the wind 
 of vanity. ' Yes ; I looked into Spinoza some time ago, and it was 
 a clear ether, but there was no God : ' this, the remark of a distin- 
 guished man in conversation, is another excellent example of Vor- 
 stellung, figurate conception, imagination in lieu of thought. If 
 one wants to think God, one has no business to set the eye a-roving 
 through an infinite clear ether in hopes of seeing him at length ! 
 ' I have swept space with my telescope/ says Lalande, ' and found 
 no God.' To the expectation of this illuminated Astronomer, then, 
 God was an optical object ; and as he could find with his glass no 
 such optical object rather no optical object to correspond to his 
 Vorstellung, which Vorstellung he had got he knew not where and 
 never asked to know, which Vorstellung, in fact, it had never 
 occurred to him in any way to question God there was none ! 
 These, then, are examples of Vorstellungen, and not of thought ; 
 and we may say that the Vorstellung of the Materialist as to space 
 constitutes a rebuke to the Vorstellung of the Spiritualist as to a 
 clear ether in which it was a disappointment that no God was to 
 be seen! God, whether as revealed to us by Scripture, or as demon- 
 strated by philosophy, is a Spirit; and a Spirit is to be found and 
 known by thought only, and neither by the sensuous eye of the 
 body nor the imaginative eye of the mind. 
 
 Unfortunately, it can hardly be said that there is thought proper 
 anywhere at present; and circumstances universally exist which 
 have substituted figurate conception in its stead. In England, for 
 example, the literature with which the century began was a sort 
 of poetical reaction against the Aufkliirung, and the element of 
 that literature is Vorstellung, Imagination merely. Acquired 
 
Xlii PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 stores, experience, thought, these were not, but, instead of these, 
 emotions enough, images enough, cries enough ! Nature, was 
 beautiful, and Love was divine : this was enough with Genius ! 
 to produce the loftiest works, pictures, poems, even alchemy ! An 
 empty belly, when it is active, is adequate to the production of 
 gripes : and when an empty head is similarly active, what can you 
 expect but gripes to correspond convulsions namely, contortions 
 of conceit, attitudinisings, eccentric gesticulations in a wind of our 
 own raising ? It were easy to name names and bring the criticism 
 home ; but it will be prudent at present to stop here. It is enough 
 to say that the literature of England during the present century 
 largely consists of those Genieschwiinge, those fervours, those swings 
 or springs or flights of genius, which were so suspicious and dis- 
 tasteful both to Kant and Hegel. Formal personal ability, which 
 is only that, if it would produce, can only lash itself into efforts 
 and energies that are idle that have absolutely no filling what- 
 ever but one's own subjective vanity. Or formal personal ability 
 which is only that, has nothing to develop from itself but reflexes 
 of its own longing, self-inflicted convulsions ; it has no thoughts 
 only Vorstellungen, figurate conceptions, emotional images, mostly 
 big, haughty ones enough, too. One result of all this, is what we 
 may call the Photographic writing which alone obtains at present. 
 For a long time back, writers have desired to write only to our 
 eyes, not to our thoughts. History now is as a picture-gallery, or 
 as a puppet-show ; men with particular legs and particular noses, 
 street-processions, battle-scenes these images all images I 
 mow and mop and grin on us from every canvass now. We are 
 never asked to think only to look as into a peep-show, where, 
 on the right, we see that, and on the left this ! Now, this 
 it is which constitutes an immense source of difficulty in the 
 study of Hegel. Lord Macaulay remarks on ' the slovenly way in 
 which most people are content to think ; ' and we would extend 
 the remark to the slovenly way in which nowadays most people 
 are content to read. Everything, indeed, has been done by our 
 recent writers to relieve us even of that duty, and a book has 
 become but a succession of optical presentments followed easily by 
 the eye. Reading is thus, now, a sort of sensuous entertainment : 
 it costs only a mechanical effort, and no greater than that of smok- 
 ing or of chewing. The consequence of this reading is, that the 
 habit of Vorstellungen, and without effort of our own, has become 
 so inveterate, that not only are we unable to move in Begriffe. in 
 
VORSTELLUNG. ILLUSTRATIONS. xliii 
 
 pure notions, but we are shut out from all Begriffe by impervious 
 clouds of ready-made Vorstellimgen. Thus it is that writers like 
 Kant and Hegel are sealed books to us, or books that have to be 
 shut by the most of us after five minutes in very weariness of 
 the flesh in very oppression of the eyes. 
 
 We must bear in mind, on the other hand, that Vorstellungen 
 are always the beginning, and constitute the express conditions, of 
 thought. We are not to remain by them, nevertheless, as what is 
 ultimate. When Kant says that the Greeks were the first to think 
 in abstracto, and that there are nations, even nowadays, who still 
 think in concrete, he has the same theme before him, though from 
 another side. The concrete Vorstellung is the preliminary condi- 
 tion, but it must be purified into the abstract Begriff; else we 
 never attain to mastery over ourselves, but float about a helpless 
 prey to our own pictures. (We shall see a side again where our 
 abstractions are to be re-dipped in the concrete, in order to be 
 restored to truth ; but the contradiction is only apparent.) 
 
 So much, indeed, is Vorstellung the condition of the Begriff, that 
 we should attribute Hegel's success in the latter to his immense 
 power in the former. No man had ever clearer, firmer Vorstel- 
 lungen than he ; but he had the mastery over them he made 
 them at will tenaciously remain before him, or equally tenaciously 
 draw themselves the one after the other. Vorstellung, in fact, is 
 for the most part the key to mental power ; and if you know a 
 man's Vorstellungen, you know himself. If, on one side, then, 
 the habit of Vorstellungen, and previous formation of Vorstellungen 
 without attempt to reduce them to Begriffe, constitute the greatest 
 obstacle to the understanding of Hegel, power of Vorstellung is, 
 on the other side, absolutely necessary to this understanding itself. 
 So it is that, of all our later literary men, we are accustomed to 
 think of Shelley and Keats as those the best adapted by nature 
 for the understanding of a Hegel. These young men had a real 
 power of Vorstellung; and their Vorstellungen were not mere 
 crass, external pictures, but fine images analytic and expressive of 
 original thought. 
 
 ' By such dread words from Earth to Heaven 
 My still realm was never riven. 
 When its wound was closed, there stood 
 Darkness o'er the day like blood. 5 
 
 ' Driving sweet buds, like flocks, to feed in air. 5 
 
xliv PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 ' Thou 
 
 For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 
 Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
 The sea- blooms and the oozy woods which wear 
 The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 
 Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, 
 And tremble and despoil themselves : Oh hear ! ' 
 
 These are Vorstellungen from Shelley (whose every line, we may 
 say, teems with such) ; and if they are Vorstellungen, they are also 
 thoughts. Keats is, perhaps, subtler and not less rich, though 
 more sensual, less grand, less ethereally pure, than Shelley ; Vor- 
 stellungen in him are such as these : 
 
 ' She, like a moon in wane, 
 Faded before him, cowered, nor could restrain 
 Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower 
 That faints into itself at evening hour : 
 But the God fostering her chilled hand, 
 She felt the warmth, her eyelids opened bland, 
 And, like new flowers at morning song of bees, 
 Bloomed, and gave up her honey to the lees.' 
 
 How much these images are thoughts, how they are but analytic 
 and expressive of thought, will escape no one. 
 Compare with these this : 
 
 ' And thou art long, and lank, and brown, 
 As is the ribbed sea-sand.' 
 
 This, too, is a Vorstellung ; but, in comparison with the preceding, 
 it is external and thought-less, it is analytic of nothing, it is expres- 
 sive of nothing ; it is a bar to thought, and not a help. Yet there 
 is so much in it of the mere picture, there is so much in it of that 
 unexpectedness that makes one stare, that it has been cited a 
 thousand times, and is familiar to everybody ; while those of Keats 
 and Shelley are probably known to those only who have been 
 specially trained to judge. By as much, nevertheless, as the 
 Vorstellungen of Keats and Shelley are, so far, it may be, 
 superior to this Vorstellung of Wordsworth's, (Coleridge gives 
 it to him,) inferences may be drawn, perhaps, as to an equal 
 original greater fineness of quality on the part of both the former 
 relatively to the latter. Neither will Coleridge stand this test 
 any better than Wordsworth; and even the maturer products, 
 however exquisite, of Tennyson (whose genius seems bodily to rise 
 
ABSTRACTIONS OF UNDERSTANDING. xlv 
 
 out of these his predecessors) display not Vorstellungen equally 
 gold-new, possibly, with those of Keats and Shelley.* Intensely 
 vivid VorsCellung, this, we may say, almost constitutes Mr Caiiyle: 
 in him, however, it is reproductive mainly ; in him, too, it very 
 frequently occurs in an element of feeling : and feeling is usually 
 an element hot and one-sided, so that the Vorstellung glares. 
 The test applied here is not restricted to writers it can be 
 extended to men of action ; and Alexander and Caesar, Wellington, 
 Napoleon, Cromwell, will readily respond to it. Cromwell here, 
 however, is almost to be included as an exception ; for he can 
 hardly be said to have had any traffic with Vorstellung at all ; or 
 what of that faculty he shows is very confused, very incompetent, 
 and almost to be named incapable. Cromwell, in fact, had direct 
 being in his categories, and his expression accordingly was direct 
 action. We have here, however, a seductive subject, and of end- 
 less reach ; we will do well to return. 
 
 There is a distinction, then, between those who move in 
 Vorstellungen wholly as such, and those who use them as living 
 bodies with a soul of thought consciously within them ; and the 
 classes separated by this distinction will be differently placed as 
 regards Hegel: while the former, in all probability, will never 
 get near him, the latter, on the other hand, will possess the power 
 to succeed; but success even to them, as habits now are, will 
 demand immense effort, and will arrive when they have contrived 
 to see, not with their Vorstellungen, "but without them,, or at least 
 through them. 
 
 As regards the difficulty which we have just considered, the 
 division between Hegel and his reader is so, that the former 
 appears on the abstract, the latter on the concrete side ; but we 
 have now to refer to a difficulty where this position is reversed 
 where, Hegel being concrete, the reader cannot get at him, just 
 for this, that he himself cannot help remaining obstinately 
 abstract. The abstractions of the understanding, this is the word 
 which is the cue to what we have in mind at present. It is 
 impossible to enter here into any full exposition of how Hegel, 
 in the end, regarded understanding, or of how his particular 
 
 * Still there is no wish here to do injustice to the perfectly rich imaginations of 
 both Coleridge and Wordsworth. Nay, the image itself, the "ribbed sea-sand," 
 though a little in excess, is not inapplicable, if only the eye, in looking along it, 
 will siop in time ! 
 
xlvi PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 regards were in the first case introduced. It must suffice to say 
 at once, that understanding was to Hegel as the god Horos, it was 
 the principle and agent of the definite everywhere; but, as such, 
 it necessarily separated and distinguished into isolated, self- 
 dependent individuals. Now this which has been indicated is our 
 (the readers') element ; we live and move among wholly different, 
 self-identical entities which each of them as regards the other 
 are abstractly held. This, however, is not the element of Hegel ; 
 his element is the one concrete, where no entity is, so to speak, its 
 own self, but quite as much its other ; and he holds the key of 
 this concrete in that he has been enabled, through Kant, to per- 
 ceive that the conditions of a concrete and of every concrete are 
 two opposites : in other words, Hegel 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. Now it is 
 this condition of actual things which the abstractions of the under- 
 standing interfere to shut out from us ; and it is our life in these 
 abstractions of the understanding which is the chief source of our 
 inability to enter and take up the concrete element of Hegel. 
 The Logic of Hegel is an exemplification of this Cosmical fact, 
 from the very beginning even to the very end ; but it will 
 sufficiently illustrate what we have said, perhaps, to take the single 
 example of Quantity. 
 
 To us, as regards quantity, continuity is one thing, and dis- 
 cretion quite another : we see a line unbroken in the one case, and 
 but so many different dots in the other. Not so Hegel, however : 
 to him continuity is not only impossible without discretion, and 
 discretion is not only impossible without continuity, but dis- 
 cretion is continuity, and continuity is discretion. We see them, 
 abstractly, apart the one independent of, different from, the 
 other: lie sees them, concretely, together the one dependent on, 
 identical with, the other. To Hegel it is obvious that continuity, 
 and discretion, not either singly, but both together, constitute 
 quantity that, in short, these are the constitutive moments or 
 elements of the single pure, abstract, yet in itself concrete, notion, 
 quantity. If a continuum were not in itself discrete, it were no 
 quantity ; and nowhere in rerum natura can there be found any 
 continuum that is not in itself discrete. Similarly, if a discretum 
 were not in itself continuous, it were no quantity, and so on. In 
 
INFINITE DIVISIBILITY AND OTHER PARADOXES. xlvii 
 
 fact, to the single notion, quantity, these two sub-notions are 
 always necessary: it is impossible to conceive, it is impossible 
 that there should be, a How much that were not as well con- 
 tinuous as discrete : it is the discretion that makes the continuity, 
 and it is the continuity of discretion that makes quantity ; or it is 
 the continuity that makes the discretion, and it is the discretion 
 of continuity that makes quantity. Quantity is a concrete of the 
 two ; they are indivisibly, inseparably together in it. Now every 
 notion truly such is just such disjunctive conjunct or con- 
 junctive disjunct. Hence it is that dialectic arises: false in us as 
 we cannot bring the opposing characters together, because of the 
 abstractions of the understanding ; true in Hegel, because he has 
 attained to the power of seeing these together, that is, in their 
 truth, their concrete, actually existent truth. 
 
 For example, it is on the notion, quantity as such, on the 
 dissociation and antagonism of its warp and woof of its two 
 constituent moments, that all those supposed insoluble puzzles 
 concerning the infinite divisibility of time, space, matter, &c., 
 depend ; and all disputes in this connexion are kept up by simply 
 neglecting to see both sides, or to bring loth of the necessary 
 moments together. My friend tells me, for instance, that matter 
 is not infinitely divisible, that that table to take an actual case 
 can be passed over, can both factually and mathematically be 
 proved to be passed over, and hence is not infinite, but finite. I, 
 again, point out that division takes"" nothing away from what it 
 divides ; that that table, consequently, (and every part of the table 
 is similarly situated,) is divisible, and again divisible usque ad 
 infinitum, or so long as there is a quantity left, and, as for that, 
 that there must always be a quantity left -for y as said, division 
 takes nothing away. Or I too can bring my Mathematics, and 
 certainly with equal evidence. In this way, he persisting on his 
 side, I persisting on my side, we never come together. But we 
 effect this, or we readily come together, when we perceive that 
 both sides are necessary to the single One (Quantity), or that each, 
 in fact, is necessary to the otheE. In short, quantity as continuous 
 is infinitely divisible ; as discrete, it consists of parts which are 
 as ultimate and further indivisible. These are the two points 
 of view, under either of which quantity can be set ; and, more 
 than that, these two points of view are, each of them, equally 
 essential to the single thing, quantity, and are the moments 
 
xlviii PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 which together constitute the single thing (correctly notion), 
 quantity. 
 
 This is not the place to point out the entire significance of the 
 single fact that is suggested here, nor of how Hegel was led to it, 
 and what he effected with it : this which we so suggest were a 
 complete exposition of the one secret and of the entire system of 
 Hegel. Such exposition is the business of the general work which 
 we here introduce ; but it will be found brought in some sense to 
 a point though necessarily imperfectly, as the reader arrived 
 there will readily understand in the ' last word ' at the end of 
 the volume. Our sole object at present is to illustrate the 
 difficulty we labour under relatively to Hegel from the abstrac- 
 tions of the understanding, and to render these themselves, to 
 some preliminary extent, intelligible. 
 
 We may add, that the above is the true solution to those 
 difficulties which have at different times been brought forward 
 as paradoxes of Zeno, or as antinomies of Kant. The case, as 
 summed by Hegel, (see under Quantity,) will be found to be 
 particularly disastrous not only to the German, but even to the 
 Grecian not only to the Hegelian, but even to the Aristotelian- 
 pretensions, of such men as Sir William Hamilton, Coleridge, and 
 De Quincey. The two last, indeed, with that 'voice across the 
 ages,' between them, are even ludicrous. 
 
 It is to be feared that the view given here of the difficulties of 
 Hegel will prove disappointing to many. As was natural to a 
 public so prepared by the passions, the interjections, the gesticula- 
 tions of those whom we regard as our recent men of genius, the 
 general belief, in all probability, was, and still is, that Kant and 
 Hegel are difficult because they ' soar so high,' because they have 
 so very much of the ' fervid ' in them, and especially because they 
 are 'mystic.' To be disabused of these big figurate conceptions 
 on which we rise so haughtily may prove a pain. Indeed, as by a 
 sudden dash on the solid ground, it may be a rather rude shaking 
 out of us of these same bignesses, to be brought to understand 
 that the difficulties of Hegel are simply technical, and that his 
 Logic is to be read only by such means as will enable us to read 
 the Principia of Newton industry, tenacity, perseverance ! In 
 England, ever since these same fervid men of genius, a vast 
 number of people, when they are going to write, think it neces- 
 sary, first of all, to put their mouths askew, and blow the bellows 
 
KANT AND HEGEL GENERALLY. xlix 
 
 of their breasts up : only so, they hope, on the strong bias of their 
 breath, to ' soar ' to blow themselves and us, that is ' into the 
 Empyrean!' But Hegel, alas! never puts his mouth askew, 
 never thinks of biassing his breath, never lays himself out at all 
 for the luxury of a soar. Here are no ardours fervours ; here is 
 an air so cool, so clear, that all such tropical luxuriances wither 
 in it. Hegel, no more than Kant, will attempt anything by a 
 Genieschwung : all in both is thought, and thought that rises, 
 slowly, laboriously, only by unremitting step after step. Apart 
 from thought qua thought, Kant and Hegel are both very plain 
 fellows : Kant, a very plain little old man, whose only obstacle to 
 us is, after all, just his endless garrulity, his iterating, and again 
 iterating, and always iterating G-eschw'dtz Hegel, a dry Scotsman 
 who speaks at, rather than to us, and would seem to seek to en- 
 lighten by provoking us ! It is not at all rhetoric, eloquence, 
 poetry, that we are to expect in them, then ; in fact, they are 
 never in the air, but always on the ground, and this is their 
 strength. Many people, doubtless, from what they hear of Hegel, 
 his Idealism, his Absolute Idealism, &c., will not be prepared for 
 this. They have been told by men who pretended to know, that 
 Hegel, like some common conjuror, would prove the chair they 
 sat on not a chair, &c. &c. This is a very vulgar conception, and 
 must be abandoned, together with that other which would con- 
 sider Hegel as impracticable, unreal, visionary, a dreamer of 
 dreams, ' a man with too many bees in his bonnet.' Hegel is just 
 the reverse of this; he is wholly down on the solid floor of sub- 
 stantial fact, and will not allow himself to quit it no, not for a 
 moment's indulgence to his subjective vanity a moment's re- 
 creation on a gust broom-stick of genius. Hegel is a Suabian. 
 There are Suabian licks as well as Lockerby licks. Hegel is as a 
 son of the border, home-spun, rustic-real, blunt : as in part already 
 said, there are always the sagacious ways about him of some plain, 
 honest, deep-seen, old Scotsman. Here, from the Aesthetic, is a 
 little illustrative specimen of him. 
 
 ' Eomances, in the modern sense of the word, follow those of 
 Knight-errantry and those named Pastoral. In them we have 
 Knight-errantry become again earnest and substantially real. 
 The previous lawlessness and precariousness of outward existence 
 have become transformed into the fixed and safe arrangements of 
 civilised life ; so that Police, Law, the Army, Government, now 
 
1 PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 replace the chimerical duties which the Knight-errant set himself. 
 Accordingly, the Knight-errantry of the modern Hero is corre- 
 spondently changed. As an individual with his subjective ends 
 of ambition, love, honour, or with his ideals of a world reformed, 
 he stands in antagonism to this established order and prosa of 
 actuality, which thwarts him on all hands. In this antagonism, 
 his subjective desires and demands are worked up into tremendous 
 intensity ; for he finds before him a world spell-bound, a world 
 alien to him, a world which he must fight, as it bears itself 
 against him, and in its cold indifference yields not to his passions, 
 but interposes, as an obstacle to them, the will of a father, of an 
 aunt, societary arrangements, &c. It is especially our youths who 
 are these new Knights-errant that have to fight their way through 
 that actual career which realises itself in place of their ideals, 
 and to whom it can only appear a misery that there are such things 
 at all as Family, Conventional Eules, Laws, a State, Professions, 
 &c., because these substantial ties of human existence place their 
 barriers cruelly in the way of the Ideals and infinite Eights of 
 the heart. The thing to be done now, then, is for the hero to 
 strike a breach into this arrangement of things to alter the 
 world, to reform it, or, in its despite, to carve out for himself a 
 heaven on earth, to seek out for himself the maiden that is as a 
 maiden should be to find her, to woo her, and win her and carry 
 her off in triumph, rnaugre all wicked relations and every other 
 obstruction. These stampings and strugglings, nevertheless, are, 
 in our modern world, nothing else than the apprenticeship, the 
 schooling of the individual in actual existence, and receive thus 
 their true meaning. For the end of such apprenticeship is, that 
 the subject gets his oats sown and his horns rubbed off accom- 
 modates himself, with all his wishes and opinions, to existent 
 relations and reasonableness ; enters into the concatenation of the 
 world, and earns for himself there his due position. One may 
 have ever so recalcitrantly laid about him in the world, or been 
 ever so much shoved and shouldered in it, in the end, for the most 
 part, one finds one's maiden and some place or other for all that, 
 marries, and becomes a slow-coach, a Philistine, just like the rest : 
 the wife looks after the house ; children thicken ; the adored wife 
 that was at first just the one, an angel, comes to look, on the whole, 
 something like all the rest : one's business is attended with its toils 
 and its troubles, wedlock with household cross ; and so there are 
 
KANT AND HEGEL GENERALLY. li 
 
 the reflective Cat-dumps (Katzen-jammer) of all the rest over 
 again.' If the reader will but take the trouble to read this 
 Scotice, the illustration will be complete. 
 
 It is a mistake, then, to conceive Hegel as other than the most 
 practical of men, with no object that is not itself of the most 
 practical nature. To the right of private judgment he remains 
 unhesitatingly true, and every interest that comes before him 
 must, to be accepted, demonstrate its revelancy to imperical fact. 
 With all this, however, his function here is that of a philosopher ; 
 and his philosophy, while the hardest to penetrate, is at once the 
 deepest and the widest that has been yet proposed. If the 
 deepest and the widest, it is probably at this moment also the 
 most required. 
 
 It has been said already that our own day is one a pretty late 
 one, it is to be hoped in that general movement which has been 
 named Aufklarung, Free-thinking, the principle of which we 
 acknowledged to be the Eight of Private Judgment. Now Kant, 
 who participated deeply in the spirit of this movement, and who 
 with his whole heart accepted this principle, became, nevertheless, 
 the closer of the one and the guide of the other by this, that he 
 saw the necessity of a positive complement to the peculiar negative 
 industry to which, up to his day, both movement and principle 
 had alone seemed adequate. The subtle suggestions of Hume 
 seemed to have loosened every joint of the Existent, and there 
 seemed no conclusion but universal Scepticism. Against this the 
 conscientious purity of Kant revolted, and he set himself to seek 
 some other outlet. We may have seen in some other country the 
 elaborate structure of a baby dressed. The board-like stiffness in 
 which it was carried, the manifest incapacity of the little thing to 
 move a finger, the enormous amount and extraordinary nature of 
 the various appliances swathes, folders, belts, cloths, bandages, 
 &c., points and trusses innumerable all this may have struck us 
 with astonishment, and we may have figured ourselves addressing 
 the parents, and, by dint of invincible reason, persuading them to 
 give up the board, then the folder, then the swathe, then the 
 bandage, &c. ; but, in this negative action of taking off, we should 
 have stopped somewhere; even when insisting on free air and free 
 movement, we should have found it necessary to leave to the 
 infant what should keep it warm. Nay, the question of clothes 
 as a whole were thus once for all generalised, and debate, once 
 
lii PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 initiated, would cease never till universal reason were satisfied 
 till the infant were at length fairly rationally dressed. As the 
 function of the Aufklarung (for it is nothing less) must stop 
 somewhere, then, when it applies itself to the undressing of the 
 wrong-dressed baby, so must the same function stop somewhere 
 when it applies itself to the similar undressing of the similarly 
 wrong-dressed (feudally-dressed) State. A naked State would 
 just be as little likely to thrive as a naked infant : and how far 
 it is worth while considering is a State removed from absolute 
 nudity, when it is reduced to the self-will of the individual con- 
 trolled only by the mechanical force of a Police ? 
 
 No free-thinking partisan of the Illumination has ever gone further 
 than that ; no partisan of the Illumination has ever said, Let the 
 self-will of each be absolutely all : the control of a Police (Protec- 
 tion of Person and Property) has been a universal postulate, insisted 
 on by even the extremest left of the movement. Yet there are those 
 who say this there are those who say, Remove your meddlesome 
 protection of the police ; by the aid of free competition we can 
 parson and doctor ourselves, and by the aid of free competition, 
 therefore, we can also police ourselves : remove, then, here also 
 your vicious system of checks, as all your no less vicious system 
 of bounties and benefits ; let humanity be absolutely free let 
 there be nothing left but self-will, individual self-will pur et 
 simple ! There are those who say this : they are our Criminals I 
 Like the cruel mother whose interest is not in its growth, but in 
 its decease, our criminals would have the naked baby. But if 
 self-will is to be proclaimed the principle, if self-will is the 
 principle, our criminals are more consistent than our ' advanced 
 thinkers/ who, while they assert this principle, and believe this 
 principle, and think they observe this principle, open the door to 
 the Police, and find themselves unable to shut it again, till it is 
 driven to the wall before the whole of reason, before Reason herself 
 who enters with the announcement that self-will is not the 
 principle, and the direct reverse of the principle. 
 
 Now, Kant saw a great deal of this Kant saw that the naked 
 baby would not do ; that, if it were even necessary to strip off 
 every rag of the'old, still a new would have to be procured, or life 
 would be impossible. So it was that, though unconsciously to 
 himself, he was led to seek his Principles. These, Kant came to 
 see, were the one want ; and surely, if they were the one want in 
 
THE ILLUMINATION AND ITS CORRECTION. liii 
 
 his day, they are no less the want now. Self-will, individual 
 commodity, this has been made the principle, and accordingly we 
 have turned to it, that we might enjoy ourselves alone, that we 
 might live to ourselves alone, that the I might be wholly the~~I~ 
 unmixed and unobstructed. ; and, for result, the I in each of us is 
 dying of inanition even though we make (it is even because we 
 make) the seclusion to self complete even though we drive off 
 from us our very children, and leave them to corrupt at Boarding- 
 schools into the one common model that is stock there. We all 
 live now, in fact, divorced from Substance, forlorn each of us, 
 isolated to himself an absolutely abstract unit in a universal, 
 unsympathising, unparticipant Atomism. Hence the universal 
 rush at present, as of maddened animals, to material possession ; 
 and, this obtained, to material ostentation, with the hope of at 
 least buying sympathy and bribing respect. Sympathy ! Oh no ! 
 it is the hate of envy. Eespect ! say rather the sneer of malice 
 that disparages and makes light. Till even in the midst of 
 material possession and material ostentation, the heart within us 
 has sunk into weary, weary, hopeless, hopeless ashes. And of 
 this the Aufklarung is the cause. The Aufklarung has left us 
 nothing but our animality, nothing but our relationship to the 
 monkey ! It has emptied us of all essential humanity of Philo- 
 sophy, Morality, Eeligion. So it is that we are divorced from 
 Substance. But the animality that^is left in the midst of such 
 immense material appliance becomes disease ; while the Spirit 
 that has been emptied feels, knows that it has been only robbed, 
 and, by very necessity of nature, is a craving, craving, ever-restless 
 void. 
 
 These days, therefore, are no improvement on the days of Kant ; 
 and what to him appeared necessary then, is still more necessary 
 now. Nay, as we see, the Illumination itself does not leave self- 
 will absolutely independent, absolutely free. Even the Illumina- 
 tion demands for self-will clothing and control. At lowest it 
 demands Police ; for the most part, it adds to Police a School and 
 a Post-office ; and it sometimes thinks, though reluctantly, hesi- 
 tatingly, that there is necessary also a Church. It sees not that 
 it has thus opened the whole question, and cannot any longer, by 
 its will, close it. When Enlightenment admits at all the necessity 
 of control, the what and how far of this control can be argued out 
 from this necessity and self-will is abandoned. For it is Eeason 
 
Hv PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 that finds the necessity, it is Eeason that prescribes the control ; 
 and Eeason is not an affair of one or two Civic Eegulations, but 
 the absolute round of its own perfect and entire System. In one 
 word, the principle must not be Subjective Will, but Objective 
 Will ; not your will or my will or his will, and yet your will and 
 my will and his will Universal Will Eeason ! Individual will 
 is self-will or caprice ; and that is precisely the one Evil, or the 
 evil One the Bad. And is it to be thought that Police alone 
 will ever suffice for the correction of the single will into the 
 universal will for the extirpation of the Bad ? 
 
 To this there are wanting Principles. And with this want Kant 
 began ; nor had he any other object throughout his long life than 
 the discovery of Principles Principles for the whole substance 
 of man Principles Theoretical, Practical, and Aesthetic : and this 
 Eubric, in that it is absolutely comprehensive, will include plainly 
 Politics, Eeligion, &c., in their respective places. This is the sole 
 object of the three great works of Kant ; and they respectively 
 correspond, as is easily seen, to the three divisions just named. 
 This, too, is the sole object of Hegel; for Hegel is but the 
 continuator, and, perhaps, in a sort the completer, of the whole 
 business inaugurated by Kant. 
 
 The central principle of Kant was Freiheit, Free-will ; and 
 when this word was articulated by the lips of Kant, the Illumin- 
 ation was virtually at an end. The single sound Freiheit was 
 the death-sentence of the Aufklarung. The principle of the 
 Aufklarung, the Eight of Private Judgment, is a perfectly true 
 one. But it is not true as used by the Aufklarung, or it is used 
 only one-sidedly by the Aufklarung. Of the two words, Private 
 Judgment, the Aufklarung accentuates and sees only the former. 
 The Aufklarung asks only that the Private man, the individual, 
 be satisfied. Its principle is Subjectivity, pure and simple. But 
 its own words imply more than subjectivity its own words imply 
 objectivity as well ; for the accent on Private ought not to have 
 blinded it to the fact that there is equally question of Judgment. 
 Now, I as a subject, you as a subject, he as a subject, there is so 
 no guarantee of agreement : I may say A, you B, and he C. But 
 all this is changed the instant we have said Judgment. Judgment 
 is not subjectively mine, or subjectively yours, or subjectively his : 
 it. is objectively mine, yours, his, &c.; it is a common possession; 
 it is a thing in which we all meet and agree. Or, it is not sub- 
 
THE ILLUMINATION AND ITS CORRECTION. Iv 
 
 jective, and so incapable of comparison, but objective, capable of 
 comparison, and consequently such that in its regard we virtually 
 do all agree and, in the end, actually shall all agree. Now, Private 
 Judgment with the accent on Private is self-will ; but with the 
 accent on Judgment, it is Freiheit, Freedom Proper, Free-will, 
 Objective Will, Universal Will. This is the Beginning: this is 
 the first stone of the new world which is to be the sole work of at 
 least several succeeding generations. Formally subjective, I am 
 empty ; exercising my will alone, I am mere formalism, I am only 
 formally a man; and what is formal merely is a pain and an 
 obstacle to all the other units of the concrete it is a pain and an 
 obstacle to itself it is a false abstraction in the concrete, and 
 must, one way or other, be expunged.* The subject, then, must 
 not remain Formal he must obtain Filling, the Filling of the 
 Object. This subject is not my true Me ; my true Me is the 
 Object Eeason the Universal Thought, Will, Purpose of Man 
 as Man. So it is that Private Judgment is not enough : what is 
 enough is Judgment. My right is only to share it, only to be 
 there, present to it, with my conviction, my subjective conviction. 
 This is the only Eight of the Subject. In exercising the Right of 
 Private Judgment, then, there is more required than what attaches 
 to the word Private ; there must be some guarantee of the Judg- 
 ment as well. The Eights of the Object are above the Eights of 
 the Subject; or, to say it better, the Eights of the Object are the 
 true Eights of the Subject. That the^ubject should not be empty, 
 then that he should be filled up and out to his true size, shape, 
 strength, by having absorbed the Object, this is a necessity ; only 
 so can the Private Judgment be Judgment, and as such valid. If, 
 then, the Aufklarung said, Self-will shall work out the Universal 
 Will by following Self-will, Kant and Hegel put an end to this by 
 reversing the phrase, and by declaring, Self-will shall work out, 
 shall realise Self-will that is, effect a true will of any kind by 
 following the Universal Will. The two positions are diametrically 
 opposed : the Aufklarung, with whatever belongs to it, is virtually 
 superseded. The Aufklarung is not superseded, however, in the 
 sense of being destroyed ; it is superseded only in that, as it were, 
 it has been absorbed, used as food, and assimilated into a higher 
 form. The Eight of Private Judgment, the Eights of Intelligence 
 
 * Let the reader recall to mind any abstract person he may know, and think 
 how deranging and unbearable he is. 
 
Ivi PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 these, the interests of the Aufklarung, are not by any means 
 lost, or pushed out of the way : they are only carried forward into 
 their truth. Nay, Libertt Egalite FraterniU themselves are not 
 yet lost; they, too, will be carried forward into their truth: to that, 
 however, they must be saved from certain merely empty, formal 
 subjectivities, blind remnants of the Aufklarung, furious sometimes 
 from mistaken conscientiousness ; furious, it is to be feared, some- 
 times also from personal self-seeking. 
 
 But what is the Object ? what is Keason ? what is objective 
 Judgment ? So we may put the questions which the Aufklarung 
 itself might put with sneers and jeers. Lord Macaulay, a true 
 child of the Aufklarung, has already jeeringly asked, ' Who are 
 wisest and best, and whose opinion is to decide that ? ' Perhaps 
 an answer is not so hopeless as it appeared to this distinguished 
 Aufgeklarter. Let us see 
 
 It was not without meaning that we spoke of Reason as entering 
 with the announcement that Self-will was not the principle, and 
 we seek firstly to draw attention to this, that Keason does not 
 enter thus only for the first time now ; there is at least another 
 occasion in the world's history when she so entered. The age into 
 which Socrates was born was one of Aufklarung, even as that of 
 Kant and Hegel. Man had awoke then to the light of thought, 
 and had turned to see by it the place he lived in, all the things 
 that had fallen to his lot, his whole inheritance of Tradition. 
 Pew things that are old can stand the test of day, and the sophists 
 had it speedily all their own way in Greece. There seemed 
 nothing fit any longer to be believed in, all was unfixed; truth there 
 seemed none but the subjective experience of the moment ; and 
 the only wisdom, therefore, was to see that that experience should 
 be one of enjoyment. Thus in Greece, too, man was emptied of 
 his Substance and reduced to his senses, his animality, his relation- 
 ship to the monkey and, for that part, to the rat. Now it was, 
 then, that Socrates appeared and demanded Principles, Objective 
 Standards, that should be absolutely independent of the good-will 
 and pleasure of any particular subject. Of this quest of Socrates, 
 the industries of Plato and Aristotle were but Systematisations. 
 It was to Thought as Thought that Socrates was led as likely to 
 contain the Principles he wanted, and on that side which is now 
 named Generalisation. Socrates, in fact, seems to have been his- 
 torically the first man who expressly and consciously generalised, 
 
THE ILLUMINATION AND ITS CORRECTION. Ivii 
 
 and for him, therefore, we must vindicate the title of the True Father 
 of Practical Induction. A, he said, is valour, and B is valour, and 
 C is valour ; but what is valour universally ? So the inquiry went 
 forward also as regards other virtues, for the ground that Socrates 
 occupied was mainly moral. Plato absolutely generalised the 
 Socratic act, and sought the universal of everything, even that of a 
 Table, till all such became hypostasised, presences to him, and the 
 only true presences, the Ideas. Aristotle substituted for this 
 Hypostasis of the Ideas the theory of the abstract universal 
 (Logic), and a collection of abstract generalised Sciences (Ethics, 
 Politics, Poetics, &c.). Thus in Greece, too, Eeason, in the person 
 of Socrates, entered with the announcement that the principle is 
 not self-will, but a universal. 
 
 But were such principles actually found in Greece ? And, if so, 
 why did Greece perish, and why have we been allowed to undergo 
 another Aufldarung? It will be but a small matter that Socrates 
 saw the want, if he did not supply it : and that he did not supply 
 it, both the fate of Greece and we ourselves are here to prove ! It 
 must be admitted at once that Socrates and his followers cannot 
 have truly succeeded, for in that case surely the course of history 
 would have been far otherwise. The first corollary for us to draw, 
 however, is Look at the warning ! Aufklarung, Illumination, 
 Enlightenment, destroyed Greece ; it lowered man from Spirit to 
 Animal ; and the Greek became, as now, the serf of every con- 
 queror. In Eome we have the same warning, but material appli- 
 ances being there so infinitely greater, and the height from which 
 the descent was made being there, perhaps, so much higher in 
 colours infinitely more glaring, forms infinitely more hideous, and 
 with a breadth and depth of wallowing misery and sin that would 
 revolt the most abandoned. It is to be noted, too, that for Socrates, 
 Eome had only Cicero (the vain, subjective, logosophic Cicero* 
 who, however, as pre-eminently a master of words, will always 
 be pre-eminent with scholarly men). In presence of such 
 warnings, then, the necessity of a success in the quest of 
 objective standards greater on our part than that on the part of 
 Socrates, becomes of even terrible import. Nevertheless, again, 
 the unsuccess of the latter and his followers was by no means 
 absolute. Such principles as are in question were set up by all of 
 them. By way of single example, take the position, ' That it is 
 better to suffer than to do injustice/ where, as it were, the subject 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
Iviii PEEFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 gains himself by yielding himself. We shall afterwards see, too, 
 that Aristotle had at least reached terms of the concrete notion 
 about as good as any that can be given yet. Nevertheless, it is to 
 be said that, on the whole, the inquest in their hands proved un- 
 successful : their principles remained a loose, miscellaneous, un- 
 certiorated many; the concrete notion was probably blindly touched 
 only ; unity and system were never attained to ; and, in the main, 
 the ground occupied at last was but that of formal generalisation 
 and the abstract universal. 
 
 But now at last have we succeeded better? do we know 
 Eeason ? have we the Object ? Or, in the phrase of Macaulay, 
 can we tell who are wisest and best, and whose opinion is to 
 decide that ? In the first place, we may say that the question of 
 wisest and best is pertinent only to the position of Hero-worship ; 
 a position not occupied by us a position which sets up only the 
 untenable principle of subjectivity as subjectivity. A man is not 
 wisest and best by chance only, or caprice of nature ; we were but 
 badly off, had we always only to wait for our guidance so we were 
 but badly off, were it left to each of us, as it were, to taste our 
 wisest and best by subjective feeling. A man is wisest and best by 
 that which is in him, his Inhalt, his Filling his absorbed, assimi- 
 lated, and incorporated matter : it is the Filling, then, which is the 
 main point ; and in view of that Filling, abstraction can be made 
 altogether from the great man it fills. Lord Macaulay's questions, 
 then, (and those of Hero-worship itself,) are seen, abstraction being 
 made from the form, to be identical with our own do we know 
 Eeason, have we the Object ? 
 
 Now, if it were question of an Algebra, a Geometry, an 
 Astronomy, a Chemistry, &c., I suppose it would never occur 
 to anyone to ask about the wisest and best, &c. ; I suppose, in 
 these cases, it is a matter of little moment whether we say Euler, 
 Bourdon, or Peacock ; Euclid, Legendre, or Hutton ; Berzelius, 
 Liebig, or Eeid, &c. : I suppose the main thing is to have the 
 object (otherwise called the subject) itself, and that then there 
 would be no interest in any wisest and best, or in opinion at all. 
 In the matter of Will, Eeason, Judgment, then, did we but know 
 the Object, the Universal, and could we but assign it, in the same 
 way as we know and assign the Object, the Universal, in the case 
 of Algebra, Chemistry, &c., the problem, we presume, would, 
 by universal acknowledgment, be pretty well solved. But just 
 
GERMAN POLITICS. lix 
 
 this is what Hegel asserts of Philosophy. We hear much in 
 these days of Metaphysic, Philosophy having crumbled down 
 definitely into ruins this, by an unworthy misapplication and 
 perversion, on the authority of Kant himself this, at the very 
 moment that Hegel claims for himself the completion of the 
 Kantian Philosophy into a Science, an exact Science, and its 
 establishment for ever this, from men more ignorant of what 
 they speak about than any Mandarin in China ! Nay, if we are 
 to believe Hegel and no man alive is at this moment com- 
 petent to gainsay him the exploit is infinitely greater still, the 
 science accomplished infinitely more perfect and complete than 
 any Algebra, Astronomy, Chemistry, or other science we possess. 
 This perfection and completion we may illustrate thus : Geometry 
 is an exact science ; it rests on demonstration, it is thoroughly 
 objective, it is utterly independent of any subjective authority 
 whatever. Bat Geometry is just a side-ly-side of particulars ; it 
 is just a crate of miscellaneous goods; it properly begins not, 
 ends not; it is no whole, and no whole product of a single 
 principle. Now, let us conceive Geometry perfected into this 
 a perfectly-rounded whole of organically-articulated elements 
 which out of a single principle arise and into a single principle 
 retract, let us conceive this, and we have before us an image of 
 the Hegelian System. This science, too, is to be conceived as 
 the Science of Science the Scientia of Scientia ; it is to be 
 conceived to contain the ultimate principles of all things and 
 of all thoughts to be, in a word, the essential diamond of the 
 universe. These pretensions have, of course, yet to be verified. 
 Nevertheless, the Concrete Notion, which is the secret of Hegel, 
 will be found a principle of such rare virtue that it recommends 
 itself almost irresistibly. The unity and systematic wholeness, 
 too, attract powerfully, and not less the inexpugnable position 
 which seems, at length, extended to all the higher interests of 
 man. And at last we can say this, should the path be but a 
 vista of the imagination and conduct us nowhere, it yields at 
 every step the choicest aliment of humanity such aliment as 
 nourishes us strongly into our true stature. 
 
 To such claims of this new Science of Philosophy, there lies a 
 very close objection in Germany itself. ' In all practical matters/ 
 the German is said to be ' slow/ and, indeed, ' quite behind ; ' and 
 such quality and such position are held to comport but ill with 
 
Ix PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 the alleged pre-eminence of his philosophy. In the first place, 
 we may say in reply, that the fact is capable of dispute : the 
 rising of 1848 and other democratic movements may be pointed 
 to; and the German, with reference at least to his philosophy, 
 may be declared much too fast, and much too rash. In the next 
 place, what is meant by ' practical matters/ is Politics, and Politics 
 such as the Aufklarung accepts ; all those measures, namely, 
 which, be they in themselves bad, or be they in themselves good, 
 lead nowhere at present unless to that American Constitution of 
 no Institution but an incompetent Police* His philosophy teaches 
 the German to view these things in another light than that of the 
 unverified Aufklarung: that is very certain. But the truth of the 
 whole matter is just this that German Politics cannot as yet be 
 attributed to German Philosophy, for that philosophy cannot be 
 said to be yet known in Germany. Even what political influence 
 has overflowed from the writings of Hegel or of Kant, or from the 
 general terms and distinctions of philosophy, has not fallen on the 
 masses, but on isolated students, who are by no means induced 
 thereby to put shoulder to shoulder with the remnants of the 
 Aufklarung. Any argument against German Philosophy from 
 Politics, as Politics appear to an ordinary English eye, is to be 
 held, therefore, as inapposite. Yet, probably, it is true that all 
 true Germans are slow ; that all true Germans, however small the 
 number, wait wait till we understand, till they understand how 
 to advance : for Reform, the Keform of Illumination, is but as a 
 detected trick of the trade which cannot any longer raise a hope. 
 These Germans, then, wait for principles of position, and leave 
 to others the completion of that single principle of negation 
 'throw off every tie of feudalism' which the Aufklarung still 
 so cheerfully executes, in the simple faith that it is realising 
 something positive new Sciences, new Political Systems, and 
 what not ! Such principles these Germans hope, too, to find in 
 their philosophy were it but once open to them. - Nor even were 
 it found incomplete when open, would it then wholly disappoint, 
 did it but still appear as all the rest only are, Algebra, Astronomy, 
 Chemistry, &c. a science begun. 
 
 We have now said nearly all that we desired to say by way of 
 
 * As this was written the New York Police was being charged with inefficiency 
 on a public occasion : neither had the Austrian and French defeats issued in a 
 German Empire. 
 
PRINCIPLE AND THE PABULUM. IxL 
 
 Preface, with the view of meeting objections, explaining con- 
 nexions, removing difficulties, and demonstrating something of 
 the value of the proffered wares, as well as of our present need 
 for them. We shall only add now a word of conclusion by naming 
 a little nearer some of the Principles concerned. 
 
 To Kant the three interests that were vital, and which lay at 
 the centre of every thought and movement in him, were the 
 Existence of God, the Freedom of the Will, and the Immortality 
 of the Soul. These three positions Kant conceived himself to 
 have demonstrated, and in the only manner at once consistent 
 with themselves and with the thinking faculties of man. This is 
 the fact. It is precisely in these themes that Hegel follows Kant ; 
 these are his objects also : yet it is precisely here especially in 
 reference to God and Immortality that the teaching of Hegel 
 has been held, and by what is called his own school, to be inex- 
 plicit. Not the less, however, is it to be said that every step of 
 his system is towards the Immortality of the Soul, that every 
 step is towards the Freedom of the Will, that every step is 
 towards God. Hegel, in truth, would restore to us all that Under- 
 standing, all that Eeflexion, all that the Illumination has deprived 
 us of, and that, too, in a higher and richer form, and not less in 
 the light and element of the Illumination itself, and in perfect 
 harmony with its principle and truth. Hegel, in fact, completes 
 the compromise of Understanding by the complement of Reason. 
 Philosophy is to him not Philosophy unless, or rather Philosophy 
 is to him only Philosophy when, it stands up for the substance 
 of Humanity, for all those great religious interests to which alone 
 we virtually live. Accordingly, it is not only the interests of 
 what is called Natural Eeligion that he seeks to restore, but those 
 of Christianity itself: there, too, he would complete the com- 
 promise of Understanding by the complement of Reason. Surely, 
 then, these are great matters ! 
 
 What we shall take leave to name the Historic Pabulum, this 
 alone is the appointed food of every successive generation, this 
 alone is the condition of the growth of Spirit ; and this food 
 neglected, we have a generation that but vacillates vacillates, it 
 may be, even into temporary retrogression. This last is the 
 unfortunate position now. The Historic Pabulum passing from 
 the vessel of Hume, was received into that of Kant, and thence 
 finally into that of Hegel ; but from the vessels of the two latter 
 
Ixii PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 the generations have not yet eaten. This is the whole. Europe 
 (Germany as Germany is itself no exception) has continued to 
 nourish itself from the vessel of Hume, notwithstanding that the 
 Historic Pabulum has long since abandoned it for another and 
 others. Hence all that we see. Hume is our Politics, Hume is 
 our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our Eeligion, it 
 wants little but that Hume were even our Taste. 
 
 A broad subject is here indicated, and we cannot be expected 
 at present to point out the retrogression or the leside-tJie-point of 
 all philosophy else, as in the case of Eeid, Stewart, &c. Neither 
 can we be expected to dwell on the partial re-actions against the 
 Aufklarung which we have witnessed in this country ; as, firstly, 
 the Prudential Ee-action that was conditioned, in some cases, 
 by Public considerations, and in others by only Private ones ; 
 secondly, the Ee-action of Poetry and Nature, as in Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Shelley, &c. ; and thirdly, the Germanico-Literary Ee- 
 action, as in Caiiyle and Emerson. The great point here is to see 
 that all these re-actions have been partial and, so far as Thought 
 qua Thought is concerned, incomplete, resting for their advance- 
 ment, for the most part, on subjective conceit (calling itself to 
 itself genius, it may be), that has sought aliment, inspiration, or 
 what was to it prophecy, in contingent crumbs. Hence it is that 
 what we have now, is a retrograde re-action a Eevulsion and of 
 the shallowest order, back to the Aufklarung again ; a re-action 
 the members of which call themselves 'advanced thinkers,' 
 although at bottom they are but friends of the monkey, and would 
 drain us to our Senses. In this Eevulsion in this perverted or 
 inverted re-action, we must even reckon Essayists and Eeviewers, 
 Strauss, Eenan, Colenso, Feuerbach, Buckle, and others. It is 
 this retrogressive re-action, this revulsion to the Aufklarung, that 
 demonstrates the insufficiency of the previous progressive re-actions 
 against the Aufklarung, Prudential, Poetical, and Germanico- 
 Literary. In short, the only true means of progress have not 
 been brought into service. The Historic Pabulum, however 
 greedily it has been devoured out of Hume, has been left untouched 
 in the vessel of Hegel, who alone of all mankind has succeeded in 
 eating it all up out of the vessel of Kant. This is the true nature 
 of the case, and these generations, therefore, have no duty but 
 to turn from their blunder a blunder, it is to be admitted, at the 
 same time, not quite voluntary, but necessitated by certain 
 
PRINCIPLE AND THE PABULUM. Ixiii 
 
 difficulties and apply themselves to the inhaustion of the only 
 food on which, it will be found, Humanity will thrive.* 
 
 * " Aufkldrung, a word which, meaning in its ordinary use simply enlightenment 
 up-lighting or ligh ting-up may be translated, with reference at once to the 
 special up-lighting implied, and a certain notorious exposition of it, the Age of 
 Reason." This, from Essay on Lord Macaulay in 1860, was, at least as known to me, 
 the first British mention of a German word that is now somewhat current. When 
 enlightenment is said in England, the hearer has no call to think of infidelity ; but 
 his own word to a German suggests at once a whole historic movement (of 18th 
 century) which issued in an opening of the eyes to the Biblical lacunae. This has 
 had a shallow result in many or most a salutary only in a few, who regret to hear 
 or see, on every new step of science, the constant repetition of a supposed quite 
 enlightened, 'You see?' which is now utterly irrelevant. Men of science may be 
 right in their negative ; but that is no reason why they should fail to recognise the 
 positive. Educated people ought really to be ashamed of a raid that is now out of 
 date, and only blocks ' advance. ' After all, it is simply vulgar. 
 
THE SECRET OF HEGEL, 
 
 i. 
 
 PBOLEGOMENA.-THE STBDGGLE TO HEGEL 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 PRELIMINARIES OF THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL. 
 
 ONE approaches Hegel for the first time such is the voice of 
 rumour and such the subjects he involves as one might approach 
 some enchanted palace of Arabian story. New powers imagina- 
 tion is assured (were but the entrance gained) await one there 
 secrets as it were, the ring of Solomon and the passkeys of the 
 universe. But, very truly, if thus magical is the promise, no less 
 magical is the difficulty ; and one wanders round the book as 
 Aboulfaouaris round the palace irrito, without success, but not 
 without a sufficiency of vexation. Book palace is absolutely 
 inaccessible, for the known can show no bridge to it ; or if acces- 
 sible, then it is absolutely impenetrable, for it begins not, it enters 
 not, what seems the doorway receives but to reject, and every 
 attempt at a window is baffled by a fall. 
 
 This is the universal experience ; and one is almost justified to 
 add, that whether in England, or in France, or in Germany itself 
 this, the experience of the beginning, is, also, all but equally 
 universally the experience of the end. And yet how one cloaks 
 the hurt, how one dat verba dolori, how one extenuates defeat 
 nay rather, perhaps, how one rises in triumph over the worthless, 
 which is, however, only the sour ! ' It is but scholasticism/ one 
 is happy enough to see at last ; ' or a play upon words ; ' * at all 
 events there is no advance in it on Plato/ ' or on Aristotle/ ' or 
 on Plotinus/ ' or on Thomas Aquinas ; ' ' at least that Being and 
 
2 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 Nothing " is " the same, is but a letise of good, heavy, innocent 
 Teutschland ; ' ' and then there cannot be a doubt but everyone 
 must recoil at the reconciliation of contraries,' ' aye, and shudder 
 at Pantheism ! ' But not thus is it that Hegel will be laid, and 
 not thus is it that in the end our own ignorance shall be hailed 
 as knowledge. 
 
 But, if it be thus with those who admit defeat with those, that 
 is, who actually acknowledge their inability to construe (though for 
 the most part, at the same time, with the consistency of an ostrich, 
 they comically assume to confute}, it must be confessed that one's 
 satisfaction is not perfect, either, with those who arrogate a victory 
 and display the spoils. A victory ! one is apt to mutter, yes, a 
 victory of the outside a victory, as it were, of the table of con- 
 tents a victory of these contents themselves, perhaps, but so that 
 it looks like a licking of them all up dry a victory then which 
 has been, not chemically or vitally, but only mechanically effected ; 
 effected in such wise, indeed, that the displayed spoils (the books 
 they write) consist but of a sort of logical Petrefactenkunde, but of 
 a grammatical fluency of mere forms, which, however useful to a 
 professor as a professor, affect others like the nomenclature of 
 Selenography ; whose Mare Magnum and Lacus Niger and Monies 
 Lucis (if these be the names) are names only names, that is, of 
 seas and lakes and mountains in the Moon, which can possess 
 correspondent substance, consequently, for him only who reaches it 
 a consummation plainly that must be renounced by a Seleno- 
 grapher. 
 
 It is in view of this difficulty of Hegel that the chapters bearing 
 in their titles to refer to the struggle to Hegel have been, though 
 with considerable hesitation, submitted to the reader. They con- 
 sist, for the most part, of certain members of a series of notes 
 which, as it were, fell by the way exclamation is natural to pain 
 during the writer's own struggle to the Logik and the Encyclo- 
 paedie. Originating thus, these notes (though sometimes written 
 as if referring to a reader) brought with them no thought of publi- 
 cation so far as they themselves were concerned ; many of them, 
 indeed, were destroyed before any such thought occurred ; and as 
 the rest remained, they remain still, for to change them now would 
 be but to anachronise and stultify them. Imperfections, then, of 
 all sorts are what is to be looked for in them ; but still the hope 
 is entertained that they may assist, or that, should they fail to 
 assist, they may succeed to encourage ; for, representing various 
 
HEGEL'S DIFFICULTY. 
 
 stages of success, or unsuccess, in the study of Hegel, they may be 
 allowably expected to have peculiar meaning for more than one 
 student, who, finding his own difficulties reflected in what claims 
 to have passed them, may feel himself stimulated afresh to a- 
 renewed attempt. 
 
 In the circumstances of the case too, I am sure the reader will 
 not deem it unreasonable that he should be warned that the 
 opinions expressed in these notes both as interimistic and pro- 
 visional in themselves, and as always referring to another, whether 
 from the point of view of Hegel or from that of his commentator 
 must not be regarded as deliberate products of either, but must 
 be viewed only as a preparatory scaffolding to be afterwards 
 removed. 
 
 I shall always recollect the first time I opened the Encyclopaedia 
 of Hegel. It was the re-edition by Eosenkranz (Berlin, 1845) of 
 Hegel's own third edition, a compact, substantial, but not bulky 
 volume, with clear and well-sized type, that -seemed to offer a 
 ready and satisfactory access to the whole of this extraordinary 
 system. Surely, was the thought, there will be no difficulty in 
 making one's way through that ! What a promise the very con- 
 tents seemed to offer, if floating strangely in such an air of novelty ! 
 First of all, three grand Parts: the Science of Logic, the Philosophy 
 of Nature, the Philosophy of Spirit ! Evidently, something very 
 comprehensive and exhaustive was about to be given us ! For 
 Logic, Nature, Spirit which last of course could only refer to 
 intelligence, or to thinking, willing, feeling self-consciousness in 
 general being all three explained to us, there manifestly could 
 remain nothing else to ask after. Then the Sub-parts ! As the 
 Parts were three, so under each of the three the Sub-parts were 
 also three. Under Logic : the doctrine of Being, the doctrine of 
 Essence, the doctrine of the Notion. Under Nature : Mechanic, 
 Physic, Organic. Under Spirit: Subjective Spirit, Objective 
 Spirit, Absolute Spirit. Nor did two trichotomies suffice ; there 
 was a third into the majuscules A, B, C, a fourth into the minus- 
 cules a, b, c, a fifth into the grammata a, ft y, and lastly (not to 
 mention an occasional excursion to the Hebrew Aleph, Beth, Gim- 
 mel), the discussion in the body of the work was seen a sixth 
 (seventh) trichotomy to proceed by the numbers 1, 2, 3. The 
 outer look at least was attractive ; there was balance, there was 
 symmetry, and the energy of a beginner could at lowest hope that it 
 was in presence, not of artifice and formality, but of nature and 
 
4 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 realifcy. At all events, be it as it might with the form, the matler 
 was unexceptionable, and promised knowledge of the most com- 
 plete, interesting, and important nature. For under Logic, there 
 were not only Propositions, Syllogisms, &c., to be discussed, but 
 all the great questions of Ontology also, as Being, and Existence, 
 and Noumenon, and Phenomenon, and Substance, and Cause and 
 Effect, and Eeciprocity, &c. &c. Then the treatment of Nature 
 seemed an extremely full one ; for Static, and Dynamic, and 
 Mechanic, and Chemistry (Chemism rather), and Geology, and 
 Botany, and Physiology, and much else, seemed all to have place 
 in it. Lastly, at once how pregnant and how new the matter of 
 the Philosophy of Spirit appeared ! Psychology, Morals, Eeligion, 
 Law, Politics, Society, Art, and Philosophy : these were the sub- 
 jects discussed, but all in a new order, and under new categories, 
 and with strange new associates at their sides. What was Being- 
 for-self, for example, and what was Phenomenology, and the World 
 of Appearance, and, above all, what was the Absolute Idea ? 
 
 But let us cease to wonder let us begin to read. 
 
 Well, we have read the Fore-word of Eosenkranz. We have 
 found in it, certainly, a considerable sprinking of to us new 
 words ; some of them, too, of endless syllable, Mongolic, merely 
 stuck together on the agglutinative principle, such as Sichinsichselb- 
 streflectiren (which does not occur here, however), or Ineinander- 
 greifen (which does) ; but we have gone through with it we seem 
 to ourselves to have understood it there is no hidden difficulty in 
 it, so far as we can judge. Though we have heard in it, too, that 
 there is a split in the school, and that Hegelianism is not in 
 Germany what it was ; we have been told as well that this 
 Encyclopaedia is a national treasure, the estimation of which will 
 only grow with time ; that other sciences are obliged to conform 
 themselves to the notions it contains, and that it presents a preg- 
 nant concentration beside which the Manuels de Philosopliie of the 
 French and others are but shallow maunderings, empty and 
 antiquated. For our own part, moreover, we have felt ourselves, 
 throughout the reading, in presence of what is evidently both a 
 highly developed, and a wholly new, method of general thought. 
 Altogether the Fore-word of Eosenkranz is a word of encourage- 
 ment and hope. 
 
 We go further now we enter upon Hegel himself. Alas - f 
 Hegel is not Eosenkranz, and the Fore-word after a thousand 
 efforts, with surprise, with incredulity, with astonishment, with 
 
FIRST IMPRESSIONS. O 
 
 vexation, with gall, with sweat seems destined for ever to 
 remain the Hind-word also. 
 
 Even if a ray of light seems suddenly to leap to you, most 
 probably your position is not one whit the better for it ; for the 
 gleam of the beginning proves, for the most part, but a meteor oT 
 the marsh ; a meteor with express appointment, it may be even, 
 to mislead your vanity into the pitfall of the ridiculous. You 
 shall have advanced, let us assume, for example, to the words : 
 'The Idea, however, demonstrates itself as Thought directly 
 identical with itself, and this at the same time as the power 
 to set itself over against itself, in order to be for itself, and in 
 this Other only to be by itself.' You shall have seen into these 
 words, let us say, so far ; and you shall have smirkingly pointed 
 them out to friends, and smiled complacently over the hopeless 
 blankness that fell upon their features ; but in the smirk, and in 
 the smile, and in the delusion that underlies them, you shall 
 have, like Dogberry, to be ' written down an ass ' the while. 
 These words but abstractly state the position of Idealism do 
 they ? And so, hugging yourself as on a secret gained, you relax 
 pleasedly into the cloudland of the Vorstellung, to see there, far 
 off across the blue, the whole huge universe iridescently collapse 
 into the crystal of the Idea. You will yet see reason to be 
 ashamed of your cloudland, to be disappointed with your secret, 
 how true soever, and to find in every case that you have not 
 yet accomplished a single step in advance. 
 
 The Encyclopaedia proves utterly refractory then. With 
 resolute concentration we have set ourselves, again and again, 
 to begin with the beginning, or, more desperately, with the end, 
 perhaps with the middle now with this section, now with that 
 in vain ! Deliberate effort, desultory dip ''tis all the same thing ! 
 We shut the book ; we look around for explanation and assistance. 
 
 We are in Germany itself at the moment (say) ; and very 
 naturally, in the first instance, we address ourselves to our own 
 late teacher of the language, ' Other writers] he replies, ' may be 
 this, may be that ; but Hegel ! one has to stop ! and think / and 
 think ! Hegel ! Ach G-ott ! ' Such a weary look of exhausted 
 effort lengthens the jaw ! and it is our last chance of a word 
 with our late teacher; for henceforth he always unaccountably 
 vanishes at the very first glimpse of our person, though caught 
 a mile off! 
 
 But here is a friend of ours, an Englishman, of infinite ability, 
 
6 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 of infinite acquirement, conversant with many languages, but 
 especially conversant with German, for he has held for years a 
 German appointment, and rejoiced for years in a German wife. 
 He will assist us. With what a curious smile he looks up, and 
 shakes his head, after having read the two or three first sen- 
 tences of the first preface to the Encyclopaedia ! This preface is 
 Hegelian iron certainly, and with the tang of Hegelian iron in 
 every word of it ; but, looking at it now, it is difficult to under- 
 stand that it should ever have seemed hard. Nor do I suppose 
 that it really was hard to the friend alluded to. Only, the closely 
 wrought concentration must have seemed exceedingly peculiar ; 
 and it must have been felt that in such words common and 
 current as they are as Inhalt, Vorstellung, Begriff, and even 
 dusserliche Zv:eckmassiglceit , ausserliche Ordnung, Manier, Ueber- 
 gange, Vermittelung , &c., there lay a meaning quite other than the 
 ordinary one ; a meaning depending on some general system of 
 thought, and intelligible consequently only to the initiated. 
 
 We are driven back on books again then ; and we have recourse 
 to the Life of Hegel as written by Eosenkranz. This writer 
 possesses at once a facile and a lucid pen, beneath which, too, 
 there rise up ever and anon the most expressive images, the most 
 picturesque metaphors. Image, metaphor, facility, lucidity, all 
 seem ineffectual, however, the instant they come to be applied to 
 what alone concerns us the philosophy of Hegel. The per- 
 spicuity and transparency which give light everywhere else, here 
 suddenly so far as we are concerned vanish ; and there is an 
 incontinent relapse, on our part, into the ancient gall. Let the 
 reader look, for example, at these, the first two sentences of what 
 appears in the work referred to as a formal statement of the 
 system of Hegel ! 
 
 ' Philosophy was to him the self-cognition of the process of the 
 Absolute, which, as pure Ideality, is not affected by the vicissitude 
 of the quantitative difference of the Becoming which attaches to 
 the Finite. The distinction of the Pure Idea, of Nature, and of 
 the Spirit as personification of history, is eliminated in the total 
 totality of the Absolute Spirit that is present in them.' 
 
 The reader will do well to refer to the original, and to examine 
 from time to time the succeeding page, or page and a half, in test 
 of his own proficiency. Insight into Hegel will have begun, when 
 the passage referred to has become sun-clear. Not more than 
 begun, however, for the glance into the system involved here 
 
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA, ROSENKRANZ. 7 
 
 extends only to the 'totality,' and, compared with a knowledge 
 which were truly knowledge, is altogether inadequate. In the 
 case of Hegel, there is nothing more deceptive than what are 
 called general views. It is extreme injustice to all interests 
 concerned, to sum up his system in a paragraph ; and still worse 
 to fancy that it is understood, and finished off, and done with in 
 the single word Pantheism. He who would know Hegel, must 
 know what Hegel himself would call das Einzelne, and even das 
 Einzelne des Einzelnen ; that is, he must not content himself with 
 some mere fraudulent or illusory general conception of the whole ;^ 
 but he must know 'the particular' (strictly, 'the singular'), and 
 c the particular of the particular.' The System of Hegel is this : 
 not a mere theory or intellectual view, or collection of theories or 
 intellectual views, but an Organon through which as system of */" 
 drill, instruction, discipline passed, the individual soul finds itself 
 on a new elevation, and with new powers. A general view that 
 shall shortly name and give shortly to understand a single 
 statement that shall explain this were a demand not one whit 
 more absurd as regards the Principia of Newton than as regards 
 the Logic of Hegel. Of the latter, as of the former, he only knows 
 anything who has effected actual permeation. Fancy the smile 
 into which the iron of Hegel broke when the never-doubting 
 M. Cousin requested a succinct statement of The System! 'Mon- 
 sieur} said he, ' ces choses ne se disent pas succinctement, surtout en 
 fran^ais ! ' ^ 
 
 The Life of Hegel by Eosenkranz, then, however interesting, 
 however satisfactory otherwise, failed there at least for us 
 where only we wished it to succeed. It extended no light for 
 perception of the System. There it was dark and impervious 
 as dark and impervious as the Encyclopaedie itself. The opening 
 sentences of the relative statement and the succeeding passages 
 already referred to were flung, in the wonder they excited, to 
 more than one correspondent, and the ' total totality ' remained 
 an occasion of endless smile. 
 
 From all this it was evident, then, that the System of Hegel 
 was something eminently peculiar, and that, if it were to be 
 understood at all, the only course that remained was to take it 
 in its place as part and parcel of what is called German Philo- 
 sophy in general ; and, with that object, to institute, necessarily, 
 a systematic study of the entire subject from the commencement. 
 JSTow that commencement was Kant ; in regard to whom, so far, 
 
8 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 at least, as Hume and the philosophy of Great Britain generally 
 were concerned, we might assume ourselves to possess what 
 preliminary preparation was specially required. With Kant, 
 then, without carrying the regression further, and with reasonable 
 hope of success, we might begin at once. 
 
 The Kritik of Pure Reason was accordingly taken up, and an 
 assiduous study of the same duly set forward. The Introduction 
 and the Aesthetik necessitated, indeed, the closest attention and 
 the most earnest thought in consequence of the newness of 
 the matter and the imperfections of the form, but offered on the 
 whole no serious impediment. It was otherwise, however, with 
 the Transcendental Analytik, the burthen of which is the Deduc- 
 tion of the Categories, pronounced by Hegel what is hardest in 
 Kant even pronounced by Kant what is- hardest in himself. 
 Here there was pause ; here the eyes wandered ; here they looked 
 up in quest of aid from without. 
 
 The translations that offered themselves to hand were most 
 of them to be regarded but as psychological curiosities. They 
 seemed on the whole, in fact, to have been executed as it were 
 with the eyes shut, or as if in the dark ; and consequently they 
 fell on the eyes of the reader like a very ' blanket of the night,' 
 against the overpowering weight of which no human lid could 
 stir. Reinhold,* Schwegler,^ not were procured, but fell in the 
 way, scarcely with the required profit. The former was one of 
 those nervously clear, nervously distinct individuals who blind 
 with excess of light and deafen with excess of accent; while 
 the latter, excellent, admirable, afforded only a summary that 
 was scarcely of any avail to the interest concerned the Deduc- 
 tion of the Categories. SaintesJ extended a thin varnish of 
 the 'Literature of the Subject;' but, as regarded the main object 
 of a full perception of what that really was that the Kritik of 
 Pure Reason strove to, he was as far from throwing any satis- 
 factory light on Kant, as afterwards Vera, on the whole, to 
 
 * Reinhold : Versuch einer neuen Theorie des Menschlichen Vorstellungs- 
 vermogens. 
 
 t Schwegler : Geschichte der Philosophic im Umriss. 
 
 \ Saintes : Vie et Philosophic de Kant. 
 
 Vera : Introduction a la Philosophic de Hegel. 
 
 It must be understood that these censures come from one whose desire was 
 thoroughly to see into the whole connexion and details of the systems in question, 
 and that consequently another who should only aim at a 'general conception' may 
 feel very differently towards some of the works mentioned. Rosenkranz and Sibree, 
 
KANT THE BEGINNING. 9 
 
 me at least in the one little volume was from throwing a 
 sufficient one on what I really wanted to know of Hegel. Three 
 Vortrcige (just to complete the digression here which the refer- 
 ence to Vera has begun) of Kuno Fischer, besides that they came _ 
 years too late, were not done justice to by acquisition and perusal 
 of the two volumes on Kant which were announced to follow. 
 Haym (Hegel und seine Zeit) was a man of genius, but all his 
 admirable writing, all his brilliantly-pointed expression, failed to 
 convince me that there was nothing in Hegel. The prefatory 
 notice to the extracts of Frantz and Hillert, a slender pamphlet 
 on Hegel's subjective Logic published by Chapman, Gruppe 
 ' Gegenwart, &c., der Philosophic,' Fortlage ' die Llicken des 
 Hegelschen Systems ' (I may also mention Coleridge's Biographia 
 Literaria, and Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy) 
 these and the other works already named constitute what in 
 my case is the Literature of the subject ; and, though very 
 2'eadily allowing each its own peculiar merits (Schwegler's 
 book is indispensable) it is not too much to say that a single 
 satisfactory idea on the main thing wanted by a struggling 
 student who would be thorough, is not to be got from the 
 whole of them. He who after such reading supposes himself 
 to possess an adequate conception of Kant and Hegel simply 
 -deludes himself.* 
 
 On the whole, the conclusion at this stage was, that we must 
 return to the principals. If we really desired to come to any 
 knowledge of Kant and Hegel, or, for that part, of Fichte and 
 Schelling either, it was with Kant and Hegel, with Fichte and 
 Schelling, that we had alone to do. Accordingly, Tennemann, 
 Chalybaeus, Michelet, though heard of, were not consulted. 
 Neither were the Elucidations to Hegel by Rosenkranz inquired 
 for ; and the same author's suggestive Reformation of the 
 Hegelian Logic only came to hand when it was no longer 
 required. The pertinent articles in the Conversations-Lexicon 
 
 for example, speak alike highly of the work of Vera ; and they are both authorities 
 of weight. Rosenkranz, as is well known, is the Hcgelianer par excellence. And I 
 have no hesitation in characterising Mr Sibree's translation of Hegel's Philosophy of 
 History as by far the best contribution to German philosophy that has as yet (1864) 
 appeared in England. The one work is no test : Vera has written many works on 
 Hegel, all excellent. He himself, besides, was one of the most amiable, accom- 
 plished, and delightful of men. 
 
 * The reader will remember that the reference above to Schwegler's book pre- 
 ceded by some years any thought of its translation by the author. (New note. ) 
 
10 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 were too short to be of much service as regards the ' Philosophies r 
 themselves ; but useful light was obtained here and there on the 
 technical meanings of German philosophical terms. 
 
 It was a consolation to learn from another such encyclopaedic 
 work, whose name I forget, that Hegel had been a shut book both 
 to Goethe and Schiller, and that, as regards Jean Paul, it was in a 
 manner an expression wrung from him, that Hegel was 'the 
 subtlest of all metaphysical heads, but a very vampire of the 
 living man.' In a like reference, it was not unpleasing to know 
 that the Kritik of Pure Eeason had remained opaque to Goethe,, 
 and to perceive from the words conveying it, that the claim of 
 the same great man to an understanding of the Kritik of 
 Judgment was perhaps not less susceptible of a negative than 
 of an affirmative. Such evidences of the difficulty, then, were a 
 consolation to the suffering individual student, at the same time 
 that everything seemed to confirm the truth of his conclusion, 
 that, in this case, as in most others, the true policy was to pass 
 by the subordinates, and hold perseveringly by the principals. 
 
 But again, if we may neglect what is named the ' Literature of 
 the subject,' as but a parasitic consequent, how far, it may be 
 asked, are we justified in assuming this or any movement to lie 
 in its principals alone, and what is the same thing on another 
 side how far is it possible to separate the consideration of 
 any such movement from the consideration of its literature ? 
 These questions probably enable us to open at best what we 
 would proceed to say. The movement, of which there is question 
 at present, is an intellectual movement of such a nature as i& 
 not rare in history. The Germans commonly distinguish such 
 movements by the word Gahrung, which signifies zymosis, fer- 
 mentatio, ferment. Now the dramatic zymosis of England, at 
 the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century, presents a considerable analogy to the philosophical 
 zymosis of Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century ; while neither of them,, 
 perhaps, can well be surpassed, as an example of the class, by 
 any other which has occurred in history. In both, the same 
 passionate enthusiasm, the same eager haste, the same burning 
 rush, the same swift alternation of io triumphe, the same pre- 
 cipitation and superfetation of production. Man, strung to his- 
 utmost, vies his utmost; and each new day brings forth its- 
 portent; which portent, again, in its place and season, is as. 
 
THE LITERATURE OF THE SUBJECT. 11 
 
 temporary centre and feeding fuel to the growing, glowing, and 
 inflaming hubbub. 
 
 Germany, for its part, however, was luckily free, as indeed 
 behoved philosophy, from an element of sense which deformed_ 
 and disgraced the English ferment. For such pure white flames 
 as Kant and Fichte, the substance proper of the spirit was oil 
 enough ; the natural speed of their own life sufficed them ; 
 they required not, like Marlow, the fierce combustible of wine, 
 as it were to give them edge upon themselves, that so they might 
 eat into themselves, and devour up their own sweetness in an 
 instant's rush. Yet Fichte, absolutely without a fear absolutely 
 without a misgiving in the intensity of his sincerity, in the 
 intensity of his honesty, in the intensity of his conviction, was 
 as swift and precipitate as even Marlow. Of this, his every act, 
 liis every word is proof. He kindles to Kant, he writes his 
 'Kritik of All Eevelation' in four weeks, he rushes to Konigsberg, 
 he extends to Kant this same 'Kritik' by way of introductory 
 letter. He becomes professor at Jena; his lectures are as 
 inflaming fire, and his works Wissenschaftslehre, Kechtslehre, 
 Sittenlehre leap from him like consecutive lightnings. The 
 Journal he edits is, for its plainness of speech, confiscated by the 
 Government: he rises up, he rushes to the front, he defends, he 
 appeals, he listens to no private Hush, man! hold your tongue, we 
 are going to look over it ; he will have ' lawful conviction ' or 
 ' signal satisfaction.' Submit to be^ threatened ! it is he will 
 threaten, he will quit quit and take his people with him ; he and 
 they will found a university for themselves ! So single, so entire 
 in his conviction of his first philosophy, this is no impediment to 
 equal singleness, to equal entirety in his conviction of his second. 
 Then, when the political horizon darkens over his country, he 
 calls his compatriots to arms calls to them through the very 
 roulades of the French drums, calls to them in the very hearing 
 of the French governor ! Nor when, as if in answer to his call, 
 the war arises, does the student slink into his study as if his work 
 were done. No ! the word is but exchanged for the deed ; and in 
 the doing of the deed, both he and his brave wife fall a sacrifice to 
 their own nobleness! * The eagle Fichte ! whose flight was arrow- 
 straightj whose speed the lightning's ! Or take him in less serious 
 and more amusing circumstances. The enthusiasm in the days of 
 Marlow, the drunkenness of intellection could not be greater than 
 
 * But she recovered, while he died. (New.) 
 
12 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 this. Fichte visits Baggesen, whom as yet he has not seen ; 
 Baggesen lias a child at the point of death, and cannot receive 
 Fichte. They cannot part thus, however: Baggesen comes to 
 Fichte in the stair ; and there the two of them, Fichte and 
 Baggesen, find Consciousness a subject so interesting, "that, in such 
 position, in such circumstances, they remain discussing it an hour 
 and a half, turning away, the one from the other, at last, each, we 
 may suppose, as in the dream of a seraph. 
 
 It must be admitted, indeed, that the excitement in Germany 
 took on, in some respects, larger proportions than that in England. 
 The numbers of the affected, for example, were much greater in the 
 former country than in the latter. The former country, indeed, 
 would probably count by hundreds as the other by tens. Schulze, 
 Kraus, Maimon, Krug, Kiesewetter, Erhard, Eberhard, Heyden- 
 reich, Bouterweck, Bendavid, Fries, Eeinhold, Bardili, Beck, 
 Hiilsen, Koppen, Suabedissen these really are but a tithe of the 
 names that turn up in the German fluctuation, and each of them 
 is to be conceived as but a seething froth-point in the immeasurable 
 yeast. 
 
 In these zymoses, then, whether in Germany or in England, we 
 may say that those who took part in them were stirred to their 
 very depths; that they stood up, as it were, convulsed; that they 
 emulously agonised themselves mutually, to the production of 
 results, in both countries, on the whole transcendent, almost 
 superhuman. Now, however wide was the seething sea in 
 England, we all know, in these days, that it has subsided round a 
 single, matchless island, Shakspeare, the delight, the glory, the 
 wonder of the world ; beside which, it is, on the whole, only by a 
 species of indulgent indifference on our parts that we allow certain 
 virtuosi to point out the existence of some ancillary islets. But 
 just as it is in England as regards the dramatic zymosis, it is, or 
 will be, in Germany as regards the philosophic; only, the latter 
 country, perhaps, will distinguish its single island by a double 
 name. We have arrived now at the point where an answer to the 
 questions which we have left a short way behind us is easy, is 
 self-evident. The seething thing, named English Drama, or 
 German Philosophy, is one thing; and the practical outcome of 
 the seething, another. Thus different, each, then, may be con- 
 sidered apart and by itself ; and two diverse branches of human 
 industry are seen to become hereby possible. He who shall make 
 it his business to watch the gathering of the materials for the 
 
ZYMOSES, ETC. 13 
 
 seething the first bells or bubbles of the same the further 
 progress, all the consecutive phases as they appear in time 
 will be the Phenomenologist or Historian of the Seething. By 
 this historian, plainly, no detail is to be neglected, nor is any- 
 name to be omitted. 
 
 A very different task, however, is his who would take the other 
 branch, and discuss only the settled outcome of the ferment : and 
 this is the task in special reference to German Philosophy which 
 we here would desire to attempt ; a task which is, probably, 
 insusceptible as yet of the form of art which as yet cannot be 
 effected, as it were, by a picture, by a statue, or even by a homo- 
 geneous essay, but which must content itself with the ground in 
 its regard being simply broken into. For us then, with such 
 object, the majority of the names tossed over in the turmoil will 
 have no interest; for us, in short, the principals will suffice. And 
 thus, by another road, we are brought to the same conclusion as 
 before to neglect, namely, the 'Literature of the subject;' and 
 this, not only so far as it follows, but also so far as so to speak 
 it accompanies the ferment. But again the terms principals 
 and outcome are not necessarily coincident. In the ferment of 
 the English Drama, Marlow, Ben Jonson, and others may, even 
 beside Shakspeare, be correctly enough named principals; yet it 
 is the last alone whom we properly term outcome. As it is, then, 
 in the English movement, so probably will it be in the G-erman 
 also ; and in this light, perhaps, there awaits us a closer circum- 
 scription yet than that which we had already reached. In other 
 words, there may be principals here, too, whom, in part or in 
 whole, it is not necessary to regard as outcome. 
 
 The reader, indeed, may have already perceived a tendency on 
 our part to talk somewhat exclusively of Kant and Hegel ; and 
 may already, perhaps, resent the slight thereby implied to Eichte 
 and Schelling, as to men who have hitherto ranked on the same 
 platform as equals themselves, and no less equals of the others 
 also. No man, for instance, will subordinate Fichte to Schelling ; 
 yet, as there has been assigned to Kant the relative place of 
 Socrates, and to Hegel that of Aristotle, so there has always 
 been reserved for Schelling no less proud a place the place of 
 Plato. It may well be asked, then, why should Fichte and 
 Schelling give way to Hegel ? Is it possible to take up the works 
 of either of the former without perpetually coming on Anldcinge 
 on assonances to Hegel for which this latter seems the debtor ? 
 
14 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 Do not sources apparently of special inspiration to Hegel crop out 
 all through the ' Ideen ' and the * Transcendentale Idealismus '- 
 all through the ' Wissenschaf tslehre/ and the ' Eechtslehre,' and 
 the ' Sittenlehre ? ' Are not the considerations contained in 
 these works largely the material on which at least Hegel turns ? 
 Whence else could there have been extended to him the ruts or 
 the rails whereby his waggon was enabled to roll forward with 
 filling to the inane ? In what respect is the single quest of 
 Schelling or of Fichte to be distinguished from that of Hegel or of 
 Kant ? Is it not true that there is but one quest common to all 
 the four of them ? Is not, after all, this quest with each but, in 
 one word, the a priori? Do not they all aim at an a priori 
 deduction of the all of things a deduction which shall extend to 
 man the pillars of his universe, and the principles as well by 
 which he may find support and guidance in all his ways and 
 wishes ? If, then, they are thus successive attempts at the same 
 result, why should they not all of them be equally studied ? To 
 this we may answer, that, so far as there is a succession, there is 
 no wish to deny the right of any of them to be studied. We 
 seek a practical concentration only, and, in the interest of that 
 concentration, we would eliminate everything that is extraneous, 
 everything that is superfluous but nothing more. Now, as 
 regards Kant, there is no room for doubt ; his place is fixed, not 
 only by common consent, but by the very nature of the case. It 
 was he who originated the whole movement, and without him not 
 a step in it can be understood. As regards Hegel, riot so much to 
 common consent is it that he owes his place, as to the inexorable 
 sentence of history ; for there has been no step since his death 
 which is not to be characterised as dissolution and demise. But 
 if Hegel be the historical culmination and end, both Fichte and 
 Schelling must submit to be historical only so far as they lead to 
 him only so far as they approve themselves in his regard as 
 nexus of mediation to Kant. Now, at a glance, there is much in 
 both of them that is extraneous, and incapable of being regarded 
 as historically connective in any respect. Fichte, for example, 
 had two philosophical epochs ; and if both belong to biography, 
 only one belongs to history. The epochs of Schelling were, I 
 suppose, three times more numerous ; but, of them all, only the 
 second and third are historical ; those, namely, which, following 
 the first, the initiatory identification with Fichte, sought to 
 vindicate for Nature an independent place beside the Ego, and 
 
" OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 RELATIVE PLACES OF KANT AND THE REST. 15 
 
 then resumption for both into an indefinite Absolute. Nay, of 
 the two epochs just named, it is even possible that we ought to 
 strike off the latter; for there are not wanting good reasons to 
 maintain that the work of this epoch the resumption, namely, oF 
 both Nature and the Ego into the Absolute belongs, not to 
 :Schelling but to Hegel. Some of these reasons we shall see 
 presently. Meantime, we shall assume the philosophical majority 
 -of Hegel to commence with the publication of the ' Phaeno- 
 menologie des Geistes,' in 1807. On this assumption, the 
 historical works of Fichte are the ' Wissenschaf tslehre ' in its 
 various forms, the ' Grundlage des Naturrechts,' and the * System 
 der Sittenlehre ; ' while the ' Ideen zu einer Philosophic der 
 ]STatur/ the 'Von der Weltseele/ the 'Erster Entwurf ernes 
 -Systems der Naturphilosophie,' the l System des Transcendentalen 
 Idealismus,' and the ' Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophic,' 
 shall represent the historical works of Schelling. 
 
 It is very probable, however, that even these conclusions will 
 become to the student, as he advances, doubtful. With Fichte 
 and with Schelling, his satisfaction will not always be unmixed ; 
 -and reasons will begin to show themselves for believing Hegel 
 however apparently their debtor, both for stimulation and 
 suggestion to have, after all, in the end, dispensed with both, 
 and taken a fresh departure from Kant for himself. In such 
 circumstances, he will incline to think still further concen- 
 tration both justifiable and feasible. No doubt it is interesting, 
 he will say, to see the consecutive forms which the theme of 
 Kant assumes now in the hands of Fichte, and now in the hands 
 of Schelling. No doubt this is not only interesting, but also, 
 for Hegel, in some sort adjuvant. Still, if it is true that all 
 culminates in Hegel, and that Hegel himself has made good his 
 attachment to Kant, with practical elimination of all that is 
 intermediate, then, evidently, for him whose object is the outcome 
 only, Fichte and Schelling are no longer indispensably necessary. 
 Then the dissatisfaction with these writers themselves ! 
 
 As writers this, at least, is the experience of the present 
 student Fichte and Schelling were incomparably the most 
 accomplished of all the four, and offered by far the least impedi- 
 ment to the progress of a current intelligence. Schelling, however 
 (his vindication of nature as in opposition to Fichte, and such 
 like, being neglected), seemed to have little to offer as stepping- 
 stone to Hegel besides what we may call, perhaps, his Neutrum 
 
16 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 of Reason his generalised Universal of Reasons which neutrum 
 again coalesces in effect with the absolute neutrum, which resumes 
 into itself both nature and the ego, both objectivity and subjectivity. 
 And even as regards this, probably by far the most important 
 element nameable Schellingian in Hegel, there were considerations 
 which might just reverse the received relation of its origin. 
 
 The facts on which the considerations alluded to rest are these : 
 Hegel, when his time was come and his system at least in its 
 first form lay complete in his desk, wrote to Schelling disclosing 
 his intention to enter the career of Letters, or rather Philosophy, 
 and asking his advice as to where to settle. He feared the 
 literary revel and riot of Jena, he said : would not Bamberg, with 
 opportunities to study Roman Catholicism, be a judicious pre- 
 liminary residence ? Hegel wrote this letter in November 1800, 
 and his arrival in Jena the following January was the result of the 
 correspondence. Now Schelling, who had but just summed and 
 completed himself and had but just given himself to the world 
 as summed and completed in his ' System des Transcendentalen 
 Idealismus,' is found, immediately after his first meetings with 
 Hegel, and with signs of haste and precipitation about him, 
 offering himself to the world again, new summed, new completed 
 this time, indeed, as he professed, finally summed, finally completed^ 
 in what was at least partially antagonistic of the immediately 
 previous sum his ' Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie.' 
 
 These facts are few, but they probably cover a whole busy 
 beehive of human interests both as regards Schelling and as 
 regards Hegel. Haym, for example, a writer of brilliant genius, 
 whom we have already mentioned, scarcely hesitates to insinuate 
 that this haste of Schelling was probably not unconnected with 
 the new-comer Hegel this, as thinking, perhaps, of the proverbial 
 communicativeness of first meetings. If, then, Hegel, on these 
 occasions communicated anything to Schelling, the burthen of 
 such communication would be most probably the Neutrum or 
 Absolute ; for, while it is the most prominent element in Hegel 
 that can be called Schellingian, it is precisely in the last-named 
 work of Schelling's that it emerges on the whole fully formed and 
 fully overt. In this way, this same neutrum or absolute may be 
 viewed as the honorarium or hush-money paid by the Unknown 
 to the Known for the privilege of standing on the latter's shoulders 
 and in the light of the latter's fame. For possibly the application 
 of Hegel to Schelling was not without its calculations. It broke 
 
HEGEL AND SCHELLING. 17 
 
 a long silence, and it concerned correspondents very differently 
 placed. Hegel was by four years and five months the senior of 
 Schelling: as yet, nevertheless, he had done nothing ; he was but 
 an obscure tutor, and his existence was to be wholly ignored^ 
 Schelling, on the contrary, though so much his junior, was already 
 an old celebrity, a placed professor, an established author, a 
 philosopher the rival of Fichte, the rival of Kant. To Hegel, 
 unknown, obscure, of no account, nothing, but who would rank 
 precisely among these highest of the high who would, in fact, as 
 the paper in his desk prophesied to him, be all the immense 
 advantages that would lie in Schelling's introduction, in Schelling's 
 association of him with himself as philosophical teacher, as 
 literary writer, could not be hid. Why, it would be the saving to 
 him of whole years of labour, perhaps of a whole world of heart- 
 breaks. There is, quite accordingly, a peculiar tone, a peculiar 
 batedness of breath in the letter of Hegel : admiration of 
 Schelling's career, almost amounting to awe, is hinted ; he looks to 
 Schelling with full confidence for a recognition of his disinterested 
 labour (the paper in his desk), even though its sphere be lower ; 
 before trusting himself to the literary intoxication of Jena, he 
 would like preliminarily to strengthen himself somewhere else, say 
 at Bamberg, &c. &c. It is difficult to avoid distrusting all this, 
 for we feel it is precisely Jena he wants to get at, and we know 
 that he was not slow to come to Jena when Schelling bade him. 
 Then, we seem to see, Bamberg had served its turn ; it and its 
 opportunities for the study of Catholicism might now go hang ! 
 what was wanted had been got. 
 
 In their first meetings at Jena, then, such being the relative 
 positions of the two former fellow-students, Hegel, it may be 
 supposed, would naturally desire to conciliate Schelling would 
 naturally desire indirectly to show him that the advantages of a 
 partnership would not, after all, be so very wholly on one side, 
 would naturally desire to make him feel that he (Schelling) had 
 not done so ill in giving the stranger the benefit of his intro- 
 duction and the prestige of his fame. Very probably, then, Hegel 
 would not hesitate, in such circumstances, to show Schelling, if he 
 could, that in his ^Schelling's) own doctrines there lay an element 
 which, if developed, would extend to the System the last touch 
 of comprehensiveness, simplicity, and symmetry.* 
 
 * Certainly in the eyes of all this is what Hegel, in his 'Differenz des Fichteschen 
 
 B 
 
18 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 Bat this Neutrum or Absolute will be found to be very 
 fairly expressed, and more than once too, in the ' Transcendentale 
 Idealismus ! ' 
 
 An ' absolut Identisches ' in which the ' Objective ' and ' Sub- 
 jective' shall coalesce is talked of in various places. We may 
 instance these : At page 29, we hear of ' ein Absolutes, das von 
 sicJi selbst die Ursache imd die Wirkung Subject und Object 
 ist;' at pages iv. and v. of Preface, an * Allgerneinheit' is talked 
 of, in which * das Einzelne vb'llig verschwindet;' again, at page 29, 
 the ' Selbstbewusstseyn ' is identified with Nature, and both with 
 the absolute identity of Subjective and Objective ; lastly, pp. 4, 5, 
 we have the following : * Nature reaches the highest goal, to 
 become wholly object to its own self, only through the highest 
 and last reflexion, which is nothing else than Man, or, more 
 generally, that which we name Reason, through which (reflexion) 
 nature first returns completely into its own self, and whereby it 
 becomes manifest that nature is originally identical with that 
 which is recognised in us as what is intelligent and conscious.' 
 
 This would seem to dispose definitively of any pretensions of 
 Hegel. But again, it is a curious thing that, once a doctrine has 
 become historically established, we are often startled by expres- 
 sions in the works of previous writers which seem accurately to 
 describe it ; yet these previous writers shall have no more insight 
 into the doctrine concerned than any Indian in his woods ; and 
 we ourselves should have found something quite else in the 
 expressions, had we read them before the doctrine itself was 
 become historically overt. Small individuals there are in the 
 world, however, who ferret out such ex post facto coincidences, and 
 assume to denounce thereby some veritable historical founder as 
 but a cheat and a thief and a plagiarist ! Now, this might have 
 happened here, and Schelling, for all his expressions in the Tran- 
 scendental Idealism, might have been quite blind to their real 
 reach till he had had his eyes opened by the communications of 
 Hegel; in which circumstances, too, it would be ill-natured to 
 Marae him for showing haste to make good his own in the eyes of 
 the public. It is certain that a Universal of Reason lies much 
 more in the way of the notions of Hegel than in that of those of 
 Schelling, who, in the duality of reality here and ideality there, 
 
 and Schellingischen Systems,' did for Scbelling. Schelling, as everybody knew, sank 
 both sides of his philosophy into an Indifferenzpunkt. If this punkt was implicitly 
 an absolute for Schelling, perhaps Hegel made it for him even explicitly such. (New.) 
 
COLERIDGE. 19 
 
 seems to leap to a neutrum which, as indifference, is a neutrum, 
 which is zero (the Null !) rather than an absolute, rather than 
 reason. Be all this as it may, we are compelled, as it conies to us, 
 to attribute this tenet to Schelling ; and the Hegelian may still 
 take to himself the consolation which, indeed, lay open to his 
 master he may sardonically look on at the little use Schelling 
 made of it at the little use Schelling could make of it, as it 
 wanted to him that connexion with Kant which enabled Hegel, 
 by giving body to the form, to realise his system. 
 
 For the rest, the balanced magnet of an absolute, and more, the 
 subordination of all to Art as highest outcome of this absolute 
 itself the restlessness and inconstancy of his faith whether as 
 regards others or himself, his silence during the life of Hegel, 
 his malicious breaking of silence after the death of Hegel, and the 
 little intelligence he seemed to show of the very system he broke 
 silence on, all this dissatisfied with Schelling, and left an impres- 
 sion as of the too ebullient ardour that o'erleaps itself. Schelling 
 has been said to resemble Coleridge, and not without reason so far 
 as the latter's similarly ebullient youth is concerned. Doubtless, 
 too, some will see in both a like versatility of opinion, and a like 
 unsatisfactoriness of close : but, in these respects, any likeness 
 that can be imputed is not more than skin-deep ; and otherwise, 
 surely, not many points of comparison can be offered. Coleridge, 
 exquisite poet, was, with all his logosophy, no philosopher ; and it 
 is difficult to believe even that there* is any single philosopher in 
 the world whom he had either thoroughly studied or thoroughly 
 understood. Schelling had both studied and originated philo- 
 sophy. Than Coleridge, consequently in that regard, he was 
 infinitely profounder in acquisition, infinitely profounder in medi- 
 tation of the same ; he was infinitely clearer also, infinitely more 
 vigorous, infinitely richer, and more elastic in the spontaneity of 
 original suggestion and thought. 
 
 As for Fichte, having overcome the difficulty of his second 
 proposition, which is that of Entgegensetzung, all seemed easy so 
 far as study was concerned ; and undoubtedly there lay in certain 
 of his political findings in his method of movement by thesis, 
 antithesis, and synthesis, and in that his undeniable and most 
 valuable contribution, the unconditionedness of the notion of the 
 ego elements to which Hegel owed much ; but notwithstanding 
 this, and notwithstanding the impetuous nobleness of the man, 
 whose unhesitating headlong singleness, if to be viewed with 
 
20 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. I. 
 
 Mr Carlyle as a rock at all, must be viewed as a rock, not at rest, 
 but in motion, irresistible from without, nor yet quite resistible 
 from within, the general aspect of the system is, on the whole, 
 unsubstantial and unreal; the in and in of the development 
 wearies and awakens doubt, and one finds oneself easily sympa- 
 thising with the aged and somewhat chagrined Kant, when, in a 
 letter to Tief trunk, he characterises it as a ' sort of ghost,' a mere 
 'thought-form/ 'without stuff/ which is incapable of being 
 ' clutched,' and which accordingly ' makes a wonderful impression 
 on the reader.' 
 
 On the whole, then, for us, but very little material could be 
 pointed to as separating Hegel from Kant; nay, this material 
 itself could be derived quite as well at first hand from the original 
 quarry, as at second hand from the trucks of the quarry-men ; and 
 generally, in all respects, it was Hegel who specially continued 
 and developed into full and final form all the issues which Kant 
 had ever properly begun. The true principals, then, were Kant 
 and Hegel ; and, they being won, all others might be cheerfully 
 neglected. Neither as regards their difficulty, surely, was there 
 any reason to dread eventual despair, were but the due labour 
 instituted. What they understood, another might understand ; 
 and for no other purpose than to be understood, had these their 
 works been written, had these their works been published. 
 
 Let us confine ourselves to Kant and Hegel, then ; nay, for the 
 start, let us confine ourselves in them to those works of theirs 
 which are specially occupied with the express scientific statement 
 of their respective systems. In a word, let us at first confine 
 ourselves to three works of each : as regards Kant, to the ' Kritik 
 of Pure Keason,' * the Kritik of Practical Eeason,' and the ' Kritik 
 of Judgment;' as regards Hegel, to the ' Phaenomenologie des 
 Geistes,' the ' Logik,' and the * Encyclopaedic.' This, then, is what 
 has been done indeed, to the production of greater restriction 
 still, from the above enumeration, * the Phaenomenologie des 
 Geistes ' is, on the whole, to be eliminated.* 
 
 The present work relates to Hegel alone ; and the immediately 
 succeeding chapters present a series of notes which, as products of 
 an actual struggle to this author, may prove, perhaps, not unadapted 
 to assist, or at least encourage, others in a like undertaking. 
 
 The reader, meantime, is not to suppose that by confining our- 
 
 * Of course this does not mean that the student is not, eventually, to know all the 
 works of the Masters, (New. ) 
 
WHAT WOKKS SPECIALLY STUDIED. 21 
 
 selves to Kant and Hegel, we wish it to be inferred that we 
 consider these writers beyond the reach of some of the same 
 objections already stated as regards Fichte and Schelling. The 
 restriction in question is not due to any such motive, but depench? 
 only on considerations of what really constitutes the thing called 
 German Philosophy; in regard to which, at least in the first 
 instance, every restriction seemed necessarily a boon, if at once 
 productive of simplification, and not incompatible with a suffi- 
 ciently full statement of the essential truth of the subject. By 
 such motives is it that we have been actuated : and be it further 
 understood that our present business is not with objections, not 
 with judgment of the systems at all, but only as yet and if possible 
 with their statement and exposition. 
 
22 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., A. 1. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 NOTES OF THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL. 
 
 A. 1. 
 
 THE Idea is thought : thought consists of ideas to think is to 
 follow ideas. Thought, then, as whole of ideas, is an element sui 
 generis, and will possess its own organic order ; ideas will follow 
 an order native to and inherent in them : but the general, the 
 universal of all ideas may be called the idea. The idea, then, is 
 salf-idgrrtical 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 its objective side, into 
 itself, or subjective side, as satisfied, gratified, and contented know- 
 ledge. We are not required to think of existent nature in all this, 
 but only of the nature of a general idea of the idea in its own self. 
 Besides being self-identical thinking, it is thus also seen to be, as 
 defined by Hegel, the capability of opposing or exposing itself to 
 itself, and that for the purpose of being in its own self and for its 
 own self just its own self, in fact. In this process the objective 
 side can evidently be very properly called its state of otherness or 
 hetereity ; and it is only when it arrives at this state of otherness 
 or hetereity, and has identified it with itself, that it can be said to 
 be by itself that is, at home and reconciled with itself. 
 
 The notion of a general idea idea as a general, as a universal 
 the idea is taken and looked at by the mind, and is seen to possess 
 this immanent process or nature. But idea follows idea or the 
 idea is in constant process : to show the order and train of these, 
 or the moments of this process, may be called the system of 
 thought, that is, of Logic, then. Now, what is concerned here, is 
 not the succession of ideas as they occur subjectively on what is 
 called the association of ideas, but it is that _succession which 
 occurs in~~real flunking, in thought as thought in objective 
 
A BEGINNING. 23 
 
 thought, in the performance of the Idea's own immanent process 
 and function. 
 
 Now, how then will the Idea, the speculative Idea, arise and 
 develop itself in any subject ? The first question that will 
 naturally suggest itself will relate to Being. The idea will be 
 first asked, or will first ask itself, to exercise its function, to do its 
 spiriting on the fact of existence, for the nearest and first character 
 of the Idea is that it is. The idea, then, first of all, holds itself as 
 a mirror to the general thought of existence to Being in its 
 abstract generality, to the mere essence of the word is. Now, it 
 cannot do so without the opposite notion of nothing also arising. 
 It is implies or involves it is not, or, at all events, it was not; it 
 cannot help saying to itself, the moment it looks at it is, it was not. 
 Not and is, then, is and not, must arise together, and cannot help 
 arising together. Neither can they help flowing into the kindred 
 notions, origin and decease, or coming J^ be and ceasing _tp_be. 
 The instant we think of Being, Existence, just as Being, Existence, 
 in general, without a single property or quality, the notions of not, 
 of coming to be, and of ceasing to be (which are both included in 
 Becoming), must follow and do follow. So is it with us when we 
 think, so is it with our speculative ideas that is, so is it with the 
 speculative idea the Idea then ; and so was it also in History. 
 The first philosophical systems must have revolved around these 
 simple notions, and Hegel is quite in earnest when he maintains 
 the coincidence of History and of Logic. What is thisSeyn, this 
 Being ? Whence comes it ? Whither goes it ? What is change ? 
 What is the influence of number, quantity, proportion ? Why is 
 it ? These are the simple questions that circle round Being, Origin, 
 Decease^ Kecorning. What is it particularly to be individually 
 to be (Das^yn^Fiirsichseyn) ? These really are the questions of 
 the Ionics, of the Eleatics, of Heraclitus, of Pythagoras, of 
 Democritus, &c. 
 
 Now these notions are all capable of being included under the 
 designation Quality, for they are all replies to Qualis ? Mere exis- 
 tence as an idea soon passes into that of special or actual existence 
 that really is and continues to be in the middle of that coming to 
 bejand ceasing to be. It is next also seen to be not only existent 
 in the middle of this process, but individually existent, as it were 
 personally existent. The whole progress of Hegel through Seyn, 
 Nichts, Werden, Entstehen, Vergehen, Daseyn, Eeality, Negation, 
 Something, Other, Being-in-itself, Being-for-other, Precise Nature, 
 
24 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., A. 1. 
 
 manifested Property, Limit, &c. ; these may be viewed as adum- 
 brations of stages of iiifantile consciousness : Dim thought that 
 there is, that there is nothing^ that there comes to be, that there 
 ceases to be, that there is a middle state that is in the coming to 
 being and the going from being ; that this is marked-off being, 
 denned being ; that there is a definite and an indefinite ; that there 
 was negation, that there is reality ; that this reality thickens itself 
 under reflexion and reference on reality and on negation, and from 
 reality to negation, and from negation to reality, into a something 
 that is what it is to be in itself, in which distinction disappears 
 and it remains a familiar Unity. 
 
 When a blind man recovers sight, all is a blur, an indistinct 
 formless blur that seems to touch him, that is not distinguished 
 from himself, or that conceivably he could not have distinguished 
 from himself, had he not learned from the other senses that there 
 was another than himself. Now, a child is in the position of the 
 blind man who recovers sight, but without ever having learned 
 a single item from any other sense, or in any other manner. 
 Naturally, then, that there is, &c., abstract Seyn, &c., will be the 
 sequence of unrecorded consciousness. Distinctions of quality 
 will certainly precede those of quantity the differences of kind 
 will be seen before the fact of the repetition of an individual. 
 
 This Logic, then, may be viewed as the way \ve_came tojbhink 
 the way in which thought grew, till tliere was a world for 
 Reflexion, for Understanding to turn upon. Even this, then, 
 is an othering of its own self to see its own self, and it is the 
 mode in which it did other itself. It is quite apart from nature 
 or from mind raised into spirit ; it is the unconscious product of 
 thought; and it follows its own laws, and deposits itself accord- 
 ing to its own laws. Hegel, as it were, swoons himself back 
 into infancy trances himself through all childhood, and awakes 
 when the child awakes, that is, with reflexion, but retaining a 
 consciousness of the process, which the child does not. It is a 
 realisation of the wish that we could know the series of develop- 
 ment in the mind of the child. His meaning of Keflexion, of 
 Understanding, of Reason, comes out very plain now, for the 
 process is a transcending of the Understanding, and a demon- 
 stration of the work of pure Reason. Then, again, it is common 
 to us all it is an impersonal subject. 
 
 To repeat conceivably there is first a sense of being or the 
 vague, wide idea Being ; there is no I in it : I is the product of 
 
A BEGINNING. 25 
 
 reflexion ; it is just a general there is ; it is the vast vague infinite 
 of "Being ; it has its circumference everywhere, and its centre no- 
 where. That is plain that Being is at once such centre and 
 circumference ; for though it is vast, and everything and every- 
 where and, at the same time indefinite, and vague and nowhere 
 still, as Being, as a vast that is, there is a principle of punctual 
 stop in it of fixture, of definiteness; it is indefinite and in- 
 determinate, but, as is, it is also definite and determinate. 
 
 This is conceivably the first sense of Being. But evidently in 
 what has been already said there is a sense of Nothing involved. 
 It is the boundless blank, that is, and no more ; it is the roofless, 
 wall-less, bottomless gulf of all and of nothing: senses or ideas 
 of Being and Nothing, like vast and infinite confronting vapours 
 the infinite vaporous warp and infinite vaporous woof, confront- 
 ing, meeting, interpenetrating, wave and weave together, waft and 
 waver apart, to wave and weave together again. 
 
 Then, as the only conceivably true existence the only thing 
 conceivably worth existence is mind, thought, intelligence, 
 spirit, this must have been the first, if not as man, then as 
 God. And the first of the first was such process. The sense of 
 the indistinguishable the necessity, the besoin of the distinguish- 
 able ! No, then, is the principle that creates distinction. There 
 is no use to explain this; we can go back no further: it is the 
 universe it is what is. Understanding begins, so to speak, when 
 Reason ceases. 
 
 The Logic, then, is the deposit and crystallisation in Eeason 
 previous to Reflexion. It is the structure that comes ready 
 constructed to Understanding. The detection of its process is 
 the analysis or resolution of what the understanding looks upon 
 as something simply and directly there something ready to its 
 hand, something simply and directly given, and which is as it 
 is given. It is what each of us has done for himself during 
 infancy and childhood, in darkness and unconsciousness ; or it is 
 the work of Reason before Reflexion. We see, then, that under- 
 standing, which transcends so much, as in astronomy, &c., must 
 itself be transcended, and speculative reason adopted instead. 
 Carlyle's unfathomdbleness of the universe must be seen to rest 
 on understanding. 
 
 After all, too, there may be Jacob Bohmic cosmogonic ideas 
 at bottom : no saying how far he allows these notions of Being 
 and Nothing to take the form of forces, and build up the All. If 
 
26 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., A. 1. 
 
 there be no Jenseits only a here and this which supposition 
 does not, in Hegel's way, infringe in the slightest the truth of 
 Immortality then his theory is as good as any. How otherwise 
 are we to conceive a beginning ? A beginning is what is begun, 
 and is not what is begun. The beginning of all beginnings 
 cannot differ. Being, too, is the basal thought and fact of all. 
 Nothing, the principle of distinction and difference, is equally 
 basal. It is very difficult to conceive objective thought, however, 
 and to conceive it gradually developing itself into this actual 
 concrete me, with these five fingers, which now write on paper, 
 with pen and ink, &c. Something seems always to lie in the 
 actual present, the actual immediate, that says such a genesis 
 from abstract thought is impossible. Yet again, a genesis of 
 thought from mere matter that is equally impossible ; thought 
 must be the prius : then how conceive a beginning and progress 
 with reference to that prius ? Our system of reconciliation 
 (English Idealism) is a deus ex machina: I the thinking 
 principle am so made that such a series presents itself! Which 
 just amounts to I am tired thinking it; I just give it up to 
 another, and say he cuts the knot believing my own saying 
 with much innocence and simplicity, and resting quite content 
 therein, as if I really had got rid of the whole difficulty and 
 solved the whole matter. English Idealism, in its one series, 
 is certainly a simpler theory than the ordinary one, that there 
 are two series that first it (the object) and that then I (the 
 subject) are so made. Stone-masonry and wood-carpentry are 
 thus spared the Prius. Yet, again, there is nothing spared the 
 Prius; all has been thrust into it, out of the way, as into a 
 drawer, which is then shut, but it is all still in the drawer. 
 Whether it (the object) is so made and / (the subject) am so made, 
 or only / am so made, the so is in the Prius ; whatever else be 
 in the Prius, the Prius is responsible to that extent : the so is ; 
 and since the so is, the Prius must be so. We are still in 
 presence, then, of the whole problem, which is simply the So. 
 All this is plain to a Hegel, and all this he would meet by his 
 absolute idealism. Hegel has a particular dislike to the deus 
 of modern enlightenment, which he names an empty abstraction. 
 An abstract sumrmim an abstract prius and nothing more, 
 seems indeed to constitute what goes to make up the idea, when 
 we examine it closely. But if Hegel ridicules the deus of 
 deism, it must be allowed he is sincere in his devotion before 
 
PLATO'S ravrov, ETC. 27 
 
 God who, as every man's own heart as tradition, as Scripture 
 tells us, is a Spirit. Nor does he believe that he contradicts 
 either Reason or Scripture when he endeavours ' to know God.' 
 Hegel is probably right in opening his eyes to a deus ex 
 machina, and in desiring to draw close to G-od, the Spirit, in 
 that he endeavours to deduce from this universe, the universal 
 Subject of this universe. Nevertheless, his principle has much 
 more the look of a mere regulative than of a constitutive and 
 it is a constitutive that we must have. 
 
 A. 2. 
 
 Plato discovers a boyish delight in the exercise of the new- 
 found power of conscious generalisation extended to him by 
 Socrates. Hegel seems to have learned a lesson in this art from 
 Plato, for TOLVTOV and Odrepov, or identity and otherness, which 
 are the instruments or moments of the generalisation of the latter, 
 seem to perform a like function in the dialectic of the former. 
 The Socratic evolution of the idea through elimination of the 
 accidental from the concrete example presents analogies (when 
 transferred i'rom mere ethical ideas to ideas in general) to both 
 the Heraclitic and the Eleatic modes of thought. The accidental 
 which is eliminated, is analogous to the fluent and changeable of 
 Heraclitus ; while the idea that regains is analogous to the 
 permanent and abiding One of the Eleatics. As if what is were 
 an absolute Being, but also a relative yet really existent Non- 
 being. In the relations of the Ideas, the principle of Identity is 
 Eleatic, that of Difference is Heraclitic. The Ideas are the 
 Universal and Necessary in the Particular and Contingent : the 
 latter is only by reason of them; still the former come forward 
 or appear only in it. How very analogous the categories, the 
 dialectic, &c. &c., of Hegel to all this ! 
 
 B. 
 
 One, single, empirical man cannot be taken, but he and what 
 lie embodies are universalised, as it were, into a universal subject. 
 The Logic is the immanent process of the Keason of this subject. 
 The logical values are, as it were, depositions from the great sea 
 of reason; and yet, by a turn, the great sea takes all up again 
 into its own transparent simplicity and unity. We are admitted 
 
28 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., B. 
 
 to the ultimate and elementary fibres of the All. Being and 
 Nothing interweave to Becoming. Coining to be and Ceasing to be 
 interweave to So-to-be, to So-being, or Here-being to sublunary 
 existentiality, to mortal state, which again is just Quality. Reality 
 and Negation interweave to Something and Other. In Something 
 and Other, the subtle delicacy of the thought-manipulation comes 
 well to light, and displays the nature of the whole work, which is 
 the construction of the Thing-in-itself from materials of thought 
 only. So it is that the understanding succeeds reason, and turns 
 on the work of reason as on its material. Let us rapidly sketch 
 the development in a single wave. 
 
 / There is a tree, a horse, a man there is a feeling, there is a 
 passion, there is a thought. All these phrases are, without doubt, 
 universally intelligible. Now, in the whole six of them, there is 
 presents itself as a common element ; and it suffers no change in 
 any, but is absolutely the same in all. There is a tree, &c. there 
 is a thought, &c. however different a thought may be from a tree, 
 or a feeling from a house, the phrase there is has precisely the same 
 meaning when attached to tree or house that it has when attached 
 to thought or feeling. Let us abstract, then, from these subjects, 
 from these words, and repeat the phrase there is, there is, till the 
 special element which these two words contribute begins to dawn 
 on our consciousness. Let us repeat to ourselves there is with 
 reference to matters not only outward, but inward ; and let us 
 repeat it, and again repeat it, till it acquires, so to speak, some 
 body as a distinct thought. If we succeed well with the two 
 words there is, we shall find no difficulty in making one other step 
 in advance, and in realising to ourselves a conception of what is 
 meant by the bare word is. 
 
 But the reader must understand that he is to do this. He is 
 now to cease reading, and to occupy himself a good half-hour with 
 the rumination of what he has just read. If he contents himself 
 with simple perusal, he will find himself very soon stopped by 
 insurmountable obstacles, and most probably very soon compelled 
 to give up in disgust. But if he will devote one half-hour in the 
 manner we have indicated, the result will be a perfect conception 
 of the meaning of is, that is, of Abstract or Pure Being, of Abstract 
 or Pure Existentiality, of the Hegelian Seyn. And most appro- 
 priately is it named abstract; for it is the ultimate and absolute 
 Abstract. It is that which may be abstracted or extracted from 
 every fact and form of existence, whether celestial or terrestrial, 
 
SUMMARY OF THE EARLY CATEGORIES. 29 
 
 material or spiritual. Eather it is the residue when we abstract 
 from all these. It is the absolutely terminal calx the absolutely 
 final residuum that continues and must continue for our thought 
 when abstraction is made from the whole world. Let there be no 
 stone, no plant, no sea, no earth, no sun, no star in all the firma- 
 ment let there be no mind, no thought, no idea, no space, no time, 
 no God let the universe disappear we have not yet got rid of is: 
 is will not, cannot disappear. Let us do our best to conceive the 
 universe abolished let us do our best to conceive what we call 
 existence abolished still we shall find that we cannot escape 
 from the abstract shadow is which we have indicated. Being is 
 absolutely necessary to thought ; to thought, that is, it is abso- 
 lutely necessary that there be Being. Ask yourself, What would 
 there be, if there were just nothing at all, and if there never had 
 been anything neither a God, nor a world, nor an existence at 
 all ? Ask yourself this and listen \ Then just look at the ques- 
 tion itself, and observe how it contains its own dialectic and 
 contradiction in ^esupposing the Being it is actually supposing 
 not to 'be ! 
 
 It may appear to the reader a very simple thought, this, and a 
 very unnecessary one : still, if he will consider that it is the 
 universal element that there is nothing in the heaven above 
 nor in the earth beneath where it is not present, and that it is as 
 essential a constituent of thought as .of matter, it will probably 
 appear not unnatural that it should be^begun with in a system of 
 Universal Logic, of Universal Thought. Without it there is no 
 thought, and without it there is no thing. Take it even as a 
 matter of conception, it is that which is absolutely first that 
 which, without us or within us, is absolutely over-against us, 
 absolutely immediate, absolutely and directly present to us. 
 The Eleatics had a perfect right to exclaim, 'Being only is, 
 and nothing is just nothing at all ! ' 
 
 Look at it again, now ; call up the shadow is let us once 
 more realise to ourselves all that we think when we say there is 
 with any reference or with no reference let us place before us the 
 conception of abstract existence, of abstract Seyn. and we shall 
 perceive that it is characterised by a total and complete absence of 
 any possible predicate. It is the absolute void, the absolute inane. 
 Like the mathematical point, it is position without magnitude ; 
 and again, it is magnitude without position it is everything in 
 general, and nothing in particular : it is, in fact, nothing. 
 
30 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., B. 
 
 If this prove repugnant to the reader, let him ask himself, what 
 then is it, if it is not nothing ? or let him ask himself, what then 
 is nothing ? and the result of his deepest pondering will be that, 
 after all, the shadow nothing is the shadow is that abstract 
 nothing and abstract being, or the abstract not and the abstract 
 is, contain precisely the same thought, and that the one, quite as 
 much as the other, is the absolute void, the absolute inane that 
 the one quite as much as the other is position without magnitude, 
 and magnitude without position that each involves and implies 
 the other, and that both are all in general, and -nothing in 
 particular. It is absolutely indifferent, then, which we take first, 
 as either only leads to the other. Nothing the conception con- 
 tained in the absolutely abstract Nothing, involves the position 
 implied in abstract Being, and the latter is as absolutely predi- 
 cateless as the former. The shadow is, abstract existentiality, 
 will, if the endeavour to think it be continued long enough, be 
 .seen in the end to be the absolute nothing, the absolute void. 
 There is no object whatever suspended in it ; nay, there is not 
 even space to admit of either object or suspension. For the reader 
 is required to realise the conception there is in reference not only 
 to material things, but in reference also to immaterial things 
 ideas, thoughts, passions, &c., where already qualities of space are 
 excluded. And then, again, nothing or not similarly perseveringly 
 pondered and realised to thought, will be seen in the end to imply 
 is or Being, and to possess an absolutely identical characterisation, 
 or an absolutely identical want of characterisation, as is or Being. 
 
 The reader may possibly feel it absurd, unreasonable, even 
 unnatural, to be asked to occupy himself with such thoughts ; but 
 we pray him not to be disheartened, but in simple and good faith 
 to believe that the call is made on him for his best endeavours to 
 co-operate with us, not without hopes of a solid and satisfactory 
 result. That Being should be Nothing, and Nothing Being, is not 
 absurd, if only that Being and that Nothing be thought which we 
 have done our best to indicate. We are not fools, and we discern 
 as perfectly as another the difference of house and no house, 
 dinner and no dinner, a hundred dollars and no dollar. 
 
 The reader must have the goodness to recollect that our Nothing 
 is the abstract Nothing the thoroughly indeterminate, and not 
 the, so to speak, concrete and determinate Nothing implied in that 
 word when used as the contrary of some concrete and determinate 
 Something. No dinner is nothing certainly, but then it is a quali- 
 
THE EARLY CATEGORIES. 31 
 
 fied nothing: it is a nothing that refers to a special something, 
 dinner ; it contains in itself, so to speak, this reference, and so is 
 distinguished from other analogous terms. We hope, then and, 
 however apparently unmeaning our language may be, we hope also__ 
 that the reader will lend us his faith yet awhile longer that it 
 is now plain to everyone that, in our sense of the terms, Pure 
 Being and Pure Nothing are the same. They are both absolute 
 blanks, and each is the same blank ; still it must be understood 
 that our sense is the true sense of Pure Being and Pure Nothing 
 the true sense of Being and Nothing taken strictly as such, taken 
 in ultimate analysis. Again, it is still true that Being is not 
 Nothing and Nothing is not Being. We feel that though each 
 term formulates the absolute blank, and the absolutely same blank, 
 there is somehow and somewhere a difference between them. 
 They point to and designate the absolutely same thought, yet still 
 a distinction is felt to exist between them. Being and Nothing 
 are the same, then, and they are not the same. Each formulates 
 and implies the same elements ; but one formulates what the other 
 only implies, which latter, in turn, formulates what the former 
 only implies. Being formulates, so to speak, Being and implies 
 Nothing; while Nothing implies Being but formulates Nothing. 
 Being implies negation but accentuates position ; while Nothing 
 implies position but accentuates negation. But this is just another 
 way of saying they are the same. The two conceptions, as point- 
 ing to absolutely the same thought, are still essentially the same. 
 Their difference, however, when the two are steadily looked at 
 in thought, is seen to generate a species of movement in which 
 they alternately mutually interchange their own identity. Being, 
 looked at isolatedly, vanishes of its own accord, and disappears in 
 its own opposite ; while Nothing again, similarly looked at, refuses 
 to remain Nothing, and transforms itself to Being. The thought 
 Being leads irresistibly to the thought Nothing, and the thought 
 Nothing leads as irresistibly to the thought Being : that is, they 
 disappear mutually into each other. 
 
 The real truth of the whole thought, therefore, is represented by 
 neither the one expression nor the other : this truth is seen to lie 
 rather in the movement we have indicated, or the immediate 
 passage of the one no matter which we make the first into the 
 other. The truth of the thought, then, is that they mutually, pass, 
 or, rather, that they mutually have passed, the one into the other. 
 But what is this process ? If Being pass into Nothing, is not that 
 
32 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., B. 
 
 the process that we name decease ? and if Nothing pass into Being, 
 is not that the process that we name birth, or origin, or coming to 
 be ? Are not both processes a coming to be in the one case, 
 Nothing coining to be Being, and in the other Being coming to be 
 Nothing ? Are they not both, then, but forms of Becoming, and 
 does not the general process Becoming contain and express the 
 whole truth of Being and of Nothing ? 
 
 The abstract thoughts, then, that we name Pure Being and Pure 
 Nothing are so mutually related that they are the same, and yet 
 not the same ; in other words, they are susceptible of distinction, 
 but not of separation. Again, the abstract process of which birth, 
 growth, decay, death, &c., are concrete examples, and which we 
 name pure or abstract Becoming, is so constituted that it presents 
 itself as the truth of both Being and Nothing ; it is seen to contain 
 both as in their own nature inseparate and inseparable, and yet 
 distinguishable, but only by a distinctivity which immediately 
 resolves and suppresses itself. Their truth, in fact, is this mutual 
 disappearance of the one into the other, this mutual interchange ; 
 and that is precisely the process that we name Becoming. The 
 truth of the matter is that the one passes into the other and not 
 that they are but this is Becoming. 
 
 There may, to the general reader, appear something unsatisfac- 
 tory in all this, as though it were a mere playing upon words. It 
 is not what he has been accustomed to ; he is not at home in it ; 
 he feels himself in doubt and embarrassment. He has been led, in 
 a manner new and strange to him, from one thought to another ; 
 he is not sure that the process is a legitimate one ; and he is in 
 considerable apprehension as to the results. Still we beg a little 
 further attention on his part, and we shall not hurry him. He 
 may suspect us of having practised on him a mere tour deforce ; 
 but as yet he has not gone very far, and we entreat him to retrace 
 his steps and examine the road he has already beaten. Let him 
 realise to himself again the thought is, pure being, and he will find 
 himself impelled by the very nature of the thing, and not by any 
 external influence of ours, to the thought not, nought, or pyre 
 nothing. Having then realised these thoughts, he will find again 
 that they, in their own peculiar mutual influences, imply the 
 process, and impel him involuntarily to the thought, of pure 
 Becoming. 
 
 If we consider now the process or thought expressed by the term 
 Becoming, we shall see that in it Being and Nothing are elements, 
 
THE EARLY CATEGORIES. 33 
 
 or, rather to borrow a word from mechanical science Moments. 
 Becoming is the unity of both ; neither is self-dependent, each is 
 distinct, yet each disappears into the other, and Becoming is the 
 result of the mutual eclipse of both. They are thus, then, moments,, 
 of Becoming, and, though transformed and so to speak van- 
 ished, they are still there present, and still operative and active. 
 Becoming has two forms according as we begin with Being and 
 refer to Nothing, or begin with Nothing and refer to Being. It is 
 evident, too, that Coming to be, and Ceasing to be, involve a middle 
 ground of reality, that is : nay, Becoming itself, as based on the 
 diversity of its moments, and yet as constituting their disappear- 
 ance, involves a neutral point, a period as it were of rest, where 
 Becoming is become. This neutral point, this period of rest, in the 
 process of Becoming where Becoming is become, this middle point 
 of reality between Coming to be and Ceasing to be, we name 
 There-being or So-being, that is the being distinguishably there, or 
 the being distinguishably so, what we might also call state Daseyn, 
 ordinary existency, finite existency. 
 
 The reader, probably, will not have much difficulty in realising 
 to himself this further step which, not we, but the thing itself, 
 the idea itself, has taken. Pure Being leads irresistibly to Pure 
 Nothing, and both together lead irresistibly to pure Becoming, the 
 forms or moments of which are Coming to be and Ceasing to be : 
 now, between these moments, or in the mutual interpenetration of 
 these moments that is to say, in* Becoming itself there is 
 involved or implied an intermediate punctum that is, a middle 
 point of unity, of repose this point, this stable moment, or quasi- 
 stable moment, in which Becoming is as it were Become, is There- 
 being or So-being. Becoming indicates absolutely a become, and 
 that become as such and in perfect generality is mortal state, 
 sublunariuess, in every reference, but in no special. 
 
 So-being, then, as being no longer becoming but become, is 
 eminently in the form of being ; or, in other words, So-being 
 emphatically is. The one-sidedness, however, does not in reality 
 exclude the other element, the not, the nothing ; Becoming lies 
 behind it it is but product of Becoming, and both elements must 
 appear. The other element, indeed, the not, will manifest itself as 
 the distinctive element. (We are now, let us remark, following 
 Hegel almost literally, as the reader will see for himself by 
 referring to the original or to the actual translation which he 
 will find elsewhere.) 
 
 c 
 
34 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., B. 
 
 So-being, or There-being, is being, but it is now predicable being. 
 It is not like pure being, wholly unlimited, wholly indeterminate ; 
 it is now, on the contrary, limited and determinate. But limita- 
 tion is negation. So-being, in fact, is Being qualified by a Non- 
 being ; but both present themselves in a condition of intimate and 
 perfect interpenetration and union. The resultant unity is, as it 
 were, no compound, but a simple. Neither element preponderates 
 over the other. As far as So-being is being, so far is it non-being, 
 so far is it definite, determinate, limited. The defining element 
 appears in absolute unity with the element of being, and neither 
 is distinguished from the other. Again, the determinating prin- 
 ciple, viewed as what gives definiteness, as itself definiteness, as 
 definiteness that is, is quality. Quality is the characteristic and 
 distinctive principle of So-being. But as So-being is constituted, 
 so is Quality. Quality, with special reference to the positive 
 element of So-being, quality viewed as being, is Keality, while, on 
 the other hand, with reference to the negative element, viewed as 
 determinatingness, it is Negation. 
 
 We see, then, the presence of distinction, difference in So-being ; 
 we see in it two moments, one of reality and one of negation. Still 
 it is easy to see also that these distinctions are null ; in fact, that 
 quality is inseparable from So-being, and that these moments are 
 inseparable from quality ; that is, that they subsist or consist 
 there in absolute unity. Each, in fact, can be readily seen to imply 
 and constitute the other ; or each is reflexion from and to the other. 
 But the resolution or suppression of distinction is a most important 
 step here, for from it results the next determination, one of the 
 most important of all. For this perception yet withdrawal of 
 distinction involves a reflexion, a return from the limit or differ- 
 ence back to the reality. But this reflexion, this doubling back to 
 and on itself implying at the same time absorption or assimilation 
 of the limit, the difference is the special constitutive nature of 
 So-being. But a further thought springs up to consciousness here. 
 In saying all this, we are manifestly saying of So-being, that it is 
 in itself or within itself (for reflexion from, witli absorption of, the 
 limit into the reality itself is nothing else) that it is a somewhat 
 that is, or just that it is Something. 
 
 Something, then, as Self-reference, as simple reference to self, 
 is the first negation of the negation. Arriving at the negation, 
 reflexion took place back on itself with resolution of the negation. 
 Something, then, as negation of the negation is the restoration of 
 
THE EAKLY CATEGORIES. 35 
 
 simple reference to self, but just thus is it mediation, or coin- 
 mediation of itself ivith itself. This principle manifests itself, but 
 quite abstractly, even in Becoming ; and it will be found in the 
 sequel a determination of the greatest importance. But if~~ 
 reflexion back to and on itself in So-being gives birth to Some- 
 thing, a similar reflexion in regard to negation gives birth to the 
 conception or determination of otherness, or other in general. So- 
 being, then, appears again in these moments as Becoming, but of 
 this Becoming the moments are no longer abstract Being and 
 Nothing, but themselves in the form of So-being Something 
 and Other. 
 
 Here the reader will do well once again to retrace his steps, and 
 ascertain accurately the method which has determined results so 
 important and striking. The results Something and Other are the 
 most important we have yet obtained, and it is absolutely neces- 
 sary to be decided as to the legitimacy or non-legitimacy of their 
 acquisition. 
 
 We started then with Being, in which, as abstract, the decisive 
 point is its indefiniteness, through which indeliniteness it passes 
 into Nothing. Being and Nothing, in their mutual interchange of 
 identity, led directly to Becoming, which, in its own nature, and 
 in the opposition of its moments, manifested a quasi-permanent 
 middle point of There-being or So-being. So-being, then, mani- 
 fested itself as Being with a limit^ with a restriction. The 
 element being was its proximate genus, while the limit was its 
 differentia. The proximate genus appears, then, as Reality, while 
 the differentia appears as negation. Between being and limit, 
 proximate gemis and differentia, reality and negation, a process of 
 reflexion, as between reciprocally reflex centres, takes place, 
 rather has taken place. This reflexion, on the side of reality, 
 elicits the conception of simple reference to self, which involves 
 a being in or within self, of somewhat within itself or Something. 
 On the side of negation, reflexion elicited the conception of other- 
 ness, of another, of other in general. And it is these determina- 
 tions of Something and Other which we have now to examine. 
 
 Something and Other readily show themselves as interchange- 
 able. Each is Something, and each is relatively Other. True, the 
 Other is constituted by this reference to Something, but it 
 manifests itself as external to this Something. It may thus be 
 isolated and considered by itself. But thus considered, it 
 presents itself as the abstract other, the other as other, the other 
 
36 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., C. 1. 
 
 in itself, the other of itself, the other of the other. Physical 
 nature is such other. It is the other of Spirit. Its nature, then, 
 is a mere relativity, by which not an inherent quality, but a mere 
 outer relation is expressed. Spirit, then, is the true Something, 
 and Nature is what it is only as opposed to Spirit. The quality 
 of Nature, then, isolated and viewed apart, is just that it is the 
 other as other, that it is that which exists externally to its own self 
 (in space and time, &c.). 
 
 C. 1. 
 
 That there is, is thought only in itself. Thought in itself 
 come to itself come to be constitutes is. Thought in its very 
 commencement and absolute beginning the very first reference 
 of thought the very first act of thought could only be is i.e. 
 the feeling, sentiment, or sense of Being. This is the Cogito-Sum 
 of Descartes, and this is the Ich-Ich of "Fichte. In fact, the Ich- 
 Ich of Fichte having passed through the alembic of Schelling and 
 become a nentrum, an impersonativum, receives from Hegel the 
 expression of est Seyn which single word conveys to him the 
 whole burthen of the phrase, ' Seyn ist der Begriff nur an sick' or 
 * Being is the Notion only in itself/ 
 
 To Hegel, a commencement, a beginning, is not, as it is to us, a 
 creature of time, an occurrence, a thing that took place ; it is a 
 mere thought a thought that possesses in itself its own nature, 
 and in the sphere of thoughts its own place. And just thus is it 
 again for Hegel a creature of time, an event, an occurrence, a 
 thing that took place. To Hegel, then, the idea of a commence- 
 ment is unavoidable ; but still it is only an idea so and so 
 constituted and so and so placed in respect of others. To us it 
 is more than an idea it is an event, an actuality. To Hegel it is 
 also, in one sense, more than an idea. To Hegel also it is an 
 event, an actuality ; but still to him it remains in its essence 
 ideal it remains an idea so placed and so constituted that we 
 name it event, actuality, &c. To us, too, the notion of a 
 beginning is an unavoidable and absolutely necessary pre- 
 supposition ; but this beginning we attribute to the act of an 
 agent God. In the system of Hegel, God, too, is present; and 
 without God it were difficult to see what the system would be; 
 but to Hegel, when used as a word that contains in it a dispen- 
 sation from the necessity of a beginning, this word amounts only 
 
A BEGINNING AGAIN. 37 
 
 to a deus ex machina; or the idea which it is supposed to imply, 
 being but an ultimate abstraction, void, empty (in fact, idea-less), 
 is slighted by him as the le dieu-philosophe, the deus of the 
 Aufklarung for by such phrases we may at least allow ourselves 
 to translate his thought. To Hegel the introduction of this deus 
 is only a postponement of the question, only a removal of the 
 difficulty, and that by a single step ; it is but the Indian elephant, 
 which, if it supports the world, demands for its own feet the 
 tortoise. To Hegel, in his way, too, God is a Subject, a Person, a 
 Spirit ; but as that he is the sphere of spheres and circle of circles, 
 in whose dialectic evolution the notion of a beginning is u 
 constitutive point, element, or moment, but at the same time not 
 participating in that material and sensuous nature which we 
 attribute to the character of a beginning. 
 
 Still, when our object is a beginning in relation to thought as 
 thought to thought perfectly universally, whether the reference 
 of our view be to the thought of God, or to the thought of man, 
 we must all of us admit that a beginning of thought is to thought 
 a presupposition absolutely necessary. Such necessity exists for 
 my thought, for your thought, for all thought let us say, then, 
 for thought in general. But the beginning of thought as thought 
 could only be that it was. All that thought beginning could say 
 for itself would be is, or, if you like, am; both words referring 
 simply, so to speak, to the felt thought of existence in general. 
 The absolutely first as regards thought just is thought is, or 
 rather the possibility of thought, is, for as yet it is only un- 
 developed and unformed. We look at thought as it was 
 necessarily constituted at the moment of its supposed birth, and 
 entirely apart from involution in any material organ or set of 
 organs with that or these we have nothing to do, our whole 
 business is with thought, and with thought as it in its own self 
 unfolded and expanded itself. We have nothing to do with any 
 physiological process we watch only thought, the evolution of 
 thought, the process of thought. Taking thought, then, supposi- 
 titiously at its moment of birth, we can only say of it, it is. Nay, as 
 already remarked, it could only say ?s, or am, of itself, or to itself; 
 for thought is reflex, thought speaks to itself, thought is conscious, 
 and the very first act of thought though in blindness, dumbness, 
 and, in a certain sense, in unconsciousness would, of necessity, 
 be a sense of Being. Thought, then, begins with the single 
 predicate is (or am), and its further progress or process will 
 
38 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., C. 2. 
 
 evidently consist of an evolution or multiplication of predicates ; 
 thought will simply go on naming to itself what it finds itself to be ; 
 and this is just the history of the world. It is at this system of 
 predication, then at this evolution of predicates that here, in 
 logic, we are invited to assist. 
 
 The meaning of the phrase, ' Being is the Notion only in itself,' 
 will probably now be beginning to show itself. The Begriff, the 
 Notion, has just come to be; Der Begriff ist, or cogito-suin ; for 
 Begriff is cogito, and sum is is. Thought now is, thought is in 
 itself, it has come to itself so far; it refers to itself, to its being; 
 it has come to be, it simply is as yet, however, only in itself. 
 There is, as yet, only blank self-identity. 
 
 It will not be too much to say further, here also, that as 
 thought grows, the characteristics, the predicates that will add 
 themselves, will all possess as well the form of Being they will 
 all be we shall be able to say of each of them, it is. Further, we 
 shall be able to say that they are distinguishable, that is that they 
 are different, that is that they are other to other. The very 
 process of the growth the progression will be from one to the 
 other, a constant transition, that is, to other, others, or otherness. 
 The reason common to all this is just that as yet the Notion is 
 only in itself, the form as yet is only that of a Seyn, of a Being, of 
 an Is, of simple self-identity. 
 
 The process is predication merely a substrate or subject is 
 excluded, and there can be no form of proposition or judgment. 
 It is a progression from predicate to predicate because the 
 progress of Reason before consciousness the Seyn is rather 
 a process of deposition and concretion, and implies neither subject 
 nor proposition. 
 
 C. 2. 
 
 Shall I be able to conduct you through this vast Cyclopean 
 edifice this huge structure this enormous pile this vast mass 
 that resembles nothing which has ever yet appeared in France 
 or England or the world? One of those vast palaces, it is, of 
 Oriental dream, gigantic, endless, court upon court, chamber 
 on chamber, terrace on terrace, built of materials from the east 
 and the west and the north and the south marble and gold and 
 jasper and amethyst and ruby, old prophets asleep with signet 
 rings guarded by monsters winged and unwinged, footed and 
 
STRANGENESS OF THE SYSTEM. 39 
 
 footless, there out in the void desert, separated from the world 
 of man by endless days and nights, and eternally recurrent and 
 repeating solitudes, lonely, mysterious, inexplicable, a giant 
 dreamland, but still barbaric, incoherent, barren ! After all, the- 
 omnium gatherum of infinite laboriousness, a Chinese puzzle, a 
 mighty ball (in snow-ball fashion) of picked-up pieces of broken 
 crystal reflexions of Heraclitus, and Parmenides, and Pythagoras, 
 and Plato, and Aristotle, and Plotinus, and Proclus, and Descartes, 
 and Spinoza, and Kant, and Fichte, and Jacob Bb'hm, and a 
 thousand others ! No growth after all, but a thing of infinite 
 meddle and make a mass of infinite joinings, of endless seams 
 and sutures, whose opposing edges no cunning of gum, or glue, or 
 paste, or paint can ever hide from us ! 
 
 Like Goethe, Hegel is a proof of the simple open susceptibility 
 and ready impressibility of the Germans. Contrary to general 
 supposition, they are really inoriginative. Nothing in Germany 
 grows. Everything is made: all is a G-emachtes. It is an endless 
 recurrence to the beginning, and a perpetual refingering of the old, 
 with hardly the addition of a single new original grain. 
 
 Hegel coolly accepts the new position demands no proof, 
 supplies no proof only sets to work new-arranging and new- 
 labelling. All is ideal, and all is substance, but all must have the 
 schema of subject. Nature is but the other of Spirit, and the 
 Logical Idea unites them both. This is parallel to the scheme 
 of Spinoza Extension, Thought, and Substance. The general 
 schema is to be considered applicable also as particular, or as 
 method. All are ideas ; they must be classified, then thrown 
 into spheres, objective, subjective, and so on. The logical are 
 the common categories the secret machinery of the whole the 
 latent, internal, invisible skeleton. 
 
 Say a pool of water reflects the world above. Now, let there be 
 no above, but let the pool still reflect as before. The pool, then, 
 becomes in itself reflector and reflexion, subject and object Man. 
 Kestore now again the above which we withdrew, the above that 
 was reflected in the pool the mighty blue gulf of the universe ; 
 and call that the reflexion of a mightier to us invisible pool, 
 which is thus also reflector and reflexion, subject and object, but, 
 as pool of all pools, God. This is an image of Hegel's world. 
 He will have no Jenseits, no Yonder and Again ; all shall be 
 Diesseits, a perpetual Here and Now. God shall be no mystery ; 
 he will know God. He will apply the predicates and name the 
 
40 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., C. 2. 
 
 subject. The logical formulae are the real predicates of God. 
 God is that real and concrete not that unreal and abstract, not 
 that nonentity and nowhere that is understood as the dieu of the 
 Philosophes, the infidel god. Being and Non-being are the ultimate 
 secrets of the universe, the ultimate and essential predicates of God. 
 
 He blinks no consequences ; each individual as only finite, as 
 only Daseyn, as only quasi-permanent moment must be resolved 
 into the Werden, which alone is the truth of Being and Non- 
 being. He will pack all into the form he has got he will not 
 see that anything sticks out of it he will not allow himself to 
 think that either he or we see that it is a packing. 
 
 Again, the system is like the three legs which are the symbol 
 of the Isle of Man. Throw it as you will, it keeps its feet. Turn 
 it, toss it, it is ever the same, and triune, There is a magical toy 
 just like it consisting of three plates or so seize any one of 
 them, and all clatters down into the same original form. 
 
 The Thing-in -itself is a mere abstraction, a surface of reflexion, 
 a regulative. Is, taken immediately, that is, without reflexion, is 
 a pure abstraction. It is a pure thought a mere thought. Hegel 
 sees thus an immense magical hollow universe construct itself 
 around from a few very simple elementary principles in the 
 centre. 
 
 Pie has completely wrested himself from mere mortal place on 
 the outside groping into a concrete delusion. He sees himself 
 like a planet circling round a centre ; he sees that his own nature 
 mirrors that centre ; then he forcibly places himself in the centre, 
 to take up, as it were, the position of God, the Maker, and 
 sees himself as mere man as concrete delusion circle round 
 himself. 
 
 How small must all other men appear to him that trip over 
 his Seyn and his Nichts what fearful laughter is in this man ! 
 
 Does he not come out from the centre of that world, that den, 
 that secret chamber of his, begrimed with powder, smelling of 
 sulphur like some conjuror, hard and haggard, his voice 
 sepulchral and his accents foreign, but his laugh the laugh of 
 demons ? Contrast this with the simple pious soul, on the 
 green earth, in the bright fresh air, patiently industrious, 
 patiently loving, piously penitent, piously hopeful, sure of a new 
 world and a new life a better world and a better life united to 
 his loved ones ; there for ever in the realms of God, through the 
 merits of his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 
 
WESEN. 41 
 
 C. 3. 
 
 In Wesen Hegel has to exhibit the metaphysical nature of 
 Essence ; the peculiarity of which is assumed by us to lie in this, 
 that it alone constitutes the reality, while the manifestation con- 
 stitutes the unreality; nevertheless, at the same time, also, the 
 manifestation depends on the essence, and yet, no less, the essence 
 depends on the manifestation. This is a simple idea ; but with 
 this, and this only, Hegel contrives to wash over page after page. 
 Such a conception quite suits the nature of the man ; his delight 
 is endless in it. He looks at it incessantly, finding ever some new 
 figure, some new phrase for the extraordinary inter-relations of 
 essence and manifestation. And never were such words written 
 selcouth, uncouth, bizarre, baroque pertinent and valuable only 
 to a Hegel. Style and terminology how clumsy, inelegant, obscure ! 
 Then the figures, like * life in excrement,' an endless sprawl an 
 endless twist and twine endless vermiculation, like an anthill. 
 
 We will not remain content with the manifestation, we must 
 pierce through it to the centre verity, he says ; it is the back- 
 ground that contains the true, the immediate outside and surface 
 is untrue. Then this knowledge is a reflexive knowledge it 
 does not take place by or in the essence it begins in another, it 
 has a preliminary path to travel a path that transcends the 
 directly next to us, or, rather, that enters into this. Thought 
 must take hints from the immediate^ and thus through inter- 
 agency attain to essence. Then and so on ! Strange, meaning- 
 less, stupid as all this may seem, it is still the same thing that 
 is spoken of the mutual relations that result from a thing 
 considered at once as essence and manifestation. The manifestation 
 exhibits itself as real and unreal, as separable from essence and 
 inseparable, and the whole idea is the product of a process of 
 reflexion between the two parts between the sort of negative 
 abstraction or interior that is viewed as what is eminently real 
 and that corresponds to essence, and the affirmative manifestation 
 or exterior, that is yet viewed as relatively negative and unreal. 
 Essence, in short, is an idea resulting from reflexes between an 
 outer manifestation and an inner centre or verity. Such is the 
 whole metaphysic of the matter, and to this we have page after 
 page applied.* 
 
 * This just shows, however, that we must verify our categories our distinctions 
 our common terms of thought and speech. 
 
42 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., C. 4. 
 
 C. 4. 
 
 Kant ideally constructed all as far as the Thing-in-itself, God, 
 Immortality, &c. Fichte transmuted the Thing-in-itself into the 
 Anstoss, the Appulse, and summed up the others under the Ego. 
 Schelling got rid of Ego, Anstoss, &c., in his neutrum of the 
 Absolute. Hegel only mediated what Kant had left immediate, 
 up to the stand-point of Schelling; that is, he deduced by a 
 process of evolution the Thing-in-itself, &c. The means he 
 adopted consisted of his expedients of abstraction and reflexion. 
 Through these he succeeds in showing the mediate nature of these 
 Bestimmungen, values, previously looked 011 as immediate. 
 
 There is much that is suggestive in Kant, much that is sound 
 and pregnant; but there is again even in him, mainly Britannic 
 as he is, the German tendency to ride an idea to death to be 
 carried on one's hobbyhorse, nothing doubting, far into the inane. 
 The non-reality of his categories, the inconceivableness of their 
 application, the unsatisfactoriness of his conclusions on time and 
 space, the insufficiency of his schema of time in regard to 
 causality (bunglingly borrowed, though it be, and in a crumb-like 
 fashion, by Sir W. Hamilton) all this, and much more, must be 
 held as evident. Then Fichte develops a most pregnant con- 
 ception in that of the pure Ego, but he stops there ; or, rather, 
 everyone instinctively refuses to follow him further on his hobby- 
 horse of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and wonders at the 
 simple, futile laboriousness of the noble, honest man. Schelling 
 and his neutrum must content themselves with their temporary 
 or contemporary influence. He was ever, as it were, a susceptible, 
 ardent stripling a creature of books and the air of chambers : 
 his transcendence of the Ego only misled Hegel, and his neutrum 
 is untenable. If ever man dropped into the grave an ' exasperated 
 stripling ' of fourscore, it was Schelling. He longed to be great ; 
 but neither Fichte, nor Spinoza, nor Jacob Bohm, nor Plotinus, 
 nor Hegel could supply him with a bridge to what he coveted. 
 Hegel has a brassier and tougher determination to be original at 
 all costs than Schelling. He attacks all, and he reconciles all. 
 He is as resolute a Cheap-John, as cunning and unscrupulous and 
 unhesitating a hawker, as ever held up wares in market. Here, 
 too, we have the same credulity in the sufficiency of his hobby- 
 horse, the same tendency to superfetation and monstrosity. Strange 
 
OBJECTIONS TO KANT AND THE KEST. 43 
 
 how such a tough, shrewd, worldly man should have so egregiously 
 deceived himself! Because he could new-classify and new-name, 
 he actually thinks that he new-knows and new-understands ! He 
 actually believes himself to say something that explains the- 
 mystery, when he says materiature has no truth as against Spirit, 
 and when he talks of the monstrous power of contingency in 
 nature ! No ; the current belief (as shown in Kossuth) that the 
 Germans have got deeper into the infinite than other people is an 
 out-and-out mistake. They have generated much monstrosity 
 botli in literature and philosophy, through the longing to be great 
 and new; to equal the bull, they have blown themselves out like 
 the frog, and burst that's all ! A few grains of sound thinking 
 can be gathered out of them, but with what infinite labour ! From 
 Fichte, the Ego ; from Schelling, Nil ; from Hegel, amid infinite 
 false, some true classification and distinction ; from old Kant, 
 certainly the most, and with him the study of metaphysic must in 
 Great Britain recommence. 
 
 In regard to Hegel, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are seldom 
 far from each other, but the latter predominates. If, for a 
 moment, the words light up, and a view be granted, as it were, 
 into the inner mysteries, they presently quench themselves again 
 in the appearance of mere arbitrary classification and artificial 
 nomenclature. The turns are so quick and thorough ! one 
 moment we are north, the next south, and, in fact, we are required 
 to be in both poles at once ! An art that so deftly and so swiftly 
 turns this into that, and that into this, rouses suspicion : we fear 
 it is but the trick of speech ; we fear we have to do with a fencer 
 but all too cunning ; we are jealous of the hot and cold blowing, 
 and, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, we exclaim, 'An I thought he 
 had been so cunning in fence,' &c. 
 
 We cannot help seeing an attempt to knead together all the 
 peculiarities of his predecessors : the categories, freedom, and 
 antinomies of Kant, the Ego, and the method of Fichte, the 
 substance and the neutrum of Schelling. It is thus he would 
 make his Absolute Subject, to whom we can see no bridge ! 
 who is either ourselves, or we cannot get at him. If he is not 
 ourselves, he refuses to cohere ; we cannot articulate the bones of 
 this Universal, nor breathe into him individual life ! He will not 
 cohere, indeed ; like the great image in Daniel, he breaks in 
 pieces of his own accord, and falls down futile. The sense is often 
 multiform, like a gipsy's prophecy or the scrolls of the alchemists. 
 
44 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 1. 
 
 The singular is being constantly hypostasised, but not as singular 
 as transformed rather into his huge, vast, self-contradictory, 
 untenable Universal ! 
 
 D. 1. 
 
 The transition from Seyn (Being) to Daseyn (There-being, That- 
 being) is a faulty one. The contradiction latent in Werdeu 
 (Becoming) itself, and made obvious to thought by alternate 
 consideration of its two antagonistic forms, moments, or elements, 
 is inadequately expressed by Daseyn. The inadequacy is one of 
 excess : Daseyn means more than the idea to which it is applied. 
 Fixedness in the flux, or qua si- permanence in the flux, is the sole 
 notion arrived at by consideration of the contradiction in question. 
 Now Daseyn, it must be admitted, implies, so far as its etymology 
 is concerned, but little more than this. While Seyn is Being, 
 Daseyn is IV/ere-being or .Here-being; while the former is 
 is, the latter is there or liere is; and the there or here, though in 
 itself an appellative of space, and though as yet space and its 
 concerns have no place among these abstract thoughts, involves 
 an error so completely of the infinitely small kind, that it may 
 justifiably be neglected. But an appellative of space is not the 
 only foreign element, the interpolation of which we have here to 
 complain of, and it is not the etymological use of the word which 
 we are here inclined to blame. It is in the ordinary and everyday 
 use of the word that the source of the error lurks. Daseyn, in 
 fact, not by virtue of the step it indicates in the process, but by 
 virtue of its own signification, introduces us at once to a general 
 insphering universe, arid particular insphered unities. Nay, 
 Hegel himself tacitly accepts all this new material so con- 
 veniently extended to him, for he says at once Daseyn is Quality ; 
 that is, having arrived at the one particular quality, fixedness, he 
 hesitates not to sublime it into the type of all quality, or into 
 quality in general. This, however, is just what the Germans 
 themselves call ErsMeichung ; there is here the semblance only of 
 exact science, the reality, however, of interpolation and sur- 
 reptitious adoption. Seyn, Nichts, Werden, Entstehen, Vergehen 
 (Being, Nothing, Becoming, Origin, Decease), have been turned 
 and tossed, rattled and clattered before us, till the sort of in- 
 voluntary voluntary admission is abstracted, ' Oh, yes, we see ; 
 Daseyn is the next step.' But after this admission the logical 
 
OBJECTIONS TO HEGEL. 45 
 
 juggler has it all his own way: Daseyn being conceded him in 
 one sense, the fine rogue uses it henceforth freely in all. 
 
 It may be objected that we do not sufficiently consider the 
 nature of the fixedness that we do not sufficiently realise what 
 fixedness it is. This fixedness, it may be said, is the fixedness in 
 the flux, the fixedness between coming to be and ceasing to be ; 
 and fixedness, so placed, indicates a very peculiar quality the 
 quality, in fact, of all quality. It is the abstract expression of 
 every existent unity, whether bodily or mental; just such fixed- 
 ness is the abstract absolute constitution of every existent 
 particular entity ; and it is no subreption to call it quality, for 
 every entity that bodily or mentally is there, is there by virtue of 
 this fixedness in the coming and going that is, by virtue of 
 its quality. To this, the only reply is, You admit the objection, 
 you drag in the empirical world. Then they say, Why, we have 
 never excluded it. We admit the presence of Anschauen (percep- 
 tion) behind all our reasoning ; but we contend that all our 
 reasoning is absolutely free from it, that there is no materiature 
 whatever in it, that it consists of absolutely pure abstract thought. 
 Our Werden is the pure thought of all actual Werdens ; our Daseyn 
 is just what of pure thought all actual Daseyns contain. Daseyn 
 is nothin^ but that abstract fixedness. Then we conclude with It 
 
 O 
 
 is all very well to say so, but the presence of actual perception is 
 constantly throwing in prismatic colours, and the whole process, 
 if it is to be conceived as a rigorous one, is a self-delusion. 
 
 This (of * Bestimmung, Beschaffenheit, und Grenze,' in the full 
 Logic) is the most intricate and the least satisfactory discussion we 
 have yet been offered. There is no continuous deduction : the 
 deduction, in fact, seems to derive its matter from without, and so 
 to be no deduction at all. The distinctions are wire-drawn, 
 equivocal, shadowy, evanescent. The turns and contradictions are 
 so numerous, that suspicion lowers over the whole subject. It is 
 an imbroglio and confusion that no patience, no skill can satisfac- 
 torily disentangle. The greater the study, the more do weak points 
 come to light. For what purpose, for example, has Eigenschaft, a 
 word involving the same matter, been treated several pages pre- 
 viously in an exoteric fashion, if not to prepare the way for the 
 esoteric fashion here ? Then will this hocus-pocus with Bestimm- 
 theit, Bestimmung, Beschaffenheit, An sich, An ihm, &c., really 
 stand the test of anything like genuine inspection ? We are first 
 told that, &c. He then describes, &c. A very pretty imbroglio, 
 
46 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 1. 
 
 truly ! and one that results from the same thoughts being con- 
 torted through all manner of different terms. But this is the least 
 of the confusion, the greatest is behind, &c. We are next told,&c. 
 Suppose we apply his own illustration to his own words, we shall 
 find that in man his Bestimmung is Denken, his Bestimmtheit 
 ditto, his An sich ditto, and his An ihrn ditto. His Seyn-fur- 
 Anderes is called his Natiirlichkeit, but might easily be shown to 
 be just Denken too. The confusion, in fact, becomes everywhere 
 worse confounded. All seems a mere arbitrary play of words, the 
 player perpetually shifting his point of view without giving notice 
 of the shift. But what, then, can be the truth here ? The truth 
 is, we have just to do with a brassy adventurer who passes himself 
 off as a philosopher, but presents as his credentials only an involved, 
 intricate, and inextricable reformation of the industry of Kant ; 
 and this, in the middle of adventurer-like perpetual abuse, correc- 
 tion, and condemnation of this same Kant. The object he seems 
 to have here before his eyes, is the special constitutive quality of 
 Something, which is a compound of outer manifestation and inner 
 capability. Then, that there is sometimes an outer manifestation 
 that does not seem directly to depend on the inner force, but to be 
 mere outside. Then, that accidental and essential manifestations 
 are really the same. Then, that a thing changed by influence of 
 something, reacts on that something, contributes elements to its 
 own change and maintains itself against the Other. Water liquid, 
 and water frozen, are the same yet different, for example, two 
 somethings and one something ; the negation seems immanent, it 
 is the development of the Within-itself of the Something. Other- 
 ness appears as own moment of Something as belonging to its 
 Within-itself. Then, that the identity and diversity of the two 
 Somethings lead to Limit, &c. &c. The whole business of Hegel 
 is here to reduce these empirical observations into abstract terms, 
 and to treat them as if they were results of thought alone, and as 
 if they were legitimately and duly deduced from his abstract com- 
 mencement with pure Being. The confusion of language, the 
 interpolation of foreign elements, the failure of exact deduction, the 
 puzzle-headed fraudulence of the whole process, can escape no one. 
 He draws first his great lines of Being and Nothing. Then, over 
 the cross of these two lines, he sets himself, like a painter, to lay 
 on coat after coat of verbal metaphysic with the extravagant 
 expectation that the real world will at length emerge. The first 
 coat to the cross is Werden ; again it is Daseyn ; and again it is 
 
OBJECTIONS TO HEGEL. 47 
 
 Fursichseyn. It also becomes manifest that he alternately paints 
 with two colours and with one : Being and Nothing two, Becoming 
 one, Origin and Decease two, Daseyn one, Keality and Negation two, 
 Something one, An sich and Seyn-fiir-Anderes two, and so on. 
 It will be found, in fact, that the whole process is but a repeated 
 coating of Being and Nothing, now as diverse and again as identical 
 till the end of the entire three volumes. 
 
 Nor is it a bit better with his exoteric works not a bit with 
 the ' Philosophy of History,' the most exoteric of all ! Second 
 chapter, second section, second part, it has a strange effect to hear 
 Hegel talk of the Greek and Christian Gods in the same breath : 
 ' Man, as what is spiritual, constitutes what is true in the Grecian 
 gods, that by which they come to stand above all Nature-gods, and 
 above all abstractions of a One and Supreme Being. On the 
 other side, it is also stated as an advantage in the Grecian gods, 
 that they are conceived as human, whereas this is supposed to be 
 wanting in the Christian God. Schiller says, " Men were more 
 Godlike when gods were more menlike." But the Grecian gods 
 are not to be regarded as more human than the Christian God. 
 Christ is much more Man : he lives, dies, suffers death on the 
 Cross ; and this is infinitely more human than the man of beauti- 
 ful nature among the Greeks ! ' Was there ever any really divine 
 sense of the All awakened in him ? What curious maundering 
 dreaming, or dreaming maundering, is all that playing at philoso- 
 phising over the Greek gods ! He tals much of abstract and con- 
 crete ; but, after all, did the concrete ever shine into him but through 
 the abstractions of books ? Of the origin of these gods in common 
 human nature, do we get a single glimpse in all his maundering ? 
 They come from other nations and they did not, they are local and 
 not local, they are spiritual and they are natural; and it is black 
 and white, and red and green, and look here and look there, and 
 this is so and so, and that is so and so : and so all is satisfactorily 
 explained, clear and intelligible ! How could he ever get anyone 
 to listen to such childish theorising disconnected theorising, and 
 silly, aimless maundering the thought of his substance, that 
 develops itself from An sich to Fiir sich, recurring to him only at 
 rare intervals, and prompting then a sudden spasmodic but vain 
 sprattle at concatenation and reconciliation ? The fact is, it is all 
 maundering, but with the most audacious usurpation of authorita- 
 tive speech on the mysteries that must remain mysteries. ' God 
 must take form, for nothing is essential that does not take form;' 
 
.48 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 1. 
 
 ' but if God is to appear in an appropriate expression, this can only 
 be the human form : ' what is this maundering does Hegel see 
 anything ? What is God to Hegel ? Does he figure a universal 
 thought, conscience, will, emotion, a universal spirit? Has that 
 spirit the sense of ' I ? ' can there be thought, conscience, emotion, 
 will, without ' I ? ' How am I to figure myself beside this Hegelian 
 universal ? How comes my thought to be mine, egoised into my 
 ' I ? ' How am I specialised out of the Universal ? Is it not a 
 vain wrestling to better name the All in characteristics of mind ? 
 Is there any deduction any explanation ? 
 
 The exasperating sensation in attempting to construe all this 
 into ordinary words or forms of thought! It is just that there 
 is no Jenseits, no Yonder, only a Here and Now of Spirit running 
 through its moments ! What relief to the understanding on such 
 premises, but the Materialism of Feuerbach or the Singleism of 
 Stirner, which seem indeed to have so originated ? 
 
 Language contains so many words, distinguished by so very 
 slight, subtle, and delicate meanings, that it gives vast oppor- 
 tunities to a genius such as that of Hegel ; who delights to avail 
 himself of them all, to join them, disjoin them, play with them 
 like an adept, arriving finally to be able to play a dozen games at 
 once of this sort of chess, blindfold. His whole talk seems to be 
 a peculiar way of naming the common, a simply Hegel's way of 
 speaking of naturalism. What is, is, and I give such and such 
 names to it and its process, but I do not fathom or explain it 
 and its process I merely mention it in other than the usual 
 words. 
 
 The ' Vestiges ' transcend the actual only in a physical interest ; 
 but here the physical is translated into the metaphysical. The 
 final aim of all is consciousness ; and said consciousness is figured, 
 not as subjective, as possessed by some individual, but as objective 
 and general, as substantive and universal. The realised freedom 
 of spirit viewed as substantive reason, this is the process we are to 
 see taking place, and it is in the form of the State we are to recog- 
 nise its closest approximation to realisation ! The State is the 
 nidus in which are deposited all the successive gains of the world- 
 spirit. The State is the grand pupa of existence, surrounded by 
 the necessary elements of nourishment, &c. Mankind are seen, 
 then, like coral insects, subjectively secreting intelligence, and 
 depositing the same objectively in the rock of the State ! 
 
 Is, then, a Constitution the great good, as it were the fruit and 
 
OBJECTIONS TO HEGEL. 49 
 
 outcome of the whole universe ? In spite of all changes in ideals 
 and reals, is there an objective spiritual gain handed down from 
 generation to generation? Can this be exhibited? Out of the 
 human real, reposing on and arising from the human ideal, is there- 
 a universal real or ideal gained ? Can it be characterised ? Carlyle, 
 ' as witness Paris-city/ admits that much has been realised ; but is 
 not his standpoint chiefly rejection of the objective and assertion 
 of the subjective ? Is not that the nucleus of Hero-worship, 
 which looks for weal from living individuals, not from the objective 
 depositions of reason (in the shape of institutions) in time ? Is, 
 then, the great practical question that of Hegel, not what was he 
 or what was another, but what are the objective gains of the world- 
 spirit ? 
 
 Hegel alludes to an ' element in man that elevates him above 
 the place of a mere tool and identifies him with the Universal 
 itself; there is the divine in him, freedom, &c. the brute is not, 
 &c. but,' he says, ' we enter not at present on proof ; it would 
 demand an extensive analysis, &c. &c. ! ! ' Fancy the audacious 
 cheek of the Professor, beating down his hearers by mere words 
 giving other names to common categories as if they were all 
 thereby explained and in his waistcoat pocket ! Where is his 
 justification where is the basis of all those fine airs of superi- 
 ority? Does he believe more than a Divine government of 
 the world does he see aught else than the hard lot of much 
 that is good and true ? Is the one explained or only named by 
 the word Keason, and the other by Contingency? 'which 
 latter has received from the former, the Idea, authority to 
 exercise its monstrous influence ! ' Must we not repeat dedit 
 verba ? 
 
 It is intelligible how the State looms so large in Hegel's eyes. 
 It is a type of the step in philosophy named the transcending 
 of the Ego. The will and the idea here are not expressions of 
 what is individual, but of what is general. This is true, too, to 
 the aim of the Socratic generalisation which raised up the 
 universal and necessary out of the particular and accidental. 
 But does all one's worth come from the State ? Since the 
 State grows in worth, must not a portion of worth come from 
 the individual ? Is not the individual always higher than the 
 State, Christ than Jewry, Socrates than Athens, Confucius than 
 China ? 
 
 Hegel is always pedagogue-like with him naming is explaining. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. If., D. 1. 
 
 Nor is it true that we are more subjective, the Greeks more objec- 
 tive. Xenophon (the murmurs of the individual Ten Thousand), 
 as well as Homer (Thersites), shows subjectivity to have had 
 greater influence then than now. 
 
 o 
 
 How definitively conclusive Hegel is to himself on all these 
 matters in this ' Philosophy of History ! ' Whether he is in 
 Africa or Europe, America or Asia, he dictates his views equally 
 imperially his findings are infallible, never doubt it, sir! Ah 
 me ! these sentences on all and everything in the world are 
 quite irreversible ! ' In Ashantee, the solemn ceremony begins 
 with an ablution of the bones of the mother of the king in the 
 blood of men,' why does Absolute Wisdom omit to ask itself, 
 What, if she still live ? The statesman shows his son how very 
 little wisdom is required in the governing of the world ; and 
 Hegel makes plain here that Absolute Knowledge has only to 
 assert and again assert, and always assert. How unscrupulous 
 that sniff of condemnation ! How unhesitating that decisiveness 
 of sentence in the midst of so little certainty ! bless you ! he 
 does not fear ! An impure spirit, with impure motives, takes to 
 an ethereal subject, will take rank with the best, will speak as 
 authoritatively as they, and pours out indiscriminately slag and 
 ore: Germany here, too, true to its character of external inten- 
 tional effort according to the receipt in its hands. But in that 
 leaden head of his, what strange shapes his thoughts take, and 
 how strangely he names them ! 
 
 In the preface to the * Phaenomenologie,' observe the dry, sap- 
 less, wooden characterisation, in strange, abstract, prosaic figures, 
 of the hapless plight of the unfortunate Schellingian ! Hegel it 
 is, rather than Schelling, who has put in place of reasoning, a 
 curious species of inward vision applied it is to strange things 
 of wire in an element of sawdust, dull, dead, half-opaque, sound- 
 less, fleshless, inelastic a motion as of worms in a skull of wood 
 not the rich shapes in the blue heaven of the true poet's 
 phantasy ! How he continues throwing the same abstract, 
 abstruse, confused prose figures at Schelling ! Verily, as Hum- 
 boldt says of him, language here has not got to the Durctibrech: 
 that is, we may say, perhaps, language remains ever underground 
 here, muffled, and never gets to break through, as flowers elsewhere 
 do, or as other people's teeth do ! Eeally, Hegel's rhetoric is 
 absolutely his own. There is something uribefangenes simple- 
 tonish in him : he is still the Suabian lout ! 
 
THE PROCESS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 51 
 
 D. 2. 
 
 This referring to a passage in the same preface is just fr 
 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 trans- 
 ferred to the All, the Absolute, the Substance, to enable us to 
 form a conception of unal negativity of Spirit passing into the 
 hetereity of external nature, finally to return reconciled, har- 
 monious, and free into its own self. Surely, too, that process of 
 self-consciousness strikes the key-note of the whole method and 
 matter of Hegel ! 
 
 An sick rnay be illustrated by an ill-fitting shoe. First, con- 
 sciousness is only in itself or, as the German seems to have it, 
 only at itself, only in its own proximity : there is malaise quite 
 general, indefinite, and indistinct; it is everywhere in general, 
 and nowhere in particular. But, by degrees, the mist and blur, 
 the nebula, resolves itself into foci and shape ; Ansichseyn 
 becomes Fiirsichseyn, and it is seen that the shoe is too wide 
 in the heel that and nothing else. 
 
 The intermedium is the first step in the divine process (the 
 phase of universality, latent potentiality being first assumed) ; it 
 is reflexion into its own self, and as such only, and no more, it 
 is the awakening of consciousness, the kindling, the lighting, the 
 flashing 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 reflexion of this 
 into itself or on to itself, and this reflexion 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, 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
52 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 2. 
 
 circumscribed, individual entity, and in the metaphysical a self- 
 consciousness. Keduced to its most abstract form, it is nothing 
 but a Becoming a becoming something a focus in the nebula, 
 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. 
 
 The same reason the same forms, processes, peculiar experi- 
 ences and characters, exist in the outer world which exist in the 
 inner: analogy passes into its very depths the outer is just the 
 inner, but in the form of outerness or hetereity, alienation. Thus 
 Hegel, horsed 011 his idea, penetrates and permeates the whole 
 universe both of mind and matter, and construes all into a one 
 individuality which is Substance, the True, the Absolute, God. 
 
 The idea is evidently substance, for it is common to all ; it is the 
 common element; it is the net into which all is wrought, whether 
 physical or metaphysical. Behind the logical categories, there lie 
 side by side the physical and the spiritual. Hegel really meant it 
 and Rosenkranz is wrong to take it as mere figurative exaggera- 
 tion when he says that what is here is 'the demonstration of 
 God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature 
 and a finite spirit.' 
 
 Much is Aristotelian in the above. There are reflexes of the 
 Svva/uiis and the evepyeia. It is Metaphysic Proper, an inquiry 
 into the essential TO TI eV-rm 
 
 Negation in Hegel always seems to produce affirmation, not 
 destruction. Negation seems in him, indeed, but the specific 
 title of the element of variety arid distinction. Such element is, 
 in fact, negation. It is negation of its own unity, and each 
 constituent member is the negative of the rest and of the whole. 
 
 The whole is to be conceived as an organic idea a concrete 
 idea in which beginning is to be taken as also ideal, not a thing 
 in time and nature, but a mere thought so and so characterised 
 and articulated with the rest. The same is the case with subjec- 
 tivity in general, and my subjectivity in special. 
 
 ' There are periods when thought compromises existence when 
 it becomes destructive, negative. These are periods of so-called 
 enlightenment. But thought, that has done this, must in its turn 
 be looked at.' The true nature of the Begriff must be seen 
 into ; and he who understands Hegel's word Begriff, understands 
 Hegel. 
 
THE GENERAL IDEA. 53 
 
 Despite the intensity of his abstraction, there is always in 
 Hegel a glance at the whole concrete actual universe. Yet to 
 read him is not to judge of things as this or that, but to follow a 
 thread of aqua regia that dissolves and resolves the things them-- 
 selves a menstruum in which the most hard and solid objects 
 become quick and flow. Hegel, indeed, seems ever to drive into 
 the very grounds of things. Still, his secret is very much the 
 translating of the concrete individual into the abstract general or 
 universal. He is always intelligible when we keep before us the 
 particular individual he is engaged translating; but let us lose 
 the object, the translation becomes hopeless. The eye must never 
 wander ; let a single hint be missed, let a single stitch drop, the 
 whole is to recommence again. The first chapter of the ' Phaeno- 
 menologie/ on Sensuous Certainty, is generally looked on as very 
 extravagant and untenable ; still it is really in abstract terms a 
 very fair description of the progress of consciousness from crude 
 Sensation to intelligent Perception. This is its intention, and 
 not a dialectic destruction of an outer world. Still, Hegel may 
 very well speak of a reversion or inversion ; for whereas elsewhere 
 things support thoughts, in him, on the contrary, thoughts support 
 things, and the tendency in the reader to dazzle, dizziness, and 
 turn, cannot be wondered at. But the thought being the prius, 
 this method must be right. 
 
 D. 3. 
 
 Hegel will look at everything and say what it is. In his eyes, 
 what we call the common idea of God is an abstraction utterly 
 vague and predicateless. Then, again, it is thought that is the 
 true mental act applicable to God. God, as a universal, is not 
 only thought, but in the form of thought. We see here, then, 
 that Hegel's system is a universe of thought, in which Nature, 
 the Ego God himself, in a sense are but moments ; or the 
 universe is an organon of thought into which all particulars the 
 whole itself are absorbed as moments; and the aggregate of these 
 moments which, however, is other than an aggregate constitutes 
 the organic whole. The general conception under the phrase 
 Supreme Being as eighteenth century enlightenment (in which the 
 bulk even of Ecclesiastics, forgetting their Bible, now share) has it 
 is quite abstract, quite formal, orformell; that is, it is an empty 
 
54 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 3. 
 
 formal act in which there is no substance it is a longing opening 
 of the jaws, but there is no nut between them. 
 
 The universe in time is viewed grandly as a spirit whose object 
 is to bring before his own consciousness all that he is in himself, 
 and each new fact so brought becomes superseded and transformed" 
 as a step to a higher stage. History is really such consciousness 
 in perpetual enlargement, enfranchisement, elevation. This can 
 be personified as a Spirit ; and all being thought this Spirit is 
 the Universe, the One, the All, God. In it empirical Egos are 
 but as moments, but as scales of thought. It is plain, then, that 
 philosophy with Hegel will be the developed sum of all preceding 
 philosophies. The progress pictured in the * History of Philosophy ' 
 is the process of philosophy itself ; and in philosophy, this 
 progress is seen in unempirical development. Thought as it is, is 
 concrete ; that is, it is Idea. The knowledge or science of this, 
 relating as it does to a concrete, will be a system for a concrete 
 is self-diremption in self-union or self-conservation. And here, 
 then, is it at once necessity and freedom : necessity, as so and so 
 constituted ; freedom, as that constitution is its own, and has its 
 own play, its own life. A sphere of spheres it is (each a necessary 
 moment) and the entire idea constituted by the system of these, at 
 the same time that the entire idea appears also in each. 
 
 The Idea is thought, not as formal, but as the self-evolving 
 totality of its own peculiar principles and laws, which it gives to 
 its own self, and not already has and finds to its hand in its own 
 self. This is characteristic of Hegel. He thus avoids the 
 question of a first cause ; constituting thought as the first, the 
 last, and the only. That thought might, give itself its own 
 distinctions is evident from language. To use but inadequate 
 examples, thing is but a form of think, thankful but another way 
 of saying think ful. 
 
 Can creation be accounted for otherwise ? Assume God well, 
 creation is simply his thought; in the world of man and nature 
 we have simply to do with the thought of God. We cannot 
 suppose God making the world like a mason. It is sufficient that 
 God think the world. But we have thus access to the thought of 
 God the mind of God. Then our own thought as thought is 
 analogous. So the progress of generalisation is to study thought 
 as thought in the form of a universal. Thought being viewed in 
 this way, the whole is changed : creation, God, and all else have 
 taken up quite new and different relations ; nor is there any 
 
THE GENERAL IDEA. 55 
 
 longer the difficulty of a beginning, &c. Logic, thus, has to do 
 quite with the supersensual ; mathematic is seen to be quite 
 sensuous in comparison. 
 
 In the beginning Seyn und Nichts, Being and Nothing there 
 is room for much reflexion. "We are not to suppose that it relates 
 to formal and professional logic only. It must be taken sub specie 
 ccternitatis. The whole question, What was the beginning what 
 was it that was the first ? is there. The answer, God, does not 
 suffice ; for the question still recurs, And God whence ? Hegel 
 must be credited with the most profound and exhaustive thought 
 here. It is the first question in universal metaphysic. What 
 was the beginning ? How are we to conceive that ? Kather, we 
 feel that it is inconceivable : we feel that, when we answer, Oh, 
 God of course, we have yielded to our own impatience to our 
 own weariness of what is never-ending, and that the terminus we 
 have so set up is arbitrary merely, a word mainly ; that, in short, 
 the business is to begin again so soon as we have taken breath 
 and recovered temper. There is a whole school, however, which 
 pronounces this to be the answer ; that is, that answer there is 
 none for us. Humanity is to see here its own deficiency and 
 insufficiency of original nature. We are only adequate to a 
 compartment, not to the whole. Our sphere is limited ; our 
 functions must learn and acknowledge their own bounds. Percep- 
 tion and confession of ignorance in regard to all such questions, 
 constitute on our part wisdom and philosophy. 
 
 This however, is, in reality, but again the human mind halting 
 for breath, resting for temper. The question recurs, and luill 
 recur, so soon as action itself, after its own pause, recurs. Not 
 but that the new action may fare similarly, and be obliged to halt 
 with the same result ; a state of matters which will simply con- 
 tinue till there is a successful effort towards the satisfaction of a 
 need which is absolutely inextinguishable, however temporarily 
 appeasable. To a mind like Hegel's, all this is obvious, and he 
 will look steadily along the line, his mind made up to this that 
 the necessity for an answer shall, so far as he is concerned, not be 
 shirked. How are we to conceive the beginning, then, he asks 
 himself, and continues asking himself, till the thought emerges, 
 What is a beginning ? and in a few moments more he feels he has 
 the thread : of the organon, thought, the distinction beginning is 
 but a moment, but an involved and constituent element, joint, or 
 article. It is but a portion of the articulated apparatus, of the 
 
56 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 3. 
 
 whole system or series. It is a characteristic of the universe, 
 thought a characteristic among others that it has a particular 
 pin or pole, or special pinion, named beginning a pole which it 
 gives to its own self for its own distribution, disposition, and 
 arrangement. 
 
 Gives its own self! the reader may exclaim: why, then there is 
 something before the beginning, that gives the beginning ! Well, 
 yes ; but that is not the way to put it. There is thought, and 
 there is nothing but thought ; thought is the All, and, as the All, 
 it is, of course, also what we mean by the term the prius it is the 
 first : these terms prius, first, beginning, &c., are, in fact, predicates, 
 attributes of its own, part and parcel of its own machinery, of its 
 own structure, of its own constitution. When we use the expres- 
 sion God, we are just saying the same thing, for God is obviously 
 thought; or God is Spirit, and the life of Spirit is thought. 
 Creation, then, is thought also ; it is the thought of God. God's 
 thought of the Creation is evidently the prius of the Creation ; but 
 with God to think must be to create, for he can require no wood- 
 carpentry or stone-masonry for his purpose : or even should we 
 suppose him to use such, they must represent thought, and be 
 disposed on thought.* The stone-masonry and wood-carpentry, 
 then, can be set aside as but the accessory and non-essential, and 
 the Creation can be pronounced thought :f whether direct through 
 thought, or indirect through stone-masonry and wood-carpentry, 
 all recurs to God. Then God viewed personally, on the question 
 
 * For us, then, truly to think them, is to reproduce the thought of God, 
 which preceded their creation, and which, so to speak, therefore contained 
 them. 
 
 f But it is pleonastic to assume stone-masonry and wood- carpentry as inde- 
 pendent self-substantial entities, out of, and other than, thought. Let us say 
 rather that thought is perceiving thought, thought is a perceptive thought, or the 
 understanding is a perceptive understanding. So Kant conceived the understanding 
 of God. Our perception he conceived to be derivative or sensuous (intuitus 
 derivations} while that of God appeared to him necessarily original and intellectual 
 (intuitus originarius). Now the force of this is, that the perception of God makes 
 its objects ; creation and perception, with understanding of the same, are but a one 
 act in God. Man, Kant conceived, possessed no such direct perception, but only a 
 perception indirect through media of sense, which media, adding elements of their 
 own, separated us for ever from the thing-in-itself (or things-in-themselves), at the 
 very moment that they revealed it (or them). But suppose thought in all cases to 
 be perceptive thought, thought where subject thinking and object thought are 
 identical identical in difference if you like, even as the one side and the other side 
 of this sheet of paper are identical in difference then we come tolerably close to 
 the standpoint of Hegel. 
 
THE GENERAL IDEA. 57 
 
 of a beginning must still yield the same answer. God is thought, 
 and ' beginning ' is but one of its own natural poles, or centres of 
 gravitation, disposition, and revolution. 
 
 Now, in the conception ' beginning,' the first step or element, 
 in regard to anything whatever beginning or begun, is so far as 
 thought is concerned just the thought 'is.' Even God placed 
 under the focus of the category ' beginning,' must have first said 
 to himself ' is,' ' there is.' But in this first step there is no more 
 than that. Descartes called the first step sum, but manifestly he 
 ought to have said est. The ego involved in sum is a concrete 
 infinitely higher in ascent than est, esse, Seyn, Being. That there 
 is, is manifestly the most abstract thought that can be reached. 
 That is, when we perform the process of abstraction, when we strip 
 off all empirical qualities, one after the other, 'is' is the residuum 
 abstract Being, predicateless ' is.' Even when we think of any 
 natural entity, when we think even of life, say, it is evident that 
 the first step of the beginning is 'is.' But what, even under that 
 point of view, would be the second ? Why, ' is not.' There must 
 be, at first (we are using the category, we are seeing through our 
 lens 'beginning' at this moment) a wholly indefinite and indeter- 
 minate, and, so to speak (since the category natural life accom- 
 panies our thought here), instinctive thought or feeling ' is/ but 
 this must be immediately followed by the thought or feeling 'not.' 
 There is as yet only ' is/ there is nothing else. That is, the very 
 ' is ' is nought or not. But throwing off any reference to natural 
 life, and restricting ourselves to thought absolutely and per se, it 
 is still plainer that the abstract initial 'is' is identical with the 
 abstract and initial ' non-is.' Because the ' is ' is the last product 
 of abstraction ; it has no attribute, it is bodiless position ; it not 
 only ' is/ but it is ' non.' One can readily see, then, that in Hegel's 
 so abstract, formal, and professional statement of Seyn und Nichts, 
 there is involved a creative substratum of the most anxious, 
 persevering, and comprehensive concrete reflection. One can see 
 that he has bottomed the whole question of a beginning. "Why 
 he should have set it up so abruptly and so unconnectedly steep, 
 is a query impossible for us to answer. 'Is' and ' is-non/ then, 
 contain the same subject-matter, or the same no subject-matter : 
 each is an absolute and ultimate abstraction ; the ' is ' is a ' non-is/ 
 and the 'non-is' is in the same sense an 'is.' In this sense, then, 
 Being and Non-being are identical ; neither the one nor the other 
 possesses a predicate they are each nothing. But, if they are 
 
58 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 4. 
 
 the same, they are again not the same, there is a distinction 
 between them, and so on. 
 
 From the position that thought is the all and the prius, it 
 follows that thought must contain in itself a principle of pro- 
 gression or movement. Hegel asserts his method to be this 
 principle ; and we should certainly very decidedly stultify our- 
 selves, if we should suppose that Hegel sets up this method in 
 the merely arbitrary fashion of an impostor bent on some per- 
 sonal result. Hegel's method is the product of reflexion equally 
 deep arid earnest with that which originated his beginning. 
 Thought's own nature is, first, position ; second, opposition ; 
 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 abso- 
 lutely impossible on a principle of absolutely simple, single, unal 
 identity. The first, then, though unal, must have separated into 
 distinctions ; and these by union, followed again by disunion and 
 reunion ad infinitum, must have produced others till thought be- 
 came the articulated organon it is now. It is also plain that, 
 were there movement only by separation into contraries without 
 reunion into higher stages, the progress would fail in systematic 
 articulation, and also in improvement. Ite-union, then, is evi- 
 dently a step as necessary as separation. The union of 'is' 
 and 'non-is' in 'becomes,' need also not be confined to logical 
 abstractions, but may be illustrated from the concrete. Every 
 concrete process of Becoming is a union of the two. Eesuming 
 our illustration, too, from the life of thought, it is evident that, 
 after the first dim consciousness ' is ' and the second ' not/ the 
 third of 'becomes' of a coming to be and of a ceasing not to 
 be must succeed. 
 
 D. 4. 
 
 The question is, What is truth ? i.e. What is the Absolute ? 
 But the absolute cannot be hopped to by means of some cabalistic 
 hocus-pocus. It must be worked up to. But where does it lie ? 
 Wherever it lies, to be known it must come into our knowledge. 
 But we already possess knowledge. Is it so sure that the abso- 
 lute is not already there ? Let us take our knowledge just as we 
 have it, and look at it. Let us take knowledge, not in some 
 out-of-the-way, enchanted-looking corner, we do not know where, 
 
KNOWLEDGE, THE ALL, ETC. 59 
 
 but as it comes up. Let us take this thing knowledge, not as 
 we suppose it, not as in some sublime indeterminateness we 
 imagine it, but as it manifests itself now and here to us, 
 just as it at once directly shows or appears. For result as the 
 ' Phaenomenologie,' which starts thus, will show it will be found 
 that the opinion of object will disappear, and that there will 
 remain the idea only. Our knowing and what we know are 
 identical. The object becomes, so to speak, intelligised, and the 
 intellect objectivised. The relation between the supposed two 
 is one of mere otherness in identity. The object is knowing but 
 in the form of otherness. Knowledge involves the relation of 
 two factors; but they are both the same substance. Knowing, 
 even to know itself, must have a something to know ; and this 
 process involves and introduces at once the relation of otherness. 
 Man's error is the hypostasising of his ideas the separating of 
 his indivisible self, by a dead wall of his own assumption, into 
 an irreconcilable duality of thinking and thought. We have 
 been desperately hunting the whole, infinite, unreachable heaven 
 for an Absolute, which, folded up within us, smiled in self- 
 complacent security, at the infatuation of its very master. We 
 have wearied heaven and earth with our importunate clamours 
 for a glass that bestrid the bridge of our own nose. 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 
 far forest. 
 
 It is the peculiar nature of the Idea to be the union of the 
 universal and the particular in the individual. Here lie the 
 elements of the explanation of the relation which the subjective 
 bears to the objective. Such questions as Life and Death, the 
 Soul, Immortality, God, are to be regarded from a wholly-changed 
 point of view. Death is a constituent of the sphere of the Finite, 
 but the Idea is imperishable. / am the Idea you lie &c. ; 
 but we are also singulars. As singulars, there is change death ; 
 but, as participant of the self-conscious Idea, we are immortal. 
 It is just an all of thought triple-natured with infinite grada- 
 tions and spheres. Freedom, perfect self-consciousness, is the 
 goal. Take it as nature, the same thing can be said. In fact, 
 it is just a double language, the object and the idea; the same 
 goal, the same gradations in the one as in the other. 
 
 The preface to the ' Phaenomenologie ' is the plainest piece 
 of speaking anywhere in Hegel, and capable of being put as 
 
60 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 5. 
 
 key to the whole system. It is full of the most hard, heavy, 
 and effective thought, in new, subtle, and original directions ; 
 and the expression is as heavy and effective. A most surprising 
 light is thrown upon what passes unquestioned under our eyes 
 and among our hands ; and the object Hegel sets himself here 
 will be something beyond all precedent, if accomplished. 
 
 At present, thought is thus and thus constituted : but the 
 process of which this constitution is the result, is simply experi- 
 ence. A history, then, of the phases of experience since the 
 beginning, the first stage of thought, up to the present, would 
 enable us to understand how this present arose; and thus we 
 should get an insight into the nature of thought itself. But 
 this process to Hegel has reached the highest stage of absolute 
 thought: therefore, then, if he can conduct us through all the 
 stages actually experienced by consciousness from the first to 
 the last, he will conduct us necessarily, arid with full con- 
 viction to ultimate and absolute thought itself. We are supposed 
 to see only the bare process: but Hegel has helped himself by 
 diligent reference to actual history ; and we shall assist ourselves 
 by looking out for reflexions of the same. There is everywhere 
 a power of naming, in consequence of perception of the inner 
 nature and limits of what is looked at, that must give pause, 
 at all events, and open the eyes. The necessity and coherence of 
 the systematisation will, at least, benefit all effort for the future. 
 Hegel, indeed, clamours always for necessity and completeness of 
 exposition. He cannot allow a subject to be attacked from an 
 indefinite, conceded, common ground. The common ground must 
 prove its nature, legitimacy, extent, &c. to the last dregs. He 
 must begin with the beginning, and work all up into a one bolus 
 of thought. 
 
 D. 5. 
 
 Kant, in demonstrating the ' possibility of a Transcendental 
 Logic,' begins the realisation of idealism. Idealism before that 
 was but an abstract conception, an announced probability on a 
 balance of reasons. With Kant actual development commences, 
 and he very fairly initiates the business proper of Hegel, which 
 was, not to prove the principle of idealism, but construct its 
 system, lay out its world. In the series, Kant is as Geometry, 
 Fichte as Algebra, Schelling as Applied Mathematic, and Hegel 
 as the Calculus. 
 
ORIGIN OF KANT AND THE REST. 61 
 
 Thinking of Quantity as an intellectual notion to which things 
 must adapt themselves as universal, particular, and singular, 
 of Quality, and the & priori necessities to which all a posteriori 
 elements must submit in its regard, of substance and accident, 
 and the conditions they impose on all experience before experi- 
 ence, one gets to see the origin of Hegel. The Idea, which 
 is the All, is so constituted that it organises itself on these cate- 
 gories suppose them God's creative thoughts or suppose them 
 simply the elements of the monad, of that which is, the Absolute. 
 
 In the 'Kritik of Practical Keason/ pp. 219, 220, Part 8 of 
 the collected Works, occurs a passage which may be translated 
 thus : 
 
 ' Because we consider here, in its practical function, pure Reason, which, 
 acts consequently on a priori principles, and not on empirical motives, the 
 division of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason will necessarily resemble 
 that of a syllogism. That is, it will proceed from the universal in the Major 
 (the moral principle), through a subsumption under the same, in the Minor, 
 of possible (particular) acts (as good or bad) to the Conclusion, namely, 
 the subjective actualisation of Will (an interest in the practically possible 
 good and the consequent Maxim). To him who follows with conviction the 
 positions of the Analytic, such comparisons will prove pleasing ; for they 
 countenance the expectation that we shall yet attain to a perception of the 
 unity of the entire business of pure reason (theoretical as well as practical), 
 and be able to deduce all from a single principle, which is the inevitable 
 demand of human reason ; for we can find full satisfaction only in a complete 
 systematic unity of all the possessions of our reason.' 
 
 More than one deep germ of Hegel seems to lie here. The 
 movement of the syllogism, for example, is seen here as it were 
 in concrete and material application, and not as only formal and 
 abstract. Then the demand of unity, of a single principle ! The 
 universal appears in Hegel as the Logic, the particular as Nature, 
 the singular as Spirit. Then the universal, the abstract, is seen to 
 be the ground of the other two. At page 107 of the 'Vestiges of 
 the Natural History of Creation,' we hear of the electric brush 
 that electricity is as a brush. Well, let us say here, the Logic, the 
 universal, is the electric brush, the particular (Nature) is the 
 materiature which attaches to and crassifies the ramification of 
 said electric brush to the development, as it were, of a system of 
 organs, and the singular (Spirit) is the one envelope of subjectivity 
 that converts all into an absolute unity, at once absolutely nega- 
 tive and absolutely positive. In this way, we may conceive 
 formed Hegel's Idfo-Monade. Again, Kant's one general principle 
 
62 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IT., D. 5. 
 
 is to universalise the particular, objectify the subject, convert 
 An sich or nature into Fiir sick or spirit ; and Hegel's really is 
 just the same. 
 
 In the Kritik of ' Judgment/ section 86, occurs the following : 
 
 ' For (.such is the conviction of everyone) if the world consisted of beings 
 merely inanimate, or some animate and some inanimate, but the animate still 
 without reason, the existence of such a world would have no worth at all, for 
 there would exist in it no being that possessed the slightest notion of any 
 worth. If, again, there were also rational beings supposed to exist, but whose 
 reason was such only as knew to put a value on things according to the 
 relation of nature which these things bore to them (to their own gratification), 
 but not to give to their own selves a priori, and independent of the experiences 
 of nature, a value (in freewill), then there were (relative) aims in the world, 
 but no (absolute) end-aim, because the existence of such rational beings would 
 remain still aimless. But moral laws are of this peculiarity, that they 
 prescribe to reason something as aim without condition consequently in the 
 manner in which the notion of an end-aim requires it ; and the existence of 
 such a reason as, in the relation of an aim, can be the supreme law to itself 
 in other words, the existence of rational beings under moral laws can there- 
 fore alone be thought as end-aim (final cause) of the existence of a world. Is 
 this not so, then there lie in the existence of the same either no aim at all, as 
 regards its cause, or aims without end-aim.' 
 
 To this noble passage, let us add portion of the note at the 
 bottom of the same page : 
 
 ' The glory of God is not inaptly named by Theologians, the final cause of 
 creation. It is to be observed, that we understand by the word creation, 
 nothing else than the cause of the existence of a world, or of the things, the 
 substances in it [* die Ursache vom Daseyn einer Welt ; ' literally, to a Hegel, 
 the original or primal thing or matter of the being there of a world] ; as also the 
 proper notion of the word [Schopfung, creation, but literally a drawing ; 
 compare scooping] brings that same sense with it (actuatio substantial est 
 creatio), which consequently does not already involve the presupposition of a 
 spontaneously operative, and therefore intelligent Cause (whose existence we 
 would first of all prove).' 
 
 There were no worth in a world, then, that cannot appreciate 
 worth. The world were blind and worthless without a being that 
 can think. But what is the action on the world of a being that 
 can think ? By thinking, he arranges all in his own way all 
 takes place and meaning, not from itself, but from him (it had no 
 meaning before him). It is thus his own self he projects around 
 him; the other is but the stand for his own qualities, thereon 
 disposed. The analogy of his own inner construction converts the 
 opacity of the other into lucidity, transmutes its rigidity into 
 pliancy ; and the other remains as nothing when opposed to the 
 
ORIGIN OF HEGEL. 63 
 
 qualities it merely sustains. Hegel, in reading Kant, may be 
 conceived as falling on such ideas, and so, as arriving at his 
 anthropological monad, which, as all that is ours, as all that we 
 can know anything else, too, being merely suppositious, i.e. 
 again our own, again ourselves may be reasonably made, All, 
 Absolute, and Infinite. Actuatio substantice est creatio is a phrase, 
 too, that has not failed to bear fruit in Hegel. Ursache vom 
 Daseyn, and the remarkable phrase ' with laws, not under laws,' 
 which occurs in the same neighbourhood, may be also viewed as 
 suggestive of Hegelian elements. The passage in Kant offers 
 to the spiritualist or idealist a bulwark impregnable to any 
 materialist, a talisman in the light of which every materialist 
 must fade and die. 
 
 On Kant's theory, the world being phenomenal, materiature 
 being simply an unknown appulse, giving rise to a subjective 
 material, not necessarily at all like the materiature, not neces- 
 sarily the same in all subjects, and incapable of comparison 
 as between subjects, this subjective material (all that holds 
 of sensation or feeling), to become a world, would require a 
 system of forms which can themselves be only subjective, 
 only ab intra. These, then, would appear somehow as pro- 
 jected into the subjective material, to form part and parcel of 
 the same. Further, they themselves, though subjective as belong- 
 ing to the subject, might be objective as belonging to all the 
 subjects, and as capable of being identified in each by actual 
 comparison ; they might be of an objective and universally deter- 
 minable nature. They might come from our intellectual nature, 
 for example. This is Kant. The subjective material in us set up 
 by the unknown outer materiature, is received into an objective 
 but internal net of arrangement. Feeling is the matter, but 
 intellect is the form of all experience, however outer and indepen- 
 dent it appear to us. Well, Kant succeeds in placing Sensation 
 and Perception under Understanding, and Will under Eeason ; 
 but he has still Emotion, in the general scheme of man's faculties, 
 and Judgment in the particular of the cognitive faculties, undis- 
 cussed. Now, what is he to do with design and beauty, which 
 still keep apart from Understanding and Eeason ? If he is right 
 in his world, they cannot come from without ; they, too, must be 
 subjective in the sense of coming from within, or they may be 
 due to some harmony of the outer and inner. It is in this way, 
 and from such considerations, that Judgment becomes the sphere 
 
64 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 5. 
 
 of design and beauty, which are of an Emotional nature. One can 
 see, then, what led Kant to be averse to all theoretic arguments 
 about God ; for there was nothing noumenal known in Kant's 
 world but the Categorical Imperative ; all the rest was pheno- 
 menal unknown materiature apart and depended on forms ab 
 intra: Kant's theoretical world, in short, or world of knowledge, was 
 only phenomenal. Plainly, then to Kant, all form being ab intra, de- 
 sign and beauty (which only show ab extra) would present a peculiar 
 phase to him, and would require peculiarly to be dealt with. 
 
 It was easy to Kant's followers to see how small a rdle was left 
 for materiature, and to fall on the idea of expunging it, Hence it 
 was that Fichte attempted to build all up from these internal 
 forms, and to that he required a principle of movement in them- 
 selves, and a radiation from a single bottom one through a 
 systematic articulation of all the others. As left by Kant, 
 however, he was still on the platform of consciousness and a 
 subjective intellect; hence his system could only be one of 
 subjective idealism or objective egoism, which terms imply the 
 same thing. From this limited form Schelling freed the advancing 
 system by his principle of an absolute or neutrum into which 
 both nature and thought were resolved. But in Schelling the 
 sides remained apart, and the absolute had to be sprung to. 
 Hegel examined all, rethought all, and completed all. He perfected, 
 first, the thought-forms into a complete self-formative system 
 into an organic and, so to speak, personal whole, to which the 
 particular, nature, took up the position of, as regards the first, 
 only its other, and in it the universal forms only repeated them- 
 selves as in particularity or otherness, while, third, he summed up 
 both in the singular of Spirit. His three parts present analogies 
 to the three of the syllogism, the three cognitive faculties, the 
 three faculties in general, &c. ; and to the last Kant is repeated. 
 
 Hegel in his main principle has certainly put his finger on 
 the rhythmus of the universe. Understanding steps from abstrac- 
 tion to abstraction ; but Reason conjoins and concretes them. 
 'Beginning' is an abstraction, and, as such, is untrue; it is 
 concrete only with its end, and so true. Life and death must also 
 for their truth be concretely joined, and the result is the higher 
 new, the birth of the Spirit. God abstractly, as Hegel puts it, is 
 the mere empty word, the infidel God ; he is true only as concrete 
 in Christianity, the God-man. So in all other cases. The true 
 notion is the conjunction of the contradictories. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO HEGEL. 65 
 
 D. 6. 
 
 Kant's Categories form really the substance of Hegel. Hegel 
 seems an apt borrower generally. His absolute is the neutrum of 
 Schelling, converted into subject by the Ego of Fichte. Aristotle 
 assists him in the further characterisation of this subject through 
 the distinctions of Matter, Form, Actuality, &c. Plato lends his 
 aid in enabling him to look at it as idea, and to develop it as 
 idea. The very monad of Leibnitz, the triad of Proclus, and the 
 Qualirung of Bohme are auxiliary to him. But his infinitely 
 greatest obligations are to Kant, who enables him to lay out his 
 whole system and carry out his whole process. 
 
 Must we conceive, as well as name, to understand but how 
 is the conception of heterisation or alienation to Nature pos- 
 sible ? 
 
 Are we encouraged by the general nature of the case (all being 
 Werden, and Werden being always a union of identical opposites) 
 to believe that even in death there is process, that there again 
 Non-being is passing into Being, and that this applies to all 
 members of the universe, spiritual or material ? Or are these 
 abstractions but a system of fantastic and delusive shadows shed 
 of the universe into the brain of man ? Or, even so, are they not 
 still thoughts are they not threads ol essential thought, threads 
 from the main of thought, electric threads round which cluster 
 and accrete in sensuous opacity the matter-motes that make the 
 universe ? It is important to pause on this. Again, it must be 
 noted that the admission Seyn und Nichts ist dasselbe is the 
 other important point; grant that, and Werden cannot be 
 repressed. It is a conjunction of the extremes of thought; for 
 Being is regarded as the primal fount of possibility, while 
 Nothing is that of all impossibility. It seems violent to force us 
 to conjoin them for the birth of reality. Still, each is a thought, 
 and each can be thinkingly examined: if the result declares 
 identity, we must accept it, it and its consequences. 
 
 Take any actual concrete, abstract from quality after quality, 
 and observe the result. Let the concrete be this paper, for 
 example : well, we say there is whiteness in it, there is cohesion, 
 there is pliancy, &c. &c. now let us throw out all these, and we 
 shall be left at last with there is nothing. The whole question 
 now is, is this caput mortuum of abstraction an allowable base for 
 
 E 
 
66 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., D. 6. 
 
 the whole world of thought? In such sentence, it is very plain 
 that there is and nothing, subject and predicate, are equally 
 nothing, and, so far as that goes, identical ; but the objection is 
 obvious that this results only from their having now no longer 
 any matter of application any applicability any use. So long 
 as they were in use, in actual application, in actual work, they 
 were very different. When out of use, they are both of course 
 equally idle, and, so far as any result is concerned, equally null. 
 Food and no food are of identical result are, so to speak, equally 
 nothing, if placed in a stomach that will not digest. Distinctions 
 are distinctions only when in use ; they are empty, void, null, 
 when unapplied; and so, unapplied, may be set equal if you will. 
 But where is the warrant to make such equality a foundation for 
 the whole burthen of concrete thought in its abstract, or formal, 
 or logical form ? To do so is a feat of ingenuity ; but it is a feat, 
 a trick, a mockery, a delusion; and the human mind that, dazzled, 
 may admire, will still refuse conviction and assent. There still 
 recurs the question, however, Are we not at liberty to take up the 
 notions Being and Non-being with a view to analysis and com- 
 parison ? To this the answer must be, Yes, but that yes does not 
 empower you to set Being as identical with Non -being. You say 
 you do not wish so to set them, that it is not you who set them 
 at all, that they set themselves, and that they set themselves as 
 both equal and unequal, and it is this duplicity of relation that 
 sets free the notion Becoming as a notion that, essentially single, 
 is yet more essentially double and contains both of the others. 
 You say you do not ask us to make any reference to concrete 
 things, outer or inner that you only wish us to see how abstract 
 thought may build itself, &c. But 
 
 Another objection is the refusal of the mind to believe in a 
 concrete not or nothing in the identification of positive determina- 
 tion with negative limitation yet such is the chief lever of 
 Hegel. In short, the main result will be, as regards Hegel, that 
 we shall have to reject his system as articulated, and yet retain it 
 largely both as a whole and in parts. The system as articulated 
 is probably the result of the mere striving, so common at that 
 time, after universality and necessity, which are the only two 
 elements that can produce a coherent and complete whole, a 
 Cosmos. Still, Hegel shows the connexion of positive determina- 
 tion and negative limitation that they are but different sides of 
 the same reality that, as abstract thoughts, they coalesce and 
 
EXPLANATIONS, ETC. 67 
 
 run together. It must be understood to shadow out also the only 
 possible mode of conceiving an actual beginning. 
 
 But, let us do our best, we cannot help feeling from time to 
 time, that there crops out an element of weakness, of mere verbal 
 hocus-pocus, distinctions which will not maintain their objective 
 truth before the test of another language. No: the system that 
 has built itself up so laboriously out of the unresting river must 
 resolve itself into the same again, though largely to its material 
 enrichment. So with the system of Kant. Still, in both, 
 principles of form as well as matter will be found of permanent 
 and abiding worth. 
 
 
 E.I. 
 
 ' Being is the Notion only in itself.' This can be taken, first, 
 subjectively, and second, objectively. 
 
 First, subjectively, the notion is thought, thought in act, a 
 subject, a thinker, a spirit, God, you, I. The notion then (with 
 such meaning) as being, as is, as the absolutely first, crude, dim, 
 dull, opaque, chaotic, unconscious, brute / am, the first flutter 
 of life, the absolute A in quickening (Alphabetic A) is only in 
 itself latent, undeveloped. The German an, not quite the 
 English in, here. An means properly at, beside, near. So the 
 notion an sich is the notion at itself, like the first speck of life on 
 the edge of the disc. The notion is, as it were, just come to 
 itself. There is no answer possible, in one sense, to what is a 
 thing in itself, for every possible answer would involve what it is 
 for another. An sich is thus just Seyn ; both are equally incap- 
 able of direct explanation, neither can be said. To say it, would 
 be to limit it, to negate it, to give it a determinate manifestation, 
 &c. Whatever were said, it would be still more that ; that, then, 
 would describe it falsely, imperfectly, incompletely, that is, 
 negatively, &c. Latency, undevelopment, inch oat ion, is what the 
 term implies ; and this amounts to the universal universal, the 
 sum mum genus, the utterly unspecified, indeterminate, indefinite 
 universal principle of all particulars the Seyn the base, the 
 case, the all-embracing sphere and mother liquor, and yet also the 
 invisible dimensionless first of everything manifest. At bottom, 
 virtually, occultly, independently, absolutely, materialiter, are all 
 shades of An sich; and they all resolve themselves into Seyn, and 
 that into absolute, or abstract, or Hank self-identity. 
 
68 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., E. 1. 
 
 This description of An sicli is pertinent in every application of 
 the term, whether to the all of things or any single particular 
 whole ; it is a constituent in the thinking of every whole. The 
 universe has no advantage in this respect over this little crystal. 
 This gives a glimpse into the constitution of thought as thought ; 
 of which, it is not right to say that it is subject to such and such 
 poles, but rather that these are just its modi and constitute it so 
 and so ; thought is just such. 
 
 Second, objectively, of everything we may form a notion, but 
 the notion is no true notion unless it correspond to its object. 
 Call the object Seyn now, then obviously Seyn is just the Notion 
 but as yet an sick, in itself, potentially that is. Or, take it, in a 
 slightly other way. Existence, as it is there before us, or here 
 with us, is just God's Notion ; but in this form, it is only the 
 Notion in itself, occultly, latently, undemonstrated by explanation 
 and development. Again, the phrase may be taken historically 
 objectively, as symbolising the first stage of thought historically. 
 The hoof of Seyn breaks up into the fingers (Bestimmungen), 
 which also are (sind or sind seyend). As thus separated, they are 
 to each other, other. 
 
 'A setting out of the Notion as here in itself, or a going into 
 itself of Being.' This susceptible of the same points of view: 
 First, subjectively, I set myself out of myself, or I develop myself; 
 and this just amounts again to I go into myself. The reference 
 to me, of course, to be universalised into reference to the whole or 
 any whole. 
 
 There are four forms shadowed out then : 1. The first subject ; 
 2. The present sensuous object ; 3. History as applied to Thought ; 
 4. The Notion qua notion, without distinction of object. The 
 three first are but illustrative of the last. 
 
 The second forms of a sphere are the finite (the fingers of the 
 hoof). The importance of thinking through predicates and 
 eliminating the subject as an entity of mere supposition and 
 conception: this is the root of the multi-applicability of the 
 Hegelian discussion. 
 
 The first, the beginning, cannot be a product or result ; neither 
 can it contain more than one significate. The beginning must be 
 an absolutely first, and also an absolutely simple ; were it either a 
 derivative or a compound, it would contradict itself and be no 
 beginning. But when we can say, it is, I am, &c., we have a 
 beginning. The beginning of a thing is when it is. As with a 
 
EXPLANATIONS, ETC. 69 
 
 part, so witli the whole. The am or is is the absolutely first 
 predicate that can be attached. To begin an examination of 
 thought, then, (logic), is to begin with A in the alphabet of pre- 
 dication, is to begin with the absolutely first predicate, and that is 
 Being. In this shape, it is pure thought; it is utterly indeter- 
 minate, incoinpound, and inderivative or first. Thought is but 
 predication, an ascription or attribution of predicates ; for predicate 
 in the thinking subject corresponds to specificate in the thought 
 object; i.e. these are identical, because the specificate can only 
 exist in thought as predicate. The latter term, then, is the 
 preferable in a system of logic. 
 
 ' Seyn is pure abstraction/ Something of the Hegelian, peculiar 
 use of the word, as the separation and isolation effected by the 
 analysing understanding, floats here. Suppose we apply, as 
 regards Non-being, the four forms previously applied to Being. 
 1. The first subject: it is evident / am in such position 
 (first subject) is equal to I am not or nought as yet. 2. The 
 present sensuous object also is and is not, for it properly is 
 only in its absolutely first principle. 3. History as applied : 
 at A, thought both was and was not. 4. The notion qua notion : 
 it is in itself, and not as it is there. That it is, then, is also that 
 it is not. Even as that outward Seyn, it is not as not me, &c. 
 But it is only necessary to think Being in abstract generality. 
 
 The absolute is an affair of thought, it is not just as much as it 
 is : for what is is a variety ; there is not only identity, but difference 
 also. An absolute cannot be thought without a non-absolute. 
 It is the non-absolute that gives the cue to the absolute. So 
 when when we ask what a thing is which is the same as asking 
 what is it in itself we imply by the very question that it is not, 
 or why the question ? It is the non-being that gives the cue to 
 the being. Here is a crystal of salt: we ask, what is it? The 
 very question involves that as it is, it is not. Thought is itself 
 evidently just so constituted ; it has opposite poles. Nothing, 
 then, is thus a definition of the absolute. The Absolute is 
 Nothing. There is only the absolute and the non-absolute. 
 Only the synthesis is ; neither of its antitheses per se is. Pure 
 Seyn is the absolute Negative of whatever is: it is the Absolute, 
 &c. This seen in the Thing-in-itself, in God as merely abstract 
 supreme being of enlightenment, &c. The Nothing of Buddha is 
 precisely the same abstraction. We seek the universal of Being 
 by abstracting from every particular being, and the resultant 
 
70 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., E. 1. 
 
 abstraction in which we land is precisely the same entity, however 
 we name it whether Being or Nothing whether the tre supreme 
 of Voltaire or the nothing of Buddha. 
 
 What is, is thought, concrete thought, that, of itself, determines 
 itself, thus and thus. The empirical ego of you or me with 
 all its empirical realities it and these but forms of thought 
 modi of the great sea. This great sea still is, truly is, is great and 
 the all, though in me, though in you. The my and me, the you 
 and yours, the in me, the in yon, are but constituents of the sea, 
 and can be so placed as to become mere pebbles and cockle-shells 
 by it. I deceive myself, you deceive yourself: /, this /, and my, 
 and all mine, you and yours, and he and his, but mere straws 
 blowing beside the sea. It is my error a case applicable to you 
 and him, and each of us to think them me, true me. These me, 
 true me are only that ocean and that one crystal-drop, that 
 infinite of space and that one eye-gleam, that un reachable all and 
 that invisible point, that everywhere and that nowhere Thought. 
 
 Our discontent with the abstractions Seyn and Nichts arises 
 from their own proper life. They tend of themselves further, 
 that is, to further specification. This attaches to the true idea of 
 a true beginning. Freedom, as form of Nothing, shows the 
 necessity of the existence of Nothing. 
 
 Nothing is the same as Being. This is partly as taking each 
 abstractly ; but the other meaning hovers near also. The Seyn as 
 Ansichseyn is really the same as Nothing. Determinate Is, is 
 built around a womb of nothing, which womb is also called the 
 Seyn. They are thus together Becoming : what is become was not, 
 but is. The crust upon the gulf which is the womb of all, holds at 
 once of Being and of Non-being : if it is this, it is not that ; it is 
 not all, it is but part ; that is, it is limited, negated, or contains 
 Nothing quite as much as Being. Said womb, too, being the 
 absolute A and source and base of all, is the veritable is; the 
 other veritably is not, its is is elsewhere, its is is in another. 
 Every whole is similarly placed ; every whole is similarly a 
 womb of nothing and being. It is in this womb, which is 
 nothing, that it veritably is; and from it, this nothing, it is, that it 
 develops, that it draws what it is. But this drawing or develop- 
 ment is just Becoming. Becoming, then, contains both, and is 
 the truth of both. A system of monads thus, and of monads in 
 monads and a monad. 
 
 The elements of Something are reality and negation negation 
 
EXPLANATIONS, ETC. 71 
 
 that is an otherwise-being. This latter is form ; it is not the reality, 
 it is form and may vary without affecting the reality. It is thus 
 an otherwise-being of the Reality itself : it is thus the other of 
 the Eeality ; it is there where the other also finds its other, its 
 bar, its halt ; it is the general region of otherness, of distinction, 
 separation, discrimination ; it is being-for-other, as it is that of the 
 being that alone is for the other ; it is there being-for-other also 
 as regards its own self ; it is also its being by or with the other ; 
 it is there where it is wholly for the other, for distinction, &c. 
 (Realise this by reference to yourself as a Something. Your 
 naturality, your personality, is your being-for-other ; but are you 
 in any part of that person ? It is other than your reality.) Other- 
 wise-being is a predicable of each and all, for by the otherwise-being 
 only is it capable of discrimination : it is there where its being is 
 for another. 
 
 Something becomes another. This process endless, ceaseless, 
 but what is othered is just the other. The something thus retains 
 itself. It is thus the true infinite ; that, that going over into 
 another, retains, in this going over and in this other, distinct 
 reference to its own self. This the substance or substratum of 
 Kant and Spinoza. In this process, too, or in this notion of Kant 
 and Spinoza, lies Being-for-self (Fiirsichseyn), or self-reference and 
 self-retention. Despite the other and othering, that which is, still 
 is for itself and by itself, and with itself. This the true infinite 
 which remains and abides the negation of the negation the 
 mediating process of itself with itself not the bastard infinite 
 that arises from mere repetition of alternation, and ends in an 
 tibahi ' and so on ad infinitum ! ' It is our own fault if we make 
 absolute the mere other, the mere finite and changeable. 
 
 With Self-reference (Being-for-self) the principle of Ideality 
 appears ; it is here we refer to something that does not exist as 
 there or here, as a This, in outside crust, but that is ideally there 
 in the centre the substance of Spinoza, the substrate of Kant, 
 the absolute of Hegel. The finite is reality, but its truth is its 
 ideality. The infinite of the understanding even the spurious 
 one is ideal. Here we see that all philosophy, as it idealises 
 reality, is idealism. 
 
 To be for, by, and with one's own self, this is the Fiirsichseyn, 
 and it is the substance or substrate of Kant, &c. Hegel's phrase is 
 its perfect abstract expression. 
 
 One bottom principle God must be assumed ; but thus all 
 
72 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II. , E. 1. 
 
 change is quite indifferent, and the true infinite is this bottom 
 principle that abides. The surface endlessness of difference is but 
 a spurious infinite. 
 
 Self-reference is immediacy, no result of intermediacy ; it is 
 directly first and present, it is inderivative, it is uncaused ; it is A, 
 it is the first, the absolute but as negation of negation. The 
 negativity of self-reference involves the exclusion of other units 
 from the one unit; as, for example, the distinction of my me from 
 my empirical affections and experiences. The one self-reference, 
 thus the single unit flows over into many. This the vital cell 
 from which arises the whole chapter on Fiirsichseyn. This chapter 
 developing thus One and Many, Attraction and Repulsion, &c., 
 mediates the transition from Quality to Quantity, and becomes 
 itself readily intelligible. 
 
 The repulsion of the Ones will probably appear forced and 
 artificial, however perhaps, at best ingenious. To the musing 
 mind, it has a certain credibility. Suppose a subject of the 
 Werden, suppose a beginning and progressing consciousness, the 
 first thought presumably will be am, which is tantamount to is. 
 Such is is but nothing, and must give rise to such thought ; but 
 the not has also is, or positivity, that is, there becomes. But if 
 there becomes or arises, there also departs or ceases ; while, at the 
 same time, there is between both the quasi-stable moment of there 
 is there. Attention is now directed to this quasi-stable moment as 
 such. It has reality, it has cleterminateness, it implies another, it 
 becomes other, and that equally other. It is thus limited and 
 alterable; but in the midst of this, the subject, the consciousness, 
 remains by itself and for itself. It is one. But this one, as so 
 produced, as affirmative to self and negative to other, implies 
 several ones, &c. It is possible to figure what is for itself &$ some- 
 thing with qualities a crystal of salt in which case there is a 
 mean of passage from the one to the many. Absolutise this 
 crystal to the world: the one is the many, the many the one or 
 the whole of many, which is Quantity. 
 
 That there is, there must have been not. That not is is, there 
 must have been becomes. But becomes is negative positivity, or it 
 involves quality. But quality, as what it is, is reality; and as 
 what it is not, it is determinateness. But reality with determin- 
 ateness, or determinate reality, is something. Something, as far 
 as it is, as far as it has reality, is in itself; while so far as it is 
 determinate, or as far as it has form, it has an element of other- 
 
EXPLANATIONS, ETC. 73 
 
 ness ; for form is where something is other, where it may be 
 othered while it at the same time remains unaffected. Deter- 
 minateness is thus the otherwise-being of the something, it is 
 where the being of the something is with other. There also is it 
 that there is the general region of otherness the region of 
 separation, distinction, discrimination. It is there where the other 
 and all others are separated from the something. It is there 
 where the something is, in every reference, for other. It is there 
 where the something is for, by, and with its own other. The 
 two factors or constituent elements of the something, then, are 
 Ansichseyn and Seyn-fiir-Anderes, or the quality to be in self and 
 the quality to be for other ; in which latter phrase, the ' for ' is 
 equivalent to for, by, and with. Where the something is for, by, 
 and with, another, however, it is there precisely that the bound 
 or limit falls. Something thus, then, is bounded, limited, or 
 finite. It has also, as we have seen, an element of otherness in 
 itself. In fact, the other involved by limit is itself something. 
 Something then becomes something, or the other becomes other, 
 ad inftnitum. But as it is only the other that is othered, the Self 
 remains for, by, and with itself. But this Being-for-self, the true 
 Infinite, is a principle of ideality, &c. &c. One cell is thus formed 
 a self-suhsistent monad; for self-reference is self-presence or 
 immediacy. As excluding the other, it is absolute. 
 
 But even thus, must we not say Hegelianism is the crystal of 
 Naturalism ? 
 
 After all, the navel-string and mother-cake of Hegel are still 
 the desiderata. Where does he attach to ? whence is he ? Well, 
 these are multiform ; they may be found generally in the history 
 of philosophy. The absolutely first radical is sum, which, 
 objectified, becomes est and so on. Fichte's beginning can be 
 shown to lead to Hegel's, as also Schelling's principle, &c. &c. 
 Then there is a beginning findable in this way, that he just takes 
 up the actual as he finds it, and sorts it and names it in his own 
 fashion, and as it leads him. Or he says, God is the Wesen, and God 
 is a Spirit; and matter, &c., as made by him, can be called just 
 his other. He is thought ; but as having made matter, this also 
 is his that is, it is just his other. But materiality is in itself 
 just the other of spirituality: the one outer, the other inner; the 
 one extense, the other intense, &c. &c. : in fact, there are the Two. 
 
 This view not without consolation. The superior actual is 
 certainly thought, which uses up matter as mere aliment, and 
 
74 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., E. 2. 
 
 converts it into its own element. Such is the process, the trans- 
 formation of the Natural into the Spiritual. Death of the Natural 
 is a matter of course, then ; but that involves as always a 
 step higher, and there is no destruction. Again matter is itself 
 thought. The nearest actual is, after all, the subjective moment 
 of thought. The element of despair lies in the inessentiality of 
 the particular, of the singular subject. Still the singular subject 
 in himself is the Objective, &c. The sheet-anchor of hope is 
 thought. 
 
 The immortality probably no concern of Hegel's ; he is above 
 all doubt or anxiety or thought in that respect with his views of 
 Matter, Thought, Spirit, the Absolute generally. His God, then, 
 is le Dieu Absolu, that which is, but that is Thought, Spirit : moi, 
 je suis 1'Absolu ; toi, tu es 1'Absolu ; lui, il est 1'Absolu: il faut 
 que nous nous prosternions devant 1'Absolw, ce qui est notre 
 mystere, notre vie essentielle, notre vrai nous-rneme, PUniversel, 
 ce qui est, le vrai, le tout, le seul ! (The reversion to French here 
 involuntary somehow !) 
 
 E. 2. 
 
 There is a certain justification for the Hegelian God-man histori-* 
 cally, not only in the outward Christ, but in the fact that, whereas 
 formerly one's God was foreign and external to oneself in a priest, 
 &c., and to be propitiated externally by a sacrifice, by rites, &c., 
 the mind (reason) is now a law in conscience unto its own self, 
 that it obeys God in obeying itself. This, in short, is the identifi- 
 cation of man's essential reason with the Divine nature. Thus, 
 then, God is no longer an outer, an other, but within, and Us. 
 Hegel must have largely in view this historical alteration of the 
 historical standpoint. How finely he says : No proof would ever, 
 or could ever, have x been offered of God's existence, had our know- 
 ledge of and belief in such existence been obliged to wait for the 
 proof. 
 
 E EM ARK. ^ 
 
 The preceding Notes, though not to be regarded as expressive of 
 definitive conclusions in any reference, will, nevertheless, assist 
 such ; and so justify of themselves, we hope, their respite from 
 fire. They are not, we are disposed to believe, hard to understand; 
 and a reader who has any interest in the subject may be expected, 
 we 'shall say, to read them pretty well through. But this effected, 
 
GENERAL REMARK. 
 
 iere will result, surely, some amount of familiarity with a variety 
 of the leading notions and peculiar terms involved ; a familiarity 
 which must somewhat mitigate the shock of the abrupt steepness, 
 the strangeness and the difficulty of the access, which Hegel him- 
 self accords. The role to be assigned to thought as thought, for 
 example the metaphysic of a beginning, the nature of abstract 
 being, the special significations to be attached to abstraction, 
 understanding, reason, &c. all this, and other such matter, must, 
 as regards intelligibility and currency, very much gain to the 
 reader as his consideration proceeds. A slight glimpse, too, of the 
 genetic history of the subject may not be wanting. One or two of 
 the summaries, again that is, if long separation from them may 
 allow me to speak as a stranger in their regard will be found, 
 perhaps, so far 'as they go, not without spirit and not without 
 accuracy, nor yet failing, it may be, in something of that dialectic 
 nexus without which Hegel can but yield up the ghost, leaving 
 the structure he has raised to tumble all abroad into the thousand 
 disconnected / clauses of a mere etymological discursus. 
 
 To such readers as approach Hegel with prejudice and precon- 
 ceived aversion, even the objections and vituperations which we 
 have unsparingly but possibly quite gratuitously expended in 
 his regard, may prove, on a sort of homoeopathic principle, not 
 only congenial, but remedial. The ' charlatan ' of Schopenhauer 
 is, perhaps, the ugliest of all the missiles which have ever yet been 
 flung at Hegel ; but others quite as ugly will be found under C. 
 and D. of the present chapter, and. it is only the peculiarity of 
 their place^ together with the hope of service, which can excuse 
 us for exhibiting them. 
 
 On this head, it may be worth while remarking that it is quite 
 possible that Rosenkranz, who chronicles this reproach of Schopen- 
 hauer, is himself not without a certain complacency in view of the 
 same. Not improbably, even as he chronicles it, though with 
 rejection of course, he feels at the same time that there exists in 
 Hegel a side where it is at least intelligible. It was an age of 
 systems, and Hegel produced his. Nor did he feel, the while, 
 under any obligation to explain it, or account for it, or, in any way, 
 make it down. To him, it was enough that he had produced it ; 
 there it was; let the reader make what he could of it ! But just 
 here lay the difficulty ! With the others with Kant, with Fichte, 
 with Schelling there was a perceived and received beginning, 
 there was an understood method, above all, there was a un'iver- 
 
76 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., REMAKE. 
 
 sally intelligible speech. But, Hegel ! Hegel had changed all 
 that. The ball he flung down to us showed no clue ; the principles 
 that underlay the winding of it, were undiscoverable ; and what 
 professed to be the explication was a tongue unknown ; not the 
 less unknown, indeed, but the more exasperating, that it was 
 couched, for the most part, in the oldest and commonest of terms. 
 Yet still all previous great ones looking small and inferior when 
 dressed in its forms it was seen, indirectly in this and directly in 
 other respects, to involve claims and pretensions of a dominant and 
 even domineering supremacy. Nay, though at once the necessity 
 and the hopelessness of investigation were felt (necessity, in that 
 there could be no security till a competent jury had sat on that 
 laborious rope of the Hegelian categories, and, after due inspection, 
 pronounced its sufficiency ; hopelessness, in that the very nature 
 of the case seemed somehow to postpone the possibility of this 
 inquiry into an indefinite future) the very paramountcy of the 
 pretensions, the very inextricability of the proof, had, with a public 
 so prepared as then, strange power to dazzle, seduce, or overawe 
 into acquiescence. 
 
 Nor was this hid from Hegel himself ; so that there necessarily 
 arose on his part, as well as on that of his hearers, such secret con- 
 sciousness as gradually infected and undermined whatever/m?i&- 
 ness the mutual relation might have originally contained. To be 
 obliged to speak, as to be obliged to hear, what is felt to be only 
 half understood, is to be very peculiarly placed ; and the develop- 
 ment, in such circumstances, of a certain bias, of a certain 
 disingenuousness, will, in hearer as well as speaker, be hardly 
 prevented. Distrust grows in both; distrust, which assertion in 
 the one, as acceptance in the other, strives vainly to overbid. You, 
 on the one side, show possession of what is taken for a mystery of 
 price ; why blow away, then, you feel, this mystery, and conse- 
 quently this price, by any indiscreet simplicity of speech ? You, 
 on the other side, again, are credited with understanding the same; 
 and the feathers of everyone concerned are flattered the right way 
 when you smile the smile of the initiated not but that all the 
 while, to be sure, the very fibres of your midriff are cramped to 
 agony with your unavailing efforts to discern. 
 
 But there is no necessity to go so far as this in either case. The 
 bias to both, consequent on an equivocal claim, made on the one 
 hand, and granted on the other, suffices. The relations in such a 
 case are unsound, the common-ground largely factitious, and frank- 
 
GENERAL REMARK. 77 
 
 ness there can be none. What results is a readiness to fall into 
 loudness and let us say here effrontingness, over which hangs 
 ever an air of fraudulence. 
 
 Again, scholars, men of letters, are, for the most part, by original 
 constitution, and acquired habits the latter from seclusion mainly 
 that is, both in temperament and temper, keen, intense, single- 
 sighted, and precipitate ; naturally prone, therefore, to exhibit 
 a certain unsparingness, a certain inconsiderate thoroughness, a 
 certain unwitting procacity, as well in demonstrating the failures 
 of others as the successes of themselves. Now this element has 
 decided place in Hegel. This it is that prompts the unnecessary 
 bitterness of his antagonistic criticism, as in the case of Kant, 
 where, from the good, honest, sincere, moderate, and modest soul 
 that fronted him, provocation was impossible, and where, indeed, 
 grace, if not gratitude, should have reduced him to respectfulness 
 as in the presence of the quarry of his own whole wealth. 
 
 There is a side in Hegel, then, where the ' charlatan ' of Schopen- 
 hauer may have at least appeared intelligible even to Eosenkranz. 
 Nay, Rosenkranz himself, in telling us (first words of his Wissen- 
 schaft der logischen Idee) that, in his case, the study of Hegel has 
 been ' the devotion of a life, alternately attracted and repelled/ 
 virtually admits that a taint of doubt will penetrate even to the 
 simplest faith arid the most righteous inclination. On the whole, 
 the conclusion may be considered legitimate then, that, from the 
 circumstances explained, there is apt to fall on Hegel a certain air 
 as it were of an adventurer, which it takes all his own native force, 
 all his own genuine weight, all his own indisputable fulness to 
 support and carry off, even in the eyes of those who, in his regard, 
 cannot be considered superficial students. 
 
 There is that in the above which may suggest, that it is not the 
 spirit of the partisan which is to be anticipated here ; where, 
 indeed, the whole object is neither condemnation, nor vindication, 
 but simply presentation, or re-presentation. To Hegel, that is, we 
 would hold ourselves nakedly suscipient, as to the reader nakedly 
 reflectent. And this is the nearest need at present, for Hegel 
 hitherto has been but scantly understood anywhere ; receiving 
 judgments, consequently, not only premature but stupid. This 
 reminds me to say, what is hardly necessary, however, that the 
 objections and vituperations which occur in this chapter are not 
 judgments: they are but the student's travail cries. Again, it is 
 to be noted that, if we judge not against, neither do we judge here 
 
78 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. II., EEMAKK. 
 
 for, Hegel. There has beeai too much difficulty to understand, to 
 think as yet of judging; this will follow of itself, however, as soon 
 as that has been effected. There is no seeking in all this to speak 
 apologetically of Hegel ; such impertinent worldly squeamishness, 
 did it exist, were what alone required apology. Hegel wants none. 
 He is the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity, and closes the 
 modern world as Aristotle the ancient. Nor can it be doubted but 
 that much of what he has got to tell us is precisely that which is 
 adapted ' to bring peace ' in our times, peace to the unquiet hearts 
 of men, peace to the unquiet hearts of nations. 
 
 The preceding Notes, then, will, it is hoped, prove useful, and 
 constitute, on the whole, no ineffective introduction. In the suc- 
 ceeding chapters, the approach to Hegel becomes considerably 
 closer, to end, as we believe, at last in arrival. 
 
THE SECRET. 79 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF THE STRUGGLE CONTINUED: THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 A. 
 
 THE paper, from which the present chapter principally derives, 
 superscribed ' The Secret of Hegel,' and signalised by formality of 
 date, &c., has the tone of tbe contemporaneous record of some just- 
 made discovery. This discovery, if not quite complete not yet 
 'the secret' definitively home has certainly still its value, 
 especially to the advancing learner; but the tone is too spontane- 
 ous and extemporaneous to be pleasant now, and would, of itself, 
 necessitate did no interest of the learner interfere considerable 
 rescission, if not total suppression. Nevertheless, the interest of 
 the learner shall be considered paramount, and the tone shall not 
 be allowed to pretermit the paper itself: only, to avoid respective 
 suicide, we shall give such turn to its statements as shall break 
 the edge of what egoism the solitary student may exhibit to him- 
 self on emerging into the new horizon which, crowning his own 
 efforts, the new height has suddenly opened to him. 
 
 ' This morning,' it is . thus the paper a little grandiloquently 
 opens, ' the secret of Hegel has at length risen clear and distinct 
 before me, as a planet in the blue ; ' glimpses, previous glimpses, 
 with inference to the whole, it admits ; but it returns immediately 
 again to * this morning ' when ' the secret genesis of Hegel stood 
 suddenly before me/ 
 
 ' Hegel,' the paper continues, ' makes the remark that he who 
 perfectly reproduces to himself any system, is already beyond it ; 
 and precisely this is what he himself accomplished and experi- 
 enced with reference to Kant.' Now this is to be applied to the 
 writer of the paper itself, who seems to think that he too has 
 reproduced Kant, and that, accordingly, he has been ' lifted on 
 this reproduction into sight of Hegel.' But the pretension of the 
 position does not escape him. Surely, he goes on to soliloquise, 
 
80 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 be cannot consider himself the first, surely he cannot consider 
 himself the only one who has reached this vision, surely he 
 cannot have the hardihood to say that Rosenkranz and Schwegler, 
 for example, do not understand the very master in the study and 
 exposition of whom they have employed their lives ! No, he 
 cannot say that, that would be too much ; such men must be 
 held to understand Hegel, and even infinitely better than at this 
 moment he, who has still so much of the details to conquer. 
 Still, it appears, he cannot help believing that there is a certain 
 truth on his side, and that, even as regards these eminent 
 Hegelians, so far as he has read them, he himself is the first who 
 has discovered the whole secret of Hegel, and this because he is 
 the first, perhaps, to see quite clearly and distinctly into the 
 origin and genesis of his entire system from Kant. 
 
 The manner in which these writers (we allow the manuscript 
 to go on pretty much in its own way now), and others the like, 
 work is not satisfactory as regards the reproduction of a system, 
 which shall not only be correct and complete in itself, but which 
 shall have the life and truth and actual breath in it that it had to 
 its own author. Their position as regards Hegel, for example, is 
 so that, while to him his system was a growth and alive, to them 
 it is only a fabrication and dead. They take it to pieces and put 
 it up again like so much machinery, so that it has always the 
 artificial look of manufacture at will. They are Professors in 
 short, and they study philosophy and expound philosophy as so 
 much business. All that they say is academical and professional ; 
 we hear only, as it were, the cold externality of division and 
 classification for the instruction of boys. Such reproductions as 
 theirs hang piecemeal on the most visible and unsatisfactory 
 wires. They are not reproductions in fact ; they are but artificial 
 and arbitrary re-assemblages. But to re-assemble the limbs and 
 organs of the dead body of any life, is not to re-create that life, 
 and only such re-creation is it that can enable us to understand 
 any system of the past. In the core-hitting words of Hegel 
 himself, 'instead of occupying itself with the business in hand, 
 such an industry is ever over it and out of it ; instead of abiding 
 in it and forgetting itself in it, such thinking grasps ever after 
 something else and other, and remains rather by its own self than 
 that it is by the business in hand, or surrenders itself to it/ 
 
 That these men, and others the like, have very fairly studied 
 Hegel, and very fairly mastered Hegel, both in whole and detail, 
 
THE SECRET. 81 
 
 we doubt not at all ; neither do we at all doubt that many of 
 them very fairly discern the general relations, though they are 
 inclined to underrate, perhaps, the particular obligations, of Hegel 
 to Kant. Still there is something knowing all this, and ad- 
 mitting all this, and acknowledging, moreover, that no claim had 
 probably ever yet a more equivocal look, we feel still as if we 
 must in short, the claim of discovery is repeated. 
 
 For that there is a secret of Hegel, and that there is a key 
 necessary to this secret, we verily believe Rosenkranz and 
 Schwegler would themselves admit ; thereby, at all events, leav- 
 ing vacant space for us to occupy, if we can, and granting, on the 
 whole, the unsatisfactoriness which we have already imputed to 
 the statements or keys offered by themselves. Yes, there is a 
 secret, and every man feels it, and every man asks for the key to 
 it every man who approaches even so near as to look at this 
 mysterious and inexplicable labyrinth of Hegel. Where does it 
 begin, we ask, and how did it get this beginning, and what 
 unheard of thing is this which is offered us as the clue with 
 which we are to guide ourselves ? And what extraordinary 
 yawning chasms gape there where we are told to walk as on a 
 broad smooth bridge connecting what to us is unconnected and 
 incapable of connexion ! There is no air in this strange region ; 
 we gasp for breath ; and, as Hegel himself allows us to say, we 
 feel as if we were upside down, as if we were standing on our 
 heads. What then is all this ? and where did it come from ? and 
 where does it take to ? We cannot get a beginning to it ; it will 
 not join on to anything else that we have either seen or heard ; 
 and, when we throw ourselves into it, it is an element so strange 
 and foreign to us that we are at once rejected and flung out out 
 to our mother earth again, like so much rubbish that can neither 
 assimilate nor be assimilated. 
 
 Yes, something very strange and inexplicable it remains for the 
 whole world ; and yet excites so vast an interest, so intense a 
 curiosity that Academies offer rewards for explanations of it, and 
 even pay the reward, though they get no more satisfactory 
 response than that ' the curtain is the picture.' How is this ? 
 When, as it were, deputations are sent to them for the purpose, 
 how is it that his own countrymen cannot give such an intelligible 
 account of Hegel as shall enable Frenchmen and Englishmen to 
 understand what it is he really means to say ? Yet the strange 
 inconsistency of human nature ! Though this be an admitted fact 
 
82 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 now, we have heard, years ago, from his Chair, a Paris Professor 
 (Saisset) declare his conscientious hatred of Hegel, and his resolu- 
 tion to combat him to the death, and this too in the interest of 
 spiritualism ? Why the hatred, and why this resolution, if Hegel 
 were not understood ? And why treat as the enemy of spiritual- 
 ism a man whose first word and whose last is Spirit, and only for 
 the establishment of the existence of Spirit ? And in England, 
 too, we are not less inconsequent. Sir William Hamilton, even 
 years ago, was reputed to have entertained the notion that he had 
 refuted Hegel, and yet Sir William Hamilton, at that time, knew 
 so little of the position of Hegel, with whom his pretensions, 
 nevertheless, claimed evidently the most intimate relations, that 
 he classes him with Oken as a disciple of Schelling ! 
 
 Sir William Hamilton, however, is not alone here : there are 
 others of his countrymen who at least do not willingly remain 
 behind him in precipitate procacity and pretentious levity. A 
 knowledge of Kant, for example, that is adequate to the distinction 
 of speculative and regulative! feels itself still strong enough to 
 refute Hegel, having melted for itself his words into meaning at 
 length ly distilling them ! Another similar example shall tell 
 us that it knows nothing of Hegel, and yet shall immediately 
 proceed, nevertheless, to extend an express report on the Hegelian 
 system ; knowing nothing here, and telling us no more, it yet 
 shall crow over Hegel, in the most triumphant and victorious 
 fashion, vouchsafing us in the end the information that Hegel's 
 works are in twelve volumes! and whispering in our ear the 
 private opinion that Hegelianism is a kind of freemasonry, kept 
 secret by the adepts in their grudge to spare others the labour it 
 cost themselves ! 
 
 Besides these German scholars who, in England, are situated 
 thus with respect to Hegel, there is another class who, unable to 
 read a word of German, will yet tell you, and really believe they 
 are speaking truth the while, that they know all about Kant 
 and Hegel, and the whole subject of German Philosophy. This 
 class grounds its pretensions on General Literature. They have 
 read certain review articles, and perhaps even certain historical 
 summaries ; and, knowing what is there said on such and such 
 subjects, they believe they know these subjects. There never was 
 a greater mistake ! To sum up a man, and say he is a Pantheist, 
 is to tell you not one single thing about him. Summaries only 
 propagate ignorance, when used independently, and not merely rela- 
 
THE SECRET. 83 
 
 tively, as useful synopses and reminders to those who have already 
 thoroughly mastered the whole subject in the entirety of its details. 
 
 A large class say, we do not want to go into the bottom of 
 these things, we only want a general idea of them, we only want 
 to be well-informed people. This does not appear unreasonable on 
 the whole, and there are departments of knowledge where general 
 ideas can be given, and where these ideas can be used very 
 legitimately in general conversation. But such general ideas are 
 entirely impracticable as regards the modern philosophical systems. 
 No general idea can convey these ; they must be swallowed in 
 whole and in every part intellectually swallowed. We must pick 
 up every crumb of them, else we shall fare like the Princess in the 
 Arabian story, who is consumed to ashes by her necromantic 
 adversary, because unhappily she had failed to pick up, when in 
 the form of a bird, all the fragments which her enemy, in the 
 course of their contest, had tumbled himself asunder into. 
 
 To say Kant's is the Transcendental or Critical Idealism ; 
 Fichte's, the Subjective Idealism; Schelling's, the Objective 
 Idealism ; and Hegel's, the Absolute Idealism : this is as nearly as 
 possible to say nothing ! And yet people knowing this much and 
 no more will converse, and discourse, and perorate, and decide 
 conclusively upon the whole subject. 
 
 No : it is much too soon to shut up these things in formulae and 
 there leave them. These things must be understood before we 
 can allow ourselves such perfunctoriness ; and to be understood, 
 they must first be lived. Indeed, is not this haste of ours 
 nowadays, and yet this glaum and grasp of ours at comprehensive- 
 ness, productive of most intolerable evils ? For instance, is it not 
 veritable injustice of Emerson to talk of Hume as if his only 
 title to consideration arose from a lucky thought in regard to 
 causality ? Does not such an example as this show the evil of 
 our overhasty formulating ? He who believes that even Hume 
 has been yet thoroughly understood, formulated, and superseded, 
 will make a mistake that will have very detrimental effects on his 
 own development. 
 
 These well-informed men, then, who conceive themselves 
 privileged to talk of Kant and Hegel, because they have read the 
 literary twaddle that exists at this present in their regard, would 
 do well to open their eyes to the utter nothingness of such an 
 acquirement in respect to such subjects. In reference to Hegel, 
 Professor Terrier sums up very tolerably correctly in the words 
 
84 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 already quoted;* l Who has ever yet uttered one intelligible word 
 about Hegel? Not any of his countrymen, not any foreigner, 
 seldom even himself, &c.' Different from the rest, Mr Terrier, 
 like a man of sense, does not proceed, immediately after having 
 uttered such & finding as this, to refute Hegel. When we hear of 
 the worthy old Philister of an Edinburgh Professor, who, regularly 
 as the year came round, at a certain part of his course, announced 
 with the grave alacrity of self-belief in sight of one of its strong 
 points, ' I shall now proceed to refute the doctrines of our late 
 ingenious townsman, Mr David Hume/ we laugh, and it seems 
 quite natural and reasonable now to all of us that we should 
 laugh. But how infinitely more strongly fortified is the position 
 of the old Edinburgh Professor, relatively to Hume, than that of 
 the (so to speak) new Edinburgh Professor (Sir William Hamilton 
 say), relatively to Hegel ? Hume's writing is intelligible to the 
 meanest capacity, so to speak; Hegel's, impenetrable to the 
 highest. We know that the old Professor could understand the 
 man he opposed so far, at least, as the words are concerned ; we 
 know that the new could not understand Hegel, even so far as the 
 words are concerned. We know this, for he admits this; and 
 even asks ' But did Hegel understand himself ? ' 
 
 Here is the secret of Hegel, or rather a schema to a key to it : 
 Quantity Time and Space Empirical Eealities. 
 This, of course, requires explanation. We suppose the reader 
 to have mastered Kant through the preceding reproduction of his 
 system.-)- Well, if so, he will have little difficulty in realising to 
 himself the fact that what we give as a schema to the secret of 
 Hegel, is a schema of the whole Theoretic system of Kant in its 
 main and substantial position. Quantity stands for the Categories 
 in general, though it is here still looked at specially. Quantity, 
 then, is an intellectual thought or Begriff, it is wholly abstract, it 
 is wholly logical form. But in Time and Space, we have only 
 another form of Quantity ; it is the same thought still, though in 
 them in a state of outwardness ; the Category is inward Quantity ; 
 the Perception is entirely the same thing outwardly. Then 
 
 * See Preface, p. xxx. 
 
 f The allusion is to a MS. The reader will necessarily be disappointed with this 
 same schema to a key to the secret ; he will necessarily find it very meagre, very 
 abstract. He will think better of it by and by, however, it is hoped ; as it is also 
 hoped that after the full discussion of the subject as in relation to Kant, it will 
 appear anything but meagre, and anything but abstract. (I may add now that 
 the Text-Book to Kant represents the mentioned MS. New.) 
 
THE SECRET. 85 
 
 Empirical Eealities, so far as they are Quantities (what is other 
 than Quantity in them has other Categories to correspond to it), 
 are but a further potentiating of the outwardness of the thought 
 Quantity, but a further materialisation, so to speak. Here lies 
 the germ of the thought of Hegel that initiated his whole system. 
 The universe is but a materialisation, but an externalisation, but a 
 heterisation of certain thoughts : these may be named, these 
 thoughts are, the thoughts of God. 
 
 To take it so, God has made the world on these thoughts. In 
 them, then, we know, the thoughts of God, and, so far, God 
 himself. Probably too, we may suppose Hegel to say, Kant has 
 not discovered all the categories, could I but find others, could I 
 find all of them, I should know then all the thoughts of God that 
 presided at the creation of the universe. But that would just be 
 so far to know God himself, God as he is ' in truth and without 
 veil ' (' Hiille,' best translated just hull here), that is, in his inward 
 thought, without wrappage (hull or husk) of outward material 
 form, God as he is in his * eternal essence before the creation of 
 the world and any finite Spirit.' 
 
 These Categories of Kant are general Thoughts. Time and 
 Space are, according to Kant himself, but the ground-multiples, 
 and still a priori, in which these categories repeat or exemplify 
 themselves ; and after the fashion of, firstly, these ground-unities 
 (the categories), and, secondly, these CL. priori ground-multiples of 
 the same (time and space), must, thirdly, all created things 
 manifest themselves. Kant conceived these relations subjectively, 
 or from the point of view of our thought. Hegel conceives them 
 objectively, or from the point of view of all thought. Kant said : 
 We do not know what the things are, or what the things are 
 in themselves (this is what is meant by the thing-in-itself), for 
 they must be received into us through media, and, being so 
 received into us, they, so far as we are concerned, cease, so to 
 speak, to be themselves, and are only affections of our sense, 
 which become further worked up, but unknown to ourselves, in 
 our intellectual region, into a world objective, in that it constitutes 
 what we know and perceive, and what we all know and perceive, 
 and, what, in the intellectual element being capable there, but 
 not in that of sense, of comparison, we can all agree upon (the 
 distinctive feature of the only valuable meaning of objective) 
 but subjective (as dependent simply on the peculiar construction of 
 us) in its whole origin and fundamental nature. 
 
86 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. 111., A. 
 
 Hegel, for his part, will not view these principles of pure 
 thought and pure sense as only subjective, as attributes that 
 belong to us, and are only in us, as attributes only human : he 
 considers them, on the contrary, as absolutely universal general 
 principles on which, and according to which, the all or whole is 
 formed and fashioned. The universe is one; and the principles of 
 its structure are thoughts exemplifying themselves in pure a priori 
 forms of sense, and, through these again, in empirical objects. 
 These empirical objects, then, are thus but as bodies to thoughts, 
 or, rather, as material schemes and illustrations of intellectual 
 notions. They are thus, then, externalised, materialised, or, better, 
 lieterised thoughts, (i.e.) thoughts in another form or mode ; that 
 is, they are but the other of thought. Nay, the pure forms of 
 sense, these pure multiples or manys, named Space and Time, are, 
 themselves, but thoughts or notions in another form. Time in its 
 succession of parts, and Space in such succession of parts, each is 
 but perceptively what the notion Quantity is intellectually. They, 
 then, too, are but thoughts in another form, and must rank, so far, 
 with the empirical objects. We have thus, then, now the Universe 
 composed only of Thought and its Other: thought meaning all the 
 notions which we find implied in the structure of the world, all the 
 thoughts, as we may express it otherwise, which were in God's mind 
 when he formed the world, and according to which he formed the 
 world, for God is a Spirit and thinks, and the forms of his thinking 
 must be contained in his work. Nay, as God is a Spirit and thinks, 
 his work can only be thought ; as God is a Spirit and thinks, the 
 forms of his thinking must be, can only be That which is. In 
 correct parlance, in rigorous accuracy, only God is. It is absurd to 
 suppose the world other than the thought of God. The world 
 then is thought, and not matter ; and, looked at from the proper 
 side, it will show itself as such. But a judicious use of the 
 schema of Kant enables us to do this. 
 
 Quantity Time and Space Material Forms. 
 
 Here is thought simply passing into types, into symbols that 
 is, only into forms or modes of its own self. Properly viewed, 
 then, the world is a system of thought, here abstract and there 
 concrete. To that extent, this view is pantheistic ; for the world 
 is seen as the thought of God, and so God. But, in the same way, 
 all ordinary views are pantheistic ; for to each of them, name 
 itself as it may, the world is the work of God, and so God : as 
 the work of God, it is the product of his thought, the product 
 
THE SECRET. 87 
 
 of himself, and so himself. The pantheism of Hegel, then, is 
 only a purer reverence to God than the pantheism of ordinary 
 views, which, instead of hating Hegel, ought to hate only that 
 materialism with which these ordinary views would seek to con-~ 
 found Hegel, but to which lie is the polar opposite, to which he 
 nourishes a holier hatred than they themselves. 
 
 Here, then, we have arrived at the general conception of the 
 system of Hegel : but this is, by a long way, not enough. Such 
 general conception is the bridge that connects Hegel to the 
 common ground of History, so that he is no longer insulated 
 and unreachable, but can now be passed to in an easy and 
 satisfactory manner. We see now that what he has to say 
 springs from what preceded it ; we now know what he is about 
 arid what he aims at ; and we can thus follow him with intelli- 
 gence and satisfaction. But it is necessary to know a Hegel 
 close. 
 
 Kant had the idea, then, but he did not see all that it con- 
 tained, and it was quite useless so long as it remained in the 
 limited form of principles of human thought. But Hegel him- 
 self, perhaps, could not have universalised or objectivised these 
 principles of Kant, had he not been assisted by Eichte and 
 Schelling. Kant showed that our world was a system of 
 sensuous affection woven into connexion by the understanding, 
 and, principally, by its universal nations, the categories. But 
 Kant conceived these sensuous affections to be produced by 
 the thing-in-itself or things in themselves, which, however, we 
 could not know. Fichte now, seeing that these things in them- 
 selves were absolutely bare, naked, and void mere figments of 
 thought, in fact conceived they might safely be omitted as 
 suppositions, as not at all necessary to the fact, from which we 
 might just as well begin at once, without feigning something 
 quite unknown and idle as that beginning. All now, then, was 
 a system of thought, and as yet subjective or human thought. 
 For this seemingly baseless and foundationless new world, a 
 fulcrum was found in the nature of self-consciousness. 
 
 Till self-consciousness acts, no one can have the notion * I/ 
 no one can be an ' I.' In other words, no one knows himself an 
 ' I,' feels himself 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 
 
88 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 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 1 is self-create, then. 'I' start into 
 existence, come into life, on the very first act of self-conscious- 
 ness. ' I ' then (' I ' was not an ' I ' before) am the product 
 of my own act, of my own self-consciousness. 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 f I ' 
 to itself, and with the very first act of self-consciousness ' I ' 
 begins. (We may say, too, what is, but is not to itself * I,' is 
 as good as is not which, properly considered, is another clue to 
 Hegel.) Here, then, is something self-created, and it is placed 
 as the tortoise under this new world ; for it is from this point 
 that Fichte attempts to deduce, by means of a series of opera- 
 tions of the thought of this ' I/ the whole concretion of the 
 universe. Although Fichte attained to a certain generality by 
 stating his Ego to be the universal and not the individual Ego, 
 still a certain amphiboly was scarcely to be avoided; and the 
 system remained airy, limited, and unsatisfactory. 
 
 Fichte had developed the outward world from the Ego, as the 
 inferable contradictory of the latter that is, as the Non-ego ; 
 but Schelling now saw that the Non-ego was as essential a 
 member in the whole as the Ego ; and he was led thus to place 
 the two side by side, as equal, and, so to speak, parallel. Thus 
 he came to the thought, that if from the Ego we can go to the 
 Non-ego, it will be possible to pass through the same series 
 reverse-wise, or from the Non-ego back to the Ego. That is, 
 if we can develop Nature from Thought, we may be able also 
 to find Thought the laws and forms of Thought in Nature 
 itself. It is evident that Thought and Nature would be thus 
 but two poles, two complementary poles, the one of Ideality, 
 the other of Eeality. But this conception of two poles neces- 
 sarily introduced also the notion of a centre in which they 
 would cohere. This middle-point would thus be the focus, the 
 supporting centre, from which all would radiate. That is to 
 say, this middle-point would be the Absolute. But the absolute 
 so conceived is a neutrum ; it is neither ideal nor real, it is 
 wholly indefinite and indeterminate. No wonder that to Oken, 
 then, it presented itself as, and was named by him, the Null. 
 But the general conception of an absolute and neutrum operated 
 with fertility in another direction. Every 'I' is just an 'I/ 
 
THE SECRET. X^ CAl 89 
 
 and so we can throw aside the idea of subjectivity, and think 
 of the absolute 'I': but the absolute 'I' is Reason. Eeason is 
 ascribed to every man as that which constitutes his ego ; we 
 can thus conceive Keason as per se, as independent of this par- 
 ticular subject and that particular subject, and as common to 
 all. We can speak of Eeason, then, as now not subjective but 
 objective. This new neutrum, this new absolute, it could not 
 now cost much difficulty to identify and set equal with the 
 former neutrum, or absolute, that was the centre of coherence 
 to ideality and reality. But in Schelling's hands, supposing it to 
 have been originally his own, it remained still wholly indefinite, 
 vacuous, idle : it required, in short, the finishing touch of Hegel. 
 
 We can conceive now how Hegel was enabled to get beyond 
 the limited subjective form of Kant's mere system of human 
 knowledge, and convert that system into something universal 
 and objective. The thing-in-itself had disappeared, individuals 
 had disappeared ; there remained only an absolute, and this 
 absolute was named Eeason. But Hegel could see this absolute 
 was a neutrum, this reason was a neutrum ; they were but names, 
 and not one whit better than the thing-in-itself. But were the 
 categories completed, were they co-articulated were they taken, 
 not subjectively as man's, but objectively as God's, objectively 
 just as Thought itself were this organic and organised whole 
 then substituted for the idle and empty absolute neutrum of 
 Schelling, the thing would be done ; what was wanted would 
 be effected; there would result an absolute not idle and void, 
 not unknown and indefinite, but an absolute identified with 
 truth itself, and with truth in the whole system of its details. 
 The Neutrum, the Eeason, the Absolute of Schelling could be 
 rescued from indeterminateness, from vacuity, from the nullity 
 of a mere general notion, by setting in its place the Categories 
 of Kant (but completed, &c.) as the thing, which before had been 
 the name, Eeason. You speak of Eeason, says Hegel to Schelling, 
 but here it actually is, here I show you what it is, here I bring it.* 
 
 As yet, however, we still see only the general principle of Hegel, 
 and the connexion in which it stands with, or the connexion in 
 which it arose from, the labours of his predecessors. But such 
 mere general principle is quite unsatisfactory. This, in fact, 
 explains why summaries and the mere literature of the subject are 
 
 * This is still to be supposed true, though, of course, both Fichte and Schelling 
 had each his own statement of the categories. (New.) 
 
90 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 so insufficient: the general principle remains an indefinite word 
 a name merely till it gets the core and meaning and life of the 
 particular. Probably the very best summary ever yet given of 
 Kant is that of Schwegler, and it is very useful to him who already 
 knows Kant ; but good as it is, it is only literature (see the vast 
 difference between literary naming, and living, struggling, working 
 thought, by comparing Schwegler's statement of Kant with Hegel's 
 in the Encyclopaedia !) it only characterises, it does not reproduce, 
 and it is impossible for any one to learn Kant thence. We must 
 see Hegel's principle closer still, then, if we would thoroughly 
 understand it. We take a fresh departure then : 
 
 Quantity Time and Space Empirical Objects. 
 
 I have conceived by this scheme the possibility of presenting 
 the world as a concrete whole so and so constituted, articulated, 
 and rounded. But I have not done this I have only conceived 
 it : that is, I have not demonstrated my conception ; I have not 
 exhibited an actuality to which it corresponds. How set to work 
 to realise this latter necessity, then ? The abstract, universal 
 thoughts, which underlie the whole, and on which Kant has struck 
 as categories, are evidently the first thing. I must not content 
 myself with those of Kant; I must satisfy myself as to whether 
 there are not others. In fact, I must discover all the categories. 
 But even should I discover all the categories, would that suffice ? 
 Would there be anything vital or dynamical in a mere catalogue 
 Must I not find a principle to connect them the one with the 
 other a principle in accordance with which the one shall flow from 
 the other ? Kant, by the necessity he has proclaimed of an archi- 
 tectonic principle, has rendered it henceforth for ever impossible for 
 us to go to work rhapsodically, contented with what things come 
 to hand, and as they come to hand. By the same necessity he has 
 demonstrated the insufficiency of his own method of uniting the 
 elements of his matter the method of ordinary discussion, that is, 
 of what Hegel invariably designates raisonnement. This raisonne- 
 ment suppose we translate it reasonment is by Kant's own 
 indirect showing no longer applicable where strict science, where 
 rigorous deduction is concerned. Mere reasoning good sense, that 
 simply begins, and ends, and marches as it will, limited by nothing 
 but the necessity of being such as will pass current, that is, such 
 as begins from the beginning conventionally thought or accepted 
 by the common mind, and passes on by a like accepted method of 
 ground after ground or reason after reason, which similarly approves 
 
THE SECRET. 91 
 
 itself to the common mind, almost on the test of tasting, is no 
 longer enough. There is conviction now only in rigorous deduc- 
 tion from a rigorously established First. No ; after the hints of 
 Kant, mere reasonment or intelligent discussion hither and thither, 
 from argument to argument, ungrounded in its beginning, unse- 
 cured by necessity in its progress, will no longer answer. We are 
 now bound to start from a ground, a principium, an absolutely first 
 and inderivative. It will not do to start from an absolutely form- 
 less, mere abstract conception named by what would be serene 
 philosophical wisdom, but what is really, with all its affectation, 
 with all its airs of infallibility, mere thin superficiality and barren 
 purism First Cause, &c. : Reason will not stop there. Should we 
 succeed in tracing the series of conditions up to that, we should 
 not remain contented : the curiosity of what we name our reason 
 would stir still, and set us a-wondering and a-wondering as to 
 what could be the cause, what could be the beginning of the first 
 cause itself. Philosophy, in short, is the universe thought; and 
 the universe will not be fully thought, if the first cause, &c., 
 remain unthought. 
 
 To complete philosophy, then, we must not only be able to think 
 man, and the world in which he finds himself, but what we name 
 God also. Only so can we arrive at completion ; only so can the 
 all of things be once for all thought, and thus at length philosophy 
 perfected. How are we to think a beginning to God, then ? It 
 all lies in our scheme : Quantity Trme and Space Empirical 
 Objects. 
 
 Quantity, standing for the categories in general, though itself 
 but a single and even a subordinate category, is Reason, that but 
 repeats itself in its other, Time and Space, and through these again 
 in Empirical Objects. Reason, then, is the thing of things, the 
 secret and centre of the whole. But Reason can be only fully 
 inventoried, when we have fully inventoried the categories. But 
 when we have done so, is it reasonable to suppose that they will 
 remain an inventory, a catalogue ? Is it not likely that, as in 
 their sum they constitute Reason, they will be held together by 
 some mutual bond, and form in themselves, and by themselves, a 
 complete system, an organised unity, with a life and perfection of 
 its own ? Nay, even in Kant, even in the meagre discussion of 
 the categories which he supplies, are there not hints that suggest 
 an inward connexion between them ? Kant himself deduces 
 Action, Power, Substance, &c., from Causality ; and in his discus- 
 
92 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 sion of Substance and Accident, do not similar inward connexions 
 manifest themselves ? Even in Kant, though he conceives them 
 as merely formal, and as absolutely void till filled by the multiple 
 of, first, perception and then sense, they are seen to be more than 
 formal ; they are seen even in themselves, even abstractly taken 
 to possess a certain characteristic nature : even thus they seem 
 to manifest the possession of certain properties the possession, in 
 short, of what Hegel calls Inhalt ; a certain contained substance 
 matter, essence ; a certain filling of manifestible action, a certain 
 Bestimiming in the sense not only of vocation and destination, but 
 of possessing within themselves the principles which conduct to 
 that end or destiny. 
 
 This word Inhalt we shall translate /?itent ; and this meaning 
 will be found in the end to accord sufficiently with its common one. 
 Gehalt, in like manner, will be translated Content ; and we, in 
 starting with Intent and Content in England, are not one whit 
 worse off than Hegel himself was in starting with Inhalt and 
 Gehalt in Germany. Use will make plain. The categories, then, 
 even abstractly and apart from sense, may be supposed to possess 
 a certain natural Intent, a certain natural filling, and so a certain 
 natural life and movement of their own. 
 
 Let me, then, we may suppose Hegel to continue, but find the 
 complete catalogue of the categories, and with that the secret prin- 
 ciple on which they will rank, range and develop themselves ; 
 let me effect this, and then I shall have perfectly a pure concrete 
 Eeason, pure because abstract, in the sense that abstraction is made 
 from all things of sense, and that we are alone here with what is 
 intellectual only, but concrete, in the sense that we have here a 
 mutually co-articulated, a completed, an organic, a living whole 
 Eeason as it is in its own pure self, without a particle of matter, 
 and so, to that extent and considering the source of that Eeason, 
 God as he is without hull, before the creation of the world or a 
 single finite intelligence. Nay, why demand more ? Why crave 
 a Jenseits, a Beyond, to what we have ? Why should not that be 
 the all ? Why should we not, realising all that we anticipate by 
 the method suggested why should we not realise to ourselves the 
 whole universe in its absolute oneness and completeness, and with 
 the whole wealth of its inner mutual interdependent and co-arti- 
 culated elements ? Why not conceive an absolute Now and Here 
 Eternity the Idea, the concrete Idea that which is the 
 Absolute, the All ? We see the universe we find the eternal 
 
THE SECRET. 93 
 
 principles of thought on which it rests which constitute it ; why 
 then go further ? Why feign more a Jenseits, an unknown, that is 
 simply a Jenseits and an unknown, an unreachable, an unexistent ? 
 No ; let us but think the universe truly, and we shall have truljr 
 entered into possession of the universal life, and of a world that 
 needs no Indian tortoise for its pedestal and support. Pantheism ! 
 you call out. Well, let it be pantheism, if it be pantheism to show 
 and demonstrate that God is all in all that in him we live, move, 
 and have our being that he is substance and that he is form, that 
 he is the Absolute and the Infinite ! 
 
 But conditioned cannot understand the unconditioned, you say ; 
 the contingent cannot understand the absolute, finite cannot under- 
 stand the infinite ; and in proof thereof you open certain boys' 
 puzzle-boxes of Time and Space, and impale me on the horns of 
 certain infantile dilemmas. Well, these wonderful difficulties you 
 will come to blush at yourselves, when you shall have seen for 
 yourselves, and shall have simply endeavoured to see what I, 
 Hegel, have given you to see. 
 
 But what difficulty is there in the Infinite ? Let us go to fact, 
 and not trouble ourselves with fictions and chimeras. Let us have 
 things, and not logical forms (using this last phrase simply as it is 
 now generally understood), and that is the business of philosophy, 
 and this it is that you simply fail to see in my case ; that I give 
 you things, namely, and not words ; that I conduct you face to 
 face with the world as it is, and ask^you to look into it : let us 
 have things, then, and where is the difficulty of the Infinite ? Is 
 not the Infinite that which is ? Is there any other infinite than 
 that which is ? Has not that which is been from all eternity, and 
 will it not be to all eternity ? Is not the Infinite, then, that which 
 is ? And what are we sent here for ? Are we sent here simply 
 to dig coals and drink wine, and get, each of us, the most we can 
 for our own individual vanity and pride, and then rot ? What, 
 after all, is the business of man here ? To advance in civilisation, 
 you say. Well, is civilisation digging coals and drinking wine, &c. ; 
 or is civilisation thought and the progress of thought ? Is there 
 anything of any real value in the end but thinking ? Even in 
 good feelings, what is the core and central life ? Is it not the good 
 thought that is in them ? There is no feeling worthy of the name 
 (tickling the soles of the feet, for example, is not worthy of the 
 name) but is as dew around an idea ; and it is this idea which 
 glances through it and gives it its whole reality and life. We are 
 
94 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 sent here to think, then that is admitted. But what are we sent 
 to think ? Why, what but that which is and this is infinite ! 
 Our business here, then, even to use your own language, is to think 
 the Infinite. And where is the difficulty, if the instrument with 
 which you approach the Infinite thought be itself infinite ? Is 
 it not thought to thought? Why should not thought be able to 
 put its finger on the pulse of the Infinite, and tell its rhythmus 
 and its movement and its life, as it is, and ever has been, and ever 
 will be ? 
 
 And the Absolute ! It is impossible to reach the Absolute ! 
 What, then, is the Absolute ? Bring back your eyes from those 
 puzzle-boxes of yours (Space and Time), which should be no 
 puzzle-boxes, if, as you say you do, you understand and accept 
 the teaching of Kant in their very respect ; bring back your eyes 
 from those puzzle-boxes bring them back from looking so hope- 
 lessly vacuously into it is nothing else your own navel and 
 just see what is the Absolute ? What does thought, in any one 
 case whatever of its exercise, but seek the Absolute ? Thought, 
 even in common life, when it asks why the last beer is sour, the 
 new bread bitter, or its best clothes faded, seeks the Absolute. 
 Thought, when it asked why an apple fell, sought the Absolute and 
 found it, at least so far as outer matter is concerned. Thought, 
 when, in Socrates, it interrogated the Particular for the General, 
 many particular valours for the one universal valour, many 
 particular virtues for the one universal virtue, sought the Absolute, 
 and founded that principle of express generalisation and conscious 
 induction which you yourself thankfully accept, though you 
 ascribe it to another. Thought in Hume, when it asked the secret 
 foundation of the reason of our ascription of effects to causes, 
 sought the Absolute ; and if he did not find it, he put others, of 
 whom I Hegel am the last, on the way to find it. What since the 
 beginning of time, what in any corner of the earth, has philosophy, 
 has thinking ever considered, but the Absolute ? When Thales 
 said water, it was the Absolute he meant. The Absolute is the 
 fire of Anaximenes. The numbers of Pythagoras, the one of 
 Parmenides, the flux of Heraclitus, the vovg of Anaxagoras, the 
 substance of Spinoza, the matter of Condillac, what are all these 
 but names that would designate and denote the Absolute ? What 
 does science seek in all her inquiries ? Is it not explanation ? 
 Is not explanation the assigning of reasons ? Are not these 
 reasons in the form of Principles ? Is not each principle to all 
 
THE SECilET. 95 
 
 the particulars it subsumes, the Absolute ? And when will ex- 
 planation be complete, when will all reasons be assigned ? When 
 but when we have seen the ultimate principle ? and the 
 ultimate principle, whether in the parts or in the whole, may 
 surely be named the Absolute. To tell us we cannot reach the 
 Absolute, is to tell us not to think ; and we must think, for we 
 are sent to think. To live is to think ; and to think is to seek 
 an ultimate principle, and that is the Absolute. Nor have we 
 anything to think but that which is, which is the Infinite. Merely 
 to live, then, is to think the Infinite, and to think the Infinite is 
 to seek the Absolute ; for to live is to think. Your Absolute and 
 your Infinite may be, and I doubt not are, quite incomprehensible, 
 for they are the chimeras of your own self-will ; whereas I confine 
 myself to the realms of fact and the will of God. So on such points 
 one might conceive Hegel to speak. 
 
 Eeason, then, and the things of Sense, constitute the universe. 
 But the things of Sense are but types, symbols, metaphors of 
 Reason are but Reason in another form, are but the other of 
 Reason. We have the same thing twice : here, inward or in- 
 tellectual ; and there, outward or sensuous. By inward and 
 intellectual, however, it is not necessary to mean what pertains 
 to the human subject : the inward and intellectual to which we 
 allude, is an inward and intellectual belonging not specially to 
 human beings as such, but an inward and intellectual in the form 
 of universal principles of reason, which constitute the diamond 
 net into the invisible meshes of which the material universe 
 concretes itself. Reason, then, is evidently the principle of the 
 whole, the Absolute, for it is Itself and the Other. This, then, is 
 the general form of the universal principle of the pulse that 
 stirs the all of things. That, which being itself and its other, 
 reassumes this other into its own unity. This, the general 
 principle, will also be the particular, and will be found to apply 
 to all and every subsidiary part and detail. 
 
 Nay, what is this, after all, but another name for the method of 
 Fichte that method by which he sought to deduce the all of 
 things from the inherent nature of the universal ego ? His method 
 is Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis ; or, in Hegel's phraseology 1, 
 Reason ; 2, its other ; 3, Reason and its other. Now this, though 
 summing up the whole, has a principle of movement in it, when 
 applied, by which all particulars are carried up ever towards the 
 general unity and completeness of the whole. 
 
96 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 If we are right in this idea, and if we but find all the categories, 
 we shall find these flowing out of each other on this principle in 
 such wise that we have only to look on in order to see the genesis 
 of organic Eeason as a self-supported, self-maintained, self- 
 moved life, which is the all of things, the ultimate principle, the 
 Absolute. Supposing, then, the whole of reason thus to co- 
 articulate and form itself, but independently of Sense, and to that 
 extent abstractly, though in itself an intellectual concrete, it will 
 not be difficult to see that it is only in obedience to the inherent 
 nature, the inherent law, that, raised into entire completion in 
 this abstract form, it now of necessity passes as a whole into its 
 Other, which is Nature. For Nature, as a whole, is but the other 
 of Eeason as a whole, and so always they must mutually correlate 
 themselves. It is mere misconstruction and misapprehension to 
 ask how the one passes into the other to ask for the transition of 
 the one into the other. What we have before us here is not a 
 mundane succession of cause and effect (such mundane successions 
 have elsewhere their demonstrated position and connexion), but it 
 is the Absolute, that which is, and just so do we find that which 
 is, constituted. That which is, is at once Reason and Nature, but 
 so that the latter is but the other of the former. 
 
 If, then, we have correlated and co-articulated into a whole, 
 the subordinate members or moments of Reason, it is evident that 
 the completed system of Reason, now as a whole, as a one, will 
 just similarly comport itself to its other, which is Nature. In 
 like manner, too, as we found Reason per se to constitute a system, 
 an organised whole of co-articulated notions, so we shall find 
 Nature also to be a correspondent whole correspondent, that is, 
 to Reason as a whole, and correspondent in its constitutive parts or 
 moments to the constitutive parts or moments of Reason. The 
 system of Nature, too, being completed, it is only in obedience to 
 the general scheme that Reason will resume Nature into its own 
 self, and will manifest itself as the unity, which is Spirit, and 
 which is thus at length the final form and the final appellation 
 of the Absolute : the Absolute is Spirit. And Spirit, too, 
 similarly looked at and watched, will be found similarly to 
 construct and constitute itself, till at last we shall reach the 
 notion of the notion, and be able to realise, in whole and in part, 
 the Idea, that which is, the Absolute.* And, on this height, it 
 
 * "From the logical Idea the concrete Idea is distinguished as Spirit, and the 
 absolutely concrete Idea as the absolute Spirit" (Hegel, WW. xvii. 172). (New.) 
 
THE SECRET. 97 
 
 will be found that it is with perfect intelligence we speak of 
 Reason, of the Idea, thus : 
 
 ' The single thought which philosophy brings with it to the study of history 
 is simply that of Keason : that it is Reason that rules the world ; that, in the 
 history of the world, it is Eeason which events obey. This thought, with 
 respect to history, is a presupposition, but not with respect to philosophy. 
 There by Speculative Science is it proved that Reason and this term shall 
 suffice us on this occasion without any nearer discussion of the reference and 
 relation involved to God that Reason is the substance as well as the infinite 
 power, the infinite matter as well as the infinite form, of all natural and 
 spiritual life. The substance is it, that, namely, whereby and wherein all 
 Actuality has being and support. The infinite power is it, in that it is not so 
 impotent as to be adequate to an ideal only, to something that only is to be 
 and ought to be not so impotent as to exist only on the outside of reality, 
 who knows where, as something special and peculiar in the heads of certain 
 men. The infinite matter is it, entire essentiality and truth, the stuff, the 
 material, which it gives to its own activity to work up ; for it requires not, 
 like functions of the finite, the conditions of external and material means 
 whence it may supply itself with aliment and objects of activity. So to speak, 
 at its own self it feeds, and it is itself and for itself the material which itself 
 works up. It is its own presupposition and its own absolute end, and for 
 itself it realises this end out of the inner essence into the outer form of the 
 natural and spiritual universe. That this Idea is the True, the Eternal, the 
 absolutely Capable, that it reveals itself in the world, and that nothing reveals 
 itself there but it, its honour and glory : this, as has been said, is what is 
 proved in philosophy, and is here assumed.' * 
 
 Such, then, we believe to be the s&cret origin and constitution 
 of the system of Hegel. We do not say, and Hegel does not say, 
 that it is complete, and that no joining gapes. On the contrary, 
 in the execution of the details, there will be much that will give 
 pause. Still in this execution we may say as much as this on 
 our own account all the great interests of mankind have been 
 kindled into new lights by the touch of this master-hand ; and 
 surely the general idea is one of the hugest that ever curdled in 
 the thought of man. Hegel, indeed, so far as abstract thought is 
 concerned, and so far as one can see at this moment, seems to 
 have closed an era, and has named the all of things in such 
 terms of thought as will, perhaps, remain essentially the same 
 for the next thousand years. To all present outward appearance, 
 at least, what Aristotle was to ancient Greece, Hegel is to 
 modern Europe. 
 
 We must see the obligations of Hegel to his predecessors, 
 
 * Hegel, Phil, of Hist., 3rd edition, pp. 12, 13. 
 
98 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 however, and among these, whatever may be due to Fichte and 
 Schelling, Kant must be named the quarry. Still it is to be 
 remarked that Hegel did not content himself with these, but 
 that he subjected the whole wisdom of the ancients, and the 
 whole history of philosophy, to a most thorough and searching 
 inquest. And not that only : Hegel must not be conceived as a 
 worker among books alone ; the actual universe as it is in history 
 and present life was the real object of his study, and, as it mani- 
 fested itself, his system had also to adapt itself; and never, 
 perhaps, was the all of things submitted to a more resistless 
 understanding. 
 
 Still the secret of Kant is the secret of Hegel also : it is the 
 notion and only the notion which realises, that is, which trans- 
 mutes into meaning arid perception, the particulars of sense. 
 That the ego together with the method of Fichte, and the 
 neutrum together with the correlated ideal and real of Schelling, 
 also contributed much, no one can doubt. We can see, too, the 
 corroborative decision he derived from his profound and laborious 
 analysis of the ancients, and indeed of the whole history of 
 philosophy. Still there remains to Hegel in himself such pene- 
 tration of insight, such forceful and compellative power as 
 stamps him as yet the respective master of thought. 
 
 NOTE 1. 
 
 The transmutation of Kant into Hegel may be presented in yet 
 another manner. Hegel's Idee is just Kant's Apperception, and 
 the moments in the transformation are these: Apperception is 
 the word for my essential reality and core, and this not only as 
 regards my subject but as regards my object ; for it compels this 
 object to conform, or rather transform itself to it. The object, 
 that is, is a concretion of Apperception through its forms of space 
 and time and the categories; and empirical matter is but its 
 contingent Other. What is permanent and universal in the object 
 holds of Apperception. Apperception, however, is not specially 
 mine: it is yours, it is his, it is theirs. There is a universal 
 Apperception, then, and it, together with its empirical other, 
 constitutes the universe. But, on the ideal system, the other of 
 Apperception (the Thing-in-itself) is also itself Apperception. 
 Apperception, then, is the universe. Hegel now had only to 
 see into what Apperception consisted of, and then state it as the 
 
THE SECEET. 99 
 
 Idee. It is presented thus, as all we know and as complete in 
 itself, so that we need not assume an unnecessary and redundant 
 elsewhere a superfluous other side, or other place. The notion 
 of Beyond or Ulteriority, this very notion itself must be conceived 
 as forming part of our own system of notions. It should not be 
 applied out of that system. We have but there is but this 
 here and this now. 
 
 NOTE 2. 
 
 In thinking God, the necessity for the unity or identity of 
 two contraries is obvious. Jacob Bohme saw into this with great 
 lucidity. Boundless affirmation is a dead, dull, unconscious 
 nonentity. Boundless extension were no universe. Limit is 
 necessary to the realisation even of extension; negation to that 
 of affirmation. If there is to be a product, a thing with articula- 
 tions and distinctions in it, a system with manifestible properties 
 and qualities, there must be a No as well as a Yes. Negation is 
 quite as real as Affirmation. The mind is the same in the form 
 of memory that it is in judgment : the mind, then, is not a mere 
 Yes, it is a No also. Memory is not judgment; this is not that; 
 but the one opposite does not cancel the other. In all distinction, 
 the element effective of distinction works through negation : this 
 is not that. Without negation, then, there were no distinction, 
 that is, no manifestation, that is, no^life. To think God, then, 
 as alive and real, a principle of distinction, of negation must be 
 thought in him that is, the unity or identity of contraries. 
 
 There is a difficulty (on the Hegelian view) in connecting 
 myself (as a single separate subject) with the universal object 
 or all. It is difficult to perceive how I am related to it, how I 
 birth from it, or decease into it, &c. &c. But this whole side, 
 perhaps, is only an apparent difficulty. That which lives, and 
 all that lives is thought; I find my 'I* to be a constituent 
 moment of that all of thought. It is the subjective moment and 
 absolutely necessary and essential to the life of the whole. In fact, 
 just as when the logical notion (the all of the categories, the 
 intellectual organic principles of the whole) is complete, it breaks 
 through into nature in other words, when as complete in itself, 
 it must, like every other moment in the system, relate itself to 
 its other, so the subject as other of the object is absolutely 
 necessary, and they are mutually complementary, and so, both 
 essential constituents in the all of things. 
 
100 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., A. 
 
 This notion of a life which is thought, is the ground on which, 
 presumably, after Hegel, we must rest the notion of the immor- 
 tality of the soul. We are moments in the great life : we are the 
 great life : we are thought and we are life ; and nature and time 
 do not master us who are Spirits, but we them which are but 
 forms and pass. 
 
 God again, in accordance with the same views, as related to a 
 world of thought, may be looked at variously in philosophy, as 
 the Absolute in religion, as the Father, the Creator, the Preserver, 
 God, the inner verity, the Being whom we are to glorify, adore, 
 obey, love. In the Hegelian system there is no contradiction in 
 all this. The religious moment is as essential as the philosophical 
 or the natural. 
 
 Hegel's views can conciliate themselves also admirably with 
 the revelation of the New Testament ; for his one object is also 
 reconciliation, the reconciliation of man to God, of the abstract 
 atom which man now is to the Substance of the Universe. 
 Christianity in this way becomes congruent with the necessities 
 of thought. History is a revelation, and in history, Christianity 
 is the revelation. It revealed to a world that sat amid its own 
 ruins, with its garments rent, and its head in ashes, the religion of 
 Vision, of Love, of sweet Submission. The Hegelian system supports 
 and gives effect to every claim of this religion. And this, too, 
 without any necessity to put out the eyes of the mind and 
 abdicate reason; this, too, with perfect acceptance of, and sub- 
 mission to, all the genuine results of criticism, whether French or 
 German, though Hegel deprecates any such industry now, and 
 thinks its purpose has been served. 
 
 The philosophies of Kant and Hegel only give defimteness and 
 distinction to the religion of Christ. In Christ the Vision Was so 
 utter into the glory and the beauty of the all that it passed into 
 Love, which, in its turn, was so rich and utter that it passed into 
 Submission, also itself the richest and sweetest ; and thus Percep- 
 tion, Emotion, Will coalesced and were the same, and the triple 
 thread of man had satisfaction in its every term. Now to all this 
 Vision, and Love, and Submission, Kant and Hegel give only the 
 defimteness of the intellect; that is, they assist at the great 
 espousals of Eeason and Faith. 
 
 Hegel ascribes to Christ the revelation that God is man or that 
 man is God. Now, there is a side to this truth (touched on 
 already) which has escaped notice. Before Christ, God was 
 
THE SECRET. 101 
 
 external to man, and worship or obedience to him consisted in 
 external ceremonies. But since Christ, God is inward to man : 
 he is our conscience. We no longer ask the will of God from 
 external oracles, from external signs, &c., but from our own 
 selves : that is, we are now a law unto ourselves, we are to 
 our own selves in the place of God, we are to ourselves God, God 
 and man are identified. All that, indeed, lies in the principle, so 
 dear to the children of the thin Enlightenment even, the right of 
 private judgment. In this way, then, too, as in every way, is 
 Christ the Mediator, the Kedeemer, the Saviour. 
 
 The teaching of the Hegelian system as to the free-will of man, 
 is decisive in its exhaustive comprehensiveness of view. The 
 life of the All is to make itself for itself that which it is in itself 
 that is, progressively to manifest itself, to make actual what is 
 virtual, to show evolved, developed its inner secrets, to make its 
 inner outer, or, best of all, in the phrase with which we began, 
 to make itself for itself that which it is in itself. Now it is from 
 this that the true nature of the free-will of man flows. So far as 
 it is only as we are in ourselves that we can develop ourselves, 
 there is necessity ; but, again, it is we ourselves that develop 
 ourselves, which is freedom : both fall together in the notion of 
 Reason ; which, to be free, is necessary. 
 
 The following nearer glimpses, though later in date, cohere 
 sufficiently with the preceding to be included in the same chapter. 
 They are distinguished by the letters B, C, &c. for convenience of 
 reference, though not distinguished in themselves by diversity of 
 time. 
 
 B. 
 
 In every sense, Being is a reflexion from (or as against) Non- 
 being. Assume God, and remain contented with such first, as the 
 self-explained and self-evident punctum saliens, then Creation, 
 when it is, is a reflexion from and against the previous nothing, 
 the nothing before it was. Assume thought (spirit) as the first, 
 that runls through its own cycle from indefinite An-sich (In- 
 itself) to the complete entelecheia of Fiir-sich (For-itself), then 
 Being (there is, or am) is a reflexion from and against Non- 
 being. Assume a primal, material atom, then it is a reflexion 
 against non-being, and without a background of non-being, 
 unreceived into an element of non-being, progress, development of 
 
102 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., B. 
 
 any kind, would be impossible. Every way, the first spark of 
 affirmation is from and against an immediately precedent negation. 
 The first ray of consciousness is felt to be developed as against 
 and on occasion of, a realm of nothing. Being and nothing are 
 indissoluble pairs : they are but obverse and reverse of the same 
 thought, of the same fact ; and their identity is the secret of the 
 world. Take either, you have the other also ; even when hid from 
 you by the abstraction the abstractive power of your own 
 understanding, it is not the less there. Try Nothing for a start, 
 and seek thereby to annihilate Being, you will find the attempt in 
 vain ; for, ever, even from the sea of Nothing, a corner of Being 
 will pertinaciously emerge. In short, negation implies affirmation, 
 and not less (nor more) the latter, the former. To negate 
 (negation) is as much in rerum natura as to affirm (affirmation). 
 They are ground-factors of the absolute of that which is, and 
 which is, just because it is, just because it is and must be, 
 nameable otherwise also thought. Diversity in identity as identity 
 in diversity (but another expression of the one fact, the in- 
 dissoluble union of affirmation and negation) is the ultimate 
 utterance to which thought can arrive on thinking out the 
 problem of its own existence. This is but an abstraction it may 
 be said. Granted ; it is but a formal enunciation ; nevertheless, 
 let it be seen still that it names the ultimate substantial fact, and 
 that the state of the case would remain the same suppose the 
 world then to remain were every human being destroyed. To 
 be sure, in thinking these thoughts we are always attended by a 
 Vorstellung, we have always the conception something before our 
 imagination and dominating our understanding. We say always, 
 yes, identity in difference, difference in identity certainly; but 
 then there must have been something in which there was the 
 identity in difference, &c. There must have been a substantial 
 something in which that formal and abstract thought was realised 
 was seen to be true. But this seems self-contradictory. Now 
 how remove this difficulty ? How reconcile ourselves to the 
 discrepancy and divarication ? 
 
 This can be done in no other way than by following out thought 
 in all its directions, each of which will be found to terminate in 
 it just is so. The primitive and radical constituent fact, or 
 property of the all, of that which is, of the absolute, is just that 
 affirmation and negation, identity and difference, being and 
 nothing, must be taken together as constituting between them but 
 
AFFIRMATION. 103 
 
 a single truth. Either alone is but half a truth, either alone is 
 meaningless, unsupported, evanescent, either alone, in fact, is no 
 truth : throughout the whole wide universe, either alone exists 
 not ; the vacuum itself is. If we would have truth, things as they 
 are, then we must take them together as a one identical something 
 even in diversity. This, each can illustrate for himself by 
 referring to any one member of the complement of the universe 
 a stone, a coin, a river, a feeling, a thought. Nothing can be per- 
 ceived or conceived that has not this double nature, in which 
 negation is not as necessary a moment of its constitution, as 
 affirmation. In short, it is this, because it is not that ; that really 
 just is, it is because it is not. Much private reflexion is required 
 to substantiate all this to individual thought. Nevertheless, each 
 faithful individual thinker will find in the end no other 
 conclusion. 
 
 What is, then, is thought, whose own ground-constitution is 
 affirmation and negation, identity and difference. It is easy to 
 see that, if we commence, like the materialists, with a material 
 atom and material forces, the conclusion will be the same. The 
 progress disproves the possibility of absolute original identity. 
 Starting with God, too, this result is immediate. God is a Spirit, 
 God is thought. Thought, that is, is the ultimate element of the 
 universe, and on thought does the whole universe sit. Proceeding 
 from thought, the universe is in itself but thought, a concretion of 
 thought if you will, still in itself but thought. But from this we 
 have now a substantial, corresponding to our formal, first. 
 Thought and its other, or God and his universe (a unity), this 
 is the first fact, and affords a substantial support to the formal 
 truth that identity and diversity, affirmation and negation, being 
 and nothing, coalesce, or cohere in a single unity. Now assuming 
 this to be the primal and rudimentary determination, all additional 
 and progressively further such will be found but successive powers, 
 successive involutions (potentiations) of this, and of this in its 
 essential and native simplicity. The truth is not the one or the 
 other, the truth is the one and the other, the truth is both. But 
 this re-union (in the case of Nothing and Being) is not a return to 
 the first identity ; the identity which now emerges is the higher 
 one of Becoming. The thought that differentiates Being and 
 Nothing, and then unites them, cannot do so without progress. 
 This elaboration is a new step, and thought finds by its own act 
 that it has arrived at the new and higher fact and thought of 
 
104 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., B. 
 
 Becoming, for Becoming is the substantial union of Being and 
 Non-being. No one can show anything in this world that 
 absolutely is, or that absolutely is not ; everything that can be 
 shown, neither is, nor is not, but becomes : no man has ever gone 
 twice through the same street. Not only is the unity ever richer, 
 but the very moments which formed it, become, when looked back 
 upon, themselves richer. Being and Nothing formed Becoming ; 
 but these re-looked at in Becoming are seen now to be Origin 
 and Decease, and so on. In short, thought is what is, and its own 
 inner nature is to be as itself against its other, while its life or 
 progress is to overtake and overpass this other, and re-identify 
 it with its own self, but ever with a rise or increase. This will be 
 found accurately to express the history of thought : this will be 
 found accurately to express the history of the world. 
 
 The pulse of thought, then, the pulse of the universe, is just 
 this: that any whole of affirmation being complete, does not 
 remain as such, but, developing its differences, passes over into its 
 own opposite, a movement which further necessitates re-union in 
 a higher form. Every concrete in rerum natura will prove the 
 actual existence of this process. In the production of the 
 mammifer, according to certain naturalists, animalcule, worm, fish, 
 reptile, bird succeed each other, overthrow each other, so to speak 
 with Hegel, refute each other, but this only by assumption each 
 into its own self of that which it succeeds and supplants, attaining 
 thus a higher form. Bud, flower, fruit, is the illustrative sequence 
 of the Phaenomenologie to the same effect. Even so, thought, face 
 to face only with its own abstract self, will be found to take on a 
 succession of ascending phases, which ever as complete develop 
 differences, pass into their opposites, and re-unite into higher 
 unities, till a system results, whole within itself, and consisting of 
 members which accurately correspond with the abstract universals 
 which the ordinary processes of abstraction and generalisation 
 have (hitherto in a miscellaneous, empirical, and unconnected 
 manner rhapsodically, as Kant would say) pointed out from time 
 to time in what exists around us. 
 
 This system, again, now a whole, obeys the same law, and 
 passes into its opposite, Nature, which opposite, becoming itself 
 complete, re-unites with its co-ordinate, abstract thought, the 
 notion, Logic, to the realisation of both in the higher form of 
 Spirit. The three ultimate forms, then, are Notion, Nature, 
 Spirit, each of which is a whole within itself, and all together 
 
AFFIRMATION. 105 
 
 unite into the crowning Unity, the Absolute, or the Absolute 
 Spirit, which, as it were, giving the hand to, and placing itself 
 under, the first notion, abstract being, substantiates its abstraction, 
 and conjoins all into the system and light and satisfaction of arf 
 explained universe. 
 
 This, truly, is the one object of Hegel : to find an ultimate 
 expression in terms of exact thought for the entire universe both 
 as a whole and in detail. It is not as if one took the ball of the 
 world in his hand, and pointing out the clue, should seize it, and 
 unwind all before us : but it certainly is, reverse-wise, as if one 
 took the clue of the unwound ball, and wound it all on again. Or 
 again, we may have observed some one hold a concrete, say a 
 coaguluni of blood, under a stream of water, till all colour dis- 
 appeared from the reticulated tissue, till, as it were,all matter (washed 
 out of the/brm) disappeared, and left behind only pure form, trans- 
 parent form. Now this is just what Hegel desires to accomplish 
 by existence. He holds the whole huge concrete under the 
 stream of thought, he neglects no side of it, he leaves no nook of 
 it un visited ; and he holds up at last, as it were, the resultant and 
 explanatory diamond. In short, the philosophy of Hegel is the 
 crystal of the universe : it is the universe thought, or the thought 
 of the universe. 
 
 But suppose we resign these pretensions, which may too readily 
 seem extravagant, and take Hegel in^a more every-day manner, 
 we can still say this : That all questions which interest humanity 
 have been by him subjected to such thought as, for subtlety, 
 for comprehensive and accurate rigour, challenges what best 
 thought has ever yet been so applied. In brief, in Hegel we have 
 offered us principles, first principles, those principles which 
 constitute the conscious or unconscious quest of each of us : 
 theoretically as regards what we can know; practically (or 
 morally) as regards how we should act; and aesthetically as 
 regards the legitimate application of feeling : and these three heads, 
 it is plain, (the principles of politics, of course, included) must 
 contain all that interests mankind : these three heads contain a 
 response to the world's one want now ; for the world's one want 
 now is principles. 
 
 C. 
 
 When one remains, a common case in the study of Hegel, 
 unintelligent, on the outside, of his dialectic, one feels indeed on the 
 
106 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., C. 
 
 outside ; and the terms take on a very forced and artificial look. 
 One cannot help suspecting then, indeed, externality, labour from 
 the outside, in Hegel also. However laborious (and consequently 
 a serious sincerity in that respect), one gets to fear the presence 
 of cunning in these deductions, of underhand intention, of 
 interested purpose, of mere jesuistry, casuistry, and contrivance. 
 The double edge seems to glitter so plainly all about ; this is said, 
 and the opposite has been said, and it appears a matter of mere 
 arbitrary choice whether it is the one or the other that is said and 
 where and when, both being evidently equally sayable anywhere 
 and anywhen, that conviction revolts, and the whole industry 
 drops down piecemeal before us, a dead and disenchanted hull, an 
 artificial externality, a mere dream of obliquity and bias, set up 
 by the spasmodic effort and convulsive endeavour of a feverish 
 ambition that, in ultimate analysis, is but vanity and impotent 
 self-will. So shows Hegel when our own cloud invests him. But 
 the cloud rising, * lets the sun strike where it clung/ and before 
 us hangs an enchanted universe again, which a vast giant 
 heaves. 
 
 Entrance here may be effected thus (the remark concerns the 
 discussion of causality) : 
 
 Take causality : how is it to be explained ? No explanation 
 has been worth the paper it covered with the exception of 
 (Hume is most valuable, and an indispensable preliminary) 
 those of Kant and Hegel. Kant's : a function of judgment 
 original to the mind, involving a unity of an intellectual plurality ; 
 a sensuous plurality, in two perceptive forms (space and time), 
 sensuous, but original to the mind, independent of, and anterior to, 
 any actual impression of sense : these are the elements to be con- 
 joined into the notion of causality. Well, the intellectual unity, 
 which is the function of judgment named Keason and Con- 
 sequent, is not a unity as such, but is a unity of a multiple, the 
 terms of which are, 1, Eeason, and, 2, Consequent. The con- 
 junction involved here of a plurality to a unity is wholly 
 intellectual, and may be called, looking to the form of its process, 
 an intellectual schema. Suppose now another faculty besides 
 judgment to be possessed originally, and of itself, from the first 
 of a certain plurality which should be analogous to the plurality 
 contained in the above function of judgment, would not conceiv- 
 ably faculty coincide with faculty, (each being equally in the 
 mind), in such fashion that the plurality of the latter faculty 
 
CAUSALITY. 107 
 
 might undergo the influence of the unitising function of the former 
 faculty (judgment) to the production of another schema which 
 should also be anterior to experience and original to the mind^? 
 Productive Imagination, for example, which holds of sense in that 
 it exhibits objects, and of intellect in that it is not necessarily 
 beholden to any direct intervention of an actual act of special 
 sense for these objects but may spontaneously produce them to 
 itself, may be a faculty capable of exposing to the action of the 
 functions of judgment pluralities of a sensuous nature but still 
 such as are anterior to all actual sense. Productive Imagination is, 
 indeed, nameable in general, only reproductive., for the objects it 
 exhibits to itself are if spontaneously exhibited then, and with- 
 out any calling in of special sense then originally at least for 
 the most part, products of sense ; but it may also merit the name 
 productive simply, from this that it may possess in itself objects of 
 its own and anterior to all action of sense whatever. But 
 Imagination is present to Judgment, and the objects of the former 
 are necessarily present to the functions of the latter ; there will, 
 consequently, therefore, be conjunct results : one of these is 
 Causality, a result of sensuous multiples (space and time) inherent 
 h priori in Productive Imagination brought under that unitising 
 function of Judgment named Reason and Consequent. Or, to 
 take it more particularly once again : suppose that time and space 
 present sensuous multiples analogous <to the preceding intellectual 
 multiple, and suppose these forms, though perceptive and sensuous, 
 to be still independent of special sense, to be a priori, and to 
 attach to the mind itself, to lie ready formed in the productive 
 imaginative faculty of the mind, in fact, then this faculty, being 
 intellectual, can be conceived capable of presenting its stuff, its 
 multiples directly to the action of the various functional unities 
 of judgment. This is conceivable, and it is conceivable also that 
 the intellectual schema of judgment would reproduce itself as an 
 imaginative, and, so- far, sensuous schema out of the peculiar 
 multiples, space and time, or that the intellectual schema, unity, 
 notion would receive these (space and time) as stuff or matter in 
 which to sensualise or realise itself. Reason and Consequent, then, 
 which is an original function of judgment, and which represents an 
 intellectual schema, or the intellectual unity of a multiple, being 
 applied to an analogous multiple in productive imagination, which 
 is the sequence of time, a sequence which is given necessary 
 (what is second being incapable of preceding what is first in time, 
 
108 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., C. 
 
 so far as time is as such concerned),* there may conceivably result 
 an imaginative, and so far sensuous schema, which will only want 
 the filling of actual (special) sense, of actual event, to come 
 forward as cause and effect, which, though manifesting itself only 
 in contingent matter (this amounts to the objection of Hume), will 
 bring with it an element of necessity by reason of its intellectual 
 or a priori elements (and this is Kant's special industry, his 
 answer, or his complement to Hume). This is Kant's explanation, 
 then. Looked at narrowly, it is a chain of definite links (how 
 much of this chain did he see, who states Kant's Causality to be 
 just a separate and peculiar mental principle ?), a system of definite 
 machinery, attributing no new, depending only on old, constituents 
 of the mind ; but this chain lies still evidently between two 
 unknown presuppositions. The mind and its constitution con- 
 stitute the presupposition on the one side ; no basis of absolute 
 and necessary connexion is assigned to it ; we have still loosely 
 to ascribe it to the act and will of God that it is namely, 
 and as it is. The other presupposition is absolutely unknown, 
 absolutely blank things in themselves, which act on special 
 sense to the development of effects in us, which effects we 
 confound with the things, and which, as it were, clothing these 
 unknown things in themselves, become to us the vast system of 
 the outward and inward universe. There are thus two unknown 
 things in themselves postulated by the theory of Kant, an 
 outward acting on outer sense to the development of the outer 
 world, and an inner (our absolute ego, but, as known only through 
 media of sense, unknown in itself) acting on inner sense to the 
 development of the inner world of feelings, &c. What we know, 
 then, is, the effects on our senses, outward and inward (for Kant 
 holds an inner sense for our own emotional states), of two unknown 
 things in themselves, and the manipulation to which our faculties 
 (as source of form) subject these effects (as stuff, or matter). 
 This is the result of the Theoretical Philosophy of Kant. This 
 result he complements, however, by a certainty gained practically 
 of the existence of God, of Immortality and of Freewill, as 
 expounded in his Practical Philosophy. The Theoretical world 
 
 * It seems obligatory here to point to this : If the necessity of the time sequence 
 conditions the necessity of the causal sequence, how account for the necessity, not 
 of sequence, but of co-existence, in the relation of reciprocity, action and reaction ? 
 Kant himself names the category of reciprocity even in connexion with that of 
 causality. See here subsequent writings. (New.) 
 
HEGEL ON CAUSALITY. 109 
 
 belongs wholly to the Understanding (so far, at least, as all 
 constitutive principles are concerned), and has no traffic (con- 
 stitutive^) but with the Conditioned. The Practical world, on the 
 other hand, belongs wholly to Reason, and is in direct relation 
 with the Unconditioned. The ^Esthetic world offers itself between 
 these two extremes as belonging to (the only remaining cognitive 
 faculty) Judgment, and as manifesting, at all events, a certain 
 harmony between the Conditioned and the Unconditioned 
 a certain possibility of relation between them, not indirect as 
 through sense only, but direct also. So constituted are the three 
 great Kritiken which expound the system of Kant ; a system 
 which stands largely still in serious want of patiently intimate 
 and comprehensive exposition. Hegel, for his part, has certainly 
 given it the necessary study ; but, quite as certainly, he blinds an 
 uninitiated reader, on the whole, to the magistral position of the 
 action of Kant by loudness on the one hand, as by silence on the 
 other. 
 
 Now Hegel, and his theory of causality : 
 
 The unknown things in themselves will not content him ; he 
 must know them too, and accomplish a system of absolute know- 
 ledge. The first look at Causality in Hegel's hands is very dis- 
 appointing. Issuing from Substantiality and passing into Recipro- 
 city, as in Kant, what occurs between seems only an abstract 
 description of the phenomena of causality. The description is very 
 accurate certainly nay, rather, it is an exact reproduction of all 
 the movements of our naked thought, when we explain, or, in 
 general, deal with, any example whatever of concrete cause and 
 effect. Now, it strikes us, to describe is not to explain. Kant gives 
 a theory, in which we see an intelligible reason for this, and an 
 intelligible reason for that, till all coheres to a system which would 
 explain and account for precisely that which we wish explained 
 and accounted for. Hegel does no such thing. He simply 
 describes the fact in wonderfully penetrating abstract language 
 certainly (which, however, it costs an agony of mental effort to 
 follow and understand), but still it is just the fact, and as it pre- 
 sents itself there in experience. What are we to make of this 
 then ? Are we to understand that abstract description is explana- 
 tion ? Is an absolute generalisation of causality, in such wise that 
 we have an accurate characterisation which will adapt itself to 
 every concrete example whatever, any accounting for the fact and 
 the notion and the necessity of causality ? To be able to answer 
 
110 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., C. 
 
 this question, is to understand Hegel. It is really so : Hegel's 
 theory of causality is constituted by an abstract description of the 
 absolute universal or general of causality. But just thus it consti- 
 tutes the notion causality : it gives position and development to the 
 secret system of the movements of thought thought, in general, 
 your thought, my thought, all thought in its regard. We see 
 thus, as it were, the very secret maggots of our brain in motion. 
 But this metaphor must not be dwelt on till it mislead. What we 
 have to see here is that, after all, Hegel's description is, so to speak, 
 not his description, nor anybody's description ; his description is 
 the notion, and constitutes the notion, the notion causality. The 
 notion here is not something belonging subjectively to Hegel, and 
 subjectively described by him. The description is so that it is 
 not subjective but objective ; the description is so that its move- 
 ments are the movements of the notion itself: in short, it is the 
 notion itself that we have objectively before our minds then (if we 
 have but realised the words), the notion in its own nature, in its 
 own inner life and energy and movement. Again, as we have 
 seen, it is transformed /row one notion, and to another, it is but a 
 transformation in a series of such. Now if we trace this series in 
 either direction, we shall find it to consist of objective notions all 
 similar to that of causality, all transformed from and to each other 
 in an element of necessary thought, and this too with a beginning, 
 a middle and an end which round into each other, and constitute 
 together a self-complete system. Now this system is what Hegel 
 names Logic. 
 
 The question recurs, however, where is the explanation ? Where 
 is the connexion with that which is with the world of reality ? 
 After all, it is just abstract thought just the various thoughts 
 which actual experience of sense occasions in us. We have derived 
 these thoughts from experience and where is there any explana- 
 tion in them of experience and the world of experience ? Has not 
 Hegel with his abstract scholasticism but simply returned to Locke 
 (with whom ail knowledge was a product of experience alone) ? 
 And has the world ever seen a more complete case of self-stultifi- 
 cation, than this pretending to explain to himself, and this offering 
 to explain to us, the whole mystery of existence, by an infinite 
 series of abstract terms, which it took a lifetime to produce, and 
 which it demands a lifetime in us intelligently to reproduce (the 
 varieties in the form of the reproduction too being commensurate 
 only with the individual readers) was ever, in short, self-stultifi- 
 
HEGEL ON CAUSALITY. Ill 
 
 cation more complete and monstrous ? Are not the dicta of Locke 
 and Hegel, though apparently a reversal the one of the other, after 
 all identical ? Locke says, Notions are abstractions from Sensa- 
 tions ; while, for his part, Hegel says, Sensations are concretions 
 from Notions : where, at bottom, is the difference ? Yes, but 
 observe, Hegel's series is the organic system of thought complete 
 so to speak, alive in itself. It is the thought of sensuous experi- 
 ence ; and it would be hard to say what sensuous experience were, 
 apart from, and beside, this thought. It is sensuous experience in 
 itself. Sensuous experience apart from it, does not seem a body 
 even. Sensuous experience can only be called the other of this. 
 This is the pith, the truth, the reality, of sensuous experience, and 
 sensuous experience itself beside it, is but its other. Yes, you 
 object, but it is taken from sensuous experience it is the ultimate 
 winnowing if you will, the crystal if you will, of sensuous experi- 
 ence but without preceding sensuous experience it could never 
 have been acquired. Yes, we reply, but what matters that ? We 
 do not wish it to be subjective thought ; it is objective thought ; it 
 is thought really out there, if you will, in that incrustation that is 
 named world. It, this world and all outer objects, are but sensu- 
 ous congeries, sensuous incrustations of these thoughts. Did a 
 human subject not exist, it is conceivable that this congeries and 
 incrustation would still exist ; and it would exist still a congeries 
 and incrustation of objective thought. _The universe, in fact, is but 
 matter modelled on thought. Thought is a system, and this system 
 is the universe, and the element of sense, or what we conceive as 
 that element, is nothing as against this system, and can only be 
 named with propriety the Other. 
 
 But now, if all this be conceived as the Absolute, as simply that 
 which is, is any other explanation required ? Thought is once for 
 all as it is, and as it is, it has been developed before you in a 
 necessary system. In this system causality has its own place. 
 To demonstrate this necessary system of thought, and to demon- 
 strate the place there of causality, is to account for and explain 
 causality. Such is Hegel's work : he does not move by reasons for 
 this, and by reasons for that ; he rejects what he designates raison- 
 nement, reasonment : he believes himself to have explained the 
 universe, when he has demonstrated the notion and the necessary 
 system of notions. To tell what is truly to tell what is this it is 
 to Hegel to philosophise : and Hegel never seeks to transcend 
 what is. That which is, is the Absolute ; and it will be enough if, 
 
112 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., D. 
 
 sufficiently fortunate to find the clue, we should be able to unwind 
 that which is, out before our eyes, into its whole system of neces- 
 sary moments with a necessary first and a necessary last that 
 necessarily connect and cohere together. 
 
 Thus Hegel : Thought is the real contents of the universe : in 
 Nature, it is but as other, and in a system as other : in Spirit, it 
 returns from Nature, its other, into its own self, is by its own self, 
 and is its own energy. The Absolute Spirit, then, God, is the first 
 and last, and the universe is but his difference and system of 
 differences, in which individual subjectivities have but their part 
 and place. Subjectivity, however, is the principle of central 
 energy and life : it is the Absolute Form. The thought of subjec- 
 tivity again, that is, the thought it thinks, just amounts to the 
 whole system of objective notions which are the absolute contents. 
 Thus is man, as participant in the absolute form and the absolute 
 matter, raised to that likeness with God of which the Bible speaks ; 
 but God himself is not detracted from or rendered superfluous. 
 Pantheism is true of Hegel's system, just as it is true of all others, 
 Christianity and Materialism included ; and there is nothing in 
 the system to disprove or discountenance a personal God, but on 
 the contrary. 
 
 D. 
 
 Think the Universal, that is, Pure Being, or what is All in 
 general and not any one Particular and such thought is a neces- 
 sity, we must sum up the universe in one, we must think Pure 
 Being, we must think the Universal : it is all, but it has no bound, 
 no mark, no line, no point, whether within or without it there is 
 no within, there is no without, there is no spot in it, of colour, or 
 light, or opacity, there is not a checker anywhere descriable, it is 
 signless, it is noteless, it is nothing, it is all and it is nothing, it is 
 everywhere and it is nowhere ; it has identically the same character 
 as nothing, or the same characterlessness. Try nothing : it yields 
 the same result ; it is everywhere and nowhere, it is nothing and 
 it is all, for existence as such follows necessarily such an assign- 
 ment as even that of nothing. Now here is the great difficulty 
 how is the universal to become the particular, or how is the parti- 
 cular to get to the universal ? Only, one would say, by the 
 addition of another. But this other any other contradicts the 
 former universal. If there be this other, then the former was not 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GENERALISATION. 113 
 
 the universal. Such must be the case unless the other be even in 
 its otherness identical with the universal. But how is this conceiv- 
 able ? The same, yet not the same ! Identity, yet non-identity ! 
 How can such opposites be implicated into formal unity, and 
 difference annulled ? Nay, were such process accomplished, how 
 from formal unity, an absolute simple, an absolute one, could 
 plurality, multiplicity, variety be extricated and deduced ? Such 
 simple, such one, must remain for ever simple, for ever one. Nay, 
 ' remain,' and * for ever,' are determinations inapplicable. What 
 is attempted to be described, to be said, to be spoken, to be thought, 
 is simply indescribable, unsayable, unspeakable, unthinkable. The 
 proposition, then, is simply a non-ens, an impossibility. Its con- 
 ception is a conception simply, but as a conception that is incon- 
 ceivable, it must be named a mere arbitrary supposition of my 
 own, a mere arbitrary position (attitude) of my own self, and which 
 cannot be persisted in, mere Meynung, S6a, opinio, mine-ing, 
 my-ing, or me-ing. But it cannot in reality be my'd or me'd : the 
 universal must involve the particular, for it is othered, there is 
 this diversified universe. 
 
 The actual universal, then, is one which involves the particular. 
 What is, then, is at once simple unal universal, and composite 
 plural particular. This is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Never- 
 ending, and the Nowhere-ending; and just so is it the Eternal, 
 that it is itself and its other. Were i itself only, and not also its 
 other, it were bounded, limited, finite ; it were obstructed, cabin'd, 
 cribbed, confined by this other; it were itself metamorphosed into 
 another by this other ; its infinity and universality were negated 
 and denied, and we were forced to look further, to look beyond it 
 for a truer universal that should, by embracing at once it and its 
 other, restore the universal equilibrium and balance. 
 
 But have we more here than a mere necessity of our own 
 thought? No doubt, it is a primary antithesis, contrariety, even 
 contradiction, for the other to the universal seems not only 
 contrary but contradictory to seems to negate, to render nugatory, 
 null, and impossible, any such universal ; but is not this an affair 
 of thought simply ? 
 
 Or are we to suppose it in rerum natura, the foundation-stone, 
 the elephant and tortoise, the cross-beams, the fork, the inter- 
 section, the crux of the universe? (In more senses than one 
 probably a crux.) Do we see a universal in rerum natura, that 
 is at once universal and particular? See is an inadequate, an 
 
 H 
 
114 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., D. 
 
 inapplicable word: it would not follow that though we did not 
 see such, we might not know such. Seeing is but a province, but 
 a part; surely we cannot consign the Absolute to its keeping, 
 surely we cannot agree to admit its finding as final. But, even a 
 wider province than seeing being allowed us, we are met at once 
 "by an objection which seems fatal: a universal, or the universal, 
 never can be known to us : we are such that we never can know a 
 universal : what is other than ourselves, is known as other, that is, as 
 necessarily particular. Sense can bring no outer to us that is not 
 particular ; sense can bring no inner to us that is not particular : 
 knowledge of a universal is impossible to us. But is knowledge 
 limited to the revelations of sense, and to these revelations as 
 received by sense ? In this question we have come to one of the 
 most important turning-points that exist : there is here veritably 
 a most critical parting of the ways, which, as taken, decides on a 
 man's whole future. 
 
 To take the facts of sense as the facts of sense, to keep them 
 separate each in its oneness and independence, and live among 
 them thus would be what ? Consider well ! Would it not be 
 exactly the life of a lower animal, the life of a beast ? Look at 
 the cows grazing ! They receive the facts of sense as the facts 
 of sense, and in their entire isolatedness and sunderedness. They 
 hunger, they crop the grass, they stumble over a stone, they are 
 stung by a gadfly, they are driven by a man, by a dog, by a stick ; 
 they are excited by a red rag, &c. &c. : may not the cows be 
 represented as stumbling from particular to particular, as knowing 
 no better, and as knowing no other ? And in what respect would 
 man differ did he stop by the isolated and individual fact of 
 sense ? There are certainly men who might be readily character- 
 ised as differing from the lower animals only in the relatively 
 greater number and variety of the sensuous facts received : men 
 who rise and eat and drink and plod or idle, and apparently think 
 not. But can this phase of humanity be considered the true 
 phase of humanity ? Can these men be said to know truly ? 
 Can these men be said to live truly ? Or rather, be it as it may 
 with these men, does not Humanity as Humanity, now and from 
 the beginning, comport itself quite otherwise ? Is there not one 
 word which describes, accurately describes, exhaustively describes, 
 the conjunct action of universal mankind from the time that 
 was to the time that is and to the time, we may safely add, that 
 will be : the one word, generalisation ? In every department of 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GENEKALISATION. 115 
 
 human industry this will be found the case : it and it alone 
 the process represented by the word generalisation (what we 
 called elsewhere the seeking of the Absolute) has altered, and 
 alters daily, man's whole universe for him, from the heaven above 
 him, and sun and moon and stars, to the very dust of his footing. 
 This is the plastic force that has moulded universal history. 
 Eeligions rise at its coining, and at its going fall. Politics are 
 its playthings ; science, its creature. Cities grow, grow, grow 
 without stop or stay grow to its bidding. The whole universe of 
 man is in perpetual transformation, in perpetual flux, in perpetual 
 rise beneath it. It is the loom, the ever-changing, ever-growing 
 loom in which the vestments of humanity vestments of religion, 
 poetry, philosophy, science vestments of institutions, govern- 
 ments, customs, manners vestments of head or neck, or foot or 
 hand or body are from day to day wrought for him. It in fact 
 actually is : ' The roaring loom of time which weaves for God the 
 garment we see him by.' 
 
 Generalisation attains its summit in universalisation : it would 
 seem, then, that the life of man, the final cause of man, is to seek the 
 universal. But how does this seeking comport itself with the facts 
 of sense ? Does it receive them as they are, and leave them as they 
 are, or does it further manipulate and utterly transform them ? Has 
 man, then, been wrongly employed all this time, and ought he to 
 have remained fixed by the facts -jof sense, and inquired no 
 further? What long vistas of thought and of truth and of 
 instruction, such questions open to us ! No ; plainly man has 
 not rested by the facts of sense, "and as plainly he could not rest 
 by them. But there is system and a purpose in this universe, 
 and of this universe man is indisputably the highest term, the 
 consummate outcome; what has proved itself his ultimate 
 activity, then, must be allowed the highest place in this system 
 and in this purpose. Generalisation, then, is a necessary moment 
 in the business of the universe, and the effecting of generalisation 
 is the special vocation and destination of man. We have not to 
 stand by the particular of sense, then, on the contrary, it belongs 
 to us to rise to the universal of reason ; and great already has this 
 rise been. Kead Pliny, and consider what a new heaven and a 
 new earth the generalisation of 1800 years has effected ! Few 
 things are more striking than the second book of Pliny: the 
 creed of ultimate thought 1800 years ago ! All that was then the 
 best effort of intelligence; all that was then the likeliest account ; 
 
116 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., D. 
 
 that then was the universe thought ! Every step in this rise too 
 has been a transformation, often a contradiction, of sense. The 
 earth is not a plane, the heavens do not turn round over it, the 
 sun does not get up in the east and go down in the west, &c. 
 Theoretically, then, the business of man has been to transcend 
 sense, to leave to sense its own truth, but to transmute it into a 
 higher. Morally, also, man has displayed a like progress against 
 sense and towards reason, let Comte-ites say what they will. 
 
 The truth is not attained by the senses, then : before such 
 attainment, the intervention of the intellect is required, the 
 intervention of thought, and that is inevitably the elevation of the 
 particular into the general. Things, then, must be thought as 
 well as felt and perceived, and so only does knowledge result. 
 In searching for the universal, then, in rerum natura, we are not 
 limited to our senses but have a right to add to them, nay, we are 
 irresistibly called upon to add to them, as instruments of inquiry, 
 the faculties of the intellect also. That this is so, the very men 
 whom we have instanced as taking their stand by sense, can be 
 adduced to prove. They do think and they must generalise, for 
 they cannot use the rudest language spoken without in the very 
 word (as Hegel points out), river, bread, tree, whatever it may be, 
 rising to a general. Nay, the very beasts of the field that 
 stumble from particular to particular, are not absolutely without 
 thought, for each of their dull feelings, each of their dim per- 
 ceptions is at bottom, thought, thought in itself: these feelings, 
 these perceptions, are impossible without thought; are, so far, 
 modes of thought, not thought as thought, but thought in 
 itself. 
 
 Is there, then, in rerum natura the universal or a universal, or 
 is such only an affair of thought ? For only an affair of thought, 
 as Hegel remarks, may be something very worthless, as also some- 
 thing very valuable. Chimeras and hobgoblins and what not are 
 only affairs of thought, but they are utterly worthless. The 
 reason of this is, that they are only of thought, that is, that they 
 are that abstract, formal universal merely which has not its other, 
 its particular, as identical with it ; or, if you will, they are such 
 abstract, formal particular as is identical with its own self only, 
 and has no universal to which to unite itself. So far as thought, 
 then, is to be of avail in the inquiry, it must not be subjective 
 thought engaged with its own bubbles, but objective thought that 
 has before it a veritable ens, and holding consequently both of 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GENERALISATION. 117 
 
 the particular and the universal. Does thought, does sense, 
 or both, or either, possess such ens an ens, then, that is in rerum 
 natura ? 
 
 What at once are space and time ? Why, at once, both are 
 matters concretely of perception and, so far, of sense. Neither, 
 indeed, is taken in expressly by any sense we do not smell 
 them, or taste them, or hear them, nor properly do we touch them, 
 or see them still what is smelt, tasted, heard, touched, seen, is 
 smelt, tasted, heard, touched, seen, as in both. We cannot 
 touch, see, &c., without touching, seeing, &c., extension and motion 
 in extension with consequent lapse of duration ; and there is here 
 what amounts to both space and time. Space and time, at all 
 events, are more than thoughts ; whencesoever derived, and how- 
 soever otherwise constituted, they are both objects not of thought 
 only but of perception also. They are really both perceived, 
 through the intervention of Other, it may be, in the first instance, 
 but still they are both perceived. Now of what nature are space 
 and time ? Is either finite ? Has either a limit, whether any- 
 where, or any when ? The question, of course, is strictly absurd ; 
 for the one is all and anywhere, and the other is all and anywhen. 
 Nay, there is that, not only in the phrases all and anywhen, all and 
 anywhere, but in the simple words where, when, which might have 
 suggested the due train of reflexion here, and prevented time and 
 space from being used as puzzle-boxes to the gravelling of mere 
 reason. These puzzles, in fact, result only from this that time 
 and space are true universals such universals as are identical 
 with their particular. The question of a limit to a where and a 
 when, then, which, from the very necessity of thought, or, what is 
 the same thing, from the very necessity of their own nature, are 
 at once everywhere and anywhere, everywhen and anywhen, is 
 strictly absurd. Still, we can put the question by way of 
 experiment ; and the answer from everyone is precisely what we 
 have shown the simple ideas, where and when, of themselves 
 suggest. None is the answer ; there is no limit to either space or 
 time: in their very notion, they are simply pure quantities. 
 There is an objection, however, it' not to the infinitude of space 
 and time, at all events to our knowing of that infinitude. To 
 know the infinitude of either, would require us to pass through 
 this infinitude. We can only vouch for what we know, and our 
 knowledge of either must be limited: we can neither traverse 
 infinite space, nor endure through infinite time. Therefore, it is 
 
118 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., D. 
 
 said, the conclusion is, they may be finite or they may be infinite, 
 but, so far as we know them, they must be finite. This is but a 
 puerility, a puerility of that fussy, bustling, unmisgiving pre- 
 tentiousness, which we know to root in shaliowness itself, but to 
 which human nature tends silently, weakly, to yield just because 
 of the unmisgivingness, and consequent pertinacity. The solution, 
 of course, is easy, and has been already given in several forms. 
 The one true form is just this, however : Time and space are simple 
 Quantities, pure Quantities. For the exhibition of the puzzles, 
 we have so often alluded to, we are not confined to space and 
 time; let us but take quantity simply, just the notion quantity, 
 and we shall find them all to emerge thence : but quantity is a 
 notion absolutely necessary ; we are it, and it is us, just as surely 
 as thought itself. Or to speak more palpably to current conception: 
 time and space are given infinite, we know them infinite, we even 
 perceive them infinite, or, at all events, know that, put us where 
 you may or when you may to perceive either, we shall perceive no 
 end to it. They are given infinite, they are known infinite, they 
 are perceived infinite, they are infinite. 
 
 In rerum natura, then, there are infinities, there are universals : 
 space and time, at least, are two such. But are they of the class 
 we seek universals at once themselves arid their particular ? We 
 have said yes already, but we may now more particularly see the 
 reason. Infinite space has many finite spaces ; infinite time has 
 many finite times. Or universal space has many particular spaces; 
 universal time has many particular times. 
 
 From these very examples, then, out of rerum natura, it is 
 intelligible that there is a universal which is particular, and 
 becomes realised into singularity again by reflexion into identity, 
 by reference of difference in itself back into identity with itself. 
 Such universal is a true universal. For the universal as such and 
 no more, the particular as such and no more, the singular as such 
 and no more : these are but creatures of subjective thought, and 
 exist not in rerum natura. The truth of all the three is their 
 union, and each is what it is, through, and by reason of, the others. 
 This is what is named the Antithesis, and it repeats itself at every 
 turn. 
 
 The lesson here, then, is, not to take things in isolation, and 
 separation, and individualisation, but together. The mainspring 
 separated ^from the watch, is but an insignificant bit of metal, 
 useless, without the vestige of a notion, which even a child flings 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GENERALISATION. 119 
 
 speedily away. To remain standing by the particular to the 
 exclusion of the universal, or by the universal to the exclusion of 
 the particular in general, to remain standing by the one to the 
 exclusion of the other, is but an affair of abstract understanding, is 
 but the conversion of an item of a concrete into an abstract whole, 
 is but, as Hegel names it, an abstraction of the understanding 
 Understanding as opposed to reason, which latter, reversing 
 the work of the former, resumes difference into identity. The 
 truth is not infinite or finite, but infinite and finite, not liberty or 
 necessity, but liberty and necessity, not right or wrong, but right 
 and wrong, not this side or that side, up or down, but this side 
 and that side, up and down in short, the truth is, not the 
 universal or the particular, but the universal and the particular. 
 
 The intolerant should take this lesson those nervous, peracute 
 individuals who perpetually peremptorily prescribe their right to 
 their fellows who en revanche have fire (pain) in their bellies to 
 burn up the wrong of everybody else who would reform, reform, 
 reform, but who, in the end, would only petrify into their own 
 painful thin rigidity the f oison of the world ! 
 
 E. 
 
 Hegel is in earnest with Kant's idea. Kant held the mind, by 
 its notions, to determine that is, give unity of form, system, 
 intellectual meaning to outward multiples or manifolds which 
 corresponded sensuously to the inward, or intellectual, multiples 
 or manifolds, involved, comprehended, or embraced in the 
 respective unities of the concrete notions themselves. Kant's 
 notions, however, are few and disjunct. They form no system 
 whether as regards complete compass, or thoroughly inter- 
 connected details. They rise not, neither, to their own universal. 
 They give us only, and in an unconnected manner, an explanation 
 of how it is that we give to the contingent manifold of sense the 
 necessary determinations : one, some, all ; reality, negation, limita- 
 tion ; substantiality, causality, reciprocity; possibility, actuality, 
 necessity. Hegel firstly completes and universalises the system 
 of notions thus begun by Kant. Secondly, he gives this system 
 unity of origin and of interconnexion. Thirdly, he exhibits each 
 notion in its own pure proper nature without admixture of foreign 
 elements of any kind. Fourthly, he demonstrates this system to 
 be Logic, the Idea, the all of thought that is in the universe, and 
 
120 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., E. 
 
 that conditions the universe, and that creates, regulates, and 
 moves the universe. Fifthly, he demonstrates Nature to be 
 only this connected All of thought, not, however, as before, only 
 inwardly to intellect, but now outwardly to sense ; that is, he 
 uncloses Kant's imperfect and cramped schematism of judgment 
 into the expanse of Nature as explained by the ' philosophy ' of 
 the same ; and here he leaves no corner unvisited, but demon- 
 strates the presence of the notion in the most crass, refractory, 
 extreme externality demonstrates all to be but a concretion of 
 the notion. 
 
 Thus it is Hegel is in earnest with the idea of Kant, which was, 
 that outward objects arrange themselves around subjective but 
 universal notions of our own ; which subjective notions, then, 
 present themselves to us objectively as part and parcel, and 
 very largely part and parcel, of every externality of sense 
 that can come before us. Hegel, indeed, is so complete, that 
 he leaves existential reality at the last as a mere abstraction, 
 as nothing when opposed to the work of the notion. Thus 
 it is intelligible, too in Hegelian language that it is the 
 understanding which, coming to objects as an outer to an outer, 
 and taking them as they are, believing them as they are, subjects 
 them to a mere formal external process of reflexion, to which the 
 distinctions it finds remain fixed and incommunicable, and which 
 results only in classified arrangement according to its own unex- 
 amined and disjunct notions which are only taken for granted 
 of cause and effect, substantiality, reality, reciprocity, &c. &c. To 
 this mere position, attitude, and operation of -the understanding 
 which is thus separate from the object and separate from the all 
 and has before it only a pedantically classified chaos of fixed and 
 incommunicable separates or particulars, Hegel opposes Eeason, 
 which, according to the inner constitution of the notion, advances 
 at once to the perfect characterisation of every particular, and, at 
 the same time, its identification with, and involution into, the one 
 entity or syllogism, which is at once all, and some, and one. Before 
 the wand of this compulsive conjurer, we see the vast universe 
 stir, shake, move, contract itself, down, down, closer, closer, till the 
 extremest member is withdrawn the ultimate tip, the last frag- 
 ment disappears, and the whole is licked up into the pure negativity. 
 Forth from this absolutely negative point, as from an invisible but 
 magic atom, we can see the whole huge universe shaken out 
 again. 
 
THE NOTION IN ITSELF AND FOR ITSELF. 121 
 
 F. 
 
 Extricate (the reference is to In itself, For itself, &c.) the 
 Hegelian double-entendre. If God has created the heaven and 
 the earth if the thought of God as a Spirit has created the heaven 
 and the earth that is, simply, if thought is what is, then Seyn, 
 what is (these outward things we see, say), is (are) thought in 
 itself. These outward things as products of thought, rather as 
 individuals, as members, as component parts (and as necessarily 
 such, for we cannot conceive God or thought to act on caprice) in 
 the totality which makes up that which is, these outward things 
 are (so viewed, and the totality being thought, thought in itself) 
 in the sense that this Seyn, these existences constitute what it (the 
 totality, thought) is. What is this up-coiled ball ? Unravel it 
 these individuals that sprawl out are what the ball is in itself. The 
 particularities into which the ball can be unclosed, are what the 
 ball is in itself. The illustration is easily applied to the universe, 
 to thought, or to any totality in general. But now if the universe 
 be thought, then the particulars of the universe will be just thought 
 in itself. The universe is thought, and whatever is in the universe 
 is thought, and the particulars in the universe just go to make up 
 what thought is in itself. Hegel certainly means this "by in itself; 
 and in that case, it is an external Seyn which the in itself refers 
 to. But Hegel also means that the particulars are only parti- 
 culars, that they are not the universal, not thought as thought, 
 but thought only as particularised thought then in itself, thought 
 not in its proper form as thought. In this sense, however, it is 
 evident that the In itself refers now to something inward. 
 
 In the sensuous singulars, then, let us say, into which thought 
 runs out, it sees what it is in itself. By reflexion in regard to 
 these, thought becomes for itself. It develops, that is, a variety of 
 reflexions in regard to an inner and an outer, a phenomenal phasis 
 and a noumenal principle, substance and accident, cause and effect, 
 &c., by which it explains to itself these particulars and singulars, 
 and so becomes as for itself, as thought to thought. 'Now, the 
 whole sphere of this reflexion may be named "Wesen, or essential 
 inner substance and principle, and consists of reflexes that, as it 
 were, ply between the Seyn or outer, and the Wesen or inner. 
 This Wesen, then, is the An sich, the In itself now ; and the 
 irrepressible presence of dialectic is seen here. The external Seyn 
 
122 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. III., F, G. 
 
 was thought in itself; but this in itself has passed now into the 
 sense of inner. The Seyn has become Wesen : we ask what is it 
 in itself? Then, again, this In itself becomes For itself, because 
 the In itself of a thing is what it really is, is itself, its centre, its 
 For itself, while its outer show is only what is for another for you 
 and me, or anything "other that comes to it externally. Expres- 
 sions, thoughts themselves seem drunken then, as much under 
 movement as the outer flux which never is but always becomes. 
 In itself has no sooner been accepted as an outer, than it is seen, 
 in the turning of a hand, to have become its own opposite, the 
 innermost inner. But thought in these reflexions being for itself, 
 further perceives that these are thoughts ; it is then now led up to 
 the consideration of thought as thought ; that is, it is now In and For 
 itself, it is thought in thought and thought for thought. But this 
 result is just the Idea, or the unity of an Objective and a Subjec- 
 tive ; and this, again, amounts to Absolute Idealism, or a system in 
 which the Notion is at once pulse and substance. The movement 
 of the notion, then, is to make itself for itself what it is in itself; 
 and this is its life and existence and purpose as the Absolute, the 
 one monad, the all that is, which life and existence and purpose 
 may all be viewed as identical with the honour and glory of God. 
 God thus characterised, may be considered as determined. But 
 this is not pantheism. Pantheism is some unreasoning dull belief, 
 that just what we see, and as we see it, is all that is is God. But 
 here Hegel strikes the mass till it collapse to Deity a person, a 
 life, a reality, a spirit, an infinity ! 
 
 G. 
 
 Hegel says, 'The finitude of things consists in this, that their 
 existence and their universal, their body and their soul, are indeed 
 united else they were nothing but they are separable and are 
 mutually independent.' Now it is very difficult to see into this, 
 but here is a sort of a meaning. Water is water, a certain par- 
 ticular ; but water is HO, or hydrogen and oxygen, and HO can 
 be viewed as relatively its universal. Water is thus finite, its 
 universal being thus other than itself, united to but separable 
 from itself. Hegel's idea, however, probably is, that the finite 
 things are other than thought, which is their true soul, their true 
 universal. With man it is otherwise: he is thought; particular 
 
ABSOLUTE AFFIRMATION, ETC. 123 
 
 and universal fall together in him. As finite things are there 
 say before us, they are different from their notion. 
 
 H. 
 
 If God is the affirmation of all that is, he is likewise, and even 
 so, the negation of all that is: all that is disappears into the very 
 breath that bears it; or, in what it appears, it disappears. This is 
 an excellent example of the dialectic that is, and must be.* 
 
 * Let the reader be reminded that we are still in the ' Struggle.' Technical 
 terms come to be directly considered later. 
 
124 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., A. 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 THE NOTES OF THE STRUGGLE CONTINUED. 
 
 IT is vexatious on the part of Haym, in the manner of a rhetorical 
 expedient familiar to most, to name some of the early categories 
 with a and so on, to describe the series of these as a long string, to 
 assert their production by an illusory reference every now and 
 then to the world of fact, and so to pronounce them worthless. 
 This action of Haym's is quite beside the point. This, in fact, is 
 just to miss the categories, and their true nature. What if they 
 should derive from reference to the concrete actual world as it is? 
 What if they did come thence? If Haym does not like to see 
 them derived thence, whence else, even in the name of common 
 sense, would he wish them ? Is there something more veracious 
 and veridic than nature, then something more real than reality 
 itself ? 
 
 Is Hegel, then, likely to be very fell on this reproach of Haym's, 
 that he has taken his categories from nature, from reality (which 
 is here the sense of nature) ? Ah, but Haym will say, the 
 categories profess to be se//-derived ! Well, if in one sense the 
 categories do profess this, still Hegel has again and again pointed 
 out that the substantiating result for all, the most abstract as the 
 most concrete, is empirical fact, actual fact of nature veritably 
 offered and presented to us. This, in truth, is the secret of 
 Hegel's greatness, that he has no traffic with any necromantic 
 products of mere thought, but even in his highest, even in his 
 furthest, even in his most abstruse, recondite, and hard to under- 
 stand has ever the solid ground beneath his feet. So it is here : 
 the categories really are in nature and the substantial quarry of 
 actual fact. True also is it, however, that, considered in a 
 generalised form, freed from application in the concrete con- 
 sidered, as it were, in the element of thought alone, absolutely 
 
IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM. 125 
 
 abstractly for and by themselves (and this just describes the 
 everyday action of thought on any and every object, and why then 
 should thought be ordered to suspend its ordinary procedure here?) 
 true it is that these categories are seen to constitute a system ~6y 
 themselves. But, a system, what does that imply, unless that they 
 are all in mutual connexion, and with means of communication 
 from the one to the other in such wise that if you shall truly think 
 any one, you cannot help truly arriving at all the rest ? Do you 
 suppose that all that concrete, which you call natural universe, 
 came there without thought, and without thoughts ? Do you 
 suppose that the constitution of each separate atom of that 
 concrete does not involve thought and several thoughts ? And 
 then, the interconnexion of these atoms to this whole huge 
 universe, is it all an affair without thought, then ; or is there not 
 rather an immense congeries of thoughts involved and implied in 
 all these innumerable interconnexions ? You seem to think that 
 there is no necessity to take it so ; you seem to think that it is 
 enough just to take it as you find it. And how do you find it ? 
 Just a basis of so much soil, dirt, earth, out there around us, down 
 there beneath us ! You have found it so ; it has so come to you, 
 and so you take it, and you would put no questions to it ! 
 Questions ! you say ; what do you mean ? Why question the 
 common mud? What thought or thoughts can be involved in 
 mere mud ? But just this is it : the categories are the thoughts 
 of this mud the thoughts it implies, the thoughts, so to speak, 
 that presided at its creation, the thoughts that constituted and 
 constitute it, the thoughts that are it. What necessity for all that ? 
 you seem to say again. There it just is ! If asked how it came 
 there, Why, we must just say God ! 
 
 Now, what do you mean here ? Is it not just this : I live, 
 I see, I feel, I think ; and there is an innumerable plurality and 
 variety in what I live, in what I see, in what I feel, in what I 
 think. Now, I cannot live, &c., this innumerable plurality, with- 
 out thinking it all up into a First and One. Is not this very much 
 what you mean when you come to think what you mean ? Has any 
 man since the world began ever found it otherwise ? Is not God 
 the word, the key-word, for the clearing up to us, up and out of 
 the way, of this innumerable variety ? Prove the being of God 
 proof of the being of God ; what absurdity ! Prove the breath I 
 breathe prove the thought I think ? That is it prove the 
 thought I think ! I must think, must I not ? But to think is 
 
126 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., A. 
 
 to think is just in so many words God ! That is the ultimate 
 and extreme goal ; or it is the ultimate and all-including centre 
 the one punctum of stability, the one punctum of certainty in 
 which all thought coils itself to satisfaction and rest. To the 
 central fire and light of reality which is named consciousness, you 
 acknowledge the presence of the one in, and the countless out : 
 now as absolutely certain as their presence, is the presence to the 
 same centre, of a first and one that is the reason of both God. 
 To think is God. 
 
 God, then, is a word standing for the explanation of the variety 
 that is. But, standing so, there is no explanation assigned, there 
 is only one indicated. Standing so, there is indicated a being 
 named God ; but there is no beingness assigned. Now, let us be 
 in earnest with this natural fact and it is a natural fact as we 
 are with all other natural facts ; let us not simply name it, and 
 know that it is there, and so leave it. Let us turn to it rather, 
 and look at it. Once, when we heard thunder and saw lightning, 
 we cried, God ! God ! and ran into our caves to hide ourselves ; 
 but by-and-by we took courage, and stood our ground, and waited 
 for thunder and lightning, till now we have made them, as it 
 were, even our domestic servants. So was a natural fact, so is it. 
 As in this case, so in a thousand others, God was the exclamation 
 that summed to us variety ; and as in it, so in them, it was not 
 allowed to remain a mere exclamation, a mere word, but had to 
 transmute itself from word to thing, or, better, had to transform 
 itself from the Vorstellung, the crude figurate conception, into the 
 Begriff, the intellectually seen notion. Now, such varieties as 
 these of thunder and lightning were but examples of variety in 
 general, were but examples of the main fact, the variety of this 
 universe ; and again, it is not as regards any particular variety, 
 but as regards the universal variety, that the word God is used 
 nowadays for the First and One : this is what we have now to 
 consider. (Of course, Eeligion is a concrete of certain doctrines, 
 and God, as the centre of these, is a word having many meanings 
 a word designative of a thought subject of many predicates 
 besides First and One. It is only the natural fact that man must 
 think God, and must think God as First and One, and not the 
 developed predication of Eeligion, which is sought to be considered 
 here.) 
 
 The cry that rises spontaneously to the lips on sight of this 
 living variety, is God ; and the necessity of the cry is, a First and 
 
IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM. 127 
 
 One, a meaning to the All ! Now this First and One, which we 
 must think, let us take courage and stand to see. But, let us 
 observe well, it is as yet just a First and One, not some vast 
 Grandeur some huge, formed, or unformed, Awe of the imagina- 
 tion, which we merely mean, but know not; it is just a First and 
 One, the fact before thought, not the phantom before imagination : 
 in a word, it is the Begriff, and not the Vorstellung, which we 
 seek to take courage before, and stand to see. 
 
 So far as thought is concerned, then, the word God for us as 
 yet indicates a First and One, or an explanation of the variety. 
 Explanation, indeed, is preferable to First and One for it implies 
 not only a First and One, but also a transition to the many, to the 
 variety, from the First and One. Let us take it so, then. God, in 
 what the word indicates as yet to thought, amounts to no more 
 than the explanation. God is the explanation. But how must 
 an explanation, or the explanation, be thought? For this ex- 
 planation must belong to an element of necessity ; it can be no 
 matter of contingency and chance ; it must be something in its 
 nature absolutely fixed and certain. How, then, must it be 
 thought ? for very certainly only in one way can it be thought. 
 This is the question of questions ; this is the beginning of thought ; 
 this is the first of Hegel ; this is Alpha : how must we think the 
 explanation ? Can we, for example, think the explanation a 
 thing, a stone perhaps ? Can we think it water, or fire, or earth, 
 or air ? * Can we think the explanation the sun or the moon ? 
 Can we think it space ? Can we think it time ? To all we shake 
 the head. But we have science now, and great groups of things 
 have received explanations of their own: can any of these 
 explanations be extended to the case before us ? 
 
 Is magnetism an explanation for us ? Can we think the First 
 and One, that has power of transition to the Many, electricity ? 
 Can we think a first of electricity, and a succession out of its 
 identity of all ? Can electricity make an opaque atom ? You 
 have read the ' Vestiges,' and you have very great confidence in 
 the electric brush. That the brush should become a nebula is 
 quite conceivable to you ; nor less conceivable is it that the 
 nebula should opacify in foci, and so give birth to an opaque 
 atom. To the question, Can electricity make an opaque atom, 
 you answer then, Perhaps ! Can this atom take life ? The 
 
 * It is thus, as we see from the ancients, that abstract thought begins : so after 
 mythology (the mythological explanation) philosophy arises. 
 
128 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., A. 
 
 electric brush is still powerful within you, and you answer again, 
 Perhaps ! Can this life develop and develop, and rise and rise ? 
 you still say, Perhaps. Can this life become in the end man and 
 thought? you still say, Perhaps. Now this is the present 
 material theory of creation ; this is the explanation, this is the 
 First and One with transition to the Many, this is the God of the 
 materialists. The materialists are to themselves practical men ; 
 they depreciate the imagination, and they cry up the under- 
 standing : it is a remarkable fact, however, that the bulk of self- 
 named practical men are the slaves of phantasy merely. Consider 
 how it is here ! Electricity, as yet, is but a name used as 
 indicating the common principle of certain separate facts. The 
 facts remain still of an interrupted, scattered, ill-connected 
 nature, and the common principle, in its vagueness, remoteness, 
 shadowiness, is as unsatisfactory as the facts : neither the One nor 
 the Many cohere well to each other; neither the One nor 
 the Many cohere well to themselves, or, in other words, the 
 relative science is yet very imperfect. Electricity, thus, being 
 something unknown, and, as we say, mysterious, is in famous 
 fettle for the use of Imagination, who can easily apply it, in her 
 dreaming way, in explanation of anything unknown, seeing that 
 just as being unknown, it is capable of all. It is imagination, 
 then, and not understanding, which, in the case before us, takes up 
 electricity as a phantom which is dreamed a First and One with 
 transition, &c., but which is no known One and of no known series. 
 But an idol of the phantasy, where explanation is the quest, is 
 empty and inapplicable. A mere name will not suffice here. If 
 you want my conviction, you must get me to understand 
 electricity as a First and One; you must somehow contrive to 
 place it before me in transition to the Many. Has electricity as yet 
 really effected a single transition ? Electricity is the power of the 
 water-drop, you say. But even as you take it, electricity is not 
 the water-drop : no, even according to you, it is Hydrogen and 
 Oxygen that are the water-drop. You make experiments, you 
 demonstrate the power of electricity in the water-drop to be equal 
 to I know not what immensity of horse-power. But what is that 
 to HO ? What does your electricity do there ? Why is it 
 necessary ? Your explanation has infinitely complicated the 
 explanation, infinitely deepened the mystery. Besides, is it so sure 
 that this power is actually in the water-drop ? Your experiment 
 was a process, your experiment was not the water-drop. The 
 
IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM. 129 
 
 electricity was a product a product of your energy, of your 
 operation, of your process, of your experiment. The water-drop 
 was left on one side. Is it not possibly to be suspected that 
 chemistry now-a-days may be synthetic where it is thought 
 analytic, multiplicative where it is thought divisive, involvative 
 where it is thought evolvative ? Show me a single transition of 
 electricity from A to B, where B is richer and more various than 
 A, yet still A. Show me a single opaque atom which is electricity 
 and only electricity. Show this single atom becoming another. 
 Show me this atom taking life. Show me this life becoming 
 another, becoming a higher. Show me life becoming thought. 
 To suppose electricity thus augmenting itself, is it not mere 
 superfetation of imagination, mere poverty of thought ? In 
 practical men, too, to whom spades are spades ! Can the under- 
 standing be ever asked to look on at such a process at electricity 
 as the unal first, that passes into another, an atom, an infinity of 
 atoms, an infinite variety of atoms that passes again into another, 
 life and an infinity of lives, that passes yet again into another, 
 thought and an infinity of thoughts ? But suppose this : electricity 
 made matter, matter organisation, organisation thought! What 
 all this while have you been doing with space and time ? Has 
 electricity made these also ? If not, then it is not a first and one. 
 The God of the materialist, then, has had a God before him who 
 made space and time ; rather, perhaps^the materialist was so lost 
 in his evolution of electricity, that he forgot all about space and 
 time. But let us suppose electricity adequate to space and time 
 also what is the result then ? Why, then we have certainly 
 what is wanted a First and One with power of transition to the 
 Many, a single material principle whose own duplication and re- 
 duplication have produced the All. But what is this ? A simple 
 in a manner, unsensuous, too, as invisible, intangible, &c. } in itself 
 that holds virtually in it that holds virtually within its own 
 unity and simplicity Matter and Time and Space, and Man and 
 Thought and the Universe, why this is Idealism ! Between 
 the electricity of the materialist and the thought of the idealist, 
 where is the difference ? Each is a simple that virtually is the 
 congeries, a unity that virtually is the many. Ex hypothesi, 
 electricity in its very first germ involved the capacity to become 
 all the rest, that is, virtually was all the rest that is, all the rest 
 is virtually, that is, ideally, in it. The rest, in the first instance, 
 was not actually, but only virtually or ideally in it. The 
 
 I 
 
130 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., A. 
 
 materialist must, then, to this extent admit himself an idealist, 
 and that there is no difference between himself and his former 
 opposite save in the first principle. The one says thought, the 
 other electricity, but both mean the First and One which contains 
 all the rest, which implies all the rest; the First and One in 
 which all the rest ideally are or were. We have only now to 
 consider the principles ; and if any preference can be detected in 
 either, it will be sound reasoning to adopt the preferable. In this 
 way, either the materialist must, seeing its superiority, adopt 
 thought and become wholly an idealist; or the idealist must, 
 seeing its superiority, adopt electricity and become partially a 
 materialist, that is, so far as his first principle is concerned. But 
 the first principle which is to contain all the rest, being supposed 
 material and outward, evidently presupposes space and time. It 
 must be granted, then, that electricity, if adequate to all the rest, 
 is inadequate to space and time, and leaves them there absolutely 
 unexplained, absolutely foreign to its own self. Here, then, the 
 advantage is with the other principle, thought, which is not 
 outward, but inward which is independent of space and time, 
 which involves space and time. You can never pack space and 
 time into an outward, but you may, and very readily, into an 
 inward. Thought has an advantage over electricity here, then. 
 Again, a second advantage possessed by the former over the latter 
 is, that an inward is still nearer to me certainly to myself, the 
 centre of all certainty than any outward. Again, an inward is 
 liker myself, is more homogeneous than an outward. And again, 
 let it be said at last, thought, as an infinitely more powerful 
 principle than electricity, is also an infinitely preferable one. But 
 you object here Thought is conditional on man, electricity is in- 
 dependent. The answer is easy : It is quite certain that thought 
 is as independently present in the universe as electricity. The 
 world is but a congeries of means to ends, and every example of 
 such involves a thought. The wing that beats the air is a 
 thought ; an eye that sees, a sense that feels, an articulation that 
 moves, a pipe that runs, a scale that protects, all these, and 
 myriads such and they are thoughts are as independent in 
 nature as electricity. There is not an atom of dust but exhibits 
 quantity and quality; electricity itself exhibits power, force, 
 causality and these are thoughts. The idealist may now say to 
 the materialist, then, idealism in the end, being common to both, 
 and my rationale of the same being infinitely preferable to yours, 
 
IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM. 131 
 
 you are bound, on all laws of good reasoning, to abandon your own 
 and adopt mine. 
 
 How must the explanation be thought ? We name and even 
 the materialist will not say no the explanation God, and, as we 
 have seen, these predicates must be thought in his regard : that he 
 is First, that he is One, and that in him is transition to the Many. 
 Now, it is by necessity of thought that we attach these predicates 
 and the question is, does not the necessity of thought go further ? 
 We say, it will be observed, transition, and not creation ; and the 
 reason is, that creation is an hypothesis of imagination, and not a 
 necessity of thought as thought. Creation is but a clumsy 
 rationale : it is what Kant would call a synthetic addition ; it is a 
 mere addition of a pictured something to a pictured nothing ; it is 
 a metaphor of imagination, and not a thought of thought proper : 
 in a word, it is a Vorstellung, not a Begriff; a crude, current, 
 figurate conception, and not a notion. Creation is but the meta- 
 phor of transition ; the former is the Vorstellung, the latter is the 
 notion. The predicates we have hitherto found are certain, then : 
 they must be allowed. We think, and to think is that. To think 
 is to seek an explanation, and an explanation is a First and One 
 with capability of transition to all actual examples of the Many. 
 But this principle evidently of First and One becomes the many, 
 and becomes the various, even by virtue of its capability of transi- 
 tion. As many, as various, it is endless, it is unlimited ; it is 
 now, was, and ever will be ; and, however various, it is still at 
 bottom one and the same. This is to be granted : the materialist 
 calling it a principle, the spiritualist and the idealist calling it 
 God, a Spirit, Thought, agree in this, that the principle (call it as 
 you will) must be thought as One, as First, as capable of transi- 
 tion (say creation, if you will), as unlimited whether in time or 
 space, and yet as at bottom always self-identical. But a self- 
 identity that can become other, both in number and in kind, is 
 an identity with itself that becomes different from itself. The 
 principle (the principium) contains in it, involves, implies both 
 identity and difference. This is plain : granted identity alone, 
 and you have identity, identity perdrix, toujours perdrix till the 
 end of time, which is never. For progress, then, for a single step, 
 it is absolutely necessary that your receipt should contain not 
 identity alone, but difference also. Have paper and the colour of 
 paper only, and all the painting in the world will never make a 
 mark. To suppose God creator of this universe by act of his will, 
 
132 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., A. 
 
 alters not the matter one jot : in that case, he has thought differ- 
 ence, he has willed difference, he has made difference. The differ- 
 ence is still derived from his identity. Without his identity, 
 the poised universe of difference shakes, sinks, vanishes, disappears 
 like smoke. In short, God as thought, and not merely imagined, 
 involves a coexistence of identity and difference, of unity and 
 plurality, of first and last. 
 
 The predicates which we have at this moment in characterisa- 
 tion of the principle or principium are : Firstness, unity, plurality, 
 identity, difference, illimitation, and limitation. Why, here are 
 quite a succession of categories from a single necessary thought. 
 All of these are themselves necessary thoughts. No thinker that 
 lives and thinks, but must think one and many, identity and 
 difference, limitation and illimitation, &c. The misfortune is, 
 indeed, that while he must think both of the members of each of 
 these pairs, he conceives it his duty somehow to think only one, 
 and that to think both would be self-stultification, and a contra- 
 diction of the laws of thought themselves. He will see at least 
 he ought to see now, however, that he has been practising a 
 cheat on himself, and that he must think both. 
 
 Now these are thoughts, and absolutely necessary thoughts, for 
 these thoughts are actually in the universe, and on them the 
 universe actually is made. Even were there no man in the world, 
 and were the world supposed still to exist, there would be in the 
 world unity and plurality, and difference and identity, and limita- 
 tion, &c. Nay, there are single things that are at once all these. 
 Space is unity, and space is plurality ; space is identity, and space 
 is difference ; space is limitation, and space is illimitation. And as 
 it is with space, so it is with time. But neither space nor time, 
 nor both, can be the principle, the principium themselves : let 
 them exist for ever and everywhere, let them coexist for ever and 
 everywhere, still they are barren still from such clasps as theirs 
 not one atom of thought shall spring, not one atom of matter shall 
 drop. 
 
 There are categories, then ; and, like water from a sponge, they 
 exude from the very nature of things. It is no objection, then, 
 this of Haym's, that we have Nature at our back when we state 
 these categories. That such is the case, is beyond a doubt. Still, 
 these categories, exuding from the concrete, do come together into 
 a common element or system, and they are the thoughts which 
 the nature of things involves, whether there be a human thinker 
 
IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM. 133 
 
 or not, and which are capable of being discerned directly a human 
 or any other thinker comes upon the scene. 
 
 The first thought, of course, is simply that of First. Before there 
 was a first if that be possible there was the thought of it. The 
 first is the first, and that is the thought even prior to the thing. 
 Suppose it was a grain of sand that was first, why that grain of 
 sand involves thought : it is there in quantity and quality, it is 
 alone, it virtually contains all, &c. All these are thoughts, and 
 first itself is a thought. But what is first ? Why, just God, the 
 principle, just what is. What is, is the first that is. But what 
 is, is. What is involves Being. Ah, there we have it : Being is 
 the absolutely first, the absolutely universal predicate in thinking 
 this universe, figure the subject of predication as you may. Being, 
 that what is, is, this is the first, and this also is the immediate or 
 the inderivative. It is what is, and we do not ask for anything 
 higher as producer of it ; it is what is, and it is consequently the 
 first. Now, as Being is the necessary first, it will suffice for the 
 present to assert that what Haym calls the long string of the cate- 
 gories just necessarily ravels out of it, and simply assures itself of 
 its own truth by that occasional glimpse at the concrete actual to 
 which Haym would wholly attribute it. And such we think a 
 legitimate mode of illustrating the possible or probable incubant 
 thoughts of Hegel. 
 
 Hegel's general undertaking, indeedf seems to be, to restore the 
 evolution immanent to thought itself (which evolution has only 
 presented itself concretely and chronologically in the particular 
 thinkers preserved in history) to restore this evolution to uni- 
 versal consciousness, in abstract purity, and in such wise that the 
 whole movement and every moment of the movement should 
 be understood as each veritably is, with Idealism, or rather the 
 Idee-Monade, as the result, and thereby infinitude retrieved for 
 man in union and communion with God what we may call, 
 * Eecovered Paradise to all mankind/ 
 
 It is no mere process of the generalisation of particular historical 
 facts, however, that we are to see in Hegel. History, no doubt, 
 lies paradeigmatically behind the system, but the connexion 
 between them is probably of a subtler nature than the usual 
 generalisation. We are not to suppose that Hegel has taken the 
 exact concrete facts of the history of philosophical thought as 
 it has manifested itself in time, and so to speak, broken, and trod, 
 and pressed them down into an ultimate lymph which is thought 
 
134 THE STEUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., B. 
 
 itself in its own nature and in its own life not to suppose that 
 he has grasped the solid masses themselves, and compressed and 
 kneaded them till they became the transparent and plastic essence 
 which is his Logic, but rather that, along the long range of solid 
 rocks from Thales to Kant at the foot of these he has laid him- 
 self down as the pure and harmonising mirror into which their 
 pure reflexions fall. Till the reader, then, has acquired a certain 
 ease of traffic, as it were, not with the bodies, but with the souls of 
 facts, the reference to history in Hegel may as readily to use a 
 foreign expression disorient as orient him. 
 
 B. 
 
 Hegel acts on the dictum of Aristotle, % yap \vcris rijs 
 evpevis ea-Tiv, in the sense that the finding of the knot is the 
 loosening of it, for we may name a main object with him to be the 
 elimination of the antithesis by demonstration of the antithesis ; 
 which said antithesis is at first Being, and Non-being and at last 
 the absolute Subject-Object, the Spirit, that which is in itself and 
 by itself and for itself, the Absolute, the concrete reciprocal of all 
 reciprocals. It is also to be seen that this reciprocity or re- 
 ciprocation is in its nature notional, is identical with that which 
 Kant discovered to constitute perception, which to him was, 
 shortly, and simply Hegel's Notion ! the subsumption of the par- 
 ticular under the universal to the development of the conjunctive 
 singular. Kant, too, perceived that sensation and perception were 
 but externally what thought, or the categories, were internally. 
 Kant, however, did not bring his thoughts together. This was 
 done by Hegel to the production and by no other means of the 
 Hegelian system. He saw, first of all, in a perfection of con- 
 sciousness which Kant lacked, this reciprocity of inner and outer, 
 of thought and sense. He saw also that these elements related 
 themselves to each other as universal and particular ; and, seeing 
 as much as that at the same time that the whole reach of Kant's 
 theory of perception was clear before him, a theory in which all 
 the three moments of the notion have place, it was not difficult 
 for him to complement and complete them by the addition of the 
 singular. Quite generally, then, he was able to state to himself 
 that the ultimate truth of the universe was just this : Notional 
 reciprocation pervades the whole, and is the whole ; and, more 
 particularly, in this movement the ultimate point of repose is the 
 
RECIPROCITY. 135 
 
 production of the singular by its subsuming the particular (which 
 is as matter, that is, negation, or simply difference) under the 
 universal (which is form, or affirmation, or identity). 
 
 Seeing this, the next step or question would be, how put 
 together all the details in completeness and perfection how inter- 
 connect, how systematise them ? Having come to that which is 
 most general as the ground unit, or rather as the ground form, it 
 would be natural to make it the first, and endeavour to find a 
 transition from it to the rest. Hegel's first step, then, in this light, 
 would be, in the first instance, to exclude sense and perception as 
 the mere other or copy of the more important intellect. In such 
 restriction, his element evidently would be the purely logical. 
 Now, the categories lying before him, he had in them logical 
 elements not due to the merely subjective movement of notion, 
 judgment, and syllogism ; and he could not possibly escape the 
 thought of an objective logic as a necessary addition to the usual 
 subjective one. 
 
 Now, how begin ? What category was the most general objec- 
 tive one ? It was manifestly not Eelation nor Modality ; for both 
 Relation and Modality concern a foregone conclusion presuppose, 
 that is, their own substrate. It must either be Quantity or Quality. 
 But the latter is evidently prior to the former. The quantity of 
 any what is a secondary consideration to the what itself; and we 
 see Kant himself succumbing to the necessity of this priority in 
 his ' Kritik of Judgment/ Let us begin with Quality, then. But 
 what is the most universal quality, so far as all particular qualities 
 are abstracted from, and there is question only of quality as it is 
 thought, question only of the thought of quality ? Why, Being ! 
 Being is a qualitative thought, and it is, at the same time, the most 
 abstract, the most universal of all thoughts. But should we com- 
 mence with this thought, transition from it, movement is no longer 
 possible by process of logical generalisation : such possibility can 
 be attained only through the reverse process of logical determina- 
 tion or specification. But a specification, beginning with such 
 first, would, if ended, especially if ended in a circle of return be 
 a complete system ; and a specification, again, can be effected only 
 through the addition of the necessary differentiae. But just such 
 power possessed the formula derived from Kant. For the genus 
 was the same as Kant's general notion, the difference the same 
 as his particular notion (we may call it so, for, though to Kant 
 it was only materials of sense, we know now that even so it is 
 
136 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., B. 
 
 only the other of thought, it still is in itself thought), and the 
 species stood to the genus and differentia just as the singular 
 stood to the universal and the particular.* 
 
 Seyn, being, would be a beginning, then ; but how find a differ- 
 entia by which to convert it into a species, which species, too, 
 should be the absolute species proxima? We have found the 
 universal genus, but how find the universal differentia? Why, 
 if the one is being, if the one is the universal identity and mani- 
 festly the ultimate genus must be the universal identity, and, 
 looking at it in that way, being is easily seen to be just that the 
 other must be, as already named indeed, the universal difference, 
 the universal source of distinction and separation, which just is 
 negation, not, or nothing. The universal difference, t^en, is but 
 the contrary of the universal genus ; and our very first step has 
 brought us to the antithesis at its sheerest and abruptest. 
 
 But, subsuming not or nought under being, which is precisely 
 what we have to do in a process of logical specification or deter- 
 mination, what species results ? To subsume not under being, or 
 to incorporate not with being, is to give not the character of being 
 is, so to speak, to 'being-ate not is to give being to not : and 
 what does that amount to but a becoming ? Nought passing into 
 being (being passing into nought, if you will) is surely becoming. 
 Now, this as first reciprocation is type of all the rest. Take 
 Hegel's widest or most general division of Logic, Nature, Spirit : 
 the last subsumes the second under the first; spirit logicises 
 nature ; spirit is the conjunctive singular of the universal (logic), 
 and of the particular (nature) ; spirit is the concrete One of iden- 
 tity and difference. Again, spirit is the ultimate sublimation or 
 concretion of the form becoming, as logic is of being (identity) and 
 nature of non-being (difference). 
 
 Of other Hegelian divisions, Begriff subsumes Wesen under 
 Seyn, or Begriff, notion, gives being to what is called Wesen, or 
 essential principle ; Maass subsumes Quantity under Quality, or 
 Measure qualifies Quantity. Fiirsichseyn, singular being, subjec- 
 tive being, subsumes Daseyn, particular being, objective being, 
 natural being, under Seyn, universal being, subjective and objec- 
 tive Being, logical Being, &c., &c. In the Philosophy of Nature, 
 as in that of Spirit, the triplicity is certainly not so formally exact 
 as it is in these examples ; but it still aims at the same pattern, 
 and throughout the Logic it remains almost always perfectly true 
 
 * It is Kant's theory of perception that underlies this. 
 
RECIPROCITY. 137 
 
 to itself. This is obvious in such examples, for instance, as Daseyn, 
 Quality, So"mething; Identity, Difference, Ground; Substantiality, 
 Causality, Eeciprocity, &c.; where the third member is the product^ 
 of the subsurnption of the second under the first, or results, so to 
 speak, by infecting the second with the nature of the first. In 
 fact, the object is to be serious with the notion of reciprocity and 
 its resolution in a relation. The antithesis constituted by recipro- 
 city is taken in its abstractest form as Being and Nothing, and 
 it is gradually raised to its ultimate concretion of subject and 
 object. The first resolutive relation, too, Becoming, is contained 
 in the last, the Absolute Spirit. We are to suppose the threads 
 of the antithesis gradually thickening from the lowest to the 
 highest, and the relation, or the crossing of the threads, gradually 
 thickening likewise. Throughout, then, we have but the anti- 
 thesis in its series of stages. 
 
 This explication goes pretty deep into the nature of the Hegelian 
 industry ; but Hegelian writing is not thereby at once made cur- 
 rent, readable at sight. No ; Hegelian difficulty largely remains : 
 not that it is because, as Goethe thought, Hegel wanted lightness, 
 or because, as Humboldt thought, speech had never come to a 
 thorough * breaking-through ' with him. No : the reason of the 
 difficulty lies partly in the fact that Hegel will give no sign of the 
 origin of his system, nor of the concretes that lie under his abstract 
 characterisation ; partly in the fact, to#, that this characterisation 
 is abstract, and the most abstract that has ever yet been exempli- 
 fied on the whole perhaps : partly again in this, that he has sought 
 to make the abstract evolution of his Logic parallel with the con- 
 crete evolution of philosophical thought in history ; and partly, 
 finally, that each sphere demands for its characterisation its own 
 words, which words remain ever afterwards intelligible only when 
 referred to the sphere where they, as it were naturally, took birth 
 and presented themselves. No reader, however intelligent, will 
 ever be at ease with Hegel till he has gone through the whole 
 system of Logic with such diligence and completeness as to have 
 ever all the technical words present to his consciousness in the 
 exact sense in which they were employed by Hegel. Even so, 
 Hegel himself is often in such an agony of difficulty with the 
 refractoriness of his own materials, and what he sees is so hard 
 to be learned from the abstraction of the language, that there is 
 little hope of ready reading in such an element ever for anyone. 
 
 One other source of difficulty lies in the artificiality and for- 
 
138 THE STEUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., B. 
 
 malism which are everywhere present in the construction. With 
 each new product a new differentia is necessitated to be derived 
 from this product, which reunited to the product gives rise to a 
 third and higher. Such a method entails outside effort, and the 
 appearance of artificial straining. Still, Hegel is to be considered 
 as genuine. He might certainly have made himself perfectly easy 
 to be understood, had he explained his connexion to Kant, and 
 described what he would be at both in principle, method, and 
 result ; and so far suspicion and a grudge will always follow him. 
 Nevertheless, Hegel is the historical continuator of Kant, and he 
 has really carried forward the interest of philosophy as received 
 from the hands of Kant. Nay, with all its artifice, his method is 
 the true one that is, if Kant was right, and a science of Meta- 
 physic is now founded and begun and the elevation of the 
 antithesis must henceforth be the business of philosophy, as it is 
 of experience probably, and life itself. 
 
 C. 
 
 Few things more tantalising, after all, than Hegel's constant 
 reference to the Notion, the Begriff. What, of course, is meant, 
 is the logical notion, or the notion as notion. It will not do, how- 
 ever, to have recourse here to merely technical logic, to merely 
 technical definition, and content ourselves with a mere phrase, a 
 mere abstract expression. Any mere technicality of any mere 
 book is something very different from what Hegel aims at. The 
 Notion, in fact, is the concrete notion ; the notion is the notion 
 that was taken up by Kant, and which, passing through the hands 
 of Fichte and Schelling, reached finally those of Hegel himself. 
 The Notion, then, is simply Kant's notion ; and the transformation 
 of Kant's notion into Hegel's Idea, is the one business of the 
 Hegelian Logic. The Notion, in short, is Reciprocity. .For this 
 is the true name for the purpose that impelled Kant in a similar 
 direction in Metaphysic to that of Copernicus in Astronomy. 
 Kant sought to invert the relation ; sought rather more than this 
 to reciprocate the relation to prove objects not only affecting^ 
 but affected ; that is, not only influencing us, but influenced by us. 
 The notion, then, passing from Hume to Kant in the form of 
 Causality, was converted by the latter virtually into that of 
 Reciprocity. Reciprocity this is the ultimate abstraction for, the 
 ultimate generalisation of, the work of Kant ; this is that work's 
 
THE NOTION. 139 
 
 brue appellation. Most wonderful is the penetrating, rending, 
 irresistible force of Hegel. Thought becomes reduced before him 
 to its ultimate nerve : the volumes of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, 
 Locke, Hume, are transformed to sentences in a paragraph ; and the 
 vast Kant has become a single word. Substance becomes Causality, 
 Causality becomes Reciprocity, and Reciprocity becomes the Notion. 
 In Kant, however, it was only the notion an sick, the notion in 
 itself; it had the immediacy, the identity, the instinctivity, the 
 unconsciousness of nature. In Kant it only appeared, but it knew 
 not its own self in him ; or Kant was quite unconscious that the 
 one notion which moved in his whole industry was Reciprocity. 
 From Kant and the stage of immediacy, it soon passed, however, 
 to Fichte and Schelling, or the stage of reflexion, the stage of the 
 difference, the stage of negation, the stage of particularisation, and 
 as soon, finally, to Hegel, or the stage of complete and total recon- 
 ciliation and insight the stage of singularisation, which is the 
 stage also of the restoration of immediacy by the sublation of 
 mediacy (the negation of the negation, or, what is the same thing, 
 commediation with self). Reciprocity on this last stage, being 
 developed to its issues, is now the Idea, which one word expresses 
 the resolution of objectivity in reciprocity with subjectivity and 
 of subjectivity in reciprocity with objectivity into the concrete 
 reciprocity of the notion, the logical notion, the notion as notion, 
 which is itself a reciprocity, and the uUimate reciprocity of univer- 
 sality, particularity, and singularity. All this, of course, is very 
 hard to realise to understanding ; but, after a due analysis both of 
 Kant and Hegel, the desired ' light ' will always ' go up ' to honest 
 labour. 
 
 All this can be said differently ; it is all capable of being 
 expressed in the Aristotelian formula that relates to Form, 
 Matter, and perfect Actualisation. The SuvajuLi?, vXy, and 
 evT\Xia * of Aristotle amount precisely to the Begriff, Urtheil, 
 and Schluss of Hegel. In fact, all that is said in Hegel is but 
 the single principle involved in this formula, in one or other of 
 its innumerable forms : always and everywhere with him and 
 in him we have to do wholly and solely with the resultant unity 
 of a triple reciprocity. And in this, it may be, Hegel has hit an 
 essential, or the essential secret of the universe. ' Omne trinum 
 
 * Dr Thomas Brown was talking of the ' mystic Entelecheia ' of Aristotle as 
 something unfathomable at a time when it had been familiar to Hegel at least for 
 some years. 
 
140 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., C. 
 
 perfectum rotundum ; all good things are three : three is the 
 sacred number, the fundamental figure, the foot that scans the 
 rhythmus of the Universe.' This is the ultimate cell, the multi- 
 plication and accumulation of which has built the All. The 
 universal becomes particular, and both are resolved or combined 
 into singularity, which, indeed, only realises each. Any cell in 
 its material, structure, and function, will be found to illustrate 
 this. Such, indeed, is the inner nature, the inner movement, the 
 rhythm of self-consciousness itself; and self-consciousness is the 
 prius of all. It is the first and centre, and all else are but 
 reduplications, inspissations, crassations of it outwards. This 
 simplicity constitutes a great difficulty in Hegel ; for with what- 
 ever he may be occupied, he can always only see in it the same form, 
 and speak of it in the same dialect. Hegel's so frequent utterance 
 in regard to immediacy which has made itself such by resolution 
 of mediacy attaches itself to the same principle. It agrees with 
 this, too, that what is to explain, account for, or act as ground in 
 any reference, is always with Hegel the stage which is named 
 Schluss, Entelechy, Singularisation, Eeconciliation, &c., the nature 
 of which just is that it is an Immediate resultant from Mediacy, 
 the inner nerve being always reciprocity. 
 
 Hegel just modified and developed the stand-point of Kant. 
 In his hands, for example, the categories must become the category 
 or the notion ; and this again, freed from subjectivity, and looked 
 at objectively as what is, must become the Absolute or the Idea 
 in its first, or simplest, or most abstract form or principle. When, 
 indeed, ' the light went up ' to him from Kant, his object would 
 be to complete these categories, these substantial creative notions, 
 to complete them, to found them, and to derive them from a 
 principle from a something first, simple, and certain. But, with 
 such abstract generalised notions or universals before him, the 
 inquest or request would naturally be the abstract generalised 
 universal notion as notion. From this he could begin: this 
 should be the life of all the other generalised notions (as being 
 their universal), and through them of all existence generally. 
 What is this ultimate notion, then ? What is the notion as such ? 
 Where find it ? how conceive it ? These presumably were 
 Hegel's first thoughts, and we are here certainly on his real trail, 
 which Haym, with all his laborious investigation of the Hegelian 
 steps in the writings themselves both published and manuscript 
 of Hegel, has unquestionably missed. This, indeed, could only 
 
THE NOTION. 141 
 
 manifest itself to one who stood at last on an exhaustive analysis of 
 the ' deduction of the categories.' From such coigne of vantage 
 there is a sudden glimpse at last into the initial secret of Hegel^ 
 his junction to the world of his predecessors, the one broad 
 bridge that at once made him and them, a one and identical 
 common country. 
 
 With all effort, Hegel could not expect to attain what he 
 sought immediately. But as regards where he ought to search, he 
 would find himself naturally referred to logic. But what is logic ? 
 what is the foundation of logic ? How came logic to birth ? 
 What is so named, is seen at first sight to imply, at all events, 
 that all other concretes are left out of view, presumably, perhaps, 
 as considered to their ultimate, and that thought abstractly, 
 thought as thought, is what is now examined. Historically, then, 
 all objective elements and interests are behind logic; or, 
 historically, so situated is the genesis of logic. In other words, 
 logic is the historical outcome of the investigation of all particular 
 concretes which present themselves. So is it that logic becomes, 
 as it were, the biographic ghost of history in its element of 
 abstract or generalised thought. Nay, the steps of generalisation 
 which present themselves, so to speak, historically in the life of 
 the public individual, may be seen to repeat themselves in the 
 progress from instinct to reason, from brutality to morality, &c. 
 &c. biographically in the life of the ^private individual. In this 
 manner there is the glimpse of a concrete logic obtained. But 
 Hegel must be conceived as returning from such general view to 
 the particular question, What is the notion as notion ? And in 
 the answer to this question it is that the origin, the principle, the 
 form, 'and even, in a certain light, the matter of the Hegelian 
 system lie. But we may come to the same point from other 
 directions. 
 
 There is in the brain of Hegel a dominant metaphor. This 
 metaphor relates to a peculiar evolution which is characterised 
 thus : It begins, of course, with a first ; but this first is presently 
 seen to imply its opposite, which opposite, developed in its turn, 
 coalesces with the former to the production of a third, a new form, 
 constituted by and containing, but only impliciter, the two former 
 as moments. This third, this new form, develops itself now up to 
 the full of its unity, and is presently seen to imply its opposite 
 with the same results. Now, we have to conceive this process 
 repeated again and again till an end is reached ; which end, we 
 
142 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., C. 
 
 have further to conceive, passes back into the first, and thus the 
 whole movement constitutes a simple circle. Each link in this 
 circular chain, too, is seen to be a kind of triple unity. Ever, 
 indeed, there seems somehow a flight of three, the last of which is 
 always a return to the first, but changed, as if it were richer, 
 heavier, more complete more completely developed, in fact. 
 Each of the three terms concerned must be conceived to begin, to 
 fill, to reach its full ; and when full, to show, as it were, the germ 
 of its opposite, which rising up into its full, seeks union and 
 coalescence with its former to a new production. This is the one 
 metaphor of the thought of Hegel ; and even here we can see that 
 we have never moved from the spot; for this metaphor is but 
 another way of expressing the one movement or principle already 
 characterised in so many ways as Svvajuus, v\rj, evreXexeia ; Begriff, 
 Urtheil, Schluss ; universality, particularity, singularity ; thesis, 
 antithesis, synthesis ; being, essence, notion, &c. &c. Wherever 
 we are in Hegel indeed, we have ever the same triplet before us in 
 one or other of its innumerable forms. Always there are the two 
 opposites or reciprocals which coalesce like acid and alkali to 
 a base a base in which they still implicitly are, but only as 
 moments. This base, again, if the result of its moments, is really 
 their base, their ground, their foundation, their Grundlage. If 
 they found it, it founds them. It is the mother-liquor into which 
 they have passed : it is a living base out of which they can arise 
 and show themselves, and into which they can again disappearingly 
 return. This is the Hegelian metaphor : a ground, a base, from 
 which arise members, which again withdraw themselves a 
 differentiated Common or One. And what is this but the dis- 
 junctive or reciprocal whole of Kant, suggested to him by the dis- 
 junctive judgment, and discussed by him at so much length, and 
 with such fresh, new, and creative vigour ? A sphere of reciprocity : 
 this is the whole. This is the Hegelian Idee-Monade. The re- 
 ciprocity still must be understood as notional reciprocity the 
 triple reciprocity of universal, particular, and singular, each of 
 which, as reciprocal of the others, holds the others in its own way, 
 and is in fact the others. It is identity gone into its differences 
 indeed, but still even in these identical with itself. Differentiated 
 identity, or identified difference, constitutes the one reciprocal 
 sphere of Hegel a sphere which is the whole universe a sphere 
 which is each and every atom in the universe a sphere which, as 
 self-consciousness, or rather as the Notion (self-consciousness in its 
 
THE NOTION. 143 
 
 simplest statement), is the one soul, the one spirit which is life, 
 vitality itself and the only life, the only vitality. Thus it is 
 which is so curiously characteristic of the Hegelian philosophy 
 that every attempt to understand or explain any the least con- 
 siderable of its terms becomes a flight into the system itself. So, 
 for particular example, is it that the third is always the base and 
 the truth of the first and second. We see this corroborated by 
 fact ; for it is simply the progress of thought to give itself the new 
 as the reason or explanation or ground of the old, or of what pre- 
 ceded it. Thus it is that the modern world is the truth of the 
 ancient, Spinoza the truth of Descartes, Hume the truth of Locke, 
 and Kant the truth of Hume, as Hegel is of Kant. On this last 
 particular ground, and in harmony with the whole system, Begriff 
 is third where Seyn and Wesen are first and second. The Hegelian 
 Logic even outwardly presents these three stadia, and the reason 
 lies in the Hegelian notion, or is just another side of the Hegelian 
 metaphor. There is opposed to perception this world of outer 
 images: these constitute the Seyn, the immediacy. But now 
 understanding takes what perception offers will not content itself 
 with what perception offers as it is offered, will treat this in its 
 way, and insists on demanding the inner nature of this outer nature, 
 the inner being of this outer being ; it insists on satisfaction to its 
 own Reflexion, and demands the Wesen of this Seyn, the inner 
 essentity of this outer appearance, the, Noumenon of the Pheno- 
 menon. But all this can be said in the two words, Begriff and 
 Urtheil. The act of perception may be named the immediate 
 Begriff, the Begriff in itself: in itself as being yet only virtual, 
 that is, existent and factual, but object of consciousness as yet 
 neither to itself nor anything else ; in itself, too, as really in itself 
 for every particular into which the whole sphere (or notion) goes 
 asunder, constitutes, each with each, just what the sphere or notion 
 is in itself ; and in itself as really in itself in this sense, that to 
 whatever yet it may develop itself, that development depends on, 
 is conditioned by, the first natural germ as it was in itself when 
 first manifested. In particular explanation of the third or last 
 phase, it may be stated that self-will is the notion in itself of the 
 whole developed notion of morality. At the same time, it will be 
 as well to enter a caveat against this statement being supposed to 
 favour what is called the selfish system. Self-will is the notion of 
 morality in itself; but it is only through its negative of humilia- 
 
144 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., C. 
 
 tion and submission that it reaches its own consummation ; and 
 this can hardly be a dogma of the Selfish System. 
 
 But if the act of perception be the notion in itself, the act of 
 understanding is the notion for itself. Perception is content to 
 hold its matter just as it is, and asks no further. Understanding 
 is not so content ; understanding will not so hold its matter, 
 understanding must peep and pry and spy into, understanding 
 must separate, its matter separate it for its own passage into it : 
 understanding, too, having once effected this separation, keeps it 
 up ; it regards this separation as the truth ; it holds each part to 
 be in its truth only when separated from the whole, and in isola- 
 tion by itself: understanding, that is, puts faith only in its own 
 abstractions. Perception holds what we may call its matter 
 perception itself being only relatively as form immediately ; 
 whereas understanding will hold and must hold this matter (the 
 same matter) only mediately. But the object or matter immediately 
 is the object or matter in itself, and the object or matter mediately 
 is just the object or matter for itself. Understanding, then, will 
 not have the object otherwise than as it is mediately, as it is in 
 reflexion, as it is for itself. Understanding, that is, scouts outer 
 nature, and will have inner nature. Though it has it there as in 
 perception, it still asks what is it ? It demands the Wesen of this 
 Seyn. Seyn, then, is the -mtent, ingest, or matter of all per- 
 ception ; and Wesen is the mtent, ingest, or matter of all under- 
 standing : and this matter in perception is only unmittelbar or an 
 sich, while in understanding it is mittelbar or fur sich. In per- 
 ception, that is, it is just the undeveloped Begriff, just what is 
 apprehended or begrasped in its first direct unity ; but in under- 
 standing it is the judgment (a judgment has been passed on the 
 matter in regard to what it is) and the judgment is the Ur-theil, 
 the primal or primitive parting, the dis-cernment But now is the 
 opportunity of the third branch of logic, of reason, to reunite in 
 the Schluss (the shut, the close), what has been separated by 
 understanding in the Urtheil, and restore it to the unity of per- 
 ception in the higher form of reason : in which form it is the 
 notion, the logical notion, the true and complete notion, and Seyn 
 and Wesen are now complemented by their third. 
 
 But here now, then, we have a new triad for the principle of 
 Hegel: Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeasoning! The 
 three stadia of common logic are, after all, representative of what 
 Hegel would be at ! The three stadia of common logic constitute 
 
THE NOTION. 145 
 
 but a stage of the Hegelian evolution constitute between them 
 but the Hegelian notion and in very perfect form ! Hegel too, 
 then, has seen into the depths of the meaning of the common 
 logic; and he co-operates with Kant to restore it from death and 
 inanity to life and wealth. How striking this placing parallel with 
 each other the forms Perception and Simple Apprehension ; and 
 the matters Seyn and Begriff! What vision this of Under- 
 standing as that which separates and remains fixed by what it 
 separates the judgment, the Urtheil, which is the primitive part- 
 ing ! What new truth in the function of Eeason as reconciliant 
 speculation, which restores the notion, the first product as it came 
 to us, but now in its very truth ! What wonderful sagacity to 
 regard all Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss as but the turns of a single 
 movement, which movement is the one essential secret of all 
 that is ! 
 
 But this the psychological triad of Perception, Understanding, 
 and Reason, or the logical one of Simple Apprehension, Judgment, 
 and Reasoning is capable of being applied both historically and 
 biographically. Historically Seyn, the intent of Perception, 
 sufficed the earliest men. The Notion, the Begriff, what was 
 simply begrasped and begriped of Simple Apprehension, was 
 enough for them. They asked no questions, they simply lived ; 
 it was an era of Faith. How many times the Notion, meaning 
 thereby the whole logical movement and that is tantamount to 
 the whole vital movement has passed through its own phases 
 historically, cannot be said. There seems good reason for suppos- 
 ing the philosophy of Aristotle to have been in some sort an 
 Absolute Idealism ; aud in that case, the Greeks at all events 
 represent one complete cycle of the Notion. We see the stage of 
 Perception and Seyn, or of Simple Apprehension and Begriff, the 
 age of faith, in Homer. Then the first appearance of the Urtheil, 
 of the separating and dis-cerning Understanding, the first appear- 
 ance of the Negation, is the turning of such thinkers as Thales 
 and the other Ionics on the Seyn, outer being, and the question- 
 ing of it, the demanding the Wesen, the inner principle of it, the 
 resolution of it by reflexion into its differences, water, fire, earth, 
 and what not. Then the separation, the reflexion, the abstraction, 
 the generalisation so begun a beginning of Idealism it is, for 
 even Water when proposed as the principle by Thales is, as Hegel 
 tells us, but a beginning of Idealism ; if it is the principle, it is a 
 unity which ideally holds, which ideally is, the total variety 
 
 K 
 
146 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., C. 
 
 waxed more and more perfect, more and more pure, in the succeed- 
 ing philosophers. We have Pythagoras, for example, seeking an 
 explanation in the numerical difference, which is so far an abstract- 
 ing from outer solidity. Then we have the first absolutely abstract 
 thought, the Eleatic being. In fact, Heraclitus, Democritus, 
 Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, can be all used as types of 
 certain stages of the movement of the notion and applied in ex- 
 planation of the system of Hegel. Of this movement, we may 
 conceive the modern world to constitute another cycle. In the 
 Middle Ages, there was simple apprehension the reign of Faith. 
 Then came Eeflexion to break into this unity, and set up the 
 differences as principles. This Reflexion, as in Greece so here, 
 culminated in an age of Aufklarung. People conceived themselves 
 fully enlightened as to their ancient folly, and hastened to rid 
 themselves of it at the shortest in some cases, as Carlyle has it, 
 by setting fire to it But, looking at this Eeflexion, only in -the 
 philosophical element, and omitting Descartes, Spinoza, and the 
 rest, we remark that the Aufklarung culminated in David Hume, 
 and passing from him to Kant, received from this latter its first 
 turn into the final form, completed by Hegel, of the universal 
 reconciliant Idea or Schluss of Speculation and Reason. This last 
 form is what we have now to welcome : the doubts, despairs, 
 despondencies of mere reflexion are ended ; we have to quit the 
 penal fire of the negative, and emerge into the sunshine of the 
 new and higher positive of the positive which restores to us, and 
 in richer form, all that understanding, all that reflexion, all that 
 scepticism and the enlightment of the eighteenth century had 
 bereft us of. Thus does the Notion describe its cycles; and it 
 may be remarked of these, that each, though full, is a rise on its 
 predecessor. The Greek, though a complete cycle, is still, as it 
 were, in the form of the first moment, Seyn ; it is a cycle an sich f 
 The modern world again is dominated by Wesen, and may be 
 named a cycle fur sick. To believe the analogy, we shall be 
 followed then by a cycle an und fur sick, in which Reason shall 
 predominate ! How strangely this coheres with prophecy and 
 the utterances of Scripture ! 
 
 What is said historically, may be said biographically : Seyn, 
 Wesen, Begriff, or Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss, are the three stages 
 in the life of every thinker. 
 
 Why the Notion, Begriff, is third to Being and Essence, will 
 have now made itself apparent in a variety of ways. The directest 
 
GENESIS OF THE NOTION. 147 
 
 is simply that of what is : Seyn is the first form, Weseii the 
 second, and Begriff the third. This explains itself at once by refer- 
 ence to the faith of the religious era, the unrest of the reflective 
 era (Hume), and the restored repose of the rational era effected by 
 the Notion (Begriff) of Kant and Hegel. The third form can be 
 easily seen, too, though preceded by the others, to be at the same 
 time the ground, Grundlage, or containing base of these. We 
 may remark here, too, that we have now the necessary light 
 whereby to place and appreciate Comte. The constitution of the 
 notion really gives him a show of truth as regards an age of 
 Eeligion and an age of Metaphysic ; but it is a fatal error to 
 suppose them past only, and not still operant, now and always : 
 Comte, too, knows nothing of the how or why, or real nature of his 
 ages, and it is amusing to compare his third and final one (the 
 Aufklarung) with that (Eeason, Faith) of Kant and Hegel. Comte, 
 with the smirking, self-complacent sufficiency of the shallow, 
 orders us to return to Seyn (Perception), Phenomena ; and knows 
 not, that he brings to the examination of the same, all the 
 categories of reflexion, full-formed, and in that he drifts a prey to 
 these categories, thinks himself by their means (whose nature is 
 hid from him) master of the Phenomena ! 
 
 D. '/ 
 
 The third paragraph of the opening of the third volume of the 
 Logic of Hegel, entitled 'Vom Begriff im Allgeineinen/ may be 
 translated thus : 
 
 * Objective Logic, which considers Being (Seyn) and Inbeing or Essentity 
 (Wesen), constitutes properly the genetic exposition of the Notion. More 
 particularly, Substance is the real Inbeing t or Inbeing so far as it is united 
 with Outbeing (Seyn) and gone over into Actuality. The Notion has, there- 
 fore, Substance as its immediate presupposition ; or Substance is that in itself 
 which the Notion is as in manifestation. The dialectic movement of Sub- 
 stance through Causality and Reciprocity onwards, is therefore the immediate 
 genesis of the Notion, and by this genesis its Becoming is represented. But 
 its Becoming, like Becoming everywhere, implies that it (the Becoming) is the 
 reflexion of what becomes into its Ground, and that the next presentant other 
 into which the former (that which is engaged becoming) has passed, constitutes 
 the truth of this former. Thus the Notion is the truth of Substance ; and 
 while the particular mode of relation in Substance is Necessity, Freedom 
 manifests itself as the truth of Necessity, and as the mode of relation in the 
 Notion.' 
 
 It was in reading this passage that the historic ' light went up 
 
148 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., D. 
 
 to us ' as to what the Begriff really meant. Of course, it was 
 known, we may say, all along previously, that, as stated by 
 Schwegler and Haym, it was a tenet of Hegel that the history of 
 philosophy was, in outward concretion and contingency, what the 
 development of the notion was in the inward concretion and 
 necessity of logic. But still, on the whole, the tenet was looked 
 loosely at, in the manner of Haym and Schwegler themselves, as 
 a mere analogy and ideal, as a mere Eegulative, and not by any 
 means as a Constitutive. ' Schwegler expresses this thus : 
 ' History is no sum in arithmetic to be exactly cast up. Nor 
 anywhere in the history of philosophy, either, can there be talk 
 of an d priori construction ; what is factual cannot be applied as 
 the illustrative exemplication of a ready-made notional schema : 
 but the data of experience, so far as capable of a critical inquest, 
 are to be taken as ready-furnished to us, and their rational con- 
 nexion is to be analytically exposed ; only for the arrangement 
 and scientific articulation of this historical material can the 
 Speculative idea supply a Kegulative.' As said, however, in read- 
 ing the above passage from Hegel, * a light went up,' and Hegel 
 was seen to be much more in earnest with his peculiar tenet than 
 it seemed to have occurred to anyone even to surmise. It was 
 seen, in fact, that the Notion was Kant's notion, and that its 
 genesis lay in the thinking of the philosophers who had preceded 
 him, in the thinking, that is, of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, 
 Locke, Hume, to whom Substance really presented itself though 
 each named it otherwise, perhaps as what was the whole object 
 of inquiry and research. Concrete facts do undoubtedly lie behind 
 the abstraction of Hegel ; and if this abstraction can, on one side, 
 be viewed as the development of thought as thought, apart from 
 any other consideration, it can also be viewed, on the other side, 
 as being but the counterpart of the actual particular facts of 
 history. To him, indeed, who is well read in history in general, 
 and in that of philosophy in particular, the light now offered will 
 shine into meaning many tracts of Hegel which might have 
 appeared previously quite impervious. 
 
 In further reference to the exposition of Substance being the 
 genesis of the Notion, we remark, that what is in and for itself, is 
 to itself at once its own ground and its own manifestation, its own 
 identity and its own difference, its own affirmation and its own 
 negation, &c. &c. Now Substance is all this: the notion conveyed 
 by this word is just that it is its own Wesen and its own Seyn, its 
 
GENESIS OF THE NOTION. 149 
 
 own Inbeing and its own Outbeing, its own ground and its own 
 manifestation, &c. It is evident that the sort of movement in- 
 volved here in this species of play between inside and outside, 
 ground and manifestation, identity and difference, may be appro- 
 priately termed reflexion : for neither factor is, in itself, absolute, 
 independent, isolated, &c.; neither factor has an independent exist- 
 ence both have only a relative existence, either is quite as much 
 in its other as in itself. The ground is ground just because of the 
 manifestation, and the manifestation is manifestation just because 
 of the ground. Thus they are reciprocals, and reciprocals in unity. 
 Again, the Notion that is, our notion, Kant's notion, or rather 
 now Hegel's notion is the unity of Being and Eeflexion, or Seyn 
 and Wesen. The categories, or their universal, the category, let 
 us say, is as much outward as inward ; it is what is, whether we 
 look outwards or inwards ; that is, it is Seyn, Being. And again, 
 inasmuch as in it we can look both outwards and inwards, it in- 
 volves or is Eeflexion ; that is, the Notion is the Unity of Being 
 and Eeflexion. In fact, all that is wished to be said here (begin- 
 ning of fourth paragraph of ' Vom Begriff im Allgemeinen '), is that 
 the movement of Substance is manifestation of what it is in itself, 
 and this manifestation is identical with what it is in itself, and 
 Substance and Manifestation are just identical together and in 
 general: further, that this movement of Substance is evidently 
 identical with the movement of the potion, and the former con- 
 stitutes thus the genesis of the latter. In other words, the evolu- 
 tion of Substance through Causality, Eeciprocity, &c., in the heads 
 of Spinoza, Hume, and Kant terminated in the genesis of the Idea 
 in the brain of Hegel. In short, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, &c., 
 are simply abstracted from, and the development which these and 
 others gave to Substance (for the object then was an inner prin- 
 ciple or truth that should explain phenomena and such is Sub- 
 stance) may be considered as the development of Substance itself, 
 or as the dialectic movement of the plastic All of thought which 
 was then in the form of Substance. 
 
 Substance unites in its own self both of the correlative sides: it 
 is that which as Inbeing is also Outbeing ; it is both inner ground 
 and outer manifestation ; that is, it is Actuality, or what actually 
 is. There can be no doubt but the thoughts of Descartes, and the 
 rest, circled around the poles which these simple ideas represent. 
 ' Substance is that in itself which the Notion is in manifestation.' 
 This means, Kant's Notion which is now in actual manifestation 
 
150 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., D. 
 
 is but a development from Substance ; and Substance, therefore, 
 was in itself what Kant has actually developed it into. The dia- 
 lectic movement of Substance through Causality and Eeciprocity 
 onwards is therefore the immediate genesis of the Notion ; and by 
 this genesis its Becoming is represented. It is well to know this 
 literal truth to history on the part of Hegel, especially as concerns 
 the characteristic tenets both of Kant and himself. Categories, 
 Dialectic, Method, have all been regarded hitherto as appurten- 
 ances of the system, and of nothing but the system : close literal 
 generalisation, though in ultimate abstraction, of actual outer facts 
 has not been thought of ; and Hegel's claim on actual history has 
 simply given rise so far as precise fact was concerned to in- 
 credulous shakings of the head. The truth in general, however, is 
 what was said a short way back, of Hegel being a pure mirror into 
 which fell the pure reflexions of the long line from Thales to Kant; 
 and in particular the truth is, that the text of the Logic may in 
 this place be regarded as a direct tmallegory of the actual origin 
 of the Idea of Hegel in his studies of his immediate predecessors, 
 especially Kant. 
 
 Hegel does not stop at reciprocity, and it may appear wrong, 
 therefore, to assert that the notion is reciprocity. It is to be ad- 
 mitted that the notion is beyond and more than simple reciprocity : 
 still it preserves the colour and lineaments of its parent ; and the 
 notion is a reciprocity, the notion, in fact, is the notional recipro- 
 city represented by any one of the many triads we have already 
 seen. This, we may just point out in passing, has escaped Eosen- 
 kranz, who mistakes the genesis of the notion so much, that he 
 proposes a reform of the Hegelian Logic, the main item of which 
 is untruth to history the insertion of Teleology between Eecipro- 
 city and the Notion. It wants but a very slight glance at the 
 system to discern that it is a triple sphere of triple spheres end- 
 lessly within one another almost in the fashion of a Chinese toy, 
 and that the essential principle of each triplicity is reciprocity. 
 Compare Logic and Nature, for example, as they appear in the 
 system: is it not as if there were an inner congeries hanging down 
 side by side with an outer congeries, without direct transition from 
 the one to the other, but each perfectly parallel to the other 
 parallel, that is, in reciprocity ? Is not the Hegelian method but 
 an evolution or development an expansion through all that is, of 
 the notion? Is it not simply an exhibition or demonstration of 
 the notion in all that is in existence, or an arrangement of all that 
 
GENESIS OF THE NOTION. 151 
 
 is in existence on the notion? What is the precise meaning, for 
 example, now, of Hegel's rejection of what he calls raisonnement ? 
 
 Why, raisonnement is the method that existed while causality was 
 
 the notion ; but that method it is proper to withdraw and change, 
 now that reciprocity (in a notional form certainly) is the notion. 
 This is a true insight into the most characteristic and obscure of 
 all the very extraordinary process of Hegel. While causality 
 reigned, explanation consisted in assigning a reason for a conse- 
 quent; that is, raisonnement was the method. Now, however, 
 that reciprocity reigns, it is reciprocity that must guide, and con- 
 stitute henceforth (till a new principle) the method of all theorising, 
 and of all explanation. And this is simply what Hegel has per- 
 formed : instead of accounting for this universe by a series of 
 causes and effects, or reasons and consequents, he has simply 
 carried his notional reciprocity, orderingly, arrangingly, into it, 
 and presented it to us as a sphere of spheres, all of which follow 
 notional reciprocity as their law and principle. 
 
 What is said in regard to the relativity, or mode of relation 
 which obtains in Substance as opposed to that which obtains in 
 the Notion, is very important, and displays a most deep and un- 
 mistakable historical dye. On the stage of Substance, man, as his 
 thought could only then show to him, was under Necessity ; and 
 Necessity constituted then the great subject of discussion: but 
 here, on the stage of notional reciprocity, the prius of which 
 exhibits itself as subjective or of the nature of thought, we are in 
 an element of Freedom, that element being thought or reason, 
 which is but our inmost selves, and which to obey, then, is but to 
 obey ourselves is but Self-obedience, and that is Liberty. It is 
 historical also, that he who first announced the notion of reciprocity, 
 and in its subjective or notional form, was the same Kant who was 
 the first to demonstrate, as if by exact proof, this fact of our Moral 
 Liberty or Freedom. Is it not wonderful concentration on the 
 part of Hegel, then, to shut up such enormous masses as the dis- 
 cussions of Kant in single and brief phrases ? 
 
 Still, there is difficulty enough : this (the fourth paragraph of 
 ' Vom Begriff im Allgemeinen ') is, on the whole, one of those 
 hopeless passages which so often bring the reader of Hegel into 
 the gall of vexation and the bitterness of despair. In the Egyptian 
 fog of the first sentence of this paragraph, how is it possible for 
 any man to see? How hopeless must the British student of Hegel 
 find himself in such a quandary as this ! Of course, he is at a full 
 
152 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., D. 
 
 stop. If he has not yet tried the second book of the objective 
 Logic, winged by hope from the reference, he tries it now, but 
 speedily shuts it again to begin at the first which is but too 
 evidently the preliminary necessity. The first, however, is no less 
 obdurate than the others; and the baffled reader finds himself im- 
 potent, imbecile, flushed, on the outside of a vast block, inacces- 
 sible, impenetrable, hopeless as the flank of Atlas. But is Hegel 
 always then to remain this intemerate height ? Not so : the his- 
 torical and other clues which we are here engaged on will be 
 found, in the end (as we have largely seen already), adequate to a, 
 successful ascent here and everywhere. 
 
 Philosophy has reached in Kant an entire new position. Kant 
 may be named that position an sick; Fichte and Schelling, the 
 same fur sick; and Hegel is its an und fur sich the absolute 
 power, the pure negativity, that, as absolute power, reconnects 
 itself with itself, and so is an undfilr sick. Hegel thus indicates 
 that he has consummated the whole task of the ages by bringing 
 the All to the last orb and drop and point of unity in the negative 
 fur sich; that is, the All both in the one whole and the infinite 
 details ; and this, too, for itself or consciously, the fully objecti- 
 vised or filled subjectivity, and the fully subjectivised or vitalised 
 objectivity which latter result indicates a life that, as it were, 
 eats up all objects into its own self, into its own unity, so that all 
 that is remains at last the reine NegativitM; negative in that it has 
 negated all into itself ; but negative, too, in that it can negate itself 
 into All, the One into the Many as well as the Many into One, 
 Unity into Variety as well as Variety into Unity, Identity into 
 Difference as well as Difference into Identity. 
 
 But just this is the Notion, or the Notion is just the pure 
 negativity that negates its One (the Universal) into Many (the 
 Particular), and negates this Many again into the One which is the 
 concrete Singular and Unity of both. This is but the general ex- 
 pression of the notion ; but no notion is different. No object in 
 the outer world even but is so constituted : a grain of sand even is 
 a universal which has passed into a particular, and has again 
 cohered into a singular. Nay, apart from this constitution, what 
 is the sand ? Can any one tell this ? Is it sayable ? Anything 
 else, in truth, is but abstract reference to itself, and is what the 
 Germans call a Gemeintes a thing meant, a thing opined merely. 
 In fact, we are to track and trace the notion everywhere. Every- 
 thing runs through its moments. These moments constitute the 
 
GENESIS OF THE NOTION. 153 
 
 universal movement. Consider these moments in the form of the 
 three historical periods, of the three psychological acts, or best of 
 all, of the three logical functions ! As Seyn (Simple Apprehension)^ 
 for example, we have the first reflexion of the Notion, as Nichts 
 (Judgment) the second, and as Werden (Keason) the third, which 
 last is the negation of the negation, or the restoration of the first 
 in higher form. 
 
 Hegel, then, completed Kant by ascending to the category of the 
 categories the category as such, the notion. This, without doubt, 
 he "was enabled to effect by a careful analysis of the source from 
 which Kant himself had supplied himself Formal Logic. The result 
 of this analysis was discernment of the notion, and consequently of 
 the fact, that all Philosophy (Ontology included) had gone into 
 Logic, which fact he henceforth proclaimed. He saw, moreover, 
 that the entire of philosophic thought which had preceded the new 
 position inaugurated by Kant, constituted what might be named 
 an Objective Logic. The realisation of this Objective Logic, he was 
 gradually enabled to accomplish by a profound study of the history 
 of philosophy, but always in the company of the Kantian categories 
 and his own generalisation of the same. He found, for example, 
 that a beginning was almost indifferent (the beginning of all philo- 
 sophy that preceded Kant viewed as an Objective Logic, which is 
 the true beginning, being unconsidered), inasmuch as what was 
 everywhere, and repeated itself everywhere, was simply the Notion. 
 Quantity, for instance (as seen in Kant), formally expresses the 
 notion in universality, particularity, and singularity. Nay, Quan- 
 tity in its notion is but the Notion. Quality is equally so, for its 
 third member, Limitation, is very inadequately represented by this 
 word. Eelation exhibits the same nature. Other assonances, but 
 essentially of the same character, present themselves. Thus, 
 Immediate is the unparticularised Universal, Eeflexion is the 
 Particular, and the commediated result or notion is the Singular. 
 In short, these and other triads represent the Notion. With this 
 mode of viewing all things, it is not difficult to see that Seyn is just 
 the beginning that would occur to thought ; and the history of 
 philosophy demonstrates it to have so occurred, and as such. It is 
 the universality as such, the ultimate generality or abstraction ; it 
 is the Immediate it is formal, it is identical ; as it was the first 
 stage of historical thought, so it is the first stage of biographical 
 thought it is the absolutely first and simple, that is, it is the 
 first of everything and the base of everything. How else can one 
 
154 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. IV., D. 
 
 begin than by saying it is ? The is must be simply accepted ; 
 what we have to do is to understand it. It is stupid abstraction 
 to seek to start before is, is. The beginning as beginning is just 
 it is; till you can say that, you can say nothing; and it is the 
 first thing you can say : indeed, should you go back into an ulti- 
 mate analysis of what is, it is the first thing you must just simply 
 say. It is just the beginning of Descartes (in a way) generalised 
 from / am to it is, or simply is, or simply to-le or 'being. In fact, 
 it is to say no more than this to say, with eighteenth-century 
 enlightenment, God is : for the three letters there are (as used) a 
 bare word, and wholly undetermined. The beginning of Fichte, 
 the ego, so also the identity of Schelling : these are at bottom just 
 the same thought as being. 
 
 It is, besides, the fundamental base : every particular feels 
 granting it power to feel that being is its first and centre and 
 secret and life. Nay, it is the one absolutely inextinguishable 
 entity. Conceive all life withdrawn endeavour to conceive the 
 annihilation of even space and time ; still you will find you cannot 
 get rid of Being, of the notion is. Do all you can to reduce the 
 universe to nothing, to conceive that it is an accident that there 
 should be existence at all; endeavour your utmost to conceive 
 that all this is superfluous, and that there might just be nothing ; 
 do this and endeavour this, and you will find even nothing turns 
 up, ever somehow, the thought is, the thought there is the thought 
 of being, of existence. That there should be nothing at all is an 
 inconceivable empty abstraction. We are bound, then, to admit a 
 centre of existence, of being, independent even of space and time ; 
 and what is this but Idealism ? Where can this centre be, which 
 will be, even if you destroy space, where but in thought ? He 
 that will in his solitary walks occupy himself earnestly with such 
 reflexions, will at last find ' a light go up ' to him, a light in which 
 he will see space shrinking into disappearance, and yet being, 
 existence, solid and immovable as the centre and the core of 
 thought itself. We cannot annihilate being, we must just begin 
 with it and say, there is. But this being is a notion, and will take 
 on the forms of the notion. It comes to us in the first form of the 
 notion, which is the universal, the affirmative, the immediate, the 
 identical, the formal, the abstract, the ansich. But just because it 
 is a notion, a true notion, its universal will part into the particular, 
 its affirmative pass into the negative, its ansich free itself through 
 opposition to fiirsich, &c., &c. ; and in similar terms the third step 
 
GENESIS OF THE NOTION. 
 
 155 
 
 to concreter unity may also be described. Thus, then, the whole 
 progress will be a flight ever of three stages, each new flight being 
 always stronger and stronger, till, by guidance of the notion itselL 
 and its own native rhythm, we exhaust the universe, and reach the 
 totality articulated into itself absolute truth, the absolute. 
 
 Hegel had convinced himself well that this was the method, by 
 historical study, by biographical thought, and by reference to out- 
 ward nature and the concrete everywhere. Deep examination of 
 Kant gave him the notion, the form, while universal study, of a 
 more or less exhaustive and penetrative character, gave him the 
 material. 
 
156 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 CHAPTEK V. 
 
 NOTES OF THE STRUGGLE CONCLUDED. 
 
 THE beginning is Kant, whose notion was that objects adapted 
 themselves to the subject. This is his Copernican notion his 
 notion in its simplest form. Its particularisation is, the Categories 
 as functions of Apperception, and in possession of a complex or 
 manifold, in the shape of the sensuous but a priori forms, Space 
 and Time. This particularisation constituted to Kant an a priori 
 subjective machinery form by which our sensations (matter 
 & posteriori, in that they are excited by causes external to our- 
 selves, but subjective, quite as much as the & priori elements, in 
 that they are simply our own states) are taken up and converted 
 or projected into the connected world of experience or of percep- 
 tive objects. In this way, each of us inhabits a universe of his 
 own subjective sensational states (still nameable inner or outer) 
 reticulated into nexus, law, and system by his own subjective 
 intellectual functions. The sensational elements, further, being 
 incapable of comparison as between subject and subject, are thus 
 in the more important derivative moral sense of the word strictly 
 subjective; while the intellectual elements, on the contrary, being 
 capable of demonstration, through comparison, as the same in each 
 of us and common to us all, are thus in the more important sense 
 the word derived from its use in reference to morals objective ; 
 objective, that is, in their validity and evidence, though subjective 
 in their constitution and place as of the mind and belonging to 
 the mind.* 
 
 * These two senses of the words subjective and objective ought to be well under- 
 stood and well discriminated by every student of Philosophy. After a careful and 
 protracted analysis, we cannot find Sir William Hamilton, from the manner in which 
 he understands the words, whether using them himself or quoting them from others, 
 to have had any glimpse of their second, derivative, and more peculiarly German 
 and important sense. Yet this is the sense in which the words are principally used 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 157 
 
 Further, this world which Kant would have us inhabit is, 
 theoretically (that is, so far as direct knowledge is concerned), 
 phenomenal only. All that we know, every actual object of our_ 
 knowledge, is indebted for its matter (form merely is inadequate 
 to the constitution of any object of knowledge) to sense, either 
 outer or inner : but sense, being a medium, conveys no knowledge 
 of what the thing which affects sense is, but only of what or how 
 it appears. Still, though all that we know even our own ego is 
 phenomenal, there are legitimate inferences to the noumena of 
 things-in-themselves without us, of God above us, and of our own 
 ego as a free and immortal spirit within us. The sensational 
 elements, to which we owe the matter or manifold or simply many 
 of knowledge, are a posteriori, then ; and the intellectual elements, 
 to which we owe the form or nexus or unities and unity of know- 
 ledge, are a priori : the latter, that is, are part and parcel of our 
 original structure and constitution, while the former are, so far as 
 their occasions are concerned, derivative from elsewhere, or, as we 
 name it, from experience, for which we have in this reference to 
 wait. But the two terms (things), what is a priori and what is 
 a posteriori, are too heterogeneous to clasp and weld together at once 
 and without more ado. There is an intermediate element in and 
 through which they cohere with each other. This is the provision 
 of a formal manifold, a perceptive manifold (space and time), which, 
 being at once, as perceptive, sensational, and, as formal and a- 
 priori, intellectual, constitutes a medium in which the matter of 
 affection (sensations) and the form of function (categories, notions) 
 coalesce to the production of this whole formed universe, outer 
 and inner. Shortly, then, the many of affection are mediated 
 into the one of function through the intellectual and a, priori- 
 placed, but sensational and a ^os^Hori-presentant, perceptive forms 
 of space and time ; which are thus, as limitlessly projected spectra 
 or cones of illumination, subjective as but within us, but objective 
 as appearing with everything from without as from without. In 
 this way, then, we see that sensation undergoes the manipulation 
 of intellect. 
 
 But in this notion of Kant, that which was the spark to Hegel 
 
 by Hegel, who may be even found speaking slightingly of the other sense as the 
 common one ; and as for Kant, in his ' Streit der Facultaten ' there occur even pro- 
 minently these formally denning words : ' Welche zwar subjective "VVichtigkeit (fur 
 mich), aber keine objective (fur Jedermann geltende) enthielten. ' The chapter in the 
 K. of P. R. on Meinen, Wissen und Glauben is a very easy one, and being in the 
 practical interest, uses the distinction passim, as do the practical works generally. 
 
158 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 lay here : the category as quantity, quality, relation, &c. though 
 a unity, was a unity of a multiple, which multiple Kant named 
 the intellectual schema. Now and here properly is the spark 
 time and space are found to possess sensuous multiples, to consti- 
 tute sensuous schemata, which accurately correspond with these 
 intellectual multiples or schemata. The sensuous multiples, in 
 fact, of space and time are only externally what the intellectual 
 multiples of the categories are internally ; nay, special sense itself 
 is but the same multiple, only placed in degree more external still. 
 That is, there is the centre, the unit self-consciousness ; then im- 
 mediately by this centre lies the multiple of the category : next to 
 the multiple of the category (or categories), again, lies that of time ; 
 the multiple of space is external to that of time : lastly, on the 
 absolute outside there lie the multiples of special sense, or our 
 actual sensations. Here are just, as it were, three degrees (count- 
 ing time and space together) of the externalisation of central self- 
 consciousness three forms of the same unit. To Hegel to 
 whom, further, the things-in-themselves (generally expressed in 
 the singular as the thing-in-itself) that Kant figured as causes of 
 our special sensations, were manifestly mere unnecessary assump- 
 tions, mere abstractions of reflexion, and supererogatory additions 
 to the sensations themselves the subjective-objective nature of 
 the whole world sprung up clear at once. That the world of sense 
 is but a repetition externally r of the internal category here at once 
 is the idea both of his Objective Logic and of his Philosophy of 
 Nature. In this way, what we call Hegel's Idee-Monade must 
 arise to him an absolute, a sum of all, a one and only reality that 
 was at once the subject and the object in absolute concrete unity 
 and identity. 
 
 But, having got this notion of Kant, which now in him and for 
 him had grown or become the Idea, how did he proceed to realise 
 his conception in actual execution ? The first step could be no 
 other than to complete the categories, which were now seen to be 
 the secret of the world; for as they themselves were the whole 
 inner, it was but an externalisation of themselves that constituted 
 the whole outer. 
 
 This was the first act, and beyond doubt Hegel was most active 
 and industrious, and indeed wholly unwearied, in studying Kant 
 in their regard ; and not only Kant, but all other philosophers, 
 ancient and modern : and not only philosophers and books merely, 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 159 
 
 but nature without him, and mind within him, and history as 
 record and preservative solution of both. 
 
 This study would conceivably result in a collection ; of which 
 collection, as we see still from the mere outside, that of Kant 
 not only as regards the Categories proper, but also the Notions of 
 Keflexion, the Ideas, &c. constitutes the bulk still, and still 
 infinitely the best. But even on the principles of Kant, Hegel 
 could not content himself with a mere collection. All in Kant 
 disposes itself architectonically (Kant's own word) on, and derives 
 itself architectonically from, a single principle. After Kant, in 
 fact, an architectonically-principled system is a necessity, and 
 indispensable. How find a new architectonic principle, then ? 
 Categories have manifested themselves to be the whole truth ; but 
 categories are notions notions relatively abstract, if in themselves 
 concrete ultimate generalisations : all that is necessary is simply 
 to generalise them, and so obtain their universal, or the notion as 
 notion. But what is the notion as notion ? It will be no formal 
 identity either : it also will probably contain a multiple like the 
 rest. In this multiple, too, probably there will lie the means of 
 transition ; which being carried out, may terminate in ultimate 
 instance by leaving the categories an organic system. 
 
 Here now, again, Hegel just simply follows the lead of Kant. 
 As Kant went to formal logic for his judgment, or category, Hegel 
 betakes himself thither also in search of his notion. Nay, little 
 hesitation was left him as to where specially to look for his notion ; 
 for Kant having already used up Judgment for his Categories, and 
 Reasoning for his Ideas, formal Logic had now only Simple Appre- 
 hension to offer ; and simple apprehension was, besides, the precise 
 rubric to which the nature of the case referred him (Hegel) in any 
 question of notions, or a notion. As Kant found the forms of the 
 Judgment to be Quantitative, Qualitative, &c., so quite as readily 
 Hegel finds the forms of the Notion to be Universal, Particular, 
 and Singular. These three forms constitute the multiple of the 
 notion as notion. But the idea of an architectonic principle could 
 not let these forms again merely fall out of each other : it de- 
 manded nexus for them, too, and union in a common whole. 
 Here it is that Hegel manifests great subtlety of insight. Indeed, 
 in this whole matter, Hegel presents vast industry, vast labour, 
 vast thought ; the result of which was to say it in sum his 
 modification of the Aristotelian Logic, or his Subjective Logic, for 
 
160 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 which, nevertheless, it is right to add, abundant materials already 
 lay in the works of Kant. 
 
 But here, as specially regards an architectonic principle, and 
 the forms of the notion itself, Hegel again directly follows the 
 hint of Kant. Kant transformed the classifications of the Judg- 
 ment under the rubric of technical logic, so named into actual 
 functions of the thinking subject into actual functions of apper- 
 ception or self-consciousness. Hegel similarly vitalised and 
 subjectivised the technical forms of the notion. Hegel, following 
 the abstract notion into its abstract movements of life in the 
 actual thought of the subject, saw that that movement was the 
 universal (in the sense of the all-common, the common whole, 
 the one, the monade, the absolute for this movement is the move- 
 ment of the notion in absolute generality), determining itself to a 
 particular, from which it returns again to itself, but as Singular. 
 This, certainly, is the ultimate nerve of thought. We certainly, 
 for our parts, ordinary persons in this ordinary material world, 
 separate independent subjects beside separate independent objects, 
 conceive ourselves to be determined by these objects, and to 
 return to ourselves from them or their examination with, so to 
 speak, a mere colouring knowledge. But the position of idealism 
 is once for all held by Hegel, and the (universal) subject accord- 
 ingly is, in his eyes, self-determined ; so that the absolute universal 
 of the subject's innermost or most characteristic movement, is the 
 universal (himself), determining himself to the particular (his 
 state as object), and returning to himself from the same as 
 singular (the notion, the knowledge gained, the reunion of the 
 particular the other, the negative of the universal with itself 
 or with this universal). This is the nerve of self-consciousness ; 
 and self-consciousness is the absolute the dimensionless point 
 that, though point and dimensionless, is the Universe. Self- 
 consciousness is the universal, the all-common (as in German), or 
 the common whole that is : but it thinks itself; and itself in being- 
 thought is to itself its object, its negative, its particular, which so 
 is just the particular of the universal. But so long as itself is to 
 itself in the form of object, or other, which it considers, it has not 
 completed the act of thought: that act is completed when it 
 returns, as knowledge, to itself as singular, that is, from the 
 particular back into the universal. This is the single secret of 
 Hegel ; and his obscurest writing is but an abstract, and so almost 
 mystifying description of all this. 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 161 
 
 Bat let us open our eyes to the step we have just taken. 
 Self-consciousness was, to us, a short way back, the centre, and 
 all the rest was as the circumference external to it. But in this 
 mode of looking, the centre is simply a dead identity, a mere 
 abstract formless unity. Now, however, we have given a multiple, 
 a life, a movement to the centre itself; for we have found that it 
 is just the notion as notion, the category of categories, the uni- 
 versal into which these are generalised. Self-consciousness, in 
 short, is now identified with the notion, and all now is in living 
 nexus from the inmost centre out to the extremest verge. But 
 let us open our eyes a little wider, and ask how stands it now 
 with the concrete universe, and what sort of a philosophical or 
 religious creed must we now entertain ? Well, we must now 
 suppose self-consciousness the absolute. There is no difficulty in 
 this word absolute, electricity, for example, is the absolute 
 of the materialists : it is to them the first, the all, and the 
 only, which gradually condenses (or gyrates, it may be) into 
 an opaque atom and all atoms, which again gradually organise 
 themselves into the functions of life and thought, &c. Elec- 
 tricity, capable of all this, were very intelligibly an absolute. 
 True, as we have seen, it would still be a defective absolute, 
 and so no absolute, for it assumes space and time as quite 
 independent of itself: still, what we are required to conceive 
 under the word absolute will be easier, to us from this reference 
 to the industry of the materialists. Well, we are now to 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: it is independent, indeed, not only of 
 considerations of space, but also of those of time. Space and time 
 belong to it, not it to them ; and notions, consequently, of a 
 foundation 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 something 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. But should we be satisfied with 
 self -consciousness as the one, how account for the many, the 
 
 L * 
 
162 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 variety of this formed universe ? Self-consciousness is no formal 
 identity, no abstract unit : it involves a multiple, it is a movement. 
 It is to the evolution of this multiple, to the continuation of this 
 movement, and on its own necessity the necessity of thought as 
 thought that we are to attribute the whole. But all this is very 
 difficult to realise in conception. On the one hand, this primary 
 vesicle, or atom, or call it what you may, of thought, which 
 grows into the universe, though named thought, seems to differ 
 but little from any supposed primary atom of matter to whose 
 development the universe might be ascribed. In fact, idealism in 
 this way is just a sort of materialism. This evolution of an 
 absolute necessity seems as mechanical, cold, cheerless, and 
 unsatisfactory under the one name as under the other. Whether, 
 so to speak, it is seed-thought or seed-matter which grows into 
 the universe, seems to us to make no difference, and the whole 
 affair becomes not even pantheism, but simply materialism 
 idealistic materialism if you will, without question of a God at 
 all. On the other hand, and looking at it in another way, where 
 am I to conceive self-consciousness unless in myself? Am I the 
 absolute ? Am I God, then ? There is that in the very question 
 which confutes the supposition. I, with my aches and my pains, 
 with my birth and my death, am too manifestly in involution 
 with nature am too manifestly in subordination to the powers 
 of nature, to the very vermin of nature ever to entertain any such 
 absurd notion. Nay, it is this very involution with nature which gives 
 countenance to the counter opinion as maintained by the materialists. 
 My birth and my death are processes which differ in no essential 
 respect from those exhibited in the birth and death of the vilest rat 
 that ever crawled. I am an animal even as the rat is. His death 
 is but the cessation of so much machinery : no soul glides by that 
 whitened tongue as he gnaws the trap that stifles him ; no one can 
 believe in any soul there ; no one can believe in any exhalation 
 thence. The rat and his birth and his death are but affairs of matter 
 plainly, mere gross matter, despite an anatomical organism and 
 physiological processes as wonderful as our own. How in our 
 case, then, believe in the unproved, in the unevidenced allegation 
 of a soul separable from our bodies, which allegation has been got 
 up by some of the weaker brethren in support of their own 
 vanity ? Assuredly, when we consider mere nature alone, the 
 creed of the materialist brings with it a weight of conviction 
 which sets absolutely at nought any such dream as an absolute 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 163 
 
 self-consciousness in mere humanity. How, then, are we at all 
 to conceive this self-consciousness of Kant and Hegel, which is to 
 be supposed the one truth of which all else that is constitutes 
 but forms ? Well, in the first place, Hegel might answer, You 
 are only asked to look at the fact; make it conceivable after- 
 wards to yourself, or not, as you may. The fact just is, that all 
 that is (and every item of all that is) exhibits in its deepest base 
 the type of self-consciousness, the type of thought; and even 
 thus far you are secured from the materialist and his mere 
 suggestion of what we named seed-matter. Nay, as we have 
 shown already, a single seed-matter which was, however infinitely 
 extended in space or prolonged in time, yet at one certain time 
 and in one certain space, virtually or impliciter this whole 
 formed variety of organisation, thought, &c., would amount to 
 a principle, not materialistic, but idealistic. Fancy electricity 
 at one time all and alone ! Well, it is something invisible, im- 
 ponderable, &c. &c., and it is a single entity, yet it contains in it 
 the possibility of becoming absolutely all that we see and think 
 now ; that is, electricity, so characterised in itself, was then 
 virtually all that is now : what is this but idealism ? Even thus 
 your seed-matter shows itself identical with seed-thought only 
 that seed-thought contains time and space, which seed-matter 
 does not. But you have no warrant to suppose seed-thought at 
 all from our doctrine, if by seed-thought we are to suppose a 
 principle impersonal and brute. Thought or self-consciousness 
 cannot be impersonal : thought or self-consciousness, however 
 endowed with power of development and evolution, always implies 
 a subject. Now, it was to this subject that your last and most 
 serious difficulty related. But why should this subject appear to 
 you so difficult, and why should you hesitate to name it God ? 
 The self-consciousness of the universe is the divine self-conscious- 
 iiess, and not the human : why should this seem difficult on the 
 Hegelian notion ? Perhaps the difficulty lies here that we see 
 no provision as yet for more than one self-consciousness, and that 
 we cannot understand the transition from the one divine self- 
 consciousness into the many human. It is to be said, however, 
 that Hegel demonstrates number and quantity to be a necessity 
 of the notion ; that he exhibits the notion, or rather the idea, 
 externalising itself into nature, to which field man, so far as he 
 is animal, certainly belongs ; and that he afterwards delineates 
 the development of spirit, in which sphere also man, in that he 
 
164 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 thinks, &c., has place. Perhaps you are not satisfied yet, how- 
 ever, and the Absolute Spirit, into which as into a subjective 
 focus Hegel would fain direct all, looms out very vague and 
 hazy to you ; perhaps the personality both of God and man seems 
 to you to be suddenly extinguished again in what you named 
 already seed-thought; perhaps the whole result may seem to 
 you but an indefinite pantheism, in which if the individual 
 human subject is not himself the absolute, it is difficult or 
 impossible to say what he is. But why should it be im- 
 possible to conceive the divine idea as externalising itself, 
 and man holding of God both in nature and in spirit ? The self- 
 reflecting pool of a pool was mentioned, some chapter or two back, 
 when an attempt was made to illustrate these thoughts : and why 
 should a reflected but self-reflecting droplet of a self-reflecting 
 drop be impossible on the Hegelian system ? Hegel has demon- 
 strated the subordination the nothingness of nature as against 
 spirit. He has thereby saved you who are thought and a spirit 
 from nature. Now, you are once for all in the universe, you 
 are no waif of chance, you are an outcome of the necessity to be 
 and this not only in the externalisation of nature, like the rat, but 
 in the original and primitive substantivity of thought why not 
 conceive yourself, by continuation of the same necessity, then, 
 spirit still in communion with the Spirit of God, when the death 
 of the body shall have given birth to Spirit ? What is there in 
 the Hegelian system to render such conception more difficult now 
 than it had seemed previously ? Does God, conceived as creating 
 nature, and as creating man the probationer of nature, that is to 
 inherit an immortality of heaven or hell according to the events 
 of his probation is this conception, taken just so, in any respect 
 easier than the probable conception of Hegel ? Cannot we, at all 
 events, rise from Hegel with a clearer, firmer conviction of the 
 existence of an infinite principle in this universe with a clearer, 
 firmer conviction of this infinite principle being thought, spirit 
 and with a clearer, firmer conviction that man partakes of this 
 infinite principle, and that consequently he is immortal, free, and 
 in communion with God ? For, I confess it all comes to this, and 
 that philosophy is useless if inadequate to this. A philosophy, in 
 fact, whose purpose and effect are not to countenance and support 
 all the great interests of religion, is no philosophy, but a material 
 for the fire only. But, it may be objected here, if the end of 
 philosophy is only religion, philosophy will be superfluous, should 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 165 
 
 its end be attainable independently of itself; there is revealed 
 religion, and it brings its own evidence, and why should this 
 cumbersome and vague and unsatisfactory interposition of philo- 
 sophy be foisted in at all ? This, the gravest of questions, deserves 
 the gravest and sincerest of answers. 
 
 The answer lies in the necessity of history ; and, in the case 
 before us, this necessity of history is named Aufklarung. This 
 single word, in fact, constitutes the answer to the question 
 considered. Eighteenth-century enlightenment, which is the 
 Aufklarung alluded to, cannot now be regarded as a temporary 
 and accidental outbreak of infidelity principally French ; it has 
 now taken its place as an historical movement, and must now be 
 acknowledged as a necessary member of the appointments of 
 providence. The French criticism, English criticism, German 
 criticism, which belonged to that movement, cannot any longer 
 be ignored : on the contrary, all the ascertained and approved 
 results of these must now be admitted into that common stock 
 of the possessions of humanity which is named truth or knowledge. 
 But the position of revealed religion does not remain unmoved the 
 while. For one thing, revealed religion must henceforth consent to 
 place its documents on the ordinary and common basis of evidence, 
 historical and other ; and, indeed, it is precisely the nature of this 
 evidence which renders desirable any appeal to philosophy. The 
 humble pious Christian who performs his probation of earth in 
 full consciousness of the eye of heaven, is certainly independent 
 of philosophy, and has, to that extent, no call to seek its 
 aid. In fact, it is to consult the interests of truth as truth, to 
 admit here that in the bliss of conviction the humble pious Chris- 
 tian who may never have heard of philosophy, is probably prefer- 
 ably situated to the greatest philosopher that ever lived. It follows 
 not from this, however, that there is not that in philosophy which 
 even to the humble pious Christian would constitute a gain. In 
 the singleness of his view, in the singleness of his endeavour, he 
 who would be religious merely becomes narrow and thin and rigid. 
 The warmth that should foster becomes with him the fire that 
 shrivels ; while the light, the mild light that should guide, becomes 
 constricted in his strait heart into the fierce flash that misleads. 
 Humanity wells from him ; he becomes a terror and an edge from 
 which even his children flee. To give the due breadth, then, to 
 this too keen edge, it may have been that the Aufklarung, in the 
 purposes of providence, appeared ; and just such function does 
 
166 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 philosophy possess for all, for the fierce in faith as for the no less 
 fierce in the so-called reason still arrogated to themselves by the 
 fragments of the Illumination. Man must not rigidly restrict 
 himself to a single duty, but must unclose himself into the large- 
 ness of his entire humanity. It is good to know all things the 
 stars of heaven and the shells of earth, and not less the won- 
 drous entities which philosophy discloses in the bodiless region of 
 thought as thought. The humbl pious Christian, then, indepen- 
 dent of philosophy as regards his faith, may still profitably resort 
 to the same for the pasture of his humanity. But religion is not 
 confined to the humble only ; and never was there a time in the 
 history of humanity when the proud heart longed more ardently 
 than now to lay itself down in peace and trust within the sanctuary 
 of religion, an offering to God. Now for these latter is it that 
 religion since the Aufklarung must appeal to philosophy. And 
 just to fulfil this function was it that Kant and Hegel specially 
 came. The former, breathing ever the sincerest reverence for 
 Christianity, had no object during his long life but the demonstra- 
 tion to himself and others of the existence of God, the freedom of 
 the Will, and the immortality of the Soul. The latter followed in 
 the same cause, and, in addition to the reconstruction of the truths 
 of natural religion, sought to reconcile to philosophy Christianity 
 itself. 
 
 This, then, as regards Hegel is ever to be borne in mind, what- 
 ever doubts and difficulties may afflict the student, that his one 
 object is the reconstruction of religion, both natural and revealed, 
 and on the higher basis which the Aufklarung, so far as it has ap- 
 proved itself true to the essential interests of humanity, demands. 
 Very obscure, certainly, in many respects is the system of Hegel, 
 and in none, perhaps, obscurer than in how we are to conceive 
 God as a subjective spirit, and man as a subjective spirit, and God 
 and man as in mutual relation. Beyond all doubt, however, 
 Hegel really attempts this and believes himself to fulfil this. It 
 is to be said, too, that the contradiction which is objected to the 
 thought of Hegel may be equally objected to the fact of the universe. 
 Finite and infinite, conditioned and absolute, both are ; and of this 
 fact, the dialectic of Hegel may be the true thought. Confiding in 
 such hope, let us proceed and see to the bottom the true nature of 
 this immeasurable Hegelian claim. 
 
 Hegel, then, converted the simple apprehension of the technical 
 logician into a vital function, the notion qiia notion, self-conscious- 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 167 
 
 ness in its ultimate nerve self-consciousness, so to speak, in its 
 ultimate throb. But he has carried the same lesson of Kant into 
 other fields. Technical logic in its technical forms corresponds 
 with actual vital functions ; but so it is everywhere the history 
 of thought itself, if vitally resumed, will be found to correspond, 
 with facts of individual consciousness. The various philosophers 
 are but thought itself on its various stages ; and instead of reading 
 this movement as the outer thing which history usually appears 
 to us, we ought to read it as the organic movement of thought as 
 thought. Spinoza, for example, thinking substance, is but the 
 notion as substance developing itself; and abstracting from 
 Spinoza, we can quite easily conceive the process, and consider the 
 process as a plastic movement in and by itself. Passing to Hume, 
 substance becomes causality, or the notion, leaving the form of 
 substance, assumes that of causality. Abstract now from Hume, 
 then, and observe the plastic movement itself, which speedily 
 transforms causality into reciprocity, and through reciprocity 
 (in the brain of Kant for it is not only that reciprocity follows 
 causality and causality substance in the tables of Kant, but Kant 
 performed the act of reciprocity, he altered the relative position 
 of subject and object, or through him this position became in- 
 different) into the notion. But, the notion ! what notion ? Why, 
 just Kant's notion for Kant's notion is virtually identical with 
 the notion qua notion of Hegel, or Kant's notion just is this 
 notion but in itself. Hegel's notion, in fact, is the absolute 
 universal of thought, the primal of ultimate nerve, which is both 
 the primitive and original form, and the primitive and original 
 matter of all that is; and Kant's notion is at bottom nothing else, for 
 Kant's notion is that objects adapt themselves to the subject, that 
 things obey or adapt themselves to notions, that the categories are 
 multiples which repeat themselves externally in a word, that the 
 notion (the category is a notion) is the original and only vitality. 
 Nay, Kant, though he knew it not himself, really named the notion, 
 and in its ultimate abstraction, when he asked, ' Why are synthetic 
 judgments, a priori, possible ? ' This is what Hegel means when 
 he says the notion ; and if anyone will take the trouble to read 
 1 Of the notion in general/ with which the Subjective Logic opens, 
 or ' s the Absolute Idea ' with which it closes, he will probably 
 be able to perceive that Hegel himself, both esoterically and 
 exoterically, though even in the latter case grudgingly and 
 enigmatically as it were, confirms the statement. In very truth, 
 
168 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 the abstraction of Hegel is often of a quasi-allegorical nature ; and 
 the origin, history, and progress of the Kantian Philosophy are 
 very much the matter of the same in the sections alluded to. 
 
 Hegel, then, despite hie enigmatic disclosures, has well kept his 
 own secret ; but the instant one applies the keys which have now 
 been given, the whole flies asunder into ease and light. 
 
 The movement of the abstract notion, (it is relatively always 
 abstract, though inherently also always concrete,) for example, 
 has three steps. In the first, it is the universal, that is, it is in 
 itself, as it were, passively shut together into its own identity; 
 virtually the all and each but undeveloped ; in the second, it is 
 the particular, or it is for itself, that is, it surveys itself, has given 
 itself an object, and so has differentiated itself into subject and 
 object; and in the third, it is the singular, or subject and object 
 have coalesced again, or just it has gone together with its own self 
 again, that is, it is in and for itself, or rather, in, for, and by itself. 
 But these are the three parts also of the one organic logical move- 
 ment, which one organic movement of thought may just, indeed, be 
 named the notion : the first step is simple apprehension, the 
 second is judgment, and the third is reason or reasoning. The 
 connexion, perhaps, is best seen in the German words for the 
 objects of these three departments (which together constitute the 
 whole) of Technical Logic, Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss. The 
 Begriff is the notion yet in its entirety, in its unity, in its 
 identity, as begripped, begriped, or begrasped together. The 
 Urtheil is the Ur-theil (ordeal in English compare theil, deal, 
 and the French tailler), the primitive or first parting, the judg- 
 ment which is a dis-cernmenk, that is, both a separation and an 
 elevation into special notice of a part. The Schluss is the shut, 
 the close, the return of the movement to unity. As Begriff, 
 then, there is but unity, self-identity, a mere formal oneness ; 
 but as whole, common whole, universal, which we have taken it 
 to be, it yet virtually contains all in itself all variety, that is, 
 or all particulars ; it is only not yet stated, or expressed, in this 
 form, not yet this form in position (Gesetzt) : it, therefore, vir- 
 tually all these, but not yet ' set ' gesetzt, or formally stated as 
 all these, is as yet in itself; or its own substantial variety is as 
 yet only virtual, only in itself. The Begriff-stage of the notion 
 is, therefore, only the notion an sick, or in itself. This is the 
 Swam? of Aristotle. But this state of the case is changed in the 
 Urtheil. A process of sundering has taken place a movement 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 169 
 
 of reflexion ; the Notion is aware of something (itself still, and so 
 is the movement reflexion) which is the object, the particular. 
 But, on the ideal basis, object being but subject, we may say that 
 the Begriff, which as Begriff is only in itself, is now as Ur-theil, 
 for itself: that is, it has an object, or there is something forj.t^ 
 which something again being but itself, it itself may just be said 
 to be for itself. As Schluss, or singular, again, the notion has 
 returned to itself, and is in and for itself. But on this stage, it is 
 again a unity, a self-immediate, and in a higher form than it was 
 'at first, because it has returned to itself enriched by the particular 
 which it discerned or into which it dis-cerned, in the judgment. 
 This new unity, as a unity, and as self-immediate, may again be 
 considered as in the form of Begriff, that is, as in itself, and 
 again as passing into the form of judgment for itself, and return- 
 ing into a new Schluss as in and for itself. 
 
 Now this is the whole of Hegel, and this is his ultimate secret. 
 These are the steps : An sich, Fur sick, An und fur sick. They 
 have analogues in Aristotle and elsewhere ; but unless they be 
 regarded simply in their derivation from Kant, they will be 
 misunderstood. 
 
 One can see that with this principle the idealist has a great 
 advantage over the materialist, so far as a consistent cosmogony 
 is concerned. In the first place, were the theory of the materialist 
 to prove satisfactory, his conclusion would, by its own dialectic, 
 strike round from materialism into idealism ; for an invisible, im- 
 palpable, imponderable, and so ' already very immaterial and 
 ideal something, like electricity, which in itself or virtually were 
 all that is, would be, and could be, nothing but idealism. And 
 in the second place, the theory of the materialist is very unsatis- 
 factory : for a single material simple, even if able to add to its 
 size by its own duplication, could never even by an eternity of 
 duplication add anything but itself to itself, it could never add 
 another than itself; again, whatever may be asserted, or plausibly 
 theorised, no transition of matter to thought, to organisation, to 
 multiplicity, even to a single other, has ever been proved ; and, 
 lastly, could a material one vary itself into a many, not only 
 material but spiritual, and not only so material, but also otherwise 
 material, and had such process been actually proved, time and 
 space would remain unaccounted for on the outside still. How 
 different it is with the ideal principle ! It is at once not only a 
 one, but a many ; it is at once evidently a principle of transition 
 
170 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 in itself, and it is proved such ; it is at once adequate to matter 
 (its other) and to thought ; moreover, it is adequate to time and 
 space : lastly, in addition, it is the nearest verity to, the most 
 vital fact in, each of us, and it requires neither an elephant of 
 support nor a tortoise of origination it is causa sui and principium 
 sui. 
 
 But let us apply what we have found in direct explication of 
 the system of Hegel as it stands. The notion as notion, as 
 organic whole of the movements we have seen, is to be the 
 architectonic principle which is to be beginning, middle, method, 
 and result to the whole of philosophy. How begin, then ? Why, 
 just the notion is. Is is a verity ; so that there must be is a 
 verity, and it is the notion that just must ~be and is. The notion 
 is, and the notion firstly is in itself. Now the notion in itself is 
 the stage of the Begriff or of simple apprehension, and the object 
 here on the great scale is nature. Nature is the notion yet 
 begrasped together, the notion as before simple apprehension, 
 or perception and sensation. It is in nature that the notion is as 
 yet only latent, only virtual, only potential, only impliciter, only 
 an sich. Nature will afterwards appear as the notion also Ausser 
 sich : the two ideas are at bottom not incompatible, but identical ; 
 such is the dialectic of thought and speech ; and this is no pre- 
 judice to us here regarding nature as the notion an sich. But if it 
 is in nature that the notion is an sich, it is in spirit, or in feeling, 
 willing intelligence, that the notion becomes fur sich, or consciously 
 looked at ; and again it is in the realm of abstraction from both 
 these concretes, from the concrete of a subject as well as from 
 the concrete of an object it is in logic that the notion is in 
 and for itself. But thought is the prius of all ; therefore it is, 
 that in the universal rubric, the ordinary order is reversed, and 
 what is last as in phenomenal evolution is first as in noumenal 
 fact. In this way, then, we can see into the first inscription found 
 in the Hegelian writings Logic, Nature, Spirit. Still, there are 
 reflexions possible in an opposite sense which, on the principles of 
 Hegel, would justify the same triad, and in the same order : it 
 is possible to look at logic as if it were the notion an sich, at 
 nature as if it were the notion fur sich, and at spirit as if it were 
 the notion an und fiir sich ; and it is quite possible that Hegel, 
 though he directly styles logic ' the science of the idea in and for 
 itself,' did regard, and did arrive at, his general division in this 
 latter manner : it is certain he places logic relatively to nature and 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PKINCIPLE. 171 
 
 spirit as on a stage of An sich, and that he regards spirit as the 
 highest form of the idea. The result of logic, to be sure, is the 
 idea in and for itself ; but even thus the result can be regarded as 
 a new Begriff, as a new unity in itself, and again developed into a 
 new in and for itself, or spirit. 
 
 But, however this be, let us take each of these grand forms, one 
 after the other, and apply the same formula. Let us take logic, 
 and confine ourselves to the notion as in the element of the same. 
 JSTow in this element what is the most immediate or an sich form 
 of the notion ? Why, that What is, is just What is or Being. 
 What now in the same element is it for itself? Here we have to 
 consider that we are in a moment of reflexion ; that we seek a 
 mediate, not an immediate ; that we say to ourselves, what is 
 What is ? that is, what is it in its essence, its principle, its true 
 inner nature, its true self; what is the in-being of that out-being, 
 or what is being as for itself? The answer plainly is Wesen. Lastly, 
 what is it that unites these ? what is it that is in and for itself? 
 The notion as notion (the Begriff) is what is in and for itself, and 
 unites in itself both Seyn and Wesen. 
 
 In these three forms, now, we have the three moments of 
 thought as they have manifested themselves in outer history. 
 The last stage, the Begriff, refers to the Begriff of Kant, and 
 is the stage of the development of the Kantian philosophy ; 
 though Begriff, it is a stage of reason, a stage of Schluss. Wesen 
 is the stage of reflexion, and has reference to the period of the 
 Aufkliirung, where an inner explanation is demanded of every- 
 thing ; that is, where the movement is reflexion, where what is 
 direct and immediate is not accepted as such, but its principle is 
 demanded. This is called also the stage of understanding proper, 
 as faculty which seeks, and maintains for its own sake, distinctions, 
 which are at bottom, however, but separations and isolations. 
 That this is the stage of Urtheil or judgment is also well seen. 
 Seyn precedes reflexion ; it is the stage of instinctive natural 
 belief, that takes what is as it is there at first hand before it. 
 We may conceive reflexion to be an affair of the modern world, 
 and to cover the whole field from Bacon to Kant. Seyn precedes 
 Bacon, and reason is subsequent to Kant. 
 
 Taking now Seyn apart from Wesen and Begriff, and applying 
 our formula, what is the result ? Now here the notion is in the 
 element of being ; there is no reference to inner principle or to 
 notion : there is no appeal either to reason or understanding, but 
 
172 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., A. 
 
 simply to sensuous perception. We are in presence only of what 
 is sensuously before us : but still it is that as thought, as logically 
 thought. What is being as logically thought in itself? What is 
 to wit, what, so to speak, superficially is, as logically thought in 
 itself, is plainly Quality. Quality is what is directly perceived as 
 constituting What is in itself. For itself now is quality gone into 
 its differences, the negative moment of quality ; but that is a 
 little consideration is certainly necessary here quantity. In 
 quantity, what superficially is, is for itself; for it is an out-of-one- 
 another, a mere externality. Measure, again, is evidently the 
 union of both quality and quantity. The correctness of quality 
 and quantity to the formula becomes beyond a doubt on referring 
 to the mode in which Hegel regards both. In the triad Seyn, 
 Daseyn, Fiirsichseyn, the same principles will be seen. Being is 
 just the moment of simple Apprehension, the stage of the Begriff, 
 the undifferentiated universal. Daseyn, again, is the universal 
 gone into its difference, gone into its particularity, and the union 
 of both is the singularity of Fiirsichseyn. Seyn, Nichts, Werden, 
 being, nothing, becoming, constitute again a triad of the same 
 nature. Nichts is the negative moment, the judgment, while 
 Werdeu is the moment of reason which re-unites the two pre- 
 ceding moments into a new third. Under Daseyn, again, we have 
 Daseyn as such, Finitude and Infinitude : and here the An sich 
 or simple formal identity, the Fur sich, or the Urtheil, or the 
 dif-ference, and the An und fur sich, or concrete identity, or 
 Schluss, are all apparent. Then under Daseyn as such, there is 
 Daseyn in general, Quality as its difference, and Something as 
 the conjunctive Schluss. Under all the divisions of Daseyn, 
 in fact, will be found the attempt to begin with formal abstract 
 identity as the universal or common whole, and pass through the 
 difference and particular to the new or concrete singular whole. 
 The same thing is mirrored in Quantity, Quantum, Degree, and 
 repeated in all the sub-forms, as will be seen if these are properly 
 analysed, to an extraordinary degree of closeness. The formula 
 of identity, difference, and reconciliation of both are seen in Wesen, 
 Erscheinung, and Wirklichkeit also. Certainly, the matter occa- 
 sionally proves refractory ; but the formula is never let go, but is 
 ever the principle of transition in every discussion. In fact, the 
 movement of the notion as notion, which may be described as the 
 reciprocity of a disjunctive sphere, is attempted to be imitated 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 173 
 
 everywhere. Let us just set down a few more of these Hegelian 
 rubrics by way of additional examples. 
 
 Subjectivity, objectivity, idea, might almost be used as names 
 for the movement itself. Then positive, negative, and infinite 
 judgments; categoric, hypothetic, and disjunctive (the last -as 
 specially viewed by Kant and Hegel refers to a concrete sphere) ; 
 assertoric, problematic, apodictic. Under judgment we do in one 
 or two cases, indeed, find, not a triplicity, but a quadruplicity ; but 
 under ' the Absolute Idea ' in the conclusion of the Logic will be 
 found some reasonings which, without being directly applied by 
 Hegel to these particular instances, very well explain how the 
 triplicity may be stated as a quadruplicity. 
 
 The formula again manifests itself in Mechanism, Chemism, 
 and Teleology, and also in the subordinate divisions under each of 
 these heads. Logic and its sub-forms stand not alone either, but 
 under Nature and Spirit the same principle can be everywhere 
 traced. In short, the beginning is always with the form in which 
 the notion is naturally direct or immediate to us ; it is the 
 notion as it presents itself in its undeveloped virtual in itself, 
 in its formal identity or selfness, in its unbroken universality. 
 This is a stage which is subjectively the stage of sensation passing 
 into perception. Logically, it is the stage of simple apprehension 
 and the Begriff. Then the middle is the stage of reflexion : the 
 universal, self-identical unit passes now into its differences, into 
 its particularities ; and its particularities are just its differences, 
 for relatively to the genus, the species is particular, and a genus 
 in its species is just in its differences, or the species are just the 
 dif-ferences of the genus. This is a negative stage, a stage of 
 separating and discriminating understanding only. Humanity on 
 this stage is in a period of Aufklarung, and sharp emphatic divi- 
 sion and distinction is peremptorily accentuated on all subjects 
 and interests. The negative is after all pain, however ; and this 
 stage is always one of finitude, unhappiness, discontent: it is 
 now that Hegel's Ungliickliches Bewusstseyn reigns. The last 
 stage is the stage of reason, of re-union and reconciliation. His- 
 torically, it is a period when the wounds of the Aufklarung are 
 healed. 
 
 From this scheme, a thousand utterances of Hegel, unintelligible 
 else, will spring at once into meaning. It does not follow, however, 
 that Hegel will henceforth be quite easy to read. "No ; Hegel's 
 dialect remains as abstract as ever : the dialectic of the transition 
 
174 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., B. 
 
 is often in such refractory matter, that it is laboured to insupportable 
 pain, or subtle to evanescence ; and in brief, Hegel will never be 
 easy reading. A useful hint here will be, that Hegel often uses 
 words so in their directly derivative sense, that this sense and the 
 usual sense, as it were, coquet with each other into a third sense. 
 The reader must always look narrowly at the composition and 
 analytic sense of the words used. Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss, are 
 alone sufficient to exemplify both the analytic signification and the 
 coquetry. The Urtheil, for example, even as the Ur-theil, or primi- 
 tive parting, is still the Judgment, &c. 
 
 This, then, is the special origin and peculiar nature of the 
 Hegelian method a method which claims to be a form identical 
 with the matter: and the claim must be allowed; for what is 
 concerned, is thought in essential form, and so also in essential 
 matter. Still, however, the system, even in that it is developed 
 on a formula, has the formalism and artificial look which attend 
 such, in a sort, mechanical aids everywhere else ; and after all, it 
 is the matter, or what may be specially discussed, that in the end 
 despite the discovery and application of an absolute, or the 
 absolute form will assign the relative value of the total industry. 
 Perhaps, what is really good in the system, would be quite as 
 good if disencumbered of the stiffness of the form, and freed from 
 the stubborn foreignness of the language. This we have yet to 
 
 B. 
 
 The central ego is externalised into the category that into 
 time, that into space, that into sensation. In ultimate generalisa- 
 tion, again, the form of the category is universality, particularity, 
 and singularity. In that ultimate form, moreover of the notion 
 as notion the category is scarcely any longer to be named 
 externalisation, but rather simply expression of the ego; for the 
 form indicated by the category is the form of the ego as the ego. 
 The ego is, firstly, the universal ; it is identity, it is immediacy, it 
 is An sich. The ego, secondly, surveys itself; that is, it gives 
 itself, or becomes to itself, the particular, the difference, the dis- 
 cernment, the reflexion : it is Fur sich (and Anders-seyn and Seyn 
 fur Anderes are evidently just identical with Fur sich, the moment 
 the ego is the all). The ego, thirdly, returns from survey of 
 itself with increase of knowledge; that is, returning into itself 
 
 The form, as absolute form, can never cease to have value. 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC., OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 175 
 
 (the universal) from or with the particular, it does not just re- 
 assume its old identity, but is now the singular, which is identity 
 -in diversity, immediacy in reflexion, the universal in the par- 
 ticular, or it is A n und fur sich. 
 
 The multiple of the category as category, or of the notion~as~ 
 notion, will constitute at once the beginning, middle, and end of 
 the organic whole. But this multiple is the common form of all 
 the particular multiples presented in the several categories ; and 
 that common form, or the ultimate generalisation of the function 
 of the categories, is the conjunction of a many into a one. But 
 this just amounts to the union of Particularity and ZTm'versality 
 into $m#ularity. This, again, is precisely the movement of 
 Apperception itself. The reduction of the manifold, under the 
 category, to or in apperception this is the singularisation of a 
 particular through a universal; and this is just the form and 
 movement of self-consciousness, as self-consciousness, of the ego 
 as ego. Nay, the same terms constitute an exact abstract expres- 
 sion of the movement we call Perception, and Kant's philosophy 
 amounts to a new theory of this concrete act. 
 
 The example of the restoration of external dead forms (the pro- 
 positions, syllogisms, &c. of technical Logic) into internal living 
 functions was, as was his habit, generalised by Hegel. The 
 Begriff, the notion, the ultimate generality or universality, in 
 complete abstraction from all and every subject, substantiated as 
 the objective all of existence this is not the only result in the 
 hands of Hegel of an extension of the principle of Kant. The 
 same principle was applied to a variety of other, if not to all 
 other concrete fields. There are fields, indeed, where this 
 principle seems instinctively applied by common consent. 
 Textile Manufacture, Ceramic Art, and a hundred other similar 
 industries, are always objectively conceived and spoken of by us : 
 we look at them as distinct objects in themselves, and that 
 develop themselves, and we do not refer to the successive subjects 
 that manipulated them. Now, what we do in such cases, Hegel 
 did in the case of abstract thought. He abstracted from the 
 historical subjects of philosophy, and placed philosophy itself as a 
 plastic object forming itself before him. Hegel has stated this 
 openly himself, but he has not been rightly taken at his own 
 word ; and this most important step for the interpretation of his 
 writings has, as it were, been taken short, to the production of a 
 stumble. 
 
176 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., B. 
 
 By history itself, Hegel has repeated the same process ; but 
 perhaps this process is more remarkable in its application to 
 religion. Religion is a concrete sphere of man's world, actually, 
 vitally there, and manifesting itself on various stages of develop- 
 ment and evolution even like the rest. People talk of the proof 
 for the existence of God who is the object of religion, as if we 
 could not know this object, nor have religion without this proof. 
 But, as Hegel points out, if we had been obliged to wait for the 
 proof in order to have religion and a knowledge of God, neither 
 religion, nor such knowledge, would be now in the world. Re- 
 ligion is a fact of man and man's world, manifesting itself in 
 successive phases like every other of his concrete surroundings. 
 Hegel then took the series of its phases, as the successive develop- 
 mental movements of a plastic object, and exhibited it to us so, 
 in complete abstraction or separation from its complicating and 
 encumbering subjectivities. Now this step of Hegel is precisely 
 the step required to be taken by many well-meaning men now-a- 
 days, to whom the letter of religion seems to cause so much 
 difficulty and uneasiness that they desire to see it still proceeded 
 against in the manner of the Aufklarung. The letter of religion, 
 however, ought to be seen to be but a subjectivity, but an external 
 and transitory form, and the plastic object itself which is now, was 
 always, and ever will be, is what alone ought to be looked at. It 
 is but the thought of an infant which in these days finds itself 
 arrested by arithmetical questions in regard to the Israelites, or 
 by astronomical, geological, or other difficulties, in regard to the 
 Bible generally. Hegel is not further behind in his arithmetic 
 than others, probably ; yet it was by force of absolute and eternal 
 truth that he regarded the Christian religion as the revealed 
 religion, and it was with consistent conviction that he bore him- 
 self throughout life as a sincere adherent to the Lutheran faith. 
 To him, it was clear that the Aufklarung had accomplished its 
 work, that to attempt to continue that work was a blunder 
 and an anachronism, and that, on the contrary, it was the 
 business of the new day, assimilating into itself the truth 
 of its predecessor, yet to atone for the damages wrought 
 by that predecessor, and restore the rights of that higher faith 
 and reason to which, in its subjection to the understanding 
 merely, it this same predecessor, the Aufklarung had done so 
 much injustice. How superfluous, then, how retrograde, how 
 simply silly all your Feuerbachs arid Strausses (to say nothing of 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC. OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 177 
 
 Bishop Colenso, and ' Essays and Reviews ') would have appeared 
 to him ! So far as happiness was concerned, Hegel knew well 
 that the humble pious Christian who had never heard of dis- 
 crepancy, difficulty, or doubt, was even infinitely superior to the 
 profoundest philosopher in existence ; and he would have con^ 
 sidered it a very thin sincerity, a very painful conscience, a very 
 mistaken conscience, which, in the interests of theoretic truth, 
 should insist on damaging the practical (moral and religious) 
 truth of a soul so blessed. To Hegel the repose of such souls was 
 sacred. No doubt, he felt that their enlargement theoretically, or 
 so far as knowledge (insight) is concerned, was desirable, but 
 practically they were at present well, and disturbance in behalf 
 of theory (knowledge) might advantageously be postponed till the 
 work of the understanding should be fairly seen into, and the 
 reign of reason established. Disturbances there had already been 
 enow ; our souls were miserable, and the world was reeling asunder 
 into a selfish atomism under the influence of the Aufklarung : it 
 was time to stop all that, it was time to bring the Aufklarung 
 itself to the bar and demonstrate its insufficiency : it was time, in 
 short, to complement, and atone for understanding by reason, in 
 the keeping of which latter was the higher and highest weal of 
 man religion, God, the freedom of the will, the immortality of 
 the soul, and all the blessings of the Evangile of Christ.* 
 
 The philosophy of Hegel, then, is simply this substantive or 
 objective history of philosophy: it is philosophy as plastic object 
 unfolding itself in entire freedom from every external subjective, 
 from every external chronological, concomitant or ingredient. 
 With special reference to Hegel himself, we see philosophy, in the 
 relative development, passing from the Begriff of Kant into the 
 
 * Had Bishop Colenso and the Essayists and Keviewers, then, understood their 
 age, instead of thrusting the negative on faith, they would have demonstrated to 
 understanding its mere blindness to the affirmative, and would thus consequently, 
 instead of bringing misery to the happy, have brought happiness to the miserable. 
 It is the business of no man now-a-days to continue the Aufklarung. We acknow- 
 ledge what it has done for us, but we go our own way the while. No negative 
 criticism of the letter shall longer bind us to the affirmative of the spirit. If Chris- 
 tianity, so far as external history is concerned, must submit to the ordinary imperfec- 
 tion, of empirical form, it can still irrefutably rest its authority on the inspiration of 
 its matter, and strengthen itself into safety and security by a conjunctive reference 
 to the supernatural and revelatory character of history in particular and the world 
 in general, as well as the demonstration of reason in the new philosophy. It is the 
 business of to-day to bind up our still-dripping wounds, and not to continue 
 piercing us with the cold point of Eighteenth-century enlightenment. 
 
 M 
 
178 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., B. 
 
 Idea of Hegel. This point, however, has probably been pretty 
 well missed. Men saw, indeed, that Hegel characterised philo- 
 sophy as that in abstraction which its own history is in concretion ; 
 but they hardly believed him in earnest. They saw here and 
 there some analogy between certain of the categories in abstract 
 logic, and certain of the actual doctrines of the historic philo- 
 sophers, Ionic, Italic, Eleatic, &c. ; but they never supposed that 
 the logical progress was to be considered as strictly parallel with 
 the historical progress ; still less did they suppose that the con- 
 ception was continued into modern philosophy ; and least of all 
 that that peculiar Logic of Hegel contained a demonstration of its 
 own derivation from the philosophy of Kant. They believed, on 
 the contrary, that the former was a system sui generis, an edifice 
 apart a system and edifice independent of all other systems and 
 edifices, whether of Kant or others. One feels that this allegation 
 must expect opposition. The connexion of the Hegelian system 
 with the history of philosophy has not been ignored by subsequent 
 German students and critics, but again and again formally main- 
 tained. Haym, for example, in the very second paragraph of his 
 book avers, ' as it (the philosophy of Hegel) is the history of 
 philosophy in mice, so it is philosophy in nuce' It is impossible 
 for words to say in any more direct fashion that the philosophy of 
 Hegel is the history of philosophy. Still, it is to be asserted here 
 that the connexion of the system of Hegel with history is under- 
 stood in a very different sense by Haym from that which we 
 suppose ourselves at present to entertain. Haym, after all, has 
 not attained to the truth as regards Hegel. Haym represents the 
 system of Hegel as something quite arbitrary and artificial, which 
 has arisen in obedience to a desire to make the Eeal harmonise 
 with the Ideal, and according to conceptions of Grecian symmetry. 
 This, the result of Haym, is a complete and total mistake : Haym 
 makes Hegel act on an external motive, whereas Hegel really acted 
 on one internal ; Haym makes Hegel to labour consciously towards 
 an ideal object, whereas Hegel worked consciously towards a real 
 object. Hegel, in fact, takes philosophy, actual philosophy, as it 
 comes to him from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and remoulds it 
 onwards on its own objective principles, and not on his own sub- 
 jective ones just as Kant receiving philosophy from Hume, 
 attempted honestly to mould it onwards thence. 
 
 The proof of the truth of what lies here will consist in this, 
 that, after all explanations, Hegel has remained obscure and 
 
SPECIAL ORIGIN, ETC. OF THE HEGELIAN PRINCIPLE. 179 
 
 unintelligible ; whereas now as we hope, that is the Hegelian 
 system will be found at least open. It is a curious thing, this 
 contrast between words and the meaning of words. Haym's words 
 are perfect ; they seem to state the case quite as directly as those 
 of Hegel: yet Haym, in all probability, never said to himself f 
 why, that abstract characterisation means Kant, this again Fichte 
 and Schelling, and that other Hegel himself; in fact, it just 
 expresses the development of the Begriff; there it is An sich with 
 Kant, here Fur sich with Fichte and Schelling, and there, finally, 
 it is An und fur sich with Hegel : that so abstract paragraph, in 
 short, is the history in nuce of philosophy in Germany ! ! Now 
 here the key was complete, and a realisation effected of the words 
 of Hegel in a field and with a literality of which Haym had never 
 dreamed. 
 
 In this there lies a correction for those who are perpetually 
 finding the historical views of the great masters perfectly antici- 
 pated in crumbs of their predecessors : for in the light of a 
 subsequent idea words may readily seem to convey that of which, 
 as written and when written, they had not the remotest glimpse. 
 The industry that would attribute the merit of the new light to 
 the preceding perfectly dark words is mean : it is false and 
 fraudulent to the great historical name in its injustice ; and it is 
 false and fraudulent in that it seeks to procure for itself the credit 
 of research and the glory of originality. Thus, here, words may 
 be found in many writers directly pnunciative of the connexion of 
 Hegel's philosophy with the history of philosophy such words 
 are perfectly direct there in his own works at the same time that 
 these writers themselves had no perception of the close and literal 
 application which really obtained. 
 
 How striking the course of thought : Substance, Causality, 
 Eeciprocity, Begriff, Idee ! Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, 
 Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, are all there. The 
 reciprocity lay in Kant, who altered the relative positions of 
 subject and object, and thus was the notion, the notion of recip- 
 rocity, an sich. In Fichte and Schelling, the notion of reciprocity 
 passes into its differences of subjectivity and objectivity, and 
 becomes fur sich. Kant is the notion in immediate or universal 
 form ; Fichte and Schelling, the notion in particular form. But it 
 is Hegel who takes the notion of reciprocity as such, who converts 
 it into the an und fur sich, the concrete singular, and exhibits it 
 
180 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 everywhere as the substantial, original creative cell, and as the 
 substantial, original, universal system of cells the Idee. 
 
 C. 
 
 The opening determinations of the system present themselves 
 so abruptly, that one is apt to ask : How did Hegel come upon 
 them ? Cannot they be connected in some ordinary way with 
 ordinary thought ? Is there no means of bridging over the chasm 
 between ourselves here and Hegel there? Hegel very rightly 
 asserts that all this is discoverable just in what the notion of a 
 beginning brings with it, and it may be recommended to everyone 
 to think out the matter from this point of view for himself : still, 
 what the above questions indicate as the want of the inexperi- 
 enced reader is to be found in the genesis of Hegel from Kant, 
 and in the successive notions which arose to the former in the 
 progress of that genesis. 
 
 The categories in Kant had a burthen, a manifold, an ingest, a 
 matter of their own. They and this matter, though subjective in 
 origin, though in us, projected themselves out there into the 
 objects, and came back to us (in sensation) with the objects and in 
 the objects, forming in fact, though unconsciously to us, a most 
 important, or the most important, portion of the objects. This is 
 the first thought that, conceivably, rose to Hegel in the genesis in 
 question ; and he may be supposed to express it to himself thus : 
 The object is formed by me, wholly by me ; for the thing-in-itself 
 which has been left as an unknown noumenon by Kant, is but an 
 abstraction, and exists not. What is, is my Sensation, in my 
 Space and Time, in my Categories, and in my Ego. But each Ego 
 as Ego is identical with my Ego as Ego. What substantially is, 
 then, what necessarily is, what universally is what, apart from 
 all consideration of particular Subjects or Egos, objectively is, is 
 Sensation in the net of Space and Time ganglionised into the 
 Categories. All is ideal, then ; but this ideal element (the com- 
 mon element that remains to every subject on elimination of the 
 individual subject) can only be named an objective one. Now in 
 this objective element there are two parts one capable of being 
 described as sensuous, and the other as intellectual. But these 
 two parts are not wholly discrepant and heterogeneous. The 
 sensuous part, for example, is but a copy, but an externalisation of 
 the intellectual part. The former is but the other of the latter. 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 181 
 
 The latter, then, is the more important, and contains all that, 
 essentially and substantially, its other is. In such relation, 
 indeed, its other is to it as nothing. Neglecting the other t or the 
 copy, then, let us confine our attention to the categories, to the 
 intellectual part, to the inner part, of which the other is but the 
 other, or, what is the same thing, a repetition sensuously and 
 outwardly. 
 
 Well, these categories declare themselves at once as objective 
 thoughts. So far as there is an out, they are out there objectively 
 in the world ; or the world is made on these categories, on these 
 thoughts. This, then, is the first Hegelian thought : the category 
 is objective, is in the object or forms the object. To know all the 
 categories, then, would be to know all 'the thoughts which formed 
 the universe to know all the thoughts, indeed, which are the 
 universe. But such knowledge, concerning as it does the thoughts 
 of God, would be tantamount to a knowledge of God himself. 
 
 From this scheme it will be evident, how completely all that is 
 peculiarly Hegelian lay already in the findings of Kant. 
 
 But to look more closely, we may say that directly this ' light 
 went up' to Hegel, it would naturally and necessarily be the 
 categories that would engross all his attention the categories of 
 Kant. What were they ? Where had Kant got them ? How 
 had Kant manipulated them ? Could nothing more be made of 
 them ? Here, surely, was a most promising field for an aspirant 
 to the honours of philosophy; and most thoroughly, it must be 
 said, was it ransacked, and turned over, and re-modelled, and re- 
 made, and re-presented by Hegel. Ke-presented indeed, so that 
 even any trace of the original, would scarcely with any readiness 
 suggest itself. The same work, however, which established Hegel, 
 serves also to discover him ; and this is the thorough investiga- 
 tion of that which is the essential part, the essential and central 
 secret indeed of the whole system, of Kant the Deduction of the 
 Categories. 
 
 It is curious to watch the manoeuvres of Hegel here, the manner 
 in which, when led to the subject, he speaks of these categories of 
 Kant. By way of example, let us refer to a very remarkable 
 Note which occurs in the ' Allgemeine Eintheilung ' of his Logic 
 (Berlin, 1833, pp. 52, 53). The correlative text runs thus : 
 
 ' Kant has, in latter times, set opposite to what has been usually named 
 logic, another logic, a transcendental logic namely. That which has been here 
 named objective logic would correspond in part to that which with him is the 
 
182 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 transcendental logic. He distinguishes it from what he names universal logic in 
 such wise that it (a) considers the notions which refer themselves a priori to 
 objects, and consequently does not abstract from the whole matter of objective 
 knowledge, or that it contains the rules of the pure thinking of an object, and 
 (/3) at the same time relates to the origin of our perception so far as it (our 
 perception) cannot be ascribed to the objects. It is to this second side that 
 the philosophical interest of Kant is exclusively directed. His main thought 
 is, to vindicate the categories for self-consciousness, as the subjective ego. In 
 consequence of the direction thus imposed, the view remains standing fast 
 within consciousness and its antithesis [of an object and subject, to wit] ; and 
 besides the empirical element given by sensation and perception, it has some- 
 thing else left over which is not entailed and determined by thinking self- 
 consciousness, a thing -in-itself, a something foreign and external to thought ; 
 though it is easy to see that such an abstradum, as thing-in-itself, is itself only 
 a product of thought, and that, too, only abstracting thought.' 
 
 The Note itself runs thus : 
 
 ' I may mention that I take frequent notice in this work of the Kantian 
 philosophy (which to many may seem superfluous), because this philosophy 
 its more particular character as well as the individual parts of the execution 
 may be considered as they may in this work or elsewhere constitutes the 
 base and starting point of later German Philosophy, and this its merit remains 
 undetracted from by what may be excepted to in its regard. In the objective 
 logic frequent reference requires to be made to it for this reason also, that it 
 enters into particular consideration of important, more special sides of the 
 logical element, while later discussions of philosophy have, on the contrary, 
 paid little heed to this (the logical element), have partly indeed exhibited in 
 its regard often only a barbarous but not unrevenged contempt. The 
 philosophising which is the most widely extended among us, passes not 
 beyond the Kantian results, that reason can come to know no true material 
 content, and as regards absolute truth that we are to be directed to Belief. 
 In this philosophising, however, the beginning is immediately made with 
 that which in Kant is the result, and consequently the preceding executive 
 development, which is itself a philosophical cognition, and from which the 
 result issues, is cut off beforehand. The Kantian philosophy serves thus as a 
 bolster for indolence of thought, which comforts itself with this, that all is 
 already proved and done with. For actual knowledge, and a definite real 
 something of thought which is not to be found in such sterile and arid self- 
 comforting, recourse ought, therefore, to be had to the mentioned preceding 
 executive development.' 
 
 Now, in the passage from the text, the Hegelian objective logic 
 is said to correspond partly to the Kantian transcendental logic. 
 
 This, then, in one point of view, may be considered as an 
 admission of the one system being partly derived from the other. 
 The remark, however, is casual and general, and, taking into its 
 scope, as it does, the whole of the transcendental logic without 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 183 
 
 restriction to the deduction of the categories, it really gives no 
 hint that would lead anyone to put any stress on the connexion, 
 or expect anything further from its development than what lay on 
 the surface, viz., that the categories of Hegel included, among others, 
 those of Kant. The two points which are stated in characterisa- 
 tion of the position of Kant, are in reality identical. They are 
 given quite in the language of Kant, and not a trace of that turn 
 which made them Hegel's can be found in them. Hegel passes 
 lightly over them, indeed, to state that Kant's leading thought is 
 to vindicate the categories for the subjective ego (that is, as 
 functions of the subjective ego), and he concludes by alluding to 
 the defective and inconsistent nature of the Kantian theory. No 
 one from such writing could believe that Hegel was aware that 
 any particular advantage had accrued to him from the Kantian 
 system ; and when one reads the unrespecting criticism with 
 which we find Kant perpetually assailed throughout the whole 
 course of Hegel's unabridged Logic, the very last idea that would 
 occur to anyone would be that the system of Hegel is contained 
 all but ready-formed in the system of Kant that it emerged, 
 indeed, from the same almost at a scratch of the nail. Nay, it is 
 Kant's treatment of these very categories that Hegel, nevertheless, 
 censures the oftenest and the most unexceptively. A page further 
 on than the last just quoted, for example, we find Hegel expressing 
 himself as follows : 
 
 { Inasmuch now as the interest of the Kantian philosophy was directed to 
 the so-called transcendentality of the categories, the result of their treatment 
 issued void ; what they are in themselves, without the abstract relation to Ego 
 common to all, what their nature as against and their relation as towards one 
 another, that has not been made an object of consideration ; the knowledge of 
 their nature, therefore, has not found itself in the smallest furthered by this 
 philosophy : what alone is interesting in this connexion presents itself in the 
 critique of the Ideas.' 
 
 How very misleading all this writing is ! We know that the 
 Ideas are universally considered less satisfactory than the Cate- 
 gories ; yet Hegel, when blaming the latter, can bestow a word of 
 praise on the former ! Impossible to think, then, that Hegel lies 
 so very completely in these very categories ! Again, Hegel is 
 perpetually telling us that all his divisions into Books, Sections, 
 Chapters, &c., are only something external, something added as 
 mere convenient rubric for reference after the system itself has of 
 itself run through all its own moments. Who can think other- 
 
184 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 wise, then, than that this system is a peculiar life, a life of its 
 own, and a life apart? Who for a single moment would be 
 tempted to suspect that in Kant, too, lay the principle and 
 principles of these divisions, which must have all presented them- 
 selves to Hegel not after the system, but wholly beforehand ? 
 But let us look at the Note now. 
 
 Here he acknowledges the philosophy of Kant to be the basis 
 and the starting-point of the later German philosophy. But cela 
 va sans dire who does not know that ? Is it not common-place 
 that Fichte rose out of Kant, and so on ? Does the acknowledg- 
 ment lead in the slightest to a perception of the peculiar obliga- 
 tions of Hegel to Kant ? Not by any means : he apologises for 
 his frequent notice of Kant, 'which may appear to many quite super- 
 fluous! and the award he extends to the philosophy of Kant is 
 made magnanimous by allusion to the defects of its execution and 
 particular details ! In fact, not any particular derivation of Hegel 
 from Kant, but just the trivially current derivation of Fichte and 
 of German philosophy in vague generality from Kant, is what 
 Hegel's words would naturally call up to any reader here. Again, 
 he admits that Kant enters more particularly into the considera- 
 tion of logic than later philosophers. But we recollect that 
 transcendental logic is on the very outside of the book of Kant ; 
 the admission, too, is quite slight and general ; and so Hegel's 
 observation here passes as one quite superfluous and of no import- 
 ance. He points out then, that later philosophers have begun 
 with the Kantian result which result again is summed up so far 
 truly but inadequately, and as in terms of censure so far mislead- 
 ingly and have dispensed with any knowledge of the preceding 
 execution. But this execution is philosophical cognition, and the 
 advantage of a return to it is hinted. There is nothing in all this 
 to prompt any inference of the particular truth of the case 
 relatively to Hegel. Observe, however, the three words which 
 are isolated from the rest by dashes, ( but not unrevenged ; ' 
 they refer to the contempt of later German philosophers with 
 respect to logic. It is not logic in general that is in Hegel's head 
 at this moment, however. No ; what is really there is the deduc- 
 tion of the categories, and ' not unrevenged ' is a chuckle aside 
 over what he (Hegel) has gained and they (Fichte and Schelling) 
 have lost in that regard. This seems very clear as soon as the 
 real nature of the relation subsisting between Kant and Hegel is 
 seen into. But none of these words, whether in the text or the 
 
OF THR A 
 
 UNIVERSITY J 
 MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. Rfl^* 185 
 
 Note, would have given the slightest intimation of their home 
 meaning to anyone as yet ignorant of that relation : and much less 
 would they have revealed that relation. They are of such a 
 nature, however, that they seem to shelter Hegel from the possible 
 charge of injustice to Kant, and of having meanly concealed the_ 
 true nature of his vast obligations to Kant when these obligations 
 shall have otherwise become known. They certainly contain the truth 
 implicitly ; they are very far, however, from expressing the truth 
 explicitly; and Hegel must for ever bear the brand of having 
 grudged the light. These words, it is true, are not the only ones 
 used by Hegel when he has his own relation to Kant in his mind : 
 there occur here and there others especially in ' Vom Begriff im 
 Allgemeinen ' which, like these, amount to admissions, but act 
 the part neither of revelation nor acknowledgment till he who 
 reads them has contrived to obtain for himself the necessary light 
 from elsewhere. 
 
 The scheme of the Kantian categories we have already presented 
 in such form, that no one who has any knowledge of Hegel can 
 possibly help exclaiming, Why, Hegel is all there ! Hegel certainly 
 owes to Kant his main principles in every way, and his leading 
 views in general. Hegel, to be sure, is an intellect of irresistible 
 force, and, in the course of his exposition, there occur infinite 
 originalities, infinite new lights, which are of the greatest import 
 to the development of thought and even perhaps history. The 
 looking at apperception, the categories, the intellectual manifold 
 of these and the sensuous one of s^ace and time, sensation, free- 
 will, the antinomies, the ideas, the notions of reflexion the 
 looking at these and other such, the materials of the inexhaustibly 
 rich Kant, in an objective manner, was a most happy ' light ' that 
 ' went up ' to Hegel, and quite comparable to that light which 
 went up to Kant out of the materials of Hume. And how inter- 
 esting these lights are ! * The light that went up to Hume out of 
 Locke, is as historically visible as those two others ; and the true 
 nature of philosophy and the history of philosophy will never be 
 understood as it is, by the student of philosophy, till these lights 
 go up to him in the same way they went up to their first possessors. 
 As regards Hegel, too, some rays of the light that rose up to him 
 apparently all out of Kant, must be attributed, as we have said 
 already, to Fichte and Schelling. The objectivising of the cate- 
 
 * Dem ersten, der, etc., . . . dem ging ein Licht auf, ... so ging alien Natur- 
 forschern ein Licht auf. (Kant, K. of P. R., Pref.). New. 
 
186 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 gories and their system constituted probably, in the main, the 
 light that made Hegel. Such implicit admissions, as we have 
 seen, then, cannot screen Hegel from the reproach at least of 
 ingratitude to Kant, or from the macula of peculiarly equivocal 
 concealment a macula not one whit lightened or lessened by this, 
 that the concealment was calculated to become, if need were, a 
 grudging and equivocal revealment. That utter insulation of 
 Hegel, that absolute inaccessibility which has remained so long 
 obdurate, that impenetrable hardness of form and speech we may 
 regard all this though a peculiar dialect was inevitable as to 
 some extent matter of intention. It is certain Hegel saw that he 
 was not understood ; and it is now equally certain that, with a 
 word about his derivation from Kant, he might have made all easy 
 at once. He was surprised by sudden death, however, at a time 
 of life when he might reasonably have expected to have lived, say, 
 at least some ten years longer ; and it is quite possible that, had 
 he been spared, he might have condescended to explain the enigma 
 and have kindly vouchsafed us some mitigation of the hardness of 
 his forms and dialect. 
 
 It is not to be unconsidered, either, that the German polemical 
 tone is of a ruder nature generally than would be tolerable in 
 England. Hegel, in one of his papers and in so many words, calls 
 some one ' a liar ! ' Hegel, indeed, is, in this respect, always con- 
 sistent with himself, and Kant and the individual just alluded to 
 are by no means exceptions. Hegel's polemical tone everywhere 
 is always of the hardest, of the most unsparing always, if we may 
 say so, of the most unmincing and butt-end description. One has 
 but to think of all occasions on which his biographer allows us to 
 see Hegel in conflict, to become aware of a general bearing quite 
 correspondent to the burthen of what has been already said. We 
 hear of him, for example, apropos of one of his most friendly fellow- 
 professors, who, in the programme of the session, had presumed to 
 recommend to his students out of love a work of Hegel : we 
 hear of him when in conflict with a Eoman Catholic priest who 
 had taken umbrage at the manner in which Hegel, in his public 
 lectures, had expressed himself in respect to a mouse which was 
 supposed to have nibbled the Host : we hear of him in his literary 
 or philosophic societies : and on all such occasions, we cannot help 
 getting to think of Hegel as of a man of an audacious stomach 
 as of a man of a bold and unhesitating self-will. His attitude to 
 Schelling bears this well out also. We saw already, how he broke 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 187 
 
 ground, when his time had come, by writing to Schelling in 
 what calculated manner, and with what probable views. Well, 
 once in Jena, we have to see him a declared Schellingian. He 
 starts forward at once to the front, indeed, as the most zealous and 
 pugnacious of disciples, and he fights for his master with all -the 
 unhesitating brass of an advocate by special retainer. In a few 
 years, however, when Hegel can dispense with prominence on 
 another man's height, the manner in which he ' says ' himself 
 ' loose ' from Schelling is as cruel and determined as is well con- 
 ceivable. This is to be seen in the preface to the Phaenomenologie, 
 a work which, previous to its publication, Schelling told its author 
 he looked forward to as the deepest work of the age ! That hard 
 heart of Hegel, that relented not, at such words, to mitigate his 
 preface ! and to Schelling what bitter commentary on his own 
 expectations that preface must have seemed ! It is to be borne in 
 mind, too, that when Hegel was exhibiting open zeal for Schelling, 
 and demonstrating with an air of perfect conviction the advance 
 which Schelling's position constituted, as compared not only with 
 that of Fichte, but with that of Kant also at that very moment 
 he had in his desk the first sketch of his own system, a system 
 that lay directly in that of Kant, a system that proved the con- 
 tempt entertained by Schelling for the execution and details of 
 Kant, and for logic in general, to have been, as we have seen, 'not 
 unrevenged/ It lay in the nature of the Hegelian iron, then, to 
 kick out of sight the ladders of his rise, to provide for self, to take 
 measures afar off, and to set deep plans for the realisation and 
 particularisation of self. His attitude in later years to Govern- 
 ment coheres with the same view. It certainly lay in the nature 
 of his philosophy to profess constitutional conservatism and per- 
 horresce the usually inconsiderate and shallow innovator of pre- 
 judice and passion; but to connect himself so closely, as he did, 
 with the Ministers of the day, and to become, as it were, their 
 fee'd and recognised fighting-man, their retained gladiator, their 
 staunch bull-dog of philosophy on hire it was in the nature of 
 his own self-seeking that this lay. Let us study and appreciate 
 Hegel, indeed, as long and deeply as we may, a tone will cling to 
 him that still brings somehow involuntarily to the palate ' savour 
 of poisonous brass.' * 
 
 The insulation of Hegel, then, the rubbing out of his own 
 footsteps, the removal of all preliminary and auxiliary scaffolding, 
 
 * Certainly that 'poisonous brass' here is quite all too much ! (New.) 
 
188 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 the concealment generally despite a certain equivocal revealment 
 of his relation to Kant, must be pronounced, in great part at 
 least, an operation of prepense calculation and intentional design. 
 This operation it is our present business here to render abortive ; 
 and the means to this lie in a statement of the general nature 
 of the Kantian Categories, of the special light that went up to 
 Hegel in their regard, and of his probable steps and mode of 
 transit from this light to his complete system. It was with 
 this statement we were engaged, when called off to animadvert 
 on the blame which, dashed somewhat by certain considerations 
 must attach to Hegel, of an interested disownnient of Kant and 
 concealment of the first steps of his own operations. 
 
 What they were where they had been got these categories, 
 then, this was not difficult to perceive. They were derived from 
 the various classes of propositions, as these propositions presented 
 themselves in' the ordinary text-books of technical or Aristotelian 
 Logic. The various kinds of propositions (or judgments) Kant 
 conceived must relate to the various kinds of the act of the 
 faculty of Judgment itself, or to the various functions of this 
 faculty. The functions of this faculty, then, in such case, were 
 either Quantitative, Qualitative, Eelative, or Modal. As Quan- 
 titative, again, they were either Universal, Particular, or Singular ; 
 as Qualitative, either Affirmative, Negative, or Limitative ; as 
 Eelative, either Categoric, Hypothetic, or Disjunctive; and as 
 Modal, either Problematic, Assertoric, or Apodictic. Further 
 here, it is sufficient to state now that Kant transformed the 
 technical classes of propositions into functions of judgment, and 
 into certain a priori ground-notions of synthesis, correspondent 
 to these functions, and resultant from them. Here, then, we 
 see what the categories are and where they were got. 
 
 But Kant similarly transformed the technical classes of Syl- 
 logisms into certain a priori ground-notions of Synthesis which 
 he named the Ideas. The function of these Ideas was only 
 Eegulative, whereas that of the Categories was Constitutive. 
 But, what is the important point for us at present, the former 
 are a vitalisation of Eeason, while the latter perform the same 
 service for Judgment. It was, plainly, to technical or formal logic, 
 then, that Hegel was referred, when he sought to investigate 
 the categories, and endeavour, by the completion of their system, 
 to complete the system also of ground-thoughts, which not only 
 permeated and arranged the universe, but which actually con- 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 189 
 
 stituted and created it, all that held of Sense "being but a copy 
 and repetition of all that held of Intellect. 
 
 In this search Hegel found himself, even as regards the Cate- 
 gories and Ideas, to make many modifications. Still in Judgment 
 and Reason he had, on the whole, been forestalled by Kanfe 
 There was one division of logic, however, which still lay virgin 
 and untouched by Kant, the first namely, or that which has 
 been inscribed Simple Apprehension. Well, as Kant had been 
 so successful with Judgment and Reason, it was at least possible 
 that a like success might attend an investigation of Simple Appre- 
 hension also, if conducted on the same principles and directed by 
 the same view. But Kant's categories were notions and, as notions, 
 ought to belong to simple apprehension. There was thus a con- 
 nexion between Simple Apprehension and Judgment ; they were 
 not wholly isolated and incommunicable; the forms of the one 
 might pass into the forms of the other; the one, indeed, might 
 be but a gradation of the other. Here we have in perfection 
 one of the most special and peculiar of all the Hegelian levers. 
 Kant himself blindly expressed this in relating the categories 
 to Apperception or Self-consciousness : he failed to perceive that, 
 as notions, they might have been set down as ground-acts of 
 Apprehension, and that Apprehension then might be set identical 
 with Apperception or Self-consciousness. Had Kant seen this, he 
 would probably have utilised in his peculiar way, and adopted 
 into his system, the whole body of Technical Logic. 
 
 But again, the categories are generalisations, and the question 
 in that light is spontaneous : Can they not be generalised further ? 
 As the original functions of Apperception itself, this at first sight 
 seems impossible, and they themselves ultimate. Still they are 
 notions, and the universal of them is the Notion. But the Notion 
 as the Notion is just the Faculty as the Faculty, Apprehension 
 as Apprehension, or Apperception as Apperception. Here is 
 another example of gradation in the same matter, another 
 coalescence of differences into identity : the faculty and the 
 function were both seen to constitute, so to speak, the same 
 stuff and to possess the same life. There is involved here another 
 of the great Hegelian levers the elimination, that is, of faculties ; 
 the elimination, indeed, of all substrata of functions, qualities, 
 thoughts, &c. the reduction of all to Gesetztseyn, which we may 
 translate, perhaps, reflexion, or adjectitiousness. 
 
 Again, the one function of all the categories is, the conversion 
 
190 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 of the Universal, through the Particular, into the Singular. Such 
 is the absolutely generalised function of the categories as they 
 are understood by Kant. This, then, is the Notion, and this is 
 the inner movement of the Notion. Nay, such is the inner 
 movement of Apprehension, such is the inner movement of 
 Apperception itself. This is the pulse of Self-consciousness ; this 
 is the nerve of the Ego. This movement, this pulse, this nerve, 
 is what is ultimate rather what is first in the constitution of 
 this universe. This is the First and One (throb) which has 
 expanded into the All : this is Vitality : this is the Infinite Form 
 and the Infinite Matter ; this is the Absolute ; this is What is.* 
 
 The conception of the notion as notion, then, was not for Hegel 
 far to seek ; and this notion, with such views, and so instructed by 
 Kant, he could not very well have missed. The categories were 
 but generalisations ; it was but natural to demand a generalisation of 
 them. This was imposed on him, too, by his very necessity to attain 
 a First and One. Nay, consideration of Kant's Apperception itself 
 would lead him to Simple Apprehension, and to the same thought. 
 He was in search of a principle by which he might obtain a 
 beginning, secure a method of progression, and complete a system : 
 such quest as this lay at once to hand, the instant he perceived the 
 reach of the notion of Kant as expressed in the categories, especially 
 when these were objectivised. Hegel knew from Kant that in every 
 notion there was matter and form ; and it was not difficult for him 
 to perceive that what Kant called the intellectual schema, was the 
 multiple contained in the notion and tantamount to its matter. 
 In regard to the Notion as Notion, it would be with joy he would 
 perceive that there Matter and Form as was a particular want 
 of Schelling coalesced and were identical ; that the movement 
 which constituted the Form of the Notion, constituted also its 
 Matter. Kant himself defines a pure notion to be such as arises 
 out of the understanding, ' ouch dem Inhalte nach ' (also as regards 
 matter). Logik in Kant's Works, p. 270. 
 
 At page 271 of the same work, these words might have proved 
 suggestive to Hegel : ( The Idea does not admit of being obtained 
 by Composition (Aggregation) ; for the Whole is here sooner than 
 the part' At all events, this is a main tenet of Hegel on the 
 question of the original tortoise of the universe. There cannot be 
 a doubt that Hegel had examined with great attention the Logic 
 
 * This, we may add also, is how & priori Synthetic Judgments are possible, or the 
 Notion is the a priori Synthetic Judgment. 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 191 
 
 of Kant; and there is much matter there capable of proving 
 richly suggestive. At page 274, we have the following, after an 
 admirable account of Abstraction in general which we can 
 recognise as the source of Hegel's incessant word abstract : ' The 
 abstractest notion is that which has with none that is different 
 from it anything in common. This is the notion of Something ; 
 for what is different from it is Nothing, and has therefore with 
 Something nothing in common.' Again, from page 279, these 
 words might be very significant for Hegel : ' By means of con- 
 tinued logical abstraction there arise always higher, as, on the 
 contrary, by means of continued logical determination always 
 lower notions. The greatest possible abstraction yields the 
 highest or abstractest notion that from which there cannot be 
 any further predicate (or significate) thought- off. The highest 
 completed determination would yield a thoroughly determinate 
 notion, or such a one that no further significate could be thought 
 to it.' 
 
 Altogether, it was not difficult for Hegel, once possessed of that 
 glimpse by which Ego was seen to be externalised by the Category, 
 the Category by Time and Space, and these by Sensation, to 
 perceive that Apprehension itself (or Apperception or the Ego) 
 perfectly generally expressed, would constitute the Notion, and 
 that a thorough completion and articulation of a system of 
 Categories from the Notion would constitute, in the strictest 
 language, a consummate philosophy, or the entirety of those 
 universal principles according to which the universe was organised, 
 and of which the whole outward was but a repetition. As regards 
 his method, too, it was plain that if he was to begin with what 
 was most general, he must proceed to what was most particular 
 (the Singular), and thus his progress would be, not a generalisation, 
 but a specification or individualisation logical determination, in 
 short. The passages just cited from the Logic of Kant, then, may 
 perhaps not be without bearing on the beginning, progress, and 
 termination of Hegel. For his beginning is that which is 
 abstractest of all, his progress logical determination, and his 
 termination that which is concretest of all. In this, what is last 
 supports and is ground to all that precedes ; for it is verily that 
 which is ; and all that has been done, has been to begin with the 
 simplest link of the complicated chain that constitutes the 
 interior of the ultimate principle, and to let all manifest itself in 
 development towards this ultimate concrete whole. This whole, 
 
192 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 again, is with Hegel 'sooner than the part;' the Seyn is just the 
 Seyn, or What is, is ; and Hegel conceived that, as a philosopher, 
 he had nought to do but demonstrate this Seyn in its intellectual 
 principles and constitution ; and thus Hegel was an empiricist. 
 
 Hegel has clung very closely to Kant, then, and his special 
 guide seems to have been frequently the latter's special Logic itself. 
 There are additional proofs of this. The work in question begins 
 thus : ' Everything in Nature, as well as in the lifeless as in the 
 living world, takes place according to rules.' Now, one may say 
 that Hegel's single industry has been to carry out this into all and 
 every : his one idea has been to exhibit all as an organism, and 
 every as a necessary member of the same. Then, again, Kant 
 follows this up by observing that at the bottom of the crude, un- 
 conscious concrete that, in the first instance, every and each human 
 interest is seen to constitute, there lies an intellectual pure system 
 which acts, as it were, as the supporting skeleton and as more. 
 For instance, under Speech, which, as it first shows, is so very crude 
 a concrete, something so very unconscious and uninvestigated, 
 there lies a very decided pure intellectual system, on and round 
 which all the rest gathers as so many motes on and round a 
 system of pure rays Grammar (a Grammatik). 
 
 ' Thus,' says Kant, ' for example, Universal Grammar is the form of language 
 in general : some, however, speak, without knowing grammar ; and he who 
 speaks without knowing it, really has a grammar and speaks according to 
 rules, of which, however, he is unconscious. 3 . . . * Just as all our faculties 
 in general, understanding in especial, is in its acts astrict to rules, which 
 may be investigated by us. Understanding, indeed, is to be regarded as 
 the source and as the faculty of rules. ... It is eager to seek rules, and 
 satisfied when it has found them. The question occurs, then, as understand- 
 ing is the source of rules, on what rules does it itself proceed ? . . . These 
 rules we may think for themselves, that is, in abstracto, or without their 
 application [which is accurately the moment of understanding, judgment, 
 Ur-theil, abstraction, or fur sicli in Hegel]. ... If we now, however, set aside 
 all ingredients of knowledge [it would be more intelligible to an Englishman 
 or a Frenchman to say perception^ which derive only from the objects, and 
 reflect solely on the operation of understanding in general, we discover those 
 rules which in every respect, and quite irrespective of any and every particular 
 object of thought, are absolutely necessary, just because without them we 
 should not be able to think [or perceive] at all. These rules, therefore, can be 
 seen, and seen into, a priori, that is,, independently of all experience, because 
 they concern merely the conditions of the operation of understanding in 
 general, be it pure or empirical, without distinction, indeed, of the objects at 
 all. . . . Thus the science which consists of these universal and necessary 
 rules, is merely a science of the Form of our cognition through understanding, 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 193 
 
 or of thought. And we may form for ourselves, therefore, an idea of the 
 possibility of such a science, in the same way as of a universal Grammatik 
 (or Grammar), which shall regard nothing further than the mere form of 
 Speech in general, apart from words, which constitute only the matter of 
 speech. This science of the necessary laws of understanding and reason in 
 general, or what is the same thing of the mere form of thought in general, 
 is called Logic. Thus as a science which considers all thought in general, 
 irrespective of the objects, which are only as the matter of thought, Logic will 
 constitute the foundation of all the other sciences, and must necessarily be re- 
 garded as the Propcedeutic of all exercise of the understanding.' 
 
 Most readers read such sentences without realising the thought 
 of their writer ; they seem to them to allude only to what is called 
 formal Logic, which, everybody knows, abstracts from all matter 
 of thought ; and they pass on without any consideration further. 
 Not so Hegel: he enters into the very mind of Kant, and sees 
 what he sees. But what Kant sees is not the Aristotelian Logic, 
 but a pure Form, which, subjective in that it is of intellectual 
 or mental origin, is yet veritably objective, a pure objective shape, 
 to which every actual material object must congrue. Kant sees, 
 in fact, a diamond net of intellect pure form which the matter 
 of special sense (as it were, falling and condensing on the net) 
 crassifies into actual outer objects. This is in rude outline Kant's 
 new theory of perception, and Hegel, whether he called it per- 
 ception or not, saw perfectly well what it was, and spent his life 
 in the realisation of it. He saw Kant's notion here which he 
 could afterwards identify with the notion as notion he saw that 
 of which Kant said ' we might form an Idea,' and of this he just 
 by infinite labour formed (or realised) the Idea: Hegel's Idee is 
 nothing but Kant's Idea (but, as here in Kant, the Idea is but 
 notion, but an sicli) of the possible science suggested. Kant ideates 
 an CL priori diamond objective net of perception : Hegel realises the 
 same as a systematic articulately-detailed whole his Logic ; which, 
 viewed as an objective whole, he names (probably with reference to 
 the word as used here by Kant) the Idea. Kant's transcendental 
 Idea, then, is now to be conceived as simply developed into the 
 Logical Idea of Hegel. Or, to say it otherwise, the Logic of Hegel 
 is intended to be in absolute truth all that Kant pictures ; it would be 
 the diaphanous skeleton, the inner, necessary, pure, abstract system, 
 pure as a Grammatik, pure as a Mathematic, pure as an Algebra 
 pure as an ultimate, perfectly generalised Calculus on and round 
 which the innumerable opaque motes of outer matter should gather, 
 group, and dispose themselves into the concrete world of thought and 
 
 o 
 
 N 
 
194 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 sense. Hegel set himself in earnest to realise the idea of Kant, and 
 sought to find a pure Noetic of Knowledge (Logic) as others seek 
 to find the pure Grammatik of Speech (Grammar). If Hegel's 
 Logic, indeed, is not this, it is nothing. But it is this perhaps 
 not perfectly it is this, and has discovered those pure essentities 
 of thought which are the spring and levers of the whole. For 
 example, a whole universe of concrete sorrow, whole lifetimes of 
 concrete anxiety, concentrate themselves in those simple essen- 
 tities Finite and Infinite concentrate themselves, and demonstrate 
 themselves, and answer themselves, resolving and clearing them- 
 selves into insight and peace. Our most earnest English writers 
 now-a-days to confine ourselves to writers may be conceived as 
 just staggering blindly back at present caught in the last draught 
 of the receding Aufklarung. ' To be blown about the desert dust,' 
 or ' sealed within the iron hills,' a particle of matter: this they ponder, 
 all of them. To them, ' time has become a maniac scattering dust,' 
 1 life a fury slinging flame,' ' and men but flies, that sting, lay eggs, 
 and die.' The great bulk of earnest men, now-a-days, in short, 
 longing for Eeligion, yearning for God and Immortality, weeping 
 towards Christ, longing, yearning, weeping towards all those 
 essential truths of humanity which the light of the understanding, 
 brought to the fierce focus of the Aufklarung, has shrivelled into 
 ashes within their hearts such men may all be conceived as at 
 certain seasons sitting hour after hour in gloom and silence ponder- 
 ing these things, and rising at length with a sigh, and the mournful 
 refrain, No hope, no hope ! But these two words, Finite and Infinite, 
 being discussed in ultimate abstraction (which is their truth), in 
 Logic proper at once the knot resolves itself and the cloud lifts. 
 
 Kant, in the same sense, characterises this conceived Logic as 
 the ' Universal art of Reason, the Canonica Epicurif and that, as 
 such, 'it borrows no principles from any other science.' And 
 again, he says ' In Psychology we consider how thought is seen 
 and known usually to proceed, not how it must or ought to pro- 
 ceed;' but 'in Logic we do not want to know how the under- 
 standing is, and how it thinks, and how it has hitherto proceeded 
 in thinking but how in thinking it must and ought to proceed : 
 Logic is to teach us the correct use of the understanding, that is, 
 that use of understanding that agrees with its own self.' And 
 here we are not to deceive ourselves that the burthen of the 
 ordinary definition of Logic, the right use of Reason, is what 
 is aimed at. No ; what is aimed at is something very different : 
 
MOKE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 195 
 
 it is the intellectual objectivity of knowledge as opposed to the 
 sensuous objectivity of the same; for even of the latter, the 
 former is the essential antecedent, or there is no sensuous 
 objectivity in which the intellectual elements do not constitute . 
 the essence. How very earnest Hegel has been with all this, 
 and how completely he has assimilated it, is, on accurate acquaint- 
 ance, very plain. 'The question,' says Kant, 'is not what and 
 how much does understanding know, or how far does that know- 
 ledge extend ; but in Logic the question is only, how will the 
 understanding know its own self/ that is, its own pure form, and 
 forms, that lie in dbstracto under the crass and opaque concrete. 
 Again, he defines his transcendental Logic to be that l in which 
 the object itself is conceived as an object of mere understanding,' 
 which surely is tantamount to calling said Logic an objective 
 Logic. And he winds up with the following express definition 
 in small capitals: 'Logic is a rational science not as regards 
 mere form only, but as regards matter also ; a science a priori 
 of the necessary laws of thought, but not in respect of any 
 particular objects, but in respect of all objects in general; a 
 science, therefore, of the correct exercise of understanding and 
 reason in general, but not subjectively, that is, not with reference 
 to empirical (psychological) principles as the understanding does 
 think, but objectively, that is, with reference to a priori principles 
 as it must and should think.' What study Hegel has made of 
 all this, his Logic demonstrates. 'Here, again, Hegel's idea is 
 well seen: 'Technical or Scientific Logic is a science of the 
 necessary and universal rules of thought, which can and must 
 be known & priori, independently of the natural exercise of under- 
 standing and reason in concrete, although they can be first of 
 all discovered only by means of the observation of said natural 
 exercise.' Here, too, is something very Hegelian : In this Logic 
 'not the smallest regard is to be entertained whether of the 
 objects or of the subject of thought.' This is accurately the 
 Hegelian Logical Idea, which is (though in abstracto) the concrete 
 thought of all that is, elimination being made of all reference to 
 any actual empirical object or any actual empirical subject.* 
 
 Kant, to be sure, declares that Logic 'can be no science of 
 speculative understanding,' for so it were an 'organon' for dis- 
 covery, acquisition, and a ddition, and no mere ' Propaedeutic ' 
 or 'canon' for regulation and ' dijudication ; ' while Hegel, on 
 
 * For perfect light on this Idea, see p. 96, Note New. 
 
196 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 his side, seems to have converted Logic just into this speculative 
 organon. Nevertheless, this very act of Hegel may be not uncon- 
 nected with this very remark of Kant. As regards method, again, 
 Kant says : ' By Method is to be understood the mode and manner 
 in which a certain object, to whose cognition this method is to be 
 applied, may be rendered capable of being completely understood : 
 it must be taken f rom the nature of the science itself, and, as a necessary 
 order of thought thereby determined, it does not admit of alteration! 
 Again, he accurately distinguishes Philosophy from Mathematic, and 
 points out the absurdity of applying the method of the latter to 
 the former. Many passages, both in the Kritik of Pure Eeason 
 and in the Logic, can easily be found to prove this, and we 
 need not quote. In reference to philosophy, he says there 
 belongs to it, ' firstly, an adequate complement of rational facts ; 
 secondly, a systematic articulation of these facts, or a synthesis 
 of the same in the Idea of a whole.' Again : * Every philo- 
 sophical thinker builds, so to speak, his own work on the ruins 
 of another ; none has ever been realised, that was complete in 
 all its parts.' Then we have much about wisdom as opposed 
 to knowledge, which repeats itself in the practical sections of 
 Hegel (' Misologie,' found here too in the Logic of Kant but 
 that is Plato's), and then there occurs this eminently Hegelian 
 sentence: 'Philosophy is the only science which is capable of 
 procuring us this inner satisfaction [of wisdom, that is, in act 
 as well as knowledge] ; for it closes, as it were, the scientific 
 circle, and through it then only do the other sciences first 
 acquire order and connexion/ Hegel's historical idea seems here 
 too: 'He who would learn philosophy, must regard all the 
 systems of philosophy only as the history of Eeason in its exer- 
 cise/ of Eeason, that is, as it has historically manifested itself 
 in actual operation. Schelling also has this thought at full in 
 the 'Transcendental Idealism;' yet it is to be observed that 
 though Kant's words, or Schelling's words, name now the Hegelian 
 Idea, neither Kant nor Schelling saw the Hegelian Idea then. 
 
 We are not to lose sight, meantime, of the bearing which Logical 
 Determination has on the method and system of Hegel. The 
 common secret of all these philosophisings, Kantian, Fichtian, 
 Schellingian, was generalisation or abstraction. It lay at hand 
 then, that the most abstract notion would, in a system, be the 
 natural commencement. But, this accomplished, the question 
 would then arise, how are we to proceed, in what manner advance 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 197 
 
 from this beginning ? It cannot be by further abstraction or 
 generalisation, for we suppose ourselves at the abstractest and 
 most general already : determination, then, specification, is the 
 only principle of transition left us. But, supposing this to be the 
 method we must adopt, how put it into operation, and where end 
 it ? are the next questions. As regards putting it into operation, 
 that is possible by finding for every genus the differentia by addi- 
 tion of which it (the genus) will be transformed into the im- 
 mediately subordinate species ; and as regards an end, that will 
 take place, when we have reached the most concrete conception 
 that belongs to this universe. The beginning, then, will probably 
 not be difficult, inasmuch as it is just the genus summum, or the 
 last product of abstraction: neither presumably will the end be 
 difficult, as, if we find the true method, it will come of itself. The 
 whole difficulty now, then, relates to this method : how, being in 
 possession of a genus, can we find, without addition of any other 
 element, the differentia which will convert it into its first species ? 
 This seems impossible; for logic holds that the genus is the 
 common element, while the differentia is that which is peculiar 
 to the species, just that, in short, which distinguishes the species 
 from the genus. We are at once at a stop here, then ; and it 
 seems that even if we had the beginning, the summum genus, any 
 advance from it would be impossible, as it is a differentia that is 
 the necessary instrument of movement, and a differentia lies not 
 in the genus, least of all in the sunjmum genus, but is to be found 
 only in the species. Now, in what has been said lies the germ 
 and motive of all Hegel's reasoning as regards a beginning, and of 
 that principle as well which is named the Hegelian principle /car 
 eox*iVy an( i which has always been objected to Hegel as his absurd 
 contradiction of all the laws of logic, of thought, and of common 
 sense objected to him, too, invariably with that shallow exulta- 
 tion and exaltation peculiar to the opponent who is utterly 
 ignorant of the man he fights, as if the mere objection were an 
 absolutely unanswerable and utterly annihilative refutation and 
 reply. But that Hegel is right, there is the universe for proof : 
 'God himself could not have created the world, had the summuni 
 genus been only summum genus, and had a differentia required tp 
 be waited for, from an elsewhere that existed not. It all lies there. 
 The beginning and the movement of Hegel ought to be now per- 
 fectly intelligible, and so far, likewise, reasonable. There are 
 truths absolute incapable of being changed even by absolute 
 
198 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 power, and this is one of them : the three angles of a triangle are 
 not more absolutely equal to two right angles than the unity of 
 difference and identity is absolutely true since the world is. 
 Logically expressed, what has been said amounts to this : logical 
 determination is only possible if the genus really contains and 
 implies the differentia of the immediately following species. Now 
 let us try this in actual working ; let us find the summum genus, 
 and let us see whether the differentia be not held in it at least 
 impliciter. But here we are just again saying, though in another 
 form, what we have already so often repeated. The Genus is the 
 Begriff, the Differentia is the Ur-theil, and the Species is the 
 Schluss : we have not yet got beyond An sich, Fur sich, and An 
 und filr sich ! The same movement, the same form press ever in 
 upon us ; and they are those of the Notion. But to apply. 
 
 Seyn, Being, is the most abstract notion of all. Everyone will 
 find this the case on trial : Kant directly states this both in the 
 conclusion of his Transcendental Analytic, and in his Logic ; and 
 Hegel repeatedly points out that it is equivalent to the sum of all 
 realities. Seyn is the beginning, then Seyn is the summum 
 genus : does it contain impliciter the Differentia ? Or Being is the 
 Begriff, what is the first Ur-theil both as parting and judgment ? 
 But this was identified but lately as the moment of abstraction or 
 fur sich : what, then, is Being in absolute abstraction, or fur sich ? 
 Why, Nothing. At first glance, then, it seems wholly hopeless to 
 search for any differentia here, where all is vague and indeter- 
 minate, and Being itself has but the value of Nothing. But what 
 is to come after ? or what is the first species under Being ? Why, 
 in Being as Being, there is as yet nothing ; it is a sea from which 
 not a scale of distinction can be landed. The first step in such a 
 sea towards a distinction must be a Becoming. Becoming, then, 
 is more particular than Being : by what is it more particular ? 
 Being implies that there is ; but Becoming implies both that there 
 is, and that there is not. Is not, then, or simply not, is what it 
 contains more than Being. But if, by any means, we could 
 have found this not first of all, though implicitly, in Being we 
 should have found the differentia necessary for its conversion into 
 the species Becoming. But we found this: absolutely abstract 
 Being was just at the same time Nothing ; Being as Being was 
 predicateless, &c. &c. 
 
 The same process applied to Becoming will detect there, im- 
 plicitly contained, the differentia that converts it into Daseyn; 
 
MOEE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 199 
 
 and Daseyn conveys that there not only is, but that there is actually 
 there, or here, or now. Quality is found impliciter in Daseyn, and 
 Daseyn is thereby converted into Etwas, Something. This, in short, 
 seems the course of the march of Hegel from beginning to end. 
 
 Of course, it is easy for us, with Hegel's scheme before us, to 
 state the examples; while for Hegel the construction of his 
 scheme, with all that he had to assist him in the general concep- 
 tion of Determination through the addition of differentiae, would 
 prove very difficult. Still, though he must have had great trouble, 
 the receipt being so very plain, the accomplishment of the process 
 would plainly be very possible to patient trial. 
 
 It is to be understood that Hegel did not look at the process as 
 altogether external, artificial, technical form. He had come upon 
 it, doubtless, when endeavouring to accomplish for the matter of 
 Simple Apprehension what Kant had accomplished for that of 
 Judgment and Reason, &c. No doubt, Hegel vitalised logical 
 determination into the process of the concrete ; and, no doubt, 
 Hegel was perfectly correct in this. The concrete, and the ulti- 
 mate principle of the concrete let us even name it God must 
 contain identity, arid it must also contain diversity. Progress is 
 possible only from this to that ; but these very words imply other 
 and others, diversity. But God is not to be viewed as twofold 
 in God's unity, then, identity and diversity must both cohere, 
 without prejudice the one to the other. This is a deep subject: 
 Hegel, however, has probably thpught it out ; his result being 
 that difference is as essential to the Absolute that is, to this 
 universe and the principle and principles of this universe as 
 identity itself. So long, indeed, as we remain by identity, by that 
 which is always self-identical, and nothing but self-identical, 
 march there is none ; but in that God created the world, he demon- 
 strated that self-identity was not alone what constituted him. 
 Negation is as necessary as affirmation, then ; nay, Spinoza 
 asserts omnis determinatio to be negatio, implying thereby that the 
 particular arises only by particularisation, that is, by differentiating 
 by differencing the conceived original identity. In all philosophy, 
 then, negativity is an essential constituent, as it is an essential 
 constituent of the eternal frame of things. Kant had his negative 
 in the form of a Thing-in-itself, and Fichte could not move with- 
 out the same principle, but rarified into the Anstoss, the appulse. 
 or reflecting plane of impact. Hegel, for his part, like the royal 
 thinker he was, resolves these negatives into the ultimate negative 
 
200 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 of nothing, nought, or not, negation as such. In fact, the ultimate 
 principle is to him the pure Negativity ; and even such is Ego as 
 Ego, or Self-consciousness as Self-consciousness : even such is the 
 Notion ; for, like Ego, on the one side in every case it negates all 
 difference into its own identity ; while, on the other side (like ego 
 also in the case of idealism, or as God), it negates its own identity 
 into all difference. Here is a glance into the very depths of being. 
 Hegel, very probably, made progress easy to himself by the ready 
 formula, Find your differentia (always impliciter in the genus), 
 and add it expliciter to the genus for the formation of the species : 
 still, he had in his mind concrete truth in the shape of the 
 necessity of difference to identity and of all the consequences of 
 the same. The Ur-theil, the difference, is quite as necessary as the 
 Begriff, the identity. What is in itself must become for itself ; 
 and unity stepping asunder into differents, that is Ur-theil, that is 
 dis-cernmQut. We are not content with the immediate identity of 
 sense, for example ; we demand the mediacy, the explanation of 
 understanding, which is a movement between differents. Hegel's 
 principle, then, is more than mere formula : what, in fact, we here 
 refer to under the series genus, differentia, and species, is identical 
 with that expression of his principle which Hegel generally uses 
 namely, That everything passes into its opposite, but again re- 
 sumes the same to production of a higher form : for what else in 
 logical language is this, but just that the genus contains the 
 differentia, and, by manifesting and resuming the same, it passes into 
 the species ? This logical language, then, is no mere dead formula 
 not a mere form in a book ; it is a form that pervades and animates 
 the universe itself. The identity of the seed passes into its differ- 
 ences and becomes the tree. As Hegel's own illustration has it, bud, 
 blossom, fruit, follow each other, refute each other; yet the last 
 still contains the others, and it is only identity which has passed 
 into its differences. Hegel, face to face with nature, saw that this 
 principle was true ; face to face with history, he found it true ; 
 face to face with thought in his own soul, it still showed true ; 
 and face to face with the history of philosophy, it was no less 
 true. Everywhere he tried it, and everywhere the answer was the 
 same. Still, it is to be understood that even a Hegel cannot 
 escape the appearance of formalism and mechanism which the 
 application of a formula always entails. There is a certain formal 
 mechanism in the very initial questions, What is the absolutely 
 abstract genus ? what is the absolutely abstract differentia ? and in 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 201 
 
 the answers, The absolutely abstract genus is the absolutely abstract 
 identity the absolutely abstract sum of all realities, which is just 
 Being as Being; the absolutely abstract difference can only be 
 Nothing ; the absolutely abstract species, from the addition of such 
 difference to such identity, can only be the absolutely abstract 
 Becoming. These, perhaps, are the bottom thoughts ; but absolutely 
 abstract thoughts look very formal beside these material things, sky 
 and earth and air, and bird and beast and man. It is but formalism, 
 it is but a dry gulp to us to take down Logic as creating principle 
 of this Nature yet still what help ? 
 
 Thus, then, at all events, tracing Hegel from Kant, we have 
 gone deep into the former, and have well-nigh surprised, perhaps, 
 his whole secret. We can throw yet another light, however, which 
 of course coheres with what has been already said. Hegel con- 
 sistently sought in the history of philosophy for the thought which 
 had immediately preceded his own, in the belief that the nexus 
 between them would prove the differentia of the latter. Or we may 
 say this otherwise. 
 
 The results reached can be conceived as accruing to Hegel from 
 an examination of the subjective side, as it were, of the industry 
 of Kant. There is yet another side of the same industry, the 
 objective. It, doubtless, occurred to Hegel spontaneously, that 
 differentiation was the principle of the objective and historical 
 progress of thought in outward manifestation as a succession of 
 thinkers. Still this also, so far as the expression is concerned, 
 lies in Kant. We have seen already the sentence, ' He who would 
 learn philosophy must regard all the systems of philosophy only 
 . as the history of the exercise of Eeason,' that is, the systems of 
 philosophy are the history of Eeason itself. Schelling also has 
 the same thought, and, we may add, that thought also which 
 Hegel realised in the ' Phaenornenologie.' Both thoughts cohere, 
 indeed, and belong to the same fact. Indeed, the vitalisation of 
 logic was itself sufficient to suggest such historical expectations, for 
 it showed that these dead linguistic formulae had formerly been 
 alive in actual historical thought. 
 
 Objectively, then, the thought of Hegel was preceded by that of 
 Kant, as that of Kant was preceded by those of Hume, Locke, 
 Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes. That is to say, the thought of Sub- 
 stance was the objective thought that immediately preceded the 
 thought of Kant ; and, more closely still, it was Substance gone 
 into Causality which was the immediate foregoer of the Notion of 
 
202 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., C. 
 
 Kant. Now, Kant, so far as Substance was concerned, had 
 completed the series appertaining to the relation involved by 
 adding Eeciprocity. Eeciprocity, indeed, is the name that not 
 inaptly describes the peculiar view with which Kant followed 
 up the suggestions of Hume. Kant, for example, referred all 
 to the reciprocity of Noumena. What constituted knowledge 
 was Phenomena derived from the reciprocal action of the Nou- 
 menon within and the Noumenon without. Eather, Kant in- 
 verted the previous relative positions of these two Noumena 
 by subordinating the object (which had previously been the 
 principal) to the subject (which had previously been secondary), 
 and thus by such inversion generated a certain virtual reciprocity. 
 At all events, from reciprocity the Notion of Hegel directly takes 
 life : it is just with reciprocity that Hegel has seriously occupied 
 himself. He has concentrated his attention on the peculiar 
 manner in which Kant derives this notion of reciprocity from 
 the logical function of the disjunctive judgment, and has thus 
 gradually created his own Notion or Idea, which just is, that 
 What is, is a concrete unity, the life of which lies in the principle 
 of reciprocity, and more particularly in the notional form of 
 that principle as it exhibits itself even in Kant himself. For 
 in Kant, we find the singular to be but a sort of reciprocal result 
 from the reciprocal interaction of the particular and the universal. 
 This is best seen in the Kantian rationale of a perceptive act. 
 This (any) concrete unity (perceived), the disjunctive sphere a 
 single cell, say is to be conceived possessed of the reflex life of 
 consciousness. An illustration suggests itself. 
 
 In a letter written to a literary veteran, some twenty years 
 a g) by a stricken youth, in one of those intrusions which are, 
 to buddm^ letters, in the light of love, so natural, but to budded 
 letters, in the light of experience, so unendurable, there occurs 
 the following passage : ' I lie in the centre of this me y this dew- 
 drop, round which the rays of Deity, interpenetrating and passing 
 through it, paint the spectrum of the universe.' This may be 
 allowed to be a fair symbol for idealism in general; and the 
 same youth, separated by many years from any knowledge of 
 German, stumbled in his thoughts on what may perhaps be 
 allowed to be a fair symbol for the phase of idealism which 
 now occupies us. It is this : Conceive a magician, a man of 
 mighty power, a Prospero, so to place before the eyes of a 
 Miranda a scale of fish, a plume of bird, a tooth of beast, a 
 
MORE PARTICULAR DERIVATION. 203 
 
 leaf of branch, a pebble from the rock, a grain of sand, &c., 
 so, and so strangely, that they should liquidly collapse somehow 
 before her eyes taking her with them into the aforesaid dew- 
 drop ! JSTow this is a Vorstellung of the Begriff of Hegel, or 
 better, perhaps, of his Idea. The All, What is, is, so far as ^F/ogic 
 is concerned, the Idea. Now, this Idea is but a dew-drop which, 
 by a triplicity of reciprocity in itself, develops itself, or rather at 
 any time can develop itself, into the universe. As it is, in the 
 first instance that is, as simple unity or identity, knowledge (or 
 particularity), there can be none in it: it is just What is an sich, 
 in itself. But let it, by virtue of its own inner negativity, negate, 
 isolate a single point of its yet undisturbed periphery, and there 
 result immediately a particular and a universal which collapse 
 into a singular. The dew-drop, the lucid vesicle, is conceived 
 capable of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness as act may be 
 conceived as the form, the embracing element, the pjvhens ; while 
 the object of self-consciousness may be conceived as the matter, 
 the Inhalt, the intent or ingest, or the prehensum : lastly, the 
 realisation of the prehensum to the prehens may be conceived 
 as a singular act of knowledge, a union of Form and Matter, 
 an Entelecheia. The applicability of several of the Hegelian 
 triplets must at once suggest itself: the moments of the move- 
 ment, for example, are all respectively susceptible of the names, 
 Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss ; Immediacy, Mediacy, and Both ; Identity, 
 Difference, restoration of Identity, &c. &c. 
 
 Again, in further explanation, it is to be considered that the 
 1 Phaenomenologie ' precedes the ' Logic,' and that the latter 
 work consists, in a measure, but of the abstract conclusions of 
 the former work; which conclusions being placed together, are 
 seen to form a system apart by themselves. 
 
 There is possible yet another glimpse of the industry of Kant 
 which will greatly assist to an adequate conception of the industry 
 of Hegel. Looked at in a large and generalised fashion, the 
 industry of Kant was, in ultimate instance, to reduce all the 
 concreter interests of man to the three cognitive faculties. The 
 result of the ' Kritik of Pure Eeason,' for example, is to reduce 
 the whole theoretic world, the whole world of knowledge (for 
 the thing-in-itself=o) to Understanding ( = Simple Apprehension 
 here) ; the result, again, of the ' Kritik of Judgment ' is to reduce 
 the whole sesthetic world, the world of feeling or emotion, under 
 Judgment ; and, lastly, the * Kritik of Practical Keason ' refers 
 
204 THE STKUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., D. 
 
 the Practical world, the world of Will, to Keason. This is 
 sufficiently singular in itself; and, no doubt, it was sufficiently 
 singular to attract the special attention of Hegel. What a 
 light it must have proved to this latter indeed ! The whole 
 universe brought back into cognition, just as if all the light 
 ever shed by the sun were arrested, and compressed, and brought 
 back into his single focus ! That the thing thought was but the 
 faculty thinking, or that known and knowing were one ! That 
 the forms of thought, which collectively might be named logic, 
 were the real secrets and souls of the whole immeasurable external 
 chaos ! Such thoughts as these might entrance anyone ; such 
 thoughts as these even spring to meet us from this side of 
 Kant as from others ; and such thoughts as these are the main 
 and master thoughts of Hegel. Of the realisation of such 
 thoughts, indeed, it is that his whole laborious work and works 
 consist. If Kant reduced all to the three cognitive faculties, 
 Hegel but performed the same feat under another form when he 
 reduced all to the Notion ; for the three cognitive faculties are but 
 the three moments of the Notion. One can readily see now how 
 it is that considerations of logic dominate everywhere in Hegel ; 
 and one can now readily understand, also, his contempt of nature 
 as something no more real than our ordinary trains of ideas that 
 float at random. One can now understand, too, how it is that 
 there is a greater difficulty in Hegel, and that is the transition to 
 God. In the meantime, we may quiet ourselves by remembering 
 that Hegel enters on the consideration of God on a much higher 
 sphere, where it is not Logic, but the concreter interest of Eeligion, 
 that is concerned. 
 
 In this way, probably, we may have accomplished something 
 not altogether unsatisfactory towards some explanation of the origin, 
 principle, form, and matter generally of Hegel. 
 
 D. 
 
 A short but luminous formula for Hegel perhaps as good as 
 any that can be devised is this : 
 
 The Substantive is What is ; 
 But the Adjective is the Substantive : 
 Therefore, the Adjective is What is. 
 Or the Whole is Adjective-substantive. 
 
 If it be objected that these are but objective moments, and 
 
A SHORT FORMULA. 205 
 
 that the subjective moment is absent, the latter may be added by 
 considering the adjective as now pronominally ', as it were, reflected 
 into the verb. 
 
 Thus the Notion manifests itself in Grammar also. It is strange, 
 this pertinacity of the Notion ! How striking as regards Christi- 
 anity, the Keligion of Truth, that its moments correspond accurately, 
 as we have seen, to those of the Notion ! It is the religion of 
 Vision (as through the lily into the inner glory, the glory of God), 
 of Love, of Submission ; and these correspond to the trefoil of man, 
 Cognition, Emotion, Volition, and so to the trefoil of the Notion. 
 
 K 
 
 The last word of the secret of Hegel that is probably now 
 required, is contained in the last paragraph of ' Eeciprocity,' and 
 constitutes the conclusion of the objective and the commencement 
 of the subjective Logic. This last word is the Begriff of the 
 Begriff; a phrase often enough used by followers of Hegel, in the 
 sense of totality, probably, but it is doubtful if ever by any of 
 them in the sense meant by Hegel himself, who, however, has, in 
 his own way, explained his meaning tolerably exoterically, too, 
 to him who has the true nature of the industry of Kant fairly 
 before his mind in the sections ' Vom Begriff im Allgemeinen/ 
 and 'Die Absolute Idee.' The original German must here be 
 thoroughly studied, for an English translation would be so uncouth 
 as absolutely to repulse approach. Some notion of what is in- 
 tended may perhaps be caught from this : Conceive the particular 
 and that just amounts to, Take the organic series of particulars 
 as the middle then the negative reflexion of these as to themselves 
 collectively as an organic whole, is the universal ; while this 
 same negative reflexion of themselves to themselves as a unit, is 
 the moment of singularity. Conceive your thirty-two teeth 
 negatively reflected into themselves as a case, and also negatively 
 reflected into themselves as a bite (their own functional act), and, 
 through the rough Vorstellung, something of the Begriff may 
 shine! This conception being properly understood at the same 
 time that it is borne in mind that the whole and all is self-conscious 
 thought universality and singularity are thus seen to be identical, 
 while the particular is also identical with each, and is held between 
 them as in a transparent distinction, so that all three coalesce 
 and the result is a triune transparent distinction. 
 
206 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., E. 
 
 Why is it after EECIPKOCITY ? Because such is the truth of 
 actual history : it came to birth so after Substantiality, Causality, 
 and Eeciprocity or after Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. Its relation 
 to reciprocity appears in this that, as it comes forward here (in the 
 Logik), it is in the form of Schluss, and in Seyn and Wesen respec- 
 tively has already been Begriff and Urtheil: though itself the 
 Begriff, then, it, as in the form of Schluss, resumes the others and 
 completes the reciprocity. Here in the form of Schluss, it con- 
 stituted elsewhere in the form of Begriff the beginning of the whole. 
 Under Seyn, then, where the Begriff was im Begriffe, or as Begriff, 
 all was An sich, all the distinctions also. Hence the particular 
 form there of other to other. In the same way we perceive 
 that, the Begriff under Wesen being im Urtheile, the form 
 becomes that of separation into Eeflexions. We have now to 
 understand that the Begriff being im Schluss, has reached the 
 perfection of its form and terminates in the Idea. The special 
 movement under each division is always the same, however : 1, 
 Simple Apprehension ; 2, Judgment ; 3, Eeason ; for Hegel is 
 always in earnest with the realisation of the living pulse of Logic. 
 Matter, indeed, cannot be his business here. That business is 
 not surely with a first artificer, and what he made and how he 
 made it but with thought and the demonstration of thought as 
 the absolute organ or organism, and the organic all or absolute. 
 Thus it is that he always bears it with him, that thought, though 
 it is itself the object looks on this object as another, in such wise 
 that its knowledge of the same is of a negative nature intelligible, 
 perhaps, from this illustration that, in the movement of the sun, 
 what is seen, is just the negative of what is. Hegel would convert 
 the new principle into Science; but such 'science of the Notion 
 can only be Logic. 
 
 Verstandige Vernunf t, or verniinftiger Verstand, we may remark 
 here, amounts to plurality in unity, or unity in plurality ; just 
 what Kant meant but only as it were An sich, or implicitly and 
 virtually by his Einheit and Mannigfaltiges ; and this is the 
 reciprocity which Hegel has in view. Verstand here is taken so 
 that its strict etymology falls into and modifies its ordinary mean- 
 ing. There is an idiomatic use of Verstehen which illustrates the 
 Hegelian sense : Verstehen, that is, sometimes means, to become 
 stale, to be injured by long standing, as it were to stand itself 
 away. The relation this meaning bears to the fixed isolation, the 
 sundered identity, which Hegel would have us perceive to be 
 
FURTHER EXPLANATION. 207 
 
 implied by understanding, is tolerably obvious. Hegel always 
 regards the particle Ver as equivalent to trans, and as referent to 
 a process of transition or transformation the nature of which is 
 characterised by the root. So Allgemein, Besondern, and all the 
 Hegelian terms. Kant's phrase Anschauender Verstand is equiva- 
 lent to the Hegelian Verstandige Vernunft. In Bestimmen, too, 
 see the etymological look it is a giving voice (Stimme) to What 
 is ; or Logical Determination (Bestimmung), the whole process of 
 Hegel, is but a sort of naming of Adam. Geist, similarly, is an 
 excellent word for the ultimate, absolute, and positive Unity : the 
 living Spirit of the moment is always the co-including and realis- 
 ing point of the All. 
 
 As regards both Understanding and Keason (in its dialectic 
 part), it is not difficult to understand the word negative a^ applied 
 to their function. We may just say generally, indeed, that 
 thought has no purpose and no act but to negate Seyn taken as 
 what sensuously is. But, more particularly, Understanding 
 negates the unal self thus effecting an intercern or interpart. 
 Eeason negates the negation, not into nothing, but into the 
 restored unal self. Here we see: 1, Unal Self Simple Appre- 
 hension, or Begriff; 2, Intercern Judgment, or Ur-theii; 3, 
 Eesolution of Difference into a Unal Self of differents Eeason 
 and Schluss. Everywhere the Notion is a Negativitat: the 
 Particular is negative part negating part, &c. ; the Universal, as 
 negating the parts, is negative ; and the Singular, as negating all 
 into the absolutely self-identical unit of Self, is eminently negative 
 and eminently the reine Negativitat. In fact, what we have 
 everywhere is division in the indivisible, separation in the in- 
 separable, difference in the identical ; so that identity is abstrac- 
 tion and the form of abstraction. 
 
 Such sentences as the following will be now intelligible, and 
 may prove illustrative: 'This spiritual movement, which in its 
 unity [i-e. irn Begriff] gives itself its characteristicity [i.e. its 
 determinate and determinating variety, as im Urtheil], and in 
 its characteristicity its equality with itself [resumption of All- 
 gemeines and Be-sonderes, into Ein-zelnes ini Schluss], which 
 is thus the immanent evolution of the Notion, is the absolute 
 method of cognition, and, at the same time, the immanent soul 
 of the import itself ' import here amounting to that which the 
 All, both substantially and formally, is. ' The nature, the peculiar 
 inner being, the veritably eternal and substantial element in the 
 
208 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., E. 
 
 multiplicity and contingency of the phenomenal and passing out- 
 ward, is the notion.' ' Only in its notion has anything actuality ;. 
 so far as it is diverse from its notion, it ceases to be actual, and 
 is null ; the side of tangibility, palpability (Handgreiflichkeit) r 
 and of sensuous out-of-selfness (Aussersichseyn) belongs to this- 
 null side.' The sensuous never is, but always is not; the notion, 
 then, is its truth ; what it is apart from that notion is evidently 
 a nothing : take the page before us, for example. In illustration 
 of the life of the Notion, we must bear in mind the progress of 
 history, in all departments, from, 1, Instinctive life, through, 2, 
 Kequirements of Eeflexion into, 3, Eeason. This, in the concrete, 
 is not to be looked for in the exactitude of a formula : often we 
 see retrocessions of the individual, a fall-back from understanding 
 to sense^as in Eeid. On the whole, in the Begriff of the Begriff 
 we see that Hegel has returned to substantiality, fact, life, while 
 Kant, in his categories, was still in distinctions of mere formal 
 logic. Kant thus may be said to have had only a regulative,, 
 while Hegel has a constitutive, force. Before such merits one 
 relents to conceive Hegel as absorbed in creation, and never 
 sufficiently on his own outside, as it were, to explain his origin 
 from Kant. But this origin and the debt to Kant are not to 
 be forgotten. 
 
 Thus, then, we see plainly how actual fact of life and history 
 coheres with general logic. Being, Nothing, Becoming, through 
 all the intermediate steps, are just finally hammered into, and 
 correspond respectively to, the closing triunity Logic, Nature, 
 Spirit. Legends of all peoples exemplify the same. Eden is 
 but Simple Apprehension passing into Judgment. Then the Good 
 Principle is Being, the Bad, the Negative. Faust, again, is the 
 latter stage of the era of Judgment, the stage named by Hegel, 
 ' Das ungliickliche Bewusstseyn ; ' the Understanding has done 
 its work, Keason has not yet begun, and all around is but empty 
 abstraction, without a single rest for Faith (or Hope) of any kind : 
 and the result is but a precipitation into the senses ; more com- 
 monly now-a-days the end is but vague despair and an impotent 
 sighing for all that has been lost. 
 
 The categories we may conceive as an internal web invisible 
 to us, and of which, so long as they are uninvestigated, we are 
 but the prey. Still, to most individuals, certain categories become 
 enlarged isolated thickenings occur in our inner web which as- 
 thickened come before consciousness and from which as ganglia 
 
FURTHER EXPLANATION. 209 
 
 our single spirit issues. In this manner, we may conceive our- 
 selves enabled to analyse and pass judgment on the characters 
 of men by exhibiting, that is, their ganglionised or hypertrophied 
 and ossified categories, of which they were the slaves. The thin 
 man acts from a single category; the rich man is a rich spirit 
 resultant from many categories mutually related in a healthy 
 common system. Cromwell, though so inarticulate, drew breath 
 from a vast bulk of categories ; and from the weight of the 
 universal it was that he possessed his irresistible mass and 
 moment; nor was the universal that led him, in the slightest 
 hollowed out, as is so common everywhere at present, by the 
 wind of the vanity of the singular. The bad effects of such 
 wind are very apparent in Napoleon. Wellington is otherwise ; 
 but his universal was simply the red tape of England. 
 
 Hegel's work is this : the spider of thought a point spinning 
 its web of thought around itself: the bombyx of eternity, the 
 cocoon of eternity, and their unity in eternity itself! Hegel 
 takes Kant's notion as the secret, the key, of the universe. It 
 is at once the absolute form and the absolute import. And it 
 is this form and this import which only mvolve themselves 
 throughout the whole system, from the lowest, simplest, and 
 abstractest of abstractions up to the highest, most complex, and 
 concretest of concretes. Once possessed of the Kantian notion, 
 his way was successively to discharge its concretion till it reached 
 an ultimate tenuity, and thence to, let it remake itself again. Or 
 we may say that Hegel lies in a consideration of the absolute 
 adversatives negation, position, &c. He saw that thought was 
 but as a football from inner to outer, and from outer to inner, &c. ; 
 and he resolved to make shuttle what had previously been but 
 shuttlecock ; that is, he wove together into indissoluble unity by 
 relation what hitherto had been irreconcilably disunited by this 
 very same relation. This is another synonym for his work, as 
 that of reason, repairing and restoring what had been injured and 
 destroyed by the eighteenth century, in the work of understanding. 
 If the reflexion of Spinoza and Hume has unfixed and unsettled all, 
 the reflexion of Kant and Hegel will again restore all to place and 
 to peace. Hegel's one object, indeed, has been a demonstration of 
 the absolute intussusception. The result is a crystal sphere per- 
 fectly transparent but covered with infinite tracery of intussus- 
 cipient lines opaque, yet transparent which appear and disappear 
 in the own movement of the sphere's own inner. 
 
 o 
 
210 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., F. 
 
 F. 
 
 A tempting way to state the main notion of Hegel is this : 
 What is, says Spinoza, is Thought and Extension, which again are 
 but modifications (even as attributes they amount to this) of one 
 and the same God. Hegel says of this that there is no transi- 
 tion in it, no deduction, no mutual connexion. Now Hegel's 
 secret is just to add the missing element ; or it is the introduction 
 of intermediation and connexion into the divided and disunited 
 trinity of Spinoza. This, of course, is said roughly and generally 
 to give a general and rough idea; for in reality the Nature of 
 Hegel is not derived and is something very different from the 
 Extension of Spinoza : at all to compare, indeed, such vast organic 
 wholes as the Logic, Nature, and Spirit of Hegel with the mere 
 phraseologies of Spinoza in reference to Thought, Extension, and 
 God, is possible only in a wide manner on the mere outside. Still, 
 to assist us to an understanding of Hegel, let us say that what he 
 did was to introduce nexus and connexus into the three of Spinoza. 
 Following this out, then (but as mere illustration), Hegel says, 
 Extension, that is the Particular ; Thought, that is the negative 
 reflexion of this Particular into itself as the Universal ; God, that 
 is the negative reflexion of this same Particular into itself as the 
 Singular, which is thus seen to be a union of both, and each, 
 indeed, is but the other. Now this revolts ; for God, at first sight, 
 is in this way lost to us. God in this way appears a mere crea- 
 tion of our own thought in its barest form, indeed, a mere 
 human reflexion. This conclusion is not quite legitimate, how- 
 ever. We assign to God a variety of attributes ; or God cannot 
 be conceived without a variety of attributes : in a word, then, 
 there is God's unity, and there is God's variety. Now, if we can 
 suppose Extension adequately to collect and represent all God's 
 variety, then assuredly we shall not be very far wrong if we 
 assume God's unity to be the negative reflexion into itself of God's 
 variety, that is, of Extension. This reflexion, moreover, does not 
 belong to us ; it must be conceived as objective fact independent 
 of us. Besides, we are not at all occupied at present with the 
 truth, but only with the fact of Hegel. This huge box has long 
 lain shut we open it we lay out the contents : this is our work. 
 By and by probably, a separate work, the appraiser will follow 
 with his work, and tell us the value. One thing, it is absurd to 
 think of God as an entity somewhere in space, visible and 
 
ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATION. 211 
 
 palpable, could we but get there. ' I have swept space with my 
 telescope,' says Lalande, ' and found no God.' The absurdity of 
 the atheist is seen in that, but there is no less also reflected in it 
 the absurdity of crude theism which as yet has not reached 
 thought proper, but only figurate conception (Vorstellung). But" 
 since Hegel, however it be with the God of Hegel, we must cer- 
 tainly always substitute now Begriff for Vorstellung, intellectually 
 thought notion for sensuously seen image. God is no longer to be 
 pictured in space ; he is not locally, topically in nature ; God is a 
 Spirit, and can be only in the spiritual world, only in the absolute 
 world, which is thought. 
 
 Logic has always appeared under the three rubrics of Simple 
 Apprehension, Judgment, and Keason. In this respect, Hegel's 
 Logic does not differ from any other, or, if it differs, it differs only 
 in being truer to the rubric. Hegel's Logic is, from first to last, in 
 matter and method, in form and substance, in book and chapter, 
 in section and paragraph, in sentence and even word, nothing but 
 Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeason. Simple Appre- 
 hension, Judgment, and Eeason, this itself is but one of the sacred 
 names, just one of the synonymes of the whole. Judgment is 
 but the negative reflexion of Simple Apprehension into itself, and 
 Eeason is but the negative reflexion that sums both. Nay, each 
 is so much the other, all is so dialectic, that, it may be, Hegel 
 himself sometimes mistakes the cue and places as Particular what 
 is Universal, &c. This is but the Notion ; that is, in one of its 
 forms. Everywhere in Hegel we have before us only the Notion. 
 Being, Nothing, Becoming : Being is but Simple Apprehension 
 (Perception, if you will) at its abstractest ; Nothing is the act of 
 Judgment on Being; it is the negative reflexion of pure Being into 
 itself; Becoming is the act of Eeason on Being, and is both Being and 
 Nothing in concrete unity, the truth of both, the Singular that is. 
 It is just as if we said : Everything that is, is ; Everything that is, 
 is not ; Everything that is, is Both that is, it becomes. Each of 
 these averments, too, is true only the last is the concrete truth, 
 the others are but abstractly true. Eeason, in fact, is always to 
 be assumed as the concrete moment that is base or mother-liquor 
 to the two abstract moments of Simple Apprehension and Judg- 
 ment. How natural is all this in the circumstances ! The 
 Idealist can only look to Logic when in search of those principles 
 which are the prius of all : the Idealist, too, as in the moment of 
 Eeason, is but the natural third, and the concrete truth, to the 
 
212 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., F. 
 
 Perceptive animal whose object is Seyn, and the abstracting 
 Critic (or Judge) whose object is Wesen. 
 
 We are to understand, then, that Hegel, from first to last, is 
 but touching or tapping, into its various successive forms, the 
 primitive or original cell of the Notion or the triune Reflexion. 
 There is the crystal sphere tap it lines of reflexion glance in 
 it by which there are seen two in one or a triple unity, Becoming, 
 in which both Being and Nothing nestle. Another touch and 
 Becoming is Become Here-being, There-being, or So-being, 
 Again, a tap, and reflexions glance of Reality and Negation which 
 collapse to Something, and thence again expand into Being- 
 for-other and Being-in-self. These collapse, in their turn, to 
 Determination. Determination sunders into the duplicity of 
 Beschaffenheit and shuts again into the Unity of Limit. Limit, 
 sundering into the duplicity of the spurious Infinite, clasps together 
 again in the unity of the genuine Infinite, and so on. Perhaps, in the 
 above statement, from Being-for-other and Being-in-self onwards, 
 the movement of the series appears in simpler and more consistent 
 general form. Now, all these changes take place, so to speak, without 
 moving from the spot Hegel never abandons the notion with which 
 he starts, and all change is from reflexion on it, or, rather, in it. 
 
 Even when, in the true Infinite, he has reached the verge of 
 Being, and has passed into Quantity, Hegel has not yet moved 
 from the spot: Quantity but resumes what precedes, though in 
 another, that is, as another sphere. Again, Quantity returns to 
 Quality, and both collapse into Measure. In this way, through 
 an extraordinary alternation of Simple Apprehension, Judgment, 
 and Reason, repeated in an extraordinary alternation of their own 
 forms, we reach, at last, the Absolute Spirit. Now Hegel's 
 hypothetical addition to Spinoza, taken as described above, gives 
 the general nature of this Absolute Spirit at the shortest. The 
 Particular, Nature, is negatively reflected into the Begriff 
 (Thought, Logic), which is the Universal, and, through this also, 
 into the Singular of the Spirit. In the very statement, there 
 glitters the hem of truth in such a variety of directions, that it 
 seems to bring with it its own authentication. When the objec- 
 tion it is only human reflexion occurs, let it occur, also, that 
 human reflexion is thought. Let it occur, too, that it is to be con- 
 ceived as an objective reflexion, not something formal, but some- 
 thing intensely concrete. If it is but a reflexion, it is a reflexion 
 from, and contains the absolute wealth of, both thought as thought 
 
ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATION. 213 
 
 and nature as nature. It is not the mere abstraction of Spinoza ; 
 it is, on the contrary, the concrete of concretes. In fact, it can- 
 not be otherwise ; Nature, Thought, each alone, both together, 
 necessitate the reflexion of God ; God is their truth, and, though 
 a necessity of formal thought, is also a necessity of concrete 
 existence. 
 
 But, perhaps, it will be objected again, is it not very general 
 this, very thin, abstract, and bodiless this outcome of a universal 
 spirit, the highest expression of which is not as in you and me, 
 but in societies, institutions, literatures, arts, philosophies, &c. ? 
 Is this abstract and generalised result of the human race as human 
 race all that we are to get as God ? Call it idealism if you will, 
 what is it better than materialism ? Is that abstract result 
 institutions, laws, arts, &c. aught better than a matter into which, 
 even as we form it, we perish, as the coral insect lives only that 
 he may die into the coral rock ? Is this, then, the end of all the 
 hopes of man ? God is but an abstract generalisation of thought ! 
 and for the carrying forward of this abstract generalisation is it 
 only that we emerge ! emerge but to cease ! This we are to call 
 our true selves, and to this we are to sacrifice ourselves ! It is 
 but natural to think thus. It is one-sided, however, to speak of 
 the result of thought as an abstraction and generalisation ; there 
 is neither abstraction nor generalisation as usually understood 
 here present; what we have here is a life. What we have 
 here is the organised universe and its organised outcome. Spirit 
 is the word. Hegel has always meaning in his words, and by 
 spirit he means not a ghost, not an airy vaporous body, but the 
 essential concrete of all, which is a Spirit. In what Spirit do 
 you live, and think, and act ? Ever, in every age, the essential, 
 organic, vital drop of the whole is its Spirit ; and with each 
 new age, the Spirit is ever richer intellectually, morally, 
 emotionally. Nature, then, and Man Nature and Thought- 
 all that is here, just taken together as an organised body what 
 can the soul of this body be but even such a Spirit as is here 
 indicated ? Such Spirit is the Thought, the Emotion, the Will of 
 such a body such Spirit is the Spirit of God. Leave Vorstellung, 
 pass to Begriff shut not only your Byron and open your Goethe 
 (in every way a very finite step) but take the infinite step even 
 from poetry as poetry call it genius to philosophy as philosophy. 
 
 In such abstractions, you say, there is no hope for you ! But 
 why so ? Are not man and nature and all things thought, and 
 
214 THE STJRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., F. 
 
 where is thought, if not in you, who are to yourself the Ego, the I, 
 in which all meet ? You are but Modus not the Absolute ; 
 finite not the Infinite : you must perish ! Consult Hegel and 
 see the necessity of the Modus. And what is perishing ? What 
 is Death ? Where are these, when, What is, is Thought ? Modus 
 finite ! is it not true that you at the same time are ? What is, 
 is Thought : and are not you Thought ? Absurd that you should be 
 continued ! Why so ? On the contrary, it is no more absurd that 
 you should be continued than that you are. That you are is the 
 guarantee of your necessity. God is a concrete Spirit God is the 
 living Universal not an abstract unit why should not the death 
 of the body be the birth of Spirit ? and why should not you 
 continue united to the Universal Spirit then, even as you are so 
 united here, in natural form, now and what is the relation to that 
 Universal Spirit ? is not the One Many, and the Many One ? 
 But all this is premature ! As yet we only seek to understand 
 and express : as yet we have not attempted to think and judge : 
 as yet we have had enough to do to find our way; as yet we 
 have not had time to think. 
 
 The general conclusion, thus far, is that the Secret of Hegel 
 is the tautological reciprocity of the Logical Notion, which is a 
 concrete in itself ; and this is to be found expressed in the last 
 paragraph of the Section ' Eeciprocity.' 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 These Notes of 'the Struggle to Hegel are now concluded. 
 Their general nature and burthen are effort to understand and 
 express Hegel ; and a certain adoption of the side of Hegel will 
 be granted as allowable to the effort to express for the sake even of 
 efficiency, especially in the case of a student only speaking to 
 himself in preparation for the public. The state of the fact is 
 accurately depicted here. 
 
 These Notes it was proposed to follow up by a general chapter 
 on the Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter of the System, which 
 should methodically bring to a focus all the findings in these 
 respects which are, in a necessarily irregular and imperfect 
 manner, indicated in the Notes themselves. This chapter, how- 
 ever, is reserved for the present, as its composition is likely to be 
 more efficient later.* 
 
 * The function of this contemplated chapter, however, will be found to a certain 
 extent fulfilled by the answers to the four general questions with which the Inter- 
 pretation ' III ' almost opens. 
 
REMARK. 215 
 
 Meantime, we may say this: The Principle is the Notion as 
 expressed at the end of ' Eeciprocity ' ; the Form (or Method) is 
 the movement of this Notion ; and the Matter is the development, 
 or simply the introduction, of this Notion into the entire wealth 
 of the outer and inner Universe. As regards Origin again, that 
 lies in Kant ; and in this respect we may name six special refer- 
 ences : There is the light derived from 1, The externalisation of 
 the Categories ; 2, The generalisation of the same ; 3, The utilisa- 
 tion of the branch of Logic (S. Apprehension) left vacant by 
 Kant; 4, The realisation of Logic in general; 5, The Kantian 
 theory of Perception ; and, 6, The reduction of what we may call 
 the concrete faculties of man, Cognition, Emotion, Will, under his 
 abstract ones, as named in Logic, S. Apprehension, Judgment, and 
 Eeason. Lastly, as regards Kant, not only did he breathe the 
 precise tendency, exhibited and perhaps perfected by Hegel, to- 
 wards a philosophy which should be a complete and co-articulated 
 system in explanation of the All, but there lie scattered over the 
 whole field of his labours a thousand hints, which must have 
 proved of the greatest service to Hegel. Some of these we have 
 already seen ; but there lie a multitude more both for the seeing 
 and the seeking. By way of example, here is a small one : 
 
 Metaphysic lias, as the special aim of its inquiry, only three Ideas : God, 
 Freedom, and Immortality, and so that the second united with the first shall lead 
 to the third as a necessary conclusion (Schlusssatz). 
 
 Indeed, we may quote further : 
 
 All else, with which this science is occupied, serves merely as means to 
 attain to these Ideas and their reality. These Ideas are not required in aid of 
 natural science but to transcend nature. The attainment of them would 
 render Theology, Morals, and, through the union of both, Eeligion, conse- 
 quently the highest ends of our existence, dependent on speculative Reason 
 alone and on nothing else. In a systematic exposition of these Ideas, the 
 order given, would, as the synthetic, be the most appropriate ; but in the 
 labours, which must necessarily precede any such exposition, the analytic, or 
 reverse, arrangement will be better adapted to the end proposed : for here, in 
 fulfilment of our great design, we proceed from what experience offers us 
 immediately to hand psychology, to cosmology, and thence to the cognition 
 of God.* 
 
 Particular points of derivation as regards both Fichte and 
 Schelling have been already alluded to. But, on the whole, what- 
 ever suggestions may have proceeded from others, Kant, the 
 
 * Kant, Krit. d. E. V. Trans. Dialec. Book. I. Section 3, Note. 
 
216 THE STRUGGLE TO HEGEL CHAP. V., F. 
 
 original quarry, was alone adequate to stimulate Hegel to the 
 accomplishment of what he did accomplish ; and these two writers 
 may be directly connected as cause and consequence. I may add 
 to the six special references above, that the point in which Kant 
 and Hegel are, perhaps, seen closest, is the fact that the a priori 
 Synthetic Judgment of the one, and which was set up as the single 
 angle of inquiry, is simply an sich what the Notion of Hegel is an 
 und filr sich. It is to be considered also that, in what follows, 
 much will occur adapted to bring into the true ultimate focus all 
 that we have already seen as regards the explanation of the opera- 
 tions and general industry of Hegel.* 
 
 * It was said, p. 178 : ' Hegel takes philosophy, actual philosophy, as it comes to 
 him from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling ; and remoulds it onwards on its own objective 
 principles, and not on his own subjective ones, just as Kant, receiving philosophy 
 from Hume, attempted honestly to mould it onwards thence.' This, in wide 
 generality, is the literal state of the case ; and it may seem super-ingenious, super - 
 exhibitive of memory, super-laboriose, painfully to collect, as possibly suggestive to 
 Hegel, all these mere sporadic crumbs from Kant. Now, no doubt, Hegel knew 
 perfectly well all the works up to his own date both of Fichte and Schelling ; and, 
 no doubt also, both preceded him. Of all this there is no want of acknowledgment 
 in Hegel himself. * Still there, in what is the immediate reference for either, at 
 all sensibly neither appears. If for Fichte it is dialectic that is spoken of, then it 
 is to be said that Hegel's dialectic is his own, that no man shares it with him, and 
 that it is even opposed to that of Fichte, and, again, if Naturwissenschaft be the 
 word in Schelling's regard, then this, too, must be said that even here the principle 
 at work with Hegel is not that at work with Schelling, but one that has not been 
 as much as surmised by the latter. That is, it is perfectly just to affirm that it was 
 Kant Hegel studied studied to his depths that it is to Kant Hegel owes infinitely 
 the burthen, and that it is from Kant he comes. 
 
 * As regards Fichte, for example, there is the declaration of Hegel that Fichte 
 was the first man in this world who ever set Reason on evolving from itself its own 
 constitutive involution see Hegel, "WW. xv. 308, 310, 328, and iii. 32. Named in 
 the others, it is still Fichte that is meant in the last, where also Schelling comes to 
 be meant, and if here, on a particular point, with a negative, there is no lack of 
 general acknowledgments elsewhere. (New Notes.) 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 217 
 
 II. 
 
 A TRANSLATION FKOM THE COMPLETE LOGIC OF 
 THE WHOLE FIKST SECTION, QUALITY. 
 
 FIRST SECTION. 
 
 DETERMINATENESS OR DEFINITENESS (QUALITY). 
 
 BEING is the indefinite Immediate ; it is devoid of definiteness as 
 in reference to Essentity [i.e., any inner principle to which it were 
 to be supposed due], as also of any which it might possibly have 
 within itself. This reflexion-less Being is Being directly as it is 
 only in its own self. 
 
 As it is indefinite, it is quality -less being; but, in itself, the 
 character of indefiniteness attaches to it, only as in contraposition 
 to the definite, to the qualitative. Definite being as such, then, 
 contraposing itself to being in general, the very indefiniteness of 
 the latter constitutes its Quality. It will be found, therefore, 
 that First being is in itself definite, and consequently, 
 
 Secondly, that it goes over into There-being, is There-being 
 [Daseyn particular existency] ; but that this latter as finite 
 being sublates itself, and goes over into the infinite reference 
 of being to its own self, i.e., 
 
 Thirdly, into Being-for-self [individuality, singularity; and so 
 we are to have Being successively Universal, Particular, and 
 Singular]. 
 
218 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 BEING. 
 
 A. 
 
 BEING, pure Being, without any further definition. In its in- 
 definite immediacy, it is only equal to itself, and neither is it 
 unequal as regards other; it has no diversity within itself, and 
 none in any reference outwards. Should any determination 
 or wtent [Form or Matter] be supposed in its regard, which 
 might be distinguished in it, or by which it might be distin- 
 guished from another, it would not be held fast in its purity. 
 It is pure indefiniteness and vacancy. There is nothing to be 
 perceived in it, so far as it is at all allowable to speak of 
 perceiving at present, or it is only this pure void perceiving 
 itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is 
 equally only this void thought, this void thinking. Being, the 
 indefinite immediate, is, in fact, Nothing, and neither more nor 
 less than Nothing. 
 
 B. 
 
 NOTHING. 
 
 NOTHING, pure Nothing ; it is simple equality with itself, perfect 
 vacancy, determiriation-lessness and mtent-lessness [form-lessness 
 and matter-lessness] ; undistinguishedness in itself. So far as it 
 is allowable to mention perception or thought here, the distinction 
 [we may remark] is admitted, of whether something or nothing is 
 perceived or thought. The perceiving or the thinking nothing 
 has therefore a meaning ; both [perceiving nothing and perceiving 
 something'] are distinguished, thus Nothing is (exists) in our 
 perception or thought; or rather it is empty perception and 
 thought themselves ; and the same empty perception or thought 
 as pure Being. Nothing, therefore, is the same form, or rather 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 219 
 
 formlessness, and so in general the same, as what pure 
 Being is. 
 
 C. 
 
 BECOMING. 
 1. Unity of Being and Nothing. 
 
 PURE Being and pure Nothing is, therefore, the same. What is the 
 truth, is neither Being nor Nothing, but that Being, does not 
 pass over, but has passed over into Nothing, and Nothing into 
 Being. But the truth is just as much not their undistinguished- 
 ness, but that they are not the same, that they are absolutely 
 distinguished, but still, nevertheless, unseparated and inseparable, 
 and either immediately disappears in its opposite. Their truth is, 
 therefore, this movement of the immediate disappearance of the 
 one in the other; Becoming ; a movement in which both are 
 distinguished, but by a distinction which has equally immediately 
 resolved itself. 
 
 REMARK 1. 
 
 The Antithesis of Being and Nothing in common conception. 
 
 Nothing is usually opposed to Something ; Something, however, 
 is already a definite "Beent [Existent], which distinguishes itself 
 from [anjother Something; and so also, therefore, the Nothing 
 opposed to the Something, is the Nothing of a given Something, 
 a definite Nothing. Here, however, Nothing is to be taken in its 
 simple indefiniteness. Should it be considered more accurate that 
 Non-being, instead of Nothing, be opposed to Being, there were 
 nothing to object to this as respects the result, for in Non-being 
 the reference to being is implied ; both, being and the negation of 
 being, are enunciated in one, Nothing, as it is in Becoming. But 
 we are concerned here, first of all, not with the form of the opposi- 
 tion (form, also, at the same time, of the co-reference), but with the 
 abstract, immediate negation, nothing purely for itself, reference- 
 less negation, what might be expressed also, were it wished, by 
 the mere word not. 
 
 The Eleatics first of all, especially Parmenides, enunciated the 
 simple thought of pure being as the absolute, and as the one truth : 
 only Being is, and Nothing is altogether not, enunciated this (in 
 
220 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the fragments of Parmenides which remain) with the pure intoxi- 
 cation of thought when for the first time it has apprehended itself 
 in its absolute abstraction. In the Oriental systems, in Buddhism 
 essentially, Nothing, as is well known, the Void, is the Absolute 
 Principle. The deep-thinking Heraclitus brought forward, against 
 the former simple and one-sided abstraction, the higher total 
 notion of Becoming, and said : Being is as little as Nothing is, or 
 all flows, that is, all is Becoming. The popular, particularly 
 Oriental proverbs, that all that is has the germ of its death even 
 in its birth, while death, on the other hand, is entrance into new 
 life, express at bottom the same union of Being and Nothing. 
 But these expressions have a substrate, on, or in, or by which 
 the transition takes place ; Being and Nothing are held asunder 
 in time, are represented as alternating in it, but are not thought 
 in their abstraction, and therefore not so that they are in, by, and 
 for themselves the same. 
 
 Ex nihilo nihil Jit is one of the positions to which in meta- 
 physic great importance was ascribed. There is to be seen in it 
 either only the empty tautology, Nothing is Nothing ; or if the 
 Becoming (fit} is to have actual meaning in it, then, inasmuch as 
 only nothing comes out of nothing, there is rather in fact no 
 Becoming present in it, for Nothing remains in it Nothing. 
 Becoming implies, that Nothing does not remain Nothing, but 
 passes over into its other, into Being. If later, especially Chris- 
 tian, metaphysic rejected the position, From nothing comes nothing, 
 it maintained necessarily a transition from nothing into being: 
 however synthetically or merely conceptively it took this position, 
 still there is, even in the most imperfect union, a point in which 
 Being and Nothing coincide, and their distinguishedness disappears. 
 The proposition, From nothing comes nothing, nothing is just 
 nothing, has its special significance in its contrariety to Becoming 
 in general, and consequently also to the creation of the world out 
 of nothing. Those who, waxing even wrathful in its defence, 
 maintain the position nothing is just nothing, are unaware that 
 they thereby express adhesion to the abstract pantheism of the 
 Eleatics ; essentially, too, to that of Spinoza. The philosophical 
 opinion which holds, Being is only Being, Nothing is only Nothing, 
 as valid principle, merits the name of Identitdtssystem : this abstract 
 identity is the essence of pantheism. 
 
 If the result, that Being and Nothing are the same, seems 
 startling or paradoxical in itself, there is just nothing further to 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 221 
 
 be said ; it were more reasonable to wonder at this wondering, 
 which shows itself so new in philosophy, and forgets that there 
 present themselves in this science quite other determinations than 
 in ordinary consciousness and in the so-called Common Sense of 
 mankind, which is not just exactly sound sense or sound untfer= 
 standing, but understanding grown up and hardened into abstrac- 
 tions, and in the belief or rather the superstition of abstractions. 
 It would not be difficult to demonstrate this unity of Being arid 
 Nothing, in every example, in everything actual, in every thought. 
 What was said above of Immediacy and Mediacy (which latter 
 implies a reference to another -, and so Negation) y the same thing 
 must be said of Being and Nothing, That nowhere in heaven or on 
 earth is there anything that in itself contains not both, Being and 
 Nothing. As, in such reference, truly, the question is of a certain 
 actual Something, those elements are in it no longer in the perfect 
 untruth, in which they are as Being and Nothing, but in a 
 further developed form, and have become (conceived, for example, 
 as Positive and Negative), the former posited, reflected Being 
 the latter posited, reflected Nothing ; but Positive and Negative 
 imply, the one Being and the other Nothing as their abstract 
 ground-principle. Thus in God himself, Quality (Energy, Creation, 
 Power, &c.), involves essentially the element of negativity, 
 these are a bringing into existence of an other. But an empirical 
 illustration by means of examples of the position maintained 
 would be here quite superfluous. As now, indeed, this unity of 
 Being and Nothing lies once for all established as first truth and 
 basis, and constitutes the element of all that follows, all further 
 logical determinations There-being, Quality, in general all notions 
 of philosophy are examples of this unity quite as much as 
 Becoming. But so-called common (or sound) sense may be 
 invited, so far as it rejects the undividedness of Being and 
 Nothing, to try to discover a single example where the one is 
 separated from the other (Something from Limitation, or the 
 Infinite, God, as has been just mentioned, from energy in act). 
 Only these empty things of thought, Being and Nothing, them- 
 selves, are such separated things, and it is they which by said 
 common sense are preferred to the truth, the undividedness of 
 both, which is everywhere before us. 
 
 We cannot be supposed to seek to meet on all sides the per- 
 plexities into which an ordinary consciousness, in the case of such 
 a logical proposition, misleads itself, for they are inexhaustible. 
 
222 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 It is possible only to mention a few of them. One source of such 
 perplexity, among others, is that such a consciousness brings with 
 it to the consideration of such abstract logical position, concep- 
 tions of a concrete Something, and forgets that there is no question 
 of any such here, but only of the pure abstractions of Being and 
 Nothing, and that it is these alone which are to be held fast. 
 
 Being and Non-being are the same thing ; it is, therefore, the 
 same thing, whether I am or am not, whether this house is or is 
 not, whether these hundred dollars are or are not in my possession. 
 Such inference or such application of the proposition alters its 
 sense completely. The proposition contains the pure abstractions 
 of Being and Nothing ; the application, on the other hand, makes 
 of these a determinate Being and determinate Nothing. But, as 
 has been said, the question here is not of determinate being. A 
 determinate, a finite being (entity), is such as connects itself 
 with others ; it is a complex which stands in the relation of 
 necessity with many other such, with the whole world. As 
 regards the reciprocating system of the whole, metaphysic might 
 advance the at bottom tautological allegation, that were a 
 single dust-atom destroyed, the whole universe would collapse. 
 In the instances opposed to the position in question, something 
 appears as not indifferent, whether it is or is not, not for the sake 
 of being or non-being, but for the sake of its concrete relations, 
 which relations connect it with others such. If a determinate 
 complex, any determinate object be presupposed, this object 
 because it is determinate, is in manifold relation to other objects ; 
 it is not indifferent to it, then, whether a certain other object, 
 with which it stands in relation, is or is not ; for only through 
 such relation is it essentially that which it is. The same thing is 
 the case with conception (non-being being taken in the more 
 determinate sense of conception as against actuality), in the 
 context of which the being or non-being of an object, which is 
 conceived as determinately in relation with some other, is not 
 indifferent. 
 
 This consideration involves what constitutes a main moment in 
 the Kantian criticism of the ontological argument for the existence 
 of God, which is regarded here, however, only in reference to the 
 distinction of Being and Nothing in general and of determinate 
 being or non-being, which there presents itself. There was 
 presupposed, as is well known in said so-called proof or argument, 
 the notion of a Being, to whom all realities accrue, and conse- 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 223 
 
 quently also existence, which was likewise assumed as one of the 
 realities. The Kantian criticism took stand specially by this, that 
 existence or being (these taken as synonymous) is no quality, or 
 no real predicate ; that is, it is not a notion of something which 
 can be added to the notion of a thing.* Kant means to say here, 
 that, being is no element of comprehension. Thus, he proceeds, 
 the possible contains no more than the actual ; a hundred actual 
 dollars contain not in the least more than a hundred possible 
 ones; that is, the former have no other logical comprehension 
 than the latter. For this comprehension, considered as isolated, 
 it is in fact indifferent to be or not to be ; there lies in it no 
 difference of being or non-being this difference on the whole 
 affects it not at all ; the hundred dollars become no less if they 
 are not, and no more if they are. A difference must come only 
 from elsewhere. ' On the other hand,' suggests Kant, ' there is 
 more in my means in the case of a hundred actual dollars, than 
 in that of the mere notion of the same, or their possibility. For 
 the object in the case of actuality is not merely analytically con- 
 tained in my notion, but adds itself synthetically to my notion 
 (which is a determination of my condition), without these said 
 hundred dollars themselves being in the least increased by this 
 existence besides my notion.' 
 
 There are presupposed here two kinds of conditions, to use 
 the Kantian expressions (which are not without confusion and 
 awkwardness) : the one, which Kfvnt names notion, but by which 
 ordinary conception is to be understood ; and another, the state of 
 means. For the one as for the other, for one's means as for one's 
 conception, a hundred dollars are a complex of comprehension, or, 
 as Kant expresses himself, 'they add themselves synthetically 
 thereto;' I as possessor of a hundred dollars, or as non-possessor 
 of the same, or again, I as conceiving a hundred dollars, or not 
 conceiving them, here, certainly, are cases of a different com- 
 prehension. Stated more generally: The abstractions of Being 
 and Nothing cease both to be abstractions, when they receive a 
 determinate comprehension (or import) : Being is then reality, 
 the determinate being of a hundred dollars ; Nothing, negation, 
 the determinate negation of the same. This element of com- 
 prehension itself, the hundred dollars, when taken abstractly by 
 itself, is in the one unchanged, the same that it is in the other. 
 But now that Being further is taken as state of one's means, the 
 
 * Kant's Kritik of P. II., 2nd edn., p. 628 sqq. 
 
224 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 hundred dollars come into relation to a state ; and for this state, 
 the determinatum which they are is not indifferent : their being 
 or non-being is only Alteration [of state] ; they are transferred to 
 the sphere of existence. When, therefore, it is urged against the 
 unity of Being and Nothing, that it is nevertheless not indifferent, 
 whether this and that (the hundred dollars) be or be not, it is a 
 mistake to transfer to mere being and non-being the difference of 
 whether I have or have not the hundred dollars a mistake which, 
 as has been shown, rests on the one-sided abstraction which leaves 
 out of view the determinate existence present in such examples, 
 and holds fast mere being and non-being ; as, on the other hand, 
 it (the mistake) transforms the abstract Being and Nothing, that 
 [here, in this Logic] should alone be apprehended, into a deter- 
 minate Being and Nothing into a There-being [a finite existence]. 
 Only There-being contains the real difference of Being and 
 Nothing, namely, a Something and an Other. This real difference, 
 instead of abstract Being and pure Nothing and their only opined 
 difference, is what floats before conception. 
 
 As Kant expresses himself, there comes 'through the fact of 
 existence something into the context of collective experience ; ' 
 'we obtain thereby an additional object of perception, but our 
 notion of the object is thereby not increased.' That, as appears 
 from the preceding illustration, is as much as this through the 
 fact of existence, essentially just because something is a deter- 
 minate existence, it is in connexion with others, and among such 
 also with a perceiving agent. ' The notion of the hundred dollars,' 
 says Kant, ' is not increased by perception/ The notion here is 
 the already-noticed isolatedly-coucQived hundred dollars. In this 
 isolated form, they are indeed an empirical matter, but cut off, 
 without connexion and determinateness towards other (others): 
 the form of identity with themselves takes from them the 
 reference to another, and makes them indifferent whether they 
 are perceived or not. But this so-called notion of a hundred 
 dollars is a false notion : the form of simple reference to self [as 
 in a notion strictly such] does not belong to such limited, finite 
 matter ; it is a form put on it and lent to it by subjective under- 
 standing : a hundred dollars are not referent of self to self, but 
 changeable and perishable. 
 
 The thought or conception, before which only a determinate 
 being, existence, floats, is to be referred to the previously-mentioned 
 beginning of science made by Parmenides, who purified and 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 225 
 
 elevated his own conception, and thereby that of all following 
 times, into the pure thought, Being as such, and in that manner 
 created the element of science. That which is first in science 
 has of necessity to show itself historically as first. And we have 
 to regard the Eleatic One or Being as the first hint of the (true) 
 thought. Water and such material principles are hypothetically 
 to he considered to be, or would be the universal [or All-common] 
 principle ; but they are as material things not pure thoughts : 
 Numbers are neither the first simple unal thought, nor that which 
 is permanent in itself, but the thought which [as a thought] is 
 quite external to itself. 
 
 The reference back from particular finite being to being as such 
 in its completely abstract universality, is to be regarded not only 
 as the very first theoretical, but as even also the very first 
 practical postulate. When, for example, there is a cry raised, as 
 about the hundred dollars, that it makes a difference in the state 
 of my means, whether I have them or not, or that it makes a still 
 greater difference to me whether I am or not, whether an other be 
 or not, the reminder may be held up without mentioning that 
 there doubtless are actual means, to which such possession of a 
 hundred dollars is indifferent that Man, in his moral thought, 
 ought to raise himself to such abstract universality as would render 
 it in truth indifferent to him whether the hundred dollars, let 
 them have whatever quantitative relation they may to the actual 
 state of his means, are or whether they are not indifferent to 
 him even whether he himself be or not (in finite life, that is, for a 
 state, determinate being is meant), &c. even 'si fractus illabatur 
 orbis, impavidum ferient ruinse,' was the utterance of a Eoman, 
 and much more the Christian ought to find himself in this 
 indifference. 
 
 There is still to be noticed the immediate connexion in which 
 the elevation over the hundred dollars, and all finite things in 
 general, stands with the ontological proof and the said Kantian 
 criticism of the same. This criticism has by its popular example 
 made itself universally plausible : who does not know that a 
 hundred actual dollars are different from a hundred merely 
 possible ones that they make a sensible difference in my state of 
 means ? Because, therefore, in the case of the hundred dollars 
 this difference manifests itself, the notion that is, the deter- 
 minatum of comprehension as mere possibility and the being are 
 different from each other : and so, therefore, also God's Notion is 
 
 p 
 
226 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 different from his Being ; and just as little as I can educe from 
 the possibility of a hundred dollars the fact of their actuality, so 
 little can I ' claw out ' of the notion of God his existence : and the 
 ontological proof is nothing but this ' clawing out ' of the exist- 
 ence of God from his notion. Now, if certainly it is not without 
 its own truth that Notion is different from Being, God is still 
 more different from the hundred dollars and other finite things. 
 It is the Definition of Finite Things, that in them notion and 
 being are different, notion and reality, soul and body are separable, 
 and they themselves consequently perishable and mortal: the 
 abstract definition of God, on the other hand, is just this that 
 his Notion and his Being are unseparated and inseparable. The 
 true criticism of the Categories and of Eeason is exactly this to 
 give thought an understanding of this difference, and to prevent 
 it from applying to God the distinguishing characters and relations 
 of the Finite. 
 
 KEMARK 2. 
 
 Defects of the Expression Unity, Identity, of Being and Nothing. 
 
 There is another reason to be mentioned contributive to the 
 repugnance against the proposition relative to Being and Nothing : 
 this reason is, that the expression of the result, furnished by the 
 consideration of Being and Nothing, in the proposition, Being and 
 Nothing is one and the same, is incomplete. The accent is laid 
 mainly on their being one and the same, as is the case in the pro- 
 position of a judgment in general, where the predicate it is, which 
 alone enunciates what the subject is. The sense seems, therefore, 
 to be, that the difference is denied which difference, at the same 
 time, nevertheless, is immediately presentant in the proposition ; 
 for it names loth terms, Being and Nothing, and implies them as 
 things different. It cannot, however, be meant that abstraction is 
 to be made from them, and only their unity is to be held fast. This 
 sense would of itself manifest its own one-sidedness, inasmuch as 
 that from which abstraction is to be made, is, nevertheless, actually 
 present and expressly named in the proposition. So far now as 
 the proposition, Being and Nothing is the same, enunciates the 
 identity of these terms, but in effect just as much implies their 
 difference, it contradicts itself in itself and eliminates itself. 
 Looking at this still closer, we have here a proposition, which, 
 considered strictly, involves the movement to disappear through 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 227 
 
 its own self. But just thus there happens in its own self that 
 which is to constitute its special purport namely, Becoming. 
 
 The proposition contains thus the result it is that in itself. 
 The point, however, which is to be noticed here, is the difficulty, 
 that the result is not itself expressed in the proposition ; it is~air 
 external reflexion which discerns it in it. Here, then, in the 
 beginning this universal remark must at once be made, that a 
 proposition, in the form of a judgment, is not competent to express 
 speculative truths : a knowledge of this circumstance is sufficient 
 to obviate much misunderstanding of speculative truths. A judg- 
 ment is an identical reference between subject and predicate: 
 abstraction is made thereby from this, that the subject has still 
 more characters than those of the predicate ; as well as from this, 
 that the predicate has more extension than the subject. Now, if 
 the matter in hand is speculative, the non-identity of subject and 
 predicate is also an essential moment ; but in a judgment this is 
 not expressed. The paradoxical and bizarre light in which much 
 of later philosophy appears to those who are not familiar with 
 speculative thought, arises frequently from the form of the simple 
 judgment, when applied in expression of speculative results. 
 
 In order to express the speculative truth, the difficulty may, 
 in the first place, be attempted to be met by the addition of the 
 contrary proposition, as above, Being and Nothing is not the same. 
 But thus the further difficulty arises that these propositions are 
 then unconnected, and so exhibit ^he matter in hand only in the 
 state of antinomy, while it (this matter) refers only to a one and 
 same thing. The terms, too, which are expressed in the two pro- 
 positions are to be supposed directly in union, at the same time 
 that this union can be expressed only as a movement, an unrest of 
 incompatibles. The most common injustice which is done to 
 speculative matter, is to make it one-sided to hold up, namely, 
 only one of the propositions into which it can be resolved. It 
 cannot, then, be denied that this allegation is held to As true as 
 is the statement, so false it is; for if ever the one proposition of a 
 speculative nature be taken, the other must, at least, be equally 
 considered and assigned. There is here yet to be specially 
 mentioned that, to say so, unfortunate word unity. Unity 
 designates still more than identity a subjective reflexion ; it is 
 especially taken as the relation which arises from comparison, 
 from external reflexion. So far as such reflexion finds the same 
 thing in two different objects, there is a unity present to it in such 
 
228 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 wise that there is presupposed, as regards this unity, the perfect 
 indifference of the objects themselves which are compared, so that 
 this comparing and unity nowise concern these objects themselves, 
 and are a finding and determining external to them. Unity 
 expresses, therefore, the quite abstract self-sameness, and sounds 
 the harder and the harsher, the more those things of which it is 
 enunciated show themselves to be directly different. For unity 
 it would be, therefore, so far, better to say only, unseparatedness 
 or inseparalleness : but thus, again, the affirmative of the relation 
 of the whole were not expressed. 
 
 Thus the whole veritable result which has here yielded itself is 
 Becoming. And this is not merely the one-sided or abstract unity 
 of Being and Nothing ; but this movement implies : that pure 
 Being is directly and simply such ; that it is, therefore, equally pure 
 Nothing ; that the difference of these is, but just as much that it 
 eliminates itself and is not. The result, then, really asserts quite 
 as much the difference of Being and of Nothing, but only as 
 meant, supposed. 
 
 We think that Being is rather something quite other than what 
 Nothing is; that there is nothing clearer than their absolute 
 difference ; and that there seems nothing easier than to show it. 
 It is, however, just as easy to convince oneself that this is im- 
 possible, that it is unsalable. Those who would persist in the 
 difference of Being and Nothing, let them challenge themselves to 
 assign in what it consists. Had Being and Nothing each any 
 determinateness by which they might be distinguished the one 
 from the other, they would be, as has been observed, determinate 
 Being and determinate Nothing not pure Being and pure Nothing, 
 as they still are here. Their difference, therefore, is entirely 
 blank ; each of the two is in the same way indeterminate : the 
 difference, therefore, lies not in them, but in a tertium quid, in a 
 mere supposition. But supposition is a mere subjective state 
 which does not belong to this course of exposition. The tertium 
 quid, however, in which Being and Nothing have their support, 
 must also present itself here, and it has already so presented 
 itself : it is Becoming. In it they are as different ; Becoming is 
 only so far as they are different. This tertium quid is another 
 than they : they consist only in another ; that is to say as well, 
 they consist (or subsist) not independently each. Becoming is the 
 maintainment or maintaining medium of Being as well as of Non- 
 being; or their maintainment is only their being in a one; 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 229 
 
 precisely this their maintainment it is that equally eliminates 
 their difference. 
 
 The challenge to assign the difference of Being and Nothing 
 includes this other also, to say, what then is Being and what is 
 Nothing ? Let those who strive against perceiving that the cue 
 as well as the other is only a transition, the one into the other 
 and who maintain of Being and of Nothing this and that just 
 say what it is they speak of, that is, produce a definition of Being 
 and Nothing, and demonstrate that it is correct. Without having 
 complied with this first requisition of ancient science, the logical 
 rules of which they accept and apply in other cases, all that they 
 maintain in regard to Being and Nothing are but assertions, 
 scientific nullities. Should it be said, Existence, so far as, in the 
 first place, existence can be held synonymous with Being, is the 
 complement to possibility, then we have thus another character 
 presupposed, possibility, and Being is not enunciated in its im- 
 mediacy, not just as simple per se, but as conditioned. For being 
 which is mediated, a result, we shall reserve the expression 
 existence. But one represents to oneself Being perhaps under 
 the figure of pure light, as the clearness of untroubled seeing 
 Nothing again as absolute night, and one illustrates their distinc- 
 tion by this well-known empirical difference. In truth, however, 
 if one will realise to oneself more exactly this very seeing, one 
 will easily perceive that there will be seen in absolute light just 
 as much and as little as in the abs9lute dark ; that the one seeing 
 as much as the other is pure seeing seeing of Nothing. Pure 
 light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same. Only 
 in determinate light and light becomes determinate through 
 darkness in troubled light, therefore, just as only in determinate 
 darkness and darkness becomes determinate by light in illu- 
 minated darkness, can anything be distinguished, because only 
 troubled light and illuminated darkness possess in themselves 
 distinction, and are thereby determinate Being There-being, or 
 So-being [Daseyn particular existence]. 
 
 KEMAKK 3. 
 
 The Isolating of the Abstractions, Being and Nothing. 
 
 The unity, whose moments are Being and Nothing as insepar- 
 able the one from the other, is itself, at the same time, different 
 from them, and thus to them a third something, which in its own 
 
230 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 most strictly proper form is Becoming. Transition is the same as 
 Becoming; only that in the former, the two, from the one of 
 which to the other of which the movement is made, have more the 
 appearance of being independently apart from each other, and the 
 movement is rather conceived as taken place between them. 
 Wherever and however Being or Nothing is in question, there this 
 third [something] must be present also ; for these subsist not by 
 themselves, but are only in Becoming, in this, so to speak, third. 
 This third, indeed, has numerous empirical forms ; but these are 
 put out of view by abstraction, in order to hold fast these its own 
 products, Being and Nothing, each per se, and show them inde- 
 pendent of movement. In reply to such simple procedure of 
 abstraction, we have merely just equally simply, to point to the 
 empirical existence in which said abstraction itself is only some- 
 thing, has a Daseyn. Through whatever reflexional forms, indeed, 
 the separation of the inseparable is sought to be attained, there 
 is independently present in every such attempt the opposite of its 
 own self, and so, without recurring or appealing to the nature of the 
 facts themselves, we may always confound every such attempt out 
 of its own self, just by taking it as it gives itself, and demon- 
 strating in it its own other. It would be lost trouble to seek, as it 
 were, to arrest all the sallies and windings of reflexion and its 
 reasonment, in order to cut off and render impossible to it all the 
 shifts and shuffles by which it conceals its own contradiction from 
 its own self. For this reason, also, I refrain from noticing numer- 
 ous self-called refutations and objections which have been brought 
 forward against the doctrine that neither Being nor Nothing is 
 anything true, and that only Becoming is their truth ; the mental 
 training calculated to give insight into the nullity of such refuta- 
 tions or rather, quite to banish all such weak suggestions from 
 oneself is to be effected only by a critical knowledge of the forms of 
 the understanding ; but those who are the most fertile in such objec- 
 tions fall on at once with their reflexions against the very first 
 propositions, without by an enlarged study of logic helping or 
 having helped themselves to a consciousness of the nature of these 
 crude reflexions. 
 
 We shall consider, however, a few of the results which manifest 
 themselves when Being and Nothing are isolated from each other, 
 and the one placed out of touch with the other, so that their 
 transition is negated. 
 
 Parmenides held fast by Being, and was but consistent with 
 
QUALITY TKANSLATED. 231 
 
 himself, in affirming at the same time of Nothing, that it in nowise 
 is ; only Being is. Being, thus complete by itself, is indeterminate, 
 and has, therefore, no reference to any other : it seems, therefore, 
 that from this 'beginning there can be no further progress made 
 from it itself, that is and any progress can only be accomplisliecl 
 by the joining on to it of something alien, something from without 
 and elsewhere. The step forward, that Being is the same as 
 Nothing, appears, then, as a second absolute beginning a transi- 
 tion that is fur sich (per se), and adds itself externally to Being. 
 Being would be not at all possibly the absolute beginning, if it 
 had a determinateness ; it would then depend on another, and 
 would not be immediate, would not be the beginning. If it be, 
 however, indeterminate, and so a true beginning, neither has it 
 anything by which to lead itself over into another ; it is at once 
 the end. There can just as little anything break or dawn out of 
 it, as anything break or dawn into it ; in Parmenides, as in Spinoza, 
 there is no transition from Being or Substance to the Negative, 
 the Finite. But if transition nevertheless is to be made 
 which, as has been remarked, in the case of reference-less and 
 so progress-less Being, can only take place in an external fashion, 
 such transition or progress were a second, a new beginning. 
 Thus Fichte's absolutely first, unconditioned axiom, A = A, is 
 position, Thesis ; the second is opposition, Antithesis ; this latter 
 is now to be considered partly conditioned, partly unconditioned 
 (and so contradiction in itself). $Tow this is a progress of outer 
 reflexion, which just as well again negates what it started with as 
 an absolute, the opposition, the antithesis is negation of the first 
 identity, as it, at the same time, immediately, expressly reduces 
 its second unconditioned to a conditioned. If, however, on the 
 whole, there were any right to proceed, i.e. to sublate the first 
 beginning, such right must have been of this nature, that it lay in 
 this first itself that another could connect itself with it ; that is, 
 the first must have been determinate. But the Being [of Par- 
 menides] or, again, the Substance [of Spinoza] does not enunciate 
 itself as such. On the contrary, it is the immediate, the still 
 absolutely indeterminate such. 
 
 The most eloquent, perhaps forgotten, delineations of the im- 
 possibility to come from an abstract to a further and to a union 
 of both are made by Jacobi in the interest of his polemic against 
 the Kantian synthesis a priori of self-consciousness, in his Essay 
 on the attempt of Criticisnius to bring Eeason to Understanding 
 
232 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 (Jac. Works, iii. vol.). He states (p. 113) the problem thus: 
 That there be demonstrated the occurrence or the production of 
 a synthesis in a pure [blank unity], whether of consciousness, of 
 space, or of time. ' Space is one, Time is one, Consciousness is 
 one ; tell me now, how any one of these three ones shall purely 
 multiply itself in itself: each is only one, and no other; an 
 identical one sort, a the- this- that self sameness / without the-ness, 
 this-ness, that-ness ; for these slumber with the the, this, that, still 
 in the infinite = o of the indeterminateness, from which each and 
 every determinate has yet to expect its birth. What brings 
 into these three infinitudes, finitude; what impregnates space and 
 time a priori with number and measure, and converts them into 
 a pure multiple; what brings the pure spontaneity (I) into oscilla- 
 tion ? How gets its pure vowel to a consonant or rather, its 
 soundless uninterrupted sounding how, interrupting itself, breaks 
 it off, in order at least to gain a sort of self-sound [literally vowel], 
 an accent ? ' One sees from this that Jacobi has very sharply 
 recognised the non-ens of abstraction, whether a so-called absolute 
 (i.e., only abstract) space, or a so-characterised time, or a so- 
 characterised pure consciousness, ego ; he takes stand immovably 
 in it for the purpose of maintaining the impossibility of a transition 
 to an other, the condition of a synthesis, and to a synthesis itself. 
 The synthesis, which is meant, must not be taken as a conjunction 
 of characters already there externally; the question is partly of 
 the genesis of a second to a first, of a determinate to a beginning 
 indeterminate, partly, again, of immanent synthesis, synthesis a 
 priori, a unity of differents that is absolutely (or that in and for 
 itself is). Becoming is such immanent synthesis of Being and 
 Nothing ; but because synthesis mostly suggests the sense of an 
 external bringing together of things full-formed, ready-present, 
 externally confronting each other, the name synthesis (synthetic 
 unity) has been justly left out of use. Jacobi asks, how does the 
 pure vowel of the ego get to its consonant, what brings deter- 
 minateness into indeterminateness ? The what were easily 
 answered, and in his own fashion has been already answered 
 by Kant ; but the question of how amounts to, in what mode 
 and manner, in what relation, and so on, and demands thus the 
 statement of a particular category; but of mode and manner, 
 of categories of the understanding, there cannot be any question 
 here. The question of hoiv belongs itself to the erroneous ways 
 of reflexion, which demands comprehensibleness, but at the same 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 233 
 
 time presupposes its own fixed categories, and consequently feels 
 itself armed in advance against the reply to its own question. 
 Neither has it with Jacobi the higher sense of a question con- 
 cerning the necessity of synthesis ; for he remains, as has been 
 said, fixed in the abstractions, in order to maintain the impos- 
 sibility of a synthesis. He describes (p. 147) with particular 
 vivacity the procedure in order to reach the abstraction of space. 
 ' 1 must for so long strive clean to forget that I ever saw, heard, 
 touched, or handled anything at all, my own self expressly not 
 excepted. Clean, clean, clean must I forget all motion ; and 
 precisely this forgetting, because it is hardest, I must make my 
 greatest concern. I must get everything in general, as I have 
 got it thought away also completely and entirely shot away, 
 and leave nothing whatever over but only the forcibly kept per- 
 ception of infinite immutable space. I may not therefore again 
 think into it my own self as something distinct from it, but at the 
 same time connected with it ; I may not allow myself to be simply 
 surrounded and pervaded by it : but I must wholly pass over into 
 it, become one with it, transmute myself into it ; I must leave 
 nothing over of myself, but this my perception itself, in order to 
 contemplate it as a veritably self-subsistent, independent, single 
 and sole manifestation.' 
 
 In this quite abstract purity of continuity, that is, indefinite- 
 ness and void of conception, it is indifferent to name this 
 abstraction space, or pure perception, pure thought ; it is quite 
 the same thing as what the Indian names Brahma, when, 
 externally motionless and no less internally emotionless, looking 
 years long only to the tip of his own nose, he says within himself 
 just Om, Om, Om, or perhaps just nothing at all. This dull, void 
 consciousness, conceived as consciousness, is Being (das Seyn}. 
 
 In this vacuum, says Jacobi further, he experiences the opposite 
 of what he is assured by Kant he ought to experience : he finds 
 himself, not as a plurality and manifold, but rather as a unit 
 without any plurality and variety; nay, ' I am the very impossibility, 
 am the annihilation of all variety and plurality, can, out of my pure, 
 absolutely simple, unalterable nature, restore again, or " spook " into 
 myself, not the smallest atom of any such ; thus all out-of and 
 near-one-another-ness, all thereon founded variety and plurality, 
 reveals itself in this purity aa ptirely impossible.' 
 
 This impossibility is nothing else than the tautology I hold 
 fast by the abstract unity, and exclude all plurality and variety ; 
 
234 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 hold myself in the difference-less and indeterminate, and look 
 away from all that is distinguished and determinate. The 
 Kantian synthesis & priori of self-consciousness that is, the 
 function of this unity to sunder itself, and in this diremption or 
 sundering to maintain itself is attenuated by Jacobi into the 
 same abstraction. This ' synthesis in itself,' the ' original ordeal,' * 
 is one-sidedly reduced by him into 'the copula in itself; an Is, Is, Is, 
 without beginning and end, and without What, Who, and Which : 
 this repetition of the repetition continued ad infinitum is the sole 
 business, function, and production of the all-purest synthesis ; it 
 itself is the mere, pure, absolute repetition itself.' Or, indeed, we 
 might say, rather, as there is in it no remission, that is, no nega- 
 tion, distinction, it is not a repetition, but only undistinguished 
 simple being. But is it then still synthesis, when Jacobi omits 
 precisely that by which the unity is synthetic unity ? 
 
 In the first place, when Jacobi plants himself thus fast in the 
 absolute (i.e., abstract) space, time, and consciousness, it is to be 
 said that he, in this manner, misplaces himself into, and holds 
 himself fast in, something empirically false; there empirically 
 exist no space and time, which were not limited, not in their 
 continuity filled with variously-limited existence and vicissitude, 
 so that these limits and alterations belong unseparated and 
 inseparably to space and time : in like manner, consciousness is 
 rilled with determinate sensation, conception, desire, &c.; it does 
 not exist separated from a particular matter of some sort. The 
 empirical transition, moreover, is self-evident : consciousness can 
 make, indeed, void space, void time, and void consciousness itself, 
 or pure being, its object and matter ; but it remains not with such, 
 it presses forward out of such void to a better, i.e., in some manner 
 or other, a more concrete matter, and however bad such a matter 
 may be otherwise, it is so far better and truer: just any such 
 matter is a synthetic one in general ; synthetic taken in the more 
 universal sense. Thus Parmenides with his illusion and his opinion 
 must consent to own an opposite of being and of truth ; as, 
 similarly situated, is Spinoza with his attributes, modes, extension, 
 motion, understanding, will, &c. The synthesis involves and 
 shows the untruth of those abstractions ; in it they are in unity 
 with their other not, therefore, as self-subsistent not as absolute, 
 but directly as relative. 
 
 * Das ' ursprunghliche Urtheilen ' at once the ' original judging ' and the 
 1 original disparting. ' (New note. ) 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 235 
 
 The demonstration of the empirical nullity of empty space, &c., 
 is not, however, that with which we have to do. Consciousness 
 certainly can abstract, can fill itself with the indeterminate also ; 
 and the abstractions it then holds fast are the thoughts of pure 
 space, time, pure consciousness, pure being. Now, it is ~fche 
 thought of pure space, &c. i.e., pure space, &c. which is in itself 
 to be demonstrated as null : i.e., that it as such is already its own 
 contrary ; that as it is there in its self, its contrary has already 
 penetrated into it ; it is already of itself gone forward out of itself 
 is determinateness. 
 
 But this manifests itself immediately in their regard [that is, as 
 regards pure space, time, &c.]. They are, as Jacobi profusely 
 describes them, results of abstraction ; they are expressly deter- 
 mined as undetermined ; and this to go back to its simplest form, 
 amounts to being is being. Just this indeterminateness of being, 
 however, is what constitutes its determinateness ; for indeter- 
 minateness is opposed to determinateness : it is itself consequently, 
 as so opposed, the determinate or negative, and the pure, quite 
 abstract negative. This indefmiteness or abstract negation, which 
 Being in this manner has in its own self, is what outer as well as 
 inner reflexion enunciates when it takes it as equal to nothing, 
 and declares it an empty thing of thought, Nothing. Or it may 
 be expressed thus : Since Being is determinationless, it is not the 
 (affirmative) determinateness, which it is, not Being but Nothing. 
 
 In the pure reflexion of the Beginning, as it has been taken in 
 this Logic with Being as such, transition is still concealed : since 
 Being is taken only as immediate, Nothing breaks by it only 
 immediately forth. But all following findings, as at once Daseyn, 
 are more concrete ; in it, that is already explicit which involves and 
 produces the contradiction of those abstractions, and therefore their 
 transition. With respect to Being as said simple, immediate, the 
 recollection that it is the result of perfect abstraction, and so for 
 that very reason but abstract negativity, Nothing, becomes lost 
 from view behind the science which within its own self, expressly 
 from Essence onwards, will present said one-sided immediate as a 
 mediate, in which Being is explicated as Existence, and the 
 mediating agency of this Being as the Ground. 
 
 In the light of said recollection, the transition from Being into 
 Nothing may be represented (or, as the phrase goes, explained and 
 made intelligible) as something even light and trivial. It may be 
 said for example, that without doubt Being which has been made 
 
236 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the beginning of the science (and of science) is Nothing ; for we 
 can abstract from everything ; and when one has abstracted from 
 everything, there remains, of course, nothing over. But, it may 
 be continued, the beginning is thus not an affirmative, not Being, 
 but just Nothing ; and Nothing is then also the end, at least as 
 much so as immediate Being, and even still more. The shortest 
 way is to let such reasoning take its own course, and look on to see 
 how the results it vaunts are characterised. Taking it for granted, 
 then, that Nothing were the result of said raisonnement, and that 
 now, consequently, the Beginning must be made with Nothing (as 
 in Chinese philosophy), there were no necessity on that account to 
 stir a hand ; for before one could stir a hand, this Nothing would 
 have just as much converted itself into Being (see above, B., 
 Nothing). But, further, said abstraction from all and everything 
 (which all then, nevertheless, is) being presupposed, it is still to be 
 more exactly understood ; the result of the abstraction from all 
 that is, is first of all abstract being, being in general ; as in the 
 cosmological proof of the existence of God from the contingent 
 being of the world (over which being the ascent or advance con- 
 tained in the proof is made), being is still brought up along with 
 us, being is determined as Infinite Being. But abstraction can 
 certainly again be made from this pure being also ; Being, too, 
 can be thrown into the all from which abstraction has been 
 already made ; then there remains Nothing. It is still possible 
 for us, would we but forget the thinking of Nothing i.e., its 
 striking round into Being or did we know nothing of this, to 
 continue in the style of one may this, one may that : we may, for 
 example (God be praised !), abstract also from the Nothing (as, for 
 that part, the creation of the world itself is but an abstraction 
 from nothing), and then there remains not Nothing, for it is just 
 from it we have abstracted, and we are once more landed in 
 Being. This one can, one may, gives an external play of abstrac- 
 tion, in which the abstracting itself is only the one-sided activity 
 of the negative. Directly at hand, it lies in this very one can, one 
 may, itself, that to it Being is as indifferent as Nothing, and that 
 just as much as each of the two disappears, each of them equally 
 also arises : again, it is equally indifferent whether we start from 
 the act of the Nothing, or from the Nothing ; the act of Nothing 
 i.e., the mere abstracting is no more and no less anything true 
 than the mere Nothing. 
 
 The dialectic, according to which Plato handles the One in the 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 237 
 
 Parmenides, is also to be regarded rather as a dialectic of external 
 reflexion. Being and the One are both Eleatic forms, which are the 
 same thing. But they are also capable of being distinguished : it 
 is thus Plato takes them in the dialogue mentioned. Having 
 removed from the One the various characters of whole and parts 
 of being in itself, of being in another, &c. of figure, time, &c., 
 the result is that Being does not belong to the One, for only in 
 one or other of these modes does Being attach to any one Some- 
 thing (p. 141, E.). Plato then proceeds to handle the position, the 
 One is; and we have to see how, from this proposition, the transi- 
 tion to the Non-is of the One is accomplished. It takes place by 
 comparing the two members of the proposition advanced, the One 
 is. This proposition contains the One and Being ; and the One is 
 contains more than when we say only, the One. In this that they 
 are different, then, is demonstrated the moment of negation which 
 the proposition holds within it. It is obvious that this path 
 (method) has a presupposition, and is an external reflexion. 
 
 In like manner as the One is here placed in connexion with 
 Being, may that Being which is supposed capable of being held 
 fast abstractly by itself, be demonstrated in the simplest fashion, 
 without calling in thought at all to be in a union which implies 
 the contrary of that which is supposed to be maintained. Being, 
 taken as it is immediately, belongs to a subject, is a thing enun- 
 ciated, has an empirical being, and stands, therefore, on the level 
 of limitation and the negative. JLu whatever phrases or flexions 
 the understanding may express itself, when it sets itself against 
 the unity of Being and Nothing, and appeals to what is immedi- 
 ately before us, it will find just in this very experience nothing 
 but determined being, defined being, Being with a limit or nega- 
 tion [a term, an end], that very unity which it rejects. The 
 maintaining of immediate being reduces itself thus to an empiri- 
 cal existence, the holding up of which cannot be rejected, and just 
 because it is to an immediacy outside of thought, that its own 
 appeal is made. 
 
 The case is the same with Nothing, only reversewise, and this 
 reflexion is familiarly known and has often enough been made in 
 its regard. Nothing, taking in its immediacy, shows itself as 
 Be-ing or Be-ent (as a thing that is) ; for it is in its nature the 
 same as Being. Nothing is thought, nothing is mentally con- 
 ceived, it is spoken of ; it is therefore. Nothing has in thought, 
 mind, speech, &c., its Being. This Being again is, furthermore as 
 
238 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 well, distinguished from it : it is therefore said, that nothing is 
 indeed in thought, mind ; but that on that account not it is, not 
 to it as such does being attach, that only thought or mental con- 
 ception is this Being. Notwithstanding this distinction, it is just 
 as much not to be denied that nothing stands in connexion with a 
 being, but in connexion, though it implies difference also, there is 
 a unity with being. In whatever manner nothing may be 
 enunciated or exhibited, still it shows itself in conjunction, or if 
 you will contact, with a being, unseparated from a being, or just 
 in a Daseyn. 
 
 But in that nothing is thus demonstrated in a Daseyn, usually 
 still this distinction of it from being (Seyri) is wont to float before 
 the mind, namely, that the Daseyn of nothing [its actual exist- 
 ence] is entirely nothing appertinent to it itself; that it does not 
 possess being for and by its own self, that it is not being as such. 
 Nothing is only absence of being, as darkness is only absence of 
 light, cold only absence of heat, &c. Darkness [the strain con- 
 tinues] has only meaning in reference to the eye, in external 
 comparison with the positive, light ; and just so is cold only 
 something in our sensation. On the other hand, light, heat, like 
 being, are per se, are themselves, the objective, the real, the 
 actuose, of absolutely quite another quality and dignity than those 
 negatives than nothing. We find it frequently adduced as a 
 very weighty reflexion and important cognition, that darkness is 
 only absence of light, cold only absence of heat. But in this field 
 of empirical matters it may be empirically remarked, in reference 
 to said acute reflexion, that in light darkness certainly shows 
 itself actuose, inasmuch as it determines it to colour, and only 
 thereby imparts to it visibility indeed ; for, as formerly observed, 
 in pure light vision is just as little possible as in pure darkness. 
 But visibility is actuality in the eye, and in that actuality the 
 negative has just as much share as the light itself, which passes 
 for the real and positive. In like manner, cold makes itself 
 perceivable enough in water, in our sensation, &c. &c.; and when 
 we refuse to it a so-called objective reality, we have with that 
 won altogether nothing as against it. But it might further be 
 objected, that here too, as above, it is a negative of definite import 
 that is spoken of, and that we have not steadily remained by 
 nothing itself, to which being is, as regards empty abstraction, 
 not inferior nor, indeed, superior. But it were well to take by 
 themselves cold, darkness, and the like definite negations, in order 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED, 239 
 
 to see what is involved in this common constitution which they 
 exhibit. They are not then to be considered as nothing in 
 general, but as the nothing of light, heat, &c. of something 
 definite, of an import, a content [an actuality] : they are thus 
 determinate, and, if we may say so, Staining nothings. BuTTar 
 de^wedness, determinedness, is, as comes again further on, itself 
 a negation: they are thus negative nothings. But a negative 
 nothing is something affirmative. The striking round of nothing, 
 by reason of its definiteness (which definiteness manifested itself 
 a little while ago as a Daseyn a particular state of being in a 
 subject, in water, or whatever else), into an affirmative, appears to 
 a consciousness which remains fixed in the abstraction of the 
 understanding as the greatest of paradoxes, however simple it is 
 to perceive that the negation of a negation is a positive. To be 
 sure, on the other hand, the perception of this simple truth may 
 appear to a like consciousness and just because of its simplicity 
 as something trivial, on which therefore high and mighty 
 understanding need bestow no attention. The matter meanwhile 
 has, with all this, its own correctness : nay, not only has this 
 correctness, but possesses, because of the universality of such 
 forms or determinations, an infinite extension and universal 
 application. It were not amiss, as regards these things, then, to 
 pay a little attention after all. [Original curiously tangled : see 
 p. 105, WW., vol. iii, ed. 1833.] 
 
 It may be still remarked, as regards the transition of Being and 
 Nothing into one another, that it ought to be taken up into the 
 mind just so without any further operation of reflexion. It is 
 immediate and quite abstract because of the abstraction of the 
 transient moments ; i.e., because in either of these moments the 
 determinateness of the other moment is not yet set (manifested as 
 implied), and so as means by which the transition were to be 
 effected. Nothing is not yet set (manifested as implied) in Being, 
 though certainly Being is essentially [in itself] Nothing, and vice 
 versa. It is, therefore, inadmissible to bring in here what are 
 further determinations, and to treat Being and Nothing as in any 
 relation : said transition is not yet a relation. It is, therefore, not 
 allowable to say, Nothing is the ground of Being ; or, Being is the 
 ground of Nothing ; Nothing cause of Being, &c.; or, transition is 
 possible into Nothing only under the, condition that something is, 
 or into Being only under the condition of Non-being. The sort of 
 inter-reference between them cannot be further defined, unless the 
 
240 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 co-referred sides themselves were at the same time further deter- 
 mined. The connexion of Ground and Consequent, &c., has no 
 longer mere Being and Nothing as the sides which it unites, but 
 expressly Being which is Ground and a something something 
 which, to be sure, is only a reflex, and not self-subsistent, but 
 still not the abstract Nothing. 
 
 KEMARK 4. 
 
 Incomprehensible-ness of the Beginning. 
 
 We may perceive from the preceding, what is the nature of the 
 dialectic against a beginning of the world, and also its end, by 
 which the eternity of matter should be supposed proved ; i.e., 
 of the dialectic against becoming, origin or decease, in general. 
 The Kantian antinomy respecting the finitude or infinitude of the 
 world in space and time receives more particular consideration 
 further on, under the notion of quantitative infinitude. Said 
 simple ordinary dialectic rests on the holding fast of the antithesis 
 of being and nothing. It is proved in the following manner, 
 that there is no beginning of the world, or of anything else, 
 possible : 
 
 There cannot anything begin, neither so far as it is, nor so far 
 as it is not : for so far as it is, it does not just begin ; and so far as 
 it is not, neither does it begin. Should the world or anything 
 else be supposed to have begun, it must have begun in nothing. 
 But nothing is no beginning, or there is no beginning in nothing : 
 for a beginning includes in it a being ; but nothing contains no 
 being. Nothing is only nothing. In a ground, cause, &c., when 
 the nothing is so determined or defined, an affirmation, being, is 
 contained. For the same reason there cannot anything cease. 
 For in that case being would require to contain nothing. But 
 being is only being, not the contrary of itself. 
 
 It is obvious that there is nothing brought forward here against 
 Becoming, or beginning and ending, this unity of Being and 
 Nothing, but their assertoric denial and the ascription of truth to 
 Being and Nothing, each in division from the other. This dialectic 
 is, nevertheless, at least more consistent than reflective conception. 
 To this latter, that Being and Nothing are only in separation, 
 passes for perfect truth ; but, on the other hand, it holds beginning 
 and ending as equally true characterisations : in these latter, 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 241 
 
 however, it de facto assumes the undividedness of Being and 
 Nothing. 
 
 On the presupposition of the absolute partedness of Being from 
 Nothing, the beginning as we so often hear or Becoming, is 
 certainly something incomprehensible ; for we make a pre- 
 supposition which sublatSs the beginning or the becoming, which 
 nevertheless we again grant; and this contradiction, which we 
 produce ourselves, and whose resolution we make impossible, is 
 what is incomprehensible. 
 
 What has been stated is also the same dialectic which under- 
 standing uses against the notion contained in the higher analysis 
 of infinitesimal magnitudes. This notion is treated more in detail 
 further on. These magnitudes have been defined as such, that 
 they ARE in their disappearance, not before their disappearance, for 
 they were then finite magnitudes ; not after their disappearance, 
 for they were then nothing. Against this pure notion it has been 
 objected, and perpetually repeated, that such magnitudes are either 
 something or nothing ; that there is no middle state (state is an 
 inappropriate, barbarous expression) between being and non-being. 
 There is here, too, assumed the absolute separation of being and 
 nothing. But, on the other hand, it has been shown, that being 
 and nothing are in effect the same, or, to speak the above dialect, 
 that there is nothing whatever which is not a middle state between 
 being and nothing. Mathematic has to thank the adoption of said 
 notion, which understanding resist^, for its most brilliant results. 
 
 The adduced raisonnement, which arrives at the false assumption 
 of the absolute separatedriess of being and non-being, and remains 
 fixed in it, is to be named, not dialectic, but sophistry. For 
 sophistry is raisonnernent from a groundless presupposition, which 
 is accepted without examination and inconsiderately ; but we call 
 dialectic the higher rational movement, in which such seemingly 
 absolutely separated things pass over into one another through 
 themselves through that which they are and the presupposition 
 negates itself. It is the dialectic immanent nature of Being and 
 Nothing themselves to manifest their unity Becoming as their 
 truth. 
 
 2. Moments of Becoming. 
 
 Becoming, Coming-to-be and Ceasing-to-be, is the unseparated- 
 ness of Being and Nothing ; not the unity which abstracts from 
 Being and Nothing ; but as unity of Being and Nothing, it is this 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 definite, determinate [concrete] unity, that in which as well Being 
 as Nothing is. But thus as each is, only unseparated from its 
 other, each also is not. They ARE, therefore, in this unity, but as 
 evanescents, but as sublated. They sink down from their 
 previously-conceived self-sulsistcncy into moments, distinguished 
 and distinguishable, but at the same time resolved. 
 
 Considered as in reference to their distinguishedness, each is in 
 it as unity with the other. Becoming, then, contains Being and 
 Nothing as two unities such that each of them is itself unity of 
 Being and Nothing. The one is Being as immediate and as 
 reference to Nothing ; the other, Nothing as immediate and as 
 reference to Being : the moments are in disparate determination in 
 these unities. 
 
 Becoming is thus in a double form. In the one, Nothing is as 
 immediate : this form is as beginning from Nothing which refers 
 itself to Being, or, what is the same thing, passes over into Being. 
 In the other, Being is as immediate : this form is as beginning from 
 Being which passes over into Nothing. The former is Origin 
 or Coming-to-be ; the latter, Decease, Ceasing, or Ceasing-to-be. 
 
 Both are the same, Becoming, but, as these so diverse directions, 
 they mutually interpenetrate and paralyse themselves. The one 
 is Ceasing-to-be ; Being passes over into Nothing, but Nothing 
 is equally the contrary of itself, a passing over into Being, 
 Coming-to-be. This Coming-to-be is the other direction ; Nothing 
 passes over into Being, but Being equally sublates itself, and is 
 a passing over into Nothing, Ceasing-to-be. They sublate not 
 themselves antagonistically, not the one the other externally ; but 
 each sublates itself in itself, and is in its own self the contrary of 
 itself. 
 
 3. Sullation (resolution) of Becoming. 
 
 The equilibrium into which Coming-to-be and Ceasing-to-be 
 reflect themselves, is, at first hand, Becoming itself. But Becom- 
 ing equally goes together into peaceful unity. Being and Nothing 
 are in it only as disappearing; but Becoming as such is only 
 through their distinguishedness. Their disappearing, therefore, is 
 the disappearing of Becoming, or the disappearing of the dis- 
 appearing itself. Becoming is an untenable unrest, which sinks 
 together into a peaceful result. 
 
 Or it might be expressed thus : Becoming is the disappearing of 
 Being in Nothing and of Nothing in Being, and the disappearing 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 243 
 
 of Being and Nothing generally ; but it rests, at the same time, 
 on the distinguished ness of these. It contradicts itself, therefore, 
 within itself, because it unites such within itself as is opposed to 
 its own self, but such a union destroys itself. 
 
 This result is a disappearedness, but not as Nothing ; as~ 
 Nothing it were only a relapse into one of the distinctions 
 already sublated, not a result of Nothing and of Being. It is the 
 unity of Being and Nothing which has settled into unbroken one- 
 ness. But unbroken oneness is Being, nevertheless, even so, no 
 longer as individually a whole, but as form of the whole. 
 
 Becoming, thus as transition into the unity of Being and 
 Nothing, which unity is as beent (existent), or has the form of the 
 one-sided immediate unity of these moments, is Daseyn [actual 
 finite, definite existence, taken quite generally]. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The expression, Sublation. 
 
 Aufheben und das Aufgehobene (das Ideelle), sublation and what 
 is sublated (and so only ideellement, not re'ellement is), this is one 
 of the most important notions of philosophy, a ground-form which 
 repeats itself always and everywhere, the sense of which is to be 
 exactly apprehended and particularly distinguished from the 
 Nothing (negation). What subl^tes itself, does not, on that 
 account, become nothing. Nothing is the immediate [directly 
 present to us] ; what is sublated, on the other hand, is a mediate, 
 it is a non-beent but as result which set out from a being : it 
 has, therefore, the definite particularity from which it derives still 
 IN itself [impliciter ; what anything has in itself, it implies or 
 involves]. Aufheben, To sublate, has two senses, now signifying 
 as much as to preserve, maintain, and again as much as to cause to 
 cease, to make an end of. Even preserving includes the negative in 
 it this negative, that something, in order to be conserved is 
 removed or withdrawn from its immediacy, from an existency 
 open to external influences. What is sublated or resolved is thus, 
 at the same time, preserved ; it has only lost its immediacy, but 
 it is not on that account annihilated. The two characters of sub- 
 lation just stated, may be described lexikalisch as two significa- 
 tions of the word. It is striking to find language using the same 
 word for two contradictory predicables. To speculative thought, 
 
244 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 it is gratifying to find words which have a speculative meaning in 
 themselves. The German language has a considerable number of 
 these. The double meaning of the Latin tollere (which the 
 Ciceronian wit tollcndum esse Octavium has made notorious) is 
 more circumscribed, its affirmative character amounting only to a 
 lifting-up. A thing is sublated, resolved, only so far as it has 
 gone into unity with its opposite ; in this more particular sense, as 
 what is reflected, it may be fitly named moment. Weight, and 
 distance from a point, are called, with reference to the Lever, its 
 mechanical moments, because of the identity of their effect, not- 
 withstanding their diversity otherwise ; the one being, as it were, 
 the real of a weight, and the other the ideal or idee'l of a line r a 
 mere character of space (S. Encycl. Hegel, 3d edn., 261, Eem). 
 The remark must often occur to be made, that philosophy uses 
 Latin expressions for reflected characters, either because the 
 mother-tongue has not such as are required, or if having them, as 
 here, because they remind more of what is immediate, while the 
 foreign tongue suggests rather what is reflected. 
 
 The more particular sense and expression which now that 
 they are moments Being and Nothing receive, come out in the 
 discussion of Daseyn, the unity in which they are kept or put ly. 
 Being is Being, and Nothing is Nothing, only as contradistin- 
 guished from each other ; in their truth again, in their unity, they 
 have disappeared as these characters, and are now something else. 
 Being and Nothing are the same ; therefore, because they are the 
 same, they are no longer being and nothing, and possess now a 
 different significance: in Becoming, they were origin and decease; 
 in Daseyn, as a differently-determined unity, they are again 
 differently-determined moments. This unity remains now their 
 base [the ground, the mother-liquor that holds them], from which 
 they do not again issue in the abstract sense of Being and Nothing. 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 245 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 THERE-BEING (DASEYN*). 
 
 THERE-BEING is definite, determinate Being ; its determinateness, 
 definiteness, is beent determinateness, beent definiteness, Quality. 
 Through its quality, is it, that Something is, and as in opposition 
 to an Other. Through its quality, likewise, is it a to-able and 
 finite. Through its quality is it negatively determined ; and not 
 only so as opposed to an Other, but directly in itself. This its 
 negation as, primarily, opposed to the Finite Something, is the 
 Infinite ; the abstract antithesis in which these distinctions [Finite 
 and Infinite] appear, resolves itself into the Infinitude which is 
 without antithesis, into Being -for -self (Fursichseyri). 
 
 The discussion of There-being has thus the three divisions 
 
 A. There-being as such ; 
 
 B. Something and Other, Finitude ; 
 
 C. Qualitative Infinitude. * 
 
 THERE-BEING AS SUCH. 
 IN There-being 
 
 a. as such, its determinateness, first of all, is 
 
 b. to be distinguished as Quality. This (quality), however, is 
 to be taken as well in the one as in the other moment of There- 
 being, as Reality and as Negation. But so determined, There- 
 being is at the same time reflected within itself ; and set as such, 
 it is 
 
 c. Something, There-beent-ity. 
 
 * Whereness and ubiety being in the dictionary, perhaps it might be allowable to 
 coin Thereness and ibiety. There-being, though the literal rendering of Da-Seyn, is 
 so irredeemably ugly, and Das&yn itself must now be so well understood, that per- 
 haps the latter term may be the preferable one to use generally. N. 
 
246 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 a. There-being in general. 
 
 There-being issues from Becoming. There-being is the simple 
 oneness of Being and Nothing. Because of this simplicity 
 (singleness), it has the form of an immediate. Its mediation, 
 Becoming, lies behind it ; it (this mediating process) has fixed 
 itself, and There-being therefore appears as a prime from which 
 one might begin. It is at first hand in the one-sided character 
 (determination) of Being ; the other character which is also in it, 
 Nothing, will likewise manifest itself in it as in contraposition to 
 the former. 
 
 It is not mere Being, but There-being ; etymologically taken, 
 Being in a certain place ; but the idea of space is not relevant 
 here. According to its Becoming, There-being is, in general, 
 Being with a Non-being, in such wise that this Non-being is 
 taken up into simple unity with [the other moment] Being. 
 Non-being taken up into Being in such wise that the concrete 
 [resultant] whole is in the form of Being, of Immediacy, con- 
 stitutes Determinateness as such [i.e., definiteness, particularity, 
 peculiarity, speciality, specific force, virtue, vitality, value, say 
 specificity]. 
 
 The Whole is likewise in the form, i.e., determinateness of 
 Being, for Being has in Becoming shown itself likewise to be 
 only a moment, a sublated, negatively-determined one. It is 
 such as yet, however, only for us in our reflexion ; it is not yet 
 thus evolved in its own self. But the determinateness as such (the 
 specificity) of There-being will be the evolved and overt one, 
 which is also implied in the expression There-being (Zto-seyn). 
 The two distinctions are always to be kept well in view ; only 
 what is evolved, explicit (set) in a notion, belongs in the course of 
 its development to its content ; while any determinateness that is 
 not yet evolved in its own self belongs to our reflexion, whether 
 employed on the nature of the notion itself, or only on external 
 comparison. To call attention to a determinateness of the latter 
 sort can only serve to illustrate or pre-indicate the course which 
 will exhibit itself in the evolution. That the Whole, the oneness 
 of Being and Nothing, is in the one-sided determinateness of 
 Being, is an external reflexion ; but in the Negation, in Some- 
 thing and Other, &c., it will come to be posited, evolved, set. To 
 notice the distinction referred to was in place here ; but to review 
 all the observations which reflexion may allow itself, would lead 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 247 
 
 to the unnecessary anticipation of what must yield itself in the 
 matter in hand. Such reflexions may, perhaps, serve to facilitate 
 a collective view and understanding generally ; but they are 
 attended by the disadvantage of being possibly regarded as 
 unauthorised statements, grounds, and ground-layings for ~tb& 
 further development. They are to be taken, therefore, for no 
 more than they really are, and must be distinctly separated from 
 what is a moment in the progress of the thing itself. 
 
 There-being corresponds to the Being of the previous sphere. 
 Being, however, is the Indefinite ; there present themselves on 
 this account no sigriificates in it. But There-being is a definite 
 being, a concrete , there manifest themselves, therefore, directly in 
 its regard a number of significates, distinguishable relations of its 
 moments. 
 
 b. Quality. 
 
 Because of the immediacy in which in There-being, Being and 
 Nothing are one, they do not exceed each other, they do not go 
 beyond each other ; as far as There-being is Being, so far is it 
 Non-being, so far is it determined, defined. Being is not the genus, 
 determinateness not the species. The determinateness has not yet 
 detached itself from the being ; indeed, it will not again detach 
 itself from it ; for the truth which is now established as ground 
 and base is the unity of Non-being with Being ; on it as 
 ground appear all further determinations. But the reference, 
 in which determinateness stands here to being, is the imme- 
 diate unity of both, so that there is no distinction of them as 
 yet set. 
 
 Determinateness thus isolated to itself, as beent determinate- 
 ness, is Quality ; a determination wholly single and direct. 
 (Determinateness in general is the more universal term ; it may be 
 Quantitative as well [as Qualitative], and also still further deter- 
 mined.) Because of this simplicity (and singleness) there is 
 nothing further to be said of Quality as such. 
 
 But There-being, in which Nothing quite as well as Being is 
 contained, is itself the standard for the one-sidedness of Quality 
 as ONLY immediate or beent determinateness. Quality is to be 
 exhibited quite as much in the character of Nothing, in which 
 case then the immediate or leent determinateness appears as one 
 such distinguished against other such, and so as a reflected one : 
 Nothing thus as the determinate of a determinateness, is equally 
 
248 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 a something reflected, it is a negation. Quality distinguished as 
 leent is Reality ; Quality as fraught with a negative, is Negation 
 generally, also a Quality, but which has the value of a restriction, 
 and which further on is determined as Limit, Limitation. 
 
 Both are a There-being, but in the Reality as Quality with the 
 accent that it is a Bcent, it is concealed that it contains deter- 
 minateness, therefore also negation : the Eeality passes therefore 
 only for something positive, from which negation, limitation, 
 restriction, is excluded. The negation taken as mere restriction 
 would be what nothing is ; but it is a There-being, a Quality only 
 determined with a Non-being. 
 
 REMARK. 
 
 Keality may seem a word of much ambiguity, because it is used 
 of various and even opposed interests. In a philosophical sense, 
 we may speak, perhaps, of merely empirical reality as a worthless 
 existency. But when it is said of thoughts, notions, theories, they 
 have no reality, this means that no actuality attaches to them : in 
 itself or in the notion, the idea of a Platonic Republic, for 
 example, may very well be true. Its worth is here not denied to 
 the idea, and it is allowed to keep its place, as it were, beside 
 Keality. But opposed to so-called mere ideas, mere notions, the 
 real has the value of the alone true. The sense in which in the 
 one case the decision as regards the truth of a matter is assigned 
 to external existency, is just as one-sided as when the idea, the 
 essential principle, or even the inner feeling, is represented as 
 indifferent towards outer fact, or is, perhaps, considered indeed 
 just so much the more excellent, the further it is removed from 
 reality. 
 
 In reference to the expression Reality, we may make mention 
 of the former metaphysical notion of God which, in especial, 
 constituted the basis of the so-called ontological proof of the 
 existence of God. God was defined as the sum of all realities ; 
 and of this sum it was said that it included no contradiction, that 
 the realities neutralised not the one the other ; for a Reality is to 
 be taken only as a perfection, as an affirmative that contains no 
 negation. The realities are thus not opposed to each other, do 
 not contradict each other. 
 
 It is assumed in the case of this notion of reality, that this 
 latter still remains when all negation is thought out of it ; but 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 249 
 
 just thus all its determinateness were cancelled. Keality is 
 Quality, There-being ; on that account, it implies the moment of 
 the negative, and by it only is it the determinate which it is. In 
 the so-called eminent sense, or as in the usual understanding 
 infinite (and so, namely, it is expected of us to take it), it (reality} 
 is extended into the indefinite, and loses its meaning. God's 
 goodness is not to be goodness in the usual, but in the eminent 
 sense; not different from his justice, but tempered by it (a Leib- 
 nitzian term of accommodation, reconciliation); just as, on the 
 other hand, his Justice is to be tempered by his goodness : thus 
 neither goodness is any longer goodness, nor justice any longer 
 justice. Power is to be tempered by wisdom; but in this way it 
 would not be power as such, for it were in subjection to the other: 
 Wisdom is to be enlarged to power, but in this manner it dis- 
 appears as the end and means determining wisdom. The true 
 notion of the Infinite and its absolute unity, which will present 
 itself later, is not to be conceived as a tempering, mutual limitation 
 or mixture, which is but a superficial relation, held, too, in an in- 
 determinate mist, with which only notionless conception can con- 
 tent itself. Keality, which in the above definition of God is taken 
 as determinate quality, when extended beyond its determinateness 
 ceases to be reality ; it is converted into, or has gone back to, 
 abstract Being ; God as pure reality in all reality, or as sum of all 
 realities, is the same formlessness and matterlessness as the empty 
 absolute in which all is one. , 
 
 Again, Reality being taken in its determinateness, then, as 
 it, reality, includes essentially the moment of the negative, the 
 sum of all realities becomes just as much a sum of all negations 
 the sum, then, of all contradictions, directly, as it were, the 
 absolute power in which all that is determinate is absorbed. But 
 as this absolute all-absorbing power is itself only so far as there 
 still remains opposed to it a not yet absorbed, it becomes, when 
 thought as extended into realised, unlimited power, only the 
 abstract nothing. Said reality in all reality, the being in all 
 There-being, which is to express the notion of God, is nothing else 
 than abstract Being, the same thing as Nothing. 
 
 Determinateness is Negation put affirmatively ; Omnis deter- 
 minatio est negatio this is the proposition of Spinoza. It is a 
 proposition of infinite importance ; only the negation as such is 
 formless abstraction ; it is not, however, to be imputed to specula- 
 tive philosophy, that it views negation, or nothing, as an ultimum: 
 
250 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Negation is such to speculative philosophy just as little as reality 
 [as such] is to it truth. 
 
 Of this proposition, that determinateness is negation, the unity 
 of the Spinozistic Substance, or that there is only one Substance, 
 is the necessary consequence. Thought and Being (or Exten- 
 sion), the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza has before him, 
 he could not but, in this unity [of substance] consider one, for as 
 determinate realities they are negations, the infinitude of which is 
 their unity : according to Spinoza's definition, of which more 
 again, the infinitude of anything is its affirmation. He took them, 
 therefore, as attributes that is, as such that they have not an 
 individuality proper, an independent being of their own, but are 
 only as in another, as moments ; or rather they are to him not even 
 moments, for his substance is what is quite determinationless in 
 its own self, and the attributes are, as the modi are, distinctions 
 which an external understanding forms. In like manner, the sub- 
 stantiality of individuals cannot subsist in the face of said proposi- 
 tion. The individual is reference to himself by this, that he sets 
 limits to everything else; but these limits are just so limits to 
 himself also, references to all else he has his being not in him- 
 self [alone]. The individual is certainly more than only what is 
 on all sides limited ; but this more belongs to another sphere of 
 the Notion : in the Metaphysic of Being it is a directly determin- 
 ate ; and that what is such, that the Finite as such should in and 
 of itself be against this, determinateness asserts itself essentially 
 as negation, and drags it [the individual, the finite] into the same 
 negative movement of the understanding, which makes all dis- 
 appear into abstract unity, into Substance. 
 
 Negation stands immediately opposed to Reality : further on, 
 in the special sphere of the reflected determinations, it becomes 
 opposed to the Positive, which is a reality reflecting to Negation, 
 a reality, in which the negative seems (shines, shows), the 
 negative, i.e., which is as yet concealed in reality as such. 
 
 Quality is then specially property, when in an external reference 
 it manifests itself as immanent determination. By properties of 
 herbs, for example, we understand determinations [manifested 
 powers] which are not only proper to a Something, but imply also 
 that it by them, in reference to others, maintains itself in a 
 peculiar manner [its own proper], and allows not the foreign 
 influences set in it to take their own course, but makes good its 
 own determinations in these, although, indeed, it excludes them 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 251 
 
 not. The more quiescent definitenesses, as figure, shape, are, on 
 on the other hand, not always called properties, possibly not even 
 qualities, inasmuch and so far as they are conceived as alterable, 
 not identical with the Being or Beingness itself. 
 
 The Quolirung or Inqiialirung (the agonising or inagonising, 
 inward pain-ing, pang-ing, throe-ing), an expression of Jacob 
 Bohme of a philosophy that goes into the deep, but a troubled 
 deep, signifies the movement of a, quality (the sour, litter, fiery, 
 &c.) in its own self, so far as it in its negative nature (in its Qual, 
 its pang) expresses and affirms itself through another signifies in 
 general the Unrest of the Quality in itself, by which it produces 
 and maintains itself only in conflict. 
 
 c. Something. 
 
 In There-being, its determinateness has been distinguished as 
 Quality ; in Quality as there-been t is distinction of the reality 
 and of the negation. By as much now as these distinctions are 
 present in There-being, by so much are they also null and 
 withdrawn. The reality contains itself negation; it is There- 
 being not indeterminate, abstract Being. No less is Negation 
 There-being not the nothing that is to be supposed abstract, but 
 express here as it is in itself, as beent, as constitutively in There- 
 being. Quality in general is thus not divided from There-being, 
 which is only definite, determinate^ qualitative Being. 
 
 This sublation of the distinction is more than a mere withdrawal 
 and external leaving out again of the same, or than a simple 
 turning back to the simple beginning, to There-being as such. 
 The distinction cannot be left out ; for it is. The factum what 
 is present therefore, is There-being, distinction in it, and resolu- 
 tion of this distinction ; There-being not distinctionless, as in the 
 beginning, but as again equal to itself through resolution of the 
 distinction, the simplicity (unality) of There-being mediated through 
 this resolution. This sublatedness of the distinction is the deter- 
 minateness proper of There-being [as it were, its special speci- 
 ficity] ; it is thus Insichseyn, Being-within-self : There-being is 
 There-Beent-ity a Something. 
 
 The Something is the first negation of the negation, as simple 
 beent reference to self. There-being, or living, thinking, and so 
 further, determines itself essentially [that is, in and from its own 
 nature] as a There being-one, a living-one, thinking-one (Ego), &c. 
 
252 THE SECKKT OF HEGEL. . 
 
 This determination is of the highest importance, in order not to 
 stop by There-being, living, thinking, &c., as generalities for the 
 same reason, not by the Godhead instead of God. Something 
 rightly passes with conception for a Real. Nevertheless, Some- 
 thing is still a very superficial determination ; just as Eeality and 
 Negation, There-being and its Determinateness, though no longer 
 the blank Being and Nothing, remain, all the same, quite abstract 
 determinations. For this reason they are also the most current 
 expressions, and the understanding, that is philosophically un- 
 formed, uses them most, casts its distinctions in their mould, and 
 opines to possess thus something veritably good, and firmly fixed 
 and definite. The Negative of the Negative is as Something only 
 the beginning of the Subject ; the Being- within-self only first of 
 all quite indefinite. It determines itself further on first as Beent- 
 for-self and so on, till only first in the notion it attains the con- 
 crete intensity of the Subject. As basis of all these determinations, 
 there lies at bottom the negative unity with self. But there- 
 withal the negation as first negation, as negation in general, is to 
 be firmly distinguished from the second, the negation of the 
 negation, which is the concrete absolute negativity, just as the first, 
 on the contrary, is only the abstract negativity. 
 
 Something is Beent as the negation of the negation ; for this 
 negation is the restoring again of the simple reference to self; 
 but just thus is Something withal the mediation of itself with itself. 
 Here in the Simple of Something, then still more definitely in 
 Being-for-self, in the Subject, &c., is there present mediation of 
 self with self ; even already in Becoming is mediation present, but 
 only the quite abstract mediation; Mediation with self has reached 
 position (is set, express} in Something, so far as Something is deter- 
 mined as a simple Identical (Einfaches). Attention may be 
 directed to the presence of mediation in general, as opposed to the 
 principle of the asserted mere immediacy of knowledge from which 
 (according to it) mediacy is to be excluded ; but no particular 
 attention need be called to this moment of mediacy in the sequel, 
 for it is to be found throughout, and everywhere, in every notion. 
 
 This mediation with itself which Something is in itself, taken 
 only as negation of the negation, has no concrete determinations 
 as its sides ; so it collapses into the simple unity which Being is. 
 Something is, and is also a There-beent ; it is in itself further also 
 Becoming, which, however, has no longer only Being and Nothing 
 as its moments. The one of these, Being, is now There-being,-and, 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 253 
 
 further, a There-beent. The second is equally a There-beent, but 
 determined as negative of the Something an Other. The Some- 
 thing as Becoming is a transition, whose moments are themselves 
 Somethings, and which itself, therefore, is aeration ; a Becoming 
 already become concrete. Something, however, alters (others) itself 
 first of all only in its notion ; it is not yet in position (express) as 
 thus mediating and mediated ; it is set, first of all, only as simply 
 (unally) maintaining itself in its reference to self, and its negative 
 is set as equally qualitative, as only an Other in general. 
 
 B. 
 
 FlNITUDE. 
 
 a. Something and Other; they are, first of all, indifferent as 
 regards each other ; an Other is also an immediately There-beent, 
 a Something ; the negation falls thus outside of both. Something 
 is in itself as against its Being-for-other [its relativity to all else]. 
 But the determinateness [the specificity] belongs also to its In- 
 itself, and is 
 
 b. its qualification, determination (purpose) which equally passes 
 into So-constitutedness, Talification, which, identical with the 
 former, constitutes the immanent and, at the same time, negated 
 Beiug-for-other [relativity], the Limit of the Something, which is 
 
 c. the immanent determination qf the Something itself, and this 
 latter is thus finite. 
 
 In the first division, in which There-being in general was con- 
 sidered, this had, as first taken up, the character of Beent. The 
 moments of its development, Quality and Something, are, therefore, 
 equally of affirmative nature. In this division, on the other hand, 
 there develops itself the negative element which lies in There- 
 being, which there (in the first division) was only first of all nega- 
 tion, first negation, but now has determined (or developed) itself 
 up to the point of the Being-within-itself of the Something, to the 
 negation of the negation. 
 
 a. Something and an Other. 
 
 1. Something and Other are both, in the first place, There-beent, 
 or Something. 
 
 Secondly, each is equally an Other. It is indifferent which is 
 
254 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 first named Something ; and just because it is first named is it 
 Something (in Latin, when they present themselves both in one 
 proposition, they are both called aliud, or the one the other, alius 
 alium ; in the case of a mutual reciprocity, the expression alter 
 alterum is analogous). If we call one There-being A, and the 
 other B, B is, in the first instance, determined as the Other. But 
 A is just as much the other of B. Both are, in the same manner, 
 Others. The expression This serves to fix the distinction and the 
 Something which is to be taken as affirmative. But This just 
 expresses that this distinguishing and picking out of the one 
 Something is a subjective designating falling without the Some- 
 thing itself. Into this external monstration falls the entire deter- 
 minateness ; even the expression This contains no distinction ; all 
 Somethings are just as much These as they are also Others. One 
 opines or means by This to express Something perfectly deter- 
 mined : it escapes notice that Speech, as work of understanding, 
 enunciates only what is general, except in the name of a single 
 object : the individual name, however, is meaningless in the sense, 
 that it does not express a universal, and seems, therefore, as merely 
 posititious and arbitrary, for the same reason, single names can 
 also be arbitrarily assumed, given, or also changed. 
 
 Thus, then, otherwiseness appears as a determination foreign 
 to the There-being that is so distinguished, or the Other appears 
 out of the single There-being ; partly, because a There-being is 
 determined as Other, only through the comparing of a Third 
 [you or me] ; partly, because it is other only by reason of the 
 Other that is out of it, but is not as of or for itself so determined. 
 At the same time, as has been remarked, even for conception, 
 every There-being is distinguishable as an other There-being, and 
 there remains not any one There-being that were distinguishable 
 only as a There-being, that were not without or on the outside 
 of a There-being, and, therefore, that were not itself an Other. 
 
 Both are equally determined as Something and as Other, con- 
 sequently as the same thing, and there is so far no distinction of 
 them. This self-sameness of the determinations, however, falls 
 only into outer reflexion, into the comparing of both ; but as the 
 Other is at present determined, it is per se the Other, in reference 
 indeed to the Something, but it is per se the Other also outside of, 
 apart from the Something. 
 
 Thirdly, therefore, the Other may be taken as isolated, in 
 reference to its own self; abstractly as the Other; the TO erepov 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 255 
 
 of Plato, who opposes it to the One as one of the moments of 
 totality, and in this manner ascribes to the Other a special nature. 
 But thus the Other taken as such is not the Other of Something, 
 but the Other in itself, that is, the Other of itself. Such Other 
 in its own determination is Physical Nature ; it is the Other of 
 the Spirit : this its definition is thus at first a mere relativity, by 
 which there is expressed, not a quality of nature itself, but only a 
 reference external to it. But in that the Spirit is the true Some- 
 thing, and Nature therefore in itself is only what it is as against 
 (Gegen) the Spirit, its quality, so far as it (nature) is taken per se, 
 is just this, to be the Other in itself, the out-of-itself-be-entity 
 (in the forms of space, of time, of matter). 
 
 The Other by itself is the Other in itself, so the Other of itself, 
 so again the Other of the Other ; so, therefore, that which within 
 itself is unequal simpliciter, that which negates itself, that which 
 alters itself. But just thus it remains identical with itself, for that 
 into which it alters itself is the Other, which any further has no 
 determination else ; what alters itself is, in no different way but 
 in the same, determined as an Other: in this latter, therefore, 
 it goes together only with its own self. It is thus posited as reflected 
 into self with sublation of the Otherness ; as self-identical Some- 
 thing from which, consequently, the Otherness, which is at the 
 same time moment of it, is merely a distinguishedness, not as some- 
 thing itself which is appertinent to it. 
 
 2. Something maintains itself ,in its non-there-being ; it is 
 essentially one with it, and essentially not one with it. It stands, 
 therefore, as though referring to its Otherwiseness ; it is not purely 
 its Otherwiseness. Otherwiseness is at once contained in it, and 
 separated from it ; it is Being -for -other. 
 
 There-being as such is immediate, reference-less ; or it is in the 
 determination of Being. But There-being as containing within 
 itself Non-being, is determinate Being, Being negated within itself, 
 and then nextly Other, but because at the same time it also 
 maintains itself in its negation, only Being-for-other. 
 
 It maintains itself in its non-there-being, and is Being ; but not 
 Being in general, but as reference to self opposed to its reference 
 to Other, as equality with itself opposed to its inequality. Such 
 Being is Being-iN -itself. 
 
 Being-for-other and Being-iN-toZ/ constitute the two moments 
 of the Something. There are two pairs of determinations present 
 here : 1, Something and Other ; 2, Being-for-other and Being-in- 
 
256 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 itself. The former pair contain the reference-lessness of their 
 determinateness ; Something and other fall asunder from each 
 other. But their truth is their co-reference ; the Being-for-other 
 and the Being-in-self are, therefore, the former determinations 
 express as moments of one and the same, as determinations, which 
 are co-references, and in their unity remain in the unity of There- 
 being. Each of them itself, therefore, contains in it at the same 
 time also its other moment, the moment that is distinguished 
 from it. 
 
 Being and Nothing in their unity, which is There-being, are no 
 longer as Being and Nothing; they are this only out of their 
 unity. Thus, too, in their fluent unity, in Becoming, they are 
 Origin and Decease. Being in the Something is Being-in-self. 
 Being, the reference to self, the equality with self, is now no 
 longer immediate, but reference to self only as Non-being of the 
 Otherwiseness (as There-being reflected within itself). Just so 
 Non-being as moment of the Something is, in this unity of Being 
 and Non-being, not non-there-being as such, but Other, and, more 
 determinately, viewed at the same time in reference to the 
 distinguishing of Being from it, reference to its non-there-being, 
 Being-for-other. 
 
 Thus Beiug-in-self is firstly negative reference to the non- 
 there-being ; it has the Otherwiseness out of it, and is opposed to 
 it: so far as something is in itself, it is withdrawn from otherwise- 
 ness and from Being-for-other. But, secondly, it has non-being 
 itself also in it ; for it is itself the Non-being of the Beiug-for- 
 other. 
 
 The Being-for-other, again, is firstly negation of the simple 
 reference of the Being to itself which is to be first of all There- 
 being and Something ; so far as Something is in another or for 
 another is it without its own Being. But, secondly, it is not the 
 non-There-being as pure Nothing ; it is non-There-being that points 
 or refers to its Being-in-self, as to its Being reflected within its 
 own self, just as on the other hand the Being-in-self points or 
 refers to the Being-for-other. 
 
 3. Both moments are determinations of that which is one and 
 the same, namely, the Something. Something is in itself, so far 
 as it is returned into its own self out of the Being-for-other. 
 Something has again also a determination or circumstance in itself 
 (the accent falls here on in) or in it, so far as this circumstance 
 is outwardly in it, a Being-for-other. 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 257 
 
 This leads to a further determination. Being-in-self and 
 Being-for-other are in the first place different ; but that Something 
 has in it the same thing which it is in itself, and contrariwise what 
 it is as Being-for-other, the same thing is it also in itself this is the 
 identity of the Being-in-self and the Being-for-other, in accord- 
 ance with the determination, that the Something itself is one and 
 the same of both moments, and therefore they are in it undivided. 
 This identity yields itself formally, as we see, in the sphere of 
 There-being, but more expressly in the consideration of Essentity, 
 and then of the relation of Inwardness and Outwardness, and in 
 the precisest degree in the consideration of the Idea as the unity 
 of the Notion and of Actuality. One opines to say something 
 lofty with the In-itself, as with the Inner; but what Something is 
 only in itself, that also is only in it ; in itself is only an abstract, 
 and so even external determination. The expressions, there is 
 nothing in it, or there is something in that, imply, though some- 
 what obscurely, that that which is in one, belongs also to one's 
 Being-in-self, to one's inner genuine worth. 
 
 It may be observed, that the sense of the Thing-in-itself yields 
 itself here, which is a very simple abstraction, but which for long 
 was a very important determination, something distinguished as it 
 were, just as the proposition, that we do not know what the 
 things are in themselves, was a much-importing wisdom. Things 
 are in themselves so far as all Being-for-other is abstracted from, 
 that is as much as to say in general, so far as they are thought 
 without any determination whatever ; as nothings. In this sense 
 truly one cannot know what the thing in itself is. For the 
 question what requires that determinations be assigned ; inasmuch, 
 however, as the things, of which they are to be assigned, are to be 
 at the same time things in themselves that is to say, just without 
 determination there is thoughtless-wise introduced into the ques- 
 tion the impossibility of an answer, or there is made only an 
 absurd answer. The thing in itself is the same as that absolute, 
 of which nothing is known but that all is one in it. One knows 
 then perfectly well what is in these things in themselves ; they are 
 as such nothing but truthless, empty abstractions. What, how- 
 ever, the thing in itself is in truth, what is truly in itself, of this 
 (or that) Logic is the exposition, in which, however, something 
 better is understood by In itself than an abstraction namely, 
 what something is in its Notion : this latter, however, is concrete 
 
258 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 in itself, comprehensible (notion-able, knowable) as notion in 
 general, and cognisable as determined within itself and as con- 
 nected system of its determinations within itself. 
 
 Being-in-self has at nearest the Being-for-other as its counter- 
 standing moment ; but there is also opposed to it Positedness or 
 Explicitness (Gesetztseyn) ; in this expression there lies also the 
 Being-for-other, indeed, but it implies markedly the already- 
 accomplished bending back (reflexion) of that which is not in 
 itself into that which is its Being-for-self, into that in which it is 
 positively. The Being-in-self is usually to be taken as an abstract 
 manner of expressing the notion ; Position (Setzeri) falls specially 
 only into the sphere of Essentity, of objective reflexion ; the 
 Ground (ratio) posits (setzt exinvolves, eximplies) that which is 
 grounded by it ; the Cause still more brings an Effect forth, a 
 There-being (a Daseyn, an entity) whose self-subsistence is im- 
 mediately negated, and which has the sense in it, to have its affeir, 
 its Being in another. In the sphere of Being, There-being comes 
 only forward from Becoming, or there is implied with the Some- 
 thing, an Other, with the Finite the Infinite; but the Finite 
 produces not the Infinite, posits, sets the Infinite not. In the 
 sphere of Being, the self-determining of the notion is only first of 
 all in itself; thus is it only transition a passing over ; even the 
 reflecting determinations of Being, as Something and Other, or 
 the Finite and Infinite, though they essentially refer to each 
 other, or are as Being-for-other, have the value of what is 
 qualitative and subsistent per se ; the Other is, the Finite, like the 
 Infinite, appears equally as immediately beent, and standing firm 
 per se ; their sense seems complete even without the other. The 
 Positive and Negative, on the other hand, Cause and Effect, how- 
 ever much they are also taken as isolatedly beent, have at the 
 same time no meaning without the one the other; there is in 
 themselves their seeming (showing) the one into the other, the 
 seeming of its other in each. In the various spheres of deter- 
 mination, and especially in the progress of the exposition, or more 
 accurately, in the progress of the notion to its exposition, it is a 
 main matter always well to distinguish this, what is yet in itself 
 and what is posited (gesetzt set, realised), likewise the determina- 
 tions as in the notron and as posited, Be'ent-for-other. This is a 
 distinction which belongs only to the dialectic development, and 
 which the metaphysical philosophy, as also the critical, knows 
 not ; the definitions of [former] metaphysic, as its presuppositions, 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 259 
 
 disfcinguishings, and concludings, seek only to maintain and pro- 
 duce what is Beent and that, too, Beent-in-itself. 
 
 The Being-for-other is, in the unity of the Something with 
 itself, identical with its In-itself ; the Being-for-other is thus in 
 the Something. The determinateness thus reflected into itself is 
 by this again simply beent, and so again a quality the Determina- 
 tion, the Qualification. 
 
 b. Qualification, Talijlcation, and Limit. 
 
 1 \ The In-itself into which the Something is reflected out of its 
 Being-for-other into itself is no longer abstract In-itself, but as 
 negation of its Being-for-other it is mediated through the latter, 
 which is thus its moment. It is not only the immediate identity 
 of the Something with itself, but the identity through which the 
 Something is what it is in itself also in it ; the Being-for-other is 
 in it, because the In-itself is the sublation of the same, is out of 
 the same into itself ; but quite as much also, be it observed, 
 because it is abstract, and therefore essentially affected with 
 negation, with Being-for-other. There is here present not only 
 Quality and Eeality, beent determinateness, but determinateness 
 that is beent in itself, and the development is to posit it [set, state, 
 exhibit, express it] as this determinateness reflected into itself. 
 
 1. The quality which the In-itself in the simple Something 
 essentially in unity with its other 'moment, the Being-m-^, is, can 
 be named its Determination (qualification), so far as this word in 
 exact signification is distinguished from determinateness in 
 general. The Determination (qualification) is the affirmative 
 determinateness, as the Being-in-itself, with which the Some- 
 thing in its There-being remains congruous against its involution 
 with other by which it might be determined remains congruous, 
 maintains itself in its equality with itself, and makes it good (its 
 equality) in its Being-for-other. It fulfils its determination 
 (qualification, vocation) so far as the further determinateness, 
 which manifoldly grows through its relation to Other, becomes 
 in subjection to, or agreement with, its Being-in-itself its 
 filling. The Determination implies this, that what Something is 
 in itself, is also in it. 
 
 The Determination of Man is thinking reason : Thought in 
 general is his simple Determinateness, by it he is distinguished 
 from the lower animals. He is thought in himself (an sich), so 
 
260 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 far as it (thought) is at the same time distinguished from his 
 Being-for-other, his special naturality and sensuous nature by 
 which it is that he is immediately connected with Other. 
 But thought is also in him ; Man himself is thought, he is there as 
 thinking, it is his existence and actuality ; and further in that it 
 is in his There-being (There-ness) and his There-ness (Existence) 
 is in thought, it is concrete, it is to be taken with Implement and 
 Complement, it is thinking reason, and thus is it Determination 
 of Man. But this deternn nation is again only in itself (only an 
 sich) as an Is-to-be (a Sollen, a Devoir) ; that is, it, together with 
 the complement, which is incorporated into its In-itself, is in the 
 form of In-itself in general against the There-being not incor- 
 porated into it, which complement is thus at the same time still 
 as externally opposing, immediate sense and nature. 
 
 2. The filling of the Being-in-itself [the In-itself simply] with 
 determinateness is also distinguished from the determinateness 
 which is only Being-for-other and remains out of the determina- 
 tion. For, in the field of the Qualitative, there remains to the 
 differences or distinctions even in their sublation [alluding to the 
 various moments of the Daseyn or the 2$twas] immediate quali- 
 tative being as opposed the one to the other. What the Some- 
 thing has in it divides, then, and is, on this side, external There- 
 being of the Something, which is also its There-being, but belongs 
 not to its In-itself. The Determinateness is thus Talification [So- 
 constitutedness, and that amounts to Property, or, indeed, Accident]. 
 So or otherwise constituted is Something as engaged in external 
 influence and relations. This external reference on which the 
 Talification depends, and the becoming determined by another, 
 appears as something contingent. But it is quality of the Some- 
 thing to be given -over to this externality, and to have a Tali- 
 fication. 
 
 So far as Something alters itself, the alteration falls into the 
 Talification ; it is that in the Something which becomes another. 
 It [Something] itself maintains itself in the alteration which 
 touches only this unsteady superficies of its Otherwise-being, not 
 its Determination (definition, qualification). 
 
 Qualification and Talification are thus distinguished from each 
 other ; Something is in its qualification indifferent to its talification. 
 What, however, the Something has in it, is the middle term of 
 this syllogism that connects both. The being in the Something, 
 rather, showed itself to fall into these two extremes. The simple 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 261 
 
 middle is the determinateness as such ; to its identity belongs as 
 well qualification as talification. But the qualification passes over 
 per se into talification, and the latter into the former. This lies in 
 the preceding ; the connexion is more particularly this : So far as 
 what Something is in itself, is also in it, it is affected with Being- 
 for-other ; the qualification is thus as such open to the relation to 
 Other. The determinateness is at the same time moment, but 
 contains at the same time the qualitative distinction to be different 
 from the In-itself, to be the negative of the Something, or to be 
 another There-being. The determinateness, which thus includes 
 within itself the other, being united with the In-itself brings Other- 
 wise-being into the In-itself, or into the qualification, which is 
 thereby reduced to talification. Contrariwise, the Being-for-other, 
 isolated as talification and taken per se, is in it the same thing as 
 what the Other as such is, the Other in itself, that is, of itself ; 
 but thus it is self-to-self-referent There-being, thus Being-in-itself 
 with a determinateness, and therefore Qualification. Thus, so far 
 as both are to be held apart from each other, on the qualification 
 depends the talification, which appears grounded in what is 
 external, in another in general, and the foreign determining is 
 determined also at the same time by the special immanent 
 qualification of the Something. But further, the talification 
 belongs to what the Something is in itself: with its talification 
 Something alters itself. 
 
 This alteration of the Something is no longer the first alteration 
 of the Something merely as regards its Being-for-other ; this first 
 one was only the alteration appertinent to the inner notion, was 
 the in-itself-laeent one; the alteration now is alteration posited 
 (set) in the Something. The Something itself is further 
 determined, and the negation appears as immanent to it, as its 
 developed Being-within-itself. 
 
 In the first place, the transition of the qualification and the 
 talification into one another is the sublation of their difference ; 
 but thus is There-being or Something in general replaced ; and, 
 inasmuch as it is a result out of that difference, which still com- 
 prehends in itself the qualitative Otherwise-being, there are two 
 Somethings, but not only as others opposed to one another in 
 general, in such wise that this negation were still abstract and fell 
 into the comparison only, but it is now rather as immanent to the 
 Somethings. They are as there-beent indifferent to each other ; but 
 this their affirmation is no longer immediate, each refers itself to 
 
262 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 itself ty means of the sublation of the Otherwise-being, which in 
 the qualification is reflected into the In-itself. 
 
 Something relates itself thus out of its own self to the Other, be- 
 cause Otherwise-being is contained within it as its own moment ; its 
 Being- within-self comprehends negation within itself the negation 
 by means of which in any case it has now its affirmative There- 
 being. But from this (its affirmative There-being) the other is 
 also qualitatively distinguished ; it is thus set down as out of the 
 Something. The negation of its other is only the quality of Some- 
 thing, for as this sublation of its other is it Something. Therewith 
 does the Other first properly oppose itself to a There-being itself : 
 to the first Something, then, the Other is only externally opposed ; 
 or again as they, in effect, directly cohere, that is, in their notion, 
 their connexion is this, that There-being has gone over into Other- 
 wise-being, Something into another Something, as much as the 
 Other, is another. So far now as the Being-within-self is the 
 Non-being of the Otherwise-being which is contained in it, but at 
 the same time distinguished as beent, the Something itself is, the 
 negation, the ceasing of another in it ; it is determined as com- 
 porting itself negatively against it, and as at the same time main- 
 taining itself thereby ; this Other, the Being-within-itself of the 
 Something as Negation of the Negation, is its In-itself, and this 
 sublation is at the same time in it as simple negation, namely, as 
 its negation of the other Something external to it. There is one 
 determinateness of these negations or Somethings which is as well 
 identical with the Being-withiu-itself of the Somethings, as 
 Negation of the Negation, as it also, in that these Negations are as 
 other Somethings mutually opposed, joins them together out of 
 themselves and equally disjoins them from one another (the one 
 negating the other) the Limit* 
 
 3. Being-for-Other is indefinite, affirmative community of 
 Something with its Other; in Limit, the Non-being-for-Other 
 comes forward, the qualitative negation of the Other, which latter 
 is thereby excluded from the Something reflected into its own self. 
 The development of this notion is to be observed, which manifests 
 itself, however, rather as mvelopment and contradiction. This 
 contradictory character shows at once in this, that the Limit as 
 negation of the Something, negation reflected into itself, contains 
 ideally in it the moments of the Something and of the Other, and 
 
 * The power of A on B means as well the power of B on A that power is the 
 limit N. 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 263 
 
 these are at the same time, as distinguished moments in the sphere 
 of There-being, set down as really, qualitatively diverse. 
 
 a. Something, then, is immediate, self-to-self-referent There- 
 being, and has a limit in the first instance as against Other. The 
 Limit is the non-being of the Other, not of the Something itself; 
 the Something limits in its limit its Other. But the Other is 
 itself a Something ; the Limit, then, which the Something has 
 against the Other, is likewise Limit of the Other as a Something 
 Limit of this latter so that by it it excludes from itself the first 
 Something as its Other, or is a non-being of said Something. The 
 Limit, thus, is not only non-being of the Other, but non-being as 
 well of the one as of the other Something non-being, conse- 
 quently, of the Something as such. 
 
 But Limit is essentially the non-being of the Other Something 
 at the same time, then, is through its Limit. Something, in that 
 it is limiting, must submit to be limited; but its Limit, as a 
 ceasing of the Other in it, is at the same time itself only the being 
 of the Something ; this latter is through it that which it is, has in it 
 its quality. This relation is the external manifestation of the fact 
 that the Limit is simple, or the first, negation, at the same time 
 also that it is the other relation, the negation of the negation, the 
 Within-itself of the Something. 
 
 Something, therefore, is, as immediate There-being, Limit to 
 other Something ; but it has this Limit in it, itself, arid is Some- 
 thing through agency of it, whicji is just as much its non-being. 
 Limit is the mediating means or agency, the medium, whereby 
 Something and Other each as well is as is not. 
 
 /3. So far now as Something in its Limit is and is not, and these 
 moments are immediately, qualitatively separated, the non-There- 
 being and the There-being of the Something fall asunder, apart 
 from each other. Something has its There-being (its existence) 
 out from (or as it is otherwise also conceived in from) its Limit ; 
 but just so the Other also, because it is Something, is outside of 
 its Limit. It (the Limit) is the middle between both, and in it 
 they cease. They have their There-being on the other side, the 
 one from the other, of their Limit ; the Limit as the non-being of 
 each is the Other of both. 
 
 It is in respect to this diversity of Something from its Limit, 
 that the Line appears as Line only outside of its limit, the Point ; 
 the Plane as Plane outside of the Line ; the Body as Body only 
 outside of its limiting Plane. This is how the Limit specially is 
 
264 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 for conception, which is out-of-its-selfness of notion, and hence 
 its manifestation by preference in things of space. 
 
 y. But, further, Something, as it is outside of the Limit, is 
 unlimited Something, only There-being as such. Thus, then, it 
 is not distinguished from its Other ; it is only There-being, has 
 therefore the same determination as its Other each is only Some- 
 thing as such, or each is Other; both are thus the same thing. 
 But, again, this their directly immediate There-being implies the 
 determinateness as Limit, in which both are what they are, dis- 
 tinguishably from each other. But this determinateness as Limit 
 is equally their common distinguishableness, at once their unity 
 and diversity unity and diversity of the same things, just like 
 There-being. This double identity of both (There-being and 
 Limit) contains this, that the Something has its There-being only 
 in the Limit, and that, inasmuch also as the Limit and the 
 immediate There-being are at the same time each the negative, 
 the one of the other, the Something, which is established as only 
 in its Limit, just as much sunders itself from itself, and points 
 away over and beyond itself to its non-being, pronouncing this its 
 being, and so passing over into the same. To apply this to the 
 preceding example, and as regards the finding that Something is 
 what it is only in its Limit, the Point is not limit of the Line, 
 only in such wise that the latter just ends in the former, and is as 
 existent outside of the former ; neither is the Line similarly limit 
 of the Plane, nor the Plane similarly limit of the Solid with line 
 and plane similarly so ending: but in the Point the Line also 
 begins; the Point is the absolute beginning of the Line; even when 
 it (the line) is conceived as on both sides unlimited, or, as it is 
 called, infinitely produced, the point still constitutes the element 
 of the line, as the line of the plane, and the plane of the solid. 
 These limits are the principles (principia) of that which they 
 limit ; just as unity, for example, as the hundredth, is the limit 
 indeed, but also the element of the whole hundred. 
 
 The other finding is the unrest of the Something in its Limit, 
 in which, nevertheless, it is immanent its restlessness as the 
 contradiction which impels it out beyond its own self. Thus the 
 point is this dialectic of its own self to become line, the line the 
 dialectic to become plane, the plane universal space. Of these 
 there occurs the other definition, that the line originates in the 
 motion of the point, the plane in that of the line, &c. This move- 
 ment, however, is considered then as something incidental, or as 
 
QUALITY TKANSLATED. 205 
 
 something just so thought. This consideration, however, is 
 annulled specially by this, that the determinations from which the 
 Line, &c., should be supposed to originate are, as regards the Line, 
 &c., their elements and principles, and at the same time also 
 nothing but their Limits : accordingly the origin cannot be con-~ 
 sidered as incidental, or only so-conceived. That point, line, 
 surface, per se, contradicting themselves, are beginnings, which 
 repel themselves from themselves, that the Point, for its part, 
 passes over through its notion out of itself into the Line, moves 
 itself in its own self, and gives origin to the Line, &c. &c. this 
 lies in the notion of limit as immanent in the something. The 
 application itself, however, belongs to the consideration of space ; 
 but to indicate it here -it is thus that the point is the absolutely 
 abstract limit, but in an existent entity ; this latter (a thereness) 
 is taken still quite indefinitely, it is the so-called absolute, i.e. 
 abstract space, the absolutely continuous Out-of-one-another-ness 
 [succession]. From this, that the limit is not abstract negation, 
 but is in this there-ness, is spatial determinateness, it results that 
 the point occupies space, has space, is spatial, is the contradiction, 
 that is, which unites in itself at once abstract negation and con- 
 tinuity, and so is the going-over and the gone-over into the Line, &c., 
 just as also for the same reason it results that there is no such 
 thing as a Point, or a Line, or a Surface. 
 
 Something, with its immanent Limit ? established as the contra- 
 diction of its ownself, by which contradiction it is directed and 
 impelled beyond itself, is the Finite as such. 
 
 c. Finitude. 
 
 There-being is determinate ; Something has a Quality, and is in 
 it not only determined, but limited ; its quality is its limit, pos- 
 sessing which, it remains at first hand affirmative quiescent 
 There-being. But this negation developed in such wise that the 
 antithesis of its There-being and of Negation as its immanent 
 Limit is itself the Within-itself of the Something, and this 
 latter consequently is in itself only Becoming constitutes its 
 Finitude. 
 
 When we say of things, they are finite, we understand by that, 
 that they not only have a determinateness, Quality not only as 
 Reality and beent-in-self distinctive nature, that they are not 
 merely limited for as such they have still There-being without 
 
266 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 their limit but rather that non-being constitutes their nature, 
 their being. Finite things are, but their reference to self is, that 
 they refer themselves to themselves negatively, even in this refer- 
 ence to themselves dispatch themselves beyond themselves, beyond 
 their being. They are, but the truth of this Being is their End. 
 The finite thing alters itself not only like Something in general, 
 but it passes away and it is not merely possible for it to pass away 
 as if it could be without passing away : but the being as such of 
 finite things is to have the germ of their passing away as their 
 Within ; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death. 
 
 a. The Immediacy of Finitude. 
 
 The thought of the fiuitude of things brings this sadness with 
 it, because it is the qualitative negation pushed to its point ; in 
 the singleness of such determination, there is no longer left them 
 an affirmative being distinguished from their destination to perish. 
 Finitude is, because of this qualitative simple directness of nega- 
 tion (which has gone back to the abstract antithesis of nothing 
 and ceasing to be as opposed to being), the most stiff-necked 
 category of understanding ; negation as such, tality, limit, recon- 
 cile themselves with their Other, the There-being; even the 
 abstract nothing, per se, is given up as an abstraction ; but finitude 
 is negation as in itself fixed, and stands therefore up abrupt over 
 against its affirmative. What is finite admits readily indeed of 
 being brought to flux it is itself this, to be determined to its end, 
 but only to its end ; it is the unwillingness rather to let itself be 
 affirmatively brought to its affirmative, the Infinite, to let itself be 
 united with it ; it is given as inseparable from its nothing, and all 
 reconciliation with its other, the affirmative, is thereby truncated. 
 The destination of finite things is not further than their end. 
 Understanding remains immovable in this hopelessness of Finitude,. 
 in that, regarding non-being as the true nature of things, it makes 
 it at the same time imperishable and absolute. Only in their other, 
 the affirmative, were it possible for their perishableness to perish ; 
 but thus their finitude would divorce itself from them, and it 
 is, on the contrary, their unalterable Quality, i.e. their Quality 
 that passes not over into its other, into its affirmative ; it is thus 
 eternal. 
 
 This is a very important consideration ; that, however, the 
 Finite is absolute this stand-point truly will not readily be taken 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 267 
 
 to itself by any philosophy, or opinion, or by understanding 
 (common Sense). The opposite rather is expressly present in the 
 maintaining of the finite ; the Finite is the limited, the transitory ; 
 the finite is only the finite, not the intransient; this lies immediately 
 in its definition and expression. But the question is, whether in 
 the mode of looking, the being of finitude is stuck by, whether the 
 perishableness remains, or whether the perishableness and the 
 perishing perishes, whether the passing-away passes away ? That 
 this latter, however, is not the case, is the fact even in that view of 
 the finite which regards] the perishing or passing-away as the 
 ultimum of the finite. It is the express averment that the finite 
 is irreconcilable and inconsistent with the infinite, that the finite 
 is absolutely opposed to the infinite. To the infinite, being, 
 absolute being is ascribed; the finite thus remains opposite it, 
 held fast as its negative ; incapable of union with the infinite, it 
 remains absolute on its own side ; affirmation could come to it 
 only from the affirmative, the infinite, and it would perish so ; but 
 a union with the infinite is that which is declared impossible. 
 If it is not to remain opposed to the infinite, but to pass or perish, 
 then, as has been already said, just its passing is the ultimum, not 
 the affirmative, which would be only the passing of the passing. 
 If, however, the finite is not to pass away in the affirmative, but 
 its end is to be conceived as the nothing, then we are again back 
 to that first abstract nothing which is long since passed. 
 
 In the case of this nothing, hawever, which is to be only 
 nothing, and to which at the same time an existence is attributed 
 in thought, conception, or speech, there presents itself the same 
 contradiction as has just been signalised in the case of the Finite, 
 only that it only presents itself there, while in Finitude it expressly 
 is. There it appears as subjective, here it is maintained the 
 Finite stands opposed in perpetuity to the Infinite, what is in itself 
 null is, and it is as in itself null. This is to be brought intel- 
 ligibly to consciousness ; and the development of the finite shows 
 that it in it (suo Marte), as this contradiction, falls together in 
 itself, and actually resolves this contradiction by this not that it 
 is only perishable and perishes, but that the perishing, the pass- 
 ing, the nothing, is not the last, the ultimum, but that it perishes 
 and passes. 
 
268 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ft. To-le-to, or Obligation-toy and Limitation. 
 
 This contradiction, indeed, is directly abstractly present in this, 
 that the Something is finite, or that the finite is. But Something 
 or Being is no longer abstract, but reflected into self, and developed 
 as Being-within-self which has in it a Qualification and a Talifica- 
 tion, and still more definitely, a Limit, which as what is Immanent 
 in the Something, and constitutive of the quality of its Being- 
 within-self, is finitude. We have now to see what moments are 
 contained in this notion of the finite Something. 
 
 Qualification and Talification manifested themselves as sides for 
 external reflexion ; the first, indeed, itself implied Otherwise- 
 being as belonging to the In-itself of the Something; the 
 externality of the Otherwise-being is on one side in the proper 
 internality of the Something, on the other side, it remains as 
 externality distinguished therefrom it is still externality as 
 such, but in the Something. But in that, further, the Otherwise- 
 being is determined as Limit, or just as negation of the negation, 
 the Otherwise-being immanent to the Something is demonstrated 
 or is stated as the reference of the two sides, and the unity with 
 itself of the Something now (to which Something as well the 
 Qualification as the Talification attaches) is its reference as turned 
 to its ownself, the reference of its beent-in-self Qualification to its 
 immanent Limit, which reference at the same time negates in it 
 this its immanent Limit. The self-identical Within-Itself refers 
 itself thus to itself as its own non-being, but as negation of the 
 negation, as negating the same thing in it which at the same time 
 preserves in it There-being, for that is the Quality of its Within- 
 Itself. The proper limit of the Something taken thus by it as a 
 negative, that at the same is essential and intrinsic, is not only 
 Limit as such, but Limitation. But the Limitation here is not 
 alone what is expressed as negated (not alone the-as-negated- 
 posited) ; the negation is double-edged, seeing that what is the 
 posited negated is the limit; for this (Limit) in general is what is 
 common to the Something and the Other, and also determinate- 
 ness of the Being-in-self-ness of the qualification or determination 
 as such. This Being-in-self, as the negative reference to its Limit 
 (this latter being at the same time distinguishable from it), is 
 thus to itself as Limitation the To-le-to, or OUigation-to (Devoir, 
 Sollen). 
 
 That the limit, which is in the Something, prove itself as only 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 269 
 
 Limitation, the Something must at the same time within its own 
 self transcend it (the Limit), must refer itself in itself to it as to a 
 non-beent. The There-being of the Something lies quiescently 
 indifferent, as it were beside its limit. Something, however, 
 transcends its limit, only so far as it is its sublatedness, the 
 In-itself which is negative to it (the limit). And in that it (the 
 limit) is in the determination [manifestible peculiar nature] itself 
 as Limitation, Something transcends so its own self. 
 
 The To-be-to (Sollen) contains therefore the double distinction, 
 now determination as beent-in-self determination against the 
 negation, and again determination as a non-being that is dis- 
 tinguished as limitation from it, but at the same time that is 
 beent-in-self determination. 
 
 The Finite thing has thus determined itself as the reference of 
 its determination to its limit ; the former is in this reference To- 
 be-to (Sollen), the latter is Limitation. Both are thus moments 
 of the Finite both consequently themselves finite, as well the 
 To-be-to as the Limitation. But only the Limitation is expressed 
 as the Finite ; the To-be-to is only limited in itself, or for us. 
 Through its reference to its own immanent limit, has it limita- 
 tion ; but this its be-limitation is concealed in the in-itself, for in 
 its There-being, that is, in its determinateness as against limita- 
 tion, it is expressed as the in-itself. 
 
 What is to be, or is under obligation to be, is and at the same 
 time is not. If it were, it were not, merely to ~be. The To-be-to has 
 therefore essentially a limitation. This limitation is not some- 
 thing foreign ; that which only is to be, is the determination 
 (destination) which is now expressed as it is in fact, namely, at 
 the same time only a determinateness. 
 
 The Being-in-itself of the Something remits itself in its deter- 
 mination therefore into the Is-to-be, or the Ought-to-be, in this way, 
 that the same thing which constitutes its Being-in-itself is in one 
 and the same respect as non-being ; and that, too, in this wise, 
 that in the Being-within-self, the negation of the negation, said 
 Being-in-itself is as the one negation (the negating one) unity 
 with the other, which is at the same time as the qualitatively 
 other, limit, through which said unity is as reference to it (limit). 
 The Limitation of the finite is not something external, but its own 
 determination is also its limitation ; and this (limitation) is as 
 well its own self, as also the To-be-to ; it is what is common to 
 both, or rather that in which both are identical. 
 
270 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 As To-be-to, nowfagain further, the finite thing passes beyond its 
 limitation; the same deter minateness which is its negation, is 
 also sublated, and is thus its Being-in-itself ; its limit is also not 
 its limit. , 
 
 As To-be-to, consequently, Something is raised above its limita- 
 tion, again contrariwise only as To-be-to has it its limitation. 
 Both are inseparable. Something has a limitation, so far as in 
 its determination or destination it has the negation, and the 
 determination or destination is also the sublatedness of the 
 Limitation. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The Ought-to, Is-to, Obligation-to, the To-have-to, or To-be-to, 
 (Sollen, Devoir), has played recently un grand role in philosophy, 
 especially in reference to morality, and likewise metaphysically 
 as the last and absolute notion of the identity of the Being-in- 
 self, or of the reference to self, and of the determinateness or 
 limit. 
 
 You can, for you ought this expression, which was supposed to 
 say a great deal, lies in the notion of the To-be-to. For the To- 
 be-to is the being beyond the limitation ; limit is sublated in it, 
 the Being-in-itself of the To-be-to is thus identical reference to 
 self, and so the abstraction of the being able to. But, conversely, 
 it is equally true, you can not just because you ought. For in the 
 To-be-to there equally lies the limitation as a limitation; said 
 formalism of the possibility to has in it a reality, a qualitative 
 Otherwise-being, over against itself, and the mutual reference of 
 both is the contradiction, consequently the not being able to, or 
 father the impossibility -to. 
 
 In the To-be-to, begins the transcendence of Finitude, Infini- 
 tude. The To-be-to is what, further on in the development, 
 exhibits itself, with reference to said Impossibility-to, as the 
 Progressus in infinitum. 
 
 As regards the Form of the To-be-to and the Limitation, two 
 prejudices may be more particularly animadverted on. In the 
 first place, great stress is usually laid on the limitations of 
 thought, of reason, &c., and it is maintained that the limitation 
 eannot be gone beyond. There lies in this averment the failure 
 to see that just in the very determining of Something as limita- 
 tion, the limitation is already left. For a determinateness, limit, 
 is only determined as limitation in antithesis to its other, or as 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 271 
 
 against its unlimitated part ; the other of a limitation is just the 
 beyond of the same. The stone, the metal, is not beyond its 
 limitation, just because the latter is not limitation for it. If, 
 however, as regards such general propositions of mere under- 
 standing, that the limitation cannot be transcended, thought will 
 not take the trouble to endeavour to see what lies in the notion, 
 attention may be directed to the actuality, where such positions 
 will be found to manifest themselves as what is most unactual. 
 Just by this, too, that thought is-to-le something higher than the 
 actual, is to keep itself apart from it in higher regions that is, in 
 that it is itself determined as a To-be-to on one side it reaches 
 not as far as to the notion, and, on the other side, it is its lot to 
 comport itself just as untruly towards the actual as towards the 
 notion. Because the stone thinks not, not even feels, its limi- 
 tatedness is not limitation for it, that is, is not in it a negation for 
 the thought, feeling, &c., which it does not possess. But even the 
 stone is as Something distinguished into its determination or 
 in-itself and into its There-being, and to that extent even it 
 transcends its limitation ; the notion which it is in itself implies 
 identity with its other. If it is an acidifiable base, it is oxidis- 
 able, neutralisable, &c. In the oxidation, neutralisation, &c., its 
 limitation to be only as base sublates itself; it transcends its 
 limitation, just as the acid sublates its limitation to be as acid ; 
 and the To-le-to, the obligation to transcend its limitation, is (in 
 the acid as well as in the caustic b/ise) so much present, that it is 
 only by dint of force that these can be kept fixed as waterless, 
 that is, purely non-neutral acid and caustic base. 
 
 Should an existence, however, contain the notion, not merely as 
 abstract In-itselfness, but as beent-for-self totality, as instinct, as 
 life, feeling, conception, &c., it effects out of itself this to be, and 
 to pass out, over and beyond the limitation. The plant transcends 
 the limitation to be as germ, and just as much the limitation to be 
 as blossom, as fruit, as leaf ; the germ becomes a developed plant, 
 the blossom fades away into, &c. &c. A sentient existence in the 
 limitation of hunger, of thirst, &c., is the impulse to pass out 
 beyond this limitation, and it effects this transcendence. It feels 
 pain, and the privilege of sentient nature is to feel pain ; there is 
 a negation in its self, and this negation is determined in its feeling 
 as a limitation, just because Sentient existence has the feeling of 
 its self, which self is the totality that is out and beyond said 
 determinate ness (of hunger). Were it not out and beyond it, it 
 
272 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 would not feel it as its negation, and would have no pain. But 
 it is reason, thought, which we are required to suppose incapable 
 of transcending limitation reason, which is the universal, which, 
 per se, is out and beyond the, i.e. all particularity, which is nothing 
 but transcendence of limitation. It is true that not every going- 
 beyond or being-beyond the limitation is a veritable emancipation 
 from this latter, a genuine affirmation ; the To-be-to itself is already 
 such imperfect transcendence, and wholly an abstraction. But 
 the pointing to the wholly abstract universal suffices as against 
 the equally abstract assurance that the limitation cannot be tran- 
 scended, or, indeed, the pointing to the infinite in general against 
 the assurance, that the finite cannot be transcended. 
 
 A seemingly ingenious fancy of Leibnitz may here be mentioned : 
 if a magnet had consciousness, it would regard its direction to the 
 north as a determination of its own will, a law of its freedom. 
 Kather, if it had consciousness, and so will and free choice, it 
 would possess thought, and so space would be for it as universal 
 space, implying all directions, and thus the one direction to the 
 north would be rather as a limitation of its freedom, just as it 
 would be a limitation to be kept fixed in one spot, for man, but 
 not for a plant. 
 
 The To-be-to on the other side is transcendence of the limitation, 
 but only a finite transcendence. It has therefore its place and its 
 value in the field of the finite, where it holds fast its Being-in- 
 itselfness as opposed to its limitatedness, and maintains it (the 
 Ansich-seyri) as the rule and the essential, opposed to what, in 
 comparison, is the null. Duty is a To-be-to, an obligation-to, 
 directed against the particular will, against self-seeking greed and 
 self-willed interest ; it is enjoined as a To-be-to, an obligation-to, 
 on the will so far as it, in its capability of movement, can deviate 
 from the true. Those who estimate the To-be-to of morals so 
 high, and opine that morality is to be destroyed, if the To-be-to 
 is not recognised as ultimum and as truth, just as the raisonneurs, 
 whose understanding gives itself the endless satisfaction to be 
 able to adduce a To-be-to, an Ought-to, and so a knowing 
 letter, against everything that presently is who therefore will as 
 little allow themselves to be deprived of the ought-to perceive 
 not that for the finitude of their circle, the ought-to is perfectly 
 recognised. But in actuality itself it stands not so hopeless with 
 reason and law, that they only ought to be, it is only the 
 ubstractum of the Being-in-itself that maintains this just as little 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 273 
 
 so, as that the ought-to is in itself perennial, and, what is the 
 same thing, the finite absolute. The Kantian and Fichtian 
 philosophy assigns the ought-to, the to-be-to, as the highest point 
 of the solution of the contradictions of reason ; it is, however, rather 
 only the stand-point of fixture in finitude, and so in contradiction. 
 
 y. Transition of the Finite into the Infinite. 
 
 The Ought-to, per se, implies the Limitation, and the Limitation 
 the Ought-to. Their reference to each other is the Finite entity 
 itself, which contains them both in its Being-within-itself. These 
 moments of its determination are qualitatively opposed to each 
 other ; the Limitation is determined as the negative of the Ought- 
 to, and the Ought-to equally as the negative of the Limitation. 
 The Finite entity is thus the contradiction of itself within itself ; it 
 sublates itself, passes away. But this its result, the negative in 
 genera], is (a) its very determination [Qualification or its In-itself] ; 
 for it (the result) is the negative of the negative. The Finite is 
 thus in passing away not passed away ; it has in the first instance 
 become only another Finite, which however is equally a passing 
 away as transition into another Finite, and so on ad infinitum. 
 But (/3) this result being considered closer, the Finite has in its 
 passing away, this negation of itself, attained its Being-in-itself, it 
 has gone together with itself in it. Each of its moments contains 
 just this result : the Ought-to passefe over the Limitation, i.e., over 
 its own self ; but over it, or as its other, there is only the Limitation 
 itself. The Limitation, however, points immediately out over 
 itself to its other, which is the Ought-to ; but this again is the 
 same disunion of Being in itself (Ansichseyn) and of Being there 
 (Daseyri) as the Limitation, that is, it is the same thing ; out over 
 itself then it goes together equally only with its own self. This 
 identity with itself, the negation of the negation, is affirmative 
 being, and so the other of the Finite the Finite as that which is 
 to have the First negation as its determinateness that other is the 
 Infinite. 
 
 C. 
 
 THE INFINITE. 
 
 The Infinite in its simple notion may in the first instance be 
 regarded as a new definition of the absolute ; it is as the deter- 
 
 s 
 
274 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 minationless reference to self, put as Being and Becoming. The 
 forms of There-being fail or fall out in the series of the deter- 
 minations which can be regarded as definitions of the absolute, 
 because the forms of its sphere are, per se, immediately expressed 
 or put only as determinatenesses, as finite in general. The 
 Infinite, however, appears directly as absolute, being expressly 
 determined as negation of the Finite, and thus there is reference 
 expressly made in the Infinite to the limitatedness of which Being 
 and Becoming (though in themselves neither showing nor having 
 any limitatedness) might yet, perhaps, be not unsusceptible and 
 any such limitatedness is negated in it's, the Infinite's, regard. 
 
 Even thus, however, the Infinite is not yet in effect excepted 
 from limitatedness and finitude ; the main point is to distinguish 
 the true notion of the Infinite from the bastard or spurious Infinite, 
 the Infinite of Eeason from the Infinite of Understanding. The 
 latter, indeed, is the finitised Infinite, and it will be found that 
 just in the attempt to keep the Infinite pure and apart from the 
 Finite, the former is only finitised. 
 
 The Infinite is 
 
 a. in simple determination the affirmative as negation of the 
 Finite : 
 
 b. it is thus, however, in alternating determination with the 
 Finite, and is the abstract, one-sided Infinite : 
 
 c. the self-sublation of this Infinite with that of the Finite as a 
 single process is the veritable Infinite. 
 
 a. The Infinite in general. 
 
 The Infinite is the negation of the negation, the affirmative, the 
 being, which out of the limitatedness has again restored itself. 
 The Infinite is, and in a more intense sense than the first immedi- 
 ate Being ; it is the veritable Being, the rising out over the Limi- 
 tation. At the name of the Infinite there arises to spirit its own 
 light, for spirit is not herein only abstractly with itself, but raises 
 itself to its own self, to the light of its thinking, of its universality, 
 of its freedom. 
 
 First of all as regards the notion of the Infinite, it has been 
 found that There-being (Daseyri) in its Being-in-itself (Ansichseyn) 
 determines itself as Finite (Endiiches), and transcends the Limita- 
 tion (Schranke). It is the nature of the Finite itself, to transcend 
 its own self, to negate its negation, and to become infinite. The 
 Infinite thus does not stand as something ready-made and com- 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 275 
 
 plete, per se, over the Finite, in such wise that the Finite shall 
 have and shall hold its permanence out of or under the former. 
 Nor do we only as a subjective reason pass over the Finite into 
 the Infinite. As, for instance, when it is said that the Infinite is 
 the notion of reason, and through reason we raise ourselves over 
 the things of time, this takes place nevertheless without prejudice 
 to the finite, which is nowise concerned in said elevation an 
 elevation which remains external to it. So far, however, as the 
 Finite itself is raised into the Infinite, it is just as little any 
 foreign force which effects this on it, but its nature is this, to 
 refer itself to itself as limitation, limitation as such, and also as 
 To-be-to, and to transcend the same (limitation), or rather as refer- 
 ence to self to have negated it and to be beyond it. Not in the 
 sublatiori of the Finite is it that there arises the Infinite, but the 
 Finite is only this, through its very nature to become (rise) to the 
 Infinite. Infinitude is its affirmative determination, that which in 
 itself it truly is. 
 
 Thus the Finite has disappeared in the Infinite, and what is, is 
 only the Infinite. 
 
 b. Alternating Determination of the Finite and the Infinite. 
 
 The Infinite is; in this immediacy it is at the same time the 
 negation of another, the Finite. Thus as beent, and at the same 
 time as non-being of another, it has fallen back into the category 
 of the Something as a determinate in general, or more accurately, 
 because it is There-being reflected into self and resulting through 
 sublation of the determinateness expressed or set consequently as 
 There-being that is distinguished from its determinateness, it has 
 fallen back into the category of Something with a Limit. The 
 Finite in view of this determinateness stands opposed to the 
 Infinite, as real There-being; they stand thus in qualitative 
 reference as constant or permanent out of each other ; the imme- 
 diate being of the Infinite awakes the being of its negation, the 
 Finite again, which primarily seemed lost in the Infinite. 
 
 But the Infinite and Finite are not in these categories of 
 reference only; both sides are further determined as merely 
 others mutually. That is to say, the finite is the limitation 
 expressed as the limitation, it is There-being with the determina- 
 tion (nature) to go over into its Being-in-itself, or infinitely to 
 become. Infinitude is the nothing of the Finite, its Being-in-itself 
 
276 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 (Ansichseyri) and its To-be-to, but this at the same time as reflected 
 into self, the To-be-to carried out, or only self-to-self-referent quite 
 affirmative being. In Infinitude there is the satisfaction present 
 that all determinateness, change, all limitation, and with it the 
 To-be-to itself, have disappeared determinateness is expressed as 
 sublated, the nothing of the finite. As this negation of the finite 
 is the Being-in-self determined, which (Being-in-self) thus as 
 negation of the negation is affirmatively within itself. This 
 affirmation, however, is as qualitative immediate reference to self, 
 Being ; and thus the Infinite is reduced to the category that it 
 has the Finite as another opposed to it ; its negative nature is 
 expressed as the beent, and so first and immediate, negation. The 
 Infinite is in this manner burdened with the antithesis to the 
 Finite, which, as Other, remains at the same time determinate real 
 There-being, though it is expressed as in its Being-in-itself, the 
 Infinite at the same time sublated ; this (Infinite) is the non- 
 finite ; a being in the determinateness (form) of negation. Opposed 
 to the finite, the sphere of beent determinatenesses, of realities, is 
 the Infinite, the indeterminate void, the other side (the beyond) of 
 the Finite, which (Finite) has its Being-in-self not in its There- 
 being, which (There-being) is a determinate one. 
 
 The Infinite counter the Finite thus expressed or put in quali- 
 tative reference of other to each other, is to be named the spurious 
 Infinite, the Infinite of the Understanding, to which it has the 
 value of the highest, of absolute truth ; to bring understanding to 
 a consciousness of this, that, in that it opines to have reached its 
 satisfaction in the reconciliation of the truth, it, on the contrary, 
 is landed in unreconciled, unresolved, absolute contradiction this 
 must be effected by the contradictions into which it falls on all 
 sides, as soon as it attempts application and explication of these 
 its categories. 
 
 This contradiction is immediately present in this, that the Finite 
 as There-being remains counter the Infinite ; there are thus two 
 determinatenesses ; there are two worlds to hand, one infinite and 
 one finite ; and in their reference the Infinite is only limit of the 
 Finite, and is thus only a determinate, even finite Infinite. 
 
 This contradiction develops its intent into more express forms. 
 The Finite is the real There-being which thus dialectically remains, 
 even in that transition is made to its non-being, the Infinite ; this 
 latter has, as has been shown, only the first, immediate negation 
 as its determinateness counter the Finite, just as the Finite as 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 277 
 
 regards said negation has, as negated, only the value of an Other, 
 and therefore is still Something. When, consequently, under- 
 standing, elevating itself out of this finite world, mounts to its 
 highest, the Infinite, this finite world remains stationary for it as 
 a this side, so that the Infinite appears only beyond the Finite, 
 separated from the Finite, and just thus the Finite separated from 
 the Infinite ; both assigned distinct places, the Finite as There- 
 being, Being on this side, and the Infinite again, the In-itsclf 
 indeed of the Finite, but a Yonder away into the dim, inaccessible 
 distance, out of which the Finite finds itself and remains here. 
 
 Sundered thus, they are just as essentially referred to each other 
 by the very negation which separates them. This negation, co- 
 referent of them, the self-reflected Somethings, is the mutual limit 
 of the one counter the other ; and that, too, in such wise that each 
 of them has in it the limit not merely counter the other, but the 
 negation is their Being -in-self ; each has thus the limit, even per 
 se or independently in it, in its separation from the other. The 
 limit, however, is as the first negation ; both are thus limited, 
 finite in themselves. Still, each is also as affirmatively referent 
 of self to self the negation of its limit ; it thus immediately repels 
 it from itself as its non-being, and, qualitatively separated there- 
 from, it sets it as another being apart from itself, the Finite its 
 Non-being as this Infinite, this latter just so the Finite. That 
 from the Finite to the Infinite necessarily, i.e. through the deter- 
 mination of the Finite, transition imist be made, and the Finite 
 raised as into its Being-in-self, is easily granted, seeing that the 
 Finite is determined, as persistent There-being indeed, but, at the 
 same time, also as what is in itself null, and therefore what in its 
 own determination (nature) resolves itself; while the Infinite again 
 is indeed determined as attended by negation and limit ; but, at 
 the same time also as what is beent in itself in such wise that 
 this abstraction of the self to self referent affirmation constitutes 
 its determination, and with such determination consequently the 
 Finite There-being lies not in it. But it has been shown that the 
 Infinite itself reaches its affirmative Being as result only ly means 
 of the negation, as negation of the negation, and that this its affir- 
 mation taken as only simple, qualitative Being, brings down the 
 negation it contains to simple immediate negation, and so conse- 
 quently to determinateness and limit, and this [qualitative being 
 again] then as in the same way contradictory to its Being-in-itself is 
 -excluded from it as not its, rather is put as what is opposed to its 
 
278 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Being-in-itself, the Finite. In that thus each, just in it and from 
 its own determination, is implication of its other, they are insepar- 
 able. But this their unity is concealed in their qualitative other- 
 ness ; it is the internal one, which only lies at bottom. 
 
 Hereby is the manner of the manifestation of this unity deter- 
 mined ; expressed in the There-being it is as a striking round or 
 transition of the Finite into the Infinite, and vice versd; so that 
 the Infinite only stands forward in or by the Finite, and the Finite 
 in or by the Infinite, the other in or by the other, that is to say, 
 each is an own proper immediate existence in or by the other, and 
 their reference is only an external one. 
 
 The process of their transition takes the following complete 
 shape. Transcendence is made beyond the Finite into the Infinite. 
 This transcendence appears as an external act. In this void 
 beyond the Finite what arises? What is the positive element 
 therein ? Because of the inseparableness of the Infinite and 
 Finite (or because this Infinite, thus standing on its own side, is 
 itself limitated), Limit arises; the Infinite has disappeared its 
 other, the Finite, has put itself in place. But this on the part of 
 the Finite appears as an event external to the Infinite, and the 
 new limit as such a one as arises not out of the Infinite itself, but, 
 still, is just there. There is thus present a relapse into the pre- 
 vious determination which has been sublated to no purpose. But 
 this new limit is itself only such as is to be sublated, or transcended. 
 So there has thus again arisen the void, the nothing, in which, just 
 in the same manner, again determinateness, a new limit, is met 
 with and so on, ad infinitum. 
 
 There is present the alternation of the Finite and the Infinite ; 
 the Finite is finite only in reference to the To-be-to or the Infinite, 
 and the Infinite is only infinite in reference to the Finite. They 
 are inseparable, and at the same time absolutely others to one 
 another ; each has itself the other of it in it ; thus each is unity 
 of it and of its other, and is in its determinateness There-being 
 There-being not to be that which it itself is, and which its 
 other is. 
 
 It is this reciprocal determination which, negating its own self 
 and its own negation, presents itself as the Progressus ad Infinitum, 
 which in so many forms and applications has the value of an 
 ultimate, beyond which there cannot be any further transition, but 
 thought, arrived at this, And so on, ad infinitum, supposes itself to 
 have reached its end. This Progress appears always when relative 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 279 
 
 determinations are pushed to their antithesis, so that they are in 
 inseparable unity, and yet to each counter the other a self-sub- 
 sistent There-being is ascribed. This Progress is therefore the 
 contradiction which is not resolved, but is always only enunciated 
 as present. 
 
 There is an abstract transcendence present, which remains 
 imperfect, in that this transcendence is not itself transcended. The 
 Infinite is there before us; it is, to be sure, transcended, for a 
 new limit is assumed, but just thus rather we are only back in the 
 Finite. This bastard Infinite is in itself the same thing as the 
 perpetual To-be-to ; it is indeed the negation of the Finite, but it 
 cannot in truth free itself therefrom ; this comes forward in itself 
 again as its other, because this Infinite only is as in reference to 
 the Finite which is other to it. The Progress in infinitum is 
 therefore only the self-repeating sameness, one and the same 
 wearisome alternation of this Finite and Infinite. 
 
 The Infinitude of the infinite Progress remains burdened with 
 the Finite as such, is limited thereby and itself finite. But thus, 
 consequently, it were assumed in effect as Unity of the Finite and 
 Infinite. But this unity is not reflected on. This unity, however, 
 is that alone which in the Finite evokes the Infinite, and in the 
 Infinite the Finite: it is, so to speak, the mainspring of the 
 Infinite Progress. Thisi Progress is the externale of said Unity 
 and Conception remains standing by this externale by the per- 
 petual repetition of one and the ,same reciprocation, an empty 
 unrest to advance further out over the limit into the Infinite, 
 which advance finds in this Infinite a new limit, by which, 
 however, it is just as little able to call a halt as in the Infinite. 
 This Infinite has the fixed determination of a Further side which 
 cannot be reached, just for this very reason, that it is not to be 
 reached, just because there is no leaving off from the determining 
 of it, as the Further side, as the beent negation. In consequence 
 of this its nature, it has the Finite as a Hither side opposed to it, 
 which can as little raise itself into the Infinite, just for this 
 reason, that it has this determination of a There-being generative 
 of Another, generative consequently of a perpetual repetition 
 generative of itself in its beyond itself again, and yet, at the same 
 time, as different therefrom. 
 
280 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 c. The Affirmative Infinite. 
 
 In this hither and thither of an alternating conclusion, now of 
 the Finite, and again of the Infinite, the truth of these is already 
 in itself present, and all that is necessary is simply to take up what 
 is present. This movement hither and thither constitutes the 
 external realisation of the notion ; what the notion contains 
 impliciter is expliciter, formally expressed, in this (outer realisa- 
 tion), but externally, as falling asunder ; the comparison of these 
 diverse moments is all that is required to yield the unity which 
 gives the notion itself ; the unity of the Infinite and Finite is, as 
 has been often remarked already, and as deserves now specially to 
 be remembered, a one-sided expression for this unity as it is in 
 truth ; but the elimination of this one-sided statement must also 
 lie in the externalisation of the notion which is now before us. 
 
 Taken in its first, simply immediate statement, the Infinite is 
 only as transcendence of the Finite; it is in its determination 
 [definition, express nature] the negation of the Finite ; thus the 
 Finite, as only that which is to be transcended, is the negation of 
 itself just in it just that negation which the Infinite is. There 
 lies thus in each, the determinateness of the other, yet, according 
 to the infinite Progress, they are to be mutually excluded, and 
 only reciprocally to follow each other ; neither can be stated and 
 comprehended without the other, the Infinite not without the 
 Finite, the Finite not without the Infinite. When what the 
 Infinite is, is said, the negation, namely, of the Finite, the Finite 
 itself, is co-enunciated ; for the definition or determination of the 
 Infinite, it cannot be dispensed with. People require only to know 
 what they say to find the Finite in the Infinite. Of the Finite, for 
 its part, it is at once granted, that it is what is null, but just its 
 nullity is the Infinitude, from which it is thus inseparable. In 
 this way of regarding them, they may seem to be taken with 
 reference to their other [or only in their reference}. Now should 
 they be supposed reference-less, in such wise that they are con- 
 nected only by an And, they will stand as if mutually opposed, 
 self-subsistent, each only in itself. Let us see now, how in such 
 shape they are constituted. So placed, the Infinite is one of the 
 two ; but as only one of the two it is itself finite it is not the 
 whole, but only one side ; it has in its Opposite its limit ; it is 
 thus the finite Infinite. Or there are only two Finites before us. 
 Just in this, that it is thus placed as sundered from the Finite, 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 281 
 
 and therefore as one-sided, lies its Finitude, and therefore its unity 
 with the Finite. The Finite, for its part, placed as per se apart 
 from the Infinite, is this reference to self, in which its relativity, 
 dependency, its passingness is removed ; it is the same self- 
 substantiality and affirmation of itself which the Infinite is taken" 
 to be. 
 
 Both modes of consideration, though seeming at first to have a 
 different determinate for their start so far as the former is 
 supposed to view them only as reference of the Infinite and Finite 
 to each other, of each to its other ; and the latter is supposed to 
 hold them apart from each other in their complete isolation, 
 give one and the same result; the Infinite and Finite, viewed 
 according to the reference of both to one another, which reference 
 were to be external to them, but which is essential to them, 
 neither being what it is without it, contain thus each its other in 
 its own determination, just as much as each taken per se, regarded 
 in itself, has its other lying in it as its own ndoment. 
 
 This yields, then, the decried unity of the Finite and Infinite 
 the unity, which is itself the Infinite, which comprehends in 
 itself its own self and the Finite and therefore is the Infinite 
 in another sense than in that, according to which the Finite is 
 separated from it and placed on the other side. In that they 
 must be as well distinguished, each, as already shown, is also 
 itself in it the unity of both ; and thus there are two such unities. 
 The common element, the unity o/ both determinates, as unity, 
 expresses both in the first place as negated, seeing that each is 
 supposed to be that which it is in their distinguishedness ; in 
 their unity they lose, therefore, their qualitative nature; an 
 important reflexion against conception, which will not emancipate 
 itself from this to hold fast, in the unity of the Infinite and 
 Finite, these according to the quality which they are supposed to 
 have as taken apart, and therefore to see in said unity only the 
 contradiction, not also the resolution of the same by the negation 
 of the qualitative determinateness of both; thus the directly 
 simple all-common unity of the Infinite and Finite is falsified. 
 
 But further, in that now also they are to be taken as different, 
 the unity of the Infinite, which each of these moments is, is 
 differently determined in each of them. The Infinite, so deter- 
 mined, has in it the Finitude which is distinguished from it; the 
 former is in this unity the In-itself, and the latter is only deter- 
 minateness, limit in it ; but it is a limit which is the directly 
 
THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 other of it (the Infinite), its antithesis ; its determination, which 
 is the In-itself as such, becomes by the falsifying addition of a 
 quality of such a nature vitiated ; it is thus a finitised Infinite. 
 In like manner, in that the Finite as such is only the Nou-In- 
 itself, but by reason of the unity in question has likewise its 
 opposite in it, it becomes raised above its value, and that too, so 
 to speak, infinitely ; it is expressed (set) as the Infinitised Finite. 
 
 In the same manner, as previously the simple, is the double 
 unity of the Infinite and Finite falsified by understanding. This 
 takes place here also by this, that in the one of the two unities 
 the Infinite is taken as not negated, rather as the In-itself, in 
 which therefore there is not to be determinateness and limitation ; 
 the In-itself were by this depreciated and vitiated. Contrariwise, 
 the Finite is likewise held fast as the non-negated, though in 
 itself null, so that in its connexion with the Infinite it is raised 
 to that which it is not, and is thereby not disappearing but 
 rather perpetually continuing unfinitised against its own dis- 
 tinctive determination. 
 
 The falsification, which, with the Finite and the Infinite, under- 
 standing commits in holding fast their mutual reference as 
 qualitative diversity, in maintaining them as in their nature 
 separated and indeed absolutely separated, is occasioned by for- 
 getting that which for understanding itself the notion of these 
 moments is. According to this notion, the unity of the Finite 
 and Infinite is not an external bringing together of them, nor a 
 combination alien and repugnant to their distinctive nature, in 
 which combination there would be conjoined what were in 
 themselves separated and opposed, mutually self-substantial and 
 existent, and consequently incompatible; but each is just in it 
 this unity, and that only as sullation of itself, in which neither 
 shall have any advantage over the other as regards In-itself-ness 
 and affirmative There-being. As already shown, the Finite is 
 only as transcendence of itself; there is contained therefore in 
 it, the Infinite, the other of itself. Just so is the Infinite only 
 as transcendence of the Finite ; it implies, therefore, essentially 
 its other, and is, consequently, in it the other of itself. The 
 Finite is not sublated by the Infinite as by an independent power 
 existing apart from it ; but it is its Infinitude, to. sublate itself. 
 
 This sublation is, consequently, not alteration or otherness in 
 general, not sublation of Something. That in which the Finite 
 sublates itself, is the Infinite as the negating of the Finite ; but 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 283 
 
 this latter is long ago itself only There-being determined as a Non- 
 being. It is, therefore, only the negation which in the negation 
 sublates itself. Thus for its part Infinitude is determined as the 
 negative of Finitude, and, consequently, of determinateness^ in 
 general, as the void Further side ; its self-sublation in the Finite 
 is a turning back from empty flight, a negation of the Further side, 
 which Further side is a negative in itself. 
 
 What is present, then, is in both the same negation of the nega- 
 tion. But this is in itself reference to itself, affirmation but as 
 return to itself, i.e. through the mediation, which the negation of 
 the negation is. These determinations are what is to be essen- 
 tially kept in view : the second point, however, is, that they are 
 also express in the infinite progress, but, as they are so in it, not 
 yet in their ultimate truth. 
 
 In the first place, in it, both, as well the Infinite as the Finite, 
 are negated both are, and in the same manner, transcended; 
 secondly, they are expressed as distinct and different, each after 
 the other, as per se positive. We take thus these two determina- 
 tions comparingly apart, as in the comparison, an outer comparison, 
 we have separated the two modes of consideration, that of the 
 Finite and Infinite in their reference, and that of the same each 
 taken per se. But the Infinite Progress expresses more ; there is 
 present in it, also, the connexion of what is likewise distinguished, 
 directly nevertheless only as transition and alternation. Let us 
 see now in a simple reflexion what in effect is present. 
 
 First, the negation of the Finite and Infinite, which is expressed 
 in the infinite Progress, may be taken as simple, consequently as 
 separate, and only successive. Starting with the Finite, the Limit 
 is transcended, the Finite is negated. Now, then, we have the 
 Further side, the beyond of the same, the Infinite : but in this 
 latter the Limit again arises, and thus we have the transcendence 
 of the Infinite. This twofold sublation nevertheless is expressed 
 partly in general only as an external traffic and alternation of the 
 moments, partly not yet as a imity ; each of these transcendings 
 is a special apposition, a new act, so that they fall thus asunder 
 from one another. There is, however, also further present in the 
 infinite progress their reference. There is, firstly, the Finite ; then 
 it is transcended this negative or beyond of the Finite is 
 the Infinite; thirdly, this negation is again transcended there 
 arises a new Limit, again a Finite. This is the complete, self- 
 closing movement, which has arrived at that which constituted 
 
284 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the beginning ; the same thing from which we started arises, i.e. the 
 Finite is restored ; the same thing has therefore gone together with 
 itself, has in its beyond only found itself again. 
 
 The same is the case as regards the Infinite. In the Infinite, 
 the beyond of the limit, there arises only a new limit, which has 
 the same fate, as Finite to be necessarily negated. What we have 
 thus again is the same Infinite, which disappeared previously in 
 the new limit: the Infinite, therefore, through its sublation, 
 across through the new limit, is not farther advanced, neither has 
 it been removed from the Finite, for this latter is only this, to go 
 over into the Infinite, nor from itself, for it has arrived ly itself. 
 
 Thus both, the Finite and the Infinite, are this movement, to 
 return to themselves through their negation; they are only as 
 mediation within themselves, and the affirmative of both contains 
 the negation of both, and is the negation of the negation. They 
 are thus result, and not, consequently, what they are in the deter- 
 mination of their beginning ; not the Finite, a There-being on its 
 side, and the Infinite, a There-being or In-itself-leing beyond the 
 There-being, i.e. beyond that which was determined as finite. The 
 unity of the Finite and Infinite is so very repugnant to under- 
 standing only on this account, that it presupposes as perennial or 
 persistent the Limitation and the Finite as well as the In-itself ; 
 thus it fails to see the negation of both, which is factually present 
 in the infinite Progress, as well as that they therein only present 
 themselves as Moments of a Whole, and that they arise only by 
 means of their contrary, but essentially also just as much by 
 means of the sublation of their contrary n 
 
 If, in the first instance, the return to self was regarded as the 
 return as well of the Finite as of the Infinite to itself, there mani- 
 fests itself now in this result an incorrectness which is connected 
 with the one-sidedness just commented on; now the Finite and 
 now the Infinite is taken as starting-point, and by this only is 
 it that there arise two results. But it is absolutely indifferent 
 which is taken as beginning; and so the difference which pro- 
 duced the duplicity of the results, disappears of itself. This 
 is likewise expressed in the both ways unlimited line of the 
 infinite Progress, wherein each of the moments appears with like 
 alternate presentation, and it is quite external, where we catch on, 
 and with what begin. They are in it distinguished, but in like 
 manner the one as only moment of the other. In that both of 
 them, the Finite and the Infinite, are themselves moments of the 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 285 
 
 process, they are, in community, the Finite ; and in that they are 
 equally also in community negated in it and in the result, this 
 result as negation of said Finitude of both is with truth regarded 
 as the Infinite. Their distinction is thus the double sense which 
 both have. The Finite has the double sense firstly to be only the 
 Finite counter the Infinite, that stands opposed to it ; and, 
 secondly, to be at once the Finite and its opposing Infinite. The 
 Infinite also has the double sense, to be one of said two moments 
 when it is the spurious Infinite and then to be the Infinite in 
 which said both, it itself and its other, are only moments. How, 
 therefore, the Infinite is in effect before us, is, to be the process, in 
 which it submits to be only one of its determinations counter the 
 Finite, and so only one of the Finites, and to sublate this difference 
 of itself from itself into the affirmation of itself, and to be through 
 this mediation as true Infinite. 
 
 This distinctive determination of the true Infinite cannot be 
 contained in the formula, already animadverted on, of a unity of 
 the Finite and Infinite ; unity is abstract motionless equality with 
 self, and the moments are just thus as unmoved beents: the 
 Infinite, however, is, like both of its moments, rather essentially 
 only as Becoming, but becoming now further determined in its 
 moments. Becoming has first abstract being and nothing for its 
 determinations ; next, as Alteration, it has There-beents, Some- 
 thing and Other ; now, as the Infinite, it has Finite and Infinite, 
 themselves as Becomes. 
 
 This Infinite, as a returned-ness into self, reference of itself to 
 itself, is Being, but not Determination-less, abstract Being, for it 
 is formally set as negating the negation ; it is consequently also 
 There-being, for it contains the negation in general, and conse- 
 quently Determinateness. It is and is there, present, now. Only 
 the spurious Infinite is the Beyond, because it is only the negation 
 of the Finite that is given as Keal, thus it is the abstract, first 
 Negation ; only as negatively determined, it has not the affirma- 
 tion of There-being in it ; held fast as only negative, it is supposed 
 to be even not there, it is to be supposed unreachable. But this 
 unreachableness is not its worth, but its want, which has its 
 ultimate ground in this, that the Finite as such is held fast as beent. 
 The Untrue is the Unreachable ; and it must be seen, that such 
 Infinite is the Untrue. The image of the Progressus ad infinitum 
 is the straight line, only in the two limits of which is the Infinite, 
 and always only where the line and it is There-being is not, 
 
286 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 and which (line) proceeds out beyond to this its non-There-being, 
 i.e. to the Indeterminate ; as true Infinitude, bent back into itself, 
 the image is the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is 
 closed and completely present, without beginning and end. 
 
 The true Infinite thus as There-being, which is put as affirma- 
 tively counter the abstract negation, is reality in a higher sense 
 than the former one, which was determined as simple reality it 
 has here obtained a concrete wtent. The Finite is not the real, 
 but the Infinite. Thus, too, reality becomes further on deter- 
 mined as Essentity, Notion, Idea, &c. It is superfluous, however, 
 to repeat such earlier, abstractor, categories, as reality, on occasion 
 of the concreter, and to apply them in the place of determinations 
 more concrete than they are in themselves. Such repetition, as to 
 say that the Essentity or that the Idea is the Eeal, has its occasion in 
 this, that to unformed thought, the abstractest categories, as Being, 
 There-being, Keality, Finitude, are the currentest. 
 
 The recalling of the category of Keality has here its preciser 
 occasion, in that the negation, against which it is the affirmative, 
 is here the negation of the negation, and so it (Eeality itself) is put 
 as opposed to that Eeality, which finite There-being is. The 
 negation is thus determined as identity ; the Ideel * is the Finite 
 as it is in the true Infinite, that is, as a determination, wtent, 
 which is distinguished, but not self-subsistently beent, only as 
 moment. Ideality has this concreter sense, which by a negation 
 of finite There-being is not completely expressed. As regards 
 reality and ideality, however, the antithesis of finite and infinite 
 is understood so that the finite passes for the real ; the infinite, on 
 the other hand, for the ideel : in the same way as further on the 
 notion is regarded as an ideel, and as only ideel, There-being on 
 the contrary as the real. Thus it avails nothing to have the 
 special expression of the ideel for the assigned concrete deter- 
 mination of the negation ; in said antithesis, the one-sidedness of 
 
 * The Ideal has a preciser meaning (of the Beautiful and what bears on it) than 
 the Ideel ; the former has not yet any application here ; for this reason the expres- 
 sion Ideel is here used. As regards Reality there is no such distinction ; the Reel 
 and the Real are well-nigh synonymous ; the shading of the two expressions, as it 
 were, counter each other, has no interest. 
 
 (This is Hegel's note, and valuable for the meaning of ' Ideel ' as against 
 ' Ideal.' The latter is of aesthetic application only : the former of metaphysical ; 
 it means what is, but what has gone in, what is taken up, what is only held (as in 
 solution), what is aufgehoben, sublated, withdrawn, put past. This may countenance 
 the suggestion that formed may be regarded as rather metaphorical, while formeZ is 
 quite literal in accentuation of form.) New. 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 287 
 
 the abstract negative which attaches to the spurious Infinite is 
 returned to, and the affirmative There-being of the Finite per- 
 sisted in. 
 
 Transition. 
 
 Ideality may be named the Quality of Infinitude ; but it is 
 essentially the Process of Becoming, and consequently a transition 
 (as was that of Becoming into There-being), which is now to be 
 assigned. As sublation of Finitude, i.e. of Finitude as such, 
 and just as much of its only opposing, only negative Infinitude, 
 this return into self is reference to its own self Being. As in this 
 Being there is negation, it is There-being ; but as this negation is 
 further essentially negation of the negation, self to self-referent 
 negation, it is that There-being which is named Being -for-self. 
 
 EEMARK 1. 
 
 The Infinite in the usual sense of the spurious Infinite and 
 the Progress into the Infinite, like the To-le-to, are the expression 
 of a contradiction, which gives itself out as resolution and as 
 ultimum. This Infinite is a first elevation of sensuous conception 
 over the Finite into the thought, which, however, has only the 
 mtent of nothing, of that which is expressly given and taken as 
 non-beent a flight beyond the limitated, which flight collects 
 itself not into itself, and knows not^ how to bring back the negative 
 into the positive. This uncompleted reflexion has both of the 
 determinations of the true Infinite the antithesis of the Finite 
 and Infinite, and the unity of the Finite and Infinite perfectly 
 before it, but brings not these two thoughts together; the one 
 conveys along with it the other inseparably, but it (the reflexion) 
 lets them only alternate. The fact of this alternation, the infinite 
 progress, is always then present whenever the contradiction of the 
 unity of two determinations and of their antithesis is persisted in. 
 The Finite is the sublation of itself ; it includes in itself its nega- 
 tion, Infinitude, the unity of loth ; Process is made out beyond 
 over the Finite to the Infinite as its Further side, separation of 
 loth ; but beyond the Infinite there is another Finite the beyond, 
 the Infinite, contains the Finite, unity of loth ; but this Finite 
 is also a negative of the Infinite, separation of loth, and so on. 
 Thus in the relation of causality, cause and effect are inseparable ; 
 a cause which should have no effect is not a cause, as an effect 
 
288 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 which should have no cause were no longer an effect. This 
 relation gives therefore the infinite progress of causes and effects ; 
 something is determined as cause, but it has, as a finite ( and it 
 is finite just specially because of its separation from the effect) 
 itself, a cause, i.e. it is also effect ; consequently, the same thing 
 which was determined as cause, is also determined as effect unity 
 of cause and effect ; what is now determined as effect has again 
 a cause, i.e. the cause is to be separated from its effect and taken 
 as a different something ; this new cause is again itself only an 
 effect unity of cause and effect ; it has another for its cause 
 separation of both determinations, and so on ad infinitum. 
 
 A more special form can be given the progressus in this way ; 
 it is asserted that the Finite and the Infinite are one unity ; this 
 false assertion requires now to be corrected by the opposite one, 
 that they are directly different and mutually opposed ; this again 
 is to be corrected, into the assertion that they are inseparable, that 
 the one determination lies in the other, through the averment of 
 their unity, and so on ad infinitum. In order to understand the 
 nature of the Infinite, it is no difficult request, that we should 
 have a consciousness that the infinite progress, the developed 
 infinite of understanding, is so constituted as to be the alternation 
 of the two determinations, of the unity and of the separation of 
 both moments, and then again that we should also have a conscious- 
 ness, that this unity and this separation are themselves inseparable. 
 
 The resolution of this contradiction is not the recognition of 
 the equal correctness and of the equal incorrectness of the two 
 statements ; this were only another form of the persistent con- 
 tradiction ; but the Ideality of the two, as in which they, in their 
 difference as mutual negations, are only moments ; said monotonous 
 alternation is factually as well the negation of their unity as of 
 their separation. In it (the Ideality) is just as factually present 
 what has been shown above, that the Finite passes beyond itself 
 into the Infinite, but just so beyond the same again it finds itself 
 spring up anew, and consequently therein it only goes together 
 with its own self, as the Infinite similarly ; so that the same 
 negation of the negation becomes the affirmative result, which 
 result demonstrates itself consequently as their truth and their 
 prime. In this Being consequently as the Ideality of both of 
 the characters distinguished, the contradiction is not abstractly 
 vanished, but resolved and reconciled, and the thoughts are not 
 only complete, but they are also brought together. The nature of 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 289 
 
 speculative thought shows itself in this detailed example in its 
 special form, it consists alone in the taking up of the opposed 
 moments in their unity. In that each shows itself factually to 
 have in it its contrary as such, and in it to go together with itself, 
 the affirmative truth is this unity that gives movement to itself 
 within itself, the taking together of both thoughts, their infinity, 
 the reference to self not the immediate, but the infinite 
 one. 
 
 The test of philosophy, by such as are already in some degree 
 familiarised with thought, has been frequently placed in the 
 problem, to answer, How the Infinite comes out of itself, and into 
 Finitude ? This, it is usually supposed, cannot possibly be made 
 comprehensible. The Infinite, by the notion of which we have 
 arrived, will in progress of the present development further deter- 
 mine itself, and show in it, in all the multiplicity of the forms, 
 what is here demanded, or How it, if we are to express ourselves 
 thus, comes to Finitude. At present we consider this question 
 only in its immediacy, and in regard to the previously considered 
 sense which the Infinite is wont to have. 
 
 On the answering of this question it is supposed in general to 
 depend whether a philosophy exist ; and in that people give out 
 that they will be content to let it rest on this, they believe them- 
 selves to possess in the question itself, a sort of quoestio vexata, an 
 unconquerable Talisman, through which they are firmly secured 
 against any answer, and consequently against philosophy and the 
 establishment of philosophy. But even in other objects a certain 
 education is presupposed, in order to understand how to put 
 questions, and still more in philosophical objects is such education 
 to be presupposed necessary in order to attain a better answer 
 than only that the question is worth nothing. As regards such 
 questions, it is usually fair to point out, that the matter does not 
 depend on the words, but that it is intelligible from one or other 
 of the phrases of the expression, what it is it depends on ? Ex- 
 pressions of sensuous conception as going and coming out, and the 
 like, which are used in the question concerned, awake the 
 suspicion, that it (the question) belongs to the position of ordinary 
 conception, and that for the answer also there are expected just 
 such sensuous conceptions, as are current in common life and have 
 the shape of a sensuous similitude or metaphor. 
 
 When, instead of the Infinite, Being in general is taken, then 
 the determining of Being, that is, a negation or finitude in it, 
 
290 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 seems more readily intelligible. Being, to be sure, is itself the 
 undetermined, but it is not immediately expressed in it that it is the 
 contrary of the determined. Whereas the Infinite has this 
 expressed; it is the Turn-Finite. The unity of the Finite and 
 Infinite seems thus immediately excluded ; it is on this account 
 that uncompleted reflexion is at its stubbornest against this unity. 
 It has been shown, however, and, without entering further into 
 the determination of the Finite and Infinite, it is immediately 
 evident, that the Infinite in the sense in which it is taken by the 
 reflexion alluded to, that is, as contraposed to the Finite, has 
 in it its other, just because it is contraposed to it, and is therefore 
 already limited, and even finite, the spurious Infinite. The 
 answer to the question, How the Infinite becomes Finite, is con- 
 sequently this, that there is no such thing as an Infinite that is 
 first of all Infinite and which is afterwards under a necessity to 
 become finite, to go out into the Finite ; but that it is per se by and 
 for its own self already just as much finite as infinite. In that 
 the question assumes that the Infinite is on one side per se, and 
 that the Finite which has gone out into separation from it, or 
 which may have come whencesoever it may is, separated from it, 
 truly real : here rather it were to be said, that this separation is 
 incomprehensible. Neither such Finite nor such Infinite has truth ; 
 the untrue, however, is unintelligible. But it must just as much 
 be said, they are intelligible ; the consideration of them, even as 
 they are in conception, that in the one the distinctive nature of 
 the other lies to have simple insight into this their inseparable- 
 ness, is to comprehend them ; this insepardbleness is their notion. 
 In the self -substantiality of said Infinite and Finite, on the other 
 hand, said question sets up an untrue J^tent, and implies at once 
 an untrue reference of the same. On this account it is not to be 
 answered, but rather are the false presuppositions it implies i.e., 
 the question itself to be negated. Through the questioning of the 
 truth of said Infinite and Finite, the position is altered, and this 
 alteration retaliates on the first question the perplexity which it 
 sought to inflict; this question of ours is to the reflexion from 
 which the first question issues, new, as such reflexion possesses not 
 the speculative interest which, by and for its own self, and before 
 it co-refers determinations, seeks to ascertain whether these 
 same determinations are, in the manner in which they are 
 presupposed, anywise true. So far, however, as the untruth of 
 said abstract Infinite, and of the similar Finite which is to remain 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 291 
 
 standing on its side, is recognised, there is to be said as regards 
 the exit of the Finite out of the Finite, that the Infinite goes out 
 into the Finite, just because, in the manner in which it is taken 
 as abstract unity, it has no truth, and no principle of subsistence 
 or consistence in it; and conversely, for the same reason of its - 
 nullity, the Finite goes in into the Infinite. Or rather it is to be 
 said, that the Infinite is eternally gone out into the Finite, that, 
 no more than pure Being, is it absolutely alone per se, without 
 having its other in it itself. 
 
 Said question, How the Infinite goes out into the Finite, may 
 mean the still further presupposition, that the Infinite in itself 
 includes the Finite, and consequently is in itself the unity of itself 
 and of its other, so that the difficulty refers itself essentially to the 
 separating, which as such is opposed to the presupposed unity of 
 both. In this presupposition, the antithesis which is held fast, 
 has only another form ; the unity and the distinction are separated 
 and isolated from each other. Said unity, however, being taken 
 not as the abstract indeterminate unity, but as the determinate 
 unity of the Finite and Infinite, as it already is in said presup- 
 position, the distinction also of both is already present in it, a 
 distinction which, at the same time, is not a letting-loose of these 
 into separated self-dependency, but retains them in the unity as 
 ideel. This unity of the Infinite and Finite and their distinction 
 are the same inseparable as Finitude and Infinitude themselves. 
 
 REMARK 2. 
 
 The position, that the Finite is ideel, constitutes Idealism. The 
 idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising 
 the Finite as not a veritable Beent. All philosophy is essentially 
 Idealism, or at least possesses it as its principle, and the question 
 is only how far has it carried out this principle ? Philosophy is 
 this as much as religion; for religion just as little recognises the 
 Finite as a veritable Being, as an ultimate, absolute, or as non- 
 posititious, uncreated, eternal. The contrast of idealistic and 
 realistic philosophy is therefore without import. A philosophy 
 which should ascribe to the finite There-being as such, genuine, 
 ultimate, absolute Being, would not deserve the name of philo- 
 sophy; the principles of earlier or of later philosophies, water, or 
 matter, or atoms, are thoughts, universals, ideels, not things, as 
 -they directly find themselves before us, i.e., in sensuous singleness; 
 
292 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 even the Thaletic water is not such thing, for, though certainly 
 empirical water is meant, it is also conceived at the same time as 
 the In-itself QI Essentity of all the other tilings ; and these are not 
 self-substantial entities, grounded in themselves, but they are 
 expressed (resultant) from (of) another [the Water], i.e., they are 
 ideel. The principle, the universal, being named the ideal t (as 
 still more the notion, the idea, the spirit, are to be named ideel), 
 and then again single sensuous things being to be conceived as 
 sublated, as ideel in the principle, in the notion, or still more, in 
 the spirit, attention may be directed, in passing, to the same 
 double side, which showed itself in the Infinite; that is to say, that 
 at one time, the Ideel is the concrete, the veritably Beent, but at 
 another time again, just as much its moments are what is ideel, 
 namely what is sublated in it, in effect, there is only the One 
 concrete Whole, from which the moments are inseparable. 
 
 By the Ideel, as commonly opined, is especially meant the form 
 of conception ; and what is in my conception in general, or what 
 is in the notion, the idea, in the imagination, &c., is called ideel, 
 so that ideel applies even to fancies conceptions, which are not 
 only diverse from the real, but are to be supposed essentially not 
 real. In effect the Spirit is the Idealist proper ; in it, as it is when 
 feeling, conceiving, still more when thinking and comprehending, 
 the mtent or object is not as the so-called real There-being; in the 
 singleness of the ego, such external Being is only sublated it is 
 for me, it is ideel in me. This subjective idealism, be it the un- 
 witting idealism of consciousness in general, or be it consciously 
 enunciated and upheld as principle, regards only the conceptive 
 form according to which an mtent (an object) is mine ; this form 
 is upheld in systematic subjective idealism, as the only true one, 
 to the exclusion of the form of objectivity or reality, or of the 
 external There-being of the mtent. Such an idealism is formell, 
 inasmuch as in its attention to the form it neglects the content of 
 conception or thought, which whether conceived or thought 
 may still remain quite in its finitude. With such idealism, there 
 is nothing lost, as well because the reality of such finite matter 
 There-being and its finite complement is retained, as because 
 (inasmuch as it is abstracted from) said matter is to be regarded 
 as of no consequence in itself; and again there is nothing won 
 with it, just because there is nothing lost, for the ego, the concep- 
 tion, the spirit, remains filled with the same finite matter. The 
 antithesis of the form of subjectivity and objectivity is certainly 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 293 
 
 one of the Finities; but the matter, how it appears in sensation, 
 perception, or even in the more abstract element of conception, of 
 thought itself, contains finities in abundance, which (finities), by 
 exclusion of the single mode of finitude alluded to, the form, 
 namely, of subjective and objective, are not yet by any means got 
 rid of, and have still less disappeared of themselves. 
 
294 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 BEING-FOK-SELF. 
 
 IN Being-for-self qualitative Being is completed; it is infinite 
 Being. The Being of the beginning is determination-less. There- 
 being is sublated (negated), but only immediately sublated 
 (negated) Being ; it thus, in the first case, contains only the first, 
 just immediate negation ; Being is indeed equally retained, and in 
 There-being both are united in simple unity ; but just on that 
 account they are in themselves mutually unequal ; their unity is 
 not yet in position. There-being is, therefore, the sphere of differ- 
 ence, of dualism, the field of finitude. The determinateness is 
 determinateness as such a relative, not absolute determinateness. 
 In Being-for-self, the difference between the being and the deter- 
 minateness or the negation is posited and equated ; Quality, 
 Otherwise-ness, Limit, as also Keality, Being-in-itself, To-be-to, 
 &c., are the imperfect in figurations of the negation into the Being, 
 so that in them the difference of both still lies at bottom. In that 
 in the Finitude, nevertheless, the negation has gone over into the 
 Infinitude, into the posited negation of the negation, it (the nega- 
 tion) is simple reference to self, and, therefore, in itself the equa- 
 tion with the Being, absolute determinate Being. 
 
 Being-for-self, is, firstly, immediate Being-for-self-ity, One. 
 
 Secondly, the One goes over into the plurality (many) of Ones, 
 Repulsion; which otherwise-ness of the One resolves itself in the 
 ideality of the same, Attraction. 
 
 Thirdly, the reciprocal determination of Eepulsion and Attrac- 
 tion, in which they sink together (collapse) into equilibrium, 
 passes over (and so also Quality, which in Being-for-self reached 
 its point) into Quantity. 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 295 
 
 A. 
 
 BEING-FOR-SELF AS SUCH. 
 
 The total notion of Being-for-self has yielded itself. It were 
 only now necessary to point out that the conception corresponds to 
 the notion, the conception which we attach to the expression, 
 Being-for-self, in order to be authorised to use said expression 
 for said notion. And so, indeed, it seems ; we say that something 
 is for itself, so far as it negates the otherwiseness, its reference 
 to and communion with other, so far as it has repelled these, 
 abstracted from them. The other is in it only as sublated, as its 
 moment ; Being-for-self consists in this, that it has so gone beyond 
 the limitation, its otherwiseness, that, as this negation, it is the 
 infinite return into itself. Consciousness contains as such in itself 
 the determination of Being-for-self, in that it represents to itself an 
 object which it feels, perceives, &c., that is, in that it has within 
 it the mtent of this object, which mtent is thus in the manner of 
 an ideel; consciousness is, in its very perception, in general in its 
 involution with its negative, with its other, by its own self. Being- 
 for-self is the polemical negative attitude towards the limiting 
 Other, and through this negation of it, it is a being reflected within 
 itself, although too beside this return of consciousness into itself 
 and the ideality of the object, the reality of this latter is also 
 preserved in that it is, at the same time, known as an external 
 object. Consciousness is thus appearant* or it is the Dualism on 
 one side to know of an object outer and other to it, and on the 
 other side to be for itself, to have the object ideel in it to be not 
 only by such other, but in it also by its own self. /Sfe^-conscious- 
 ness, on the other hand, is Being-for-self as completed and set ; 
 the side of reference to another, an outer object, is eliminated. 
 Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example of the presence of . 
 infinitude, always of an infinitude abstract, truly, but which, at 
 the same time, nevertheless, is of a quite other concrete nature 
 than Being-for-self in general, the infinitude of which latter has 
 still only a quite qualitative determinateness. 
 
 * That ' consciousness is thus erscheinend ' surely can only mean that it is thus 
 consciousness (not ^/-consciousness) presents itself as an object to itself. (New.) 
 
296 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 a. There-being and Being -for -self. 
 
 Being-for-self, as already intimated, is Infinitude sunk together 
 into simple Being ; it is There-being (has existency), so far as the 
 negative nature of infinitude, which is the negation of the nega- 
 tion, in the now, once for all, explicit form of the immediacy of 
 Being, is only as negation in general, as simple qualitative 
 determinateness. Being, in a determinateness such that it is 
 There-being, is, however, directly also diverse from Being-for-self, 
 which is only Being-for-self so far as its determinateness is said 
 infinite one ; still There-being is, at the same time, moment of the 
 Being-for-self ; for this latter contains certainly also Being that 
 has been subjected to negation. Thus the determinateness, which 
 in There-being as such is another, and Being -far-other, is bent back 
 into the infinite unity of the Being-for-self, and in Being-for-self 
 the moment of There-being is present as Being-for-One (or just 
 Being-for-a). 
 
 b. Being-for-One. 
 
 This moment expresses how the Finite is in its unity with the 
 Infinite, or is as Ideel. The Being-for-self has not negation in it 
 as a determinateness or limit, and not therefore as reference to a 
 There-being other from it. Though this moment has been 
 designated as Being-for-One, there is still not yet anything present 
 for which it were, the One not, whose moment it were. In 
 effect such is not yet fixed in Being-for-self; that for which 
 Something ( and there is here no Something ) were, what the 
 other side should at all be, is in like manner moment, just only 
 Being-for-One, not yet One. There is thus as yet an indistinguish- 
 ableness of the two sides, which two sides may flit before the 
 mind in the Being-for-One ; there is only a Being-for-Other, and 
 because it is only a Being-for-Other, this Being-for-Other is also 
 only Being-for-One ; there is only the one ideality of that for 
 which or in which there should be a determination as moment 
 and of that which should be moment in it. Thus Being-for-one 
 and Being-for-self form no veritable determinatenesses counter 
 each other. So far as the difference is assumed for a moment and 
 a Being-for-self-ity is spoken of here, this latter is the Being- 
 for-self-ity as sublatedness of the Otherwiseness, and this 
 (Being-for-self-ity) again refers itself to itself as to the sublated 
 other, and is therefore/or-cwe (for a); it refers itself in its other 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 297 
 
 only to itself. The Ideel is necessarily for-one, but it is not for 
 another; the one (the a), for which it is, is only itself. Ego, 
 therefore, the Spirit, or God, are Ideels, because they are infinite ; 
 but they are not ideel, as beents-for-self, diverse from that that 
 is foT-one (for a). For so they were only immediate, or, nearer^ 
 There-being and a Being-for-other ; because that which were for 
 them, were not themselves but another, if the moment of being 
 for-one attached not to them. God is therefore for himself, so far 
 as he is himself that that is for him. 
 
 Being-for-Self and Being-for-One are therefore not different 
 imports of Ideality, but are essential, inseparable moments of it. 
 
 REMAKE. 
 
 The Expression Was fiir eines ? 
 
 The apparently, at first sight, singular expression of our language 
 for the question of quality, what for a thing (was fiir ein Ding) 
 something is, gives prominence, in its reflexion-into-self, to the 
 moment considered here. This expression is in its origin idealistic, 
 seeing that it asks not, what this thing A is for another thing B, 
 not what this man is for another man ; but what this is for a 
 thing, for a man? so that this Being-for-one [say for a, or for a 
 one] has, at the same time, come back into this thing itself, into 
 this man himself; that that which is and that for which it. is, is 
 one and the same thing, an identity, such as the ideality must 
 also be considered to be. 
 
 The ideality attaches in the first instance to the sublated 
 determinations, as diverse from that in which they are sublated, 
 which again may be taken as the Eeal. In this way, however, 
 the Ideel is again one of the moments and the Real the other ; 
 but the Ideality is this, that both determinations are equally only 
 for-one, and pass valid only for-one, which one ideality is just thus 
 undistinguished Reality. In this sense, Self-consciousness, the 
 Spirit, God, is the Ideel, as infinite reference purely to self, Ego 
 is for Ego, both are the same thing ; Ego is twice named, but of 
 such a two, each is only for-one, ideel ; the Spirit is only for the 
 Spirit, God only for God, and only this unity is God, God as 
 Spirit. Self-consciousness, however, as consciousness passes into 
 the difference of itself and of another, or of its ideality in which it 
 is perceptive, and of its reality in that its perception has a deter- 
 
298 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ruinate mtent, which mtent has still the side to be known as the 
 unresolved negative, as There-being (an object). Nevertheless, to 
 call Thought, Spirit, God, only an Ideel, presupposes the position 
 on which finite There-being passes for the Eeal, and the Ideel or 
 the Being-for-one has only a one-sided sense. 
 
 In assigning the principle of Idealism, in a preceding Remark, 
 it was said that the decisive question in the case of any philosophy 
 was, how far has this principle been carried out in it ? As regards 
 the mode of carrying this out, a further remark may be made in 
 connexion with the category by which we stand. On this point 
 the question is, whether, beside the Being-for-self, finite existence 
 is not still left independently standing, moreover, again, whether 
 there be set in the Infinite itself the moment for-one, a bearing of 
 the ideel to its own self as ideel. Thus the Eleatic Being, or the 
 Spinozistic Substance, is only the abstract negation of all deter- 
 minateness, without ideality being set in it itself ; with Spinoza, 
 as will be considered again further on, infinitude is only the 
 absolute affirmation of a thing, and thus only unmoved unity ; 
 his substance, therefore, comes not even to the determination of 
 Being-for-self, much less to that of subject and Spirit. The 
 Idealism of the pure and lofty Malebranche is in itself more 
 explicit ; it contains the following ground-thoughts : As God 
 comprehends within himself all the eternal verities, the Ideas, 
 and Perfections of all things, in such wise that they are only his, 
 we for our part see them only in him ; God awakes in us our 
 sensations of objects through an action which has nothing 
 sensuous in it, in consequence of which we imagine that we 
 obtain not only the idea of the object, which idea represents its 
 truth, but the sensation also of its existence (' De la recherche de 
 la Verite", Eclairc. sur la nature des ide'es,' &c.). As then the eternal 
 verities and ideas (essentities) of things are in God, so also is their 
 Daseyn in God, ideel, and not an actual Daseyn ; though as our 
 objects, they are only for-one. This moment of explicit and 
 concrete idealism, which is wanting in Spinozism, is present here, 
 inasmuch as the absolute ideality is determined as knowing. 
 However deep and pure this idealism is, nevertheless the above 
 relations partly contain much that is indeterminate for thought, 
 while, again, their mtent (the matter they concern) is partly 
 quite immediately concrete (Sin, Eedemption, &c., appear in them 
 just directly so) ; the logical character of infinitude, which should of 
 necessity be its basal element is not completely carried out, and 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 299 
 
 so this lofty and genuine idealism, though certainly the product 
 of a pure speculative spirit, is not yet that of a pure speculative, 
 or veritably foundation-seeing and seeking, thought. 
 
 The Leibnitzian Idealism lies more within the limit of the 
 abstract notion. The Leibnitzian ideating principle, the Monad, 
 is essentially ideel. Ideation is a Being- for-self in which the 
 determinatenesses are not limits, and consequently not a There- 
 being, but only moments. Ideation is also, indeed, a more con- 
 crete determination [ Vorstellen comprehends in it Perception, &c.], 
 but has here no wider meaning than that of Ideality ; for with 
 Leibnitz even what is without any consciousness is a concipient, 
 a percipient. In this system, then, otherwise-ness is eliminated ; 
 spirit and body, or the monads in general, are not others for one 
 another, they limit not each other, have no influence on one 
 another; all relations in general fall away, which depend on a 
 Daseyn as ground and source. Any plurality in it is only an 
 ideel and inner one ; the monad in it (the plurality) remains 
 referred only to its own self ; the particulars develop themselves 
 within it, and are no references of it to others. What on the real 
 side is taken as there-beent reference of the monads to one another, 
 is an independent only simultaneous Becoming, shut in to the 
 inner being of each of them. That there is a plurality of monads, 
 that consequently they are also designated as others, nowise 
 affects the monads themselves ; this is the reflexion of a third 
 (party) that falls outside of them ; they are not in themselves others 
 to one another; the Being-for-sAf [the In-being] is kept pure, 
 without the side-by-side-there of a There-being [an Out-being, a 
 finite existence]. But just here lies the uncompletedness of this 
 system. The Monads are such concipients only in themselves (an 
 sich), or in God as the Monad of Monads, or just in the System. 
 Otherwiseness is still present ; let it fall into what it likes, into 
 the ideation (the reflexion) itself, or however the third be char- 
 acterised, which considers them as others, as a plurality. Their 
 plurality as existences is only excluded, and that only for the 
 moment, the monads are only set by abstraction as such that they 
 are non-others. If it is a third party that sets their otherness, it 
 is also a third party that withdraws the same ; this whole move- 
 ment, indeed, which makes them ideel, falls on the outside of 
 them. Should one remind us that this movement of thought 
 falls nevertheless itself only within an ideating monad, one must 
 be reminded as well that the very -intent of such thought is 
 
300 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 within its own self external to itself. Transition is made from the 
 unity of the absolute ideality (the monad of monads) immediately, 
 without understanding how ( through the figurate conception 
 of creation) to the category of the abstract (reference-less) plurality 
 of a finite existency, and from this equally abstractly back again 
 to the same unity. The ideality, the ideation in general, remains 
 something formell, as much so, even when elevated into or as 
 consciousness. As in the already adduced fancy of Leibnitz about 
 the magnetic needle, if it had consciousness, considering its 
 direction to the north as a determination of its own free will, 
 consciousness is only thought as one-sided form, which is indifferent 
 to its determination and mtent, so the ideality in the monads is 
 a form that remains external to the plurality. Ideality is to be 
 immanent to them, their nature is to be ideation; but their 
 relation is on one side their harmony, which falls not into their 
 existence itself, and so is a pre-appointed one (a pre-established 
 one) ; on the other side, this their Daseyn is not conceived as 
 Seyn-fur-Anderes, nor further as ideality, but is determined only 
 as abstract plurality ; the ideality of the plurality, and the further 
 determination of the units into harmony, is not immanent and 
 proper to this plurality itself. 
 
 Other idealism, as, for example, the Kantian and Fichtian, gets 
 not further than the To-be-to (Sollen) or the infinite progress, and 
 remains in the dualism of There-being and Being-for-self. In 
 these systems the thing-in-itself, or the infinite appulse, enters 
 immediately indeed into the Ego, and becomes only afor-it ; but still 
 departure is thus made from a free other-wise-ness, which perpetually 
 abides elsewhere as a negative Ansichseyn [as what is independent 
 in itself and negative to it (the Ego)]. The Ego, therefore, may be 
 characterised as Ideel, as Beent-for-self, as infinite reference to 
 self; but the Being-for-one is not completed to the disappearance 
 of said unknown whereabouts of a thing-in-itself, or of said direction 
 towards such unknown. 
 
 c. One. 
 
 Being-for-self is the simple unity of itself and of its moment, 
 the Being-for-one. There is only one determination present, the 
 reference-to-itself of the sublation. The moments of Being-for-self 
 have collapsed into indistinguishableness, which is immediacy or 
 being, but an immediacy which founds itself on the negating 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 301 
 
 which is set or posited as its determination. The Being-for-self is 
 thus Being-for-self-ifa/ / and in that in this immediacy its inner 
 import disappears, it is the quite abstract limit of itself, One, or 
 the One. 
 
 We may remark beforehand on the difficulty which lies in the 
 following exposition of the development of the One, and on the 
 reason of it. The moments which constitute the notion of the 
 One as Being-for-self go asunder in it ; they are, 1, Negation in 
 general ; 2, two negations ; 3, and so of a Two that are the same 
 thing ; 4, that are directly opposed ; 5, reference to self, identity 
 as such ; 6, negative reference and yet to self. These moments go 
 asunder here by this, that the form of Immediacy, of Being, comes in 
 in the case of Being-for-self as Being-for-self-ity ; through this im- 
 mediacy, each moment becomes set as a special beent determination; 
 and nevertheless they are equally inseparable. Of each determina- 
 tion thus its contrary must be equally said ; it is this contradic- 
 tion which, by the abstract tality of the moments, constitutes the 
 difficulty. 
 
 B. 
 
 ONE AND MANY. 
 
 The One is the simple reference of Being-for-self to itself, in 
 which reference its moments have collapsed into themselves, in 
 which therefore it has the form of immediacy, and its moments 
 therefore are now TViere-beents. 
 
 As reference of the negative to itself the One is a Determining, 
 and as reference to itself it is infinite ^//"-determining. But 
 because of the immediacy now again present, these differences are 
 no longer only as moments of one and the same self-determination, 
 but they are set at the same time as beent. The Ideality of the 
 Being-for-self as totality thus strikes round, firstly, into Reality, 
 and that, too, into the most fixed and abstract, as One. Being-for- 
 self is in the One the set unity of Being and There-being, as the 
 absolute union of the reference to other and of the reference to 
 self; but now there enters also the deter minateness of Being 
 counter the determination of the infinite negation, counter the Self- 
 determination, so that, what One is in itself, it is now only in it, 
 and consequently the negative is another as distinguished from it. 
 What shows itself as there "before it distinct from it, is its own Self- 
 determining ; its unity with itself thus as distinguished from itself 
 
302 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 has sunk into Reference, and as negative unity is negation of itself 
 as of another, exclusion of the One as of another from itself, the 
 One. 
 
 a. The One in its own self. 
 
 In its own self is the One on the whole ; this its Being is no 
 There-being, no determinateness as reference to other, not talifica- 
 tion ; it is this, that it has negated this circle of categories. The 
 One is consequently incapable of any becoming-otherwise ; it is 
 un-o^erable, unalterable. 
 
 It is undetermined, no longer so, however, as Being is so ; its 
 indeterminateness is the determinateness which reference to itself 
 is, an absolute determined-being, or absolute determinedness ; set 
 (settled) Being- within-self. As from its notion self-to-self-referent 
 negation it has the difference within it, a direction from itself 
 away out to other, which direction, however, is immediately turned 
 round, because from the moment of ^//-determining there is no 
 other to which to go, and so has gone back into itself. 
 
 In this simple immediation, the mediation of There-being and 
 Ideality even has disappeared, and so consequently also all diversity 
 and multiplicity. There is nothing in it (within it) ; this nothing, 
 the abstraction of the reference to self, is here distinguished from 
 the Being-within-self itself, it is a set issue (an eximplicatum), 
 because this Being-within-self is no longer the Simple (unit) of 
 the Something, but has the determination, that, as mediation, it is 
 concrete ; as abstract, however, it is indeed identical with One, 
 but diverse from its determination (qualification). This nothing 
 so-determined and as in a one (in one or just in a) is the nothing 
 as vacuum, as void. The void is thus the Quality of the One in 
 its immediacy. 
 
 b. The One and the Void. 
 
 The One is the Void as the abstract reference of the negation to 
 itself. But from the simple immediacy, the affirmative Being of 
 the One which is still present, the void as the Nothing is directly 
 different, and in that they stand in one reference, of the One itself 
 namely, their difference is express or explicit; but different from 
 what is Beent (the Beent), the nothing as void is out of (outside 
 of) the beent One. 
 
 The Being-for-self, in that in this manner it determines itself as 
 the One and the Void, has again reached a state of There-being 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 303 
 
 (existency). The One and the Empty have, as their common 
 simple basis, the negative reference to self. The moments of the 
 Being-for-self come out of this unity, become mutually external; 
 in that the quality of Being comes in through the simple unity of 
 the moments, it [this quality of Being] sets itself to one side, ancf 
 so down to There-being [mere finite existency], and therein its 
 other quality, the negation in general, places itself opposite, 
 similarly as There-being [an existency] of the Nothing, as the 
 Void. 
 
 KEMARK. 
 
 The One in this form of There-being is the stage of the category, 
 which with the Ancients presented itself as the Atomistic principle, 
 according to which the Essentity of Things is, the Atom and the 
 Void (TO aTOjmov or ra aroyua KOI TO Kevov). Abstraction, advanced 
 to this form, has acquired a greater determinateness than the 
 Being of Parmenides and the Becoming of Heraclitus. However 
 high it places itself in that it makes this simple determinateness 
 of the One and the Void the principle of all things, reduces the 
 infinite variety of the world to this simple antithesis, and makes 
 bold out of this latter to know the former, no less easy is it for 
 crude figurate conception to set up for itself, in its reflexion, here 
 Atoms, and there, just alongside, an Empty. It is no wonder, 
 therefore, that the atomistic principle has at all times maintained 
 itself ; the equally trivial and external relation of Composition, that 
 requires to be added in order to attain the semblance of a Con- 
 crete and of a variety, is equally popular with the atoms them- 
 selves and the void. The One and the Void is Being-for-self, the 
 highest qualitative Being-within-self, fallen into complete exter- 
 nality ; the immediacy or the being of the One, because it is the 
 negation of all otherwiseness, is set as no longer determinable and 
 alterable ; in view of its absolute reserve and repulsiveness, there- 
 fore, all determination, variety, connexion, remains for it but a 
 directly external reference. 
 
 The atomistic principle nevertheless, remained not in this 
 externality with its first thinkers, but besides its abstraction it 
 had also a speculative burden in this, that the vacuum was 
 recognised as the source of motion ; which is quite another 
 relation of the atom and the void than the mere side by side of 
 these, and their indifference mutually. That the void is the 
 source of movement, has not the unimportant sense that some- 
 
304 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 thing can only move itself in a void and not in a space already 
 filled, as in this latter there would be found no more place ; in 
 which sense the void would be only the presupposition or condi- 
 tion, not the ground (ratio) of motion ; just as here also movement 
 itself is presupposed as already existent, and the essential, a 
 ground of it, is forgotten. The view, that the void is the ground 
 of motion, contains the deeper thought that in the negative 
 generally there lies the ground of the Becoming, of the unrest of 
 self-movement; in which sense, however, the negative is to be 
 taken as the veritable negativity of the infinite. The void is 
 ground of movement only as the negative reference of the One to 
 its negative, to the One, i.e., to its own self, which, nevertheless, is 
 set as a There-beent (as a Daseyn). 
 
 In other respects, however, further determinations of the 
 ancients respecting the shape and position of the atoms, the 
 direction of their movement, are arbitrary and external enough, 
 and stand withal in direct contradiction to the fundamental 
 determination of the atom. With the atom, this principle of the 
 hightest externality, and consequently also of the highest notion- 
 lessness, physical science suffers [is at fault] in its molecules, its 
 particles ; as is also the case with that political science which 
 starts from the single will of the individuals. 
 
 c. Many Ones. 
 KEPULSION. 
 
 The One and the Void constitutes Being-for-self in its nearest 
 or first There-being : Each of these moments has negation for its 
 determination, and is at the same time set as a There-being. As 
 regards the former, the one and the void is the reference of the 
 negation to the negation as of another to its other ; the one is the 
 negation in the form of Being, the empty the negation in the form 
 of non-being. But the one is essentially only reference to itself 
 as referent negation, i.e., is itself what the empty out of it is 
 supposed to be. Both, however, are also set as an affirmative 
 There-being, the one as the Being-for-self as such, the other as 
 indeterminate There-being generally, and each as referent to the 
 other as to another There-being. The Being-for-self of the One is, 
 nevertheless, essentially the Ideality of the There-being and of 
 the Other; it refers itself not as to another, but only to itself. 
 But in that the Being-for-self is fixed as One (an a), as a Beent for 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 305 
 
 self, as immediately existent, its negative reference to self is at the 
 same time reference to a Beent and as this reference is at the 
 same time negative, that, to which it refers itself, remains deter- 
 mined as a There-being and another ; as essentially reference to its 
 own self, the other is not the indeterminate negation as a void, but- 
 is similarly one. The One is thus a Becoming of (rather to) a 
 plurality of Ones. 
 
 Properly, however, this is not quite a Becoming ; for Becoming 
 is a going over from Being into Nothing ; One, here on the con- 
 trary, becomes only One. One, as referred, implies the negative 
 as reference, has the negative therefore itself in it. Instead of 
 Becoming, there is therefore, firstly, present the proper immanent 
 reference of the One ; and, secondly, so far as this reference is 
 negative and the One at the same time beent, it is itself that the 
 one drives off from itself. The negative reference of the One to 
 itself is Repulsion. 
 
 This Kepulsion, thus as position of a plurality of Ones but 
 through One itself, is the special coming out of itself of the One, 
 but to such ones out of it as are themselves only One. This is 
 the repulsion in accordance with the notion, that repulsion which 
 is in itself. The second repulsion is different from this one, and 
 is that which floats, in the first instance, before the conception of 
 outer reflexion, as not the production of the Ones, but only as a 
 mutual distance of presupposed Ones already there. It is to be 
 seen now, then, how said in-itself-loQeni, repulsion determines itself 
 into the second, the external one. 
 
 First of all, we have to fix for certain, what characters the 
 many Ones as such possess. The Becoming to the Many, or the 
 becoming-produced of the Many, disappears immediately, as a 
 becoming-se (implied) ; the produced Ones are Ones, not for other, 
 but refer themselves infinitely to themselves. The one repels 
 only itself from itself, therefore becomes not, but already is ; what 
 is conceived as the repelled one is likewise a One, a Beent ; repel- 
 ling and being-repelled attaches in the same manner to both, and 
 constitutes no difference. 
 
 The Ones are thus prae-set (presupposed) as counter one another; 
 set (implied) through the repulsion of the One from itself; prae 
 (of the ^-supposed), set as not set ; their being-set is sublated, 
 they are Beents counter one another, as referent of themselves 
 only to themselves. 
 
 The plurality appears thus not as an Otherwiseness, but as a 
 
 u 
 
306 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 determination perfectly external to the One. One, in that it 
 repels itself, remains reference to itself ; as so also that one that is 
 taken at first as repelled. That the Ones are other counter each 
 other, are held together in the determinateness of plurality, nowise 
 concerns, therefore, the Ones. If the plurality were a reference of 
 the Ones themselves to one another, they would limit each other, 
 and would have a Being-for-other affirmatively in them. Their 
 reference and this they have through their virtual unity as it 
 is here set, is determined as none; it is again the previously- 
 determined Void. This void is their limit, but a limit external to 
 them, in which they are not to be for one another. The limit is 
 that in which what are limited as well are as are not ; but the void 
 is determined as the pure non-being, and only this constitutes their 
 limit. 
 
 The repulsion of the One from itself is the Explication of that 
 which in itself the One is ; but Infinitude, as laid asunder (out- 
 of-one-another, explicated) is here Infinitude come out of itself, but 
 it is come out of itself through the immediacy of the Infinite, of 
 the One. This Infinitude is quite as much a simple reference of 
 the One to One, as rather the absolute referencelessness of the 
 One ; the former as according to the simple affirmative reference 
 of the One to itself, the latter as according to the same reference 
 as negative. Or the plurality of the One is the own proper setting 
 of the One ; the One is nothing but the negative reference of the 
 One to itself, and this reference, therefore the One itself, is the 
 Many Ones. But just thus the plurality is directly external to 
 the One; for the One is just the sublation of the Otherwiseness, 
 the repulsion is its reference to self, and simple equality with 
 itself. The plurality of the Ones is Infinitude as unconcerned, 
 self-producent Contradiction. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The Leibnitzian Idealism has been already noticed. We may 
 add here, that, from the ideating monad onwards, which monad 
 is determined as beent-for-self, it advanced only to Eepulsion as 
 just considered, and indeed only to plurality as such that in it the 
 ones are each only for itself, indifferent to the There-being and 
 Being-for-self of any others, or as such that in it in general others 
 are not in any way for the one. The monad is per se the com- 
 pletely isolated world; it requires none of the others ; but this 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 307 
 
 inner variety which it has in its ideation alters nothing in its 
 determination as beent only for itself. The Leibnitzian idealism 
 takes. up plurality immediately as one given, and comprehends it 
 not as a repulsion of the monad ; it has plurality, therefore, only 
 on the side of its abstract externality. The atomistic has not the 
 notion of ideality ; it takes the one not as such that it compre- 
 hends within itself both moments, the Being-for-self and the Being- 
 for-it, not therefore as an ideel, but only as simple, dry Being-for- 
 self-ity. But it goes beyond the mere indifferent plurality ; the 
 atoms come into further mutual determination, though properly 
 only in an inconsequent manner ; whereas, on the contrary, in the 
 indifferent independency of the monads, plurality remains as fixed 
 and immovable ground-determination, so that their reference falls 
 only into the Monad of Monads, or into the reflecting Philosopher. 
 
 C. 
 
 EEPULSION AND ATTRACTION. 
 a. Exclusion of the One. 
 
 The many ones are leents; their There-being or reference to one 
 another is non-reference, it is external to them ; the abstract 
 void. But they themselves are now this negative reference to 
 themselves (to one another), as to,beent others; the exhibited 
 contradiction, infinitude set (expressed) in immediacy of being. 
 Thus now the repulsion finds that immediately before it, which is 
 repelled by it. It is in this determination Exclusion; the one 
 repels from itself the many ones only as unproduced by it, as non- 
 set by it. This repelling is, reciprocally and universally, relatively 
 limited by the Being of the Ones. 
 
 The plurality is in the first instance not set otherwiseness 
 (not expressly so determined) ; the limit is only the void, 
 only that in which the ones are not. But they also are in the 
 limit ; they are in the void, or their Eepulsion is their common 
 Reference. 
 
 This reciprocal repulsion is the set (express) There-being of the 
 many ones ; it is not their Being-for-self, so that they were only 
 distinguished in a third something as a many or a much, but it is 
 their own distinguishing, and preservative of them. They negate 
 themselves (each other) mutually, set one another as such that 
 
308 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 they are only for-one. But they negate just as much, at the same 
 time, this, that they are only far-one; they repel this their ideality 
 and are. Thus the moments are sundered, which are directly 
 united in the ideality. The one is in its Being-for-self also for- 
 one, but this one, for which it is, is itself; its distinction from 
 itself is immediately sublated. But in the plurality the distin- 
 guished one has a being ; the Being-for-One, as it is determined in 
 the exclusion, is therefore a Being-for-other. Each becomes thus 
 repelled by another, sublated and made a one that is not for itself, 
 lout, for-one, and that another one. 
 
 The Being-for-self of the many ones shows itself, therefore, as 
 their self-preservation, through the mediation of their mutual 
 repulsion, in which they mutually sublate themselves, and set the 
 others as a mere Being-for-other ; but, at the same time, this self- 
 preservatiori consists in this, to repel this ideality, and to set the 
 ones not to be for another. This self-preservation of the ones 
 through their negative reference to one another is, however, rather 
 their dissolution. 
 
 The ones not only are, but they conserve themselves through 
 their reciprocal exclusion. Firstly, now, that by which they should 
 keep firm hold of their diversity counter their becoming negated 
 is their Being, and that, too, their Being-m-seZ/" counter their refer- 
 ence to other ; this Being-in-self is, that they are ones. But all 
 are this; they are in their Being-in-self the same thing, instead of 
 having therein the fixed point of their diversity. Secondly, their 
 There-being and their mutual relation, i.e., their setting themselves 
 as ones, is a reciprocal negating ; this, however, is likewise one and 
 the same determination of them all, through which then they 
 rather set themselves as identical ; as by this, that they are in 
 themselves the same thing, their ideality which was to be as resultant 
 through others is their own, and they therefore just as little repel 
 it. They are thus in their being and in their setting only one affir- 
 mative unity. 
 
 This consideration of the ones that (in both of their determina- 
 tions, as well so far as they are, as so far as they mutually refer), 
 they show themselves as only one and the same thing and indis- 
 tinguishable is our comparison. It is, however, to be seen what, 
 in their mutual reference itself, is set (express) in them. They are, 
 this is in this reference presupposed, and are only so far as they 
 mutually negate themselves, and repel at the same time from 
 themselves this their ideality, their negatedness, i.e., so far as they 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 309 
 
 negate this mutual negating. But they are only so far as they 
 negate, and so, in that this their negating is negated, their 'being 
 is negated. It is true, in that they are, they were not negated by 
 this negating, it is only an externality for them ; this negating of 
 the other rebounds off from them and reaches only touchingly 
 their surface. But again only through the negating of the others 
 do they turn back into themselves ; they are only as this media- 
 tion, this their return is their self-preservation and their Being- 
 for-self. In that again their negating effectuates nothing, through 
 the resistance which these beents, as such or as negating, offer, they 
 return not back into themselves, maintain themselves not and are 
 not. 
 
 The consideration was previously made that the ones are the 
 same thing ; that each of them is one, just like the other. This is 
 not only our reference, an external "bringing together, but the repul- 
 sion is itself reference, the one excluding the ones refers itself to 
 them, the ones, i.e., to its own self. The negative relation of the 
 ones to one another is thus only a going together with self. This 
 identity into which their repulsion goes over is the sublation of 
 their diversity and externality, which, as excludents, they were 
 rather mutually to maintain. 
 
 This setting of themselves on the part of the many ones into a 
 single One is Attraction. 
 
 KKMAK&. 
 
 The Unity of the One and the Many. 
 
 Self-dependency pushed to the point of the beent-for-self unit is 
 that abstract formell self-dependence which is self-destructive ; the 
 extremest, stubbornest error which takes itself for the most perfect 
 truth ; appearant in concreter forms as abstract freewill, as pure 
 Ego, and then further as the Bad. It is that freewill which so 
 misunderstands itself, as to set its substantial being in this ab- 
 straction, and in this Being-by-self flatters itself purely to win 
 itself. This self-dependency is more definitely the error to regard 
 that as negative, and to maintain oneself against that as negative, 
 which on the contrary is one's very being. It is thus the negative 
 bearing to one's own self which, in that it would win its own very 
 being, destroys the same, and this its act is only the manifestation 
 of the nullity of this act. Eeconciliation is the recognition of 
 
310 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that against which the negative bearing goes as rather one's true 
 being, and is only as a leaving-off from the negativity of one's 
 Being-i'or-self instead of persisting in it. 
 
 It is an ancient saying, that the One is Many, and in especial 
 that the Many is One. As regards this the observation may be 
 repeated, that the truth of the One and the Many expressed in 
 propositions appears in an inadequate form, that this truth is to 
 be understood and expressed only as a Becoming, as a process, 
 repulsion and attraction, not as Being, in the way in which in a 
 proposition it is set as quiescent unity. The dialectic of Plato 
 in the Parmenides concerning the deduction of the Many from the 
 One, namely from the proposition, One is, has been already 
 noticed and remarked upon. The inner dialectic of the notion has 
 been assigned ; the easiest way is to take the dialectic of the 
 proposition, that the Many is One, as external reflexion ; and 
 external it may well be here, seeing that the object also, the 
 Many, is what is mutually external. This comparison of the 
 Many with one another gives at once the fact that the one is ab- 
 solutely characterised just as the other is ; each is one, each is one 
 of the many, is excluding the others ; so that they are absolutely 
 only the same thing, or absolutely there is only one determination 
 present. This is the fact, and there needs only to take up this 
 simple fact. The obstinacy of the understanding stubborns itself 
 against taking this up, because before it, and rightly too, there 
 flits also the difference ; but this difference is as little excluded 
 because of said fact, as certainly said fact despite said difference 
 exists. One might, as it were, console understanding as regards 
 its simple apprehension of the fact of the difference by assuring it 
 that the difference will presently come in again. 
 
 b.. The one One of Attraction. 
 
 Repulsion is the self-severing of the One firstly into Many, the 
 negative bearing of which is powerless, because they mutually 
 presuppose one another as Beents: it (Kepulsion) is only the 
 To-be-to (Sollen) of Ideality : this latter, however, is realised in 
 Attraction. Eepulsion goes over into Attraction, the many Ones 
 into one One. Both, repulsion and attraction, are at first hand 
 different, the former as the reality of the Ones, the latter as their 
 set ideality. Attraction refers itself thus to repulsion, so that it 
 has this latter as its presupposition. Eepulsion furnishes the 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 311 
 
 material for attraction. Were there no Ones, there would be 
 nothing to attract ; the conception of lasting attraction, of the 
 consumption of the Ones, presupposes an equally lasting production 
 of the Ones ; the sensuous conception of attraction in space holds 
 the stream of the attracted Ones to last ; in place of the atoms 
 which disappear in the attracting punctum, there comes forward 
 another Many out of the void, and on, if it is desired, ad infinitum. 
 If attraction were conceived as accomplished, i.e., the Many brought 
 to the point of a single One, there would only be an inert One, 
 there would no longer be any attraction present. The ideality 
 there-been t in attraction has still in it the character of the 
 negation of itself the many Ones to which it is the reference, 
 and attraction is inseparable from repulsion. 
 
 Attraction attaches, in the first instance, equally to each of the 
 many Ones as immediately present Ones ; none has a preference 
 over the other : there seems thus an equilibrium in the attraction 
 present, properly an equilibrium of attraction and of repulsion, 
 and a dull repose without there-been t ideality. But there can be 
 no speaking here of a preference of any such one over another, 
 which would be to presuppose a determinate difference between 
 them the attraction rather is the setting of a present indis- 
 tinguishableness of the Ones. Only attraction itself is the setting 
 of a One different from the rest ; they are only the immediate 
 Ones which through repulsion are to conserve themselves ; but 
 through their set negation there Arises the One of attraction 
 which therefore is determined as the mediated One ; the One that 
 is set as One. The first Ones, as immediate Ones, turn not in 
 their ideality back into themselves, but have this (ideality) in 
 another. 
 
 The one One, however, is the realised ideality that is set in the 
 One ; it is attractive through the mediation of repulsion ; it implies 
 this mediation within itself as its determination. It absorbs thus 
 the attracted Ones not into itself as into a point, i.e., it does not 
 abstractly sublate them. In that it implies repulsion in its deter- 
 mination, this latter retains the Ones as Many at the same time in 
 it ; it brings, so to speak, by its attracting, something for (before) 
 itself, it gains an extension or a filling. There is thus in it unity 
 of repulsion and attraction in general. 
 
312 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 c. The reference (relation) of Repulsion and Attraction. 
 
 The difference of One and Many has determined itself as the 
 difference of their mutual Reference, which has divided itself into 
 two references, Repulsion and Attraction, of which each, in the 
 first instance, stands self-dependently out of the other, still so that 
 they essentially cohere. The as yet indeterminate unity of these 
 has to yield itself more closely. 
 
 Repulsion, as the ground-determination of the One, appears first, 
 and as immediate, like its Ones which, produced by it, are still at 
 the same time set as immediate. The repulsion appears, thus, 
 indifferent to the attraction, which adds itself externally to it as 
 thus presupposed. On the other hand, attraction is not presup- 
 posed by repulsion ; so that in the setting and being of this latter 
 the former appears to have no share, i.e., so that repulsion is not 
 already in it the negation of itself, the Ones are not already in 
 them negated. In this way, we have repulsion abstractly per 
 se ; as similarly attraction has, counter the Ones as Beents, 
 the side of an immediate There-being, and comes to them quite 
 as another. 
 
 If we take accordingly bare repulsion thus per se, it is the 
 dissipation of the many ones into the indefinite, beyond the 
 sphere of repulsion itself; for it is this, to negate the reference of 
 the many to one another ; referencelessness is their they being 
 abstractly taken determination. Repulsion, however, is not 
 simply the Void ; the Ones as referenceless are not repellent, not 
 excludent, as their determination requires. Repulsion is, though 
 negative, still essentially reference; the mutual repulsion and 
 flight is not the freeing from that which is repelled and fled 
 from, the excludent stands still in connexion with that which is 
 excluded by it. This moment of reference, however, is attraction, 
 and so consequently in repulsion itself ; it is the negating of that 
 abstract repulsion according to which the Ones were only self-to- 
 self referent Beents, non-excludent. 
 
 In that, however, departure is taken from the repulsion of the 
 there-beent Ones,- and so also attraction is set as coming externally 
 to them, both are with their inseparableness still kept asunder 
 as diverse determinations ; it has yielded itself, however, that not 
 merely repulsion is presupposed by attraction, but just as much 
 also there takes place the counterreference (coup) of repulsion to 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 313 
 
 attraction , and the former has just as much its presupposition 
 in the latter. 
 
 By this determination they are inseparable, and at the same 
 time they are determined as To-le-to and Limitation, each counter 
 the other. Their To-be-to is their abstract determinateness as ~of 
 Beents-in-themselves, which determinateness, however, is withal 
 positively directed beyond itself, and refers itself to the other deter- 
 minateness, and thus by means of the oilier as other each is ; their 
 self-dependency consists in this, that in this mediacy of being 
 they are set as another determining for one another : Repulsion as 
 setting of the Many, Attraction as setting of the One, the latter at 
 the same time as negation of the Many, and the former as negation 
 of their ideality in the One, so that only by means of repulsion 
 attraction is attraction ; and only by means of attraction, repulsion is 
 repulsion. That therein, however, the mediation with self through 
 other is rather in effect negated, and each of these determinations 
 is mediation of itself with itself, this yields itself from their nearer 
 consideration, and takes them back to the unity of their notion. 
 
 In the first place, that each presupposes itself, refers itself in 
 its presupposition only to itself, this is already present in the 
 mutual bearing of Repulsion and Attraction while still only 
 relative. 
 
 The relative repulsion is the reciprocal repulsion of the many 
 ones which are conceived as finding themselves immediate, and 
 already in existence there. But that there are many ones, is repul- 
 sion itself; the presupposition which it was supposed to have is 
 only its own setting. Further, the determination of being which, 
 in addition to their being set, was supposed to attach to the Ones 
 by which they were prae or there beforehand belongs likewise 
 to the repulsion. The repelling is that whereby the ones manifest 
 and maintain themselves as ones, whereby they as such are. 
 Their being is the repulsion itself ; it is thus not a There-being 
 relative to another, but relates itself entirely only to its own self. 
 
 The attraction is the setting of the One as such, of the real One, 
 against which the many in There-being are determined as only 
 ideel and disappearant. Attraction thus at once presupposes 
 itself sets itself as out before to be ideellement in the form, that 
 is, of the other ones, which otherwise are to be Beent-for-Self and 
 Repellent-for-(Mers, and so also therefore for an attracting some- 
 thing. Against this determination of repulsion they attain ideality 
 not only through relation to attraction, but it is presupposed, it is 
 
314 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the in-itself-beent ideality of the Ones, in that they as Ones that 
 conceived as attracting included are one and the same thing and 
 undistinguished from one another. 
 
 This its-own-self-prae-Setting (its own presupposition) of both 
 elements, each per se, is further this, that each contains in itself 
 the other as moment The Self-presupposing generally is in one 
 the setting itself as the negative of itself; Kepulsion, and what is 
 so presupposed is the same thing as what presupposes Attraction. 
 That each in itself is only moment, is the transition of each out of 
 itself into the other, is to negate itself in itself, and to set itself as 
 the other of itself. In that the One as such is the coming-asunder- 
 from-itself, it is itself only this, to set itself as its other, as the 
 Many, and the Many are only equally this, to fall together into them- 
 selves and to set themselves as their other, as the One, and just in 
 it only to refer themselves to themselves, each in its other just to 
 continue itself there are thus also present, but virtually and 
 unseparated, the coming-asunder-from-self (Eepulsion) and the 
 setting-of-self -as-one (Attraction). It is set, however, in respect of 
 the relative repulsion and attraction, i.e., those whereby immediate 
 there-beent ones are presupposed, that each itself is this negation of 
 it in it, and so also consequently the continuity of it into its other. 
 The repulsion of there-beent Ones is the self-conservation of the 
 one by means of the mutual repulsion of the others, so that (1) 
 the other ones are negated in it, the side of its There-being or of 
 its Being-for-other, but this side is just thus attraction as the 
 Ideality of the Ones and that (2) the One is in itself without 
 reference to the Others ; but not only is the In-itself as such long 
 since gone over into the Being-for-self, but in itself, by very deter- 
 mination, the one is said Becoming of Many. The Attraction of 
 there-beent Ones is the ideality of the same and the setting of the 
 One, in which thus it (attraction), as negation and as production 
 of the One, sublates itself as setting of the one is in it the nega- 
 tive of itself, Kepulsion. 
 
 With this the evolution of Being-for-self is completed, and 
 arrived at its result. The One as referring itself infinitely, i.e., as 
 set negation of the negation to its own self, is the mediation or 
 process, that it repels from itself itself as its absolute ('i.e., abstract) 
 otherwiseness (the Many), and, in that it refers itself to this its 
 non-being, negatively, as sublating it, is just therein only the 
 reference to its own self ; and One is only this Becoming, or such 
 that in it the determination that it begins, i.e., that it is set as 
 
QUALITY TKANSLATED. 315 
 
 Immediate, as Bee'nt and that likewise as result it has restored 
 itself as One, i.e., the equally immediate, excludent One : this deter- 
 mination has disappeared ; the process which it [the One] is, sets 
 and implies it always only as a thing sublated. The sublating, 
 determined at first only as relative sublating, reference to other 
 There-beent-ity, which reference is thus itself a different repulsion 
 and attraction, demonstrates itself just thus to go over into the 
 infinite reference of mediation through negation of the external 
 references of Immediates and There-beents, and to have as result 
 just that Becoming which in the retentionlessness of its moments 
 is the collapse, or rather the going together with itself into simple 
 immediacy. This Being, in the form which it has now attained, is 
 Quantity. 
 
 To review shortly the moments of this Transition of Quality 
 into Quantity : The Qualitative has for its ground-determination 
 being and immediacy, in which immediacy the limit and the 
 determiuateness is so identical with the being of the something 
 that the something itself with its alteration (that of the deterinin- 
 ateness) disappears ; thus set it is determined as finity. Because of 
 the immediacy of this unity, in which the difference has disappeared, 
 which difference, however, is still in itself there (in the unity of 
 Being and Nothing), this difference falls as otherwiseness in general 
 out o/said unity. This reference to other contradicts the immediacy 
 in which the qualitative determinateness is reference to self. This 
 otherwiseness sublates itself in the infinitude of Being-for-self, 
 which realises the difference (which, in the negation of the nega- 
 tion, it has in it and within itself) as one and many and as their 
 references, and has raised the Qualitative into its veritable unity, 
 i.e., into the unity that is set as no longer immediate but as self- 
 commediating unity. 
 
 This unity is thus (a) Being, only as affirmative, i.e., immediacy 
 mediated with itself through the negation of the negation, Being 
 is set as the unity that interpenetrates and pervades its own 
 Determinatenesses, Limit, &c., which are set as sublated in it : (/3) 
 There-being ; it is in this determination negation or determinate- 
 ness as moment of the affirmative Being, no longer immediate, 
 nevertheless, but reflected into itself, referent of self, not to other, 
 but to self ; what is simpliciter what is determined in itself the 
 One; the otherwiseness as such is itself Being-for-self: (y) Being- 
 for-self, as that Being that continues itself all through the deter- 
 minateness, and in which the One and 
 
316 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ness is itself set as sublated. The One is at the same time as 
 gone out beyond itself and determined as Unity, the One conse- 
 quently, the directly determined Limit, set as the Limit, which is 
 none, which is in or by Being, but to which Being is indifferent, 
 or which is indifferent to Being. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The Kantian construction of matter by means offerees attracting and repelling. 
 
 Attraction and Kepulsion, as is well known, are usually regarded 
 as forces. It will be proper to compare this definition of them, 
 and the dependent relations, with the notions which have come 
 out in their regard. In the conception alluded to (of forces) they 
 are considered as self-dependent, so that they refer themselves not 
 through their nature to each other ; i.e., that each is not to be 
 considered only a moment transient into its contrary, but as 
 immovably and persistently opposed to the other. They are 
 further conceived as coalescing in a Third, Matter ; so, however, 
 that this Becoming into One [the coalescence] is not considered as 
 their truth, but each is rather a First [a prime], and a Beent-in-and- 
 for-self [a self-dependent], while matter or affections of it are set 
 and produced by them. When it is said, that Matter has within 
 itself the forces, there is understood by this unity of them a con- 
 nexion, but such that in it still they are at the same time presup- 
 posed as existent in themselves and free from each other. 
 
 Kant, as is known, constructed matter out of the repulsive and 
 attractive forces, or at least, as he expresses himself, brought forward 
 the metaphysical elements of this construction. It will not be 
 without interest to view this construction more closely. This 
 tnetaphysical exposition of an object which seemed not only itself, 
 but in its properties to belong only to experience, is for one part 
 worthy of notice in this, that it, as an essay of (experiment with) 
 the Notion, has at least given the impulse to the more recent 
 philosophy of Nature, that philosophy which makes Nature its 
 scientific ground, not as it is only sensibly given to be seen, but 
 which construes its principles from the absolute Notion ; for another 
 part also because stand has been frequently taken by said Kantian 
 construction, and it has been considered a philosophical begin- 
 ning and foundation of physics. 
 
 Such an existence as sensuous matter, is, indeed, no object of 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 317 
 
 logic, just as little so as space and the forms of space. But there 
 underlie the repulsive and attractive forces, so far as they are 
 regarded as forces of sensuous matter, these same pure determina- 
 tions of the One and the Many and their mutual references, which 
 have been just considered, and which I have named Eepulsion and 
 Attraction because these names present themselves at nearest. 
 
 Kant's procedure in the deduction of matter from these forces, 
 named by him a construction, deserves not, when considered close, 
 this name, unless every kind of reflexion, even the analytic, be name- 
 able construction's indeed for that matter later Nature-philosophers 
 have given the name of construction to the most vapid raisonnement 
 and the most groundless melange of an arbitrary imagination and a 
 thought-less reflexion, which specially employed and everywhere 
 applied the so-called Factors of Attraction and Kepulsion. 
 
 Kant's procedure is at bottom analytic, and not constructive. 
 He presupposes the conception of matter, and then asks what 
 forces are necessary to produce its presupposed properties. Thus, 
 therefore, on one side, he requires an Attractive force, because 
 through Repulsion alone without Attraction no matter could properly 
 exist. ( ( Anfangsgr. der Naturwissensch,' S. 53, f.) On the other 
 side he derives Repulsion equally from matter, and alleges as 
 ground of this, because we conceive of matter as impenetrable, and 
 this because matter presents itself to the sense of touch, through 
 which sense it manifests itself to us, in such a determination. 
 Repulsion therefore is, further, at once thought in the very notion 
 of matter, because it is just immediately given with it; but Attrac- 
 tion, on the contrary, is annexed to it through inferences. There 
 underlies these inferences, however, what has just been said, 
 namely, that a matter which had only repulsive force would not 
 exhaust what we conceive by matter. This, as is plain, is the 
 procedure of a cognition, reflective of experience, a procedure 
 which first of all perceives .peculiarities in the phenomena, places 
 these as basis, and for the so-called explanation of them, assumes 
 correspondent elements or forces which are to be supposed to pro- 
 duce said peculiarities of the phenomena. 
 
 In regard to the difference spoken of as to how the repulsive 
 force and as to how the attractive force is found by cognition in 
 matter, Kant observes, further, that the attractive force belongs 
 quite as much to the notion of Matter although it is not contained 
 in it. Kant italicises this last expression. It is impossible to 
 see, however, what is the distinction which is intended to be 
 
318 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 conveyed here ; for what belongs to the notion of a thing must 
 veritably be contained in this thing. 
 
 What makes the difficulty, and gives occasion to this empty 
 expedient, consists in this, that Kant one-sidedly, and quite 
 beforehand, reckons in the notion of matter only that property of 
 Impenetrability, which we are supposed to perceive by feeling, on 
 which account the repulsive force, as the holding-off of another 
 from itself, is to be supposed as immediately given. But again, if 
 matter is to be considered as incapable of being there, of existing, 
 without attraction, the ground for the assertion of this must be a 
 conception of matter derived from sensible experience ; attraction, 
 therefore, must equally be findable in such experience. It is 
 indeed easy to perceive that Matter, besides its Being-for-self, 
 which sublates the Being-for-other (offers resistance), has also a 
 connectedness of what is for itself [of its parts, that is, identified 
 with itself], extension and retention in space in solidity a very 
 fast retention. Explanatory physical science demands for the 
 tearing asunder, &c., of a body a force which shall be stronger than 
 the mutual attraction of its particles. From this fact, reflexion 
 may quite as directly deduce the force of attraction, or assume it 
 to be given, as it did in the case of repulsion. In effect, when 
 the Kantian reasonings from which attraction is to be deduced 
 are looked at (' The proof of the theorem that the possibility of 
 matter requires a force of attraction as second fundamental force,' 
 loc. cit.\ they are found to contain nothing but that, with mere 
 Eepulsion, matter would not exist in space. Matter being pre- 
 supposed as occupying space, continuity is ascribed to it, as ground 
 of which continuity there is assumed an attracting force. 
 
 Granting now, then, to such so-called construction of matter, at 
 most an analytic merit detracted from, nevertheless, by the 
 imperfect exposition the fundamental thought is still highly to 
 be prized the cognising of matter out of these two opposed char- 
 acters as its producing forces. Kant's special industry here is the 
 banishment of the vulgar mechanical mode of conception, which 
 takes its stand by the single character, the impenetrability, the 
 Beent-for-self punctuality, and reduces the opposed character, the 
 connexion of matter within itself, or of several matters mutually 
 (these again being regarded as particular ones), to something 
 merely external ; the mode of conception which, as Kant says, 
 will not admit any moving forces but by Pressure and Push, 
 i.e., but by influence from without. This externality of cognition 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 319 
 
 always presupposes motion as already externally existent in 
 matter, and has no thought of considering it something internal, 
 and of comprehending it itself in matter, which latter is just thus 
 assumed per se as motionless and inert. This position has only 
 before it common mechanics, and not immanent and free motion. 
 Although Kant removes this exernality in that he converts 
 attraction, the mutual reference of material parts, so far as these 
 are taken as mutually separated, or just of matter generally in its 
 Out-of-its-self-ness, into a force of matter itself, still on the other 
 side his two fundamental forces, within matter, remain external 
 and self-dependent, each per se opposite the other. 
 
 However null was the independent difference of these two forces 
 attributed to them from this standpoint of cognition, equally null 
 must every other difference show itself, which in regard to their 
 specific nature is taken as something which is to pass for firmness 
 and solidity, because they, when regarded in their truth as above, 
 are only moments which go over into one another. I shall con- 
 sider these further differentiations as Kant states them. 
 
 He defines, for example, attraction as a pervading force by 
 which one matter is enabled to affect the particles of another even 
 beyond the surface of contact im-mediately ; repulsion, on the 
 contrary, as a surface-force by which matters are enabled to 
 affect each other only in the plane of contact common to them. 
 The reason adduced for the latter being only a surface-force is as 
 follows : ' The parts in mutual contact limit the sphere of in- 
 fluence the one of the other, and the repelling force can affect no 
 remoter part, unless through those that lie between ; an immediate 
 influence of one matter on another, that should be supposed to go 
 right through the parts or particles in consequence of an extensive 
 force (so is the repulsive force called here) is impossible.' (' S. 
 ebendas. Erklar. u. Zusatze,' S. 67.) 
 
 It occurs at once to remark that, nearer or remoter particles of 
 matter being assumed, there must arise, in the case of attraction 
 also, the distinction that one atom would, indeed, act on another, 
 but a third remoter one, between which and the first, or the attract- 
 ing one, the second should be placed, would enter directly, and in the 
 first instance, the sphere of the interposed one next to it, and the 
 first consequently could not exercise an immediate simple influence 
 on the third one ; and thus we have a mediated influence as much for 
 attraction as for repulsion. It is seen, further, that the true pene- 
 tration of an attracting force must consist in this alone, that all the 
 
320 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 particles of matter in and for themselves should attract, and not 
 that a certain number should be passive while only one were active. 
 As regards repulsion, it is to be remarked, that in the adduced 
 passage, particles are represented in mutual contact, that is, we 
 have at once the solidity and continuity of a ready -made matter 
 which allows not any repulsion to take place through it. This 
 solidity of matter, however, in which particles touch each other -, that 
 is, are no longer separated by any vacuum, already presupposes the 
 remotion of repulsion ; particles in mutual contact are, following 
 the sensuous conception of repulsion that is dominant here, to be 
 taken as such that they do not repel each other. It follows quite 
 tautologically, then, that there where the non-being of repulsion is 
 assumed, there cannot be repulsion. But this yields no additional 
 descriptive character as regards the repulsive force. If it be 
 reflected on, however, that particles touching each other touch 
 only so far as they still keep themselves out of each other, the 
 repulsive force will be seen necessarily to exist, not merely on the 
 surface of matter, but within the sphere which is to be supposed a 
 sphere of attraction only. 
 
 Further, Kant assumes that 'through attraction matter only 
 occupies a space without filling it' (loc. tit.); 'because matter 
 does not by its attraction fill space, this attraction is able to act 
 through the empty space, as no matter intervenes to set bounds to 
 it.' This conclusion is about of the same nature as that which 
 supposed above something to belong to the notion of a thing, but 
 not to be contained in the thing itself : only so can matter occupy 
 yet not fill a space. Then it was through repulsion, as it was first 
 considered, that the ones mutually repelled each other, and mutu- 
 ally referred to one another only negatively that is, just through 
 an empty space. But here it is attraction which preserves space 
 empty ; through. its connecting of the atoms it does not Jill space, 
 that is as much as to say, it maintains the atoms in a negative 
 reference to one another. We see that Kant unconsciously encoun- 
 ters here what lies in the nature of the thing that he ascribes to 
 attraction precisely the same thing that he, at the first view, 
 ascribed to repulsion. In the very effort to establish and make 
 fixed the difference of the two forces, it had already occurred, that 
 the one was gone over into the other. Thus through repulsion 
 matter was to fill a space, and consequently through it the empty 
 space to disappear which attraction leaves. In effect, in that it 
 eliminates empty space, it eliminates the negative reference of the 
 
QUALITY TRANSLATED. 321 
 
 atoms or ones, i.e., their repulsion ; i.e., repulsion is determined as 
 the contrary of itself. 
 
 To this obliteration of the differences there adds itself, still 
 further, the confusion that, as was remarked in the beginning, the 
 Kantian exposition of the opposed forces is analytic, and through- 
 out the whole investigation, matter, which was to have been derived 
 only from these its elements, appears from the first ready-formed 
 and fully constituted. In the definition of the surface-force and 
 of the pervading force, both are assumed as moving forces, whereby 
 matters are to be supposed capable of acting the one way or the 
 other. They are enunciated thus, then, as forces not such that 
 only through them should matter exist, but such that through them 
 matter, already formed, should only be moved. So far, however, as 
 there is question of forces by means of which various matters might 
 act on each other and impart movement, this is quite another thing 
 than the determination and connexion which they should have as 
 the moments of matter as such. 
 
 The same antithesis, as here between Repulsion and Attraction, 
 presents itself further on as regards the centripetal and centrifugal 
 forces. These seem to display an essential difference, in that in 
 their sphere there stands fast a one, a centre, towards which the 
 other ones comport themselves as not beent-for-self ; the difference 
 of Ihe forces, therefore, can be supported on or by this presupposed 
 difference of a central one and of others as, relatively to it, not 
 self-subsistent. So far, however, as they are applied in explana- 
 tion for which purpose, as in ttfe case also of repulsion and 
 attraction, they are assumed in an opposed quantitative relation, so 
 that the one increases as the other decreases it is the movement 
 which they are to explain, and it is its inequality which they are 
 to account for. One has only to take up, however, any ordinary 
 relative explanation as of the unequal velocity of a planet in its 
 course round its primary to discern the confusion which pre- 
 vails in it and the impossibility of keeping the quantities distinct ; 
 and so the one, which in the explanation is taken as decreasing, 
 may be always equally taken as increasing, and vice versd. To make 
 this evident, however, would require a more detailed exposition 
 than can be here given ; all the necessary particulars, nevertheless, 
 are to be found a^ain in the discussion of the Inverted Relation. 
 
322 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE SECTION, QUALITY, AS TEANSLATED IN II, 
 HEKE COMMENTED AND INTEEPEETED. 
 
 DEFINITENESS (QUALITY). 
 
 THE language he has encountered must appear very strange to the 
 uninitiated English reader, and, perhaps, he may be inclined to 
 attribute the circumstance to imperfection of translation. Let 
 him be assured, however, that in German, and to the German 
 student who approaches Hegel for the first time, the strangeness 
 of the initiatory reception is hardly less repulsive than it has 
 but even now proved to himself. There is no valid reason for 
 despair, then, as regards intelligence here, because it is a trans- 
 lation that is before one, and not the original. To due endeavour, 
 the Hegelian thought will gather round these English terms quite 
 as perfectly, or nearly so, as round their German equivalents. 
 Comment nevertheless is wanted, and will facilitate progress. 
 
 Bestimmen and its immediate derivatives constitute much the 
 largest portion of the speech of Hegel. The reader, indeed, feels 
 for long that with Bestimmung and Bestimmung he is bestimmt (or 
 -yerstimmt) into Uribestimmtlieit ; and even finds himself, perhaps, 
 actually execrating this said Bestimmung of Hegel as heartily as 
 ever Aristotle denounced or renounced the Idea of Plato. Stimme 
 means voice, and the action of Bestimmen is to supply voice to what 
 previously had none. As already said, then, Hegel's Bestimmung 
 is a sort of naming of Adam : it is a process of logical determina- 
 tion a process in which concrete determinateness, or determinate 
 concretion, grows and grows in organised complexity up from 
 absolute abstract indeterminateness or from absolutely indeter- 
 minate abstraction to a consummate absolute. To Hegel what is, 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 323 
 
 is thought ; and the life of thought can only be logical determina- 
 tion, or the distinguishing (differentiating) of indefinite abstraction 
 (the beginning of thought) into ultimate concrete definiteness (the 
 end of thought) by means of the operation of the faculties of 
 thought (Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeason), to the 
 resolution of the Begriff (the An sick, the indefinite Universal) 
 through the Ur-theil (the Fur sich, the separation into Particulars, 
 into Many, as against One), and the production of the Schluss (the 
 concrete Singular), which is the All of Thought, Thought elevated 
 into its ultimate and complete concretion as the absolute Subject 
 (which again is the ultimate An und fur sich). This is a very 
 complete expression for the industry of Hegel. Bestimmen, then, 
 is to develop in abstract thought all its own constitutive, consecu- 
 tive, and co-articulated members, or elements, or principles. 
 Bestimmen attaches or develops a Bestimmung, and produces 
 Bestimmtlieit. Bestimmen is to be-voice, to vocify, voculate, render 
 articulate, to define, determine, or distinguish into the implied con- 
 stitutive variety: even to accentuate will be seen to involve the 
 same function; or we may say modulate, then modify that is, 
 dis-eern into modi the native constituent modi. Bestimmen is 
 the reverse of generalisation ; instead of evolving a summum 
 genus, it involves a species infima, or rather an individuum not 
 indeed infimum, but summum. Generalisation throws out differ- 
 entiae, Bestimmung (specification, particularisation) adds them. The 
 one abstracts from difference and holds by identity ; the other 
 abstracts from identity and holds b^ difference. Bestimmen, then, 
 is to produce, not logical extension, but logical comprehension 
 (Inhalt), logical determination ; it adds differentia or significates ; 
 it means to specify, to differentiate, to distinguish, to qualify, 
 characterise, &c., or more generally, just to define or determine. 
 Bestimmtheit has the sense in it of the past participle: it is a 
 differentia-turn, specificatum, qualification a determinate, a definite 
 in general, or the quality of determinateness and definiteness ; 
 hence the meanings attached by Hegel himself to it of form, 
 product, &c., and of element when that word signifies, not a 
 constitutm^, but a constituted element. Bestimmung may refer 
 to the process as a whole, but it generally applies to a resultant 
 member of this process: it is what corresponds to a predicate; 
 it is a significate, a specificate, a differentia, &c. ; it is an attribute, 
 a property, a peculiarity, a speciality, a particularity, a quality ; it 
 is a principle, a sign, an exponent, a constituent, and, in that 
 
324 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 sense, an element also. It may be translated character, char- 
 acteristic, article, member, modus, determination, definition, trait, 
 feature. Then looking to the use of the trait, the senses vocation, 
 destination, &c., are brought in. Qualification is another very 
 useful word for it, and so likewise are form, function, factor, term, 
 specification, expression, value, even affection, state. Bestimmtheit, 
 then, here (in the text before us), is determinateness, the char- 
 acteristicity, the specificity, the definitivity of a thing, the one 
 single vis or virtue that makes it what it is and that is always 
 due to Quality. 
 
 Being, Seyn, to understand this word, abstract from all par- 
 ticular being, and think of being in general, or of the absolute 
 generality of being. There must be no sense of personality 
 attached to it, as is so common in England; nor, indeed, any 
 sense of anything positive. The common element in the whole 
 infinite chaos of all and everything that is, is being. Seyn, in 
 Germany, often in Hegel himself, means the abstraction of 
 sensuous Isness : but here it is more general than that ; it is the 
 quality of Isness pur et simple; it brings with it a sense of 
 comprehensive universality. Carlyle ('Frederick the Great/ 
 vol. iii. p. 408) says, ' " Without Being," as my friend Oliver was 
 wont to say, " Well-being " is not possible/' ' Cromwell had 
 soldiers and other concrete materiel in his eye, when he said 
 being here ; still put as being, these are abstractly put. In like 
 manner, we have here to put, not soldiers, &c. only, but all that 
 is, abstractly as being. It refers, in fact, to the absolutely 
 abstract, to the absolutely generalised thought of being. In short, 
 being as being must be seen to be a solid simple without inside or 
 outside, centre or sides : it is simply to be taken an ihm selber, 
 absolutely abstractly ; it is the unit into which all variety, being 
 reflected, has disappeared : it is the an sich of such variety. 
 
 The meaning of Immediate, Unmittelbar, will be got by practice : 
 what is abstractly, directly present. Anything seen, felt, &c., is im- 
 mediate. Being, then, is simply what is indefinitely immediate 
 to us. It (the term immediate) is derived from the logical use 
 of it as in Immediate Inferences, i.e., inferences without inter- 
 mediate proposition. Essentity or Essence, Wesen, is inner or 
 true, or noumenal being as opposed to outer, apparent, sensuous, 
 or phenomenal being. It is the principle of what is or shows. 
 It may be translated also inbeing, or principial being. By practice, 
 however, the Hegelian Wesen will attach itself even to Essence 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 325 
 
 once the thought is seen. It is evident that, the thought of pure 
 or abstract Seyn being realised, there is no call for any reference 
 to the thought of Wesen. Absolutely abstract being seems self- 
 substantial, and awakens no question of a whence or what ; it is 
 thus free from any determination which it might receive by bemg- 
 related to Essence : in this absolute generalisation, indeed, Seyn 
 and Wesen have coalesced and become indistinguishable. But it 
 is as opposed to Wesen that Seyn acquires the sensuous shade 
 already spoken of. In that contraposition, Seyn is phenomenal 
 show ; it is the Seyn of Wesen, and so outer, and very outer a 
 palpable crust, as it were, which very tangibly is. As yet, as we 
 have said, our Seyn is the abstraction from all that is, and so the 
 common element of all that is. It is to be said and seen, also, 
 that the two shades of Seyn tend to run together, for, after all, 
 each at last only implies immediacy to consciousness. 
 
 In itself (An sich), italicised, means in itself as virtually, im- 
 pliciter, or potentially in itself: it is the Svvafjn? of Aristotle. At 
 the end of the first paragraph, we have also an ' in its own self ' 
 which is not italicised : this is a translation of the peculiarly 
 Hegelian German, an ihm seller, an innovation on his own 
 tongue to which Hegel was compelled in order to distinguish 
 another and current shade of meaning which might confuse the 
 sense he wished to attach to an sick. An ihm selber, in fact, 
 implies, not the mere latent potentiality of an sich, but a certain 
 overt potentiality, a certain manifestation, a certain propria persona 
 actuality, formal presence, a certain assonance to the Aristotelian 
 evTeXexGict" Hegel intimates, as we saw above (pp. 256-7), that an 
 sich, with the accent not on sich, but on an, may be viewed as equiva- 
 lent to an ihm. But an sich, on the whole, in the passage referred 
 to, has taken on a shade of meaning quite peculiar to the place (Lk. 
 i. pp. 126-7). In this latter case what is an ihm is to be regarded 
 as Seyn-fiir-Anderes, and so outwardly an ihm (in it). Hegel 
 illustrates the meaning here by the common expressions, there is 
 nothing in him or in it, or there is something in that, and seems 
 to see implied in these a certain parallelism or identity between 
 what is latent in itself, and what is overt in it. The addition of 
 the selbst or selber introduces another shade, and renders the task 
 of a translation still more difficult ; for in English an ihm selber is 
 in itself quite as much as an sich. To separate the words, as in 
 the first German phrase, and say in it self, would be hardly 
 allowable. Perhaps the plan actually adopted is as good as any : 
 
326 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that is, to italicise in itself when it stands for an sick, and to 
 leave it without such distinction, or write it, as here, 'in its own 
 self (also without italics), when it represents an ihm selbst or 
 seller. What is intended to be conveyed by the text Seyn an ihm 
 selber, Being in its own self, is not hard to make out : it means 
 being as (when abstractly thought) it is there before us overtly in 
 its own self, and without reference to another or any other. An 
 sich, then, implies potential latency ; An ihm selber, irrespective 
 selfness, or irrespective, self-dependent overtness; and An ihm, 
 such overtness connected with and equivalent to such latency. 
 Again, these terms will occur in Hegel, not always in their 
 technical senses, but sometimes with various shades, and very 
 much as they occur in other writers. It must be confessed, 
 indeed, that it is these little phrases which constitute the torment 
 of everyone who attempts to translate Hegel. An, for example, 
 in the phrase an ihm, is often best rendered by the preposition by. 
 An, in fact, is not always coincident with the English in. An 
 denotes proximity, and is often best translated by at or by: nay, in 
 all of the three phrases above, the substitution of at or by for in 
 will help to illustrate the contained meaning. Consider the phrase 
 ' Das Seyn scheint am Wesen,' which we may translate, the 
 phenomenon shows in the noumenon ; would not the sense seem 
 to be more accurately conveyed by, the phenomenon shows by the 
 noumenon, or even by, the phenomenon shows at the noumenon ? 
 When an refers to overtness or manifestation, then, we may trans- 
 late it by* 
 
 There-being or Here-being is the translation of Daseyn, and is an 
 unfortunate necessity. Existence might have answered here ; but 
 Existence, being reserved by Hegel to name a much later finding, 
 is taken out of our hands. What a German means by Daseyn is, 
 this mortal sojourn, this sublunary life, this being here below ; 
 and what Hegel means by it, is the scientific abstract thought 
 implied in such phrases. It is thus mortal state, or the quality of 
 sublunariness ; it is existential definiteness, or definite existen- 
 tiality, and implies reference thus to another or others. It is 
 determinate being, Here-being, There-being, Now-being, or, best 
 perhaps, /So-being or That-being; it is the quasi -permament 
 moment of being that manifests itself between Coming to be, and 
 Ceasing to be; it is the to-be (Seyn) common to both phrases : and 
 
 * It is to be borne in mind, too, that the Ansich of a thing is the special inner 
 being of it, the essential truth of it. N. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 327 
 
 this constitutes the perfectly correct abstract description, or 
 thought (the notion), of every single Daseyn or Here-being, 
 or So-being, and consequently of Daseyn, Here-being, So-being, 
 as such.* 
 
 Being-for-self is the literal rendering of Fursichseyn ; which; 
 indeed, cannot be translated otherwise. It means the reference 
 of all the constituents of an individuality, of a personality, of a 
 self, to the punctual unity of that individuality, or personality, or 
 self: it is the focus in the draught of the whole huge whirlpool, 
 that whereby its Many are One. For, however, does not com- 
 pletely render Fur. The German, when much intruded on^ 
 exclaims, 'One can never be Fur sich here!' Vowels also are 
 described as letters which fur sich sound, consonants not so. Fur 
 sich, then, is the Latin per se and a little more : it expresses not 
 only independence of others, but occupation for oneself. Were a 
 Voter, when asked, ' Whom are you for ? ' to reply, ' For myself,' 
 he would convey the German fur mich. That is fur sich which 
 is on its own account. By Fursichseyn, Being-for-self, then, we 
 are to understand a being by one's own self and for one's own 
 self. 
 
 Generally, in reading Hegel, let us bear both the current and 
 the etymological meanings in mind. That finite, for example, is 
 literally ended or limited, infinite unended or unlimited, must not 
 be lost sight of. Finally, I will add this, that almost all the tech- 
 nical terms of Hegel appear in Kant also, especially in his ' Logic,' 
 where much light is thrown upon them as used, not by the latter 
 only, but by the former as well. 
 
 * When your servant announces to you, The Postman ist da, that is Da-Seyn. 
 This environment of miscellaneousness is Daseyn ; and every item of it is a Dasey- 
 endes your pen, ink, chair, table, &c. These are all finites items of finite exist- 
 ence, Daseyn. Schelling (WW. i. 309) has this: 'It is sufficiently striking that 
 the language has so exactly distinguished between the Dasyenden (that is in space 
 and time) and the Scyenden (that is independent of any such condition '). A Da- 
 seyendes what is un-mediatedly , as though by direct sense, face to face with us is 
 also an immediate. 
 
 I may add here what has its cue, p. 335. To call the categories 'functions 
 of apperception ' is quite common ; but then Ego to Kant is only a logical point 
 and wholly empty, where is there room for functions ? But again, if (ii. 733 it.) 
 dieses Vermogen ist der Verstand selbst, and understanding is judgment, &c. ! Kant, 
 in the Deduction of the Categories, if even with no thought of functions, certainly 
 gives an objective rdle to apperception. N. 
 
328 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 BEING. 
 
 A. Pure Being. B. Nothing. C. Becoming : 1. Unity of Being 
 
 and Nothing. 
 
 THE explanation of terms already given seems sufficient for the 
 above sections also ; and we may now apply ourselves to some 
 interpretation of the particular matter, confining our attention for 
 the present to what of text precedes Eemark 1. We shall rely 
 upon the reader perusing and re-perusing, and making himself 
 thoroughly familiar with all he finds written in the paragraphs 
 indicated. 
 
 All that they present has remained hitherto a universal stum- 
 bling-block, and a matter of hissing, we may say at once, to the 
 whole world. Probably, indeed, no student has ever entered here 
 without finding himself spell-bound and bewildered, spell-bound and 
 bewildered at once, spell-bound and bewildered if he has had the 
 pertinacity to keep at them and hold by them perhaps for years. 
 When the bewilderment yields, however, he will find himself, it 
 is most likely, we shall say, putting some such questions as the 
 following : 1. What has led Hegel to begin thus ? 2. What does 
 he mean by these very strange, novel, and apparently senseless 
 statements ? 3. What can be intended by these seemingly silly 
 and absurd transitions of Being into Nothing, and again of both 
 into Becoming? 4. What does the whole thing amount to; or 
 what is the value of the whole business ? These questions being 
 satisfactorily answered, perhaps Hegel will at last be found 
 accessible. 
 
 1. What has led Hegel to begin thus ? To this question, the 
 answer is brief and certain : Hegel was led to begin as he did in 
 consequence of a profound consideration of all that was implied 
 in the Categories, and other relative portions of the philosophy, of 
 
* 
 
 'r 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 QUALITY INTEKPRETED, ETO^i?i lf i - '329 
 
 Kaiit. But in order to awaken intelligence and carry conviction 
 here, it is obviously incumbent upon us to do what we can to 
 reproduce the probable course of Hegel's thinking when engaged 
 in the consideration alluded to. No doubt, for a full explanation, 
 there were necessary some preliminary exposition of the industry 
 of Kant; but, simply assuming such, we hope still to. be able to 
 describe at present Hegel's operations, so far as Kant is concerned, 
 not unintelligibly.* 
 
 The speculations peculiar to Hume generally, and more especi- 
 ally those which bear on Causality, constitute the Grundlage, the 
 fundamen, the mother-matter of the products of Kant. Now in 
 this relation (of Causality) there are two terms or factors, the one 
 antecedent and the other consequent ; the former the cause, and 
 the latter the effect. But if we take any cause by itself and 
 examine it d priori, we shall not find any hint in it of its corre- 
 sponding effect : let us consider it ever so long, it remains self- 
 identical only, and any mean of transition to another to aught 
 else is undiscoverable. But again, we are no wiser, should we 
 investigate the matter a posteriori: that the effect follows the 
 cause, we see ; but why it follows the reason of the following 
 the precise mean of the nexus the exact and single copula this 
 we see not at all. The source of the nexus being thus undiscover- 
 able, then, whether a priori or a posteriori, it is evident that 
 causality is on the same level as what are called Matters of Fact, 
 and that it cannot pretend to the same authority as what again are 
 called Relations of Ideas. Did it belong to these latter examples 
 of which are the axioms and other determinations of Mathematic 
 it would be both necessary and intelligibly necessary ; but as it 
 belongs only to the former class, the weight of its testimony its 
 validity can amount to probability only. That a straight line is 
 the shortest possible from any here to any there, I see to be uni- 
 versally and necessarily true from Kelations of Ideas; but that 
 wood burns and ice melts, I see to be true only as Matters of 
 Fact, which are so, but might, so far as any reason for the state of 
 the fact is concerned, be otherwise : they are, in truth, just matters 
 of fact, and relations of ideas do not exist in them. Matters of 
 Fact, then, are probable ; but Kelations of Ideas are apodictic, at 
 once necessary and universal. Causality now belonging to the 
 former, it is evident that the nexus between the fire and the burn- 
 
 * The Text-Book to Kant has been already referred to as realising a contemplated 
 preliminary exposition. N. 
 
330 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ing of wood (say) is but of a probable nature. The fire burns the 
 wood, I perceive ; but it might not : the affair concerns contingent 
 matter only, and no examination of the relation, either a priori or 
 d posteriori, can detect any reason of necessity. Causality, then, 
 as presenting itself always in matters of fact, and as exhibiting 
 neither d priori nor d posteriori any relation of ideas, cannot claim 
 any authority of necessity. Why, then, when I see a cause, do I 
 always anticipate the effect ; and why, when I see an effect, do I 
 always refer to a cause ? Shut out, for an answer here, from the 
 relations of ideas, and restricted to matters of fact, I can find, 
 after the longest and best consideration, no ground for my antici- 
 pation but custom, habit, or the association (on what is called the 
 law of the Association of Ideas) of things in expectation which I 
 have found once or oftener associated in fact ; for so habitual 
 becomes the association, that even once may be found at times to 
 suffice. Thus far Hume. 
 
 But now Kant who has been much struck by the curious new 
 views so ingeniously signalised by Hume, and who will look into 
 the matter and not shut his eyes, nor exclaim (as simply Eeid did, 
 in the panic of an alarmed, though very worthy and intelligent, 
 divine), ' God has just put all that into our souls, so be off with 
 your sceptical perplexings and perplexities.' (Neither will he 
 pragmatically assert, like Brown, Causality is a relation of an 
 invariable antecedent and an invariable consequent, and absurdly 
 think that by the use and not the explanation of this term invari- 
 able, which is the whole problem, he has satisfactorily settled all !) 
 now Kant, who is neither a Keid nor a Brown, but a man as 
 able as Hume himself, steps in and says, this nexus suggested by 
 you (Hume) between a cause and its effect, is of a subjective 
 nature only ; that is, it is a nexus in me, and not in them (the 
 cause and the effect) ; but such nexus is inadequate to the facts. 
 That this unsupported paper falls to the ground the reason of that 
 is not in me surely, but in the objects themselves ; and the reason 
 of my expectation to find the same connexion of events (as between 
 unsupported paper and the ground) is not due to something I find 
 in myself, but to something I find in them. I cannot intercalate 
 any custom or habit of my own as the reason of that connexion. 
 True, as you say, neither d priori nor a posteriori can I detect the 
 objective copula ; and true it is also that we have before us only 
 contingent matter or Matters of Fact : nevertheless, the nexus is 
 such that mere custom is inadequate to explain it. The nexus is 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 331 
 
 such, indeed, that (as Brown saw *) it introduces an element of 
 invariability, and custom evidently cannot reach as far as that ; so 
 that the question remains, why are the objects invariably con- 
 nected in our expectation why, in short, is the relation of causal- 
 ity as necessary and as universal in its validity as any axiom Tf 
 Mathematic, as any one of those very Eelations of Ideas from which 
 it has but this moment been expressly excluded ? Every change 
 (effect) has its cause : this is a truth of no probable nature ; we say, 
 we see that cork floats, but it might not ; but we cannot say we 
 see that change has its cause, but it might not : on the contrary, 
 we feel, we know, that change must and always have its 
 cause. Now, the source of this Necessity and Universality 
 that is the question, and lie where it may, it very plainly can- 
 not be an effect of any mere subjective condition of ourselves, 
 of any mere anticipation through habit. Hume certainly has 
 shut us out though very oddly he himself (in custom) had 
 recourse to such from all a posteriori sources ; for whatever 
 is known a posteriori, or by experience, is but a Matter of 
 Fact, and therefore probable only, or contingent only. But, if 
 the source cannot be & posteriori, it must be (a priori. Hume, to 
 be sure, talks of an a priori consideration in this very reference 
 (causality) ; but there must be another and truer a priori than 
 the a priori of Hume. Now, first of all, what is it that we name 
 the a posteriori ? That is a posteriori, the knowledge of which is 
 due to experience alone ; and the organ of experience is percep- 
 tion, sensation, inner or outer ; inner for affections from within, 
 and outer for affections from without. But Locke traces all our 
 knowledge to affection either of outer or of inner sense, therefore 
 all our knowledge must be a posteriori. But this is manifestly 
 erroneous ; for in that case, there could be no apodictic, no neces- 
 sary and universal knowledge at all : but there is such knowledge 
 universally admitted, too in what are called relations of ideas ; 
 and causality seems itself though with a difference another 
 instance of the same kind. This latter knowledge, then (the 
 apodictic), cannot be a posteriori, and, consequently, it must be a 
 priori. But besides sensuous affection, we possess only intel- 
 
 * It is sufficiently curious, in the end, to perceive that Brown, when he said 
 * invariable connexion is Causality, and we know all the cases of such connexion by the 
 will of the Divine Being, 1 fancied himself to be saying something against Reid, or 
 something for or against Hume or just fancied himself to be philosophising 
 indeed ! 
 
332 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 lectual function : if the former be the source and seat of the a 
 posteriori, then the latter may be the source and seat of the a 
 priori. But that being so, the necessity of causality must still 
 have its seat in the mind, in us ; or, in other words, its source 
 must be subjective and we have just declared a subjective 
 source impossible ! Again, we have just said also that causality 
 concerns contingent matter : change itself is only known a pos- 
 teriori or by experience ! Here seem great difficulties. How 
 can what is only a posteriori obey what can only be a priori ? 
 And how can an a priori or necessary truth have a subjective 
 source, or belong to the mind only ? As has been seen already 
 also and just said, this necessity of causality is not the only truth 
 that cannot be & posteriori ; we are led to enlarge the problem to 
 the admission of the whole sphere named Relations of Ideas. 
 Kelations of Ideas ! The phrase belongs to Hume himself, and he 
 admits the necessity involved : did Hume, then, never ask whence 
 are they ? and did he unthinkingly fancy that, though Ideas 
 themselves as but derivative from Matters of Fact were con- 
 tingent and probable, the Eelations that subsisted among them 
 might be apodictic and necessary ? Had Hume stumbled on 
 such considerations as these, he would have been led into a new 
 inquiry ; he would have been forced to abandon his theory of all 
 our knowledge being limited to Impressions of Sense and resultant 
 Ideas of Reflexion ; he would have been forced to see that, as 
 there are apodictic truths, there must be a source of knowledge a 
 priori as well as & posteriori, and that all our ideas are not neces- 
 sarily copies of our impressions. Stimulated by the example of 
 causality, too, he might have been led to see that the element of 
 necessity did not restrict itself to Relations of Ideas only, but 
 associated itself with contingent matter, with Matters of Fact as 
 well; and might have asked, therefore, are there not, besides 
 causality, other such examples of an apodictic force in & posteriori 
 or contingent matter ? what is the whole sphere of necessary 
 knowledge, as well pure as mixed ? and what is the peculiar 
 source of all such knowledge ? In this way, he might have been 
 led to perceive that apodictic matter, impossibly a- posteriori, must 
 be b priori, and an & priori which had attained new reaches. He 
 had talked, for example, of examining a cause a priori in search of 
 its effect, as has been already remarked: but, after all, this a 
 priori is & priori only as regards the effect ; after all, any know- 
 ledge gained by the examination would be of an & posteriori 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 333 
 
 nature. The true & priori, then, must be anterior, not to this and 
 that experience, but to all experience ; it must concern a know- 
 ledge that is not empirical, that reaches us not from elsewhere 
 through a channel of sense. Plainly, then, it must be an element 
 confined to the mind itself ; and plainly also, lie where it may,Ht 
 must lie elsewhere than in sensation. Now, it is this elsewhere 
 than in sensation that gives the cue and clue to the possibility of 
 an element of necessity subjective as in us, but of an objective 
 VALIDITY and of an objective HOLE. Sensation being excluded, 
 there remains for us the understanding only ; and it is not so 
 difficult to surmise that principles of the understanding a faculty 
 that concerns insight, discernment, evidence may bring with 
 them their own authority. The contributions of sensation, for 
 example, are wholly subjective in this sense, that they are mine 
 only, or yours only, or his only that they are incapable of com- 
 munication, and, consequently, incapable likewise of comparison. 
 An odour, a savour, a touch, a sound, a colour, affects me, affects 
 you, affects him ; but the affection of each is peculiar and proper 
 to himself; we cannot show each other our affections; that is, 
 they are incommunicable and incapable of comparison. But it is 
 different with the contributions of understanding : these bring 
 their own evidence ; this evidence is the same to all of us ; it can 
 be universally communicated, and universally compared. Now, a 
 validity of this nature may be correctly named objective, for it is 
 independent of every subject. An objective role, again, implies that the 
 possessor of such r61e presents itself* with and in objects. A priori 
 principles, then, will be principles peculiar to the understanding 
 only ; subjective in that they have their source in the mind, in us, 
 but objective in that they possess a universal and necessary validity 
 independent of every subject ; and objective, perhaps, also in this, 
 that though subjective in origin, they present themselves with and 
 in objects in every event of actual experience. In this manner, we 
 can see the possibility of an apodictic element both pure and 
 mixed. In fact, we see that the whole business was opened, 
 when we opposed sensuous affection to intellectual function, and 
 assigned the a posteriori to the one and the a priori to the other. 
 This very sentence, indeed, is the key to German Philosophy ; it 
 is a single general expression for the operations as well of Hegel 
 as of Kant. German Philosophy, as we all know, begins with the 
 question: How are Synthetic Judgments a priori possible ? Now 
 to this question, the answer of Kant and the answer is his 
 
334 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 system is, Intellectual Function with the apriori seusuous forms, 
 or sensuous species Space and Time ; while the answer of Hegel 
 implying in his case a system also is, Intellectual Function alone.* 
 But to apply this to Causality how find in the mind a principle 
 correspondent to something so very outward and a posteriori, and 
 yet so apodictic and necessary ? Now the intellect, or the under- 
 standing, is just Judgment ; and Judgment has functions, of which 
 functions the various classes of propositions (which are but 
 decisions or judgments of Judgment) are the correspondent Acts. 
 Now the hypothetical class of propositions points to a function of 
 Judgment which we may name Reason and Consequent. Evi- 
 dently at once here is a function of Judgment, the sequence of 
 the elements of which is exactly analogous to the sequence of 
 the elements of Causality. The state of the case, however, is not 
 yet free from great difficulty. Assuming the function of Reason 
 and Consequent to be the mental archetype of Causality, how are 
 we to connect it with contingent matter, and reduce it into a 
 relation which within us as Reason and Consequent comes to 
 us actually from without in the shape of innumerable real causes 
 and innumerable real effects ? This very important portion so 
 suggestive as it proved to Hegel of Kant's industry is wholly 
 unknown in England, and seems to have been universally 
 neglected (unless by Hegel) in Germany. If the reader will 
 take the trouble to turn up the works of Sir William Hamilton, 
 he will find Kant's theory relegated to that class which names 
 Causality only a special and peculiar mental principle, and 
 nothing more. Of the deduction of the principle and in a 
 System of such from the very structure of the mind itself, and 
 of the laborious succession of links whereby it is demonstrated to 
 add itself to outward facts and come back to us with the same, 
 there is not one word in Hamilton. He knows only that Kant 
 opines Causality to be a peculiar mental principle ! In short, no 
 Ahnung, not even a boding of the true state of the case, seems ever 
 
 * The antithesis of matters of fact and relations of ideas is virtually identical with 
 that of sensuous affection and intellectual function. Unnamed, it underlies the whole 
 thing. Hume shut himself out from relations of ideas by erroneously seeing (in 
 Causality, &c. ) matters of fact only. Kant was driven by the evidence or peculiar 
 validity of causality to what was in effect relations of ideas. Hegel, in effect, has 
 only cleared relations of ideas into their system that crystal skeleton which, the 
 whole truth of the concrete, of sensuous affection, of matters of fact, underlies and 
 supports the same. Of this, so to speak, invisible skeleton Causality is but one of 
 the bones. The above answer put to Kant is to Hegel the ' What' that is asked 
 for by Jacobi see back, p. 232. N. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 335 
 
 to have dawned on this great German scholar, who knew the 
 Germans just so well and intimately that he annihilated them all ! 
 It is amusing to observe the self-assured Sir William fooling 
 himself to the top of his bent with his sharp distinctions and 
 well-poised divisions about Kant violating the law of parsimony, 
 postulating a new and express principle, while he, for his own vast 
 part, on the contrary, &c. &c. ! ! ! Hamilton, however, introduces 
 into his own theory (!) a certain relativity of time ; and relativity 
 of time but with something of a claim to coherency and sense, 
 the while belongs the theory of Kant also. Now, one can 
 believe that Hamilton was at least an ardent manipulator of the 
 leaves of books. 
 
 Time it was that became in the hands of Kant the medium of 
 effecting the reduction in question, or that connexion between the 
 inner and the outer which was manifestly so necessary. It will 
 not be required of us at present, however, to track the probable 
 heuristic course of Kant any further in this direction. Suffice it 
 to say, that the desire to incorporate an inner law with outer 
 bodies especially in such a reference as Causality necessarily 
 led Kant to a consideration of Space and Time. The result of 
 this consideration was, that space and time, though perceptive 
 objects and so far sensuous, were & priori and so far intellectual, 
 so far appertinent to the mind itself. In this way, there was a 
 priori or native to the mind, not only function, but affection : both 
 being side by side in the mind, then, function had affection in its 
 clutch, or Unity had a Many on which it might exercise its energy. 
 A schema, an d priori schema was thus formed, into which matter 
 from without that is, empirical or a posteriori matter had to fit 
 itself to the eventual production of the formed, of the rational, 
 of the ruled and regulated universal context of Experience. 
 
 Indeed, thought Kant, how can it be otherwise ? The a posteriori 
 is but affection : we are, of course, acted on from without, but we 
 know only the resultant affections set up. These are within us : 
 they have no system in themselves, they are wholly contingent : 
 this system which they so much require, they can only obtain 
 within us, and the understanding alone is what is adequate to the 
 want. In the end, the affections of sense were found to be con- 
 strued into the formed universe, through the a priori perceptive 
 spectra, Space and Time, and wider the synthetic energy of the 
 various functions of Apperception.* Lastly, the various syntheses 
 * See Note, p. 327 at end. 
 
336 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of these functions were named Categories. Causality, then, is but 
 a function of Apperception, externalised into, and coming back to 
 us from, or with, actual outer objects, through the media, sensuous 
 but a priori, or a priori but sensuous, of Space and Time. Now, 
 observe what the world has become ! It is now wholly in us ; 
 but we to it are quite formal ; we are but the subjectivity that 
 actualises it, as it were, into life ; it is function and affection it 
 is the matter within us : abstracting from ourselves then, that 
 matter of function and affection remains, and the world is this : 
 There are intellectual Syntheses (Categories), there are Space and 
 Time, there are Empirical Affections. But, narrowly looked at 
 and this is a consequence of Kant's own industry, though it never 
 occurred to Kant empirical affections, as well as space and time, 
 are but externalisations of the categories, are but outwardly 
 what the categories are inwardly. The categories, then, are 
 truly what is; the categories are the true essence of the 
 universe : in the categories we have to look for the ultimate prin- 
 ciples, and the ultimate principle of everything that is. This is 
 what occurred to Hegel ; and it is here that he receives the torch 
 from the hands of Kant, and proceeds to carry it further. Intellec- 
 tual Function is the secret, then : almost it would seem as if the 
 work of Kant and Hegel were but a new analysis of the human 
 mind, a new statement of its constituent elements, an identification 
 of this mind and these elements with, an enlargement of this mind 
 and these elements to, the mind and elements of God and all so 
 that creation should be seen to be but the other of this mind and these 
 elements to be but the external counterpart of these, its internal 
 archetype and archetypes. Now this is probably the shortest and 
 clearest general view we have yet attained to; but we cannot 
 stop here the uninitiated reader must be carried more deeply 
 into the details still, before he can be dismissed as competently 
 informed. Nevertheless, it will always be of use to bear in mind 
 that the ultimate proposition of Hegel seems to be this : To 
 know all the Functions which Affections obey, and to demonstrate 
 the presence of the former everywhere in the latter, would be at 
 once to know the Absolute, and to complete Philosophy. 
 
 Let us look well at these categories, then, says Hegel, and 
 consider them in their own absolute truth. First of all, then, there 
 are the four capital Titles, as Kant names them, Quantity, Quality, 
 Kelation, and Modality. Now, of these the first three are evi- 
 dently objective and material, while the last is only subjective 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 337 
 
 and formal : the first three concern the constitution and construc- 
 tion of objects themselves, the last only their relation to us. But 
 to the development of the absolute world, we abstract from our- 
 selves, and it would seem, therefore, as if we must abstract also 
 from this modality of Kant. Things exist in Quantity, Quality, 
 and Kelation ; and this division seems complete in itself. As for 
 Subjectivity and it is subjectivity that modality involves it is a 
 sphere apart ; Subjectivity, in short, implies Things and something 
 more. Things have their own laws ; but Subjectivity appears in 
 an element which, while implying laws of its own, involves sub- 
 jection to those of things also. Subjectivity, then, appears a 
 higher stage, and it seems necessary to complete things or objec- 
 tivity first. 
 
 The first glance of Hegel, then, eliminates for the nonce mod- 
 ality, and we have to see him now employed on Quantity, Quality, 
 and Kelation. Now, are these the most universal of all objective 
 categories, and are they complete ? Again, this being so, are they 
 deducible the one from the other, and all from a common principle 
 which is obviously the First and the Fundament ? The categories 
 being the Absolute, being ti .'^ What is, it is evident that their 
 completion and in a system would constitute, at last, Philo- 
 sophy. They cannot, thei be left standing as we receive them 
 from Kant. Notwithstanding that Kant derives them from the 
 functions of Judgment, actual analysis fails ; they have not 
 in him the architectonic oneness and fullness which he himself 
 desiderates, but rather that rhapsodic appearance of undeduced- 
 ness and incompleteness which he himself abhors. They 
 look meagre, disconnected, arbitrary : we instinctively refuse 
 to accept them as the inner and genetic archetypes of all 
 that is. We must be better satisfied in their regard : they 
 must be larger and fuller somehow : we must trace them 
 both up to their necessary source, and down into all the rami- 
 fications of their completed system. In this way, we shall 
 have the crystal of the universe, the diamond net into which 
 the whole is wrought, God and the thoughts of God before the 
 birth of time or a single finite intelligence, or even entity. 
 Idealism thus would be finished and complete. Thought would 
 constitute the universe: the universe would simply be thought, 
 thought in its two reciprocal sides, thought inner and thought 
 outer. The proper name for Philosophy in this case would be 
 Logic ; for, indeed, the all of things would simply be reduoed to 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Logic. Nay, Logic would be the Absolute Logic would supplant 
 and replace Theology itself. The chaos of this universe, in fact, 
 that stands before ordinary intelligence, would shapingly collapse 
 into the law and order and unity of a single life a life which we 
 should understand a life which each of us should participate 
 modally. The Substance, Attribute, and Modus of Spinoza would 
 thus be realised, would thus have flesh on their bones, and be 
 alive and actual. These are grand thoughts, suggestive of a close 
 at last to the inquest of man : we must complete them : we must 
 take up the lead that Kant has given us : we must strike boldly 
 through the gate which he led up to it by Hume has been the 
 first to open to us ! Let us look well to what he has done, then ; 
 let us follow all his steps ; above all, let us look again into all the 
 materials he has collected as categories. What we have to do is 
 to complete their Many, and to find their One : what we have to 
 do is to demonstrate the All, and in co-articulation with the 
 Principium with that which is first and one and inderivative ! 
 
 As regards their One, that in Kant is Apperception, Judgment ; * 
 but Judgment is only a single moment of Logic : there remain 
 two others Simple Apprehension and Keason. The last, cer- 
 tainly, Kant has drawn into consideration, but perhaps imper- 
 fectly ; and, as regards the second (the first in the rubric), he has 
 not thought of it at all. But, if Logic is to be considered the 
 principle of the whole (and why should not Logic constitute the 
 principle of the whole ? what God has created must be but an 
 emanation of his own thought, of his own nature ; and do we not 
 know that man, so far as he is a Spirit, is created in the likeness 
 of God ? why, then, should not Logic, which is the crystal of 
 man's thought, be the crystal also of God's thought, and the 
 crystal as well of God's universe of that universe which, as God's 
 universe, must be but the realisation, the other side, of God's 
 thought ?) if Logic, then, is to be the principle of the whole, we 
 must be serious with Logic, and take it together in all its parts. 
 Simple Apprehension, then, is a moment no more to be omitted 
 than any of the rest. 
 
 But, possessing the light of system and unity which Kant's 
 demand for an architectonic principle has kindled in us, we 
 cannot be content with Logic itself in these mere chapters and 
 
 * Kant (WW. ii. 69, 70, 79, 733) identifies consciousness with understanding, 
 understanding with judgment, and judgment with thought or thinking itself. See 
 also Text-Book to Kant, p. 389. New. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 339 
 
 headings, in this mere side-by-side of Simple Apprehension 
 Judgment, and Keason : they, too, must be organically fused into 
 a concrete unit, which unit were evidently the ultimate or basal 
 unit, the absolutely primordial cell in other words, the Absolute, 
 itself. But is this possible ? can we view these as but elements 
 of a single pulse, moments of a single movement ? Yet, again, 
 what we are contemplating is a principle too subjective for our 
 objects as yet, and we seem to be tending too much to the stand- 
 point of Kant. Kant held by Apperception and a subjective 
 idealism : Kant postulated an elsewhere which, received into our 
 organs, only so and so affected us, only so and so appeared to us 
 in consequence of the constitution peculiar, not to it (the else- 
 where, the thing-in-itself), but to them (the organs). In this 
 way, knowledge could only be phenomenal and provisional. But 
 it is not so that we would view the problem : we eliminate sub- 
 jectivity in the first instance ; we stretch out the threads of the 
 categories as the primordial and essential filaments ; on these we 
 lay the particularised universe of things ; and then we say, 
 Behold the world, behold what is ! With such design before us, 
 then, we cannot "begin with Simple Apprehension, Judgment, 
 and Keason : these, as named, concern subjectivity ; and even if 
 they are the ultimate moments of the All, we must have them 
 in another form before we can lay them down as objective 
 categories of foundation and support. We can talk of Quantity, 
 Quality, and Relation, for these are objective, and all things sub- 
 mit to their forms. But the moments of Logic in the form of the 
 moments of Logic are too subjective to serve a similar purpose : 
 in such form, they seem alien to things. The moments of Logic 
 in such form, then, will not answer as a beginning, however 
 much they may constitute the true rhythm of all things. In 
 other words, the Logical movement is the ultimate principle 
 but we do not find it in the beginning in that form ; it has a 
 preliminary path to describe before reaching the same. But let 
 us look again at the categories as we find them in Kant. 
 
 Well, we look at them and it is to be seen, without difficulty, 
 that they are but results of generalisation. The question 
 occurs, then, has this process reached completion, or is it sus- 
 ceptible of being carried further ? Again, in the latter event, 
 might not, in ultimate generalisation, a category be anticipated 
 which should be the category of categories, or the notion of 
 notions; for Kant himself calls the categories notions, Stamm- 
 
340 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 begriffe, root-notions. The notion of notions ! well, but we have 
 just seen that the logical movement must be the fundamental 
 principle ; if, in another way, therefore, a notion of notions is to 
 emerge with a claim to the like authority and place, the two 
 results must coincide and be identical. In other words, this 
 ultimate generalisation, this last abstraction, which is the notion 
 of notions, will constitute the first form of the logical pulse and, 
 in general, just the beginning that we want. This logical pulse, 
 too, being coincident with the ultimate category or notion of 
 notions, is capable of being regarded 'as KO.T egoxw the Notion. 
 
 But the categories are, so to speak, concrete abstractions : they 
 possess a filling, content, matter, an implement, a complement, an 
 ingest, an mtent, a tenor, a purport, an import (Inhalt) : Quantity 
 possesses universality, particularity, singularity ; Quality, affirma- 
 tion, negation, limit; Relation, substance, causality, reciprocity. 
 The ultimate Category, or the Notion, then, being also a concrete 
 abstraction like the rest, will possess a filling of its own ; and this 
 filling or matter must be the universal of all these fillings or 
 matters. Each of these matters, again, must be but a particular 
 of it (the matter of the notion), as universal. They, then, thus 
 particulars of the same universal, must be mutually related and 
 affiliated as congruent differences of the same identity. But in 
 this last phrase we have a hint given us as to how we should 
 regard the matter of the notion. These words identity and 
 difference can be used in description of the first two moments of 
 the matter of all the Titles. Under Quantity, Universality, not 
 only in its notion, but in its very name, points to unity or 
 identity; while Particularity, again, is but difference the 
 particulars are but the differences of the universal, the species but 
 the differences of the genus. Under Quality, Affirmation is plainly 
 identity but the identity, so to speak, of common concurrence ; 
 and as plainly Negation is difference, for it implies a No to a Yes, 
 or difference is at twain, and two contain difference. Under Ke- 
 lation, Substance is but the supporting identity of the All of things, 
 while Causality is but the difference in this identity implying, as 
 it does always, the first and the second, the one and the other. 
 The fourth Title of Kant we have eliminated for the present as it 
 refers to subjectivity : nevertheless, the fourth [title is equally 
 illustrative of the same facts Nay, in the Titles themselves, let 
 alone their moments, cannot a like relation be detected ? Is not 
 the Quality of anything just its own identity? and is not 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 341 
 
 Quantity just anything's own difference ? Increase or decrease of 
 Quantity (within limits) does not alter Quality (you and I would 
 be much the same were we some pounds heavier : the cabbage is 
 its own identity (and this lies in its quality), but its growth from 
 day to day (Quantity) constitutes its difference) And this is a 
 lesson to us Kant is wrong to place Quantity before Quality 
 now that attention is called to this, we seem to see, just in a 
 general way indeed, that Quality ought to precede Quantity: 
 Quality is indeed the inner reality or identity, while Quantity is 
 but the outer difference. In identity and difference, then, we seem 
 to have obtained wider universals for the two first moments of all 
 the Kantian triads. But they are triads ; what, then, of a third 
 moment in this our own new triad ? may we hope to find a 
 similar wider universal for it also ? ' Now this will not be difficult, 
 if we observe in each triad the relation which the third term or 
 moment bears to the first and second. The third moment, in fact, 
 always seems to participate in both of those which precede ; we 
 can see it, in a manner, to conjoin and sum these. The singular, 
 for example, contains in it both the universal and the particular ; 
 limitation implies both affirmation and negation ; while, in the last 
 place, reciprocity or community seems to contain in its one virtue 
 both that of substantiality and that of causality. But these triads 
 of Kant have been derived from certain Logical triads which also 
 manifest the same property. To convince himself of this, let the 
 reader but glance at the Table in Kant that sums the various 
 judgments : Disjunctive, for example, does it not involve a virtue at 
 once Categoric and Hypothetic ? Nay, does not the third Title, 
 Eelation (we have eliminated the fourth), manifest itself as but, in 
 a manner, a uniting medium of both Quantity and Quality 
 though, to be sure, it is a relation proportion of quantity, with 
 quality as a result rather than Eelation in general, which 
 accurately accomplishes this ? (By-the-bye, let us not forget this 
 exact new third just discovered for Quantity and Quality 
 Proportion, Measure, Maass /) 
 
 But if the third moment is always related to the first and 
 second, they, too, probably will be mutually related ? It really is 
 so. This, indeed, we have already said : in every case, it is the 
 relation of identity and difference. On looking quite close, 
 indeed, the second moment (difference) is seen to be just the 
 opposite, the contrary, the negative of the first (identity). Nega- 
 tion is the opposite of affirmation ; particularity is the opposite of 
 
342 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 universality ; and the same relation does in fact obtain between 
 substantiality and causality, for the latter involves reference to 
 dependence or derivation, and that is the opposite of substan- 
 tiality. Nay, looking to the Titles themselves, there is virtually 
 the same relation between Quality and Quantity ; for if the one is 
 inner, the other is outer. 
 
 The three moments, then, are always interconnected, as Yes, No, 
 and Both. This is sufficiently singular, and suggests very clearly 
 the possibility of ranging all in a common system. The movement 
 plainly is one of identity, opposition, and reconciliation of both 
 in a new identity. This movement, accordingly, name it 
 as we may (in the terms of Aristotle as formerly, if it is thought 
 fit), is the notion of notions, or the notion. This movement will 
 be the logical movement also. Yes ; the same relation but repeats 
 itself in the triad Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeason 
 (Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss) : Judgment always says no to the awards 
 of Sense, and Eeason reconciles them in a new and higher truth. 
 Such is but the history of the world ! What we see everywhere 
 is but the logical movement repeating itself in a variety of forms 
 and under a variety of names. We have certainly discovered the 
 principle, then, and the proper pulse of this principle: but how 
 are we to set it in action to the production of a system ? The 
 categories have presented themselves as triads, the moments of 
 which collapse, in the case of each triad, into a trinity (tri-unity). 
 Now, let us hut find the first trinity, and the sequence of trinities 
 ought to flow of itself, according to the movement, up to the 
 ultimate trinity, which is the consummation of the whole : in this 
 way, the thing would be done our aim accomplished ! 
 
 The course of Hegel's thoughts and the nature of his whole 
 industry dialectic and all can now have no difficulty to any 
 reader. A glance at the contents of the ' Logik ' or ' Encyclopaedic' 
 will from the mere outside amply suffice to confirm all. Consider 
 this one point : it occurred to ourselves, a moment ago, that it 
 was difficult to find and name a proper third to identity and differ- 
 ence as identity and difference ; and we were tempted to say, com- 
 munity or reciprocity itself. On turning to the contents of the 
 works named (the 'Logik' and the 'Encyclopaedic'), we found 
 Hegel had experienced the same difficulty; for in the one work, 
 the third to identity and difference is the Contradiction, while in 
 the other it is the Ground. This last term approaches, it will be 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 343 
 
 observed, the one which had occurred to ourselves, Community; for 
 the Ground is the Community of the Differences. 
 
 Hegel now, then, has realised Logic. He has discovered the 
 principle of the Categories, and of their concatenation as well =a 
 principle which is true in fact, and which is capable of being 
 made the principle of the universe. What he has to do now, then, 
 is to complete the categorical trinities, and, at the same time, con- 
 duct them all up to, or derive them all down from, a similar 
 simple multiple, or multiple simple, which were the First and 
 inderivative. But to this he possesses a clue in perceiving that 
 the process is one of logical determination, where, necessarily, the 
 first is the absolute abstraction, and the last the absolute concre- 
 tion. Again, both of these will be but forms of the absolute 
 principle, which is the notion; and the notion quantitatively 
 named, but with a qualitative force is the reciprocal unity, or 
 the tautological reciprocity of universality, particularity, and singu- 
 larity. Here, in fact, is the type of the system itself : the absolute 
 universal will be the First, while the absolute singular will be the 
 Last, and the absolute particular or the ultimate categories which 
 represent all the ground- thoughts descriptive and constructive of 
 the universe will be the Middle, or the matter comprehended 
 between the first and last. For a First, then, Hegel sees that he 
 must find the most abstract universal, or the most universal 
 abstract ; or that he must find that trinity which shall exhibit the 
 notion in its most abstract or universal form. In a word, he must 
 find the most abstract universal identity (the genus), the most 
 abstract universal difference (the differentia), and the most abstract 
 universal community of identity and difference (the species), or 
 however else we may name and the names are legion the 
 several constituent moments of the notion. But Hegel has 
 actually before him other categories and many remarks of Kant 
 for his express guidance and direction in this whole industry. 
 Some of these, as in relation to Something and Nothing, &c., we 
 have seen already ; and here, from the ' Kritik of Pure Reason,' 
 are a few more, which the reader will now see must have contained 
 much matter eminently suggestive to Hegel : 
 
 It is to be observed that the Categories, as the true Stammbegriffe (root- 
 notions) of pare understanding, possess their equally pure derivatives, which 
 can by no means be omitted in a complete system of Transcendental Philosophy, 
 but with whose mere mention I may be content in a mere critical preliminary 
 inquest. 
 
344 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Hegel, then, could see what he had to do for the construction of 
 a system. Poor Kant, like a hen that had hatched ducks, was 
 never done with cluck-clucks of consternation over the mad fashion 
 in which his rash brood Fichte and the rest dashed into the 
 bottomless water of speculation, never done with cluck-clucks of 
 consternation and of fervid warning to return to the solid land of 
 kritical procedure, for which he pathetically assured them their 
 excellent ' Darstellungsgabe ' (say style) could do so much. It is 
 questionable if he could have recognised in Hegel that return to 
 his own results which he so ardently longed for and so unweariedly 
 called for. It is quite certain now, however, that the whole work 
 of Hegel was simply to furnish that ' complete system of the 
 Transcendental Philosophy ' indicated by Kant. 
 
 Let me be permitted (the veteran proceeds) to name these pure but deriva- 
 tive notions, the predicables of pure understanding (in contrast to the predica- 
 ments). If we have the original and primitive notions, the derivative and 
 subaltern may be easily added, and the family-tree of pure understanding 
 completely delineated. As I have here to do, not with the completion of the 
 system, but only with that of the principles towards it, I may be allowed to 
 postpone the addition of such a complement to another work. This object, 
 however, may be pretty correctly reached, if any one but take in hand the 
 ordinary ontological text-books, and set, for example, under the category of 
 Causality, the predicables of power, action, passion, &c. ; under Reciprocity, 
 those of the present, resistance, &c. ; and under Modality, origin, disease,, 
 &c. &c. The categories combined with the modi of pure sense [Time and 
 Space], or with one another, furnish a great number of derivative d priori 
 notions, &c. 
 
 Hegel was thus directly referred to the very manner in which 
 he should set about his task ; and his task was comparatively easy, 
 for, as Kant himself points out 
 
 The great compartments (Facher) are once for all there it is only neces- 
 sary to fill them up ; and a systematic Topik, like the present, does not 
 readily permit us to miss the places to which each notion properly belongs, at 
 the same time that it causes us readily to remark those which are still empty.* 
 
 Kant proceeds : 
 
 As regards the Table of the Categories, some curious remarks may be made 
 which may have, perhaps, advantageous results as respects the scientific form 
 of all rational truths. For that this Table, in the theoretic part of philosophy, 
 is uncommonly serviceable, nay indispensable, in order completely to project 
 
 * The above quotations are from the K. of P. U. g 10 ; those that follow, from 
 11, same work. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 345 
 
 a plan towards the Whole of a Science, so far as this science is to rest on a 
 priori notions, as well as mathematically to distribute the same according to 
 definite principles, appears directly of itself from this, that said Table contains 
 at full all the elementary notions of understanding, and even the form of a 
 system of the same in the human understanding, and consequently furnishes 
 direction and guidance to all the moments of any contemplated speculative 
 science, and even to their order, as indeed I have already given elsewhere an 
 example in proof (s. ' Metaphys. Anfangsgr. der Naturwissensch '). Here now 
 are some of these remarks : 
 
 The first is : that this Table, which contains four classes of Categories, parts 
 tirst of all into two Divisions, the first of which is directed to objects of Per- 
 ception (pure as well as empirical) ; the second, again, to the Existence of these 
 objects (whether as referred to one another or to the understanding) [Quantity 
 1 pure,' Quality ' empirical,' Relation ' mutual reference,' Modality ' reference 
 to the understanding ']. 
 
 The first class I would name that of the mathematical, the second that of 
 the dynamical, Categories. The first class, as is evident, has no correlates, 
 which are found only in the second. This difference must have its reason [as 
 Hegel has well investigated] in the nature of the understanding. 
 
 2nd Remark. That in every case there is a like number three of the 
 categories of every class, which summons to reflection [and Hegel reflected 
 and pondered this to some effect], as all a priori distribution elsewhere through 
 notions is necessarily a Dichotomy [Black or not-Black, &c.]. Moreover, that 
 the third category in every case [Hegel is all here] arises from the union of the 
 second with the first of its class. 
 
 Thus Allness (Totality) is nothing else than Plurality [a Many] considered 
 as Unity ; Limitation is nothing else than Reality united to Negation ; Com- 
 munity is one Substance Causally determining another Reciprocally ; lastly, 
 Necessity is nothing else than Existence given by Possibility itself. Let it 
 not be thought, however, that the third ^category is for this reason a merely 
 derivative one, and not a root-notion of pure understanding. For the union 
 of the first and second in order to produce the third notion demands a special 
 act of understanding, which is not identical with that which is exerted in the 
 case of the first and second. Thus the notion of a Number (which belongs to 
 the category of Totality) is not always possible where there are the notions of 
 Plurality and Unity (as, for example, in the conception of the Infinite) ; nor 
 out of this, that I unite the notion of a cause and that of a substance, is Influ- 
 ence that is, how one substance can be the cause of something in another 
 substance directly and without more ado to be understood. From this it is 
 obvious that a special act of understanding is necessary to this ; and so as 
 regards the rest. 
 
 3rd Remark. In the case of a single category, that, namely, of Community, 
 which occurs under the third Title, is the agreement with the corresponding 
 form in the Table of the Logical Functions (here the disjunctive judgment) 
 not so self-evident as in that of the others. 
 
 In order to assure oneself of this agreement, it is to be observed : that in all 
 disjunctive judgments the sphere (the Many of all that is contained under the 
 judgment) is conceived as a whole distributed into parts (the subordinate 
 notions), and, as these parts cannot be contained the one under the other, 
 
346 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 they are thought as mutually co-ordinated, not subordinated, in such wise 
 that they, act on each other, not one-sidely as in a series, but reciprocally as 
 in an aggregate (if one member of the distribution is established, all the rest 
 are excluded, and vice versfi). 
 
 Now what we have to think is a similar conjunction in a Whole of Things, 
 where the one- is not subordinated as effect to the other as cause, but co- 
 ordinated as at the same time and reciprocally cause in reference to the other 
 (for example, the case of a body, the parts of which at once reciprocally attract 
 and resist each other), which is quite another sort of conjunction than that 
 met with in the simple relation of the cause to the effect (of reason to conse- 
 quent), in which the consequent does not reciprocally in its turn determine the 
 antecedent, and does not therefore constitute a whole with it (like the Creator 
 with the world). The same process which understanding observes when it 
 represents to itself the sphere of a distributed notion, it observes also when it 
 thinks a thing as capable of distribution ; and as the members of distribution 
 in the former mutually exclude each other, and nevertheless are united to- 
 gether in a single sphere, so it conceives the parts of the latter as such that 
 existence attaches to each of them as substances independently of the rest, 
 and yet that they are united together in a single whole. 
 
 In these remarks the reader will readily observe many germs 
 which it was the business of Hegel only to mature. That, under 
 each class, the third category, for example, should be a concrete 
 of the two former this an sick, virtually, is the dialectic of Hegel. 
 Once, indeed, that Hegel had observed this peculiarity, and that 
 he had also generalised the categories into the category, his system, 
 we may say, and in all its possibilities, was fairly born. Kant 
 observes,* ' that there are two stocks or stems of human knowledge, 
 which arise perhaps from a single common root, as yet unknown to 
 us, namely, ' Sense and Understanding, through the former of which 
 objects are given, and through the latter thought.' Now, to see that 
 this bringing together of sensation and intellect amounted to the 
 percipient Understanding (intuitus originarius, intellectuelle An- 
 schauung, anschauender Verstand) of Kant to see moreover that 
 Kant's own industry had no other tendency than to realise such 
 reduction and identification, this also may be named the be- 
 ginning of Hegel ; for, in a word, Hegel's system is a demonstra- 
 tion that Sensation and Understanding are virtually one, the 
 former being but outwardly what the other is inwardly, and each 
 the necessary reciprocal counterpart of the other. This, too, is 
 evidently the effect of the speculations of Kant in reference to the 
 Categories and the Schemata resultant from the conjunction of 
 these with Time and Space. To co-ordinate and reduce to one, 
 
 * K. of P. K., Introduction, sub finem. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 347 
 
 Sense and Intellect, or Sensations and Ideas (Notions), this is 
 another of those curt statements of the whole which may conduce 
 not only to the understanding, but to the judging, of the Hegelian 
 system. Hegel himself has remarked, that to reproduce a system 
 is the true way critically to judge it : he intimates even that he 
 who faithfully reproduces a system is already beyond it. Now, no 
 doubt, these curt statements are calculated to bring one's know- 
 ledge up to the very apex of insight; but they only mislead, 
 deceive, ruin, when they themselves are taken as knowledge, and 
 when it escapes notice that their function is not to constitute 
 knowledge, but only to give focus to knowledge. A general 
 statement is but gas and of a very dangerous kind in the mouth 
 of him who is empty of the particulars. In these curt words, 
 tending though they do to carry us beyond what they concern, 
 there is this danger, then, to all parties in humanity ; and there 
 is yet in them another danger to a single party. To the 
 Materialist, for example, such words as above are so glaringly 
 absurd, and the enterprise they indicate so glaringly stupid, that 
 he feels justified, from the mere outside, to neglect and reject all 
 industries (as those of Kant and Hegel) which are capable of 
 being characterised by them. It is the former danger which is 
 the important one, however, and the latter we may neglect, for, as 
 the idealist views man as Spirit, the materialist views him only as 
 Animal, however acute he (the materialist) may be, then, as 
 regards mundane commodity, he is wholly opaque to what alone 
 is human Religion, Philosophy, and even Poetry and is mani- 
 festly of no account to men who can interest themselves in such 
 subjects as the present. 
 
 To possess a curt formula for the whole of Hegel, does not 
 dispense us from the labour of the particular, then ; and we have 
 yet much of this to achieve. 
 
 It is now to be seen, nevertheless, that a complete answer to 
 our first question as to what led Hegel to begin as he did, is 
 rapidly rising on us. We see what was the One of his system, 
 and how he found it ; we see also what his Many are to be, and 
 how he is to find them. Of a clue to the First of his Many 
 we have also some perception now, though this First itself has not 
 yet exactly announced itself. Suppose Hegel, in quest of this 
 First, &c., to adopt the hint of Kant and take the text-books of 
 Ontology in his hand, or suppose him to inspect the derivative 
 categories all the categories, indeed, mentioned by Kant him- 
 
348 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 self, it will not be difficult to discern how it was he was enabled 
 to succeed. Kant expressly states as categories, Daseyn and 
 Nichtseyn, or Being and Non-being ; and he also elsewhere sug- 
 gestively speculates in regard to Something and Nothing, an ulti- 
 mate Abstract, &c. : it could not be difficult, then, for Hegel with 
 his eyes opened as they now were to the general issue, by the 
 realisation of the Logical Movement itself to see that Seyn and 
 Nichtseyn were categories to be ranked under Quality, that 
 Quality, as we have ourselves so very clearly seen, must precede 
 Quantity, and that this very sub-category Seyn was itself the 
 most abstract quality conceivable. But Seyn being this ab- 
 stractest notion of all, his beginning was found. Though the notion 
 constituted the principle, he could not make the notion in the 
 form of notion the beginning. The notion itself must have a 
 beginning, and this beginning might be constituted by Seyn. The 
 notion itself in its own development must submit to the law of 
 its own rhythm, and could not appear on the scene in any 
 Minerva-like completeness as at once the full-formed notion. The 
 notion itself must begin, and must begin by appearing under the 
 form of its own first moment universality, identity, or an sich, 
 &c. But appearing as the absolutely first universality, or the ab- 
 solutely first identity, it could only appear as the primal indefinite- 
 ness that is and that is pure being. What is call it the world, 
 call it God, call it the notion if it began, could only begin in ab- 
 solute indefiniteness. In fact, it is not necessary that this in- 
 definiteness should ever have been it is enough that, if we want 
 what we call a beginning, we must begin with indefiniteness. 
 What is a beginning ? A beginning implies that there at once is 
 and is not and how can that be named otherwise than as pure 
 being, indefinite being ? that what is, is but as yet absolutely 
 indefinitely ? This is the true Begriffoi the Vorstellung primor- 
 dial chaos. Afundamen, afomes, a v\q, a rudimentum, a Grundlage, 
 a groundwork, a mother- matter is always postulated by the Vors- 
 tellung ; but this postulate translated into the language of thought 
 proper, amounts to the indefiniteness that is, or pure being. 
 
 But if pure being be the first, according to the law of the notion, 
 its own opposite, or non-being, must be the second, and the third 
 must be a new simple that concretely contains both; or the third 
 must be a species of which the first is the genus, and the second the 
 differentia : but this here is just Werden; every becoming at once 
 is and is not, or is at once being and non-being Here, then, is 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 349 
 
 the absolutely first triad, the absolutely first form of the always, 
 tri-une notion ; or here is the absolutely germinal cell : it is impos- 
 sible to go further back than to the absolute indefiniteness that 
 at once is and is not, but becomes. It is an error on our part to 
 have a difficulty here, and to stultify ourselves with the Vorstel 
 lung of a substrate, of a something that was this indefiniteness. 
 In one sense that is not requisite, as it is here Logic that we have 
 before us as it is here with thoughts only, and not with things 
 that we have to do. But if we want a substrate, that we possess 
 in thought. Thought is and thought is all that is (or the notion), 
 and the first form was indefiniteness, but an indefiniteness that 
 still was. Or take it otherwise, there actually is, there really is, 
 there can be no doubt of that ; there really is this variegated uni- 
 verse Jupiters, and belts of Saturn, and double stars, and the sun 
 and the earth ; Barclay's porter, Hook's patent coffee-roaster, and 
 what not : well, the beginning of all that if ever there was a be- 
 ginning must have been in an indefinite One, the only name for 
 which could be pure being. Let any one turn and twist it as he 
 may, he will find no other issue. Hegel's beginning, then, is true, 
 not only. to the principles of Kant, not only to the requirements of 
 Logic, or to those of this new logical notion generalised by Hegel 
 out of Kant, but it is true also to the nature of facts such as we 
 see and know them. 
 
 Surely, this was an immense success for Hegel. Having 
 realised Logic, and seen it to be the essential all having dis- 
 covered the notion itself to have also discovered the absolutely 
 initial form, not only of that notion, but just of the facts around 
 us as any peasant may see them ! 
 
 Being, Non-being, Becoming ! Here is the trinity as it must 
 have been in its beginning ! 
 
 Again, from the realisation of Logic, it followed that Logic 
 would be the vital pulse in every sphere that every sphere, in 
 short, would be but a form, but a metaphor, but a Vorstellung of 
 Logic : but, this being so, history itself would have to submit to 
 the same truth, history itself would present in its process only a 
 development of Logic. But limiting ourselves in history to the 
 history of Logic itself, we should expect to find even this special 
 history following the same laws. The first special logicians, then, 
 would in this case be found historically to be engaged with Seyn, 
 Nichtseyn, Werden, &c. On inquiry, Hegel found all this true to 
 fact: all this is represented in the Greek thinkers that precede 
 
350 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Socrates. Nay, all this is true up to the present instant : for the 
 notion itself only emerged an sicli (the moment of Simple Appre- 
 hension) in Kant, became fur sich or agnised into its differences 
 (the moment of Ur-theil) in Fichte and Bchelling, and transformed 
 itself to an und fur sich (the moment of Schluss) in Hegel. This 
 is another reason why, though the notion was the bottom truth, 
 no beginning could be made with it in that form : to have 
 attempted this, would have been to stultify history. It is in 
 history that we have series which demand beginnings ; and as 
 regards Logic, it is in history that we must find its beginning also. 
 Thus is it that Hegel was driven to a profound study of thought 
 as it has historically appeared, and the result of this study was to 
 confirm him in the sequence of the logical series which he con- 
 templated. 
 
 We may safely hold now, then, that the first question How it 
 was that Hegel was led to begin as he did is fairly answered. 
 We see at once the nature of his one the nature of his many 
 the nature of \\isfirst and where and how he got them. 
 
 2. What does Hey el mean by these very strange, norel, and appar- 
 ently senseless statements ? This presents now no difficulty. So 
 much of the answer, however, has passed into what precedes, or 
 must be reserved for what follows, that very little is left us to say 
 under the present head. 
 
 The indefinite immediate seems a strange phrase ; but what else 
 can be said of pure being, but that it is the indefinite immediate ? 
 There is an immediate to us we arc there is something present 
 to us : now, if we take no note of any particularity in this that is 
 present to us, but generalise all particularities into their common 
 one) what we reach is indefinite, but it is still immediate. Being 
 is not annihilated by the abstraction, there still is ; and what is, 
 when we absolutely abstract from all particularity, is just the 
 indefinite immediate. The result of such abstraction is but the 
 void self-identical faculty ; or it is just thought gone into its own 
 indefinite blank where it will see none and have none of its own 
 constituent distinctions. But anything like a personal reference 
 any thought of any individual's special faculty destroys the 
 abstraction. Being is what is when everything is abstracted from 
 the absolute universal of all particulars : and being, surely, is 
 simply that one thing in which all particulars concur. Whatever 
 is, is, or is being ; that is, being is common to everything. In this 
 abstraction, it is evident that we are quite freed from any question 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 351 
 
 of an inner principle whence this being might arise. Indefinite 
 being brings with it no such want ; or indefinite being, as the 
 materia communis, is felt to be this principle itself. Being is 
 simply indefinitely What is ; and, as we know that there is a 
 definitely What is, we know that what indefinitely is, is just the_ 
 fundamen and tout-ensemble of all that definitely is. All that 
 requires to be understood in the paragraph that regards Seyn will 
 now be perfectly intelligible. Other terms not as yet noticed, 
 have their places elsewhere. 
 
 We may add only that An sich is perhaps the best term for the 
 initial identity, the initial indefinite potentiality, which, if a 
 beginning is required at all, must be attached as beginning to the 
 notion. The notion as indefinite identity is in the moment of 
 simple apprehension ; though simple apprehension, as form, is 
 itself much later in the series of developments ; and as indefinite 
 identity the notion may be correctly described as simply an sich, 
 simply in itself, simply virtual, or potential, or impliciter. But 
 this is just pure Seyn : pure being is nothing more and nothing 
 less than simply the notion an sich, or, if you like, the notion of 
 an sich. But, in obedience to the laws of What is, identity must 
 pass into difference, Simple Apprehension must become Judgment, 
 the Begriff must sunder its be -griped -ness into the part-ing 
 which is the Urtheil ; the An sich must awake into Fur sich. 
 Thus is it that we see how Fur sich becomes applicable to the 
 second step : Fur sich refers to a certain amount of consciousness; 
 recognition is implied ; and recognition is a result of distinction, 
 of difference. Against this appropriation of Fur sich for the second 
 moment of the universal pulse, we know that many objections 
 may be urged from the usage of Hegel himself. Even in the table 
 of contents, for example, we see Fiirsichseyn placed as the resum- 
 ing moment of Reason. Nor is it an affair of place only ; for we 
 know that Fiirsichseyn denotes the collapse of all particularity 
 into singularity. Neither is this the only example of a similar 
 usage. Nevertheless, we believe that we are right in the main, and 
 that even the exceptions will give little pause to the student who 
 is anything instruit. The very chapter in Hegel which is specially 
 entitled Fiirsichseyn is devoted to the evolution of the One and 
 the Many with a view to the transition of Quality into Quantity.* 
 
 * So far as the Ur-theil gives unity to its own dif-ference, it has the action of 
 Fiirsich ; but to give that name to the moment of Unterschied is, as a matter of 
 mere naming, of no moment. N. 
 
352 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 The third step now is readily intelligible as the stage of an and 
 fur sick. 
 
 3. What can be intended by these seemingly silly and absurd 
 transitions of Being into Nothing, and again of loth into Becoming ? 
 Well now, there is, after all, no great difficulty here. Suppose we 
 define Nothing, how otherwise can we define it than as the 
 absence of all distinguishableness, that is, of every discrimen 
 whatever? But the absence of every recognisable discrimen 
 whatever is just the absence of all particularity, and the absence 
 of all particularity is but the abstraction from all particularity- 
 pure being! Pure being and pure nothing, then, are therefore 
 identical. Pure Seyn can be no otherwise defined than pure 
 Nichts: Seyn like Nichts, and Nichts like Seyn each is the 
 absence of all distinguishableness, or of every recognisable 
 discrimen whatever. Did you take up anything, and call it pure 
 Seyn, and yet point to a discrimen in it, you would only be 
 deceiving yourself, and speaking erroneously ; for in pure Seyn 
 there can be no discrimen. Seyn must be universal, and any 
 discrimen would at once particularise it. Thus, then, Pure Being 
 and Pure Nothing are absolutely identical they are absolutely 
 indistinguishable. It is useless to say nothing is nothing, but 
 being is something : being is not more something than nothing is. 
 We admit Nothing to exist ; nothing is an intelligible distinction ; 
 we talk of thinking nothing and of perceiving nothing : in other 
 words, nothing is the abstraction from every discrimen or 
 particularity. But an abstraction from every discrimen, does not 
 involve the destruction of every or any discrimen : all discrimina 
 still exist; in nothing we have simply withdrawn into indefiniteness. 
 This nothing, then, of ours still implies the formed or definite 
 world. Precisely this is the value of Pure Being : when we have 
 realised the notion pure being, we have simply retired into the 
 abstraction from all discrimina, but these for all our abstraction 
 and retirement still are. Pure Being and Pure Nothing, then, 
 point each to the absolutely same abstraction, the absolutely same 
 retirement. In both, in fact, thought, for the nonce, has turned 
 its back on all its own discrimina ; for thought is all that is, and 
 all discrimina are but its own. In fact, both being and nothing 
 are abstractions, void abstractions, and the voidest of all abstrac- 
 tions, for they are just the ultimate abstractions. Neither is a 
 concrete ; neither is, if we may say so, a reale. What, then, is 
 What actu is in point of fact is is neither the one nor the other ; 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 353 
 
 but everything that is, is a crvvo\ov, a composite, of both. This is 
 remarkable that the formed world should hang between the 
 hooks of two invisible abstractions, and, at the same time, that 
 every item of the formed world should be but a a-vvdXov of these 
 two invisible abstractions. We cannot handle being here and 
 nothing there, as we might this stone or that wood ; yet both stone 
 and wood are composites of being and nothing : they both are and 
 are not and this in more senses than one. They are that is, they 
 participate in being. They are distinguishable, they involve 
 difference ; difference implies negation : that is, they participate in 
 non-being. The stone is not the wood, the wood is not the stone : 
 each, therefore, if it is, also is not. Again, neither the one nor the 
 other is, any two consecutive moments, the same ; each is but a 
 Werden, but a Becoming. A day will come when both the one 
 and the other, both this wood and that stone, will have dis- 
 appeared : their existence was a process, then every instant of 
 their existence was a change, and it took the sum of these changes 
 to accomplish their disappearance. All here is mortal nothing 
 is twice the same no man ever passed twice through the same 
 street. This, then, is the truth of being and nothing : neither is ; 
 what is, is only their union and that is becoming ; for becoming 
 is nothing passing into being, or being passing into nothing. 
 This will probably suffice to guide the student who can and will 
 think, in the proper direction to gain his own repose as regards 
 these seemingly silly transitions. > 
 
 One word may still be added advantageously, however, in 
 reference to the difference of Being and Nothing ; for, absolutely 
 identical, they are still absolutely different : in them, indeed, the 
 two sides which obtain throughout the universe have reached 
 their absolute and direct antithesis. In Being, thought is, will- 
 ingly in Nothing, thought is, unwillingly in abstraction from 
 all particularity. Being is the tub that sees itself just emptied ; 
 Nothing is the same tub that would now see itself refilled. 
 Thought is well pleased to find itself in being ; but in indefinite- 
 ness (nothing) it is uneasy ; it has a want, it craves craves, in 
 short, to have definiteness, particularity, difference, craves to 
 know and to see itself to know and to see its own distinctions, 
 its own discrimina : and this evolution of thought's own self to 
 thought's own self, what is it but the universe ? Thus is it that 
 thought is the pure negativity, and sets its own negative which is 
 the object. Thus is it that thought does not remain indefinite 
 
 z 
 
354 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 but presses forward, according to its own rhythm, on to the revela- 
 tions of history and existence. This is another curt formula for 
 what Hegel would : it corresponds exactly to his phrase in regard 
 to Reason making itself fur sich that which it is an sich. It is well 
 worthy of observation, too, that the second moment of the one 
 throb, the one pulse, that which corresponds to the Ur-theil is one 
 of pain. The Ur-theil, which is a breaking asunder into the 
 differences, is but as a throe of labour : the evolution of Existence 
 is but the absolute in travail. Daseyn is but a continual birth 
 and birth is pain. So it is that he errs mightily who seeks in 
 life as life repose: life as life is monstration and probation 
 movement difference ; repose is reachable only in elevation over 
 the finite particulars which emerge or rather only in the refer- 
 ence of these to that Affirmation of which they are but the 
 Negative. That there should be pain in Nothing, then, and that 
 this pain should be the fount of movement, we can now under- 
 stand. The difference between Being and Nothing, in fact, is but 
 that being is the implication of all particularity, and Nothing the 
 abstraction from all particularity. It is obvious, then, that though, 
 so to speak, the middle is always the same (and the middle is the 
 matter held, which here is in both cases indefiniteness, and precisely 
 the same indefiniteness, for implication of all particularity is the 
 same Inhalt as abstraction from all particularity), the extremes 
 differ ; or, that though Being and Nothing are statements of pre- 
 cisely the same thing, the one is an affirmative statement while 
 the other is a negative one. In fact, we can conceive both Being 
 and Nothing as possessing two sides. There is a side in Being in 
 which it is Nothing; and again there is a side definite existence 
 being always involved where it is Being. So it is with Nothing : 
 even as Nothing, definite existence is still involved ; and so it has 
 precisely the same two sides as Being. In short, each constitutes 
 the middle and the extremes of which we have just spoken ; and 
 their difference lies in this that in the one, the one extreme is 
 accentuated, and in the other, the other. 
 
 4. WTiat does the ivhole thing amount 'to or what is the value of 
 the whole business ? Under the three previous questions, we have 
 already had to deal with some considerations which tend to throw 
 light on this question also. It represents nevertheless, perhaps, 
 the very greatest difficulty which everyone feels on his first in- 
 troduction to the system of Hegel. What is all this to do for me ? 
 what is it intended to explain ? in what way is the general 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 355 
 
 mystery rendered any less by it ? Such questions occur to every- 
 one. All these abstract terms are mere formalities, one feels, and 
 one is tempted to exclaim, What influence can be allowed any 
 such formalities in questions that concern the origin of this so 
 solid, real, and substantial universe ? It is to be said at once, 
 that the light of the whole can never be seen at the first step : 
 how can one link, and that the first one, give insight into the 
 entire reach of that which issues as an immense organic whole ? 
 Such vast consummation can never be expected to be intelligible 
 in the beginning, in the same way as in the end. It is this con- 
 sideration which seems to actuate Hegel ; who, in general, 
 vouchsafes abundantly scornful, dry, abstract allusion, but never 
 one word of plain, straightforward, concrete explanation. Informa- 
 tion in Hegel is, for the most part, but a disdainful abstruse riling 
 of us. We, however from what we know already of his proctdes 
 hitherto, and of his aims generally, can luckily help ourselves. 
 
 We have seen, then, from accurate insight into the categories 
 of Kant, that the probability is, that all that is, is but a, form of 
 the one movement of thought, of the one logical throb, which is 
 the notion. This is much. The substantiality of the outer world 
 ought not to be allowed to come in, as it were, as a stumbling- 
 block here. The outer world is but outer, the inner but inner : 
 they are equally ideal. Thought is the organic whole of its own 
 discrimina : these are in spheres ; outer and inner are two such : 
 outer and inner, in short, exist in inutual reciprocity, and the one 
 is no less substantial than the other, or they are consubstantial. 
 But what do we mean by substantiality as we ordinarily object it ? 
 It refers to matter, to solidity, to thingity ; substantiality means a 
 basis of somewhat, &c. &c. If we will but look close, however, we 
 shall find that all this means only individualisation or self- 
 reference : to thought its own discrimina are ; this is self-reference 
 self-reference is Being. If thought distinguishes its own dis- 
 crimina from itself, and gives them self-reference, then they are : 
 but when they also outwardly are, then the discrimination becomes 
 more absolute, then the distinction becomes a chasm then the 
 self-reference has grown substantial, and one seems to have before 
 one only isolated, self-complete, self-substantial immediates. Not 
 a whit on that account, however, are they more substantial than 
 the inner. Nay, the inner is their truth, the inner is the genuine 
 substantiality ; and they themselves are but transitory forms, a 
 prey to the contingency of the notion in externality to its own self. 
 
356 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 The notion, then, is the real substantiality of the universe ; and 
 its first forms, however formal they may seem, are the actual First,. 
 the actual beginning. You think of sand, and earth, and mud, and 
 clay ; but you have no business to think of sand, and earth, and mud,, 
 and clay here. Where thought as thought is concerned, it is absurd 
 to apply the category of natural causality ; and with a little 
 patience you may find sand, and earth, and mud, and clay them- 
 selves actually reduced to the notion, and held thereof. Natural 
 causality itself is but the notion the notion, however, in a peculiar 
 sphere : instead of the notion, then, being submiss to causality, it 
 is causality that must submit to the notion, from which, indeed, 
 it derives all its own virtue. 
 
 Once for all, the triad, Being, Non-being, Becoming, is the 
 tortoise of the universe, and the elephant of the same may rest 
 secure on it : that triad is the abstractest form, and so the most 
 rudimentary form, of the living concrete notion, which is the soul 
 and centre of the all. Thought is, and we can go no further back 
 than to, we can begin no sooner than with, its own absolutely in- 
 definite identity, which is pure Being. But thought that apprehends 
 itself as ~Being, judges itself Nothing, and reasons itself into Be- 
 coming. (Keason is the Ver-nunft, from ver-nehmen = transsu- 
 mere.) The earliest Begriff (Seyn) parts into the earliest Urtheil 
 (Nichts), and resumes ?itself !n the new one of the earliest Schluss 
 (Werden). This will be found to be even historically correct. 
 There is nothing unusually strange in this: consider that you 
 yourself are, that existence is, and you will see a strangeness 
 just in this, that there should be such a state of the case at all 
 to be matter of fact, which is at least not in any respect less 
 striking than that of the Hegelian procedure. To subjective 
 thought, being is an absolutely necessary idea ; and to objective 
 thought it is equally necessary, for before our existence could be 
 and our existence is being must have been thought. But in 
 either case, the further process of transition to nothing and to 
 becoming is also necessary. A primordial slime in a primordial 
 time and space is the very anility or infantility extremes meet 
 of thought: it is but the crude Vorstellung of a crude babe. 
 Thought is the prius of all ; and these, being, non-being, &c., are 
 the absolutely necessary categories that underlie existence. 
 
 It will be seen now, then, that the error of the reader in regard 
 to the simple paragraphs of our text, is that he thinks too much,, 
 rather than too little. He comes to them with a mind that teems 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 357 
 
 with prejudices, presuppositions, crude figurate conceptions (Vor- 
 stellungen), what are called formed opinions, and so forth; and 
 he is not at all prepared to see the beginning taken in what seems 
 to him so cavalier a fashion -nothing, without more ado, set down 
 as being and thus by the Jesuitical juggle of a logical presto,~as- 
 it were, genesis asserted and the world begun. What is here, 
 ho wever, is not genesis in that sense ; what is here is abstraction, 
 generalisation ; what is here is logical ; there is no attempt to 
 create a single dust-atom. The reader, moreover, has no business 
 to speculate, to guess and guess, to conjecture and conjecture ; he 
 has no business to sweat himself into a supposed meaning, by the 
 earnest attempt to see through a mill-stone of his own devising : 
 he has no business, in short, but simply to take up what is there 
 before him. 
 
 There is a subjective Logic in which we learn about terms, pro- 
 positions, syllogisms, &c. ; but there ought also to be an objective 
 Logic in which we shall learn about the secret criteria which we 
 apply to objects, the levers by which we grasp them, and char- 
 acterise them, and make them familiar to us. For there are such 
 criteria, there are such levers ; and the truth in their regard is, 
 that we at present know them not ; that they are not the tools of 
 us, but we rather are the tools of them. A complex or comple- 
 ment of some kind, for example, is brought for our examination. 
 At first it is but an unintelligible mass ; but at length we under- 
 stand it. Now, to understand it, what have we done ? We have 
 simply beset it, or transfixed it, or supplied it with categories. 
 Kather, what it was, it is no longer ; what it was, has disappeared; 
 it is now a simple system a simple congeries of categories. The 
 stuff has entirely vanished ; the whole mass and matter has been 
 converted into thought. What then is valuable what then is 
 true in the object, is these levers and criteria not of its judgment 
 only, but actually of its conversion and transformation. There is 
 nothing left in it which is not thought; for the other, which 
 appears, or which we opine in it, is nothing as against thought 
 against the thought, that is, into which it has been transformed. 
 Cause, effect, relation, principle, essence, true nature, quality, 
 action, reaction, force, influence, &c. &c. such are the secret 
 criteria, or tools, or levers we apply. Now, simply to discover 
 and explain all these, this is the business of the Logic of Hegel ; 
 arid it is thus very plain how that Logic, if a complete, co-articu- 
 lated system of these, must, no less, in simple truth, be the crystal 
 
358 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of the universe. Being, nothing, becoming, then, are but three of 
 these levers ; and is it not a truth that we characterise, and deter- 
 mine, and finish off whole columns of facts with such predicates 
 as these ? But have we ever looked at these predicates them- 
 selves ? have we ever inquired into their own nature, or into their 
 relative connexion ? have we ever satisfied ourselves of the condi- 
 tions of their authority ? The Materialist is a man that will have 
 no nonsense, see you ; he will look at facts only ; even when he 
 has stuck each fact, like a pincushion, so full of the needles and 
 pins of his own brain that nothing but these any longer shows, he 
 actually believes himself to be still contemplating the fact. The 
 Materialist, in fact, is but the prey of a thousand little imps 
 within him, whom he sees not. Unknown to himself, in truth, 
 the Logic of Hegel is all there within his skull. The difference 
 between him and Hegel is this : from Hegel it issues pure, and in 
 system, and as it is ; from the Materialist it issues in that mis- 
 cellaneous mass or mess (Gebrau), named by Hegel raisonnement t 
 blindly, irregularly, rhapsodically, not as it is, but as it is 
 opined about causes, and conditions, and essential, and accidental^ 
 &c. &c. 
 
 But the Materialist is, in this respect, no worse than the great 
 body of mankind at present. We all fancy, being, nothing, one, 
 many, &c., so plain in their meanings, that there is no need of 
 investigating them. Everybody, we say, knows perfectly what 
 nothing is, perfectly what it is to be, and perfectly what it is to 
 become. Or again, we may conceive the most of us to say, if we 
 did not know what they are, in what respect have the paragraphs 
 of the text improved our knowledge ? Are we to swallow such 
 statements for information seriously meant. Do you really ask 
 us to believe that being is nothing; or that because being is 
 nothing, or nothing being, there is anything become ? Why, the 
 singing of the tea-kettle is something infinitely more substantial, 
 something infinitely more instructive than any such barren non- 
 sense of empty verbiage, call it philosophy, metaphysic, logic, or by 
 whatever other fine name you will ! Nay, why should we accom- 
 pany you further? With such a foundation, what are we to 
 expect ? If, indeed, we grant you that being is nothing, what can 
 we expect ? Can such demand on our credulity be aught else than 
 a preparation for sophistry, legerdemain, imposture, falsehood ? 
 
 Such objections, in fact, at first hand, cannot be taken amiss. 
 Hegel receives them, in general, with his peculiar and terrible 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 359 
 
 sneer, and, on the whole, simply allows the System itself to 
 answer them. For our part, we trust that a sufficient answer will 
 be found in what precedes. One turn more, however, and we 
 have done with Being and Nothing, and this whole matter of a 
 beginning. 
 
 In dealing with objects, I certainly use sundry inner distinc- 
 tions; objects, in fact, obey these distinctions: it were well, then, 
 if we knew these distinctions and the system of them, if there be 
 a system of them. In regard to every object that presents 
 itself, we say, for example, it is. The pen is, the paper is, the 
 thought is, the feeling is : now the pen is the pen, the paper is the 
 paper, the thought is the thought, the feeling is the feeling ; but 
 what is the is ? By this is, we determine them ; they obey it. It 
 is a somewhat, therefore, and surely we may allowably spend a 
 moment in looking at it for itself. In general, we look at it only 
 for the others the pen, the paper, &c. ; but suppose we look at it 
 now for itself. Is whatever first was, that surely was the first 
 of the first : whatever came first fire, or earth, or water, or chaos, 
 or thought is was the first of it; with is, it began, and till 
 there is, there can be no beginning. Everyone will admit that 
 What is, is. Now, let him give any meaning he likes to this 
 what ; let him conceive it as mind, or as matter, or as space, or as 
 time ; he will admit without difficulty that he can equally with- 
 draw this meaning mind, matter, space, time. Let him try, 
 however, to withdraw the Is, and he will find it impossible. We 
 withdraw mind ; still there is matter, there is space, there is time. 
 We withdraw matter ; still there is space, still there is time. We 
 withdraw space; still there is time. We withdraw time, and 
 still there is. That is not meant arithmetically that if I begin 
 with six words, and withdraw four of them, two remain. This 
 withdrawal is meant to be performed by the mind in earnest 
 thought, and earnestly occupied with its thought. It is very easy 
 not to do this, it is very easy to refuse to do this, and it is very 
 easy to sneer rather than do this ; but he who will do this there 
 are some few, perhaps, who cannot do this will be obliged to 
 admit that, let him abstract and abstract from what he may, he 
 cannot get rid of the notion, Being. It is impossible to realise to 
 thought that there can possibly be, or that there could possibly 
 be an absolute void, or rather the absolute void of a void ; for 
 even a void itself would have to be withdrawn, did we desire to 
 effect an absolute non-is. There is, is, or isness, is an absolutely 
 
360 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 necessary thought, then, necessary and universal a category 
 the first category. 
 
 Now, there is no wish here to go out of Logic. It is with 
 being, or isness, as a thought only that we concern ourselves. And 
 surely in signalising this abstractest of all possible thoughts 
 this, then, in that respect, first thought we are not untruly, not 
 fraudulently employed. 
 
 Well, now, this is a beginning of objective Logic ; this principle 
 of determination, Is or Being, is a thought an absolutely neces- 
 sary, universal thought and it forms a necessary ingredient in 
 thought, and in all characterisation by thought. Of everything 
 in this universe we must say that it is : yes, but of everything in 
 this universe we must say also that it is not. This is a penny, it 
 is not a ha'penny ; it is copper, it is not silver ; it is round, it is 
 not square, &c. &c. That it is not is as essential a principle 
 of determination in regard to everything in this universe, as 
 that it is. In our apprehension of an object, affirmation 
 possesses not one whit more truth, not one whit more reality, 
 not one whit more necessity, than negation. An object, to 
 be apprehended as an. object, requires to be precisely appre- 
 hended ; and precision is the deed of negation. Non-is, then, and 
 is are necessary correlatives, are necessary conjuncts, never sepa- 
 rate, absolutely inseparable in every act of determination of any 
 kind ; and determination constitutes the nature of the opera- 
 tion of every function we possess sense, understanding, imagina- 
 tion, &c. 
 
 Being and Nothing, then, are thus inseparably present in every 
 concrete ; and here in utter abstraction they are inseparable also : 
 rather, here in utter abstraction they unite and are the same. 
 View either separately, and before your very view even as you 
 view it passes into the other. Nothing will not remain Nothing, 
 it will not fix itself as Nothing, it grows of itself into there is. 
 Nothing involves Being, or Nothing cannot be thought without 
 the thought of Being. Being, again, absolutely abstract is an 
 absolutely necessary thought ; but it is characterless, it is Nothing. 
 Think abstract Nothing, it introduces Being; think Being, it 
 introduces Nothing. But Nothing passing into Being is origina- 
 tion ; Being passing into Nothing is decease ; and both are 
 Becoming. Becoming, then, is that in which both Being and 
 Nothing are contained in unity. Or such is the constitution of 
 the absolutely general thought Becoming ; and there can be 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 361 
 
 pointed out no single actual case of Becoming in which this con- 
 stitution does not accurately display itself. These three abstract 
 thoughts, each equally necessary and universal, are also necessarily 
 and universally bound together, therefore. There is no finite object 
 whatever which has not received the determination of each of 
 these three thoughts. Every finite object whatever truly is, every 
 finite object whatever truly is not, every finite object whatever 
 truly becomes, and becomes in one or other of the modes of its 
 double form. Nor does any object receive such determination 
 from us; it possesses such determination in its own self; it has 
 received such determination from God, it has been so thought by 
 God, it has been created by God on and according to these 
 thoughts, Being, Nothing, and Becoming. These thoughts are 
 out there without us in the universe, and in here within us 
 in the universe : they are objective thoughts in obedience to which 
 the whole is disposed. They are necessary pressures or compres- 
 sures moulding the all of things. They are three of God's 
 thoughts in the making of the universe. 
 
 There is no necessity, then, to give these thoughts the peculiar 
 dialectic look of the peculiar abstraction of Hegel. They can be 
 approached and examined in the same analytic way in which we 
 approach and examine all the other denizens of the universe 
 which may be submitted to us. Still, the more the reader thinks 
 and the more he looks at them, the more will he find himself con- 
 vinced that the brief paragraphs of the text actually contain the 
 whole matter, and really perfectly, determine it : nor are we now 
 without the means of explaining all the Hegelian peculiarities in 
 or with which this whole matter appears. From the light we now 
 abundantly possess, for example, we must expect in what is named 
 Being, simply the elementary form of the Begriff, or the Begriff 
 an sich. What is an sich just is abstractly is that and as yet 
 no more. Now, what is it that most abstractly is, or what is it 
 that is in the most eminent manner an sich ? Why, simply the 
 first thought that can arise. But in its first natural form and 
 we know no other first such thought arises on sensation. This is 
 in every way the first. We have no business with any world but 
 the world we know. What is, is thought. This is the absolute. 
 But it is no absolute vacuum. It is an absolute distinguished 
 in itself. This we know; and, therefore also, that the indefinite 
 implies the definite, as the latter the former. Our field, then, is 
 this Here of thought ; in which Here Sensation is the phenomenal 
 
362 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 First or Sensation is what is most eminently an sich. The- 
 Notion as in Sensation, then, is the first part of Logic, or Simple- 
 Apprehension just as it has always been. 
 
 But the first thought in sensation can abstract nothing but the 
 wholly indefinite sense (rather than thought) of Being, Is, Am. 
 The reflexion on which abstraction can only be that it is as there 
 is simply no distinction in it the simple Nothing. But this 
 result is the consequence of a reflexion on the first thought, Being. 
 But such second act is not an act of sensation, of simple appre- 
 hension. It is a doubling back on such act ; it is a thinking of 
 the act of simple apprehension, a seeking to discriminate in it. 
 But to discriminate is to distinguish this as against that, that is, 
 to negate, to develop differences in what was previously self- 
 identical. This new act reflexion is an act of understanding, 
 an act of judgment. The Nothing, then, is a result of judgment. 
 In other words, the Begriff of Simple Apprehension, which was 
 Being, has passed into the Ur-theil of Judgment, which is Nothing. 
 And this is sufficiently curious and significant, for it is the uni- 
 versal formula : On the Being the satisfaction, fullness, and faith 
 of Simple Apprehension, there follows always the Nothing 
 the dissatisfaction, the emptiness, the doubt of Understanding 
 (Judgment) : Under the Or-deai, the Ur-theil, the Begriff breaks 
 up and sunders from its substantiality into the strife of the 
 differences. 
 
 In these two moments, we may recognise also the Kantian 
 elements of a Perception, the objective-subjective of Sensation, and 
 the subjective-objective of a Judgment or Affection receiving its 
 meaning, its sense, its objectivity from Function. Only, in Hegel, 
 the question is not of sensation as sensation, but of the thought 
 involved. Again, Simple Apprehension is positive, while Judg- 
 ment is negative. The former, too, seems passive, while the latter 
 is active. The negative, lastly, may be held to have more relation 
 to the subject, and so far to have a greater claim to be named the 
 subjective moment : the first is only an sich, the second is fur sich. 
 This, however, depends rather on the point of view : function 
 seems more subjective, since it is an act, though the result is 
 objective evidence ; but, again, affection is more subjective, as 
 feeling, as yielding only subjective evidence. There is a certain 
 duplicity indicated here, as regards the use of the word subjective,, 
 which should be borne in mind. 
 
 But neither has Nothing any distinction in it. Thought before 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 363 
 
 (in presence of) Nothing can abstract from it only Being. Thus 
 Being and Nothing are the same. Being and Nothing are insepar- 
 able : wherever there is thought, there is distinction ; and wherever 
 there is distinction, there is and there is not. And it is remark- 
 able, that even in having recourse to Being as Being, it is only- 
 Nothing we encounter. Nothing is the fruitful womb in which 
 all is : it is Nothing (the Negative round which we build, or on 
 which we hang, our Positive) which is the important element, the 
 very soul and life of what is. (Something of the necessary dialec- 
 tic shows here, however.) 
 
 But this third reflexion, that Nothing is returned to Being, im- 
 plies, like the former, also its own gain. Nothing gone into Being 
 is Becoming.. It is not meant here to say that this is a theory of 
 generation. What we have here are thoughts only. The con- 
 sideration of material things does not belong to Logic as Logic. 
 Matter as Matter is apart from Logic. What is here said is, that 
 Being gone into Nothing, or Nothing gone into Being a transi- 
 tion which here takes place expresses in two or three words 
 what we express also by the one word Becoming. Again, what is 
 the nature of this third reflexion ? As the former ones were Simple 
 Apprehension and Judgment, this is Keason. What were sepa- 
 rated are here brought together in a Schluss. Judgment stated a 
 difference ; but Keason has here reconciled identity and difference 
 into a new identity. Eeason, then, has ended in a new Begriff, 
 in a renewed act of Simple Apprehension, on which Judgment 
 again acting, develops the differences Origin and Decease, which 
 Reason again reconciles into the quasi-fixed moment (between 
 both) of Daseyn. 
 
 But we have outstripped our text, and must now return. We 
 have now to see in the ' Remarks ' what Hegel himself thinks 
 proper to extend to us by way of explanation. Perhaps we ought 
 to have translated, and included among these Remarks, the dis- 
 sertation on ' Wherewith must the beginning, &c. be made/ which 
 precedes the opening of the detailed Logic ; but much of the 
 matter it contains has already oozed out in another form. Besides, 
 Hegel's explanations are seldom of any use to the uninitiated, 
 and are calculated as much to mislead as to guide. In the disser- 
 tation in question, for example, Hegel's beginning seems to have 
 been conditioned by wholly absolute considerations at which we 
 knowing the relativity of the beginning to Kant can only 
 shake our heads not, however, as doubting their truth, but as in- 
 
364 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 timating only that Hegel, had he liked, might have led us to the 
 house by a much straighter and easier path. What an incubus of 
 labour might not Hegel have spared us, had he but let us see him 
 starting from Kant had he but named his consequent realisation 
 of Logic into its one vital tri-une pulse ! But this philosophical 
 Wolsey could not stomach the confession of his debts. Instead of 
 that, while the reader is again and again misled by even loud and 
 apparently unexceptive reprobation of the doctrines of Kant, the 
 merits of the same are effectually concealed from him by the very 
 manner in which they are expressly mentioned. It is only after 
 long initiation that one comes to detect twinkles of a confession in 
 Hegel, as in that allusion ' not unrevenged/ when speaking of his 
 predecessors (since Kant) neglecting Logic, &c. In his explana- 
 tions, indeed, Hegel is but too often only indirect; he seems to seek ab- 
 stract points of connexion, and to avoid the concrete truth : in fact, 
 we have a general sense of being rather abstrusely sneered into light 
 than kindlily and directly led. One feels, indeed, almost savagely in- 
 dignant with Hegel, when one thinks of the world of labour, of 
 the almost superhuman labour, which the peculiarity of his state- 
 ment has involved. Had he but told us, one thinks to oneself, I 
 was simply serious with the general scope of Kant with his en- 
 deavour to reduce the whole human concrete under the cogni- 
 tive faculties, to demonstrate objectivity to be contained in the 
 categories, and to exhibit the world of sense as but an external- 
 isation and Vereinzelwng of the same: serious with these 
 thoughts, it was not difficult to systematise and complete 
 the categories ; it was not difficult to place nature as that same 
 system of categories in outward form ; it was not difficult, in 
 obedience to the general pulse, to set spirit as resuming in itself 
 both nature and the categories (the logical idea) ; and it was not 
 difficult, whether by generalising the categories, or by fusing the 
 cognitive faculties simple apprehension (sensation) judgment, 
 reason into a concrete one vitality, to find that general pulse 
 which should be the basis and principle and motive power of the 
 whole, and which Kant himself actually named when he said, 
 a priori synthetic judgment. Had Hegel but told us this and 
 why did he not tell us this ? of what advantage has his reticence 
 been to any man even to^himself? But let us turn now to 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 365 
 
 EEMARK 1. 
 
 And let us, first of all, consider any technical terms which may 
 seem in want of a word of explanation. Beent is a translation of 
 Seyendes, and found unavoidable. The reader will have remarked 
 the quite Hegelian subtlety, that opposition implies relation, 
 reference, connexion, conjunction, even in that it is opposition. 
 Wesentlich (essentially) implies always a reference to the 
 Hegelian Wesen ; it may be translated as concerns the essential 
 constitutive principle. Substrate the substrate here regards 
 change ; it means the subject of the change, the something that 
 undergoes the change. There now is, and again there is not : but 
 there is a substrate conceived under this transition : it appears 
 just two different states of the same something ; these states are 
 merely held asunder in time. This conception of a substrate com- 
 pletely subverts the abstraction which Hegel would have us think. 
 Synthetisch and Yorstellend, synthetically and conceptively 
 these words deserve particular notice. Conceptively relates to one 
 of the most important points in Hegel, to his use, that is, of the 
 word Vorstellung, and its cognate forms. In Locke the word 
 idea is used just for a, or any state or fact of consciousness in 
 general. In sensation, it is the feeling present in the mind which - 
 is the idea ; in perception and imagination, the object outward in 
 the one case, inward in the other is the idea ; then in memory, 
 the idea is whatever is remembered, and in thought whatever is 
 thought. Now, Vorstellung, in current German, in Kant for one, 
 is exactly this Lockeian idea. Hegel, however, opposes Vor- 
 stellung as the crude, almost sensuous, pictorial image or con- 
 ception of common thought, to Begriff as the Notion of rigorously 
 logical, rigorously scientific thought. To Hegel the thoughts of 
 most of us, when we say, Heaven, Hell, God, Justice, Morality, 
 Law even perhaps Being and Here-being are but crude figurate 
 conceptions, Vorstellungen, and require to be purified into 
 Notions, Begriffe, if we would think aright our own thoughts. 
 The Vorstellungen are but 'Metaphors' (as Hegel says) ex- 
 ternalisations, as it were, of the Begriffe, and to be really under- 
 stood and seen into, require to have what is metaphoric, pictorial, 
 sensuous, external we had almost said crustaceous stripped off 
 them. Conception, then, is to be understood in the translations 
 here as representing Vorstellung, and Notion Begriff. This for 
 many reasons. Conception derivatively is certainly the Begriff 
 
366 THE SECRET OF HEGKL. 
 
 a taking together, or a being taken together ; but then the Latin 
 Notio has already been reserved by Kant (he uses conceptus, also, 
 in his Logic *), and the rest as the strict equivalent of Begriff, 
 while conception, perhaps, in general usage, is fully looser than 
 notion. The custom of both Kant and Hegel is such that it was 
 impossible to employ idea for Vorstellung. In general, and where 
 accuracy is necessary, Idea translates Idee, Notion Begriff, and 
 Conception Vorstellung. In translating Kant, it is better to sub- 
 stitute for Vorstellung, the precise mental state which is referred 
 to at the moment. In translating Hegel, we often convey 
 Vorstellung by the phrase figurate conception. We know now 
 what is Hegel's Begriff, and so are in a condition to understand 
 what is said of a false Begriff as opposed to a true one. Our 
 mere subjective thoughts, or mere products of ordinary generalisa- 
 tion, are not necessarily Begriffe : these are always forms of the 
 Begriff, are self-referent, and objectively true.-f 
 
 Synthetically contains an allusion here to an expression of 
 Kant's (see page 223 above, and, for additional illustration of 
 synthesis, pp. 232, 233, 234, as also 372 further on) about 
 existence adding itself synthetically to the notion of the hundred 
 dollars ! It is not difficult to illustrate what Hegel means by 
 these merely conceptive and synthetic elements, in the ordinary 
 form in which creation stands before the mind. 'God might have 
 thrown into Space a single Germ-cell from which all that we see 
 now might have developed itself.' Observe the synthesis here 
 the mere outward adding of one thing to another, as a mason puts 
 stone to stone, a joiner wood to wood, or as a gardener drops an 
 acorn into the earth, and a whole oak rises. God drops the Germ- 
 cell into Space. Each is complete by itself, and each is just 
 mechanically, synthetically annexed to the other : God is added on 
 complete at once ; and so of the others, the germ-cell, moreover, 
 
 * The pure Begriff is always to Kant notio see K. P. R., p. 258, and Logik, 
 p. 272 (edn., Rosen).! N. 
 
 f I have been at some pains with these technical terms, both as here, and as in 
 'Protoplasm.' I have seen Begriff rendered by conception rather than by notion. 
 I fancy the notion in the way is the American one ! Eead Hegel's Latin, and notio 
 is the word. The Latin of Kant and Schelling, and even that of Cicero, is to the 
 same effect; while the English of Bacon and the philosophers after him, stamps 
 notion as the only relative coin possible. As an Oxonian shudders at a false 
 quantity, so I too shudder at conception for 'notion.' I confess that I cannot 
 help thinking of sciolism a little then. For technical terms, I may add that, when 
 Hume 'divides all the perceptions of the mind into two classes,' we have in 'per- 
 ception ' (as there) another rendering for Vorstellung. N. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 367 
 
 constituting but an outward synthesis to the notion in God's 
 mind. But observe the Vorstellung, the conception, the scenic 
 representation, the picture ! Three units, out of each other, are 
 here side by side, God, the Germ-cell, Space: each is entire, 
 complete, and independent in itself ; there is no transition from 
 the one to the other ; each and this is true even of the Germ-cell 
 has the character of a First, an Immediate. In short, all here is 
 synthetic and conceptive : we see Space just an absolute universal 
 void we see an indefinite giant suddenly show therein, or come to 
 the edge thereof, and drop into the vacancy down, down, a germ-cell ! 
 Now this has seemed thinking to a writer who believes himself in 
 advance, as it is called, and who may be in such advance. Yet it 
 is to thinking precisely what the writing of the Chinese is to that 
 of Europeans, precisely what discourse by hieroglyphics is to dis- 
 course by alphabets. The exact truth of the matter is, that a 
 thinker of the order indicated, however worthy otherwise, is to a 
 Hegel but a little boy as yet in his picture-books. Thinking, to 
 be thorough, must be thought out. This will illustrate much. 
 Hegel intimates, then, that creation, as usually thought, is the 
 appearance of something in nothing at the will of another some- 
 thing, and that this process is merely synthetic and the whole thing 
 a picture, a Vorstelluug. The point of union he alludes to, where 
 being and nothing coincide, may be named the limit, or the begin- 
 ning, or the will in act, for each of these involves an is and a non-is. 
 
 Negation and negative: it is subtle perception on the part of 
 Hegel to have discerned that wherever there is question of one 
 and another, there is negation, and that thus God's energy even 
 as affirmative, is negative. 
 
 Gesetzt, posited : this brings up probably the greatest difficulty 
 in Hegel, viz., what he means by ein Gesetztes ? what by Gesetzt- 
 seyn ? As usual, we shall find the Hegelian sense to have a very 
 strict connexion with the ordinary one. Now, what is the ordin- 
 ary one ? The ordinary one is to be found in the discussion of 
 hypothetical syllogisms as contained in the common text-books of 
 Logic. Setzend, in fact, is the equivalent of the Latin participle 
 ponens in the phrase modus ponens. ' If perfect justice exists, the 
 hardened sinner will be punished : but perfect justice does exist ; 
 therefore the hardened sinner will be punished : ' this is a hypotheti- 
 cal syllogism in the modus ponens. Now, the two parts of which 
 the Major consists here are called the antecedent and the conse- 
 quent, and in the modus ponens the former ponit, setzt, sets, posits, 
 
368 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 or infers the latter. In the example before us, the existence of 
 perfect justice is the antecedent, and it posits the punishment of 
 the hardened sinner, which is the consequent. If the word posit 
 were a vernacular English word parallel to the German setzen both 
 in its logical and in its ordinary senses, we should have no difficulty 
 in the respective translation ; but it is not so, and we are con- 
 stantly in perplexity in consequence of being unable properly to 
 render the various shades and secondary meanings which setzen 
 and its derivatives acquire in the hands of Hegel. For instance, 
 an antecedent may be considered as only in itself or potential, 
 until the consequent is assigned, and then it is the antecedent 
 which seems posited. Posited in this case seems to refer to 
 statement or explication ; and this sense is very common in HegeL 
 Here, then, it is gesetzt means, it is developed into its proper ex- 
 plication, statement, expression, enunciation, exhibition, &c. Again 
 a Gesetztes, as not self-referent, is but lunar, satellitic, parasitic,, 
 secondary, derivative, dependent, reflexional, posititious, &c. Then 
 on the part of that which posits, something of arbitrary attribu- 
 tion may enter. Altogether, Gesetztseyn alludes to reflexion, 
 relativity, mutual illativity, &c. Setzen has the senses, to put in 
 the place of, to depute, and also duly to set out the members of 
 a whole or set ; and allusions to these senses also are to be found 
 in Hegel. In short, such senses as the following will sometimes 
 be found in place in this connexion : vicarious, representative, 
 attributive, adjectitious, &c. &c. To eximply or eximplicate often 
 conveys the meaning of setzen, as also the simple assign. See 
 further Hegel himself on the word above at p. 255; see also pretty 
 well passim from p. 384 to long Note last but one. In Kant and 
 Fichte, setzen means, to lay down as granted, to take for granted, 
 to establish, to affirm, to assert, to assume, &c. ; and this meaning 
 is, at bottom identical with the Hegelian.* 
 
 Inhalt means here, logical comprehension, or the complement of 
 significates which attach to a notion: Inhalt is to Hegel the 
 import of something, and the import is not always mere contained 
 matter, but implies that matter as formed or assimilated. 
 
 Opined, Gemeint. Meinuny is the S6a of the Greeks ; it implies 
 crude, instinctive, uninvestigated, unreasoned, subjective, or per- 
 sonal opinion, raem-ung, as if it were a mine-ing, or m^-ing 
 
 * A dictionary meaning of set is to 'cause to be.' Darwin (Life, etc., iii. 260) 
 writes : ' This (flower) never sets seeds, whereas the small blue Lobelia is visited 
 by bees and does set seeds.' New. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 369 
 
 something purely mine something purely subjective and in- 
 stinctive. 
 
 The Eemark itself is sufficiently miscellaneous ; its general 
 object, however, is to illustrate what has just been said, and repel 
 the most usual objection. This objection concerns the identifica- 
 tion of being with nothing, and probably requires now but small 
 notice at our hands, seeing that so much has been already done to 
 insure a correct understanding of what is meant by each of the 
 terms, and of how they are to be identified. The whole error of 
 the objection lies in opposing to nothing, not abstract, but concrete 
 being ; in which case, the nothing itself ceases to be abstract. As 
 nothing and being are the same, it seems to be inferred that we 
 say it is the same thing whether we have food or not, whether we 
 have clothes or not, whether we have money or not, &c. : but this 
 reasoning is very bad. Nothing when it is concreted into no-food 
 is hunger ; in the same way, as no-clothes, it is cold, and as no- 
 money, it is poverty. Now we have been speaking of nothing as 
 nothing, and not of hunger, cold, and poverty. Again, we have 
 been speaking of being as being, and not of corporeal or animal 
 being. When you oppose, then, these definite nothings to this 
 definite being, it is absurd to suppose that the results will be 
 identical with those which issue from the opposition of abstract 
 being and abstract nothing. Nothing, when abstract being is 
 concerned, is the abstraction from everything definite and 
 particular, and abstract being itself is the same abstraction ; but 
 the nothing of light is darkness, and it cannot be said that the 
 eye is indifferent whether it be the one or the other: definite 
 being is a complex of infinite rapports. But where is the use of 
 your abstraction, then, may be urged in reply ? Why, this 
 ultimate generalisation being we are bound to make it, and it 
 has always been considered a determination of the greatest con- 
 sequence surely, then, it is worth while pointing out that this 
 being is identical with the abstract nothing, that they are both 
 abstractions, and that their truth is Werden. These are great 
 poles of thought, subjective and objective ; and it is important to 
 know them, as they are, and in their relations. The incidental 
 references illustrate this: the philosophy of Parmenides, for 
 example, was centred in the thought abstract being, while that of 
 Heraclitus related simply to becoming, and we see what vast 
 effects may be produced by the contemplation of abstract nothing 
 in the case of Buddhism. Being is the first abstract thought, 
 
 2 A 
 
370 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 indeed, and, with the Eleatics, we find it as such in history ; for 
 the material principles and the numbers which preceded it are not 
 pure thoughts. 
 
 The importance of our findings, too, is well shown in the im- 
 possibility of a creation and in the pantheism, which result from 
 the absolute separation of being and nothing exhibited in the 
 common dictum Ex nihilo nihil fit. A creation is impossible 
 without the community of nothing and being ; and if all that is, 
 is just being, or if all that is, is just substance, then there results 
 only the abstract pantheism of Parmenides or of Spinoza. We may 
 remark, however, that as used the dictum is safe from the 
 animadversion of Hegel ; for so, it is nothing else than the law 
 of causality in another form; what it means is simply the a 
 priori synthetic judgment of Kant there is no change without a 
 cause. It is this sense which prevents the reader from altogether 
 sympathising with Hegel here. What Hegel wishes to hold up, 
 however, is the essential importance in this universe of the dis- 
 tinction, nothing : in effect, negativity, in the sense of distinctivity, 
 is the creative power ; and there is nowhere anything which does 
 not confess its influence. As yet, too, the category cause is not 
 in view. 
 
 The errors of Kant in reference to the ontological argument 
 spring from bluntness to the distinctions we' signalise, and thus 
 demonstrate the value of the latter : Kant, in fact, exhibits a 
 similar confusion of the finite and the infinite, as well as a very 
 imperfect perception of the nature and relations of being, non- 
 being, and so-being (Daseyn). 
 
 The objections to the relative teaching of Hegel, then, arise 
 from the untutored attitude of common sense, which means ever 
 the blind instinctive employment of stereotyped abstractions of 
 one's own, whence or how derived one knows not, asks not, cares 
 not : in the case before us, for example, common-sense insists that 
 its abstraction, a differentiated nothing, is our abstraction, reference- 
 less nothing. We may add, that the practical lesson is to perceive 
 that it is our duty, in view of the infinite affirmation in which we 
 participate, to entertain complete tranquillity in the presence of 
 any finite particular that may emerge. 
 
 KEMARK 2. 
 There seems nothing very hard here; the chief object is to 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 371 
 
 point out the difficulty of giving a true expression to speculative 
 propositions, which are always dialectic. The form of the judg- 
 ment is shown to be inadequate. Identity, unity, inseparability, 
 are all imperfect expressions of the relation that subsists between 
 being and nothing. The concluding illustration in regard to light 
 and darkness speaks for itself. 
 
 Of terms, we may notice two Abstract and Unterschied. 
 
 Abstract is one of the commonest words in Hegel, and is often 
 used in such a manner as perplexes : it always implies that some- 
 thing is viewed in its absolute self-identity, and absolutely apart 
 from all its concrete references. As regards Unterschied, it is 
 worth while observing that it means inter-shed, or inter-part : the 
 Unterschied of Seyn and Nichts may be profitably regarded as 
 just a sort of abstract water-shed. 
 
 EEMARK 3. 
 
 This is the most important of all the Eemarks in this place, and 
 the reader ought to make a point of dwelling by it long, and 
 studying it thoroughly. The rigour of thought in regard to a 
 First, a Second, the transition between them, and the principles 
 of progress in general, ought to improve the powers of every 
 faculty which has been privileged to experience it. What is said 
 in regard to crude reflexion and the means of helping it, is also 
 striking and suggestive. Then we are taught what a true syn- 
 thesis is, and what a false one. Again, we learn that it is the 
 abstractions which are unreal, while their concrete union is fact. 
 In truth, the general gist of the remark is, it is absurd to remain 
 in abstract self-identity, and say movement, progress, is impossible 
 to you ; for synthesis must be possible, and is necessary just for 
 this reason, that synthesis is that is, there is this variegated 
 empirical universe. The observations in regard to determinate 
 nothings are very important, as well as those that bear on the 
 necessity of our keeping strictly to the precise stage we have 
 reached, without applying in its description or explanation 
 characters which belong to later stages. The incidental notice 
 of the Parmenides of Plato is exceedingly terse, full, and satis- 
 factory. 
 
 Hegel remarks of Plato's critique of the Eleatic One: 'It is 
 obvious that this path (method) has a presupposition, and is an 
 external reflexion.' A co-operative reader, and every reader should 
 
372 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 be co-operative, ought to ask himself, where is 'the presupposition?' 
 and where is the ' external reflexion ? ' Again, in the first Kemark, 
 the reader ought not to leave without understanding : * Metaphysic 
 might tautologieally maintain, that were a dust-atom destroyed,, 
 the whole universe would collapse/ Let the reader go back here, 
 and study both for himself. The presupposition is, that variety is 
 incompatible with unity: the external reflexion is, that the two 
 forms are just externally counted : Hegel's universe is such, that 
 the whole is not more each part than each part is the whole to 
 destroy a part and destroy the whole are thus tautological ; what 
 is concerned, moreover, is but an axiom in physics. 
 
 There is also expressed here such respect for the empirical 
 world as helps us to see that the system of Hegel is no chimera of 
 abstraction, no cobweb of the brain, but that what it endeavours 
 is simply to think this universe, as it manifests itself around us, 
 into its ultimate and universal principles. 
 
 As regards terms, we may remark that Beziehung implies more 
 than mere reference; it implies, as it were, connective reference : it 
 is used pretty much, in fact, in its strict etymological meaning. 
 Synthesis, as alluded to in a previous note, will be found fully 
 explained here: the unphilosophical synthesis thinks it enough 
 just to put together full-formed individuals from elsewhere, as 
 God, a germ-cell, and space (say); while philosophical synthesis is 
 immanent, and points to a transition of necessity with concrete union 
 of diferents. The allusion to * urspriingliche Urtheilen ' leads one 
 to think of Kant as the source of all that Hegel seems peculiarly 
 to teach as regards the Ur-theil ; at all events leaving appercep- 
 tion and the categories out of sight Kant's transcendental doctrine 
 of Urtheilskraft is wholly employed on the commediation of the 
 inner unities with the outer multiples, and contains a great variety 
 of matter which must have proved eminently suggestive in regard 
 to the main positions assumed by Hegel. 
 
 EEMARK 4. 
 
 This remark is still occupied with the Unity of Being and 
 Nothing; but it is exceedingly terse, clear, and illustrative. 
 The dialectic against the beginning or ending of the world 
 is very happily shown to rest wholly on the separation of 
 being and nothing; and the hit to ordinary understanding 
 which believes against this dialectic a beginning and ending 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 373 
 
 of the world, and yet accepts with this dialectic the divided- 
 ness of being and nothing, is a very sore one. The mode 
 in which incomprehensibility is explained to be produced is 
 excellent, and genuinely Hegelian. The illustration afforded by 
 infinitesimals is also exceedingly satisfactory, as are also the- 
 definitions of sophistry and dialectic. Something that is in its 
 disappearance was eminently adapted to attract a Hegel, whose 
 own object is always something very similar; that is, it is, like 
 infinitesimals, very much of a ratio the one of a double. ' In fact 
 reciprocity very well answers to the bottom thought of Hegel, 
 the notion itself is in one way of looking but a form of re- 
 ciprocity. So we have neither being nor nothing, but a sort of 
 outcome of their reciprocal reflexions, where the one is very much 
 the other and in consequence of the other. Hegel seems to con- 
 template the intussusception of the infinite universe into a 
 geometrical punctum : the world is the oscillating coloration of a 
 partridge's eye ; it is but a vibrating point an ideal throb. The 
 method is infinite referential inferentiality, or relative illativity of 
 object and subject; but the object is the subject's, and the subject 
 itself is the veritable absolute. There is a Chinese toy or puzzle 
 which appears as a hollow sphere with innumerable contained suc- 
 cessively smaller spheres, movable, and successively within one 
 another: conceive this expanded into the infinitude of space, ex- 
 tended into the infinitude of time, and occupied by all the 
 interests of the universe and man, sphere under sphere, but so 
 that all, perfectly transparent, perfectly permeable, are mutually 
 intussuscipient, and collapse punctually into a single eye-glance; 
 conceive this, and you have the Vorstellung, the figure, the meta- 
 phor of the System of Hegel. But is not this a mere intellectual 
 jeu tf esprit? Outside effort and intentional production, in such a 
 scheme, and with only human faculty to carry it out, must be ex- 
 pected; but this must also be said, that, in the progress of the 
 work, there is no great interest of the world, which does not 
 require to be touched; and this touch we find always to be that of 
 a very master of thought. Again, it is not only an objective system 
 that is concerned; it is also a subjective organon: he, indeed, who 
 has passed through such a Calendar finds himself always in the 
 ratio of his original force, of course a power of rare elasticity and 
 vigour, and with a range of the most gratifying compass a Hegel 
 himself is keen to the last point, strong to the last weight, and 
 wide as the universe. Lastly, if we bear in mind that Kant and 
 
374 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Hegel have at length introduced objective principles into philo- 
 sophy, and thus lifted it bodily to the platform of science, e.g. y the 
 categories, the notion, &c. one will see good reason to consider 
 the system of Hegel (and the same may be said for that of Kant) 
 an essential and indispensable element in the culture of all who 
 would present themselves in the arena now-a-days, and work for 
 the public whether in science or in art, in statecraft or the 
 professions, in literature, or the mere business of the schoolmaster. 
 
 2. Moments of Becoming. 3. Sublation of Becoming. Remark. 
 
 We may spend a word, first of all, on the terms Zunachst, 
 Unmittelbar, Daseyn, Moment, Ideel, and Grundlage. Zunachst 
 remains for long something troublesome to the student of Hegel. 
 It means at nearest in the direction in which you are going. If 
 you are generalising, then it will mean the next step towards the 
 genus summum; and nearer (naher) will mean, nearer to universal 
 extension. But if, like Hegel's, your process is one of determina- 
 tion, and towards ultimate comprehension or singularisation, then 
 you must look on the opposite side of the line, and nearer and nearer 
 must mean, greater and greater comprehension, or more and more 
 complex, more and more particularised, more and more indivi- 
 dualised. Zunachst, then, may be translated primarily, in the first 
 instance, in the first place, at first hand, primd facie, &c. ; and some- 
 times also, at closest, or at strictest : first of all is also a convenient 
 phrase ; shortly, properly, &c., will sometimes be found to render it. 
 Das ndhere means the particular, the details, and this manifests 
 the process to be one towards increased precision and definiteness: 
 the nearness involved regards the particular object concerned. 
 
 Unmittelbar : Direct will be found best to translate this word in 
 paragraph 2 of No. 2 ; so also at end of No. 3 : as it is used in the 
 Remark opposed to das Aufgehobene, one gets a vivid glance of the 
 direct leingness which immediacy amounts to. 
 
 Daseyn : an English equivalent for this word is difficult to find ; 
 but this is no reason why we should make any difficulty of the 
 notion. Being, Seyn, is easily understood to be being in general, 
 the universal or general fact of existence, of being at all: but 
 Daseyn refers to a definitely-recognised being ; it is that which 
 constitutes the recognisableness of every and any member of this 
 actual existence. Seyu applies to the whole ; it is the universal 
 indistinguishable mush: but Daseyn has thrown the checker down,, 
 and Seyn has become a whole of distinguishable individuals. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 375 
 
 Distinguishableness, in fact, is the quality of Daseyn ; or, in 
 truth, considering what we imply by the termination ness, I know 
 not but what we might say ness amounts to Seyn, ness declares the 
 fact that there just is : but then nessness would denote the quality 
 whereby a thing is, and distinguishably is. Daseyn is the nessnoss, 
 of anything that is ; that, as it were, that I can metaphorically rub 
 and feel between the thumb and finger. Now this Daseyn, Ness- 
 ness, is accurately composed of being and nothing, and the latter 
 is not one whit less essential than the former. 
 
 Grundlage is here the constitutive One of separable individuals ; 
 it is the base, in the sense of a chemical base that goes accurately 
 asunder into its constituents, and eclipses these into its unity 
 again ; a mother-liquor which we can figure as this moment dis- 
 appearingly sundered into its dry elements, and the next reap- 
 pearingly resolving these into its liquid unity again. 
 
 Ideel and Moment we can take together, as they both refer to 
 the one process of Aufhebung. Now that process is what has 
 been described as producing a Grundlage. Water is hydrogen 
 and oxygen ; in it they are aufgehoben, and become ideel ; it is 
 their Grundlage, they are its Moments. In this way, one can see 
 how hydrogen and oxygen are in water withdrawn, each from its 
 own immediacy. The moments of Spirit are Nature and the 
 Logical Idea; in it they are Ideel as in their Grundlage. "YAy 
 and popart are aufgehoben in the evTe\e\eia. I drop this gold 
 into that aqua regia, and it disappears ; it is aufgehoben, but it is 
 not destroyed it still idfollement is, it is now a moment. In 
 Hegel, however, the moments are more than synthetic differents 
 collapsing to a simple one ; each is very much the other, and in 
 consequence of the other, or each, while itself reflected into the 
 other, holds the other reflected into itself, and so is the other. 
 The moments in reference to the lever are very illustrative. All 
 through Hegel, indeed, this reciprocation or mutuation of the 
 moments is the great fact : ' each sublates itself in itself, and is in 
 itself the contrary of itself.' Sublation, resolution, elimination, &c. 
 will be now intelligible as translations of Aufhebung. 
 
 If it be considered that the one moment has the nature of 
 matter in it, and the other that of form (one sees that the 
 Aristotelian characterisation of ihemoments is about the most general 
 of all), it will be easily understood that the one, as in the case of 
 the lever, is always relatively real and the other relatively ideal. 
 
 As regards interpretation here, it is difficult to see that any 
 
376 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 words can be used more light-giving than those of Hegel himself. 
 In fact, nothing can surpass the accuracy of eye with which he 
 sees, or the distinctness of lip with which he names. No doubt, 
 what is here must appear very strange to a beginner ; but, after 
 all, it is employed on what is around us, and is an attempt to 
 observe and (in a way) generalise ultimate facts. What we mean 
 by being, if we will but look closely enough, is only indefinite 
 immediacy, as nothing in the same way is immediate indefiniteness. 
 Being and nothing are thus the same; or being has gone into 
 nothing, and nothing has gone into being. But such movement 
 is a process, and is named becoming. This process unites both 
 distinctions, but so that they are alternately direct and indirect, 
 and in such fashion that the one has concreted or thickened itself 
 into origin, and the other similarly into decease : but these again, 
 as but different directions of the same process, arrest themselves 
 and sist process into proceed or product; or being and nothing, 
 now origin and decease, as but opposing directions of becoming, 
 arrest themselves, and sist becoming into become and that is 
 Daseyn, Here-being, There-being, /So-being. 
 
 In the directest fashion, this is but the generalisation of what 
 is before our eyes and between our fingers : in other words, this is 
 the thinking of the same; these are the thoughts which the 
 commonest things involve : this, then, is Logic ; why, then, 
 should we not be content to take it thus ? The generalisation of 
 Aristotle, in regard to the abstract ultimates of ordinary reasoning, 
 was not, we should say, one whit less strange, or one whit more 
 satisfactory, when it emerged, than is now the generalisation of 
 Hegel in regard to the ultimates of things. Things, in truth, have 
 ultimate forms, as well as thoughts, and it is good to know them 
 all ; nor is it to be supposed that less good will result from the 
 ultimate thinking of things than from the ultimate thinking of 
 thoughts. Nay, observe, in both cases, it is ultimate thinking ; and 
 as thoughts and things are all, this ultimate thinking will not con- 
 stitute only all ultimate thinking, but it may go together systema- 
 tically as a whole, and so constitute the ultimate and essential 
 truth of the universe, or philosophy at length ! Again, 
 Hegel is no less qualified for this abstraction here, than 
 Aristotle was for that abstraction there; and these laconic 
 paragraphs in regard to nothing, being, becoming, and their 
 process, may at once be held up in proof thereof. In every 
 particular, the characterisation is consummate the identification 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 377 
 
 of the distinction we use as Being with the distinction we use as 
 Nothing, the exhibition of each as process, the pointing out that 
 process as becoming, the demonstrating becoming to unite the 
 distinctions at once as identical and as different in the opposing 
 forms of origin and decease, and lastly, the precipitation of becoming 
 by its own contradiction into become all is masterly, and there 
 is present a dialectic which, as mere process, must wonderfully 
 sharpen our wits. But it is not for a moment to be thought that 
 it is alone as subjective discipline, and not also as objective 
 thinking, that this dialectic is valuable: on the contrary, the 
 thoughts themselves must be seen to be the ultimate and essential 
 thoughts that found, or ground, or beground the universe. Or so 
 only can a beginning be thought ; and so only, therefore, can a 
 beginning be constituted. 
 
 A beginning, in truth, or the beginning, is what constitutes the 
 bottom consideration here. To Hegel it is, no doubt, evident that 
 it is utterly impossible to start with a single unit and conditions. 
 Such a start were in its own crude presuppositions its own refuta- 
 tion. No material unit is competent to a material many ; while 
 to presuppose conditions for the production of this many, is just 
 to presuppose this many itself. Before trying to find a beginning, 
 we should have asked, what is a beginning ? What is the cate- 
 gory ? this is the first question. It is absurd to talk of conditions 
 before we know what conditions are. It is futile to explain the 
 beginning, unless we have first of all fairly seen into all that the 
 category, beginning, implies. An* outward of any kind, for 
 example, and a beginning will be found absolutely incommensur- 
 able. In this way, as regards the object of our quest, we are shut 
 in to the inward we are shut in to thought as thought, and the 
 only possible conclusion is, that the thought of the beginning is 
 just the beginning of thought. To postulate a single substance 
 exposed to a variety of conditions in a ready-made time and space j 
 is simply to take things as we see them simply to trip over crude 
 figurate conceptions of the bottom categories, identity and difference, 
 which should have been examined first. To talk of a primitive matter 
 and conditions in explanation of transition, is to stultify oneself 
 is to begin with the very variety which requires to be explained. 
 
 Again, it seems very difficult to think- of a beginning as only 
 inward ; we cannot think an inward without an outward as sub- 
 strate and basis. We cannot conceive of thought as in the first 
 instance merely in the air. 
 
378 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 This is perfectly just. Thought is not thought literally like so 
 much water, held somewhere in the bag of the universe : thought 
 implies a thinking subject. It may be that this subject is not at 
 first in evTeXexeia, or even in evepyeia or yuo/o0>} ; it may be that, 
 at first, it is only in the stage Svvajuug, or that it is only potentially. 
 Beginning, in fact, applied to such subject must find it only poten- 
 tially there, or only as indefinite immediacy, that is, the subject 
 itself, in the beginning, must find itself only in indefinite im- 
 mediacy. Being is the first dim thought, which, when sought to 
 be looked at closer, is only nothing ; but from this nothing there 
 is a return again to the sense of being, which now, increased by 
 the reflexion nothing, can be conceived very intelligibly to contain 
 the thoughts becoming and become. But this become is so far definite, 
 it definitely is, and it becomes the something of reflexion, and so 
 on. In short, the whole process of the Logical Idea can have the 
 universal Subject assigned to it as substrate. The reader is likely 
 to find all this strange ; but it is not a whit more strange than 
 that pebble from the brook, or this pen in my hand : we cannot 
 blink the fact that there is existence, and that man's life has been 
 to understand it. Very truly also that pebble from the brook is 
 not an object just because it is a material something : all that 
 constitutes what it essentially is to me, are categories, and what it 
 is apart from these categories is as nothing : no object, even the 
 most material, but is in very truth a congeries of thoughts. There 
 is no absurdity,' then, in the thought of the beginning as the begin- 
 ning ; for we must have confidence in thoughts and know them 
 as the only verities when opposed to things. 
 
 It is on such universal and absolute considerations, then, that 
 Hegel would rest his beginning and all his other proctdfe ; and he 
 does not for a moment think it necessary to allude to the manner 
 in which he gradually worked himself into light on the stand- 
 point and with the materials of Kant. One word in reference to 
 that the actual and concrete origin will not be out of place, if only 
 to reassure ourselves of the mundane connexions and really 
 external nature of Hegel's operations, however esoteric be their 
 issue, and however absolute their truth. It is hardly necessary, 
 probably, to remind the reader that Hegel, adopting the hint of 
 Kant, and taking in his hands both the ontological manuals and 
 Kant's own materials, could hardly fail to observe that Seyn was 
 the genus summum, Nichts the differentia summa, and Werden the 
 species summa. As little reason either is there for reminder that 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 379 
 
 Hegel, realising Logic, recognised in the three steps named but 
 three forms of the three moments of the single logical heart-beat 
 common to the universe, or that, vitalising history, his attention 
 was specially directed to that notion of reciprocity which connected 
 him with Kant. Let us point out in passing, however, that the 
 three numbers under Werden refer to the same considerations. 
 Thus, No. I is 'the unity of being and nothing,' which is the 
 Begriff, or the moment of simple apprehension ; No. 2 is ' the 
 moments of becoming ' or manifestly the Ur-theil ; and No. 3, 
 the ' Sublation of Becoming/ is a movement of Schluss or an act 
 of Keason. The reciprocity of opposing moments with mutual 
 eclipse in a common sphere (in analogy with Kant's mode of 
 viewing the disjunctive judgment) is also obvious. We are not 
 for a moment to suppose, then, that the logical series of Hegel, 
 whatever it involves, really rests for its start on absolute considera- 
 tions, or really flows alone and absolutely from nothing but an 
 internal pulse : the veritably genetic considerations and pulse of 
 Hegel are certainly, for the most part, relative and external. I 
 know not whether the problem ever presented itself to Hegel in 
 the brief propos, We have to identify Affection with Function ; 
 but what that phrase implies lies not obscurely at the centre of 
 his whole industry. If the reader will but take the trouble to 
 reflect on the problem as thus expressed, he will realise to himself 
 the nature and course of the necessarily first thoughts of Hegel. 
 His first difficulty, for example, will be the formality of the pro- 
 blem as announced, and the necessity for matter. What is Func- 
 tion what is Affection ? Thinking is function yes and feeling 
 is affection ; but how get them together where shall we begin 
 how shall we begin ? The logical movement is function ; but 
 simple apprehension and the rest are quite formal how are we 
 to realise them ? There seems no possibility of a transition from 
 the one to the other. In the midst of such thoughts as these, it 
 certainly would be a relief to recur to the Categories, and to 
 observe in these a sort of middle-ground between affection and 
 function media, as it were, which united both ; for the categories 
 involve an intellectual schema, which schema, in that it possesses 
 matter, is to a certain extent sensuous. To complete these cate- 
 gories, then, from the confines of the object up to those of the 
 subject, would seem a very hopeful portion of work towards solu- 
 tion of the general problem. But before the categories presented 
 themselves thus to Hegel, I think there is evidence that he had 
 
380 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 attempted the question from another side : to name it at once, I 
 think the ' Phaenomenologie ' proves Hegel to have been led to 
 begin first of all with Affection, in the hope of being able to work 
 up to Function. In this work, as is seen at a glance, he starts 
 with crude sensation, passes on to intelligent perception, and again 
 to understanding, &c. ; and the general object throughout is to 
 resolve these forms into notions, or into forms of reason. All is 
 sought to be pointed out as an affair of reflexion ; ever there is 
 reflexion behind reflexion. Under perception, for example, observe 
 how in every such act he points out a variety of moments which 
 are necessarily notional, and not perceptional at all : 
 
 In that the qualities (the reference is to a thing and its qualities) are ex- 
 pressed in the simple oneness of the universal [as the common unity the 
 thing itself], they refer themselves to themselves, are indifferent to one 
 another ; each is on its own account, free from the rest. The simple, self 
 equal universality itself again is distinct and free from these its determinate- 
 nesses ; it is pure reference of self to self, or the medium in which these deter- 
 minatenesses all are, and interpenetrate each other therefore in it as in a simple 
 unit without touching each other ; for just through their participation in this 
 universality, are they indifferently per se. This abstract universal medium, 
 which may be named Thingness in general or the pure Essentity, is nothing 
 else than the Here and Now (which were the results of crude Sensation) as 
 they have exhibited themselves, namely as a Simple Together of Many ; but 
 the Many are in their deterininateness themselves simply Universal. This 
 salt is a simple Here, and at the same time plural ; it is white and also sharp, 
 cubical also, and also of a certain weight, and so*on. All these many qualities 
 are in a simple Here, in which therefore they interpenetrate and pervade each 
 other ; none has another Here than the other, but each is everywhere in the 
 same Here in which the others are; and at the same time, without being 
 separated by separate Heres, they do not in this interpenetration affect each 
 other : the white does not affect or alter the cubical, neither of them nor both 
 together the sharp, and so on ; but as each is itself simple reference of self to 
 self, it lets the others alone, and refers itself to them only through the neutral 
 or indifferent Also. This Also is therefore the pure Universal itself, or the 
 Medium, the Thingness which thus holds them together. 
 
 That in this way perception is attempted to be exhibited as an 
 affair of thought, is plain ; and certainly the statement has its own 
 subtlety of analytic and metaphysical truth : it may prove, indeed, 
 a useful illustration of the manner of Hegel. In the celebrated 
 preface to this work, the industry, an example of which we have 
 just seen, is expressly referred to: 
 
 By this in general, that, as was expressed above, substance is in itself 
 subject, is every object (Inhalt^ literally, implex, or whole of comprehension) 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 381 
 
 its own reflexion into itself. The subsisting, or the substance of a finite object, 
 is its equality with its own self; for its inequality with itself were its dis- 
 solution. But self-equality, or equality with self, is pure abstraction ; and thia 
 is thought. When I say Quality, I say the simple determinateness : by 
 quality is one object distinguished from another, or by quality is it an object;, 
 it is for its own self, or it consists through this simplicity with itself. But by 
 this is it essentially thought. Herein is it understood, that das Seyn (being) 
 is thought, &c. . . . Thought is the immanent Self of the Object, &c.* 
 
 By these quotations, it will be intelligible that Hegel in his 
 earlier stages was employed in an endeavour to lead the notion 
 directly into the object by an analysis of the successive phases of 
 this latter, or of the successive faculties to which it was submitted. 
 That is, Hegel at first sought to reduce Affection to Function by 
 an analysis of the former. Transition from the one to the other, 
 however, is not in this manner perfectly satisfactory, and Hegel 
 was enabled to perceive later that to complete one side first, and 
 to allow it, when completed, to pass over bodily, as it were, into its 
 other in obedience to the general rhythm, would constitute, on the 
 whole (ridiculed as it has been universally, and by Schelling 
 particularly), a much more satisfactory transition. In short, it 
 occurred in time to Hegel to identify the first form of the notion, 
 with the most abstract category, to develop category after category 
 risingly towards the notion itself, to exhibit it itself, describing its- 
 own subjective forms, passing over into the notion of the object 
 and terminating in the Idea, and thus to complete Logic, or the 
 whole of those inner forms which ^were the souls of everything 
 without. Logic completed, or the Logical Idea appearing summed 
 and full-formed as an organic whole, he exhibited the same as 
 passing over, and falling asunder now into externality and 
 particularity as Nature. The next step was the conjunction of 
 both into Spirit. But enough has now been said by way of 
 reminder of the external operations of Hegel : we return now ta 
 our commentary of the text where necessary. 
 
 * Pref. Phaenoin., pp. 41, 42; Berlin, 1841. The preceding, op. cit. p. 84. 
 
I 
 
 382 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 CHAPTEK II. 
 
 THERE-BEING. 
 
 AND, first of all, we have to see the moment of the Begriff, or 
 of Simple Apprehension, in 
 
 THERE-BEING AS SUCH. 
 
 The general distributions or divisions which precede * a. There- 
 being in general/ though to be perused, need not be allowed to 
 arrest the reader for their full understanding, which, indeed, is 
 impossible in the first instance. Nowhere, in truth, can any 
 reader hope to read with the same perfect intelligence and open 
 sense with which Hegel wrote, till after a repeated return from 
 the united whole to the separated parts. 
 
 As moment of simple apprehension, with but identity before us, 
 the identity of There-being as such, or of There-being in general, 
 there is not much to be said here. Accordingly, what is said is 
 more of the nature of general remark. The construction or con- 
 stitution of every There-being is accurately named, however ; and 
 that is the main point. Everything that definitely is, is 
 product of becoming, and as such it is a <rvvo\ov, a com- 
 posite but in perfect unity singleness, and simpleness of being 
 and nothing. Now, everything that is, definitely is : we have, 
 therefore, in the characterisations here reached, the principles of 
 the universal structure of the all of things. The distinction is 
 certainly subtle and difficult to realise; still it is very certain that 
 it is a not which gives the qualifying force the edge of in- 
 dividuality and self-identity to being itself. Without that not, 
 being itself indeed is not, or nought ; for it is an absolute ab- 
 straction, and there shows riot a sign in it. In the value assigned 
 to Daseyn, then, there is more than mere thought : we cannot say, 
 only, according to these thoughts all things are; but we can 
 say also, according to this very constitution all things are. When 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 383 
 
 the ingredients of certain medicinal juleps, &c., are sent dry, they 
 are called the species of these medicaments. Now, similarly, 
 we may say, that Daseyn is the universal species of every- 
 thing that is. It is not necessary, then, that we should call 
 up before us the idea of the originating subject in order to 
 put ourselves at home with the meaning of Daseyn; this 
 assignation is sufficient by itself ; we see at once its truth and 
 value as the basal form. Again, it is important to know that 
 being and nothing are not, each apart and by itself, anywhere 
 denizens of this universe. What is, is an inseparable one of both ; 
 neither being as being, nor nothing as nothing, anywhere actually 
 is. Both are abstractions, and utterly void abstractions. It is 
 saying very little for God, then, to say He is pure Being, or, what 
 is the same thing, the Sum of all Eealities ; yet no mode of 
 characterising God is thought very generally, at least more 
 appropriate or solemn. As Hegel points out, there is the same 
 warrant for, and the same honour in, the designation for God of 
 Sum of all Negations. 
 
 The caution as regards the intercalations of reflexion is of value 
 in its general scope, but its particular relevancy is not clear. Daseyn, 
 There-being, is a simple one, therefore in the form of immediacy, 
 therefore also in the form of being : this seems result of the objec- 
 tive evolution, and not of the reader's subjective reflexion. Neither 
 is it to this that Hegel's remark applies, but to our seeing, also, 
 that it is only one-sidedly in the determination of Being, and that 
 in point of fact the other determination, Nothing, is present also. 
 Now it is this part that has been anticipated by reflexion, and not 
 yet expressly evolved. The first sentence of the relative para- 
 graph exhibits a peculiar grammatical construction. Up to the 
 semicolon there are three clauses, of which the second is separated 
 from the first by a comma, and the third by a comma and a dash 
 from the second : now the function of this dash is to connect the 
 third clause (ein aufgehobenes, negativ-bestimmtes) as well to the 
 nominative (Das Ganze) of the first clause as to that (das Seyn) 
 of the second. The peculiarity has been attempted to be con- 
 veyed in the translation. Such longe-referent, multi-referent con- 
 struction is not unusual in Hegel, and brings its own difficulties.* 
 
 * There may be something of fancy in this same longe reference here ; but, taking 
 nothing from, it perhaps even improves, the sense. Aufgehobenes, Negativ- 
 bestimmtes : printed so as substantives, these words are right : they are adjectives 
 in the text, and wrong as such directly agreeing only with ' Moment.' My first 
 translation may be fully the better one ! N. 
 
384 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 As regards the terms, there is not much occasion to add any 
 remark. For Daseyn, perhaps, There-ness, So-ness, as well as 
 Ness-ness would be more eligible than There-being, &c. For setzen 
 we have used the term evolution ; but we shall have a better 
 opportunity for the further discussion of this word. Verniittelung 
 is an awkward term to convey in English : it is that process, 
 mediation, or intervention of means, which brings about a result ; 
 in fact, it is always a bringing about. Inhalt, as usual, is a corn- 
 plexus notarum, a complement of the significates of logical com- 
 prehension. 
 
 b. Quality. 
 
 The difficulty here is to conceive picture negation as There- 
 being, or Thereness, and Quality : it is hard to inspissate Nothing 
 with Substance ; we must fix our eye, however, on the substantial 
 negation in all quality as steadily as we can. The moment of 
 objective reflexion must be well looked at here. The one element 
 is distinguished from the other, and so, therefore, it is now a 
 reflected entity, or it contains a reflexion from the other in it, at 
 the same time that, by distinction, it is in a manner shed off or 
 reflected on to its own self. The effect of the bestimmen of being 
 by nothing may be illustrated. ' Daseyn ist bestimmtes Seyn : ' 
 one might almost translate this, There-being is curdled being ; or 
 There-Tiess is curdled-ness. Something of a real negation may be 
 so seen. Again, throw into that clear air so much cold, and it is 
 opacified, curdled into a cloud. In these examples, one might 
 figure that negation had been added to the being that was, and so 
 this opaque, curdled, determined There-being resulted. Being, in 
 short, is determined ; there is a terminus put to it, a negation ; 
 and so it is There-being, so much there-ness. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 Reality and Negation. 
 
 This observation is full of the most excellent matter, and opens 
 striking vistas into several very unexpected directions. This 
 applies to the sum of all realities, to that of all Negations to the 
 notions of God's Goodness, Justice, Wisdom, Power to that of 
 Absolute Power, &c. &c. The allusion to Bohme is very interest- 
 ing; and as regards Spinoza, the critique of Hegel is always 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 385 
 
 absolutely irresistible and masterly. There is a hint, too, very 
 well worth observing, that though the individual belongs to other 
 spheres than that of Seyn, he must, so far as he holds of Seyn, 
 submit to the characterisations of Seyn. The writing here is so 
 exoteric, that comment is unnecessary. As regards terms, in the 
 beginning of the Eernark, as we see, Hegel himself sets an sick as 
 equal to im Begriffe. For the hopelessness of solution which some 
 may feel in regard to Goodness, Power, &c., let me suggest that vital 
 reciprocity which is the root of the whole : right is right only because 
 there is a left; lip, up, only because there is a down; and each is quite 
 as much in the other or simply other as it is in itself, or itself. 
 With a general remark or two, we shall pass on. If we sup- 
 pose what Daseyn is, to have been thought before Daseyn was, we 
 shall come to see, on due consideration, that it could not have been 
 thought otherwise than Hegel indicates. It is to this strict think- 
 ing of Hegel that we are to refer his tendency to keep in view the 
 etymological meaning of his terms. In fact, this alone ought to 
 be a guarantee of his sincerity, and earnestness, and good faith 
 with us. He is not contented with a vague sign; he does not 
 move in tropes ; he must have a word that accurately and pre- 
 cisely and exactly cuts out his thought; and he never uses a 
 word without distinctly seeing what it amounts to, or perfectly 
 satisfying himself that it is adequate to his purpose. This, how- 
 ever, makes the difficulty of Hegel ; because in him, if we attempt, 
 as the sensuous modern literature has taught us, to float on with 
 words in their ordinary and current sense, we find ourselves pres- 
 ently lost. It is a severe task, then, to him who would follow 
 Hegel, to keep by the thought of Hegel, and, in spite of the cloud of 
 current sense, recognise distinctly in each word, and even in each 
 fraction of a word, what that precisely is which Hegel means it to 
 convey. Take the word endlich, finite, for example : if we commit 
 ourselves to the vague and phantasy-exciting signification in com- 
 mon use, we shall never see into the notion ; while, on the contrary, 
 how different, how clear it becomes when we tame phantasy into 
 thought, and correct loose opinion by etymology ! That is finite 
 which is ended or endable in space, in time, or in thought ; that 
 is infinite which is neither ended or endable in space, in time, or 
 in thought: rather, anything in time and space is superfluous, 
 everything in these being limited by other, and thought with the 
 pure forms of sense themselves is alone what is infinite. Consider 
 E<*o, for example : it is wholly infinite unended, unendable. 
 
 2 B 
 
386 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 It is this same close restricting of himself to reality which has 
 procured Hegel the reproach of Haym, that perception is always 
 behind him. The reproach is a compliment : Hegel would deal 
 with facts of existence, and not with fictions of conception. It 
 does not follow, indeed, that thought is less pure thought because 
 perception is behind it ; rather, in an opposite supposition, thought 
 would be but empty idle subjectivity : function and affection are 
 necessary complementary reciprocals. Still the development from 
 Seyn to Daseyn which we have witnessed, though true to percep- 
 tion, has always found its materials within its own self. (The 
 divisions are, of course, from their very nature, anticipations.) 
 What is said of a category is always to be understood by reference 
 to the world of facts ; but this is the point which must not be 
 overlooked, that it is also universally and necessarily true and 
 applicable in that world. In reading Daseyn, for example, it just 
 gains in sense and truth, the more real and energetic and entire 
 the reference is which we make to the concrete : the thing is, that 
 the characterisation is unexceptive. Besides, we have not to 
 occupy ourselves with the concomitant reflexions in such manner 
 as to hide from ourselves the progressively extricated differentiae 
 which are again re-incorporated to increase and progress. 
 
 The homogeneousness with which being and nothing are one in 
 There-being is the important consideration. We have not being 
 here, and nothing there : they are perfectly incorporated into a 
 one. Light and darkness are, as it were, perfectly commingled 
 into the resultant colour. Again, the colour is directly a light, 
 as There-being is directly being; but the other moment, dark- 
 ness, nothing, is equally there, and will manifest itself on its 
 own side. Colour is not partly light, and partly dark; it is a 
 uniform simple immediate : still it is the Grundlage, the neutral 
 base, in which light and darkness both are ideellement, that is 
 ideally moments, but sublated. The illustration corresponds 
 not inexactly. The definiteness, then, seems mainly due to the 
 negative element : it is the dark gives colour and distinction in 
 colour. Not very different is it in the case of a flavour; the 
 peculiarity of it, the difference of it, is the edge, and seems apart 
 from the lody of the flavour : when it is all peculiarity or edge, it 
 is thin, worthless, or passes into nothing. (One meets characters 
 who are all edge, distinction, emphasis, accent ; they cut, but they 
 do not move: the fair union makes the great man, as Homer, 
 Sophocles, Epaminondas, Cervantes, &c.). Sound is much the 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 387 
 
 same ; it is determination by silence that produces musical notes : 
 possibly, varying proportions of vibration and non-vibration con- 
 stitute much of the difference in sounds. Colour, in like manner, 
 may result, not, as in the coarse theory of Goethe, from a mecha- 
 nical mixture of light and darkness, but from variety in the 
 alternation of vibration and non-vibration (undulation offers no 
 difference to make a difficulty). It is remarkable., too, that there 
 are seven musical notes and seven colours ; and if the latter be 
 really reducible to three, is such reduction applicable to the 
 former ? Are colours but music to the eye music but colours to 
 the ear ? Perhaps, variety in odours and flavours similarly arises, 
 and all difference is but alternation of vibration and non-vibration. 
 Thus, too, may neutral effects be accounted for, as the black of 
 the union of iron and gallic acid in ink. Non-being, then, is the 
 seat of determination, the edge of difference how else is edge 
 conceivable but as cessation ? Edge here, too, is but another word 
 for the smack, the pitch, the feel. In this way we can see differ- 
 ence in identity almost as a matter of fact. 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. Hegel's 
 general view must be capable of being so stated. What is the 
 universe to him, if not the one absolute vox inflecting itself into 
 its involved voculations ? Bestimmung is but articulation, and the 
 absolute Bestimmung is but the absolute articulation of the 
 absolute one and that one is just thought : Thought's own native 
 articulations constitute the all of things. The above remarks, it 
 is to be understood, however, are not to be regarded materially, or 
 in themselves, but only formally and relatively, as illustrative of 
 the union of being and nothing in every There-being. 
 
 c. Something. 
 
 The reader ought to pay particular attention to this section, for 
 it is the most important we have yet seen, both in itself and as 
 illustrative of the thinking peculiar to Hegel. We may notice, in 
 the first place, what is spoken of as the Unterschied, the inter-shed, 
 the distinction, the dif-ference, which in There-being appears as 
 reality and negation. It is the same difference which was first 
 named being and nothing, then origin and decease, and now as 
 here. Being and nothing collapsed, or were eclipsed, into the 
 concrete neutral base, becoming ; There-being assumed a like rela- 
 
388 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 tion to origin and decease ; and now we see Something similarly 
 to resume reality and negation. Thus, then, we see logical 
 determination verily in process : the moments have successively 
 thickened themselves, and the base (which is just also a moment) 
 has likewise successively thickened itself. Now, the means pro- 
 ductive of this thickening has been simply reflexion, or indeed just 
 thinking : the one moment of the single logical rhy thmus passes 
 into its opposite, and with it collapses into a higher third : this is 
 Hegel's dialectic; but it is also simple apprehension, judgment, 
 and reason ; or it is Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss ; or, again, it is v\rj, 
 Mo/o</7, evreXexeia, an sich, fur sich, &c. &c.* 
 
 What we have to see here, however, is, that the difference exists, 
 and that it is always, in whatever form, still the difference, an 
 antithesis and at the same time synthesis of two such, that the one 
 is only because the other is, and both collapse into a third. The 
 reader must bear in mind the inter-shed, then, as the primordial, 
 but ever-present and vital, diaeresis or diaphora of the world : 
 Yes No Both ! 
 
 The single pivot of this section, however, finds itself in the 
 phrases first and second negation, the negation of the negation, the 
 concrete absolute negation, resolution of difference, sublation of dis- 
 tinction, the negative reference of self to self, the negative unity of self 
 with self, the Mediation of self with self, Being-within Self, &c. ; all 
 of which just mean the same thing, and that is, the negation of 
 the constitutifcgf variety, or many into the constituted unit or one, 
 or the absorption of the parts into the whole, said whole being 
 further regarded as simply singular. In Something, in short, 
 There-being sublates its own difference, or it returns to itself from 
 its own difference, and is thus gone into itself. If any one will 
 consider what a Subject is, he will readily understand this: an 
 Ego or I is the unity of an infinitude of details, but as Ego it is 
 wholly negative, as Ego all its details have disappeared ; Ego is, 
 therefore, the negative unity of itself with itself, or the media- 
 tion of itself with itself; and thus is it the negation of the 
 negation, for its details are in the first instance as negative to 
 it (the abstract negative is here involved, productive of variety 
 or difference), but it as return to itself is the negation of 
 
 * Perhaps it is confusing to call this movement Reflexion, as Hegel is known at 
 least in strictness at first usually to reserve that term for only one of its contained 
 moments that of the separating and abstracting understanding or judgment : an 
 instance of this occurs in this very paragraph, in an allusion to unformed Reflexion. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 389 
 
 the negation, and the resumption of concrete unity. The two 
 negatives or negations are thus, then, very clear ; and Something 
 as negation of the negation is seen to be the beginning of the 
 Subject. The words in the text, ' There-being in general, distinc- 
 tion in it, and resolution of this distinction/ contain the whole 
 business. In these words, too, the moments come completely to 
 the surface: 'There-being in general' is the immediacy of the 
 Begriff, the An sich, or the moment of simple apprehension ; 
 ' distinction in it ' is the mediacy of the Ur-theil, or the moment 
 of judgment ; and ' resolution of this distinction ' is, as Schluss or 
 resuming totality, the moment of reason. In him who shall under- 
 stand this section, the lesson of Hegel has fairly begun. Every way 
 the thinking here is admirable : consider the pointing out, though 
 that is an anticipation, and Something has first of all to other 
 itself in itself, that Something, as in itself Becoming, goes asunder 
 into the concrete Werden that has Something and Other as its 
 sides, both of which are Somethings. 
 
 The reader will get a glimpse of the negative reference to self, 
 if he will conceive his finger running questioningly over an 
 unknown surface, and suddenly returning from the edge of the 
 same back, as it were, to its centre with the word wood, or stone, 
 or glass, &c., as the case may be. Let him suppose himself to be 
 blindfolded, and successive surfaces to be tentatively offered to one 
 finger, and he will find that he is in contact for some time simply 
 with an unknown blur of difference, which blur suddenly collapses 
 to a unity and to a unity of self-reference when what it is and 
 that is its notion suddenly strikes him. Then only when it 
 attains self-reference is the blur Something. Hegel's rneta- 
 physic of Something, then, and it is perfect, for no Something in 
 the universe but will be found to be accurately constituted so, 
 is but a concrete act of perception as perception was determined 
 by Kant. Consider what an unknown blur the Santa Maria must 
 have proved to the Indians who watched with appalled astonish- 
 ment those bright shapes, Columbus and the harnessed Spaniards, 
 descending from it ; and consider, again, the easy unity of self- 
 reference in which it would have all gone together as ' ship ' to 
 the eyes of any European sailor, had any such, by shipwreck or 
 otherwise, found himself among them ! All this refers to Kant's 
 theory of perception a theory which, as stated at full elsewhere* 
 in its own place, shall only be alluded to here. This theory, we 
 
 * (In the Text- Book to Kant.) 
 
390 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 may observe, Hegel has undoubtedly made his own. In Kant's 
 theory of Perception, then, there are three moments : there is, 
 first, the manifold of Sense; second, the synthetic unity of the 
 Category ; and third, the Apperception of the individual subject. 
 This, again, is but the Notion of Hegel: the Category is the 
 Universal; the Manifold, the Particular; and subjective Apper- 
 ception, the Singular. Now, we have seen manifolds united into 
 the self-referent Singles, wood, stone, glass, ship, &c., and it appears 
 as if this self- reference were the result of the single category 
 Something. But this is not the case: in an act of perception 
 there are generally a vast number of categories involved. The 
 Indians who saw the Santa Maria, though they had no form 
 4 ship ' to apply, were, nevertheless, not idle with their categories, 
 but had soon stuck it full with many characterisations of their 
 own. It was a thing, and had qualities ; it was a force ; perhaps 
 it was an animal and had life: it was certainly there in Quantity 
 and Quality ; it was Something, it had definite being, it involved 
 becoming, it implied pure being. This is to try and convey to the 
 reader that all perceptions that is, all objects are but congeries 
 of categories, of notions. Take any object you like, and throw 
 out of it one after the other the categories you have thought into 
 it (Kant), or which are in it (Hegel) then ask yourself what 
 remains ? To the common mind what remains is still the object, 
 the wood, stone, glass, ship, in absolute, isolated, free independence, 
 after as before. To Kant what remains is the manifold of sense 
 affection set up in us by the unknown thing in itself or things in 
 themselves without us, disposed into the really internal, but 
 apparently external, forms of space and time : this, then, is what 
 remains to Kant an unperceived, incoherent manifold of affection. 
 To Hegel, again, what remains must be otherwise characterised. 
 For him, the Kantian Thing-in-itself, as a mere void characterless 
 assumption, exists not. To him, again, the sensuous element, 
 affection, as but the externalisation or mere other of the intel- 
 lectual element, function, exists only in this latter. To Hegel, 
 consequently, withdrawal of the categories is the total eclipse at 
 once of an inner and an outer ; or sense, as but the reflexion of 
 thought, must disappear with thought. If you discharge, indeed, 
 all categories from any object a stone, say what is there then 
 that does remain ? Can you name it ? can you find in it a single 
 character whereby you can say it ? No ; it is unsayable, an 
 Unsagbares, a characterless void, like the Kantian Thing-in-itself! 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 391 
 
 At least, it is as nothing to the other element, which has just been 
 discharged, or at best it is only the other of that element. To 
 Hegel, then, the object of thought is thought, and anything else 
 opined in it is but its other as other. But Hegel is not satisfied 
 with saying as much ; he wishes to show as much, and he exhibits 
 the object of thought just the object in gradual growth from the 
 nothing of pure being up to the All and the One of the Absolute 
 Spirit. The Logic of Hegel, then, is but the genetic exposition of 
 the true Thing-in-itself as opposed to the inane Thing-in-itself of 
 Kant. Nay, the reader must feel this himself now after the 
 metaphysic of Something. Has not 'a light gone up' to him thence? 
 Has he not felt that the solidity of every Something was, after all, 
 thought ? Has he not been made to see that even his ordinary 
 perceptions imply thoughts, are impossible without thoughts, and 
 that these thoughts constitute the all-important moments of these 
 perceptions ? Even to him, then, now, in this Logic, is it not the 
 formation of the Thing-in-itself he sees before him ? If we refer 
 now to a passage quoted from the ' Phaenomenologie,' a little way 
 back, we shall see how much the ' Logik ' is a rise as regards the 
 same. What was to Hegel in the one work the vague, inarticulate, 
 as it were dreaming, Sichselbstgleichheit, or equality with self, is 
 here the precise, fully-developed, perfectly self-conscious negative 
 reference to self. Kant is, in every way, the materia of Hegel; 
 but if any one will realise to himself what thinking lay in Hegel 
 between those determinations of the^ ' Phaenomenologie ' and these 
 of the ' Logik,' he will get a glimpse into well profundity. Hegel 
 is a royal thinker, tenacious, deeply- incisive, long-breathed. 
 
 The necessity of the one of a notion to the many of sense before 
 we can even perceive: this, a determination of Kant, is another 
 way of exhibiting the germ-cell of Hegel. Hegel saw this to be 
 necessarily, in every case, a negative reference to self ; and so he 
 made it his object to find all the cases, and in their sequence and 
 system. How much, then, deep consideration of what constitutes 
 Kant's theory of perception, and also the Thing-in-itself, had to do 
 with the origin of the system of Hegel, ought now to be tolerably 
 clear, and we may conclude here with a word on two or three of 
 the terms. 
 
 Real and Reality must always be understood by reference to 
 the place in the development where the latter word emerges ; 
 indeed, this is a remark universally applicable as regards the 
 terms of Hegel : to understand them we have only to refer to the 
 
392 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 moment out of which their notion rose. Opine, as usual, concerns 
 crude subjective mein-ung, as it were the mere mine-ing, ra^-ing, 
 or we-ing of thought. Being-within-self, or Insichseyn : the effect 
 of In here, as contradistinguished from An, must be seen into ; it 
 is attempted to be conveyed by within. In Something, indeed, a 
 within begins. 
 
 ' In Something Mediation with Self has reached position :' these 
 last three words translate ist gesetzt. The meaning plainly is, that, 
 in the one notion, the other is explicit or fairly overt, and expressed, 
 that is, it is in logical position. This setzen, especially in its de- 
 rivatives Gesetztseyn and Gesetztes, is always particularly trouble- 
 some to an English translator. What it means here, however, is 
 happily particularly plain. 
 
 The would-be abstract nothing, of course, refers to the common 
 understanding, and its ' it is the same thing, therefore, whether I 
 have a house or nothing, a hundred dollars or nothing, &c.' This 
 nothing plainly would be abstract, or is supposed to be abstract; 
 but, on the contrary, it is evidently concrete, as it refers to a 
 concrete house, dollars, &c. 
 
 That the most abstract determinations ' are also the most 
 current expressions of unformed reflexion/ (and it is hoped the 
 manner, ' the reflexion/ &c., will not prove too foreign here,) 
 might have been suggested to Hegel by a remark of Kant's at 
 page 280 of the Logic in his collected works, which points out 
 that abstract notions are ' sehr brauchbar/ very useful and useable, 
 ' as they may be applied to many things/ Some forty-three pages 
 further on, Hegel says the same thing again thus : * to unformed 
 thought, the abstractest categories, being, there-being, reality, 
 finitude, &c., are the most current.' Hegel's own thought is 
 evidently here, even were it on occasion of Kant, which, however, 
 the whole matter is of little moment, is not certain. Never- 
 theless, one cannot read the Logic of Kant seemingly meagre as 
 it is without thinking perpetually how much this and that must 
 have done for Hegel. Here is a passage which well illustrates 
 the Vorstellung of Hegel, as well as the production of a pure 
 universal ' Logik ' as parallel to a pure universal * Gramrnatik : '- 
 
 Knowledge of the universal in abstracto is speculative knowledge ; know- 
 ledge of the universal in concrete, common knowledge. Philosophical know- 
 ledge is speculative knowledge of reason, and it begins therefore there where 
 the common exercise of reason commences to make attempts in the cognition 
 of the universal in abstracto. 
 
QUALITY INTERPKETED, ETC. 393 
 
 From tliis determination of the difference between the common and the 
 speculative use of reason, we may infer what people the beginning of 
 philosophising must date from. Of all nations the Greeks, then, first began 
 to philosophise. For they first attempted to cultivate cognitions of reason, 
 not by aid of the leading-string of images (figures, pictures), but in abstracto ; 
 while other nations, on the contrary, sought to make notions intelligible to 
 themselves always only by means of images in concreto. Thus even at the 
 present day there are nations, as the Chinese and certain Indians, who treat 
 indeed of things which are derived solely from reason, as of God, the Im- 
 mortality of the Soul, &c., but seek not, nevertheless, to explore the nature of 
 these objects according to notions and rules in abstracto.* 
 
 Kant goes on to say, that what philosophy appears among 
 Persians and Arabians comes from Aristotle, that the Zendavesta 
 displays no trace of the same, and that the ' gepriesene ' Egyptian 
 wisdom was, in comparison with Greek philosophy, mere child's- 
 play. The antithesis of the Hegelian conception to the Hegelian 
 notion is precisely that of an image in concreto and a thought in 
 abstracto. It is as images or pictures, one sees, that conceptions 
 are just representations of notions. The hint to Hegel's whole 
 process is also plain. Here from the * Soul's Tragedy ' of 
 that wonderfully analytic and subtle character-reproducing poet, 
 Browning, is a passage which may illustrate the same subject of 
 conceptions and notions : 
 
 As when a child comes in breathlessly and relates a strange story, you try 
 to conjecture from the very falsities in it, what the reality was, do not con- 
 clude that he saw nothing in the sky, because he assuredly did not see a flying 
 horse there, as he says, so, through the contradictory expression, do you see, 
 men should look painfully for, and trust to arrive eventually at, what you call 
 the true principle at bottom. 
 
 This suggests another Hegelian characteristic : we, like dupes, 
 are led daily, and blindfolded, by ' what you call the true principle 
 at bottom,' without the slightest notion of what it is ; but he, for his 
 part, must see arid know and settle it all as Wesen. 
 
 B. 
 
 FlNITUDE. 
 
 The reader will find elements of difficulty here. Let him re- 
 member, first of all, the exact point of the development at which 
 he has arrived. He has seen There-being sublate its own deter- 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 189. 
 
394 THE SOCKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 minateness, distinction, or difference by reflexion into its own self 
 as a Something. The sublation has not destroyed the difference, 
 however, which still, as it were, remains outside the reflexion into 
 self, and thus distinguished from the self of the Something is, in 
 that relation, Other. The reader must see that the other is not im- 
 ported from elsewhere, but that the Something others itself in 
 itself. This is the first point to be observed, and it is one of the 
 greatest importance : we must never part company with what we 
 have before us, and always see clearly whither we are arrived. 
 At present we have reached Something and Other, which, as such, 
 have, in the first instance, the air of being indifferent in regard to 
 each other. Now, it is important to see that, each being equally a 
 Something and only other because of the other, the element of 
 negation is not in them themselves, but falls out or outside of 
 both. But this involves a reflexion the one from the other, with 
 the result that Something is in itself against its Being-for-Other. 
 To understand this, we must see that we have not introduced a 
 foreign other, that the other spoken of is the other which reflected 
 itself in the Something itself, and which still is the Something, 
 but so that the Something there is as Other, or is its own Being- 
 as-Other. This is the true development of the notion implied in 
 the Hegelian Seyn-fiir-Anderes. The reflexion by which the 
 negation was identified with There-being, and restored to, or incor- 
 porated with, the reality and these were the moments of There- 
 being gave birth to the Something, which Something again, as 
 negative reflexion into self, involved another from which the re- 
 flexion took place. But this other was still its own ; and it is the 
 peculiar constitution of every Something in this universe, that it 
 involves, or implies, or contains its own other. There, however, 
 in this region of other, the Something is as Being-as-other, or, as 
 Hegel prefers it, Being-for-other. The peculiar force of the German 
 fur, as already seen in the illustrations relative tofilr mich and 
 fur sick, is here to be recalled and reconsidered. We say in 
 English, it passes for genuine, it passes for gold, &c. : this is the 
 same/o?' as that in the Being-for-other. Something in the deter- 
 mination so designated, is every way other; it is there where it 
 is as other, and there where it is in every direction for other. 
 
 Now this the region of otherness, is the region also of recognis- 
 ableness, determinateness. And again the determinateness is the 
 Something's own. But the Something's determinateness reflected 
 into the Something, becomes that Something's qualification or 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 395 
 
 precise determination; meaning thereby its vocation, destination, 
 purpose, chief end, or how else you may name its one manifestible 
 peculiar nature. Then, again, the peculiar manifesting nature 
 passes plainly into the peculiar manifested nature; and that is 
 Beschaffenheit, or so-constitutedness, which we may translate, in 
 opposition to qualification (from qualis) by talification (from talis). 
 Talification, then, alludes to Something being constituted such, 
 that when involved with Other it asserts itself thus and thus ; or 
 talis (such sort) is just the answer to qualis (what sort). 
 
 Now this actual manifestation, identical also (as we have seen) 
 with the potential manifestibility, must, without difficulty, be 
 perceived to constitute, as Hegel says, the immanent and, at the 
 same time, negated Being-for-other, or the Limit of the Some- 
 thing. That it is the immanent Being-for-other is plain ; and 
 that, manifesting itself only as or when involved with other, it is 
 also negated, is likewise plain. Not less easy is it to see that its 
 assertion against or on other is its Limit ; or that where it at once 
 affirmatively or immanently and negatedly or with other is, there 
 is its Limit, or there is it in its Limit. 
 
 But just such constitution (of assertion with or against other) 
 as characterises Limit, is what we name the immanent determina- 
 tion, proper nature, of any Something. 
 
 Lastly, if Limit (End) is the proper nature of Something, Some- 
 thing is evidently the Finite, or that which is of an ended nature 
 ended and endable, inasmuch as there is reference in it to a 
 negating Other. 
 
 The remark that follows is prompted by this that Hegel in the 
 second chapter has passed into the moment of the Ur-theil, and he 
 excuses the affirmative nature of the findings under the first 
 division A affirmative though the moment is negative by 
 pointing out that, if in the first instance we had a positive verdict, 
 and the Urtheil almost in the form of the Begriff, we shall now, 
 under the second division, find all as negative as can be wished, 
 and the Urtheil fairly as Urtheil. 
 
 Terms here are thus explained. Bestimmung emerging from 
 the development as the Qualification or what sort which it is, is 
 accurately defined ; and Beschaffenheit no less so. Immanent is in 
 every English dictionary. 
 
 a. Something and an Other. 
 This is certainly very difficult thinking ; but it is, at the same 
 
:>96 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 time, singularly deep, penetrating, and comprehensive. Under 
 the first moment, marked 1, there are three sub-moments : Firstly, 
 to Simple Apprehension, both (Something and Other) are Some- 
 thing ; secondly, to Judgment, both are Other ; thirdly, to Eeason, 
 the Other is the Other for itself, and just so also is it, at the same 
 time, Something, or the Something. That both are Something, 
 and that both are relatively Other, we may take this as quite 
 plain, without more explanation ; but the Other isolated and for 
 itself is more difficult. Yet this is not so very difficult when the 
 true point of view is attained to. The Other belongs not to the 
 Somethings themselves ; it is quite external to them ; it is some- 
 thing else than they, then; something independent, sui generis, 
 and on its own account : it may be isolated, then, and considered 
 for itself, and so on. Then the Other as Other must just be this 
 externality as such of Nature : it is always to Spirit its Other, and 
 nothing but its Other, at the same time that it is in its own nature 
 simply the Other as such. Then this other by self-reflexion 
 sublates itself, and otherness remains simply a distinguishedness 
 a relativity, not a substantiality and positivity. These are great 
 thoughts : they are the truth of Idealism, or, rather, they are that 
 idealistic Eealism which is the only true, and which extends to 
 each moment of the antithesis its own rights, in such manner that 
 each is seen to be but the necessary complementary reciprocal of 
 the other. 
 
 Under number 2, we are to expect a moment of extinction ; 
 and that it proves to be, for the poles of the single antithesis, 
 which were at first being and nothing, are now distinguished as 
 Being-in-self and Being-for-other. So far as words are concerned, 
 Hegel's own seem sufficient ; but we may point out in passing, 
 that a firm view of Non-there-being maybe procured by consider- 
 ing the constitution of There-being, in which the element of 
 negation, which was still, however, There-being, is what is now 
 referred to as the Non-there-being. Again, we may remark that 
 we have all our materials still before us, and need not move from 
 the spot, neither to please Haym, who will have it that we do 
 move, nor Eosenkranz, who certainly, in all conscience, moves 
 enough, and never thinks, indeed, of staying by the spot. The 
 phrase ' their truth is their reference/ or ' their reference is their 
 truth,' is understood at once when the Something is thought as 
 othering itself in itself; for the other and the reflexion to self are 
 very plainly mutual complements, true only in their sum. Again, 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 397 
 
 it is well worthy the reader's deepest consideration, how it is that 
 being is just reference to self: there is a little corner in these 
 paragraphs whence there is a good glimpse into this. Certainly, 
 we are not limited to our own materials, but the findings will be 
 found true for all materials : it is true, for instance, of all Some- 
 things, and of all Others, that their truth is their reference. 
 
 Under number 3, as is natural to expect now, we shall find the 
 moments which have been but just disjoined re-united again. 
 There is no difficulty here, indeed, to those who have followed 
 what precedes ; the most of the space, in fact, is taken up with 
 certain explanations. What we see first is, that the Other is still in 
 the Something, though this latter has gone into itself. Circumstance 
 has been chosen expressly to translate Umstand, which is here the 
 Being-for-other. The sense of In-itself is made very plain here. 
 We have spoken of it as implying latent potentiality ; but this we 
 see now is a secondary nuance. The In-itself is, first of all, just 
 the counter-reflexion to Being-for-other; but then, In-itself 
 without Being-for-other is only abstract is only potential. The 
 Being-for-other, in fact, as regards the constitution of any Some- 
 thing, is in the In-itself, or just is in it, and is truly the Some- 
 thing, is truly the In-itself, or is just truly it. This is all amply 
 illustrated in the text ; especially striking is it that In-itself as a 
 characterisation simply abstract is simply also external. There is 
 no allowance to be made, then, for what we are in ourselves, 
 unless in relation to what we are or have manifested ourselves 
 for others. 
 
 The Thing-in-itself is here made plain ; and the simple trick 
 reflexion plays itself in such distinctions is very simply and 
 happily exposed. The true In-itself is the notion, whether as 
 totality or individual detail : this, however, we see, requires Setzen, 
 requires position; for the an^sich is just at first the abstract 
 Begriff. That suggests the special meaning of Gesetztseyn, which 
 is so difficult to render in English. We are here in Seyn, being ; 
 but being is the reference to self, and each of its moments, there- 
 fore, will be as beent or self-referent. A character of self- 
 substantiality will attach to each, and movement among them 
 will be but a passing from one to the other. But the result of 
 self-reference is Being-in-self, or the In-itself; and so it is that 
 being is so much or so wholly Ansichseyn. The moments, then 
 here are rather set or posited, than that they set or posit each 
 other; which latter movement is that peculiar to Wesen or 
 
398 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Essence. This Hegel illustrates by examples from both spheres. 
 If it is difficult to translate, we are not allowed, then, neverthe- 
 less, to fail to understand. Under Being, the action of Setzen is 
 to explicate, or to make the implicit explicit. This is a process of 
 evolution, expression, realisation, statement, and it is usually 
 named logical position. Under Essence or Wesen, the moments 
 of evolution become overtly reciprocal, or the one posits, sets, or 
 stakes the other. As we have seen, right sets left, left right, &c. 
 Anything thus set, then, is not independent and self-subsistent ; 
 it is derivative, representative, vicarious, subdititious, surrogative, 
 pronominal ; it is a reaction, a recoil, a rebound or redound, a 
 replication, a reflexion, a reciprocation, it is an exinvolute, an 
 eximplicate, an occasionate. In this way, one can see the meaning 
 of ein Gesetztes. Again, Gesetztseyn just expresses the abstract 
 quality of all this : it is posititiousness, adjectitiousness, ascripti- 
 tiousness, attributiveness, assertiveness, &c. &c. In short, we are 
 to see the universal presence of reflexion and reciprocation, of 
 relativity and correlativity, or of the relative inference already 
 spoken of. No doubt, Hegel sees in Setzen, to set, or stake, or 
 put in place of, and from this the rest derives. In reference to 
 the Metaphysical methods that preceded his own, he has good 
 right to say that this element of mutuation and reflexion never 
 entered, and that the whole effort was to maintain something 
 positive. We may fancy Hegel teasing out substantial unity into 
 a whole world of reflexion ; and then, in that case, one might 
 say, What is, is Gesetztseyn, mere reflexion, mutuation, tnutua- 
 titiousness. 
 
 b. Qualification , Talification, and Limit. 
 
 We have seen the Being-for-other declared in the Something, 
 in it, rather than in its in-itself. This is a dredging or deepening of 
 abstract In-itself, into a capability of the Being-for-other. Or the 
 Being-for-other being reflected into the In-itself, this In-itself is 
 now be-mediated (concretely furnished) thereby. It is no longer 
 abstract latent potentiality which is before us as the In-itself ; 
 the Being-for-other seems now reflected into its depths, and to 
 lie within it, mediating it, or giving it a concrete interior. Never- 
 theless, the In-itself is still abstract in that it holds in it a mere 
 reflexion of the Being-for-other, and is still provided with nega- 
 tion or with Being-for-other. But what is mirrored here is 
 
QUALITY IJSTERMtETJfiD, ETC. 399 
 
 just inner qualification, inner determination proper, or peculiar 
 inner nature. One can understand this, and how the notion of 
 capacity or c&pSLb'ility is brought about ; and one can see also that 
 this is a deterndnateness not only beent, but an sich beent, or 
 beent in itself. From In-itself to In it, there is a rise of manifes- 
 tation, still the abstractness of the In-itself is a necessary moment ; 
 without abstractness, the inner nature would simply be Being-for- 
 Other, which it is not. There is a peculiarity of grammar in the 
 phrase ' into which it is reflected into itself : ' it is Hegel's, 
 however, and intentional. 
 
 That to which the Something is adequate, is evidently the force 
 of Bestimmung here, which is thus, as it were, equal to the defini- 
 tion, and more than the differentia. 
 
 No. 1 further illustrates this sense of Bestimmung ; and the 
 reader has simply to see that this sense has fairly risen, as well 
 as that nothing has been taken in from elsewhere. Well con- 
 sidered, what is said about ' determinateness manifoldly growing 
 through involution with Other/ &c., does not impugn this state- 
 ment : we are still in presence only of our original materials. 
 
 The next paragraph contains excellent illustration, but is diffi- 
 cult, and requires intimate initiation before one can find oneself at 
 home in it. 
 
 In the first place, we must understand Eeason to be Vernunft 
 (Ver-nommenes) ; and that implies what is taken together and 
 trans, which again is the concrete All and the resuming One, or 
 simply the living Totality that is. In this light, then, Man is the 
 thinking totality of all that is, or of the universe. This is his deter- 
 mination, but thought as such is his determinateness; or the one 
 is his qualification, the other his qualifica ted ness. Then, again, 
 all that Man is, even what in him has not the form of thought (as 
 the element of nature or of sense), is in itself thought. But Man 
 is thought not only in himself, but in him; that is, we cannot 
 say ' there is nothing in him,' but we must say there is thought in 
 him : it is recognised as his manifestible peculiar nature as his 
 Bestimmung, and throughout his whole actuality and existence. 
 Thought is thus concrete, not the abstract form as which we gener- 
 ally regard it, but endowed with the Inhalt and Erfullung, the 
 implement and complement of actual objectivity and life. Such 
 is man's nature, life, or living purpose ; but this nature is only in 
 itself, it is not a completed realisation and statement, not actu full 
 explication and expansion ; it together with this filling which is 
 
400 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 veritably in it is in the form of In-itsclf in general it is only an 
 Is-to-be its filling appears as external to it, as over-against it, as 
 what still is to be brought into it. In this way, this paragraph 
 will be found intelligible. I have attempted to help a little the 
 last sentence in the translation. The construction of this sentence 
 is peculiar ; for the last die in it, referring to the Erfullung, has 
 awkwardly to skip clauses to make good its reference. Implement 
 is used in its etymological sense for filling, &c. 
 
 No. 2 has seven paragraphs, and we shall remark on them 
 separately. The f lrst is easy in itself, but is received with hesita- 
 tion and suspicioa by the reader. Hegel appears here to play so 
 very clearly fast and loose just as it suits him, that the hocus- 
 pocus of the whole business must just be held patent. It is to be 
 said, however, that the nature of the case really is so; that, for all 
 appearances to the contrary, we have still before us the original 
 one orfundamen, and the original two or momenta; and that it is 
 not our fault, nor, indeed, virtue, if reflexion now on this side and 
 now on that, or now in this moment and now in that, should seem 
 double and contradictory. This doubleness is in truth not ours, but 
 that of the thing itself, of what is. It is quite fair, then, to return 
 to the Being-for-other, and the result of its independence now : in 
 fact, we must see that its independence now, or outside of the deter- 
 mination as the determination, can only be what Hegel calls it 
 the Beschaffenheit ; for the Beschaffenheit of anything is just 
 that Being-for-other in it which remains apart from its function 
 proper, its defining and characterising business as such. 
 
 The next paragraph is explanatory, and its general reference 
 outwards is perfectly allowable. It is to be seen as a result of its 
 very metaphysical or logical constitution, too, that Something is 
 a prey to influence from without : Something has negation, other, 
 in it. 
 
 Change in Something (i.e., anything) will be found to be 
 seated, not where the Something is in itself, but where it is indif- 
 ferent outer other, or where it is indifferent outer Being-for-other ; 
 and that, as apart from the determination (or qualification) as 
 such, is the region of what we name Talification. Change, too, is 
 legitimately introduced, for change is implied in being * a prey to 
 influence from without.' 
 
 The fourth paragraph contains the reciprocal transition of Quali- 
 fication into Talification, and of the latter into the former, and is 
 of some length and difficulty. The burthen is this: Qualifi- 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 401 
 
 cation arises from the reflexion of the Being-for-other of the Some- 
 thing into the In-itself of the same, and is analogous to what we 
 name special function. But though the reflexion has sublated the 
 Being-for-other, it has not cancelled it the constitutive moments 
 of the Something still remain other to other. But the Being-for- 
 other that remains outside of the Qualification (special function) 
 is Talification concomitant, collateral, secondary, or, as it were, 
 contingent function. The Qualification seems indifferent, then, to 
 the Talification ; yet as regards the Something both are in it, or 
 both belong to the one determinateness of the Something, or both, 
 then, by implication pass into one another mutually. What Some- 
 thing is in itself is also in it; but that implies a Being-for-other 
 or just another to which the qualification is open : but qualifi- 
 cation in involution with other is talification. Or the determin- 
 ateness as such implies a negative, and thus introduces an element 
 of otherness into the qualification which is thus again talification. 
 These steps are certainly difficult, and the original is not easy. 
 Perhaps it is after the words ' the connexion is more particularly 
 this,' that the reader finds the longest pause ; for the copula of 
 thought that unites the immediately next sentence, relating to the 
 ' qualification as such being open to the relation to other/ with the 
 sentence which follows, bearing on the * determinateness being at 
 the same time moment,' is, we should say, very hard to hit. Indeed, 
 what the precise ' determinateness ' alluded to is, is not at all 
 readily seen. The sentence or two, of comment immediately above 
 declare the determinateness in question to be the first and original 
 determinateness as such, while they make the one sentence (of the 
 two whose copula is difficult to see), though corroborative, yet 
 independent of the other. The former of them may also be con- 
 ceived as preliminarily demonstrating the ' openness to other ; ' 
 but that, as the comment holds, amounts at once to talification. 
 In short, the differentia is at bottom a proprium ; and a proprium 
 is always a possible differentia. 
 
 The conversion of Talification into Qualification occurs thus: 
 the element of talification is that by which the Something is open 
 to the accidentality of involution with other. Now, this element 
 per se is just what was called the Other as such. It is thus the 
 other of itself, and so again self-referent There-being : but that is 
 just an In-itself together with a determinateness or qualification. 
 Thus, talification which appeared outer is identified with the 
 inner, and thus the determining of the other is met by the 
 
 2c 
 
402 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 immanent determining of the Something itself. To illustrate 
 the Something is a chair, the Bestimmung or qualification is human 
 support in a certain posture, its Being-for-other is solidity, its 
 determinateness is wood, its Beschaffenheit or talification is in- 
 flammability. This Being-for-other of wood expressed by its 
 inflammability does not concern that which is reflected into the 
 Something as chair (solidity) and fulfils the Bestimmung support ; 
 they seem indifferent to each other : it is the solidity in the wood, 
 and not its inflammability, which concerns the chair in its function 
 as chair. Nevertheless, the inflammability as regards the chair is 
 in it ; and this involves a Being-for-other, or another to which 
 the special function of the chair is open and exposed. Or the 
 determinateness, wood, is at the same time moment, and contains 
 at the same time the qualitative difference, to be different from 
 the In-itse/f, to be the negative of the Something (the chair), or 
 another There-being, another Thereness, /Soness, Nessness, or just 
 entity than the chair. In this way, it is evident that the function 
 special of the chair is involved with whatever Being-for-other 
 (quality) the determinateness, the wood, possesses, and is thus 
 talification. The inflammability of the chair is held over, and in 
 terrorem of, the qualification or function of the chair. Another 
 Being-for-other of the chair that remains outside of its qualification 
 or special function is, that the wood is food to a certain tick or 
 worm ; this Being-for-other is thus talification ; and how dependent 
 the function proper or the qualification is on this talification is 
 too obvious to require extension : the chair, in short, may fall 
 into powder, and qualification vanish into talification. 
 
 Again, the Being-for-other which does not enter into the 
 qualification of the chair, but is separated from it as talification, 
 evidently per se just amounts to what has been named the Other 
 as such. Take it as the inflammability of wood that is other 
 to its solidity ; in the chair, it is just the other as such, the other 
 of itself, so self to self-referent There-being, or a self to self- 
 referent entity inflammable wood. It is so, too, we see that the 
 talification belongs to what the Something is in itself, or that the 
 Something alters with the talification. The chair falls to powder 
 under its eatableness, or into charcoal under its inflammability. 
 For the determinateness of the chair, the wood, is at once the 
 chair and the other of the chair. Here we can see how the other 
 of the something is the other per se, the other in itself, the other 
 of itself, the other of the other, &c. ; for the wood as other of the 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 403 
 
 chair is the other of itself, and so an entity referent of self to self, 
 or wood as such. Any number of similar illustrations will not 
 now be difficult to the reader, and the passage of qualification into 
 talification, or of quality into tality, and vice versa, as well as how 
 it is true that Something always involves an Other which is itself 
 Something, will not now probably be hard to see. We are not 
 confined either to such finite things as chairs, &c., for examples, 
 we may similarly use men. The quality of Napoleon was to lead 
 armies, and to reach thus his zenith ; but it was his tality to be 
 vulgarly ambitious, to seek aristocratic connexions, and to reach thus 
 his nadir and extinction. It was the quality of Burns to sing; 
 but it was his tality to be greedy of the moment : as high, then, as 
 he rose by quality, so low did he sink by tality. The theme is 
 new and endless; but surely it is enough to show the vein, 
 without exhausting it by an easy process of rhetoric or simple 
 prosiness which will, perhaps, prove irresistible to others. It is 
 important to see that the Something always still expresses its own 
 inner self in the tality, and that it is with the tality that Some- 
 thing alters itself. This is well seen in all the illustrations 
 chair, Napoleon, Burns. 
 
 The fifth paragraph tells us, what we see perfectly, that the 
 change now alluded to is not that which concerned the traffic in 
 its own self of the Something with the Other brought to it by its 
 own Determinateness, but a change fairly expressed and overtly 
 explicated as regards the Something. The first change was wholly 
 of the nature of In-itself ; but this is one determined : it also 
 appears to be connected with a development of the potential 
 interior or within-itself of the Something. Or, we may say, the 
 first othering of Something was implicit, while the present is, on the 
 contrary, explicit : negation is now explicitly determined as im- 
 manent to Something, or as its evolved ivithin-itself, whereas pre- 
 viously negation was discerned in Something only by implication. 
 
 The identification of quality and tality replaces the Something. 
 Still, in view of the qualitative difference subsisting between 
 qualification and talification there appear two Somethings. These 
 two Somethings, then, are in the one Something ; they are not 
 separated by mere abstract difference, by difference as such, a 
 difference having place in their comparison only ; their difference 
 is now rather immanent to them, inherent in them. The 
 affirmation of neither is direct, the affirmation of both is 
 indirect; it is a result of the elimination of the otherness 
 
404 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 introduced by the quality or qualification, whether of the 
 one or of the other, into the common In-itself. This can be 
 illustrated by the chair and the wood, which are two Somethings 
 in their qualitative difference, and one only after sublation of the 
 same. Or we may say, water is Something ; its quality is that it 
 is the universal menstruum that flows, or just, par excellence, the 
 Vehicle ; its tality is capability of becoming ice. Well, H is in 
 each (the water and the ice), or each is H 0. This is the one 
 something, but they themselves again are two. Yet the negation, 
 or difference between them, is an inherent one ; it belongs to the 
 within-itself of the H 0. Each, too, affirmatively is, not directly 
 as either water or ice, but indirectly through elimination of all 
 determined difference as H O. As water and ice, nevertheless, 
 they are mutually indifferent. 
 
 ' Something relates itself thus out of its own self to the other : ' 
 it is important here to see the etymological force of verhdlt sich. 
 Ver, as we have seen, implies transition to and with, or both trans 
 and cum : the Something relates itself to the other, then, in the 
 sense that it holds itself away (transformingly) to and with the 
 other. This we see (as in the relation of water to ice) to occur, 
 too, out of its own self. The ice is set in the water as its own 
 moment, and the ice is here the otherwise-being. The Being- 
 within-self, or just the within of the water, includes in it this 
 negation, this ice, and it is by means of it that the water continues to 
 have its affirmative being. The ice is just the developed within-itself 
 of the water. But ice and water are qualitatively different, the ice 
 is apart from or out of the water: this must be allowed, for Some- 
 thing is Something only by negation or sublation of the other. 
 (This we saw when engaged on Something and Other as such.) 
 Only by such sublation is it that the Something presents itself 
 as over-against the Other, which here for the first time is itself a 
 There-being, or a separate entity; it is thus external to it, or, 
 seeing that they still cohere in their notion, it is otherness in 
 general that results each is something and each is other. Of the 
 Somethings we have here, then, though coherent in their notion 
 (H 0), the one (the water) is qualitatively distinct from the other 
 (the ice). But, inasmuch as the Being- within-itself (of the water) 
 is the non-being of the otherwise-being (the ice) which is implied 
 in it (the water), but at the same time distinguished or dis-cerned 
 as beent, the Something itself (the water) is the negation, the 
 ceasing of another in it ; it is explicitly put it is in position it 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 405 
 
 is set as negatively preserving itself against the other, and as 
 maintaining itself by the other. The ice is at once the negation 
 and the affirmation of the water. The within-itself of the water 
 is the negation of the negation (the ice) or this is its in-itself> or 
 what it is in itself. But negation of the ice is as simple negation 
 in it. But this amounts to Limit : the negations are at once 
 mutually excluded and mutually implied. 
 
 As regards technical terms, almost all has been already said that 
 is required. It is not difficult to see that the Ansich becomes 
 vermittelt (be-middled, be-mediated), and no longer abstract when 
 the Seyn-fiir-Anderes is reflected into it. Still it remains 
 relatively abstract ; the chair regarded as the reflexion into itself 
 is relatively abstract as regards its determinateness, its Being-for- 
 other, the wood, &c. The eye as the eye is a reflexion into itself, 
 and relatively abstract compared with its coats, &c. Further on, 
 abstract is seen in the sense of formal self-identity as regards the 
 difference of the Somethings when involved in alteration, or change. 
 Concrete is seen to imply implement, or filling. Sollen will come 
 to be explained again : it always refers to a "being to he, or an owing 
 (or ought-ing) to be. If the reader looks deeply at the phrase ' the 
 other of itself/ he will see that this is an exact expression of the con- 
 stitution of Something, as it is found developed in its own place, 
 
 We have now achieved a most important stage in the study of 
 Hegel. This matter of qualification, &c., and the transition into 
 Limit, I have always regarded a? the pons asinorum over which 
 most students have hitherto been unable to cross. (That it has 
 been passed, I know.) The present writer, for his part, must 
 confess that he lay in leaguer here for years, and that the para- 
 graph in especial in which the transition to Limit formally occurs 
 was a thousand times abandoned as utterly and wholly hopeless. 
 As regards this particular paragraph, what is said in allusion to 
 the first Something is an endless stumbling-block till the true 
 point of view is obtained ; and then, indeed, it is suddenly seen to 
 be very simple. The opposition relating here ' first properly to a 
 There-being itself ' demonstrates the 'first Something ' to be the 
 first of the two considered here, and not the first something as 
 treated in the book itself. But future students will never know 
 what they owe to those who have preceded them. The point of 
 view, however, that removes the great difficulty of the para- 
 graph will be got, perhaps, from the following : if, as regards the 
 Something and the Other of Change, the student insist on seeing 
 
406 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 in his conception the Other only as immanent in, and not as 
 other separated from, the Something, he will never succeed in 
 realising Limit: let him eject it as other (simple negation) and 
 then negate it as other (negation of the negation), and limit is at 
 once visible. Water and ice are qualitatively other separation ; 
 they are at bottom the same communion : limit is between both 
 and both; as negation of the negation, it unites both, as negation 
 simply it divides both. The Something first claims and then 
 denies first drags in and then ejects and this is the function 
 of the character in question (Limit). In short, assumption of the 
 other, rejection of the other these are the fulcra of the move- 
 ment from Beschaffenheit to Grenze. 
 
 It will not have escaped the reader, probably, that the portion 
 of Hegel's Logic which we have just discussed concerns that 
 matter which mainly appears in Ancient Logic as the Predicables : 
 the Genus, the Species, the Differentia, or Differentia specifica, 
 Sia<j>opa eiSoTToios, the Proprium, the Accidens, the Definitio, &c., 
 have all place here. It will be sufficient to indicate this ; the 
 extension of it by the reader himself will usefully familiarise him 
 with the various materials. It belongs to the worth of Hegel that 
 he has, as it were, re- vitalised these otherwise mere gram- 
 matical vocables, and exhibited them in their living connexion 
 with the absolute. (This last word, however unintelligible, just 
 amounts to the very well-known and familiar rerum natura.) In 
 fact it is always to be kept in view that, so far as Hegel is con- 
 cerned, the reflexions are always vital, are such as have occurred 
 in the development and formation of the thought of all of us of 
 thought as thought. 
 
 In number 3, now, we have the very important and striking 
 evolution of the notion of Limit. It is not easy to get into the 
 mood of mind, the recueillement, the peculiar Vertiefung, which is 
 necessary to the realisation and proper intelligence of the determi- 
 nations which present themselves here. There is a mode of read- 
 ing the pertinent sentences, and of looking at the occurrent 
 distinctions, which ends in a result so flat and shallow and trivial, 
 that really one feels tempted to say, if we are to consider this the 
 veritable outcome, then assuredly Hegel might have spared him- 
 self all his pains both of thought and writing. 
 
 The Pyrenees are just as much Spain's limit on the side of France, as France's 
 on the side of Spain ; the Channel just as much limits off France from 
 England, as England from France ; the Rhine which divides Alsace from 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 407 
 
 Baden, equally divides Baden from Alsace, &c. ... In passing from French 
 to Spanish soil, we say, There France ends, here Spain begins ; contrariwise, 
 in passing from Spanish to French soil, we say of the same sod which in the 
 first instance was designated as beginning of Spain, that it is the termination 
 of Spain ; and what was regarded before as the termination of France, converts 
 itself into its commencement.* 
 
 It is in the same neighbourhood that we find Kosenkranz philo- 
 sophising in the following form : 
 
 To destine a man for the vocation of the artist, who possessed not any 
 original capacity for such a function, were in vain. The eye has the destina- 
 tion to see, because in light it has its quality ; IT is LIGHT-GREEDY. 
 
 That is, the eye sees because it sees ! But it is something quite 
 else that we must endeavour to recognise here in Hegel the 
 primordial thoughts, namely, which contain the universe, or the 
 same thing from another side those thoughts which, acquired in 
 latency, now latently constitute in all of us the soul and substance 
 of everything we see or feel. At pp. 249, 250, 251 above, we 
 shall find a useful comment of Hegel's own on what now occupies 
 us. There we are told that the individual, as but a sum of refer- 
 ences to other, has his being not in himself. There we hear also 
 of herbs remaining equal to themselves when involved with other, 
 or of making themselves good in said other and through said other. 
 Lastly, we hear of the pang attributed by Jacob Bohme to quali- 
 ties, the bitter, the fiery, the sour, &c., in that they maintain and 
 produce themselves only in the stress of conflict. In beginning 
 the discussion of Limit, it is with 'such considerations as these that 
 we are to prepare our minds. In short, we are to carry vividly 
 with us our findings in regard to tality, for tality is the region 
 and it is a vital one in which lies the limit that at once unites 
 and separates Something and Other. We are to see assertion and 
 negation meet in limit we are to see that this one line of aqua 
 fortis, Limit, sums and contains in it the virtue of Something on 
 this side, and of Other on that ; that it is the Something, and that 
 it is the Other. Of a truth, it is a very genuine, very exquisite, 
 very penetrating and comprehensive metaphysic, which y here 
 exhibits to us. To a man who has a turn that way, indeed, the 
 delight in the successive steps and in the result may prove no less 
 
 * Rosenkranz: Wissenschaft der Logischen Idee ; Konigsberg, 1858; Parti., pp. 
 140, 141. (It is to be acknowledged that these are still illustrations of Limit, and 
 that Rosenkranz might still have had veritable metaphysical depth in mind. One 
 has to confess inability to grasp that philosophical k light-greediness ' which fol- 
 lows. New.) 
 
408 THE SEURKT OF HEGEL. 
 
 entrancing than that which was experienced by Pythagoras on the 
 squaring of his triangle, or that of Keats on first looking into 
 Homer. Something and Other are to be conceived in potential 
 mutual grips, then, and not side-by-side indifferents ; each is in 
 the line of contact, and each is negated or is not in the same. 
 Now, we are still to conceive ourselves in presence of our original 
 materials : we have still before us the original Something and the 
 original Other, though thickened mutually by mutual reflexions 
 Being-in-self, Being-for-other, Being-m-^, qualification, talifica- 
 tion, &c. till now the evolution has reached a point at which it 
 seeks to replace both by the single characterisation, Limit. For 
 instance, chair was an example of the original Something, the 
 Other of which was wood. Now, the wood introduces inflam- 
 mableness into the chair ; but still the chair, as a chair, sets 
 bounds to this action on it of its own other. The chair does not 
 succumb at once ; the chair remains a chair for so long ; the chair, 
 by its very size, &c., may negate the inflammableness. Even here 
 there is a Limit. Much more is there a Limit where the Quality 
 of the Burns, the Napoleon, meets and potentially engages the 
 Tality of the same. Certainly, more closely-illustrative examples 
 are supplied by the collapse of light and darkness into colour, of 
 acid and alkali into salt, &c. ; but still it is right to see that we 
 are not obliged to turn our backs on what we set out with, and 
 that this is really such as to imply the matter of the new illustra- 
 tions as well. Of these, colour, as between light and darkness, 
 will probably suffice to assist the reader throughout the whole 
 dialectic here. 
 
 The discussion immediately before us embraces a preliminary 
 paragraph, and three statements of moments, respectively desig- 
 nated by the grammata a, /3, y. We shall bestow a remark or 
 two on these in their order. 
 
 Being-for-other is indeterminate, affirmative community of 
 Something with its Other : ' this applies to the relation of the 
 original Something to its Other, as well as to that Something 
 engaged in change and so involved with other which is the point 
 that we have reached at present, and the point, therefore, that we 
 have specially to bear in mind. Change, too, as we saw, was 
 fairly introduced, and we have thereby acquired for ourselves the 
 right of a wider externality, and of an influence from without in 
 general. The Limit appears at first the direct antithesis of the 
 Being-for-other, or the Non-being-for-other. The fulcra of the 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 409 
 
 dialectic movement are at once indicated by the opposing of 
 ideally to really. 
 
 Under a, we see, firstly, that Limit, as Non-being as well of the 
 Something as of the Other, is just Non-being of Something in 
 general ; and secondly, that Limit, as Non-being of the Other, is 
 Being of the Something. Something, then, has the Limit in it, 
 and is Something through that which is also its Non-being. Thus, 
 through Limit, Something at once is and is not, and Other at once 
 is and is not. 
 
 Under /3, we find that on the one side as well as on the other of 
 the Limit, Something exists out from its limit. Darkness and 
 light exist equally out from colour. As regards Hegel's own 
 examples, though they illustrate well the relation of the Something 
 being out from the limit, it is difficult to see where we should 
 place their Other. ' It is the middle between both, and in it they 
 cease : ' how apply this to the line, or the plane, or the solid ? The 
 line is on one side of the Limit, the Point ; but what are we to 
 conceive as the Other, on the other side ? We may ask the same 
 question as regards plane and solid. I suppose there is no answer, 
 but that the line, plane, solid, &c., in the other direction is the 
 Other. It requires a good deal of reflexion, however, before we 
 retire satisfied here.* Limit is spoken of as presenting itself to 
 conception first of all spatially, or, so to speak, in the terms of 
 space : we are told, too, that the conception is but the out-of -its- 
 self-ness of the notion, as it were, the trope, the symbol, the 
 metaphor of the latter. 
 
 The concluding moment (y) deserves and requires the very closest 
 attention. It may be named the metaphysic and also the 
 essence of distinguishableness ; and due Vertiefung, or a due 
 deepening of ourselves into the matter concerned and it would de- 
 light a Hegel to observe this involuntary dialectical identification of 
 a deepening into ourselves with a deepening into the thing itself ought 
 to bring with it a vivid conviction of the substantial existence of 
 an element of reflexion in the very crassest of the things of sense. 
 
 Out from or without the Limit, Something is necessarily un- 
 limited. Unlimited Something is simply Nessness quite generally 
 unlimited $0-ness (There-being). But the Other is situated 
 precisely similarly : it, too, is simply /Sb-ness, simply JVessness, and 
 without end. Either can be called Something, either can be called 
 Other ; but they possess not a single distinction, the one from the 
 
 * The point and the line are the two: limit, properly, is between both. New. 
 
410 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 other : each is simply Nessness that and nothing else. They are 
 both, therefore, the same thing. 
 
 But now each is Daseyn (There-being, &c.), or each is Seyii 
 (Being) with a Bestimmtheit (a determinateness). Now, this 
 determiuateness, in which each is what it is distinguishably from 
 the other, may still be regarded as the Limit between them. But 
 into this Limit the determinateness of each enters : this Limit is 
 their common distinguishableness. But the distinguishableness of 
 each falling into the one Limit, this one Limit is at once their 
 unity and diversity ; and, again, unity and diversity of the same 
 things, this just expresses the constitution of There-being as it 
 manifested itself in its place. There-being and Limit, each then 
 is found to be identical as well with Something as with Other, or 
 we have a double identity of both. Now this implies that Some- 
 thing has Nessness (There-being) only in the Limit, while, again, 
 the immediate, direct entity of the Something being at the same 
 time the negative of the Limit, the Something which has but 
 just been placed in the Limit 'just as much sunders itself from 
 itself, and points away over and beyond itself to its non-being, 
 pronouncing this its being, and so passing over into the same.' 
 The latter part of this description refers to Something being out 
 from its Limit, while its Limit is its true Self. 
 
 The illustrations that follow in the text commend themselves. 
 Sometimes the German is more graphic than the English here : 
 for instance, the eye itself seems to be considered in such phrases 
 as ' in the point, the line as well fdngt an as hort aufl almost as 
 if it were, in the point, the line as well catches on as leaves off, as 
 well kindles up as dies out. The unrest of the Something in its 
 Limit, as of the Line in the Point, usually represented as arbitrary 
 conception, but now characterised as natural dialectic, is very 
 striking. No less striking is the demonstration of the dimensions 
 of the point in consequence of its having place only in a There- 
 being or There-ness, which There-ness, as quite indefinite There- 
 ness, can only be space. Limit and There-being have been so 
 identified and distinguished, that the perfectly abstract limit, the 
 point, having its There-being in its limit and yet beyond it, 
 must set itself infinitely beside itself, and give rise to the per- 
 fectly abstract There-being or There-ness, space ; and such is this 
 There-being or There-ness in which it is. Altogether here, under 
 Limit, one 'sups full' of dialectic dialectic not more startling 
 either than it is fertile, and, we hope we may add, convincing. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 411 
 
 The angle, the pivot, the hinge of this dialectic lies pretty much 
 in this That the development of the contradictions of Limit leads 
 to the bringing together of Something and Other as each just 
 There-being, and finally to the crumpling of all up into Limit as 
 the inner of both Something and Other, and the inner justrof 
 Nessness at all. Entity, we may remark, has also been used here 
 as another synonym of There-being ; indeed, the word aught, or 
 aughtness, if always alone used, would, we doubt not, come very 
 well, in the end, to represent and convey the Hegelian Daseyn : 
 when Hegel began, Daseyn was as far from meaning what it means 
 now, as to an Englishman aught or aughtness is at present. 
 
 We may remark, that illustrations from geometrical lines and 
 points occur in the ancient philosophical Commentators, with 
 whom, as we shall have occasion to see elsewhere, Hegel has many 
 points of contact, and whom doubtless he earnestly studied. In 
 the Commentary of Proclus on the Parmenides, for example, we 
 find ' a line ' spoken of as ' the first continuous and divisible nature 
 amongst magnitudes ; hence, it participates of an indivisible, that 
 is, of a point ; and this point, though it is allotted a superlinear con- 
 dition, and is indivisible, yet it subsists in the line, is something 
 belonging to it, and is the summit of the line.' Thomas Taylor 
 adds, as commentary to this (which is his own translation), that 
 ' points, in a line have a linear, in a superficies a superficial, and 
 in a solid a solid subsistence ; or, in other words, that in a line, 
 superficies, and solid, they are respectively affected with the 
 nature of line, superficies, and solid, at the same time that they 
 still retain in each their non-quantitive nature ; hence/ and this 
 is the Neo-Platonic moral ' we may see as in images how in- 
 corporeal natures, when they become profoundly connected with 
 bodies, are affected indeed with a corporeal nature, but still retain 
 an incorporeal subsistence ! ' 
 
 c. Finitude. 
 
 From the first paragraph we see that mere limit, or endedness, 
 is not what alone constitutes the finite, but the negation of a 
 developing within-itself, which is simply perpetual process or 
 becoming. 
 
 Non-being is thus the nature of what is finite : it perpetually 
 is not even in that it is. Finite things possess a self- reference 
 that is only negative ; for they are only through their negation 
 
412 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 their developed negation, if you will ; where, indeed, the develop- 
 ment is but a despatching of themselves beyond, a sending of 
 themselves out, over, the being they at any moment have. They 
 are beent, then, but the truth (at any time) of their being is their 
 end. This is specially profound, and merits a long reflexion. To 
 pass away, this is their very within, or within-self. The hour of 
 the birth of the manifestation of any finite entity is the hour 
 of its death its disappearance. There is a double meaning in 
 the word end : it means both termination and purpose. 
 
 There is an anecdote told of Hegel, that, being somewhere at 
 table where the dishes were long of coming, he should have 
 expressed himself, as if it were, Let them just come (' Wir wollen 
 ihnen ihr Schicksal schon anthun/), we will soon achieve for them 
 their destiny. He must have had his own finite things so vividly 
 before his mind's eye in this expression, that it will probably 
 contain illustration for the reader here. 
 
 a. The Immediacy of Finitude. 
 
 This, as the title directly announces, is a moment of simple 
 apprehension, where from its very nature little is to be said: 
 accordingly, it will be found that Hegel is apt under such moments 
 to occupy space with mere exoteric remark ; here it is the mourn- 
 fulness of the finite which he takes for his subject, and the first 
 paragraph sets vividly before us the one abstract side which 
 understanding insists on alone regarding, that is, the eternal 
 destination of finite things to their end. In the next paragraph, 
 even in explaining how understanding views the finite as eternal, 
 the dialectic breaks out which is to demonstrate the impossibility 
 of such eternity. This dialectic is more overtly stated in the 
 third paragraph. 
 
 /3. To-be-to, or Obligation- to, and Limitation. 
 
 The usual difficulty of translating Hegel comes to the surface 
 very glaringly in this section. The words Bestimmung, Grenze, 
 Schranke, Sollen, Ansichseyn, Insichseyn appearing in English as 
 qualification (determination, destination, manifestible peculiar 
 nature, &c.), limit, limitation, To-be-to, Being-iii-self (Being-in- 
 itself, In-itself), Being- within-self, &c., &c., suffice to render the 
 translation even in external appearance, so much * clotted nonsense/ 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 413 
 
 so much chaotic, incoherent insanity. What is here, however, 
 is not at all that, but, however abstruse, recondite, subtle, and 
 profound, the clearest and most lucid intelligence. The transla- 
 tion, too, is correct, and, the technical terms being duly pondered, 
 will readily enough yield meaning, however baroque, however" 
 piebald they appear. 
 
 ' The passing away passes away ' this contradiction is abstract 
 formally self-identical, absolutely separated and by itself in 
 the very expression Something is finite, or in that, the finite is. 
 Where we are in the development, however, Something or Being 
 (which here cohere) are no longer abstract, but be-mediated, or 
 concrete. Hegel's remarks on the Platonic treatment of The One 
 is illustrate a contradiction similarly abstractly or isolatedly and 
 abruptly present. 
 
 That Something has an inner nature, this implies that a 
 capability of being otherwise belongs to the very In-itself, to the 
 very internality of the Something. This otherwise-being refers to 
 an externality, though one that still only is to be. The inner 
 nature of Something now being considered in reference to this 
 externality, gives rise to the metaphysic of the whole notion before 
 us. Nor is this metaphysic to be regarded as metaphysic only ; 
 it is actual thought within us, actual thought which we follow 
 and obey, though latently and unconsciously, in every perception 
 and assignment of inner nature, &c., in any particular concrete or 
 sensuous case whatever. These be the very secret maggots of the 
 brain, and as they sprawl or wriggle through one another. The 
 otherwise-being, then, is a certain externality, which is in the 
 Something, and which is identical with the characterisation we 
 have already seen as Limit. Well considered, this otherwise- 
 being can now be set as the whole virtue of the Something, and 
 again it is in its nature a reference a reference of the inner nature 
 of the Something on its own Limit. The inner nature just is 
 through this Limit to which it negatively refers : its Non-being is 
 its There-being. The limit is thus at once negated and preserved, 
 or it is Limitation, meaning by the word Limit that is passable. 
 But if the inner nature determine Limit as Limitation, that is as 
 passable, it has in that reference the character of a Solleu, a 
 Devoir, a To-be-to ; that is, it has not actu passed the Limitation, 
 but it is to do so, and will certainly do so. The double edge of 
 the negation is seen in each of the moments of the one notion. The 
 Finite Thing, in obedience to its inner Sollen, Devoir, or To-be-to, 
 
414 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 is over, or superior to, its Limitation ; but again it is Sollen, or it 
 is to only because of its Limitation. This will probably suffice to 
 suggest the notion which is followed out in such penetrating and 
 exhaustive detail by Hegel. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The first sentence is an allusion in especial to certain findings, 
 of Kant and Fichte, to each of whom the uttimum was moral 
 progress, moral To-be-to, ad infinitum. Schwegler, epitomising in 
 regard to Kant, says correctly, ' No sensuous nature can be holy, 
 and one that is sensuous-rational can approximate to holiness 
 only as to an ideal in infinite progress ; ' and similarly in regard 
 to Fichte, ' the final goal of moral action lies in infinitude ; it can 
 never be attained, as the ego can never be fully independent of all 
 limitation, so long as it remains an intelligence, a self-conscious 
 ego.' Both the moral and the metaphysical r61es are illustrated 
 in these quotations ; the latter will be still clearer, however, from 
 considering the following position of Schelling, also as epitomised 
 by Schwegler (whose epitomes in general, indeed, are so good, that 
 they offer themselves as particularly convenient for an easy and 
 ready reference). The * brief,' as Hobbes would call it, of Schelling 
 on the point referred to, runs thus : 
 
 Absolutely apprehended, nature is nothing else than infinite activity, infinite 
 productivity ; which, should it of itself unhindered realise itself, would in a 
 moment with instant rapidity produce an absolute product, whereby empirical 
 nature were not expressed or explained ; if we are to do this, if we are to have 
 finite products, then we must assume that the productive activity of nature 
 is checked by an antagonistic activity, a retarding one, also seated in nature 
 herself : thus there arises a series of finite products : as, however, the absolute 
 productivity of nature seeks an absolute product, these individual products are 
 only phenomenal products beyond each of which again nature immediately 
 proceeds, in order to satisfy the absoluteness of her inner productivity by an 
 infinite series of individual products. 
 
 The Sollen and the Schranke are very clearly contained in these 
 quotations. There, however, they are still, so to speak, but in a 
 clotted state ; and to be seen as they are, they stand in need of the 
 Socratic midwifery of Hegel. In other words, neither Kant, nor 
 Fichte, nor Schelling has attained to a glimpse of the implied 
 import in dbstracto ; the whole three of them still see it only 
 crassly and uncertainly in concrete, as it were in mass ; and it is 
 
QUALITY INTERPKETED, ETC. 415 
 
 left for Hegel to dissect and divellicate and demonstrate the 
 Begriff, supplanting thus and putting to flight the figurate 
 conception, the pictorial Vorstellung. And in what masterly 
 perfection is not this accomplished ! The general section __on_ 
 Finitude is the pertinent exposition ; but the whole businese 
 sums itself in the single Hegelian expression, ' the Identity of the 
 Ansichseyn (the Being-in-self) and the Bestimmtheit (the deter- 
 minateness).' The In-itself of what is seeks ever to assert itself 
 by effacement of its own determinateness. This is the Sollen, the 
 Progressus ad Infinitum; and it is sis ted only by the Identity of 
 Hegel. By such strokes as this is it that Hegel asserts for him- 
 self his place royal, maugre the vast and indispensable material 
 he owes to all of his predecessors, an all from which no single 
 name of the whole bright series can be excluded not Parmenides, 
 nor Heraclitus, not Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Plotinus, 
 nor Proclus, nor Spinoza, nor Leibnitz, nor Fichte, nor Schelling, 
 though, for amount and importance of contribution, Kant the 
 honest, simple, good, the sincere, the inexhaustibly-fertile Kant 
 incomparably outweigh them all. 
 
 In the determining of Something as Limitation, this Limitation 
 is already passed : limitation implies in the very subject of the 
 limitation a reference to what in it is unlimitated ; or this very 
 reference is already beyond the limitation. There again we have 
 the Hegelian penetrative subtlety and truth ! By his allusion to 
 the actual, Hegel means to say that it is absurd to resist his find- 
 ings as contradictory, for such things actu are. The caustic irony 
 of the master breaks out in the expression, that the thought en- 
 gaged in such objections a thought that would bear itself as 
 higher than the actual attains neither to a true perception of the 
 notion concerned, nor to a true bearing towards the actual. 
 
 ' The notion which it is in itself implies identity with its other.' 
 The stone is virtually more than as it is there : as it is there, or as 
 its There-being (Daseyn) is, it is under limitation ; but as it is in 
 itself, it is capable of innumerable reactions with other agents ; 
 but as it is in these it is other, and thus in itself, even in its 
 Daseyn or Limitation, it is identical with its other. 
 
 The independence of any leent-for-self totality, as instinct, life, 
 &c., in regard to limitation carries much force with it, and much 
 light into many difficulties of Hegel. The self of sensibility is 
 beyond its negation, pain ; were it not beyond it, it would not 
 feel it as negation, and have no pain. 
 
416 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 But it is more absurd still to be blind to the independence of 
 limitation on the part of reason. If, however, you simply abstractly 
 assure me that limitation, the particular, cannot be passed, I simply 
 as abstractly point to the universal which has passed. Every 
 universal is an example, but just consider this: the world, for all 
 its constitutive finitude, is infinite. 
 
 The necessary relation of space to man's freedom apropos of 
 Leibnitz and the magnet is a deep glance. 
 
 Hegel is always clear and great as regards the will, as is, 
 indeed, but natural after a Fichte and a Kant, and there is 
 a very luminous little word here. His caustic irony comes down 
 again on the adherents of a perpetual and never-effected ought-to, 
 whether in the field of morals, or among your ordinary crude 
 revolutionists, who always know so much better than everybody 
 else that, in their eyes, just everything in the existent order of 
 things ought-to be changed : Hegel assures them that in their 
 case, and as regards their finitude, the applicability of their own 
 principle, the ought-to, is to be perfectly recognised ! 
 
 The gist of what follows is, that we are to place ourselves in 
 the whole notion, and not one-sidedly hold by either of its alter- 
 native moments : if the Sollen is a consequence of the Schranke, 
 the Schranke is a consequence of the Sollen ; and we are not to lose 
 ourselves in the despairing contemplation of a process which can 
 never be accomplished, at the very moment that we possess all the 
 conditions of its accomplishment. Such despairing contemplation 
 is a result of our occupying only the abstractum of the Ansichseyn. 
 To seek only the inner nature, only the realisation of what is in 
 itself, is to stultify ourselves by an abstraction in which we are 
 blind to the only realisation that, namely, which lies in the 
 deter minateness, the limit, but in its concrete connexion with the 
 in-itself. The only answer to the longing of the in-itself, is its 
 complement, the determinateness ; and in mutual reference they 
 have reached completion and repose. So it is that the Sollen, both 
 of Kant and Fichte, is but a perpetuating of mere finitude. 
 
 y. Transition of the Finite into the Infinite. 
 
 The text seems quite simple, direct, and intelligible here, and 
 calls for no remark. It is matter of familiar knowledge that, 
 in the school which is named of Hegel, the immortality of the 
 soul remains a qucestio vexata. This alone were decisive evidence 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 417 
 
 to prove that Hegel as yet has remained unintelligible to the very 
 individuals who arrogate his name ; for, did they know him, the 
 question would be set at rest by the instant triumph of one side or 
 the other, seeing that in very truth Hegel's ruling on the point has_ 
 not wanted, on his part, the most decided expression. One may 
 say, indeed, that from the first word to the last, the Logic, or the 
 System generally, of Hegel is nothing but an argument for the 
 Immortality of the Soul ; and this by allowing the living notion of 
 concrete reason to confute at every turn the empty abstractions of 
 our mere opinion. This comes very clearly to the surface in the 
 short section before us, 'The Finite in its passing away, this 
 negation of itself, has reached its Being-in-self, it has therein gone 
 together with itself ; ' and again, ' out over its own self, it goes 
 together only with its own self ' : these words concern at bottom 
 the immortality of the soul. Here is a passage from the 
 * Phaenomenologie ' which may illustrate them : 
 
 To analyse a conception into its original elements, is a going back into its 
 moments, which at least have not the form of the conception there before us, 
 but constitute the immediate property of the self (the subject, the ego). This 
 analysis, indeed, comes only to thoughts, which are themselves familiar, fixed, 
 and settled determinations. But an essential moment is this unactual, shared- 
 off thing itself ; for only by this, that the concrete shares itself, or separates itself, 
 and reduces itself to an unreality, is it das sich Bewegende, has it movement 
 in itself. The action of separation is the craft and business of understanding 
 the greatest and most wonderful, or rather the absolute power. The sphere 
 which remains at rest shut up in itself, and as substance possesses its moments, 
 is the immediate and therefore not the wonderful relation. But that the ac- 
 cidental as such in separation from what embraces it, that what is connected 
 with the rest and only actual in this connexion should gain a peculiar existence 
 and a separate freedom, this is the enormous power of the negative ; it is the 
 energy of thought, of the pure ego. Death, should we so name that unreality, 
 is the fearfullest thing of all, and to keep hold of what is dead is that which 
 demands the greatest power. Powerless Beauty hates Understanding, because 
 it expects this of her, this to which she is incompetent. But not the Life that 
 fears death and would preserve itself from destruction, but the Life that bears 
 it and maintains itself in it, is the Life of the Spirit. The Spirit wins its 
 truth only in that in the absolute destruction it finds itself. It is not this 
 power as the positive which looks away from the negative, as when we say of 
 something, this is nothing or this is false, and so, done with it, turn away from 
 it to something else ; but it is this power only in that it looks the negative in 
 the face, and stands to it. This standing to it is the magical might which 
 converts the negative into das Seyn, into Being. 
 
 The talismanic word here, then, is abstraction : it is only by 
 abstraction that we give a separate reality to death ; there is no 
 
 2D 
 
418 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 death in the concrete ; what passes away, passes away only into its 
 own self. We shall have occasion to see the same thing in other 
 forms again. Hegel probably felt it unworthy of him directly to 
 explain a thing which lay in him so clearly on the surface : it is 
 in no covert way, indeed, that he gives us to understand that he, 
 for his part, saves himself in that other into which he seems to 
 pass. In short, it is the one aim of Hegel to put to flight abstrac- 
 tion, restore the concrete ; and that is immortality and a single life. 
 As regards technical terms, it does not seem that we have any 
 longer much to say. Hegel's general principle of action in regard 
 to such must be now apparent : as they appear, they appear along 
 with their notion, and further explication seems uncalled for. 
 This may be regarded as another merit peculiar to the method 
 of Hegel : the terms come as they are wanted, and with the express 
 meaning which he who uses them seeks. We may add, that this 
 is true even of the nuances, or shades of meaning. The reader 
 must have observed, for example, that the word Bestiminung, 
 determination or qualification, has, of late, very decidedly taken 
 on the sense of destiny or end ; but, to be sure, the qualification, 
 quality, inner nature of anything is precisely the function it ad- 
 ministers, its mission, vocation, office, purpose, &c. The general 
 sense of Bestimmung is perhaps pretty well got in this way. Suppose 
 (as p. 387) what is a voice : well, there must be distinction in it ; and 
 its own native distinctions (differences) are just its Bestimmungen : 
 these are its accents, modulations, or inflexions, then ; they are its 
 signs, significates, exponents, modi, &c. Or we might say, this 
 voice, as it is a voice, cannot remain a self-identical One only ; as 
 such, it must part into its own constituent Many, into its Variety. 
 Now this variety may be named its system of vocabilities, or each 
 unit of the many of the voice will be a vocability. In reference 
 to this voice, then, its Bestimmungen are its vocabilities; but, 
 again, its Bestimmung is just its vocability vocability is its 
 qualification, function, nature, destiny, end, &c. In this way, we 
 can make obvious the transition from one vocability to vocability 
 in general, or from one Bestimmung to Bestimmung as such. 
 Lastly, looking at Bestimmung as logical determination, as a thing 
 from without, we might translate it, in reference to the voice, by 
 vocabilisation. The identity of outer and inner looms out here : 
 did an external vocabilisation (say here notation) truly enumerate 
 all the vocabilities native to the voice, this external act would be 
 simply identical with the internal act of the voice itself by which 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 419 
 
 it should give manifestation to its implied vocabilities. We 
 may point out that the- logical moments show themselves very 
 plainly here. There is first the simple unal self-identity of the 
 voice, its being as such ; in which being, however, it is as yet only 
 implicit, only in itself, only an sick the moment of simple appre- 
 hension, Suva/mi?, v\r], &c. Then there is the other moment, the 
 Urtheilen of the voice into its native constituent differences, which 
 have, each to each, the first or qualitative negation. Lastly, there 
 is the moment of reason, the negation of the negation, the restora- 
 tion of the differences to the one self of the one voice. This, 
 again, is the one fundamental Hegelian notion. Whatever 
 is must differentiate itself, or it would remain nothing; but 
 its differentiation, or explication, is the movement of its own 
 necessity: it is in itself, and it is in its differences, and 
 it is through its differences into itself. But what is is 
 thought, and its differences in their own necessity unfold them- 
 selves, first, unconsciously, and, second, consciously (through 
 science) in the thinking subject. So we have, first, internal thought 
 as wholly in itself, Logic, and again external thought, still in itself, 
 Nature, and, lastly, internal and external thought, re-united into 
 the higher internality of Spirit, and now wholly fur sich. Of this 
 one notion, every concrete that exists is deinonstrably a type : 
 take, as we have seen Hegel do, a grain of salt, for instance. 
 Everywhere, we have abstract unity, abstract variety, and the 
 only and single truth at bottom concretely loth in one. This 
 pulse is fairly to be seen but an sich in Kant : it is Hegel's 
 merit to have made it wholly an-und-fur-sich. 
 
 Verstand, in its peculiarly Hegelian sense initiated, but still 
 an sich, by Kant occurs in the passage translated from the 
 ' Phaenomenologie.' We shall have to note the Ver, and to think 
 of its function, which is to signify a process of transition, the 
 agent of which is the root. Verstehen, in the sense of to become 
 stale, is an example in point. To Hegel, what Verstand (in its 
 other sense) versteht, it steht ver as regards the rest. That is, in 
 English, what understanding understands, it stands not under, 
 but the German unter between or asunder from the rest. In 
 German as in English, separation is involved ; in truth, both are 
 just the Ur-theilen. Unterscheiden, discernment, distinction, are 
 all pertinent here. As in the passage alluded to, these words con- 
 cern always the moment of differentiation, which is characterised 
 as more wonderful than the first moment of self-included, self- 
 
420 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 identical substantiality ; what is spoken of as ' the accidental as 
 such separated from what embraces it.' This phrase in the text 
 appears literally 'the accidental as such separated from its Umfang' 
 (or logical extension) ; and we see thus how true Hegel remains to 
 his own principles. The accidental separated from its extension, 
 appears very unintelligible, until we understand the Hegelian 
 notion ; then, however, we see very clearly that the separation in 
 question concerns extension, and not comprehension. 
 
 Of other terms, we saw Heel varied by qualitativ-unterschieden, 
 qualitatively dis-cerned and dif-ferenced ; and this will be seen to 
 cohere well with what has just been said. 
 
 The German Princip is truer to its Etymology than our con- 
 venient but wholly indefinite principle. Vorstellung has been 
 already spoken of as the Aussersichseyn of the Begriff. Sollen 
 and Schranke the latter especially must be seen to have senses 
 here peculiar to Hegel, just as it is not English, but arbitrary on 
 our part, to oppose as we have done Limitation to Limit. But the 
 point is to see the notion. 
 
 ' The Sollen is limited only an sich, or for us.' * This seems a 
 curious expression to occur unexplained, and may have proved 
 puzzling to many readers. The in itself, we think, as undeveloped, 
 is precisely that which is not for us. If we reflect, however, we 
 shall see that we are mistaken. To say a thing is so and so in 
 itself, is to say what the thing itself has not yet developed : who, 
 then, as yet can know this so and so, but we only ourselves who 
 find ourselves in a condition to predicate it ? 'If the embryo is a 
 man an sich, it is not a man fur sich,' says Hegel, in another refer- 
 ence ; but we can see, in the present reference, that if the embryo 
 is not a man f iir sich, it is a man for us ; and so what it is an sich, 
 it is for us. This is very subtle, and Hegel, as usual, allows us to 
 find it out pretty much for ourselves.*)* 
 
 The reader will do well to observe the different translations 
 which have occurred in reference to the difficult word Setzen. 
 Gesetzt ist has been translated appears, presents itself, is taken, 
 stated, established, demonstrated, put, placed, given, set, &c., the 
 meaning always being that logical position has been effected in 
 regard to what is spoken of ; what was implicit is now explicit, 
 or technically set. Hegel himself varies the expression by explicirt 
 
 * In 5th paragraph under /3. t The expression occurs again and again in the 
 'Phaenomenologie,' as see pp. 19 and 66 there see also later under ' Schwegler' in 
 the Commentators ' here. New. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 421 
 
 1st, and also by exponirt 1st, when what is is spoken of as Gesetzt- 
 seyn, we are to understand that it is illative adjectivity. Ein 
 Gesetztes, again, is an effected evolute, an effected attribute, an effected 
 adjective, a term developed from within and referred out in place, 
 Here, again, we see how inward and outward come together. 
 What is implied or implicated is also explicated ; it is in Some- 
 thing, yet it is other than, or out of, the Something. Similarly, 
 what is involved is evolved, what is inferred is ef-ferred, what is 
 illated is e-lated, &c. Setzen has thus an advantage over any of 
 these words, for it implies both, or Setzen is just to ex-imply. We 
 can understand now, then, that Gesetztseyn is just implication 
 as to Englishmen a system of implication ; for such system being 
 thoroughly recognised, just amounts to a system of explication. 
 We are to see that im-position involves ex-position, or that what 
 is, is just position. Or we may say, the three moments of the con- 
 crete trinity, in which each is the other, are to implicate, to expli- 
 cate, and to replicate. Thus, too, one can see that all are but dis- 
 tinctions of self-identical thought, or all is but illative reflexion, 
 a dialectic in which ' each member sublates itself in itself, and is 
 in itself the contrary of itself/ and the whole seems as ' a Bacchantic 
 tumult with everyone concerned drunk.' After all, we can see, 
 too, that setzen is not different from bestimmen, for both refer to 
 the placing of the differences. Setzen, however, is hardly so wide 
 as bestimmen, and denotes rather a special bestimmen or determi- 
 nation where the reciprocity is peculiarly overt, as in the mutual 
 relation of cause and effect, or in that of positive and negative, &c. 
 Still, to determine will very generally translate setzen, as well as 
 bestimmen. 
 
 C. 
 
 INFINITUDE. 
 
 Here, in the first place, as usual, the general heading maps out 
 the course of the dialectic that is to follow, and names the prin- 
 cipal moments. The point to which we have now arrived is this : 
 The finite passes away into its other; but the finite is a passing 
 away : the passing away, then, passes away. Or the finite negates, 
 itself ; but the finite is negation : the finite, then, negates negation, 
 and affirmatively is. In brief: the Finite goes together with 
 itself, and this is the Infinite. It is difference-less self-reference, 
 at once a being and a becoming. These naturally can be used as 
 
422 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 definitions of the absolute ; but the whole series of the sphere of 
 particular being (There-being), as subjected to the first or simple 
 negation, is finite, and cannot be so used. The Infinite, too, so 
 used, as expressing in itself negation of the Finite, seems prefer- 
 able to either Being or Becoming, which do not directly express 
 independence of limitatedness, or definitude. The presence of 
 reference to, and so of an implication of, limitatedness, finiteness, 
 negation, in the Infinite, is at the same time hinted. The two 
 Infinites, the true and the spurious, or that of Eeason and that of 
 Understanding, being briefly named and even characterised, the 
 division follows : 
 
 a. The Infinite in general. 
 
 Here again, as in a moment of simple apprehension, there is a 
 difficulty to know what to say, and what is said may be regarded 
 as the summary of all that follows. Indeed, we may say, that the 
 reference to the Finite still implied in the Infinite is the hinge, 
 or pivot, or key to all that follows. 
 
 In the first paragraph, we see the joy with which Hegel hails 
 the Infinite as the name at which our true ' light goes up ' to us. 
 This is a very overt indication of Hegel's views in reference to 
 the immortality of the soul. 
 
 It is through its reference to its In-itself that There-being de- 
 termines itself so far as it is There-being or negated being as 
 finite. Thus it is the nature of the Finite itself to transcend 
 itself into the Infinite. This must be seen to be its own act, and 
 not result of an external force. Neither must we view it as if 
 which is quite usual our subjective reason had simply crossed 
 over the Finite into the Infinite, leaving the former still there. 
 Finite and Infinite are not to be conceived side by side, like as 
 another German says cat and dog. What takes place, in short, 
 is a dialectic transition in which both fall together as moments. 
 
 b. Alternating determination of the Finite and the Infinite. 
 
 In this a moment of judgment the differences are, of course, 
 kept apart, and this constitutes the gist of what we are to see, 
 which, however, is one of the most important of considerations. 
 
 The first paragraph shows the Infinite and let us be serious in 
 thinking the Infinite, and not satisfied with a mere logical term, 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 423 
 
 as constituted, to be Something with determinateness with a 
 Limit. The Finite has thus the character of determinate or real 
 There-being opposed to the Infinite: they seem permanently 
 apart, then. As the Infinite is immediately or directly cou-_ 
 stituted, it awakes the Finite ; or the being, the what-it-is, or as- 
 it-is of the one directly awakes that of the other. 
 
 The intention of the next paragraph is to thicken the contrast 
 between the two moments : they are to be exhibited as mutually 
 other. The Finite is Limitation ; its nature is perpetually to seek 
 its In-itself. Infinitude is this In-itself, the To-be-to or Is-to-be 
 of the Limitation, and this, too, as a thing effected. This Infinite 
 is the nothing of that Finite ; but this Infinite also, as the 
 accomplished Sollen, the effected and carried-out To-be-to, is 
 reflected into itself, is self-referent affirmative Being. The 
 Infinite, then, is bee'nt, and it is the negation of the Finite ; but 
 as a beent negation it is other to this Finite. The Finite remaining 
 as determinate real There-being, is other to the Infinite. Yet the 
 Finite has also the character of being sublated into the Infinite, 
 which is thus the Non-Finite a being or beingness, but in the 
 form or sense of negation. The Finite, then, is as the sphere of 
 the definite realities : the Infinite as the void which is beyond all 
 such ; but still the Finite has its In-itself not in its definite and 
 determinate There-being. The dialectic is so double-edged, that 
 the last welches (the last ' which ' but one) of the paragraph, though 
 construed with the Finite, might/ without embarrassment to the 
 sense, be construed with the Infinite but perhaps not quite as 
 well. 
 
 This Infinite, which has just been developed, is the bastard or 
 spurious Infinite, that which constitutes to mere understanding as 
 the separating and abstracting power, the last word of wisdom. 
 In this, nevertheless, understanding only envelops itself in con- 
 tradictions. 
 
 The contradiction at once shows in this, that both still are, and 
 an Infinite, limited by another, is only a Finite. 
 
 Understanding that would seek its Highest, its Infinite, leaves 
 the Finite still standing : it strives into a far inane which is and 
 is not ; while that on which it has turned its back, and only turned 
 its back, also is and is not. 
 
 The relation of the one to the other is recognised and acknow- 
 ledged by understanding ; but understanding can see in this 
 relation, not their inseparability and unity, but only their differ- 
 
424 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ence, distinction, separation, and mutual independence. From 
 understanding it is quite concealed that the one is but the 
 burthen of the other, or that the one is through the other. 
 The reflexion of understanding whereby it enables itself to 
 persist in the mutual independence of each moment is well put ; 
 at the same time, the true state of the case is hinted. 
 
 Again, the result to understanding is expressed. But this has 
 in it the nature of a process. You pass into the Infinite ; but the 
 Infinite is inseparable from the Finite, and the Finite reappear- 
 ing, the Limit is replaced, which again then is to be transcended, 
 but only necessarily with re-placement of a new limit and so on 
 ad infinitum ! The precision of the text here cannot be surpassed. 
 
 The next paragraph is equally precise is for penetrative speech, 
 quite admirable, indeed, and requires no comment. The defini- 
 tion of sublunary being, of mortal state, * not to be that, or to be 
 not that, which it itself is, and which its other is,' is a subtlety of 
 the one mint. 
 
 The progress in infinitum what it is generally considered in 
 what case it appears, and its true definition as considered the 
 text here is unequivocal. The following paragraph is equally so ; 
 and the whole matter is seen to be, not a perpetual variety, but a 
 perpetual self-sameness. In the concluding paragraph of this 
 section, the mechanism of the Infinite Progress is again char- 
 acterised, and its contradiction declared fixed because the implied 
 unity is not reflected upon. 
 
 c. The Affirmative Infinite. 
 
 Perhaps, it would suffice now to conjoin under a single general 
 comment all the remaining matter of the Infinite, whether as it 
 appears here under the present section, or as under Remark 1. 
 Still, the space saved would be but little, and a word of comment, 
 paragraph by paragraph, as before, may perhaps prove so far 
 something of a support to the reader. We continue as we have 
 begun, then. 
 
 In the unresting alternation of the Infinite Progress the truth 
 lies, but in itself. Such alternation is but an externalisation of the 
 truth ; or it contains the true notion, but in outwardness, so that 
 its moments fall out from each other. Unity of these moments, 
 however, will result from their very comparison. At the same 
 time, the term unity is defective, and may expect to find its own 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 425 
 
 corrective complement also in some step of this movement which 
 constitutes outwardly what the notion before us is inwardly. 
 
 The Infinite presents itself directly as transcendence of the Finite, 
 as negation of the Finite. But this being so, the Finite has only_ 
 the value of a something that is to be transcended ; the Finite 
 thus is in itself the negation of itself ; and the Infinite is no more 
 than this. The peculiarity of the one, then, is also that of the 
 other ; and neither is possible without the other. If it be objected, 
 that this is a result of looking at them only in their reference to 
 one another, let us see how it will be with them, each being 
 regarded apart by itself. The first consequence is, that the 
 Finite being there in its own independence, the Infinite is no 
 longer Infinite ; and the second is, that the Finite, just because of 
 this independence, has lost its previous relative and transitory 
 nature, and is all that the Infinite is. It must be well observed 
 by the reader that this dialectic is not a juggle, but the truth. 
 Sir William Hamilton, for his part, says this : As there is a Finite 
 to limit the Infinite, the latter is inconceivable, &c. &c. ; (therefore 
 Human Imbecility, &c. &c.). Now this is a juggle, and a logical 
 juggle ; or, being ' a raisonnement from a groundless presupposi- 
 tion,' it is ' sophistry.' Still Hamilton shall have refuted Hegel ! 
 and by the above argument ! ! a crumb of Hegel's own bastard 
 Infinite ! ! ! The dialectic of Hegel must be closely looked at ; and 
 the more closely, the more evident will it be that the iron faculty 
 of Hegel honestly received the, whole problem, honestly and 
 strongly turned it on both sides, and equally honestly and 
 strongly solved it. We see already this much at least, that the 
 Finite in its very nature involves and so evolves an Infinite, and 
 that, though there is no room for the spurious Infinite of Hamilton, 
 there is an absolute necessity for the veritable Infinite of Hegel, 
 which is and only can be Infinite by being at once itself and 
 its other. 
 
 Whether viewed together or apart, then, Finite and Infinite mani- 
 fest a mutual implication. 
 
 It is by regarding each in abstraction from the other, or it is by 
 doing violence to the concrete truth in which both co-here, that 
 both are falsified. 
 
 Viewed in this abstraction, the character by which each 
 specially is that which it is, becomes converted into its opposite. 
 
 The abstraction of understanding falsifies the double unity of 
 the two characters in the same way as the simple. 
 
426 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Understanding errs by insisting on regarding their mutual 
 reference as qualitative difference ; whereas they are, the one by 
 reason of the other, that is, they are, because each is the other. 
 
 The transition of the one to the other must be seen to be not of 
 the nature of change, of one something into another something. 
 The transition is not of that nature, but a going together of the 
 one into the other, into a resultant concrete unity, which is also 
 their presupposition and their truth. The Infinite, as only out of 
 the Finite, is but as an inane that flees ; but in that it is through 
 its sublation of the Finite, it has returned, as it were, out of this 
 flight into the inane, and is a solid and concrete Here. 
 
 Each, then, is an affirmative as a negation of the negation ; but 
 the infinite progress exhibits them not thus in their truth. 
 
 In that progress they are compared apart, just as we compared 
 apart the two together, and each by itself a comparison merely 
 external, and not touching the internal state of the case. But 
 this same progress virtually contains, not only their difference or 
 separation, but their connexion as well. 
 
 In simple negation they are apart ; but, the nature of the 
 reference considered, even in this movement the Finite is seen to 
 go together with its own self. 
 
 The Infinite, in like manner, without being rid of the Finite, 
 arrives ever only by its own self. 
 
 Each, then, is itself as negation of the negation ; and understand- 
 ing errs by regarding each only affirmatively, and not with refer- 
 ence to the negation it contains. They are moments of a whole, 
 each through its contrary, and, at the same time, through the sub- 
 lation of its contrary. 
 
 There are the two ; each is itself, but the sublation of both is the 
 true Infinite. 
 
 The result, not abstract unity, but becoming ; so that each of its 
 moments but becomes. 
 
 The Infinite, in its return and reference to self, is being, and 
 not abstractly such, but as being- There (Daseyn), positively there 
 or here. Only the bastard infinite is the impalpable retreat into 
 the inane, because it is the simple negation of the finite, taking 
 the same not up into self as negation of the negation : it is this 
 infinite, then, which is unreachable, which is not even there, which 
 is not even palpably existent, which is without Daseyn. Instead 
 of falling in awe before this unreachable infinite, we ought to 
 see that it is not mighty, but meagre not sublime, but deficient. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 427 
 
 The true Infinite is Eeality, and reality in a higher sense ; for 
 as the development grows, so does reality. But, on the whole, 
 reality is a term which has its place now behind us : only, it is 
 remarkable how apt we are to determine any matter in hand-by^ 
 the abstractest of characters, and so the furthest from the concrete 
 truth. 
 
 Keality here, as negation of the negation, is opposed to the 
 former reality of There-being. The result is identity ; but the 
 finite is but ideel in the infinite. Ideality has thus an eminently 
 concrete sense ; but it avails not to have the term, because opinion 
 adheres to the affirmativeness of the finite, and despises what it 
 calls only the ideal. 
 
 Of terms, Diesseits, Jenseits, Aeussere, and Spetwiativ might 
 require a word ; but what they mean is very plain, each in its 
 place. Kant's speculativ, already given (p. 392 above), may be 
 contrasted with Hegel's, as also with the mathematical, which 
 last refers to ' the discovering of Properties and Kelations.' An 
 external consideration must always regard tilings as outwardly 
 apart, and not as inwardly coherent. Placing ' the Transition ' 
 last, we take next, and in the same way, paragraph by paragraph, 
 
 EEMARK 1. 
 
 The mechanism of the spurious infinite is again perfectly char- 
 acterised. These are happy expressions : a contradiction which 
 comes forward as solution ; a beginning of thought over the infinite, 
 but with an mtent or import which is taken as nothing ; a flight 
 which collects itself not, and knows not how to bring back the 
 negative into the positive ; an uncompleted reflexion, that brings 
 not the two thoughts together. These expressions are alone 
 sufficient to expose the nullity of Hamilton's halfness. 
 
 We must know that the Progressus is the alternation of the 
 union and of the disunion of the two moments ; and, again, we 
 must know that the union and disunion are themselves insepar- 
 able. 
 
 The alternation is, in point of fact, as well negation of the 
 union as of the disunion ; but they are ideally together as 
 moments in the whole. The ideality of the differences, this is 
 the solution. It is here that speculative thought shows itself. 
 
 * How does the infinite come out of itself and into finitude ? ' 
 With this question philosophy is generally thought to be at once 
 
428 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 tested and posed. Hegel says, that we shall by-and-by see clearer 
 into what the infinite really is: meantime, he is nothing loath to 
 take up the question in its direct form. 
 
 The proper putting of a question must be allowed to require 
 some amount of training as well in philosophy as in other matters. 
 Now here, perhaps, the question is so put, that it seems as if only 
 (igurate conception asked, and as if the answer was expected to 
 be only in its own dialect. 
 
 Determination does not seem quite repugnant to being ; though 
 this latter is quite undetermined, because this character is not 
 directly and at first hand expressed in it. But the infinite seems 
 expressly the non-finite, and so their incompatibility is at once 
 taken for granted. 
 
 But here the question contains false presuppositions : it assumes 
 a Finite and an Infinite which are not. The Finite and Infinite 
 are as we have seen them, and not as the question presupposes 
 them. The question, then, deserves no better answer than that 
 the infinite goes out into the finite, in order to be truth, instead of 
 nullity, and so the finite ; or that they are both eternally so, the 
 one in the other. 
 
 The question, if we suppose it to grant the unity claimed, may 
 proceed to inquire, how about the separation ? But the separa- 
 tion lies in the very fact that it is the finite and the infinite which 
 are in the unity, which as unity, then, is only such as ideally com- 
 prehends both. The unity and the distinctivity are equally 
 appertinent to, and are inseparable in, the concrete truth. 
 
 Kant and Hegel are both difficult writers; but this difficulty 
 being looked into, will be found to arise from opposite causes in 
 the one as compared with the other. He who will look narrowly 
 into Kant will find that it is what Hegel calls his Geschwatzigkeit 
 that constitutes his difficulty. With Hegel, again, apart from the 
 peculiar thought and the peculiar dialect, it is compression which 
 presents itself as the obstacle. Here, however, in this discussion 
 of the infinite, there are impediments in the way of a quite 
 Kantian nature ; or the discussion in question is carried out to too 
 great a length. Hegel usually sees what he has got to say, and 
 names what he has got to say, with the instant precision of an instru- 
 ment of steel : here, however, he introduces us into an intricacy 
 strange for him the intricacy of breadth, that is, and a breadth pro- 
 duced,not by extension of treatment, but byre-iteration of repetition. 
 The mutual reference of the one to the other is the hinge on which 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 429 
 
 the dialectic of Finite into Infinite and Infinite into Finite turns ; 
 and the whole business ought to have been summed in a less 
 number of phrases than that presented by the pages over 
 which it has been scattered. We shall find, indeed, by-and-by, 
 with reference to the ' Encyclopaedic/ that Hegel has really~ 
 effected such concentration elsewhere. This is an important 
 consideration as regards the art of statement, and the result seems 
 to be that, where a scientific truth is concerned, we ought to satisfy 
 ourselves with one presentation of the same, fearing that any 
 others, especially many others, and just in proportion to their 
 many, might be rather apt to introduce hesitancy for assurance, 
 and obscurity for light. 
 
 The discussion above continues that bearing on the immortality 
 of the soul which we have already signalised. Perhaps we should 
 notice here a doubt which may have presented itself to the reader. 
 The passing-away of the finite is a passing-away of the passing- 
 away, and there is still only affirmation present. True! but if 
 what is concerned is only of a material nature, the interests of the 
 soul remain unsecured. We admit the eternity of matter, we 
 know that transformation in that kind involves no loss of 
 materials : but still form disappears ; and if the soul be form, it 
 is nowise secured from the same consummation. The answer 
 here is, that Hegel occupies a platform where such objections 
 have no place : the notion is the originative spot, the point and 
 pulse of movement and of life, and we are the notion that is, the 
 notion, as Socrates says of the soul, is insuscipient of its contrary, 
 death which latter would amount in such case to utter and uni- 
 versal annihilation, which is absurd, &c. 
 
 If we but attentively consider what we mean when we say 
 finite, there will be little difficulty in realising the position which 
 Hegel would maintain. What is finite passes away; but if then 
 what passes away were independent and non-relative, there were 
 nothing; or, we might ask, where would the passing-away pass 
 away to ? ' What becomes of the old moons ? ' as the African 
 king seriously inquires. The finite alone has evidently a chasm 
 on one side, and demands its complement. In fact, there can be 
 no Finite without an Infinite, and no Infinite without a Finite : 
 they are but the two necessary sides or moments of one and the 
 same concrete truth. What is, is, and determinately is ; and this 
 necessarily involves both a first and a second negation, or, what is 
 the same thing, both finitude and infinitude. To take the picture, 
 
430 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the Vorstellung, we have already used What is, is a Voice ; Being 
 is a Voice. Were it abstract only, it were nothing. But it passes 
 into its distinctions ; it rings its changes ; it undergoes the evolu- 
 tion of its native and constituent notes. Even so it negates these, 
 and is itself; or it is through these into itself. Thus, then, the 
 Infinite (Voice) is through the Finite (Notes) ; thus, too, the Finite 
 (Notification) is the first Negation of the Infinite (Voice) ; and 
 thus also, lastly, the Infinite (Voice) is the Negation of the 
 Finite (Notes), or the negation of the negation. Thus the Infinite 
 (Voice) is * the Process in which it submits to be only one of its 
 moments as opposed to the Finite (Notes), but sublates this 
 difference of itself from itself into the affirmation of itself, and 
 only through this he-mediation is truly as the Infinite (Voice)/ 
 Thus, too, we see that ' the negation is determined as Identity ; 
 the Ideel is the Finite as it is in the Infinite (as the Notes are in 
 the Voice), it is as a determination (the vocabilisation, notifica- 
 tion), the matter or implement, which is distinguished, but not 
 self-substantially is, but only as moment (in the voice).' The 
 Vorstellung sounds better in German if I may venture to express 
 myself in German : Was ist, ist eine Stimme ; oder das Seyn ist 
 die unendliche Stimme, Abstract aber ist diese Stimme nichts : 
 oder abstract ist sie nur an sick. Sie muss aber auch fur sich seyn, 
 und um fur sich zu seyn, muss sie sich unterscheiden ; d. h. sich die 
 Keihe ihrer Bestimrnungen geben. In ihren Bestimmungen ist die 
 Stimme bestimmt; oder die Bestimmungen sind die Bestirnmtheiten, 
 Den Bestirnmtheiten (oder der Bestimmtheit) gegenuber ist die 
 Stimme das Unendliche. Die Bestimmtheit dagegen der Stimme 
 gegenuber, ist das Endliche. Die Bestimmtheit ist die Negation 
 der Stimme, zugleich aber ist die Stimme die Negation der 
 Bestimmtheit, also die Negation der Negation. Die unendliche 
 Stimme ist nur durch die endlichen Bestimmungen ; und diese 
 nur durch jene. 
 
 It is a main manifestation of Hegel, that he points ever to the 
 concrete and existent actual. Pointing thus, he intimates to 
 narrow Intellectualism, represented, it may be, by a Jacobi, or by 
 his arrtirt pupil Hamilton, ' Kest not in your insoluble abstrac- 
 tions ; behold actu what you declare impossible.' Pointing thus, 
 too, he equally intimates to narrow Materialism, that the Eeal 
 which it would declare the only, is inextricably interwoven with 
 the Ideal which it would deny, or, rather, that the web of this 
 latter is the vital all, into which the former seems to be received 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 431 
 
 but as dead and inorganic stuff, and against which this stuff, as what 
 cannot be named, or said, or characterised, is veritably as nothing. 
 There is this variegated universe ; that is, there is Identity and 
 Variety : either abstract side is self-stultification ; there is but the 
 concrete both. There is an analogy thus in the position of HegeL 
 to that of Bishop Butler. The industry of the latter may be ex- 
 pressed thus: 'You, Deists, &c., find our Christianity not good 
 enough for your high intellectual notions ( or, say with Hegel, ab- 
 stractions); but look to the actual which you cannot deny and see 
 how it comports itself with the same ! ' In this comparison the ad- 
 vantage, however, is all on the side of the German, whose argument 
 makes appeal to perfection, and not, like Butler's, to defect, or 
 to what must be admitted at least to appear such. It is this, 
 indeed, which gives an air of special pleading to the argument of 
 Butler, and finally negates it. The employment of German as 
 above, suggests, apropos of Languages, an illustration of the 
 Hegelian, or what we may call the Absolute Method. He who 
 would master a living language, let him, Firstly, devour cart-loads 
 of what interests him in it, through interlinear translations. Let 
 him, Secondly, with his own language before his eyes, shout aloud 
 to himself the foreign equivalents, at least four hours daily, and 
 for several months. Thirdly, let him hearken to the foreign 
 language read to him, let him tell in his own words (but in the 
 foreign language) what he has heard read, and let him in the 
 foreign language, of course converse generally with the reader. 
 These are the great features of tMe absolute method by which the 
 modern languages may be more or less perfectly acquired, and 
 any closer discrimina it is at present not necessary to mention. 
 The reader will see that the three moments of this method may 
 be named respectively, Hamiltonian, Ollendorffian, and Eobert- 
 sonian, without, however, implying that what is particuliar to 
 these names perfectly represents the moments in question ; at the 
 same time that it is only fair to point out that it is, as usual, the 
 second moment which contains the Arbeit, the labour, and, in 
 this case, certainly the bulk of the merit. Now these moments 
 are by no means incomplete forms of those of the notion. Simple 
 Apprehension is the first moment say it is English that will 
 make itself French it simply takes up or absorbs the French 
 disappears into the English, and exists there only an sich, or in 
 potentia. Judgment, dis-cernment, separation, is the second 
 moment the French is flung out from the English and becomes 
 
432 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 fur sick ; what was at first only potentially implicit in the English, 
 is now gesetzt, explicit, realised to tongue and ear, but still abstractly; 
 the two first moments, indeed, are, as they ought to be, abstract 
 But now comes the concrete moment, in which the second moment 
 is reflected into the first to the development of a concrete living 
 actuality ; or, as it is here, French is reflected into English, so that 
 the composite is equally both, An English which is at will French, 
 and a French which is at will English a faculty or power which 
 is an und fur sich. 
 
 A similar illustration we pointed out already in the tenets of 
 Comte. Comte himself completes the two first moments of the 
 notion, in the forms of Eeligion and Metaphysic, by what we may 
 call his Empirical Kealism. Empirical Realism, however, is not 
 a moment of Eeason, but of the renunciation of Reason ; it is a 
 falling back into one of the abstractions and the coarser one too 
 into one of the sides of the antithesis of understanding : instead 
 of an advance to the moment of reason, it is a retrogression to a 
 single one of the differences of judgment. Of course, it is un- 
 necessary to notice that Comte did not, and could not, bring thus 
 together his own expressions, whose origin was but empirical 
 casuality ; neither is it necessary to point out that the two former 
 moments do not belong exclusively to past times, but are neces- 
 sary flexions of the Notion itself in all time. Not Comte, but 
 Hegel, then, shall complete for us the triad by adding to religion 
 and metaphysic his own ideal realism, or real idealism which 
 very plainly is a moment of reason, and a concluding moment of 
 reason in that sphere. 
 
 Excellent illustration to a like effect might be obtained from 
 Political Economy, a branch of science which awaits entire trans- 
 formation from the introduction into it of the notion. So far 
 as I know, apart the Rechtsphilosophie, there is but one allusion 
 to Political Economy in Hegel, occurring in his contemptuous 
 remark that the English call Staatswirthschaft Philosophy. The 
 subject involving a certain amplitude of detail, is inadmissible at 
 present, however. We may say this, nevertheless, that Political 
 Economy is but one of the moments in the general movement of 
 the Aufklarung, and that, consequently, it must just share the 
 limits and conditions and characterisation in general of that 
 movement. This observation, short as it is, we believe to throw 
 a flood of light on, or rather quite to determine, the particular 
 nature and authority of the branch of science in question. At 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 433 
 
 present, Political Economy is in its hour of strength, and also in 
 its hour of weakness ; that is, it has reached the moment of 
 Judgment and gone asunder into idle abstractions. The whole 
 movement belongs, indeed, to a moment of Judgment historically 
 presentant ; but at its dawn in Hume for it is absurd to extend 
 isolated and individual expressions into an ex post facto scope 
 beyond their merely contemporary application, and to see this 
 science (viewed strictly as such) rise, whether in the Mercantile 
 system of Colbert, or in the Physiocratic system of Quesnay 
 (' Tableau Economique/ 1758), at its dawn in Hume (1752), a 
 dawn mainly widened by Adam Smith (1776), a plain, honest, 
 solid, faithful, and excellent faculty, but without the penetrative, 
 fertile, and various originality of Hume it occupied relatively a 
 sub-moment of simple apprehension, and possessed much more 
 concrete truth than it manifests now in its complete efflorescence 
 of abstraction. Consider, for example, the thin starched ruffles 
 that rise now into the moral sublime over such empty abstractions 
 as ' Demand and Supply,' ' Capital will find its own channels/ &c. 
 &c. ! Is not this enough ? The business of National Economy is 
 to secure our material supplies, or to realise stewardship over our 
 material necessities an indispensably necessary, a first or the 
 first function in every community well, said ruffles reach the 
 moral sublime here, too, with This function, the Stewardship of 
 the Nation, must be carefully guarded from the Kational, Universal, 
 or True Will, as it is in the conjunct, and must be as carefully 
 committed to the Irrational, Particular, and Sensuous Will 
 (otherwise named Self-will), as it is in the disjunct : in a word, 
 the Stewardship of the Nation must be saved from Eeason and 
 intrusted to Caprice ! A very pretty abstraction of Judgment this ! 
 just that abstraction which expressly constitutes what Hegel calls 
 Das Bose, and what we call wrong, evil, sin, crime ! In short, no 
 interest more imperatively demands the moment of Eeason con- 
 crete Eeason nowadays, than that of Political Economy, which, 
 through the extreme of abstraction, threatens to fall bodily ' on 
 the other ' at present, and dismember universal society. Yet we 
 have come to such a pass with our * advanced thinkers/ that it is just 
 proper prudence for all of us nowadays to give -in a grave adhesion 
 to Demand and Supply, and all the rest of them, not trusting the 
 enemy with the slightest opening through the very hint of a doubt. 
 I wonder if the Jupiter ever suffered for its indiscretion at the 
 commencement of the cotton dearth, in exclaiming that the law 
 
 2E 
 
434 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of supply and demand, though now evidently false in the concrete, 
 was still true in the abstract ! Did the Jupiter fail to consider, 
 then, that Political Economy concerning the concrete only, truth 
 in the abstract would be to it but a small set-off against the ruin 
 of the science in its concrete falsehood ? But verily the remnants 
 of the Aufklarung, if we but look at Political Economy, pelt us so 
 unmercifully as shallowness and conceit always do with ' ignor- 
 ance/ that, as we said, a proper prudence orders us to cry as 
 loudly as the rest, ' Long live the conqueror ! ' and we do our best 
 to stifle our laughter even when we see the unique Mr Buckle, 
 without the qualm of the scruple of a doubt, but with ruffled crop 
 well swelled, and outblown cheeks, magnificently advancing to 
 mediate between mind and matter through what he calls the laws, 
 and we the abstractions, of Political Economy ! The reader, we 
 hope, will understand, nevertheless, that we believe in a science 
 of Political Economy, that we consider the interest involved to be 
 a primary necessity, and that we call as loudly as any for the 
 emancipation of industry from the fetters of feudalism, rejoicing 
 also as sincerely as any in the immense and splendid success with 
 which that process of emancipation has been already rewarded. 
 
 The abstract vacuum that names itself, or mis-names itself, 
 Political Economy, nowadays, is, it is only fair to remark, not 
 without its reply to the above objection to the substitution of 
 individual caprice for general reason in this, or any other interest 
 of humanity. It has been found this is the burthen of the 
 answer that free individual self-interest is the best steward of 
 the State, and that ordinary provisions of Police suffice to effect 
 the necessary control. If the and which we have italicised be 
 correct, then it is no longer the Particular but the Universal Will 
 with which we have to do ; and, again, if the it has been found is 
 correct, then there is an end of any objection whatever. It is to 
 be remarked, however, that belief in sounding abstractions is 
 perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Aufklarung: 
 ever, when at any time self-convicted of a blunder, it recovers 
 itself again by clutching to some big platitude c a wise man 
 always,' * a good man never,' ' the vulgar and the ignorant,' 
 ' but a well-regulated understanding,' &c. &c.; just as it is 
 the sublime of wisdom in Dr Hugh Blair to repeat and re-repeat 
 over a thousand pages, 'practise all virtue, avoid all vice 
 practise all virtue, avoid all vice ! ' * This it has been found, 
 
 * Empedocles (vrjareva-ai /cd/t^ros) was quite as wise as Blair, to say nothing of 
 the A ureum Carmen and the verse /*^5' dlAo7i0Tws aavrbv %x fiv 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 435 
 
 we have to fear, then, is but one of these big-sounding abstrac- 
 tions ; nay, its own and contains its own refutation. By this and 
 Self-will, is declared to be not perfectly free Self-will, but self- 
 will under control of a form of that is, just Eeason ! This 
 concedes the whole question ; for if you grant the smallest end~or 
 part of the wedge Eeason, you will find yourself destitute of any 
 power of resistance to my introduction of the whole, You say, 
 for example, not only is Police to be made an affair of the State, 
 but even such interests as those of Education or the mere carrying 
 of our letters are not to be intrusted to individual self-interest, 
 but must be reserved for the assignments of universal will : you 
 say this, and you wish to stop there ; but who so wroth as you 
 when certain Theological Expositors assert their own exposition 
 to be the exposition ultimate, the exposition final, the exposition 
 absolute ? and yet these expositors do no more than you your- 
 selves do or propose to do ! You see, then, that when you call for 
 individual self-interest, but under edge of the small end of Eeason, 
 you have virtually effected at once a complete suppression of self- 
 interest or the Particular Will, and a complete introduction of 
 Eeason or the Universal Will ; in other words, Political Economy 
 is an affair of the State, and not of the Individual ; or it is not an 
 affair of free individual self-interest as such, but of free individual 
 self-interest in the sense that it is free,, or that it has been free'd 
 (from self-will, that is) by the decernments of Eeason, of the 
 Universal Will, of the State. 
 
 EEMARK 2. 
 
 There is matter in this short note which your common writer 
 could not have kept himself from trowelling over an entire treatise, 
 perhaps. The ordinary view, religious or other, of the transitori- 
 ness of all finite existence, is with much subtle depth of truth 
 identified with Idealism : even the water of Thales, as principle of 
 all things, had the force of Ideality. On one side, the principle, 
 as sublating the moments, and, on the other, the moments, as sub- 
 lated in the principle, may be regarded as ideel. 
 
 Mental conception, as opposed to external reality, is what is 
 usually regarded as the ideal side or element ; and certainly, con- 
 sciousness, seeing that it sublates or takes up all matter into itself 
 or, what is the same thing, seeing that all its matter is sublated 
 into it, and only so for it is the true idealist. This position is 
 
436 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that of subjective idealism, which insists on its own conceptive 
 form, in opposition to the matter which presents itself in that 
 form. But with such idealism, there is neither loss nor gain as 
 regards the matter, that is. There is no loss, for, despite the form, 
 there is the matter ; and, in a higher sense, there is no loss, for the 
 truth is still supposed to lie in the abstracting from this matter as 
 from that which is not the true In-itself or Principle. Again, there 
 is no gain, just because there is no loss, or because this matter 
 remains there in me, if you will just as real, and at the same 
 time just as finite that is, as unsatisfactory and as unaccounted 
 for as ever. To remove one finity, that of the antithesis of sub- 
 ject and object, does not remove the other innumerable unrecon- 
 ciled or unresolved finities which attach still to the matter (or 
 object), whatever be its true relation of identity at bottom to the 
 form (or subject). The reader may profitably see here again the 
 greater thinker and the lesser. To Hegel the relation of object 
 and subject is as regards the true business in hand but as the 
 veriest particle; to Sir William Hamilton this relation is the whole, 
 totum et rotundum, and he fills his whole world with clamour 
 about the Cosmothetic Idealist, the Presentative Realist, &c. &c., as 
 if the mode in which the outward is regarded as connected with 
 the inward alone constituted Philosophy, and as if the distinguish- 
 ing with Greek Predicates of all such modes, actual or possible, 
 were Philosophising ! The nature of the necessity which Hegel 
 sees is indicated here: he would begin with the acknowledged 
 first finity, and proceeding resolvingly through the whole series, at 
 length wind all up together as a whole into the one Infinite, the 
 Absolute Spirit. What a vast difference there lies between this 
 gigantic enterprise and the single question, Is the object /, or is 
 it another than I? or, rather, how shall we name in Greek the 
 different answers ? 
 
 It may be worth while in simple summary now to review the 
 ground over which we have just passed. Well, Being is that 
 which is when all distinction is abstracted from : it is, therefore, 
 that which indefinitely is ; it is the indefinite What, the indefinite 
 here and always, the indefinite immediate ; or what all this just 
 amounts to it is the indefinite First and Simple. But, being 
 indefinite, it is no more nor less than Nothing ; for, in an actual 
 definite existence as the thinker always is Nothing is no more 
 and no less than that abstraction from all definiteness (distinction,, 
 difference) which Being is. In short, Being and Nothing are each 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 437 
 
 simply the void faculty, and whichever we assume, Being or 
 Nothing, the faculty accompanies it, and cannot be prevented 
 from accompanying it. This faculty, however, is not to be 
 regarded as specially mine, or yours, or his : it is to be regarded 
 as the absolute faculty, both yours and mine and his, and yet 
 that faculty in relation to which mine or yours or his is but as a 
 meinung, an opinion but as a tint, a shade, a reflexion : at the 
 same time, nevertheless, tint, shade, reflexion is not without its 
 own necessity. This faculty is the conceived principle and prin- 
 cipium of all that is ; and in reference to such principle, a begin- 
 ning only can be effected by abstracting from all its differences, 
 by returning to its own simple abstract identity and that is 
 Being : but simple abstract identity as distinction-less is Nothing 
 in fact, in every instance when we say Nothing, it is simply this 
 distinction-less abstract identity we mean. All this is very strik- 
 ing : it is the nature of thought to demand a principle ; but, if it 
 but look at what that must be which it demands, it will find that 
 the principle can be but the abstraction from the difference, or 
 the Identity. This is of universal application. Just so situated 
 is the Beginning ; it is abstraction from Difference up to Identity, 
 and there is no further lack for it. These few thoughts have that 
 in them to alter all human reflexion, and so all human industry at 
 present. This abstraction, then, which a Beginning necessitates, 
 is just Being (What is) gone over into Nothing; and this is but a 
 literal expression of the state of the case. But it is equally liter- 
 ally true that it is Nothing which has gone into Being ; for in this 
 abstraction it is Nothing now that is. But what does this amount 
 to ? There is a definite existence ; of that definite existence there 
 is necessarily an eternal or infinite principle which is, was, and 
 ever will be no abstraction can destroy it, therefore : in this 
 abstraction, then, which is characterised as Nothing, there is still 
 Being. Well, then, reach this abstraction in reality as an actual 
 beginning, or what is the same thing reach it in thought, there 
 is a traffic in actual operation in which Being is seen, so to speak, 
 to beingate Nothing, and Nothing to nothingate Being ; but the 
 one result is the formal definition of Origin, and the other of 
 Decease; both are Becoming, and further, Being and Nothing 
 blent, are beent distinction, Daseyn, Entity or aughtness, sub- 
 lunariness, mortal state. Or, to take the abstraction in another 
 manner in every case, the principle, the faculty is still presup- 
 posed : Being, then, the faculty, and Nothing, its contained matter, 
 
438 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 or a view equally true Nothing, the faculty, and Being, its 
 contained matter these are identical, but also absolutely dis- 
 tinguished ; and the distinction is just that of Form and Filling. 
 We can thus get a glimpse even here of a main Hegelian doctrine 
 that Form and Filling, or that outer and inner, are the same. 
 What were the Form without the Filling, the Filling without the 
 Form ? The Filling is what the Form is ; the Form is the Filling. 
 Being and Nothing are thus the crudest example of the negative 
 reference to Self. But this intermovement is in Seyn ; it is 
 Werden the transition of what is to what is not, and again of 
 what is not to what is. 
 
 This process, then, of Being passing into Nothing, and vice versd, 
 is Becoming a unit in which both Nothing and Being are. Being 
 becoming Nothing is Decease ; while Nothing becoming Being is 
 Origin. Becoming thus, between the two directions of origin and 
 decease, is sisted into Become. But what has become is determinate, 
 or it contains at once Eeality and Negation, the union of which 
 constitutes what we mean by Something. 
 
 But Something is its own negative ; even in its very self-refer- 
 ence, or reflexion into Self, it just by that virtually excludes itself 
 that is, as an other. Or the reference to self is negative of that 
 element named by Kant the manifold, and which we may name 
 the variety what is self-reference, indeed, if not just sublation, 
 negation, of the variety ? this variety, then, is an other in general 
 to this unity and thus in its very notion Something of itself 
 alters itself, others itself. Or Something is the negation of its 
 own determinateness, which latter is to it relatively other j or 
 Something as distinguishable Something implies other in it, by 
 which, but also from .which, it is distinguished. 
 
 Something and Other, then, each is Something, and each is 
 relatively Other. True, the other is a distinction indifferent to 
 either in its own self ; it is external to both, it falls out of both, 
 though it is constituted by the external reference of the one to 
 the other. Belonging, then, to neither, it may be isolated and 
 considered by itself. But, thus considered, it presents itself as 
 the abstract other, the other as other, or evidently the other of 
 itself. Physical Nature is such other ; it is the other of Spirit ; 
 its nature, then, is a mere relativity, in which, not an inherent 
 quality, but a mere outer relation is expressed. Spirit, then, is 
 the true Something, and Nature is what it is only as opposed to 
 Spirit. The quality of Nature, then, isolated and viewed apart, is 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 439 
 
 just that it is the other as other is that which exists externally 
 to its own self (in space, time, &c.). 
 
 The other by itself is the other in itself, the other of itself, and 
 so evidently the other of the other. It is the absolutely self- 
 disparate, self-discrepant, self-unequal principle it is the absolute 
 odd. It is the self-negating or the self-changing principle. But 
 even in its changes it remains self^identical, for it is other, and 
 what it changes to is other. Change, then, for this principle is 
 mere reflexion into its own self with resolution of otherness. 
 
 But Something is in itself as counter what it is for other. 
 Being-in-self and Being-for-other are the two moments that 
 constitute the Something. The one is, as it were, the con- 
 stitutive, and the other the defining, element. The Being-for- 
 other is the negating element; it is not for itself, it is for 
 the production of the other ; and yet it is the other, and without 
 it the other could not be neither for it nor for itself. This 
 otherness in the Something which is not the Something and 
 which is the Something one with it and not one with it (I am, 
 if you lop off a leg) contained in it and separated from it is not 
 so much other to it, then, as rather its Being-for-other. But in 
 the unity of Something, both are in absolute unity with each 
 other, or each in its own self involves and implies the other. 
 Both are of a derivative or dependent nature ; for each is constituted 
 by reflexion from itself to the other, and from the other to itself, 
 and each is itself as not being th$ other. Or each reflects to the 
 other, and is constituted by reflexion from the other. But what 
 Something is for other, that is in the Something ; or it is in it to 
 be so and so for other. What, then, it is thus for other belongs to 
 its In-itself, to its own genuine intrinsic worth. This considera- 
 tion points to the true nature of the Kantian and common Thing- 
 in-itself. To attempt to predicate what a thing in itself is, at the 
 same time that all predicates (Being-for-other) are to be excluded 
 from it, is simply the self-stultification of utter thoughtlessness. 
 
 As yet the evolution is in itself; or under Seyn (Being) the 
 members appear, not relative, but independent, the notion, as yet, 
 being but implidter ; in other spheres relation or correlation 
 increases but we are here stepping too close for a mere 
 retrospect. 
 
 We have seen, then, the successive and consequent evolution of 
 Being, Nothing, Becoming, Origin, Decease, Become-ness or Ness- 
 ness, Keality, Negation, Something, Being-for-self, and Being-for- 
 
440 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 other. Now, what Something is for other, being reflected into the 
 In-itself of the Something, constitutes that Something's Qualifica- 
 tion or appointed nature ; while what Something is for other, being- 
 reflected apart from the In-itself, constitutes that Something's 
 Talification, or its assertion of itself as against other. But in this 
 assertion, it at once is and is not a definition which is identical 
 with that of Limit. But Something in reference to its Limit is a 
 To-be-to, or its Limit is Limitation. Again, as To-be-to, it is 
 beyond its Limitation, and passes into Infinitude. Infinitude as 
 opposed to Finitude is the spurious, as reconciled with Finitude 
 the true, Infinite ; and the true Infinite is that which is by and 
 for itself, or Being-for-self. 
 
 Suppose, now, we repeat this evolution, but expressly accom- 
 panied by the logical moments which have produced it, it may 
 stand thus : 
 
 The most absolutely abstract object, filling, matter, or mtent 
 (Inhalt) of Simple Apprehension, is Being. To Judgment now 
 that would discriminate, differentiate, dis-cern this Being is 
 Nothing; while to Reason, on the other hand, both must fall 
 together into Becoming, as the only truth. What is Becoming 
 to Reason, is now again to Simple Apprehension the other of it, 
 or Become. What is Become parts before Judgment into Reality 
 and Negation. Reason, which reflected Nothing into Being to 
 the development of Becoming, reflects now Negation into Reality 
 to the development of Something. The Something of Reason is 
 to Simple Apprehension the other of it, that is, another, or simply 
 Other. To Judgment the Other breaks into what it is in itself 
 and what it is for other. Reason now again reflects the Being- 
 for-other into the Being-for-self, and the Qualification (in the 
 sense of characteristic function or quality) arises. Qualification 
 to Simple Apprehension is the other of it, or it is Talification. 
 Talification falls asunder before Judgment into let us say at 
 once, in order not to stop now Action and Reaction. Reason 
 reflects reaction into action, and Limit results. The Limit to 
 Simple Apprehension is its other, or (say) Faculty. Faculty 
 separates under Judgment into a To-be-to and a Limitation. 
 Reason, reflecting the Limitation into the To-be-to, gives birth to 
 the Infinite. Before Simple Apprehension the Infinite is but 
 Finite, and the Finite to Judgment becomes the spurious Infinite, 
 or an irreconcilable antagonism of Finite and Infinite. Reason, 
 lastly, reflecting Finite unto Infinite, there emerges the true 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 441 
 
 Infinite, or the Fiirsichseyn, which is its own other to Simple 
 Apprehension, or the One and so on. 
 
 The reflective reader may see here a good reason for Hegel's 
 reticence may come now to understand how it was that, like 
 another Prospero, he broke ' his staff/ and, ' deeper than did ever 
 plummet sound,' drowned, not 'his book/ but the receipt that 
 made it. We allude, of course, to the changes just introduced 
 above into the Hegelian scheme changes which, in some respects, 
 seem to render the transitions easier and more consistent, and 
 which, if carried out at length in a discussion as full as that of 
 Hegel himself, would necessitate the addition of a great deal of 
 matter. Hegel, probably, then just feared that this would be the 
 result of a revelation of his formula that every puny whipster, 
 that is, would introduce his own innovations and that the world 
 would become disgusted by an endless clamour rung, and he 
 himself just utterly stultified. That Hegel was right, if so fearing 
 he so acted, the immediate result will probably soon prove now ! 
 
 A remark or two on some of the proposed changes may be here 
 in place. To ask for the abstract object of Simple Apprehension 
 is certainly the directest way in which we can reach pure Being 
 or Seyn ; and the reflexion of the second moment into the first, so 
 as to infect, if we may say so, the negation of the one by the 
 beingness of the other, is perhaps the shortest way to the dialectic 
 method. That the object of Eeason when transferred to Simple 
 Apprehension should become ju^t its other, is an assignment at 
 least in harmony, not only with the general manner of Hegel, but 
 with the nature of the case, and it certainly seems to bring with 
 it its own recommendations. Hegel's own transition, for example, 
 to other in his Something and Other, seems quite irregular, and 
 not in obedience to the regular march of the notional moments. 
 In Hegel, too, the extrication of Become from Becoming evidently 
 necessitates on his part an unusual exertion, nor one quite satis- 
 factory either. Again, the section devoted to Qualification, Tali- 
 fication, and Limit is very confused as it stands, and can be 
 justified only by suggesting that now or here in a very intense 
 form we are in a moment of judgment, and the differences all fall 
 out of each other : but surely the consistency, clearness, and ease 
 introduced by the innovation proposed have the advantage by 
 much of any such suggestion. Then, again, the Ee-extrication of 
 the moments out of Talification and in higher potentiation, as 
 Action and Reaction, seems fc to introduce not only formal, but 
 
442 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 material advantages. Of course, we do not mean to say that 
 Action and Eeaction are the proper names of the moments 
 extricated these names occur much more consistently further on 
 in the development, and they must be certainly replaced here by 
 others of a much more abstract nature. But a very near peep 
 into the actual operations of Hegel may be obtained by consider- 
 ing what has occurred here. What has occurred here, indeed, 
 the reader may depend on it, occurred often to Hegel himself; 
 and he, too, had to hunt often enough for abstract new terms by 
 which to replace the old ones which had in the first instance 
 suggested themselves. Inherent and relative, for example, must 
 have occurred a thousand times to him, and been a thousand 
 times replaced. Faculty, of course, also, is here only for the nonce, 
 and requires to be set aside for something more abstract. I cannot 
 help thinking, however, that were Talification, Limit, To-be-to, 
 Limitation, Finite, Infinite, &c., entirely re-thought and in sub- 
 jection to the new scheme proposed, there would result very great 
 improvements to the Hegelian Logic. The Fursichseyn of Eeason 
 becoming to Simple Apprehension One, must prove sufficiently 
 pleasing to any student really interested in Hegel. 
 
 That Hegel has really been guided by the moments of the 
 Notion, must, we should think, be patent to every one. In the 
 general system, the Logic is but the whole matter or IntQiit, the 
 whole object of Simple Apprehension in abstracto and so is it 
 that the Logic really demonstrates and presents before us the 
 Thing-in-itself. Nature is the object of Judgment in abstracto, or 
 it is the Notion gone into difference as such, or it is all the 
 moments of the Thing-in-itself fallen into outwardness. Or it is 
 abstractly Difference, the Other, as Logic was abstractly Identity 
 or the Thing-in-itself. The Spirit is the concrete moment of 
 Reason it is the concrete Totality in which both of the abstract 
 moments meet and realise themselves, though, at the same time, 
 they are to be regarded as only ideel in it. It the Spirit is, 
 absolutely, the only truth. But Logic, though constituting as a 
 whole but the moment of Simple Apprehension, must submit its 
 subdivisions to the entire virtue of the triune notion. Accordingly, 
 it falls firstly into Being, Essentity, and Notion ; and a little 
 reflection will show that these are objects respectively of Simple 
 Apprehension, Judgment, and Reason ; or they are respectively 
 moments of Identity, Difference, and Totality. Being, again, 
 though as a whole very specially a moment of Simple Apprehen- 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 443 
 
 sion, follows also in its own proper subdivisions the flexions of the 
 notion ; or we have Quality, Quantity, and Measure. Here 
 Quantity is very eminently mere Difference, or it is but the 
 externality of Quality, while Measure reunites both. Then the 
 divisions of Quality are Being, There-being, and Being-for-self, in 
 which forms the type of the notion is too evident to require 
 comment. The reader, however, may profitably ask himself, why 
 do Seyn, Mchts, and Werden absolutely distribute the absolutely 
 first moment, &c. ? The differences will always be found to 
 stand for the particular ; their reflexion into an indefinite all con- 
 stitutes the universal; and their negative reflexion into unity 
 constitutes also the singular : consider Daseyn, Seyn, and Fiirsich- 
 seyn ! Of Seyn as Seyn, is it possible to say more than it is, it is 
 not, it comes to be, it ceases to be, it always becomes ? At all events, 
 is Seyn ever anything else to Simple Apprehension ? Simple 
 Apprehension is always a moment of indefinite An sich, or to it 
 the variety is always reflected into an indefinite unity. With 
 Judgment, the function of understanding proper begins : there is 
 an attempt to think the object ; which being thought, breaks up 
 into its differences. In this moment, then, the object is no longer 
 an sich, it is fur sich in the sense that it goes before itself in the 
 state of Anders-seyn, of otherwise-being. As regards the three 
 moments used distributively under Judgment, we can justify them 
 by saying that the difference is successively apprehended, judged, 
 and reasoned. The action of Simple Apprehension is always as 
 Unmittelbar or immediate, that of Judgment is as Mittelbar or 
 mediate : so it is that the object of the one has always the virtue 
 of Seyn, of Beingness, in it, while that of Judgment is as much 
 led by the virtue of Nichts or Negation. 
 
 But these circumstances of form become formalities, empty, 
 barren, wearisome, when unduly dwelt on ; and attention may be 
 profitably turned in conclusion to the importance of the matter 
 discussed quite apart from the form. 
 
 The first material lesson of Hegel attaches to the mere words. 
 We are all apt to use our words vaguely ; but Hegel forces us, as 
 it were, to look into their very bellies. It is unnecessary to quote 
 examples ; all the technical terms of Hegel are such or we may 
 say, indeed, that his whole speech is but one long and perfect 
 example. This is a matter of the most essential importance, and 
 an indispensable preliminary to all thought proper. Even in this, 
 Hegel, as a philosopher, has gone boldly to the front, and has 
 
444 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 attempted to remove in his own case, and in the whole case 
 generally, the oldest and most tenacious objection which lies 
 against philosophy, that, namely, which is drawn from the 
 ambiguity of language. 
 
 Again, throughout, the reader must find himself exercised in 
 such application at once of abstraction and distinction as must 
 greatly improve his own force. As regards information, surely 
 that is not wanting, when we consider all that has been said in 
 regard to Parmenides, Heraclitus, Buddhism, Spinoza, Kant, 
 Jacobi, the general question of transition, the attributes of God, 
 the necessary involution of the negative, the immense affirmative 
 function of the negative, the conditions of creation, the con- 
 stitution of Pantheism, the nature of common sense to be fore- 
 thickened and fore-occupied by its own fixed abstractions, the 
 crude figurate conception, certain points of morals, Idealism, &c. 
 These are, for the most part, but incidental topics, yet they 
 involve much and very momentous matter. 
 
 But the main thing which we have to see here is the beginning 
 at length, and the realisation of philosophy. Philosophy, in the 
 Notion, has reached a scientific principle, and must henceforth, 
 consequently, be reputed the most rigorously scientific of all the 
 Sciences. We do not assist here either at the ordinary uncertiorated, 
 unsecured, miscellaneous process of pro-and-con reasonment, pro- 
 and-con remark ; but we sit before a necessary evolution, and as 
 Kant declared the essence of philosophy in abstracto, and simply 
 look on. What we see is the notion, and the notion in its own 
 movement, the notion describing by its own necessity the 
 articulated series of its own constitutive forms. The first, the 
 unexplicated notion, the beginning, is being, the indefinite Im- 
 mediate, but seeing that we are here Being that is in itself 
 definite. But the absolutely first indefinite, or indefinite First, is 
 Nothing; and again seeing that we are here no other Nothing than 
 this Nothing is even possible. But the notion that reflects again 
 on Being as counter this Nothing, is already Becoming is already, 
 indeed, Become. This, in truth, constitutes all that a beginning 
 or the beginning can be. 
 
 Then, again, determinateness is not that completely thought 
 out, with the evolution, too, of many surprising results? De- 
 terminateness is the affirmative thing it is, very much because of 
 negation. Other is negation ; and how could anything be 
 cognisable unless by other in it, or otherwise-being, otherwise- 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 445 
 
 ness ? Identity itself must have Difference, otherwise it were a 
 null. Is Form possible without Matter ? What is there, is but 
 an entelecheia of these : these are but its abstract distinctions, its 
 elementary distinctions; and they are those of the Notion, and 
 always the same though in a thousand forms. What is Matter 
 but just Identity now for itself, or to itself ? Matter is but its 
 other the other of Identity, that is in which other it is for itself. 
 But identity for itself is just identity in its dif-ference. That 
 Identity by its own very necessity involves Difference, to show 
 by, as it were is not this a thought, a category, not in me or you, 
 but deep, necessary, universal in the nature of existence itself ? 
 And existence what else is existence but the spectacle, the 
 exhibition of these categories ? Immediate must become mediate 
 that is, no longer in itself, but through another. These are not 
 mere formalities they are material truths, and the most material. 
 Through them it is that Hegel procures us a glimpse into the very 
 deeps of Being. The same strain is but continued in Qualification 
 and Talification, Finite and Infinite ; and the result is really to 
 show us the principles of our own existence, as it were the pillars 
 of the universe. The truth all through is, that opposition is but 
 reference; that * the one moment does not sublate in an external 
 fashion the other, but that each sublates itself in itself, and is in 
 its own self the contrary of itself.' Identity and Difference, Form 
 and Matter, have just demonstrated themselves so. What we see, 
 then, is that all differences, as tyut first negations, negate them- 
 selves into the one whole that is and this is the truth, this is the 
 absolute. The first Seyn is in itself determinate, and goes over into 
 Daseyn, finite Being, the series of its own Finities, which returns 
 into its own single constituent Self and that is the Fursichseyn. 
 The Universal is the Particular, and the Particular is the Singular. 
 Suppose Water the Absolute : abstracting from the host of outer 
 things its differences, we have pure Being, the pure Universal ; 
 but in itself it is differentiated, and we know it is ; it goes over, 
 therefore, into its Particular all these outward things we see : 
 but they again are it, they are ideel in it ; it therefore is the Fur- 
 sichseyn, the one concrete Singular. We have used Water here 
 in illustration ; but our old figurate conception, the Voice, would 
 apply still better. The Voice abstractly is the Universal, Pure 
 Being, Identity, &c. ; but it must pass over into its Particular, its 
 Difference, its Daseyn and that is its inherent scale or compass, 
 its native or inherent implement of notes ; but these again coalesce 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
446 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 and constitute the concrete Singular which is, and that is the 
 Voice. In all this, the immortality of the subject is really implied. 
 One would think, then, that the matter of what we have seen is 
 certainly not in any respect less than the form. 
 
 There is considerable assonance in all this to much that is Neo- 
 Platonic a matter which, as Hegel himself remarks, might be as 
 appropriately named Neo-Aristotelian. Proclus, for example, says 
 of the Dialectic method, that it is * connate with things themselves/ 
 that it ' receives its principles from intellect/ that it ' ascends 
 through well-ordered gradations to being iteelf ;' and he continues, 
 ' it also terminates the wandering of the soul about sensibles, and 
 explores everything by methods which cannot be confuted, till it 
 arrives at the ineffable principle of things ' (in Parmenid. lib. i.). 
 In the same work he observes : 
 
 In the first place, it is necessary to despise the senses. . . . After this, it 
 follows that we should dismiss imaginations (Hegel's Vorstellungen), those 
 winged Stymphalidae of the soul, as possessing only a figured intellection of 
 things, but by no means able to apprehend unfigured form and as impeding 
 pure intellection ... in the third place, we must entirely extirpate multi- 
 form opinions (Hegel's Meinungen), and the wandering of the soul about 
 these. 
 
 He then goes on to refer to the insufficiency of the Dianoetic 
 Intellect (Hegel's abstracting Understanding) and terminates the 
 paragraph thus : 
 
 Many, therefore, are the wanderings of the soul : for one of these is in 
 imaginations, another in opinions, and a third in the dianoetic power ; but a 
 life according to intellect is alone inerratic ; and this is the mystic port of the 
 soul, into which Homer conducts Ulysses, after an abundant wandering of 
 life. 
 
 Again we find him (same work, lib. v.) saying 
 
 Let us now consider what negations are, whether they are better or worse 
 than affirmations . . . it is not immanifest how Plato, in the Sophista, says 
 that Non-being, by which he means Difference, is related to Being, and that it 
 is not less than Being. . . . Negations, therefore, are better than affirmations, 
 and are adapted to such as are ascending from the partial to the total. . . . 
 As the one is the cause of wholes, so negations are the causes of affirmations. 
 ... So the one, being void of multitude, gives subsistence to all multitude, 
 and, being without number and figure, produces number and figure, &c. 
 
 In truth, passages containing such assonances to Hegel seem to 
 constitute the stuff of Proclus. Hegel, not far on in his ' Philo- 
 sophy of History/ says, ' for, like Mercury, leader of souls, the Idea 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 447 
 
 is in truth the leader of the nations and of the world.' Not with- 
 out analogy is that passage of Proclus, where his Philosophy is 
 talked of as ' moving knowledge/ ' unfolding the forms which we 
 essentially contain/ &c., 'like that God who leads into light 
 intellectual gifts/ &c. &c. (Proclus in Eucl. p. 14). The GfocT 
 here alluded to is Mercury, and it is quite possible that the passage 
 of Proclus was in some way or other present to the consciousness 
 of Hegel as his own statement arose. 
 
 But this matter is not peculiar to Proclus ; it belongs to the 
 whole Neo-Platonic school. Here is a passage from Plotinus in 
 which Hegelian elements may be still readily enough perceived as 
 well within the figures of the original, as across the perhaps some- 
 what uninitiated pur-blindness of the translation, executed as it is 
 by Thomas Taylor, from whom (his ' Metaphysics of Aristotle ') we 
 have been borrowing the extracts of Proclus also : 
 
 Let us, then, receive by our dianoetic power this our sensible world, so 
 disposed that every part may remain indeed what it is, but that one thing may 
 mutually reside in another. Let us suppose that all things are collected as 
 much as possible into one, so that each particular object may first present 
 itself to the eyes ; as if a sphere should be the exterior boundary, the spectacle 
 of the sun immediately succeeding, and a representation of the other stars, 
 and the earth, the sea, and all animals appearing within, as in a diaphanous 
 globe : and lastly, let us conceive that it is possible to behold all things in each. 
 Let there be then in the soul a lucid imagination of a sphere, containing all 
 things in its transparent receptacle ; whether they are agitated or at rest, or 
 partly mutable and partly stable. IjjTow, preserving this sphere, receive 
 another in your soul, removing from this last the extension into bulk, take 
 away likewise place, and banish far from yourself all imagination of matter ; 
 at the same time being careful not to conceive this second sphere as something 
 less than the first in bulk, for this must be void of all dimension. After this, 
 invoke that Divinity who is the Author of the Universe, imaged in your 
 phantasy, and earnestly entreat him to approach. Then will he suddenly 
 come, bearing with him his own divine world, with all the gods it contains ; 
 then will he come, being at the same time one and all, and bringing with him 
 all things concurring in one. There, indeed, all the gods are various amongst 
 themselves in gradations of power, yet by that one abundant power they are 
 .all but one, or rather one is all : for the divinity never fails by which they 
 are all produced. But all the gods abide together, and each is again separate 
 from the other in a certain state unattended with distance, and bearing no form 
 subject to sensible inspection; or one would be situated differently from the other, 
 nor each be in itself all. Nor, again, does any one of these possess parts different 
 from others and from itself ; nor is every whole there a divided power, and of 
 a magnitude equal to its measured parts : but it is indeed a universe, and a 
 universal power proceeding to infinity in a power which is the parent of 
 energy. 
 
448 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Taylor ('Met. of Aristotle,' pp. 426, 427) also translates as 
 follows from the same book of Plotinus on Intelligible Beauty : 
 
 Divine natures are not at one time wise, and at another time the contrary ; but 
 they are perpetually wise, with a tranquil, stable, and pure intellect, under- 
 standing all things, and knowing not properly human concerns, but their own 
 that is, such as are divine, and such as intellect itself perceives. But the 
 gods who inhabit this visible heaven, for they abound in divine leisure, assidu- 
 ously contemplate, as if it were above them, what the primary and intelligible 
 heaven contains. But those who are stationed in this higher world contem- 
 plate its inhabitants possessing the whole of this diviner heaven. For all 
 things there are heaven. There the sea, animals, plants, and men are heaven. 
 Lastly, every portion of this heaven is celestial : the gods likewise who reside 
 there do not disdain men, nor any other of its inhabitants, because everything 
 there is divine ; and they comprehend the whole of this intelligible region 
 with the most perfect repose. 
 
 Hence the life of these divinities is easy, and truth is their generator and 
 nurse, their essence and nutriment. Hence, too, they perceive all things not 
 such, indeed, as are subject to generation, but such as abide in essence. They 
 likewise perceive themselves in others : for all things there are perfectly per- 
 spicuous. Nothing there is dark, nothing opposing ; but everything is con- 
 spicuous to all, intrinsically and universally. For light everywhere meets 
 with light. Each thing contains in itself all, and all things are again beheld in 
 another ; so that all things are everywhere, and all is truly all. There everything 
 is all ; there an immense splendour shines ; there everything is great, since 
 even what is small is there great. There the sun is all the stars ; and every 
 star is a sun, and at the same time all the stars. But one thing excels in each, 
 while in the meantime all things are beheld in each. There motion is 
 perfectly pure : for in its progression it is not confounded by a mover foreign 
 from the motion. Permanency also there is disturbed by no mutation : for it 
 is not mingled with an unstable nature. Besides, beauty there is beauty itself, 
 because it does not subsist in beauty : but everything abides there, not as if 
 placed in some foreign land ; for the being of each is its own stable foundation. 
 Nor is its essence different from its seat : for its subject is intellect, and itself 
 is intellect. Just as if any one should conceive this sensible heaven, which is 
 manifest and lucid to the eyes, germinating into stars by its light. In 
 corporeal natures, indeed, one part is not everywhere produced from another, 
 but each part is distinct from the rest. But there each thing is everywhere 
 produced from the whole, and is at the same time particular and the whole. It 
 appears, indeed, as a part ; but by him who acutely perceives, it will be be- 
 held as a whole : by him, I mean, who is endued with a sight similar to that 
 of the lynx, the rays of whose eyes are reported to penetrate the depths of the 
 earth. For it appears to me that this fable occultly signifies the perspicacity 
 of supernal eyes. Besides, the vision of these blessed inhabitants is never 
 wearied, and never ceases through a satiety of perceiving. For there is no 
 vacuity in any perceiver, which, when afterwards filled up, can bring per- 
 ceiving to an end . . . rather by perceiving he more assiduously perceives. 
 
 Here (from Plotin. Enn. iii. 8. 3.) is a bit of ancient Idealism, 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 449 
 
 apposite to the modern, whether subjective or absolute : Kcu TO 
 Oecopovv IJLOV Oewprjima Troiel, cb<T7rep oi yew/uLCTpai Oewpovvre? 
 y pa<povcr LV' a\\ e/mov /ULIJ y/oa^outTJ/s 1 , Oecopovcrrjs Se, V^'KTTOLVTOLL at 
 TCOV (rcofjLarcov y/oa/xyucu, axrTrep eKTTiTTTOvarai. Which translated, as 
 if it were the Absolute spoke, might run thus : 
 
 And my speculating (seeing) creates what is speculated (seen), just as 
 Geometricians speculating draw lines (in thought) : but I not drawing 
 lines, but speculating (seeing), there rise up the lineaments of the corporeal 
 objects as if falling in projection out of me. 
 
 The nature of the Neo-Platonic teaching, and its analogy to the 
 philosophy of Hegel, may be seen in almost every the usual ex- 
 pression of Thomas Taylor, who so perseveringly kept company 
 with Plotinus, Proclus, and the rest. In the Introduction and 
 Notes to his translation of the Metaphysics of Aristotle, we have 
 the following : 
 
 Wisely, therefore (p. xv.), does Plato assert that the philosopher ought not 
 to descend below species, and that he should be solely employed in the con- 
 templation of wholes and universals. For he who descends below these, 
 descends into Cimmerian realms, and Hades itself wanders among spectres 
 devoid of mind, and exposes himself to the danger of beholding the real 
 Gorgon, or the dire face of Matter, and of thus becoming petrified by a satiety 
 of stupid passions. 
 
 Again (p. xvii.) 
 
 Objects of sense rather resemble the delusions of sleep than the realities of 
 vigilant perception. ^ 
 
 Once more (p. 400) 
 
 I shall rejoice if I have been able to add anything of my own which may 
 contribute to elucidate the conceptions of these divine men, and induce the 
 reader to abandon with generous ardour the grovelling contemplation of 
 sensible objects, profoundly dark and incessantly flowing, for the exalted 
 survey of the all-splendid and ever-permanent forms in the world of mind. 
 
 Lastly (p. 428) 
 
 Every Idea is not only the paradigm, but likewise the producing cause, of 
 Sensibles : for something else would be requisite by which sensibles are 
 generated and assimilated to ideas, if these divine forms remained sluggish and 
 immovable, and without any efficacious power, similar to impressions in wax : 
 for it is absurd to admit that the reasons in nature possess a certain fabricative 
 energy, but that intelligible forms should be deprived of productive power. 
 Every divine form, therefore, is not only paradigmatic, but paternal, and is by 
 its very essence the generative cause of the Many. 
 
 Thomas Taylor lived probably in a thick element of confused 
 
 2F 
 
450 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 splendour, and is not by any means (who is ?) an immaculate 
 translator; but the sufferings, the persecutions, the patient 
 poverty, the dauntless perseverance, the uncheered but assiduous 
 labour of the noble, ardent man, entitle him at least to our respect ; 
 and not this only, but the successful outcome of that enormous 
 labour compels the gratitude of every earnest and true Student 
 Sir William Hamilton errs, as not unusual, then, when he turns 
 his sharp nail on the' good Taylor; and (so far as my poor judg- 
 ment may have any right to speak in the case) we are still much 
 safer with this latter than with his critic, as a translator of Greek 
 philosophy. We will be thankful, then, for what Hamilton calls 
 his ' mere rubbish.' 
 
 It would be easy to adduce, both from Aristotle and from Plato, 
 many passages (which we had marked for the purpose, indeed) 
 breathing the same spirit as those already cited from Proclus and 
 Plotinus ; but we shall leave this to the reader's own activity. At 
 p. 356 of Franz and Hillert, Hegel will be found translating from 
 Plato thus : 
 
 The empirical manner of thinking found in geometry and the kindred 
 sciences, thou seemest to me to name raisonnement ; and, consequently, 
 reasoning (Schliessen, reflectirende Erkennen) finds itself between the vovs 
 and what we name 56a. Thou hast apprehended perfectly correctly. In 
 accordance with these four distinctions, I shall name the four relative bear- 
 ings of the soul : a, vd-rjais (Begreifen), comprehension, a thinking of what is 
 highest ; /9, dtavota, the second ; 7, the third, is belief or true opinio (Meinung) ; 
 5, and the last, is the Vorstellung or figurate knowledge (das bildliche Wissen) : 
 these are the degrees of truth, of clearness. 
 
 Hegel, commenting on this, proceeds : 
 
 Plato defines thus the senses as the first mode ; as second mode he defines 
 reflexion, so far as it introduces thinking into a consciousness otherwise 
 sensuous. And here, he says, is the place where science makes its appear- 
 ance ; science rests on thought, the determination of general principles, first 
 sources, hypotheses. These hypotheses are not manipulated by the senses 
 themselves, are not sensuous in themselves ; they certainly belong to thought. 
 But this still is not genuine science which consists in considering the universal 
 per se, the spiritual universal. Plato has comprehended under the term S6^a 
 sensuous consciousness, properly sensuous conception, opinio, immediate 
 knowledge. In the middle between opinio and science proper, there lies 
 ratiocinating cognition, inferential reflexion, reflecting cognition, that forms 
 for itself general laws, definite genera. The highest, however, is thought in 
 and for itself, which is directed to the highest.* 
 
 * Neither of these two passages appears quite so in Hegel's collected works ; the 
 latter, indeed, looks rather like a bringing together in sum ; still, if a little mixed 
 in a place or two, they are to be considered quotations as referred. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 451 
 
 The reader will have no difficulty, then, in view of such utter- 
 ances, (Suva/mis, evepyeia, VTe\e\eia, /c.r.A., will be fresh in his 
 memory as well) in perceiving the analogy which Hegel bears to 
 the most important Greek philosophers, both early and late. 
 
 There is a passage in Reid* which describes the Neo-Platonic 
 philosophers in the usual conventional, vague terms, as mystically 
 adoring and seeking union with the One ; still, nevertheless, the 
 description is so couched, that to a stndent of Hegel there is 
 involuntarily suggested by it, that this mystic One is but the 
 Logical Idea. We may suppose said student to be pleasantly 
 surprised with this, and to be still more pleasantly surprised when 
 he afterwards finds Hegel himself saying somewhere precisely the 
 same thing.f On these grounds, however, should he, or any one 
 else, infer the philosophy of Hegel to have derived from either 
 new or old Platonics, or from either new or old Aristotelians, he 
 will only fall into a very serious mistake. The philosophy of 
 Hegel derives directly only from the generalised categories of 
 Kant in themselves and in their realisation or externalisation 
 in the things of sense : Hegel's philosophy, in short, in the notion, 
 coils itself in nucem, and the notion, or this nut, came straight to 
 him from Kant. We are to suppose, however, that once his 
 philosophy was formed Hegel was nothing loath to make as 
 prominent as might be every analogy whatever which tended to 
 associate him with the great masters of the ancient world : the 
 one longing is almost overt in, him, indeed, that he should be 
 placed now as Aristotle was placed then. 
 
 It will tend to strengthen the view just expressed to point out 
 that there are descriptions in existence intended to refer exclu- 
 sively to the philosophy of Plato, which, nevertheless, can be 
 applied almost line by line to the philosophy of Kant a 
 philosophy which we know and see owed nothing to Plato, but 
 which was the result of a very natural train of inferences a train 
 
 * Reid, p. 264, Hamilton's edition, says, in reference to the Alexandrians, ' By a 
 proper purification and abstraction from the objects of sense, we may be in some 
 measure united to the Deity, and, in the eternal light, be enabled to discern the 
 most sublime intellectual truths.' The italics will strike the key of Hegel. 
 
 t ' If at times the excellence of the philosophy of Plato is placed in his scientifi- 
 cally valueless Myths, there are also times, named even times of enthusiasm, when 
 the Aristotelian philosophy is prized because of its speculative depth, and the 
 Parmenides of Plato, certainly the greatest art- work of the Ancient Dialectic, is 
 honoured as the veritable unveiling and the positive expression of the divine life, and 
 even, amid much impurity of that which gave rise to it, the misunderstood Ecstasis 
 is in reality nothing else than the Pure Notion, 1 Phaenom., ed. 2nd, p. 55. 
 
452 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 which we may say we also actually see from certain main 
 positions of David Hume. Descriptions of this nature will be 
 found at pages 262 and 263 of Hamilton's Eeid, where the 
 describer (Hamilton) has not the slightest thought of Kant at 
 that moment in his mind. The analogy lies very obvious in this, 
 however, that mental forms, which awakened ly, mingle with, the 
 contributions of sense, are in reality not one whit more Platonic 
 than that they are Kantian. The verses of Boethius at p. 263 
 contain distinctive features which might have been copied quite 
 as easily and correctly from Kant as from Plato.* 
 
 No doubt, Hegel, by his reference to the ancients, was enabled 
 to bring the determinations he had arrived at in connexion with 
 Kant into more magistral place, as dominant centres, as it were, 
 in definitively vital, absolute, and infinite spheres ; no doubt, he 
 was enabled thus to cover, as it were, the whole field : neverthe- 
 less, he owed not this to any direct action of either Plato or 
 Aristotle, but rather to a reaction on these through the findings of 
 Kant. Eather, we may express it thus : To Hegel, the light of 
 Kant lit Aristotle; and to the same Hegel, by such reciprocity as 
 he loved, the re-lighting of Aristotle re-lit Kant. Thus, if the 
 findings of modern philosophy have been very much moved into 
 place by the previous findings of the ancient, it must also be said 
 that only through the former were these latter themselves 
 re-found. Indirectly to Kant, directly to Hegel, then, is it that 
 we owe at present that revival of the study of early philosophy 
 which has expanded in Germany to such enormous dimensions, 
 
 * These verses are the following : 
 
 ' Mens est efficiens magis 
 
 Longe causa potentior, 
 
 Quam quse materise modo 
 
 Impressas patitur notas. 
 
 Prsecedit tamen excitans 
 
 Ac vires animi movens 
 
 Vivo in corpore passio, 
 
 Cum vel lux oculos ferit 
 
 Vel vox auribus instrepit : 
 
 Turn mentis vigor excitus 
 
 Quas intus species tenet, 
 
 Ad motus similes vocans, 
 
 Notis applicat exteris, 
 
 Introrsumque reconditis 
 
 Formis miscet imagines.' 
 
 Stuff from without, Form from within, the whole description may be predicated 
 of the Kantian theory quite as truly as of the Platonic. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 453 
 
 which has exhibited itself in no contemptible form in France, and 
 which even in England has been adequate at least to some 
 first approaches. From Hegel specially is it that we derive the 
 ability now to recognise in Aristotle, not the sensual materialist 
 that controverted, but the absolute idealist that completed Plato. 
 This is much, and the proof of it is certain : to that the single pas- 
 sage from Aristotle's 'Metaphysic' which closes the Encyclopaedic of 
 Hegel would alone suffice ; from it we know, as also from elsewhere, 
 that Aristotle, even as much as his mighty modern compeer, con- 
 cluded TCLVTOV VOV$ KCU VOrjTOV Kdl <TTLV % VOr]<Tl$ VOYIVWS VO^CTIS- 
 
 If it be true, then, that it is to Hegel we are indebted for the 
 new thew whereby we have obtained the new power over the old 
 philosophy, and if it be also true that this Hegel himself has 
 hitherto remained like some swart Magus charmed into insoluble 
 opacity by virtue even of his own spells, we may well when this 
 Hegelian trance shall have been unbound anticipate for the 
 history of philosophy, and for philosophy itself, progression and 
 advance realisation beyond a hope. 
 
 THE TRANSITION. 
 
 It is not difficult to see that ideality may be named the quality 
 of infinitude ; for is not infinitude just that in which the whole 
 wealth of the finite is ideally held ? That the infinite, too, is but 
 a process of becoming, is also plain ; for its life and reality is but 
 the evolution of its native differences, the finite, just as the 
 notification or vocabilisation, a process of becoming, is the life of 
 our illustration, the absolute Voice. But as becoming becomes 
 into There-being, so there is transition in the infinite. Sublating 
 the finite, and sublating, in this same act, its own self as an only 
 abstract infinite, it is a return, as it were with both, into its 
 own self, and is thus reference to its own self, being. But this 
 being is no longer abstract ; it contains negation, There-being ; 
 it is distinguishably and palpably there, or here : but again, as it 
 is in its express nature negation of the negation, or the negation 
 that refers itself to itself, it is that There-being that definite, 
 palpable existentiality which is properly named Being-f or-Self ; 
 that is, it is the existentiality which absolutely is, that existen- 
 tiality which is to and for itself, which is its own inner variety and 
 life, and which has no call for an outer, whether of support or 
 derivation : in short, it is the true Fiirsichseyn. 
 
454 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 BEING-FOR-SELF. 
 
 IF this (first) paragraph be read in the light of our general illus- 
 tration, the absolute voice, and, after all, probably the very best 
 name for thought (especially now that it is viewed as the absolute 
 and only), would be the absolute voice, the various expressions 
 which constitute it will spring at once into meaning. 
 
 * In Being-for-self, qualitative Being is completed : ' that is, the 
 voice, the one, having run through its native constituent notes, 
 its variety, its many, has returned into itself as still the voice and 
 the one ; and thus completion (oneness and allness) is given to its 
 whole qualitative being ; in other words, a complete answer has 
 been given to every question of Qualis, what sort, in its regard. 
 This, too, is * infinite being ; ' it is unended and unendable ; it is 
 entire, totum et rotundum, the absolute voice. The being of the 
 voice, before a single finite note, ' the being of the beginning,' 
 was but abstract, * determination-less.' The notification, which to 
 the voice is as ' There-being ' or Thereness (the presence of a 
 definite somewhat) to consciousness, is the sublated and negated 
 voice, the immediately, or directly, and at first hand, sublated and 
 negated voice, just as an object, or the series of objects, is the 
 immediately sublated and negated leing first being of thought or 
 consciousness (say). It is worth while remarking that the sublated 
 voice is quite as much the lifted-up voice as the negated one, and 
 just so we may see that the sublated Being, if negated as to its 
 universality (an other being introduced) and apparently for the 
 moment left out of count, is lifted up, made prominent, eminent, 
 or even, as it were, tilted up into the edge of a single, passing, 
 momentary note, or finite object. In this There-ness, this other of a 
 note (or Object), the voice (Being) ' is still retained ; ' but still all 
 for the moment seems to have gone into the single edge of this 
 note (or object) ; there seems nothing but it : the voice and the 
 
QUALITY INTERPKETED, ETC. 455 
 
 note (Being and There-being) are in simple unity, certainly ; but 
 still in the first instance the note (or the There-ness) is a usurping 
 one side that seems quite all and other to its own universal. The 
 two sides, then, though in themselves one, ' are mutually unequal ; ' 
 they are ungleich, not level, uneven ; as we said, there is a tilted- 
 up edge; or all this and the whole truth of the case can be 
 conveyed in the single expression their unity is not yet mutuated. 
 
 We have used for Gesetztseyn Mutuatitiousness ; but this is the 
 first time we have used mutuated for gesetzt. This is the place, 
 now, however, for the introduction of such new mode of state- 
 ment. By mutuated, I mean overtly placed ly and for an occult. 
 This sense has been growing on us ; and in this we are not 
 singular ; for we hold it evident that it so grew on Hegel himself. 
 There is something of this in our own word set, and accordingly it 
 has been frequently used for setzen in the present translation and 
 commentary. To set in the sense of to stake, or to set to music, 
 indicates substitution, mutuation ; and a setter-dog sets the game. 
 Then a set is a certain more of ,which one sets the other, and with- 
 out the other were null. The German setz, however, has in it, 
 like the Latin vice, much more of this reciprocation and exchange 
 than the English set. Thus, es setzt means there arises ; es wird 
 Etwas setzen implies a warning that something (disagreeable) will 
 replace the present state of matters, or this that now is, sets that 
 that also is, though in the future; and Setz-schiffer means a 
 substitute captain, a locum tenen$, one, i.e., that is for and by 
 another, and in turn sets or implies this other. Implies seems a 
 good rendering for the word in question, but what is implied is, 
 derivatively and otherwise, rather set in than set out, and it is an 
 explicit implicitness that is wanted, as it were, an eximpliedness 
 or eximplicatedness. In fact, the sense of overt statement must be 
 as evident in the word adopted as that of implication. It is easy 
 to see, indeed, that statement, as also expression, exposition, and 
 the like, really conveys what we attribute to this Setzen : it and 
 these are, so to speak, all overts by arid for occults. The same 
 thing is to be seen in the logical form, the modus ponens, which 
 probably at least helped to lead Hegel to the term ; there we see 
 that the first sets the second, and it is the second which is left 
 overt. We may allude, in passing, to the use of Aufhebend in the 
 modus tollens ; and the quotation from Cicero, tollendum esse 
 Octavium, in the remark relative to Auf heben, demonstrates the 
 analogy to have been present to Hegel himself. By mutuated, 
 

 
 456 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 then, is meant something overt, something expliciter, something 
 formally stated, expressed, put, placed, or set, but still something 
 that is reciprocally stated, &c., and so something consequently that 
 reciprocally states, &c. 
 
 The two sides, Voice and Note (Being and There-being or 
 Object), are still mutually unequal, uneven, or their unity is not 
 yet mutuated. We can see now the full force of the rnutuated ; 
 each side remaining abstract, or separate, there is difference, 
 duality, mutual inequality; but when it is seen that the voice 
 still is in the note, Being still is in There-being, then reconcilia- 
 tion has taken place, the concrete truth is restored, the unity of 
 the two sides is mutuated, is set. What follows about finitude, 
 determinateness as such, relative and absolute determinateness, is 
 now easy. ' In Being-for-self, the difference between being and 
 determinateness or negation is posited and equated ' this also is 
 plain; the dif-ference between the two sides, voice and note, is 
 mutuated and ausgeglichen, levelled-out, equated. 
 
 ' Quality, Otherwiseness, Eeality, Being-in-itself, Ought-to, &c., 
 are the imperfect infigurations of the Negative into Being, &c.' 
 The series of notes (say in this way) is a series of infigurations, 
 indentations, into the voice, and they are imperfect so long as 
 they are held to be different from the voice. Einbildung, how- 
 ever, must be seen to imply its usual sense of subjective conceit and 
 conceiting, as well as its literal meaning of infiguration ; the 
 assignments in question have that in them which approximates 
 them to subjective fancies ; they are not regarded in their truth 
 when regarded as absolute. The application of our illustration to 
 what follows may now be left to the reader. We may remark in 
 passing on ungleich, ausgeglichen, and Einbildungen as examples 
 of that favourite Hegelian irony in which the direct, literal, 
 structural sense flirts or coquets with the reflex, figurative, and 
 conventional one. Indeed, Setzen, Daseyn, Differenz, and even 
 Vollendet, are in the same key : as regards Setzen, Hegel has gone 
 back to its ancient idiomatic, colloquial sense ; Daseyn is to be 
 seen both as There-ness and as this Being here below ; the Differenz 
 is the difference, as the Unter-schied is the inter-cern ; and we 
 are even to see that Vollendet applies to what is not only ended, 
 lout full. As we have seen, too, this verbal care of Hegel extends 
 itself into a syllabic one : in Vergleichung, for example, we are 
 perpetually made to see that it is a comparison. Then the ter- 
 minations haft, ig, lich, sam, are never lost sight of; and, as 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 457 
 
 regards the verbs, such prefixes as er t ver, zer, are his very 
 instruments. As respects these, the student of Hegel ought to 
 consult the more advanced grammars. 
 
 A. 
 
 BEING-FOR-SELF AS SUCH. 
 
 Here the notion Being-for-self is completely prescinded. The 
 distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness, which is 
 wholly German, ought to be well borne in mind. The expression 
 appearant is a translation of erscheinend which seems forced on 
 us : we are to see that a certain duality is always implied in this 
 word ; there is an outer show or shine or seeming or appearance 
 which appears other and independent, but which is still only a 
 moment, only ideel in another and inner. Self-consciousness, 
 though further advanced and more concrete than Being-for-self, is 
 still abstract when compared with the Absolute Spirit. 
 
 a. Here-being (There-being), and Being-for-self. b. Being-for- One. 
 
 The distinctions here are subtle, but they are simple, and they 
 are, intelligibly put. In Being-for-self the real and the ideal 
 sides, or the Finite and the Infinite ; that is to say, the Notes and 
 the Voice, as it were, (Daseyn and Seyn), have fallen equal, have 
 fallen identical. So far as there is notification, there is voice ; and 
 so far as there is voice, there is notification ; or so far as there is 
 definite Being, there is infinite Being, &c. There is present but 
 a single ideality, which, at the same time, is rather a single many 
 than a single one. We have before us, so to speak, a sentient 
 material breadth ; so far as there is sentiency there is matter, and 
 so far as there is matter there is sentiency ; the diffusion and the 
 concentration, the extension and the intension, are coincident ; but 
 there is not properly a one on either side there is only a Being- 
 for-One. We have, in fact, only a simple solution, in which 
 solvent and solvend are co-extensive : but such solution cannot be 
 viewed as yet quite One ; it is rather a self-identical breadth than 
 a self-identical One. 
 
 From this there will now be little difficulty in reading (b.) the 
 Being-for-One. ' There is only a Being-for-Other ; ' the notification 
 (to say so) reflected into the voice is but a single system, a single 
 
458 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Being-for-other, and so a Being-for-one. The notification is the 
 sublated other ; the voice is at once sublatedness of this other, and 
 referent of itself to itself as to this sublated other: the voice, then, 
 like the sublated notification, is also only for- One. The conclusion, 
 ' God is, there fore, for himself, so far as he is himself that that is for 
 him,' is not only of vast importance, but of simple intelligibleness. 
 
 KEMARK. 
 
 What is said about the expression peculiar to the Germans when 
 inquiring into the what sort or the quality of any man or thing, 
 What for a man is he ? What for a thing is it ? sheds a quite 
 decisive light on the distinction in question, the Being-for-One. 
 The applicability of the phrase reflexion-into-self here comes out 
 very clear. The general sense of this passage enables us to see 
 that Hegel's fiir is for, and not as ; Seyn-fur-Anderes, therefore, is 
 Being-for-another, not as another. Nevertheless, what is for 
 another is as that other ; what is for consciousness is as conscious- 
 ness, is in the form of consciousness, is consciousness ; there is 
 a small dialectic here that would have pleased Hegel. The sub- 
 stitution of as instead of for in the relative expressions of the 
 paragraph that follows will contribute towards the general light. 
 
 This light is Idealism, and there is that in the second paragraph 
 here as also in the first to render it irresistibly intelligible if 
 not irresistibly convincing. One here can as little resist believing, 
 as resist seeing, the object eclipsed into the subject, and both 
 constitutive only of a single ideal Being-for-One. 
 
 In this Eemark there follow further words of the most pene- 
 trative lucidity as regards idealism in general, and the idealisms 
 of Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, in particular. 
 In these critiques the strokes are few and single, but each is a 
 creation, or each is a destruction. Philosophy is complete or 
 incomplete only as it is complete or incomplete Idealism. This 
 is plain, for the only quest of philosophy is principles, unities; 
 and it ought to be plain to us, as it has been very plain to Hegel, 
 that such quest to be complete can only terminate in the 
 principle, the unity, a result which, as expressing all eclipsed 
 into one, is and can be only Idealism. But has any philosophy 
 hitherto either seen this or done this ? Of any philosophy yet has 
 the principle been anything else than an abstract conception, or 
 just an abstract utterance, in the face of which the actual still 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 459 
 
 smiled unconjured ? By here a stroke and there a stroke, Hegel 
 demonstrates this to be the state of the case both with Spinoza 
 and the Eleatics. Justice is done to the character and to the 
 greater perfection of the scheme of Malebranche, at the same 
 time that this latter is reluctantly undermined and respectfully 
 removed. It is impossible to praise too highly the extraordinarily 
 pregnant, lucid, and comprehensive summary here, or the equally 
 extraordinary dexterity with which, a support or two being un- 
 done, the whole structure is made to crumble and vanish before 
 our eyes. It is as if art wonderfully lit up a sudden universe, 
 as wonderfully, as suddenly, to withdraw it again. 
 
 The critique of Leibnitz is equally masterly. The incongruities, 
 the gaping edges, the incoherences, the general gratuitousness of 
 the entire scheme, are all touched into such intensity of light that 
 the whole vanishes. Such episodes as these assist us greatly as 
 regards an understanding, as well of the painful abstractions of 
 the text, as of the aims and objects of Hegel in general. By this 
 Idealism ' lying more within the limit of the abstract notion/ 
 is probably meant that it is more an affair of abstract notions, and 
 just of subjective imagination in general, than the Idealism of 
 Malebranche, which followed nearer the stream of the actual. 
 ' Should one remind us that this movement of thought falls itself 
 within an ideating monad, &c. : ' the ideating monad alluded to 
 is, of course, Leibnitz himself Leibnitz, too, conceiving other 
 monads the same as himself. * 
 
 The remark ends with a single but effective word as regards 
 the Thing-in-itself of Kant, and the Anstoss of Fichte, the appulse, 
 the unimaginable stone of offence, the reflecting plane from which 
 the Ego's own energy returns to itself as the object. To Kant all 
 that is in the subject is his own, whether in the shape of sensations 
 or in that of categories : Kant, however, postulated still Things-in- 
 themselves as sources of the sensations. Fichte again placed these 
 Things-in-themselves also in the subject under the name of an 
 Anstoss, a source of reflexion, which was in the subject and out of 
 the subject, and performed for the subject all the functions of 
 Things-in-themselves. Manifestly either expedient can only be 
 said to be the Ego's ; it is not traced to, it is not resolved into, the 
 Ego ; it remains a free other or otherwiseness, a negative and in- 
 dependent Ansichseyn ; it is assumed in, but it stays out, and is 
 never sublated by process of proof. To the last, then, there 
 remains dualism, for which there is no cure but Sollen and the 
 
460 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Progressus in Infinitum. Where we translate ' departure is thus 
 made, &c./ the er of the original may seem to be evaded : the 
 antecedent of this er was to Hegel most probably the Anstoss ; 
 but if we go higher for it and assume it to be Anderer Idealismus, 
 we shall get a meaning that includes the expedient of Kant as 
 well. 
 
 c. One. 
 
 The moments collapsing into indistinguishableness, immediacy 
 (Being) results for the Being-for-self a negative immediacy ; 
 Being -for -self is thus Being -for- self -ity, the One. The transi- 
 tion here is very delicate, and the defining phrase, ' the abstract 
 limit of itself, 5 infinitely subtle. We saw this phrase before in 
 the case of the point, and it will be useful to look back and see that 
 the point differs from the One now arrived at. The point, too, 
 is the abstract limit, but in einem Daseyn ; as point, there is a 
 There-being at its side ; here There-being has disappeared. 
 
 The reason for the externalisation or distribution of the moments 
 is also extremely fine : they must appear as separate independent 
 units, seeing that they refer to a one so absolute and negative : it 
 is in the form of negative independent immediacy, and so must 
 they be as its. We have here the umbra of a Thing and its 
 Qualities, and more than that. As regards the six moments them- 
 selves, they will all be found to lie in the one, by reflecting on 
 what its development has brought along with it, and what it now 
 implies. ' Of each determination thus its contrary must be equally 
 said/ This because the six moments will be found to be so paired, 
 and each is as independent as the other, at the same time that 
 each is inseparable from the other. Tality is appropriately used 
 here, as it is a quality dependent on involution with other ; and 
 the determination results in every case here from involution with 
 other, which other must also be equally said. Looking back, the 
 phrase, ' There is only one determination present, the reference to 
 itself of the sullation,' is an exceedingly happy one : the result can 
 only be Immediacy, Being ; Flirsichseyn is Fiirsichseyendes, or 
 Being-for-self is Being-for-self-ity ; and again, as this Immediacy 
 is the result of a Negating, from such a negated Being-for-self-ity, 
 ' all its inner import has disappeared/ ' it is the absolutely abstract 
 limit of itself the One.' The reader may still illustrate all this 
 for himself by a reference to the illustration we have ventured to 
 propose of Voice and its Notification. The Voice, as unity of its 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 461 
 
 own self and its notification (which stands for the Seyn-fur-Eines, 
 the Being-for-One), is Fiirsichseyn, Being-for-self. But there is 
 only one determination present now the reference to itself of the 
 sublation, indistinguishable one-ness, immediacy, Being, a beent 
 immediate one-ness that has resulted from negation ; the voice 
 thus is an absolutely abstract One, and, conceived as Thought or 
 all that is, evidently the One. The voice so placed, say, manifestly 
 implies negation in general ; then two negations, i.e. the negation 
 of itself by the notification which is the first negation, and the 
 negation of this negation back into itself, which is the second. 
 The two things negated, voice and notification, are, thirdly, the 
 same ; fourthly, they are directly opposed ; fifthly, there is refer- 
 ence to self-identity as such in the voice ; and sixthly, it refers 
 negatively to its notification, but still to itself. The voice being 
 thrown down into an absolutely abstract One, these its moments 
 seem thrown off from it, to stand around it externally, independently, 
 but still inseparably. 
 
 B. 
 ONE AND MANY. 
 
 The One being immediate, its moments are as There-beeut. 
 The One still contains the negative (which was lately the Being- 
 for-One), and so, though One, it has still determination. In its 
 reference to Self the One is still ^{/"-determination, and without 
 end, entirely, infinitely. These differences, the determination and 
 the Self-determination, are now, in the immediacy that has come 
 in, beent. Ideality is transformed into Eeality, the hardest and 
 abstractest, One. But the determinateness of the Beingness is 
 as opposed to the infinite negation of the Self-determination ; or 
 what the One is in itself, that it is now in it. The negative, that 
 is, is distinguished as other. The unity is now a reference, and as 
 negative unity it is negation of itself as of another. 
 
 We are to conceive the negative as One and identical with the 
 One. We are to conceive also, nevertheless, that within the One 
 there is a traffic of the One with its own negative, so that also 
 within the One a certain diremption takes place a certain rise of 
 an sich into an ihm, of in itself into in it to the distinction of 
 the One from the One. The One is as One, but it is a negative 
 One : this it is in itself; this it is also in it ; that is, this it is 
 
462 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 distinguishably to its own self; but if it is this distinguishably to 
 its own self, it sets itself as another, ' it is the negation of itself as 
 of another, exclusion of the One as another out of itself.' 
 
 The determination of an absolute One the notification of the voice, 
 as it were is evidently its negative. The immediacy introduces 
 the form of Being, and the moments become external to each other. 
 Even shrunk into its abstraction, the One is intensely beent, and 
 its moments are independently There-beeut. Ideality is Keality. 
 
 The development here is so abstract and subtle, that there is 
 great difficulty in getting the true Vorstellung for the Begriff, the 
 true conception for the notion. A plural outer world is not, how- 
 ever, to be too soon disengaged : the One is to be left in simple 
 traffic with the negative as negative. What puzzles the reader, 
 and even an attentive one, is that, the moments being reciprocal, 
 there is a difficulty of perceiving, which Hegel intends the One to 
 be in as excluding, and which as excluded But the metaphor of 
 the voice is still applicable. Notification and voice are identified 
 in the one unity, the voice but this is immediacy, Being ; notifi- 
 cation and voice both are ; the determinateness of Being stands 
 opposed to the infinite negation ; that is, the notes are opposed to 
 the infinite negation of them the one voice which is negative in 
 that it absorbs them, and infinite in that it is entire, totum et 
 rotundum. What the voice is in itself, it is now in it, or the notes 
 (the negative) rise in it and show, and so on. It just comes to 
 this, the moments re-assert anew their difference ; the determina- 
 tion (the negative) separates from its recipient negation, and fresh 
 distinctions arise. The poles, real and ideal, or material and 
 formal, which have just collapsed, re-extricate themselves for 
 a further collapse on a higher stage. And this is the case 
 universally with Hegel : detach anywhere the smallest particle of 
 his mass, and it will be found magnetic like the mass itself; it 
 will throw itself in poles, one of reality and one of ideality, but 
 neither of which is less real or more ideal than the other ; so that 
 the whole is an absolute ideality that is at the same time an 
 absolute reality. This we see in the very first form, Being, 
 Nothing, and Becoming. At first sight, one thinks of artifice ; one 
 says to oneself, Give me what is at once affirmative and negative, 
 identical and non-identical, and I will make anything you like of 
 it ; but one calms oneself when one looks to the actual and sees 
 what is there above all, when one reflects that these, after all, 
 are but expressions of the one living notion itself which contracts 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 463 
 
 to an atom and expands to a world. The an ihm must be viewed 
 as a certain rise of the an sich into visibility ; the abstract barren 
 bottom of the vase becomes the pregnant middle. What has 
 been just said, too, must be seen to be only preliminary to what 
 follows under the minuscules, a, b, c. 
 
 a. The One in its own self. 
 
 It appears contradictory, after what we have just read, to find 
 the One unalterable ; and the whole industry may seem a mere 
 trifling, a mere playing with words. But what we have just read 
 {immediately under B) is only preliminary, and if we but look 
 close, we shall really find this one sentence that ends in unalter- 
 able to be genuine metaphysic : the Absolute, God, is really so 
 determined when thought contemplates him as the One in its own 
 self, i.e., in its irrespective absoluteness. This may be a hint to 
 the reader that it depends on himself all through, whether the 
 words of Hegel shall remain abstract and words only, or shall 
 become concrete and alive things. The notion, followed only 
 in its naked nerve, is thin to invisibility; and the words that 
 cannot seize it, or rather that do not seize it, for the reader, 
 break asunder into an externality, as idle and contemptible, as 
 trodden nutshells : with him it rests, however, to -look till these 
 broken nutshells cohere into a transparent, plastic menstruum 
 which, not shows, but is the notion : with him it rests to expand 
 the same into Vorstellungen which are the universe ; for all here 
 is sub specie ceternitatis. 
 
 This section (a) is very important in several respects. In the 
 first place, the development is sufficiently simple, and requires 
 not the assistance of repetition in another form, but only the 
 touch of a word here and there. The conclusion drawn of the 
 unchangeableness of the One, contains yet another lesson for us ; 
 it may teach us to remain true to our thoughts, and not to inter- 
 rupt them by the contradictions of a divided reference, the end of 
 which is but foolish wonder, perplexity, doubt, ignorance. 
 
 An ihm selbst ist das Eins uberhaupt there is here in the 
 very position of the words the usual Hegelian occult fullness 
 of thought ; to translate it, ' In its self ' means any ' one ' on the 
 whole, will show this. Perception of this must have been in 
 Hegel's head, otherwise it would have been natural to begin, The 
 one in its own self is the one on the whole, &c. 
 
464 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 The Seyn, Being, that is referred to as indeterminate, but not 
 in the same way as the One, is, of course, that we began with. 
 
 We have here three very instructive specimens of that 
 troublesome word Setzen, which even mutuation does not yet seem 
 to have laid : these are gesetztes Insichseyn, set (settled) Being- 
 within-self ; diess Nichts ist ein Gesetztes, this Nothing is a set issue ; 
 and So diess Mchts gesetzt als in JEinem, this Nothing so-deter- 
 mined and as in a. The French constater would very perfectly 
 render Setzen in all these expressions, and the French constater 
 means to ascertain, to determine, to settle, to establish, to fix, &c. 
 Of these English words, the word determine is the best in the 
 sense of to make out and establish, a sense somewhat different 
 from that contained in it when used to translate bestimmen, in 
 which case it means to specificate, notify, characterise, &c. In the 
 first of the three examples, we have the absolute before us, One, 
 but full ; its circle of determination complete within it, absolutes 
 Bestimmtseyn, Absolute Determined-Ness what is this but con- 
 summate Insichseyn, Insichseyn, Being- within-Self, just as such ? 
 In this sense it is gesetztes, a certain somewhat just definitely- 
 established and determined as that certain somewhat. The Being- 
 within-self, here, therefore, is just the Being-within-self itself 
 Arthur, ' not Lancelot nor another.' Thus it is gesetztes Insichseyn, 
 set (settled) Being-within-self, Being- within-self in actual position, 
 formally posited, Being- within-self as such, Beiug-within-self 
 explicit. In the second instance, it results from the simple incom- 
 posite immediacy of the One that there is Nothing in it, and this 
 nothing is called ein Gesetztes, a set issue. Now the meaning is 
 that, a concrete having gone away before us into an abstract (the 
 concrete Being-within-self into the abstract oneness Nothing), it 
 is for this reason that Nothing here is a Gesetztes; it is put as an 
 Explicit here for another ; the concrete has set or settled into this 
 abstract ; it is a set issue, a settled (together) ^Explicit, a settled 
 consequent or resultant, a ^ consequent or resultant settled-ity : the 
 water in a wink is ice, Being- within-self in a wink is Nothing ; 
 this Nothing is a Gesetztes it results from, it replaces another, 
 it is an Explicit. It may also be named a Determined or a Deter- 
 minate, this having determined into that. From all this, it is 
 evident that the common meaning of the words will not suffice us 
 here, unless we can contrive to immerse them ever and anon in 
 the secret light of Hegel's own thinking. Ein Gesetztes, then, is 
 the exponent consequent or the resultant Explicit of a transition, 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 465 
 
 almost as if it were an ex-occultate. The third gesetzt simply means 
 constituted : so constituted a Nothing in a or in a one is just the 
 void. The reader will observe, however, that the very same pro- 
 cess is pictured in this constituted as in the other words. The 
 word mutuate, too, the process of transition or mediation ^it 
 involves being considered, will convey the meaning of every one 
 of the three expressions : in the first, we have mutuated Being- 
 within-self, in the sense of something formally mutuated, formally 
 expressed or stated after process in a word, it is Being- within- 
 self express (and the direct or derivative sense must here be seen 
 to coquet with the ordinary one) ; in the second, the Nothing is 
 very evidently a mutuate, an overt representative of another after 
 process here, too, in a word, an expression (in the double sense 
 and of another) ; and in the third, ' this nothing so mutuated or 
 expressed' conveys the same meaning on the same terms. Again 
 the meaning of setzen has grown on us. 
 
 It will scarcely be necessary to make any remark on the ex- 
 quisite felicity of the extrication of the void or vacuum. Only 
 the inexperienced reader, always struggling painfully against t/fie 
 feeling of being lost, may once again in his bewilderment cry 
 out, But what is this what does it all mean ? One thing it does 
 not mean, and that is creation what is commonly meant by 
 creation. Creation, in this sense, does not exist to a Hegel. It 
 is not to be supposed, then, that Hegel has the slightest desire 
 here to make the vacuum to create empty space. This is Logic ; 
 we have to do here only with thoughts ; there is no question here 
 of a single dust-atom, nor even of the space it might occupy. 
 But we have here, nevertheless, the genetic thought of a void. 
 There is evidently progress in this world ; but progress is a thought, 
 and cannot exist in outward matter. This alone is a guarantee of 
 the ideal fundamen, of the intellectual, of the spiritual nature of 
 the absolute of the world. Let us assume it so, then. Thought 
 is the absolute, or to use the common parlance the nature of 
 things (natura rerum) is thought. But thought being this, and 
 the life of thought being progress, a beginning is postulated. But 
 this beginning is only thought is; that is, the beginning is 
 Being, Seyn. Thought now starting thus with itself and with 
 this as beginning evolves out of its own necessity by virtue 
 and that is necessity of its own triple flexions (which flexions on 
 a certain considerably advanced stage of the evolution name 
 themselves simple apprehension, judgment, and reason) the whole 
 
 2G 
 
466 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 articulation of its own innate constitution. Now through Hegel 
 we have got so far on with this series of articulation or articulate 
 series ; so far that we have reached the thought of the vacuum 
 the development of an actual There-beent vacuum is another 
 affair, and has yet to be waited for. Let the reader, then, see 
 that as yet we have to do only with thoughts, and as they evolve 
 themselves out of each other by their own necessity (which means, 
 in obedience to the native flexions of the concrete notion) ; but 
 let him see as well that these thoughts are the thoughts of things 
 and that they constitute what is essential in things, that without 
 which things were not, or that without which it would be im- 
 possible to say what these things were. This ought to assist the 
 reader to orient himself. 
 
 b. The One and the Void. 
 
 ' The One is the Void as the abstract reference of the negation 
 to itself:' here the reader ought to see that this 'negation' is 
 thought itself. Thought is the One, but the reference of a One to 
 itself can only be abstract ; that is, this reference is the reference 
 of a negation to itself ; thought in self -reference as only One 
 has, so to speak, the sentiment of negation, though sentiment as 
 sentiment belongs to another sphere. The mechanism by which 
 the dif-ference is express, explicit, patent, or simply understood and 
 accepted, is very fine, and gesetzt is again illustrated. ' Has again 
 reached a state of There-being ; ' the original is simply ' has 
 reached a There-being,' and Hegel would probably not have liked 
 the addition * state of ; ' but, perhaps, it will assist realisation of 
 the position, and not, on the whole, injure the development ; for 
 ' to reach a There-being ' is veritably to reach a palpable Here- 
 ness or There-ness, a definitely relative, actual, existential state, 
 though most of these words present themselves only later in the 
 development. * The One and the Empty (Void, Vacuum) have as 
 their common sinple basis, the negative reference to self ; ' this is 
 exquisitely simple, but it is a flash that lights up at once what 
 was impossible to Sir William Hamilton, who could never con- 
 trive to struggle out of the hole of this abyss the very infini- 
 tude of space. Here-being and There-being are of course both 
 for Daseyn, and though neither can absolutely represent that 
 word, the opposition of the two phrases may picturesquely assist 
 here. Daseyn is always a definite a palpable Being-ness in 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 467 
 
 relation to other. The advantage of Daseyn is, that Hegel gets 
 out his usual irony in it a sense that coquets between its ordin- 
 ary meaning of this Being here below, this sublunary life, this 
 mortal state, and its literal meaning of being-there. Here-- 
 being were to be preferred in English, perhaps, because it seems 
 best to preserve the equivoque. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The Atomistic. 
 
 We shall in the first place supplement this Eemark by trans- 
 lating the form in which it appears in the third edition of the 
 ' Encyclopaedic/ There it runs thus : 
 
 The Atomistic Philosophy is that in which the Absolute is determined as 
 Being-for-self, as One, and as plurality of Ones. The Kepulsion which mani- 
 fests itself in the notion of the One, has been also assumed by it as the primary 
 and original force ; not Attraction, however, but what is simply the Thought- 
 less Chance, it is, which is to bring the resultant plurality together again. 
 The One being fixed as One, its combination with any others is certainly to 
 be regarded as something quite external. The Vacuum, which is assumed as 
 other principle to the atoms, is Repulsion itself conceived as the beent nothing 
 between the atoms. The modern Atomistic and Physical Science still 
 retains this principle has given up atoms in so far as it takes to diminutive 
 particles, molecules ; in this way it certainly assists sensuous conception, but 
 has wholly abandoned the determination of thought. Further, a force of 
 Attraction being added to that of Repulsion, the antithesis has been certainly 
 made complete, and we have given ourselves much credit for the discovery of 
 these so-called forces of nature. But their mutual connection the concrete 
 and true interest here requires to be rescued from the obscurity and con- 
 fusion, in which it has been still left even in Kant's Metaphysical Elements 
 of a Science of Nature. In recent times, the atomistic view has become in 
 Politics still more important than in Physics. According to it, the Will of 
 the Individuals as such is the Principle of the State, the source of Attraction 
 (Association) is the Particularity of our Needs and Greeds, and the Universal, 
 the State itself, is the external relation of Contract. 
 
 These episodes, which the Remarks constitute, are always both 
 agreeable and auxiliary. Here, for example, this searching 
 critique of atomism reflects a light both of meaning and import- 
 ance back on the few abstract words which we have just read in 
 the preceding paragraph. Such original incisiveness of eye 
 extends of itself a warrant of truth to the Hegelian products, 
 however trifling they may sometimes seem when externally looked 
 at. There is matter in the Remark as extracted from the 
 
468 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Encyclopaedic of later development than the position on which we 
 as yet stand in the Logic ; and the reader will do well to return 
 to it when he shall have completed Quality. The greater fullness 
 of the Political allusion is the reason which has placed it here. 
 Hegel is always content to say the least possible, and here he says 
 no word but simply places the Political Confession (Profession) of 
 the day side by side with Atomism. This side-by-side is quite 
 sufficient to justify the general attitude of the present Germans, 
 whose slowness of political movement depends on quite other 
 reasons than that cumbrousness and unwieldiness which our own 
 scribblers lofty in their constitutional superiority compassionately 
 ascribe to them. What Hegel's mere indication suggests is con- 
 crete wisdom, not the idle abstractions of the conceit to know 
 better than its neighbour and than all its neighbours. 
 
 The (main) Kemark contains no point of difficulty, unless that 
 bearing on the Ground of Motion. This ground is placed in the 
 negative reference of the One to its Negative. Now we have already 
 said that the voice, as absorbing the notification, could be named 
 the negation of the latter, as also that this same latter constituted, 
 as determination, the negative of the former. Where we are in 
 the development, then, the voice is One, and its determination its 
 notification, is its; but in this abstract oneness (we do not stop 
 for the particular development) the One refers negatively to its 
 own negative (which is at bottom itself, though now presentant as 
 there). But negative reference to another is Repulsion, and Repulsion 
 of ^another is Motion. 
 
 c. More or Many Ones. 
 EEPULSION. 
 
 The first paragraph accomplishes at full, what we have sketched 
 in one or two of the preceding sentences, the extrication of the 
 determination, the negative of the One from the One as an Other ; 
 and this amounts to more Ones. 
 
 We may remark that this extrication is pretty much the secret 
 of Hegel. There is an original duality which is also not two, but 
 one ; this is the original antithesis, the original reciprocity, the 
 absolute, the notion, the single necessity, or rather this is the 
 Protoplast of Necessity itself : the one and its determination are 
 two ; but the one is the determination, and the determination ia 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 469 
 
 the one. What is then, is God, the Absolute Spirit that in itself 
 is thought. But thought is just the notion, the reciprocal unity, 
 the necessity which we have just seen : it distinguishes itself from 
 itself ; it is, and its determination also is , but it is the infinite 
 negation that absorbs its determination, and its determination is' 
 the negative, the finite negative of it ; it then is the negation of 
 the negation, that in which each side is the negative of the other : 
 in one word, this is the pure negativity. The One sets itself: this 
 is the whole secret. Or we may say, it sets or settles into itself. 
 We may conceive thought as a successive congealment into another. 
 Water congeals into ice. The ice is seen and may be supposed 
 to be explicit, expressed up out of the now occult other, the water. 
 The water seems to have gone together into the ice, or to have set 
 or settled into the ice. This settled, viewed in its double meaning, 
 the one from without and the other from within, is pretty much 
 Hegel's gesetzt, which bears literally the force of set or settled 
 together into, and, applied to thought, that of determined, estab- 
 lished, decided, &c. It is this life of the one, then, an explication, 
 exposition, or even an extrusion and ejection, which has led Hegel 
 to the use of this peculiar word Setzen. All is a Gesetztseyn, a 
 mutuation or promutuation of the infinite One that ever is. There 
 is (to say so) but the voice and its notification. The voice is the 
 absolute Seyn ; and the notification is its infinite Werden. The 
 universe is but the glory of God ; existence, but the sport, the 
 play of himself with himself. Iji an extract from Kant, we saw 
 creation, Schopfung, alluded to in its original sense of scooping or 
 drawing-up. This may have proved suggestive to Hegel, who 
 views creation as but this sublation of God up out of himself, this 
 voluntary involuntary scooping or drawing-up of God himself out 
 of himself. To say, then, that creation, or that existence, is but 
 Gesetztseyn, settlement, has its own picturesque truth of meaning, 
 whether we view the process as taking place in the physical or in 
 the intellectual world. The process of the Logic, then, is to be 
 conceived as the process of God ; and Hegel meant no metaphor, 
 but literal truth, when he named this process ' the demonstration 
 of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature 
 and a single finite spirit/ Now of this whole process, the one 
 secret is the secerning of the One's determination out of the One 
 in the end, indeed, to restore it again, leaving but the Absolute 
 Spirit and his eternal and infinite life. The negation turns on its 
 
470 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 negative ; that is, settles into its Seyn, its Being, which is at first 
 necessarily indefinite Hence, the whole ! 
 
 As regards the expression, ' as they stand in a, or in one refer- 
 ence, their difference is gesetzt? the meaning may be, as the Two 
 are in One, their difference is express (expressed) ; the sense being 
 an equivoque of physical or direct expression, and of intellectual 
 or reflected expression. The difference is settled, inferred, under- 
 stood, taken for granted, accepted, &c. A and B are married 
 people, but they have separated : when it is said the cause of this 
 separation is not A, then B may be said to have settled or to be 
 settled, or to be ex-pressed as the cause. An effect may be viewed 
 as the ex-pression of its cause. Ice is an expression of water. 
 In manipulating mathematical formulse, we get new expressions. 
 Whether physically or metaphysically, then, the overt mutuate of 
 another after process is the expression of this other which is now 
 occult occult in the ex-pression. What A implies is express or 
 explicit when overtly set, settled, or determined as B: A, then, 
 ex-presses or determines B, and vice versd. The process always is 
 a settling, setting, or congealment of A to the ex-pression of B 
 this whether in nature or in thought ; it is a reciprocal occultation 
 into appearance, a reciprocal sun-setting into a reciprocal sun- 
 rise. 
 
 The reference of the negation to the negation as of another to 
 its other, this may be put, the reference of the One in its negation 
 to its negation as, &c. * The Being-for-self of the One is essentially 
 the Ideality of the There-being and of the Other ; ' the Voice is 
 essentially the Ideality of the Notification, which in the develop- 
 ment is now ex-pressed as There-being and another; 'it refers 
 itself not as to another, but only to itself ; ' the general reference 
 of the voice, though its notification is now distinguished and ex- 
 pressed as so-and-so, is still and even in that regard to itself. 
 Still the voice is fixed as one, as one that is per se, a direct 
 existence ; consequently, its negative reference as to its notifica- 
 tion is as to a beent, and, the negativity of the reference con- 
 sidered, to a There-beent and another. But this other, the notifi- 
 cation, is still essentially reference of the one, the voice, to its own 
 self : it is not then indeterminate negation, not the mere void ; it 
 is itself one a plurality of ones. 
 
 The next paragraph is easy. It (this last step) is not quite a 
 Becoming ; a relative Becoming, proceeding, that is, from Being, 
 ought to come to Nothing, but here it is One coming to Ones. 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 471 
 
 The one that is referred, the notification, has the negative in its 
 reference to the voice, and vice versd. What we have, then, is 
 only the one's own inherent reference the inherent reference 
 of the voice itself. But this inner reference implies duality ; that 
 is, the one, the voice, repels itself in the shape of the notification, 
 from itself in the shape of the voice, or the One's own negative 
 Self-reference is Repulsion. (Evidently Self-reference must always 
 be of this nature where there is a One possessing a Determination, 
 an articulate circle of manifestations.) 
 
 ' This repulsion thus as position : ' position is, of course, here for 
 Setzen, and may be varied by settlement, ex-pression, ex-position t 
 explicit-ment, or any other similar expedient that may be calculated 
 to convey a notion which now ought, at least, to be tolerably 
 familiar. This repulsion is evidently that belonging to, or 
 inherent in, the notion itself ; it occurs within the notion, it is 
 an sick or ansichseyend, in itself, or in-itself -bee'nt. The difference 
 of the repulsion of outer reflexion is plain ; this latter presents 
 itself as an already existent mutual holding-off of Ones just so 
 found. 'Schon vorhanden,' there is a great temptation to 
 translate this, already to the fore; this Scotch phrase accurately 
 conveys the equivoque of the Vor, which is before both in space 
 and time not that there is any question as yet of actual space 
 and time. 
 
 The becoming of the plurality cannot be called as yet so much 
 a being produced as a being set, ^or as a becoming set, where of 
 course set is the usual expressed, explicit, &c. The fulcrum here is 
 still the independence or absoluteness of the One and of each 
 One : it is only its own self it repels, and this is vice versd. Each 
 is an equal bee'nt in independent reciprocity. 
 
 They are thus mutually 'prae-set,' as it were expressed or 
 ex-plitit, or so settled-prae, i.e., settled so beforehand, and that 
 amounts to pre-(sup~)-posed : set, (sup)-posed, ex-pressed by the 
 inherent repulsion of the One in its own self ; prae (or pre), that 
 is, that this was an affair of beforehand, or already there, and so 
 an arrangement * set as not set,' which phrase for curt incisive 
 vigour cannot be surpassed. Their origin through ex-pression is 
 sublated; they are equally bee'nt, equally self-referent, or just 
 equally self-referent beeuts. 
 
 In such entire isolation, they are not other to other, not for one 
 another. Any reference between them is but the void determined 
 too not as limit, but simply as non-being. Virtually the thing is 
 
472 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 different, but this is the way in which it is now set. It is 
 competent to some one to object here, * Ay, just so ; it is always 
 a mere juggle, never absolute truth; to accomplish what you 
 want, you hide something and show something ; and then, again, 
 when you change your mind and want to go on to something else, 
 you show what you have hidden, and hide what you have shown.' 
 The objection has its own plausibility, but it must fall to the 
 ground, if the whole advance of civilisation, the whole progress of 
 society, the whole life of thought itself can be shown to depend 
 on, and consist of, nothing but this onwards and onwards of 
 settlement after settlement, expression after expression, determination 
 after determination, position after position ; in which each new 
 apparent not only replaces but implies its predecessor and all its 
 predecessors. There is but a single life in the universe, and that 
 from bubble on the beach to the sun in the centre, or from this 
 dead sun itself to the Spirit that lives, is a perpetual Setting. 
 (It is curious that this word, directly to us a going down, should be 
 now, indirectly to us, through Hegel, a rising up: this is but 
 again the infinite exchange, an ebb and flow that has still an 
 onward, the Systole-Diastole of the Living One.) 
 
 The repulsion of the One from itself (the repulsion on the part 
 of the voice of its own notification from itself), is the explication 
 (the oppression) of that which in itself the One (the voice) is. 
 But Infinitude (the one absolute infinite voice), as explicated 
 or laid asunder (auseinander), is here a-come-out-of-itself infinitude 
 (the endless units of the endless notification of the endless or 
 absolute voice) ; but it is come out of itself through the immediacy 
 of the infinite, of the One (the voice becoming immediate to 
 itself just as a One has withdrawn itself to itself from its notifica- 
 tion, which is just thrown off from it as an endlessly Different 
 and External). This infinitude (the original is simply Sie, and 
 may refer to repulsion, but we prefer to refer to the come-out-of- 
 itself infinitude; the repulsion, indeed, would involve the same 
 reference) is quite as much a simple reference of the One to One 
 (the endless notification is still the one voice), as rather the 
 absolute referencelessness of the One (this the independence of 
 the endless notification as in the negative reference, i.e. as 
 distinguished from the voice); the former as according to the 
 simple affirmative reference of the One to itself (even in its 
 notification), the latter as according to the same reference as 
 negative (voice and notification being distinguished and separated). 
 
I 
 
 QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 473 
 
 Or the plurality of the Ones is the own proper setting (expression) 
 of the One (this in its repulsion, as negative reference to its own 
 determination, which as regards our * voice ' is the notification) ; 
 the One is nothing but the negative reference of the One to 
 itself (this both as regards the universal, the voice, and the par- 
 ticular, the notification this single phrase, indeed, is a statement 
 adequate to the whole case, and takes in both aspects), and this 
 reference, therefore, the One itself, is the many ones (this is 
 plain from the last parenthetic comment the voice is the noti- 
 fication, the notification the voice, or the negative self-reference 
 of the voice implies what it negates, &c.). But just thus the 
 plurality is directly external to the One (the units of the notifica- 
 tion are external to the voice) ; for the One is but the sublation 
 of the Otherwiseness (the one voice brings its endless brood of 
 notification under its own identity*), the repulsion (i.e. of its 
 determination, the notification) is its reference to self (is the 
 voice) and (so) simple equality with itself. The plurality of the 
 ones (the endless units of the notification) is infinitude as uncon- 
 cernedly self-producing contradiction (i.e. of the one voice, and of 
 the endless many of the notification, which, viewed here sub specie 
 cetemitatis, or as the absolute, can only be named a contradiction 
 which infinitely and unconcernedly reproduces itself : this para- 
 graph is as a mirror of the absolute and actual which may be 
 looked into infinitely. 
 
 KEMARK. 
 
 TJie Leibnitzian Monad. 
 
 Leibnitz, in his Monad, seemed to have reached the conception 
 of an ideating absolute ; but he immediately fell into gross 
 inconsistencies and gratuitous incumbrances. For instance, after 
 assuming such absolute, he unnecessarily assumed a plurality 
 of such. This plurality involves the repulsion which we have just 
 considered ; but Leibnitz, without thought of this repulsion, con- 
 ceived it only as an external, abstract, indifferent plurality. In it 
 the Ones were without relation, and it itself, wholly undeduced, 
 was simply assumed as there and given. The Monad has indeed an 
 inner plurality, but this affects not its character as indifferent 
 One, for which any others are as good as non-existent. There is 
 no thought in Leibnitz of deriving an outer many from an inner 
 repulsion. The Atomistic again possesses not any thought of 
 
474 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ideality at all. Its atom is but dry individuality, wholly outer, 
 without a within, which might unite the genetic twain of form 
 and matter. Its plurality, indeed, is supposed to possess mutual 
 connexion ; but this connexion is not wrought out consistently 
 and satisfactorily. The plurality of Leibnitz is so simply by prim- 
 ordial decree, so that any mutual connexion in it falls into the 
 monad of monads, or just into the reflecting philosopher. 
 
 The last touch is quite Hegelianly caustic, and the whole critique 
 smacks of the usual iron, austere exhaustiveness. 
 
 C. 
 
 KEPULSION AND ATTRACTION. 
 a. Exclusion of the One. 
 
 We spoke of the ' genetic Twain of Form and Matter,' never- 
 theless prematurely be it understood, for the Twain have yet a 
 considerable road to travel before they assume these names. Still, 
 it is true that the One before us (the voice) stands for form, as 
 the many (the notification) stand for matter. We note this as 
 well to indicate this prematureness, as to warn the reader not to 
 understand by matter, as is usually done, mere earth, mere in- 
 organic stuffing. The notification stands in no such relation to 
 the voice ; indeed, there is a mode of looking to which the notifi- 
 cation would appear the form of the voice, its native form and 
 circle of forms : still the voice has no other matter than that 
 form; that form is what it contains or holds in it ; but it does 
 not simply contain it, or hold it in it it is identified with it ; if 
 it is matter, it is matter absorbed and assimilated, matter organised 
 and incorporated into the voice ; it is the voice itself, but so viewed 
 as contained or held in ; it is its intent, its Inhalt ; and this is 
 the proper name for matter when, as above, opposed to form. 
 All this, as has been said, however, is premature. 
 
 The first paragraph transforms active repulsion into neutral 
 exclusion. The One (the voice) self-referent, the for-One (the 
 notification) self-referent, both are simply mutually exclusive. 
 This is the manifest contradiction, that the infinite One (the 
 infinite voice relatively to its notification the latter also, indeed, 
 relatively to the former) is set or expressed in an immediacy of 
 Being. From this immediacy the repulsion ceases to find itself 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 475 
 
 repulsion ; it just finds what it repels there before it. This is 
 exclusion. 
 
 The plurality, though determined as mere plurality and not 
 relatively others, have still in the repulsion their common con- 
 nexion. The amber at once disjoins and conjoins the flies. 
 
 The repulsion, then, is the means of establishing them in a 
 Daseyn, in a definite relative There-being or Here-being mutually. 
 This is plain by a reference to the voice and its notification, but in 
 the form to which both are now reduced infinitude in immediacy? 
 an infinitude of Ones. Their repulsion is their common reference; 
 for each is what the other is ; or this mutual repulsion is the ex- 
 pressed Daseyn, relative finite existence, of the many Ones, for 
 their mutual There-being amounts to that it is a Here-being that 
 is also There. 'They negate themselves (each other mutually)/ 
 &c. : this duplicity of translation is necessary in order to convey 
 fully Sie negiren sich gegenseitig. ' They set each other as such 
 that they are only for-One/ each takes the other to be no 
 absolute but a relative that has its affair in a One ; they, then, in 
 a body are the Being-for-One of the Being-for-Self. ' But they 
 negate just as much at the same time this, that they are only for 
 One ; they repel this their Ideality and are! All now is Infinitude 
 out of itself, voice and notification an infinitude of notes mutually 
 There-beent an infinitude of There-beent voices, then each 
 would be for itself would negate its only Being-for-One, would 
 repel its Ideality and simply le. The One is Being-for-self and 
 Being-for-One indistinguishably a thoroughly independent voice. 
 But each note is bee'nt in the many notes ; the Being-for-One, 
 then, as it is determined in the exclusion, is therefore a Being- 
 for-Other. That is, the single note, after all, is not independent, 
 but relative ; its Being is not, as it was seen at first in the Being- 
 for-Self, a simple Being-for-One, but in very truth a Being-for- 
 Other. This is really what the exclusion brings us to in the 
 development. But observe the full force of such words as 
 Explication and Exclusion: they must be taken at once in 
 reflected sense as they are, and in direct sense as & folding out and 
 a closing, which closing is at the same time a closing out. The 
 contradiction which the word involves in itself a closing, a 
 movement inwards, which is a closing out, a movement outwards 
 and so of the others is put to full account. The voice counter 
 the notification, a many which it is, but which it also siiblates, is 
 ' Wider-spruch, contradiction unconcernedly producing itself:' we 
 
476 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 see here the same verbal equivoque. But to return each note 
 then is relative, is not for itself, but for One, and that another 
 one. We can carry the image to the mutual relations of finite 
 spirits, Men; in fact, what is here is the One Spirit, and the 
 Many Spirits which are, or which, indeed, is What is. 
 
 The double side in the repulsion or mutual negation, at once of 
 self-preservation and of dissolution, is plainly brought out. 
 
 The next paragraph has the same theme. The dialectic seems 
 too trenchant ; but its effect is mitigated by the explanation of the 
 next again paragraph that it was our comparison. 
 
 The many notes are, this their mutual reference presupposes ; 
 and they are so far as they at once negate and negate the negating. 
 The double edge all through is subtle but not difficult to an 
 attention that will apply itself. The double edge is this : in that 
 each is negated, it is implied as ideal ; but in that it negates it is 
 real : now both characters come to each here ; no note of the 
 many but negates, no note of the many but is negated. 
 
 The paragraph that effects the transition into Attraction is 
 sufficiently intelligible. 
 
 EEMAKK. 
 
 The Unity of the One and the Many. 
 
 This is in every way a deep and admirable Eemark. The nature 
 of self-will, of the bad, is most luminously indicated ; and a most 
 important lesson is thus read to us. In our selfishness, we lose 
 ourselves, at the very moment that we hug ourselves in the 
 thought that it is but ourselves we gain. Even in that we would 
 turn only to our own selves, it is only on our own selves that we 
 have absolutely turned the back. The one is the many, the many 
 is the one. Reconciliation, then, is to abandon the One, which is 
 but the negativity of self; or rather not to abandon it, but to 
 turn it towards the many, identifying that which it assumes to 
 be only its negative, as its own genuine and true self. What we 
 have here, placed in connexion with that atomism, political and 
 other, which has been already mentioned, yields a moral or a 
 social atomism ; and such is the historical attitude of humanity 
 at this very instant of time. Each man nowadays seeks but 
 himself : everywhere it is but one universal rivalry of individuality, 
 and that only an external one. Self-interest, in the form of one's 
 own individual self-interest, in the form of self-will that is, of 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 477 
 
 caprice, has been proclaimed the only wisdom, and has all but 
 received even legal enactment. No wonder, then, that at this 
 moment the whole social fabric should be felt to totter. No 
 article of material existence but is sapped by self-will: we are 
 poisoned when we would be fed ; we are in rags when we would 
 be clothed. Our houses smother us, our bridges break into chasms 
 that devour us, even our very roads rise up as monsters to extir- 
 pate us and all this because we have called to self-interest to 
 brand its consuming mark into them. Nor is it otherwise with 
 the spiritual side : self-interest, being allowed the right, has 
 seized it too, and made it material. Whatever is spiritual 
 nowadays is, just as whatever is material, a commodity. But 
 look to the result a universal revolt of the will of the unit 
 against the will of the One ! The best proof of this state of the 
 fact lies in this that each one sees and censures this condition 
 of things in others, and is absolutely blind to it in himself. The 
 very mistress, for example, who shall this moment be loud against 
 the revolt of domestic servants, shall, the next, be equally loud 
 for the revolt of the sex. * The injustice to woman commences at 
 her birth : the parents regret to find her not a boy ! ' Are we always, 
 then, to separate the difference and turn against it ? Nay, at the 
 very moment that we turn against the difference, as but a relative,, 
 as not the absolute at that very moment is it not the longing of 
 our whole soul actually to make absolute this very difference? 
 This we, this atom we call we, is a very good atom and the very 
 best of atoms, make it immortal and absolute by all means ; but 
 the difference ! is our atom but the difference, and is it only against 
 our atom we turn when we turn against the difference ? Yes, it is 
 even so ; we do but separate our own difference and turn upon it \ 
 and another Menenius were very acceptable now to persuade us 
 again into the identity but the differentiated identity of the 
 concrete. The social atomism which sapped and dissipated Eome, 
 the mightiest empire that time had ever seen, was animal enough ; 
 but what we witness now is baser. The coldest, shallowest, 
 meanest, every way the most miserable atomism of which universal 
 history can speak, is commercial atomism, politico-economical 
 atomism, the atomism of Manchester. And in this atomism, 
 the very arrangement which it demands as best, is it, let us say 
 even the superior atom, so very much at its ease ? Rebuked 
 however superior it may be by yet a superior superiority, on 
 'change, in the street, at church, in its newspaper, it retires from 
 
478 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the misery of the day to that solitary evening hour solitary, but 
 alone the rose of life to it when, gnawing at still a difficulty, and 
 not yet enough, and comparing the ash of the present with the 
 live-coal of the past, it once again admires the vanity of vanities, 
 and bitterly mellows itself towards the oblivion and the elysium 
 of an eight hours' sleep ! * 
 
 But there is more here than an exposure of atomism immor- 
 tality itself is here ! The pure notion has in purity followed 
 its own movement, its own native dialectic : the One is Many, and 
 the Many One ; the Differences are in Identity, and Identity is in 
 the Differences. It is impossible fully to expose to a reader all 
 the burthen of these wonderful paragraphs : each is but a water- 
 drop, that and nothing more; but to him that looks into it, it 
 radiates into that which is. 
 
 ' Each is excluding the others/ sounds not quite satisfactorily ; 
 still it is literal and intelligible. 
 
 b. The one One of Attraction. 
 
 This section is sufficiently exoteric to require no comment. 
 Towards the end, the German word which is translated extension 
 is Umfang : now Umfang is opposed to Inhalt, as logical extension 
 to logical comprehension ; but here, nevertheless, something of its 
 literal meaning, its fang urn, its grasp about, is also to be seen. 
 
 The reader ought not to fail to see here, however, the divine 
 sense, how all is sub specie ceternitatis ; and, indeed, it ought to be 
 matter of wonder to him, how a simple prosecution of the pure 
 notion should be able to lead to such concrete wisdom the peace of 
 reconciliation, the establishment of all those great religious truths 
 which, at least lately, have had the character rather of aspirations 
 than of known facts. Clues to the attitude indicated may be 
 attempted to be conveyed thus : In the first paragraph of the 
 preceding section (a), what is the full force of that 'exhibited 
 contradiction, Infinitude ex-pressed into Immediacy of Being;' 
 or in the last paragraph, same section, what is the full force of 
 that ' going-together- with-self ?' The reflexion must be seen to 
 be double : if a consciousness goes together with its own self, it 
 has certainly its own self inwardly ; but in going together with 
 its own self, it has also gone together with its own self outwardly ; 
 
 * One asks oneself in 1897, was, then, that somewhat cold and thin bogie now 
 really so warm and stout in 1864 ? 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 479 
 
 the contracting inwardly into its own abstract negativity is a 
 proportional dilating outwardly into its own self as the differences, 
 its differences, the objects, the seen outward concrete. Thus 
 doubly is it a going together with its own self; and thus is it 
 the dis-played contra-diction Infinitude unfolded into the Im- 
 mediacy of Being. Here again, under (b), the full force of the 
 one One that is the realised Ideality must not be missed. In a 
 word, he who has an eye to see may know how to discern himself 
 henceforth secure in the finite infinite, the relative absolute, with 
 God assured to him, immortality assured to him, free-will assured 
 to him, and all this by virtue of the simple notion. 
 
 c. The Reference of Repulsion and Attraction. 
 
 Beziehung, the German word for reference, has a stronger sense 
 than its English counterpart, amounting to a le-drawing, as it 
 were a drawing together, and almost equivalent to connexion 
 What we have here, then, are repulsion and attraction in mutual 
 connexion ; and by these words we are to understand, not a merely 
 physical repulsion and attraction, but a metaphysical also, a 
 repulsion and attraction sub specie ceternitatis, in the realm of 
 thought, in the world of Spirits. 
 
 The apparent immediacy of the repulsion, to the foundation of 
 the self-dependent Ones, with the apparent in the first instance 
 externality of the attraction, is tjie first point ; and to what all 
 this in rerum natura is directed must now be evident. Both, 
 then, appear, in the first instance, as abstract, as per se. 
 
 Eepulsion, thus alone, would be simply the irretrievable dissipa- 
 tion of the Ones. But thus, again, the Ones were not, as they are 
 determined to be, repellent, excludent. The repulsion still implies 
 reference; what excludes is still in liaison with that which is 
 excluded. But this is attraction ; repulsion itself implies attrac- 
 tion. Abstract repulsion, and bee'nts only s^/-referent, are thus 
 negated. 
 
 Kepulsion and attraction, then, at first view independent, are, 
 in effect, mutually presuppositious, the one of the other. 
 
 Each has precisely the same constitution; each is the other; 
 and each is so, not through the other, but through itself. 
 
 They are so while merely relative. 
 
 The implication of repulsion and the Ones is again made 
 prominent. 
 
480 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Attraction is similarly gone into ; and its implication of Many, 
 even while it would set ideality or the One, made equally evident. 
 This, in fact, is the true metaphysic of the necessity of thought, 
 i.e. of existence, that there should be at once and both One and 
 Many : so some of the weightiest of human interests are thus 
 brought to a settlement. 
 
 Each negates itself and sets itself as the other, and the other of 
 itself. The attraction of the There-beent units is their ideality, 
 the setting of the One. But in the One, attraction simply sublates 
 itself. To set a One is to be the negative of itself, that is, 
 repulsion. The thoughts here are sufficiently fine ; but they are 
 also sufficiently obvious, and sufficiently fact. The words are few 
 and abstract ; but if they be gazed into, and in the proper mood 
 of mind, they will expand to the concrete and that, too, with 
 resolution of the most fundamental problems. 
 
 ' But not only is the In itself as such long since gone over into 
 the Being-for-self : ' we are to consider that the development has 
 advanced, and, moreover, that this development is actuality, and 
 not mere expression of a book. 
 
 For this concluding paragraph of Being-for-self, in which Quality, 
 completed, passes over into its opposite, Quantity, let us avail 
 ourselves again of our metaphor, the Voice ; but let us conceive 
 this time that it is a conscious voice. Well, this voice is a One 
 that repels from itself its own self (in its determination, its 
 notification) as its absolute (i.e. abstract) otherwiseness (the 
 Many). Its series of notes is just its absolute otherwiseness ; but 
 also its abstract otherwiseness, in that it is abstractly looked at, 
 and not, in that reference, identified with itself. But in that 
 it refers itself to this sequent notification, negatively, or as 
 to its non-being, it sublates it, it refers itself in it only to 
 itself. The voice is thus but a mediation of repulsion and attrac- 
 tion, of a negative reference to itself as setting the notification, and 
 of an affirmative (yet negative) reference to itself as sullating it. 
 The voice, then, is just this becoming, in which its form as im- 
 mediate, as beent, as beginning, as catching-on (dass es anfdngt), 
 as note in the notification, and equally its form as result as the 
 one, immediate, excludent voice have disappeared. The process, 
 then, which the voice is, assumes the voice itself always as sullated : 
 in the reference outwards, it encounters not itself, but its other- 
 wiseness, its notification, there then it is sublated ; and in its 
 reference inwards it is again sublated, in that it sublates into itself 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 481 
 
 that really which it is its notification. The sublation as con- 
 sciousness is a relative sublation, a reference which is a different 
 repulsion and attraction at once ; or it repels its note (object) as 
 note, and attracts its note (object) as its. But consciousness 
 becomes self-consciousness, or the conscious voice becomes the 
 self-conscious voice ; that is, through negation of the mutual 
 externality, the mutual immediacy and There-beingness, it goes 
 over into the infinite (the unended, the endless) reference of 
 mediation, or re-mediation. Again as result, then, the self-con- 
 scious voice (notification included, notification just it) is that 
 becoming that in the retentionlessness of its moments (its notes) 
 is a collapse, a precipitation, a going together with itself into sim- 
 ple immediacy a simple immediacy at once as absolute and 
 infinite or a simple immediacy at once of its own absoluteness as 
 voice, and of its own infiniteness as notification. But voice and 
 notification gone together into this mutual indifference an indif- 
 ference both of One and Many an indifference in which any 
 reference to being is sublated, or in which any particular being- 
 ness is just indifferent have gone together into simple Quantity. 
 
 Eead in a similar mood, as it were, of pictorial reflexion, the 
 two remaining paragraphs, which briefly sum together the moments 
 we have gone through, will yield a similar captivating felicity 
 and marvellous far-reachingness. The qualitativeness of the 
 voice and its notes is readily seen to be founded on what is 
 meant by being or by immediacy. Again, the qualitative im- 
 mediacy of any one note is seen to have limit, determinateness, 
 so identified with its very being, that with its alteration the note 
 itself disappears : the notification presents itself thus as finitude. 
 If one conceive to oneself a wandering light or reflexion, one will 
 be able to realise to oneself, how with the slightest shift, with the 
 alteration, that is, the objects themselves change, and that is 
 disappear. The qualitative unity is so immediate, so without 
 mediation, or intervention of other, in any one note, that difference, 
 so far as it is concerned, seems to have disappeared. The note, 
 however, is in itself at once being and negation, or being and 
 nothing ; but this difference being only in itself and concealed 
 from it by its own immediacy, falls as otherwiseness in general, out 
 of it,. To the voice, its single note is so immediate, or the voice 
 in its single note is to itself so immediate, that the difference just 
 falls out of it as the otherwiseness of the various notes. This other- 
 wiseness is sublated into the Being-for-self of the one voce ; and 
 
 2 H 
 
482 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 all settles into the one unity that is, a determined or differenti- 
 ated unity but a unity se//-determined. Thus the voice, even in 
 its negation, the notes, is but consonant with its own self. 
 
 This unity is thus being, affirmative, negation of negation, 
 remediated immediacy : the voice can be readily seen to be all 
 this ; and so, consequently, as the unity that passes through and 
 continues through its own determinatenesses or limits (the notes), 
 which are set as sublated within it. It is also There-being, 
 relative distinctivity, no longer, however, in the form of the abstract 
 notes, but in these, as now identified with the one voice, with 
 that which simpliciter is. In this self-continuity of being, the 
 one itself has in a manner vanished ; one has gone over and beyond 
 itself, as it were, into unity, limit determined as limit simpliciter, 
 but a limit which is none a limit which, as regards the voice, is 
 in it and within it, but indifferent to it ; but the indifferent limit 
 is again Quantity. 
 
 EEMAEK. 
 
 The Kantian Construction of Matter by means of Forces Attracting and 
 
 Bepelling. 
 
 Into any explanation of this Eemark it will be unnecessary to 
 enter, the reader being now already amply supplied with all that 
 is required to enable him to comprehend it. It will constitute 
 another sample of Hegel's irresistible incisiveness, and of his 
 exhaustive and utterly overwhelming argumentation. 
 
 It is worth while pointing out that repulsion and attraction, 
 centrifugal and centripetal forces, discretion and continuity, 
 intension and extension, &c., are but the same elements which we 
 have seen from the beginning, but in new and higher forms. 
 This of itself is a proof of the truth of the notion. Thought thus 
 in its own movement assuming by due degrees all the forms of 
 the concrete, thisin itself is irresistible demonstration, irresistible 
 demonstration that what is is thought, or that thought is substance. 
 These forms themselves, in fact, by-and-by convert themselves 
 of themselves into the reciprocals of simple apprehension and 
 judgment, which coalesce in reason, and constitute the notion 
 itself in direct logical manifestation. It is worth while adding, also, 
 that this word Setzen literally finds its explanation in the peculiar 
 organic reciprocity that is the pulse and life of the whole move- 
 ment. What is Gesetzt, is the momentarily overt, apparent, ex- 
 
QUALITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 483 
 
 press, ex-plicit moment an outcome of process, which process has 
 now disappeared and is only implicit. But the process of im- 
 plication and explication involved here must be seen to be directly 
 reciprocal : if there be a movement down, there is equally a 
 movement up ; if in, then equally out. The currents meet as in 
 two inverted cones ; as the one current rushes out into one cone, 
 the other rushes out equally into the cone it meets: but these 
 currents are one ; draught and back-draught are identical ; there 
 is present, in reality, but a single movement. Perhaps, the best 
 illustration is what we have seen already as the going-together- 
 with-itself: that which is, consciousness, the voice, the one, in 
 going together with its own self inwardly, equally expands into its 
 own self outwardly ; the infinitude of its out-of-its-self-ness, its 
 constituent notes, lighten up or out to the voice at the very instant 
 that it would darken itself down or inwardly into its abstract 
 One.* 
 
 * This chapter of Fiirsichseyn, occupying some thirty-six pages in the ' Logik, 
 is satisfied with little more than one in the first edition of the Encyclopaedie, and can- 
 not be produced, even by the Zusdtze, to more than eight in the last. With its 
 extraordinary contents before us, does this indicate that Hegel came to think that he 
 had been unnecessarily prolix in the beginning ? In writing Hinrichs, Hegel inti- 
 mates in regard to the latter's ' Logik,' ' es wiirde mich grosse Anstrengung kosten 
 (it would cost me great labour) to go into the particular.' That, too, in his 
 case costs us great labour ! Should we, too, follow his own example by that most 
 difficult < Fiirsichseyn,' and even fight shy of all strict dialectic thought given by 
 himself ? That Seyn-fiir-Eines, Being-for-One, Being-for-a, what, for instance, in 
 the world is that ? Even there the interest must be supreme, or why should 
 Hegel think proper to discuss there what in Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibnitz, precisely 
 concerns I'etre supreme f The fact is that itis supreme, and he that will but enter into 
 the business will assuredly find it so. The text, however, strikes even me, after so 
 many years of absence from it ; and I see with astonishment my own explanations. 
 Here, indeed, I myself can but remind myself of the cricketer once seen at practice, 
 who, after a lucky hit to leg, marched round his wicket, triumphantly ejaculant, 
 with a hand in his coat-tail. My hit to leg is, particularly, the 'voice.' Were 
 philosophers rich, and did they understand the value of the hit, 1 should almost feign 
 modestly to decree myself a small fortune in reward ! This, too, is true, that Hegel, 
 in this, the first of his feat, and in view of what ' Quality ' is, has been prompted to 
 open his whole magazine of means (say), so that, almost already itistruit, he that will 
 is very fairly in a case to proceed. New. 
 
484 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 IV. 
 
 TRANSITION FROM QUALITY TO QUANTITY. 
 
 BEFORE passing to Quantity, it may be well to seek to perfect our 
 general view of Quality by adding to the detailed exposition of 
 the Complete Logic which the preceding has attempted to convey, 
 the condensed summary of the subject which presents itself in 
 the Encyclopaedic. But, in taking up this latter work, we cannot 
 resist extracting certain preliminary passages (generally from the 
 first edition as the shortest statement) which seem calculated to 
 assist the student. And first from the 
 
 INTRODUCTION, 
 
 on which we shall spend a very few words only, in order to give 
 prominence to such eminently Hegelian characteristics as are 
 useful or indispensable to what follows as regards the System 
 itself. The commencement may be paraphrased thus : 
 
 'The objects (subject-matter) of the sciences in general are 
 granted as presupposed, as there without more ado ; that is, they 
 are already given in conception, or they are allowed to pass as ad- 
 mitted common possessions, awakening no question and demanding 
 no justification. It is thus, too, as regards the method of these 
 sciences : this, too, is granted as a matter of course ; and we 
 are permitted to begin and prosecute our investigation according 
 to a current and conventional manner which every one accepts as 
 right and natural so right and natural, that any doubt of its 
 legitimacy never occurs. What forms a striking portion of this 
 manner, too, is this that the very terms and notions which are 
 applied in characterisation of the objects discussed, are themselves 
 just taken up out of conception, as it were in the same loose and 
 uninquiring fashion. As regards the facilities of a "beginning, of a 
 method, and in a large sense as applying to a general mediating 
 
TRANSITION. 485 
 
 element of decision and discussion of a terminology, the sciences 
 in general, then, have a great advantage over the science of 
 philosophy, which, widely different from the rest, is seen at once 
 to be under an obligation to demonstrate the necessity of its 
 object, the necessity of its method, and the necessity of its 
 characterising means or medium, or machinery of terms. In 
 geometry, arithmetic, jurisprudence, medicine, zoology, botany, 
 &c., for example, we have just to begin with the familiar name 
 of the respective objects, magnitude, space, number, justice, 
 disease, animal, plant, &c. ; and that suffices without it ever 
 occurring to us to doubt of the existence of any such objects, or 
 to demand at the hands of thought as thought a demonstration 
 of the necessity of the same. But, beginning thus, it is evident 
 that we begin with the mere crude instinctive conception or 
 Vorstellung of that into which we inquire ; and, as regards 
 progress, it is evident also that all considerations which we apply 
 in description or characterisation of the same arise in like manner 
 out of an element of current conception, and that the whole 
 business is just an empirical appeal from the Vorstellung of the 
 writer to the Vorstellung of the reader concerning a Vorstellung 
 not, however, without the frequent emergence of an inconvenience, 
 which, indeed, were only to be expected namely, that Vorstellung 
 differs from Vorstellung to the production, possibly, of a blind 
 debate which protracts itself endlessly. The movement of cog- 
 nition in the ordinary sciences, thdn, is one of mere conception ; 
 there is no necessary first, and no necessary transition thence to 
 another and another, and an end : the line of movement, too, lies 
 across a field that is blindly given, among much on both sides of 
 it that is blindly granted, and which the movement itself constantly 
 blindly uses up for its own progress and advance. 
 
 ' With philosophy it is otherwise : neither its method nor its 
 medium of characterisation and determination can refer themselves 
 to conception (Vorstellung) ; and, for its object or objects, these 
 belong as little to conception as to sense. Conceptions, certainly, 
 in the order of time precede notions ; but it is by turning on the 
 former, and through and by means of these, that thought attains 
 to the latter attains, that is, to cognition and comprehension. 
 Necessity is the element of philosophy ; and object, method, and 
 determining media are alike inadmissible, unless stamped by its 
 ineffaceable impress. In such field, proofs, demonstrations, are 
 the requirements ; and presuppositions and assertions are idle and 
 
486 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 inapplicable. In short, it is within philosophy itself that a 
 beginning which as such must be inderivative and incomposite, 
 and which yet even so seems necessarily a presupposition that 
 the object, that the method, that the characterising terms must 
 exhibit and demonstrate themselves; and anything that is said 
 now by way of what is named introduction can be only of the 
 nature of an anticipation. Keligion, it is true, has the same objects 
 as philosophy : both regard the true, and that, too, in the highest 
 sense that God is the true, and alone the true. Again, both 
 would understand the finite, and nature and man ; as also the 
 relation of these both to each other, and to God as their truth. 
 Philosophy must really therefore, then, presuppose a certain 
 acquaintance with its objects, as well as an interest in them : but 
 the element of religion is sentiment, feeling, while that of philo- 
 sophy is the notion, thought. But as regards the objects of 
 philosophy, we are not restricted to religion for illustration ; there 
 justifies itself a preliminary appeal to common, crude, current 
 conception itself: for it is matter of universal acknowledgment, 
 that the man who commences with the perceptions and the 
 greeds of mere sense is speedily impelled beyond these to the 
 presage and presentiment of an Infinite and Eternal, both as 
 regards knowledge and will a presage and presentiment which 
 prompt the questions : What can I know of God nature my 
 own soul ? What ought I to do ? What dare I hope ? True ; 
 there are those who, unable to deny this natural human tendency, 
 still utterly reject these the objects at which it aims. There are 
 those, indeed, who suppose themselves to possess philosophy, not- 
 withstanding that they profess to know only what immediate 
 sense gives them to know : but for the refutation of these, while 
 conception (common sense) can point at once to its own presage, 
 thought brings forward just philosophy itself.' 
 
 After these pregnant deliverances so paraphrased, appears a 
 paragraph ( 5 in the first edition) which we do not recollect to be 
 represented anywhere in the subsequent editions, and which, for 
 that reason and for its own importance, we translate pretty closely 
 thus : 
 
 ' Philosophy, then, is the Science of Reason, and of reason 
 conscious of its own self as all that is. Engaged in any cognition 
 but the philosophical, reason, as a subjective element on the one 
 side, presupposes given to it on the other an object, in which, con- 
 sequently, it recognises not its own self : such cognition, therefore, 
 
TRANSITION. 487 
 
 is but cognition of what is finite, or it is a finite cognition. Sup- 
 pose the objects of such cognition to belong even to self-conscious- 
 ness, as Eight (Justice), Duty, &c., they are still particular objects, 
 beside and apart from which, as apart from, or without of, self- 
 consciousness itself, the remaining riches of the universe are to 
 be found. The object of religion is, indeed, in itself the infinite 
 object which is to comprehend all others : but these conceptions 
 of religion remain not true to themselves, for, in spite of them, 
 the world in the eyes of religion still remains without, apart 
 from, the Infinite, self-substantial by itself; and what it (religion) 
 proposes as the highest truth is still, for the consciousness that 
 would discriminate and distinguish, inexplicable, incomprehen- 
 sible, a secret, a something given, and just in the form of a some- 
 thing given and external. To religion, truth is as feeling, vision, 
 aspiration, figurate conception, devotion generally, not, it is true, 
 uninterwoven with thoughts, but still truth not in the form of 
 truth. Its mood, indeed, is all-embracing, but, compared with 
 other forms of consciousness, religion constitutes but a region 
 apart, but a region of its own. Philosophy may be regarded also 
 as the science of Freedom, because in it the foreignness, the 
 otherness of the objects, the finitude of consciousness vanishes, 
 while contingency, physical necessity, relation to an outward, 
 dependency, longing, and fear perish ; only in philosophy is reason 
 perfectly at home, shut into its own self. It is from the same 
 grounds that in this science reason is freed from the onesidedness 
 of a merely subjective reason, which were regarded as property of 
 a peculiar talent, perhaps, or as gift (like art with the artist) of a 
 special divine good or it may be bad fortune : here, on the 
 contrary, reason being but reason in the consciousness of its own 
 self, this science is capable in its own nature of constituting 
 universal science. Neither is this science that idealism in which 
 the objects of cognition have only the value of a something set up 
 bv the ego, of a subjective production confined within self-con- 
 sciousness. Because reason is conscious of itself as that which is, 
 subjectivity the ego that conceives itself as a separate individual 
 beside the objects, and its own modi as in it and as diverse from 
 those of everything else out of it or over it this subjectivity is 
 taken up and resolved into the rational universality.' 
 
 In this paragraph the declarations of Hegel are both valuable 
 and clear: in particular, the relation of the individual to the 
 universe a point always of great interest to the student of Hegel 
 
488 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 is remarkably plainly characterised. The relative doctrine 
 taught may seem to be the absorption of the individual into the 
 absolute. It is fair to remark, however, that such inference, 
 especially in the naked manner in which it is thus and generally 
 stated, is not by any means necessary ; and that Hegel's ortho- 
 doxy were still safe, even had he not, by withdrawing the passage, 
 involved the opinions it contains so far in doubt But the One is 
 Many, &c. 
 
 From 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (1st Edit.) we translate as follows: 
 
 * Philosophy, in so far as it exhibits the entire range of the philo- 
 sophical sciences, but at the same time with definite indication of 
 the parts, is Encyclopaedia ; and in so far as it exhibits at once 
 the distinction and the connexion of the parts as due to the 
 necessity of the notion, it is Philosophical Encyclopaedia. 
 
 ' Philosophy being throughout rational cognition, each of its 
 parts constitutes a philosophical whole, a self-inclusive sphere of 
 the general totality ; but in every such part the philosophical idea 
 is, as it were, in a particular specification or element. Each single 
 sphere, just because it is a totality in itself, breaks through the 
 limitation of its element and founds a higher sphere. The whole 
 presents itself, then, as a sphere of spheres, of which latter each is 
 a necessary moment of the whole; and the system of its own 
 proper elements constitutes the complete idea, which again just 
 appears (as a single manifestation) in each individual. 
 
 ' Philosophy is also by very nature Encyclopaedia, inasmuch as 
 the true can only exist as totality, and through discrimination and 
 assignment of its distinctive differences, the necessity of these, 
 and the freedom of the whole : that is, philosophy is necessarily 
 System. 
 
 'A philosophising without system cannot be anything scientific; 
 for such philosophising, besides that it expressly offers itself as 
 rather a mere subjective manner of looking or thinking, is con- 
 tingent in its matter (its objects), inasmuch as this matter can 
 receive its authorisation only as a moment of the whole, and apart 
 from this whole must remain an ungrounded presupposition or 
 mere subjective certainty. 
 
 ' By a system of philosophy, there is erroneously understood 
 only a philosophy of a certain one principle that is contradis- 
 tinguished from others: the principle of veritable philosophy, on the 
 contrary, is to include in itself all particular principles. Philosophy 
 exhibits this in its own self, while its history also manifests partly 
 
TRANSITION. X^Of r 489 
 
 that the various philosophies but constituted a single philosophy 
 in various stages of development, and partly that the special prin- 
 ciples of these one underlying one system, another another 
 were but branches of one and the same whole. 
 
 ' The Universal and the Particular [the Common and the 
 Various] must be accurately distinguished, each in its special con- 
 stitution. The Universal, formally taken, and placed beside the 
 Particular, becomes itself particular. Were such position imposed 
 on objects of ordinary life, the impropriety and ineptitude would 
 strike at once. Suppose, for example, that a person in want of 
 fruit should decline cherries, pears, grapes, &c., on the plea that 
 they were cherries, pears, grapes, &c., and not fruit ! In the case 
 of philosophy, nevertheless, people think themselves free as well 
 to justify their contempt of it by the objection that there are so 
 many philosophies, and each is only a, not the philosophy, as if 
 the cherries were not also fruit, as to set a philosophy whose 
 principle is the universal side by side with those whose principle 
 is a particular nay, side by side with doctrines asserting that 
 there is no philosophy or bestowing this name on a mere to and 
 fro of thoughts, which assumes the true as something given and 
 directly there, and only applies reflexions to the same. 
 
 'As Encyclopaedia, nevertheless, the science is necessarily not 
 exhibited in the complete evolution of its particular details, but 
 only as limited to the beginnings (principia) and rudimentary 
 notions of the individual sciences. The whole of philosophy, 
 though capable of being regarded as a whole of many particular 
 sciences, constitutes truly but one science ; while each particular 
 science is at once a moment of the whole and a whole in itself. 
 
 1 Whatever is true in any science, is so through and by virtue 
 of philosophy, whose encyclopaedia therefore comprehends within 
 it every veritable science. 
 
 ' Ordinary encyclopaedias, unlike the philosophical, are only 
 aggregates of sciences empirically and contingently fallen on; many 
 of which, too, as mere bundles of facts, are but sciences in name. 
 The unity to which, in any such aggregate, the sciences are 
 reduced, is, as it was but externally that they themselves were 
 fallen on or taken up, equally an external one, an order, an 
 arrangement (a ranking). This order must always, for the same 
 reason and because the materials are of contingent nature, remain 
 an attempt, and exhibit incongruent edges. Besides, then, that the 
 philosophical encyclopaedia excludes (1) such mere aggregates of 
 
490 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 facts as, for example, philology is, it excludes also (2) such sciences 
 as are founded in mere arbitrariness, like heraldry : sciences of 
 this nature are out-and-out positive. (3) Other sciences are also 
 called positive, which possess, however, a rational foundation and 
 principle : this latter element in them belongs to philosophy ; the 
 positive side, again, remains special to them. This positive element, 
 too, is of various kinds. (1) In the ordinary non-philosophical 
 sciences, their principle (beginning}, that which is the veritably 
 true in them, has the contingent as its end, because they have to 
 introduce and reduce the universal into the empirical unit and 
 actual. In this field of mutability and contingency, not the notion, 
 but only grounds or reasons can be made available. For example, 
 Jurisprudence, the System of direct and indirect Taxation, &c., 
 require final exact determinations which lie without and apart 
 from the determination proper of the notion, and leave for deci- 
 sion, therefore, a certain latitude or margin which may be disposed 
 in one manner on one reason and in another on another, and is 
 insusceptible of any certain and definitive last. In the same 
 manner, the Idea of Nature in its singularisation (or endless separa- 
 tion into units) runs out into contingencies, and Natural History, 
 Geography, and Medicine fall into distinctions of fact, into species 
 and differences which are determined by external accident or the 
 sport of caprice, and not by reason. History, too, falls to be in- 
 cluded here, inasmuch as, though the Idea be its true nature and 
 substance, its manifestation or appearancy is in contingency and 
 the field of self-will. (2) Such sciences are also in so far positive, 
 as they do not recognise their determinations as finite, nor demon- 
 strate the transition of these and of their whole sphere into a 
 higher one, but assume them as valid simpliciter. With this finite- 
 ness of the form, as the first was the finiteness of the matter, there 
 connects itself (3) the finiteness of the cognitive ground, which 
 is sometimes raisonnement, sometimes feeling, belief, the authority 
 of others, in general the authority of inner or outer perception. 
 That philosophy also which seeks to found itself on Anthropology 
 facts of consciousness, inner perception, or outer experience 
 belongs to the same class. (4) It is still possible that it is merely 
 the form of the scientific statement that is empirical and notion- 
 less, while in other respects thoughtful observation arranges what 
 are only outer appearances in a like manner to the inner sequence 
 of the notion. There is added, perhaps, that through the antagon- 
 ism and multiplicity of the appearances (phenomena) which are 
 
TRANSITION. 491 
 
 brought together, the external, contingent circumstances of the 
 conditions are removed, and the universal steps before us. A 
 thoughtful experimental physic,- history, &c., would in this 
 manner present the rational science of nature and of human 
 eventualities and deeds in an external image which should mirror 
 the notion. 
 
 ' The whole of science (scientia) is the exposition of the Idea ; 
 the division (distribution) of the former, therefore, can be under- 
 stood only by reference to the latter, and, like this preliminary 
 conception of philosophy itself, can be something only anticipated. 
 The Idea, however, demonstrates itself as Eeason directly identical 
 with its own self, and this at the same time as the capability to 
 set itself in order to be for itself over-against itself, and in 
 this other to be only by itself. Thus science falls divisively into 
 three parts : 
 
 I. Logic, the Science of the Idea in and for itself. 
 II. Philosophy of Nature, or the Science of the Idea in its 
 
 Otherness. 
 
 III. Philosophy of Spirit, as of the Idea which from its Other- 
 ness returns into itself. 
 
 ' It has been already remarked, that the differences of the 
 various philosophical sciences are only characteristics of the Idea 
 itself, which latter alone is what* exhibits itself in these various 
 elements. In Nature it is not an other than the Idea which is to 
 be recognised, but it is in the form of externalisation, just as in 
 Spirit it is the same Idea as beent for itself and in-and-f or -itself 
 becoment. Such a form in which the Idea appears is at the same 
 time a fluent moment ; therefore, any particular science is just as 
 much this to recognise its matter (object) as beent object, as also 
 this to recognise immediately in the same its transition into a 
 higher sphere. The conception of the Division, therefore, is an 
 external reflexion, an anticipation of what the Idea's own necessity 
 produces, and shows this inaccuracy that it sets up the various 
 parts or sciences beside each other as if they were stable and 
 substantial in their mutual contradistinction, like species or 
 sorts.' 
 
 To a reader who has advanced this length, the above passages 
 will be readily intelligible without comment; and they will serve 
 to strengthen any conception already formed of Hegelian pene- 
 
492 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 trativeness, comprehensiveness, and systematic wholeness. We 
 proceed now to make a few extracts from 
 
 THE PRE-NOTION 
 
 which precedes the Logic; using specially for this purpose, 12, 
 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 35, 36, and 37 (First Edition). 
 
 1 Logic is the science of the pure Idea, that is, of the Idea in 
 the abstract element of Thought. 
 
 1 It may, without doubt, be said that Logic is the science of 
 Thought, its forms and its laws ; but thought is at strictest the 
 pure identity of cognition with itself, and constitutes, therefore, 
 only the universal determirtatum, determiuateness, or the element 
 in which the Idea is as logical. Thought is truly the Idea, but 
 not as thought formal ; on the contrary, as the Totality of its own 
 forms which it itself gives to itself. Logic is the hardest science, 
 in so far as it has to do, not with perceptions not even with 
 abstract ones, as in Geometry or other sensuous forms, but with 
 pure abstractions, and demands, on the part of its student, a power 
 of retiring into pure thoughts, of holding such fast, and of moving 
 in them. On the other side, again, it may be regarded as the 
 easiest science, inasmuch as its import is nothing but one's proper 
 thought and its current notions, and these are, at the same time, 
 the simplest. The utility of Logic concerns its relation to the 
 particular subject or individual so far as he would give himself a 
 certain training and formation for other objects. The training of 
 Logic consists in this that in it we are exercised in thinking, for 
 this science is the thinking of thinking. So far, however, as the 
 element of Logic is the absolute form of the true, and even more 
 than this the pure true itself, it is something quite other than 
 what is merely useful. 
 
 ' In form, Logic has three sides : (a) that of understanding, or 
 the abstract side [the dianoetic] ; (/3) the negative-rational or the 
 dialectic side; and (y) the positive-rational or the speculative 
 side [say the noetic]. 
 
 ' These three sides do not make three parts of Logic, but are 
 moments of every logical real, that is, of every notion, or of 
 every true in general. They may be set under the first or 
 dianoetic moment, and thereby held asunder from each other; 
 but, so held, th.ey are not considered in their truth. 
 
 ' (a) Thought as understanding holds fast the fixed individual 
 
TRANSITION. 493 
 
 and its difference from others ; and such limitated abstract has 
 the value to it of what is independent and self-subsistent. 
 
 ' (/3) The dialectic moment is the self-sublation of such 
 individuals, and their transition into their opposites. 
 
 '(1) Dialectic, isolated by understanding and taken by itself, 
 constitutes, especially when manifesting itself in scientific notions, 
 Scepticism, which views mere negation as the dialectic result. 
 (2) Dialectic is usually regarded as an external art which 
 arbitrarily produces confusion in accepted notions and a mere 
 show of contradiction, the decisions of the understanding and 
 the accepted notions being still supposed the true, while the 
 show itself is to be considered but a nullity. Dialectic, however, is 
 rather to be regarded as the true and proper nature of the decern- 
 ments of the understanding, of things, and of the finite in general. 
 Eeflexion is properly a going out over and beyond the isolated 
 individual, and a referring, whereby the individual is placed in 
 relation, but for the rest remains still in its isolated validity. 
 Dialectic, on the contrary, is that immanent going-out which 
 exhibits the onesidedness and limitation of the decernments of 
 the understanding as that which it is, the negation, namely, of 
 this and these. Dialectic constitutes, therefore, the motive soul 
 of progress, and is the principle by which alone there comes 
 immanent connexion and necessity into the matter of science, just 
 as it is in it that the true, and not the external, elevation over the 
 finite lies. ^ 
 
 ' (y) The positive-rational or speculative side recognises the 
 unity of the distinctions even in their antithesis, the positive 
 element which is retained and preserved in their resolution and 
 transition. 
 
 ' (1) Dialectic has a positive result, because it has a determinate 
 import or matter ; or because its result is really not the empty, 
 abstract nothing, but the negation of certain distinctions which are 
 retained and preserved in the result because it is a result, and 
 not a simple nothing. (2) This rational act is, therefore, though 
 abstract and of thought, still at the same time a concrete, because 
 it is not simple formal unity, but unity of distinguished dis- 
 tinctions. Philosophy, therefore, has nothing whatever to do with 
 mere abstractions and formal thoughts, but only with concrete 
 notions. 
 
 * As regards matter, the determinations of thought are con- 
 sidered in Logic in and for themselves. In this way they present 
 
494 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 themselves as the concrete pure thoughts, that is, as the notions, 
 with the force and import of that which constitutes the absolute 
 ground and foundation of all that is. Logic, therefore, is essen- 
 tially speculative philosophy. 
 
 'Under the speculative moment, form and matter are not 
 sundered and severed, and held apart, as under the two preceding. 
 The forms of the Idea are its distinctions [say its native inflexions 
 or intonations], and it were impossible to say where it should get 
 any other or truer matter than these its own forms themselves. 
 The forms of the mere Logic of understanding are, on the contrary, 
 not only not something true per se, but they cannot be even only 
 forms of the true. Bather, since, as merely formal or formell, they 
 are affected with the essential antithesis to the matter, they are 
 nothing more than forms of the finite, of the untrue. Because, 
 however, Logic, as pure speculative philosophy, is the Idea in the 
 element or form of thought, or the absolute still shut in to its 
 eternity, it is the subjective OY first science, and there fails it still 
 the side of the completed objectivity of the Idea. It not only 
 remains, however, as the absolute ground of the real, but, in 
 manifesting itself as this, it demonstrates itself as the real, 
 universal, and objective science. In the first universality of its 
 notions, it appears per se, and as a subjective special activity, 
 without and apart from which the entire wealth of the sensuous, 
 as of the more concrete intellectual, world is still supposed to live 
 its own life. But when this wealth is taken up in the philosophy 
 of the real part of the science, and has there manifested itself as 
 returning into the pure Idea, and possessing in it its ultimate 
 ground and truth, then the logical universality takes stand no 
 longer as a separate entity counter said wealth of the real, but 
 rather as comprehending this wealth, and as veritable universality. 
 It acquires thus the force of speculative theology. 
 
 * Logic, with the value of speculative philosophy, takes up the 
 place of what was called Metaphysic and treated separately. The 
 nature of Logic and the stand-point of scientific cognition now 
 receive their more particular preliminary elucidation in the nature 
 of this Metaphysic, and of the Critical Philosophy which ended 
 it. Metaphysic, besides, is a thing of the past only in reference 
 to the history of philosophy ; in itself, as lately manifested 
 especially, it is the mere understanding's view of the objects of 
 reason. 
 
 ' In order to place oneself on the stand-point of science, it is 
 
TRANSITION. 495 
 
 requisite to renounce the presuppositions which are involved in 
 the subjective and finite modes of philosophical cognition, viz. : 
 (1) that of the fixed validity of limited and opposed distinctions 
 of understanding generally ; (2) that of a given substrate, conceived 
 as already finished and ready there before us, which is to be taken 
 as standard decisive of whether any of those distinctions are com- 
 mensurate with it or not ; (3) that of cognition as a mere referring 
 of such ready-formed and fixed predicates to some given substrate ; 
 (4) that of the antithesis of a cognising subject and a cognised 
 object, which latter is not to be identified with the former ; and 
 of this antithesis each side, as in the preceding, is to be equally 
 taken per se as a something fixed and true. 
 
 'To abandon these presuppositions cannot be demanded so 
 much for the reason that they are false for science, in which 
 these forms present themselves, has to show this in their own 
 case as for the reason that they are figurate conceptions and 
 belong to immediate thought thought imprisoned in the given, 
 opinion (Meynung), for this reason in general, indeed, that they 
 are given and presuppositions whereas science presupposes nothing, 
 but that it would be pure thought. In effect, we have to begin 
 in complete emancipation from every presupposition ; and, in the 
 resolution to will to think purely, that is accomplished by the 
 freedom which abstracts from everything, and holds steadily its 
 pure abstraction, the simplicity (uniplicity) of thought. 
 
 'Pure science (scicntia), or Logic, falls divisively into three 
 parts : 
 
 I. The doctrine of Being. 
 II. The doctrine of Essence (inner nature). 
 III. The doctrine of the Notion and the Idea. 
 Or into the doctrine of Thought, or the Thought : 
 
 I. In its immediacy the Notion in itself. 
 II. In its Eeflexion and Be-mediation the Being-for-self and 
 
 the Shine of the Notion. 
 
 III. In its return into itself, and in its developed Being-by- 
 self the Notion in and for itself.' 
 
 All the above terms have been already commented on, with the 
 exception of Shine (Schein) and Being-by-self (Bey-sich-seyn). 
 Schein is just the Shine or show of a thing not the thino- j n 
 itself, but just its shining, showing, or seeming: it may thus be 
 mere seeming, or it may be true seeming which amounts to 
 
496 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 manifestation. Could we give the English word seem the sense 
 of shine, or shine the sense of seem, a translation would have no 
 difficulty. To be by self is to be chez soi, at home, or contented 
 in seclusion to, and identification with, oneself. 
 We come now to 
 
 ' The First Part of Logic, 
 
 or 
 
 The Doctrine of Being, 
 and there to 
 
 QUALITY, 
 
 and 
 
 a. Being. b. There-being. c. Being -for-self. 
 ' Under Quality, then, we have 
 
 a. Being. 
 
 'Pure Being constitutes the beginning, because it is as well 
 pure thought as the indefinite simple immediate, and the first 
 beginning cannot be anything mediated (a product of means) or 
 further determined. 
 
 'But this pure Being is the pure abstraction, consequently 
 absolutely negative, and, taken also immediately, just Nothing. 
 
 ' Nothing, as this self-equal immediate, is conversely the same 
 thing that Being is. The truth of Being as of Nothing is, there- 
 fore, the unity of both : this unity is Becoming. 
 
 b. There-being. 
 
 ' Being in Becoming as one with Nothing, and so Nothing as 
 one with Being, are only disappearant ; Becoming, through its 
 contradiction in itself, falls together into the unity in which both 
 are sublated : its result is, consequently, There-being. 
 
 ' (a) There-being is Being with a Determinateness, which is, as 
 immediate or beent deterrninateness Quality. There-being as in 
 this its determinateness reflected into itself, is There-beent-ity, 
 Something. The categories that yield themselves in There-being 
 are now to be summarily stated. 
 
 ' Quality, as beent determinateness counter the negation that is 
 contained in it but distinguished from it, is Reality. The negation 
 no longer the abstract Nothing, but as a There-being and Some- 
 thing, is only form in this latter it is as Otherwise-being. Quality, 
 
TKANSITION. 497 
 
 in that this Otherwise-being is its own determination, but firstly 
 distinguished from it, is Being-for-Other, a breadth (latitude) of 
 the There-being, of the Something. The Being of Quality as 
 Being, counter this reference to Other, is the Being-in-itself (or 
 just the In-itself). 
 
 [The distinguishableness of anything is evidently an otherwise- 
 being, an otherwise-ness, in it, while as evidently its distinguish- 
 ablenesses constitute a breadth.] 
 
 ' (/3) The Being, held fast as distinct from the Determinateness, 
 or the Being -in-itself f were only the empty abstraction of Being. 
 In There-being, the determinateness is one with the Being; 
 which determinateness, set as Negation, is at the same time Limit, 
 Limitation. The otherwise-ness is, therefore, a moment, not in- 
 different out of There-being, but its own. Something is through its 
 Quality, firstly, finite (end[ich), and secondly, alterable (vemnder- 
 lich) ; so that Finitude and Otherableness belong to its being (it 
 is at once end-ed and end-able). 
 
 'Something becomes another; but the other is itself a some- 
 thing : it becomes, therefore, equally another, and so on ad 
 infinitum. 
 
 1 This Infinite is the spurious, bastard, negative, false, or Pseudo- 
 Infinite, inasmuch as it is nothing but the negation of the finite, 
 which, however, just so arises again, and consequently is just as 
 much not sublated or this Infinite expresses only the To-be-to 
 (Sollen) of the sublation of the nite. The Progress into the 
 Infinite keeps standing by the enunciation of the contradiction 
 which the finite involves ; namely, that it is as well something as 
 its other, and is the perpetual continuation of the alternation of 
 these determinations, mutually introductive of each other. 
 
 ' (y) What is here in fact is, that Something becomes another, 
 and the Other another, just generally. Something in relation to 
 another is already another in its regard; consequently, as that 
 into which it passes is quite the same thing as that which passes 
 both have one and the same and no further determination than 
 that each is another, Something thus in its passing into Other 
 goes together only with its own self ; and this reference, in the 
 passing and in the other to its own self, is the True Infinite. Or, 
 looked at negatively : what is othered is the Other it becomes 
 the Other of the Other. Thus Being, but as negation of the nega- 
 tion, is again restored, and is the Being-for-self' 
 
 In translating the paragraphs immediately above, certain supple- 
 
 2i 
 
498 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 mentary passages have been omitted. Before proceeding to 
 Being -for-self, however, it may be well to spend a word on 
 any points in these omitted passages which may seem calculated 
 to embarrass the student. With reference to 84 (En cyclo- 
 paedic, Eosenkranz', or Hegel's 3rd, Edition), that 'Being is 
 the Notion in itself' is not difficult; for Being (Seyn) applies 
 to everything of which we say is, or it is; and everything of 
 which we say is, is just the Logical Notion in itself, that is, materi- 
 aliter, not formaliter. The Bestimmungen, the determinations 
 (and the reference in this word is always to the logical moments 
 of the logical notion, which, of course, vary with the sphere), the 
 distinguishable forms in the sphere of Seyn (Being), are evidently 
 beent, other to other, while their progressive determination (the 
 dialectic movement in that field) is plainly a passing into other. 
 This, of course, is an attempt to express Being and its peculiarities 
 in terms of the Notion ; and certainly Hegel will be at least 
 allowed to have brought before us an ingenious analogy. That 
 this progress is ' a setting out of the Notion as it is in itself is 
 also plain : anything running through the circle of its qualities or 
 powers sets out the Notion that in itself it is, and this at 
 the same time can be seen to be ' a going into its own self,' 
 ' a deepening of Being into itself.' Hegel then asserts that his 
 doctrine of Being is at once representative and resolvative of 
 the whole of the Seyn or Being ; and thus we are led to under- 
 stand what his object is in this doctrine. 
 
 The next paragraph declares the determinations of Logic to 
 constitute the definitions of the Absolute, the metaphysical defini- 
 tions of God; but that this is more especially the case with 
 spheres that are First and Third, while those that are Second refer 
 to the Finite. To define God is to think God, or to express God in 
 thoughts ; and Logic ought to comprehend all thoughts as such. 
 It is a defect in the form of Definition in general, however, that 
 in such operation there floats ever before the conception of the 
 Definer a Substrate which is to be the receptacle of the defining 
 predicates. For example, the Absolute, which we may suppose 
 to stand for God as thought, is, in reference to its predicates, quite 
 void, and only supposititious a substrate ; but the thought of the 
 substrate and that is the whole thing is in the predicate. The 
 predicate, then, is alone substantial, and the substrate, or even the 
 form of a proposition, appears superfluous. 
 
 From 86, we learn that all difficulties in regard to the com- 
 
TRANSITION. 499 
 
 mencement with pure Being may be removed by simply discern- 
 ing what a beginning in general implies. We are told, too, that 
 the Fichtian Ego-Ego and the Schellingian absolute Indifference 
 or Identity are not so very discrepant from the Hegelian Seyn or_ 
 pure Being. The former, however, are objectionable as involving 
 process, that is, as being products of means : in fact, properly put 
 as a beginning requires, both of them just become Seyn or Being, 
 while Being again just implies them. Being is the first predicate 
 then ; and so the first definition is, the Absolute is Being. This 
 is the Eleatic definition, and also the common one, that God is 
 the sum of all Kealfties ; the limitation that is in everything 
 being abstracted from, there remains for God only the reality that 
 is in all reality. 
 
 In 88, there are several points of considerable interest. In 
 the first place, we see that the whole Hegelian business is the 
 Setzen of the An sich the exposition, or simply the position, of 
 the In-itself, the explication of the implication, that formaliter 
 EXPRESSED which materialiter is (and that just amounts to the 
 Aristotelian moments which we have already so often seen). 
 We see also that the manner of philosophical cognition is different 
 from that which is usually employed, that of common sense, or of 
 figurate conception ; for, as Kant has already told us, the 
 former is a knowing in abstracto, while the latter is a knowing 
 in concreto. From this we see how much Hegel has simply 
 been in earnest with the relative teaching of Kant. We have 
 also the Metaphysic of a Beginning alluded to : the thing (what- 
 ever may be put in question) is not yet in its beginning, but still its 
 beginning is not just the nothing of the thing, but the being of this 
 latter is certainly also in its beginning. This must be referred to, 
 and collated with, what has been already said in regard to a 
 beginning, being, becoming, &c. Lastly, we are made to see very 
 clearly how the proposition Ex nihilo nihil fit is tantamount to a 
 proposition of the eternity of matter, of pantheism. ' The ancients 
 have made a simple reflexion that the proposition, From some- 
 thing comes something, or From nothing comes nothing, just in 
 effect annihilates a Becoming ; for that from which there comes, 
 and that which comes, are one and the same thing ; what we have 
 before us is only the proposition of the abstract identity of the 
 understanding. It must, however, strike us as surprising to see 
 the propositions, From nothing comes nothing, or From something 
 comes something, even in our da'ys quite unsuspectingly main- 
 
500 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 tained, without consciousness that they are the ground-principle of 
 pantheism, as without any knowledge of the fact that the ancients 
 have exhausted the consideration of these propositions.' 
 
 From 89, we learn and with conviction that every one 
 concrete consists of opposing notse or significates ; that it is the 
 province of the ahstraction of understanding, as understanding, 
 to see only one of these, to lighten this one up to the darkening 
 out of the other, and the fallacious appearance of a part as a fixed, 
 isolated, individual whole. Hence also it is manifest that the 
 demonstration of antithesis is not necessarily productive of a 
 simple negation, is not necessarily reductive of the subject of 
 antithesis to a simple nothing. 
 
 In 95, the terminal remark in reference to the true relation 
 of Finite and Infinite is a perfectly successful Hegelian statement, 
 and a full compensation for the confusing tediousness and length 
 which we have already animadverted on as the fault of the 
 similar discussion in the detailed Logic. Our explanations in that 
 reference, however, shall be allowed to dispense us from translat- 
 ing this remark, however admirable, here. 
 
 If in 86 we found that the Absolute is Being, we see from 
 87 that it is equally true that the Absolute is the Nothing. 
 This not only because the Absolute is Difference as well as 
 Identity, but because, all Difference being reflected into the one 
 of this Identity, that one is as good as Nothing. This is illus- 
 trated by the nature of the Thing-in-itself, which is to ~be all sub- 
 stance, all being, but just emerges as an absolute void Nothing. 
 Both considerations, in fact, are the same. 
 
 It is curious, I may remark by way of conclusion here, that the 
 ultimate generalisation of all generalisation should be Being, and 
 quite as much Nothing. Of that there can be no doubt. This 
 Nothing, too, is the only Nothing possible in effect it is the 
 Nothing, just what we mean by Nothing. Thrown back from 
 these generalisations as quite abstract, as quite untrue, as nothing, 
 one looks once more at the concrete ; but what is it, again, in 
 ultimate abstraction but a Becoming ? it never is. These are 
 really the initial generalised abstractions : if we want to think 
 purely of what is of the laws, forms, or principles of all things in 
 general, apart from each thing in particular it is so we must begin. 
 But, in spite of the Becoming, there is a Become, a Distinguishable, 
 a Here-being, a There-being, what we call mortal state. This has 
 Reality ; this has also Negation ; it is so Something. As its 
 
TRANSITION. 501 
 
 Reality against its Negation, it is Something in itself; and, vice 
 versd, it is Some thing for other. Its SomQthmg-f or- other identified 
 with what it is in itself, is its Qualification. But its Qualification 
 is its Talification, and both coalesce in Limit. In its Limit^ 
 Something is not only ended, but endable ; that is, it is Finite. 
 But its end, the finis of the Finite, is the Infinite ; and that is the 
 One into which all variety is reflected. But this reflexion of 
 variety into the One is the negative reflexion of this one into its 
 own self; and, again, this negativeness of the Reflexion implies 
 other than the One more ones (or, it is allowable by anticipa- 
 tion to say more Ps, more Egos). But thus we are fully in the 
 field of Fu'rsichseyn, or of 
 
 c. BEING-FOR-SELF. 
 
 * (a) Being-for-Self, as Reference to itself, is Immediacy ; and, 
 as Reference of the Negative to itself, it is Being-for-self-ity, One, 
 the One, what is within itself distinction-less, and so excludent 
 of the Other out of itself. 
 
 * (/3) The Reference of the Negative to itself is negative refer- 
 ence, so distinguish-ment of the One from itself, the Repulsion of 
 the One, i.e., the setting of many or simply more Ones. By 
 reason of the Immediacy of the Being-for-self-ity, these Many or 
 More are Beent, and the Repulsion of the Beent Ones becomes so 
 far their Repulsion the one of the Bother as of entities already to 
 the fore, or Mutual Exclusion. 
 
 ' (y) The Many, however, are, the one what the other is ; each 
 is one, or one of the Many ; they are, therefore, one and the same., 
 Or the Repulsion regarded in itself is, even as negative comport- 
 ment of the Many Ones mutually, equally essentially their Refer- 
 ence mutually ; and as those to which in its repulsion the One 
 refers itself are One, it refers itself in them to itself. The Repul- 
 sion is thus quite as essentially Attraction; and the excludent One 
 or the Being-for-Self sublates itself. Qualitative Determinateness, 
 which in the One has reached its absolute determinedness (ihr 
 An-und-fursich-Bestimmtseyn), is with this gone over into Deter- 
 minateness that is as sublated Determinateness, i.e., into Being as 
 Quantity.' 
 
 These are translations of 96, 97, 98 in the third edition of 
 the Encyclopaedie, (for the future we shall chiefly follow this 
 edition), and they constitute the entire Encyclopaedic summary 
 
502 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of the whole subject of Being-for-Self. This alone, even independ- 
 ently of the siniilar summaries of Being and There-being, would 
 suffice to demonstrate as well the inadequacy of the Encyclopaedie 
 to convey the System, as the fact that it is nothing but a handy 
 leading-string, or useful synopsis to the student who has already 
 penetrated, or is engaged penetrating, into the business itself the 
 complete Logic. Further comment, after what has been so fully 
 extended already, will be here unnecessary: 'the ^Reference of 
 the Negative to itself/ the ' Excludent of the Other out of itself/ 
 c already to the fore/ 'in it itself/ 'comportment italicised for the 
 equally-italicised Verhalten/ &c., may now be trusted to the in- 
 telligence of the reader. 
 
 Perhaps it may be worth while remarking that Hegel displays 
 in what we have just read certain Gnostic analogies. Of the 
 systems so named, we learn that it was a leading idea that ' God, 
 the sum of all veritable Being, reveals himself in this way, 
 that he hypostasises his Qualities, or allows them to pass out of 
 himself into existence as Substances ; but still directly from God 
 their issues only one substance, the vov$, Keason ; and it is from 
 this latter that the rest follow, but always so that the one is suc- 
 cessively out of the other, the divine substance being extenuated 
 in proportion to the remotion from the centre.' Speculative 
 Philosophy is not unrepresented in the definition of Gnosis as 
 Higher Wisdom, a Eeligious Wisdom, that by aid of foreign 
 philosophemes would lay deeper the foundations of the Positive 
 and Traditional.' We know, too, that in Alexandria, the seat of 
 Gnosticism, there was a desire and an effort to reconcile and unite 
 ' opposing philosophemes ; ' there, ' when the fair blossom of Greece 
 which the bland heaven had evoked, was faded and withered up 
 Art sought to replace what Nature no longer spontaneously 
 offered.' These are certainly Anklange, assonances ; but it is not 
 to be supposed that they were suggestive to Hegel ; rather they 
 ought to be suggestive to us only suggestive of the analogy of the 
 Historical Occasions : and, for the rest, we have to be thankful 
 that Hegel has probably effected, by tenacious dogging of the 
 pure notion, what the Gnostics, soaring into the figurate concep- 
 tion, were only able to convert into the monstrosities of dream. 
 
 We pass now from What sort to How much ; nor is it difficult 
 to see that How much is indifferent to What sort, or that it is 
 just the indifferent limit. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 503 
 
 V. 
 
 A SUMMARY OR TRANSLATION, COMMENTED AND 
 INTERPRETED, OF THE SECOND SECTION OF THE 
 COMPLETE LOGIC, QUANTITY. 
 
 WE have seen the collapse of the entire round of the constituents 
 of Quality into a simple identity from the qualitative indifference 
 of which, its own opposite, a wholly new sphere, Quantity, emerges. 
 This emergence, what Hegel names the UnterschiQd, the se-cern- 
 ment, the se-cession, the dif-ference, we have now more closely to 
 consider. 
 
 This section opens in a strain of singularly rich and beautiful 
 reflexion, which is also always somehow of a double aspect. On 
 one aspect, it is still Qualitative Being-for-Self which we have 
 before us (the voice, say), thoroughly identified with, and in- 
 different to, its own determinateness (the notes then); and on 
 the other aspect we suddenly find that this is Quantity. The life, 
 as it were, of the voice, now, then, is but indifferent continuity of 
 one or ones; and what is that but Quantity? This reference 
 being kept steady, the expressions of Hegel, however coy and 
 elusive, will become intelligible. Quality (a note) will be 
 readily granted to be 'the first, the immediate, or the direct deter- 
 minateness ; ' whereas Quantity is a determinateness which is 
 indifferent, so to speak, to what it is indifferent to the being it 
 conveys : * it is a Limit which is none ; it is Being-for-Self directly 
 identical with the Being-for-Other ; the Repulsion of the many 
 ones [the notes], which is immediately their non-repulsion, their 
 continuity' or the voice which is in the notes and through 
 the notes, at once Being-for-Self and Being-for-Other. The dupli- 
 city of this description is very evident : inwardly it applies to our 
 latest qualitative values, but outwardly it just names Quantity, 
 which is now then explicit. 
 
 Again, to put it so the notes appear no longer to have their 
 
504 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 affair in themselves, but in another, the voice, while at the same 
 time both they and it are reflected into themselves as indifferent 
 limits : that is, ' the determinateness in general is out of itself, a 
 something directly external to itself and to the Something ; such 
 a Limit, its indifference in its own self, and the indifference of the 
 Something to it, constitutes the quantitative determinateness of a 
 Something.' 
 
 It must be regarded as a great triumph of the method of Hegel, 
 that a mere dogging of the pure notion as it trends away off in 
 its own self before us, should lead to such an exhaustive statement 
 of the idea of Quantity a statement, too, as will be found in the 
 end, no less exhaustive of the complete theory than of the mere 
 initiatory idea. 
 
 The general division which follows now will be more intelligible 
 after the discussion ; and as for the Bernark, it contains some 
 slight illustrative matter. A corn-field, for example, is still a 
 corn-field, though its quantitative limit be altered ; but by altera- 
 tion of its qualitative limit, it becomes meadow, wood, &c. A 
 red, whether more or less intense, is still red ; but its quality 
 being changed, it ceases to be red, and becomes blue, &c. Thus, 
 from every example, we may see that Quantity always concerns a 
 Beingness, which is indifferent to the very determinateness which 
 it now, or at any time, has. Quantity is usually defined ' anything 
 that will admit of increase or decrease.' To increase is to make 
 more to decrease, less in quantity. The definition is thus 
 tautological and faulty. Still, the true notion is implied : we see 
 the distinction of Quantity to be its own indifference to becoming 
 other; which othering or alteration, too, is always external. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 505 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 QUANTITY. 
 
 A. 
 
 PURE QUANTITY. 
 
 * QUANTITY is sublated Being-for-Self ;' the voice (to call in again 
 our illustration) is identified away out into the notes and on with 
 them ; ( or, the repelling One has become the referring One, relates 
 itself to its Other as in identity, and has gone over into Attraction. 
 The absolute denyingness of the repelling One is melted out into 
 this Unity ; but still this Unity as containing the One is influenced 
 by the immanent repulsion it is unity with itself as unity of the 
 Being-out-of itself. Attraction is in this way the moment of 
 Continuity in Quantity.' 
 
 But this unity is, so to speak, np dry unity ; it is the unity of 
 Somewhat, of the Many, of the units. Continuity, then, implies 
 Discretion. The one unit is what the other is; and it is this 
 sameness which the Eepulsion extends into the Continuity. Discre- 
 tion for its part is confluent ; the discretes are the same thing, 
 one then, and so continuous. 
 
 Quantity is the unity of continuity and discretion, but firstly in 
 the form of continuity, inasmuch as it has just issued from the 
 self-identically determinate Beirig-for-Self. Quantity is now the 
 truth, the Wahrheit, the wareness, the perceived factuality of the 
 absolute, which in the last value of the Being-for-Self was leffc as 
 the self-sublating self-reference, the self-perpetuating Coming-out- 
 of-itself. 'But what is repelled is its own self; the Eepulsion, 
 therefore, is the genetic profluence of its own self. Because of 
 the self-sameness of what is repelled and driven off, this very 
 dis-cerning is uninterrupted continuity; and because of the 
 Coming-out-of-itself, this continuity, without being interrupted, 
 
506 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 is at the same time plurality, which just as much abides in its 
 equality with itself.' 
 
 These last sentences very tolerably convey Hegel's central 
 conception of the Divine Life, which is always a perpetual One 
 in a perpetual Many a perpetual Self in a perpetual Other. 
 What is, is the One flicker of a Two ; what is, is nictitation. 
 Again, one sees very clearly into the moments here : they are 
 continuity and discretion, quantity, the same but different. That 
 continuity will become extension, discretion intension, one can 
 readily anticipate : one can see, indeed, that continuity will 
 become by-and-by the outer, and discretion the inner. Nor is it 
 to be forgotten that Continuity and Discretion, Kepulsion and 
 Attraction, One and Many, Being-for-Self and Being-for-One, 
 Finite and Infinite, Something and Other, &c., were originally 
 Being and Nothing the first abstract truths, as Becoming was 
 the first concrete one, though but in naked abstraction all the 
 same. 
 
 Two very important Remarks are here now intercalated. In 
 the first, the first point noticed is, that Quantity is every- 
 where the real possibility of the One, the Unit ; but that, vice 
 versd, the One, the Unit, is no less directly continuous. The 
 tendency of conception to confound continuity with com- 
 position is then remarked on composition as a mere ex- 
 ternal putting together of the units ; each of these as we 
 saw in atomism being all the while self-identically inde- 
 pendent. This idea-less externality of view is to be exchanged for 
 the living internality of the concrete notion. Even mathematic 
 rejects such composition of indifferent discretes what at any time 
 it regards as Sum is but for the occasion so, and even in its discre- 
 tion is an infinite Many. A quotation from Spinoza next occurs, 
 which maintains two modes of conceiving Quantity, one through 
 imagination, and one through intellect; the former finite, divisible, 
 composite, the latter infinite, indivisible, single. It is interest- 
 ing to see in Spinoza the Hegelian distinction between imagination 
 (Vorstellung) and intellect (Begriff), at the same time that it is not 
 for a moment to be supposed that it was derived from him : as 
 well might we assert inasmuch as it is quite capable of being 
 regarded as potential germ in that direction that to this passage 
 in Spinoza Kant owes what mainly constitutes him his manifold 
 of Sense and his unity of the Notion. There is here a further 
 parallelism, indeed : Spinoza characterises the view of imagination 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 507 
 
 as abstract or superficial, and that of intellect as substantial; now 
 this, again, concerns the many of sense and the one of intellect ; 
 Imagination (Sense) sees abstract superficiality, Intellect concrete 
 substance. We may understand from this how it is that Hegel 
 regards the operation of the first moment, simple apprehension 
 (identified with Verstand), as of an abstract nature. The object of 
 this faculty, indeed, is always abstract identity, surface-sameness, 
 Seyn ; it is another faculty that seeks substance, the Wesen, the 
 notion.* It is not only interesting, but corroborative, to come 
 thus on thoughts in different great writers, which thoughts, though 
 with very different lookings in each, involve at bottom the same 
 truths: at the same time, it is not the competent student, but 
 only the feverishly ambitious and feverishly imbecile (and so 
 exasperated) dipper, who will talk in such cases of plagiarism. 
 Time, space, matter, light, the ego, are then characterised as 
 examples of pure Quantity, and in those penetrating terms peculiar 
 to Hegel : space, an absolutely continuous out-of-itself-ness, a self- 
 identical otherwiseness and again otherwiseness ; time, an absolute 
 out-of-itself-coming-ness, a production of the one, the instant, the 
 now, which is the immediate disappearance of the same, and 
 always, again, the disappearance of this disappearance ; so that 
 this self-production of non-being is no less simple self-equality 
 and self-identity. As for matter, Leibnitz remarks, ' It is not at 
 all improbable that matter and quantity are really the same thing '; 
 and Hegel adds, ' in effect these nations differ only in this that 
 quantity is the pure notion, while matter is the same thing in out- 
 ward existence.' Lastly, the Ego is, as pure Quantity, an absolute 
 Becoming-otherwise, an infinite removal or omni-lateral repulsion 
 into the negative freedom of the Being-for-Self, which remains 
 still, however, directly simple continuity the continuity of uni- 
 versality, or of Being-by-Self which is uninterrupted by the 
 infinitely varied limits, the matter of sensations, perceptions, &c. 
 
 The second remark is a critique on Kant in regard to his 
 Antinomies, and its consideration will have fitter place elsewhere. 
 We cannot pass it, however, without observing that it is an 
 analysis of such annihilative penetration and resistless force as is 
 in that kind without a rival. It will assist the reader here to know 
 
 * The Remark to the ' Relation of Outer and Inner' (Log. ii. 180) explicitly states 
 this : ' In every natural, scientific, and spiritual development, this offers itself, and 
 this essentially is to be recognised that the First, in that Something is only first of 
 all inwardly or in its Notion, is just on that account only its immediate, passive, 
 external, particular identity as there-bent.' But see the whole Remark. 
 
508 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that the difficulty concerning the infinite divisibility of matter 
 rests simply on the opposing of continuity to discretion, at the 
 same time that both are one and the same thing ; and that the 
 solution, consequently, is effected by pointing out the onesidedness 
 of the opposition, and the necessity of both moments coalescing in 
 the identity of Quantity. The remark ends with some exceedingly 
 interesting references to the Eleatics and to Heraclitus to 
 Diogenes, who, by walking, supposed himself to refute the sophism 
 (falsely so named) of Zeno in regard to motion to Aristotle, to 
 Bayle, &c. Hegel bestows great commendation on the Aristotelian 
 solution of the contradictions of Zeno in regard to the Infinite 
 Divisibility, and is evidently convinced of its satisfactoriness. 
 This solution would seem, indeed, though, of course, far from 
 being accompanied by the ultimate definiteness of the Hegelian 
 vision, to have been at bottom the same as Hegel's, and to have 
 consisted in the opposing of the concrete whole and real to the 
 opposition of the abstract moments in the opposing, that is, of 
 the concrete real quantities time, space, matter, motion, &c., to the 
 abstractions continuity and discretion. Hegel observes here 
 * Bayle, who, in his Dictionary, art. Zenon, finds Aristotle's solu- 
 tion of Zeno's dialectic "pitoyable," understands not the meaning 
 of, Matter is only in possibility infinitely divisible : he replies, If 
 matter is infinitely divisible, then it actually contains an infinite 
 number of parts ; and so what we have is not an infinite en puis- 
 sance, but an infinite that really and actually exists. Rather, the 
 divisibility is itself only a possibility, not an existing so of the 
 parts, and multiplicity is at all attributed to the continuity only 
 as moment, as what is sublated. Sharp-sighted understanding, 
 in which, too, Aristotle is very certainly unsurpassed, is not 
 adequate to comprehend and decide on the speculative notions of 
 this latter, just as little so as the coarseness of sensuous concep- 
 tion already mentioned (Diogenes) is adequate to refute the 
 argumentations of Zeno : said understanding errs in this, that it 
 takes for something for something true and actual such mere 
 thought-things, such mere abstractions as an infinite number of 
 parts; while said sensuous conception, on its side, will not let 
 itself be brought beyond what is empirical and up to thoughts. '- 
 The conclusion here in reference to Diogenes is very clever, for it 
 is made in perception of the possible objection that, after all, the 
 reply of Diogenes to Zeno's argument against the possibility of 
 motion was the same as that of Aristotle, the opposition, that is, 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 509 
 
 of the concrete fact to the abstract thought ; and that, if there 
 were any difference between the two, it was but one of expression, 
 Aristotle ! s reply being couched in terms of the tongue (writing), 
 and that of Diogenes in terms of the legs (walking). Hegel has^ 
 certainly correctly enough prevented this objection. 
 
 This on Aristotle here is not without a light of its own for 
 Coleridge, De Quincey, and Sir William Hamilton. At page 102 
 of his own edition of Keid's Works, the last-named very distin- 
 guished writer will be found averring, in a note, that ' the fallacy 
 of Zeno's exposition of the contradictions involved in our notion 
 of motion has not yet been detected ' ! Within sight of his enor- 
 mous reputation at once in mastery of the Greek (Aristotle), and in 
 refutation of the German (Hegel and the rest), we may not have 
 been prepared to see Hamilton, either explicitly or implicitly, so 
 commit himself. Coleridge, for his part, will be found saying 
 somewhere that Zeno, in the matter of his contradiction in regard 
 to Infinite Divisibility had forgot to bring Time into account ; and 
 De Quincey again exhibits himself somewhere, in commentary on 
 Coleridge, firing up, as usual, into the figurate conception with loud 
 exclamation, that here at last was a voice across the ages solving the 
 mystery ! Coleridge's explanation here may very possibly have been, 
 or very probably was, but a vague mention of Time, a schoolboy's 
 guess, without sight of what it meant or of what was to be done with 
 it; Coleridge, in fact, would in all probability have been quite 
 powerless before the rejoinder "Why, Time itself is an example 
 of the same contradiction. Greek and German were not weak 
 points with either Coleridge or De Quincey ! It is just possible 
 that Coleridge's remark and De Quincey's comment (though with 
 less probability in the case of the latter) preceded 1812 and the 
 Logic of Hegel ; but what of Aristotle ? and why should such 
 Grecians not have directly consulted him, well known (Bayle) to 
 have written on the point in question, when they had their attention 
 expressly directed to the Zenonic problem ? Take it as one may, 
 the reality of Hegel stands up at least somewhat in contrast here.* 
 
 * Abraham Tucker (' Light of Nature,' i. 309) will be found far in advance of De 
 Quincey or Coleridge either, in regard to a relative mention of Time (he knows Zenonin 
 Bayle). Nay, it is all even in Aristotle first of all. In his Physics, B. 6, c. 2, he 
 distinctly says that Time opposes to Space an exactly similar infinitude (al yap 
 avral Sicu/^creis &TOJ/TCU rod XP^ VOV Ka ^ T v peytOovs 233a 11-16) ; and therefore (263a 
 14), et ev aTreipy XP^ V V #7rei/ja ditpxeraL rts ov5ei> &TOTTOV. See more on this under 
 the Eleatics on the annotations to the translation of Schwegler. Still I may remark 
 at this late day that, put a finite inch, infinitely divisible, into my hand, it would not 
 be possibly infinitely divisible were there not infinite possible parts conceived ! New. 
 
510 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 B. 
 
 CONTINUOUS AND DISCRETE QUANTITY. 
 
 1 1. Quantity contains the two moments of continuity and 
 discretion. It is to be set in both as its significates. It is imme- 
 diate unity of these, already at first hand ; i.e., it is itself set at 
 first hand only in one of its significates, continuity, and is thus 
 Continuous Quantity. 
 
 1 Or continuity is, indeed, one of the moments of Quantity, 
 which (Quantity) is completed only with the other moment, dis- 
 cretion. But Quantity is concrete unity only so far as it is unity 
 of distinguished moments. These, therefore, are to be taken as 
 distinct and different, certainly not, nevertheless, to be resolved 
 again into attraction and repulsion, but in their truth each as 
 remaining in its unity with the other, i.e., as the whole. Continuity 
 is only coherent solid unity as unity of the discrete ; thus ex- 
 pressed it is no longer only moment, but entire Quantity 
 continuous Magnitude. 
 
 ( 2. Immediate Quantity is continuous magnitude. But Quantity, 
 on the whole, is not an Immediate ; Immediacy is a determinate- 
 ness (a Quality) of which Quantity is the very sublation. It is, 
 therefore, to be set or expressed in the determinateness which 
 is immanent to it: this is the one or unit. Quantity is discrete 
 magnitude. 
 
 1 Discretion is, like continuity, a moment of Quantity ; but it is 
 itself also entire Quantity, just because it is a moment in it, in 
 the whole, and, therefore, even as distinguished, steps not out of 
 this whole, not out of its unity with the other moment. Quantity 
 is Aussereinanderseyn, asunderness, out-of-one-another-ness in 
 itself, and continuous magnitude is this asunder-ness as setting 
 itself forward without negation, as a coherence that is equal and 
 alike within itself. But discrete magnitude is this asunder-ness 
 as incontinuous, as interrupted. With this many of ones there are 
 not again present, however, the many of the atom and the void 
 repulsion in general. Because discrete magnitude is Quantity, 
 its discretion is itself continuous. This continuity of the discrete 
 consists in this, that the ones or units are alike, are equal to one 
 another, or that they have the same unity, the same oneness (i.e., of 
 
QUANTITY INTERPBETED, ETC. 511 
 
 being the like of one another). Discrete magnitude is therefore 
 the asunder-ness of the many or repeated One, as of the like (as of 
 this like of one another, or of the sameness), not the many One as 
 such, but expressed as the many or much of one unity.' 
 
 The above is an exact translation ; and translation is necessitated 
 here by the impossibility of accomplishing any closer summary 
 than the text itself. This is a constant quantity in Hegel, who 
 seldom offers any loose tissue of raisonnement to give a chance of 
 distillation or compression into summary. (The true state of the 
 case, then, is, not the impossibility of extracting any sense from 
 Hegel without distillation, but this impossibility with distillation, 
 or rather the impossibility of distillation simply.) But little 
 comment seems necessary. The immediacy of the continuity of 
 Quantity at first hand depends, it will be remembered, on the 
 qualitative indifference, the value, from which it issued. Indeed, 
 this value, the indifferent For-itself-beent One, should never be 
 left out of mind here, as it is precisely from this One that 
 Quantity is, or that Quantity derives its peculiar character. The 
 One is but the prototype of the discrete, as the Oneness is but the 
 prototype of the continuous. The indifference of the For-itself- 
 beent One, is just the continuance of this One ; there is nothing 
 but One, One, One, onwards in infinitum : what is this but 
 Quantity in both of its moments ? The reader, in short, must 
 never forget ever and anon to orient himself by a reference to the 
 sub specie ceternitatis. ' Immediacy is a determinateness of 
 which Quantity is the very sublation : ' we saw this to be the 
 case when Quality passed into Quantity; that transition was 
 simply oneness, immediacy passing into indifference; but still 
 in the indifference there is the immanent One, which is the 
 discrete of Quantity: Quantity, then, may be expressed, may be 
 set as explicit, as overt in this its moment of discretion, or it may 
 be so stated. Again, this One that is the discrete, is also the 
 One, One, One, the One-ness that is the continuous ; and either 
 moment is Quantity and the same Quantity, the discrete as the 
 One at all, the continuous as the one One of, or through, all the 
 Ones. This will suffice also to supply the necessary commentary 
 to what follows as regards 'the like of one another/ &c. The 
 derivation of our asunder from the German auseinander will also 
 be obvious. The reader must be struck with the marvellous 
 truth to the nature of Quantity contained in language that is 
 meant in the first instance to apply only to the indifferent 
 
512 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 absolute One we had reached in Quality. This is the true 
 nature, then, of the Hegelian progress, as it is of thought, 
 and just of the universe in general, Setzen, explicitation ; 
 whatever at any time we have before us suddenly becomes 
 explicit as another, a new. The phrase many One has been 
 necessitated by the corresponding phrase of the original; 
 it will be found not to shock if the reader read with his 
 mind thoroughly addressed to the self-equal, self-like (discrete) 
 One, that is also the many (continuous) One, of the one, but 
 continued, For-itself-beent One. The indifference is the many 
 One, the continuum; but the one One that is persistently 
 immanent all this time in the indifference, in the continuance, is 
 the like One, the One of the Oneness, the discretum. Both are the 
 same, both are quantity ; or quantity is only at once through 
 their sameness and their distinction : without immanent difference 
 or distinction there is no such thing as recognition of an Inhalt, 
 an object, a concrete, in any case ; and in every case the question 
 is which moment is the set one, the express or explicit one, and 
 which is the implicit one that is for the time only in itself? 
 Bestimmung, it will be seen, has been translated significate ; it 
 might have been translated function; but, indeed, Bestimmung 
 always refers to signification, denotation. As regards the im- 
 mediacy, in which Quantity appears as continuous, it is to be 
 remarked that the first moment of the Notion in all its forms is 
 one of immediacy : it is always the moment of identity, of under- 
 standing or simple apprehension, and that is immediacy. The 
 three moments may be respectively named, then, immediacy, 
 mediacy, and mediated, or re-mediated, immediacy: Apprehen- 
 sion (understanding) takes up just what is before it; Judgment 
 refuses it as it is, and asks for it in another ; Reason resumes. 
 Ee-extrication of the moments from each new whole, and in the 
 form, or with the peculiar nature, of this new whole, is the spring 
 and the means of the movement, or just the movement : thus Being 
 acting on Nothing, but in Becoming, arose as Origin, while 
 Nothing acting on Being, but in Becoming, arose as Decease ; Being 
 acting on Nothing, but in There-being, re-appeared as Reality, and 
 Nothing acting on Being, but in There-being, re-appeared as 
 Negation ; Being acting on Nothing, but in Something, manifested 
 itself as Ansichseyn, In-itself-ness, the Something's own being, 
 and Nothing acting on Being, but in the Something, manifested 
 itself as the Being-for-other, the Being of the Something when 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 513 
 
 under the negation of another, that is, relatively to another, 
 and so on. 
 
 EEMARK. 
 
 The usual separation of these Quantities. 
 
 ' In the ordinary figurate conceptions of continuous and discrete 
 magnitude, it escapes notice that each of these magnitudes has in 
 it both moments, as well continuity as discretion, and that their 
 difference depends only on which is the explicit determinateness, 
 and which that that is only in itself. Time, space, matter, &c., 
 are continuous magnitudes in that they are repulsions from them- 
 selves, a fluent Coming-out-of-self, that is at the same time not a 
 going over or a relation to a qualitative other. They possess an 
 absolute possibility of One being set anywhere and everywhere in 
 them ; this not as the empty possibility of a mere otherwiseness 
 (as if one should say, it were possible that in place of this stone 
 there were a tree) ; but they possess the principle of the One in 
 themselves, it is the One of the factors which compose them. 
 
 ' Conversely in the case of discrete quantity the presence of 
 continuity is not to be overlooked ; this moment, as has been 
 shown, is One as oneness. 
 
 ' Continuous and discrete magnitudes are capable of being re- 
 garded as species of Quantity only if the magnitude is not set under 
 any external determinateness (as a certain So-much), but under the 
 peculiar distinctions or determinatetiesses of its own moments ; the 
 ordinary transition from genus to species is such as to render the 
 former liable to the ascription of external distinctions dependent 
 on some distributive principle external to it. Withal, continuous 
 and discrete magnitudes are not quanta ; they are only Quantity 
 itself in each of its two forms. They may be named magnitudes 
 so far, perhaps, as they have this in common with the Quantum, 
 that they are a peculiar determinateness in Quantity/ 
 
 This Eemark is also an exact translation, and little comment 
 seems necessary. The One as Oneness is continuity ; Oneness as 
 One is discretion. The distinctions will not remain in dry self- 
 identity : the Geometrical point is potential space, Attraction is 
 Eepulsion. Eepulsion is Motion, &c., and the question always is, 
 which elementary distinction is overt, express, explicit, ostensive, 
 and which latent, implicit, indicated, indirect, &c. ? Setzen 
 contains the whole mystery : the Moon here is always either full 
 
 2 K 
 
514 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 or new. A concrete must have difference and identity; mere 
 difference were dissolution, and mere identity were equally 
 extinction. Space has both principles ; so also time ; and these, 
 though both pure quantities, are still different. The one and the 
 many of space are at once and together. The one of time never 
 is and always is; its one is its many, its many its one: time is 
 thus a symbol of the absolute. 
 
 C. 
 
 LIMITATION OF QUANTITY. 
 
 * The discrete magnitude has firstly the One as its principle, and 
 is secondly multiplicity of the Ones; thirdly, it is essentially 
 continuous, it is the One at the same time as a sublated One, as 
 Oneness, self-continuation as such in the discretion of the Ones. 
 It is set, therefore, as a magnitude, and the peculiar determinate- 
 ness of such magnitude is the One which in this position and 
 particular being is excludent One limit in the unity. The 
 discrete magnitude as such is supposed to be immediately not 
 limited ; but as distinguished from the continuous magnitude it is 
 as a There-being (a special Beingness) and a Something, the 
 determinateness of which is the One which One as in a There- 
 being is also first Negation and Limit. 
 
 'This limit, besides being referred to the unity, and besides 
 being negation in this unity, is as One also referred to itself, and 
 thus it is encompassing and containing limit. The limit dis- 
 tinguishes itself not in the first instance here from the Something 
 of its There-being, but is as One immediately this negative point 
 itself. But the being that is here limited is essentially as con- 
 tinuity, by virtue of which it is beyond the limit and this One, 
 and is in that regard indifferent. The real discrete Quantity is 
 thus a Quantity, or Quantum, Quantity as a There-being and 
 Something. 
 
 ' In that the One which is limit, contains the many Ones of the 
 discrete quantity within itself, it sets these no less as sublated 
 within it ; it is thus limit in the continuity as such, and so the 
 difference between continuous and discrete magnitude is here 
 indifferent; or more correctly, it is limit in the continuity of the 
 one, as much as in that of the other ; in it loth undergo transition 
 into Quanta! 
 
 These three paragraphs (of C.) are exactly translated, but 
 

 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 515 
 
 sufficiently difficult. Intelligence must be sought sub specie 
 osternitatis in the first instance we must return to look again at 
 the indifferent absolute One with which we entered Quantity. The 
 One, the many Ones, the one One: all lies there; these are the 1, 2, 3 
 with which Hegel starts. In the indifferent life of the absolute One" 
 now, the One, the Unit, is still as the principle, but it continues, 
 or is the many Ones, and also when it refers back to these and the 
 series of these, it is one One and a Quantity, or Quantum. In its 
 indifference it is certainly ' essentially continuous ; ' ' it is the One 
 as sublated One, as Unity ; ' it is its own ' self-continuation in the 
 discretion of the Ones.' It is thus a quantity, and the peculiar 
 specificity of this quantity depends on the One that is its limit. 
 A ten depends on the tenth. This One (the tenth) is seen also to be 
 the excludent One. The quantity to which this One is limit is 
 characterised as Daseyn, as Etwas, and as dieses Gesetztseyn. 
 Etwas is, of course, translated only Something ; Daseyn now as 
 There-being (special Beingness), and again as particular being. 
 As for Gesetztseyn, it will be found translated on this occasion, 
 and not infelicitously, by 'in this position! But why these 
 words are used in this place requires a word of explanation. The 
 key to the whole lies in what has taken place : the one is One, as 
 continued it is many Ones, but as continued it is also one One. 
 Now this last step is as a reflexion from other or. others into self; 
 but that is precisely the constitution of Something. Again, the 
 continuance through the series of the Ones is a Werden, a Becom- 
 ing, while its suspension (by the reflexion alluded to) gives rise to 
 a Daseyn, a There-being, a definite relative So-ness. Lastly, the 
 reflexion is a Setzen, and the result is a Gesetztseyn ; the reflexion 
 is only an exploitation of what was before implicit, and the result 
 is a new explicitness, a new position, where this last word may be 
 considered an equivoque of and between its ordinary and its 
 logical senses. It will not be difficult to see now, then, that dis- 
 crete magnitude, passing through these reflexions, has become a 
 magnitude, the precise value or determinateness of which depends 
 on the One from which the reflexion back was made ; this One is 
 the limit or the excludent One in the new position, or special 
 There-ness which has been just effected through the reflexion. 
 The tenth One in a ten will readily illustrate all this. The tenth 
 One is the limit, the excludent One, the barrier that stops entrance 
 to all other Ones ; but it is the reflexion of this tenth One into 
 the other Ones that gives birth to the particular and peculiar 
 
516 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 and every way unique and special quantity Ten or a Ten ; the 
 whole acquires the edge the specificity of this One; each of 
 the other Ones is as it a tenth; each of the other Ones 
 is it; from it is the new explication, the new position, 
 the new There-ness, the new Something Ten. The Ten is at 
 first as ten units discrete without any definite boundary line 
 but these ten as distinguished from the possible continuation or 
 continuity onwards into and through other units, are a special 
 definite There-ness and So-ness, a special definite Something of 
 which the One (the tenth) is at once the specificity, and also 
 as in a There-being (negated, suspended Becoming) the first 
 negation and limit. Thus far the first paragraph ; which being 
 thoroughly understood, the two remaining ones will not be diffi- 
 cult. The reader, however, may object here why the digression ? 
 why leap from the very absolute of absolutes to a thing so very 
 everyday and common as the number ten ? We answer, there is 
 no necessity for the digression ; all must still be conceived 
 as sub specie ceternitatis ; the number ten is hut an empirical 
 illustration. The life, so to speak, of the qualitative One, now a 
 quantitative One, is still to be pursued by the clue and the virtue of 
 the pure notion. What is, is now pure Quantity, sublated Quality, 
 Determinateness external to its own self, an indefinitely continu- 
 ous o^ering or uttering of itself of the One as One, One, One ; 
 but it is the pure notion that is so characterised, and whatever is 
 implicit in this characterisation, that notion shall duly set or 
 make explicit for us. Now One, and One, One, One, and 
 again One that, referring back, resumes these Oue-One-Ones, is 
 very fairly the movement of the notion in such an element. Not 
 only is such movement characteristic of the element as element, 
 but on the other side, it is the characteristic movement of the 
 notion itself; it is again apprehension, judgment, and reason; 
 it is again identity, difference, and identified difference, or differ- 
 entiated identity; it is again immediacy, mediacy, and re- 
 mediated immediacy, or just immediate mediacy. This being 
 seen, another deep glance into Hegel has been effected with 
 realisation of the distinction that Hegel is not only true to the 
 principle, the notion, but true to the element also ; and so only 
 is it that what he says is the exhaustive metaphysic, even in an 
 external sense, of whatever sphere he enters. A great deal has 
 been written about cause and effect, for example, but it will be 
 found that Hegel alone, with vigilant eye immovably fixed on 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 517 
 
 the pure notioo, has been enabled to speak the ultimate word, 
 even as external explanation, on this subject also. The number 
 ten, then, illustrates, but it does not create the present phase 
 of the absolute or of the notion; that phase is one of pure 
 Quantity, and is applicable not to numbers only, but to extension 
 as well. There are many readers to whom all this prosecution of 
 a One, One, One, &c., will appear but trifling a trifling wholly 
 unworthy of grown men : even so, to an external eye, a bearded 
 Archimedes scratching lines, triangles, squares, circles, &c., might 
 seem but a great boy very unworthily employing himself. Archi- 
 medes, however, through these scratches brought no less a power 
 than that of Eome to bay ; through these scratches Archimedes 
 and the like enabled us to move mountains and to change seas, 
 enabled us to seize Space and Time themselves : these scratches, 
 indeed, have been to us the express successive steps heaven- 
 wards. So Hegel, following these soap-bubbles of One, One, 
 One, &c., has made us freemen of the absolute itself. 
 
 The tenth of the ten will be found to illustrate the first 
 sentence of the second paragraph also ; it is ' referred to the 
 unity ' Ten ; it is * negation in this unity ; ' it stops Ten there, 
 and it stops others off from Ten ; it is also ' referred to itself,' it 
 is the Tenth, and so each of the others is a Tenth, and the Ten 
 itself has in it (the Tenth) its own particular value or virtue ; 
 and thus is it ' encompassing and containing limit.' The Ten to 
 follow the next sentence are thus in the Tenth, the limit, 'this 
 negative point itself ' ; the Tenth, then, is thus not distinguished 
 from the Something, the Ten. Still the ten are a ' Being essen- 
 tially continuity a Ten beyond this limit/ this single One, the 
 Tenth, and in that respect 'indifferent to it.' It is thus a 
 Quantity, and a Something with a specific There-ness or peculiar 
 nature. 
 
 The last paragraph opens with renewed consideration of the 
 tenth unit of the ten ; as it is it which gives the whole peculiar 
 character of the number a ten it is the qualitative and 
 quantitative limit; quantitatively it limits the continuity; 
 qualitatively it absorbs into itself all the other units each 
 is a tenth, but only through it ; it is thus limit in the con- 
 tinuity generally, limit to the continuity as such, and limit 
 also, as it were, to the continuity of the discretes themselves 
 (in that it sums and absorbs them). Thus is it that (the tenth 
 unit sublating, absorbing, or taking up into itself both) 'con- 
 
518 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 tinuous and discrete magnitude is here indifferent/ or that * both 
 undergo transition into Quanta/ the discretes becoming each a 
 tenth and so in continuity ten through the limiting tenth. 
 
 The reader will find the illustration here a very perfect key to 
 a very blank door indeed of indefinite abstraction. Nevertheless, 
 it is always to the absolute that the reader must first address 
 himself ; only so will he find himself at home also, if we may 
 speak thus, with soap, soda, and pearl-ash. 
 
 What is explicit now is Quantity as such whether discrete or 
 continuous reduced to Limit, let us well observe this. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 519 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 QUANTUM. 
 
 ' THE Quantum, first of all Quantity with a Determinateness or 
 Limit in general, is in its perfect Determinateness the Number 
 (the Digit or Cipher). The Quantum distinguishes itself 
 
 1 secondly, in the first instance, into the extensive Quantum, in 
 which the limit is as limitation of the there-beent multiplex (or 
 many) ; in the second instance, (this There-heing passing into 
 Being-for-self) into intensive Quantum, Degree, which, as for- 
 itself, and even so no less immediately out of itself, seeing that it is 
 as indifferent limit even when for-itself, has its determinateness 
 in another. As this express contradiction, to be thus simply 
 determined within itself and at the same time to have its determin- 
 ateness out of itself, and to point for this determinateness out of 
 itself, the Quantum passes over 
 
 * thirdly, as what is expressly in itself external to itself, into the 
 Quantitative Infinite.' 
 
 If not intelligible now, this division will become intelligible by 
 the end of the chapter. The many, the multiplex, the ones, or 
 units of extensive Quanta, are evidently there-leant ; they are not 
 ansich; they are distinguishably there; they are relative distinc- 
 tivity there; they are palpably there sensibly there; and they are 
 what they are through negation of Becoming, Limit. 
 
 A. 
 
 THE NUMBER OR DIGIT. 
 
 1 Quantity is Quantum, or has a limit ; both as continuous and 
 as discrete magnitude. The difference of these kinds has here at 
 first hand no import.' 
 
 This has just been seen : the limit of the continuum is the limit 
 also of, or affects with its own virtue, the discreta. 
 
 ' As sublated Being-for-self, Quantity is already in and for itself 
 
520 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 indifferent to its limit. But withal the limit, or to be a Quantum, 
 is just so not indifferent to it; for it contains the One, absolute 
 deterininedness, within itself as its own moment, which One, there- 
 fore, as explicit in its continuity or unity, is its limit, which, how- 
 ever, remains as One, as which One it (the Quantity) now on the 
 whole is.' 
 
 This is intelligible when viewed sub specie ceternitatis, and also 
 when illustrated as before by ten, &c. Sublated Being-for-self is, 
 as it were, punctuality gone over out of itself into its own opposite, 
 and that is Quantity. 
 
 4 This One is, therefore, the principle and principium of the 
 Quantum, but as one of Quantity. So it is, firstly, continuous, it 
 is oneness or unity.; secondly, it is discrete, implicit (as in con- 
 tinuous) or (as in discrete magnitude) explicit multiplicity of Ones, 
 which have equality, likeness, sameness, continuity, the same one- 
 ness or unity with one another ; thirdly, this One is also the nega- 
 tion of the many Ones as simple limit, an exclusion of its other- 
 wiseness out of itself, a determination of itself counter other Quanta. 
 The One is so far, (a) limit referent of self to self, (/3) self-compre- 
 hensive limit, and (y) other-excluding limit.' 
 
 All this is pretty much what we saw already under (C.), ' Limi- 
 tation of Quantity,' and it is quite susceptible of the same illustra- 
 tion : the tenth unit may be seen or has been seen to take up 
 each of these three attitudes towards itself, towards the other 
 units, and in sublation of these. This is so easy of application 
 now, that no more need be said. ' An exclusion of its otherwise- 
 ness out of itself : ' in the ten there are 1, 2, 3, &c. ; now these, as 
 1, 2, 3, &c., are the otherwiseness, but they are excluded as other- 
 wiseness by the tenth, and have become equally tenth, converted, 
 that is, into the one identity. 
 
 ' The Quantum in these forms completely explicit is the Number 
 (the Cipher, the Digit). The complete position or explicitation lies 
 in the special nature of the limit as multiplicity, and so in its dis- 
 tinction as well from the unity. The Number appears on this 
 account as a discrete magnitude, but it has in the unity equally 
 continuity. It is therefore, thus, the Quantum in perfect deter- 
 minateness (specificity) ; this, inasmuch as the limit in the digit is 
 as determinate multiplicity, which has for principle the One, the 
 directly determinate. Continuity (as that in which the One is 
 only in itself, or as sublated), expressed as unity, is the form of 
 indeterminateness, indefiniteness.' 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 521 
 
 To return to the paragraph of the t&xt immediately preceding 
 the last, for a moment we would observe that the division or 
 distribution with which it ends is exceedingly instructive, inas- 
 much as the general principle of such movement comes very 
 clearly to the surface. Number, meaning any number or digit, 
 is a limit, firstly, Self-referent ; secondly, Self-comprehensive ; 
 thirdly, Excludent of other. The self-reference is identity, 
 immediacy, simple apprehension, but in the element before 
 us unity. The comprehendingness, embracingness, clipping 
 or shutting about-ness (Umschliessend) of the Second is dif- 
 ference, mediacy, reference to other, judgment, but, in the pre- 
 sent element, many. Under the third head we have what 
 Hegel may be described as always specially bringing us, the 
 Remedy, the Ee-mediacy, identity through difference, that is, 
 differentiated identity or identified difference, reference to self 
 through reference to other, an othered self, or a selfed other, 
 a concrete determinate definite One, the moment of reason, 
 but here, in this element, a numerical whole, a Number. That is 
 (with special regard to the element), unity and amount (amount of 
 constitutive unities, that is, Einheit und Anzahl) are the moments 
 of the number, the cipher, the digit. The concrete, then, is the 
 number, and the moments can be seen in its regard to be, the one, 
 identity, and the other, difference, and both, so far, relatively 
 abstract. Quantity, as a whole, might be more simply divided 
 into the universal Quantity, the particular Tantity, and the 
 singular Quantified Tantity or Tantified Quantity (which last is 
 just Quantitative Eelation). In the same way, Quality might 
 have been divided into Quality, Tality, and Qualified Tality, or 
 Talified Quality (Being-for-self). The parallelism of the other 
 triplets which we now know, will readily suggest itself. As 
 regards the general division of the whole, Logic, Nature, Spirit, 
 it can be seen to be quite parallel with Quality, Quantity, and 
 Measure, with Universal, Particular, and Singular, &c. &c. As 
 for the division of Logic into Seyn (Being), Wesen (Essence), and 
 Begriff (Notion), it is strikingly parallel with Kant's Categories of 
 Eelation, as if Hegel had said to himself, Logic is the Subject 
 inquiring into the Object, that is, into its own relations. Now 
 Kant's Categories of Eelation are Substance, Cause, and Eecip- 
 rocity. Seyn (Being) is analogous to Substance; historically, it 
 is the logic or philosophy of the Greeks, whose constant inquiry 
 
522 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 was, What is this Seyn, this Being ? A question to which there 
 were such answers as, water, air, fire, the one, becoming, number, 
 the atom, intelligence, and lastly, that of Socrates, which, though 
 in a particular element, was an sich or in itself, the abstract 
 generalised notion afterwards perfected by Aristotle through Plato 
 into Formal Logic. We may say, then, here that the Subject 
 (among the Greeks, that is) had not as yet got beyond Simple 
 Apprehension, Understanding ; at the same time, it is to be 
 admitted that Aristotle names, and occupies himself to some 
 extent with, the concrete generalised, or universal, notion. 
 Wesen, Essentity, is the platform of the modern world, which, up 
 to Kant, had demanded, in regard to the Object, What is its 
 cause ? or, what is the same thing, What is it in another ? And 
 what is this but Judgment declaring the Object nothing as per se ? 
 Kant for his part inaugurated the reign of Keason: his industry 
 was Eeason an sich, in itself; he declared the Wesen, the 
 essential principle and nature, to be the Notion or Notional 
 Keciprocity. Into this final form at least, into the absolute or 
 concrete Universal, the conception of Kant has been perfected 
 by Hegel. Socrates reached the abstract Notion, then, and 
 Aristotle completed it into the abstract Logic; but Kant dis- 
 covered the concrete Notion, and Hegel completed it into 
 the concrete Logic. This single sentence tells the whole tale. 
 The concrete Notion, as it manifests itself in Hegel, is per- 
 haps, at shortest, this The Absolute is relative. Sufficient re- 
 flection, indeed, will soon disclose the fact, that an abso- 
 lute implies relativity, that an absolute is an absolute just 
 because of its relativity, or just because of the relativity it 
 contains. The general method of Hegel, then, is, in accordance 
 with this constitution of the nature of things, always to extricate 
 from any absolute any self-identical whole may be considered 
 an absolute its own necessary relativity, the opposition of which 
 latter to the former, the absoluteness, results in the collapse of 
 both into a concrete and new identity. All this has been already 
 said in a variety of forms : it is simply the Being-in-itself-ness and 
 the Being-for-other-ness, in ultimate abstraction it is just Being 
 and Nothing. The generalisation of Socrates, then, which issued 
 in abstract induction and abstract deduction, has, in the hands of 
 Hegel, been, as it were, doubled, and doubled into a concrete: 
 at any time that advance is made to a generalised identity, note 
 must be made of the other side, also, of the generalised difference 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 523 
 
 or relativity, which will be found necessarily to constitute and 
 give its peculiar filling to that identity. The perception of this 
 double constitution of the nature of thought, and consequently of 
 things, it is, that has enabled Hegel to reverse the process of 
 Socrates ; that is, instead of ascending from the immediate object 
 to universal notions, to descend from these last according to their 
 truth, and that is to say, by their own necessary self-genetic chain, 
 which ends not but in the system of the whole a system that 
 comprises and gives meaning and place even to the contingency 
 and isolated singleness of the external immediate.* 
 
 Passing to the last paragraph translated, it is not difficult to 
 see that the number qua number is the Quantum completely 
 explicit in the forms mentioned. 'This complete position or 
 explicitation lies, &c./ that is, the principle or reason of this 
 process expressed by these forms lies, &c. The definition that 
 occurs at the end, of the ' Form of Indefiniteness,' is exceedingly 
 happy. 
 
 ' The Quantum only as such has a limit ; its limit is its abstract, 
 simple deterininateness. But the Quantum being a number, this 
 limit is expressly as manifold within itself. It (the number) 
 contains the many ones which constitute its distinctive being; 
 contains them, however, not in an indefinite manner, but the 
 determinateness of the limit falls into them ; the limit excludes 
 other units, other distinctive being, and the units included by it 
 are a determinate number the amount, to which, as the discretion 
 in the way in which it is in the number, the other is the unity, 
 the continuity of the same number. Amount and unity constitute 
 the moments of number. 
 
 ' As regards amount, we must see more closely how the many 
 ones of which it consists are in the limit ; the expression is correct 
 that the amount consists of the many, for the ones are in it not as 
 sublated, but they are in it, only expressed with the excluding 
 limit, to which they, however, are indifferent. But it is not so 
 to them. In the case of There-being (distinctive being), the 
 relation of the limit to it had firstly expressed itself so, that the 
 There-being remained standing as the affirmative on this side of 
 its limit, and it (the limit), the negation, found itself without by 
 the border ; in like manner as regards the many ones, the breaking- 
 off with them and the exclusion of any others appears as a 
 circumstance which falls outside of the included ones. But we saw 
 
 * That external immediate is Nature. New. 
 
524 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 there that the limit pervades the There-being, reaches as far as it, 
 and that the Something is thereby, as regards its determination, 
 limited, i.e. finite. Thus, in the quantitativity of number, we 
 conceive a hundred say so that the hundredth one, or unit, 
 alone appears to limit the many in such wise that they are a 
 hundred. This is right on one side ; but then, again, among the 
 hundred ones no one has any preference, for they are only equal ; 
 each is equally the hundredth ; they belong all of them, therefore, 
 to the limit, by which limit the number is a hundred : this number 
 cannot want any one of them for its special determinateness ; the 
 others make up thus apart from the hundredth one no There- 
 being (distinctivity) that were without the limit or within the 
 limit, or in general different from it. The amount is not therefore 
 a many as against the including, limiting one or unit, but 
 constitutes itself this limitation, which is a determinate Quantum ; 
 the many form a number, a Two, a Ten, a Hundred, &c. 
 
 ' The limiting one, now, is determinedness counter other, dis- 
 tinction of the number from others. But this distinction is not 
 qualitative determinateness, but remains quantitative, falls only 
 into the external reflexion that compares ; a number remains as a 
 one turned back into itself, and indifferent to others. This indiffer- 
 ence of a number to others is an essential characteristic of it ; this 
 it is that constitutes the In-itself-ness (the independent self-sub- 
 sistence) of its nature, but at the same time its peculiar externality. 
 It is such numerical one, as the absolutely determined one that 
 has at the same time the form of simple immediacy, to which, 
 therefore, any reference to other is perfectly external. The one 
 that is a number has further its determinateness, so far as that de- 
 terminateness is refer ence-to-other, as its moments within itself, in 
 its distinction of unity and amount, and the amount is itself a 
 many of ones, i.e., there is within itself this absolute externality. 
 This contradiction of Number or of Quantum in general within 
 itself is the quality of quantum, and this contradiction will de- 
 velop itself as the characterisation of this quality proceeds/ 
 
 There-being, as used in this connexion, refers to the special 
 values of the various numbers ; a Two, a Ten, a Hundred, &c., can 
 be seen to have a Daseyn, a There-being of its own, a peculiar 
 distinctivity which belongs to it and to nothing else. This throws 
 light on Daseyn itself, which is always thus, as it were, the 
 peculiar and differentiating sensibleness or palpableness of any- 
 thing whatever; it is distinctive relativity. That it and its 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 525 
 
 peculiarity arise, too, from a negated Werden here a counting 
 forward, one, two, three, &c. is also well seen in this example. 
 The irrespective independent apathy, neutrality, and externality 
 of number are well touched. Bestimmtheit, determinateness, is 
 also well seen here to convey absolute peculiarity, specificity, &c.~ 
 anything's express and constitutive point. The reader has, 
 in regard to these passages, already sufficient illustration at com- 
 mand, and we may pass to 
 
 EEMARK I. 
 
 The Arithmetical Operations. 
 
 An important critique on Kant contained here also we shall 
 reserve for notice elsewhere; the remaining matter we shall 
 endeavour to summarise a process, as regards Hegel, possible 
 only at rare intervals, and, for the most part, as here, only in the 
 Remarks. 
 
 'Magnitude as in. space (geometrical) and magnitude as in 
 number (arithmetical), though bearing the one on continuity and 
 the other on discretion, and so far different, are usually regarded 
 as equally kinds of the same thing, as equally Quanta, and as 
 equally determinate. But what holds of continuity cannot have 
 the same keenness of limit, determinateness, as what holds of 
 discretion. Geometrical limitation is limitation quite generally ; 
 for precision of determinateness if requires number. Geometry 
 measures not, is not mensuration, it compares, it likens together. 
 Its distinctions proceed by like and unlike. It is thus the circle 
 its nature being absolute likeness of distance on the part of every 
 circumferential point as regards the single central one has no 
 need of number. Like and unlike are characters, then, veritably 
 geometrical ; but they are insufficient, and number is called in, as 
 we see in triangle, quadrangle, &c. Number has in its principle 
 the one complete s^/-determinateness, and not determinate- 
 ness, as in com^ftrison, through another. There is the geometrical 
 point, a one certainly, but in the line, &c., the point is no longer 
 the point, it is out of itself into continuity another ; as essentially 
 a one of space, it becomes, when in reference (i.e., in connexion), 
 a continuity, in which punctuality, self-determinateness, the one, 
 is sublated. To maintain the self-determinateriess of the one in 
 the Out-of-self-ness of the continuity, the line must be taken as a 
 
526 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 many or multiple of ones, and must receive within itself the limit, 
 the determinateness, the conjunct virtue, of the many or multi- 
 plicity ; i.e., the magnitude of the line and so of the rest must 
 be taken as number. 
 
 4 Arithmetic considers, rather operates with, number, for number 
 is indifferent determinateness, inert, to be brought into action and 
 reference only from without. The arithmetical rules concern the 
 modes of reference or connexion. They are rehearsed in succession, 
 and seem to depend on one another, but no principle of mutual 
 connexion is exhibited. From the nature of the notion of number, 
 however, such principle of systematic co-reference may be deduced. 
 
 ' From its principle, the One, number is but an externally 
 united compound, a purely analytic figure, without internal 
 connexion. As thus externally generated, all counting is a 
 production of numbers, a numbering, or, more definitely, a number- 
 ing together. Difference in this external operation, which is always 
 the same, can come only from the mutual difference of the 
 numbers operated on, and must always depend on an external 
 consideration. 
 
 ' Numbers as Quanta are externally distinguished by external 
 identity and external difference, or by likeness and unlikeness, 
 characters which fall to be considered elsewhere. But the nature 
 of number depending on the qualitative distinction of unity and 
 amount, it is from that distinction that all others will follow. 
 
 'Again, external composition plainly infers external decom- 
 position ; so that a traffic with numbers in general must either, as 
 composing, be positive, or, as decomposing, negative, and the particular 
 species of this traffic, though following, will remain independent of, 
 this antithesis. 
 
 'T\\Q first production of number is the composing of many ones 
 just as many ones, Numeration. Such externality is only ex- 
 ternally exhibited by help of the fingers, points, counters, &c. ; 
 what Three is, or Four is, can only be pointed out. Cessation, 
 the limit of the operation being so completely external, can only 
 be contingent or at will. A system of numbers, dyadic, decadic, 
 &c., turns on the distinction of unity and amount, and more 
 precisely on what amount is to be considered as unity. 
 
 'Numbers, produced by numeration, are again numbered 
 Addition ; and here from their origin the numbers are evidently 
 mutually independent, mutually indifferent to likeness or unlike- 
 ness, mutually contingent hence unlike in general. That 7 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 527 
 
 = 12 we learn from actual counting in the first instance, and 
 know afterwards from memory. It is the same thing with 7x5 
 = 35. The ready-made tables of addition and multiplication save 
 us the trouble of always repeating such external counting ; but 
 there is no process of internal reasoning or special intuition in the 
 whole matter. Subtraction is the negative complement of the 
 same operation that obtains in Addition ; a decomposition, 
 equally analytic, of numbers equally characterised as unlike in 
 general. 
 
 'The next step is that the numbers which enter into the 
 numeration are equal or like, and no longer unequal or unlike. 
 They form thus a unity, and are subject to amount. This is 
 Multiplication the counting up of an amount of unities, the 
 unities being themselves pluralities or amounts. Of the two 
 numbers, either may be indifferently viewed as unity or as 
 amount : 4 times 3 is not different from 3 times 4. Immediate 
 assignment, in such cases, has been already shown to result from 
 previous process and the intervention of memory. Division is 
 the negative side of the same operation, and rests on the same 
 distinction. How often (the amount) is a number (the unity) 
 contained in another number ? This is the same question as, A 
 number being divided into a given amount of equal parts, what is 
 the magnitude of this part (the unity) ? Divisor and quotient are 
 thus indifferently unity or amount. 
 
 ' The final step in the equalisation is, that the unity and the 
 amount, which in the first instahce (as opposed to each other 
 simply as numbers generally) are to be considered as on the whole 
 unlike or unequal, become now like or equal. Numeration, the 
 equality that lies in number being thus completed, is now involu- 
 tion, the negative complement of which is evolution. Of this 
 process, the Square is the perfect type, further involution being 
 but a formal continuation, with repetition of equality as result, 
 or with divergence into inequality. No other distinctions and 
 no other equalisations of such are to be found in the notion of the 
 number or cipher. So is the notion constituted in this sphere ; 
 and thus by a going back into itself is the going out of itself 
 balanced. The imperfection of solution in the case of higher 
 equations, or the necessary reduction of these to Quadratics, 
 receives light from the principles enunciated. The square in 
 arithmetic, like the right-angled triangle, as explicated by the 
 theorem of Pythagoras, in geometry, is the pure self-complete 
 
528 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 determinateness of its sphere, and to the one as to the other the 
 remaining particularities of the respective spheres reduce them- 
 selves. 
 
 ' Number in relation is no longer immediate Quantum, and 
 proportion finds its place in the following section on Maass or 
 Measure. 
 
 ' The externality of the matter of number leaves no room for philo- 
 sophy proper, or the exposition of the notion as such, which depends 
 ever on immanent development. Here, nevertheless, the moments 
 of the notion manifest themselves, as in external fashion, in 
 equality and inequality ; and the subject is exhibited in its true 
 understanding. Distinction of sphere is in philosophy a general 
 necessity : what is external and contingent is in its peculiarity 
 not to be disturbed by ideas, and these are not to be deformed or 
 reduced to mere formality by the incommensurableness of the 
 matter.' 
 
 It is easy to object to these Hegelian classifications, that there are 
 really only two operations in Arithmetic, addition and subtraction, 
 and that devotion to the notion is here too obviously, too betray - 
 ingly external. It is to be said, however, that multiplication and 
 quadration really are these qualitative ascents. As regards the 
 Square in especial, the qualitativeness which it seems to introduce 
 will be found afterwards to have taken a strong hold of Hegel. 
 
 KEMARK 2. 
 
 Application of Numerical Distinctions in Expression of Philosophical Notions. 
 
 This is a very admirable Note, both important and character- 
 istic : without losing matter we shall endeavour as much as 
 possible to compress, however. 
 
 ' Numbers, as is well known, have been applied by the Pytha- 
 goreans, and especially in the form of powers by certain 
 moderns in indication or expression of relations of thought ; and 
 they have also appeared to possess such purity of form as to con- 
 stitute them a most appropriate element in the interest of 
 education an element closest to the thinking spirit, and closest 
 also to the fundamental relations of the universe. 
 
 ' We have seen Number to be the absolute determinateness (as 
 it were, point] of Quantity, determinateness in itself, and at the 
 same time quite external ; its element is the difference become 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 529 
 
 indifferent. Arithmetic is analytic ; difference and connexion in 
 its object are not internal to it, but come from without. It has 
 no concrete object with latent inner relations to be made explicit 
 by express effort of thought. It holds not the notion, nor does 
 its problem concern comprehending (notional) thought ; it is~ 
 rather the opposite of that. What is connected is indifferent to 
 the connexion, which itself is without necessity ; thought, then, 
 in such an element finds the effort required of it an utter outering of 
 itself an effort in which it must do itself the violence to move 
 without thinking and connect what is insusceptible of necessity. 
 The object is the abstract thought of Externality itself. 
 
 ' As such thought of externality, Number is at the same time 
 an abstraction from the sensuous multiplex ; of this it has retained 
 nothing but the abstract form of externality : sense thus in it is 
 brought closest to thought ; it is the pure thought of the precise 
 externalisation of thought. 
 
 ' The thinking spirit that would raise itself above the sensuous 
 world and recognise its substance may, in the quest of an 
 element for its pure conception, for the expression of its essential 
 substance, and before it apprehends thought itself as this element 
 and wins for its exhibition a pure spiritual expression, stumble 
 on the choice of number, this internal, abstract externality. So 
 is it that early in the history of philosophy we find number 
 applied in expression of philosophemes. It constitutes the latest 
 stage in that imperfection which contemplates the universal 
 unpurged from sense. The ancients, and specially Plato, as 
 reported by Aristotle, placed the concerns of mathematic between 
 the Ideas and Sense ; as invisible and unmoved (eternal) different 
 from the latter, and as a Many and a Like different from the 
 Ideas which are such as are purely self-identical and one in them- 
 selves. Moderatus of Cadiz remarks that the Pythagoreans had 
 recourse to numbers because they were not yet in a position to 
 apprehend distinctly in reason fundamental ideas and first 
 principles, which are hard to think and hard to enunciate ; but 
 numbers were to them as figures to Geometers signs merely, 
 and it is superfluous to remark that these philosophers had really 
 advanced to the more express categories, as is recorded by 
 Photius, These ancients, then, were, in fact, much in advance 
 of those moderns who have returned to numbers and put a per- 
 verted mathematical formalism in the place of thought and 
 thoughts regarding, indeed, this return to an incapable infancy 
 
 2L 
 
530 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 as something praiseworthy, and even fundamental and pro- 
 found. 
 
 'Number has been characterised as between the Ideas and 
 Sense, and as holding of the latter by this that it is in it a many, 
 an asunder or out-of-one-another ; but it is to be said also that 
 this many itself, this remainder of Sense taken up into thought, is 
 thought's own category of the External as such. The further, 
 concrete, true thoughts, what is quickest and most living, what is 
 comprehended only in co-reference, connexion, this transplanted to 
 such element of outwardness is converted into something motion- 
 less and dead. The richer thoughts become in determinateness, 
 and consequently in reference, so much the more confused on one 
 side and so much the more arbitrary and empty on the other side 
 becomes their statement in such forms as numbers are. 
 
 ' To designate the movement of the notion by one, two, three, 
 &c., this to thought is a task the hardest ; for it is to expect it to 
 move in the element of its own contrary, of reference-lessness ; 
 its employment is to be the work of sheer derangement. To 
 comprehend, e.g., that three are one and one three, this is a hard 
 imposition, because the one, the unit, is what is reference-less, 
 what shows not therefore in itself any character that might 
 mediate transition, but rather, on the contrary, excludes and 
 rejects any such reference. Conversely mere understanding uses 
 this as against Speculative truth (as, e.g., in the case of the 
 doctrine of the Trinity), and counts the terms which are to con- 
 stitute a single unity as if in demonstration of a self-evident 
 absurdity, i.e., it itself commits the absurdity of reducing that 
 which is reference pure and simple into what is precisely refer- 
 ence-less. By the name Trinity, it is never expected that the 
 unit and the digit are to be regarded by understanding as the 
 essential burthen of the object. This name expresses on the part 
 of reason contempt of understanding, which again, for its part, 
 stubborns itself against reason, and fixes itself in its conceit of 
 holding to the unit and to number as such.* 
 
 ' To employ mathematical characters as symbols is, so far as that 
 goes, harmless; but it is silly to suppose that in this way more is 
 expressed than what thought itself is able to hold and express. If 
 in such meagre symbols as those of mathematic, or in those richer 
 
 * Connexion and connexionless were here, perhaps, better for Beziehung, &c., 
 than reference, &c. Still a button, a hook or an eye, a hat-pin, each by itself 
 shows reference in it: it can but mean connexion. N. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 531 
 
 ones of mythology and poetry, any deep sense is to be supposed, 
 then it is for thought alone to summon into day the wisdom that 
 lies only in them, and not only as in symbols, but as in Nature 
 and the living Spirit. In symbols the truth is only troubled and 
 enveloped by the sensuous element ; only in the form of thought is 
 it thoroughly revealed to consciousness : the meaning, the import, 
 is only the thought itself. 
 
 * To apply the forms of mathematic^in explication of philosophy, 
 has this of preposterous, that only in the latter can the ultimate 
 import of the former be expected to yield itself. It is to logic, 
 and not to mathematic, that the other sciences must apply for 
 that logical element in which they move and to which they re- 
 duce themselves ; that philosophy should seek its logic in the 
 forms (but omens or sophistications of it)* it assumes in other 
 sciences, is but an expedient of philosophical incapacity. The 
 application of such borrowed forms is but external ; inquiry into 
 their worth and import must precede the application; such 
 inquiry belongs to abstract thought, and cannot be superseded by 
 any mathematical or other such authority. The result of such 
 pure logical inquiry is to strip off the particularity (mathematical 
 or other) of the form, and to render it superfluous and unneces- 
 sary : in short, it is logic that clears and rectifies all such forms, 
 and alone provides them with verification, sense, and worth. 
 
 ' As for the value of Number in the element of education, that 
 is contained in the preceding. Number is a non-sensuous object, 
 and occupation with it and its combinations a non-sensuous em- 
 ployment ; thought is drawn in thus to reflexion within itself and 
 an inward and abstract labour a matter of great but one-sided 
 import. For number involving the difference as only external 
 and thought-less, such employment is but a thought-less and 
 mechanical one. The endeavour consists, for the most part, in 
 holding fast the notion-less and in notion-less-ly combining it. 
 The object is the void unit ; the solid burthen of the moral and 
 spiritual universe, with which, as the noblest aliment, Education 
 should fill full the young, is to be supplanted by the import-less 
 unit ; with no possible result, such exercise being what is main 
 and chief, but to deaden and stupify the mind, emptying it, at 
 the same time, both of form and substance. Numerical calcula- 
 tion being a business so very mechanical and external, it has been 
 
 * Shadowings (or foreshadowings) for Ahnungen, as scotchings for Verkiimmer- 
 ungen, would hit the meaning better here ! ! N. 
 
532 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 possible to construct machines capable of performing all the 
 operations of arithmetic, and that most perfectly. This alone 
 were decisive of calculation as principal mean of education and 
 of the propriety of stretching the thinking spirit on the wheel in 
 order to be perfected into a machine.' 
 
 B. 
 
 EXTENSIVE AND INTENSIVE QUANTUM. 
 a. Their Difference. 
 
 The paragraphs under this head are again eligible for exact 
 translation, the metaphysic being at once eminently characteristic 
 and eminently intelligible. 
 
 ' 1. The Quantum has, as the result showed, its determinateness 
 as limit in the amount. It is discrete within itself, a many which 
 has not a being (an esse) that were different from its limit, or that 
 might have this latter out of it. The Quantum thus constituted 
 with its limit, which is a multiple in itself, is extensive magnitude. 
 * Extensive is to be distinguished from Continuous magnitude ; 
 to the former there stands directly opposed, not discrete, but inten- 
 sive magnitude. Extensive and intensive magnitudes are peculiari- 
 ties of the quantitative limit, but the Quantum is identical with its 
 limit; continuous and discrete magnitudes, again, are forms of 
 Quantity in itself, i.e., of quantity as such, so far as in regard to 
 the Quantum, the limit is abstracted from. Extensive magnitude 
 has the moment of continuity in itself and in its limit, in that its 
 many in general is continuous; the limit as negation appears so far in 
 this equality of the many as limitation of the unity. Continuous 
 magnitude is quantity setting itself forward without respect ta 
 a limit ; and so far as it is already conceived with one, this is a 
 limitation generally, without discretion being explicit in it. The 
 Quantum, only as continuous magnitude, is not yet veritably 
 determined per se, because it wants the one, the unit, in which 
 self-determinateness lies, and number. In like manner discrete 
 magnitude is immediately only distinguished plurality in general, 
 which, so far as it as such is to have a limit, is only a multiplicity 
 (eine Menge), that is to say, it is what is indefinitely limited. 
 To be a definite Quantum, to that there is necessary the taking 
 together of the many into one, by which this many were set 
 identical with the limit. Each of them, continuous and discrete 
 
QUANTITY INTERPKETED, ETC. 533 
 
 magnitude, as Quantum in general, has only one of the two 
 sides explicit in it, whereby it is perfectly determined and as 
 number. This (the number) is immediately extensive Quantum, 
 the simple determinateness which is essentially as amount, but as_ 
 amount of one and the same unity; the extensive Quantum is 
 distinguished from the number only by this, that the determinate- 
 ness is expressly set in the latter as multiplicity. 
 
 '2. The determinateness, nevertheless, how much something 
 is, by number, is not in want of distinction from any other 
 magnitude, so that this magnitude itself and some other 
 magnitude should belong to the determinateness, inasmuch as 
 the (numerical) determinateness of magnitude in general is self- 
 determined, indifferent, and simply self-referred limit; and in 
 number it (the limit) is explicitly set as contained in the self- 
 dependent one, and has its externality, the reference to other, 
 within itself. This many of the limit itself, further, is as the 
 many in general, not unequal within itself, but continues : each 
 of the many is what the other is ; as discrete many it constitutes 
 not, therefore, the determinateness as such. This many, therefore, 
 collapses per se into its continuity and becomes simple unity. 
 Amount is only moment of number; but constitutes not as a 
 multiplicity of numerical ones the determinateness of number, 
 but these ones as indifferent, external to themselves, are sublated 
 in the returnedness of number within itself; the externality 
 which constituted the ones of the ^multiplicity, disappears in the 
 one as reference of number to itself. 
 
 ' The limit of the Quantum, that as extensive had its there- 
 beent determinateness as the self-external amount, passes, there- 
 fore, into simple determinateness. In this simple determination 
 of limit it is intensive magnitude, and the limit or determinateness, 
 which is identical with the Quantum, is thus now also explicitly 
 set as simple oneness, Degree. 
 
 1 The degree is, therefore, determinate magnitude, Quantum, but 
 not, at the same time, multiplicity, or several within itself; it is 
 only a severality (not a Mehreres, but a Mehrheit) ; the severality 
 is the several taken together into the simple quality, There-being 
 gone together into Being-for-self. Its determinateness must, 
 indeed, be expressed by a number as for perfect determinateness 
 of the Quantum, but is not as amount, but simple, only a degree. 
 When 10, 20 degrees are spoken of, the Quantum that has so 
 many degrees, is the 10th, the 20th degree, not the amount and 
 
534 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 sum of these ; in that case it were extensive ; but it is only one 
 single one, the 10th, the 20th degree. It contains the determinate- 
 ness which lies in the amount ten, twenty ; contains it, however, not 
 as a plurality, but is number as sublated amount, as simple determin- 
 ateness. 
 
 ' 3. In Number the Quantum is explicit in its perfect determinate- 
 ness ; as intensive Quantum, however, as in its Being-for-self, it is 
 explicitly set as it is according to its notion, as it is in itself. The 
 form, namely, of self-reference, which it has in degree, is, at the 
 same time, the being in externality to itself of this same degree. 
 Number is as extensive Quantum numerical multiplicity, and so 
 has the externality within it. This externality, as multiplicity in 
 general, collapses into the undistinguishedness of, and sublates itself 
 so in, the one of the number, of its self-reference. The Quantum has, 
 however, its determinateness as amount ; as before shown, it 
 contains it, although it is no longer explicitly in it. The degree, 
 therefore, as within itself simple, having no longer this external 
 otherwiseness within it, has it out of it, and refers itself thereto as 
 to its determinateness. A many external to it constitutes the 
 determinateness of the simple limit which it is per se. That the 
 amount, so far as it was supposed to find itself within the number 
 in the extensive Quantum, sublated itself therein in this it is 
 determined, consequently, further, as set out of it (the number). 
 Number being explicitly set as a one, self-reflected self-reference, 
 it excludes from itself the indifference and externality of the 
 amount, and is reference to itself as reference through its own self to 
 an External. 
 
 ' In this, Quantum reaches the reality adequate to its notion. 
 The indifference of the determinateness constitutes its quality ; i.e., 
 the determinateness is the determinateness which is in itself self- 
 external determinateness. Accordingly degree, or the degree, is 
 simple quantitative determinateness under a severality of such 
 intensities as are diverse, each only simple self -reference, but, at 
 the same time, in essential reference to one another in such wise 
 that each has in this continuity with the others its own deter- 
 minateness. This reference of degree through itself to its other 
 renders ascent and descent in the scale of degrees, a continuous 
 process, a flux, that is an uninterrupted indivisible alteration; 
 each of the severals, which are distinguished in it, is not divided 
 from the others, but has its determinedness only in these. As 
 self-referent quantitative determination, each of the degrees is 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 535 
 
 indifferent to the others ; but it is no less in itself referred to this 
 externality, it is only through this externality what it is; its 
 reference to itself is at the same time the non-indifferent reference 
 to the External, has in this (latter) reference its quality.' 
 
 The majority of readers will find all this very super-subtle aridT 
 very superfluous. Reflexion, however, will convince some that it 
 is necessary to bring to account all these myriad distinctions which 
 pass current daily without inquiry. The Hegelian exposition is 
 not only an explanation in the ordinary sense ; but it lifts into 
 sunlight all the secret maggots of our very brains those hidden 
 powers whose we are, rather than that they are ours. 
 
 b. Identity of Extensive and Intensive Magnitude. 
 
 1 Degree, the degree, is not within itself a something external to 
 itself. But it is not the indeterminate one, the principle of 
 number in general, which is no amount, unless only the negative 
 amount to be no amount. The intensive magnitude is, in the first 
 place, a simple unit of the several ; there are several degrees ; 
 determined, however, they are not, neither as simple unit nor as 
 several, but only in the co-reference of this self-externalness, or in the 
 identity of the unit and the several. If, then, the several as such 
 are indeed out of the simple degree, the determinateness of each 
 simple degree consists still, in its reference to them, the several ; 
 the simple degree, therefore, implies amount. Just as twenty, as 
 extensive magnitude, implies the twenty ones as discrete within 
 itself, so such particular degree contains the ones as continuity, 
 which continuity this particular severality simply is; it is the 
 20th degree ; and is the 20th degree only by means of this 
 amount, which as such is external to it. 
 
 'The determinateness of intensive magnitude is, therefore, to 
 be considered on two sides. It is determined through other 
 intensive Quanta, and is in continuity with its otherwiseness, so 
 that in this reference to that (or them) consists its determinate- 
 ness. So far now as it is, firstly, simple determinateness, it is 
 determined counter other degrees ; it excludes them out of itself, 
 and has its determinateness in this exclusion. But, secondly, it is 
 determined in itself; it is this in the amount as its amount, not 
 in it as what is excluded, or as amount of other degrees. The 
 twentieth degree contains the twenty in itself ; it is not only 
 determined as distinguished from the nineteenth, the twenty- 
 first, &c., but its determinateness is its amount. But so far as 
 
536 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the amount is its, and the determinateness is, at the same time, 
 essentially as amount, degree has the nature of extensive Quan- 
 tity, is extensive Quantity. 
 
 'Extensive and intensive magnitude are thus one and the 
 same determinateness (characterisedness, specificity) of the Quan- 
 tum ; they are only distinguished by this, that the one has the 
 amount as within it, the other as without it. The extensive 
 magnitude passes over into the intensive because its many in and 
 for itself collapses into the unity, out of which the many stands. 
 But conversely this unity has its determinateness only in the 
 amount, and that too as its ; as indifferent to the other intensities, 
 it has the externality of the amount in itself; intensive magni- 
 tude is thus equally essentially extensive magnitude. 
 
 ' With this identity, qualitative Something re-appears ; for this 
 identity is self through the negation of its differences to self- 
 referent unity, and it is these differences that compose the there- 
 beent quantitative determinateness ; this negative identity is, 
 therefore, Something, indifferent, too, to its quantitative deter- 
 minateness. Something is a Quantum, but now the qualitative 
 There-being as it is in itself is explicit as indifferent to this con- 
 sideration of Quantum. It was possible to speak of Quantum, of 
 Number as such, &c., without a Something that were their 
 substrate. But now there steps in Something opposite these its 
 determinations, through their negation lie-mediated with itself, 
 and as there-leent for itself, and, in that it has a Quantum, as 
 that which has an extensive and intensive Quantum. Its one 
 determinateness, which it as Quantum has, is explicit in the 
 diverse moments of the unity and the amount ; this determinate- 
 ness is not only in itself one and the same, but its explicitation or 
 expression in these differences, as extensive and intensive Quantum 
 is return into this unity, which unity as negative is the explicitly 
 set Something indifferent to them (the differences)/ 
 
 The interpretation of the above rests so evidently on principles 
 which we have so often stated at full length already, that it may 
 here be dispensed with, especially as something of resume will be 
 necessary again. The super-subtlety will still appear to most 
 readers the objectionable element ; and it is to be confessed that, 
 in very weariness of the flesh, one is again and again tempted 
 to tarn away eyes of irritation from these quick and evanescent 
 needle-points, this ceaseless to-and-fro of an all but invisible 
 shuttle from identity into difference, and from difference into 
 
I 
 
 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 537 
 
 identity again, and throw one's exhausted body and vexed heart 
 on the kindly breadth of the ready concrete : but again, and in- 
 dubitably, this is subtlety, but not super-subtlety, what we are 
 asked to look at is the veritable inner fibres of the very essence 
 of things. 
 
 EEMARK 1. 
 
 Examples of this Identity. 
 
 ' The distinction of extension and intension is generally taken 
 so, that it is supposed there are objects only extensive and others 
 only intensive. Then we have in physics the new dynamical view 
 which, to the contrary mechanical one that would fill space, &c., 
 by extension or a more, opposes an intension that would reach the 
 same end through degree. The mechanical theory assumes inde- 
 pendent parts subsistent out of each other, and only externally 
 combined into a whole ; while opposed to this, the notion of Force 
 is the core of the dynamical theory. What as in the occupation 
 of space results under the former theory from a multiplicity of 
 mutually external atoms, is produced under the latter by the 
 manifestation of a single force. In the one instance, then, we 
 have the relation of Whole and Parts ; in the other, that of Force 
 and its Realisation ; and the consideration of both finds special 
 place further on. Force and realisation, it may be said here, 
 however, are certainly a nearer truth than whole and parts ; but 
 still force is no less one-sided than intension itself : its realisation, 
 manifestation, utterance, or outer&ncQ, is but as the outwardness of 
 extension, and is inseparable from the force; one and the same In- 
 tent is common to both forms, to that that is as Extensive, as to 
 that that is as Intensive.' 
 
 One gets a striking view here of the fundamental Hegelian 
 truth ; element succeeds element in gradual ascent towards the 
 ultimate unity, but in each element precisely the same moments 
 reappear as constitutive : continuity and discretion, extension and 
 intension, whole and parts, force and its realisation, outer and 
 inner running through the whole of these, we can see the same 
 moments and the same idea. 
 
 4 The extensive Quantum sublates itself into Degree, which in 
 turn is wholly dependent on the former ; the one form is essential 
 to the other, and the quantitative constitution of every existence 
 is as well extensive as intensive. 
 
 ' Take number as the example : it is amount, and so extensive ; 
 
538 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 but it is also one, a twenty, a hundred, &c., and the many gone 
 into this unality is of the nature of intension. One is extensive 
 in itself, it can be conceived as any number of parts. The tenth, 
 &c., is this one that has its virtue in an outward several different 
 to it ; or the intension comes from the extension. Number is ten, 
 twenty, &c. ; but it is at the same time the tenth, the twentieth 
 in the numerical system : both are the same determinateness, the 
 same constitutedness. 
 
 ' The unit of the circle is named degree, because any one part 
 of the circle has its determinateness in the others out of it, is 
 characterised as one only of a shut (definite) amount of such ones. 
 The degree of the circle is as mere space-magnitude only a usual 
 number ; regarded as degree, it is an intensive magnitude which 
 has a sense only as determined through the amount of degrees 
 into which the circle is divided, as the number in general has its 
 sense only in the numerical series. 
 
 ' Concrete objects show the double side, extension and intension, 
 in the externality and internality of the manifestation of their 
 magnitude. A mass, as amount of pounds, hundredweights, &c., is 
 extensive ; as exerting pressure, intensive. The Quantity of the 
 pressure is a oneness, a degree, which has its determinateness in a 
 scale of degrees of pressure. As pressing, the mass appears as a 
 Being- within-itself, as Subject, to which accrues intensive dis- 
 tinction. Conversely, what exercises this degree of pressure is 
 able to move from the spot a certain amount of pounds, &c., and 
 in this way measures its magnitude. 
 
 'Or warmth has a degree; the degree of temperature, the 10th, 
 20th, &c., is a simple sensation, a something subjective. But this 
 degree shows equally as extensive, e.g., as the extension of a fluid, 
 of the quicksilver in the thermometer, of air, of clay, &c. A higher 
 degree of temperature expresses itself as a longer column of 
 mercury, or as a smaller cylinder of clay ; it warms a greater 
 space, as a less degree only a less space. 
 
 * The higher tone is, as the intenser, at the same time a greater 
 number of vibrations ; or a louder tone that is, one to which a 
 higher degree is ascribed makes itself audible in a greater space. 
 An intenser colour suffices a greater surface than a less intense ; 
 or what is clearer, another sort of intensity, is further visible than 
 what is less clear, &c. 
 
 ' In like manner in the spiritual world, high intensity of char- 
 acter, talent, genius, is of a correspondingly wide-grasping There- 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 539 
 
 being, extended influence, and many-sided contact. The deepest 
 notion has the most universal significance and application.' 
 
 In illustration on the same side as these examples, we may 
 observe that the death of the Kedeemer is not only the most 
 intense event in history, but just what is intensest in an absolute 
 point of view and in the very possibility of things ; hence it is, or 
 will be, what is most extensive also both as regards time and space.* 
 
 On the other side, it may be said that intension will not always 
 supply the place of extension, or vice versd. The wooden mallet 
 and the iron hammer, though absolutely of the same weight, are 
 not always interchangeable. In the galvanic battery, breadth is 
 not found exactly to replace member of plates. Lastly, we are 
 apt to see in characters an excess of intensity that leads to 
 vacillation and lubricity, to flightiness, and in general feebleness : 
 we are accustomed to desire for such characters a mitigation of 
 intensity by increase, as it were, of extension in the nervous 
 system and the general frame. Nevertheless, it is quite possible 
 that these seemingly intense characters are only formally so, and 
 that the depth of their capability is no greater than the breadth of 
 their performance. In galvanism, implements, &c., it is quite 
 possible also to find such facts or considerations as would again 
 reduce both sides to a balance and an identity. 
 
 EEMARK 2. 
 
 This is a critique in relation to x Kant, and is reserved for con- 
 sideration elsewhere. I cannot help pointing out, however, that 
 we have here a considerable light on Hegel's attitude to the 
 doctrine of the Immortality. In reference to the usual argument 
 that the soul being one and simple, is indestructible by dissolution 
 of parts, Kant observes that the soul, though extensively simple, 
 may still vanish by process of remission as regards its intensity. 
 To this Hegel rejoins : the usual argument treats the soul as a 
 Thing, and applies in its characterisation the category of extensive 
 Quantum; Kant, therefore, has an equal right to apply that of 
 intensive Quantum : the soul, however, is not Ding (thing) but 
 Geist (Spirit), and ' to the Spirit/ these are Hegel's own words, 
 ' there belongs certainly Being, but of a quite other intensity thaji 
 that of intensive Quantum, rather of such an intensity that in it 
 the form of immediate Being and every category of the same are 
 
 * There is a similar remark in Rosenkranz : Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 486. 
 
540 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 as sublated ; not only, then, was reinotion of the category of 
 extensive Quantum to be conceded, but that of Quantum in 
 general was to be withdrawn : it is something further yet, how- 
 ever, to perceive how, in the eternal nature of the Spirit, there- 
 being, consciousness, finitude, is, and arises therefrom, without 
 this Spirit becoming thereby a thing. 1 
 
 c. The alteration of the Quantum. 
 
 'The distinction of extensive and intensive Quantum is in- 
 different to the determinateness (specific nature) of Quantum as 
 such. But in general Quantum is the determinateness which is 
 explicitly set as sublated, the indifferent limit, the determinate- 
 ness which is just as much the negation of itself (as always in 
 another). This distinction is developed in extensive magnitude, 
 but intensive magnitude is the There-being (the actual existent 
 specialty) of this externality which Quantum is within itself; 
 (it is the appearance as it were, the realisation in a kind of outward 
 mortal state of the notion). This distinction (of Quantum as 
 negation of its own determinateness) is set as its (Quantum's) 
 contradiction within itself the contradiction to be simple self 
 to self-referent determinateness which is the negation of itself 
 the contradiction to have its determinateness not in it, but in 
 another Quantum. 
 
 ' A Quantum, therefore, is explicitly set as, in its Quality, in 
 absolute continuity with its externality, with its otherwiseness. 
 Every quantitative determinateness, therefore, not only can be 
 exceeded, it not only can be altered, but it is explicitly, expressly 
 this, that it must alter itself. Quantitative determinateness con- 
 tinues itself so into its otherwiseness, that it has its Being only in 
 this continuity with another; it is not a beent, but a becoment limit. 
 
 'The One is infinite, or the self to self-referent negation, there- 
 fore the repulsion of itself from itself. (This is very fine, and not 
 hard to see.) The Quantum is equally infinite, explicitly set as 
 the self to self-referent negativity; it repels itself from itself. 
 But it is a determinate one, the one which has gone over into 
 There-being and into the limit; therefore the repulsion of the 
 determinateness from itself, not the production of its own Like, 
 of what is like and equal to its own self, as the repulsion of the 
 One, but of its otherwiseness ; it is now explicit in itself to dispatch 
 itself beyond itself and become another. It consists in this, to 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 541 
 
 increase or decrease itself ; it is the externality of determinateness 
 in itself. 
 
 'The Quantum, therefore, dispatches itself beyond itself; this 
 other which it becomes is firstly itself a Quantum ; but equally as 
 a limit non-beent, that drives itself beyond itself. The limit 
 which in this transition has again arisen is, therefore, directly 
 only such a one as again sublates itself and passes into another, 
 and so on into the infinite. 
 
 C. 
 
 QUANTITATIVE INFINITUDE. 
 a. Its Notion. 
 
 ' The Quantum alters itself and becomes another Quantum; the 
 further determination of this alteration, that it proceeds in 
 infinitum, lies in this, that the Quantum is constituted as con- 
 tradicting itself in itself. The Quantum becomes another; it 
 continues itself, however, into its otherwiseness : the other, there- 
 fore, is also a Quantum. But this is the other not only of a, but 
 of the Quantum itself, the negative of it as of a limited some- 
 thing; consequently, its unliinitedness, infinitude. The Quantum 
 is a Sollen, a To-be-to ; it implies to-be-determined-for-itself y and 
 such self-determinedness is rather determinedness in another ; and 
 conversely it is sublated determinedness in another, it is indifferent 
 self-subsistence. 
 
 ' Finitude and Infinitude receive thus at once each in itself a 
 double, and that an opposed import. The Quantum is finite, 
 firstly, as limited in general ; secondly, as self-dispatch beyond 
 itself, as determinedness in another. Its Infinitude, again, is, 
 firstly, non-limitedness ; secondly, its return into itself, indifferent 
 Being-for-self. If we directly compare these moments, there 
 results, that the determination of the Finitude of the Quantum, 
 the self-dispatch into another, in which its determination is 
 supposed to lie (and lies), is equally determination of the Infinite ; 
 the negation of the limit is the same Beyond over the determinate- 
 ness, in such wise that the Quantum has in this negation, the 
 Infinite, its ultimate determinateness. The other moment of the 
 Infinitude is the Being-for-self that is indifferent to the limit ; 
 the Quantum itself, however, is just so limited, that it is what is 
 for itself indifferent to its limit, and so to other Quanta and its 
 Beyond. The Finite and the Infinite (that Infinite which is to be 
 
542 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 separated from the Finite, the spurious Infinite) have, in 
 Quantum, each already in it the moment of the other. 
 
 * The qualitative and the quantitative Infinites distinguish 
 themselves by this, that in the former the antithesis of Finite and 
 Infinite is qualitative, and the transition of the Finite into the 
 Infinite, or the reference of both to each other, lies only in the 
 notion, only in the In itself. The qualitative determinateness is 
 as immediate, and refers itself to the otherwiseness essentially as 
 to a something that is other to it ; it is not explicit as having in 
 itself its negation, its other. Quantity, on the contrary, is, as 
 such, subletted determinateness ; it is explicit as being unequal with 
 itself and indifferent to itself, and so as alterable. The qualitative 
 Finite and Infinite stand, therefore, absolutely, i.e., abstractly 
 opposed to each other ; their unity is the internal reference that 
 is implied at bottom : the Finite continues itself, therefore, only 
 in itself, and not in it, into its other. On the contrary, the 
 quantitative Finite refers itself in itself into its infinite, in which 
 it has its absolute determinateness. This their reference is set 
 out at first hand in the Quantitative Infinite Progress. 
 
 b. The Quantitative Infinite Progress. 
 
 ' The Progress into the Infinite is in general the expression of 
 contradiction, here of that contradiction which the quantitative 
 Finite or Quantum in general implies. It is that alternation of 
 Finite and Infinite which was considered in the qualitative sphere, 
 with the difference that, as just remarked above, in the quanti- 
 tative sphere, the limit dispatches itself and continues itself in 
 itself into its Beyond ; consequently, conversely also the quanti- 
 tative Infinite is explicit as having the Quantum in itself, for the 
 Quantum is in its Being-out-of-self at the same time itself ; its 
 externality belongs to its determination. 
 
 'The infinite Progress is indeed only the expression of this 
 contradiction, not its solution ; but because of the continuity of 
 the one determinateness into its other, it brings forward an ap- 
 parent solution in a union of both. As this progress is first 
 expressed, it is the Aufgabe of the Infinite (i.e., at once the giving 
 up and the problem proposed ; loth sides of the English puzzle or 
 riddle are, as it were, glanced at), not the attainment of the 
 same, its recurrent production, without getting beyond the 
 Quantum itself, and without the Infinite becoming positive and 
 present. The Quantum has it in its notion to have a Beyond of 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 543 
 
 itself. This Beyond "is, firstly, the abstract moment of the non- 
 being of the Quantum ; this latter eliminates itself in itself; thus 
 it refers itself to its Beyond as to its Infinitude, as in the quali- 
 tative moment of the antithesis. But, secondly, the Quantum 
 stands in continuity with this Beyond; the Quantum consists jusF 
 in this, to be the other of itself, to be external to its own self : 
 this, that is external, therefore, is just so not another than the 
 Quantum ; the Beyond or the Infinite is therefore itself a Quan- 
 tum. The Beyond is in this way recalled from its flight, and the 
 Infinite reached. But because this now become a here from a 
 Beyond, a cis or citra from an ultra-*-ia again a Quantum, only a 
 new limit has been made again explicit; this new limit, as 
 Quantum, is again fled from by itself, is as Quantum beyond 
 itself, and has repelled itself into its non-being, into its Beyond of 
 or from its own self, which Beyond equally recurrently becomes 
 Quantum, and as that repels itself from itself into the Beyond again. 
 
 'The continuity of the Quantum into its other occasions the 
 union of both in the expression of an infinitely great or infinitely 
 small. As both have the determination of Quantum still in them, 
 they remain alterable, and the absolute deterrninateness, which 
 were a Being-for-self, is therefore not reached. This Being-out-of- 
 itself of the determination is explicit in the double Infinite, which 
 is self-opposed according to a more or a less, the infinitely great 
 and the infinitely small. In each of them Quantum is maintained 
 in constantly-recurring antithesis to its Beyond. The great, how- 
 ever much extended, vanishes together into inconsiderableness ; 
 in that it refers itself to the Infinite as to its non-being, the 
 antithesis is qualitative: the extended Quantum has, therefore, 
 won from the Infinite nothing; the latter, after as before, is the 
 non-being of the former. Or, the aggrandisement of the Quantum 
 is no nearing to the Infinite, for the difference of the Quantum 
 and of its Infinite has essentially also this moment, that it is not 
 a quantitative difference. It is only the expression of the contra- 
 diction driven closer into the straits ; it is to be at once great, i.e., 
 a Quantum, and infinite, i.e., no Quantum. In the same manner, 
 the infinitely small is as small a Quantum, and remains therefore 
 absolutely, that is to say, qualitatively, too great for the Infinite, 
 and is opposed to it. The contradiction of the infinite progress, 
 which was to have found its goal in them, remains preserved in both. 
 
 ' This Infinite, which is persistently determined as the Beyond 
 of the Finite, is to be described as the spurious quantitative infinite. 
 
544 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 It is, like the qualitative spurious Infinite, tfie perpetual crossing 
 hence and thence from the one member of the persisting contra- 
 diction to the other, from the limit to its non-being, and from the 
 latter anew back to the limit. In the quantitative progress, what 
 is advanced to is indeed not an abstract other, but a Quantum 
 that is expressed as different ; but it remains equally in antithesis 
 to its negation. The Progress, therefore, is equally not a progress, 
 but a repetition of one and the same, position, sublation, re- 
 position and re-sublation ; (the equating setzend with ponens and 
 aufhebend with tollens is conspicuously plain here) an impotence 
 of the negative to which what it sublates returns through its very 
 sublation as a constant. There are two so connected that they 
 directly mutually flee themselves ; and even in fleeing cannot 
 separate, but are in their mutual flight conjoined.' 
 
 KEMARK 1. 
 
 TJie High Repute of the Progressus in Infinitum. 
 
 This Eemark turns largely on certain declarations of Kant ; but 
 it is not of such a nature as to suggest reservation, as is usual 
 where Kant is in question. 
 
 ' The bastard Infinite especially in its quantitative form, this 
 perpetual transcendence of the limit and perpetual impotent 
 relapse into the same is generally contemplated as something 
 sublime, a kind of Divine Service, just as in philosophy it has 
 been regarded as an ultimate. This progress has manifoldly con- 
 tributed to tirades, which have been admired as sublime produc- 
 tions. In point of fact, however, this modern sublimity enlarges, 
 not the object, which rather flees, but only the Subject, that absorbs 
 into itself such huge quantities. The indigence of this mere sub- 
 jective elevation, that would scale the ladder of the Quantitative, 
 declares itself directly in the admission of the futility of all its toil 
 to get any closer to the infinite End, which to be reached indeed, 
 must be quite otherwise griped to. 
 
 ' In the following tirades of this nature there is at the same 
 time expressed, what such elevation passes into and ends in. Kant, 
 e.g., speaks of it as sublime (Kr. d. pract. V. Schl.), 
 
 When the Subject lifts himself in thought above the place he occupies in the 
 world of sense and extends the synthesis of his existence into infinite magni- 
 tude a synthesis with stars upon stars, worlds upon worlds, systems upon 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ET C. 545 
 
 systems, and again also into the immeasurable times of their periodic 
 movement, into their beginning, and incalculable duration. Conception sinks 
 under this advance into the immeasurable Far, where the farthest world has 
 still a farther the past, however far referred, a farther still behind it the 
 future, however far anticipated, always another still before it; Thought 
 sinks under this conception of the immeasurable ; as a dream, that we travel a 
 long road ever farther and perpetually farther without apparent end, ceases 
 at length with Falling or with Fainting (swimming of the head).* 
 
 ' This description, besides compressing the matter of contents of 
 the quantitative elevation into a wealth of delineation, deserves 
 especial praise for the honesty with which it relates how, in the 
 end, it fares with this elevation : thought succumbs, the end is 
 falling and a swimming of the head. What makes thought give in 
 and produces the fall and the faint is nothing else than the weari- 
 ness of the repetition that lets a limit disappear only to reappear, 
 but again disappear ; and so ever the one after the other, and the 
 one in the other, in the thither the hither, and in the hither the 
 thither, perpetually arise and perpetually depart; and there 
 remains only a feeling of the impotence of this infinite or of this 
 To-be-to, that would be master of the finite, but is without the 
 power. 
 
 1 What Kant names the awful description of Eternity by Haller 
 is usually also specially admired, but often just not for the reason 
 which constitutes its veritable merit : 
 
 I multiply enormous numbers, 
 
 I pile to millions up, 
 
 I gather time on time and world on world still up, 
 
 And when I from the giddy height 
 
 Seek thee once more with reeling sight, 
 
 Is every power of count, increased a thousand number 
 
 Not yet a part of thee. 
 
 / drag them down and thou liest there by me.f 
 
 'When this massing and piling up of numbers and worlds , s is 
 considered what is valuable as in a description of eternity, it 
 escapes notice that the poet himself declares this so-called awful 
 transcendence to be something futile and hollow, and that his own 
 conclusion is, that only ~by giving up this empty infinite progress, 
 is it, that the veritable Infinite itself becomes present to him. 
 
 'There have been Astronomers who pleased themselves in 
 making a merit of the sublimity of their science, because it has to 
 do with an immeasurable number of stars, with such immeasurable 
 
 * The latter half of this citation is not found at the place cited, 
 f The original is but a similar doggerel ! 
 
 2M 
 
546 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 spaces and times that in them distances and periods, in themselves 
 never so vast, are but as units that, never so many times taken, 
 abbreviate themselves again into insignificance. The shallow 
 astonishment to which they then surrender themselves, the absurd 
 hopes some time yet in another life to wander from star to star, 
 and for ever to acquire such new facts, they alleged as chief 
 moments of the excellence of their science which science deserves 
 admiration, not because of such quantitative infinitude, but, on the 
 contrary, because of the relations and the laws which reason recog- 
 nises in these objects, and which are the* rational infinite as 
 against said irrational infinite. 
 
 'To the Infinite which refers itself to outward sensuous per- 
 ception, Kant opposes the other Infinite, when 
 
 the individual returns into his invisible ego, and opposes the absolute 
 freedom of his will as a pure ego to all the terrors of destiny and of tyranny, 
 beginning with his nearest circumstances, sees them disappear in themselves, 
 and even that which seems eternal, worlds upon worlds, collapse in ruins, 
 and recognises singly himself as equal to himself. 
 
 ' Ego, in this singleness with itself, is indeed the attained 
 Beyond ; it has come to itself, is ~by itself, here ; in pure self- 
 consciousness the absolute negativity is brought into the affirma- 
 tion and presence which, in that progress beyond the sensuous 
 Quantum, only flee. But in that this pure ego has fixed itself in 
 its abstraction and emptiness, it has the There-being in general, 
 the fullness of the natural and spiritual universe, over against it 
 as a Beyond. There manifests itself the same contradiction which 
 is implied in the infinite progress ; namely, a returnedness into 
 itself which is immediately at the same time out-of-itself-ness, 
 reference to its other as to its non-being ; which reference re- 
 mains a longing, because ego has fixed for itself its -intent-less and 
 untenable void on one side, and as its Beyond the fullness which 
 in the negation still remains present. 
 
 'To both Sublimes Kant adds the remark, "that admiration 
 (of the former, external) and awe (before the second, internal) 
 sublime, may stimulate, indeed, to inquiry, but cannot compensate 
 for the deficiency of the same." He thus declares said elevations 
 insufficient for reason, which cannot rest by them and the feelings 
 connected with them, nor accept the Beyond and the Void for 
 what is ultimate. 
 
 ' The infinite progress has been taken as an ultimate, especially 
 in its moral application. The just-enunciated second antithesis 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 547 
 
 of the finite and the infinite, as of the complex world and of the 
 ego raised into its freedom, is properly qualitative. The self- 
 determination of the ego aims, at the same time, at the determina- 
 tion of nature, and the emancipation of itself from her ; it thus 
 refers itself through itself to its other which is, as external 
 There-being, a manifold and quantitative. Eeference to what is 
 quantitative becomes itself quantitative ; the negative reference 
 of the ego thereon, the power of the ego over the non-ego, over 
 sense and external nature, comes therefore to be conceived in 
 this way, that morality can and shall become ever greater the 
 power of sense, on the other hand, always less. The complete 
 adequacy, however, of the will to the moral law becomes mislaid, 
 into the infinite progress, that is to say, it is represented as an 
 absolutely unreachdble beyond, and just this is to be the true 
 anchor and the legitimate consolation, that it is unreachable ; for 
 morality is to be as conflict ; this conflict, again, is only from the 
 inadequacy of the will to the law, and the law, therefore, is 
 absolutely a beyond for the will. 
 
 ' In this antagonism, ego and non-ego, or the pure will and the 
 moral law on the one hand, and the sensuousness and mere nature 
 of the will on the other, are presupposed as completely independent 
 and mutually indifferent. This pure will has its peculiar law 
 which stands in essential connexion with sense ; and nature, or 
 sense, has on its side laws which are neither derived from the will 
 nor correspondent to it, nor can have even only, however different 
 from it, in themselves an essential connexion with it, but they are 
 in general determined for themselves, full and complete within 
 themselves. But both, at the same time, are moments of one and 
 the same single being, the ego; the will is determined as the 
 negative against nature, so that it (the will) is only so far as there 
 is such an element different from it that shall become sublated by 
 it, with which, however, it (the will) comes thus in contact, and 
 by which it is even affected. To nature and to nature as human 
 sense, limitation through another is indifferent, as to an independent 
 system of laws ; she maintains herself in this limitation, enters 
 independently into the relation, and limits the will of the law 
 quite as much as it limits her. It is one act, the self-determina- 
 tion of the will with the sublation of the otherwiseness of a 
 nature, and the assumption of this otherwiseness as there-beent, 
 as continuing itself in its sublation and as not sublated. The 
 contradiction that lies in this is not eliminated in the infinite 
 
548 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 progress, but, on the contrary, is expressed and maintained as not 
 eliminated and as incapable of elimination ; the conflict of Morality 
 and Sense is represented as the absolute relation that in and for 
 itself is. 
 
 ' The incapacity to become master of the qualitative antithesis 
 of the finite and infinite, and to comprehend the Idea of the true 
 will, substantial freedom, has recourse to Quantity, in order to use 
 it as mediatrix, because it is the sublated Qualitative, the differ- 
 ence become indifferent. But in that both members of the 
 antithesis remain implied as qualitatively different, each rather 
 becomes manifest at once as indifferent to this alteration, and just 
 by this that in their mutual reference it is as Quanta that they 
 now relate themselves. Nature is determined by ego, Sense by the 
 will of the good ; the change produced by the will in Sense is 
 only a quantitative difference, such a difference as allows it 
 (Sense) to remain what it is. 
 
 1 In the abstractor statement of the Kantian philosophy, or at 
 least of its principles, that is, in the Wissenschaftslehre of Ficbte,. 
 the infinite progress constitutes in the same manner the funda- 
 mental principle and the ultimate. The first axiom of this 
 statement, ego = ego, is followed by a second independent of the 
 first, the opposition of the non-ego ; the connexion of both is taken 
 at once also as quantitative difference, that non-ego is partly 
 determined by ego, partly also not. The non-ego continues itself 
 in this way into its non-being, so that in its non-being, it remains 
 opposed, as what is not sublated. When, therefore, the contra- 
 dictions thus involved have been developed in the system, the 
 concluding result is the same relation that was the commencement ; 
 the non-ego remains an infinite appulse, an absolutely other ; the 
 ultimate mutual connexion of it and of the ego is the infinite 
 progress, longing and struggle, seeking and searching, the same 
 contradiction which was begun with. 
 
 ' Because the quantitative element is the determinateness that 
 is express as sublated, it was believed that much, or rather all, 
 had been won for the unity of the absolute, for the one sub- 
 stantiality, when the antithesis in general was set down to a 
 difference only quantitative. Every antithesis is only quanti- 
 tative, was for a time a main position of the later philosophy ; 
 the opposed determinations have the same nature, the same 
 substance ; they are real sides of the antithesis, so far as each of 
 them has within it both values, both factors of the antithesis, 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 549 
 
 only that on the one side the one factor, on the other the other, 
 is preponderant; on the one side the one factor, a matter or 
 power, is present in greater quantity or in stronger degree than on 
 the other. So far as different matters or powers are presupposed, 
 the quantitative difference rather confirms and completes their 
 externality and indifference to each other and to their unity. 
 The difference of- the absolute unity is to be only quantitative ; 
 Quantitativity is indeed the sublated immediate determinateness, 
 but it is only the uncompleted, only the first negation, not the 
 infinite, not the negation of the negation. In that being and 
 thought are represented as quantitative determinations of the 
 absolute substance, even they, as Quanta, become, just like 
 carbon, azote, &c., in a subordinate sphere, perfectly external to 
 each other and void of connexion. It is a third (party), an 
 external reflexion, which abstracts from their difference and 
 perceives their inner unity, that is only in itself and not equally 
 for itself. This unity, consequently, is represented in effect only 
 as first immediate unity, or only as being, which, in its quanti- 
 tative difference, remains equal to itself, but does not set itself 
 equal to itself through itself; it is thus not comprehended as 
 negation of negation, as infinite unity. Only in the qualitative 
 antithesis arises the explicit Infinite, the Being-for-self, and the 
 quantitative determination itself passes over, as will presently 
 more particularly yield itself, into the Qualitative.' 
 
 EEMARK 2. 
 
 Which occurs here, concerns Kant, and is reserved for the present. 
 It is again one of those marvels of analysis peculiar to Hegel. 
 
 c. The Infinitude of the Quantum. 
 
 ' 1. The infinite Quantum, as infinitely great or infinitely little, 
 is itself an sich the infinite progress ; it is Quantum as great or 
 small, and it is at the same time non-being of Quantum. The 
 infinitely great and infinitely little are therefore images of figurate 
 conception, which, on closer consideration, show themselves as 
 idle mist and shadow. But in the infinite progress this contradic- 
 tion is explicitly present, and withal that also that is the nature of 
 the Quantum which as intensive magnitude has reached its 
 
550 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 reality, and in its There-being is now explicitly set as it is in its 
 notion. This identity is what we have to consider. 
 
 ' The Quantum as degree is simple, unal, referred to itself and 
 as determined in itself. In that through this unality the other- 
 wiseness and the determinateness in it are sublated, this determin- 
 ateness is external to it, it has its determinateness out of it. This 
 its out-of-itself-ness is at first hand the abstract non-being of the 
 Quantum in general, the spurious Infinite. But further this non- 
 being is also a magnitude, the Quantum continues itself into its 
 non-being, for it has just its determinateness in its externality ; 
 this its externality is itself therefore equally Quantum ; that, its 
 non-being, the Infinitude, becomes thus limited, that is to say, this 
 beyond is sublated, is itself determined as Quantum, which is thus 
 in its negation by its own self. 
 
 ' This, however, is what the Quantum as such is an sich. For 
 it is just itself (es selbst) through its outerliness ; the externality 
 constitutes that whereby it is Quantum, is by its own self. In 
 the infinite progress, therefore, the notion of the Quantum is express, 
 explicit. 
 
 1 Let us take it (the progress) at first hand in its abstract dis- 
 tinctive features as they lie before us, then there is present in it 
 the sublation of the Quantum, but equally also of its beyond, therefore 
 the negation of the Quantum as well as the negation of this negation. 
 Its (the progress') truth is their unity, in which they are but as 
 moments. This unity is the solution of the contradiction of which 
 the progress is the expression, and its (this unity's) closest mean- 
 ing consequently is the restoration of the notion of Quantity, that 
 it is indifferent or external limit. In the infinite progress as such, 
 it is usually only considered, that each Quantum, however great 
 or small, must be capable of disappearing, that it must be capable 
 of being transcended ; but it is not considered, that this its subla- 
 tion, the beyond, the downright Infinite itself disappears also. 
 
 Even the first sublation, the negation of Quality in general, 
 whereby Quantum becomes explicit, is an sich the sublation of the 
 negation, the Quantum is sublated qualitative limit, consequently 
 sublated negation, but it is at the same time only an sich this ; 
 it is set as a There-being, and then its negation is fixed as the 
 Infinite, as the Beyond of Quantum which stands as a Here, a 
 This side, as an immediate ; thus the infinite is determined only as 
 first negation, and so it appears in the infinite progress. It has 
 been shown that there is, however, more present in this last, the 
 

 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 551 
 
 negation of the negation, or that which the infinite is in truth. 
 This was before regarded as that the notion of the Quantum is 
 thus again restored; this restoration means, in direct reference, 
 that its There-being has received its closer determination ; there has 
 arisen, namely, the Quantum determined according to its notion^ 
 which is different from the immediate Quantum the externality 
 is now the contrary of itself, explicitly set as moment of the 
 magnitude itself, the Quantum so that by means of its non- 
 being, the infinite, it has in another Quantum its determinateness, 
 i.e., qualitatively is that which it is. Nevertheless, this com- 
 parison of the notion with the There-being of the Quantum belongs 
 more to our reflexion, to a relation that is not yet present here. 
 The immediately next determination is, that the Quantum has 
 returned into Quality, is now once again qualitatively determined. 
 For its peculiarity, its quality, is the externality, indifference of 
 the determinateness ; and it is now explicitly set, as being in its 
 externality rather itself, as therein referring itself to itself, as in 
 simplicity with itself, i.e., as being qualitatively determined. This 
 Qualitativity is more particularly determined, namely, as Being- 
 for-self ; for the reference to itself to which it has come, arises out 
 of mediation, the negation of the negation. The Quantum has the 
 Infinite, the For-self-deterininedness no longer out of it, but in 
 itself. 
 
 ' The Infinite, which in the infinite progress has only the empty 
 sense of a non-being, of an unreached, but sought beyond, is in 
 effect nothing else than Quality^ The Quantum as indifferent 
 limit passes out beyond itself into the infinite ; it seeks so nothing 
 else than the for-self-determinedness, the qualitative moment, 
 that, however, in this way, is only a To-be-to. Its indifference to 
 the limit, consequently its defect of beent-for-self-determinateness 
 and its going out beyond itself, is what makes the Quantum 
 Quantum ; that, its going-out, is to be negated, and to find for 
 itself in the infinite its absolute determinateness. 
 
 ' Quite generally : the Quantum is sublated Quality ; but the 
 Quantum is infinite, transcends itself, is the negation of itself; 
 this its transcendence is, therefore, an sich the negation of the 
 negated Quality, the restoration of Quality ; and this is explicitly 
 set, that the externality which appeared as beyond, is determined 
 as the own moment of the Quantum. 
 
 ' The Quantum is thus set as repelled from itself, whereby there 
 are therefore two Quanta, which, nevertheless, are sublated, only 
 
552 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 are as moments of one unity, and this unity is the determinateness 
 of the Quantum. This (Quantum) thus referred to itself in its 
 externality as indifferent limit, and consequently qualitatively set, 
 is the Quantitative Relation. In relation the Quantum is external 
 to itself, different from itself ; this its externality is the referring 
 of one Quantum to another Quantum, of which each is only valid 
 in this its reference to its other ; and this reference constitutes the 
 determinateness (the special virtue) of the Quantum which is as 
 such unity. It has in this reference not an indifferent, but a 
 qualitative determination ; is in this its externality returned into 
 itself, is in the same that which it is.' 
 
 There is the possibility here of some very auxiliary remarks. 
 First of all, the contradiction in the notion of an infinitesimal, an 
 infinitely great, or an infinitely little, is accomplished with the 
 usual Hegelian masterliness in a very clear, and, as things are, 
 very necessary exposition. It is to be at once Quantum and no 
 Quantum, that is, it is an sich the infinite progress : now it is the 
 reduction of this contradiction to the unity of relation which is 
 the relative merit of Hegel. The limitless externality which lies 
 in the notion of Quantum or Quantity is qualitative ; and there- 
 fore it is a cheap wonder that falls prostrate before the infinite 
 quantities that can be conjured up in the quantitative progress ; 
 for with such quality such quantity is the turn of a hand. The 
 bearing which intensive magnitude as that, as it were, qualita- 
 tive One, which has nevertheless its affair in an external Many 
 has on the subsequent determination of Kelation must not be lost 
 sight of. Degree, quite generally as degree, has what constitutes 
 its determinateness external to itself ; but there is no end to the 
 possibility of degree, therefore this its own constitutive externality 
 is endless ; or vice versd, the constitutive externality being end- 
 less, degree is endless; and we have thus in perfectly explicit 
 expression the quantitative spurious infinite. In this infinite, the 
 externality, the many, can be seen to be relatively to the one, the 
 degree, this degree's abstract non-being as such ; or this abstract 
 non-being, the possibility of degree, is just the spurious infinite. 
 Now all this is the very notion of Quantum in general : Quantum 
 is itself, is what n- 13, thiough its own outwardness. We may 
 even intensify the outwardness implied in the notion here; for 
 we may say, the Quantum is what it is through that outwardness 
 which it is, and also through that outwardness which it is not 
 any quantitative assignment being absolutely relative. This 
 

 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 553 
 
 relativity, the notion of a One from Two, is well before the mind 
 of Hegel. As always relative, the assignment Quantum can be 
 seen, then, always to flee in infinitum. From this flight it is 
 Hegel's business, by virtue of the notion, to recall it. 
 
 I have translated Schlecht- C/^endliche, downright infinite. 
 The sense assigned is an old idiomatic use of Schlecht as seen in 
 Schlechthin, Schlechtweg, &c. ; and again, looking close, the Un 
 of Unendliche seems italicised, which somehow plays very much 
 into the hands of Schlecht in the sense of downright. Beyond 
 all doubt, however, we have here the usual Hegelian irony ; what 
 here is downright to figurate conception or ordinary reflexion is 
 spurious to Hegel. 
 
 The reader will assist himself greatly here if he will recall the sub 
 specie ceternitatis, and reflect that it is the pure notion, the absolute, 
 which lies under all these forms. It was the sublation of Finite 
 There-being, for example, that led through the absolute Being-for- 
 self into the form of Quantity at all : all then was One, One, One, 
 that is, Quantity ; but in that Quantity, the One, Quality, still is. 
 * Quantity, then, is an sich the sublation of the negation ' of what 
 negation ? why, of the qualitative negation, of qualitative limit, of 
 the fact that the Voice again to use the Voice had a Notification 
 different from itself : Quantity is the negation of this qualitative 
 limit ; what is, is One, but even so it must be One, One, One : 
 Quantity is the condition of its life, of its very one-ness. All this is 
 very plainly present, especially in the last four paragraphs, which 
 have been just translated. The Ond is always One, the immediate ; 
 so the non-immediate is its non-being, the negation of itself : thus 
 it is caught (befangen) in the spurious Infinite, the Sollen of all 
 kinds, and is ' das ungliickliche Bewusstseyn/ the unhappy con- 
 sciousness that cannot find itself y but is for ever lost in its other. 
 All this disappears before the simple consideration that the other 
 is just the condition, the presupposition of itself ; that the other is 
 for it ; that it is through the other ; that it is One just because it 
 is One, One, One ; that it is the other, and the other is it. This is 
 return of the Quantum into Quality : its determinateness as 
 Quantum is its own externality ; but its own externality was the 
 determinateness of Quality also : sublation of the externality pro- 
 duces a like qualitative Being-for-self in both. In fact, read by 
 this absolute light, these paragraphs will yield a perfectly mar- 
 vellous meaning. While on one side all the assignments of 
 Quantity are placed before us in a rigorous exactitude of form 
 
554 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that is now for the first time witnessed, on the other side we 
 have the absolute itself demonstrated to us, and in those necessities 
 which are the purest outcomes of its own reason, of its own pulse, 
 that is, of its own self. Here, for example, we see that Quantity 
 is not a thing apart and by itself, not something peculiar, inde- 
 pendent and isolated, but absolutely one with quality, absolutely 
 one with what is : it is part and parcel of the One All, and it is 
 not part and parcel, but is that One All ; for in no other way 
 could there be One, One, One, a life, Quality : Quantity, in truth, 
 is but the abstract expression of that concrete fact. To generalise 
 and abstract may be necessary, but it is more necessary now- 
 adays to conduct our abstractions back into the life from which 
 they have been sundered. This life is one and many : these 
 many are not to be fixed as dead immovable solids (bits of ice) 
 taken up from the One, the life ; they are to be taken back, re-dis- 
 solved and seen as they are in the living One. That Quality is 
 Quality, then, is just that Quantity is Quantity, or that there is 
 Quantity : there is an absolutely necessary nexus between the 
 two entities ; they are but sides of one and the same. How were 
 an internality possible without an externality to extend it ? There 
 is not here internality then, and there externality ; but what is, is at 
 once external and internal, and such constitution is an absolute 
 necessity of thought or of the notion. He that would see rightly, 
 then, must always see in connexion, in co-reference. The Absol- 
 ute Negativity, the negation of the negation, this is the key-note : 
 what is, is a fire that feeds itself ; the fire and its fuel are one ; 
 the former is through the latter, but the former always is, there- 
 fore the latter always is, and the one is the other. Such is the 
 nature of the Divine Life : it is infinite, for that through which it is, 
 the aliment, is infinite and itself. Thus is it the pure negativity or 
 the negation of the negation, for it is through its other, its negation, 
 which at the same time it negates : the Attraction that is explicit is 
 for ever fed by the Repulsion that is implicit. In this way it is that 
 Hegel has taken firm hold of the formula of the absolute ; and this 
 negation of the negation, this necessary duplicity in the character of 
 every actual concrete existence, by which it has two abstract or 
 relatively abstract sides, he has followed out through the entire 
 circle of the universe, up from the abstractest determination to 
 the concretest, and this too by an absolutely necessary method, 
 and with an absolutely necessary beginning and end. The 
 duplicity which we see here in regard to Quality and Quantity is 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 555 
 
 the single regulative truth of things, and, the element of thought 
 being it and it nothing but thought, it is not more regulative than 
 constitutive ; it is what is, it is the absolute, it is the pulse of God 
 himself at least as expressed in this universe. Quantity is a 
 necessary position it is but Quality, completed Quality. Quality^ 
 when full-summed, consummated in itself, is Quantity, by virtue 
 of its own life, its own continuance. Quantity, which is the life 
 of Quality, its continuance, without which Quality were not, 
 which is required to extend Quality, returns by virtue of its own 
 notion and veritable constitution into the Quality which it was 
 supposed to have left. We need not say, indeed, Quantity 
 without which Quality were not ; for that is simply tautological, 
 Quantity being very evidently just the same thing as Quality, 
 though on the other side. That Quality be, Quantity is a necessary 
 condition, and so is it a necessary ingredient of Quality itself. 
 Without the Quantity that extends it, Quality is inconceivable 
 and impossible ; but conversely without the Quality that, so to 
 speak here, intends it, Quantity is inconceivable and impossible. 
 What were Quantum and Quanta if only Quantitative Quantum 
 and Quanta ? Quantum and Quanta must contract into the 
 ultimate virtue, into the essential drop of Quality, the ones are 
 the One: Quantum and Quanta are only for Quality; they are 
 only Qualitative. Time, Space, Matter, the Ego, these we have 
 already seen cited as examples of pure quantity ; but they are all 
 of them qualitative, and there only because they are qualitative, 
 they are necessary positions of the absolute in the way in which 
 we have seen such necessity as regards Quantity when referred to 
 Quality. That they are qualitative is evident from this, that each 
 has its own peculiarity ; that is, they are not absolutely the same 
 pure Quantity, and so not absolutely pure Quantity at all : pure 
 Quantity as such is just the out-of-itself of Quality, or, what is 
 the same thing, its continuance but in discretion, discretion and 
 continuance being but another example of the absolute duplicity 
 by which neither is possible without the other, or either is the 
 other. Quality is the One ; but to be the One, it must be One, 
 One, One endlessly, or Quantity : but the One refers these Ones 
 to its own oneness Quantitative Eelation. However it may be 
 with the absolute, it must be admitted, at least, that Hegel in 
 pursuit of his absolute has absolutely worked out and perfected, 
 and for the first time in universal history, the Metaphysic or 
 Theory of Quantity. Whether, then, what we may assign as the 
 
556 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ultimate dictum of Hegel thought is the one avayKq, and the 
 avayKrj of thought gives this universe be true or not, we must 
 be thankful for the vast light his metaphysic has thrown on the 
 particular and on all particulars. This brings us to say that 
 before entering on the important enunciations of Hegel in refer- 
 ence to the Calculus and the higher analysis in general, which 
 form the subject-matter of the three very long and laborious 
 Remarks by the first of which we now stand, it will be advan- 
 tageous to renew the values of Quantity we have just obtained, 
 especially those which bear on what is called the Quantitative 
 Infinite, True or False, Genuine or Spurious, Legitimate or 
 Bastard. 
 
 The Qualitative Infinite we probably understand thoroughly, 
 and on both aspects, from our illustration of the absolute Voice 
 and its Notification. The Notification as finite Note after finite 
 Note endlessly, is that alternation of endedness and unendedness 
 that but replace each other and repeat themselves, which is the 
 spurious infinite of Hegel. The absolute Voice itself, which is 
 through these notes and these notes, typifies the true Infinite. In 
 effect, Finite and Infinite are but a certain stage of the Notion, 
 of the one double single, or of the single duplicity. An Infinite 
 without a Finite were null, as a Finite without an Infinite is incon- 
 ceivable and impossible: neither, then, is possible without the 
 other ; each implies the other ; either is the other : the one truth 
 is the single duplicity that is both. When we see Finite by itself, 
 and Infinite by itself, we see a concrete Notion, or a phase of the 
 concrete Notion, in each of its two abstract sides alternately. The 
 truth (say) is the absolute Voice which is through its other, which 
 other it also negates or sublates ; and so it is the negation of the 
 negation, the pure negativity, the veritable Infinite. 
 
 This Infinite as One passed through what we may call Mona- 
 dology or the Metaphysic of the Monad into the indifferent con- 
 tinuous oneness which emerged as Quantity. Quantity showed 
 itself immediately as Continuous or Discrete ; both of which went 
 together again in the notion of limit, which was found to be not 
 only the common, but the entire truth of each. Limit next 
 manifested itself as Quantum or Number, which went asunder 
 into Extensive and Intensive Quanta, but collapsed again into 
 the quantitative Something which, as the very quality or notion 
 of Quantum, is endless self-externality, or the quantitative Infinite. 
 The quantitative Infinite is first the spurious Infinite of Quantum 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 557 
 
 fleeing ever into its indifferent limit. But this flight or trans- 
 cendence is in its truth a transcendence of the one Quantum as 
 well as of the other : this is a reference of Quantum to Quantum, 
 is qualitative, and the true Quantitative Infinite of Quantitative 
 Eelation. Simple consideration sub specie ceternitatis of the One 
 that issued from Quality and emerged in Quantity leads readily 
 to all these forms. But, not to go too far back as limitless one, 
 one, one that is always away over into another one, it is the 
 spurious infinite, while as return to its own oneness in all these 
 ones it is the true Infinite and a return to Quality. This can be 
 characterised, too, as the true reflexion for us here. Lastly, in an 
 objective mode of looking, the oneness that results from the 
 reflexion of one to one is Quantitative Eelation, and is here the 
 true Quantitative Infinite, as it is Qualitative, or as it is the return 
 of Quality to itself from Quantity. I may add, that once having 
 the absolute as One, or just the form, character, determination, or 
 term of One, the whole of Quantity, and of all that holds of it, is 
 potentially given. 
 
 KEMARK 1. 
 
 The Precise Nature of tJie Notion of the Mathematical Infinite. 
 
 ' The Infinite which the higher analysis has introduced into 
 mathematical science, while it has led to vast results in practice, 
 has been always attended with great difficulties in theory. The 
 latter, indeed, has never been able to justify the former ; confirma- 
 tion has been required for the results, as it were, from without ; 
 and the operation itself has been rather granted as incorrect. This 
 is a false position in itself unscientific and no science so situated 
 can be either sure of its application or certain of its extent. 
 
 ' What is interesting to philosophy here is, that while this, the 
 Mathematical Infinite, is at bottom the True Infinite, it is the 
 False or Metaphysical Infinite before which it is summoned and 
 required to justify itself. The former, indeed (mathematic), defends 
 itself by rejecting the competence of the latter (metaphysic), and 
 by professing to own no authority but that of its own consistency 
 on its own field. But while, on the one hand, metaphysic cannot 
 deny the value of the splendid results achieved by mathematic in 
 consequence of the Infinite in question, it must be admitted that 
 this latter science, on the other hand, is unable to procure for its 
 own self a clear conscience as regards the notion it has introduced 
 and the dependent processes. 
 
558 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ' So far as the difficulty concerns the notion alone, that is a 
 matter of no moment to any science which has rightly possessed 
 itself of an element, and truly distributed it. But here in the 
 science concerned there is a contradiction in the very method on 
 which, as a science, it rests. It permits itself, for example, to 
 handle Infinite Quanta as if they were Finite Quanta, and yet to 
 apply, in determination of the former, expedients which it absol- 
 utely rejects in the case of the latter. Justification, it is true, is 
 sought for the application of these expedients, in the fact, that 
 their results can be proved from elsewhere. But while, on one 
 side, all results have not been so proved, it is, on the other side, 
 the very object of the new method, not only to shorten, but in 
 certain respects to supersede the old, and obtain results impossible 
 to the old. Again, a result cannot justify a manner per se ; and 
 the manner here has this inexactitude in it, that it now introduces 
 as the very essential of the operation, what it presently rejects as 
 too small to be of any account. Nay, what is more extraordinary 
 still, the results obtained from this process, the inexactitude of 
 which is admitted, are, as Carnot says, " not merely free ' from 
 sensible error,' but rigorously exact'' And we know all the while 
 that something actually was omitted something not quite zero. 
 This is not truth as such correctness as such neither of which 
 admits of a less or a more. Again, be it with the result as it may, 
 proof as such is an interest, and in mathematical science the 
 interest proper. 
 
 ' It will be interesting, then, to examine closer the various 
 modes in which the general notion involved has been viewed, 
 as well as the various expedients which have been adopted to 
 justify it. 
 
 ' The usual definition of the mathematical Infinite is, that it is 
 a magnitude beyond which when it is infinitely great there is no 
 greater, or when it is infinitely small no smaller, or which, in 
 the one case, is greater, and, in the other, smaller, than any assign- 
 able magnitude. This definition does not express the true notion 
 involved, but only that contradiction which is the spurious pro- 
 gressus ; and again if Quanta are, as mathematic elsewhere avows, 
 what can "be lessened or increased, then plainly it is not Quanta as 
 such that we have now before us. 
 
 ' This is already something gained, and this is what usually just 
 fails to be seen : the Quantum as such is sublated, its character is 
 now of an infinite nature, and yet its quantitative determinateness 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 559 
 
 is to be conceived as still somehow persisting. It is in continuing 
 to regard what is infinite as finite, as Quantum, that more or less 
 becomes capable of being falsely attributed to what is infinite. 
 The infinite of a unity that is 2, or 3, or 4, &c., for example, 
 may be regarded as greater than an infinite of a unity that is only 
 1, &c. How this depends on an infinite being still regarded as 
 Quantum is evident. Kant (but, as usual, this is reserved). 
 
 'We have seen that the true Infinite Quantum is infinite in 
 itself (an ihm selbst) ; it is this inasmuch as both the Quantum 
 as such and its beyond of externality, through which beyond it 
 has its constitutive determinateness, are equally sublated. The 
 Quantum is thus gone into unal self-reference. It itself and its 
 externality, however, are still there as moments : it is the infinite 
 Quantum as containing and being its own negated externality. But 
 this is Quality : it is not any particular assignable Quantum : it is 
 the constitution of Quantum as such universally, and so Quality. 
 
 [* One can readily sublate the infinite series of Notes, through 
 which the Voice is, into the one infinite voice *] ; but, though the 
 one infinite Quantum can be conceived as only through the series 
 of finite Quanta, it is not so easy to conceive a qualitative infinite 
 Quantum by sublation into its unity of the whole infinite variety 
 or externality of the finite series. This, however, is what is required 
 to be done : the relativity of Quantity is to be conceived in its 
 own infinite qualitative form. Its infinitude is that it is a 
 qualitative determinateness. The relativity, once firmly caught, 
 can be seen to be but moment, Quantitative determinateness in 
 Qualitative form. As moment it depends on its other; it has its 
 determination from this other ; it has a meaning only in relation 
 to what stands in relation with it. Apart from this relation it is 
 nothing ; and is, in this respect, unlike Quantum as such, which 
 as such seems wholly passive, indifferent as regards relation, and 
 even in relation to possess its own immediate, settled form. But as 
 moment in relation, its passivity and indifference disappear ; its 
 immediacy is sublated ; it is what it is through another. Quite 
 generally now, then, the Quantum that has taken up this attitude 
 to its own externality (quite generally) can be seen to have sub- 
 lated itself into a Qualitative Unity ; it is infinite Being-for-self, 
 but possesses and is quantitative Being-for-One. Or we may say 
 that quantitatively it is a Fur-Eines, a Being-for-One, while 
 qualitatively it is a Being-for-self. Or again we might almost say 
 
 * See next note. 
 
560 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that it is quantitative matter (the For-One) idealised into qualita- 
 tive form (the For-self). This distinction is very difficult to 
 realise. Though something has here been added in elucidation, 
 the reader will do well to re-read *c. The Infinitude of the 
 Quantum/ together with the relative comments for this notion is 
 evidently intended to be the key-note of all that follows. The 
 moments are simply these : there is Quantum and its Beyond ; so 
 put they flee each other and we have the spurious Infinite through 
 their alternate repetition ; but they are not to be repeated : the 
 Quantum is to be seen to depend on the beyond ; the beyond is 
 to be seen to constitute it: the beyond, then, is to be taken 
 up into it to the formation of a single notion, a one infinite 
 qualitative whole, the quality being the peculiarity of its 
 constitution.* 
 
 * This notion will be found to constitute at bottom the mathe- 
 matical Infinite ; and it itself will become clearer in the progress 
 of a consideration of the various stages of the expression of the 
 Quantum as a moment of relation, from the lowest, where it is yet 
 at the same time Quantum as such, up to the higher, where it 
 obtains the signification (value) and the expression of special 
 infinite magnitude. 
 
 * The first example, then, will be Quantum in relation as ex- 
 hibited in fractions. The fraction f , for instance, is quite a finite 
 expression, and possessed of a quite finite value, the exponent or 
 quotient ; nevertheless it is different from the whole numbers, 1, 
 2, 3, &c. It is not immediate as they are, but mediate ; the virtue 
 it possesses is neither 2 nor 7, but as it were that virtue which 
 depends on the relativity of these two virtues mutually. The 
 sublation of immediacy has introduced quite a change, then : the 
 immediacy is no longer the essential, but the mediacy; and so 
 long as the latter is retained, the former may be as it likes. Thus 
 a certain infinitude emerges : 2 may become 4, 6, &c. ; and for 
 7 we may substitute 14, 21, &c. In this way we see more plainly 
 that it is not an immediate 2 or 7 with which we have to do ; for 
 both the 2 and the 7 may be changed infinitely, provided only 
 their relativity be preserved : f- has now, then, taken on a certain 
 qualitative character, inasmuch as its quantitative character 
 its composing Quanta manifest a certain indifference, in having 
 
 * Exact translation was not at first intended in this Remark hence the ad- 
 mission of additions (the 'voice,' &c.) as above, though compression was the general 
 object. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 561 
 
 become susceptible of infinite change. The 2 and 7 together, then, 
 are very different from what they are apart : the passive, inert, 
 quantitative limit which each, as 2 or as 7, has, is sublated into a 
 certain infinitude ; their value seems no longer merely quantitative 
 and of the nature of 2 and 7 ; this value, or their virtue, seems to 
 have gone over into a qualitative drop, the qualitative Being-for- 
 self, while at the same time quantitative determinateness seems 
 still to be preserved, to enter as moment, as the Being-for-One. 
 The 2 and the 7 are moments in fact ; they are no longer 2 and 7, 
 but each is what it is as in the relation, and so endlessly variable. 
 That the virtue here is qualitative will readily appear, when it is 
 recollected that Quality is but seyende Bestimmtheit, bee'nt 
 determinateness. The bee'nt determinateness which is here 
 again may be considered of an infinite nature, as it rests on 
 an infinite relation, or on Quanta which are of an infinite 
 character. The Quantitativity of 2 as of 7 remains, but as in 
 itself qualitative, seeing that each is what it is only in relation to 
 another. 
 
 * Such fraction, however, is no perfect expression of Infinitude : 
 the finite and quantitative character of divisor, dividend, and 
 quotient their mutual indifference and externality as Quanta 
 are too obvious. Its value as an illustration depends wholly on 
 the infinitude which comes upon its Quanta when they cease to 
 function as direct or immediate Quanta, on the fact that Quantity 
 seems to become indifferent, if the Quality but remain. 
 
 a ^ 
 1 The more general form -j- might appear, so far, more eligible 
 
 as an expression for the Infinite; nevertheless, as valueless in 
 itself, as altogether symbolical and dependent on another, it is 
 quite indifferent and external, and so inapplicable as illustration 
 here. 
 
 ' The relation as we have seen it in the fraction, then, implies 
 these two characters : firstly, that it is Quantum ; secondly, that 
 it is not immediate but mediate Quantum, or that it implies the 
 qualitative antithesis (i.e., a one of two, a reflexion into self from 
 reflexion to other). The single virtue of the relation is the 
 determinate but indifferent thing it is, because it has returned 
 out of its otherwiseness (the contraposed numbers) into itself, 
 and is so far an infinite. In other words, it is the secret quality 
 that 2 has to 7, or 7 to 2, that is the thing, no matter what 
 quantitative amount this secret quality may assume. The two 
 
 2 N 
 
562 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 characters are more distinct when developed in the following 
 familiar form : 
 
 ' The fraction -f- can be expressed as '285714 . . . , - as 
 
 1 a 
 
 2 +a 3 +, &c. In this form, the fraction is as an infinite 
 series ; the fraction itself is called the Sum or the finite expression 
 of the series. These terms were, perhaps, more correct, however, 
 if converted. Comparing the two expressions, -f- on the one side of 
 the equation and its decimal expansion on the other, and so with 
 the other fraction, we find that the side which is the expansion or 
 infinite series expresses the fraction no longer as relation, but as 
 Quantum, as an Amount, as a number of Quanta which add them- 
 selves to each other. That the amount consists of decimal frac- 
 tions, and so again of relations, is not a consideration here ; for the 
 question refers wholly to the amount and not to the nature of the 
 unity concerned. A number consisting of several places of figures 
 is still an amount ; and the unities of the amount are not required 
 to be considered in their peculiarity as units of the general 
 decimal system. Nor is it to be objected that all fractions do 
 not, like -f- , yield an infinite decimal series ; for every fraction may 
 be expressed as a numerical system of another unity than the 
 decimal one. 
 
 ' In the expansion, the infinitude of relation has disappeared, 
 then, and has now the form of an endless series. 
 
 * But this series is evidently the spurious Infinite. It is the 
 contradiction to state what is a relation and of qualitative nature 
 as relation-less and mere Quantum. Thus, carried out to what 
 extent it may, there is always a minus: such series is but a 
 Sollen, a To-be-to ; a Beyond that is ever beyond is here inevit- 
 able. This is the permanent contradiction that ensues from the 
 attempt to express what is qualitative as a quantitative amount. 
 
 * The inexactitude is here in actuality, which is only in appear- 
 ance in the true mathematical Infinite. Both in mathematic and in 
 philosophy the true Infinites, True and False, are to be carefully 
 discriminated. In spite both of some early and of some recent 
 attempts, infinite series is no legitimate or necessary expression of 
 the true Infinite. Such series is inferior as an expression even to 
 the fraction. 
 
 ' The infinite series remains a Sollen, a To-be-to ; it expresses 
 not what it is to express. What it expresses is burthened with 
 a beyond, and is different from what it is to express. It is 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 563 
 
 infinite as incomplete, and reaches not the other which is to com- 
 plete it. What is properly there is a Finite, and stated as a 
 Finite : it is not that which it is to be. The finite expression, 
 on the other hand, the sum, is without deficiency. It has what the 
 other only seeks. The beyond is recalled from flight. What it is 
 and is to be are unseparated and the same. 
 
 ' The distinction is closer this : In the infinite series the nega- 
 tive is outside of what is stated, as that is only a part of the 
 amount. In the finite expression, on the contrary, a relation, the 
 negative is immanent as the determinedness of the sides of the 
 relation through one another ; it is thus as returned to within itself, 
 a self-referent unity, negation of the negation (both sides being but 
 moments) ; it has thus the character of infinitude within itself. 
 The finite expression is thus the infinite expression ; the sum 
 is a relation. The infinite series is in truth sum, no relation, but 
 an aggregate. The series, then, is what is finite ; it is an imperfect 
 aggregate, and remains defective ; it is determinate Quantum, but 
 less than it should be. What fails again is also a determinate 
 Quantum, and it is this deficiency that constitutes what is mfinite 
 in the series this in the formal point of view that it is what 
 fails, what is not, a non-being ; in real meaning and value it is a 
 determinate Quantum. What is, only with what is not, constitutes 
 what is to be but is not able to be. This word infinite, even in the 
 case of the series so called, is to common opinion something high 
 and holy ; such opinion is but superstition, the superstition of 
 understanding ; that depends, however, only on a want. (Negative, 
 as used above, has reference to the necessary negation, the necessary 
 other, required for qualitative distinctivity or determinateness. 
 " Formal point of view " it is only as regards form that the series 
 is mfinite, that what fails is always not, &c.). 
 
 ' It may be remarked that there are infinite series incapable of 
 being summed ; but this is an external and contingent circumstance 
 with reference to the form of series as such. These involve an 
 incommensurability, or the impossibility of representing the 
 implied quantitative relation as a Quantum. The infinitude of 
 such series is of a higher order than in those that may be summed ; 
 but the form of series as such is still, even in these cases, the 
 spurious Infinite. 
 
 ' The usual metaphysical Infinite, and not the true mathematical 
 Infinite, it is, then, which ought to be called, not the absolute, but 
 the relative Infinite. There must be a conversion of dignity in 
 
564 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 these references. What cannot sublate its other is Finite ; what 
 has sublated this other and united it to itself is Infinite.* 
 
 * For the sake only of the illustration it contains, it may be worth while noticing 
 the curious attempt of Thomas Taylor, in his ' Dissertation on Nullities,' to prove, 
 through expedients which are at bottom only the spurious Infinite, that there exist 
 ' Nullities,' ' not Nothings,' but ' infinitely small quantities ' that ' belong to, with- 
 out being quantity,' and 'have a subsistence prior to number and even to the 
 monad itself.' Such Nullities are 11, 22, 3 3, &c.; and these, in order, are 
 stated by Taylor to be infinitely small quantities of 1, of 2, of 3, &c. Of 1 1, he 
 says, it ' is not the same with 0, or, in other words, 1 1 considered collectively, or 
 as one thing, is not the same with 1 considered as taken from one, so as to leave 
 nothing.' The key-note of this Thomas 'Taylor's Theorem' is, that | is equal to 
 
 pr, which, when expanded, becomes 1 1-j-l 1, + &c., ad infinitum. Taylor,. 
 
 while he accepts the summation of this series at the hands of the Mathematicians, 
 seems for he is by no means explicit to object to these gentlemen that they are- 
 * very far from suspecting ' that they have accomplished at the same time the sum- 
 mation of the 'infinite Nullities.' He, for his part, however, evidently sees very 
 clearly that, 1 1 being 0, (11) + (1 1), which is the single characteristic and 
 constitutive act of the series, must be but a summation of to all through ; and 
 consequently that, as this summation issues, not in nothing, but in , 1 1 is, after 
 all, not a Nothing, but a ' Nullity,' a quantity infinitely small. Taylor then pro- 
 ceeds to point out what ' it is singular that neither Euler, nor any other Mathe- 
 matician, should have considered' 'that -= -=. and, in 
 
 short, all fractions, whose numerators are Unity, and whose denominators are dis- 
 tributed into Unities, will, when resolved into infinite series, be equal to this same 
 1 1-j-l 1, &c., infinitely.' He does not on that account, however, alter his 
 original conclusion that ' the sum of the infinite nullities is J. ' Surely, neverthe- 
 less, he has now an equal title to infer that this same sum is J, , i, &c. Nay, ^, 
 4) i> -QJ & c -> ud infinitum, being all equal to the same thing and consequently to 
 one another, surely he has now an equal title to infer that 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and in 
 general all number or numbers whatever, are similarly equal ! Another instance 
 of a like confusion is this : ' If 1 5, in whatever way it may be considered, was. 
 always the same as 4, and 12 the same as 1, then, since 1 divided by 4 
 is equal to ^, 12 divided by 1 5 would also be equal to ; but on the contrary,, 
 it is equal to the infinite series l-f-3-f 15-f- &c.' Taylor's error is the omission to 
 perceive that all his Infinites are ' spurious ' : had he but completed them by what 
 Hegel names the 'defect,' the 'failing determinate Quantum,' and Euler a few 
 pages before the one cited by Taylor himself the 'remainder' (which remainder 
 
 is, in the cases mentioned, +> + 1 _|. 1 ^_ 1 > + 1 ^_ 1 _|_ 1 _{_ 1 ) 1^5' e( l ual res P ec ' 
 
 tively, -}-J, -f-J, -}~i> -or 18f ), he would have found them instantly converted 
 
 into the original relations, |, J, , and . These two one- fourths suggest that, on 
 similar reasoning, Taylor might have declared 1 1+1 1, &c.= l-j-3-{-15-|-75, 
 &c. ; but in this and in the other cases, absurdity and confusion disappear directly 
 the spurious un-ended is ended by what it ivants the relative remainder. Elsewhere 
 Taylor possibly, in similar cases, Mathematicians generally might reflect with 
 profit on the Hegelian distinction between operating (through ' increase ' and 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 565 
 
 ' It is in the sense of these findings, that Spinoza opposes the 
 notion of the true to that of the false Infinite, and illustrates the 
 same by examples. 
 
 ' Spinoza defines the Infinite as the absolute affirmation of the 
 existence of a nature of any kind ; the Finite, on the contrary, as 
 deter minateness, as negation. The absolute affirmation of an 
 existence is to be taken, namely, as self-reference, not as what is 
 because another is : the finite, on the contrary, is the negation, a 
 ceasing as mere referentiality to another that out of it begins. 
 Absolute affirmation is inadequate, however, to the notion of the 
 Infinite; which is not immediate affirmation, but as what is 
 restored through reflexion of the other into itself, or as negation of 
 the negative. But the substance of Spinoza and its absolute unity 
 are fixed and immovable : they have not the form of the self with 
 self-mediating unity ; they possess not the notion of the negative 
 unity of the self, subjectivity. 
 
 ' Spinoza's example of the Infinite is the space between two 
 circles, one of which, without touching, and without being con- 
 centric, is contained within the other. ' The mathematicians/ he 
 says, ' demonstrate that the inequalities, which are possible in such 
 a space, are infinite, not from the infinite number of the parts, for 
 its magnitude is fixed and limited, and I can assume such spaces 
 as greater and smaller, but because the nature of the thing itself 
 exceeds every deterrninateness.' This infinite of Spinoza, then, is 
 present and complete, not any unended number or series ; the 
 space, in his example, is limited} but it is infinite because ' the 
 nature of the thing itself exceeds every determinateness/ because 
 the magnitude contained in it cannot be expressed as a Quantum. 
 The infinite of a series he names the infinite of the imagination; 
 that again which is self-referent, the infinite of thought, or infinitum 
 actu. The latter is actually infinite, because it is complete within 
 itself and present. The other has no actuality, something fails 
 
 The -f- or is, like Spinoza's space, so far finite, and can be 
 
 J. a 
 
 ' diminution ') on what is Quantity, and on what is no longer Quantity. School- 
 boys, with a single string, produce, by passing loop through loop and tightening 
 loop on loop, a very sufficient whip-cord, which seems to consist of a series of 
 sufficiently solid-looking knots : one pull at the tail of the last one, however, and 
 the whole series vanishes into its first One, the single string. Thus Taylor's series 
 remained solid to him because he forgot to pull the tail, the remainder. This at 
 least illustrates what Hegel is so anxious to make clear, the spuriousness of unended 
 progressus regarded as an Infinite, and will, perhaps, be excused by the reader. 
 
566 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 assumed as greater or smaller ; but it admits not of the absurdity 
 of a greater or less Infinite ; for this Quantum of the whole affects 
 not the relation of its moments, " the nature of the thing," that is, 
 the qualitative determination of the magnitude. What in the 
 infinite series is there is not only a finite Quantum, but, moreover, 
 a defective one. Imagination clings to the Quantum as such, and 
 reflects not on the qualitative peculiarity which constitutes the 
 reason of the existent incommensurability. 
 
 4 This incommensurability that of Spinoza's example compre- 
 hends within it the functions of curved lines, and brings us nearer 
 to the true mathematical infinite which is connected with such 
 functions and with the functions of variable magnitudes in general. 
 
 ' In f- both numerator and denominator, as we have seen, are, in 
 
 a certain manner, infinitely variable ; ^ again is infinitely vari- 
 able in a still more unrestricted sense: if in the functions of 
 variable quantities, then, x and y are to be distinguished from 
 such quantities as 2, 7, a, b, &c., the principle of distinction must 
 rest on something else than variableness as such or in general. 
 Variable quantity, then, as an expression that is to be specifically 
 distinctive, is extremely vague, and, at the same time, very badly 
 chosen for characters of quantity which have their interest and 
 their principle of operation in something quite else than their mere 
 variableness. 
 
 * In -f- the 2 and the 7 are, each of them, a fixed independent 
 Quantum, and any co-reference or connexion is not essential to 
 
 them. In j too, both a and b are such quanta as are supposed to 
 remain the quanta which they are apart from, and independent of, 
 the relation. Moreover, -f- and v have fixed quotients; the 
 
 relation constitutes an amount of unities, the denominator 
 corresponding to the latter and the numerator to the former. 
 To express it otherwise, whatever change is made on the 2 and 
 the 7 (as into 4 and 14, &c.), the relation as Quantum remains 
 
 the same. This is all changed, however, in the function ~ p, 
 
 uo 
 
 for example. Here x and y represent variable Quanta capable of 
 receiving determinate values ; but it is not on x and y, but on x 
 and 2/ 2 , that the quotient depends. That is, x and y are not only 
 variable, but their relation is no fixed quantum but as a quantum 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 567 
 
 also absolutely variable. The reason of this peculiar variableness 
 of the quotient is, that the relation is not of one quantity to 
 another, but of one quantity to the square of another. This 
 introduction of & power into the relation is the circumstance to be 
 regarded as the fundamental determination : the relation of a 
 magnitude to a power is no quantum, but essentially a qualitative 
 relation. Now in such functions as that of the straight line, the 
 
 IT 
 
 relation does not concern a power; ~=a contains a fraction 
 
 y 
 
 quite similar to j- ; the fraction is an ordinary one, the quotient 
 
 an ordinary one : such functions, therefore, are only formally 
 functions of variable quantities, and have not that character to 
 which the principle of the Calculus applies. In view of the 
 specific difference which we have here so strongly before us, it 
 would have been proper to have introduced for the functions 
 named variable not only a specific name, but specific signs also, 
 and different from those of the usual unknown quantities in 
 algebra. It is to fail to see the peculiarity of the Calculus and 
 the need from which it sprung, that there should be included 
 within its matter such functions as those of the first degree. It is 
 right to complete the generalisation of a method, but it is a 
 misunderstanding here so to leave the specific difference out of 
 view that the interest of the science seems to concern variable 
 quantities in general. Much formalism of consideration and of 
 operation would have been spared^ad it been seen that what was 
 in question was not quantitative variableness as such, but relations 
 to Powers. 
 
 * But, in addition to this, there is another peculiarity that dis- 
 
 y2 
 
 tinguishes the mathematical Infinite. In the relation , the 
 
 so 
 
 y and the x have still the force and the value of Quanta ; but this 
 force and value disappear in the infinitely small differences, dx, 
 dy are no longer Quanta, nor do they represent Quanta ; they 
 have meaning only in connexion, a sense only as moments. They 
 are no longer Something in the sense of a Quantum, they are not 
 finite differences ; but they are not nothing, not indeterminate 
 zero. Apart from their relation they are zeros, but the"y are to 
 be taken only as moments of the relation, as determinations of the 
 
 differential coefficient -?-. 
 
568 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ' In this notion of the Infinite, Quantum is veritably perfected 
 into a qualitative There-being (specific existence) : it is in explicit 
 position as actually infinite; it is sublated not only as this or 
 that Quantum, but as Quantum in general. Quantitative speci- 
 ficity remains, however, as element of Quanta, as principle ; it is 
 Quanta, as some one has also said, in their first notion. 
 
 ' Against this notion is it that all attacks, bearing on the funda- 
 mental principle of the Calculus, have been directed. The mis- 
 apprehensions of mathematicians themselves in this connexion 
 occasioned these. Generally they have been unable to justify 
 their object as notion ; but this notion cannot be evaded ; for 
 here it is not finite determinateness that is concerned ; rather on 
 this field such determinatenesses are converted into identity with 
 their opposites, curved lines into straight, the circle into the 
 polygon, &c. The operations of the Calculus, then, are entirely 
 contradictory to the nature of finite values and their connexions, 
 and should have their justification only in the notion. 
 
 1 That, as vanishing, these infinite differences should have been 
 conceived as a middle-state between Something and Nothing, 
 was an error. This has been already discussed on occasion of 
 the Category of Becoming in Kemark 4 A state is a contingent 
 and external affection; it is the disappearing, the Becoming, 
 that is, the truth. 
 
 'What is infinite, it has been further said, is incapable of 
 comparison as a greater or a less ; a relation of infinite to infinite, 
 orders or dignities of the infinite distinctions which are spoken 
 of in the science itself are therefore not legitimate. The con- 
 ception of Quanta and of the comparison of Quanta in relation 
 still underlies this objection. But rather, it should be said, what 
 is only in relation is no Quantum. A Quantum is what can have 
 its own indifferent, independent existence apart from the relation 
 what, therefore, is indifferent to its distinction from another. 
 What is qualitative, again, is that which it is only in its dis- 
 tinction from another. In this sense, these infinite magnitudes 
 are not only capable of comparison, but they are only as moments 
 of comparison, of relation. 
 
 * If we examine now the chief mathematical views of this 
 Infinite, we shall find that they all imply the same thought of 
 the thing itself (which we have just expressed), but not fully 
 expiscated as notion, and that they are driven to expedients in 
 the application at variance with their better element. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 569 
 
 ' The thought cannot be more correctly determined than Newton 
 has given it ; that is, the conceptions of movement and velocity 
 (whence fluxion) being withdrawn as burthening the thought 
 with inessential forms and interfering with its due abstraction. 
 Newton says of these fluxions (Princ. Mathem. Phil. Nat., lib. h- 
 lemma xi. Schol.) that he understands by them disappearing 
 divisibles, not indivisibles a form belonging to Cavalleri and others, 
 and implying the notion of a Quantum determined in itself ; 
 further not sums and relations of definite parts, but the limits of 
 sums and relations. It may be objected that vanishing quantities 
 have no last relation, because what is before their disappearance 
 is not a last, and after, there is nothing. But under the relation 
 of such magnitudes the relation is to be understood not before 
 they disappear and not after ; it is the relation with which they 
 disappear (quacum evanescunt). So of magnitudes that become, 
 iliQ first relation is that with which they become. 
 
 ' Newton here bears to explain what is to be understood by such 
 and such an expression : this belongs to the scientific method of 
 the time, and has no foundation in the truth of things. The notion, 
 which is in itself necessary, being demonstrated, any explanation of 
 what is to be understood becomes superfluous as mere historical 
 demand or subjective presumption. But Newton's words apply 
 plainly to the notion as here demonstrated. We have quantities 
 which disappear or are no longer Quanta ; and we have relations, 
 not of definite parts, but relations which are limits of relation. 
 Not only the Quanta or sides of *the relation disappear, but the 
 relation itself so far as it is Quantum. The limit of a quantitative 
 relation is that in which it both is and is not, or, more accurately, 
 that in which the Quantum has disappeared, and there remains 
 the relation only as qualitative relation of quantity, and its sides 
 similarly as qualitative moments of quantity. Ultimate magni- 
 tudes, Indivisibles, however, are riot to be inferred from an ultimate 
 relation of vanishing magnitudes. This were to deviate again 
 from the abstract relation to such sides of it as should be supposed 
 to possess a value apart from their co- reference, per se, as indi- 
 visibles as something that were a one, relation-less. 
 
 ' The last relations, he urges, are not relations of last magnitudes, 
 but limits, to which the relations of the infinitely decreasing 
 magnitudes are nearer than any given, that is to say, finite, differ- 
 ence: the limit moreover is not exceeded, to the production of 
 nothing. Last magnitudes were indeed Indivisibles, or Ones. In 
 
570 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the last relation, however, any indifferent one that were without 
 relation, as well as finite Quantum, disappears. Here, however, 
 conceptions of infinite decrease (which is only the infinite pro- 
 gressus) as well as of divisibility, have no longer any immediate 
 sense, if the notion of a quantitative element, which is only 
 moment of a relation, be held fast in its purity. 
 
 ' As regards the continuance of the relation in the disappearance 
 of the Quanta, there is to be found (elsewhere as in Carnot, 
 "Eeflexions sur la Metaphysique du Calcul Infinitesimal") the 
 expression that by virtue of the law of continuity the vanishing 
 magnitudes still retain the relation (or ratio) from which they 
 spring, before they vanish. This conception expresses the true 
 nature of the thing, so far as not that continuity of Quantum is 
 understood which it has in the infinite progress, that is, so to con- 
 tinue itself in its disappearance that in the Beyond of itself there 
 arises again only a finite Quantum, only a new term of the series ; 
 a continuous progress is always so conceived, that the values are 
 gone through, which then are still finite Quanta. In the con- 
 tinuity of the true infinite, on the contrary, it is the relation that 
 is continuous ; it is so continuous that it rather wholly consists in 
 this, to isolate the relation alone, and to abolish any element that 
 is not the relation, any Quantum which as side of the relation 
 were to be supposed to remain Quantum apart from the relation. 
 This purification of the quantitative relation is the same thing as 
 what is meant by an empirical existence of any kind being 
 comprehended in its notion (begriffen). Such existence in such 
 case is raised beyond its own self in such wise that its notion 
 contains the same characterising constituents as it itself, but 
 taken up in their essentiality and into the unify of the notion, 
 in which they have lost their indifferent, notionless subsistence. 
 
 ' These, Newton's generative magnitudes or principles, are not 
 more interesting than the generated magnitudes. A generated 
 magnitude (genita) is a product or quotient, rectangles, squares, 
 or sides of these, in general a finite magnitude. " Such magni- 
 tude being considered as variable, as in continual movement and 
 flux, increasing and decreasing, he understands by the name 
 of moments its momentary Increments or Decrements. These, 
 however, are not to be taken as particles of a definite magnitude 
 (particulae finite). Such were not themselves moments, but 
 magnitudes generated out of moments ; what is to be understood 
 is rather the Principles or Beginnings of finite magnitudes in 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 571 
 
 process of becoming." Here the Quantum is distinguished from 
 itself, or how it is as product or there-beent, and how in its 
 Becoming, in its Beginning and Principle, that is to say, in 
 its notion, or what is here the same thing, in its qualitative 
 characterisation : in the latter the quantitative differences, the 
 infinite increments or decrements, are only moments ; only what 
 is become is that which has gone over into the externality and 
 indifference of There-being, the Quantum. If, on the one side, 
 such conceptions are to be acknowledged to imply the true notion, 
 on the other side these forms of increments, &c., are to be seen 
 to fall within the category of the immediate Quantum and of the 
 progressus, and to constitute the fundamental vice in the method 
 the permanent obstacle to the isolation into its purity of the 
 qualitative moment in quantity in contradistinction to the usual 
 Quantum. 
 
 ' The conception of infinitely small magnitudes, which, however, 
 is contained impliciter in the increments and decrements them- 
 selves, is very inferior to the above determinations. They are 
 described as such, that not only they themselves in comparison 
 with finite magnitudes, but their higher orders in comparison 
 with their lower, and even the products of several in comparison 
 with a single one, may be neglected. This call to neglect is more 
 strikingly prominent with Leibnitz than with others who preceded 
 him. This call it is which, if it has won facility for the Calculus, 
 has also given to its operations an appearance of inexactitude and 
 express inaccuracy. Wolf, in his way of making things popular, 
 that is to say, of making turbid the notion and of setting in its 
 place incorrect sensuous conceptions, has sought to render this 
 neglect intelligible by such examples as, in taking the height of a 
 mountain the calculation is not affected, if a particle of sand be 
 blown away the while ; nor does the neglect of the height of the 
 house or tower interfere with the accuracy of the calculations of 
 lunar eclipses. 
 
 ' If the fair play of Common Sense accept such inexactitude, 
 all geometricians unite to reject the conception. In such a science 
 us Mathematic there can be no question of empirical exactitude ; 
 its mensuration, whether by operations of the Calculus or by con- 
 structions in Geometry, is quite different from that of empirical 
 lines and figures, as in Land-surveying. Proofs from elsewhere, 
 besides, establish that there is no question of a less or more of 
 accuracy, while it is self-evident at the same time that an absol- 
 
572 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 utely exact result cannot issue from a process that were incorrect. 
 Then, on the other side, the process itself cannot do without this 
 neglect despite its protestations that what it neglects is of no 
 account. And this is the difficulty, this is what requires to be made 
 intelligible, and any appearance of absurdity in it removed. 
 
 ' Euler, in adopting Newton's general definition, would, in con- 
 sidering the relations of the increments, regard the infinite 
 difference as zero. (Institut. Calc. Different., P. L, c. iii). How 
 we are to understand this, lies in the foregoing : the difference, if 
 zero quantitatively, is not so qualitatively ; it is no zero, but a 
 pure moment in the relation. It is no difference ly so much ; yet 
 again, it seems strange to characterise what is infinitely small, as 
 increment or decrement or difference ; and such external arith- 
 metical operation really seems performed, addition or subtraction, 
 in that, as regards the finite magnitude present from the first, 
 something is added to it, or taken from it. It is to be said, 
 however, that the transition from the function of the variable to 
 its differential, must be regarded as of quite a different nature, 
 namely (as already determined), as a reduction of the finite func- 
 tion to the qualitative relation of its quantitative elements. 
 Again the difficulty reappears when the increments are called 
 zeros ; for a zero has no determinateness, and seems insusceptible 
 of the relation still attributed. Conception here has correctly 
 reached the negative of the Quantum, but does not hold it fast, 
 nevertheless, in its positive value of qualitative determinations of 
 quantity, which, isolated from the relation and taken as Quanta, 
 are zeros. Lagrange (Theorie des Fonct. Analyt., In trod.) remarks 
 of Limits or ultimate Eatios, that though we can very well con- 
 ceive the ratio of two magnitudes so long as they remain finite, 
 we can form no clear or distinct notion of this ratio so soon as its 
 terms have become zero. In effect, the understanding must 
 transcend this merely negative side with respect to the terms of 
 the ratio being null as Quanta, and take them up positively as 
 qualitative moments. What Euler says further as regards 
 zeros that are yet relations, and so to be otherwise expressed than 
 zeros, cannot be considered satisfactory. He seeks to support this 
 on the difference between arithmetical and geometrical ratios. In 
 the arithmetical there is no difference between and ; in the 
 geometrical, however, if 2 : 1 = : 0, then proportion is such, that 
 the first is twice the second. In common arithmetic, too, 
 n.0 = 0, i.e. n : 1 :: 0:0. But just by this that 2:1 or n : 1 is 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 573 
 
 a relation of Quanta, there cannot correspond to it any relation or 
 expression of : 0. 
 
 'In the instances given, the veritable notion of the Infinite is 
 really implied then, but it is not stamped out and taken up in its 
 specific determinateness. It is not to be expected, then, that the 
 operation can prove satisfactory. The true notion is not there kept 
 in view ; finite Quantum intrudes ; and the conception of a merely 
 relatively small cannot be dispensed with. What is infinite has 
 still to submit to, and is susceptible of, the usual arithmetical 
 operations, addition, &c. ; and is thus so far finite. Justification, 
 then, is required for such duplicity of view which would consider 
 infinite magnitudes now as increments or differences, and again 
 neglect them as Quanta, immediately after having applied to 
 them the forms and laws of Quanta, of what is finite. 
 
 * There have been many attempts to remove these difficulties ; I 
 adduce the most important. 
 
 ' It has been sought to procure for the Calculus the evidence of 
 the Geometrical method proper and the rigour of the ancient 
 demonstration expressions of Lagrange. But the principle of 
 the one being higher than that of the other, renunciation must be 
 made of that sort of evidence, just as philosophy has no pretensions 
 to that plainness which the sciences of what is sensuous (Natural 
 History, &c.) possess, and as eating and drinking are a much more 
 intelligible business than thinking and comprehending. As for 
 the rigour of demonstration 
 
 ' Some have endeavoured altogether to dispense with the notion 
 of the Infinite. Lagrange mentions Landen's method as a pure 
 analytic process that, without any infinitely small differences, 
 assumes, first of all, various values of the variables, and sets them 
 equal in the sequel. He decides that the advantages proper of 
 the Calculus simplicity of method and ease of operation are 
 thus lost. There is something here corresponding to that, from 
 which Descartes' method of Tangents proceeds. This process, on 
 the whole, belongs to another sphere of mathematical treatment 
 than the method of the Calculus ; and the peculiarity of the 
 simple relation to which the actual concrete interest reduces 
 itself that is, the simple relation of the derived to the original 
 function is not made sufficiently prominent. 
 
 ' Many, as Fermat, Barrow, Leibnitz, Euler, and others, have 
 always openly believed themselves warranted to omit the products 
 of infinite differences, as well as their higher powers, only on the 
 
574 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 ground that they disappear relatively to the lower order. On this 
 alone rests with them the fundamental position, that is, the de- 
 termination of what is the differential of a product or a power, for 
 to this the whole theoretical doctrine reduces itself. What remains is 
 partly mechanism of development, but partly again application ; 
 which latter, as will appear again, constitutes in effect the higher, 
 or rather only interest. As regards what is before us, the elemen- 
 tary consideration may be worth mentioning, that, for the same 
 reason of unimportance , it is assumed that the Elements of Curves, 
 namely, the increments of the Absciss and of the Ordinate, have 
 to one another the relation of the Subtangent and of the Ordinate ; 
 with the view of obtaining similar triangles, the arc, which forms 
 to the two increments the third side of a triangle, formerly rightly 
 named the characteristic triangle, is regarded as a straight line, as 
 part of the Tangent, and withal the increment extending to the 
 Tangent. These assumptions raise these forms, on the one hand, 
 above the nature of finite magnitudes ; on the other hand, again, 
 there is applied to the moments named infinite a process that is 
 valid only of finite magnitudes, and in which nothing can be 
 neglected because of its unimportance. The difficulty under 
 which the method labours appears in such procedure in its full 
 force. 
 
 ' An ingenious artifice of Newton to get rid of the unnecessary 
 terms in finding the differentials, may here be mentioned. He 
 (Princ. Math. Phil. Nat., lib. ii. lemma ii. post propos. vii.) finds 
 the differential of the product in the following way. The product, 
 when x, y are taken each of them smaller by the half of its 
 
 xdy ydx dxdy 
 infinite difference, passes into xy ^ ? + ; and when 
 
 Zi JL 4 
 
 . ,. , . , xdy ydx 
 
 x, y are taken greater by the same amount, into xy + - + '^- + 
 
 . The first product now, being taken from the second, there 
 
 remains over xdy + ydx, and this remainder Newton wishes us to 
 regard as the excess of the increase by a whole dx and dy, for this 
 excess is the difference of the two products ; it is therefore the 
 differential of xy. In this process we see that the troublesome 
 term, the product of the two infinite differences, dxdy, neutralises 
 itself. But, the name of Newton notwithstanding, we must 
 venture to say that this certainly very elementary operation is 
 
QUANTITY INTERPKETED, ETC. 575 
 
 nevertheless incorrect ; it is incorrect that (^ + -9 
 
 \ ~~ 5") (y~ ^) = ( x + do ^ (y + dy}xy. It can only be the 
 pressing necessity of establishing an interest of such importance 
 as the Calculus of Fluxions, which could bring a Newton to palm 
 on himself the deception of such a proof.' 
 
 Arithmetically or algebraically (at least to Newton algebra was, 
 by his 'Arithmetica Universalis ' of 1707, still arithmetic) the 
 only true result of subtracting the original product from the 
 increased product in order to find their difference is xdy+ydx+ 
 dxdy. No arithmetical or algebraical statement of the same 
 problem, but with a different result, CAN be correct. Hegel, 
 consequently, in what he relatively says, is absolutely correct if 
 Newton only arithmetically or algebraically stated his problem, 
 and only arithmetically or algebraically solved it.* 
 
 ' Other forms employed by Newton in the derivation of the 
 differential are rendered impure by the concrete adjuncts of 
 motion, &c. The introduction of the serial form, too, brings a 
 temptation to speak of attaining what accuracy we please and to 
 neglect what is relatively unimportant, &c., not always to be resisted : 
 it is thus that, in his method of resolving equations of the higher 
 degrees by approximation, he leaves out of consideration the 
 higher powers which arise by the substitution into the equation 
 of each new-found but still inexact value, for the clumsy reason 
 of their smallness ; (vide Lagrange, Equations Numeriques 
 p. 125). 
 
 'The blunder into which Newton, in the resolution of a 
 problem, by the omission of higher powers which were essential, 
 fell, which blunder gave his enemies the opportunity of a triumph 
 of their method over his, and of which Lagrange (The'orie des 
 Fonct. Analyt., 3eme P., ch. iv.) has demonstrated the true origin, 
 proves the formality and uncertainty which still existed in the 
 employment of said instrument. Lagrange shows that Newton 
 threw out the very term which for the problem in hand was 
 wanted. Newton had erred from adhering to the formal and 
 superficial principle of omission because of relative smallness. It 
 is known, namely, that in Mechanic a particular import is 
 attached to the terms of the series in which the function of a 
 motion is developed, so that the first term or the first function 
 
 * See further on this in the ' Lectures on Law. ' 
 
576 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 relates to the moment of velocity, the second to the accelerating 
 force, and the third to the resistance of forces. The terms of this 
 series are thus not to be regarded as only parts of a sum, but as 
 qualitative moments of a whole of the notion. The omission of the 
 remaining terms which belong to the pseudo- infinite series 
 acquires here a wholly different sense from the omission because of 
 their relative smallness.* Newton's error arose, then, from not 
 attending to that term which possessed the qualitative value 
 sought. 
 
 ' In this example, it is the qualitative sense on which the process 
 is made to depend. In agreement herewith the general declara- 
 tion may at once be made, that the whole difficulty of the 
 principle would be at once removed if instead of the formalism 
 which places the determination of the differential only in what 
 gives it its name the problem to find the difference of a function 
 from the alteration it undergoes when its variable magnitude has 
 received an increase the qualitative import of the principle were 
 assigned, and the operation made dependent thereon. In this 
 
 * 'Both considerations (i.e., the qualitative and the quantitative) are found very 
 simply beside each other in the application by Lagrange of the Theory of Functions 
 to Mechanic (Theorie des Fonc., 3eme P., ch. i., art. 4). The space described con- 
 sidered as function of the time elapsed gives the equation x =ft ; this developed as 
 
 f(t+$) gives ft-t-$ft + /"+, &c. The space, then, appears in the formula, 
 
 9- 2 S 3 
 
 = 3f't-\ ft-}- oTo/'"^-}-? & c - The motion by means of which this space is described 
 
 is, it is said, therefore, that is to say, because the analytic development gives 
 several rather an infinite number of terms, composed of several partial motions, of 
 
 S- 2 S 3 
 
 which the spaces, correspondent to the time, will be 3-ft, -^-ft, r*f"*i &c -> 
 
 The first partial motion is, in known motion, the formally uniform one with a velo- 
 city designated by/7, the second the uniformly accelerated one which derives from 
 an accelerating force proportioned toft. " As now the remaining terms relate to no 
 simple known motion, it is unnecessary to take them specially into consideration, and we 
 will show that they may be abstracted from in the determination of the motion at the 
 beginning of the time-point. " This is now shown, but shown only by the comparison 
 of this said series (all the terms of which should belong to the determination of the 
 magnitude of the space described in the time given) with the equation given, Art. 3, 
 for the motion of a falling body, x = at-\-bt z , in which equation only these two terms 
 are to be supposed contained. But this equation has itself obtained this form only 
 by presupposition of the explanation which is given to the terms that arise through 
 analytic development ; this presupposition is, that the uniformly accelerated motion 
 is composed of a formally uniform motion proceeding with the velocity acquired in 
 the foregoing time, and of an increase (the a in s=at 2 , i.e., the empirical co-efficient), 
 which is ascribed to the force of gravitation, a distinction which has noways any 
 existence or ground in the nature of the thing itself, but is only the expression 
 falsely made physical of what results in the case of an assumed analytic operation. ' 
 

 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 577 
 
 sense the differential of x n manifests itself to be completely 
 exhausted by the first term of the series which results from the 
 expansion of (x+dx) n . That the remaining terms are not to be 
 considered, does not depend on their relative smallness ; there is 
 no presupposition in this case of an inaccuracy, a blunder, an 
 error which is to be balanced and amended by another ; a point 
 of view from which Carnot mainly justifies the usual method of 
 the Infinitesimal Calculus. In that the question is not of a Sum, 
 but of a Eelation or Katio, the Differential is completely found by 
 the first term ; and where further terms, differentials of higher 
 degrees, are required, their determination is not to be considered 
 as the continuation of a series as Sum, but the repetition of one 
 and the same ratio, which ratio is all that is wanted, and which 
 consequently is already complete in the first term. The necessity of 
 the form of a series, its summation, and of what depends thereon, 
 must then be wholly separated from this Interest of the Eelation. 
 
 1 The elucidations which Carnot gives on the method of infinite 
 magnitudes are of the purest and clearest. But in passing to the 
 operation itself there enter, more or less, the usual conceptions of 
 the infinite smallness of the omitted terms relatively to the others. 
 He justifies the method by the fact that the results are correct, 
 and by the utility which the introduction of imperfect equations, 
 as he calls them, that is to say, of such as exhibit such arith- 
 metically incorrect omission, has for the simplification and abbre- 
 viation of calculation, rather than by the nature of the thing itself. 
 
 'Lagrange, as is well known, has v taken up again the original 
 serial method of Newton, in order to be relieved of the difficulties 
 which attend the conception of the infinitely little as well as the 
 method of first and last ratios and limits. His Calculus of func- 
 tions, its merits of precision, abstraction, and universality being 
 justly acknowledged, rests on the fundamental proposition, that 
 the Difference, without becoming nothing, may be taken so small, 
 that each term of the series shall exceed in magnitude the sum of all 
 that follow. Even in this method a beginning is made with the 
 categories of the increase and of the difference of the function whose 
 variable magnitude receives the increase (by which increase the 
 troublesome series comes in) from the original function ; just as 
 in the sequel the terms to be omitted are viewed only as sum, and 
 the reason of omission is placed in the relativity of their Quantum. 
 Partly the omission is not, as universal principle, reduced to the 
 qualitative consideration, which we saw exemplifying itself in 
 
 2o 
 
578 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 some applications (where the terms neglected were exhibited not 
 as quantitatively but as qualitatively insignificant) ; partly, again, 
 the omission itself is omitted in the very principle which, as regards 
 the so-called differential co-efficient, characteristically distinguishes 
 the so-named application of the Calculus with Lagrange, as will be 
 discussed more at full in the Eemark that follows the present one. 
 ' The qualitative character which has been pointed out, is to be 
 found in its directest form in the category, limit of the ratio, which 
 has been above mentioned, and the carrying out of which in the 
 Calculus has given rise to a special method. Lagrange decides 
 that this method wants ease of application, and that the expression 
 Limit is without definite idea. We, then, shall take up Limit in 
 the latter reference, and see closer what has been stated as regards 
 its analytic import. In the conception of Limit there certainly 
 lies the adduced veritable category of the qualitative relational 
 character of the variable magnitudes ; for the forms here which 
 come in from the latter, dx and dy, are held to be only as moments 
 
 of ~, and -~- itself is viewed as a single indivisible sign. That 
 dx dx 
 
 the advantage is thus lost which may be derived from the separa- 
 tion of the sides of the differential co-efficient, for the mechanism 
 of the Calculus in its application, this we may pass by. The 
 limit is now, then, to be limit of a given function ; it is to assign 
 in reference to this function a certain value, determined by the 
 mode of the derivation. With the mere category of limit, how- 
 ever, we were no further than with what has been the object of 
 this Remark, to show, namely, that the infinitely little, which 
 presents itself in the Calculus as dx and dy, has not merely the 
 empty, negative sense of a non-finite, a non-given magnitude, as 
 in the expressions, an infinite number, in infinitum, &c., but the 
 definite sense of the qualitative determinateness of the quantitative 
 elements, of a moment of relation as such. This category (limit) 
 has even so, however, no relation to what a given function is, and 
 enters not in its own character into the treatment of such a func- 
 tion, and into any application which, in reference to said function, 
 were to be made of it (the limit) ; and so the conception of limit, 
 confined to such r6le, leads to nothing. But limit at once means 
 more. Limit is limit of something; it expresses a certain value 
 which lies in the function of variable magnitude ; and we have to 
 see the nature of this concrete role. It is to be the limit of the 
 ratio of the two increments mutually which increases two variables 
 

 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 579 
 
 conjoined in an equation, and the one a function of the other ; the 
 increase here is quite indefinite, and there is no use, so far, of the 
 infinitely little. But the manner of finding this limit leads directly 
 to the same inconsequences as in the other methods. This manner, 
 namely, is the following: If yfx become increased by &, then 
 fx alters itself into fx+ph + yh 2 + rh 3 , &c., and so k~ph+qk\ &c., 
 
 and jr=p+qh+rh*, &c. Now, let k and Ji vanish, and all 
 vanishes except p, which p is now to be considered the limit of the 
 ratio of the two increments. Though A = 0, then -, is not to be 
 
 at once = ~ , but is to be supposed still to remain a ratio. The 
 
 conception of limit now is to be supposed to extend the advantage 
 of warding off the inconsequence which appears here ; p is, at the 
 
 same time, not to be the actual ratio that were = ^ but only that 
 
 particular value to which the ratio infinitely approximates, so that 
 the difference may be taken smaller than any given one. The 
 preciser sense of this approximation in regard to what approximate 
 will be considered again. That, however, a quantitative difference 
 which may be taken smaller than any given one (and must be so 
 taken), is no longer quantitative at ail this is self-evident; but 
 
 there is no advance even so, as regards -j~^~^ If, on the other 
 hand, ~^ = P, i.e., if it be assumed as a definite quantitative ratio, 
 
 CtfOu 
 
 as is in effect the case, then the presupposition which has set A = 
 
 k 
 is in a dilemma a presupposition by which alone-^ = p is found. 
 
 k 
 
 But if it be granted that -r = 0, and with h = 0,k of itself becomes 
 
 fi 
 
 ; for the increment k to y is, only if the increment h is, then it 
 were necessary to say what p is to be, which as p is a quite definite 
 quantitative value. To this there is at once the simple dry answer 
 that it is a co-efficient and so-and-so derived, the first function of 
 an original function, and determined in a certain definite manner. 
 If we content ourselves with this and in point of fact Lagrange 
 has virtually contented himself with this then the universal or 
 general part of the Calculus, and directly this form of it, which is 
 named the Theory of Limits, are quit of increments and their 
 
580 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 infinite or discretionary smallness quit of the difficulty of getting 
 out of the way all the terms of the inevitable series except the 
 first, or, rather, except only the co-efficient of the first quit of the 
 formal categories of the infinite, of infinite approximation, of 
 continuous magnitude,* and of all others the like, as effort, becoming, 
 occasion of an alteration, to which men have been driven in the 
 exigency of the case. But then it would be still necessary to 
 show besides the mere dry definition (sufficient for the theory), 
 that it is nothing but a function derived from the expansion of a 
 Binomial what meaning and value, i.e., what connexion and 
 application this same p still has for further mathematical re- 
 quirements : this will be the subject of Eemark 2. We proceed 
 to discuss at present the confusion which the so current use of 
 the conception approximation has occasioned in the understanding 
 of the specific qualitative determinateness of the relation, which 
 was the proper interest to be considered. 
 
 'It has been shown that the so-called infinite differences 
 express the disappearance of the sides of the relation as Quanta, 
 and that what remains is their quantitative relation, pure so far 
 as it is determined in qualitative form ; the qualitative relation is 
 here so little lost, that it is rather that which just results from 
 the transformation of finite into infinite magnitudes. In this, as 
 we have seen, consists the whole nature of the thing itself. So 
 disappear in the ultimate ratio, for example, the Quanta of the 
 absciss and ordinate ; but the sides of this relation in principle 
 remain, the one the element of the ordinate, the other the element 
 of the absciss. Now, in resorting to figurate conception, and 
 assuming the one ordinate infinitely to approximate to the other, 
 the previously distinguished ordinate passes into the other 
 ordinate, and the previously distinguished absciss into the other 
 absciss ; but essentially the ordinate passes not into the absciss, 
 nor the absciss into the ordinate. The element of the ordinate, to 
 remain by this example of variable magnitudes, is not to be taken 
 
 * * The category of continuous or fluent magnitude comes in with the consideration 
 of the external and empirical increase effected on the variables ; but, the scientific 
 object of the Calculus being a certain Delation (usually expressed by the differential 
 co-efficient), which specific peculiarity may be also named Law, to this peculiarity 
 the mere continuity is partly heterogeneous, partly mere abstract empty category, 
 seeing that as regards the law of continuity it determines nothing. What formal 
 definitions one may be misled into, the following will exemplify : " A continuous 
 magnitude, Continuum, is every magnitude considered in a state of genesis such 
 that the progress is not saltuatim, but uninterrupted.'' This definition is tauto- 
 logically the same as the definitum.' 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 581 
 
 as the difference of one ordinate from another ordinate, but is 
 rather as the difference or qualitative-quantitative value relatively 
 to the element of the absciss ; the principle of the one variable 
 magnitude stands in relation to the principle of the other. The 
 difference, in ceasing to concern finite magnitudes, has ceased frv 
 be a plurality within its own self; it has collapsed into the simple 
 intensity, into the specificity, of one qualitative relational moment 
 opposed to the other. 
 
 ' This state of the case is obscured, however, by conceiving what 
 has just been named element say of the ordinate, so as difference 
 or increment that it is only the difference between the Quantum 
 of one ordinate and the Quantum of another ordinate. The Limit 
 has here thus not the sense of the Kelation or Eatio ; it is 
 regarded but as the last value to which another magnitude of the 
 same kind constantly approximates, and in such a manner that it 
 may be as little different from it as we please, and that the 
 ultimate relation or ratio may be a relation of equality. Thus the 
 infinite difference is the libration of the difference of a Quantum 
 from a Quantum, and the qualitative nature by reason of which 
 dx is essentially not a relational character with reference to x, but 
 with reference to dy becomes lost from view, dx 2 is allowed to 
 disappear with reference to dx, but still more does dx disappear 
 with reference to x ; and that truly is as much as to say, it has 
 only a relation to dy. The endeavour of geometricians has been 
 specially directed to the rendering intelligible of the approximation 
 of a magnitude to its limit, and frow as regards the difference of 
 Quantum from Quantum, it is no difference and yet a difference. 
 But besides this the approximation is in itself a category that says 
 nothing and makes nothing intelligible ; dx has the approximation 
 already behind it it is not near, nor yet a nearer ; and infinitely 
 near were itself the negation of the being near and of the drawing 
 near (approximation). 
 
 ' Since it has happened that the increments or infinite differ- 
 ences have been considered only on the side of the Quantum that 
 disappears in them and only as its limits, they are moments quite 
 without mutual relation. We might infer from this the inad- 
 missible conception that it is allowable in ultimate relation to 
 set, say, absciss and ordinate, or even sine, cosine, tangent, versed 
 sine, and whatever else, all equal to each other. This conception 
 seems at first hand to be motive, when an arc is treated as a 
 tangent ; for the arc is for its part incommensurable with the 
 
582 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 straight line, and its element is directly of an other quality than 
 the element of the straight line. It seems still more absurd and 
 inadmissible than the interchange of absciss, ordinate, versed sine, 
 cosine, &c., when quadrata rotundis when a part however in- 
 finitely small of the arc is taken as a portion of the tangent, and 
 treated consequently as a straight line. But this operation is to 
 be essentially distinguished from the interchange censured ; it is 
 justified by pointing out that in the triangle constituted by the 
 elements of arc, absciss, and ordinate, there is the same relation 
 as if the element of the arc were the element of a straight line, 
 the tangent ; the angles are the same, and these constitute the 
 essential Relation that, namely, which remains for these elements 
 when the finite magnitudes belonging to them are abstracted from. 
 We might even say, straight lines, as infinitely small, have become 
 curved lines, and the relation of them in their infinitude is a curve 
 relation. In its definition, the straight line being the shortest 
 distance between two points, its distinction from the curve would 
 seem to rest on number (Menge), on the smaller number of what 
 is distinguishable in this distance, which is therefore a considera- 
 tion of Quantum. But this consideration disappears in the line 
 when it is taken as intensive magnitude, as infinite moment, as 
 element; but so also disappears its distinction from the curve 
 which rested only on the difference of Quantum. Thus, as 
 infinite, straight line and arc retain no quantitative relation, and 
 consequently also by reason of the assumed definition no 
 qualitative diversity any longer relatively to each other, and the 
 former passes into the latter. 
 
 'Analogous to the equating of heterogeneous forms, is the 
 assumption that infinitely small parts of the same whole are equal 
 to one another ; an assumption in itself indefinite and completely 
 indifferent, but which, applied to an object that is heterogeneous 
 in itself an object, that is, which possesses essential irregularity 
 of quantitative character may produce a peculiar inversion. 
 This we see in the proposition of the higher Mechanic, that, in 
 equal infinitely small times, infinitely small parts of a curve are 
 described, in uniform movement, inasmuch as this is said of a 
 movement in which, in equal finite, that is, existent times, finite, 
 that is, existent unequal parts of the curve are described a 
 movement, then, which as existing is irregular and is so assumed. 
 This proposition is the expression in words of what is to be 
 supposed as represented by an analytic term that yields itself in 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 583 
 
 the development we saw of the formula respecting a motion 
 irregular but subject to a certain law (Note on Lagrange and 
 relative text, p. 576). Earlier mathematicians sought, so, to give 
 their own meanings to terms and results of the newly-invented 
 Calculus (which was itself, however, just conditioned by concrete 
 objects), and to apply them in geometrical delineations, essentially 
 as established theorems capable of being used as principles of 
 proof generally. The terms of a mathematical formula into which 
 the analytic method sundered the magnitude of an object, e.g. of 
 motion, took on, in consequence of such views, a -real import, e.g. 
 of velocity, accelerating force, &c. They were held to furnish, in 
 agreement with such import, true positions, physical laws ; and 
 their real connexions and relations were supposed to be determined 
 in accordance with the analytic combination. An example of 
 this is the statement that in a uniformly accelerated motion, there 
 exists a particular velocity proportional to the times, but that 
 there constantly accrues to this pseudo-uniform velocity an 
 increment from the force of gravity. Such propositions we find 
 now, in the modern analytic form of Mechanic, absolutely as 
 products of the Calculus, without any one troubling himself as to 
 whether they have per se and in themselves a real sense one, 
 that is, to which there is a correspondent existence, and whether 
 this sense can be proved. The difficulty of rendering intelligible 
 the connexion of such forms when they are taken in the real 
 sense alluded to e.g. the difficulty of rendering intelligible the 
 transition from the downright or pseudo-uniform velocity to a 
 uniformly accelerated one is held to be quite removed by the 
 analytic manipulation as a manipulation in which such connexion 
 is a simple consequence of the now once for all established 
 authority of the operations of the Calculus. It is given out as a 
 triumph of science, nowadays, to discover by the mere Calculus 
 laws beyond experience, i.e., expressions of existence which have no 
 existence.* But in the earlier still na'ive period of the Calculus, 
 the endeavour was that, as regards said terms and propositions 
 presented, namely, in Geometrical delineations a real sense per se 
 should be assigned and made plausible, and they themselves 
 applied in such sense in proof of the main positions that might be 
 concerned. See the Newtonian proof of the fundamental pro- 
 position in the Theory of Gravitation, Princ. Math. Phil. Nat., 
 
 * Kant, too, says (WW xi. 259): 'The mathematician takes his data from else- 
 where. Mathematic informs, it does not create, existence. New. 
 
584 -THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 lib. i. sect. ii. prop. 1, compared with Schubert's Astronomy 
 (1st ed., iii. B. 20), where it is admitted that the truth is not 
 exactly so (i.e. that in the point which is the nerve of the proof, 
 the truth is not as Newton assumes it). 
 
 ' It will not be possibly denied that in this field much has been 
 accepted as proof, especially with the help of the mist of the 
 infinitely little, for no other reason than that what came out was 
 always already known before, and that the proof, which was so 
 constituted that it came out, brought forward at least the show of 
 a scaffolding of proof ; a show which was always still preferred 
 to mere belief or to mere knowledge from experience. I have no 
 hesitation, however, in regarding this mannerism as a mere 
 jugglery and charlatanery of proof, and in including under this 
 category even Newtonian proofs, particularly those bearing on 
 what has just been referred to, on account of which Newton was 
 raised to the skies and above Kepler, as having mathematically 
 demonstrated what the latter had merely found from experience. 
 
 1 The vacant scaffolding of such proofs was set up for the 
 demonstration of physical laws. But Mathematic is not at all 
 competent to demonstrate quantitative determinations of Physic, 
 so far as they are Laws which rest on the qualitative nature of 
 the moments ; this for the simple reason that Mathematic is not 
 Philosophy, proceeds not from the Notion, and has, therefore, what 
 is Qualitative, unless taken lemmatically from experience, lying 
 beyond its sphere. The desire to uphold the honour of Mathe- 
 matic, that all in it is rigorously proved, has tempted it to forget 
 its limits ; thus it appeared against its honour simply to acknow- 
 ledge experience as source and as only proof of propositions of 
 experience ; consciousness (opinion) has -become of late better 
 formed for the appreciation of this : so long, however, as con- 
 sciousness (opinion) has not clearly before it the distinction 
 between what is mathematically demonstrable and what can be 
 only got elsewhere, between what are only terms of analytic 
 expansion and what are physical existences, the interest of science 
 cannot raise itself into rigorous and pure form. Without doubt, 
 however, the same justice will yet overtake that scaffolding of 
 Newtonian proof, which has been fulfilled on another baseless and 
 artificial Newtonian structure of optical experiments combined 
 with reflexion (inference). Applied Mathematic is yet full of a 
 similar melange of experience and reflexion, but, as of said Optic, 
 since a considerable time, already one part after the other has 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 585 
 
 begun in point of fact to be ignored in science, with the inconse- 
 quence, however, of leaving alone the contradictory remainder, 
 so is it also fact that already a part of those illusory proofs has 
 fallen of itself into oblivion or been replaced by others.' 
 
 It was, in the first instance, intended, not strictly to translate, 
 but to convey this Kemark by compression of the words through 
 change of phrase or otherwise, without, however, omission, but 
 rather with addition, of matter where it might seern necessary. 
 Examples both of -compression and of addition (the latter especi- 
 ally, where the notion of the quantitative infinite is concerned, 
 as the ' voice,' &c.,* ) will be found ; but in such a writer as Hegel, 
 always compressed to the necessity of the notion, but, at the 
 same time, to the same necessity equally full, attempts of either 
 kind will almost always prove abortive. So it has been here, 
 and I am disposed to believe now that an exact translation, 
 while infinitely less troublesome to myself, would have 
 been less motley and more satisfactory to the reader. As it is, 
 however, I venture to say that there is given, on the whole, 
 at once a correct and intelligible statement of the relative thought 
 of Hegel. This is something ; for, to the best of my belief, this 
 most important note has remained hitherto absolutely sealed. 
 Eosenkranz, indeed, mentions three writers who have followed 
 Hegel on the subject. The first of these, C. Frantz, as in opposi- 
 tion to, is to be assumed ignorant of, the views of Hegel, which 
 plainly, so far as they go, are inexpugnable.-)- As regards the other 
 two, E. Huhn and H. Schwarz, Eosenkranz quoting nothing from 
 either (which surely he would have done, had he found they made 
 plain such statements as these of Hegel, the importance of which 
 no one with even the slightest tincture of mathematic, or through 
 whatever rust of time and desuetude, can miss seeing, once they 
 are made plain), and nothing seeming to have reached this country 
 on the subject at all, I am disposed to believe that they have both 
 failed to see, or evolve, the light which was necessary. In fact, 
 what is wanting to intelligence here is not mathematic, but rneta- 
 
 * The reader may be amused by the persistence of our claim to the illustration of 
 the ' Voice ' ! The truth is, however, that perhaps the very best reader of the 
 S. of H. known to us did take said voice not to be ours but Hegel's. New. 
 
 f So far as the allusion to ' Optic ' means Gothe on Light that may be 
 excepted. New. 
 
586 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 physic : the Eemark, indeed, must remain quite unintelligible to 
 any one not long acquainted with the language of Hegel, and per- 
 fectly at home with his one vital thought the notion. My belief, 
 therefore, is, that on the whole the entire Remark has remained 
 unintelligible. My belief, moreover, also is, that, despite the im- 
 perfection of form, of which I am very sensible, and for which I 
 sincerely apologise, it is now, as I have already said, perfectly in- 
 telligible if taken after, and in full understanding of, all that 
 precedes it. There may seem, in the first instance, no positive 
 material gain for matheinatic here, and accordingly the mathe- 
 matical reader may be expected to rise from his first reading not 
 only disappointed, but hostile. Feelings both of disappointment 
 and of hostility will vanish, however, if he but persevere. Hegel 
 approaches the subject, it must be reflected, not as a mathe- 
 matician, but as a metaphysician, and all that he wishes to be 
 made clear in this remark is the simple notion. There is only one 
 question, then, to put : is the notion, obscure before, now clear ? 
 Besides this, we may ask also, by the way, are these numerous 
 particular critiques of his just ? Indeed, we may ask, thirdly, is 
 not the general result a new, clearer, and distincter power of 
 vision, taken quite universally, and here specially in regard to all 
 that holds of mathematic ? 
 
 As regards the last of these questions, it can hardly escape any 
 one that, with reference to the Calculus in general, as well as its 
 various forms in particular and the chief subordinate conceptions 
 in both respects, never has the determination of the negative been 
 more sharply, more specifically and absolutely stamped out. 
 Quanta, by very definition no longer Quanta, yet treated as 
 Quanta ; Quanta, as named or as believed, yet treated as it is 
 impossible to treat Quanta ; omission because of insignificance, but 
 omission obligatory and indispensable in spite of insignificance ; 
 proof necessary from elsewhere, yet pretensions above any else- 
 where; great results of the operation, but the operation itself 
 granted incorrect ; an incorrect operation, but absolutely correct 
 results ; a specific nature claimed from variableness of Quantity, 
 but variableness of Quantity equally elsewhere ; a specific 
 nature really so-and-so characterised, yet matter not of this 
 specific nature admitted; a science par excellence the science 
 of exactitude and proof, yet expressly inexact and confessedly 
 oppressed with difficulty as to proof: these are some of the 
 examples by which this determination of the negative is 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 58*7 
 
 accompanied. Again, the concluding observations in regard to 
 the show of mathematical proof in matters known from experi- 
 ence alone, are extremely striking, and no less instructive ; as 
 the notices of Newton, Leibnitz, Euler, Lagrange, the method 
 of Limits, &c., &c., are hits so instantaneously and felicitously 
 home, that the conviction from the reason, is hardly more than the 
 delight from the irresistible skill, of the thing. 
 
 The great merit of Hegel here, however, is the notion. You 
 utterly stumble and uselessly lose yourselves in an irrelevant 
 wood, he says, when you insist on seeing the thing in increments 
 and decrements, the omission of the insignificant, approximations, 
 continuations, nisus, &c. &c. The question of Quantity ought to 
 be no difficulty to you, for you are simply to abstract from it and 
 take up what is positive enough and seizable enough as Quality : 
 what is present is only the qualitative relation of quantitativejprm- 
 cipia, which as principia are elements, but not Quanta. Seize but 
 the relation, he says, and you may give it what quantity you 
 like. 
 
 To understand Hegel aright, then, here, we must put ourselves 
 perfectly at home in the first place with the notions of Quality 
 and Quantity. You think of salt and of sugar, of pepper and of 
 pap, of heat and cold, of wet and dry, of soft and hard, of light 
 and heavy of stick, stone, metal, glass, and what not, and you 
 think to yourself, you sufficiently understand what Quality is. 
 But this that you have so before understanding, is only the Vor- 
 stellung, only the figurate conception, only the metaphor, the 
 hypotypose, the representation of the thing. What you want is 
 the thing itself, and that is the notion. But Quality is the pre- 
 cipitation of the Werden, the Becoming; Quality is the One of 
 Being and of Non-being ; it is not more through what it is, than 
 through what it is not; it owes as much to its difference as to its 
 identity : quality thus has unlike the unended series 'its nega- 
 tive within itself/ It is complete, or infinite, that is, not ended; 
 or it has sublated its other, and thus it is infinite. The series, on 
 the contrary, has its other out of it, so it is indeterminate ; when 
 it attains to this other, this negative, this that fails it, it will be at 
 once through that negative a determined Something, it will have 
 attained a qualitative character. Quality is beent determinate- 
 ness, and as a one of two, always of the nature of relation, or of 
 the negation of the negation. Quality, universally taken, is what 
 is; but Quality as What is, is, is, is; that is, it is Quantity. 
 
588 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Quantity is the out of itself of Quality; or it is Quality's necessity 
 to le. In this way, the Qualitative and the Quantitative Infinite 
 are alike and equal. Quality as What is, is ' the nature of the 
 thing itself which exceeds all determinateness/ and Quantity is 
 indifferent to it : it remains the same in all Quantity. The infinite 
 discretion of is, is, is, this is What is, is. The Being-for-self is 
 for itself only because at the same time what it is, is for it : the 
 Being-for-self and the Being-for-One are identical. Now the 
 Being-for-One as the What is, is this endless discretion, or it is 
 the quantitative form of Quality. But this referred to the pure 
 quantitative sphere is the quantitative infinite. Or, simply the 
 notion of Quantity itself, a notion necessitated by the notion 
 of Quality, is the Quantitative Infinite. Quantum, taken not 
 as any particular Quantum, but quite generally, is at once 
 external non-being quite generally, and its negation ; it is the 
 one that is boundlessly many, and yet one ; it is quantitativity ; its 
 infinitude is this, its one qualitative nature, or specific con- 
 stitution. Quantity is the relation that Quality has to itself in 
 that it is : Quantity is thus One and Many and Infinite. Being, 
 were it only Being, would at once decease ; Being is Being only 
 by reason of a Non-being through which it is, is, is ; to be it 
 must not be. All this again refers to Quantity as taken sub specie 
 ceternitatis. That I should live, requires a to-morrow when I do 
 not live. This is a negation to me as finite existence ; but sub 
 specie ceternitatis that negation is taken up into, is made one of, 
 is made one with, the absolute life. What has been said here as 
 absolutely sub specie ceternitatis, is equally susceptible of being- 
 said with reference only to pure Quantity. The Quantum quite 
 generally is through its other, and so the negation of the negation : 
 it is through the out, and the out through it, for the out is it. 
 Repulsion in Quantum is but self-reference ; that repulsion is its 
 what ; it is through its repulsion that which it is. The one is the 
 what, and the what is the one ; there is a look out and a look in. 
 The one's what is just all these ones; and that is just the one 
 Quantum endlessly, but one. It is the one continuity of all that 
 multiplied discretion. Quantum's own wing ever stretches and 
 includes its other: there is no occasion either to conceive it 
 always stretching, stretching ad infinitum, but the two may be 
 seen together and in potentia. Quantum is the Fursichseyn of 
 all that Fiireines. Hegel now sees the true Mathematical Infinite 
 to represent all this. The relation of Quantum to itself is as to 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 589 
 
 a power, is as to its own square ; this is its own self-reference 
 where unity and amount are alike, equal, and the same. Quality 
 in Quantity indeed, as out of its in, may be said to square itself. 
 I cannot help thinking Hegel to have even directly had such 
 thoughts as these. I think also he must have seen, and intends 
 us to see, that any qualitative One is similarly situated (as 
 Quality in general) to Quantity. Quantity is but its Power, its 
 Square ; and the Quantity is quite indifferent to it, so long as it, 
 
 Quality, or the qualitative One, is there. Now ~ is to any one 
 
 Ct/3C 
 
 so thinking the perfectly abstract general expression of a quali- 
 tative one in quantitative reference. The relation of Power 
 is involved in it, the relation itself, and its sides or moments 
 are no longer Quanta, but they have retreated into their 
 principle, their element. Retreated here is a bad word if it 
 
 f]s)i 
 
 recalls decrement, for in ~~ there is no question of increment 
 
 or decrement, of Quantum; all that is 'at its back' (im Eiicken). 
 To Hegel, then, the whole problem now is very simple : the 
 consideration before us is qualitative, not quantitative ; it is 
 a relation ; and this relation is expressed in the differential 
 co-efficient; and so it is that all questions of other terms, 
 of increments and decrements, &c. &c., does not enter, and 
 ought not to enter. Quality in relation to its own self is 
 Quantity, and so relatively to it, or as it, Quantity is the in- 
 finitely little. Quality is the v limit which Quantity ever 
 approaches and never is, or always is. It is the same thing 
 with any quality in particular as with Quality in general. 
 The relation of ordinate to absciss is qualitative and, as 
 such relation, independent of any Quantum that may be assigned 
 
 to it. ~ is the ultimate quantitative potentiality of any quality 
 
 whatever ; it is quantitative potentiality as such. The one 
 thing necessary for intelligence here, as always, is to see loth of 
 the moments and be able to re-nect them into their concrete one. 
 What mistakes are rampant nowadays because of a neglect of this 
 one precaution, or rather because of entire ignorance of all ele- 
 ments that belong here ! The world is deeply disappointed ; its 
 heart is broken ; all the hopes which its own beauty has made 
 grow in it wither rapidly down ; religion fails from its grasp, and 
 philosophy, which promised so much, is unintelligible or seems 
 
590 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 but babblement : hark now how loud the cry of Materialism, that 
 knows but, and cares but for, the carcase I Eminent men of science 
 see a matter-mote rise up by an easy flux of development into a 
 man, but (with an involuntary grin) through the monkey ! The 
 brain secretes thought, as the liver bile : this whole product of 
 some strange chance, which need not be inquired into take your 
 dinner rather will just go together in the centre as a vast mass 
 some day in the centre of infinite space !* Is there not an echo 
 of self-contradiction in your own words, startling even to your- 
 selves, Messieurs les Mate'rialistes ? To say nothing of infinite 
 time, of infinite space, which alone are always adequate to absorb 
 any and every amount of matter the materialists may bring in 
 explanation of them, does not the mere sight of matter uselessly 
 heaped together there in the centre through all time suggest a 
 glance back to all time and the easy question, time being infinite 
 in the direction back as well as in the direction forward, and 
 gravitation, moreover, being the only power, why has a whole lack 
 infinitude failed to bring this gravitation to its hearth in the 
 centre why is a future infinitude still necessary? It is not 
 thought, then, it is but thoughtlessness which sees the whole 
 universe reduced in course of time to a single central mass ; it is 
 but figurate conception amusing itself with very idle and very 
 unsubstantial bubbles. That gravitation, loss of heat, &c., have 
 not already effected what we are assured they will effect, or 
 simply that they have to effect this consummation, is a demonstra- 
 tion rigorously exact of heat not always being directed outwards, 
 as of gravitation not always being directed inwards. 
 
 If thought, not thoughtlessness, would inspect the problem, it 
 would find that Attraction is only possible through Eepulsion ; 
 that were there no Eepulsion, there were no Attraction, and vice 
 versd. There is but the one concrete Eeciprocity. It is perfectly 
 certain that Action and Eeaction are not more necessary recipro- 
 cals than Attraction and Eepulsion. A like one-sidedness it is 
 which leads the friends of the monkey, in comparing him with 
 man, to abstract from the Difference and regard the Identity 
 alone. But what is this identity ? It is hardly worth while 
 modern philosophers making such a fuss about our identity with 
 monkeys, were it only for what Sallust tells us, that we have our 
 bodies in common ceteris animalibus. That man is an animal and 
 that monkey is the caricature of him, has been known for thousands 
 
 * Where can this centre in an infinite space be ? 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 591 
 
 of years ; * and the modern philosophers who live by the cry 
 (strange, is it not ?) know it not one single whit better than it was 
 known at first, nor have they deposited one single stone of the 
 bridge from the Difference to the Identity, nor yet will they in 
 their way should they take an infinite time to the task. A: 
 strange metier this, then, that would enlighten us by telling us we 
 were monkeys originally, though it has nothing to show for itself 
 but the worn-out triteness of thousands of years ! Yet we are 
 expected to admire, applaud, and per Jovem even pay ! It 
 is the same abstraction from the difference which misleads other 
 eminent men to mis-spend whole laborious lives in twisting the 
 idle sand-rope of Transformation. The Difference is there not one 
 whit less than the Identity, and though you fly in your researches 
 utterly round all space and utterly throughout all time, you will 
 never eliminate it : it is impossible for you ever to take up an 
 Identity unaccompanied by its Difference. Your quest is thus at 
 once absolutely certain and utterly impossible : and this simply 
 because What is is at once identical and different. The power of 
 metamorphosis lies with thought only ; it is not in nature. Never 
 shall we see a first Natural Identity which all mankind will 
 accept as such gradually giving itself difference and difference 
 up to the present, as we might see ice become water and water 
 steam. Such transformations are possible to the notion only. 
 Nay, these very thinkers acknowledge this same truth : they do 
 not accept what is as it is they seek it in its principle. What 
 is this but accepting the metamorphosis of thought ? Thought is 
 nothing but metamorphosis the metamorphosis of the isolated 
 singular many into the one universal. It is inconsistent, then, in 
 these writers to accept thought only a certain way, and not follow 
 it out into the ultimate universal, the element of thought itself. 
 They may say, 'Though we generalise, we still leave the in- 
 dividuals, ^and know always that our generalisations are but 
 abstractions.' We too can say that we still leave the individuals ; 
 but we cannot say that our generalisations end as idle abstractions 
 which have only formal application to what is, but, on the con- 
 trary, as truth itself and as the truth, and that the material and 
 constitutive truth of the whole of things. This is a difference. 
 Thought is the secretion of matter, as the bile of the liver, you 
 say: on the contrary, it is matter that is but the secretion of 
 thought. Show me your first atom, show me it become time, 
 
 * Ut Ennius, Simla quam similis turpissima bestia nobis. Cicero, N. D. i. xxxv. 
 
592 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 space, matter, organisation, thought ; then I ask you, was not this 
 first atom all these virtually at first ? Could it have become these, 
 had it not been so virtually at first ? But that it should imply 
 such virtue that is thought these are thoughts. Or even to say 
 it was at first virtually thought, is to say that thought was the 
 veritable prius. Your path, then, ends in mine. But you have 
 not this path ; you have not made a single step on it ; you have 
 only talked of it ; and you can only talk of it for ever : for your 
 first problem, a deduction of time and space, is utterly impossible 
 to you with matter only. We, on the contrary, have a path ; 
 We, thanks to Kant and Hegel, can prove thought to be 
 the prius and the principle ; We can prove all to be but the 
 notion an sick. Once possessed of the concrete notion, We can 
 re-live its life up to the fullness of the universe. The two 
 positions, then, are widely different. Yet, since 1781, when the 
 ' Kritik of Pure Keason/ and since 1812-16, when the 'Logik' was 
 published, what innumerable writers have preferred obeying the 
 impatience of their own vanity to patient assimilation, first of all, 
 of the Historical Pabulum that at these dates was issued to them, 
 and without which they could be nothing ! Formal attitudinists on 
 the gas of genius, men of fervour, men who could evolve Systems, 
 Poems, Pictures, Keligions, Alchemy, anything these we have 
 had by the thousand ; but how many men who knew that, in them- 
 selves, mere form only, they required the rock of another to which 
 clinging they might, absorbing and assimilating matter into form, 
 grow into their own complete entelechie ? These men would be 
 matter and form unto themselves, so they consumed themselves in 
 futile subjective pulses, and died so. He only who knows how to 
 connect himself to his historical other, will ever attain to an 
 actuality of manhood. Be a man's formal ability what it may, 
 unless he attain to this, his products, however blatant, are but 
 vacant idiocy. So only even is it, that he can be original. 
 Thomas Carlyle found his other in German Literature but the 
 germs of what he found lay first of all in himself ; it was his own 
 hunger that made the food ; and if Thomas Carlyle is not original, 
 what English writer is ? But for its Difference, abstract Identity 
 dies of inanition then. So it is as regards the nisus of genius. 
 So it is as regards the nisus nowadays of a materialistic pseudo- 
 science. In every concrete there are two abstract moments which 
 are not seen truly unless together. So it is as regards the 
 Attraction and Repulsion which are still before us in Quantity, 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 593 
 
 and whose union only is adequate to that quantitative infinite 
 which Hegel finds represented in the mathematical infinite. 
 Quantum, even in that it repels its other, flees into it ; and even 
 in that it flees into it, it flees into its own self: no flight expliciter 
 without but is a flight impliciter within. Quantum, then, is this 
 one infinite relation, this boundless relativity, this without of 
 itself that is the within of itself, this negation of the negation. 
 And such is the mathematical infinite : Quantity as such has 
 disappeared, there remains only the Qualitative element and in 
 relation of potentiation. The thought is abstract ; but it is not 
 more difficult than the abstract Something or any other pure notion. 
 It may be objected that Hegel does not sufficiently illustrate 
 and, on the whole, bring out the fact that the relation implied is 
 one of powers. That it is really so, we know now to be certain, 
 for he has himself eliminated all variables of the first degree, but 
 to know the fact is not necessarily to know the reason of the fact. 
 Again, having asserted the first peculiarity of the mathematical 
 infinite to depend on a relation of potentiation, he equally asserts 
 the second peculiarity, and in complete isolation from the first. 
 
 We can easily conceive -j- to be qualitative relation only; but 
 
 these are not squares, and Hegel has not been careful to bring the 
 two peculiarities together. That the relation of one quantity to 
 the square of another is qualitative, is also but an assertion ; 
 intelligence and conviction are not secured by either^reasoning or 
 illustration. We know that Hegel regards the square, where 
 Unity and Amount are equal, as of a qualitative nature ; but this 
 knowledge seems to throw but little light here. As regards this 
 last point, it may be worth while suggesting that the relation of 
 the sides to the hypotenuse, being a relation that concerns the 
 square of the hypotenuse, the result is qualitative, the triangle 
 is always right-angled. But such illustrations must be left to the 
 mathematician by profession. As regards objections, it is to be 
 borne in mind, too, that the subject is not exhausted ; and that 
 we have the promise of seeing in the second Remark, how the 
 abstract notion takes meaning in actual application, which applica- 
 tion, too, is termed the important part of the whole subject. It 
 is with great regret, then, that I find myself (by the Number at 
 the head of the page) obliged for the present to stop here, seeing 
 that my matter already amounts to more than it is perhaps 
 prudent to intrude on the public as a first venture on a 
 
 2p 
 
594 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 subject so difficult, and, at least to superficial observation, 
 so equivocal, as the Philosophy of Hegel. Enough, how- 
 ever, has been done to enable the mathematician or the meta- 
 physician to complete the rest for himself. The judgment of 
 a pure mathematician has really been so peculiarly trained, 
 that, perhaps, any such will never prove decisive as regards any 
 Hegelian element. Still, it is much to be desired that such a 
 vast mathematical genius as Sir William Hamilton, of Dublin, 
 could be induced to verify the findings of Hegel so far as they 
 bear on the concrete science. As they appear abstractly expressed 
 in the present Eemark, they seem perfectly safe from assault; 
 but there are others (alluded to also here), such as the earnestness 
 with which Hegel seeks to vindicate for Kepler his own law as in 
 view of Newton's assumed mathematical demonstration, on which 
 one would be well pleased to possess a thoroughly-skilled opinion. 
 There is at least something grand in the way in which Hegel 
 would set up time and space themselves as the co-ordinates that 
 to the divination of Kepler and to the necessity of the notion of 
 
 S 3 A B 
 Hegel yielded and yield the law ^ or -~ 2 - Hegel may be wrong ; 
 
 but he possesses such keenness of distinction, that it is difficult 
 to conceive any intellect as the epoch is too high to gain from 
 it. It lies, too, on the surface to say that these Vectors, Tensors, 
 Sealers, &c., of Sir William Hamilton are but forms of continuity 
 and discretion in application to the concrete Quantity, Space. 
 
 By way of giving at least a formal close to the subject, I add 
 here the whole of Quantity as it appears in the fourth edition of 
 the Encyclopaedic.* The reader will be thus enabled to see as 
 well Hegel's immense power of summary as the insufficiency of 
 any such to a student who but learns, however advantageous it 
 may prove to the student who has completed his course. He 
 will also see that, besides the mathematical notes, which are two 
 in number, what has yet to be completed of the general subject as 
 it appears in the Logik is small, and that the bulk of it is already 
 given in these pages. Some amount of change in the divisions he 
 will also be able to discern ; and the very fact of change on the 
 part of Hegel it is important to know. 
 
 * That of Kosenkranz, which intentionally is without the Zusatze. 
 
QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 595 
 
 B. 
 
 QUANTITY. 
 a. Pure Quantity. 
 
 1 Quantity is pure being, in which the characteristic determinate- 
 ness is no longer explicit as one (identical) with the being itself, 
 but as subletted or indifferent. 
 
 (1) The expression magnitude (Grosse) is not pertinent to 
 Quantity, so far as it specially designates some particular 
 quantity. (2) Mathernatic usually defines magnitude as that 
 which may be increased or diminished. However objectionable 
 this definition may be (as again implying the definitum itself), it 
 involves this, that the nature of Quantity is such that it is 
 explicitly alterable and indifferent, and so that, notwithstanding 
 an alteration, an increased Extension or Intension, the thing itself, 
 a house, red, &c., ceases not to be a house, red, &c. (3) The 
 Absolute is pure Quantity, this position coincides in general 
 with this, that the character Matter is attributed to the Absolute, 
 in which (Matter) Form is present indeed, but as indifferent. 
 Quantity also constitutes the fundamental determination of the 
 Absolute, when it is taken so that in it, the absolutely Indifferent, 
 all difference is only quantitative. For the rest, pure time, space, 
 &c., may be regarded as examples of Quantity, so far as the Eeal 
 (or what is real) is to be conceived as indifferent filling of space 
 or time. 
 
 ' Quantity, firstly, in its immediate reference to itself, or in the 
 form of equality with itself as explicit, or set, in it in conse- 
 quence of the Attraction, is continuous; in the other term con- 
 tained in it, the one (unit), it is discrete magnitude. The former, 
 however, is equally discrete, for it is only continuity of the many ; 
 the latter equally continuous its continuity is the one as the 
 same of the many ones, the unity. 
 
 (1) Continuous and discrete magnitude must not, therefore, be 
 regarded as kinds or species, as if the nature of the one did not 
 attach to the other, but as if they contradistinguish themselves 
 only by this, that the same whole is now explicit under the one, 
 and again under the other of its discrimina. (2) The Antinomy 
 of Time, of Space, or of Matter, as regards its infinite Divisibility, 
 or again, its consisting of Indivisibles, is nothing else than the 
 assertion of Quantity now as continuous, and again as discrete. 
 
596 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Time, Space, &c., being explicit only as continuous Quantity, are 
 infinitely divisible ; in their other term, again, as discrete magni- 
 tude, they are an sick (in themselves) divided, and consist of in- 
 divisible ones : the one term is as one-sided as the other. 
 
 b. Quantum. 
 
 1 Quantity essentially explicit with the excludent determinate- 
 ness which is contained in it, is Quantum, limited Quantity. 
 
 1 The Quantum has its evolution and perfect determinateness in 
 the Digit (Number), which contains within itself (implies), as its 
 Element, the One, in the moment of Discretion the Amount, in 
 that of Continuity the Unity, both as its qualitative moments. 
 
 ' In Arithmetic, what are called the arithmetical operations are 
 usually stated as contingent modes of treating numbers. If a 
 necessity and withal an understanding is to lie in them, the latter 
 must lie in a principle, and this only in the moments which are 
 contained in the notion of the Digit itself ; this principle shall be 
 here briefly exhibited. The moments of the notion of Number are 
 the Amount and the Unity, and the Number itself is the Unity of 
 both. But Unity applied to empirical numbers is only their 
 Equality ; thus the principle of arithmetic must be, to range 
 numbers into the relation of Unity and Amount, and bring about 
 the Equality of these moments. 
 
 ' The Ones or the Numbers themselves being mutually indif- 
 ferent, the Unity into which they become explicitly transposed 
 appears in general as an external putting together (collection). 
 To count is, therefore, in general to number, and the difference of 
 the kinds of counting lies alone in the qualitative nature (tality) 
 of the Numbers which are numbered together ; and, for the tality, 
 the determination of Unity and Amount is the principle. 
 
 ' Numeration is the first, to make Number at all, a putting 
 together of as many Ones as is wished. A kind of counting (an 
 arithmetical operation), however, is the numbering together of 
 such as are already numbers, and no longer the mere unit. 
 Numbers are immediately and at first quite indefinitely Numbers 
 in general unequal, therefore, in general: the putting together 
 or numbering of such is Addition. 
 
 ' The next determination is, that the Numbers are equal in 
 general/ they constitute thus one Unity, and there is present an 
 Amount of such unities : to number such numbers is to Multiply ; 
 and here it is indifferent how the moments of Amount and 
 
OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC. 597 
 
 Unity are apportioned in the two numbers, the Factors, indifferent 
 which is taken as Amount, and which again as Unity. 
 
 ' The third characteristic determinateness is finally the Equality 
 of Amount and Unity. The numbering together of numbers so 
 characterised, is the raising into powers, and first of all into the 
 square. Further potentiation is the formal repetition of the 
 multiplication of the number with itself which runs out again into 
 the indefinite Amount. As in this third form, the complete 
 equality of the sole present difference, of Amount and Unity, is 
 attained, there cannot be more than these three operations in 
 Arithmetic. There corresponds to the numbering together, a 
 resolution of the Numbers according to the same determinateness. 
 With the three operations mentioned, which may be so far named 
 positive, there are, therefore, also three negative. 
 
 c. Degree. 
 
 ' The limit is identical with the whole of the Quantum itself ; 
 as multiple in itself, it is extensive as simple in itself, intensive 
 magnitude : the latter is also named Degree. 
 
 ' The difference of continuous and discrete from extensive and 
 intensive magnitudes consists, therefore, in this, that the former 
 concern Quantity in general the latter, on the other hand, the 
 limit, or the determinateness of Quantity as such. Extensive and 
 intensive magnitudes are, in like., manner, not two sorts of which 
 the one should possess a distinction which the other wanted ; what 
 is extensive is equally intensive, and vice versa. 
 
 ' In degree the notion of Quantum is in explicit position. It is 
 magnitude as indifferently independent and simple, but so that 
 it has the determinateness by which it is Quantum directly out of 
 it in other magnitudes. In this contradiction, viz., that the leent- 
 for-self indifferent limit is absolute Externality, the infinite quan- 
 titative Progress is expressly explicit, an immediacy which 
 immediately strikes round into its counterpart, mediatedness (a 
 going over and beyond the Quantum that has just been posited), 
 and vice versa. 
 
 1 A Number is thought, but thought as a beingness completely 
 external to its own self. It belongs not to perception because it 
 is thought, but it is the thought which has for its characterisation 
 the externality of perception. The Quantum not only may there- 
 fore be increased or diminished ad infinitum ; it itself is through 
 
598 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 its notion this dispatch of itself beyond itself. The infinite quan- 
 titative progress is just the thoughtless repetition of one and the 
 same contradiction which the Quantum in general is, and Quan- 
 tum as Degree, or expressly set in its determinateness. As 
 regards the superfluousness of enunciating this contradiction in 
 the form of the infinite progress, Zeno in Aristotle says justly : it 
 is the same thing to say something once, and to say it always. 
 
 * This outerliness of Quantum to its own self in its beent-for- 
 self determinateness constitutes its Quality ; in it it is just itself 
 and referred to itself. In it are united, Externality, i.e. Quantita- 
 tiveness, and Being-for-self, i.e. Qualitativeness. Quantum thus 
 put is in itself the Quantitative Relation, determinateness which 
 is no less immediate Quantum, the Exponent, than mediatedness, 
 namely, the reference of some one Quantum to another, the two 
 sides of the relation, which at the same time are not valid in their 
 immediate value, but have their value only in this reference. 
 
 ' The sides of the relation are still immediate Quanta, the 
 qualitative and the quantitative moments still external to each 
 other. Their truth, however, viz., that the Quantitativeness itself 
 is in its externality reference to itself, or that the Being-for-self 
 and the indifference of the determinateness are united, is Measure.'* 
 
 * In these mathematical references see further ' Whewell and Hegel, and Hegel 
 and Smith, ' as published with ' Lectures on the Philosophy of Law. ' New. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE COMMENTATORS OF HEGEL SCHWEGLER, 
 ROSENKRANZ, HAYM. 
 
 IN the interest of one's own self-seeking to demonstrate the 
 shortcomings of one's predecessors, is a procedure now so vulgar 
 that it would, perhaps, have been better taste to have left to others 
 the task which is here begun. Any plea in excuse can found only 
 on the important aid which may be so afforded to a general 
 understanding of the single theme, and is only to be made good by 
 the result. 
 
 There are many other Commentators of Hegel, but we have 
 selected these examples, too, of feelings impartial, partial, and 
 hostile as the latest and most generally-acknowledged best. 
 Now, each of the three has devoted a vast amount of labour and 
 time to the study of Hegel, and all of them have, more or less, 
 attained to a very considerable relative knowledge. It is not, 
 then, what is in general meant by ignorance that we would object 
 here, but o*nly a peculiar and insufficient state of knowledge in 
 this way, that the path of this knowledge has been ever on the 
 outside, from particular to particular, with darkness and inco- 
 herences between, and without perception of the single light in 
 which the whole should show without attainment to the single 
 Ruck, the single turn, stir, touch by which the painful and 
 unreachable Many should kaleidoscopically collapse into the held 
 and intelligible One. In a word, whatever general connexion 
 these three Commentators may have perceived between Hegel and 
 Kant, and however often they may have used, each of them, the 
 word Begriff, they have not signalised that literal one connexion 
 and that literal one signification which are prominent in the 
 preceding pages. Hegel was literal with idealism ; the whole is 
 thought, and the whole life of it is thought ; and, therefore, what 
 is called the history of philosophy will be in externality and 
 contingency, but a Gesetztseyn of Thought, but an explicitment, a 
 setting of one thought the other. So it was that Spinoza was 
 
600 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Substance, Hume Causality, Kant Eeciprocity, and Hegel the 
 Notion the Notion as set by Kant, and as now to be developed 
 subjectively by Hegel into the Subjective Logic which ends in the 
 Idea. So it was that he, as it were, anallegorised actual history, 
 even contemporary history, even his own position, into the plastic 
 dialectic of his abstract Logic. Hegel was literal with Idealism 
 up to the last invisible negation of the negation up to the 
 ultimate pure Negativity within which even the triple muscle of 
 the Notion lay a hidden Nisus, retracted into transparency. To 
 Hegel even the very way which had led to this was, so far, false ; 
 it was but the chain of the finite categories ; and their whole truth 
 was this negative One. Thus it was that Hegel completed the 
 whole movement of which Kant, Fichte, and Schelling had been 
 successive vital knots ; but still this completion he reached only 
 by making good his attachment directly to the first of them. 
 This was effected by the entire realisation and vitalisation of 
 Logic, even scholastic Logic (which operations Kant had begun), 
 through reduction simply of the All into the simply technical 
 moments of Logic as named Simple Apprehension, &c., and this 
 through substitution of his own conscious concrete notion (which, in 
 a word, is but the one existent, and the only existent, Entelechie 
 of Difference and Identity), for the unconscious abstract notion of 
 Kant that lay in the question: 'How are & priori Synthetic 
 Judgments possible ? ' It is this literality which we suspect to 
 have been generally missed, and we have attempted to make plain 
 the notion which Hegel meant, what we call the concrete 
 universal, as well as to elucidate the precise nature of the genesis 
 of this notion with special reference to Kant.* 
 
 SCHWEGLER. 
 
 We have already spoken with sincere respect of this most 
 accomplished man and admirable writer ; and it is to be acknow- 
 
 * Of course one is never safe from these fallacious (and vexatious) ex post facto 
 coincidences of which Kant himself may have had his own experience when 
 he wrote (Proleg. 3) as follows: Tor such principles are not readily learned 
 from others, before whom they have merely obscurely floated. We must, first of all, 
 through our own reflexion, have ourselves come upon them, and then it is we easily 
 find them elsewhere, where otherwise we certainly never should have seen them 
 beforehand for the simple reason that the authors themselves never for a moment 
 suspected that any such idea lay in their own remarks. Those who never think 
 themselves have sharpness enough, all the same, to detect all and everything in 
 anything that has been ever anywhere said, though never seen before by anybody 
 else directly it has been once shown to them.' New. 
 
I 
 
 HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 601 
 
 ledged at once that he has not only perfectly availed himself of 
 many of the main lessons both of Kant and Hegel, but that he 
 possesses also an accurate acquaintance with the bulk of their 
 details. Nevertheless, we incline to think that, not having quite 
 penetrated into the innermost articulation of Kant's h priori 
 elements, he in a way missed the key without which it was im- 
 possible but that Hegel must have remained for him more or less 
 an outer assemblage and, on the whole, but very strictly speaking, 
 impervious. The few considerations on which this opinion rests 
 we shall mention in the order in which they occurred to us in 
 perusing his book, the ' History of Philosophy in Epitome.' * 
 
 The first point to which we shall advert is contained in the 
 earliest pages of the excellent little work alluded to, and 
 concerns, on the part of Schwegler, objections to, or rather a 
 rejection of, the Hegelian equation of Philosophy and its History. 
 In passing to this we may remark, that for a Hegelian he unduly 
 accentuates the relation between philosophy proper and the 
 empirical sciences : ' Philosophy (as the thought totality of 
 empirical things) stands in reciprocity with the empirical 
 sciences; as it on one side conditions them, it is itself again, 
 on the other side, conditioned by them. There is just as little, 
 therefore, an absolute or completed philosophy (in time, that is to 
 say, generally in the course of history) as there is a completed 
 empiric ' (or science of all that reaches us by experience). There 
 is here, on the whole, and for the position, too much stress laid on 
 the empirical sciences, and too little on the fact of an independent 
 logic, which is above contingency, which is a necessary and 
 objective crystal of all that is empirical, and which, if it changes 
 at least fluctuates not at will of the mere vicissitude of the latter. 
 The identification of the historical with the logical evolution 
 Schwegler combats from the position of the contingency of the 
 former. He says, 'This view is neither to be justified in its prin- 
 ciple, nor made good historically/ But he who were thoroughly 
 on the standpoint of Hegel, would see that, while the con- 
 tingency (even that of those who appear on the stage of history) 
 is not denied, but, on the contrary, its relative necessity demon- 
 strated, the principle, all being at bottom but an evolution of 
 thought, must be true, and must be capable of being actually 
 discerned across the fluctuation of externality. Schwegler's im- 
 
 * The 'Handbook,' afterwards translated and annotated by the present author, 
 and now in many editions. 
 
602 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 perfect discrimination of the elements concerned is seen also in 
 his particular objections as to the notions of Heraclitus and the 
 Eleatics (with reference to a place for them in logic) that they are 
 ' impure and materially coloured,' or as to the Ionic Philosophy 
 that it began ' not with Seyn (being) as abstract notion, but with 
 what is concretest and crassest, the material notion of water, air, 
 &c. ; ' and that, accordingly, ' Hegel would have more consistently 
 quite rejected the Ionic Philosophy.' It is rather eminently 
 Hegelian quite to acknowledge the impurity and crassitude of all 
 commencements ; though it is equally Hegelian that this impurity 
 and crassitude should, under pouring on of the menstruum of 
 thought, clear into the lineaments of the notion which, despite 
 the clouding opacity, was never absent. Schwegler admits him- 
 self that the function of philosophy is to find in vicissitude a 
 something fixed, that philosophy begins ' there where an ultimate 
 ground of the beent, of what is, is philosophically sought;' and 
 this is precisely the position he opposes. 
 
 ' History is not a sum to be exactly cast up : there must be no 
 talk of an apriori construction of history/ But do such expressions 
 really affect Hegel ? Would Hegel & priori construct history, or 
 even count it up like a column in arithmetic ? The concrete is a 
 hither and thither of contingency ; there are difficulties and checks 
 of all kinds, chronological and other : Hegel denies them not ; he 
 would only with masterful hands rive them from before the face of 
 the notion. ' The datum of Experience is to be taken as a datum, 
 a something given over to us just so, and the rational system of this 
 datum is to be analytically set out ; the speculative idea will for 
 the arrangement and scientific connexion of this historical datum 
 furnish the regulative : Almost everywhere the historical develop- 
 ment is different from the notional : While the logical progress is 
 an ascent from the abstract to the concrete, the historical develop- 
 ment is almost always a descent from the concrete to the abstract : 
 Philosophy is synthetic, the history of philosophy analytic : 
 We may maintain, therefore, with more justice exactly 
 the opposite of the Hegelian thesis and say what is an 
 sick the first is fur uns just the last.' It will not be 
 difficult to perceive that there is the same incomplete con- 
 sciousness of Hegel's true position in these extracts also, the 
 burthen of which Hegel would partly accept and partly reject, 
 as what has been said already will enable the reader to see. It 
 is worth while, perhaps, remarking that the evolution of thought 
 

 HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 603 
 
 being Gesetztseyn, is at once of an analytic and a synthetic 
 nature. Schwegler's reversal of the Hegelian * an sich oder fur 
 uns ' is also worth pointing out. We have another instance of 
 it at pages 82, 83, where he says, ' Virtue is to be defined as the 
 keeping of the due middle in practice not the arithmetical 
 middle, the middle an sich, but the middle fur uns' Schwegler 
 is, of course, at liberty to use these terms as he pleases ; but, as 
 we have seen, the distinction implied in them by Hegel is one 
 eminently subtle and difficult, and may accordingly have escaped 
 Schwegler. Hegel's use of them as synonymes is beyond a doubt. 
 Under * Die Schranke und das Sollen,' * the Limitation and the 
 To-be-to,' we have already seen and come to understand 'das 
 Sollen ist nur an sich, somit fur uns ; ' it has been pointed out 
 also that this distinction, while it probably begins in the ' Intro- 
 duction ' to the ' Phaenomenologie,' is to be found in the ' Preface ' 
 as well ; and here are some more examples to the same effect : 
 Encyc. 162, and Logik, vol. ii. pp. 20 and 73, we have, ' Begriffe 
 an sich, oder was dasselbe ist, fur uns,' ' nicht nur an sich, das 
 hiesse fiir uns oder in der ausseren Reflexion,' and ' so ist es an 
 sich oder fur uns bestimmt.' Hegel's intention with the phrase 
 is beyond a question, then, and the synonyme of * outer reflexion * 
 in the last example but one not only confirms the signification 
 already attached to it, but considerably lessens the difficulty with 
 which it seemed burthened. He, then, who reverses this dis- 
 tinction, though of course free to ^do so, risks his reputation as a 
 student of Hegel.* 
 
 From pages 45 and 67, I adduce now two passages, which the 
 former as regards the notion and the latter as regards the idea 
 show that, even in writing on philosophy, a German may say the 
 notion and the idea when he means thereby neither the Notion 
 nor the Idea of Hegel, but simply the abstract universals of 
 generalisation : ' That all human action reposes 011 knowledge, all 
 thought on the notion, to this result Plato was already able to 
 arrive through the generalisation of the Socratic teaching itself : * 
 * If Plato had taken his station in the Idea in order to interpret 
 
 * Those two other examples from the Phaenomenologie, where there are still 
 more, we give as excellent : Fiir uns oder an sich ist das Allgemeine als Princip 
 das Wesen der Wahrnehmung (p. 82) So, dass der umgekehrte Satz nicht an sich 
 oder fiir uns die Substanz zum Subjecte macht (p. 543). See back, at p. 420 
 for more on this. Encyc. i. 70, fiir den Gedanken means no more than for * outer 
 Reftexion.' 1 At p. 55 there, Ansichseyn is the potential as opposed to fiir sich, the 
 actual. 
 
604 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 and explain the Given and Empirical, Aristotle takes his place in 
 the Given in order to find and demonstrate in it the Idea.' 
 
 With reference to Aristotle, Schwegler has occasion to speak of 
 what must have suggested the notion of Hegel to him had he 
 known it ; but (pp. 73, 74, 75, &c.) even in talking of * Zweck ' 
 and ' Entelechie ' as ' vollendetes Wesen,' and in reducing the four 
 Aristotelian Causes to Matter and Form, he is not tempted to 
 remark on the striking essential analogy to the Concrete Notion, 
 but, on the contrary, concludes in this absolutely anti-Hegelian 
 fashion : ' There remains to us, therefore, the two ground- 
 principles which pass not into each other, Matter and Form.' 
 There is a certain defence to Schwegler here in this, that it is 
 from the position of Aristotle he speaks, and not from that of 
 Hegel : but then the irresistible temptation to correlate Aristotle's 
 notions with the notion of Hegel, had he known this latter, if 
 not here, at least elsewhere ? 
 
 Schwegler's summary of Kant is a very excellent one, and 
 perhaps the very best that, in a general literary point of view, 
 has been yet given. When compared, however, with the skeleton 
 which on this subject Hegel bore in his head, and which he allows 
 us to see in his various critiques, and especially in that which 
 occurs at the commencement of the Encyclopaedic, we see how 
 much this summary of Schwegler is in its kind external. Light 
 here with him is always in proportion to the easiness and not to 
 the difficulty of what is summarised ; and thus the discussion of 
 the Religious and the Practical parts is much more satisfactory 
 than that of the strictly Metaphysical. We just touch on a par- 
 ticular point or two : 
 
 At page 154, we find : ' The Kritik of Pure Reason, says Kant, 
 is the Inventarium of all our possessions through pure reason 
 systematically arranged.' * This strikes strangely on one at home 
 with Kant ; for every one who is really so, has been so much 
 accustomed to hear the Kritik, however complete as ground-plan 
 and system of inchoative principles, always spoken of as but 
 propaedeutical to the science of metaphysic itself, or to the trans- 
 cendental philosophy as such, that it grates at once. And this is 
 really the truth, and these words of Schwegler's are never used 
 by Kant in any such connexion: on examination they will be found 
 to be taken from the preface, and to be used there, not in reference 
 to Kritik, but to metaphysic. It was only in the future that Kant 
 
 * The translation substitutes for Inventarium, ' ground-plan ' rightly. 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 605 
 
 contemplated such complete Inventarium as a completed system 
 of philosophy. The matter may seem small, but it points at least 
 to a certain slovenliness of information on the part of Schwegler. 
 
 At page 150, again, we have : ' The question, therefore, which 
 Kant set at the head of his whole Kritik, How are a priori 
 synthetic judgments possible ? . . . . must be answered with an 
 unconditional No.' This, too, grates ; for we know the contrary : 
 we know that Kant has pointed to whole spheres of such judg- 
 ments, and has demonstrated in his way the rationale of them ; 
 nay, we know that that is the express one object of his whole 
 Kritik and Kritiken. It may be said that Schwegler must have 
 had in his mind, that to every fact of actual knowledge Kant 
 postulated elements of sense as well as those of intellect. But such 
 defence were null, and from more points of view than one ; for, 
 in the first place, the knowledge of these a priori principles, 
 though abstract, were still a knowledge, and would not be denied 
 by Kant ; in the second place, there are, in Kant's system, a 
 priori elements of sense, as well as of intellect, which give 
 occasion to the conjunction necessary for such & priori synthetic 
 judgments, and have been expressly anatomised by Kant for this 
 very purpose ; and, in the third place, Kant actually details classes 
 of such a priori synthetic judgments. Nay, at page 159, Schwegler 
 himself says : ' These are the only possible and authenticated 
 synthetic judgments a priori, the ground-lines of all and every 
 metaphysic.' Thus, then, Schwegler categorically contradicts 
 himself, and declares that there x are such judgments this in 
 spite of his ' unconditional No ! ' Again, though it is true that 
 the judgments mentioned are to be viewed as metaphysical ground- 
 lines, it is not true that these are the only synthetic judgments 
 a priori ; for does not Kant regard all the propositions of pure 
 mathematic as a priori synthetics, and are not these a goodly 
 number ? These things belong to that special central domain of 
 Kant which came to him straight from Hume, which was his own 
 principal and principial industry, and which passed straight from 
 his hands into those of Hegel, to constitute there the central domain 
 of this last also. Here, then, we conceive Schwegler not only 
 open to the charge of slovenliness, but of insufficient information, 
 and that, too, in regard to a main or rather the main topic.* 
 
 * Kant himself (WW. ii. 107) says: 'Here, now, is a synthetic unity of con- 
 sciousness, which is cognised (t, priori, and supplies ground for synthetic proposi- 
 tions & priori bearing on pure thinking, exactly in the same way as space and time 
 supply ground for such propositions as concern the form of mere sense-perception. ' N. 
 
06 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Then to Schwegler the Hegelian system arises directly out of 
 that of Schelling, and he has no perception of that whole field of 
 considerations the issue of which is the partial elimination of 
 Fichte and Schelling, and the attachment of Hegel directly to 
 Kant : in short, he knows only the common and stereotyped view 
 of what is called the literature of the subject ! He says, p. 222, 
 4 From reflexion on this one-sidedness (of Schelling) the Hegelian 
 philosophy arose ; it holds fast, as against Fichte, with the then 
 Schellingian philosophy, that not a singular, the ego, is the prius 
 of all reality, but a universal, which comprehends in itself every 
 singular.' We may point out, in passing, that the phrase ' a 
 universal which comprehends in itself every singular/ were correct 
 language if applied to what we name the concrete notion. It has 
 no such application, nevertheless, but refers only to the common 
 consciousness on this subject that Hegel, namely, leads all up at 
 last into the ' Absolute Spirit.' We find him, indeed, a line or 
 two further down speaking of the ' Idea as the Absolute/ without 
 mention anywhere of the relation of the Notion to the Idea. 
 
 At pages 223, 227, 228, his perception of the method and general 
 industry of Hegel will be found to be wholly from without, wholly 
 as of a process and endeavour external and mechanical; there seems 
 not even a dream of the one living force which is the creative 
 pulse of the whole. ' The absolute/ he says, ' is, according to 
 Hegel, not being, but development ; explication of differences and 
 antithesis which, however, are not self-dependent, or at all opposed 
 to the absolute, but each singly as all together form only moments 
 within the self-development of the absolute.' ' The Hegelian 
 Logic is the scientific exposition and development of the pure 
 reason-notions, of those notions or categories which underlie all 
 thought and being, which are as much the ground-principles of 
 subjective cognition, as the immanent soul of objective reality, of 
 those ideas in which the spiritual and the natural have their 
 coincidence -point. The realm of logic is, says Hegel, truth as it is 
 without veil fur sich. It is, as Hegel also figuratively expresses 
 himself, the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before 
 the creation of the world and any finite spirit. 5 ' Hegel has 
 endeavoured, 1, completely to collect the pure reason-notions; 
 2, critically to purge them (that is to say, to exclude all that were 
 not pure perception-less thought); and 3, what is the most 
 characteristic peculiarity of the Hegelian Logic, to derive them 
 dialectically from one another, and complete them into an inter- 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 607 
 
 nally articulated system of pure reason.' ' The lever for this 
 development is the dialectic method that advances by negation 
 from one notion to another.' ' Negation is the vehicle of the 
 dialectic march. Every previously established notion is negated, 
 and out of its negation a higher, richer notion is won. This 
 method, which is at once analytic and synthetic, Hegel has 
 carried out throughout the whole system of the Science.' 
 
 This language is not incorrect; it is largely Hegel's own. But 
 this is its defect; Hegel's indirect ways have not been penetrated, 
 and -the one secret found. What sense, for instance, is there in 
 this negation of which Schwegler speaks ? How different it would 
 have been could he but have explained it ! We have objected 
 already to an expression above being considered figurative. In 
 short, what we have here are but external views, p and, on the 
 whole, the literature of the subject ! 
 
 Nor does Schwegler, when arrived at the notion of the notion, 
 manifest any consciousness of what is truly before him. Speak- 
 ing (p. 231) of reciprocity, which we know now to be the very 
 nidus where the notion is born, he says, ' We have, therefore, 
 again a Seyn (a being) that disjoins itself into several self-depen- 
 dents, which are, however, immediately identical with it: this 
 unity of the immediacy of Being with the self-disjunction of 
 Essence is the Notion.' And this is all : there is not one word of 
 that marvellous dialectic in which we get sight of the particular as 
 in a transparent distinction which is none, between the universal 
 and the singular, each of which is^but negative reflexion into self 
 and the same negative reflexion, and thus come at length actually 
 to see the notion, actually to realise at length the notion of the 
 notion. After the sentence just quoted, Schwegler proceeds to 
 define the notion, and he begins thus : ' Notion is that in the 
 other/ &c. He says notion is so and so, not the notion is so and 
 so ; the notion, therefore, is to him just notion, just notion in 
 general, the abstract universal of thinking as opposed to sense. 
 In fact, when a German begins a sentence with a noun thus with- 
 out article, the idiomatic English translation would require us to 
 begin with the indefinite article, to say here, then, a notion is so 
 and so. But let us give the whole definition : ' Notion is that in 
 the other which is identical with itself ; it is substantial totality, 
 the moments of which (singular, particular) are themselves the 
 whole (the universal), totality which as well allows the difference 
 free play as it embraces it into unity within itself.' When a man 
 
608 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 once knows the notion, it is not difficult for him to see assonances 
 to it in this definition ; but would he ever have learnt it thence ? 
 These are but vague words, vaguely and imperfectly copied from 
 others ; and what their own author is determined only to see in 
 them is a notion in general, the Socratic universal, Plato's idea, as 
 the idea of a man, a table, &c. This is evident from the words, 
 ' it is that in the other.' 
 
 ' The spiritual substance (p. 241) of the Revealed Religion or of 
 Christianity is consequently the same as that of Speculative 
 Philosophy, only that it is expressed there in the wise of the 
 Vorstellung, in the form of a history, here in the wise of the 
 notion.' There is no reason to suppose here either, that the notion 
 is meant ; the particular words are just Hegel's own ; Hegel him- 
 self uses Begriff in some three senses ; and there is no reason to 
 suppose, from anything in the whole book, that Schwegler ever 
 saw more in the notion that Plato's abstract universal, as now 
 specialised and particularised, at most, by Kant and Hegel under 
 the name of Categories, and as opposed to Vorstellung. 
 
 It is to be said, too, that the whole statement of Hegel's system 
 in Schwegler is external, and reads to every one at first to every 
 one at first, at least, who is not already an adept just like a 
 caricature, for which conviction can be expected from no sane 
 human being. On the whole, we believe ourselves right, then, how- 
 ever willing we may be to ascribe to Schwegler participation in 
 the spirit and extensive external knowledge both of Kant and 
 Hegel, in denying him to have entered a certain internal adytum 
 of either, which, nevertheless, is absolutely essential to knowledge. 
 
 ROSENKRANZ. 
 
 Though not superior to Schwegler so far as participation in the 
 spirit of Kant and Hegel is concerned, Rosenkranz has, probably 
 seen more clearly into the intimate connexion between these two, 
 studied more closely the particular of the latter of them, and 
 brought himself just generally into more intimate relations with 
 the dialectic whole. Nevertheless, with all our consequent respect 
 for Rosenkranz, and all our so far admiration for him in himself, 
 we cannot make sure that Rosenkranz has ever certainly discerned 
 either the literal attachment of Hegel to Kant, or the one thing 
 that unites both and constitutes the single principle of the former 
 the concrete universal. In support of this opinion we shall take 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 609 
 
 our evidence from the ' Wissenschaft der Logischen Idee/ which, 
 as published so lately, and as expressly devoted to a review and 
 reformation of the Hegelian Logic, promises to be amply sufficient 
 as relative authority. 
 
 It is to be admitted at once that Eosenkranz has again and 
 again perfectly expressed the process of the Absolute, as that 
 which is as well First as Last, Beginning as Kesult, that which 
 returns into itself, the movement which from itself determines 
 itself, &c. Nor less is it to be admitted that he has a hundred 
 times accentuated the ' unity of opposites,' as well as (at least 
 once) directly mentioned the triplicity, identity, difference, and 
 reduction of difference into identity. Nay, Kosenkranz has 
 actually told us foreigners that the first thing we had to do was 
 to understand Kant's question, ' How are & priori synthetic judg- 
 ments possible ? ' and. this idea of an a priori synthetic judgment 
 he has further identified with the more abstract statement, ' a 
 unity of opposites.'* Nevertheless, we cannot help believing 
 Eosenkranz, like all the rest of us, in fact, as yet to ' know only 
 in part/ We cannot make out this avowal as his this avowal of 
 our preface that, ' as Aristotle made explicit the abstract univer- 
 sal implicit in Socrates, Hegel made explicit the concrete universal 
 implicit in Kant.' Neither are we quite sure that to him this 
 concrete universal is the one logical nisus (nameable Simple 
 Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeason), of which this world, with 
 all that is subjective in it, arid with all that is objective in it, is 
 but the congeries. Yet sincerityVith idealism means, that the 
 matter (objects) of Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Eeason, 
 is identical with these its forms. 
 . The ' Science of the Logical Idea ' opens in this manner : 
 
 ' Every man is flung unasked into a together of circumstances to which he 
 must accommodate himself as conditions of his development. Thus in my 
 youth I encountered the Hegelian Philosophy as one of those powers, in 
 struggle with which my destiny has shaped itself. Years long alternately 
 attracted and repelled, my relation to this philosophy has assumed finally 
 this issue, that I have devoted my life to its critical correction and systematic 
 perfection. I should like to complete it from within out, in order to promote 
 the enjoyment of its veritable worth, as well as the fruitfulness of its applica- 
 tion to all the sciences, &c.' 
 
 Now, what have we indicated here ? A life of struggle of 
 
 * Hegel himself (Encyc. 40) says, 'Synthetic Judgments ct, priori (i.e., original 
 co-references of Opposites).' New. 
 
 2Q 
 
610 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 never-ending and yet unended struggle ! Veritably Kant and 
 Hegel are as those deserts of fable which lead to palaces of 
 prophecy, but, meanwhile, whiten only with dead men's bones ! 
 Eosenkranz, a man of unbounded acquirement, of rich endowment, 
 of keen susceptibility, of quick talent, has now a life behind him, 
 and its one object Hegel is it this he would have us to under- 
 stand ? is unconquered still ! Surely at least such interpretation 
 of the quoted words were not unjust. Alternately attracted and 
 repelled during long years : this is not success, this is not the 
 language of possession; these are but the words of the baffled 
 but still passionate wooer. There is bitterness as he looks back, 
 too, on the length of the struggle, and thinks of what has been 
 gained ; he sees a together of circumstances accommodation to 
 which was but necessity ; and he cannot help dwelling on his 
 having been committed to them unasked. The task is not yet 
 complete either : he would only like to complete it. 
 
 These considerations are strengthened by the avowals of the 
 next paragraph, which records his experience as Professor of 
 Philosophy. He had begun with Hegel simpliciter ; doubts arose ; 
 for ten years he threw himself on Aristotle, but alternated him 
 with Hegel; he separated Metaphysic from Logic; he takes 
 Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel together and compares them, &c. 
 This is not the repose, the oneness, of an intellect convinced, of a 
 mind assured. If Hegel is right, his Logic supersedes all that has 
 gone before it ; for in it he professes to have brought the science 
 down through all these two thousand years which separate us 
 from Aristotle, and to have perfected it up to the highest level 
 of the present day. Seclusion to Hegel, accordingly, would be 
 intelligible if Hegel has succeeded, as regression to Aristotle if 
 Hegel has failed : but what are we to say of an alternation of 
 both ? and why formally explain and compare Aristotle, Kant, 
 and Hegel as three interests apart, independent, each for itself ? 
 If Hegel is right, his Logic is the only one that requires to be 
 taught, and the contributions of Aristotle and Kant can be duly 
 exhibited as they present themselves in their respective places 
 there. 
 
 The critique of various later Logics that follows, confirms the 
 same inference of doubt, hesitation, vacillation on the part of 
 Eosenkranz. Hegel's Logic being what it pretends to be, there is 
 but short work needed as regards these others. Eosenkranz seeks 
 to classify these Logics, too, from the notion of thinking in general, 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 611 
 
 and, being a sworn enemy of all abstraction unverified by the 
 concrete, he would like to correlate each theoretical stage of the 
 classification with an actual historical stage. As regards this 
 latter particular, he knows no treatise but his own 'where a 
 similar attempt is made!' Now, Hegel's Logic is simply the 
 development of the Notion qua Notion that is, of Thought qua 
 Thought; Hegel's Logic ought, then, at once to have supplied 
 what Rosenkranz wanted, a topic and criteria, namely, for all the 
 various presentant Logics. Hegel's Logic, too, is supposed to be 
 correlative to historical fact, though it could not by anticipation 
 of, so to speak, posthumous Logics, prevent Rosenkranz from 
 ranging these too in subjection to the pure tree, were he so 
 minded. In fact, to analyse the notion of thought and develop 
 thus new classifications of Logic, is simply to put the Hegelian 
 Logical classifications to the rout. That such analyses and classi- 
 fications should be considered still necessary does it not lead to 
 the fear that Hegel is not yet perhaps thoroughly understood? 
 Hegel is, of course, not absolutely the last, and, it is to be hoped, 
 there is progress still.* 
 
 "We come now to his proposed Eeform of Hegel, to his actual 
 objections to the master, and specially to his system of Logic. 
 
 * In the first place,' says Rosenkranz, ' its collective form oscillates between 
 a dichotomy, namely, of Objective and Subjective Logic, and a trichotomy, 
 namely, of the doctrine of Being, Essentity, and Notion. The former division 
 repeats the old one of theoretical philosophy into metaphysic and logic, but 
 with an expression which is derived fron* the sphere of consciousness, and is 
 consequently inappropriate and deranging. The antithesis of object and 
 subject belongs only to the spirit, not to impersonal reason. The trichotomy 
 repeats the Kantian distinction of understanding, judgment, and reason. This 
 distinction of simple, reflexive, and speculative characters is one, however, 
 which pervades all the moments of the whole science, and is, therefore, not 
 competent to aiford an actual principle of division.' 
 
 Now, not one of these objections can altogether hold. The 
 first two divisions of logic may together be considered objective, 
 for they are both stages of consciousness only, not of self-con- 
 sciousness, the beginning of which constitutes the transition 
 
 * One of Rosenkranz's sentences in the above runs thus : ' I wanted to show 
 proof that the abstract genealogy of the notion makes good its necessity in living 
 fact. ' The notion here is that of thought as made out by Rosenkranz, with special 
 reference to his critique of the various recent Logics. This illustrates the general 
 speech of the notion in German writers. It is just short for the abstraction and 
 generalisation of thought in general : it is the abstract universal of thought as any 
 such ; not as the Universal, Hegel's Universal, the concrete Notion the Notion. 
 
612 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 from the second to the third. This is seen whether we consider 
 that, in the first two stages, we have but Apprehension and 
 Judgment in act, or that what is acted on is but outer, as Quality, 
 Quantity, Substantiality, Causality, &c., while in the third stage 
 it is Eeason acts, and consciously on its own forms. Besides, it 
 is Hegel (through Kant) who is the subjective logic, while Hume, 
 Spinoza, and so backwards, are the objective logic. Up to 
 reciprocity the progress was not Hegel's ; after reciprocity the 
 advance is due to his conscious subject. This last consideration 
 is only ancillary, however. Metaphysic is rightly taken into 
 Logic ; for Idealism being the truth, all the principles of things 
 must be logical. The trichotomy is ' competent to afford an actual 
 principle of division/ and for the reason which is supposed to 
 prove it 'not.' Indeed, it is interesting to observe Eosenkranz 
 here naming some of the nearest forms of the notion and talking 
 of one distinction pervading the whole, without at least referring 
 to the connexion and living unity into which he might throw all. 
 The triads of Being, Essentity, Notion, Understanding, Judg- 
 ment, Eeason, Simple, Eeflex, Speculative, are named together ; 
 but, instead of being correlated, the general division under one of 
 them is declared incompetent because another of them pervades 
 all the moments of the whole ! The reason really pro is to 
 Eosenkranz the reason con. The ' going up of the light/ however, 
 that Kant speaks of in reference to Thales and the equilateral 
 triangle, Galilei and his inclined plane, Torricelli and the weighing 
 of the air, Stahl and his chemical transformations, &c., is a curious 
 thing ! A man shall read over the right passages scores of times ; 
 he shall even have executed a translation of the En cyclopaedic 
 (edn. 1) say ; yet the light of the notion shall only rise to him 
 when occupied on some other ! This was my case ; and it may 
 have been similarly so with Eosenkranz, who names individuals, 
 but brings not together into the One. 
 
 Logic as Logic, then, is its own element, and knows not a 
 psychological distinction ; but Logic, regarded as a History, was 
 immersed in the object, till through Kant and Hegel it rose to 
 the subject. Hume's causality is outward, but Kant's categories 
 are inward, and from Kant the principle that moulds is sub- 
 jectivity. 
 
 The second objection brought forward is to the transition of the 
 subjective notion into objectivity, as mechanical, chemical, and 
 teleological ; and also to the admission of Life, the Good, &c., into 
 

 HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 613 
 
 Logic ; as if Logic ' were that total science which includes in it 
 even reality itself.' To this we may add, that Rosenkranz objects 
 also to the transition of the Logical Idea into Nature, as ' the crux 
 of the Hegelianic/ and that, so far as the Teleological notion is_ 
 concerned, he here offers us a Logic re-distributed in its interest, 
 and so that it (the Teleological notion) appears intercalated 
 between Essentity and the Notion. 
 
 It must be borne in mind, in the first place, here, that our 
 present object is not to answer objections to Hegel, but to apply 
 these in test of the relative knowledge of the objector. It is not 
 for a moment to be pretended that Hegel is perfect, that there are 
 not sins in him both of omission and commission, or that he may 
 not be amended by certain of the suggestions of Rosenkranz. But 
 surely it is inconsistent to seek to force upon Hegel matter which, 
 it can be shown, he himself refused. The following passage (op. 
 cit. p. 530), will, perhaps, sufficiently explain the grounds generally 
 of these objections of Rosenkranz : 
 
 The transition of the Ideel causality of the notion into the reality fulfilled 
 by it is the transition of the end (intended) out of its possibility into actuality, 
 its effectuation or realisation. This connexion is presented by Hegel as a 
 syllogism ; the notion of the end is through the Means to clasp itself in its 
 Eealisation together with itself, so that there is to be assumed in the result no 
 other content than was already present in the beginning. We have already 
 admitted that a formal syllogism may be certainly as well pointed out here as 
 in the process of mechanism or of chemism ; but we have also noticed that a 
 syllogism in the sense of the logical notion of the unity of the universal, 
 particular, and singular is still not to be found in it.* A detailed critique of 
 the logical incongruities into which here Hegel has fallen, has been given by 
 Trendelenburg in his ' Logische Untersuchungen.' We fully agree with him 
 when he says of the teleological notion ' If, in the manner of Hegel in the 
 application stated, the syllogism be looked for in actual existence, the three 
 terms are then arbitrarily distributed to three different realities in the relation 
 of universal, particular, and singular, without holding fast the reciprocal 
 relation of logical subordination. In the teleological reference, the subjective 
 thought of End is in and for itself universal ; but it is not the universal genus 
 of its means and of its realisation : the means are in themselves the particular 
 and different, but still not the species of the former thought ; they are really 
 subjected to it and are ruled by it, but still not logically subordinated as its 
 species ; the realisation of the end is a singular, but neither the individual of 
 the heterogeneous mean, nor of the thought that projects the end. If it be 
 said that the mean is subordinated to the design and the result to both, then 
 this real dependence is to be duly distinguished from the logical one, which 
 arises from the relation of the comprehension and extension of notions, and 
 alone conditions the Syllogism.' 
 
 * As though Hegel had not himself said that! See Encyc. 162, 3rd paragraph. New. 
 
614 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 What Trendelenburg, as quoted, says here is simply that Hegel 
 when he is in the third chapter of his second section, is not at the 
 same time back in the like chapter of his first.* This considera- 
 tion, had it occurred to Rosenkranz, might have strengthened his 
 amiability to resist the authority of the somewhat imposing 
 Trendelenburg, who only commits here, as is but the ordinary 
 habit of all professed Logicians, an Ignoratio Elenchi.-f- That is, 
 Hegel would have admitted the objection, but maintained that his 
 position was untouched. Hegel, in fact, knows all that already, 
 and he just expressly does what he is reproached with. It is the 
 same objection that lies against the admission into Logic of the 
 notion of Life, &c. ; and at page 244 of the third volume of his 
 Logik, Hegel will be found formally explaining the grounds of 
 his action. These grounds, however, concern the intimate struc- 
 ture of his whole philosophy ; and as that has been missed, they 
 themselves have not been regarded. The reader will do well to 
 refer for himself here. The transition of the notion into objec- 
 tivity is equally clear before the consciousness of Hegel, and 
 equally necessary from the very nature of his system. From page 
 121 of the second volume of his Logik we see that he expressly 
 contemplates three orders of Seyn (Being). He says there : 
 
 ' It is to be remembered beforehand that, besides immediate Seyn firstly, 
 and secondly Existence the Seyn that springs out of Wesen (Essentity), 
 there is a further Seyn the Objectivity that springs out of the Notion.' 
 Hegel manifests an equally express consciousness as regards Teleology ; 
 ' Where design is perceived,' he says (Log. vol. iii. p. 209), ' there is assumed 
 an Understanding as its originator; for the Teleological notion there is re- 
 quired, therefore, the proper, free existence of the notion.' At page 77 of the 
 second volume we have also this other distinct statement : * This correlation, 
 the whole as essential unity, lies only in the notion, in the designful end. . . . 
 The teleological ground is property of the notion, and of be-mediation through 
 the same, which is reason.' 
 
 * See Encyc. 162 subfinem. New. 
 
 t Compare the somewhat laboriose Latin of Trendelenburg with the pithy verna- 
 cular of Hegel. The former (El. Log. Arist., Adnotata, 40) says: 'Ejusmodi 
 igitur refutatio justa conclusione sive inductione sive syllogismo instituta elenchus 
 vocatur, cui quidem primitus id adhseret, lit in eadem aliquis disputatione argumen- 
 tando cogatur aut quod affirmavit negare aut quod negavit confiteri.' Hegel, 
 again (Log. i. 406), says : ' Elenchen d. i. nach des Aristoteles Erkliirung Weisen, 
 wodurch man genothigt wird das Gegentheil von dem zu sagen, was man vorher 
 behauptet hatte.' To the neatness here the Italics are not the least contribution. 
 It will be difficult to find the same neatness in Aristotle, and possibly Trendelenburg 
 who too is neat, follows not Aristotle but Hegel here. A definition so good is of 
 general interest. 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATOKS. 615 
 
 Of the designful, clear eye, with which Hegel worked, then, we 
 are not allowed to doubt ; nor ought it to be difficult for us to be 
 convinced that there could be no Zweck, no purpose, no design in 
 existence before subjectivity, and that it would have been absurd 
 in Hegel to develop a consequent in anticipation of its antecedent.' 
 Besides, we know now that the change proposed by Kosenkranz 
 would be historically false ; for the Begriff, Kant's Begriff, Hegel's 
 Begriff, was the notional Keciprocity that rose out of Hume's 
 Causality. Yet Kosenkranz ' wants to maintain the right of the 
 historical development ! ' Not only does he contradict this 
 development, however, but, even by his own showing, that of the 
 notion also ; for he himself observes (p. 17) that ' the forms of 
 Seyn are categorical, those of Wesen hypothetical, and those of 
 the Begriff disjunctive;' which alone might have suggested to 
 him Eeciprocity as the immediate foregoer of the Notion. That 
 Mechanism and Chemism should be forms of Causality, is no 
 objection to their being treated where they are ; for they are 
 evidently concreter forms than abstract causality, forms of the 
 Begriff in objectivity itself. To Hegel, Logic is the prius of all ; 
 and in it, first of all, there appears in the abstract form of the 
 notion whatever is afterwards found in the more concrete spheres 
 of Nature and Spirit. It belongs, indeed, to the depth of Hegel's 
 discernment that the Good should be regarded by him as a 
 cognitive element, and should constitute to him the transition 
 from Understanding to Eeason. Why Beauty should not be 
 included (another objection of Kosenkranz) may depend on this, 
 that its abstract elements as Kant also seems to have thought 
 are not discrepant from those of Teleology, and that its own place 
 is, like that of Religion, only in a very concrete sphere. 
 
 But what has been said above is of no moment in comparison 
 with this : the objection that Teleology, &c., are not technically 
 exact syllogisms, is alone crucially decisive as regards the secret 
 or principle of Hegel in its scope. Admit this objection, and the 
 whole fabric of Hegel lies in pieces at our feet perhaps not even 
 with the exception of the doctrine of the syllogism itself. The 
 principle which has given birth to Being, Nothing, Becoming, 
 to Being, There-being, Being -for -Self, to Quality, Quantity, 
 Measure, to Ground, Phenomenon, Actuality, to Substance, 
 Cause, Keciprocity, to Being, Essentity, Notion, is absolutely 
 the same as that which gives birth to Mechanism, Chemism, 
 Teleology ; and if the objection of being but formal syllogisms 
 
616 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 is fatal to these three last, it must be considered equally fatal to 
 all the others, for they also are in precisely the same manner but 
 formal syllogisms. A man who uses the language of Hegel 
 cannot help naming the principle of Hegel ; but to name is not 
 necessarily to see. And this we hold to be the case with Eosen- 
 kranz. Had he been perfectly awake to what was in hand, he 
 would have hesitated before contradicting the express, deliberate, 
 perfectly conscious action of Hegel; and the last thing that 
 would have occurred to him would have been to say, these forms 
 whether later or earlier than the syllogism not being exactly 
 the syllogism proper, must be rejected. How could they be the 
 syllogism proper, if either later or earlier ? and to this syllogism 
 proper is the whole system of Hegel required to shrink ? Nay, 
 observe this perfectly conclusive point : Eosenkranz actually 
 denies the presence of the notion in any triad but (as we may say) 
 its own, that, namely, where it is explicit : ' a syllogism/ he says, 
 ' in the sense of the logical notion of the unity of the universal, 
 particular, and singular is still not to be found in them,' (i.e., the 
 various triads which together constitute the entire Logic). To 
 yield to Treudelenburg here was to admit essential misunder- 
 standing. 
 
 These same views and something more he expresses, at 
 pages 504-5, thus : 
 
 But now there was yet another revolution in linguistic usage introduced by 
 Hegel ; namely, as regards the word Notion. He declared that substance and 
 subject were to be taken, not as if the subject were to be subordinated to 
 substance, but, on the contrary, as if the latter were to be subordinated to the 
 former, and maintained that essentially for the notion of truth the thing was 
 to recognise Substance as Subject. He sought here, as the eternally memor- 
 able preface to the ' Phaenomenologie of the Spirit ' exhibits in the grandest 
 struggle of enduring effort to bring to an end the blind necessity attaching to 
 the causa immanens of the Spinosism which, under the form of the Absolute, 
 was now dominant, and to say that the self-determination of Substance ( Wesen) 
 it was which was ground of necessity. With this thought he stood to the 
 Schellingianism of the day in the same relation that the monadology of 
 Leibnitz bore to the immobility and indifference of the one Substance of 
 Spinoza. Schelling's tractate on Free-will was, some years later, an express 
 testimony to the truth of Hegel here, and sought (on a hint caught from him), 
 to leap from the position of mere Reason to that of Spirit, though of Hegel's 
 suggestion and instigation mention there was none. Now, when some time 
 later Hegel in his 'Logik' advanced, in reference to the Reciprocity of 
 Substance with itself, from Necessity to Free Will, he grasped together the 
 whole sphere of the Ideas under the name of the Subjective Beqriff, and for 
 the first time caused thereby an indescribable confusion ; for this word had 
 
617 
 
 had till then the signification of a subjective Vorstellung, repr&sentatio, or of 
 a subjective thought, conceptus, or of an abstract determination of understand- 
 ing, notio. Certainly it was not unusual to say in German ' Begriff,' too for 
 the necessity of the thing itself ; for, It all comes to the notion of the thing, 
 is as much as to say, It all conies to the necessity of the essential being of 
 the thing. But now Notion was required to mean the subjective unity of the 
 universal, the particular, and the singular. There were little to be said against 
 this, since Aristotle applies \6yos in the same manner, but subjective was to 
 express here not only our subjective thinking of a notion, but the self -deter- 
 mination to its differences which lies in Substance (im Wesen), wherein we 
 have unconditionally to acknowledge a great progress, an emancipation of 
 logical forms from all improper psychological admixtures and adulterations. 
 Thus far, then, therefore we should be considered to agree with Hegel. But 
 now he had collocated the Kantian Categories as those of Being and Essentity 
 under the name of the Objective Logic, and so made from the notion of 
 Substance out the transition from the objective to the subjective logic ; and 
 now, then, again in the subjective logic, the subjective notion was to set 
 itself anew as the objective notion ; which objective notion, however, was 
 only to extend to the forms of the objectivisation of the notion ; which forms 
 are its realisation, for the complete notion, the unity of the sub- and 
 ob-jective notion, was to be only the Idea. Among these forms Hegel 
 reckons now the teleological notion, and presents it thereby properly only as 
 a mean of the subjective notion for its realisation. This would be for him 
 completely to fall out with Aristotle, who subordinates matter and form to 
 the notion of design, were it not perceivable, partly that what Hegel calls 
 the subjective notion coincides with the teleological notion as the First, 
 from which the movement issues ; partly that he has carried over the 
 objective notion of End into the notion of the Idea as Self -End. Only by 
 means of this confusion of the logical notion with the notion of the Idea are 
 many utterances of Hegel to be justified; he talks of the notion, of the 
 divine, creative, free, self-dependent notion, and means thereby the Idea. 
 If the objective notion is to be product of the subjective notion, it must 
 possess also the articulation of this latter in the distinctions of universal, 
 particular, and singular. Hegel in effect has endeavoured, in harmony with 
 his method, to demonstrate this, but, as we believe, with a double error ; 
 firstly, that is, through the presence of a formal syllogism in the mechanical, 
 chemical, and teleological processes which are to constitute the forms of the 
 objective notion ; and, secondly, by this, that these processes in the sphere 
 of the idea are able to develop themselves into systematic unities. But the 
 former determination is too little, and the latter too much. The former is too 
 little, for a formal syllogism presents itself as early as the categories of Being 
 and of Essentity ; the latter is too much, because the objectivity in it has no 
 longer the sense of mediation to, but even that of the adequate statement of, 
 the notion. In the mechanical, chemical, and teleological processes as such, 
 there fails the middle term of the particular, in the manner in which, as the 
 distinction proper of the universal, it forms the transition to the singular, &c. 
 
 Kosenkranz continues in this way to censure the transition of 
 the notion into mechanical, chemical, &c., objectivity through 
 
618 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 syllogisms which are merely formal, and possess not the veritable 
 universal, particular, and singular of the technical syllogism 
 proper. He alludes, as we see, to the presence of a formal 
 syllogism in the earlier categories; but this is no advance in 
 insight. He seems to say only that, as a formal syllogism was 
 present then, a formal syllogism is not enough, is ' too little ' now ; 
 and he shows not a trace of the true principles involved. But 
 the above passage has been principally quoted as bearing on this 
 last question. We have here Eosenkranz expressly declaring 
 what he knows about the notion. It is, however, not worth while 
 entering into any special analysis : with the double, triple, and 
 variously multiple confusion of notion and notions which exists in 
 the above, it will be sufficient to contrast the simplicity of the 
 Notion, Kant's notion, Kant's Copernican notion raised into the 
 Hegelian, Kant's Eeciprocity raised into the Hegelian Begriff 
 that Begriff of which Hegel himself gives us the Begriff, and 
 which we have no excuse in failing to understand, the one simple 
 and single concrete notion. What does the Begriff of the Begriff, 
 the Notion of the Notion, mean ? It means that the Begriff, the 
 one Notion which had been each and every one of all these mani- 
 fold Forms from Being up to Eeciprocity, is now formally the 
 Begriff, has now reached its own appropriate form as Begriff, and 
 this is true both Historically and Logically. This, then, is the 
 divine, the creative, the free, the self-subsistent Begriff, and Hegel 
 means it expressly it and not ( the Idea/ when he uses all such 
 expressions : for if the Idea is its ultimate Logical stage, it itself 
 is still the heart and soul and spirit of the Idea. In his preface 
 to the second edition of his Logic, Hegel tells us with a pen of 
 power that the categories are the substantial content of all natural 
 and spiritual things, but even in them, pure as they are, there 
 obtains the distinction of a soul and of a body. Now this soul is 
 the Notion : not any general notion, subjective or objective or 
 whatever -other as Eosenkranz may be content to view it, but the 
 one special Notion which has been already demonstrated. Hegel's 
 words are these : * 
 
 But these thoughts of all natural and spiritual things, the substantial con- 
 tent itself, are yet such a content as possesses manifold potentialities, and has 
 even still the distinction in it of a soul and of a body, of the notion and of a 
 relative reality ; the deeper base is the soul per se, the pure Notion, which is 
 
 * Log. vol. i. p. 18. 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 619 
 
 the inmost of objects, their single pulse of life, as also of the subjective think- 
 ing of the same. 
 
 1 Vom Begriff im Algemeinen/ with which the third volume of 
 Hegel's Logic opens, is an extended explanation of the notion, is 
 an extended notion exoterically (almost) of the notion : here ts^ 
 what Eosenkranz makes of it (pp. 22, 23) : 
 
 The full introduction which Hegel has given to the subjective Logic turns 
 on this to show how Substance determines itself as Subject, how necessity 
 sublates itself into Freedom. This is the proposition which, with full con- 
 sciousness of its infinite significance, he had first enunciated in the preface 
 to the ' Phaenomenologie,' 1807, and which, rightly understood, lies at the 
 bottom of his whole philosophy. This is the proposition out of which Schel- 
 ling constructed his second philosophy, a scholastically confused imitation of 
 Hegel's Philosophy of the Spirit, &c. 
 
 It is impossible to say that this is not true ; still it falls short 
 of the truth. The section in question turns on something deeper 
 and more universal than is here assigned to it, on a more penetrat- 
 ing and exhaustive principle than ' the Absolute is Subject ' of the 
 preface to the Phaenomenologie, however much the one may 
 involve the other : what lies at the bottom of the Hegelian system, 
 too, is something infinitely more definite and simple than that, and 
 Schelling may have constructed his philosophia secunda out of 
 whatever he may, but it was certainly not out of the Notion. In 
 short, we oppose to the generalities, to the this and the other, to 
 the vague hither and thither of Eosenkranz, the Notion, that which 
 once seen the whole Hegelian system becomes seen in Origin, 
 Principle, Form, and Matter. As we have said, however, he who 
 uses the language of Hegel must a thousand and a thousand times 
 state phrases which are perceived to tell the secret of Hegel, once 
 that secret is itself perceived from elsewhere. Such utterances are 
 to be found passim in Eosenkranz, and here is the very strongest 
 that I have yet come upon : 
 
 The admirable power of science becomes particularly obvious at particular 
 stages. However unsatisfactory it may frequently appear to us, however great 
 much that is doubtful it may leave behind, at such stages we are obliged to 
 admit that science has already done much, and that it gives us pledges of a 
 harmony of the universe capable of filling us with trust in the reason of the 
 same. With immense velocity there rushes through infinite space a nowise 
 particularly great ball. On this ball there move to and fro millions of nowise 
 particularly great individuals, apparently given up to absolute chance, 
 struggling with an existence ephemeral in its duration, often breaking loose 
 into mutual enmity, or even murdering each other. But these feeble creatures 
 have come gradually to learn that they live on a ball which moves round 
 
620 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 another in an exactly-measured path. They have come gradually to learn 
 that they are capable of mastery over the nature of their supporting planet ; 
 that with growing insight into the laws of nature there grows as well the 
 might of their mastery, and that it is the same reason which they find in 
 themselves as law of their actions and their thoughts, and which they meet 
 without themselves in the phenomena of nature. And amongst these absolute 
 laws of reason, they have come to know one that is, as it were, the law of laws, 
 the key to all phenomena, the hidden-manifest Archeus of all being and 
 becoming. This law they name in variously manifold wise, according to the 
 particular regions in which it manifests itself. In logic they name it on the 
 side of subjective thought, abstraction, reflexion, speculation ; or understand- 
 ing, judgment, reason ; or notion, judgment, syllogism ; or thesis, antithesis, 
 synthesis. Whatever names may be used, however, it is always the same 
 trias, in whose magic bands all lies bound : for what we enunciate as a law of 
 our subjective thought, has, if it is really a law, objective existence as well. 
 We use, therefore, these same names in order to designate objective relations. 
 We say, for example, a work of art is abstract when it wants the develop- 
 ment into harmony of an inner antithesis. We say that one existence 
 reflects itself into another. Relations of the Idea we designate as speculative. 
 We do not call digestion, for example, an abstract, nor yet a reflected, but a 
 speculative process, because it involves an assimilation of the inorganic, a 
 transition from what is dead to what is alive. Such positive unity of 
 opposed characters is speculative or dialectic.* 
 
 In what he says of a one law, Kosenkranz seems to have got 
 very near here : perhaps, nevertheless, it may be but an external 
 ray merely. It is not difficult from the very outside to perceive 
 the never-failing three of Hegel, and it is not more difficult to see 
 or divine that in all these threes unity of system is aimed at. 
 This is the external form of Hegel a form with which we become 
 acquainted from the first, and in which we can very soon become 
 expert, so far as speech is concerned, while, at the same time, we 
 are still stone-blind to the principle, and know of origin and 
 matter only what we can catch up, by an all-insufficient good 
 luck, in those desperate and desultory rambles on the surface 
 with which the most of us begin and with which the most of us 
 end. In the beginning of what has been named ' the struggle to 
 Hegel,' there will be found a variety of passages in which the 
 writer seems perfectly at home with an sich, ausser sich, fur sich, 
 with difference and identity, &c., and even with the notion, at the 
 very moment that he is divided from this last by years. Similarly, 
 in the case of Kosenkranz, it is difficult to believe a perfect 
 success, despite such passages as we have quoted above it is 
 difficult to believe this when we find him complaining that ' the 
 * Op. cit., pp. 73, 74. 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 621 
 
 trichotomy of being, essentity, and notion allows the notion of the 
 idea to be too much in the background behind that of the subjective 
 notion ! ' and adopting in preference to this trichotomy an early 
 and imperfect one of Hegel, in which * the first is the system of 
 the pure notions of the Beent, the second that of the pure notions 
 of the universal, and the third contains the notion of science.' It 
 is difficult to believe this when we find him, in spite of Hegel, 
 and of what he has accomplished and how he accomplished it, 
 disjoining once again logic and metaphysic, designating design as 
 ontological, and proposing classifications in the interest of an 
 only external balance without regard to history or the life of the 
 principle. It does not consist with such success even to hear that 
 Hegel, ' despite the height of his standpoint/ ' took into the Idea 
 concrete existential forms/ because he was * still entangled in the 
 form of science which he found to precede him/ or that it was 
 'indisputably the Schellingian definition of the notion of reason 
 as of the absolute unity of subject and object which still forced 
 itself on him here/ or that the passage from the Metaphysic of 
 Aristotle ' with which Hegel has closed the second edition of his 
 Encyclopaedic represents an unaccomplished Science/ a projected 
 ' reintegration of all the moments of his system in a speculative 
 philosophy ! ' It is difficult to believe in success when we ponder 
 these and the other objections advanced : and it is impossible, so 
 to believe, when we find Eosenkranz lamenting, * the obscurities 
 and incongruities which the Hegelian Logic has generated 
 
 THROUGH ITS DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION ! ! ' 
 
 Neither can we think Eosenkranz, though he defends it to a 
 certain extent and would only remove misunderstandings from it, 
 quite on the level of Hegel as regards the transition of the Idea 
 into Nature. This transition is a perfect parallel to that of the 
 subjective notion into objectivity, and both belong to the very life 
 of the principle of Hegel. On that principle these transitions could 
 not fail to be ; and being, they could be no other. Reciprocity alone 
 admits of no other transition ; there they just are reciprocals by 
 the grace of God, the one out what the other is in. As regards 
 the subjective notion passing into objectivity, we may say specially 
 that this is historical, that a new determination of the object did 
 in actual truth follow the subjective notion of Kant. When one 
 reads the transition of the notion into objectivity whether in the 
 Logik or the Encyclopaedic, and the express explanations by which 
 Hegel, in elucidating, formally acknowledges the doctrine and 
 
622 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 every step of the same, one feels much difficulty in believing that 
 any one could object to this transition and yet still suppose that 
 he really understood. The Begriff that as negative unity 
 necessarily became Urtheil could only come together in the 
 Schluss. (Observe both the etymological and the common 
 meanings.) Once together, unity was restored, an immediacy, 
 a vollstandiges Selbststandiges, a completed Self-substantial, 
 the Object. So with the transition of the Logical Idea into 
 Nature. This, too, is but an act of the living Reciprocity that 
 is that is the Notion, or that the Notion is. The Notion is now 
 perfected into the Idea the inner is full ; it must fall over and 
 asunder into the outer Nature. The Entschluss and the 
 Entlassung, the resolution and the release, are again the Hegelian 
 equivoque that is the one triple of the direct and the indirect, 
 the^ simple and the reflex, the literal and the figurative: what 
 remarkable consistency, that Hegel should have sought to be true 
 to the triplicity of the notion even in his single words ! But how 
 otherwise can any one state the fact ? Or how otherwise can any 
 one thinlc the relation of God to Nature ? The transition of God 
 to Nature, which as his creation is still himself, how otherwise 
 explain? It must be said, however, that Rosenkranz brings 
 himself at last to be much more at home with the latter transi- 
 tion than with the former. Reminding himself of the Johan- 
 neische Logoslehre, and putting * in place of the word Reason the 
 expression Logos,' he finds that it ' clinks already not so strange, 
 when it is said of the latter that through its regard it produces 
 nature that, in the assurance of itself, it releases nature from 
 itself/ 
 
 It is just this alternation of agreement and disagreement, with- 
 out motive from anything in the thing itself to warrant the one 
 now if the other then, that leads one to believe in the unsatisfactori- 
 ness of the catch that Rosenkranz exhibits as regards Hegel. Ac- 
 cordingly, in conclusion, it is perhaps permitted to infer without 
 serious injustice that Rosenkranz has scarcely come to see that 
 single principle which was an sich in Kant, fur sich in Fichte 
 and Schelling, and an und fur sich in Hegel. This principle is 
 notional reciprocity : this IS the manifest Archeus which Rosen- 
 kranz assumes. Only Hegel clearly saw the peculiarity of the 
 notion of Kant (as in his latent theory of perception) the 
 necessity, that is, of a union of the universal with the particular 
 to the production of the singular, which concrete singular 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 623 
 
 alone is any reality, whether as notion or thing. Once arrived 
 here, Hegel was able to see further, that a system on this 
 principle was the next requisite ; and that the means to this was 
 determination, a progressus from the first abstract to the last con- 
 crete, or, what is the same thing, from the last abstract to the 
 first concrete. This determination was but a general realisa- 
 tion and vitalisation of logic as a whole ; of which simple appre- 
 hension is the first act, its truth being the universal; judgment 
 the second, its truth the particular (otherwise nameable the 
 difference, the other) ; and reason the third, its truth the singular, 
 which is the final truth, expressing that the actual is just a 
 single concrete, the nature of which may be conceived to be a 
 particular universalised into a singular, which again is the one 
 logical nisus, the one logical vis ; and a logical vis and the logical 
 vis is what is, and all that is. Logic is the completed rhythmus 
 of thought : Seyn, what it is ; Wesen, what it was ; Begriff (in that 
 it be-gripes), what it is, was, and will be. These, too, are the 
 three epochs both of philosophy and of history. So it was that 
 Hegel spoke of history being near its term. If, as is probable, 
 each epoch, however, be a triple of all the three moments, reason, 
 which is now at last happily in germ but only in germ has still 
 the whole of her own proper path to tread, and the term of history 
 is still comparatively remote. 
 
 This concrete power, then, to which Hegel remained true 
 everywhere, and which alone gave him his Logic and his Nature, 
 his Aesthetic and his Politic, his ""Religion and his History ; nay, 
 which alone is the one subject, the one matter in all these elements, 
 Eosenkranz has scarcely succeeded fairly, clearly, firmly, and 
 once for all to see, whether in its own distinct individual self- 
 identity, or in the perfectly articulate cohesion and connexion of 
 all its multiplex forms. His work on logic, indeed, which 
 professes to reform and complete Hegel, reads and rattles like an 
 amorphous heap of dry and disarticulated bones which a merely 
 subjective breath turns over. Here dialectic, which is the very 
 ghost of Hegel, has fled, and unity we have none. For the plastic 
 demonstration of a scientific progress more strict and rigid than 
 that of even a Laplace or a Newton, we have but a hither and 
 thither of philological remark not even common raisonnement 
 as in a dictionary. Hegel, in the Introduction to his Logik (pp. 
 44, 45), speaks of how ' unfree ' thought finds itself when for the 
 first time in presence of the * Speculative,' and tells us that, would 
 
624 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 it free itself, the first thing it has to do, is to accustom itself to 
 the notions and distributions without entering on the dialectic. 
 The logical statement that might so result, he says further, would 
 give * the picture of a methodically-arranged whole, although the 
 soul of the structure, the method, which lives in the dialectic, 
 appear not itself therein.' Is it possible to say even as much as 
 this for the ' Wissenschaf t der Logik/ the culminating, Hegel- 
 amending work, of Eosenkranz ? * 
 
 HAYM. 
 
 Eosenkranz, whom Haym denominates, with the universal agree- 
 ment of Germany in general, ' the friend and pupil of Hegel, the 
 warmest and truest of his apologists/ published the work with refer- 
 ence to which we have just spoken, 'Die Wissenschaft der Logischen 
 Idee,' in 1858, while the work of Haym with reference to which 
 we are now going to speak appeared in 1857, a year earlier : why, 
 then, do we take Haym after and not before Eosenkranz ? The 
 answer is, because the opinions of Eosenkranz were before the 
 Public in many works previously to 1857, and because, in especial, 
 the matter of his work on the Logical Idea very certainly the 
 matter criticised had already appeared in the ' System der 
 Wissenschaft,' 1850, and in 'Meine Eeform der Hegelschen 
 Philosophic,' 1852. Haym, then, has been selected to ' close the 
 debate,' because, so far as is known to me, he is the latest writer 
 who has instituted a special inquest and come forward thereafter 
 with a special and deliberate judgment on the general question of 
 the worth of Hegel. 
 
 Haym remarks ( of the preface to the Phaenomenologie, that 
 ' it is not saying too much to maintain that he understands the 
 Hegelian Philosophy who is completely master of the sense of this 
 preface.' Now, while, on the one hand, it is impossible to over- 
 rate the value of the exposition involved, it is to be said, on the 
 
 * If the reader turn up in Rosenkranz what corresponds to ' Bestimmung, Be- 
 schaffenheit, und Grenze' in Hegel and in the relative commentary, he will realise 
 probably what has just been said. Take the following sentence, where the Latin 
 words are his own equivalents of the corresponding German ones (op. cit. p. 136) : 
 ' Determinatio is the Qualitas of Something by virtue of which it is able to maintain 
 its own Existence in the circle of its Destinatio only through its Aptitudo, Indoles, 
 sive Natura ; ' and a style of explanation of things dialectic will manifest itself such, 
 that of six of its main terms any one may be indiscriminately substituted for the other 
 with the result of a very large number of quite identical sentences. This, then, is 
 quite external. In the translation, we may add, the pages correspondent to Schwegler's 
 are in order : 118, 64, 97, 105-109, 217, 213, 325, 315, 316, 323, 324, 329, and 343. New. 
 
 t Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 215. 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 625 
 
 other, that this preface may be very fairly understood, and yet he 
 who understands it shall fail to understand just anything of the 
 Hegelian system proper just anything, that is, of the origin, 
 principle (the form, in a certain sense, lies on the surface), and 
 matter of this system. Nevertheless, what Haym says here may 
 be very allowably considered critical so far as he himself is con- 
 cerned. The preface to the Phaenomenologie contains at least 
 all that Haym knows of the principle of Hegel : the preface to the 
 Phaenomenologie contains within it the germ of all that Haym 
 says of the principle of Hegel. His book, to be sure, does not 
 confine itself to the preface to the Phaenomenologie, nor to the 
 Phaenomenologie itself, but passes through hands, as if under formal 
 judicial inspection, the whole series of the works of Hegel. It 
 never gets higher than this preface, however, and from its height it 
 is that what is said of the rest is seen. What is now so familiar 
 to us as the Substance-subject, or just in general the Spirit 
 (Geist) of Hegel : this, in fact, constitutes the entire key which 
 Haym offers us, and, as everybody knows, the preface to the 
 Phaenomenologie is the easiest quarry for that. 
 
 This, then, is all that Haym knows of Hegel, or, at least, all 
 that for his book he need know. But again to him the movement 
 alluded to, the schema implied in this key, is all too plainly facti- 
 tious a thing got up, a pattern cut out. This to him who is 
 very much of a politician is but too clearly only Hegel's ideal 
 resource against the horrors of the German political reality. 
 Gb'the and Schiller, he tells us, hi^d them to Greece, and brought 
 thence the veil of poesy wherewith to shut out from themselves 
 the painful hideousness of this same political reality. So to 
 Greece Hegel too betook himself in order to be able to cover over 
 the Real of modern German ugliness with an Ideal of beautiful 
 Classical totality, the instrument of which is this same wonder- 
 fully artificial Spirit with its wonderfully artificial movement. 
 The philosophy of Hegel is but a side-piece to the poetry of 
 Gothe and Schiller, and of both poetry and philosophy the inspira- 
 tion is as against our ugly German Political Eeal an Ideal of 
 Hellenic Cosmos ! 
 
 This is really no exaggeration : I know nothing else in Haym : 
 and from Haym of Hegel nothing else will anybody else ever 
 come to know. 
 
 The following quotations will probably more than suffice, not 
 only to confirm our sentence, but to illustrate as well the literary 
 
 2R 
 
626 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 abundance of Haym the extraordinary rhetorical tenacity with 
 which he accomplishes the extension and expansion of a single 
 scanty formula over hundreds of pages : 
 
 The universe, according to this system, is a Cosmos, or beautiful Totality ; 
 but it is at the same time Spirit, and describes, consequently, in whole and in 
 part, the reflexive process which is the essence of Spirit. The universe is a 
 living whole : all parts of the universe must, therefore, in constant mutual 
 self-reference, be conceived as, dialectically fluent, rounding themselves into 
 the whole (p. 221). 
 
 Unable to transmute his ideal into the actual, he transforms the actual into 
 his ideal (p. 86). 
 
 It (the system) is not so much a great, unconscious creation of time not so 
 much a jet, an invention of genius, as rather a product of talent something, 
 with reflexion and design, essentially factitious (p. 10). 
 
 He found that the Gothes and Schillers had opened to the German people 
 the treasure of its own inner and therewith the genuine treasure of spiritual 
 life in general, that they for this people had brought to view its ideals and 
 sentiments in a like manner as Sophocles and Aristophanes had brought for 
 the Athenians theirs. He resolved in the same path to climb higher ; he 
 resolved to do the same thing in reference to the general notions and categories 
 of the German nation to put into its hand, as it were, a Lexicon and a 
 Grammatic, of its pure thought (p. 310). 
 
 True ; the poetry of Gothe and Schiller sets before us a world of beauty 
 and the ideal, which brings into repose and reconciliation the disunion of 
 German spiritual life. But this reconciliation comes not into existence on 
 the basis of a beautiful and self-satisfied actuality ; these works take not 
 nutriment from the marrow of the historical and actual life of the nation. 
 That reconciliation conies into existence in contrast to, and in defiance of, 
 an unbeautiful actuality ; only by flight out of the present into the past of 
 Hellenic life does it succeed with our two great poets to realise perfected 
 beauty. Theirs, therefore, is an artificial poetry which terminates at last in 
 an overcharged Idealistic and Typic. The end, then, again, is, with Gothe, 
 resignation ; with Schiller, the unfulfilled and abstract ideal. In the enjoy- 
 ment of this fair picture- world, our nation must needs delude itself a moment 
 with the dream of Greek felicity and Greek repose to awaken directly poorer 
 and more restless than before. To Poetry such a delusion was indeed natural, 
 and who would dispute it with her after she had offered to our enjoyment 
 what was sweetest and most perfect 1 But we see now all at once Metaphysic 
 seized with the same illusion. Turning aside from the strait path of sober 
 inquiry and from the labour of deliverance through the most conscientious 
 criticism, Hegel begins to expand over our spiritual world his ideal that was 
 found in Hellas, that was strengthened by exhaustive penetration into the 
 ultimate grounds of all religion. A dreamed-of and yearned-for future is 
 treated as present. A system tricked out with the entire dignity of the 
 science of truth raises itself beside our poetry, and with diamond net spins us 
 into an idea with which the want, the incompleteness, and the unbeauty of 
 our political and historical actuality is at every point in contradiction. With 
 the Hellenising picture of nature and of fate through poets, we receive a 
 

 HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 627 
 
 Hellenising metaphysic which, in spite of our necessity, lures us to believe that 
 all the limitations and contradictions of our knowledge, of our faith, of our 
 life, reconcile themselves in the continuity of a beautiful whole (pp. 91, 92). 
 
 Halt we a moment ; for we have put hand on the second decisive word for 
 the composite enigma of the Hegelian Philosophy, the second key to the 
 understanding of its inner texture. The first word [or key] was : the beautiful 
 Cosmos is in whole the reflexive process of the Spirit : the Absolute is Spirit. 
 The second more important word [or key] is : the beautiful Cosmos is just on 
 this account in each particular part the same perpetually self-renewing process, 
 a transition, a compulsion forward from moment to moment, a dialectic that 
 returns into itself and gradually completes itself up to the whole : the Absolute 
 is infinitely dialectic. And with this last word I signalise the strangely 
 peculiar character and at the same time the pervading reason of the deep and 
 enduring influence of this philosophy. An sestheticising and vivifying of 
 logic that concealed itself under an abstract schema, that procured itself 
 authority and systematised itself under premiss of a metaphysical formula 
 for the universe, that pushed itself into everything : on this mostly is that 
 influence based. This philosophy is an out-and-out revolution of the treat- 
 ment of the notion. It proclaims that ' the determinate as such has no other 
 essential nature than this absolute unrest, not to be that which it is,' 
 that * all that is is a be-mediate ' * (a result). It brings through its dialectic 
 into flux and movement the elements which were previously held as fixed 
 and immovable. It tears up thus the whole floor of thought, and brings forth 
 thereby, beside the noble fruit of a marvellous mastery of intellect that breathes 
 life into cognition and the objects of cognition, the poisonous product as well of 
 an unscrupulous and indefensible sophistic (pp. 106-7). 
 
 And greater still than the difficulty of the outer, is that of the inner form. 
 I mean that finishedness-from-the-first, that at-once-into-existence of the whole of 
 this world of thought. Here there is not a word of any gradual introduction into 
 an investigation, of any joining on to ordinary views, of any previous setting- 
 up of the question whereby one might know where one was, of any critical 
 statement of the case where one might of himself be able to take his stand. 
 With the first step we find ourselves as through stroke of magic in a peculiar 
 new world. Like the prince in Andersen's tale, we seem in sleep to have 
 fallen on the back of the winged spirit who carries us off through the air in 
 order to let us see deep beneath us the world from which we have been 
 snatched. In other words, the System, as it is there, appears to bid defiance 
 to every analysis, to all research. It shows there like a smooth ball more 
 ready to roll than easy to catch. Broken down is the scaffolding over which 
 the arch was built. Filled up are all the inlets and outlets to this edifice of 
 thought. One and only one possibility is there to penetrate here. We possess the 
 key to this edifice only by this, that we have followed the philosopher in the 
 course of his studies and the progress of his training, that we have stolen be- 
 hind him into the innermost of his still resorts of thought and feeling. What 
 is not in actuality [this is the key as before] shall exist in the ether of the Idea. 
 The unreal notions of the Germans, divorced from the truth of things, shall 
 
 * Be-mediatc is an ugly mongrel for ein Vermitteltes ; but it seems to me to 
 convey the peculiar Hegelian sense somehow. 
 
628 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 through the native energy and force of thought shape themselves into real 
 notions, and, through this their realisation, into a world of notions. Reflexion 
 shall bring into reality the ideal which the praxis of German life denies. 
 A deed of reflexion shall be set on whereby the gulf which by the political 
 action of the German state is perpetually created and maintained between the 
 universal and the particular, between formality and reality, shall be filled up. 
 Through thought shall the fair concord between inner and outer, between the 
 parts and the whole, be restored to that reality which it possessed in the 
 poetry and art, in the State and customs of antiquity. Through thought shall 
 that contradiction-annihilating life, shall that truth of love, and that truth of 
 religion, be set into existence. The same sharp-sighted and matter-of-fact, 
 penetrating and history-sifting thought which discovered in antiquity and the 
 tenets of Christianity the ideal, but in the German present the negation of this 
 ideal the same thought moves now from the hem of the Hegelian spirit to the 
 centre of the same ; it throws itself once for all on this ideal itself in order to 
 raise its burthen into an absolute form for every interest, for the collective 
 world of being and of consciousness. Leagued with the spirit of a better 
 future, in silent agreement with the genius of German poesy, borne on the 
 wave of a new world-epoch, it soars beyond the immediate level of the actual 
 life at its feet nay, beyond the self-acknowledged limits of all reflexion, in 
 order to construct a world which is a reality only under the heaven of Hellas, 
 a truth only in the deeps of the God-adoring soul. Only the boldness and the 
 breadth of the conception can conceal the inner contradiction and the impossi- 
 bility of the enterprise. Only the intensest exertion of the thinking faculty will 
 enable the unwilling medium of reflexion to allow to rise from it an aesthetic 
 product of cognition. Only the universe, on the other hand, will be wide 
 enough to render inappreciable the dimensions within which every particular 
 existence may be able to show as correlative part of a fair and living Cosmos. 
 This is the history and this the character of the Hegelian system. I name it an 
 cesthetic work of cognition. It will not, as it were, critically decompose the 
 world of being and of consciousness, but construct it into the unity of a beauti- 
 ful whole. It will not expose the aporias of cognition not make clear to itself 
 the limits, the contradictions, and antinomies in the world of spirit, but, on 
 the contrary, it will strike down these difficulties and level out these contra- 
 dictions. It is, I say, the exposition of the universe as of a beautiful living 
 Cosmos. After the manner of the old Greek philosophy, it will show how in 
 the world as in a whole all the parts conjoin to service of one harmonious 
 order. It will make present to us the universal all as a vast organism in 
 which each particular ceases to be dead and receives the significance of a living 
 organ. It will show that the whole is an infinite all of life ; to this end it 
 will in everything finite expose its finiteness, and just with this and on account 
 of this demonstrate its necessary completion into an infinite life. . . . Such 
 main idea on which lies the conception of the whole system, will require 
 now in the first place to be suppleted by the imagination of the systematiser. 
 (Pp. 94-97.) 
 
 This theory of Haym, so enormous in word if so scanty in 
 thought, must be allowed to possess it own correctness so far. 
 The system of Hegel certainly aims at totality (as for aesthetic 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 629 
 
 beauty, Hellenic Cosmos, Greek Ideals, German Beals, Gothe 
 and Schiller, and Poetry and all that, it may be viewed for the 
 moment as simply literary importation) and the Self -reflexion 
 of Spirit is as certainly somehow present in it. An attempt at 
 totality, and an attempt at dialectic articulation, no one can" 
 deny in Hegel. But did we want Haym's five hundred brilliant 
 pages to make us aware of this ? Which of us did not see this 
 for himself the very first moment he looked into Hegel ? A 
 whole, and, in dialectic symmetry, what else lies on the surface, 
 on the very outside of the system? Is not this just what the 
 table of contents at once makes plain to us? Is not this just 
 the whole of the information we all of us get and we get it at 
 once when we look at Hegel the first day, and perhaps the 
 thousandth ? And is not this the single grievance we would have 
 removed ? Is not this the single difficulty we long to have 
 explained ? Yes, it is a whole, * finished-from-the-first,' ' at-once- 
 in-existence ' Why ? Yes, it is dialectically articulate but 
 How ? ' Beautiful Totality ! ' ' Self-reflexion of Spirit ! 'with 
 such hollow assumption you but mock us by an exclamatory echo 
 in return for an interrogatory call. Nay, nay ! hide it not in 
 rhetoric, cover it not with flowers and flourishes of literature 
 Hellenic Cosmos and what not: we see it perfectly clearly all 
 the time you see totality, you see self-reflexion ; but as for 
 anything else, you see it no more than we ourselves. How it is 
 totality, and what is the totality, hoy} it is dialectically articulate, 
 and what it is that is dialectically articulate just in general 
 what is all this about what are the thoughts here till you can tell 
 us something about that, till we can tell you something about that, 
 both of us had better hold our tongues, however literary we be. 
 
 Haym's rhetoric and literature we blow into space, then, rhetoric 
 and literature being no substitutes for ideas, no substitutes for 
 information, and we see the so-called key which was supposed to 
 lie in their midst to be no key no key, but a juggle practised on 
 us, as it were, by means of our own admissions. The probability, 
 then, is that Haym knows not the literal historical derivation from 
 Kant the probability, then, is that Haym knows not the literal 
 Hegelian Begriff? Just so; this is the truth, and in the above 
 extracts there are proofs to this effect ; but before commenting 
 upon these, we shall add others. 
 
 It (the Hegelian Philosophy) is the history of philosophy itself projected 
 on a plane (p. 1). 
 
630 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 As it is the history of philosophy in nuce, so it is philosophy in nuce 
 (p. 2). 
 
 The Logic, to say it briefly, has a course like history ; and this, because 
 history as such has been made the material and guide, the concrete agent of 
 the dialectic (p. 320). 
 
 Critique and refutation of Kantianism pervade the ' science of logic ' from 
 one end to the other. This (' science of logic') relates itself to Kant as Kant's 
 first great work related itself to Wolff and Hume. In Kant, Hegel sees his 
 
 predecessor, as Kant his in Hume And further. As the science of 
 
 logic has its explanation with Criticismus (Kant's) behind it, so it has its 
 explanation with the philosophy of the Romantic (Schelling's) behind it. 
 Rather, it is nothing but the systematisiiig of this latter explanation (p. 298). 
 
 However strange the articulation of this system may seem, however forced 
 the development of moment from moment, we should be extremely blind, 
 did we not see the clue by means of which the pretended necessity of the 
 dialectic progress receives an authorisation of fact. It receives such author- 
 isation by means of the history of the Pre-Hegelian philosophy. Our dialectician 
 expressly turns himself in special polemical excursus now against Kant and 
 Hume, now against Fichte and Schelling. Even this express polemic, 
 however, always leans quite closely on his positive developments, and almost 
 blends with the dialectic of the categories. Nay, more. Just in the last- 
 stated parts does this logical dialectic directly take nutriment from the 
 factual dialectic of the historical course and matter of the latest philosophy. 
 It is self-evident not the less self-evident because it is not spoken out that 
 it is the matter and context of the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy which is 
 criticised in the 'System of Grunclsatze' (axioms, principles) and in the 
 ' Metaphysic of Objectivity.' It is the Fichtian Wissenschaftslehre, that, as 
 in its Theoretical and Practical parts, we recognise under the title of the 
 * Metaphysic of Subjectivity.' Kant, as is well known, had no metaphysic 
 of his own : he re-coined the Wolflian metaphysic into a metaphysic of 
 Problems. He had, on the other hand, a Logic of his own, and different 
 from the usual one, a so-called transcendental logic. In this transcendental 
 logic he deduced the categories of Quantity and Quality, the relational 
 notions of Substantiality, Causality, and Reciprocity ; the modal ones of 
 Possibility, Actuality, and Necessity. In the Critique of Pure Reason, too, a 
 ' system of Grundsatze ' followed the deduction of the Categories ; and the 
 dialectic critique of the previous Metaphysic followed the system of 
 Grundsatze. Here we have the outlines, much modified, it is true, of the 
 
 Hegelian Logic and Metaphysic In his system Hegel realised the 
 
 notions in truth in the most varied manner. He realised them neither least 
 nor least successfully in this way, that he modified their colourless abstract 
 nature by the dye of their historical value. In the most varied way, also, he 
 made them fluent and capable of movement. One of these ways, and not the 
 least successful, consisted in immersing them in the stream of the historical 
 evolution. Notions, he might in this reference have said, are in truth just as 
 in a particular time they were understood, and they develop in truth into what, 
 in the historical transition from system to system, they developed into. Much 
 more certainly than this historical background of the notion- 'realising' 
 dialectic, behind the formalism of the same, do the various other ways, as just 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 631 
 
 so many other concrete supports of the progress of the reflexion from moment 
 to moment, conceal themselves/ (Pp. 113-115.) 
 
 These are the strongest expressions we can find anywhere in 
 Haym in regard to his sense of the connexion of the Hegelian 
 system with Kant and with history in general. And one is apt 
 to exclaim at first, And what would you have more ? Are they not 
 strong enough ? Is it not clear from them that Haym knows all 
 about Hegel and Kant, and Hegel and History ? We say, No : 
 if the literal connexion with Kant and History on the part of 
 Hegel which has been developed in these pages is to be inter- 
 polated by the reader into these words of Haym as uttered by 
 Haym, we have again an instance of those fallacious ex post facto 
 significations of which we have already spoken. 
 
 Hegel tells us himself that his Logic is the History of Philosophy 
 itself, not 'projected on a plane' indeed, but freed from the con- 
 crete contingency of the historical form. In this way, the Logic 
 may be very well spoken of as the ' History of Philosophy in 
 mice ; ' but how can we ever call the Hegelian System itself 
 whether with reference to the score of volumes of the ' Works/ 
 or to the three parts of the Encyclopaedie ' Philosophy in nuce ? 
 Hegel's philosophy is philosophy in nuce: how shall we obtain 
 any sense for this phrase, unless by simply explaining again that 
 Hegel's philosophy is the History of Philosophy in nuce ? There 
 is something .here of seductive literary jingle merely. 
 
 Then, Haym says that Hegel's Logic has a course like History, 
 not of its own pulse, not of any internal principle in itself, but be- 
 cause of the simple and intelligible outside reason that Hegel has 
 constructed his Logic out of History. But this is not to under- 
 stand the Hegelian connexion of Logic and History. To Hegel, 
 thought Logic is all ; it has developed itself it is a progres- 
 sive alternating Gesetztseyn, according to its own laws, its own 
 necessity, its own life ; and the History of Logic in concrete 
 natural actuality is but the same process, the same life, in the 
 mode of externality. In Logic, Substance by its own notional 
 dialectic becomes Causality, which in turn and similarly becomes 
 Reciprocity, and then the Notion. In the History of Logic (or of 
 Philosophy, if you will), this series is externally represented or 
 realised by the actual thinkings of the men Spinoza, Leibnitz, 
 Locke ; then Hume, then Kant, and then Hegel himself. It is 
 this literal connexion which neither Haym, nor, if we are right, 
 anybody else as yet has understood ; and it is a veritable inversion 
 
632 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of the truth to assert the Logic of Hegel to have been formed from 
 without by a consideration of actual history. In this assertion, 
 even, it is not for a moment contemplated that the transition of 
 Keciprocity into the Notion is the abstract expression of the con- 
 crete history of thought from Kant to Hegel ; and the last-named 
 (Hegel), instead of being enabled by History to construe Logic, 
 was, on the contrary, enabled by Logic to construe History. We 
 do not mean to say that Logic was throughout the first ; but we do 
 mean to say that a generalisation of Logic on hint of Kant was 
 the first ; that the concrete connexion between Substantiality, 
 Causality, Eeciprocity, &c., and actual modern history, was a dis- 
 covery that constituted the second ; and that, after these, by means 
 of a variety of labours and investigations now of history and now 
 of philosophy, there arose as result the Hegelian System. Now 
 it is this literal statement which we think the right one 
 as regards the connexion between the Hegelian Logic and 
 actual History. Haym plainly has not even attained to 
 the tinge of a dream of it. That there was some connexion, 
 it was not difficult for Haym to know, for Hegel tells us 
 again and again the fact ; and a very simple comparing of their 
 respective tables of contents sufficed to show that if Quantity, 
 Quality, Substance, Cause, Keciprocity, &c., had been discussed 
 by Kant, they had also been discussed by Hegel. Haym's know- 
 ledge amounts to no more than this ; he simply points to this 
 community of contents : he knows nothing and says nothing of 
 the inner articulations : what we name the unknown and hidden 
 heuristic life of Hegel when constructing his system, to this he 
 has attained no access, with whatever closeness he has followed 
 the outer history and appearances of Hegel. He sees some relation 
 between the Logic and Kant, but immediately thereafter he sees 
 some relation also between the Logic and Schelling, and this 
 latter relation he decides to be the dominant one. * Rather,' says 
 he, ' it (i.e., the Logic) is nothing but the systematising of this 
 latter explanation ' (that come to with the Romantic of Schelling, 
 namely). Haym, in fact, has to say a great many things, and this 
 is one of them. The preface to the Phaenomenologie had very 
 plainly a great deal to do with Schelling and his intellectual per- 
 ception ; it is to gain breadth to say the Logic is occupied with 
 the same business, and we need not fear to blunder, for beyond 
 doubt there is question of Schelling in the Logic as well. In 
 fact, never getting the clue into his hand, Haym cannot simply 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 633 
 
 and satisfactorily just wind ; he is obliged to grasp at a thousand 
 scattered expedients as they float by. So it is that the Logic is 
 this instant from end to end a refutation of Kant, and the next 
 nothing but an explanation come to with Schelling: the simple 
 original unit is never caught, and then developed into its necessary- 
 many. In default of this unit with its necessary many, he is 
 compelled to see and to say that Hegel realises his notions, that 
 is, constructs his system, 'in the most varied manner ;' and just 
 after the stress which he lays on the ' historical background/ as 
 the main genetic source from which Hegel drew his materials, he 
 speaks of * the various other ways ' which are the ' other concrete 
 supports ' of the dialectic evolution, and which c conceal them- 
 selves certainly much more behind the formalism ' of the dialectic 
 than even this historical background. 
 
 But let us see what Haym himself says of what Hegel himself 
 says about the historical supports of the Logic, perhaps we shall 
 gain thus more light : 
 
 Hegel maintained if, as regards the main notions of the successive 
 historical systems of philosophy, we strip off that which belongs to their 
 external circumstances of origin, their particular applications, &c., we obtain 
 the various stages of the determination of the Idea itself in its logical notion ; 
 conversely, we have in the logical progress, the progress of historical 
 phenomena in its main moments. This, so far as I see, is more than a mere 
 hint ; it is a naive admission of the source from which the Logic drew partly 
 its matter, and more than partly the form of its movement. What in the 
 Frankfort sketch of the Logic and Metaphysic became visible only in 
 individual passages, that becomes evident now with reference to the entire 
 Logic. The Categories obtain their universal dialectic flux by the reality of 
 nature and the mind being filled into them through the fine channel of 
 abstraction. (P. 322.) 
 
 Here Haym quotes from Hegel himself an assertion of the 
 existence of a much closer connexion between Logic and History 
 than even he (Haym) seemed to seek to exhibit. Hegel says, 
 History is Logic in concrete, and, conversely, Logic is History in 
 abstracto. Haym's allusions to the Pre-Hegelian philosophy, to 
 explanations come to with Kant, Schelling, &c., are thus by no 
 means revelations, and not by any means discoveries : Hegel 
 speaks much more plainly, much more unexceptively than 
 Haym. Nay, Hegel, as we have seen, has not been taken at 
 his own word ; it is here in these pages that what is the real 
 significance (when concretely translated into history) of the 
 transition of Eeciprocity into the Notion, has been for the first 
 
634 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 time pointed out ; and Haym, for his part, still believes himself 
 to throw a light of detection on Hegel, when he makes prominent 
 some relation or oilier (he cannot say particularly what relation) 
 to history in the Logic. Nay, more ; Haym flatly refuses to take 
 Hegel's own word, and insists on calling it ' a naive admission ! ' 
 An admission, above all, a naive admission, and on the part of a 
 Hegel ! Did the Sphinx, then, naively babble her own secret, 
 and was it so that CEdipus overthrew her ? Hegel says, in such 
 and such wise, History is Logic and Logic is History : Haym says, 
 Don't believe him that just means, he took outside facts and 
 reduced them to his Logic by the fine channel of abstraction, 
 that just means, his Logic is but an artificial distillation, by means 
 of a concealed process, of the concrete facts of nature, history, and 
 consciousness, which are open, which are common to all of us. 
 Haym will not take the hint that what is, is Thought ; and that 
 every particular of what is, must be but a particular of Thought. 
 An outer world that comes one knows not whence, that is the 
 prius of Haym, and Hegel's work is to him but a cunning and 
 external metamorphosing of it. Hegel gets thence, he says, partly 
 his matter and more than partly his form. This seems an inversion ; 
 surely Haym means to say that all the matter came from without ! 
 Whence else, in Haym's way of looking, could it come ? Perhaps 
 Haym has it in mind, however, that Hegel's matter is partly pure 
 invention, pure fiction. But then, that the form is more than 
 partly derived from the realms of fact ! We thought the form 
 was the dialectic, that it was an artificial and mechanical process 
 got up somehow in imitation of the movement of Spirit, that it 
 was a poisonous Sophistic, &c. &c. : but no ; the form comes 
 ' more than partly ' from the realms of fact ! To account for this 
 Hegel, then, it is quite enough to be always brilliantly in speech ? 
 But, to Haym, with these realistic tendencies in him as we see, 
 ought anything in this world to be more valuable than the 
 categories, if, as he says, ' the reality of nature and the mind ' has 
 been ' filled into them ' ? 
 
 Haym's observations in regard to history and the Hegelian 
 Logic are very far, then, from possessing that weight and apposite- 
 ness which they may at first seem to possess. We may say, he 
 names a historical connexion, but sees not the historical connexion. 
 In fact, to him the whole truth here is, that certain historical 
 materials have been taken up by Hegel aesthetically for 
 completeness' sake into his beautiful totality. The following 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 635 
 
 extracts will extend evidence in this reference of a directer 
 nature : 
 
 How does this apocrypha, this system which has grown in concealment, 
 relate itself to the philosophy of the day ; how first of all, and before all, 
 does it relate itself to the then Philosophy of Schelling 1 (P. 143.) 
 
 Both had exchanged Kant's critical tendency in philosophy for a dogmati- 
 cal one. Both had burst the thread with which Fichte had bound the whole 
 of truth to the infinite self-certainty of the ego. Both had ceased to regard 
 human freedom (free-will) as the highest form and the highest law under 
 which cognition had to subordinate the entire universe. ... In contrast to 
 the Fichtian method of reflexion and deduction, both had come to develop 
 the matter of their theory of the universe in a representative and descriptive 
 manner. . . . Both saw in the sensuous universe no longer the mere reflex 
 of ' the light immanent in the ego,' but the realisation and manifestation of a 
 third (party), of a metaphysical absolute that grasped up both subjectivity 
 and objectivity. The philosophy of both was, again, what neither the 
 Kantian nor the Fichtian had been, a System. Both systems finally and 
 this one point is far and away the most important, to this one point all the 
 rest may be reduced, from it all the rest may be explained both systems 
 rested ultimately on the same common principle, were dominated by the 
 one, now more and now less distinctly enunciated thought : the whole of 
 being is like a work of art, the whole thought as action, nature as history 
 stands under the aesthetic schema and bears the type of absolute harmony. 
 (P. 144.) 
 
 But nothing of such a struggle, of such a groping, of such a vacillating 
 irresolution, shows itself in the genesis of the Hegelian convictions. From 
 the moment he enters philosophy independently there hangs before him an 
 ideal of a view of the world and of life that only late indeed realised itself in 
 the form of a philosophical system, the physiognomy of which, however, was 
 already visible in firm traits in those early paraphrases of the evangelical 
 history and the theological dogmas. Heart and soul immovably directed to 
 this ideal, he advances with firm step to his system ; neither the Reason- 
 Kritik nor the Wissenschaftslehre can impose upon him, perplex him, divert 
 him, shake him. Unsteady, irregular, and eccentric, advancing by zig-zag, is 
 the line which Schelling describes before he throws himself into the point of 
 Identity : continuous, uninterrupted, straightly, surely drawn the path along 
 which the convictions of Hegel proceed till they establish themselves in the 
 system. (P. 145.) 
 
 What Schelling had got at second-hand, that Hegel had got at first. The 
 aesthetic world-theory of the forner had the modern, that of the latter Hellenic, 
 classicism and humanism as its foundation. . . . Hegel's philosophy in its 
 original form, on the contrary, is an independent fruit of philological studies ; 
 it is a side-piece to the poetry of Gothe and Schiller, and grown on the same 
 soil a philosophical attempt to restore the antique, as this poetry was a 
 poetical attempt. ... He has, as it were, unconsciously converted into 
 moments of his system both Kantianism and Fichtianism, and in the con- 
 struction of this system these modes of thought have themselves received the 
 colour of his ideal. . . . Schelling, because he has passed so directly from the 
 school of the preceding systems to his new position, has the advantage over 
 
636 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Hegel of being able more sharply and fundamentally to point this position. 
 His system has a name, and we know distinctly what it wants. In its 
 genesis from the preceding systems, and in its own principle, it is perfectly 
 transparent. (Pp. 146, 147, 148, 149.) 
 
 The more we consider the ' System of Ethics,' the more do we miss specific 
 Hegelian features, the more do we discover in it Schellingian features (p. 171). 
 The Schellingian mannerism of construction extends itself on the surface. 
 (P. 174.) The metal was Hegel's, the stamp was Schelling's. It completes 
 I repeat it the proof that the former, not only accommodated himself to the 
 latter, but that, up to a certain degree, he was dominated and carried away 
 by the peculiarity of the latter. (P. 179.) 
 
 When he describes Speculation as * Synthesis of Reflexion with the 
 Absolute Perception/ the true method as 'Self-destruction of Reflexion;' 
 when he says that ' the Self-sublating Contradiction is the highest formal 
 expression of knowledge and truth ; ' or when he characterises the 
 ' absolute notion ' as the * absolute direct contrary of itself : ' when he 
 demands that every part of philosophy be presented in the shape 
 of an independent, complete formation, and this formation be 'united 
 with the logical element,' all this amounts to expressions which do 
 not indeed cancel his Schellingianism, but, &c. . . . The dialectic is his 
 peculiar difference from Schelling (p. 212). He adapted himself in the first 
 three and a half years of his Jena residence to the Identitats-philosophie : the 
 consequence was, that he threw himself with greater stress on the aesthetic 
 side of his world-picture (p. 221). Much deeper than the modern had the 
 ancient spirit acted on him. Despite all acquaintance with later literary and 
 philosophical endeavours, he was still a special intimate only of the genius of 
 Hellenic Antiquity. The pith and marrow of his system had just for this 
 reason of this we have convinced ourselves grown up out of antique root ; 
 almost perfectly foreign and isolated it stood beside those creations of the 
 German Spirit which were even then in bloom, and had arrested the interest 
 of contemporaries (p. 126). 
 
 The origin and character of this system were totally different from those of 
 the systems of Kant and Fichte. The object of Kant was, first of all, before 
 a single step was taken in philosophy, with the most self-denying and im- 
 partial accuracy to buoy out the terrain of possible cognition. It was his 
 object to discover a fixed and immovable point of truth to which to attach 
 with infallible certainly the whole of knowledge, and he discovered this 
 point grasping deep down into the undermost grounds of human nature in 
 the conscience. Quite otherwise lay the matter with Hegel. It is not in 
 first rank the necessity of scientific conscientiousness and truth that impels 
 him to philosophy, but it is the necessity to represent to himself the whole 
 of the world and of life in a form fully ordered and arranged. It is not a 
 fixed, marked-off point out from which he prosecutes the discovery of truth, 
 but it is an ideal grown out of history and the mind itself a concrete image, 
 a broad and full idea, an idea of the authority of which beforehand he gives 
 himself no abstract critical account, but which out of the full energy of his 
 being he has appropriated to himself and lived for himself, which, he knows 
 not himself how, has filled and penetrated him to the full, and into which he 
 now longs to carry over the entire wealth of the being of nature and of man. 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 637 
 
 The Hegelian philosophy, accordingly, arises, as it were, from a poetic im- 
 pulse from the impulse to project a figure of the world according to an ideal 
 type lying ready in the mind of the systematiser. He is beyond Kant and 
 Fichte, without having and before he has expressly exercised any inquest 
 into their leading principles. In Frankfort, indeed, he studied the Kantian 
 moral and political theories which had just appeared ; but even in the 
 detailed study of these writings, as he plies it for himself pen in hand, he 
 enters not properly into any critical analysis of the Kantian principles, but 
 he opposes to the rigorous consequences which Kant had developed from his 
 ground-notions, quite simply his own notions which had grown up from the 
 soil of religious sentiment and historical idea. . . . The question is the 
 authorisation of Hegel to translate that ideal into the form of reflexion and 
 thought. ... Be it as it may with the truth of the Kantian and Fichtian 
 philosophy, this is certain : they were pure and natural products of the 
 factual situation of our nation (pp. 88-89). 
 
 It is an ideal grown up in a foreign soil and in an alien time by which 
 Hegel is out and out actuated (p. 91). 
 
 This labour stood visibly, quite independently of its being only a Torso, 
 all too isolated and special, all too apart from the consequent, connected, 
 manifest course which philosophy had taken in the hands of Kant, Fichte, 
 and Schelling (p. 122). 
 
 All here is and happens quite otherwise than in what has been elsewhere 
 and ever called Logic and Metaphysic. We have here partly other notions 
 than those we know from Aristotle, from Kant, or from the metaphysic of 
 Wolff. Quite otherwise is the nature of these notions, quite otherwise are their 
 cognition and mutual relations conceived. The Hegelian restoration of Logic 
 and Metaphysic is a total revolution of them (p. 313). The apriorism of Hegel, 
 because it did not, like the Kantian, derive from the concrete inner, was what 
 broke the point off all the apparent liberality of the political views of Hegel. 
 .... These were furthest from true freedom where they spoke biggest of 
 reason and the notion (p. 355). Since Rant we have had again an ethical, but 
 no longer any speculative metaphysic : now (after Hegel) we have again a 
 speculative but no ethical metaphysic (p. 367). The defect with which morality 
 remains affected in Hegel arises from his inability to appreciate the Kantian 
 conception of it (p. 376). The word free-will is a coin whose currency finds 
 itself in constant oscillation. The inner intention alone determines the sense 
 of this word. The construction which Hegel puts upon it, is the means of 
 betraying the fundamental defects of his philosophy. What falls at once into 
 the eye, is the preponderance of the theoretic over the practical, or, to say it 
 more correctly, the absorption of the willing into the thinking Spirit. Will 
 and free-will evaporate with Hegel into thinking and knowing. The will, so runs 
 the psychological definition which forms the basis of his whole system of free- 
 will, is 'a particular form of thought.' .... The will, he says, 'is only as 
 thinking intelligence true free-will ; ' free-will in that way is identical with 
 reason Sharply to say it, this is a will, then, which wills not (p. 370). 
 
 If we saw from previous quotations that Haym ascribed the 
 development of the Hegelian Logic to the actual use of the 
 historical materials of Kant &c., and from others that he would 
 
638 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 not, at the same time, accept Hegel's own admission of this his- 
 torical connexion as on internal principles, but would insist on a 
 mere external, though covered, mechanism being the only agent 
 at work, we see from these last quotations that Hayin has not 
 attained to the slightest conception of the veritable historical 
 connexion' which affiliates Hegel to his predecessors. The truth 
 of the matter is, that Hegel, by means of the most laborious, con- 
 tinuous, and frequently -repeated analyses, especially of Kant, but 
 very certainly and very particularly of Fichte and Schelling also, 
 arrived at an accurate perception of the true nature and real reach 
 of the principles that constituted the foci in the meditations of 
 Kant, and of the respective influences of the further operations of 
 Fichte and Schelling thereupon. Not till this was accomplished, 
 did he discern the remarkable light which the new results reflected 
 on the Philosophy of the Greeks and the History of Philosophy in 
 general. The new interpretations thus obtained as regards these 
 latter interests were more adapted, in the first place, to conceal 
 than reveal his relations to Kant ; but in this last he rooted, and 
 the stiff, wooden, insecure enthusiasm for Sophocles which 
 Holderlin had awakened in him had no influence on his philo- 
 sophy as such. We have it again and again under the hand of 
 Hegel, though he was certainly not at all loud about it to his con- 
 temporaries, that he knew perfectly well that he worked only on 
 a thing called the Kantian Philosophy, which was a genuine pro- 
 duct of human history and human consciousness, and which he 
 himself, as genuinely, endeavoured to advance to the place and 
 function it promised to fill and fulfil as the Science of Philosophy 
 at length. To Hegel it was perfectly evident that, do what he 
 might, and let Fichte and Schelling have done whatever they may, 
 this thing would be known in time as, and would be named only, 
 the Kantian Philosophy. JSTor one whit less evident was it, that 
 it was a true interest and carried in its womb all the germs of the 
 future. So runs the story with us and in truth ; but the reader 
 need only glance superficially back on the extracts we have made, 
 to become at once aware that with Haym the whole matter runs 
 in precisely the contrary direction. 
 
 To Haym, despite certain borrowed articles he sees in it, the 
 house of Hegel is absolutely peculiar and absolutely isolated. 
 It has no connexion whatever with the houses over- the- way. In 
 origin, motive, plan, structure, it is wholly different from these. 
 The very articles borrowed are but to fill his house ; nay, they 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 639 
 
 are just such household articles as all such houses cannot be 
 without. Hegel tells him, indeed, that in raising his house, he 
 laid others under contribution : but Haym will not believe him 
 not at all in his own way of it. The principle was modern and 
 genuine, and its treatment was through thought, thought the 
 sincerest and the truest ; but Haym would have it that the 
 principle was ancient, and its treatment through art, imagination, 
 invention. To fill up this principle, accordingly, Haym has no 
 natural clue of its own to wind into it : he is compelled to stop 
 and to stuff it with a thousand miscellaneous expedients which 
 his own great native ingenuity enables him to intercept on every 
 side but not, however, without falling on the face ever and anon 
 over his own contradictions. 
 
 These matters are so plain that it is not worth while spending 
 time on them, and we shall offer to guide the reader in interpret- 
 ing the above extracts by only a word or two. 
 
 In the quotations (pages 626-633), which were made for 
 another purpose, we shall find several expressions which militate 
 against the truth of the case (the ' Secret of Hegel ' ) as it has 
 yielded itself in the present work, and demonstrate the blindness 
 of Haym to the real origin of the System from Kant. From these 
 it is clear that to Haym the work of Hegel is but a factitious and 
 illusory attempt to transform, not his Ideal into the Actual, but 
 ' the Actual into his Ideal.' For the accomplishment of this 
 work, Hegel, in his opinion, ' turns aside from the strait path of 
 sober inquiry, from the labour x of deliverance through con- 
 scientious criticism ' (such as Kant's), to set up a ' composite 
 enigma,' ' tricked out with the appearance of a science of truth/ 
 that merely seeks to be in relation with ' a dreamed-of and 
 yearned-for future.' It stands in absolute isolation, absolutely 
 without any connexion that might be a bridge to it. It is realised 
 in ' the most varied manner ' by a variety of expedients, and in 
 general by a transcendence of 'the self-acknowledged limits of 
 all reflexion.' It is no result of criticism and analysis ; it has no 
 examination of the nature and limits of concrete thought behind it ; 
 it does not thinkingly decompose, but sesthetically construct. It 
 will not have things as they are : it will have things as it would, 
 &c. Though the description of the isolation of the system is 
 exceedingly happy and exhaustively representative of the feelings 
 of every man who approaches it for the first time, it is out of 
 place in one who pretends to have attained to initiation, and 
 
640 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 gives not a hint of the true state of the case the close and 
 literal derivation from Kant. The whole conception which the 
 words show Haym to entertain the very phrase 'composite 
 enigma ' points to a conclusion the very opposite of that which 
 has been here maintained. 
 
 In relation to the extracts which occur specially in this par- 
 ticular reference, we cannot speak differently. What concerns 
 Schelling, for example, is an enunciation in many of its con- 
 stituents completely wide of the truth. It is to follow quite a 
 wrong scent to seek, ' first of all and before all/ to track Hegel in 
 this reference. Haym himself acknowledges the incommunicable 
 disjunctions which, as regards Schelling, the Frankfort sketch of 
 the Hegelian System displays it was 'a quite other world' 
 and that 'it (the system) never receded from these its funda- 
 mental articulations' as contained in this sketch. And this is 
 the truth : in that sketch Hegel had reached to the secret of Kant ; 
 he had attained to the Begriff, and stood but in small need of 
 Schelling unless for the lift which the shoulders of the Schel- 
 lingian fame were able to extend to the then Hegelian obscurity. 
 The whole affiliation, then, of Hegel to Schelling is full of items 
 quite at variance with the veritable origin, with the veritable 
 conditions. The Frankfort sketch is evidently * a Torso/ and 
 beyond a doubt it required a licking into shape ; but how absurd 
 to say it stood in need ' of an understanding being come to with 
 the general course of German philosophy/ inasmuch as it was 
 nothing but this 'explanation/ nothing but the result of this 
 ' course/ and how infinitely more absurd it is to opine as follows : 
 ' that this in both respects (the ' licking ' and the ' explanation ') 
 really took place, we have to thank the removal of Hegel from 
 Frankfort to Jena ' ! Why, after such success as the Frankfort 
 sketch demonstrates Hegel to have obtained, the System would 
 have been eventually licked into shape though its author had 
 been consigned to Timbuctoo, had he been but left the necessary 
 means otherwise. The well-balanced affinities of Hegel and 
 Schelling, then, and their equally well-counterbalanced differences, 
 are, for the most part, but words, words, words. Hegel had not 
 exchanged 'criticism' for mere 'dogmatism;' he had not 
 abandoned 'the infinite self-certainty of the ego;' he had not 
 'ceased to regard human free-will as the highest form and the 
 highest law, &c. ; ' he had not adopted, ' in contrast to the 
 Fichtian/ 'a representative method' (at least, this is no correct 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 641 
 
 account of the matter) ; lastly, he had not with a great many 
 other things viewed all as under an ' aesthetic schema.' Again, 
 it is speaking very wide to talk of the ' physiognomy ' of the 
 system being 'already visible in firm traits' in his early theo- 
 logical studies. 'Neither the Keason-Kritik nor the Wissen^ 
 schaftslehre can impose upon him, perplex him, divert him, shake 
 him ! ' Hegel had taken good care of that ; he knew better than 
 that : he knew that out of these works only was it that he could 
 build, and he took good care to appropriate all he could for that 
 purpose out of both. We may almost say, indeed, that in these 
 two works, when they are rightly understood, will be seen the 
 beginning, the middle, and the end of Hegel. Then all that 
 about ' first hand/ ' second hand,' * modern/ ' ancient/ &c., is 
 but mere literary verbiage, so far as the special issue is concerned. 
 The Hegelian System is not ' an independent fruit of philological 
 studies.' He has not * unconsciously ' taken up into it ' both 
 Kantianism and Fichtianism.' The position of Hegel, when it is 
 understood, is as * sharply pointed ' as that of Schelling, and his 
 derivation from predecessors, not less, but more close, literal, and, 
 in the end, 'transparent.' Hegel could not get his Ethics from 
 Schelling, but only from Kant. Hegel did ' accommodate ' him- 
 self to Schelling, but he was not ' carried away ' by him ; he did 
 not allow himself to be affected by his * manier ' ; and both 
 1 metal ' and ' stamp ' are in Hegel's works Hegel's own, all 
 conditions of genesis being duly allowed for. When Hegel talks 
 of * the self - sublating contradiction being the highest formal 
 expression of knowledge and truth/ &c., these expressions 
 not only do cancel his Schellingianism, but exhibit him 
 as in possession of the Begriff infinitely beyond Schelling. ' The 
 pith and marrow of his system' we may have convinced 
 ourselves of whatever we please was not ancient but modern, 
 and this system did not stand ' almost perfectly foreign and 
 isolated ' beside its predecessors, ' which were even then in bloom/ 
 but rose bodily a literal birth out of them. ' The origin and 
 character of this system ' were not ' totally different from those of 
 Kant and Fichte.' Hegel, as much as Kant, and more open-eyed, 
 sought the ' terrain of possible cognition ; ' Hegel, as much as Kant, 
 strove to a fixed point (or principle) of truth ; Hegel, as much as 
 Kant, is distinguished by 'the most self-denying and impartial 
 accuracy.' ' The necessity of scientific conscientiousness ' is primal 
 with Hegel ; and he was not one whit keener in his longing towards 
 
 2s 
 
642 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 totality and a system than Kant himself. It is a ' fixed point ' 
 (the notion) from which he proceeds, and not ' an ideal ' which 
 possesses him ' he knows not how/ of which he can give ' no critical 
 account beforehand ' ! No man that ever lived was ever less so 
 possessed ; no man that ever lived was ever abler just to give such 
 an account. The system of Hegel does not arise from ' a poetic 
 impulse.' He is not l beyond Kant and Fichte before he has 
 exercised any inquest into their leading principles.' He did enter 
 and vastly, infinitely, incalculably more thoroughly than ever 
 student into any matter yet 'into a critical analysis of the 
 Kantian principles.' Hayrn does not know Hegel's 'authorisa- 
 tion,' certainly ; but not the less on that account is this authori- 
 sation good, though, of course, the whole thing still wants 
 confirmation. The Hegelian, quite as certainly as * the Kantian 
 and Fichtian philosophy/ was a ' pure product ' of the 'factual 
 situation ' in Germany. Hegel is not out-and-out actuated by 
 an ' ideal ' merely, and that by which he is actuated is neither 
 of ' alien soil ' nor of ' an alien time.' ' The apriorism of Hegel ' 
 did, l like the Kantian, derive from the concrete inner.' The 
 4 isolation ' of the system and the ' difference of the Logic from 
 any other have had comment enough ; but it is necessary to say 
 a word as regards the relation of Hegel to morality and free-will. 
 It must suffice at present, however, just to assert, without state- 
 ment of proof, that Hegel, while he is nowhere greater in himself, 
 is nowhere truer to Kant, than in all that appertains to Ethics. I 
 know not that there is any lesson in any mere human book that 
 can at all approach in value the lesson that comes to us from the 
 words Subjective and Objective (Form and Inhalt) as used by 
 Hegei in a practical or Ethical connexion. It is quite plain, then, 
 from a thousand tracks, that Hayrn knows nothing of the true and 
 literal derivation of Hegel from Kant. 
 
 His deliverances in regard to the ' Frankfort Sketch ' are to the 
 same effect. This sketch is named of Frankfort because it seems 
 to have been written there ; it dates thus not later than 1800 ; 
 and it is still in manuscript a manuscript ' consisting of 102 
 sheets in 4to, of which, however, the three first and the seventh 
 are wanting.' As a specimen of the contents of this remarkable 
 paper, I translate a passage contained in the notes to Haym's 
 book (p. 493): 
 
 What is united in a Judgment, the Subject and Predicate, the former the 
 Particular, the latter the Universal, contradict themselves through their 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 643 
 
 antithesis in themselves and through the opposed subsumption which they 
 mutually exercise ; each is for itself, and each refers itself in its For-self- 
 ity (Fiirsichseyn), to the other, and sets [assumes, infers, implies, or eximplies] 
 reciprocally the same as a Sublated (-ity). The one as much as the other 
 must exhibit itself as setting this ideality in the other. In the way in which 
 they refer themselves to one another in the notion of a Judgment, the con- 
 tradictory Fiirsichseyn (individuality) of each of them is set : each, however, 
 is only for itself in that the other is not for itself ; as they are in the Judgment 
 each is for itself ; the individuality of the one must therefore make the other 
 something other than it is immediately set in the Judgment : this self- 
 preservation through subjection of the other under itself is therefore im- 
 mediately an othering of this other ; but the nature of Judgment must at 
 the same time equally assert itself in this alteration and sublate at the same 
 time this otherwiseness. The way, therefore, is reflexion of this other into 
 itself. The realising of the terms of the Judgment is thus a double one, and 
 both together complete the realising of the Judgment which in this its 
 totality has itself become another ; in that the peculiarity of the terms which 
 peculiarity is essential to the Judgment has through the reflexions sublated 
 itself for itself, and rather fulfilled for itself the empty nexus (co-reference). 
 
 This extract will probably appear only so much ' clotted non- 
 sense.' Still, what Hegel is employed on here, tangled as 
 it may be, is, so to speak, the essential act of the logical 
 judgment as such the terms of it now as disjunct and again 
 as conjunct. The various extracts, however, concern the whole 
 subject, root of the System, in cognition by perception, cate- 
 gory (notion), and idea, as suggested by Kant. The quotations 
 of Haym, in truth, surprise one with the light they throw on the 
 true nature of the genesis and operations of Hegel. Indeed, the 
 perfection to which this latter has already brought the inquiry 
 is alone fitted to surprise. The triplicity is full-formed, and the 
 various divisions and subdivisions, if with differences and different 
 names, are well advanced towards the form they were afterwards 
 to assume. In short, reciprocity, the disjunctive syllogism, the 
 generalisation of the generalisation of Kant into its ultimate 
 principle, the realisation of the tri-une logical nisus, named in its 
 separate or abstract moments simple apprehension, judgment, and 
 reason this realisation carried into everything, these are the 
 creative motives apparently throughout the whole sketch. 
 
 To Haym, however, on the whole, this, the sincerest striving 
 after the inner dialectic of the Notion can only show as a bare- 
 faced arid external escamoterie. Had Haym truly seen what was 
 at work, had he truly seen the exhaustive study of Kant and the 
 carrying forward of the principles so found ; had he known the 
 veritable nature of what Hegel carried in his pocket at the moment 
 
644 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that he in appearance gave in his adhesion to Schelling, we 
 should have had some very different remarks from him on all 
 these points. But to all this Haym is simply external. Of the 
 transition of the notions, the einfache Beziehung, our reflexion, 
 and that of the thing itself, of such things, he remarks 
 (p. 109) : ' It is clear, however, that it would be a false subtlety, 
 would we see here more than one of the many formalistic turns 
 and expedients of the system at present in its commencement.' 
 Haym can only see sophistic here ; he does not know ' from what 
 point as first our dialectician took his departure, and how he con- 
 ditioned this departure/ but supposes so and so ; he speaks of ' the 
 designations in themselves quite unintelligible of Reference, Rela- 
 tion, and Proportion, &c.' This last graduated triplet ought not 
 to have been so unintelligible, for it exhibits very clearly its 
 relation to the Notion it exhibits very clearly the struggles of 
 Hegel towards his System. Failing to perceive his departure from 
 Kant, it is no wonder that the differences of Hegel from Schelling 
 prove so puzzling to Haym. But turn we now to his mode of using 
 the term Begriff,and let us see if it ever stood up to him the Begriff. 
 
 This Philosophy is an out-and-out revolution of the treatment of the 
 Notion (p. 107). He forgets, in the necessity to see his Ideal in representa- 
 tion before him, the impotence of the mere Notion, of which he himself had 
 spoken (p. 86). With both there unites itself the necessity to represent the 
 inner, and to find what were so represented, as an actual. The organ of such 
 representation is to him, such is the nature of his spirit, the understanding, 
 the sole medium in which said actualisation can accomplish itself, the Notion. 
 It is not enough to him to have begriffen Religion ; he will at the same time 
 possess it, represent it, realise it in the Begriff (p. 87). When he characterises 
 ' the absolute notion ' as ' the absolute immediate contrary of itself ' . . . this 
 is a declaration which does not do away with his Schellingianism, &c. (p. 212). 
 It were endless to pursue everywhere especially where only an ingenious 
 association of ideas is at work the trail of this dialectic. Take, however, 
 by way of example, the transition from the 'Relation of Being' to the 
 ' Relation of Thinking.' The relation of reciprocity is assumed as the most 
 highly developed form of the one, the definite notion as the most original 
 form of the other. Transition is to be accomplished from the former to the 
 latter. This transition then is to be conceived as a transition of the one into 
 the other as its ' reality.' This making real is to be considered to take place 
 according to the form of the process of the absolute spirit ; according to the 
 form, that is, of 'the othering and of the return from the othering.' How 
 runs the deduction? In the relation of reciprocity opposites are exist 
 together. Each of the opposed substances now is in relation to the other at 
 once active and passive. The double effect of both only goes to this, that 
 in the same way each of the two is in the same way neutralised, that both are 
 reduced into the quiescence of equipoise. With the completest reality is this 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 645 
 
 process described by Hegel and shown to have its part in the operations of 
 nature. We see depicted, how here the line of coming and going moves 
 forwards and backwards in injinitum ; how there are here infinitely many 
 points equally of rise and division ; how through this infinite intricacy and 
 intercrossing of coming and going, the actuality becomes the coming and at 
 the same time also the ceasing being of the substances. Directly, however^ 
 the limning of this living fact becomes compressed into an abstract sum. 
 Only so namely by means of the espial of an ingenious analogy, can the 
 reciprocal interaction and interpassioii of the opposed substances be converted 
 into their 'truth,' into the notion of the notion, that is to say, into the 
 relation of universal and particular. The truth of the relation of reciprocity 
 is to be assumed now to be a realised oneness of the opposed entities, and in 
 this neutralisedness at the same time a manifestation of them as so neutralised. 
 There has thus become, however, a self-contrary ; for in the original notion 
 the opposites were as existent. It is thus, negatively, the dropping of the 
 characteristic peculiarity of reciprocity to be a relation of existent entities, 
 and, positively, the advertence to the oneness of opposites, it is the one-sided 
 reflecting on the abstractest trait of similarity between this relation and that 
 in which universal and particular stand to each other in the definite notion, 
 it is by this that dialectic here turns to nought the upright doctrine of 
 Kant, that the notion enters indeed into existence, but never wholly assumes 
 it. The notion, then, is the * self-equal unity of opposites,' the manifestation 
 of what is latent in the process of reciprocity : on this thin thread hangs the 
 transition from the ontological to the logical forms ! (Pp. 116-17.) 
 
 It is hardly necessary, in regard to these extracts, to show that 
 Haym does not know the notion ; this has been indirectly shown 
 already ; but our purpose at present is only to show that when 
 Haym says the notion and the notion and the notion, he does not 
 mean the notion. We are not called upon at present even to take 
 note of what Haym says of reciprocity. In this reference we shall 
 say this, however, that, in what he has in view, Hegel has, properly, 
 nothing immediately to do with existents as regards the reci- 
 procity he contemplates. It may be true that, according to Kant, 
 the notion ' enters into existence but never wholly assumes it : ' 
 with this, Hegel here has no concern. But, if we withdraw from 
 existence itself, or any existence, all the moments of the notion, it 
 will very much puzzle Haym himself to tell us what then remains. 
 (In a very simple sense, indeed, that of which there can be and is 
 no notion, must be nothing). To Hegel the notion (not any thing, 
 not any existence or existent) of Causality, which is but a form 
 of the notion, has by its own dialectic movement passed into 
 Eeciprocity. What was Cause is now Effect as well, and what 
 was Effect is now no less Cause. They were tautological before, 
 and they are now only differently tautological ; and this difference 
 
646 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 is the product of the thing itself. To Hegel the notion of Eeci- 
 procity is a necessary result of the native movement of the element 
 Thought itself. But Haym may illustrate the thing to himself 
 otherwise. Haym, we may certainly say, for example, has now a 
 crude or figurate conception, a Vorstellung, of Eeciprocity. Well, 
 if he will but take the trouble narrowly to watch his Vorstellung, 
 whether as in imagination or as in actual perception if he will 
 but take the trouble to throw out all foreign admixtures, if he will 
 but take the trouble to purify and reduce his conception into its 
 absolutely abstract notion, he will obtain a result something 
 still appertinent to existence so peculiar that even he will have 
 some difficulty to prevent it passing into the notion of the 
 notion. What we have before us, then, are notions as notions, or 
 the forms of the notion as such, and any sneer about existence and 
 existents is quite irrelevant and beside the point. 
 
 Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and indeed any German writer since 
 the first of these, have been in the habit of speaking of the notion 
 just as they would speak of the perception. This is simply a 
 German method of expressing what Englishmen express by notions 
 in general, notions as such, perceptions in general, perceptions as 
 such. The notion and the perception of such usage are just the 
 universals of notions and perceptions. But the notion, as notion 
 universally, as universal notion (though the meanings will in the 
 end be found to come together), does not at all mean in this usage 
 the notion, the notion singularly, the singular notion, which, though 
 coming to him by natural genesis from Kant, is peculiar to Hegel. 
 Now ' the notion,' and ' the mere notion/ &c., of Haym is the 
 former notion, and not the latter. The perception is at this 
 moment intelligible as perception taken universally ; but if * the 
 perception ' were used as Hegel uses ' the notion/ then the percep- 
 tion would be one special, particular and peculiar would be a 
 certain single or singular perception. This has just to be pointed 
 out, and now the Keader, every time he opens his Hegel, will be 
 astonished again and again in every page that he did not see 
 before that Hegel meant by the notion, a notion, a certain 
 particular and peculiar notion. 
 
 It requires no minute inspection of the quotations from Haym 
 to discern that all this has escaped him. To him to have 
 begriffen something and to realise this something in the Begriff 
 are two different things ; but to Hegel they are the same thing, 
 for to him to begreifen and to have the Begriff have both the 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 647 
 
 peculiar and the same peculiar Hegelian meaning (a meaning in 
 the end, however, that coalesces with the ordinary one, though to 
 the development of a higher and entirely new stage of thought). 
 The mode in which Haym talks of the ' absolute notion ' is quite 
 unconscious, quite blind, quite unwitting. Then the notion of the 
 notion is not to Haym the notion of the notion : it is but the 
 relation of universal and particular (which, of course, is true too 
 in the new and higher, but to Haym unknown Hegelian sense). 
 In fact, both the way in which he uses the term, and his perfectly 
 unconscious commentary on the transition of reciprocity into the 
 notion the actual genesis of the latter demonstrate Haym never 
 to have even dreamed of regarding the notion as the notion that 
 single and singular entity which Hegel means, and which we here 
 and elsewhere attempt to express and convey. 
 
 What Haym sees is but the attempt at an organically articulated 
 Whole, which attempt everybody else sees. What he would do 
 now is, account for this attempt ; and the means he uses are an 
 Ideal of Hellenic Cosmos which he holds Hegel to realise, and 
 which he himself would in explanation realise, by * various ways/ 
 by 'many turns and expedients. 1 Haym accordingly follows 
 Hegel step by step through his life and the series of his publica- 
 tions. He is thus with Hegel and near Hegel, and can always 
 allude to some fact of Hegel. But the boastful exclamation, every 
 now and then, ' Ha ! you see I am on his traces ; I take you with 
 me into the very den of the unknown and inexplicable monster 
 at last,' is about the hollowest attempt to bawl oneself arid others 
 into a baseless conviction of success which, perhaps, any one has 
 ever witnessed. In fact, it needs not directly to demonstrate the 
 failure of Haym by reference to the historical connexion, the 
 Frankfort Sketch, the Begriff, &c. : Hayrn's whole edifice cannot 
 support itself on its own incessant self-contradictions, but tumbles 
 through these into an untenable chaos ; and, for a conclusive and 
 satisfactory refutation, it suffices to show this. Nor is this an 
 operation of any difficulty, unless, indeed, the extreme abundance 
 of the materials shall be thought such. 
 
 The single Begriff is the genetic One of the Many and of the All 
 of Hegel. Knowing this, Haym would have given us simplicity 
 and consistency ; not knowing this, he has given us, instead, only 
 multitude and incongruity. Not knowing this, he has exclaimed, 
 That symmetrical totality is but an ideal, a Greek ideal, and 
 Hegel has necessarily given it body through a variety of mis- 
 
648 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 cellaneous expedients. Haym accordingly sets up this ideal as 
 his own principle of explanation ; this is hi& facing, and behind it, 
 to fill it out into a show of substance, he stuffs all manner of rags 
 and rubbish. These, however, as only disconnectedly together, 
 easily fall piecemeal. ^Esthetic fiction enunciated of a work in 
 pure philosophy, of a work in logic, that we feel at once is not 
 likely. Involuntarily we expect the theory to prove insufficient, 
 self -contradictory, and compelled to eke itself out ever and anon 
 from elsewhere. A dream of beauty is to construct a logic ! 
 That vast Hegel, whom we so long to know just something of, 
 that vast Hegel is but a dream, and as the smoke of a dream he 
 shall be shut together into the shining, little, literary casket of 
 Haym! No; these things cohere not! Statement is easy, and 
 especially to so accomplished a rhetorician as Haym ; but how- 
 just to say it at once how are we to make intelligible a warp of 
 reflexion and a woof of imagination weaving into a logic ? 
 
 Even in the extracts which have been given already, many 
 contradictions, on examination, show. Literature, in fact, oc- 
 cupied with the satisfaction, with the applause of the moment, is, 
 perhaps, in its own nature prone to contradiction. Consider this 
 point alone : In the extract that occurs above at page 626, we are 
 told that Gothe arid Schiller ' had opened to the Germans their 
 own inner/ 'had brought for this people its Ideals and Senti- 
 ments to view' 'even as Sophocles and Aristophanes (Thucy- 
 dides and Plato are added elsewhere p. 146 of Haym's book) 
 had brought to the Greeks theirs ; ' and that Hegel, following in 
 the same track, wanted to do the same thing by the categories 
 and notions of the Germans wanted to put into their hands ' a 
 Lexicon/ 'a pure Grammatic' of such. Now, all the world is 
 agreed that Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Plato did 
 well in this matter, that they did in this a genuine work which is 
 to reap the gratitude of the latest posterity. We are to suppose, 
 then, that as these were to the Greeks, Gothe, Schiller, and Hegel 
 are to the Germans, and similarly deserve well at the hands of 
 posterity for an honest and glorious work done. But, in our 
 very next extract, all this is strangely changed. It was not 
 German Ideals and Sentiments, it seems, after all, that Gothe 
 and Schiller, and Hegel brought, it was Greek ones, and accord- 
 ingly the Hellenising poetry of the former is only 'artificial/ 
 'an over -charged Idealistic and Typic/ as the Hellenising 
 philosophy of the last is but deception, delusion, and sophistic ! 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 649 
 
 This, as one sees, is but a kind of literary speaking in the air 
 for speaking's sake ! 
 
 But there are other contradictions, and bearing more directly 
 on the matter in hand. We see, for example, to begin with the 
 earlier extracts, that the motive of Hegel is an ideal of beauty; 
 ' a poetic impulse,' derived ' he knows not how,' and we feel that 
 the result is not such as we should have expected, when we are 
 told that it is ' no unconscious creation,' ' no jet,' * not an invention 
 of genius,' but ' a Gemachtes (an artefact) of talent.' Then 
 analysis is demonstrated to be the forte of Hegel; but towards 
 his Logic it is not analysis of the aporias of thought, &c., which 
 he has employed no, his Logic, on the contrary, shall be a 
 synthesis, an aesthetic, an artificial synthesis ! It is from Schelling 
 that Hegel shall derive too, at the same time, that his work is 
 quite unlike that of Schelling, 'another world from the first!' 
 One moment Hegel is to Haym in historical connexion with Kant, 
 Fichte, and the rest ; and, the next, he is wholly isolated, discon- 
 nected, cut off, in short, totally unlike all other philosophers in 
 origin, character, &c. History (and the same thing is said of 
 perception) is the ' concrete agent of the dialectic,' ' natural and 
 mental life its principle/ yet, 'because his apriorism ( = his 
 dialectic), unlike the Kantian, did not derive from the concrete 
 inner, &c. &c.' 
 
 A multitude of extracts which are now in place, and which 
 were translated directly for the purpose of demonstrating the 
 numberless contradictions into which Haym's impossible theory 
 leads him, must, out of considerations of space (which are now 
 not unnatural), be passed over with but an occasional touch. We 
 find, from page 229, that the Greek Ideal stands in need of 
 among other supplementary expedients a Protestant Eeal ! We 
 are told, too, that in the Frankfort Sketch (p. 121) ' never has the 
 Hegelian system receded from these, its fundamental articula- 
 tions ; ' yet, ' when Hegel undertook the elaboration of a Logic,' 
 we learn (p. 293) that ' he did this from quite other points of 
 view, with multiplied other objects ! ' We are led to suppose, 
 then, that Haym is quite prepared for a difference here. But no : 
 having said this which would account for any difference he 
 seems immediately to forget what he has said, and suddenly to 
 awake to the necessity of demonstrating as in agreement with 
 his theory that we have still the old identity everywhere. 
 This, indeed, is not effected without something of confusion. 
 
650 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Though the crabbed opacity of the Frankfort Sketch has been 
 made obvious to us by the most telling words, and though the 
 grateful change of the Logic to perspicuity and symmetry, to aids 
 and assistances of all kinds, has been by the same means made 
 equally plain, we find that it is expected of us to believe, that 
 there is no real difference between these works, but only the 
 appearance of such, in consequence of 'the freshness, fullness, 
 and colour of youth ' in the former having naturally contracted 
 1 the wrinkles, ossifications, and callosities ' of age in the latter ! 
 It does not surprise us that Haym should intimate here that it 
 will tax ' all our powers of memory and discernment ' to see this 
 this, and any moderately satisfactory measure of human con- 
 sistency and sense ! These metaphors, indeed, about ' wrinkles/ 
 ' hulls,' ' kernels/ ' cores/ &c., only betray the contradiction they 
 are intended to hide (see p. 302). 
 
 At pages 173, 318, 323, are opportunities of inspecting the 
 materials, ' the most multifarious sensuously realistic and spiritu- 
 ally realistic, as well as historical motives/ out of which the 
 beautiful Cosmos (!) is ' woven together ; ' and at pages 103-5, we 
 have a detailed statement of how Haym believes Hegel to have 
 gone to work in rearing his system generally. Positively the 
 resultant edifice is not one whit stronger, not one whit less miscel- 
 laneous than any school-girl shall build you of a holiday. To 
 Haym it all depends on this, ' that the same combining imagina- 
 tion which suppleted the schema of the whole, should perpetually 
 conjoin and bring into play at once both of the faculties from the 
 co-operation of which the problem as problem sprang.' The two 
 faculties which imagination is here expected to unite, are under- 
 standing and perception. Now the word for perception here 
 (Anschauung) is very frequently used by Haym himself among 
 others in a way that confounds it very much with imagination 
 itself. It commonly indicates the apprehension of images whether 
 outwardly by sense or inwardly by phantasy. It is not really, 
 then, hair-splitting, to say that Haym here calls on imagination to 
 conjoin two faculties one of which is itself. But no sooner has 
 Haym made this call on imagination, than he makes the same call 
 as strongly, and more strongly, on understanding : 
 
 The special strength of this intellect (he says) lies in the tenacity of its 
 faculty of abstraction, in the indefatigableness of its reflection : the whole 
 burthen and honour will fall, consequently, on the function of the understanding 
 [what is imagination to be about now, then ?] : in fact, and in truth, it will be 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 651 
 
 the totality of the mind [Haym has got it at last] which acts in the execution 
 of the world-picture ; in pretension and appearance, it will be a work of pure 
 thought, or of abstract understanding. 
 
 Haym, then, asks as regards the getting actually to work, 
 and, in view of such processes and tools, the question seems very 
 natural, 
 
 How otherwise will this be possible but by a series of compromises ? The 
 logical element plainly (he continues) must be everywhere blunted and bent ; 
 the living element, again, must everywhere up to a certain degree accommodate 
 itself to the logical one : only with broken limbs, indeed, will the beautiful 
 life of the all appear in the form of reflection ; but this reflection, on its 
 part, will become [ivill become is not difficult to say} as much alive as possible, 
 it will become elastic and dialectic reflection ! 
 
 A perusal of the whole passage will bring out every mark that 
 is set here, in infinitely stronger relief, in infinitely more glaring 
 colours, and the reader will feel no surprise that all this should 
 suggest itself to Haym as ' not unlike the quadrature of the 
 circle ! ' He will probably raise his eyebrows, however, when he 
 finds that to the same Haym, 'all these operations' shall 'express 
 the special secret of Hegel's treatment of the notion ' only 
 ' they must conceal themselves under abstract forms ! ' 
 
 The confusion, the inconsistency, the inconceivableness, the 
 constant necessity of plausible shadings and additaments all 
 this is too clear here to require exposition. How imagination and 
 understanding might co-operate to a fiction, one can see well 
 enough; but that this fiction should be also a Logic and a 
 Grammatic of pure German thought, and a Sophistic of Greek 
 Ideals, and a beautiful Totality, and a broken-limbed beautiful 
 Totality ! ' compromises ' we do see, but they are compromises 
 into which Haym himself flounders, in the bewildered defence of 
 an altogether impossible theory ! 
 
 Such is the wonderful double faculty, the sinniger* Verstand, 
 with which Haym, for his own purposes, compliments Hegel. 
 In this reference the following passage is worth quoting for 
 additional illustration : 
 
 It is easy to see that this vacillation between the preference which is given 
 now to the pure Spiritual and now to the Real has its foundation in the 
 ambiguity of the Hegelian mood of mind generally. It is the same vacillation 
 
 * It is difficult to translate the sinniger of Haym. The dictionary senses are : 
 sensible, judicious, thoughtful, circumspect, ingenious, well-devised, etc. Haym 
 has probably both its etymological and ordinary senses in his mind. It seems to 
 convey to him a sense at once of subtle (even crafty) and realistic. 
 
652 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that makes him declare at one time the reality of the state, at another the 
 ideality of art, religion, and science, as the most consummate truth of the 
 absolute spirit. It is the same vacillation that sends him to seek the greatest 
 satisfaction now in the practical establishment of a vigorous and capable 
 Geraian State, and now in the philosophical construction of a harmonious 
 Ideal State rounded into itself. It is the same vacillation that leads him to 
 work the concrete into his Logic and Metaphysic, and then again in his Real 
 philosophy to rarify the concrete into abstractions. It is the same vacillation that 
 on every point of the system causes the tongue of the dialectic balance to swing 
 now over to the actual, and now though in the ever-identical tendency of the 
 ' Realising ' of the moments to swing back to the notional. On this ambiguity 
 the whole system rests. From this ambiguity the whole dialectic feeds itself. 
 It is the bottom and the root, the life and the movement it constitutes the 
 worth and the worthlessness, the strength as well as the weakness of this 
 philosophy. The philosopher is quite the same as the pedagogue (Hegel 
 is now at Nurnberg). The inconsequence of the latter is the inconse 
 quence of the former. Here as there, in fine, the preponderance in- 
 clines periodically now to the one and again to the other of the two 
 sides. It inclines at the present period to the side of the abstract and logical. 
 At the same time at which the philosophy of the Spirit is, in the Encyclo- 
 paedic, enriched by a new section in being carried up beyond the System of 
 Ethics into the consideration of Art, Religion, and Science, at that same time 
 it is declared that a philosophical education in public schools must apply itself 
 to the abstract form that the abstract is not merely in itself the earlier and 
 the truer, but also the easier and to the pupil the more intelligible ! . . . The 
 most essential result of his scholastic activity (at Nurnberg namely), the 
 special memorial of this epoch of Hegel's life lies before us in the three 
 volumes of the 'Science of Logic' (pp. 289-91). 
 
 The vacillation, the ambiguity dwelt on here is but misintel- 
 ligence. The reason seems to lie in this, that the oscillation of the 
 dialectic is altogether misunderstood and mis-named. Vacillation 
 is in very truth the absolutely last word that it should occur to 
 any one to attribute to Hegel, who, as much as any man that ever 
 lived, is always consistent with himself. The reality of the state, 
 of nature, &c., and the ideality of art, of logic, &c., have all of 
 them their prescribed places they interfere not with each other, 
 and Hegel looks through all and over all from the beginning. How 
 differently Haym would speak did he know the Begriff, did he 
 truly know the origin, principle, and matter of Hegel ! It is the 
 very essence of the science itself that there should be ever 
 and everywhere a factor or moment of ideality and a factor or 
 moment of reality, and that the latter in the end should always be 
 subordinated to the former. We have seen already Hegel enunciate 
 the advantage of abstract instruction at the commencement of 
 study, and we feel that it really requires no very special know- 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 653 
 
 ledge of the man and his work to understand that the theoretic 
 writing in the Encyclopaedie and the practical prescripts of the 
 Niirnberg Gymnasium nowise clash, and that it is only externality 
 of view that could possibly be tempted to make them clash. 
 Haym himself, with acceptance, points out elsewhere that Hegel 
 demonstrates * the abstract ' to be at present the nearest and most 
 current to us. In fact, the extract is a very excellent specimen of 
 the worth of mere literature. These words, in literary reference, 
 are perfect : no general member of the public, hearing them, but 
 must yield to the delight and the seeming instruction they convey. 
 No trick, no air, no antithesis of such balanced characterisation 
 fails. The very breadth is in keeping with the edge, the fullness 
 with the point. It seems decisive ; yet is it but words. Go and 
 see Hegel handle a Kant, and know the difference between a 
 thinker and a litterateur between the solid aliment that fills and 
 feeds, and the brilliant gas that but inflates and makes windily to 
 reel. Hegel's Logic the most essential result of his scholastic 
 activity ! This is in one apex, the type of the entire business. 
 Does any one believe that Hegel's Logic is the result of his tem- 
 porary employment as schoolmaster at Niirnberg, when forced by 
 Napoleon's Prussian campaign to degrade from his Professorship at 
 Jena ? Does any one believe that we should not have had the 
 Logik, and essentially the same Logik its roots lying in quite 
 another soil though Hegel had never seen Niirnberg ? Why fill 
 up paper with these emptinesses, then this mere playing at causa- 
 tive relations, at connective articulations ? Is this aught else than 
 a sort of customary Tarantula-dance of what is called Literature ? 
 Will the slowest to believe this any longer doubt when he is told 
 that Haym cannot restrain himself from deriving the Bau of the 
 Logik from the Bau of the Nurnberg street-gables ? 
 
 Haym accentuates elsewhere also, and at great length, the 
 incongruity that seems to lie between the pretensions of the Logik 
 as the pure truth, and those of the Philosophies of Nature and the 
 Spirit as also the pure truth, and asks where is the special seat of 
 Hegel's Philosophy. This is from the outside and beside the point. 
 The incongruity, however, 'is held up to reprobation by the same 
 method of dexterous literature. Haym, however, would never 
 have seen incongruity, had he been able through Hegel to 
 see Reciprocity, the animating reciprocity of the undeniable 
 actual. 
 
 To Haym, then, ambiguity is the product, and sinniger Verstand 
 
654 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the instrument. It but suits the case that this instrument should, 
 as we have seen, be itself an ambiguity should be itself, even like 
 the rest of the business, an ambiguity and a blur, confusion which 
 every new shift but worse confounds. Had Haym been but able 
 to look from the mside instead of the out, from the centre instead 
 of the circumference, had he been but able to see the one shuttle 
 and the one thread of the Begriff, the incoherent and untenable 
 Many of a dead chaos would have collapsed before him into the 
 One of a living organism : ... in other words, sinniger Verstand 
 would have become anschauender Verstand ! And now we have 
 touched the thing with a needle : it is impossible more glaringly 
 to put the mistake of Haym ; it is impossible more glaringly to 
 put the self-refutation of Haym. 
 
 This even-handed justice 
 
 Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice 
 To our own lips. 
 
 Shall this suffice, or shall we spread after the method of Literature 
 the burthen of these two simple adjectives over a score of pages ? 
 Shall we form antitheses : the one is confusion, the other order , 
 the one falsehood, the other truth ; the one darkness, the other 
 light ; the one death, the other life, &c. &c.? Well, it is impossible 
 altogether to resist remark here, but we shall endeavour to be 
 short. 
 
 Haym speaks (p. 108) of the sinniger Verstand which is one of 
 his compulsory shifts to explain Hegel, as an understanding that 
 is ' at once accompanied and led by an instinct for the concrete, 
 and for the concrete that lurks in the abstract : just so/ he says, 
 ' is Hegel enabled to disentangle those threads from the notions 
 through which it is possible to spin them into other and further 
 notions.' Look now not from the outside, like Haym who sees 
 only the rising up of an artificial aggregate, but from the inside, 
 to which the opposed adjectives have given entrance, and observe 
 the wonderful, new, living, and coherent sense which these words 
 of Haym have at once assumed ! ' An instinct for the concrete ! ' 
 
 Yes ! but not such as Haym contemplated. ' So he was 
 
 enabled to disentangle the threads of the notions ! ' Yes ! but 
 not by artifice, not by pretence, not by a sinniger Verstand that 
 was merely glued together, No ! but by a living anschauender 
 Verstand, an understanding which had come into possession of the 
 Concrete Notion, and was filled and quickened by its life. That 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 655 
 
 broad-painted ambiguity, then, of which Haym, ambiguously to 
 thought if antithetically to literature, speaks as 'the worth and 
 the worthlessness, the strength as well as the weakness ' of the 
 Hegelian philosophy, is an involuntary testimony to the success 
 of this last. That Haym should think of a sinniger Verstaud with- 
 reference to Hegel tends to point out that Hegel has succeeded in 
 realising that anschauender Verstand of which Schelling made so 
 much with reference to Kant. The presumption is thus ex- 
 tended to us, that Hegel has found the single unity of the All, 
 and from it and through it been enabled to develop the All. The 
 lusus naturae of an impossible faculty, so far as Haym is con- 
 cerned, is seen to indicate the very inmost secret of the very latest 
 philosophy ! 
 
 It is true that Hegel would conduct the universe into totality, 
 into a single life, and Haym's error is in assuming the process to 
 be only ambiguity. Hegel simply believes in God, believes that 
 the universe is God's ; believes that in God, therefore, all rounds 
 itself to totality. Totality, then, is the one fundamental truth, 
 and Hegel has only sought the clue to it. When Haym talks of 
 Spirit as this clue, he is nearer the truth than when he forgets it 
 for his sinniger Verstand. God is a Spirit, and Man, made in the 
 image of God, is a Spirit, and the life of a Spirit is Thought. The 
 early notes, however, in what is called the Struggle to Hegel, 
 show that knowledge to this extent comes from the surface and 
 from the first ; and Haym cannot really name the whence, the how, 
 the what of this Spirit. He can^only talk of its analogy; he 
 cannot realise, he cannot effect its fusion into the diversified 
 material. Haym says of this movement : ' This dialectic, to 
 believe Hegel, is nothing else than the principle of all natural and 
 mental life : the reverse is the truth, natural and mental life is 
 the principle of that dialectic' (p. 320). To reverse, is to mis- 
 understand, Hegel : but what, after all, does the reversal amount 
 to ? Would it be wrong in Hegel to make natural and mental life 
 the principle of his dialectic ? Where else would Haym have 
 Hegel look for the principle of his dialectic ? Again, if natural 
 and mental life thus identify itself with the dialectic, shall we not 
 prefer to regard the latter, or abstract element, as the principle, 
 and the former, or concrete element, as the realisation of the 
 principle? But, take it either way, let it be said with Hegel 
 that the dialectic is the principle of reality, or let it be said with 
 Haym that reality is the principle of the dialectic, we have in 
 
656 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 both ways the same result an identification of Logic and the 
 Actual ! 
 
 Are they, then, not to be identified ? Are Logic and the Actual 
 for ever to confront each other divided by the impassable chasm 
 of an irreconcilable difference ? What were Logic thus separated, 
 thus inapplicable ? What were the good of Logic, if it is not to 
 be conceived as the thought, the principle, of the Actual ? But 
 this is just Hegel's attempt : he would realise and systematise the 
 identification of Logic with the Actual. Why, then, should 
 Haym stigmatise this attempt as ' self-contradictory in itself,' as 
 'a confusion and corruption of the understanding and its con- 
 science?' Idealism would result, but that need not scare us. 
 That we are here to think, involves the virtual identity of think- 
 ing with that which it thinks; for to think is to assimilate. 
 Keality and Ideality must be set equal; the breadth of the 
 universe is the reciprocity of Eeality and Ideality ; but the single 
 pivot of rotation is Ideality itself. Nevertheless, though, in this 
 way, Thought and Perception are virtually identical ; there is no 
 necessity to confound opposing spheres. 
 
 Can it be else, then, here, than that Haym has just missed the 
 matter in hand, and all the while been but beating the air ? It 
 is the problem of problems that Hegel would solve, and not the 
 contradiction of contradictions that he would only cloak: his 
 crime to Haym is his virtue to the Absolute. Nay, Haym him- 
 self means nothing else, though he does not see it, when he accen- 
 tuates the Eeal and would have us seek wisdom in the Concrete. 
 When the whole Concrete had disappeared, resolved into the 
 Wisdom which Haym contemplates, what were this Wisdom but 
 the Thought of the Concrete Logic ? The sesthetic element and 
 the logical element must, in the end, coincide ; and of the two 
 ways of putting this, dialectic is principle of life, life is principle 
 of dialectic, is not the alternative of Hegel the more legitimate 
 and correct ? Haym, thus, would seem unable to bring his own 
 thoughts together. Like a true litterateur, he riots in the infinite 
 out of one another of Perception ; Ideas, Thoughts, Notions, are as 
 casual and diverse organisms that delight him there ; but he is 
 unable to bring the different of Perception into the unity of the 
 Understanding. This purblindness seems strange in a spirit so 
 vivid, but (witness the German Ideals that were yet Greek 
 Ideals) it is a true trait and constant. 
 
 Haym, in truth, is perhaps very nearly exclusively concerned 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 657 
 
 with the perfecting of his merely literary picture ; and that is 
 largely accomplished by the liberal use of that peculiarly literary 
 expedient, the supposititious es soil. That is, Haym gets within 
 Hegel, and reports to us how Hegel sketches out his work before 
 him by a 'this shall be done/ and 'that shall be done'; but Haym 
 all the time is lapped only in his own dream. This soil and sollen 
 (v. p. 316 and the volume passim), this ascription of plausible 
 genetic motive, grows into a very happy literary structure, which, 
 however, just builds the philosophy it would enclose out. 
 
 There are deliverances of Haym in reference to Being and 
 Nothing, Finite and Infinite, Qualitative and Quantitative, &c., 
 which might be used towards the same general conclusion here of 
 contradiction and defective information ; but enough probably has 
 in that respect been now said, and we may remind only of the 
 wonderful and true metaphysic which we have seen these points 
 really to contain. It throws light just to know that Haym (291) 
 is surprised Hegel should speak of * Philosophy being as docible as 
 Geometry ' ; and there is a little mistake, on Haym's part, about 
 Eeason, which it is perhaps worth the trouble to cite. One aspect 
 of the duplicity which Haym sees in Hegel concerns the contrast 
 which this latter exhibits of the remotest unreality in the extrava- 
 gance of his speculation, and of the nearest reality in the sobriety 
 of his understanding. Now the * Reason ' of the following sentence 
 (269) is supposed by Haym to stand for this said sobriety of 
 understanding. * That " Eeason " which a reader of Hegel's philo- 
 sophical writings,' says Haym, 'might easily mistake for an element 
 wholly apart, is curtly defined as the capability of " being awake, 
 of seeing in all, and of saying to all, what it is." ' Eeason here, 
 however, is not simply vigilant common sense ; it is more than 
 that, it is transcendental reason, dialectic reason, speculative 
 reason, Hegel's reason, Eeason Proper, which, when employed on 
 one moment of a concrete, will not allow its own abstraction to 
 blind it to the other : it will keep ' awake,' it will see ' all,' and it 
 will say to all, ' what it is.' 
 
 In the obliquity of Haym towards Hegel there mingles, as we 
 would now point out, a certain political bias. Political bias, 
 indeed, what we may call a sort of Fichtian flame of Liberalism, 
 is a chief characteristic of Haym ; and he cannot view with 
 patience the conservatism of Hegel, whom he seems almost to 
 suspect of simple ratting. This comes forward in what he says 
 of Hegel's inaugural address at Berlin. The address itself, we 
 
 2T 
 
658 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 may remark, is very short and very plain, but in its matter 
 peculiarly rich. Hegel begins in it by expressing pleasure at the 
 wider sphere of usefulness extended to him by his new position, 
 now and here : now that peace promises scope for philosophy ; 
 and here in a centre of civilisation that has so distinguished itself. 
 Now this last topic receives but a word a word, too, perhaps 
 tamer than is usual and conventional in all such circumstances 
 yet to Haym ' the sum of this address consists in the demonstra- 
 tion of the mutual affinity and necessity of the Prussian Govern- 
 ment and the Hegelian Theory ! ' (Page 357.) 
 
 Something of the same spirit sharpens the chuckle : ' thus runs 
 the naive self-confession of the Absolute Idealism that it is not 
 absolute ' (p. 387). Hegel, in his works, stands so perfectly self- 
 consistent as regards what is absolute and what is not absolute in 
 his mode of looking, that both ' self-confession ' and ' naive/ as 
 words quite alien, simply surprise. We have but to read the 
 Begriff der Natur with which the Naturphilosophie opens to 
 obtain the necessary conviction here. 
 
 There is an allusion to Jacobi which is not discrepant. ' This is 
 the first instance/ says Haym, referring to a certain identification 
 of himself, on the part of Hegel, with the philosopher just named, 
 * of that Geneigtheit des Concordirens und Paciscirens, that trick 
 of making union and peace which, later in the philosophy of 
 Keligion, as in reference to the Dogmatic of the Church, reached 
 its acme ' (p. 346). Now this is not the first example of the 
 tendency in question, nor were it very easy to point out where 
 that first example is contained, unless we just say that the first 
 sentence written by Hegel, after he reached years of discretion, 
 constitutes such example. From first to last Hegel has no object 
 whatever but this Concordiren and Pacisciren. The Aufklarung, 
 or Illumination, by the light of Private Judgment, has gutted 
 humanity of its whole concrete substance: Hegel would restore 
 this substance but in this light. This is the whole there is 
 nothing but this in Hegel and this is a compromise. It is this 
 compromise, however, which Haym does not understand certainly 
 not in its grounds and which, therefore, he jeeringly names a 
 ' Concordiren and Pacisciren/ Now what else was the action of 
 Jacobi than to take stand by this very substance, the enlightened 
 gutting-out of which it was the precise object of Hegel to undo ? 
 What wonder, then, if Hegel pointed out that what Jacobi sought to 
 realise by the method of sentiment, and in a consequently 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 659 
 
 rhapsodic* form, he himself had realised by the method of 
 knowledge, and in a consequently exact and necessary form ? 
 
 Haym's dissatisfaction with certain of the Hegelian religious 
 tenets is on the same platform. ' Only the long predominance/ 
 he says, * first of the Kantian and then of the Hegelian philosophy, 
 has availed to obscure the simple truth, that religion, quite as 
 much as speech or as art, is a specific mode of expression of the 
 human spirit ' (p. 399) ; and, again, ' an offensive coquetting at 
 once with orthodoxy and philosophy became the order of the day, 
 perplexed the head and the conscience, and ate like a cancer into 
 the sound reason of our nation as into its character for straight- 
 forwardness ' (p. 431). If conclusions are to be drawn from these 
 allegations as regards the tendency of the religious teaching of 
 either Kant or Hegel, and as regards the nature of the religious 
 belief especially of the latter, great injustice will be done both. 
 While there is nothing in the teaching of Kant that could avail 
 to obscure the ' simple truth ' spoken of, that ' simple truth ' is the 
 special belief of Hegel. Again, the compromise sought by Hegel 
 between religion and philosophy is frank, open, unconcealed ; and 
 it is only the jaundiced or clouded eye of a Haym that, in a 
 bearing so simple, could see the base and disreputable coquetting 
 which he at least lays at the door of the system. 
 
 But, as already hinted, it is Hegel's political teaching that 
 Haym regards the most obliquely. He attacks, for example, with 
 the greatest keenness the celebrated dictum, ' what is rational that 
 is real, and what is real that is rational/ We are spared, however, 
 the trouble of any defence here ; for Hegel's own, in the beginning 
 of the Encyclopaedic, is ample such, indeed, that it is rather 
 surprising to find Haym repeating what Hegel himself had already 
 met. In fact, he who knows the Hegelian Philosophy at all, 
 knows that ' the logical forms are the living spirit of the actual, 
 and that only of the actual is true which, by virtue of these forms, 
 is through them and in them true? ( 
 
 As belonging to the liberalism of Germany, to know the better 
 and to will the better are two of Haym's presuppositions. We 
 may fancy with what feelings, therefore, he watches the grim 
 contempt with which Hegel casts an utterly extinguishing 
 
 * Rhapsodic is here used in the Kantian sense which has reference to a process of 
 contingent and disconnected snatch. This is an inversion or perversion of the 
 original Greek use of the word : scholars think that pairreiv doiB^v refers to a con- 
 tinuous recitation. 
 
 f Hegel's Encyclopaedic, 162. The translation is exact. 
 
660 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 thunderbolt or two at the shallowly conceited Besserwissen as at 
 the shallowly sentimental Besserwollen of the modern let us 
 say revolutionist. Haym's astonishment is indescribable. So many 
 things are all wrong, it seems so natural to him that it should 
 be thought right to know better and to will better. Especially to 
 will better why is not that virtue itself ? It is not wonderful, 
 then, that Haym terms this portion of the system though, surely, 
 it is not difficult to see that Hegel founds his contempt on the 
 mere empty subjectivity of the bulk of those who raise the cries 
 immoral, sophistical, and a tribute only to the quietism of the 
 conservative re-action. He accuses it of neglecting the concrete 
 inner of man, of degrading willing into knowing, and of ignoring 
 individual subjectivity before a mere universal. Hegel's political 
 system coheres with his theory of morals ; and, as not blind to 
 this connexion, Haym dislikes the latter also, and for reasons that 
 relate to this same subordination of the individual to the universal 
 and of will to thought. Fortlage, in a work already cited, speaks 
 of Hegel having ' rolled forward the foundation-stone of a more 
 intelligent conception of the historical development of States, of 
 positive law and political justice ; ' and this is the truth. Hegel 
 is nowhere greater than in the practical sphere in that sphere, 
 namely, which relates to morality, politics, and what in general 
 concerns action. Whatever may be imperfect in Hegel, not so 
 is his theory of morals, which, as only behoved the following out 
 of the ethical principles of Kant, has placed the whole subject 
 in such solidity, breadth, and consummation of development as will 
 yet, if we mistake not, lead to many most important changes in 
 the social arrangements of Europe. 
 
 Yes, it is true that subjectivity qua subjectivity is not the true 
 practical principle, and that it must give way to a universal. In 
 the practical field, subjectivity that would be subjectivity is 
 simply Evil, the Bad, and all that can be called such; whereas 
 subjectivity that would be the universal is really all that we 
 possess as the Good. In the interests of the universal the individual 
 must harness himself. In general, the probability is that 
 through Hegel we are on the point of receiving political 
 principles at last, and of attaining to the possibility at length of 
 a nation governed. Is it, then, government and this is not 
 only what is practically done, but with much pomp even 
 theoretically laid down nowadays to wait for the voices of the 
 governed, and then to move only with such calculated slowness 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 661 
 
 as shall just anticipate any outbreak of impatience on the part of 
 the same governed? If Hegel is correct, there are objective 
 principles which, by teaching us the right, render us independent 
 of the shallow conceit and shallow sentimentality of the bulk of 
 those vain subjectivities that so commonly know better and would 
 better than their neighbours. But these objective principles 
 require quite another knoivledge and quite another will than these 
 same subjectivities can extend to them. It were easy to dilate 
 here; but enough has been said to suggest probably that the 
 utterances of Haym in this reference have been singularly rash 
 and inconsiderate, and countenance the assertion of his erroneous 
 and external position to the Hegelian system generally. 
 
 It cannot be denied, nevertheless, that Hegel, in his actual 
 connexion with the Prussian State, seemed to play at least 
 weakly into the hands of the aristocratic re-action. This was a 
 grave error; this was, on the part of Hegel, to do vast injustice 
 to himself. If the place of the philosopher was very certainly 
 not at the side of insensate revolution, neither was it and quite 
 as certainly at the back of selfish, brutal, and merely aristocratic 
 obstruction. Hegel the staunch bull-dog of Prussian pigheaded- 
 ness and pride, that honoured his inferior blood when it employed 
 his talent this is a position of all possible the most preposterous 
 and pitiable ! It is not impossible, however, something to extenu- 
 ate the blame of Hegel. Hegel's life had not been one of pros- 
 perity, of uninterrupted advance. For six years an humble 
 house-tutor, for an equal period Schelling's unknown second, and 
 at the same time an unintelligible and almost unattended sub- 
 professor (though holding any actual professorship only for 
 a few months), for two years, being 'in want of all other 
 means of subsistence,' editor of an inconsiderable journal, for 
 eight years a mere schoolmaster in Niirnberg, and reaching 
 his true place at length in Berlin only at the ripe age 
 of 48, pain, disappointment, difficulty, mortification in a word, 
 humble-pie had been his only nourishment from the moment he 
 stepped out of sanguine student-life into the chilling world. At 
 Berlin he was at last in full sunshine ; no wonder that he opened 
 to the heat, that he chirruped to it, that in thought he truckled 
 to'the givers of it. In thought to truckle to such benefactors is 
 natural to universal mankind. But how is such truckling in 
 thought to be translated into action by an awkward, inexperienced, 
 unacquainted recluse of books ? It is only the accomplished 
 
662 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 world-man who knows what is his own, and, with that, when to 
 speak and how to speak, when to act and how to act, when to 
 take offence and how to take offence. Most book-men are in 
 such matters babies; apt, perhaps, to fall into convulsions if 
 obliged to go and ask change of a shilling ; now pocketing with 
 an insensate smile, what men of the world would throw off with a 
 glance of the eyes, or receive on the edge of a still keener joke ; 
 and now with hysterical eloquence, or maniacal violence, furibuud 
 in demeaning positions, which these same men of the world 
 never would, or never could, have entered, or which if by 
 some evil star they had been once for all flung into them 
 they would have been but too happy to be allowed to quit, in 
 submissive silence and with their heads down. The natural 
 truckling in thought to exalted benefactors is but too apt by such 
 bookish innocents to be translated into a truckling in fact, and 
 they cannot help it. Hegel was a vigorous piece of mother-spun 
 Suabian manhood undoubtedly ; but he was a recluse of books, he 
 had tasted the bitters of adversity, he had had to creep for his 
 bread : place him now at once in the position and with the 
 associates that, however far off, he had always by presentiment 
 known as his own ! Would he not be innocently pleased to find 
 that his book-theories were able to lend an even welcome aid to 
 the great state-policies of those high and mighty names which had 
 been familiar to him from the distance, and whose bearers were 
 now in personal contact with him ? He was now one of them 
 himself ! He was a power in the State ! 
 
 It is in the same way we would reduce to ordinary human 
 motives the action of Hegel with reference to Schelling. There 
 was a certain cunning, a certain calculation in the approaches of 
 Hegel to Schelling at Jena, and in the relative position he 
 assumed there. He undoubtedly stood as Schelling's adherent, 
 as Schelling's second, and he undoubtedly knew that he had 
 voluntarily given himself something of this air in order to obtain 
 the benefit of Schelling's introduction and support. Nevertheless 
 to Hegel, in the unclear consciousness to all such matters of a 
 mere book-man shall we say of a mere pedant ? the whole 
 thing was very differently named. He longed keenly for a 
 certain advantage, he knew that he could identify Schelling's 
 philosophical platform so far with his own. So far, then, said 
 innocent book-cunning to him, propitiate Schelling, and obtain 
 this thing you so long for. This cunning, equally with the 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 663 
 
 Berlin truckling, we believe to be a feature of the innocence and 
 babiness incidental to a life of mere books, and the impressible, 
 egoistic, inwardly-living men who usually adopt such. Cunning, 
 too, it undoubtedly was, for, when Hegel appeared in Jena,_ 
 he had brought with him the Frankfort Sketch of his System ; 
 and that sketch proves him to have then penetrated to the 
 ultimate generalisation of Kant to the Begriff. The hysterical 
 vehemence with which he called some one ' in so many words a liar/ 
 who had given his relation to Schelling its coarsest name, throws 
 light on Hegel's own feelings and on the theory of his general 
 action now propounded. In the same way, the defence he sends 
 up to the Prussian Government in reference to the Koman 
 Catholic priest who had taken umbrage at his language as regards 
 the mouse that nibbled the host, illustrates his frame of mind as 
 man of books that knew himself a functionary of the State and 
 on the right side. 
 
 It is always to be seen, however, that what Hegel did say as 
 regards Schelling at Jena, did not compromise him as said, but as 
 interpreted, though, at the same time, it must be confessed that 
 the unnecessary and cruel bitterness with which he afterwards 
 threw off Schelling contrasts unfavourably with the calculated 
 language of suppression and accommodation with which in the 
 first instance he had taken him on. Similarly, the conservatism 
 of his writings is a genuine result of his researches and convic- 
 tions ; as there it is without motive from considerations of the 
 State ; and he erred only in the too prominent pleasure with 
 which he observed that it was capable of application to the 
 interests of the day. Hegel manifests the same bookish simplicity 
 of obsequiousness, together with a congruously innocent irrepres- 
 sibleness of delight, in his relations with Gothe. When Gothe 
 quotes him, he cannot help appending to the passage quoted a 
 notice of the honour done it. In every correspondence that takes 
 place between them, too, seeing that there is on one side a 
 certainly not larger sort of German Voltaire, and on the other 
 the deeper Aristotle of a modern Europe, the superiority of 
 Gothe both as given and taken, is surely of a veritably bookish 
 innocence on the part of both. Usage of the world seems requisite 
 to make a book-man (Hegel) know where his own honour lies ; 
 and certainly roughing of the world were not amiss where this 
 same world's success may have stiffened a book-man (Gothe) 
 into so much ridiculous starch. 
 
664 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 It is in this manner we would attempt to scratch off some 
 appearance of ambiguity from the action of Hegel ; but, be all 
 this as it may, we hold with perfect conviction, as against Hay in, 
 that not only is he honest in his moral, political, and religious 
 position, but that that position is the ripest outcome of his 
 reflexion and the special sphere of promise to us. 
 
 In the state of his belief, however, we cannot feel surprise at 
 the sentence which Haym in the end has pronounced on Hegel. 
 A few extracts will explain : 
 
 An intelligent contemporary of Hegel, a man of action, who, indeed, knew 
 not how to speculate, but only so much the better how to judge, has compared 
 the Hegelian Logic to the gardens of Semiramis ; for in it abstract notions are 
 artfully twisted into Arabesques : these notions are only, alas ! without life 
 and without root. With the practical philosophy of Hegel, it is not otherwise 
 than with his metaphysic. Where he persuades himself that he is most and 
 deepest in reality, he penetrates only superficially into its outside. His practi- 
 cal notions have the withered look of plants that root only in the flat surface. 
 In the entire depth of individual life, in the concrete inner, lie the mighty 
 motive and matter of reality. Into this richest mine of living actuality the 
 absolute idealism disdains to descend. It esteems subjectivity only so far 
 as it has ceased to be subjectivity and clarified itself into the universal. 
 Hence the superficialising of willing into knowing ; hence, moreover, the 
 disregard manifested for what is subjectively spiritual in general, and with it 
 for what is individual. (Pages 374-5.) The Logic, briefly to sum it, is the sus- 
 tained attempt to intensify and concrete abstract thought as such by means of the 
 fullness of the totality of the human spirit, and by means of the fullness of 
 actuality. Contradictory in itself as is this attempt, it must be designated from 
 the standpoint of living spirituality, from the standpoint of religious and 
 aesthetic conception, a crude and tasteless barbarism ; while from the stand- 
 point of pure rationality, it must be designated a confusion and corruption of 
 the understanding, and of its conscience. ... In a dogmatic and uncritical, in 
 a confused and barbarous form, the Hegelian Logic has been the first fraudulent 
 attempt at such a Gnosology and Philosophy. . . . That was, I repeat it, a 
 rude and coarse manoeuvre, resting on a palpable confusion and confound- 
 ing of what is of the understanding, and of what is of the concrete spirit. 
 (Pages 324-27.) 
 
 This is plain. Whatever of external form may have been seen 
 by Haym, it is evident that he has missed the origin, the principle, 
 and the matter. Of these he has even said what must be held to 
 be the exact reverse of the truth. It is impossible, indeed, to 
 mistake the nature of this conclusion ; it is impossible to fail to 
 see that in Hayni's opinion the Hegelian Logic is an utter and 
 what is worse a fraudulent failure. Nevertheless, as usual, 
 contradictions perpetually turn up in Haym, as regards both 
 failure and fraudulerice ; and perhaps it is not impossible to adduce 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 665 
 
 himself in confutation of himself. Some such, indeed, we have 
 already seen ; and, I dare say, the reader has been already puzzled 
 to reconcile, on the one hand, that marvellous faculty of sober 
 understanding, of which he has heard so much, with failure, and, 
 on the other hand, that marvellous labour of research (for what, il 
 not to see the thing, the truth ? ) with fraudulence. The sort of 
 double faculty into which this sober understanding converted 
 itself by an alliance with a so-called aesthetic faculty, was so 
 much of a contradiction, that we could only name it a lusus 
 naturce ; but these new contrasts seem even worse seem capable 
 of being considered only irreconcilable contradictories. "When we 
 hear, for example (p. 328-9), that 'the allmachtige (almighty) 
 understanding which Hegel lets operate, saw, in most cases, into 
 the actual foundation and genuine sense of the notions, and 
 behind this understanding there stood a solid knowledge, pure 
 feeling on the whole, a sober sense, and a modest phantasy/ we 
 feel that we have just received an express receipt against all 
 possibility of failure and quite as much an express receipt 
 against all possibility of fraudulence. Failure and fraudulence, it 
 must be said, are entirely unintelligible side by side with such 
 endowments. But Haym is consistent with himself throughout 
 consistent, that is, in his inconsistency ; he does not content him- 
 self with this antithesis in general or in reference to Logic only, 
 he carries it with him throughout the whole of his Critique. 
 
 We have seen, for example, the unmitigated reprobation which 
 he has heaped on the Kechtsphifosophie, yet we hear presently 
 that even the Rechtsphilosophie ' possesses an imperishable Kern 
 (core).' This too, he says, after having spoken thus : * Only one 
 step, indeed, but that a great one to this self-destruction, is the 
 Hegelian Rechtsphilosophie : it essentially has the blame of the 
 fate, that the highest science has sunk into contempt, and stands 
 opposite the powers of the actual almost impotent ! ' It is in a 
 similarly dubious mood that Haym finds himself in presence of 
 the Religionsphilosophie ; but as regards the ./Esthetic and the 
 Philosophy of History his satisfaction seems simple and unmixed. 
 ' The German people,' he assures us, ' possesses in the former an 
 aesthetic such as no other nation possesses ; ' and, as this aesthetic 
 ' constitutes an atoning side-piece and a correction for the Religions- 
 philosophie, the Philosophy of History constitutes a no less impor- 
 tant complement to the Rechtsphilosophie. 7 As regards the 
 
666 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Philosophy of History, indeed, Haym expresses himself at great 
 length, and always almost rapturously : 
 
 An energy of concrete vision (he says) accompanied here the energy of 
 abstraction, which must have surprised him to whom it was unknown that 
 even the Logic and Metaphysic had sprung from the same combination of 
 faculties. The capacity of thinking himself into a peculiar spiritual life, and 
 of bringing it, out from the firmly-seized centre, into an expanded panorama, 
 was in youth scarcely so special to him as now when in age he made a second 
 voyage of discovery into the wide realm of the life of peoples. With this 
 talent for generalisation stood that of compression into a single significant 
 word, the talent of categorising and of bringing to a point, in the most 
 admirable equipoise. Not but even the philosophy of history has a logical 
 impress [but] these are thoughts of a metalline clang which cause us to 
 forget the thin and soundless thoughts of metaphysic. (Page 451.) 
 
 It is impossible, we say, to believe in such a mangled operation 
 of so supreme a faculty : it is difficult to believe in failure ; it is 
 impossible to believe in fraudulence. Compare thoughts of failure 
 and fraudulence with the following : 
 
 After talk of ' the bitter and unsparing thoroughness of 
 Hegel's criticism,' his * hard and stinging words, &c.,' Haym goes 
 on : 
 
 Here again comes to the surface that power of an all-generalising char- 
 acterisation which had condensed the entire compass of German thought into 
 a system of sharply-limited, surely-signalised categories ; here again is 
 manifest that talent of incisive critique incisive into the flesh and life of 
 the opponent that skill to operate with knife and club at once. (Page 350.) 
 Here, before all, Hegel appears in the entire mastery of his insight. Just as 
 experienced age discourses of the worth of life, so discourses the philosopher 
 of the worth of the intellectual and imaginative forms of his time. Com- 
 pletely in it, he stands at the same time triumphant over it ; with every 
 turn of opinion he is familiar ; he sees through every standpoint, and 
 against all of them he makes good, with a superior air of quietude and 
 urbanity, a definitive conclusion of the deepest and most matured conviction. 
 (Page 393.) And, what is peculiar, the Hegelian delivery was most helpless 
 there where the ordinary talent of declamation is just most at home. In 
 narrative he foundered in an almost comical fashion. Just in what was 
 easiest he became dull and tiresome. Just in what was deepest, on the con- 
 trary, did he move with a grandly self-assured complacency and ease. Then, 
 at last, 'the voice rose, the eye glanced sharp over the auditory, and the 
 tide of speech forced its way with never-failing words to every height and 
 depth of the soul.' And that, too, not merely when the question was of 
 fleshless abstractions, but no less when he descended into the deeps of the 
 material outward. Even to paint epochs, nations, events, individuals, suc- 
 ceeded with him perfectly. Even the most special singularities and depths of 
 the character withdrew themselves not from this gift of statement. (Page 396.) 
 
 In quotation from Haym we are certainly peculiarly diffuse, but 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATOKS. 667 
 
 there is an irresistible pleasure in dwelling on his vivid and per- 
 fectly successful words at all times that he praises. Of this the 
 reader may rest assured: however wide he may be when he 
 censures, Haym is always absolutely home when he applauds. We 
 may seem here to perpetrate the very contradiction on which it is~ 
 our present business to animadvert ; we may seem here to expose 
 ourselves to the retort : Are not the cases parallel ? if Haym is 
 so very right when he commends, is it not a contradiction that 
 he should be so very wrong when he blames ? in what respect 
 is the contradiction greater to speak well of Hegel here, but to 
 denounce him as a fraud and a failure there ? To this it is easy to 
 answer : It is no contradiction to say, that though Haym has hit 
 the form, he has missed the matter ; though he sees, that is, the 
 subjective power, he is blind to the objective product, of Hegel. But 
 it is a very great contradiction to allow a man all the attributes of 
 success, and yet predicate failure of the very work special to these 
 attributes ; and it is a vastly greater contradiction to portray a 
 man, as in the last extract, who shall display every sign and 
 token by which the true, by which the genuine shall be known and 
 discriminated, and yet this man shall produce, nevertheless, only 
 what is artificial, only what is fraudulent. Here in a final extract 
 surely this contradiction, as a general attribute of Haym, is 
 palpable : 
 
 Quite undeniably, Hegel is excelled in purity and acribie of thought by one 
 of his fellow-labourers for the philosophic palm Herbart. That the under- 
 standing and the actual, that pure thought and the other faculties cannot be 
 alternately set equal in the manner of a Quiproquo, that between this setting 
 equal the want of a transcendental critique of the living spirit of man remains to 
 be filled up this hint the disciples of Hegel may borrow from the doctrine 
 of Herbart. Hegel, compared with Herbart, is an inexcusable confusionary. To 
 the position of the former, that contradiction is the soul of things, Herbart with 
 his philosophy that is wholly of the understanding opposes the principle, that 
 only the method of the elimination of the contradiction leads to truth and 
 the inner soul. But not only that in power of abstraction, in penetration and 
 tenacity of thought, Hegel may very well measure himself with his rival his 
 greatness just lies in his courage to bend and to break the law of the under- 
 standing. That means : he alone has had the great instinct to bring to a halt 
 the spiritual powers which awoke in our nation through our classical poetry, to 
 train them into the service of philosophy, and in this manner to let them sink 
 into the scientific mind of the age for further purification. He was, perhaps, 
 not altogether the greater thinker : he was certainly the greater philosopher. 
 ' Give up all hope,' one must call to those who even yet endeavour to avenge 
 the fate of the neglected Herbart : the Hegelian Logic is a living term in 
 the history of the development of the German Spirit, and will continue to 
 
668 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 exercise its powerful influence even then when the name of a Hegelian shall 
 have as completely ceased to be heard of as those of a Cartesian or a Wolffian. 
 (Pages 330-31.) 
 
 Here is what Hegel would name, after Kant, a complete nest of 
 contradictions. Herbart undeniably excels Hegel ' in purity and 
 acribie of thought ; ' yet, ' as regards power of abstraction, as well 
 as penetration and tenacity of thought/ Hegel may ' very well 
 measure himself with Herbart : ' Hegel of the two is ' the greater 
 philosopher/ if not quite the greater thinker.' Of any difference 
 that may exist between a thinker and a philosopher, as in refer- 
 ence to two such men and so placed as Herbart and Hegel, we 
 may give Haym the benefit ; but what is ' power of abstraction/ if 
 not * purity of thought ? ' and what is ' acribie/ if not ' penetra- 
 tion and tenacity of thought ? ' That is to say, in the same 
 purity and acribie of thought in which Herbart ' quite undeniably ' 
 excels Hegel, Hegel, nevertheless, may very well measure himself 
 with Herbart! It may be pleasant to ring changes on literary 
 phrases, and no doubt it is agreeable to have the credit of 
 incisive antithesis ; but really some consistency of thought were, 
 with all that, much to be wished. We are given to understand 
 that Haym's preference of Herbart to Hegel turns on this that 
 while, on one side, the work of the latter, his Qwiproquo of faculties, 
 is an untenable contradiction, the want so indicated has, on the 
 other side, been filled up by the work of the former. Herbart 
 shall be the express antidote, the exact counter-poison to Hegel. 
 Or, the principle of Herbart shall be the honourable and true one 
 of the elimination of contradiction, while that of Hegel shall be 
 the sophistical and confusionary one of contradiction itself. Yet 
 despite this, and despite all that superior purity and acribie of 
 thought it is the true and genuine Herbart that is to succumb, 
 that is, like the damned of Dante's hell, to abandon all hope ; and 
 it is the sophistical and confusionary Hegel that shall be held the 
 greater philosopher it is this false man's influence that shall 
 endure when, &c. &c. &c. ! In presence of such things, one recurs 
 involuntarily to the problem of a Providence. But, while we are 
 lost in wonder at this extraordinary reversal of what is just and 
 right while we are engaged speculating on the possible secret 
 reason of it, we are suddenly quite dumbfounded to find that the 
 precise source of the inferior virtue of Hegel is the precise source 
 as well of his superior success, or that just for his righteousness' 
 sake is it that Herbart has been condemned and consigned to the 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 669 
 
 place without hope ! The confounding of the understanding and 
 the other faculties the Quiproquo, this it was that seemed to 
 found the inferiority of Hegel to Herbart : but, if this were so, we 
 find now that Hegel's greatness his 'grandeur' just rests on the 
 very * courage with which he bent and broke the law of the under- 
 standing ! ' To bend and to break the law of the understanding, 
 it appears, is synonymous with bringing ' into harness to philo- 
 sophy the spiritual powers which German classical poetry awoke, 
 and so sinking these powers into the mind of the century for 
 further purification ! ' Why, then, because of this bending and 
 breaking, because of this Quiproquo, was Hegel denounced as a 
 fraud and a failure ; and why is a fraud and a failure to continue, 
 all the same, to exercise on the German Spirit, such a wonderful 
 influence, when Cartesians, and Wolffians, and even Hegelians 
 themselves, have so completely gone to the dogs, that their very 
 names are lost ? 
 
 It is quite possible it is pretty certain, that Haym has here 
 an idea in his head an idea which we have already attempted to 
 reduce to its true specification ; this, namely that we have to 
 look for wisdom in the concrete, and not in abstractions. But 
 surely the realisation of this idea does not necessitate a bending 
 and breaking of the law of the understanding ! Surely Haym 
 to whom, we have been led to suppose, understanding is the 
 highest faculty by whom, just because of his supreme under- 
 standing, now Herbart and now Hegel (did this latter bend and 
 break, then, just what he was best in ? or is it possible to ex- 
 haust the contradictions here?) was praised must stand appalled 
 before a bending and breaking of the law of the understanding ! 
 Surely he does not mean to say now that the Hegelian Quiproquo 
 is the means of the realisation of his idea ! Have we not been 
 just given to understand that 'a transcendental critique of the 
 living spirit of man ' is what is wanted for this realisation ; and 
 has not this critique, as the work of Herbart, been opposed to the 
 denounced antagonistic work of Hegel ? How, then, after all, is 
 it Hegel's work that gets the credit of the realisation which 
 Haym specially desires, and which, we were led to believe, he 
 had actually found accomplished in Herbart and in Herbart as 
 exultingly opposed to Hegel ? But, after all, did the German 
 poets do what Haym says here they did do ? Has he not told 
 us himself, that it was to shut out German Reals, that they 
 brought Greek Ideals, and that so, consequently, their poetry was 
 
670 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 an ' artificial Idealistic and Typic ? ' Has he not told us also, 
 that just such was the industry of Hegel; that he, too, with 
 similar objects, and for similar purposes, addressed himself to 
 Greece ? What, then, are these specially German Powers that 
 are, nevertheless, awakened, and that are to do so much ? Here 
 truly we have but confusion worse confounded ! Here we have 
 but a rankness of literary phrase that usurps the appearance of 
 philosophical thought ! That is it ! Haym demonstrates to the 
 quick what difference there is between the careless abundance of 
 the Litterateur, and the anxious parsimony of the Philosopher. 
 Had Haym been but as familiar with philosophical distinctions 
 as he is with literary images ! Images and again images, let 
 them be brilliant let them but dazzle, let them but interest, and 
 be it as it may with the unity of thought! 'This/ says Lord 
 Macaulay, ' may serve to show in how slovenly a way most 
 people are content to think ; ' and it is certainly strange, ' the 
 slovenly way ' in which so brilliant a writer as Haym ' is content 
 to think ! ' 
 
 Hellenic Cosmos, this is the conclusion to which we have been 
 brought on Hegel ; a Cosmos, of which we do not very well know 
 what to think, a Cosmos, of which we do not very well know 
 what to think Haym himself thinks. To this conclusion we have 
 been borne along on an abounding and triumphant stream of 
 the most brilliant and vivid rhetoric. Not but that we have 
 become aware, from time to time, of how this stream has been 
 indebted for its volume to contributions from without; for we 
 have seen gliding into it the spirit of the Protestant present, facts 
 of aesthetic perception, experiences of Hegel's own life, as Niirn- 
 berg and his vocation of teacher, influences of Fichte, of Schelling, 
 criticisms of Kant, and just, in general, as Haym says himself, 
 ' the plunder of historical and natural actuality.' So it is that we 
 have been borne in triumph to this conclusion of a Hellenic 
 Cosmos which has been artificially manufactured and put 
 together, violently, coarsely, crudely, barbarously, sophistically, 
 fraudulently, by aid of an unheard-of confusion and contradiction 
 of facts or faculties, or both ! . . . . But in what condition are we 
 when we arrive ? With much complacency we had remarked in 
 the preface the singularly satisfactory previous advantages and 
 preliminary preparations possessed and made by Haym for the 
 important task he undertook. We heard, well pleased, that ' he 
 had repeatedly lectured at the University on the life, writings, 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 671 
 
 and tenets of Hegel ; ' that ' he had attained to the possession of a 
 material that compelled him to enter into the details of the doctrines 
 and individual development of Hegel ; ' that he had procured for 
 study l the whole abundant treasure of the manuscripts left by 
 Hegel/ as well as other 'most desirable communications.' All~ 
 this we heard with delight ; and it was even with the intensest 
 interest that we listened to the magnificent scheme he pro- 
 pounded a scheme by which very plainly the Hegelian secret 
 would be at length secured. How otherwise were it possible to 
 feel when experiencing the promise of such words as these ? 
 
 I shall not supplant and subdue metaphysic by metaphysic, dialectic by 
 dialectic not system by system. Not this ; but I shall give, at first at least 
 and before all, an objective history of this philosophy. Very certainly I propose 
 to expound it, very certainly to criticise it : but the ground to both, I shall 
 win in the method of history by an analysis of its origin and development. . . . 
 Our purpose is to conduct the current of history into a well-enclosed and 
 fast-shut edifice of thought. . . . In the place of reason there steps up the 
 entire man, in the place of the universal the historically determined human 
 being. It was by an abstract critique that Kant, it is by a concrete historical 
 critique that we, with the resolution of a metaphysic abandoned by the belief 
 of the world, seek to furnish a contribution to the purification of the science 
 of philosophy. . . . Our business is the historical cognition of this system. 
 Our business is to resolve it into its special genesis and into its historical 
 value, to follow into its very structure the power which history has exercised 
 over it, and to discover the threads to which the progressing time could 
 attach itself, through which this time could get power over it. Our endeavour 
 shall it be to restore it to the departed or half-departed life in which it had its 
 foundation. Something analogous it shall be ours to effect in its regard to 
 what for his part Hegel effected as regards the systems of his predecessors. 
 He set them altogether in his own system. He threw over their dead bodies 
 the mighty pyramid of his absolute idealism. It is fit that to this idealism 
 no less an honour fall. In a wider, more imperishable tomb we shall set it 
 in the huge structure of eternal history we shall preserve it ; a place and 
 veritably a place of honour we shall assign it in the history of the development 
 of the German Spirit. Unfiguratively to speak : we shall see this philosophy 
 take birth and develop itself, we shall co-operate in its production. Step by 
 step we shall follow the growth of its originator shall bodily transport our- 
 selves into the spiritual environment, into the historical relations out of 
 which his mode of thought and his entire intellectual fabric rose shall 
 conceive to ourselves that the influences of development, the intellectual and 
 the moral instigations which worked on Hegel, work also upon us, and shall 
 then inquire whether we should have allowed ourselves to be determined by 
 them, should have employed and formalised them, should have decided in 
 their regard in the same manner as he. (Pages 2, 11, 14, 8.) 
 
 Penetrated by the wonderful promise of these and other such 
 words, we had listened breathlessly from the first, and never for 
 
672 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 a moment flagged. As for that, indeed, we were never allowed 
 to flag : perpetual incitement, rather, even goaded us into a pre- 
 ternatural intensity of attention. ' Hold we a moment in ! ' ' Let 
 us take it more objectively ! ' ' Turn we now the leaf, sharpen we 
 our memory, strengthen we our attention ! ' ' We have reached 
 the point to understand the universal articulation of the Hegelian 
 system ! ' ' Learn we it at last in its entire peculiarity ! ' Goaded 
 by such prickles, how otherwise can we arrive than breathless, 
 haggard, worn, and at such a finale after such promises, through 
 such torments of disappointment and contradiction, with the 
 echoes of such cries of excitation still in our ears at such a 
 finale Hellenic Cosmos, still Hellenic Cosmos, nothing but 
 Hellenic Cosmos ; how can we but stare and stagger, how can we 
 but wanly, wildly smile and ask, as we choke, Hah ! is that it ? 
 
 Ah ! we remember the pride with which we joined in 
 the exclamation of Haym: 'No longer shall either the 
 logical abstractness or the linguistic barbarism prove a hind- 
 rance to our intelligence ! ' But we are ashamed now. We 
 heard, with a smile, Haym declare of Hegelian formula?: 'No 
 doubt that he who were so instructed, would find himself quite 
 in the position of the student to whom Mephistopheles, dis- 
 guised as Faust, holds the first prelection on the method of 
 academic study ; no doubt that he would understand nothing of 
 the whole of it, that these formulae would appear to him very 
 strange, and their identification very confused/ With a smile of 
 superiority and pity we heard this, for we believed what Haym 
 assured us in regard to our own knowledge we believed him 
 when he said : * They (these formula?) can no longer appear to us 
 as a witch's rhyme ; they will appear to us only as an abbrevia- 
 tion for a view of things which is now perfectly intelligible to 
 us, not only in its meaning, but in its historical genesis and real 
 value/ We smiled with pride, pity, and superiority then; but 
 when we look back to the very occasion on which Haym made 
 these declarations (p. 220), we find that, despite his protestations, 
 he had given us no keys whatever, unless those very formula? 
 at which he pretended to smile Subtance is Subject, the 
 Absolute is Spirit, the True is System ; we find this, and by as 
 much as we were proud then, by so much are we dejected now. 
 It can seem, indeed, as if Haym had been but chaffing us. Where 
 is the ' view of things ' which is to be ' perfectly intelligible to 
 us ? 7 Where is the Hegelian ' genesis ' which we are supposed 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 673 
 
 to be so much at home in ? What is, then, that * real value/ of 
 which the knowledge is so coolly attributed to us ? We know 
 nothing of these things with all the phrases we have learned. 
 
 The article on Hegel in the ninth edition (1844) of the Con- 
 versations-Lexicon contains the following : 
 
 The Hegelian System through its connexion with the Identitatsphilo- 
 sophie, through the original and (at cost of those logical laws on which all 
 the sciences directly repose) dearly-bought novelty and seeming depth of its 
 method, through the semblance of a universal knowledge that equally em- 
 braced God and the World, through the imposing confidence with which it 
 presented itself as the sole possessor of * rational ' thought, through the capti- 
 vating symmetry of its arrangement, through the unremitting labour with which 
 its originator, supported on a wealth of knowledge, continually applied himself 
 to the following out of the fundamental thought of his system even into the 
 most concrete phenomena, finally, through the favour of external influences, 
 which is not by any means to be considered of small account had acquired a 
 great and extensive influence. . . . He saw the necessity of a thinking develop- 
 ment of what 'the intellectual intuition' meant. This necessity, taken 
 together with what is common to every Identitatssystem the proposition of 
 Spinoza, that the order and connexion of our thoughts is the same as the order 
 and connexion of things may be regarded as the natural germ of the peculiar 
 method which gives to the Hegelian system its specific character. 
 
 There is nothing here that can be considered widely different 
 from the external view of Hegel, which is common and current 
 everywhere. Now, while it is quite certain that Haym adds 
 nothing to this, it is not quite certain that he either says all this, 
 or says as well this. In particular, we may instance the pro- 
 position attributed to Spinoza, which is the same thing, but 
 in an infinitely more penetrating form than the * Spirit ' of 
 Haym. 
 
 To what end, then, has Haym written ? to what end are his 
 whole five hundred brilliant pages ? Are these aught alse than the 
 glittering bubbles of mere literature, that, after the manner of 
 bubbles presently die out, as with a murmur at their own inanity ? 
 Is it that Haym, known to have been engaged on Hegel, felt him- 
 self obliged, for his own credit, to say something of Hegel ? Is it 
 that all this all this brilliant rhetoric and all this perfect 
 literature, all these adroit turns and all these expert antitheses, 
 all that is unhesitatingly arrogated, and all that is unhesitatingly 
 denied, is it that all this and we have taken every care, at 
 least, to examine and inquire, is it that all this is but Haym's 
 way of saying, the grapes are sour ? 
 
 2u 
 
674 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Of the three writers we have passed under review, Rosenkranz 
 is the most at home with Hegel. He has evidently read him 
 faithfully most faithfully. Nor could he so read without 
 attaining to a very satisfactory insight into the general spirit of 
 his author. We have convinced ourselves, however, that, on the 
 whole, he has remained outside of the single secret. Indeed, the 
 failure of a spirit so vivid as Hayrn coming after Rosenkranz 
 testifies to the failure of the latter as. well. If these three have 
 failed, then, we may rest assured that no other has succeeded; 
 for so far as general evidence of books can be depended on 
 these three, of all who have approached the subject, are the latest 
 and the best, and ought to be amply representative of whatever has 
 preceded them. The general failure of Germany and of Europe 
 in this matter must seem extraordinary ; but when we think of 
 the failure of a man so peculiarly endowed and so peculiarly 
 placed as Schelling, we are left but small room for wonder at the 
 failure of the rest. Schelling opined that the system was but 
 ' Wolffianism,' and that Hegel himself was but the ' purest 
 exemplar of inner and outer Prosa.' We take leave to think 
 differently. Only a maker , only a faculty of the intensest poesy 
 could move as Hegel moved. It is possible that what the 
 imagination of a Homer or of a Shakespeare saw compared with 
 what the imagination of Hegel saw will yet so far as ultimate 
 speculation is concerned show but as a schoolboy's pictures on 
 a schoolboy's books. Everything in existence were it but a 
 dry wall or a morsel of soap, a grain of sand, a drop of water, or 
 the twig of a plant is valid and valuable only by the amount of 
 thought it contains ; and the imagination of Hegel holds in 
 solution as deep, as pure, as comprehensive thought as any, the 
 most philosophic imagination that has yet appeared. 
 
 Yet to Haym this very thought has been ' more than refuted : 
 it has been judged ! ' At the same time, it is declared not quite 
 without the usual contradiction that c this one great house has 
 only failed because this whole branch of business lies on the 
 ground ; ' ' we find ourselves at this moment in a great and 
 almost universal shipwreck of the spirit, and of faith in spirit at 
 all.' ' Of pretenders to the empty throne, it is true, there is no 
 want ; we hear now this one and now that one wagered on as the 
 philosopher of the future : now at last, timidly hope the disciples 
 of Herbart, is the time come when posterity will do their master 
 a tardy justice ; now many for the first time hear of the Schopen- 
 
HEGEL'S COMMENTATORS. 675 
 
 hauerian philosophy, &c., &c. The truth is just this crowding 
 up, this obtruding and intruding of the Dii minorum gentium is 
 the proof of what we say the truth is, that the realm of 
 philosophy is in a state of complete masterlessness, in a state^ol 
 break-up and demise.' Haym then tells us that the most rigid 
 Hegelians themselves admit this; that, with a timidity unlike 
 their ancient assurance, they only plead now, ' Hegel was " still 
 not unfruitful" for the development of philosophy;' and that 
 they do 'not trust themselves to decide whether the Hegelian 
 system has yet found " its Eeinhold and Beck " or not.' Haym 
 also asks, as if with the hope of cure for these things, c what if 
 science now should have only to seek a broader and surer basis 
 for what Kant did ? ' * Now, we do not dispute what is so 
 vividly described here only we should prefer to say that, 
 instead of Hegel having failed because philosophy is in ruins, it 
 is philosophy that is in ruins because Hegel (who just sought said 
 basis) has failed to be understood ! Hence the want of successors 
 hence the shipwreck of philosophy hence the judgment on 
 Hegel himself hence the necessity of a return to Kant hence 
 the inquiry after a Beck and a Eeinhold, who were still to seek, 
 perhaps, not only for Hegel, but even possibly for Kant /^ 
 
 * Haym, pp. 6, 5, 3, 4, 5, 13. 
 
 t This is said, however, if with direct and sufficient knowledge of Reinhold, only 
 with indirect and insufficient knowledge of Beck. 
 
VII. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 IN the course of his inquest, it probably occurred to Hegel, that 
 the one common object of the search of all of them Kant, Fichte, 
 Schelling, Hegel was the concrete notion. Kant named what he 
 wanted, an a priori synthetic judgment , which amounts to a 
 principle the oneness of which were already multiple the sameness 
 already different, and this as determined independently of all 
 experience by pure reason, or, what is the same thing, as self- 
 determined. Fichte aimed at precisely the same .thing in his 
 synthesis, which was to be the one of thesis and antithesis, the 
 last, too, being a process as spontaneous, a priori, and necessary, 
 as the second. Schelling, again, gave direct name to the opera- 
 tions of both Kant and Fichte, when he spoke of the identity of 
 identity and non-identity. Lastly, Hegel, while he felt that what 
 he himself had been striving after was no less and no other, 
 perceived that this very principle was the principle as well of the 
 concrete and the actual. There was this actual world ; consequently, 
 the First had been no bare identity, no abstract identity : it must 
 have at once and from the beginning contained difference, it 
 must have been from the very outset a concrete, i.e., a one at once 
 of identity and difference. Nay, such was the actual constitution 
 and nature of every single entity in this universe. How did I 
 know that door, this window, or that shutter ? The difference of 
 each was simply the identity of each : what each was for-other, 
 that it was as reflected into self, or each was only and nothing 
 but its for-other reflected into its in-itself, its difference reflected 
 into its identity, or (as, in its way, even ancient logic holds of 
 definition Bestimmung ! ) its Differentia reflected into its Genus. 
 This was the common character of the whole world, and of every 
 denizen in the world. Again, and, as it were, on another side, to 
 perceive was to think, and to think was to identify difference. 
 
 There is a vast amount of material which can be all brought 
 under this one point of view. A summum genus, for example, is 
 
CONCLUSION. 677 
 
 a necessity of thought ; but the true name and nature of a summum 
 genus were only identity. That summum genus, too, if it were the 
 summum genus of this actually varied universe, must have been 
 not more the primitive and original identity than the primitive 
 and original difference : in other words, that summum genus must 
 have already held within it also the summa differentia. A union 
 of opposites, then, was thus the one concrete fact; and it was 
 no wonder that as principle of explanation it had been the 
 one abstract quest of Kant and the rest. It was thus seen 
 that what we ought to look for was not, as in common thought 
 abstract identity, but pure negativity ; for a one that is through 
 opposites, or an identity that is supported on differents, that lives, 
 that is through these, can be named no otherwise. What is 
 pointed at, in fact, is but the concrete reciprocity of a disjunctive 
 sphere, where each term is no less itself than it is the other also. 
 Nay, the reciprocity is such, that you cannot signalise the one 
 without implicating the other ; or but for mvelopment, and to 
 the extent required, development is impossible : the current 
 forward is equally the current backward only the mtent makes 
 the extent. You look before to attraction ; but could you look 
 behind, you would equally see repulsion : if the one moment of the 
 antithesis is explicit, the other of the two is always also at the same 
 time correspondingly implicit. Reciprocity has been the bottom 
 consideration of all modern philosophy, and it is remarkable that 
 in just such reciprocity it began. Hume closed his inquiry by 
 concluding Causality not to be necessary because it was matter of 
 fact; and Kant, with a sort of reciprocating reversal, opened his 
 by inferring Causality not to be matter of fact because it was 
 necessary. 
 
 This perception on the part of Kant led to the important 
 conclusion, that there must be inferences in us quite a priori and 
 independent of any reference whatever to sensible facts. This 
 single thought of Kant it was that Hegel gazed into its ultimate 
 abstraction, or into its ultimate life, the concrete notion, the 
 primitive and original radical, the Koc's egg of the whole huge 
 universe. Study of Kant, too, enabled Hegel to see that the 
 content or matter of this notion was not confined to the intellect 
 proper, but repeated itself in perception as well; for an act of 
 perception was to Kant this, that only by the universal is the 
 particular converted into the singular. This singular, further, 
 a phenomenon to Kant as <rvvo\ov of variety of unknown thing 
 
678 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 from without and of unity of known categorical universal from 
 within (affection brought by function into focus), became a nou- 
 menon to Hegel, the actually existent concrete, the only reality 
 and truth this, by abstracting from any and every subject, as well 
 as by regarding the universal, (i.e., generalising thought), and 
 the particular (i.e., individualising sense) as only the abstract 
 moments of the single singular. To find the primordial form 
 of this singular, then, and let it by means of the nisus of its 
 own life develop, through the fullness of all and every, into the 
 one spirit that alone is this was to find also the system of Hegel. 
 
 The ultimate of Hegel, then, is the notion as notion. Let us 
 suppose a spore, a germ, and call it the notion. Now, this spore 
 has its own life ; there are three glances in it, each of which is 
 the spore itself and the whole spore. Such is the nature of 
 notional universality, particularity, and singularity. They are 
 necessary mutual complements, and cannot be disunited unless 
 by the fiction of abstraction. They are the constituent reciprocals 
 of a disjunctive sphere : they are the constituent reciprocals of 
 the disjunctive sphere ; it is the unity, the all, the absolute ; they 
 are its (its own proper inalienable, inherent) manifold, plurality, 
 variety, or phenomenal show of attributes. It is the one Identity ; 
 they are the one Difference : and identity and difference are the 
 moments of the single concrete, or they are universality and par- 
 ticularity in the single singular. The secret of the universe is 
 thought, the spirit of thought, whose own life is the play of what 
 is, and that which is, is thought in its own freedom, which at the 
 same time also is its own necessity. The absolute is the vibration 
 of a mathematical point, the tinted tremble of a single eye, infini- 
 tesimally infinite, punctually one, whose own tremble is its own 
 object, and its own life, and its own self. 
 
 This is what it is to be serious with idealism. If God is a Spirit 
 and thinks, if God created the universe on thought : in other 
 words, if thought is what is, then all is reducible to thought, and 
 logic is the name of the whole. If the word 'logic' offend, let us 
 say Xoyo9 ; but let us admire then our own resultant satisfaction ! 
 The three absolute reciprocals, that is, may be named Simple 
 Apprehension, Judgment, and Keason : with these we can shadow 
 out the whole history of man, and the whole life of the individual. 
 Idealism is this : the Inhalt of Simple Apprehension, Judgment, 
 and Eeason is identical with these its Forms; Perception is 
 identical with Intellect ; Affection is identical with Function ; 
 
CONCLUSION. 679 
 
 Object with Subject. What is, is the ' intuitus originarius' the 
 anschauender Verstand, the one absolute Spirit God. 
 
 How very little is required to convert the Vorstellung of Kant 
 into the Vorstellung of Hegel, we may see from these words of 
 the former: 
 
 The transcendental hypothesis, that all life is properly only intelligible, 
 nowise subject to the vicissitudes of time, and that neither is there a begin- 
 ning through birth nor an end through death : that this life is nothing but a 
 mere phenomenal, show i.e., a sensuous Vorstellung of the pure spiritual life, 
 and the entire world of sense a mere picture which hangs before our present 
 mode of cognition, and, like a dream, has no objective reality in itself : that, 
 did we see things and ourselves as they are, we should find ourselves in a world 
 of spiritual natures, with which world our only true union had neither begun 
 through birth nor would cease with death (as mere phenomenal appearances), 
 &c. (Krit. of P. R., Discipline of P. R., third section, last paragraph but two.) 
 
 That we should be able to say the same thing in such a variety 
 of ways, is itself a proof of the truth of the principle. The 
 reflexion of difference into identity it was, however, that Hegel 
 probably kept in his eye when he described his dialectic in those 
 words about each whole passing into its own opposite, which 
 have been so often repeated without intelligence, and with the 
 conviction at bottom that they concerned only an idle receipt, 
 a something factitious that merely would be. Collation with the 
 various other points of view which have been just indicated will, 
 however, supply a correction to this conviction. Hegel, in short, 
 perceiving that the reflexion of difference into identity was the 
 one concrete principle in the world of sense as in the world of 
 thought, must have at once seen that he had caught the principle 
 of truth the principle which would be at once beginning, middle 
 and end. There was progress in the very thing itself : if differ- 
 ence could be reflected into identity, difference might also be 
 separated from identity ; and was not that the very definition of 
 progress ? The following out of such considerations could only 
 lead to the development of Hegel's necessary chain of units, which 
 were, at the same time, an all. A beginning would not be difficult 
 to find; for a beginning would require simply to be as a beginning 
 is in thought, thought being all. We have no admissions of 
 Hegel's actual procedure; we have this latter expressed in abstract 
 results only. We have seen for ourselves, however, that a begin- 
 ning is impossible to any outward principle. Any outward prin- 
 ciple would at once presuppose and leave unexplained both space 
 and time. A single outward principle changing itself into thought, 
 
680 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 changing itself into new kinds, changing itself even into new 
 dimensions changing itself at all is inconceivable. A single 
 outward unit that had so changed itself into this universe, would 
 demonstrate itself to have held even at the first this universe 
 potentially or virtually within it. This is idealism, but an 
 imperfect idealism, time and space being left on the outside, 
 absolutely unyielding to every attempt to pack them in. A 
 beginning externally is absolutely impossible. The materialist, it 
 is true, may admit this ; but probably he will admit that a 
 beginning must be thought. So admitting, he will now admit 
 also, that that beginning must be thought in an internal principle. 
 Should he deny, however, that a beginning must be thought, he 
 will admit that it certainly very often is thought, and always, at 
 all events, that it may be thought. But if a beginning may be 
 thought, it must be thought only so and so. That is, as Hegel 
 shows, the beginning must be both absolutely First and absolutely 
 Incompound. Now, only pure Being corresponds to that descrip- 
 tion, and this is all that Hegel requires : from this, by process of 
 simple watching, the whole universe ascends ; into this, too, it 
 rounds, taking up into itself the inconceivable Mrslness and 
 Incompoundness ; for if a Beginning must be absolutely First and 
 absolutely Incompound, it just as certainly can be neither. That 
 what is, is the concrete notion, explains this. We have seen, also, 
 many other considerations, as identity, the genus sumnium, the 
 universal, &c. &c., which could only lead to the same result. 
 
 Being passes into its opposite, Non-being; and "Non-being 
 returning to Being passes into its higher opposite, Becoming. 
 We have already seen this process at some length. By external 
 reflexion of the moments into each other (as of Nichts into Seyn 
 to the development of Werden), it has already appeared to us so 
 easy to bring about the whole Hegelian series, that a danger 
 manifested itself, on the one hand, of the whole business being 
 considered phantasy and delusion, and, on the other, of our being 
 exposed to an inundation of similar attempts, with endless modi- 
 fications on the part of others. It must be said, however, that 
 Hegel, for his part, has done his best to obtain only solid results. 
 To this end, he has carried into each element the movement of the 
 notion internally, and has not contented himself with the mere 
 external reflexion of Nichts into Seyn, &c., or of Seyn into Nichts, 
 &c. (for the process has always evidently the two directions to the 
 evolution of the two new moments), but has endeavoured, on 
 
CONCLUSION. 681 
 
 this principle, to develop and demonstrate the whole concrete 
 matter of logic, metaphysic, &c. Nor is this a light labour. It 
 is indeed hard to conceive anything in this world more oppressively 
 difficult than to attempt to follow Hegel into the inner of his 
 transitions ; as, for example, in Measure, or Substantiality, 
 Causality, Eeciprocity, &c. In these Hegel shows to us, like a 
 man with an enormous load on his head, who endeavours labori- 
 ously, with many an ineffectual effort, many a sway, now to, now 
 from, to turn into such a direction (that of the notion) as would 
 immediately lighten his burthen into a new form. Nor can we 
 enter with him into the same element without feeling the same 
 weight imposed on us to the utter crushing generally of our 
 weaker powers. Hegel has not been crushed, however, but has 
 veritably demonstrated the matter of metaphysic, logic, &c., even 
 with such irresistible fascination of exposition as may prove to 
 his reader in the end nothing less than a constant surprise. 
 
 Another aspect besides those of transition into opposites, re- 
 flexion of moments mutually, successive functions of Simple Ap- 
 prehension, Judgment, and Reason, &c., on which the principle of 
 the method may be regarded, is this : Whenever there has been 
 coalescence to a new element, the last moments may be re-extri- 
 cated from this element, but in the form of this element, that is, as 
 the new moments to a new and further coalescence. The moments, 
 in short, always proceed in pairs, and in pairs that gradually 
 ascend. Consider such sequences as these : Being, Nothing ; 
 Eeality, Negation ; Something, Other ; One, Many ; Attraction, 
 Repulsion ; Continuity, Discretion; Extension, Intension ; Identity, 
 Difference ; Positive, Negative ; Matter, Form ; Whole, Parts ; 
 Force, Manifestation; Inner, Outer ; Substance, Accident ; Cause, 
 Effect ; Action, Reaction, &c. Does not one see an extraordinary 
 tautology here? To limit ourselves to the three last pairs, does 
 it not give to think that Substance and Accident are the same 
 matter as Cause and Effect, and that, in Reciprocity, what was 
 previously Cause and Effect is now alternately both Cause and 
 Effect ? Are we not made to see an ascending tautology here ? 
 Nor is it very different in other spheres. These pairs will be 
 readily seen also always to constitute what Hegel calls the Anti- 
 thesis : the successive ones of their union also will be as readily 
 seen to prove a gradually ascending series till final eclipse in the 
 Absolute Spirit. 
 
 It is not to be pretended that Hegel has always been successful, 
 
682 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 or that what he has done, like everything else that holds of time, is 
 not to be partly by rejection, partly by absorption eventually 
 superseded. The work was too prodigious for that, the fever of 
 the zymosis of the day much too ardent. Indeed, the instrument 
 he has in hand brings with it its own temptations to merely arbitrary 
 products, and the bare show of a consistent and continuous ration- 
 ale : that is to say, there is a duplicity in the notion itself which 
 steads you easily whether you would distinguish into antithesis or 
 unite to harmony. This is a dangerous power for the architect of a 
 system to possess: whether an impassable chasm yawn in the Object, 
 or an exhausted faculty frustrate the Subject, the fascination of the 
 ready expedient is equally irresistible. We must lay our account, 
 then, with finding inequalities in Hegel even crudities, it may be, 
 and things that revolt. Where such side of Hegel comes most 
 prominently to the surface is, as the nature of the element would 
 alone lead us to expect, in the Philosophy of Nature. Here the 
 object of Hegel is to lead the notion into the reports of nature 
 which the concrete sciences extend ; and the inner principle finds, 
 as Hegel takes care to make us see, the outer element only naturally 
 stiff and refractory. Nevertheless, we have in appearance one un- 
 broken chain from the abstractest natural object space, through 
 time, motion, matter, the laws of matter, light, heat, electricity, 
 chemistry, geology, &c., up to the concretest natural object, the 
 animal, and the last manifestation of the animal, death % ; and, no 
 doubt, glances of the most penetrating character have been here 
 thrown by Hegel on many of the hardest and most important 
 matters. Still at times the notion shows through these matters- 
 it is as a frame, a lay-figure, externally in their midst; they fall 
 off from it like clothes that are not its own and will not fit. It is 
 dangerous to read here, if one would preserve one's respect for 
 Hegel. Eejection is at times so unexceptive, and in an element 
 of such feeling, that all the essential greatness of the man has 
 disappeared for the time, as it were behind a dwarf. It is to be 
 said, however, that the newer and slighter the look at these points, 
 the more instantaneous and unhesitating is our sentence. Con- 
 sideration dulls our disapproval, and we retire at last, perhaps, all 
 but won over to that in regard to which we had laughed our 
 scorn fullest. At all events, one glance to the 'Science of Logic* 
 or the ' Philosophy of Spirit,' and our balance is restored ; one 
 glance to these one glance (say) to that discussion of what are 
 called the fundamental laws of thought under Identity, Difference, 
 
CONCLUSION. 683 
 
 Ground, &c., for which Hegel has in this country been so much 
 decried, and this same Hegel is once again to us the very master 
 of thought. It is but fair, however, that the reader should have a 
 sample of Hegel on this side also. In 368 of the Encyclopaedic, 
 Hegel thus delivers himself in regard to how it is with animal 
 life here : 
 
 ' Life is subjected to the complicated conditions and circumstances of 
 external nature, and may exhibit itself in the poorest forms. The fruitfulness 
 of the earth lets life for every casualty and in all ways strike out everywhere. 
 The animal world can, almost even less than the other spheres of nature, 
 exhibit a rational system of organisation independent within itself, hold fast 
 by forms which were determined by the notion, and preserve these from the 
 imperfection and intermixture of conditions, in consequence of transitions, 
 failures, and confusions. This weakness of the notion in nature generally 
 subjects not only the development of individuals to external contingencies, 
 so that the developed animal (and man the most) exhibits monstrosities, but 
 even the genera are wholly a prize to the changes of the external universal 
 life of nature, the vicissitude of which the life of the animal undergoes also, 
 and is consequently only an alternation of health and disease. The entourage 
 of external contingency contains almost only what is alien ; it exercises a 
 perpetual violence and threat of dangers 011 the animal's feeling, which is an 
 insecure, anxious, and unhappy one.' (Encyc., Part 2, p. 651.) 
 
 ' Even the genera externally a prize ! ' that is the so-called * struggle ' ! 
 But we must recollect the role of the notion and the whole teaching of 249 
 (quoted p. 745) ; where it is literally said : ' It is wholly idle to represent the 
 genera as evolving themselves, one after the other, in time.' 
 
 Allenthalben has been translated for every casualty, as the italics 
 seemed to demand, but everywhere has been added. Of disease 
 He^el speaks thus : 
 
 The organism finds itself in a state of disease, so far as one of its systems or 
 organs in conflict with an inorganic potence becomes excited (irritated), sets 
 itself fast apart by itself, and persists in its special action against the action 
 of the whole, whose fluency and all-pervading process is thus obstructed. . . . 
 The peculiar phenomenon of disease therefore is, that the identity of the 
 entire organic process presents itself as successive passage of the vital move- 
 ment through its different moments, Sensibility, Irritability, and Reproduc- 
 tion i. e ^ as fever, which, however, as process of the whole against the indi- 
 vidualised action is just as much the effort and the commencement of cure. . . 
 The curative agent rouses the organism to eliminate the special irritation, in 
 which the formal activity of the whole is fixed, and replace in the whole the 
 fluency of the particular organ or system. The curative agent produces this 
 effect by being itself an irritative, but one difficult to assimilate and overcome, 
 so that an external somewhat is offered to the organism against which it is 
 necessitated to exert its force. Directing itself against what is external, it steps 
 out of the limitation in which it was imprisoned, and with which it had be- 
 come identical, but against which it could not react so far as it was not as object 
 to it. (Encyc. 371-3.) An es here should have been sie for the limitation. 
 
684 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Now, such speculation as this, in connexion with the preten- 
 sions of the Notion, gives pause. We feel disposed to ask, what 
 is meant by ' conflict,' * potence,' ' external irritative,' &c., and, in 
 fine, has not Hegel here just committed himself to the carriage of 
 that very Vorstellung which he would not hesitate sarcastically to 
 blow to pieces from beneath the sitting of everybody else ? The 
 organism is a transparent breadth composed of myriads of ants in 
 regular connexion and in regularly consecutive movement. An 
 individual ant is suddenly thrown across to the production of an 
 opaque spot, the opacity of which rapidly spreads and thickens 
 under the misfortunes of the succeeding ants who stumble over 
 the begun obstruction. The whole power of the general organism 
 is now centred in that one spot. Present now a Spanish fly, or 
 other hostile insect, at the periphery; instantly the ants flee 
 asunder from the opaque spot, each to its post, to defend the com- 
 mon whole, with restoration of transparency as the result ! We 
 have thus a picture ; but have we more than that ? Hegel, how- 
 ever, might conceivably say here, it is just the Vorstellung that is 
 in place in Nature, the externalisation of the Begriffin the exter- 
 nalisation of the Idee. And it is to be admitted that the greatest 
 philosophers, as Plato and Leibnitz, have made advances by just 
 such expedients. Nay, the progress of those who are named scien- 
 tific men par excellence, Bacon, Newton, Berzelius, &c. &c., is not 
 differently conditioned. The most respected theories in all branches 
 of science are at this very moment only such Vorstellungen : irrita- 
 tives, conflicts, potences, are by no means confined to Hegel. It will 
 reward the student's trouble, if he but consider the most current 
 speculations in the most current text-books of the day. Should 
 he regard them as pictures and question them as such, he will 
 astonish himself with his own results. On the whole, then, 
 perhaps we may conclude with Hegel himself here : 
 
 However general, and therefore in comparison with the so multifarious 
 phenomena of disease insufficient, the above determinations may be, neverthe- 
 less it is only the firm fundamen of the Notion which is capable as well of 
 penetrating and pervading the particular details as of rendering perfectly 
 intelligible that which, whether as regards the phenomena of disease or the 
 principle of care, appears to Custom sunk in the externalities of the empirical 
 interest, as extravagant and bizarre. 
 
 It is but fair on our part to add also, that in Hegel himself 
 there is neither the ant nor the fly. 
 
 Hegel, then, on the whole, must be considered quite as eligible 
 
CONCLUSION. 685 
 
 for dispensation with respect to errors of detail as anybody else ; 
 and it is on his great principles that, in the end, his merits or 
 demerits must rest. Now, for these surely much can be said. 
 At the one great principle itself, the Notion, on the supposition of_ 
 its being fanciful, we possibly may shake our heads ; we may be 
 allowed to express ourselves equally doubtfully as regards the 
 method, which may appear to us a mere mechanical process of the 
 easiest and at the same time the most fallacious nature : for what 
 difficulty, or what likelihood of soundness, can there be in the 
 reflecting of Nothing into Being to the production of Becoming, of 
 Negation into Eeality to the production of Something, of Quantity 
 into Quality to the production of Measure, &c. &c. ? But how are 
 we to account for the results ? It may appear to us that we 
 but alternately intricate and extricate Affirmation and Nega- 
 tion from the very Alpha to the very Omega of the System ; 
 but how is it that this gradual rise of categories takes 
 place categories which strike down into the very heart of 
 the actual ? Is not the very conception of the examination 
 of the categories as such, apart and by themselves, a master- 
 stroke ? We go on arguing and reasoning with each other, 
 we settle Politics, Eeligion, Philosophy, Science, House-affairs, 
 and all through use of certain distinctions which pass 
 current with us like pounds, shillings, pence Being, Becoming, 
 Finite, Infinite, Essence, Appearance, Identity, Difference, Inner, 
 Outer, Positive, Negative, Cause, Effect, Substance, Accident, &c. 
 &c., but we have never turned upon these things themselves to 
 ask the warrant and nature of their validity. To use them, 
 nevertheless, without this inquest is not to be free, but bound 
 is to drive about an absolute log, and absolutely at their mercy. 
 This, then, must be granted as a great merit in Hegel, that he 
 has taken these things up, and subjected them to analysis in their 
 abstract and veritable selves. But the categories are not the only 
 Hegelian results; there are others, and quite as striking. On 
 many concrete interests Hegel is supposed to have thrown some 
 very extraordinary and yet very acceptable lights. His Philosophy 
 of History, his Philosophy of Eeligion, his Philosophy of Politics 
 (Eecht), his ^Esthetic, have given to think to the very deepest 
 and severest thinkers. Take the ^Esthetic alone, it is a work 
 unexampled, whether we consider the fullness, completeness, and 
 captivating felicity of the divisions and classifications, or the 
 almost surprising truth for the most part of the criticism in detail 
 
686 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 as regards matter too, Art, Poetry and General Literature 
 in which we have no reason to suppose that Hegel had ever 
 particularly dwelt, and for which we have no reason to suppose 
 that he was ever particularly called. Now, how is this ? whence 
 is this immense, extraordinary, and unexpected success ? The 
 longer we inquire and the deeper we look, the more shall we be 
 inclined to answer the Notion, all comes from the Notion, the 
 Notion does all. Just in proportion to the reality of a man's 
 piety, too, is his insight into the penetrating truth of Hegel's 
 statement of the act of devotion, of inward religious experiences. 
 Yet in the very centre of this statement the spirit that produced 
 the matter the notion can with a scratch be demonstrated to lie 
 at full length. This, then, is very striking, that Hegel should 
 have produced such important results and in such peculiar 
 spheres, and all in consequence of utter and unswerving fidelity 
 to his one single principle the Notion. There cannot be a doubt 
 of it, the most momentous questions that have interested or 
 interest humanity, all lie in the pages of Hegel apparently in 
 ultimate discussion ; and this ultimate discussion has been 
 attained only through the Notion. Special proof as regards 
 these results were out of place here ; but the reader, who is now 
 better prepared, might like to see some expressions of Hegel's 
 own in regard to the Notion, which shall extend evidence in 
 favour of what has been said of it in these pages. As remarked, 
 now that the Notion has been held up to view, almost every page 
 will offer illustrations in place (as shown, indeed, by these very 
 last quotations in regard to disease, &c.), but it may be worth 
 while to adduce one or two of a more striking character. 
 
 Thought has Us forms proper, the universal of which forms is the notion. . . . 
 From the notion in the speculative sense, what has been usually named notion 
 is to be distinguished. (Encyc. 9.) 
 
 In this field of mutation and contingency, not the notion, but only grounds 
 (reasons) can be made available. (Encyc. 16.) 
 
 The One Notion is in all and everything the Substantiality. (Encyc. 114.) 
 
 The forms of logic are, as forms of the notion, the living spirit of the actual. 
 (Encyc. 162.) 
 
 As the spirit is not only infinitely richer than nature, but as moreover the 
 absolute unity of the antithesis, in the notion constitutes its essential being, it 
 shows in its manifestation and intervention in externality the Contradiction 
 in its ultimate determinateness. (Logik, iii. p. 264.) 
 
 The notion is the eternal, the bee'nt in and for itself, just because it is not 
 the abstract but the concrete unity not determinedness abstractly referent of 
 self to self, but the unity of itself and of its other ; into which other, therefore, 
 
CONCLUSION. 687 
 
 it cannot pass over as if it othered itself in it, just because the other the 
 determinedness (the specific peculiarity) is itself: and so, in this passing 
 over, it passes over consequently, only into itself. (Lk. iii. p. 268.) 
 
 It is particularly the relation of potence or power which has been applied 
 more recently to the moments of the notion : the notion in its immediacy 
 was named the first potence ; in its otherwiseness or the difference, the 
 particularising of its moments, the second, and in its return into self, or as 
 totality, the third potence. (Lk. i. p. 393.) 
 
 The notion which Kant has set up in the d priori synthetic judgments, 
 the notion of opposed principles which are equally inseparable, an identity 
 that is in itself unseparated dif-ference belongs to what is great and im- 
 perishable in his philosophy. This notion, as it is the notion itself and 
 everything in itself is the notion, is indeed equally present in perception. 
 (Lk. i. p. 241-2.) 
 
 Although Kant made the deep observation that concerns a priori synthetic 
 principles, and recognised the unity of self-consciousness as their root 
 recognised, that is, the identity of the notion with itself he took, neverthe- 
 less, the matter of detail just from formal logic as given ; the deduction, then, 
 should of necessity have been the demonstration of the transition of said 
 simple unity of self-consciousness into these its characterising forms and 
 dif-ferences ; but of the exposition of this truly synthetic movement, of the 
 notion thus producing itself, Kant has spared himself the pains. (Lk. iii. p. 282.) 
 
 True science can organise itself only through the life proper of the notion ; 
 this the peculiar principle, which a schema would merely stick on outwardly 
 is the self-actuating soul of the completed content. (Phaenom. p. 40.) 
 
 Now that the Kantian triplicity only re-discovered by instinct but still 
 dead, still uncomprehended has been raised into its absolute significance, 
 and so, consequently, now that the true form has at the same time been set 
 up in its true matter, and that there has been established the notion of 
 science, &c. (Phaenom. p. 37.) * x 
 
 ' The categories demonstrate themselves to be nothing else than the series 
 of the evolution forms of the notion, and that not just of any notion, but of 
 the notion in its own self.' (P. of K. ii. 433.) 
 
 These quotations will make the Hegelian Notion, and all 
 that it imports, so obvious, as it were, so self-evident, that 
 little merit will seem to be left for any one who shall have 
 signalised this. It is quite certain, however, that it was not from 
 them that the 'light 5 of the Notion 'went up' to ourselves: 
 before that light went up, they were all of them read repeatedly, 
 but till that light went up they all of them remained unyieldingly 
 dark. If we are right, too, though read repeatedly in all proba- 
 bility, they yet remain dark to many the most competent readers 
 themselves. Again, it is to be considered that they lie here in 
 one focus ; whereas in Hegel they lie widely apart from each other, 
 scattered over hundreds of pages. Nor is it to be less considered 
 that, while here they are direct and express, they occur in Hegel 
 
688 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 only indirectly, parenthetically, accidentally. We add a few more 
 such passages which may illustrate special points in the one opera- 
 tion, nameable exposition of the notion ; and we feel assured that a 
 perusal of * Yom Begriff im Allgemeinen,' at the beginning, and 
 of ' Die absolute Idee ' at the end of the third volume of the Logik, 
 will complete conviction, and definitively clinch all that we have 
 in this respect anywhere said. 
 
 To be held fast in finite categories, i.e., in the yet unresolved antithesis. 
 (Encyc. 27.) 
 
 The antithesis expressed in immediacy as being and nothing. (Encyc. 87.) 
 
 The second forms constitute a sphere in its difference. (Encyc. 85.) 
 
 The negative, determinateness, the relation, the judgment, and all the 
 other determinations which fall under the second moment. (Lk. iii. p. 342.) 
 
 That the totality be set, to this there belongs the double transition, not only 
 that of the one character into its other, but equally the transition of this 
 other, its return, into the first, . . . this remark on the necessity of the double 
 transition is of great importance for the whole of the scientific method. 
 (Lk. i. p. 392.) 
 
 It is one of the most important intellections to know and hold fast, this 
 nature of the reflexional forms considered, that their truth consists only in 
 their correlation, and that each, consequently, implies the other in its own 
 very notion ; without this knowledge there is properly possible no step in 
 philosophy. (Lk. ii. p. 66.) 
 
 The difference (Unterschied) is the whole and its own moment; as the 
 identity is equally its whole and its moment. This is to be regarded as the 
 essential nature of reflexion, and as the special ground proper of all actualisation 
 and self-movement. Difference, like identity, [these] make themselves moment, 
 explication^ because as reflexion they are the negative correlation with them- 
 selves. (Lk. ii. pp. 38-9.)* 
 
 Kant has applied the infinitely important form of triplicity, however much 
 it has manifested itself with him only first of all as a formell spark of light, 
 not to the genera of his categories (quantity, quality, &c.), but only to their 
 species : he has, consequently, missed the third to quality and quantity 
 [measure]. (Lk. i. p. 396.) 
 
 In general, every real is in its beginning an only immediate identity [and 
 identity = Ansichseyn, Being-m-self, Lk. ii. p. 202] ; for in its beginning it 
 has not yet opposed and developed the moments ; on one side not yet re- 
 inner -ed itself (as though remembered itself) out of externality ; on the other 
 side through its own movement not yet uttered (outered, alienated) and pro- 
 duced itself out of internality ; it is therefore only the inner as qualifyingness 
 counter the outer, and only the outer as qualifyingness counter the inner. 
 It is thus partly only an immediate being ; partly, so far as it is equally the 
 negativity which is to become the motive of the movement, it is as such 
 
 * See also (Lk. i. p. 18) the substantial content that has the distinction in it of a 
 body and a soul : the soul is the notion (three pages further, too, at p. 21, perhaps 
 the best passage yet, where it is said the notion itself, i.e., the ground principle of 
 the particular notions) ! 
 
CONCLUSION. 689 
 
 essentially only an inner. In every natural, scientific, and spiritual develop- 
 ment generally this presents itself, and this is essentially to be recognised, 
 that the first, in that something is only first of all inwardly or in its notion, is 
 just for this reason only its own immediate, passive Daseyn (existential outness). 
 So the relation here is only the relation an sich (in itself), its notion, or only 
 inwardly. But on this account again it is only the external, immediate 
 relation, &c. (Lk. ii. p. 181.) 
 
 Justification and support will be found in these extracts for 
 many decisions in regard to the moments and their names with 
 which the Eeader may now be familiar. At page 62 above, 
 and in reference to an extract of Kant which was spoken of as 
 likely to have been suggestive to Hegel, it was remarked of the 
 action on the world of a being that can think, that it would amount 
 to a projection of this being out around him, so that the other would 
 come to be only the stand for this being's qualities thereon dis- 
 posed : if the reader will consult ' die Idee des Wahren,' in the 
 third volume of the Logic, he will be struck with the singular 
 truth of the accidental conception ; and he will also see reason to 
 admire Hegel for realising this side of the notion (for it is a side 
 of the notion) under Erkennen (cognition). 
 
 At page 610 of Frantz and Hillert's Hegelian Extracts, we have 
 the following from the Philosophy of Keligion (as in edition 1, 
 which is sometimes simpler than edition 2) : 
 
 The third is the abrogation of this antithesis, of this separation, this banish- 
 ment of the subject from God, the realising that Man feel and know God 
 within himself, raise himself as this subject to God, give himself the assur- 
 ance, the blessedness, the joy to have God in his heart, to be united with God. 
 This is the Cultus : the Cultus is not merely relation, knowledge, but act ; 
 the action to give himself the certainty, that Man is accepted by God, received 
 into Grace. The simple form of the Cultus, the inner Cultus, is Devotion, 
 Worship this Mystic thing, the unio mystica. 
 
 The most fervid saint that ever lived could give no better and 
 no other account of his inner experiences : yet here we are 
 in the third moment of the notion ! The development of the 
 notion through its ordinary moments has led us to this ! It is 
 fidelity to the notion and its own accurate language that has given 
 birth to this fidelity to the vital feelings and expressions of 
 religion ! 
 
 The last extract suggests the propriety of another word on the 
 Matter of Hegel and we may say again, in passing, that his 
 Origin is directly from Kant, and more especially from Kant's 
 Deduction of the Categories with peculiar reference to the Unity 
 
 2x 
 
690 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of Apperception and the fundamental Kantian query as regards 
 the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments, or, what is the 
 same thing, mental inferences independent of any reference to 
 the facts of experience ; his Principle is the Concrete Notion so 
 developed, and his Form or Method is his evolution of new 
 Moments to the production of a new Whole by means of extrica- 
 tion, or reflexion, or opposition of these moments, or disposal of 
 them according to the triple movement constituted by Simple 
 Apprehension, Judgment, and Reason, or however else we may 
 name the operation indicated.* As regards the Matter, we may 
 repeat at once, that it consists of all the questions which have 
 ever in any sphere been regarded as philosophical. Probably no 
 man has ever studied more deeply than Hegel the progress of 
 humanity in regard to those questions which it puts for the pro- 
 curement of explanation as respects its own existence, that of its 
 world, and the constituent phenomena of both. A man so rich in 
 knowledge of the real, a man that had so trained himself in the 
 actual, could not by any possibility come to us offering only what 
 was formal or formell, and without concrete nutriment. In an 
 age that exacts such scientific requirements as the present, it is 
 impossible that such a man, in such a position, and with such 
 pretensions, could have treated of such interests as Logic and 
 Philosophy, History and ^Esthetic, Morals, Politics, and Eeligion, 
 with no result but that of an arbitrary, fanciful, idle, and all but 
 unintelligible systematisation, and without any addition or im- 
 provement of a solid and substantial nature. This is wholly in- 
 credible : rather, it is to be expected that Hegel has said what will 
 prove for many a day almost the last word on all the great con- 
 crete interests for which alone humanity lives, and to which alone 
 it strives. 
 
 In logic, to consider the categories alone abstractly and in 
 themselves, is a glance the deepest and the truest, as the leading 
 of them all up into the notion and the idea is perhaps the rarest 
 feat yet of any one philosopher. Consider Being alone ! What 
 is Being ? Driven on the literary hot-bed which is given us at 
 present, we are all geniuses nowadays, men of rapid ideation and 
 symbolical speech (which, I suppose, is the definition of this 
 wonderful thing genius often the perquisite of the weakest), 
 
 * The extract from Kant (p. 60 above), in what concerns pure Keason aspure 
 Syllogism, may, if looked deeply at, manifest itself as Hegel's pure Form, and so 
 his pure Principle, pure Method, pure Matter, and even pure Origin. 
 
CONCLUSION. 691 
 
 and at the very first touch of the question, we soar away up on 
 Vorstellung, on imagination, away up, up to the Empyrean in 
 search of the unimaginable big at heart but to return presently 
 drooping with nothing ! This is Vorstellung. The notioft 
 however, is a cool old swordsman, takes time, moves not from the 
 spot, and looks at the thing. What is Being ? it says, why 
 Being is simply presence absolutely indefinite equally Nothing 
 Imt, this time, a seen nothing. Being is all in general, and no one 
 thing in particular ; and Nothing is no one thing in particular 
 and also all in general, for the Nothing that is no one thing in 
 particular has not destroyed a single dust-point of the all, which 
 just remains after as before. What is, has been, and ever will 
 be : we are in presence of the infinite. Nay, this infinite as much 
 is not as it is. The is to the was is another, the was is not. 
 Unchanged identity exists not even in a dream. The is, to know 
 itself even to continue itself must other itself, must become not. 
 Not, Not, Not, are the links of the circle of Identity : only by 
 Not, Not, Not, is Identity preserved. Truly to think these thoughts, 
 truly to think Identity and Difference, but sub specie ceternitatis 
 is, in ultimate result, to develop the System of Hegel. The Hegelian 
 notions are parallel to the Vorstellungen, the myths, of all concrete 
 history : Chaos is Seyn, Creation is Daseyn, Christianity (Vision, 
 Love, Submission, Intelligence, Union with God, Immortality) 
 is Fiirsichseyn. And this series is but Simple Apprehension, 
 Judgment, and Eeason, the one, single, and sole-existent logical 
 throb ! But we must renounce any attempt to present more of 
 the special matter, in the meantime, than has been already presented 
 in the two sections from the Logic, and in the various extracts 
 which have occurred to be inserted here and there. Before pass- 
 ing on to certain concluding general statements and illustrative 
 applications, we content ourselves with simply saying again, that 
 the matter of Metaphysic, Logic, of the Philosophy of Nature, of 
 Psychology, Morals, Politics, Keligion, History, Criticism, Art, has 
 all, or mostly all, been exhaustively considered by Hegel, and if 
 presented in freedom from the peculiarity of the form, would 
 speedily convince all men who cared to inquire, of his philosophical 
 mastery. Nay, if even the Hegelian notion were proved (which 
 would require such another industry as Haym's, lut on quite another 
 platform of vision) an artifice, a poem, and a dream, the state of 
 the case would remain substantially the same. As to that, indeed, 
 it is to be admitted, that the Hegelian notion has yet to receive 
 
692 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 the guarantee of a competent jury who will decide as to whether 
 or not it goes together in the end, as Hegel says, with notion as 
 ordinarily used (if not seen), and constitutes, at the same time, the 
 principle of perception. 
 
 Be this as it may, there can be no doubt but that Hegel's 
 object was truth. ' That to which,' he says, ' in my philosophical 
 efforts, I have wholly striven and strive, is the scientific cogni- 
 tion of truth.' His works, he tells us, ' have been many years 
 thought through, and with all earnestness of the object and of scien- 
 tific requirements worked through! He would ' seek truth but with 
 a consciousness of the nature and value of the relations inherent in 
 thought itself, which are the uniting and determining element of 
 every matter (Inhalt).' * A great motive of his action is ' the 
 misunderstanding, that the inadequacy of the finite categories to- 
 truth brings with it the impossibility of objective knowledge,. 
 from which misunderstanding the right is inferred to speak and 
 pronounce from feeling and subjective opinion, so that, in place 
 of proof, there step forward asseverations and the recountments 
 of what is found as facts in consciousness ; and the more 
 uncritical this is, it is considered the purer.' To Hegel philo- 
 sophy is ' the reconciliation which the spirit solemnises of itself 
 with itself ; ' and this is accomplished by ' the restoration of that 
 absolute content (Gehalt) beyond which thought at first struggled 
 and set itself out, but a reconciliation in the freest and most 
 native element of the spirit.' (Passages in commencement of 
 Prefaces to second and third editions of the Encyclopaedie.) The 
 theory, then, that would conceive Hegel's operations to root in 
 fancy, and to consist of express efforts towards an intentional 
 artefact, is exceedingly absurd and entirely opposed to the truth. 
 Never could human being more zealously receive the torch from 
 his predecessor, or more conscientiously strive to pass it brighter ta 
 him that should succeed. To name Hegel's ' Philosophiren"Phan- 
 tasiren' is the most monstrous injustice. Concretely viewed, his 
 action is but the necessary historical reaction and complement ta 
 the Illumination. In his youth he had shared the ardour of that 
 movement ; he had as keenly felt as any one the pang of intelli- 
 gence, indignant at the monstrous contradictions which an 
 interested superstition sought to impose on it ; and in that sense 
 he had for long, laborious years, though entirely by himself and 
 
 * In terms of Hume, this amounts to saying that Relations of Ideas constitute 
 the veritably important element in all Matters of Fact. 
 
CONCLUSION. 693 
 
 for himself, worked and written. It presently became evident to 
 him, however, that it would be his duty and his task, not with 
 the shallow enlightenment and frivolous gaiety of the thoughtless 
 to push that movement to its ultimate consummation in ajn 
 identification of man with the monkey, and of both with the 
 unintelligible, baseless, and fortuitous atoms of an unintelligible, 
 baseless, and fortuitous universe, but to find such correction and 
 complement for the false and one-sided extreme of the Illumina- 
 tion as would restore the equilibrium of concrete fact. The 
 danger became presently plain to him the danger of the dissolu- 
 tion of society, of its complete retrocession into barbarism before 
 the attacks of an absolutely enlightened but utterly irrational 
 understanding. The light which the Illumination had turned 
 upon our whole human heritage of time was become, he saw, a 
 flame to devour. God was to be burned out of us, the soul was 
 to be burned out of us ; we were to be left in presence only of the 
 material elements, ourselves a material calx. 
 
 Apart from the theoretical world, we can see for ourselves the 
 same movement at work in the practical world. What is the 
 principle of the economical enlightenment of the day ? Self-will ; 
 and for the realisation of self-will the destruction of every realisa- 
 tion of universal will. Now, what is that but the dissolution of 
 society what is that but the reduction of all to an infinitely 
 disconnected, inorganic atomism of irresponsible selfs? Self- 
 government is the word, not in the sense that the individual will, 
 the false will, is to govern itself into the true will, into the 
 universal will, into God's will, but in the sense that the individual 
 will, listening only to its own self-will, its own subjective interest, 
 is to govern and prescribe the universal will a universal will, 
 however, which were then chaos. Yet there are men of the most 
 undeniable talent, and in occupation of very responsible places, 
 who openly avow and with all their heart promote this principle. 
 They look forward with exultation to that day of freedom, to that 
 day of light at length, 'when we shall doctor and parson our- 
 selves.' * To doctor and parson ourselves is not to them a 
 proposition of sheer dementia, but an axiom of enlightenment 
 enlightenment so advanced that it is only too advanced for its own 
 generation ! But why should we not also lawyer ourselves, 
 banker ourselves, police ourselves ? A large section of the com- 
 
 * This, written in 1864, referred to the actual words of an accepted public 
 authority then. 
 
694 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 munity would rejoice in the enlightenment and liberality that 
 would relieve it of the incubus of a police. Strange how the 
 gorges of some of these enlightened individuals indignantly rise at 
 this as at a palpable absurdity foisted into the place of their own 
 immaculate wisdom ! We would parson ourselves, they say, we 
 would doctor ourselves, and we are not sure but that any prescrip- 
 tion of the age at which a child shall be allowed to labour is an 
 infringement of the liberty of trade ; but we must not speak of 
 attempting to police ourselves, that is going too far. They say 
 this, and with the most perfect conviction that they have still 
 spoken 'as rational beings! If they adopt the principle of self- 
 will, they adopt a principle absolutely subjective, there is no 
 guarantee of agreement possible between any two whatever. 
 What is going too far to A. is not going far enough to B., and 
 there is no oracle (criterion) that shall ultimately and definitively 
 decide. If they say, Oh, we do not mean to assert that self-will is 
 to be absolutely trusted ; they have opened the door to universal 
 will they have altered their formula from the unit for itself, to 
 the unit for the whole. Instead of a subjective principle, they have 
 now set up an objective principle ; and with such there is the 
 certainty of agreement, system, organisation in the end. Con- 
 sistency of thought would teach them to see and understand this ; 
 but in their devotion to the principles they have inherited, they 
 cannot bring their thoughts together. Point out, for example, 
 that, in obedience to the maxim, Let the individual seek his own 
 self-interest, this unit and that unit have injured the com- 
 munity, with punishment to themselves, it may be, and, it 
 also may be, without punishment to themselves, it is not 
 uncommon to be answered: Oh, the unit will find in the end 
 that the general interest is its own interest. Now, they who so 
 answer, are quite unconscious that they have just reversed 
 the very principle in which they so implicitly believe. The 
 community is best served by the individual serving himself, is 
 surely not the same proposition as, The individual is best 
 served by serving the community. But it is on the difference of 
 these propositions that the whole case we seek to make out rests. 
 The former is a subjective principle, and incapable of any one 
 specific assignment or determinate appointment whatever ; the 
 latter is an objective principle, and contains within it the entire 
 organisation of society. The one is the principle of Self-will 
 
CONCLUSION. 695 
 
 Slavery ; the other, the principle of the Universal Will 
 Liberty. 
 
 On what thin abstractions this Enlightenment sometimes inflates 
 itself ! Demand and Supply, for example, this phrase is used 
 as if it possessed in itself power as if it fulfilled functions, per- 
 formed operations, achieved results. There never was a greater 
 mistake. Demand and Supply what is so named is in itself 
 utterly empty, utterly untrue. To be true, it presupposes a con- 
 crete system and actually at work ; it is this system alone which 
 is its truth, and without this system it is an idle phrase : without 
 this system, indeed, it is a phrase which would never occur to be 
 used. Demand and Supply was the inexorable law to which the 
 universe must submit ; America was par excellence the land which 
 recognised, honoured, and obeyed such principles: yet, because 
 the negroes of Central Africa sell each other, this well-principled 
 America rushes into a war and in cotton negates the law. It 
 is something else than Demand and Supply that has worked and 
 works here then : not but that America is still true to the great 
 principle of Self-will, so true that she has here broken down and 
 put an end to a concrete system in her own midst, through which, 
 in a particular instance, the abstractions of Demand and Supply 
 had a filling of fact. Demand may now ' burst its wind' in Man- 
 chester, and Supply die of glut in Charleston; but there is no 
 longer any concrete system to reunite the pair.* In short, the 
 formal generality that describes, is no substantial principle that 
 animates and moves ; and Demand and Supply, as no more than 
 a naming, has but an abstract reference to temporary complexes 
 which are a prey to thousandfold contingency. 
 
 Said Enlightenment, nevertheless, enjoys at this moment the 
 most triumphant of reputations. Illustrious Statesmen boast to 
 have imbibed it, all Politicians swear by it, and most Newspaper 
 Editors live by it. It is not difficult to explain this. The Illu- 
 mination is an historical movement, there is much truth in it, we 
 accept it on the whole, only, we would see into it, we would 
 know its limits and conditions, we would ascertain the higher 
 truth into which it must be absorbed. Now, as it is with the 
 Whole, the Illumination in general, so it is with a part, this illu- 
 mination in particular. This part brought its light also, and what 
 it lit was not all found good. How could it ? Was it at all likely 
 that the arrangements which suited Feudalism, a state of war, 
 
 * In the time of the war. 
 
696 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 would be found to suit Industrialism, a state of peace ? The light 
 once thrown, then, the discrepancy was visible, and of late we 
 have done little else than throw off, much to the gain of Indus- 
 trialism, the obsolete provisions of Feudalism. It is this which 
 constitutes the praise of the particular illumination in question, 
 Mr Buckle intimates as much, Mr Buckle himself acknowledges 
 with satisfaction that all reform as yet is but an undoing of what 
 an ignorant (!) past had done. Nor so far as Feudalism is 
 opposed to Industrialism would we willingly be understood to 
 think otherwise here ; we accept the relative demonstrations of 
 Hume and Adam Smith ; and we rejoice as sincerely as another 
 in the advantages which have been accruing to industrialism from 
 reformation or repeal, and in special reference to the appointments 
 of Feudalism. What we seek to make plain is only besides the 
 true nature of its abstract principle the peculiarity of that con- 
 crete material in battle with which it has earned its fame. 
 
 As regards the principle, what we have said can be made good 
 also from another point of view. As part and parcel of the Illu- 
 mination, Political Economy can have at bottom no principle but 
 the Right of Private Judgment. But in this element the con- 
 siderations are not merely theoretical : they concern action ; the 
 right of private judgment is here brought into application with 
 individual commodity. No wonder, then, that the word pi*ivate 
 becomes much more strongly concentrated in this, a sphere of 
 action, than in others that bear only on theory and belief. That 
 Political Economy should openly set up self-will as its principle, 
 was in such relations obviously irresistible. Nevertheless, that it 
 was private judgment that was in question ought not to have 
 escaped notice ; and judgment applied to the interests of Political 
 Economy, that is, to the stewardship of the nation, is competent 
 to a system only, to an organisation, the necessity of which shall 
 be reason. There is possible, then, a true Science of Political 
 Economy, which shall boast not only to be negative of the past, 
 but positive of the present, and in its tendency, therefore, certiora- 
 tive of the future. This science, then, shall cease to be destructive, 
 and become constructive ; nor will it set up the merely subjective 
 principle of self-will, but honestly and strenuously strive forward 
 to the realisation of the objective principle of universal will. 
 Then, perhaps, we shall have a stewardship of the nation, but now 
 look at the chaos ! 
 
 Political Economy is usually treated of under four divisions, the 
 
CONCLUSION. 697 
 
 last of which (Consumption), however, has no prescripts that can- 
 not be included under the first. The objects of this science, 
 therefore, may be all included under Production, Exchange, and 
 Distribution ; a classification that falls out not very diverse from 
 the triplicity of the notion. Distribution as yet belongs very 
 much to a region of doubt and difficulty in every view, and may 
 be passed over at present. But how does the principle of self-will 
 work as regards the two spheres of Production and Exchange ? 
 We can, of course, in this place, not expound, but only suggest. 
 Well, in these days is there not a tendency for self-will to pene- 
 trate and render rotten every article of Production, and have we 
 not infinitely more difficulty to save ourselves from this enemy 
 than even from our rats ? Let us consider the colour of our 
 clothes alone, or let us ask simply on what principles any farmer 
 raises his potatoes. As regards Exchange, again, is there not at 
 present a very large class who live by intercepting and laying 
 their own toll on commodities, who live, as it were, by taking 
 rides on commodities through their Capital ? These men pro- 
 duce not, they merely put the consumer to the expense of their 
 ride. The expense is the least part of the damage : the active 
 centres of immorality that are thus generated, this is the great 
 point. We hear the purest disciples of Political Economy as 
 it is, speak themselves with positive terror of the threatened 
 * pestilential influence of these mushroom-moneyed men.' And, 
 indeed, there seems good reason for the terror. There seems 
 rapidly growing up among us a x spurious middle class to which 
 our legislators themselves pay deference, asking their advice in crises 
 of actual government, as if they in their political economy 
 were the depositaries of all wisdom. This class is not so much 
 constituted by honourable and thrifty producers, as by bold and 
 crafty commodity-riders, unscrupulous contractors, lucky colonists, 
 &c. Now what is the life of such people ? In one word, it con- 
 sists of the coarse brutality and vulgar insolence of expenditure 
 and display. Uneducated, unrefined, unpleasant persons they 
 often are, who see the clothes you have on, and remark on the 
 jewelry your wife wears ; yet they push into parliament and infect 
 their neighbourhood with the emulation of expense. Now these 
 are a class, so far, of Political Economy's own making, and they are 
 poisonous and deranging in the highest degree. They presume on 
 the breadth of platform their money extends to them. Merit 
 as it is called merit, in comparison, is rebuked into the cold 
 
698 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 shade by such categories as, He lives at the Clarendon he paid 
 so-and-so for his brougham ! True it is that evils are not without 
 compensation, and that there is a reaction against this class on 
 the part of gentlemen, as there was a reaction against the barbarity 
 of the time on the part of the gentle Knights of King Arthur, or 
 of a later period. Many of our best writers reflect this at present, 
 as Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, Kingsley, Kinglake (whose chapter 
 as against the coup d'ttat is but a manifesto of the principles of a 
 brave English gentleman as he is now). We would suggest, then, 
 that Production and Exchange, as they work at present, exhibit 
 nothing of system, or generalisation, union, arrangement, reason, 
 but form together the wide-weltering chaos of a disintegrated and 
 irresponsible Atomism. Will any one pretend that the steward- 
 ship of a nation is best performed in such a miscellaneous and 
 promiscuous fashion as this ? 
 
 Political Economy, then, would it really be Political Economy, 
 and prove adequate to the national stewardship, must reject this 
 its principle of Self-will, and adopt instead the principle of Uni- 
 versal Will. Indeed, Political Economy itself shows a dim sense 
 of this in that very answer which we have seen already as regards 
 the unit finding out in the end that the interest of the community is 
 its own also. This answer amounts to The true universal will 
 is the true individual will. What we would point out, however, 
 is, that while Political Economy at least as very generally ad- 
 vocated has never made this principle plain to itself, but, on the 
 contrary, has held by the opposite, it offers so holding no field 
 for the realisation of the former. It would work out the universal 
 will, we shall say, and it is sincere in believing that the true mean 
 to that end is to leave the individual to his own interests, which 
 he will find sooner or later to be identical with those of the com- 
 munity. We willingly grant also that this is perfectly true, and 
 that the means are perfectly adequate could the individual but 
 live long enough. But just here lies the rub : the individual cannot 
 live long enough. It is quite certain that a perfect experience would 
 make us all gentlemen, in the sense which has been already partly 
 indicated, that is, selfless ; so selfless, that the very self we should 
 assert if in any way obliged to assert self would be the universal, 
 and not the individual self, our self, the objective one but not 
 our self, the subjective one. It is certainly best that a man should 
 freely grow into manhood by the influences of his own natural 
 life. But how if he have not time enough, or how if he should be 
 
CONCLUSION. 699 
 
 individually so constituted as to be of himself incapable as 
 regards such growth ? Has Eeason nothing to say, then ? The 
 ligaments of vows are not in general to be recommended, but they 
 have saved many a man. Is there no system of Keason demon- 
 strable that would train and discipline and school a man into bis 
 own true manhood ? Is all organisation hopeless, must we be 
 simply left each of us to his own self-will ? We know that we 
 are not in point of fact so left; we know that there is the Govern- 
 ment, &c. ; but we deny that it is competent to Political Economy 
 largely as at present to allude to this, for that Political Economy 
 would reduce Government to the Police a Police, too, wholly 
 subject to the will of its objects, and these objects being stimulated 
 into activity by express injunctions to follow out their own self- 
 interests. Nay, we might say that in that case Political Economy 
 has no right to speak of Government at all, for no Government 
 could long exist side by side with the principle of Self-will. Is 
 there no means of expressly guiding forward Self-will into Uni- 
 versal Will by human reason, or for that consummation must it 
 be simply left to itself and the path of natural instinct ? We do 
 not make the most of Nature anywhere else by leaving it to itself: 
 our gains everywhere else are brought about by empaling natural 
 contingency within rational necessity. Are we to despair of a 
 similar method in application to the natural man ? Compare the 
 man that comes as it were direct from the furrow with him, the 
 son of a good house, who is bred who from the cradle upwards 
 feeds and fills on Inhalt, the Ihhalt of experience inherited, of 
 experience acquired, by his parents ! The former enters on the 
 world in mere natural immediacy, absolutely abstract ; his action 
 is a series of blunders, he has all to learn ; he is a boy at forty, at 
 fifty, perhaps he drops into the grave ' an exasperated stripling 
 of three-score years and ten.' Not so the other (actual exceptions 
 subvert not the ideal rule) he is a man from his majority, and 
 thenceforward does the work of a man. Here we see how the 
 Family acts in converting mere nature into reason, and may be 
 led by its example to anticipate the possibility of a like function 
 on the part of Government as well. The method of the Family, 
 however, is not to leave the individual to his own self-will and the 
 casual experience of natural life, but, through the aliment of an 
 objective reason, as it were, objectively deposited, to develop into 
 full stature the true or universal will which is implicit in the 
 natural will, the self-will of every human being. As is the method 
 
700 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of the Family, so then must be that of the Government. Nay, 
 the rudest Government that ever existed had no principle at 
 bottom but the conversion of self-will into universal will. The 
 first step, the first stir to Society, ties a knot on self-will, cuts a 
 knot from universal will. Only in a state of nature, only among 
 men anthropoid merely call them Gorillas if you will do we 
 find the principle of the Political Economy of the day at home at 
 last. It is perfectly natural, then, that there should have been so 
 much stir of late about the Monkey. The Illumination with the 
 light of the Eight of Private Judgment was destined to reach no 
 less a consummation. So it delights to humiliate, in the triumph 
 of its own intelligence, the dullards who pretend still to find bread 
 in tradition, consoling its own self when it sighs for it will sigh 
 by contemplation of the all of things, through dissipation of 
 heat and mechanical energy, speedily at rest, a cold opaque idle 
 bulk, in the centre of a cold opaque idle space and so for ever 
 a useless, unlighted universe left to blank time and its own use- 
 less, unlighted self ! These are the latest results of the Illumina- 
 tion ; and if these are to be accepted and held true, there is just 
 no more to be said ; there need not be talk any longer of self-will, 
 or universal will, or government at all ; there is but one conclu- 
 sion : let those who can enjoy the senses continue to enjoy them ; let 
 those who cannot, take aconite, like Aristotle (if true), and go to bed. 
 
 But suppose we determine not to accept these results, perhaps 
 we had better determine also to be just done at last and altogether 
 with the Illumination as the Illumination. The wide welter of 
 lonely, isolated atoms produced by it each miserable, all miser- 
 able, divorced from Substance is painful to look at. Why, books 
 themselves, which formerly were as our cells of sacred fire, are 
 now bound on the same commercial voyage as all the rest ; they 
 are but counters, and take rank by the amount they stand for : we 
 ask now, not how much of the Ideal do they contain, but how 
 much of the Eeal will they bring ? Perhaps, then, we had better 
 declare completely off with the Illumination, and turn to see if 
 there can be any help elsewhere. 
 
 Hegel demonstrates, by History and otherwise, the end of man 
 to be Freedom. Now, it must be said that the first step to 
 Freedom and this has been said by Aristotle is material posses- 
 sion. We owe Industrialism, then, however misguided, sincere 
 thanks for the immense mass of material commodity it has of late 
 realised : we possess there a most indispensable magazine for the 
 
CONCLUSION. 701 
 
 future. That this magazine is for the future, however, rather than 
 for the present, is the proof that Industrialism is as yet misguided: 
 who is there as yet that enjoys Freedom through it is there a 
 soul on this earth at present so situated as regards material posses- 
 sion that he is free from apprehension ? 
 
 Und die Sorge, die mehr als selbst mir das Uebel verhasst ist ! 
 
 By Freedom, however, Hegel means specially the realisation of 
 the universal will ; and his system must be regarded as the path 
 of Philosophy to that end. Nor will it be found, on sufficient 
 consideration, that we have reason to disapprove either of the 
 meaning attached to the word, or of the method proposed for the 
 realisation of the thing. If Philosophy have reached at length, as 
 Hegel asserts, the position of a Science if it be now Wisdom, 
 and no longer simply the love of Wisdom if, in fact, it be really 
 the Science of Science, the knowledge of knowledge, where else 
 can we ever hope to find any better promise for the realisation in 
 question? Hegel's books, however, are a hard road and a long: 
 is there no short cut is there no single practical principle com- 
 petent to act at once as criterion, as test, as guide ? Ten years 
 ago, in a little medical essay, we proposed for this very function 
 Health. 
 
 We live at present mostly for material enjoyment; material 
 possession is held up as the only reward, the only success ; and 
 human effort, accordingly, hunts such game to the uttermost parts 
 of the earth. Attainment, however, it is found on trial, rarely 
 satisfies. Life is passed between two fevers the first of inflam- 
 mation and of struggle, the last of typhus and despair. Hence 
 the rush to and fro of the ignoble at present, as of maddened 
 animals stung by gadflies; hence the profound dejection, the cloud, 
 that sits for ever on the nobler. It is a false end we seek, it is 
 a false life we lead, and we owe both to the Aufklarung, 
 Atomistic Spannung, mutual atomistic repulsion, abstract Self- 
 will, material Greed : what other fruits could a science so-called, 
 born of denial of the universal, born of destruction, bear ? We 
 are all now absolutely disintegrated, absolutely separated, 
 absolutely unsympathetic units. Each, absolutely excludeut 
 of others, absolutely includent of self, is simply desperate. We 
 live for the senses, and die. Mere life is the whole ; there is no 
 end to work out, no noble purpose to fulfil, there is no Beyond f 
 Formerly, the world had an object ; it was a scheme of probation, 
 
702 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of which all partook, in which all united, to which the Whole 
 helped the Part. It is so no longer : it is a distracted ant-hill, in 
 blind physical ferment. The Illumination could have no other 
 end. But is there no cure ? Will life again never come to have 
 the meaning of probation ? Will man again, indeed, never come 
 just to live as in a meaning ? Is it impossible to restore humanity, 
 and ' let the ape and tiger die ? ' Now, in effect, Kant and Hegel 
 have lived for no other end than this that is here indicated : both 
 would complete the side of materialism, animalism, at which the 
 Illumination is now nakedly arrived at length, by the other side 
 of idealism, spiritualism, which is found to be equally authentic 
 the moment we turn from perception as perception to thought as 
 thought. And surely this is a very coarse conclusion, Unless I 
 touch, I will not believe ; only what I hold in my hand is. Kant 
 and Hegel, then, in one word, would restore Faith. The path to 
 the new world is necessarily through them. Nevertheless, it is in 
 the same interest that we would suggest here an application to the 
 general problem of the principle of Health. Having health, we 
 should be happy ; having health, we should know we were in the 
 right. Then health is a something known, it is a tangible object ; 
 there are means to it, it can be worked to. Suppose Government 
 were but as a Board of Health, with no object but the health of 
 the Community with no duty but to do for the individual in 
 that direction what the individual could not do for himself! 
 Health is the outward sign of Freedom ; health is the realisation 
 of the Universal Will. Health as a practical principle for it 
 demands conditions, intellectual, moral, religious, &c., as well as 
 physical is adequate to bring into a focus, into a single point of 
 action, all the great interests which philosophy demonstrates in 
 the constitution of humanity. Man is a triple thread of cognition, 
 emotion, volition ; on that triplicity is his whole world disposed ; 
 and health may be set at once as sign and as goal of the harmonious 
 operation of the whole system as sign and as goal of a realisation 
 of life. 
 
 Nor are we without good reason for supposing that the founders 
 of Political Economy themselves would now agree with these 
 views. The place of David Hume as regards this science, and the 
 relations borne to him by Colbert, by Quesnay, and by Adam 
 Smith, have been already suggested. In general, we may say, 
 indeed, that in France the Illumination took on the form rather 
 of a mockery of the contradictions of Tradition, and that it was 
 
CONCLUSION. 703 
 
 Hume who really constituted the thought of that movement 
 who may be called the High Priest, then, not only of the Aufklarung 
 as a whole, but of Political Economy specially. This is the veritable 
 historical position. In David Hume, nevertheless, we find none of 
 those one-sided, and consequently untrue, extremes to which his 
 followers incline : the complete Urtheil which we see now into 
 mere self-identical abstractions, would have been an anachronism 
 then. That Government, for example, should only be an affair of 
 external and internal Police, and that, for the rest, everybody 
 should be exhorted to follow his own self-interest, of this we 
 find nothing in Hume.* The existent dialectic of concrete things 
 was too obvious to such an intellect as his, to allow him to remain 
 immovable in a single side. 
 
 We have with regard to taxes, he says (Essay, ' Of Taxes,' last paragraph), 
 an instance of what frequently happens in political institutions, that the conse- 
 quences of things are diametrically opposite to what we should expect on the first 
 appearance. It is regarded as a fundamental maxim of the Turkish Govern- 
 ment, that the Grand Signior, though absolute master of the lives and fortunes 
 of each individual, has no authority to impose a new tax ; and every Ottoman 
 prince who has made such an attempt, either has been obliged to detract, or 
 has found the fatal effects of his perseverance. One would imagine, that this 
 prejudice or established opinion were the firmest barrier in the world against 
 oppression ; yet it is certain, that its effect is quite contrary. 
 
 The same open sense to the same natural dialectic is seen here 
 (Essay, ' Of the Balance of Power '), where he is remarking on the 
 irresistible tendency displayed, up to that time, by England, to 
 interfere in the quarrels of other nations : 
 
 These excesses, to which we have been carried, are prejudicial ; and may, 
 perhaps, in time, become still more prejudicial another way, by begetting, as is 
 usual, the opposite extreme, and rendering us totally careless and supine with 
 regard to the fate of Europe A The Athenians, from the most bustling, intrigu- 
 ing, warlike people of Greece, finding their error in thrusting themselves into 
 every quarrel, abandoned all attention to foreign affairs ; and in no contest 
 ever took party on either side, except by their flatteries and complaisance to 
 the victor. 
 
 Doubtless, there are those who will find that these words have 
 already come true, and that England has already entered on the 
 second Athenian phase. Again, though no man ever saw clearer 
 into the advantageous side of what he named Luxury, yet, when 
 claiming, firstly, to that extent, he admits, ' secondly, that wherever 
 
 * It is precisely to' this, however, that ' advanced thinkers ' and advanced political 
 economists (see Buckle passim) would reduce government. 
 
 f This was what was commonly supposed the right thing to advocate then (1864 say). 
 
704 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 luxury ceases to be innocent, it also ceases to be beneficial ; and 
 when carried a degree too far, is a quality pernicious, though 
 perhaps not the most pernicious, to political society/ (Essay, ' Of 
 Luxury.') 
 
 There is dialectic here, too (Essay, ' Of Commerce ') : 
 
 It may seem an odd position, that the poverty of the common people in 
 France, Italy, and Spain, is, in some measure, owing to the superior riches of 
 the soil and happiness of the climate ; and yet there want not many reasons 
 to justify this paradox. 
 
 Similarly illustrative is his admission, though attributing the 
 power of modern states to Commerce, that 
 
 Sparta was certainly more powerful than any state now in the world, con- 
 sisting of an equal number of people : and this was owing entirely to the want 
 of commerce and luxury. ... In short, no probable reason can be given for 
 the great power of the more ancient States above the modern, but their 
 want of commerce and luxury. (Essay, ' Of Commerce.') 
 
 The extreme openness and candour of Hume's nature is seen in 
 these examples : it is only his disciples who have become thin, 
 shallow, stiff, pompous, and at the same time fierce, bigoted and 
 fanatic. Think of Mr Buckle's rationale of the difference between 
 England and France, and compare it with the admission of Hume 
 (Essay, * Of Commerce ') : 
 
 Lord Bacon, accounting for the great advantages obtained by the English 
 in their wars with France, ascribes them chiefly to the superior ease and 
 plenty of the common people amongst the former ; yet the governments of 
 the two kingdoms were, at that time, pretty much alike. 
 
 Observe his attitude here : 
 
 The public becomes powerful in proportion to the riches and extensive 
 commerce of private men. 
 
 This is now stereotyped into a fixed and immovable axiom of 
 Economical Science, and this is really the character Hume would 
 wish to demonstrate for it ; but he is led by his full nature and 
 unjaundiced eye immediately to add : 
 
 This maxim is true in general ; though I cannot forbear thinking, that it 
 may possibly admit of some exceptions, and that we often establish it with 
 too little reserve and limitation. There may be some circumstances, where 
 the commerce, and riches, and luxury of individuals, instead of adding strength 
 to the public, will serve only to thin its armies, and diminish its authority 
 among the neighbouring nations. Man is a very variable being, and suscep- 
 tible of many different opinions, principles, and rules of conduct. What may 
 be true while he adheres to one way of thinking, will be found false when he has em- 
 braced an opposite set of manners and opinions. 
 
CONCLUSION. 705 
 
 Now this has become true in these very days as regards his own 
 doctrines. Society suffered in his time from prohibition and 
 protection, which, 
 
 Deprived neighbouring nations of that free communication and exchange, 
 which the Author of the world has intended, by giving them soils, climates, 
 and geniuses, so different from each other (Essay, * Of the Balance of Trade '). 
 
 That is, in ultimate abstraction, society suffered then from a 
 certain assertion of Self-will against the Universal Will. It was 
 to do good work, then, on the part of Hume to point out this ; 
 and the consequence is, that we live now in an entirely opposite 
 system of arrangements. But the opposition may be too complete, 
 and his own words may have become true of his own results. 
 Absolute non-interference may be now ' false when we have 
 embraced an opposite set of manners and opinions.' Hume's 
 object was, in essential meaning, to give scope to universal will, 
 and frustrate self-will ; but now, in an opposite state of things it 
 is possible for precisely self-will to constitute the inconvenience, 
 and we may be obliged to return to intervention, though in a new 
 and higher light. 
 
 It seems so desirable to demonstrate affinity with the thought 
 of Hume, that a little further development in this connexion may 
 prove not unwelcome. 
 
 As soon as men quit their savage state, where they live chiefly by hunting 
 and fishing, they must fall into these two classes (husbandmen and manu- 
 facturers) ; though the arts of agriculture employ at first the most numerous 
 part of the society. Time and experience improve so much these arts, that 
 the land may easily maintain a much greater number of men than those who 
 are immediately employed in its cultivation, or who furnish the more neces- 
 sary manufactures to such as are so empl6yed. If these superfluous hands apply 
 themselves to the finer arts, which are commonly denominated the arts 
 of luxury, they add to the happiness of the State, since they afford to 
 many the opportunity of receiving enjoyments with which they would other- 
 wise have been unacquainted. But may not another scheme be proposed for 
 the employment of these superfluous hands 1 May not the sovereign lay 
 claim to them, and employ them in fleets and armies, to increase the dominions 
 of the State abroad, and spread its fame over distant nations ? It is certain, 
 that the fewer desires and wants are found in the proprietors and labourers of 
 land, the fewer hands do they employ ; and consequently the superfluities of 
 the land, instead of maintaining tradesmen and manufacturers, may support 
 fleets and armies to a much greater extent then where a great many arts are 
 required to minister to the luxury of particular persons. Here, therefore* 
 seems to be a kind of opposition betwixt the greatness of the State and the 
 happiness of the subjects. A State is never greater than when all its superfluous 
 hands are employed in the service of the public. The ease and convenience 
 
 2 Y 
 
706 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 of private persons require that these hands should be employed in their service. 
 The one can never be satisfied but at the expense of the other. As the ambi- 
 tion of the sovereign must entrench on the luxury of individuals, so the 
 luxury of individuals must diminish the force and check the ambition of the 
 sovereign. (Essay, l Of Commerce.') 
 
 In the first place, there suggests itself a lesson in method here. 
 What we see at once in this passage is after the loose manner or 
 method common to the period and continued by Mr Buckle, but 
 which is so unlike the rigorous deduction of the Notion Hume 
 engaged beating up ground for inferences through conjectural 
 picturings of what would naturally be the case in such and such 
 circumstances. It is easy to understand that such a method must 
 be at the mercy of subjective contingency, and can insure no 
 necessary result. We as subjects have as much right as Hume as 
 a subject to set on our own conjectures and insist on our own 
 results. By way of example, let us dream over again what Hume 
 has dreamed, let us see if the same natural pictures which came 
 to him will come also to us, and let us compare the conclusions. 
 Well Men as hunters have killed all their game ; they must live, 
 they take to agriculture. Practising agriculture, they require 
 certain manufactures (tools, clothes, &c.). At first they supply 
 these themselves. By-and-by certain individuals are found ex- 
 perter, more productive at this sort of industry than others. The 
 latter say then to the former, Do the same thing for us make 
 our tools, our clothes, &c., and we shall pay you out of our growths. 
 But to both classes, their respective industries become by practice 
 easier, and take less time, or produce more abundantly in the same 
 time. A surplus is the result. Every individual in the com- 
 munity is well off; he can afford to give. Accordingly he ex- 
 changes his surplus freely a variety of skills having developed 
 itself, meanwhile, in the manufacturing class, with a consequent 
 variety of products for such articles as please him, and he gradu- 
 ally surrounds himself with wealth. The variety of skills thus 
 encouraged, sunders into the full discretion of the difference, and 
 a civilised community blooms before us in full activity. But now 
 self-will enters. Indolence and incapacity have led to inequalities, 
 which, however, indolence and incapacity will not brook, which 
 they will balance by violence. Those who are the objects of this 
 violence seek defence. An executive, a government, a power that 
 can control, rises as the means of this defence. ISTow, the varieties 
 in the fortunes of this power, as it presents itself in the various 
 
CONCLUSION. 707 
 
 peoples, constitute History. Suppose this power to arise late 
 suppose the workers to have enjoyed a long immunity from 
 violence, and to have reached, each of them, a considerable 
 amount of well-being then, probably, the resultant state will 
 be an England with the workers and the executive in a healthy 
 equilibrium. Hume supposes Sparta, Eome, &c., to arise from this, 
 that the sovereign took the superfluous hands that resulted from 
 the surplus, and made to the prevention of commerce soldiers 
 of them. But suppose we go on our own way, and assume rather 
 the controlling power to have arisen early, we think it more natural 
 to see a France issue ; and, in seeing this, perhaps, at the same 
 time, more light bursts on us as regards the differences between 
 England and France, which Hume cannot, and which Mr Buckle 
 can, attribute to differences of government as such, than is 
 contained, it may be, in the very pretentious but very unsatis- 
 factory hither and thither of statements accorded us at so much 
 length and with so much unction by the latter. As for Sparta, 
 the Helots were a conquered tribe, and their conquerors took to 
 themselves their surplus and lived as soldiers. It is not difficult 
 to prefer the other application of this surplus, that, namely, to the 
 encouragement of arts and peaceful activity, and it is plain as 
 well that an early seizing of an agricultural surplus might issue 
 in a splendid state with miserable inhabitants ; but it is by no 
 means certain that the Spartans would have been less powerful 
 had they 'given employment tq a great variety of trades and 
 manufactures/ as is the averment of Hume. Sparta was certainly 
 great without commerce, but not necessarily for that reason. 
 Eather, it should be said, Sparta was without commerce, for, as 
 yet, such organised intercourse between nation and nation hardly 
 was : demand and supply was then a dead letter, for no concrete 
 system on a sufficiently general scale was yet formed to make it 
 a living spirit. Had such system existed, however, then one 
 skilled Helot only a single worker if in his own field might 
 have drawn the produce of two agricultural workers elsewhere, 
 &c. Had such things taken place in Sparta, the Helots might 
 have gradually grown into a power in the state, nor would 
 this state have been, necessarily, less strong. It might have 
 possessed so many skills, for the products of which on the 
 supposition of a general system of commerce existing men would 
 give, that it would have been difficult for an enemy to exhaust it. 
 Of all this England is an example as opposed to France. 
 
708 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Consideration of this picture, and in comparison with similar 
 pictures both of Hume and Buckle, may suggest some profitable 
 inferences as regards the particular method involved, and whole 
 general industry indeed. But we, for our parts, take leave to use 
 the illustration for the purpose of bringing home our general 
 argument. We would point out that, as self-will invaded the 
 community with violence in early times, and necessitated an 
 organised defence a defence often based on no higher motive 
 than again self-will the interests of class (feudalism, &c.), so 
 self-will attacks the community now with fraud (in adulterations 
 and impositions of many kinds), and necessitates insight on our 
 part arid a new defence. Now, I think Hume, had he lived at 
 present, would have conceded this. His great intellect would 
 have seen that his own words had come true, that the Illumination 
 had done its work, that the due middle was being overstepped ; 
 that, as extremes meet, precisely that was making its appearance 
 on the new extreme, which he had striven to crush on the old ; 
 that, in short, ' what was true while we adhered to one way of 
 thinking, was proving itself false now that he had embraced an 
 opposite set of manners and opinions.' In a word, as it was only 
 self-will that he combated then, he would have had no difficulty 
 in deciding that it was now all the more his duty to combat self- 
 will still. 
 
 Thought, in fact, has infinitely improved since Hume, through 
 Kant and Hegel, and in consequence of Hume ; and, did this last 
 live now, he would be able to think much more clearly, much 
 more consecutively, than he did then. What had been then hazy 
 to him would be now distinct, and all his opinions would be 
 found to have undergone important modifications. If he saw 
 then that there was a negative side to commerce, as in regard to 
 the possibility of an excess of luxury and of a consequent diminu- 
 tion ' of strength to the public,' he would see the same thing now 
 much more clearly. If he saw then, as in the case of Sparta, 
 that ancient greatness was owing to the want of commerce, he 
 would understand now better the reason of that, and would be 
 more likely to admit that the fall of this greatness derived from 
 luxury itself in one of its stages. That he would not allow then. 
 Averring that 
 
 No probable reason can be given for the great power of the more ancient 
 states above the modern, but their want of commerce and luxury, 
 
CONCLUSION. 709 
 
 He still asserts that 
 
 It would be easy to prove, that writers mistook the cause of the disorders 
 in the Roman state, and ascribed to luxury and the arts, what really pro- 
 ceeded from an ill-modelled government, and the unlimited extent_uf, 
 conquests : luxury or refinement on pleasure has no natural tendency to beget 
 venality and corruption, nor can anything restrain or regulate the love of 
 money but a sense of honour and virtue ; which, if it be not nearly equal at 
 all times, will naturally abound most in ages of luxury and knowledge. ( Of 
 Luxury. 3 ) 
 
 Still, we are disposed to believe that Hume would have under- 
 stood all this much better now. He would have seen more 
 clearly, perhaps, into the truth of his own words, that what is 
 good thus, may be bad so. Luxury may not always remain 
 ' innocent,' and certainly it was not ' innocent ' when Borne fell. 
 Let it be easy to Hume to prove what he may, still the truth is 
 this, that self-will had come into the state. Rome as Eome was now 
 what she wished to be, the mistress of the world ; the passion for 
 ascent in the breasts of her children could no longer expend itself 
 without; this passion still worked within, nevertheless, and would 
 have an outlet ; so it became a battle of self-wills, and the self-will 
 of Cicero or Cato is no less visible than that of Catiline or Crassus. 
 It became a battle of self-wills, till the realest of self-wills, the 
 abstractest self-will, the self-will KVLT eox*/y, Csesar's self-will, that 
 which would be rather first in a village than second in Rome, 
 asserted and made itself good.* Then there was a place instituted 
 for the rest to strive to ; for to it in ultimate analysis even the 
 most distant strove, though through an intervening interdepend- 
 ency of patron and client : and they were all slaves : the empire, 
 the freedom for which they had battled, proved their own en- 
 slavement. 
 
 The same luxury that has made our welfare, may, in other 
 circumstances, prove our bane, just as it is the same oxygen that 
 both makes and wastes our fire, ourselves. Hume will have it 
 that honour and virtue abound more in ages of luxury, but this 
 depends on the age of the luxury. There doubtless have been 
 perhaps there yet are materialists both virtuous and honourable ; 
 but still virtue, and honour are, in ultimate instance, incom- 
 patible with materialism, for materialism must end in a worship 
 of the senses. Now, so it was in the latter end of Rome ; all 
 
 * Even to this day, and in various lands, unlimited self-will names itself still 
 Cifisar ! 
 
710 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 religion had fled sensuous gratification was alone left and 
 there was no longer any place for honour and virtue. 
 
 The truth is, that commerce is both a private and a public 
 gain like everything else, when in measure : it is neither the one 
 nor the other when it is out of measure. And it is out of measure 
 now : it knows no longer anything of the universal will, it has 
 abandoned itself to self-will, and it now visibly corrupts in the 
 midst of a boundless fermentation. Interference, then, is now re- 
 quired, if we would not see the State destroyed. In very truth, 
 the present cry of so-called Political Economy consummate 
 wisdom though it seem to itself of, Hold off, hold off, leave 
 self-will to itself, is sheer dementia. For to allege that the self- 
 will it means, is self-will controlled by virtue, is an" imbecility of 
 blindness to the state of the question and to the fact that that 
 one word hands the whole matter over to Keason qua Eeason au 
 imbecility of blindness to this, that, while materialism is in- 
 compatible with virtue, it is materialism which dominates now. 
 Much reason, then, have we to set up the principle of Health, and 
 say, surely you will all agree to that, surely you would all like to 
 be at least healthy. 
 
 While, on the one hand, then, we have reason to believe that 
 Hume would have at once accepted the distinction between uni- 
 versal will and self-will, even as against himself, we have auxiliary 
 glimpses into the incompleteness of his own positions as they then 
 stood. Imperfections of thought, contradictions of thought, we 
 have seen as regards Sparta and as regards Rome, and the case is 
 not much better with such an allegation as this, that ' a nation 
 may lose most of its foreign trade, and yet continue a great and 
 powerful people.' (' Of Commerce/) The may is a category that 
 certainly leaves open for itself a very wide door ; but surely the 
 view must, on the whole, have been but hazy that could give rise 
 to such an expression. Suppose the foreign trade had introduced 
 a large amount of the necessaries of life, as grain, for example ? 
 In fine, while, in all probability, Hume would have seen it right 
 to fight the battle of universal will even against his own descen- 
 dants, we see that it is impossible to trust the loose method of 
 miscellaneous reasonment on natural conjecture, as practised, with 
 whatever captivating ingenuity, by himself, or, with whatever amus- 
 ing breadth of make-believe, by Mr Buckle : we certainly stand very 
 much in need of a method of the notion, and it is to be hoped that 
 the Hegelian, or some other, will, in the end, substantiate itself. 
 
tfNlVERSITY 
 
 CONCLUSION. 711 
 
 It will be plain, then, that it is not hostility to the founders of 
 Political Economy that prompts the position here. On the con- 
 trary, Hume is to us one of the ablest intellects : if not preferable 
 to Burns bulk for bulk, so to speak, he is still in a social aspect 
 the most perfect of men, and probably the most important literary 
 Scotchman that ever lived. His comprehensiveness, to use Mr 
 Buckle's favourite category (which with him meant pretty much 
 only desultory miscellaneous reading, and, in the first instance, 
 only his own), is superlative, and there is hardly an intellectual 
 movement now in existence of which he was not the vital germ.* 
 His most limited side is that of literary criticism ; but that was 
 the very weakest side of the Aufklarung generally (see Blair's 
 Lectures, passim !), and it is pleasing to perceive Hume, if bound- 
 less in his estimation of Pope (not but that, duly, admiration in 
 such a case is right, and very right too), not blinded by the same, 
 like many other members of the Illumination, to the merits of 
 Milton. It is a tic of the Aufklarung to say style, and style, and 
 style, with very little regard to the matter if it be only of 
 the ordinary, shallow, natural reasonment ; but Hume must have 
 meaning as well as style, he must have information from what he 
 reads. ' An author,' he says, ' is little to be valued who tells us 
 nothing but what we can learn from every coffee-house conversa- 
 tion ; ' and this he would have said, we doubt not, independently 
 of the style. There are those who say still of literary excellence, 
 really so far as the thoughts are Concerned, there is nothing new, 
 or peculiar, or great in it it all comes to the style, it is the style 
 that gives the value. It may be well to intimate again that a 
 thing is valuable and consequently style itself only in pro- 
 portion to the amount of thought it contains. 
 
 Still we think the position made good, that the disciples of 
 Hume and Smith have pushed the doctrines of their masters into 
 unwarrantable abstractions, one-sided, false, dangerous, and utterly 
 irrational. Hume points out himself the advantage of equable 
 distribution, and talks of the dangers of monopolies. Now the 
 great tendency at present is to these latter. All must be on 
 the great scale nowadays Farms, Factories, Contracts, Specu- 
 lations of all kinds. People are no longer content to ply a modest 
 
 * Hegel gives to Kant the glory of beginning the categories : yet Hume is here 
 too in his seven classes of philosophical relation, as his distinction between matters 
 of fact and relations of ideas is just the an sich, the in itself, of German Philosophy 
 in general. 
 
712 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 and moderate industry with just sufficient surplus to insure the 
 welfare of their children and the comfort of their own old age. 
 That was possible formerly, when men apart from their im- 
 mediate occupation still interested themselves in other objects 
 of intellect, of morality, of religion. But now all is changed 
 what is now is but a longing and a rush we have no time to wait 
 we must enjoy now we must make a fortune at a stroke, or 
 let us just go under. Self-will vies with self-will for material 
 possession. Material possession, indeed, is, in sum, the single 
 category now ; and for result there is this boundless welter, where 
 no individual is connected with another, where many fall every 
 instant out, as through trap-doors of the bridge of Mirza, unheeded 
 and uncared for. Nor is there any cure for this but in the 
 promulgation of true principles intellectual, moral. r *ud religious 
 which will, perhaps, lead in the end to a coalition of upper, middle, 
 and under-class veritable manhood against the spurious middle- 
 class which self-love has so swiftly generated in the material of 
 commerce. Destruction ought to be seen now to be as absurd as 
 Obstruction, and Construction the only duty. Did but true Con- 
 structive form themselves there in the centre, possessed of principles, 
 either of the extremes, Destructive or Obstructive, were overmatched, 
 while any coalition of both were but the result of a blunder. The 
 veritable Destructives among us are the apostles of seif-love, who 
 worship the American constitution of no institution, and know no 
 human ability to admire but that which by successful commodity- 
 riding raises itself into the spurious middle-class, the miserable, 
 never-satisfied, self-love-goaded members of which vie, painfully, 
 vulgarly, with each other, ' in the fashion of a ring or the pattern 
 of a shoe-buckle/ in the cost of their carriages or the prices of 
 their wines. 
 
 But if we can bring Hume to our side, we think it not im- 
 possible similarly to withdraw from the ranks of the enemy even 
 Bacon himself. No one will deny that Socrates, Plato, and 
 Aristotle were employed on true interests, political, moral, 
 scientific, &c. How about their descendants, the Schoolmen, 
 however ? Yes, here it is plain that what is a rich and living 
 concrete with masters, can become a dead and empty abstract 
 with pupils. This it was that disgusted Bacon and turned him 
 once again to Fact. Nor is this alone less than a sufficient 
 guarantee for the originality, or, as we prefer to name it, for the 
 genuineness of the faculty of Bacon ; which genuineness it is 
 
CONCLUSION. 713 
 
 that in all cases makes the superior man. Bacon possibly for the 
 rest, a somewhat weak and ostentatious personality, and as a 
 writer, infected, on the whole, perhaps, by force of classical 
 example (see Sallust in his openings), with the specious mouthing 
 of a thin moralisation said here: all these logicalities are but 
 idle abstractions, they do nothing ; let us turn to Fact instead, 
 and then we shall have something that is, for something that only 
 sounds. But if Bacon turned on what had degenerated from a 
 concrete into an abstract then, we have a right to claim his protest 
 against a similar abuse now ; for that it really is a similar abuse 
 which in these days we suffer at the hands of so-called Political 
 Economy, we think certain. Such simple suggestion, however, as 
 we have seen already, must on this head at present suffice. Men, 
 indeed, who would have us regulate our conduct by such void 
 abstractions as Demand and Supply, Capital will find its own 
 outlet, Labour its own market, Wages their own level, &c., are 
 really as idle in the lazy indifference of such cynical laisser faire 
 as the seraphic doctors who discussed the number of angels that 
 may stand on the point of a needle. Did any merchant ever 
 make sixpence by any such prescripts ? Apart from the cutting 
 asunder of the ligatures of an obsolete system (Feudalism, &c.), 
 and apart from the seeming convenience of hard, unrelenting self- 
 interest (which will be found, however, just its own dialectic in 
 the end), what merchant, since the promulgation of Political 
 Economy, can point to a gain which he owes not rather to his own 
 individual sagacity that sagacity, for example, that found cheap 
 markets for purchase and dear ones for sale, and that lessened, as 
 well, the number and commissions of the intervening hands ? 
 Will those interminable platitudes about the nature of Credit 
 ever enable a merchant to know more than his first transaction of 
 the kind teaches him, that a credit, namely, is but a loan for a 
 consideration; or, in fact, does any merchant ever trouble himself 
 to read the same ? 
 
 Demand and Supply, Capital, Wages, Labour, &c., all these are 
 concerns of human reason, and can be guided by human reason 
 only; they cannot be left to the mere allegation of a law that 
 exists we know not where in the air, perhaps ? And would 
 Political Economy (so-called) leave them to aught else ? It is 
 really worth while looking at the cheap triumph of immaculate 
 wisdom which said Political Economy procures itself in this 
 reference, as well as at the self-devotion of its trust, the awe, the 
 
714 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 prostration, the superstition of its worship of mere abstractions, 
 mere formalities that substantially are not. At present, for 
 example, observe with what swelling self-complacency Political 
 Economy (so-called) watches the rise of the rate of discount at 
 the Bank of England in steady reply to the increasing ferment of 
 reckless speculation ! It is in the presence, it thinks, of infallible 
 law, it sees Commerce the mighty commercial system correct 
 itself and this without meddlesome interference ! * It remits its 
 gas for a moment, indeed, when it suddenly sees reckless Banks 
 spring to meet this reckless speculation, but presently recovers 
 itself on renewed recognition of law. Even on the ultimate result 
 of wide-spread ruin and misery, it still smiles, as on the legitimate 
 fruit of law ! Yet at this moment, Political Economists are never 
 done with cries to England to interfere for the Danes and against 
 the Prussians ! Will, then, the bereaved widows and orphans of 
 the foreign sin be worse off than the robbed widows and orphans 
 of the domestic sin ; and is English Eeason all-powerful for a 
 trouble without, but impotent for a trouble within? If we are 
 passively to leave all to law, law we don't know where law in 
 the air law which is just as a law of nature, why make an 
 exception of the Danish difficulty? That too, in the end, will 
 settle itself on law the law of the strongest, as the other case 
 (reckless speculation, &c.) on the law of the cunningest and richest 
 a law of nature very truly each ! 
 
 But, indeed, this levity of recognition and acceptance of law is 
 wonderful. Where, after all, is this law? Is it in the com- 
 modities themselves ? Political Economy (abstract) swells big as 
 it thinks to itself of its laws of Production, its laws of Exchange, 
 its laws of Distribution: but ought these abstract phrases to 
 conceal from Political Economy this, that neither the Distribution, 
 nor the Exchange, nor, in a true sense, even the Production, is in 
 the commodities ? Distribution, Exchange, even Production, lies 
 only in Humanity ; laws in this connexion can only be generalisa- 
 tions of Humanity's action ; and the action of Humanity as 
 Humanity is Eeason. The true laws of Political Economy, then, 
 are laws of Keason, and not of Nature. But it is to some fiction 
 of a blind law of nature that this Political Economy has in reality 
 looked, superstitiously reverent. It seems to itself hitherto to 
 have been in presence of a vast power which was supposed to be 
 
 * May not this acknowledgment of a commercial system be regarded as a tribute 
 to the principle of system to the principle of universal will as against self-will ? 
 
CONCLUSION. 715 
 
 quite beyond and above all assignments and prescripts of any 
 mere man. Mr Buckle very naively betrays an instinctive 
 consciousness of the true state of the case, not only in acknow- 
 ledging that all triumphs of Political Economy hitherto have been 
 but destructions of an old (that is, that Political Economy wins 
 for its idle abstractions the credit of the industrial progress due 
 simply to the cutting of ligatures which were in place elsewhere 
 and at another time), but in proposing to mediate between man 
 and nature through the laws of Political Economy, for in this he 
 very plainly indicates what he felt, that, somehow or other, there 
 was an effort on the part of Political Economy to reduce human 
 interests to laws of Nature. Nor could it be otherwise, and the 
 whole thing is a very simple matter: for Self-will is a law of 
 Nature, a law of the flesh ; it is universal will that is the law of 
 Eeason. The light here ought to be absolutely convincing, for to 
 attempt to subject Reason to Nature brute Nature with its brute 
 Necessity and no less its brute Contingency is simply the 
 contradiction of contradictions, is simply preposterousness proper; 
 for we are human just by this, that we supersede Nature, and that 
 we conduct its Contingency into the Necessity of Eeason. 
 
 Abstract Political Economy in this aspect, then, is but de- 
 humanisation, and an abdication of Eeason, and yet it will hardly 
 be possible for any one to realise by-and-by the power possessed 
 by the be-frilled and be-ruffled Political Economy at present, of 
 sneering its opponent into the cold shade of ignorance, to be 
 there, indeed, absolutely ignored? 1 But I confess I cannot well 
 see how this Political Economy can escape the correction that 
 lies for it in the simple distinction between universal will and 
 self-will : a concrete practicality, action, must correct its abstract 
 impracticality, its mere pedantic iynavia. The only defence I 
 can conceive for Political Economy here is, that it should say, 
 self-will opposed to self-will neutralises self-will, and there is a 
 universal human result obtained thus by the action of natural law 
 without the dangerous and uncertain influence of legislative 
 interference. But here, again, this Political Economy simply 
 deludes itself by the abstractness of its own phrase. Self-will 
 opposing self-will is but a state of nature : and this view has but 
 to look around to see that, in the atomism its own call to self- 
 will has produced, it has already carried us far on the road thither. 
 Nature brute self-will this is the beginning of history, and this 
 the Political Economy of the day would make the end also. We 
 
716 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 are so far on our way, indeed, that we have actually reached the 
 Gorilla and the Sensation Novel. Consider what important 
 witnesses both are to the truth of the general position maintained 
 here. What can be the nature of a population where the one is 
 acceptable and the other necessary ? ' Goats and Monkeys ! ' 
 
 The truth, nevertheless, is, that we must live in system : the in- 
 dividual belongs not to himself, but to the community. No 
 Richard Arkwright can jump into the air into isolation and 
 say, I am my own, and what I have is my own. Neither he, nor 
 what he has, are opaque independent units, quite indifferent there 
 in the middle of the current : they really constitute portion of its 
 transparency and flow with it. The Arkwrights of the day, how- 
 ever, are so far from seeing this, that they would absurdly isolate 
 each the whole foison of the universal into the punctuality of his 
 single Ego, a feat which, were it accomplished, would only prove 
 its own dialectic absolute want. 
 
 We are to understand, then, that a national stewardship would 
 create a garden of reason and reasonable work; whereas Political 
 Economy, as it is plied now, can end in absolutely nothing else than 
 a wilderness of self-will and animal rapine ; that the one is con- 
 crete, whereas the other is abstract, and that it is for this reason 
 we claim the countenance of Bacon. For Bacon's single constitu- 
 tive virtue was to oppose the concrete to the abstract ; from the 
 mere formal self-identity of thought, from merely formal Logic, he 
 sought to divert the attention of mankind to interests, actual, real, 
 and substantial. True it is that Bacon is usually reckoned on the 
 other side from that maintained here, and that to his authority is 
 ascribed the present merely sensuous ransacking of Nature in the 
 pursuit of a merely sensuous commodity. But this position is 
 itself no concrete this position is itself an abstract; if what 
 Bacon opposed was the abstract Universal, this is but the abstract 
 Particular, mere Sense. What Bacon pointed to was, however, not 
 exactly this, but, as union of nature and thinking inquest, 
 rather the concrete Singular, though, it may be said, perhaps one- 
 sidedly, as only out. We see here, then, that if the descendants 
 of Hume have come to occupy an abstract and untenable extreme, 
 it is not different with those of Bacon. If Sense alone and 
 Thought alone oppose each other, the concrete Singular is lost to 
 both, which are now but mutually the abstract Particular and the 
 abstract Universal. Bacon's own partialness, however, led to this ; 
 for if we are to see only an external magazine to exploiter, there is 
 
CONCLUSION. 717 
 
 no ascent over material commodity, and end there can be none 
 but materialism and self-will. Hence the need of Hegel, who, to 
 Bacon's out, adds his own necessary in. It was said, some time 
 ago, that there was no such great difference, after all, between 
 Hegel and Locke that if the latter derived Notions from Sensa- 
 tions, the former derived these from those. This is not strictly 
 true; this were to assign to Hegel the position of abstract or 
 formal Idealism, while that which he plainly arrogates to himself 
 is manifestly a concrete, of which both Eealism and Idealism are 
 indifferently predicable. Hegel's Notions, in fact, are not divorced 
 from Sensations, but are the skeleton of Necessity in the Contin- 
 gency of the latter ; and thus the addition of the third moment 
 completes a concrete in this element. So, then, is Hegel's neces- 
 sary in constituted ; and there results, in place of Bacon's man and 
 nature, the single Geist, the one Spirit, the true concrete Singular 
 which alone is which takes up Nature into unity and meaning 
 possible only through both. There are both. The Idea is the 
 Prius. What it becomes it is. It already is a completion of its 
 own necessity.* 
 
 Each of these points of view will have thrown its own light, 
 then, on the general allegation, that what constitutes the Matter of 
 Hegel, constitutes also the correction and the complement of the 
 Aufklarung. Hegel would restore to us and in the light of 
 thought the concrete Substance which the light of thought 
 carried off. Hegel would procure for us a scientific answer at 
 length to these our questions, which are strictly and properly 
 ours, which are strictly and properly human : Is there Free Will,. 
 Immortality, God ? For we must presume to differ from Lord 
 Macaulay here. ' It is a mistake,' this distinguished Aufgeklarter 
 avers, 'to imagine that subtle speculations touching the divine 
 attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the 
 foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of in- 
 tellectual culture : such speculations, on the contrary, are, in a 
 peculiar manner, the delight of intelligent children and of half- 
 civilised men/ We disagree with this, and would adduce against 
 
 * The public consciousness (Bildung) of 1897, will hardly recognise its own self 
 in the public consciousness (Bildung) of 18C4 ! Nevertheless it was just in such a 
 Bildung that one had to pass one's daily life then. Manchester, Edinburgh press 
 were terrible political economists in those years, not that we go with either 
 Carlyle or Ruskin in their mere abstract aversion to the 'dreary science,' or that 
 we do not rejoice as much as Edinburgh press or Manchester either in the downfall 
 of the corn laws. New. 
 
718 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Lord Macaulay his own master, David Hume, who (' Of Luxury ') 
 affirms: 'We cannot reasonably expect that a piece of woollen 
 cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation which is ignorant 
 of Astronomy, or where Ethics are neglected! And this is the 
 truth, and demonstrates the immeasurable superiority of Hume to 
 Macaulay so far as thought is concerned. You cannot withdraw 
 one element of the concrete without deranging and disturbing all. 
 The fineness of an ode, of an epigram, is an element in the delicacy 
 of a tissue, even in the edge of a razor. The poet enters the 
 drawing-room no less honoured a guest than the inventor or the 
 warrior, for he is known though not consciously perhaps to 
 contribute to the common stock as substantially as either. Nor is 
 the philosopher behind the poet. The philosopher is, indeed, the 
 central light and heat of humanity ; and this by his answers to 
 those very questions which Macaulay, the too precipitate pupil of 
 Hume, consigns to children and half-civilised men. All men 
 hang together to constitute humanity, and the Whole would perish 
 were a single link to fail, for each is as a centre of the relations of 
 the all. The interests represented by these questions, then, can 
 simply not be omitted. As well might you hope that man, 
 disencumbered of his brain, would remain man, if living by his 
 stomach alone. These interests, in fact, stand to the universe in 
 no less a relation than the brain to man, and their suppression, 
 like its suppression, would reduce the universe, as it were, to a 
 sort of stomach. These interests constitute what is essential to 
 humanity as humanity. To convince ourselves of this, we have 
 but to recall the passage already quoted from the Judgment- 
 Kritik, where Kant points out that the existence of the world 
 would have no worth if it consisted, firstly, of inanimate beings ; 
 or, secondly, of animate beings without reason ; or, thirdly, 
 of animate beings with reason, but a reason adequate only 
 to considerations of bodily expediency. Guided by this 
 passage, we shall have no difficulty in discerning that man, 
 deprived of any interest in the questions concerned, would 
 at once sink into no higher a place than that of a human 
 beaver, who knew only and valued only what contributed to his 
 merely animal commodity. Elsewhere Macaulay 's words show 
 that he places quite under the same category the question of the 
 immortality, and almost of the main mystery of religion in general. 
 * The immortality of the soul,' he says, ' is as indemonstrable now 
 as ever ; ' and, as regards natural religion, we are no better off now 
 
CONCLUSION. 719 
 
 than Thales or Simonides.' It is not unfair, on the whole, then, 
 to infer that Macaulay said generally to himself on these points, 
 These are things which we never can settle, and of which it is 
 useless to speak aliens ! and, as Voltaire concludes, and Candide 
 concludes, ' cultivons notre jardin ! ' That is, turning the back on 
 all else, let us cultivate our garden of material commodity ; for 
 with the suppression of these questions and these interests, all 
 would come to material commodity. 
 
 What is peculiarly human is not to live in towns, with soldiers 
 and police, &c., safely to masticate our victuals ; what is peculi- 
 arly human is to perceive the Apparition of the Universe ; what 
 is peculiarly human is to interrogate this apparition is to ask in 
 its regard what ? whence ? why ? whither ? It may suit 
 Macaulay and the Illumination to say, It is absolutely useless to 
 put these questions, you never can get an answer; do not trouble 
 yourself with them, turn your back on what you call the appari- 
 tion and look to the earth 'an acre in Middlesex is better than a 
 principality in Utopia' all your Platos and your Socrates but ' fill 
 the world with long words and long beards ' take to Bacon and be 
 content with the ' fruit ' : but, apart from the valuelessness of such 
 fruit, if alone, if all, had there been no such questions, there could 
 never have been this fruit itself, * not even woollen cloth,' in a 
 word, had there been no such questions, there could never have 
 been this formed world, this system of civilised life, this deposit of 
 an objective reason. On no less a stipulation than eternal life will 
 a man consent to live at all : so it x is that philosophy and morality 
 and religion are his vital air, without which his own resultant 
 madness would presently dissipate him into vacancy. 
 
 No perception was ever clearer to man than this was to Hegel : 
 his one work, in whatever number of volumes, is but an answer to 
 what we may call the questions. After Kant, the freedom of the 
 will had little difficulty ; for that is free which is amenable only 
 to itself, and this is Eeason. Eeason is its own necessity, and in 
 its own necessity is its own freedom, for in obedience there it but 
 obeys itself. The universal will is free, then, and in the universal 
 will man is free ; for his true will is the essential and universal 
 will, while his self-will is but enslavement. Man, then, as was a 
 perception of one's early student days, is free because he obeys 
 motives ; for what obeys motives obeys itself, and is not subject to 
 the compulsion of another. Kant is particularly beautiful on this 
 question particularly beautiful in the illustrations he adduces in 
 
720 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 proof that men value a man, that a man values himself, just in 
 proportion to the sacrifice he makes of self-will for universal 
 Eeason. 
 
 As for the Immortality of the Soul, that lies secure in the 
 Notion. The notion is the vital heart of all, and for the notion 
 self-consciousness is hut another name. The subject and the con- 
 crete notion are identical, and they have not in them the character 
 of the finite, but of the infinite. The system of Hegel, from stage 
 to stage, is full of utterances on this head, and he who can read 
 there has no room to doubt. Abstract absorption into the univer- 
 sal is not Hegel's doctrine, and need be a fear to no one. ' The 
 One is Many, and the Many One/ A system of horizons under 
 one horizon, as Kant figures it this is the true Monadology. God 
 is no abstraction, but a Spirit in his own concrete differences, of 
 which every finite spirit is one. That each is, is to each the 
 guarantee of his own necessity both here and hereafter : that he 
 should be then, is not more incredible or absurd than that he is 
 now. At death, the external other of nature falls from us, we are 
 born wholly into spirit spirit concrete, for it has taken up into 
 itself nature and its own natural life. Nature is to Hegel much 
 as a late extract showed it was to Kant. It is but the pheno- 
 menon of the noumenon it is but the action of what is, and passes, 
 while the latter is and remains. Time and space and all questions 
 that concern them reach only to the phenomenon, they have no 
 place in the noumenon. There is but one life, and we live it with, 
 as the Germans say. That life we live now, though in the veil of 
 the phenomenon. There is but an eternal now, there are properly 
 no two places and no two times in the life of the Spirit, whose we 
 are, and which we are, in that it is all. So it is that Hegel is 
 wholly sincere and without affectation, when he talks of it being 
 in effect indifferent to him, how and whether he be in this finite 
 life. He is anchored safe in thought, in the notion, and cares not 
 for what vicissitude of the phenomenal may open on him. Hegel, 
 then, not Fichte, is the rock, which Mr Carlyle, in reference to the 
 latter, feigns : rock in his spirit, that is, in his faith and in his hope, 
 which faith and which hope spring alike from knowledge, if, in 
 his finite life, wraths, and indignations, even fears and apprehen- 
 sions, were perhaps known to him, just as they are to us. Flesh 
 is weak, and, while in the phenomenon, consciousness is but the 
 mirror of its vicissitude, and never blank. 
 
 Then with regard to God there is for Hegel nothing but God ; 
 
CONCLUSION. 721 
 
 and this God is a personal God, and no mere Pantheistic Substance 
 that just passively undergoes a mutation of necessity. Hegel, 
 however, looks on the ordinary fare supreme of infidelity as but a 
 name, an empty abstraction, and he has attempted to construe God 
 out of his universe into the one absolute spirit which he is. We 
 say construe, not construct Hegel as little constructs God as he 
 constructs God's universe. The system of Hegel is but the pro- 
 cess of this construing, in which all finite categories show their 
 untruth and their finitude, and pass into their truth and their 
 infinitude, the Absolute Spirit. As abstractions, for example, 
 there are both Seyn and Daseyn ; but the true concrete singular 
 is the Fiirsichseyn into which they both collapse. Neither Quality 
 is, nor Quantity is truly, or as such ; what truly and as such is, 
 is Measure. Both Ground and Appearance are the formal abstract 
 moments of the concrete singular, the Actual, which alone is. 
 Substance and Causality collapse into Reciprocity ; Notion and 
 Judgment into the Syllogism ; Life and Cognition into the Absolute 
 Idea, &c. &c. Being and Essence are but correlative abstractions 
 that find their truth in the Notion ; nay, Logic and Nature are 
 only the abstract moments, the abstract universal and the abstract 
 particular of the Absolute Spirit, which is the final concrete singu- 
 lar, the ultimate unity, the living One, which alone is. Here all 
 finite categories collapse and disappear, while those which are 
 infinite are but names of the One on lower stages. The pulse, 
 nevertheless, the ultimate vital throb, is the notion. 
 
 So little does this scheme seem to Hegel to contradict 
 Christianity, that it is just on this scheme that he is able to 
 perceive that Christianity is, must be, and can only be, the 
 Kevealed Eeligion. It is here that Hegel is, perhaps, at his 
 greatest, at his truest, at the greatest and truest of thought itself. 
 Christianity is, in his hands, rescued not less from the contingency 
 and externality of mere history, than from the contradictions and 
 discrepancies of the mere separating, and, so to speak, self- 
 identifying understanding* rescued from the vulgarity of 
 material sensation, and restored to a spiritual reality which is, 
 in very truth, one and identical with the absolute inner of the 
 living soul. To him who understands the full force of the 
 
 * The self-identifying action, alluded to here, must be supposed to fall on the 
 objects as well as the subject ; Understanding proper separates not only itself, but 
 whatever is submitted to it, into independent, self-identical selves : in a wide sense, 
 its function is thus simply to self -identify. 
 
 2z 
 
722 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Hegelian terms, there is no profane reading whatever more 
 ennobling, consoling, peace-giving, than that which Hegel offers 
 us here. Crass facts, which were opacities and obstructions, 
 melt and flow at his touch, and are taken up into us sustenance, 
 as it were, into the souls of men before whom there seems to open 
 at length the kingdom of grace. It is not with the mere abstrac- 
 tions and distinctions of thought that Hegel deals here, but with 
 the concrete element of religion itself, which is as truly human, 
 which is as much ours and indispensable, as our very senses. If 
 the instrument be thought, thought as clear and consecutive as 
 that of the soberest Aristotle, the result is feeling feeling as 
 substantial, palpable, real, as ever gave beatitude to the intensest 
 of Saints. 
 
 It is the doctrine of the Trinity which constitutes to Hegel the 
 central and vital principle of Christianity. Again and again he 
 may be found animadverting on the gratuitous astonishment of 
 Understanding at the identifying of such differences as one and 
 three. We saw a very prominent instance of this in Remark 2 of 
 the second chapter of Quantity. Similarly, towards the beginning 
 of Maass in the complete Logic, Hegel will be found expressing 
 interest in the trace of a trinity even in the ' enormous phantastery ' 
 of Indian superstition, * like a moderating thread in what is im- 
 moderate.' The passage continues : 
 
 * Though, this Indian Threeness has misled to a comparison with the 
 Christian Trinity, and though indeed a common element of the movement of 
 the notion is to be acknowledged in them, we must still, however, gain a 
 preciser consciousness in regard to the essential difference between them 
 which is not only infinite, but the veritable infinite just is this difference.' 
 
 So much in earnest is Hegel with the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 that he finds Christian writers of the most undoubted orthodoxy 
 strangely lukewarm in its regard. Tholuk, for example, he 
 censures most unsparingly, because he terms ' this doctrine a 
 scholastic doctrine, and regards it merely on the external side of a 
 surmised simply historical origin from speculation on scriptural 
 texts under the influence of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle ; ' 
 because he asserts also that ' the doctrine of the Trinity is not by 
 any means a fundament on which faith can be founded.' Hegel 
 complains also that ' he conducts his reader always only as far as 
 the Passion and Death of Christ, but not on and up to his 
 Resurrection and Ascension to the right hand of the Father, nor 
 yet to the Pouring out of the Holy Ghost ; and intimates that, in 
 
CONCLUSION. - 723 
 
 this way, the doctrine of Redemption cannot have more than a 
 moral, or even a heathen, that it cannot have a Christian, sense. 
 Perceiving the taint of Illumination and mere morality in 
 religionists represented by such men as Tholuk, Hegel avers 
 further (P. of K. ii. 207 and 229) : 
 
 ' Through such finite mode of viewing the divine element, that which is 
 in and for itself, and through this finite thinking of the absolute content, it 
 has come to pass that the fundamental tenets of Christianity have in great 
 part disappeared from the formulary. Not alone, but in especial, philosophy 
 is now essentially orthodox ; the tenets which have been always held to be 
 the ground-verities of Christianity, are maintained and preserved by it. [To 
 Hegel, indeed, it is not a care] to prove that the ' Dogma, this still mystery, 
 is the eternal truth ; for this is what goes on in the entire of philosophy.' 
 
 In truth, no one can doubt the depth and fervency of the 
 religious sense of Hegel, who will take the trouble to read his 
 pertinent deliverances. They have the breadth of feeling in them 
 of a George Fox or a Bunyan, yet do they rigorously issue from 
 the notion, and rigorously dispose themselves according to its 
 moments, and this is no unimportant testimony to the truth of 
 the principle. The peculiarly deep, living, and meaning way in 
 which all the great doctrines of our religion Good and Evil, 
 Original Sin, &c. are realised in the new element, is especially 
 striking. We shall dwell on a few extracts by way of illustra- 
 tion : 
 
 * The cultus is to give oneself this supreme, absolute satisfaction (Genuss) 
 there is feeling in it I am there present with my particular personality : 
 it is thus the assurance of the absolute^ Spirit in its people, it is their know- 
 ledge of their essential being ; this is substantial unity of the spirit with 
 itself.' ... 'It is a two-fold act God's grace, and man's sacrifice.' . . . 
 * The latter has reference essentially to the inner ; it is the sacrifice of natural 
 will, the will of the flesh, as comes more to the surface in Repentance, Puri- 
 fication, &c.' . . . * God is the creator of the world ; it belongs to his Being, 
 his Essence, to be creator ; so far as he is not this, he is imperfectly under- 
 stood. . . . But a secret, a mystery in the usual sense, is God's nature not, 
 least of all in the Christian religion ; there God gave himself to be known, 
 showed what he is, there is he revealed ; but it is a mystery for sensuous 
 perception, conception, for the sensuous mode of view and for understanding 
 as such. ... In the Idea, the Differences present themselves not as self-ex- 
 cludent, but so that they only are in this self-conclusion of the one with the 
 o ther : that is the true supernatural, not the usual supernatural, that is to be 
 conceived as up there ; for that is just something sensuous and natural, that 
 is to say, what is an asunder and indifferent. . . . The self-identical substance 
 is this unity, which as such is fundamen and principium, but as subjectivity 
 it is that which acts, which produces.' . . . * Religion is divine wisdom, man's 
 knowing of God and knowing of himself in God ; this is the divine wisdom 
 
724 . THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 and the field of absolute truth. In general, religion and the basis of the 
 state are one and the same ; they are in and for themselves identical.' . . . 
 ' The laws of the state are rational and divine things, in view of this pre- 
 supposed original harmony ; religion has not its own principles as opposed to 
 those which obtain in the state.' . . . (Hegel no voluntary.) ' There is one 
 notion in religion and state ; this one notion is the highest thing that man 
 has ; it is realised by man : the nation that has a wrong notion of God, has 
 also a wrong state, wrong government, wrong laws : this relation is seen in 
 men's ordinary conceptions, and expresses itself in this way, that to them the 
 laws, the authorities, the constitution, come from God, that thus these are 
 authorised and by the highest authority which can be given to them.' . . . 
 ' But if the laws are from the will of God, it is important to know God's will ; 
 and this is not the business of one in particular, but belongs to all.' . . . 
 4 When only the formal side is taken, room is given to caprice, tyranny, and 
 oppression. This showed itself in a marked manner in England, under the 
 Stuarts, when passive obedience was insisted on, the sovereign claiming to be 
 accountable to God only. Through means of this same claim of a divine 
 revelation, the antithesis, however, directly manifested itself. The distinction 
 of priests and laymen, namely, is not held by protestants ; the priests are not 
 privileged to monopolise the divine revelation, and still less is this the case 
 as regards the so-called lay. So there arose in England a sect of protestants 
 who maintained it was given to them by inspiration to tell how they should 
 be governed ; in consequence of such inspiration of the Lord, they stirred up 
 a rebellion in England, and beheaded the king.' 
 
 This demonstration of the inevitable alternation of the antithesis 
 that in repelling the point you are struck by the but Hegel 
 accomplishes finely also with reference to tKe Koman Empire. 
 The people so named worked only to a single end, universal 
 dominion ; but, this attained ' abstract dominion/ ' simple 
 empire ' * there manifested itself over all, a common present 
 power, a power of self-will the Emperor which, without all 
 moral restraint, could act, rage, give a loose to itself.' This same 
 abstract dominion of the Koman people ' this universal un- 
 happiness of the world ' was, in a religious point of view, the 
 preparation for Christianity : 
 
 ' The gods of all nations were collected in'the Koman Pantheon, and they 
 mutually annihilated each other just by this, that they were to be united. 
 Eome fulfils this unhappiness of the annihilation of beautiful life and 
 consciousness . . . and produces a throe which was to be the labour-pain of 
 the religion of truth. " When the time was fulfilled, God sent his Son," it is 
 said ; the time was fulfilled, when despair to find satisfaction in the temporal 
 and finite had taken possession of the spirit of man.' 
 
 Again, of Faith, Hegel declares that it is indispensable : 
 
 ' The relation of the individual to this truth, is, that the individual just 
 comes to this conscious unity, renders himself worthy of it, produces it within 
 
CONCLUSION. 725 
 
 himself, becomes filled with the Spirit of God : this takes place through 
 process within him, and this process is, that he has this Faith, for Faith is 
 the truth, the presupposition, that in and for itself and assuredly redemption 
 is accomplished : only through this faith that the redemption is in and for 
 itself and assuredly accomplished, is the individual capable of setting himself 
 into this unity.' 
 
 Of Baptism we find it said, this rite 
 
 * testifies that the child is born in the community of the Church, not in outer 
 wretchedness, that it will not havfe to meet a world at enmity with it, but 
 that its world is the Church.' 
 
 The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is characterised thus : 
 
 ' In it there is given to man the consciousness of his reconciliation with God, 
 the entering and dwelling of the Spirit within him : the Lord's Supper is the 
 focal centre of the Christian Church, and from it all differences in the 
 Christian Church receive their colour and form. In regard to it there are 
 three conceptions. 1. According to one of these, the Host, this external, this 
 sensuous, unspiritual thing, becomes through consecration the present God 
 God as a thing, in the wise of an empirical thing, is just so empirically 
 enjoyed by man. Inasmuch as God was thus known as an outward in the 
 Lord's Supper, this centre and focus of the entire doctrine, this externality is 
 the fundamental basis of the whole Catholic religion. There arises thus 
 servility of thought and deed ; this externality pervades all further forms of it, 
 the True being represented as what is Fixed, External. As thus existent with- 
 out the subject, it may come into the power of others ; the Church is in pos- 
 session of this, as of all other means of grace ; in every respect, the subject is 
 passive, receptive, knows not what is true, right, good, but has only to receive 
 it from others. 2. The Lutheran conception is, that the movement begins 
 with an External, that there is an ordinary, common thing, but that the 
 Spirit, the self-feeling of the presence o/ God realises itself, insomuch and in 
 so far as the externality is absorbed, not merely bodily, but in Spirit and 
 Belief. In the Spirit and Belief now is the present God. What is sensuously* 
 present is of itself nothing, and even consecration makes not of the Host an 
 object of veneration, but the object is in the Belief alone ; and so in the con- 
 sumption and destruction of the Sensuous element, there is the union with 
 God, and the consciousness of this union of the subject with God. Here has 
 the grand consciousness arisen, that, apart from the Enjoyment and Belief, the 
 Host is a common, sensuous thing : the process is only in the spirit of the sub- 
 ject truly certainly a trans-substantiation, but such that by it the external 
 element is eliminated, God's presence is directly a spiritual one, so that the 
 Faith of the subject belongs to it. 3. The idea here is, that the present God 
 is only so in conception, in remembrance, and thus has only an immediate, 
 subjective presence. This is the Reformed idea, an unspiritual, only lively 
 remembrance of the past, no divine presence, no actual spirituality. Here the 
 divine element, the Truth, is debased to the Prosa of the Aufklarung and 
 mere Understanding, a merely moral relation.' 
 
 That, in general, it is the notion which is the guide to these 
 determinations, will, perhaps, now at last come home to the 
 
726 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 reader, in a perfectly undeniable and definitive manner from the 
 Division (Eintheilung), which runs thus : 
 
 * The First is the Notion, as always ; the Second, again, its Determinateness 
 (specificity, Particularity), the notion in its determinate (specific, Particular} 
 forms ; these cohere necessarily with the notion itself : in the mode of con- 
 sideration properly philosophical, it is not the case that the Universal, the 
 Notion, is put first only as it were by way of honour. Notion of Right, of 
 Nature, as set first in ordinary usage, and as to which, as so set, we are still in 
 uncertainty, are general determinations, on which properly the matter in hand 
 does not depend, that depending, on the contrary, on the special contents, the 
 several chapters. In this usage, the so-called notion has, in the sequel, no 
 influence on these further contents ; it indicates in a way the ground on which 
 we find ourselves with these materials, and that we are not to introduce 
 content (matter) from any other ground (sphere) ; the content for example, 
 magnetism, electricity passes for the thing itself, the notion (that is, in the 
 usage alluded to) only for the formal or formell element of it. 
 
 In philosophical consideration, the notion is also the beginning, but it is the 
 thing, the Substance, as the seed from which the whole tree develops itself. In 
 it are all the characteristic parts contained, the whole nature of the tree, the 
 peculiarity of its saps, ramification, but not preformed in such wise that, if we 
 take a microscope, we shall see the branches, leaves, in miniature not so, but, 
 on the contrary, in spiritual wise. In this way, then, the notion contains 
 the whole nature of the object, and knowledge that follows is nothing but 
 the development of the notion, of that which is contained impliciter in 
 the notion, of that which has not yet come into existence, is not yet expli- 
 cated, laid out (displayed). And so it is that we begin with the notion of 
 Religion. 
 
 The second, then, is religion in its determinateness (in its actual form) the 
 determinate notion. But the various precise forms we take not from with- 
 out ; no, with us, it is the notion itself, that goes forward to its determinateness, 
 its particularity, in its own freedom. It is not as if we empirically treated 
 Right, for example : in which case, indeed, Right were, first of all, defined in 
 general; but then we should go somewhere else for the determinate (parti- 
 cular) Rights (Roman, German, &c.) we should take them, from actual fact. 
 With us, on the contrary, the determinateness, the series of particular forms, 
 has to yield itself from the notion itself. 
 
 The determinate notion of Religion is finite religion, a one-sided something, 
 thus and thus constituted as compared with another, one particular religion 
 as compared with another particular religion ; Religion in its finitude. 
 
 The third is the notion that comes to its own self out of its determinateness, 
 its finitude, that re-establishes itself again out of this finitude and limitation ; 
 and this re-established notion is the infinite, veritable notion, the absolute 
 Idea, the true Religion. 
 
 The first religion in the notion is not yet the true religion. The notion is 
 true certainly within itself, but it belongs to truth as well that the notion 
 should realise itself, even as it belongs to the soul that it should have given 
 itself a body. This realisation is the determination of the notion ; the absolute 
 realisation is that this determination become adequate to the notion : the 
 
CONCLUSION. 727 
 
 adequate notion is the Idea, the veritable Notion. These, abstractly put, are 
 the three parts in general. 
 
 This division may be also characterised thus. We have to consider the 
 Notion of Religion, first, in general, as universal, then in its particularity as 
 self-differentiating notion, which is the side of the Ur-theil, of limitation, or 
 difference and finitude ; and thirdly, the notion which shuts itself together 
 with itself, the Schluss (close, shut, or syllogism), or the Return of the Notion 
 from its determinateness (particularity), in which it is unequal to itself, into 
 its own self, in such wise that it comes into equality (adequacy) with its form, 
 and its limitation is removed. This is the Rhythmus, the pure eternal life of 
 the Spirit itself ; and had it not this movement, it were dead. The Spirit is 
 to have itself as object ; that is its manifestation, its relation of objectivity, as 
 in finitude. The third is that it is object to itself in this wise, that in the 
 object it is reconciled with itself, is by itself, and so has come to its freedom ; 
 for freedom is to be by self. 
 
 This division is thus the movement, nature, act of the Spirit itself, as 
 regards which, we, so to speak, only look on. Through the notion it is 
 necessary, but the necessity of the further progress has, first of all, in the 
 development itself, to demonstrate, explicate, prove itself.' * 
 
 * The quotations that refer to Tholuk occur in the preface to the second edition 
 of the Encyclopaedie ; those that bear on Religion, in the pertinent extracts from 
 Frantz and Hillert (Hegel's Philosophic in wb'rtlichen Ausziigen), but partly also 
 in the collected works. 
 
 From these extracts, I derive also the three following equations, which will interest 
 the student; Beziehung = das, worin sie identisch sind ; Verhaltniss = Auseinander- 
 treten dieser Einheit; and Setzen = dass diess durch mich sey. Reference is thus 
 reserved, as has been the general practice of this work, for the identity of the sphere 
 of Simple Apprehension, Relation for the dif-fereuce of the sphere of Judgment, and 
 Setzen is seen to apply to what is established in consciousness through process of 
 and from another, which indeed is the life of thought itself qua thought. The 
 internal process sets the external forms. That is gesetzt, into which another has 
 formally become. A succession of intellectual results that appear from implication, 
 and disappear from explication, but into new explication this is Gesetztseyn 
 ostensive expression of an implicit mutilation. There is the fruit of a womb in 
 aperto, which is presently withdrawn again, as into eclipse for a new issue. If the 
 ice is explicit, the water is implicit, but still there is substantial union. Ex- 
 implication, Gesetztseyn, is all that goes on it is the one onward. To know the 
 Hegelian Notion, and to know that the verb setzen is retained for the determination 
 of the life of the notion, is, as regards Hegel, pretty nearly to have arrived. I 
 should say, indeed, that if the reader, who has studied his way this length, will 
 now take the trouble to peruse the first two chapters of the second volume of Hegel's 
 complete Logic, he will find this author really at length in his power. 
 
 Hegel's fidelity to the notion which, indeed, is wholly unswerving is seen, not 
 only in the above equations, but in all the extracts in the text. As, in fact, we 
 have seen, even in the single terms, he is true to the triplicity of the notion : each 
 of them is a syllogism ; the ordinary sense coquets with the virtual sense into a 
 third, the Hegelian or speculative sense ; and thus the whole notion, even in a 
 word, has come full circle. Urtheil, for instance, is, first, judgment, then dif- 
 ference, and, thirdly, re-duction of the dif-ference into the first identity. Begriff, 
 similarly, is, as universal a notion indefinitely ; as particular a notion definitely, 
 
728 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 The depth and truth of these glances of Hegel into the inner 
 significance of Christianity will be denied by no one ; but there is 
 now an external side on which it will be well to say a word. It 
 relates as well to what is called plenary inspiration, as to the 
 counterpart of the same, the grubbing into what is supposed the 
 region of historical fact by such men as Strauss and Eenan. On 
 the first head, we may say, that Hegel is perfectly sincere in his 
 adhesion to the doctrine of plenary inspiration in its true sense 
 in that sense, namely, in which it relates to the inner : the Bible is 
 to him perfectly instinct with the inspiration of the Spirit. Hegel, 
 however, is unable, from the whole nature and principle of his 
 philosophy, to believe in the inspiration of an outer as outer. 
 The outer element, as in the sacrament, is to him but the medium, 
 and disappears in the inner realisation of the spirit. Plenary 
 inspiration, most assuredly, he would say, but not inspiration of 
 the letter. The letter as letter is an outer ; and the sphere of 
 externality as such is a prey to boundless mutability and con- 
 tingency. It is the decree of God that it should be so. The 
 notion in external manifestation, is nothing but, and can only be, 
 this spectacle of change and accident. Let any one look at his 
 own copy of the Bible. He got it at a certain time, he carried it 
 to certain places, he has used it on such and such occasions, and 
 others have so used it : there are accidental dog's-ears in it, tears, 
 burns, stains, thumb-marks (of Prussian officials or others). Then 
 the binding, it is in such and such materials, form, colour, &c. 
 The paper is of such and such quality, and is at such and such 
 stage of decay. There are such and such a number of pages. 
 The printing is of such and such a date, and in such and such 
 a type. The chapters, verses, &c., are appointments of certain 
 human beings. Then the matter; it is in prose and in poetry ; 
 there are histories, legislative enactments, narratives, biographies, 
 letters, proverbs, prayers, sermons, parables, revelations, pro- 
 phecies, &c. Then there are a variety of authors actually as- 
 signed. These authors, too, are completely in the yoke to 
 the categories of their respective countries, ages, languages, &c. 
 
 as the notion of some particular concrete ; as singular the Notion, Kant's Notion, 
 Hegel's Notion, the concrete Notion. 
 
 Hegel is reported to have said, ' that only one man understood him, and he did 
 not.' This man, I am inclined to believe, was Goschel. Hegel accepted Goschel's 
 exposition of his own religious views with a ' dankbaren Hiindedrucke ' ; but, no 
 doubt, saw clearly that Goschel knew nothing, after all, of the Notion. 
 
CONCLUSION. 729 
 
 Nay, externality goes deeper still, there are discrepancies in 
 this matter. Of the vision that appeared to Saul as he went to 
 Damascus, we hear, for example, in the seventh verse of the 
 ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that ' the men which 
 journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no 
 man J ; whereas, in the ninth verse of the twenty-second chapter 
 of the same Acts, we are told, ' And they that were with me saw 
 indeed the light, and were afraid ; but they heard not the voice 
 of him that spake to me.' Now, this is a contradiction in terms 
 a deeply-marked discrepancy, then : doubtless, reconciliatory 
 explanation is possible, is easy ; doubtless; it is an external dis- 
 crepancy which, instead of weakening, adds force to the inner 
 truth of the particular narrative, and of the Bible generally : still 
 it is a discrepancy a proof that whatever is external must yield 
 itself a prey to the contingency of the external. We stop here ; 
 into discrepancies at all it is no joy to enter ; we have had enough 
 of them at the hands of the general Aufklarung ; we would not 
 protract the agony ; what is wanted now is something quite else 
 an end to the misery, a renewal of Faith. 
 
 This, however, will probably sufficiently illustrate what we 
 hold to be the relative position of Hegel, as justified by such 
 passages as the following, also from the extracts of Frantz and 
 Hillert, which, from the first edition as already named simpler, are 
 perhaps preferable here : 
 
 ' The Christian is positive religion in the sense that it has come, been given, 
 to man from without, ... it will be interesting to see what is the Positive.' . . . 
 * The laws, municipal ones, laws of the state, are in the same way positive : 
 they come to us, are for us, have authority ; they are not so that we can let 
 them stand, that we can pass them by, but that even in this their externality 
 they are to be for us what is subjectively essential, subjectively binding. 
 When we apprehend, recognise, find reasonable, the law that crime be 
 punished, it is then essential for us, has power over us, not because it is 
 positive, because it is so, but it is of validity inwardly also, to our reason, as 
 what is essential, because it is inward, rational. As regards revealed religion, 
 there is necessarily this side also : inasmuch as we have there what is 
 historical, externally appearant, we have also there what is positive, con- 
 tingent, that may be in this manner, and also in that. Even in religion we 
 have this. Because of the externality, sensuous manifestation, which is 
 implied to accompany it, there is always present what is positive. But this 
 is to be distinguished : the Positive as such, the abstractly Positive, and the 
 law, the law of Reason. The law of Free-will is not to be allowed to act, be- 
 cause it just is, but because it is the determination of our Reason itself ; when 
 it is so known, it is nothing positive, nothing blindly operant. Religion also 
 appears positive in the entire tenor of its doctrines ; but it ought not to 
 
730 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 remain so, it ought not to be an affair of mere apprehension, of mere memory.' 
 . . . ' The attestation is spiritual, lies not in the sensuous, cannot be brought 
 about in immediate sensuous fashion : against the sensuous facts, therefore, 
 there may always be something objected.' 
 
 This will suffice for the first head ; as regards the second, the 
 point of view may be seen to open in the following extract : 
 
 ' As regards the empirical world, the Church does so far right in this, not 
 to undertake such investigations as those concerning how it was with the 
 appearance of Christ after his death : for such investigations proceed from 
 the point of view, as if the thing depended on the sensuous element of 
 manifestation, on this mere historical element ; as if in such narratives of one 
 as historically perceived, in historical manner, there lay the attestation of the 
 spirit and its truth. This truth stands firm in itself, although it has such 
 point of origin.' 
 
 There is an edge here that tells most unmistakably against 
 those that grub into historical fact, as if they could so discredit 
 the sacred history, let them find out what they may. Hegel has 
 no sympathy whatever with this industry; and it is rather 
 singular that it is one which in appearance at least has 
 emanated from his school. The mantle of the prophet, however, 
 is not always of direct descent. To Hegel it is no attestation 
 of anything in a spiritual sense, or simply in meaning,, that it 
 should have such and such sensuous documents in its support. 
 Apart his ordinary curiosity as man and interest as antiquary, 
 Hegel would toss into the fire if offered to attest, if offered for 
 worship just so never so authentic a piece of the true cross 
 with as little compunction as John Knox flung into the water 
 the painted board named Virgin. Eeally, what can sensuous 
 facts attest ? What were the value of a tooth of the wolf that 
 suckled Eomulus ? Should we be really better off, had we even 
 a letter to the fact under the hand of Lupa herself? Hegel's 
 dislike to critical history (which really springs from his general 
 principle), so lively in expression is it, is quite amusing : it is to 
 him nothing but an exhibition of personal vanity. What can any 
 man now hope to make of the death of Eemus what good would 
 he do, did he even demonstrate it to have actually happened so 
 and so what really is the value of such an industry ? To 
 Hegel what is in the beginning is always the continuous identity 
 of apprehension ; it appears to him everywhere, as he actually 
 names it in the geographical element, 'gediegenes Hochland/ 
 hard, solid, unbroken steppe: it lies there under vapour; it recedes 
 as you approach ; it can never be got at to come under the knife 
 
CONCLUSION. 731 
 
 or to lie in the scales ; it is but a cast of the eye, and is always 
 there before you ; it is the necessary presupposition of the notion 
 itself: it is, in short, a sphere of apprehension, and in externality 
 why would you vainly seek to split it into the self-identities of 
 the present Urtheil? So always is the germ; Hegel knows it 
 such, and mocks the idle curious that would thrust fingers into it. 
 And Hegel here is, no doubt, scientifically right, while Strauss 
 and Eenan (Hegelians that reverse their master !) are only inept. 
 Hegel, in point of fact, recommends us, 'In considering this 
 religion, not to go historically to work after the fashion of him 
 who begins from the outward, but to take start from the notion/ 
 He tells him also who begins in the external manner, that he only 
 seems to himself ' receptive,' that he is in fact ' active ' that is, 
 that the resultant work of his efforts is not a work which he has 
 only found, but which he has also made. In short, the grubbers 
 into the historical facts of such commencements are but mistaken 
 men, who, as it were, with one foot on the centre, stubbornly 
 endeavour to set the other on the horizon. Notion is the word, 
 not the Datum of Fact ; to which latter would you stretch * the 
 ladder of Jacob,' it instantly ' goes further off and becomes astro- 
 nomical.' There is no ultimate solution of any element but the 
 notion, which being in effect ourselves, any nearer nearness were 
 a strange desideratum. 
 
 Hence, pageant History ! hence, gilded cheat ! 
 . . . . What care, though owl did fly 
 About the great Athenian admiral's mast 1 
 
 Juliet leaning 
 
 Amid her window- flowers, 
 
 Doth more avail than these ! 
 
 So Keats exclaims, and Keats is right. Would we know 
 truly how the spirit of man lived, and moved, and was in the 
 old Greek world, it is to Homer we must turn, and not to 
 Thucydides. In the Iliad and the Odyssey as they are given 
 to us, in the soul of Homer whom, despite the testimony 
 of centuries and the voices of the demigods themselves, a 
 prurient modern criticism would deny in the Iliad and Odys- 
 sey, in the soul of Homer, veritably a one there lies in 
 crystal reflexion the whole Greek world, organically together ; in 
 the soul of Homer, there lies in crystal reflexion, organically 
 together, the spirit of man himself gone asunder into its own 
 necessary and native differences. Preserve the Eeal, Thucydides 
 
732 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 destroy the Ideal, Homer : we have lost both Greece, and the 
 deepest insight into man and the world of man. Eeverse the 
 action, and of what account is the loss, when compared with the 
 gain ? As then, so now : the prologue of Chaucer, the plays of 
 Shakespeare, the poems of Burns, will readily outweigh any pro- 
 fessed history. We will agree with Hegel, then, that, possessed 
 of the notion, we feel ourselves lifted high above the historical, the 
 external, the contingent, and we shall only smile at the necessarily 
 futile efforts of a Strauss and a Kenan to paw the horizon.* 
 
 ' The spiritual is higher than the external ; the spiritual cannot 
 be externally authenticated ' : it is this position also which gives 
 Hegel his peculiar place as regards miracles. He does not oppose 
 them, admits the belief they would bring to sensuous men, but still 
 he subordinates them. They are to him in a sensuous, external 
 element, and consequently lower than what is spiritual as such. 
 To support his view, he points out that the Egyptian Sorcerers 
 performed miracles as well as Moses ; but 
 
 1 The main point is, Christ himself says : There will come many who do 
 miracles in my name ; I have not known them. Here he himself rejects 
 miracles as veritable criterion of truth. This is the main point of view, and 
 what is to be held fast : attestation through miracles, as the impugning of 
 the same, is a sphere which does not concern us ; the testimony of the spirit 
 is the true one.' 
 
 Now I must not be untrue to Hegel in what concerns him here. 
 On the religious side, I know that it has been felt as a difficulty 
 that what we have on the whole for a God in Hegel seems to be 
 only a sort of logical universal that has no individual expression of 
 its own that has an expression, in fact, only through us. Now, to 
 grant the miraculous element may, it has been thought, act, so far, as 
 a kind of guarantee against this difficulty. God must be conceived 
 as Lord of Nature : prayer must be believed, as it were, to stay the 
 arm that sways the universe. This difficulty, it may be said, however, 
 was never a difficulty with Hegel himself. The religious element, 
 very certainly, all through, is what is realest in Hegel. Unlike 
 Kant, he has never a word to utter against the efficacy of prayer. 
 Declarations there are express in him as to the personality of God 
 and the immortality of the human soul. Equally express is his 
 stand by Christianity. Publicly, in his lectures, he exclaims, * I am 
 
 * I find Aristotle here consentaneous. He says in the Poetic (c. 9) : 
 '0tAo(ro0u>repoi' /cai ff7rovdai6repov iroi.r)(ns tOTopias fffrlv, the one dealing with 
 the universal, the other with the particular ; so that no prosody could make a poet 
 of Herodotus.' New. 
 
CONCLUSION. 733 
 
 a Lutheran, and will remain so.' As above, however, we see his 
 position to the miracles ; and we have no desire to make a West- 
 minster Divine of him. Miracles he does not impugn ; but he 
 subordinates them. In fact, it will illustrate his general position 
 here if we refer to a passage in his Hist, of Phil., i. 213. He 
 says there, in allusion to the popular marvellous that is attri- 
 buted to Pythagoras, ' his life appears to us as through the medium, 
 of first century apprehension, more or less in the style in which 
 the life of Christ is narrated to us, from the point of view of 
 common reality.' 
 
 If such be the attitude of Hegel in regard to religious relations, 
 his bearing is quite of a piece in reference to politics, in reference 
 to the State. The State is the rational substance of the universe, 
 and depends not on the wise opinion and good knowledge of either 
 you or me. The Aufklarung, to be sure, suddenly turned its 
 lantern upon it, among others, and declared all there-appertinent 
 rotten. Since then we have been stripping our walls bare, and 
 Mr Buckle has been able, with much comfort opening a waist- 
 coat button to perorate on Superstition. The value of Descartes, 
 it appears, is that he saw into the imposition of priests and princes, 
 and our forefathers were plunged in a hopeless limbo of ignorance 
 and darkness ! Superstition ! Superstition ! The category of 
 superstition is not enough for Hegel, however ; he is not unjust to 
 the Aufklarung, but he will not deny all tapers but its own. On 
 the contrary, Eeason to him did not begin with the Aufklarung, 
 but had been, for thousands of yars, building itself into the out- 
 ward crassitude. Hegel, then, examines Eeason as regards the 
 State, and assigns, through the Notion, the essential determina- 
 tions that constitute its organisation and life. To say this much 
 must here suffice, however ; and, perhaps, for the present, the hint 
 alone is sufficient, that political wisdom cannot possibly consist in 
 undoing alone, else its own activity were speedily its own end. 
 There are principles here, as there are in all human interests, and, 
 through Hegel, we may yet get to see and realise them. 
 
 In simple truth, the last chance is offered us in thought as 
 thought : in matter as matter, we have nothing but despair. In 
 Germany, they already ask, how would life constitute itself 
 seposita animorum immortalitate ? But we in England should ask 
 simply, how would it be were matter all ? This supposed, we shall 
 presently see everything that has been formed out of the reason 
 of man, during untold generations, break up and disappear. 
 
734 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Thought is but a function of matter, and must be studied in the 
 laws of matter. There is, consequently, no God, no spirit, no 
 immortality : Religion, Metaphysic, Morals, Politics, vanish. 
 Even science remains not ; for we are left with the registration 
 of phenomena alone ; and phenomena being but appearances, and 
 not things in themselves, inquest is at once endless and hopeless. 
 And is Poetry, Literature, one whit more possible ? Will any one 
 any longer take interest in sea or star, in mountain or in flower, 
 or in the loves and hates of men ? All must perish : there is 
 nothing left us but material commodity ; each is for himself 
 each would realise that. And would that would material 
 commodity continue to be realised? Does not the high priest, 
 Hume, tell us himself, that a piece of woollen cloth cannot be 
 expected to be realised in a nation ' where Ethics are neglected ' ? 
 What can be expected but a realisation of the ideal of abstract 
 so-called political economy at length, self-will the only principle 
 barbarism a state of Nature ? And could men now bear a 
 state of nature ? The misery of the present is infinite, and it is 
 because the Illumination has stripped us naked to matter. 
 Schopenhauer, who has fairly arrived at this stage, talks (Parerga 
 and Paralipomena, Bd. II., 156) thus : 
 
 If we reckon up, so far as is approximately possible, the sum of want, pain, 
 and misery of every kind which the sun illuminates in his course, we shall 
 admit that it would have been much better, had lie been as little able to 
 evoke the phenomenon of life on the earth as on the moon, and did the surface 
 in the former, as in the latter, still find itself in a crystalline condition. "We 
 may conceive our life, indeed, as a uselessly interrupting episode in the 
 blissful repose of Nothing, ... as only a gross mystification not to say, 
 Prellerei, cheat ! 
 
 This is the voice of Atheism, and to this voice only is 
 Materialism adequate. This is the ' ungliickliche Bewusstseyn,' 
 the unhappy consciousness ; and there is hardly a great literary 
 man in England at present who smoulders not slowly into a grey 
 ash under it. This is the infinite misery ! What wonder, if the 
 wretch who realises it to himself should creep to bed with a dose 
 of hemlock in his stomach ! The sick like himself will say, it is 
 all one ; but there are those who see the pain of the simple souls 
 that stand in relation and more ! Even as they lift the hat that 
 honours, not him, but death in his place their lips shall in- 
 voluntarily wear the shadow of a sneer a sneer that means: 
 Oh, no ; it will not do to take the pet ; you should have strutted 
 your part out you should have played out the Idea ! This is 
 
CONCLUSION. 735 
 
 it there is an Idea. It is ours to realise it and in contentment 
 so but we are wretches if we refuse. 
 
 This materialistic ruin is illustrated also by the Illumina- 
 tion in its latest scientific phase. This phase, or this mis- 
 named science, says simply, that all that we see and know 
 are but material phenomena, that vary to contingent material 
 conditions. The contingency of the variation may be understood 
 from this, that such disturbances of the earth's interior as depend 
 on volcanic agency, which itself is due to accidents of the 
 central conflagration, or to fortuitous complexions, gaseous or 
 other, may give rise to very various interchanges of land and 
 sea, of heat and cold, &c., and, consequently, to very various worlds 
 and very variously inhabited. Nevertheless, there is, at the same 
 time, everywhere present in this variety such common analogy as 
 can point only to a common origin ; and it seems reasonable to 
 conclude that all that we see is but the result of the suc- 
 cessive transmutations of a single primitive species, or, in- 
 deed, of a single primitive atom. From such antecedents, 
 there conceivably emerges, under favourable circumstances, 
 the first rude cell, which propagates itself, which improves 
 itself.* Improvement, in particular, becomes very intel- 
 ligible so soon as a stage of animality has been attained: 
 for what will exist then will be a battle of life ; all action will be 
 a trial of strength. Men select their breeders, and so modify 
 species that they cease almost to be specifically the same. So 
 Nature : through the struggle for existence and the victory of the 
 strongest, she also selects her breeders.^ Thus it is that we have 
 the Flora and Fauna which presently exist ; and these together 
 constitute but a single chain of organisation from the lowest forms 
 of life, up, through the monkey, to the man. If any links in this 
 chain still fail, if intermediate steps are still required in order to 
 complete the proof of actual transmutation, appeal need only be 
 made to the element of time. All human records are but as a 
 day, an hour : but infinite time extends a field, adequate, as we 
 look backwards, to the possibility of the fact, adequate, as we 
 look forwards, to the actual demonstration of the same. Infini- 
 tude in the latter direction has probably its term, however, so far 
 
 * Observe the mere arbitrariness the mere saying of * conceivable emergence,' 
 * favourable circumstances/ 'propagation,' 'improvement,' &c. 
 
 t This 'selection,' as already said, means only, is but, the play of natural 
 contingency, and is no principle , new or other. New. 
 
736 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 as man (and, indeed, the present sidereal system) is concerned. 
 Conditions being presupposed to remain as they are at present, 
 there is evidently going on such gradual loss of heat, mechanical 
 force, energy of all kinds, as will reduce all, in the end, to a single 
 cold, dark, meaningless mass, in the centre of a cold, dark, mean- 
 ingless space. Whether there be what is called a God to change 
 that or not ? . . . 
 
 This is what the Aufklarung, that began by seeing the corrup- 
 tions of the mediaeval church, has ended in. It is not to be 
 supposed, however, that all the members of the movement are 
 absolutely of the same mind in regard to the various articles of 
 the general creed : rather, it is curious to watch the differences 
 to watch the particular predilections. One, the Philopitheque 
 par excellence, bravely goes the whole ape waves, as he advances 
 to battle, the picture of a procession of monkeys, man at top, and 
 triumphantly thrusts his fist of enlightenment into the blind 
 pride and wretched, superstition of weak humanity ! Oilily 
 another, buoying himself blandly up on a well-balanced series 
 of smooth plausibilities, talks, subrisively-deprecatingly, of this 
 'picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter,' 
 and ascends the gratification of a triumph of enlightenment being 
 enough for him in Jovine serenity to his elevated Olympus of 
 shall we say ' philosophical Atheism ' ? The figure of Mr 
 Buckle is quite comic here, Garrick-like : with tears in his eyes 
 he speaks of the consolations of deism and immortality ; but, sud- 
 denly recollecting his duty to himself as an advanced thinker, he 
 struggles forward beyond oh, if it were only possible ! beyond 
 Comte himself ' whose great merits it were unjust to deny ! ' 
 Another figure I know, more comic still, the pattern Illuminatus 
 of a generation back : with Mr Buckle, he too does not like the 
 reproach of having been left behind; but old leavens are still 
 strong within him, and he ventures to suggest that it is not quite 
 certain yet, not quite agreed yet, that the belief in a God and in 
 Immortality is to be given up. The specially comic element, how- 
 ever, lies in his shoulders. Above these shoulders there rises a 
 clear, experienced head, and beneath them beats a sound, warm 
 heart, by virtue of both of which he can speak in the fullest 
 and most conclusive manner of books, and men, and crises of life, 
 at the same time that he is the most social and agreeable of 
 mortals. By these excellences he sets no store, however ; all that 
 he values himself on lies in his shoulders. His right shoulder he 
 
CONCLUSION. 737 
 
 names to himself Political Economy ; his left he cherishes more 
 quietly as Pang at the Biblical humbug. Talk to him of the first, 
 of the right shoulder, and he raises it high, proudly advancing to 
 the front in all the fullness of a crop well ruffled, in all the 
 spreading dignity of Philosophy in bloom. Talk to him now of 
 the second, and, ah ! it is no less dear to him ; but, see, it has 
 instantly sunk, while over it suddenly shows, crouchingly, as if 
 for a spring, a red, blue, green, yellow face, that spits out, with 
 a maniacal eye, and a rabidity that appals And what of that ? * 
 
 As regards the theory itself, perhaps, it would be fair to point 
 out, in the first place, a certain vacillation as to what position it 
 is to assume on the question of progress. For a long time, 
 generally, indeed, such is the case still, for the first three-fourths of 
 the volume, improvement in series, 'a chain/ from lowest to 
 highest, was a fixed and undoubted tenet: it was always under- 
 stood, for example, and it is still said, that ' the earliest known 
 fossil mammalia are of low grade/ Now, however, and especi- 
 ally towards the end of the volume, a change has set in ; progress 
 seems no longer necessary, and we are told that ' the earliest 
 cryptogams are the highest.' It would be fair, we say, to point 
 to this, and to call for consistency and decision ; but we shall 
 assume to give materialism its strongest side at once that 
 progression as progression is out of place in any such element. 
 Progression as progression involves an antecedent idea, involves 
 design a principle not by any means welcome to the materialist, 
 who would know no moulding liand but that of external con- 
 ditions. Accordingly, the progression that results from what is 
 only misleadingly called Natural Selection is rather apparent than 
 real. In certain seasons of scarcity, for example, the long-necked 
 Herbivora might live, while the short-necked should die ; but the 
 former need not necessarily be an improvement on the latter. 
 This, then, were not properly progression; this rather were but 
 succession contingent succession on contingent variations of 
 contingent conditions. We shall not object that, perhaps, suc- 
 cession is inadequate to the facts ; we shall adhere to such 
 influences only as might lead to a natural selection of the 
 Giraffe, on the one hand, and to an equally natural rejection 
 of the Ox, on the other. But let us remark for a moment on 
 
 * Now in 1897 has not the time most remarkably gone by for anything but 
 composure in even the left shoulder ? Is there any church nowadays that can do 
 more than settle its face at it ? New. 
 
 3 A 
 
738 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 what in the theory concerns this Giraffe. How came the 
 Giraffe by such a length of neck? Oh, it was not always so, 
 poor thing ; it used, indeed, to be much like other creatures ; 
 only, you must know, there was once a season of scarcity, and out 
 of a mass of herbivorous quadrupeds, none survived but those that 
 got at the leaves of trees, by having the advantage of the others in 
 length of neck. But was one season enough ? Oh, as for that, 
 the same thing happened more or less every season. And why is 
 the process terminated why does the Giraffe's neck not lengthen 
 still ? How do you know the process is terminated ? Perhaps it 
 is going on still ; from the short records of human existence, we 
 cannot hope, you know, &c. &c. : besides, it is only fair to say that 
 things cannot be expected to stretch for ever ! Are not these just 
 such propos as schoolboys might indulge in; all concerned, the 
 while, being already as to lee of a colour, much too foncee to 
 believe a word of them ? This theory is supposed to be superior 
 to that of Lamarck, who feigns the neck of the Giraffe to have 
 simply stretched to the effort of desire ; but is not this latter 
 much the more likely of the two ? Compare the hut of the first 
 Barisius with the palace of the Tuileries, and see between, the 
 long series of cabins, cots, cottages, and houses, which must have 
 been built the while, before the skill adequate to the first was 
 transformed into the skill adequate to the last. Figure this 
 transformation now, not as in series, but as in an individual : 
 behold the hut of the Barisius grow into the Tuileries. In this 
 way, man's hut has so grown in process of time only in obedience 
 to man's desire: why, then, should not the neck of the Giraffe 
 have similarly grown, through long generations, in obedience to a 
 similar principle ? If we can figure a single hut and a single man 
 to represent the one respective series, we may figure also similarly, 
 respectively, a single Giraffe and a single neck. There, then, at 
 the foot of its single tree, is the single Giraffe, with its single 
 neck. It but reaches the lowest leaves as yet, and has no further 
 desire. But now a breeze blows into its teeth a branch from the 
 tier above : how tender, juicy, and delicious ! Desire awakes, and 
 by dint of effort it attains to the tier above. An accidental 
 branch from the third tier similarly incites to new effort, which, 
 ever similarly stimulated, continues ever stretching from tier to 
 tier, till at length, in the end, the Giraffe or, what is the same 
 thing, its descendant after millions of generations finds itself 
 browsing on the very top ! 
 
CONCLUSION. 739 
 
 One must admit, at all events, the intrepidity of men who can 
 commit themselves to such giraffe-stories. 
 
 But we do not wish to concern ourselves at present with the 
 puerilities of the execution in detail, nor with the inadequacy of 
 succession to progression, nor with the comic uncertainty of hand 
 that cannot let go and yet will not hold progression : what con- 
 cerns us here is the materialistic theory in itself, of which succes- 
 sion is, perhaps, the most characteristic feature. Now, succession 
 does not by any means necessitate a beginning ; and it is a proof 
 of the haziness of the theorists that, through the principle of 
 analogy, they nevertheless postulate such. Of this postulatum, 
 haziness, indeed, is the very element ; for though the conception 
 of a primitive atom floats somewhere or other as nucleus in it, 
 this nucleus, however primitive it is to be, has already around 
 it an entire world of more primitive conditions, to which it, 
 indeed, is but the medium through which they variously pro- 
 nounce themselves. A beginning must be something First, 
 and something absolutely One ; but a primitive atom already 
 in conditions is neither the one nor the other. The thought, 
 then, is evidently very defective that would conceive an 
 atom primitive, and yet would see it in time and in space, and 
 surrounded by conditions. If all these elements were to be 
 granted as a beginning, creation at least to theory were not so 
 difficult. But, though a material atom be evidently thus wholly 
 inadequate to Time, Space, and Conditions, and, consequently, 
 quite impossibly a beginning, let HIS conceive it such ; let us name 
 it a First and One, and let us look at it on other sides. Now, in 
 the first place, of what size shall it be ? This question is adapted 
 to give long reflexion, perhaps, to the majority of minds ; but we 
 hasten to interrupt this by asking again : Nay, all size being but 
 relative, why think of size at all ? Any size is surely quite in- 
 different to infinite space one size quite as good as another ; a 
 needle-point were in this connexion quite as effective as a pin- 
 head, and that as a whole solar system ! A whole solar system of 
 a single substance dwindles down in opposition, to infinite space 
 into a needle-point ; and, e contra, a needle-point is thus tanta- 
 mount quantitatively to a solar system. In a word, Quantity 
 is indifferent ; it must have been hazard that assigned the first 
 quantity ; or, in our way of it, we do not see any reason for 
 quantity at all we cannot tell why there should have been any 
 quantity, or just such a thing as quantity. That is true ; these 
 
740 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 questions have been only concerns of Hegel as yet.* There 
 
 * There is that in the above which will give a firm hold at last on the Quantita- 
 tive Infinite, which consists simply in the fact of the absolute relativity of 
 Quantity ; any positivity of Quantity seems absolutely and infinitely to flee. This 
 is just the infinite divisibility on another side, but brought back, as it were, into 
 unity of notion. The reader will do well to refer to the relative places under 
 Quantity, and will probably be pleased to find himself in complete light at last. 
 We may point out now too, that, though the rationale, formerly assigned for the 
 apparent difficulties that presented themselves on occasion of the ' Nullities ' of 
 Thomas Taylor, is the technically correct one, what lies at bottom is this, that any 
 quantity is quite as good as another, so far as a capability of discretion is concerned. 
 What is involved in all that, is simply the antithesis, the Notion, the fact that the 
 seen explication implies, is through an unseen implication the development is 
 through zVvelopment. This is the Species. What is, is but the middle of the 
 growing antithesis, which was at first Being and Nothing. There is no advance 
 to identity that is not implicitly accompanied by an advance to difference : so it is 
 you repel the point only to be struck by the but. Energy, you will grant to be 
 positive, and very positive too ; still it implies a negative, another, on which it acts, 
 through which indeed it is. Nay, of the two, either is indifferently the other, just 
 as it is often manifestly indifferent which of the moments you name universal, which 
 particular. Energy is much talked of, nowadays, by philosophers, who take no 
 note of this necessary mutuation. They think energy a one ! Hegel, with his pairs 
 of inner and outer, energy and manifestation, &c., is there the while to suggest the 
 right point of view. It is necessary to know that any identity, or whole, may be 
 viewed as an absolute, which is absolute, however, only through its relativity, 
 and identical only through its difference. The extrication and opposition of the 
 relativity, the difference, from and to, the absoluteness, the identity, is the Method, 
 the collapse or eclipse of the one into the other to a new. God is, what he is, 
 through himself ; God is, at the same time, not what he is, through himself ; other- 
 wise he were not what he is through himself. This again is the Notion, an Affirma- 
 tive, an explicit 2nd that involves a Negative, an implicit 1st, a 1st and 2nd that 
 are identical in a 3rd : the Trinity ! The whole secret nature of the case will 
 yield itself to due meditation here. 
 
 The reader will, perhaps, perceive that there has been contemplated something of 
 an arrangement to produce a graduated conviction ; and the following statement 
 will, it may be, complete the metaphysical side : 
 
 The Notion, or Thought as Thought, which as such has always an object on 
 which it is engaged, is, according to Hegel, this, that it (you or I if you will) cannot 
 explicate without, accurately and exactly to the same extent, implicating cannot 
 set into position without, at the same time, quite correspondently, setting into- 
 negation. Of this notion, all antitheses are modes ; or all possible antitheses are, 
 in ultimate analysis, identical with each other in their essential form and in their 
 essential matter. Thus, explicate Being as completely as you may, you are, all the 
 time, just as completely, implicating Nothing ; and of this absolutely abstract 
 antithesis, all other antitheses are but repetitions on higher stages, and in 
 graduated series. All possible antitheses of thought will be found to constitute a 
 System the Logical Idea. Of this Idea, Nature is but and accurately so the 
 externalisation. Spirit again is but a return of the idea from externality to 
 internality. These three spheres, however, Logical Idea, Nature, Spirit, are not 
 to be understood as each self-dependent and self-subsistent : they are together one 
 one in trinity. The total result is a System, by which Hegel conceives himself to 
 
CONCLUSION. 741 
 
 seems no reason, then, why we should not at once go back to 
 nothing, so far as quantity is concerned : but, not to distress our- 
 selves with this, we shall just assume a quantitative atom in the 
 middle of Time and Space. Now, again, how shall this atom dis- 
 tinguish itself ? It must be something something positive not 
 nothing ; it must affirmatively distinguish and assert itself. But 
 it is impossible for anything to make itself distinguishable, to 
 assert itself, unless as in contrast to another and the atom is by 
 supposition alone. As Hobbes says, * idem semper sentire, et non 
 sentire, ad idem recidunt.' The qualitative limit is here so far 
 constituted quite as the quantitative one: the that is not less a one 
 of two than the there, each is through its other. The redound, 
 the contrecoup, is inevitable. You cannot make a vacuum without 
 at the same time filling the identically same vacuum : difference is 
 identity, identity difference. Eliminate A its place is filled ; 
 and you have the labour of the Danaids, not to the end of the 
 chapter, but to the creation of the world. Setzung and Aufhebung, 
 Ponency and Tollency, (we may coin alsoponated and tollated,pona- 
 tion and foliation,) are the moments of,the single mutuation that is. 
 This explication of nature, in which you are now, will disappear 
 into its implication, but in the new explication you will abide. 
 Kemain in the disappearing explication, and you remain in the 
 eternal sorrow. The explication as the explication is the abstract 
 side, and this you have chosen, forgetting that you are the con- 
 crete, and will still be the other that emerges. 
 
 A primitive external atom is^n untenable position, then, for it 
 were absolutely indistinguishable without another. Such atom 
 in fact, were no more than abstract Quality, that and no more. 
 But, abstracting from the fact that, with a primitive atom, we are 
 but in presence of abstract Quantity and Abstract Quality, let us 
 hold a first and one space-filling atom to be still conceivable: 
 Space is around it, Time is over it ; it is there, one and single, the 
 absolutely First. Why it was the first, and not another, we shall 
 not ask. It is there, and in such manner there : but how will 
 
 answer all philosophical questions which have ever yet been put. By this system 
 also he conceives himself to complete as well, not only its beginning and germ 
 the Kantian philosophy, but philosophy as such, and this finally and definitively, 
 by raising it to a scientific basis and informing it with a scientific principle. In 
 short, we may say that Hegel has shown the Metaphysical world to be not less under 
 the control of Action and Reaction than the Physical ; and that, while it is 
 Action that, as explicit and overt, is, in the first instance, believed the whole, 
 Reaction, though implicit and occult, is no less real, essential, and necessary. 
 
742 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 anything else ever come there ? It is absolutely single, how can 
 it possibly change ? how can it possibly grow ? how can it pos- 
 sibly move ? and where are your necessary conditions ? Pshaw ! 
 kick thought into limbo : it is easy to see that condensation takes 
 place, motion results, heat, light, and electricity are generated, and 
 so we have the whole ! Certainly the kick has made Cosmogony 
 easy ! 
 
 The theorists, in fact, feign all back into a single identity, but 
 quite forget to ask themselves, How, then, can we extricate 
 difference from identity ? This is really the problem in ultimate 
 generalisation, and these theorists know not who does ? that 
 this was the problem Kant set up when he asked, ' How are a 
 priori synthetic judgments possible ? ' This, however, is the first 
 step towards a true way of stating the problem, and into this it is 
 perfectly clear that Hegel saw. 
 
 What it all comes to, then, is simply things as they are; a 
 primitive atom is nought, we have only material structure under 
 material conditions. Indeed, the theorists in question may declare, 
 We never intended it otherwise, of primitive atoms we never spoke. 
 It may be said in reply, that to go back to a primitive atom was, 
 in fact, to put their own problem into its true place. A prim- 
 ordial form seems really to demand a primitive atom ; and to 
 bridge the gulf from this first atom to an oyster, were not more 
 difficult than to bridge the gulf from an oyster to a man : agencies 
 adequate to the latter may be readily assumed adequate to the 
 former also. But, indeed, the search for a primordial form, to 
 which they say they are driven by the universal analogy, is, in 
 ultimate analysis, nothing but the search for identity without 
 difference ; quite the same problem as that of the primitive atom. 
 The one great error of these theorists, in truth, is their one-sided 
 resolution to look only for identity : I am like the monkey ; so I 
 am to abstract from the differences, and speculate on how and 
 when I derived thence ! But, similarly, I am like the rat ; slit 
 each of us from chin to pubis, and how analogous are the organs ! 
 I am, in fact, an animal, and as such analogous to all animals- 
 nay, I stand as summary of the entire round of the principles of 
 nature: but what then? Am I not also more? have I not an 
 inner as well ? and on which side is the testimony, if that whole 
 outer be but one analogy of this inner, and on principles of this 
 inner? It is a mistake, then, to abstract from difference and 
 signalise identity alone, just as it is a mistake to signalise 
 
CONCLUSION. 743 
 
 difference and abstract from identity.* This mistake coheres with 
 the general mistake that these theorists propose to approach the 
 problem and manipulate the problem with all their categories 
 ready-formed : it has never occurred to them to say, we determine 
 all by difference and identity, by conditions, by cause and effect, 
 &c. : it will, therefore, be necessary to examine first of all what 
 these things mean, and whether what they involve be in itself 
 true or not. Now, this it was that occurred to Hegel ; and so it 
 was that he was enabled to discern an entire internal system, of 
 which nature was but the externalisation, and thus complete on 
 both sides the single analogy, the concrete reciprocity. 
 
 Had the theorists in question but perceived the necessity of 
 verifying those internal standards by which they proposed to 
 appreciate and appraise all, they would have consulted Metaphysic, 
 and would have been surprised to find that the whole industry 
 they contemplated had received its rationale, and, in its extreme 
 form, its coup- de-gr dee, more than fourscore years ago at the hands 
 of Kant. Or as we may say it otherwise they would have 
 been surprised to find that what they contemplated was at once 
 absolutely certain and utterly impossible. 
 
 In what he calls the Anhang, or Appendix, to the Transcen- 
 dental Dialectic, Kant proves the existence of three laws in human 
 nature imposed by it on the objects of sense, and received by it 
 from and with these objects, as if they (these laws) were part 
 and parcel of these objects themselves, and not a reflexion, a 
 colour fallen on them from the Very faculties to which they (these 
 objects) presented themselves. This peculiarity is summed up in 
 the single word transcendental: that is transcendental which is 
 really a contribution to objects from us, but which, at the same 
 time, appears to us actually in the objects themselves. Further, 
 the three laws in question enter not into objects as Constitutive of 
 them, but only influence them, so to speak, from without, as 
 Regulative of them into unity and system. Now, it is such laws 
 
 * Enlightenment, on the general question of Man, would have done well to have 
 remembered these words of one of its own foremost priests, Bayle : ' L'homme est 
 le morceau le plus difficile a digerer qui se presente a tous les systemes. II est 
 1'ecueil du vrai et du faux ; il embarrasse les naturalistes, il embarrasse les 
 
 orthodoxes Je ne sais si la nature peut presenter un objet plus etrange et 
 
 plus difficile a penetrer a la raison toute seule, que ce que nous appelons un animal 
 raisonnable. ' Et moi, j'ajoute ici (1897), que c'est M. Darwin qui se vante pouvoir 
 aisement digerer ce morceau difficile, et qui (Lite and Letters, iii. 116, 117) se trouve 
 tout-a-fait ebahi qu'il (ce morceau) est trop dur de descendre a M. Wallace. New. 
 
744 THE SECKET OF HEGEL. 
 
 that become transcendent when wrongly applied when, on the 
 supposition that they belong to the objects themselves, conclusions 
 are attempted to be made in regard to these objects which tran- 
 scend the limits of all possible experience. Here, then, we have a 
 perfect indication of the entire nature of the Darwinian industry : 
 a law, not in objects, but falling from us on them, has been 
 erroneously supposed by the reasoners in question to be still, 
 nevertheless, in them, and to be capable of supplying results quite 
 impossible to any experience. In other words, these gentlemen 
 have supposed objective what was only transcendental, attempting, 
 moreover, to force the same into such use that it became tran- 
 scendent. 
 
 The three laws alluded to Kant speaks of thus: 'Keason, 
 therefore, prepares for Understanding its field, 1. by a principle of 
 the Homogeneity of the Variety of individuals under higher 
 genera ; 2. through a principle of the Variety of the Homogeneity 
 of individuals under lower species ; and, in order to complete the 
 systematic unity, it adds, 3. a law of the Affinity of all notions, 
 which law dictates a continuous transition from every single 
 species to every other through gradual increase of Diversity : we 
 may name them the Principles of the Homogeneity, of the Speci- 
 fication, and of the Continuity of Forms.' The first law Kant 
 further expresses by the proposition, ' Entia prceter necessitatem non 
 esse multiplicanda ; ' the second by, Entium varietates non temere 
 esse minuendas ; ' and the third by, ' Non datur vacuum for mar urn] 
 or, ' Datur continuum formarum' or, ' Est lex continui in natural 
 Each of these laws aims only at a ' Focus Imaginarius' for the use 
 of our understanding, which, therefore, as a focus irnaginarius, can 
 only be asymptotically approached, nor ever reached, for it is 
 underived from experience, and is indeed wholly beyond the limits 
 of any possible experience. Into the proofs of Kant we have no 
 room to enter, but it will probably be found, in the end, that they 
 are so far, cogent. Variety, Affinity, and Unity are three neces- 
 sities of Keason, and they fall on Nature from Eeason, but, Kant 
 being right, are not in Nature as such : they are but, as he phrases 
 it, the source of three maxims of Eeason, which Keason only seeks 
 to realise. 
 
 When, then, the supporters of the modern argument in question 
 would refer all to a common genus, and would account for all 
 variety by ' transmutation of species ' (accomplished by whatever 
 expedients they may like), they are only, if we are to believe Kant, 
 
CONCLUSION. 745 
 
 repeating the schoolboy's chase after the rainbow ; they are pursu- 
 ing only what is in themselves, and will move as they move. 
 There is for him no single genus in nature, nor any infinitude of 
 mutually-affined species : these are but spectra of the reasoner's 
 own projection, illusions merely when their real quality is unde- 
 tected. They have their indispensable use, they connect and give 
 meaning to experience, but they are only snares and pitfalls when 
 applied beyond the possibility of experience. One grand system, 
 unity of type, all this must be postulated from the very constitu- 
 tion of human reason ; but from the very constitution of experi- 
 ence as well, it can never be realised in experience. It is ours to 
 assume that there is such articulate chain in fact : we but stultify 
 ourselves, however, would we attempt to see this chain in growth. 
 This, nevertheless, is just what Darwinists would see ; and just so 
 it is that Darwinianism is at once absolutely certain and utterly 
 impossible. We would catch Nature in the fact, would we 
 actually come upon her with an individual half in and half out ! 
 We would see identity end, and difference begin ; but so still that 
 the one were the other ! 
 
 But we may quote here Hegel also (as referred to p. 683 
 Encyclo. 249 and Kemark) : 
 
 N^ I 0* * 
 
 Nature is to be regarded 'as a System of Grades, of which the one necessarily 
 rises out of the other, and is the proximate truth of the one from which it 
 results but not so that the one were naturally generated out of the other, 
 but only in the inner Idea which constitutes the ground of nature. Meta- 
 morplwsis accrues only to the notion agvsuch, as only its alteration is develop- 
 ment. The notion, however, is in nature partly only inner, partly existent 
 only as living individual : to this individual alone, then, is existent meta- 
 morphosis confined. 
 
 It has been an inept conception of earlier and later ' Naturphilosophie ' to 
 regard the progression and transition of one natural form and sphere into a 
 higher as an outwardly actual production which, however, to be made clearer, 
 is relegated into the obscurity of the past. To nature externality that is, to 
 let the differences fall asunder and present themselves as neutral existences 
 is precisely proper : the dialectic notion which guides forward the stages, is 
 the inner of the same. Thinking consideration must deny itself such nebulous, 
 at bottom sensuous, conceptions, as in especial the so-called origin, for ex- 
 ample, of plants and animals from water, and then the origin of the more 
 highly developed animal organisations from the lower, &c. 
 
 This, written many years before the appearance of Mr Darwin's 
 book, reads like a critique on nothing else. This, in fact, is the 
 truth of the case and ends the business. Nature is the externality 
 of the notion, and, as such, a prey to boundless contingency : the 
 
746 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 metamorphosis, the development, the articulation, is due to the 
 notion alone. Name it in the language of Kant, or name it in 
 the language of Hegel, it is the same thing that is indicated. 
 Kant himself says, ' the principle of genera postulates identity,' 
 that of species 'diversity/ In ultimate abstraction, indeed, the 
 whole problem just concerns the metaphysic of identity and 
 difference ; neither of which is without the other* 
 
 The error, then, of the reasoners in question is patent. We 
 may say, in general, too, that they have been precipitate and rash, 
 that they have attempted to execute the realisation of their 
 problem without having first thought this problem out. Not only 
 is it utterly impossible for any material principle to be an 
 adequate Beginning, an adequate First and One, but the whole 
 problem they set themselves concerns at bottom abstract Quality, 
 abstract Quantity, abstract Identity, abstract Difference, abstract 
 Condition, and, in general, the whole body of Metaphysic with 
 which though they knew it not themselves unexamined, simply 
 presupposed, they set to manipulate their atom or their species, as 
 if so any legitimate result could be possible. Consider their 
 zoological infinite alone ! What is it but a blind presupposition 
 that Difference, through its own infinitude, identifies itself at last ? 
 So it is that the infinitude of Discretion eliminates itself and 
 restores Continuity ; and thus, too, it is that we arrive at length 
 at truth the Kantian, the Hegelian, the Concrete Notion. Cuvier 
 shall pursue Difference, and St. Hilaire Identity: but we shall 
 take part exclusively with neither. There is a genus which holds 
 under it all species, and all individuals ; there is a horizon which 
 holds under it infinite horizons, as they others : but this genus, 
 this horizon is not a material atom ; it is the Notion, it is Self- 
 Consciousness, it is God. 
 
 In passing, let us point out again the one-sidedness of the In- 
 finite of Natural Philosophy at Present, the progress of which 
 is to bring all material atoms into a cold mass, or a hot mass, 
 
 * It is interesting to find Kant coming so often directly on the notion. At the 
 end of this Appendix, he will be found saying, ' Thus, then, all human knowledge 
 begins with Perceptions, proceeds to Notions, and ends with Ideas ' the triplicity 
 of the notion almost in its very logical name. Still, the reader will see that, 
 while in Kant the Begriff is only subjective and only seems to act on nature (only 
 acts on nature, as said elsewhere, with an ' as if,' an ' als ob '), it (the Begriff) in 
 Hegel is objective, and actually in nature only so, however, that it acts not, so^to 
 speak, from without on nature as externally conditioned, but rather only schema' 
 tically, as it were, from within. New. 
 
CONCLUSION. 747 
 
 in the centre ! Were there nothing in existence but the material 
 forces of this Natural Philosophy, the past Infinite ought long ago 
 to have achieved the result contemplated. That it has not done 
 so depends on the duplicity of the Notion, to which Attraction 
 were impossible, did it not possess, at the same time, just as much 
 Eepulsion. 
 
 We were badly enough off, then, with the mere brute law of 
 Mr Buckle, but we are worse off still with the contingent lawless- 
 ness of varying conditions ; for so, there were nothing left us but 
 the atoms of Democritus, in the void of Democritus, under the 
 TVX*] f Democritus. But even suppose it so even suppose all 
 the views of materialism accepted, one after the other, up to 
 complete Darwinianism (necessarily, of course, Identity as Identity, 
 but in material form that is, as a Primitive Atom) why, we 
 have but to turn the back, and the world is as it was, the problem 
 as it was. We shall admit all, we shall see the primitive atom, 
 we shall see its gradual evolution into the formed universe. So 
 admitting, so seeing, we shall lose ourselves in the despair of 
 materialism ; we shall lament to ourselves that material agency 
 is all, that there is no hope. But just let us turn our backs on 
 the atom a moment, just let us turn round to the formed universe, 
 came it from whence it may, Ah ! it is all still there the 
 Apparition, in its wonder, in its beauty, with its innumerable 
 ideas ! The majestic shape has been there all the while, in 
 unmoved serenity, as if smiling on the tetchy infant, Man ! How 
 came she there, that majestic shape, jewelled in ideas jewelled 
 in ideas, were they but shells of the shore, or simple heath-bells 
 of the most savage moor ? That is it, all has been duly de- 
 veloped from an atom, but whence are the ideas the ideas 
 of the vast resultant organisation ? 
 
 Meantime how easy soever, how varied soever the refutation 
 men have given themselves up a prey to this materialism : 
 they go down everywhere desperate at present in a wide welter 
 of atheistic atomism. The end of the Aufklarung is material 
 self-will. But is it well so ? Is it really good to end as Schopen- 
 hauer ? Are we prepared to bear such misery ? Is there no 
 consciousness but the 'unhappy consciousness' das Ungliickliche 
 Bewusstseyn ? Must we believe ourselves but isolated atoms 
 unconnected with each other, unconnected with the universe 
 disjuncts foam-bells, haply murmuring ourselves out on some 
 plashy pebble of a forlorn shore ? 
 
748 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 No : the triumph of superior enlightenment will not support the 
 materialist himself long. It is in vain that the soul is burned 
 out of us, that God is burned out of us ; even when reduced to a 
 material calx, these, which might have been within us to our 
 comfort and support, return to haunt us from without, as ghosts 
 of vengeance. God is what is, and he will pain his creatures till 
 they confess him. 
 
 We live in the diastole of the universe, and our souls long for 
 the season of systole. All is in the disjunct cold, lonely, un- 
 supported: fain would we have company once again, warmth, 
 support, in the conjunct. Let us not be too miserable, neither ; 
 judgment is now the moment at work, we must accept the element 
 we may enjoy the variety. There is a comique to amuse at 
 present, even in the shallow, even in the triumphant worthless. 
 We must not give all to tears ; there is matter still for laughter. 
 Grisildis is, but not far off as well the wanton she of Bath. If 
 there be the ' Cotter's Saturday Night,' there are likewise the 
 ' Jolly Beggars ' ; if we have Milton's ' Cathedral Music/ we have 
 also an ode of Catullus (to Furius if you will). So let us make 
 the best of what is given us Only, let us know rightly what that 
 is, and of what whole it is but a part. We are shaken asunder 
 from each other certainly, and the traditional substance in which 
 we lived a common cement has fallen out ; but it is ours to 
 see this, and it is ours to repair this. Systole must succeed 
 diastole : it is now the time to fill the bucket. 
 
 It is but another side of the same fact, that all weight, for 
 some time back, has been put on feeling, conscience : not in our 
 works, it has been said, is merit, but in the spirit which produced 
 them. An eloquent utterance to this effect will be found in 
 Carlyle's Hero-worship. This, rightly understood, is true ; other- 
 wise, indeed, it may be also wrong. This, in one way, is but the 
 empty bucket, and the bucket has value only in its filling. I, you, 
 he, we are not to be left, each to his own opinion of feeling, con- 
 science, spirit ; there must be a guarantee that these are true and 
 right. No one can be trusted in that respect to his own self-will. 
 What is concerned is a rational object, which can be realised by the 
 universal will alone. The feeling of the individual is amenable 
 to the prescriptions of the rational object, nor possesses authority 
 but in assent and consent to the universal. It is not in the 
 power of a single female individual even to refuse a crinoline at 
 present without a creak in the machinery of society a creak that 
 
CONCLUSION. 749 
 
 falls with most pain on the ear of the recusant. This is an extreme 
 case, and a temporary, unjustifiable too, certainly, to universal 
 reason : but, in absolute fact, use and wont, observance, is 'the 
 true morality. That is the meaning of the Hegelian distinction 
 between (concrete) SittlichJceit and (abstract) Moralitat. Moralitat 
 is the conscience of the Aufklarung: it demands the right of 
 private judgment place for its own subjective feeling. Sittlich- 
 keit is the deposit of objective reason realised by time in the 
 practical ways of a people. Moralitat despite the tolerance, the 
 enlightened liberality it asserts for itself at present is a sour and 
 thin fanatic that burns its enemy alive. /SittlichJceit is a jolly 
 Burgher that lives in Substance, with his family, with his neigh- 
 bours, with his administrators, with his God. It ought to be ours 
 then, as it were, to fatten our Moralitat with a filling of Sittlich- 
 Jceit to pasture, as it were, the one on the other. But in direct 
 antagonism to this your thorough Illuminatus of the day shall 
 laugh at the mass for wearing absurd round hats and absurd 
 tailed-coats : he, for his part, shall be above the folly of the herd ; 
 his wedding shall be surreptitious, and he shall skulk about it 
 with the air of a thief in the sulks; he shall not christen his 
 children, neither, nor attend church ; he shall not ceremoniously 
 exchange cards, and never for the life of him drop one with a 
 P.P.C. on it. He shall write no letters of sympathy, none of con- 
 gratulation, not any of condolence. He shall never send any 
 kind messages to inquire, and never be seen at a funeral. He 
 shall exist in Pure Reason ! But what is this Pure Eeason ? 
 It is only his own reason; it is uncorrected by the reason of 
 others; it tyrannises over himself, it tyrannises over every one 
 unfortunately submitted to him. Eeason here, in fact, is simply 
 tantamount to abstract self-will ; and the rule of self-will is the 
 only tyranny, the rule of self-will is despotism proper.* 
 
 This self-will feels itself, indeed, abstract divorced from Sub- 
 stance. But the whole bent of all theoretic teaching for a long 
 time back in abstract Political Science and the Aufklarung 
 generally (compare Shelley on that * Anarch/ ' Custom ') has 
 been to foster nothing but this self-will ; and so it is that we are 
 all, more or less, infected Society, more or less, disintegrated by 
 it. To seek a cure, then, is not now an affair of a few individual 
 
 * No doubt, even in common usage, while feeling, sentiment, is only subjective, 
 spirit and especially conscience (like the German Gesinnung), are objective (guaran- 
 teed the bucket has its filling). 
 
750 THE SECRET OF HEGEL. 
 
 Illuminati, but that of the community at large, and it is to be 
 accomplished by a return to Substance. 
 
 But what is Substance ? Substance is the traditional observ- 
 ances prescribed by objective Eeason, in the elements of State, 
 Town, Church, Family, &c. And would you have this Substance 
 in the authority and articulation of the Notion, it is there for 
 every one in the pages of Hegel. On such a wrong course are we 
 all nowadays, that to take a homely example people still 
 entertain indeed, but there is no longer any hospitality. Eather 
 entertainments at present are periodical mortifications : I mortify 
 you by a display of my splendour in April and June ; you mortify 
 me by exhibiting yours in May and July. And in the midst 
 whether of mortification or triumph, we each sigh for the days 
 when things were otherwise : we eat the diner a la Russe, but 
 what is present to thought what is actually fragrant in the 
 nostril is some plainer meal years since. We are disposed to 
 prophesy, then, that the first symptom of a return to Substance 
 will be a return to meals actually intended for enjoyment and 
 next, perhaps, the recall of the children from the Boarding- 
 school ! 
 
 In short, what we all long for, is the Christian simplicity, the 
 Christian happiness of our forefathers. We have seen already in 
 picture the subject of this simplicity, the subject of this happiness ; 
 but it will do us good to see him once again, ' the simple pious 
 soul, on the green earth, in the bright fresh air, patiently in- 
 dustrious, patiently loving, piously penitent, piously hopeful, 
 sure of a new world and a new life, a better world and a better 
 life, united to his loved ones, there for ever in the realms of God, 
 through the merits of his Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 5 This 
 is happiness the thinnest Aufgeklarter, if he deny it with his 
 lips, will confess it by his sighs ! This is happiness, and this is 
 what must be restored to us, else History indeed draws nigh its 
 term: a universe recognised to be material only were but 
 Humanity's grave. But this happiness will be restored to us, 
 and in this restoration the very most powerful instrument will, 
 perhaps, be the identical Hegel as in contrast to whom so con- 
 tradictorily opposed the error was the picture of this happiness 
 first suggested itself. Hegel, indeed, has no object but reconcil- 
 ing and neutralising atomism once again to restore to us and 
 in the new light of the new thought Immortality and Free-will, 
 Christianity and God. 
 
CONCLUSION. 751 
 
 With the quotation from Bacon with which Kant begins his 
 Kritik, it seems fit that we should now, after Hegel, and the 
 glimpse obtained into him, end. It runs thus : 
 
 De nobis ipsis silemus: de re autem, quae agitur, petimus : ut homines earn 
 non opinionem, sed opus esse cogitent ; ac pro certo habeant, non Sectse iios 
 alicujus, aut Placiti, sed utilitatis et amplitudinis humanso fundamenta moliri. 
 Deinde ut suis commodis sequi ... in commune consulant . . . et ipsi in 
 partem veniant. Prseterea ut bene sperent, neque Instaurationem nostram ut 
 quiddam infinitum et ultra mortale fingant, et animo concipiant ; quum re 
 vera sit infiniti erroris finis et terminus legitimus. 
 
 Now, probably it will appear not presumptuous that Kant 
 should have sought to prefigure his work so. Now, too, it may be, 
 we are able to see not too dimly that the Kantian Philosophy 
 concerns an opus, and not an opinio ; the foundations of human 
 advantage and advancement, and not the interests of any dogma 
 or sect ; and that it may, indeed, be the end and legitimate term 
 of infinite error. And now, perhaps, we shall be willing to con- 
 sult together, and, for our own profit, participate in the work 
 not without hope ; at the same time that we shall assuredly not 
 bind ourselves to the mere human letter whether of Kant or 
 Hegel, as either infinite or more than mortal. Finally, if we 
 may be allowed de nobis ipsis non silere, it will be only to say that 
 we hope the imperfections of these pages may prove but as 
 the irregularity of a ladder but as the interruptedness of a series 
 of stepping-stones which yet reach at least to the terra firma of a 
 general desire HEGEL. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 OLIVKR AND BOYD, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. 
 
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