LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class V*/ THE CATEGORIES THE CATEGORIES BY JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING HOX. I.L.D.EDIN., HON. LL.D.GLASG. Foreign Member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin ; first-appointed Gifford Lecturer on the Whole Foundation^ Lectured Edinburgh University ^ 1888-90, etc.^ etc. SECOND EDITION— WITH APPENDIX EDINBURGH OLIVER AND BOYD LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO., Ltd. 1907 ^mHAL 1^1 Zo tbe /iftetnoc^ of "" MY WIFE ^ WHOSE IRREPARABLE LOSS IS ASSOCIATED INSEPARABLY I WITH ITS PUBLICATION 5 DeMcatc tbis Xittte Bool; TO ME SHE WAS THE SWEETEST WOMAN AND THE MOST INGENUOUS .;, THE TRUEST WIFE AND THE FAITHFULEST , THAT IN THE WILL OF GOD EVER BLESSED MAN 181498 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/categoriesOOstirrich CONTENTS CHAP. I'AGB I. Of Categories Generally . . . .17 II. Of the Double Statement ... 22 1. The Contradiction of Reason and Faith. — 2. Reflexion-Philosophy. — 3. The Mother's Lap. — 4. Hegel's Earliest Writing.— 5. The Phaeno- menologie. * III. Categories and Physics .... 74 IV. Religion and the Categories . . .123 V. Conclusion 147 * A general reader may not be interested in the discussion as to positions Logical and Phaenomological ; but much occurs to be said in Hegel's regard which is somewhat new, perhaps, and otherwise possibly such that the philosophical student might regret to miss it. PEEFACE Assuming it to be seen from elsewhere that to reason is to proceed from something before us, to some other something not then before us, through what in some way is a thread of identity — assuming further that to found and ground reasoning as reasoning there is required a principle, a single principle, that, of itself self-certain, is in want of not another beyond it: — Such principle, evidently, must, as conditioning progress from identity to difference, be in itself at once both — such that it is at once identity and difference — such that its differ- ence is at the same time its identity, and its iden- tity at the same time its difference— s-z^cA that from its identity it is that you pass to its difference, and not less back again from its difference to its iden- tity. There is only one existence — one actually known and recognised existence — in all this world, that comes up to, or can realise, in every point of view, the principles, the discrimina, the contra- distinguishing significatives indicated. It is the Ego. Headers may have been shocked, I fear, by the 8 PREFACE assumption in my last volume * that the antithesis and reciprocity, the dialectic, the ratio, of subject and object in the Ego is — Thought ! Still this of the Ego has been at least named or, to say so, even acted upon by the unexceptively accredited, the universally received and accepted, highest masters in the realms of pure thought — say, for the nonce, Kant and Hegel. The latter has such expressions as these : — ^Ego and Thought are the same — Ego is Thought — every man is an entire world of ideas which are buried in the night of the Ego — Ego is the universal into which every particular is negated and absorbed — I or Me, sounds trivial, but it is not so to reflection. The brute cannot say /, but only the man, for man is Thought. Then Kant, I have already quoted him elsewhere to say: That man can have Ego in his apprehension exalts him infinitely above all other living beings on earth — this capability is the under- standing (Thought) itself. And what does it amount to, this — to say that the immanent or innate ratio within the Ego is Thought? To say that — if the Ego itself is Thought — is only a little more particular, is only to approach a little nearer to the individual, precisely functioning prin- ciple or reason. But it is not to say that the Ego so regarded, is tantamount to the actual personality of a living man. Concrete Ego, as existent, is more than the merely notional Ego. Concrete Ego has its constitutive content within it or under it: the * " What is Thought ? or, The Problem of Philosophy." PREFACE 9 absolute Ego, the absolute content ; the finite ego, its own finite content. Nor is that other, the notional Ego, after all, anything new, unheard of, or absurd. Eeally, the Ego, Ego at all, as first prin- ciple is nothing strange. Descartes is there with his primitive basis of self-consciousness. Spinoza said for Ego, Substance ; but that Substance is really his master's Ego. Leibnitz, when he said Monad, said nothing but Ego; and his Monadology (take with it my water-drop in Schwegler, p. 442) is about the most perfect species of ordinary idealism, and of a little more than ordinary idealism, as yet extant. Berkeley will only have two minds reciprocally, and that is Ego. Even Hume, who has only ideas in a mind, does, in actual and good truth — though without the word — name Ego. Then the Germans ? Jacobi has only, in his natural "feeling " and " he- lief," Ego; but have we not found Jacobi himself {Secret of Hegel, p. 232, or Hegel's Logik, p. 95) naming Ego " the pure spontaneity " ? And what is that but the pure self -create? Kant, in ultimate analysis, can have, for new and substantial dis- covery, left him only the quarry of the Categories, with not a single ground or principle under them but Ego ; for that is beyond a doubt — they are all of them referred thither; so that, even more than implicitly, his one single principle of a priori de- rivation and deduction is Ego. Fichte did no more than openly and loudly shout all this : it can be easily read in himself without a call to the authority of either Schelling or Hegel. This testimony of 10 PREFACE Biese, however, is (Aristot. i. x.) summary : the ego was to Fichte " cause of itself, to itself beginning and end, free and absolute, the single true reality." Fichte himself actually says (WW. x. 97), "das Wortlein Ich — the little word Ego will be indeed at last the sole prize of Kant's, and, if I dare name myself after him, of my own knowledge-devoted life " ; as elsewhere this, " my whole philosophy, is built on the pure Ego." Nor can Schelling well be said to have done more than what, not without some little sowpgon of a boast, he claims for himself, the supplementing of Fichte's sujective deduction by "a completely objective de- monstration" of his own; while Hegel caps all by absolutely creating, though perhaps not much less absolutely in silence and concealment, his own vast system out from the very pulse-beat of the heart of the Ego itself. And neither need we stop here : the grand quadrilateral (of Kant and the others) is not without its outliers, nor these without their runners between. There is Krause, for example, the best of them it may be, it is of him that we hear that there is a progression in his philosophy " from self -con- sciousness as the first certainty in cognition" — " with Ego, of the truth of which there can be no doubt, there is found a fixed starting-point as well as a subjective criterion of truth." That, and more, too, we have from Erdmann ; while in the same reference we have again as much as this from else- where, "that God, namely, is the infinite uncon- ditioned Ego, as also that finite beings of reason PREFACE 11 know themselves in God as finite egoes." N'ay, there are, say, the Indian assurances to a like effect : " He first said, I am I ; therefore his name was I." Of the Ego, then, as underlying, prompting, guiding, a^d animating, from first to last, so much of modern philosophy, there can be no doubt ; while, as regards ancient philosophy, we have but to name Anaxagoras to be reminded that vov?, thought, the Ego, with quite as little doubt, constituted through- out the main suggestive and determinative concep- tion then. Let such be the judgment of history, then, modern, ancient ; but what is the state of the case in its own simple nature ? Let us just see our own idea of what it is to think. What is it that we do when we think ? Only try it ! Why, think your ink-bottle, pen, paper, or the fire, say. Can you y think the very shoe on your foot without — General- ising ? If we will but take the trouble to consult those who teU us of the faculties of the mind, we shall find that, directly or indirectly, all those authorities agree upon this, that Generalisation is precisely the one act that constitutes thinking. This, Locke finds, according to Stewart, " to form the characteristical attribute of a rational nature " ; and, Locke himself certainly tells us (11. xi. 10) that " the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes " ; while Stewart himself has it {Elements, etc., I. iv.) that " without this faculty of the mind we should have been perfectly 12 PREFACE incapable of general speculation — reasoning." Well, then, if Thought be simply G-eneralisation, what is that ultimately — what is the generalisation ulti- mate ? Why, Ego ! * Self -consciousness is the single condition of thought — the single foundation of thought — it is thought. And the proposition is that this is the ultimatum of the whole of Philosophy. Nevertheless, in the little volume referred to, this, that the Eatio of the Ego is Thought, was not the one purpose of the work itself. That pur- pose was specially, after all, what bore on German Philosophy; which, I was presumptuous enough to flatter myself, had been, so far, brought therewith to something of a terminal crisis. Of that little book itself, I could not expect, published as it was in the thick of the war, much notice to be taken. Nevertheless, even then, it was not without certain very gratifying press notices; and I hope I may be pardoned now if, without having the impertinence to name them, I allow my amour propre the indulgence of quoting a few of the, no doubt, too favourable expressions of friends of mine who, as experts, and officially placed, had been troubled by me with copies of the volume. And yet, if I put some stress on the fact of these friends being expressly, officially expert, it at least notifies to myself that I have not quite missed my footing beneath the laudation of an enthusiasm * Or take it thus : To generah'se a particular is to find a genus, and the genera of genera are the Categories. — Ego ! PREFACE 13 which, on the part of two or three others is, as I dare not deny, very dear to me ! " A book in which every page expresses years of thought." The writer, acknowledged to be at the head of all experts, goes on to a personal ranking which is too flatteringly kind for the recipient at all to allow himself to quote. "I have read it all with the keenest pleasure. For acute and penetrating criticism, it is almost superhuman. Poor Immanuel ! ! How will you dare to look him in the face when you get to Heaven ? Perchance there are no Categories there ! " A reader may see in this only half a kindly irony. The same reader will think it quite natural that / see in it truth. And I do see in it this truth : Kant has never yet been so analysed, will never again in this world be so analysed — oh, well, say — without cribbing ! I willingly admit, all the same, that there may be partiality in it ; but if there be, it is, as on the part of a perfectly honourable and accomplished expert, a partiality of which I am proud. One or two of my correspondents rather signalise points only : — " Chapter II., which you say ' the general reader * may ' pass by,' is most excellent and conclusive." "I have been interested in much of it. You certainly hit off in an admirably lucid way the main fallacy in the Quantified Predicate doctrine: would it were dropt from the books on Logic ! " 14 PREFACE " Your exposure of the weakness of the Kantian categories leaves nothing to be desired: especially, the point that the 'Given' is always already categorised, gives its own cue, and sounds its own prompter's whistle. That part of Kant's book, I shall never read again.'* I do not think that it is required of me to say that these latter correspondents are also official experts : the fact shows. I shall follow these np, and conclude here by — only the usual generalities apart — a whole single letter. " There is all the ' tang ' of the Seci^et in the new volume, and it is not a little remarkable that thirty- five years should separate the two. May we not say, indeed, that this is The Secret or at least the Secret told out ? It is so I understand the book as the final clearing up of the mystery, the stripping- off of the last veil that has hitherto obscured and distorted the view of Hegel. There is, of course, much else, much of yourself ; but this, I take it, is the beginning and end of the book. Attentive readers must find this indicated in the 'Secret' and in the 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Law' clearly enough, but it has never been pressed home with so much authority and such wealth of illustra- tive support. "But stated as you state it, it is more than interpretation: it has all the value of a sub- stantive philosophical pronouncement. On these all-important points I find it full of instruction — first, the question of the primal avayKrj (and in a general reference the ontological argument) ; secondly, the 'philosophy of contingency'; and PREFACE 15 thirdly, the personality of God. The way you put this last point makes it, I think, more convincing than any direct utterance one can find in Hegel, and the contrast you draw between Schelling and Hegel in this respect is helpful. The diJBPerence between the two would seem to lie mainly in Hegel's strict fidelity to the action of the Ego, while SchelHng, as you say, returns to Spinoza's Substance in this very act of professing to leave it behind. " Apart from the strictly philosophical matter, I need hardly say I have read with great interest your incisive psychology of the relations between Schel- ling and Hegel. There must have been a natural antipathy latent between two such different natures. Schelling's attitude must, to begin with, and up to the Phsenomenologie, have been one of indulgent patronage, with just a spice of contempt for the slow-going man who wrote such a ghastly style, and who must have appeared 'wooden' in many ways to his brilliant junior. If this was his general feeling, it would go far to explain his bitterness when he found himself superseded by his lumbering follower. The light you throw on the medical allusion in the Preface is quite new to me, and, if not inadvertent on Hegel's part, the stab was certainly unpardonable. Caroline, too, the redoubt- able, much-married Eomanticist, would hardly draw to Hegel." That, certainly, is remarkable, the interval of thirty- five years, to which the writer alludes; but of all human beings, German, English, or other, he alone has seen and said the totality and finality of the " Secret." Apart its complete possession of the sub- ject, the generosity of its content, with much 16 PREFACE else — all stamps this letter as indeed the letter of a friend, but of a friend whose simple word it is impossible to distrust, as that of a free, open, modest, singularly candid, and ably accomplished mind. THE CATEGORIES CHAPTEE I ERRATUM Page 79.— First line of footnote, " first volume " should read *' first edition." book on the subject, his " U-eschiclite aer uate- gorienlehre," just a history of all that concerns the general subject of the Categories. Beginning with the Aristotelian Categories, he treats at full length of all others that appeared to him justly to fall under the name : Pythagorean, Eleatic, Sophistic, Socratic, Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Neo- Platonic, Patristic, Scholastic, down through Valla, Vivos, Ramus, Gassendus, Campanella, Bacon, Des- cartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, and many others, to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Krause, Herbart, Hegel. This, plainly, is tantamount to a. whole history, 17 B 16 PREFACE else — all stamps this letter as indeed the letter of a friend, but of a friend whose simple word it is impossible to distrust, as that of a free, open, modest, singularly candid, and ably accomplished mind. /r THE CATEGORIES CHAPTEE I OF CATEGORIES GENERALLY In starting with the word "Categories," and as though for a general reader, it certainly does seem only natural that such general reader would expect to be told in the first place, at least generally, what categories are. / Trendelenburg, now, has formally an express book on the subject, his "Geschichte der Gate- gorienlehre," just a history of all that concerns the general subject of the Categories. Beginning with the Aristotelian Categories, he treats at full length of all others that appeared to him justly to fall under the name : Pythagorean, Eleatic, Sophistic, Socratic, Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Neo- Platonic, Patristic, Scholastic, down through Valla, Vivos, Kamus, Gassendus, Campanella, Bacon, Des- cartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, and many others, to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Krause, Herbart, Hegel. This, plainly, is tantamount to a. whole history, 17 B 18 THE CATEGORIES whether ancient, mediaeval, or modern, treated, as it were, by this one single man, and from his one single point of view. It is well that the reader in question should know as much; but we here, for our part, have no such apparent totality of an object. lN"or indeed is it, in essential depth, neces- sary. It is really with Kant, and since Kant, that, in relation to Categories, we can, of essential depth, talk at all. Kant began the subject in this way, that, per- plexed by Hume's call for the reason that necessarily bound the effect to its cause, and shut out from the whole sphere of sensible experience, in which, as stands up at once to every eye on the least reflection, what is called contingency is alone all and every- where, while, for its part again, what is called necessity is null and nowhere (causes and effects in this world, for example, are all of them matter of mere sense, mere sensible experience ; and there is nothing whatever to suggest that the processes among them are in any way more) — So perplexed and so shut out (or so shut in), Kant, I say, was driven, in his search for necessity, to the db priori of the intellect as apart from, and independent of, all matters of sense and of what we name the experience that holds of it. Kant, as he was led on and on in this search, eventually applied himself to jvdgment as jvdgment, in so far, that is, as judgment is a simple, innate function or faculty of mere pure d priori intellect, understanding : and, accordingly, what he first OF CATEGORIES GENERALLY 19 tabulates is what he calls Quantity. Quantity was his first Category. . All matters of sense, of sensible experience, received into the mind, from without, -say, were submitted to Quantity from within, to the control of Quantity from within, and under this control were accordingly ordered, arranged, dressed, modified — intellectually, to say so, notionalised. That is, what were first, or at first, the mere sparse contingent things taken into the mind by the action of our special senses, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight, were now converted by the Category into Notions — notions that with sense for their matter had intellect, understanding, for their Form. Further, then, these notions, these notionalised things, with the Contingency of their jnatter of sense, had now the Necessity of their form of the intellect, the understanding. Quantity, in its definite terms, contained three Oategories. That is. Quantity was either Universal, Particular, or Singular — a division that, as one sees, is made' familiar to us by every Logical Text-book. How each of these categories, ideal itself, may be conceived to act, infecting, so to speak, and assum- ing into its own self the matter of sense ideally inchoate within, will by strict reference to its logical function, with some little trouble perhaps, not remotely suggest itself. - These explanations we shall suppose to suffice for the other categories also, conspicuous for their part in their full tables as found in Kant's various works relevant, especially in the Prolegomena and the \ W THE CATEGORIES Kritik of Pure Eeason. In whole, under four head- titles, they are twelve in number. Twelve ! When one thinks that, with Kant, the whole information which we owe to the senses, is, so far, not informa- tion at all, but only something crass, raw, rude^ brute, really unseen, unheard, till these twelve categories have taken it in hand, drenched it,, dressed it, cooked it : made a world of it — this, world ; one can only pity these unfortunate twelve that have all these millions and millions of objects with all their millions and millions of mutual rela-^ tions between them — one can only pity these twelve,. I say, for their immeasurable task, an actual universe to account for ! And this, at least partly, is what we may suppose Fichte to have thought. Fichte saw at once, namely,, into and gauged the findings of Kant. Categories,, the categories were the centre of philosophy: the Categories were Philosophy itself. And so we had the Wissenschaftslehre. Schelling immediately followed with his mere repetitions of Fichte — naturally in his own way of course, and in no long time afterwards (under Hegel), with his divergences and divagations, which,. as from a man of genius, talent, and infinite accom- plishment, will always be found engaging, interest- ing, informative, and instructive (psychologically and philosophically my relative word is to be found elsewhere) ; but they are not by any means in line with philosophy as it was then approving itself, and really, absolutely, without an eye on the part of OF CATEGORIES GENERALLY 21 Schelling to what Hegel had on his part then in hand. It is this Hegel who will always be known in philosophy as, even after Kant, the master of Cate- gories. Trendelenburg (in his Latin somewhat imposing, though all the others, as Bonitz, Waitz, like Eitter and Preller, write capital Latin, but pos- sibly, all the same, not one of them perhaps so lightly, easily, flowingly as MuUach, or with more elegance than our own Hutcheson) — Trendelenburg, who has never absent from his mind a coup de grace to Hegel, cannot be said to have even entered on a discussion of his categories in the express book relative. A very full list of them, nevertheless, as they appear in the greater Logic, is to be found in Dr William T. Harris, the American Commissioner of Education's book on the " Genesis of the Cate- gories of the Mind," on Hegel's Logic that is. As concerns this our little book, however, though bear- ing in its title the word, it is not meant to talk of Categories, as formally the business in hand. What comes into speech here is, for the most part, a general theme, and really in continuance of philo- sophy as I have of late written on it, say, in my immediately previous book, " What is Thought ? " CHAPTEE II THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 1. The Contradiction of Reason and Faitli. — 2. Reflexion- Philosopliy.— 3. The Mother's Lap. ^4. HegeFs Earliest Writing. — 5. The Phaenomenologie. 1. The Contradiction of Becbson and Faith. That I begin here so will presently explain itself : And for actual first, I quote at once from " Glauben und Wissen, oder die Keflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivitat, in der Vollstandigkeit ihrer Pormen, als Kantische, Jacobische, und Fichtesche Philo- sopHie " (Belief and Knowledge, or the Eeflexion- Philosophy of Subjectivity in the Entirety of its Forms, as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philo- sophy), as immediately follows : — " In our culture, we have risen so far above the ancient duaHsm of reason and faith, philosophy and religion, that this dualism has taken on quite another sense, and been transferred to philosophy. That reason is the handmaid of faith, as earlier times expressed it, and whereto philosophy im- movably opposed its own absolute autonomy — these 22 THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 23 conceptions or expressions have disappeared. And reason — if it is reason that has given itself the name — has so asserted itself in positive religion that any contest of philosophy against that positive [miracle and such else], is regarded as something by-past, and faded from view; and that Kant, in his attempt to vitahse the positive form of religion through a gloss from his own philosophy, did not for this reason fail, that the peculiar sense of these forms would be injured thereby, but that, on the contrary, they themselves were seen to be no longer worth reference. The question, however, is whether victorious reason has not met with the fate that the conquering strength of barbarous nations is not unwont to meet with as against the submitting weakness of others that are civilised: externally to rule, namely, but, internally, or in spirit, to fall vanquished by the vanquished, conquered by the conquered. The glorious victory which en- lightened or enhghtening reason, has won over what — in its small measure of relative appreciation — ^it understood religion to be, is, seen in its truth, nothing else than this: that neither what it sup- posed to be religion remained religion, nor that the all-conquering reason remained reason ; while the new birth, triumphant over the dead, that was to have been the child of peace to unite both — has in it just as little of reason proper, as of true religion." This, the first paragraph in the whole works of Hegel, is, whether in its matter or m its form, singu- larly characteristic. And hy form here I do not mean, technically, the dialectic, though that wonderful child, triumphant over the two corpses (for the original has it so — "auf diesen Leichnamen trium- 24 THE CATEGORIES phirend ") would seem, not more ambiguously than usual, to point thither, but simply Hegel's style (diction, copia verhorum, provision or use of words) ; while by matter I do mean his Inhalt, for that Inhalt — that, his matter, generally named — cannot be better expressed than by reference to the "Gegensatz der Vernunft und des G-laubens" (the contradiction of reason and faith), a reference which is to sum itself up in the hinted substitution of reason proper for what is ordinarily thought reason, and the similar substitution of trv^ reHgion for religion ordinarily so named. For that lies in the intimation that, as regards the difference in as a predecessor of Hegel, in con- THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 27 sequence, on his part, of actual originating and determining philosophical influence. A first word of Michelet's here is this: "I had proposed this " — i.e. to begin with them — " because I knew that these four Dissertations, Hegers earliest writings/ contained the germ of his whole philo- sophy, specially, too, as it had just emerged from its mother's lap, say, in the preceding historical standpoint of the philosophy of Schelling." Michelet's voice is about the loudest, perhaps, in the — to me, at least — vulgar cry that Hegel comes from ScheUing. To me, indeed, this almost amounts to a blot on Michelet's knowledge of Hegel. In view of what we see — say, if nowhere else, in the preceding volume of mine, and also, earlier, in the Secret of Hegel (Chapter I.) — to have been the fruit of the relations of the two men at Jena, we may contend, rather, that ScheUing comes from Hegel. One may discover, if one will, signs enow of an unconscious yielding on the part of ScheUing to the authority of Hegel, which may pardonably found a presumption in the case. There is no doubt that Hegel was introduced to Fichte by SchelUng in these first two Fichtian pamphlets of his; but the quarry of Hegel's knowledge of Fichte, for aU that, was Fichte himself. As for " a mother's lap," that, for all of them in common, was the lap of Kant; and if Hegel did reaUy cUng considerably closer to that " lap " than the rest, that only showed the depth of his inquest and the truth of his insight. 28 THE CATEGORIES There are many single sentences in Schelling which can be cited for their speculative, or, even, to say so, their HegeKan relevancy; but, loosely in place, they admit not of reference to any Hegelian source. Still, such references as those on p. vii that concern the changes of philosophy, or the unchange of the substantial unity, cannot but attract the eye at least with a thought of Hegel. That on p. viii, again, recognition, to wit, "of the greatest tenderness" to Schelling on the part of Hegel ("as of Aristotle to Plato") "even when he refuted him," does not go well with that searching and irresistible scoff which we know of from the preface to the Phaenomenologie ; while, even in admitting failure for Schelling and success for Hegel in "the absolute form," it is safe to see fatal ignorance on Michelet's part of what that form is — the Ego, namely, and the native dialectic of the Ego. For he has these words : " In his philo- sophical efforts Hegel proceeded always from. this, that the absolute content (Inhalt) of philosophy had been realised by Schelling." Now we know that the absolute form was the very vitality of Hegel, and that, too, for the content , the matter itself. Not even the content, then, could Hegel have allowed to be owing by him to Schelling. Michelet is so fixed in his own idea, nevertheless, that, later (p. xix) we find it repeated and, to say so, even in a tone higher. "In the Differenzl' he says, "Hegel opposes to the system of Fichte (that highest concentration of the Eeflexion-Philosophy), THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 29 absolute Heil (salvation, redemption), in the objec- tive idealism of the Schellingian system." We may add here, though only for no more than addition, this, that at p. xii Michelet interjects once, that, whilst Hegel " holds the philosophy set up by Schelling to be the completest (vollendeste) and the last," yet, etc. ; and again this, " Hegel, so far, mostly only took for granted the content (Inhalt) of the Schellingian philosophy as the highest." Now all that, as we see it, does not represent the mind of Hegel as, in these references, it really was to Schelling. Hegel, when, in the Differenz, he sought to repay to Schelling some little of the immense debt which, in a personal regard, he owed to him at Jena, was glad to think that there was something he could point to in Schelling as not Fichte's, or even as heyond Fichte — Hegel, I say, had at that very moment, at least in principle, all his own before him. In the record of Hegel's life, then, as well as in his writings of the period, it can scarcely be difficult to find, quite convinc- ingly, a proof of as much. Nay, he must have had, even there and then, all in his mind that he afterwards threw out, so mercilessly, about " Schema^ tism" In a word, we hold that Michelet, here and elsewhere (say in editing the Natur-Philo- sophie), always, with regard to that " mother's lap" gives Schelling a credit that is quite beyond the truth. Indeed, despite all that Schelling really was, Hegel might have been inclined to find hia Jena patron at last, with his eager head and his aO THE CATEGORIES adventurous marriage, something too much of a light weight. Had Hegel really taken admiringly to Schelling, one would have almost expected to find not so few letters on his part to Schelling, the rather, too, that Schelling's letters to Hegel show, as one seems to see, quite an empressement of friendship. It is certainly not of friendship that there is any sign on the part of Hegel to Schelling in what the preface to the Phsenomeno- logie tells us. But, on the other side, as has been said, there is even to be found a certain submission on the part of Schelling to a certain authority on the part of Hegel. " I confess that as yet I do not understand thy meaning in that thou opposest the Begriff to the Anschauung : under the former thou canst not mean anything else than what thou and I named Idee, the nature of which precisely is to have a side on which it is Begriff, and another on which it is Anschauung." That (Schelling's Life and Letters, ii. 124) is not much * ; but, knowing how the three terms had with Hegel their own so very dis- tinctive senses, one feels tempted to fancy something alluded to in it almost of a consultation and agree- ment between the two friends, in which, on the whole somehow, it was not so supposable that it was the present maker of the remark, Schelling, who had the whip-hand in the position, as rather that it was the other, Hegel. There can be no doubt that the former highly valued the opinion of the latter. " Thy letter," Schelling writes to Hegel (op. * Unless what the words themselves imply further. THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 31 cit. i. 481), "has doubly delighted me, because I have been long wishing to hear from thee again;" while on another occasion he has (ii, 110) this: " How altogether delighted I was to get thy letter, it is almost impossible for me to say, nor how much I have grieved to be for so long a time almost wholly without any communication from thee ... of thy work at last to appear (p. 112), I have been full of intense expectation, what must the result be, if thy very maturity still takes time to itself to mature its fruits! I only wish for thee further the peaceful position and leisure requisite for the completion of such solid and, as it were, timeless works." When this one so solid and timeless work came to hand, was it only a solid and timeless rancour that could follow that so assured and ardent expectation ! It was only before the event' that he could writer such a friend this (ii. 23) : " I bring to thy notice, dear friend, a plan, for the reaUsation of which on the philosophical side I should like to enhst thee (even detached thoughts from thy hand would be welcome) ... I can offer and assure thee of a considerable honorar." We may recollect, too, how (Fichte's Life and Correspondence, ii. 356), he (ScheUing) recommended the " Differ enz" to Fichte "as a book from a sehr vorziiglichen Kopf." We may be able to recall also how ScheUing (WW. 1, V. 170) assures the public that Dr Hegel was "an altogether categorical man, who cannot endure the many ceremonies with philosophy, and, only so — straight to the point— has withal appetite." m THE CATEGORIES And so we cannot but think again of that remorseless rancour, pitiless virulence, that fol- lowed such intensity of friendship. Schelling's Myth-Essay was published in 1793; his first Fichte-Pamphlet in 1794; the second in 1795; certain Journal Articles in 1795-6-7-8; the Ideen, 1797; the Weltseele, 1798; First Sketch of a System of ISTature-Philosophy ' and Sequent Introduction, 1799 ; Transcendental Idealism and Journal of Speculative Physics (first volume), 1800 : and we know that Hegel only began publication, for his part, in 1801 — only began too, by the exaltation of Schelling to the very pinnacle of the philosophy in reign — and, further, by reason of these very works! That Hegel, then, came after Schelling, and must have learnt from Schelling is as little to be denied as the sun in the sky at twelve o'clock, noon. But what follows for Hegel, if, on his first publication, at that very moment he possessed, and against Schelling possessed — his secret? — a secret that was a secret, and that remained a secret, till, generations later, and not so very long ago neither, it was at last finally told at full ! What follows, I mean, as regards its bearing on the question of the "mother's lap"? What follows, in that reference, even for the Natur- philosophie ? No doubt, looking at the two relative nature-philosophies, Schelling's and Hegel's, one finds at once a hkeness: there is largely a very similar nomenclature. Just to see with the eyes is to see also with the mind a determinative THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 33 priority on the part of Schelling. Of course, both can but name, in the first instance, the very same things, and, largely, in the very same order, too. But there must be more than that; and no one can be supposed to deny that there is more than that. The work, then, let the one resemble the other externally as it may, may, internally, greatly differ in the one from the other. And that is the truth. Schelling had not the Ego, the native dialectic of the Ego ; but Hegel had, and his work is instinct with it, proceeds upon it. There is a Note to that effect at p. 216 of the New Edition of the Secret of Hegel* This will suffice now for the question of the "Mother's Lap," as we have it generally, and not only specially as Michelet has suggested it to us. We return to what we began with, the very first article in the works of Hegel, and our business with it. 4. Hegel's Earliest Writing. The first paragraph in the works of Hegel we have just had before us ; and I shall now, for the purpose I have momently in hand, translate the two or three that immediately follow, but passing over the directly next, or second one, for a brief instant. " The negative procedure of the Aufklarung, whose positive side, in its idle paltering, was without core, has contrived to get one for itself in this way, that it came itself to see its own negativeness, and that it partly freed itself from * Elsewhere I quote others to remark on the essential dif- ference of the two works. OF The UNIVERSITY 34 THE CATEGORIES shallowness through the sheerness and completeness of the negative, but that it partly, also, just thereby, can have, for positive knowledge, even so again, merely what is empirical and finite, but what is eternal only as something that is away elsewhere, and so, that, for actual knowledge, it is only a vacuum, an endless emptiness (of cognition, know- ledge) which can be filled only with the subjectivity of longing and dream. And what used to prove the death of philosophy, that reason, namely, should renounce and resign its right in the Absolute, utterly exclude itself therefrom, and only negatively bear itself thereto, became once for all, now, the highest point of philosophy; and the non-ens of the Aufklarung through consciousness thereover, has got constituted into system. "Incomplete philosophies, just by being incom- plete, immediately presuppose an empirical neces- sity ; and on its account and in its reference it is that the side of their incompleteness gets to be under- stood. The empirical element, what lies there in the world as common actuality, is, in philosophies of it, present in form of the notion [intellectual standard] as one with consciousness and thereby substantiated. The common subjective principle of the above-named philosophies is partly, not as it were a narrow form of the spirit of a small time, or of a small number: partly the mighty spiritual form which is their principle, has, without doubt, reached in them the completion of its consciousness and of its philosophical development, and so come to be fully enunciated for cognition. "The great form of the world-spirit, however, which has recognised itself in these philosophies, is the principle of the North and, religiously looked at, of Protestantism; — the subjectivity in which goodness {Schonheit) and truth manifest themselves THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 35 in feelings and convictions, in love and understand- ing. Eeligion builds in the heart of the individual its temples and altars, and sighs and prayers seek the God whose aspect it denies itself because the danger of the understanding is then present to which a seen form would seem a thing, the grove but trees. The inner -must indeed become also outer, purpose reach reality in the act, religious feeling express itself in movement, and faith that flees the actuality of cognition, find objectivity for itself in thoughts, ideas, words. But the understanding straitly separates the objective from the subjective, so that this becomes of no worth, and is nothing ; just as the conflict of subjective goodness (Schonheit) must find due security for itself against the neces- sity that makes objective what is subjective. And what goodness so would become real, objective, and where consciousness would seek representation, take bodily form, or move as so fashioned — that must wholly fall aside; for it would be a dangerous superfluity, and might, as made by understanding a something, become an evil: quite as the good feehng (das schone Gefilhl) which should become passionless aspection, prove a superstition."* * Perhaps, on the whole, the Translator is not altogether without virtue at the last here ; but what invites remark is *^ goodness" for Schonheit. Schdn^ in the dictionary, is fine, fair, beautiful ; and neither word seems applicable here. The Germans, in fact, use schon very peculiarly, without warning. Carlyle translates Gothe's Schone Seek by Fair Saint, and not at all badly. The Soul in question was, evidently, a seraph from birth, which had inward traffic afterwards, all through life, only with the most naive and innocent phantasies of purity and piety. Soul-purity, soul-piety, soul-goodness can alone translate Hegel's Schonheit as above. "Powerless Beauty hates understanding " (see S. of H., p. 417 ; Phcen., pp. 24, 25). That is the same sort of ideal use of the word and it is quite a common one. 36 THE CATEGORIES The fifteen pages of introduction which we have stated to occur before the subject proper of the article itself — Kant, namely, with Jacobi and Fichte — gets entered upon, consist of twenty such paragraphs as the four translated ones; and we pretty well guess how the reader — let him be as- accomplished (even Hegelianly) as he may — wha for the first time sees them, cannot but find them. The first one of the four, I take it, will offer the least difficulty. The theme is plain, Eeason and Faith ; and I daresay we are all so much advanced (aufgeklart) nowadays, that we can without diffi^ culty understand what is meant by the change in the question, especially as illustrated by the refer^ ence to Kant. It is, perhaps, not quite so certain,, at the same time, that we will all agree with Hegel in giving the victory — evidently a somehow modi- fied one — not to Eeason, but to Eeligion, in the contest ! It is now that we shall translate the second para^ graph (thus making five of them), in the hope that it will lend us some additional light. " Eeason — which in and for itself had already lost by this, that it took religion only as something posi- tive, and not idealistically — has been able to do nothing better for itself than, after the battle, once for all see itself, reach the knowledge of itself, and recognise its own non-ness in this way, that it sets the letter than itself (inasmuch as it itself is only understanding) as a further in a helief heyond and above itself (outcome of the philosophies of Kant^ Jacobi, and Fichte) ; and that it once more makes. THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 37 itself the handmaid of a faith. With Kant the supersensible is incapable of being known by reason : the supreme idea is not as well real. With Jacobi, 'reason is ashamed to beg, and to dig it has neither hands nor feet ' : to man it is only given to have the feeling and the consciousness of his ignor- ance of the truth, simply a presage of the truth in a reason which is merely something on the whole, subjective and instinctive. According to Fichte, God is something inconceivable, and unthinkable : knowlQdigQ (to know, knowing) knows nothing but that nothing is known, and must seek refuge in faith. In all of them the absolute, can be, accord- ing to the old distinction, as little against as for, reason : it is above reason." What is here said, in this second paragraph, taken with what has been already seen in the first (com- ment included), cannot, surely, be allowed to pass without suggesting, to any one who is awake to the time, the single question that may allowably be held, speculatively, at least, largely to dominate it. The Aufkliirung, namely, with its absolute com- pleteness of general information, supported, too, by the full enlightenment of all knowledge of science, rigorous, exact scientific truth, as it now is, tends to cbny — certainly tends sceptically to doubt — every item, every the most momentous and vital par- ticular, of Religion — Eeligion as we have it through *' the ages." Am I wrong in venturing to surmise that this to some extent summarises the central idea of a book that, considering the number of editions it counts, must have given thought, and a thought, to not a 38 THE CATEGORIES few presently existing readers — this book, namely, " The Foundations of Belief" by Mr Balfour ? It is not my purpose here to enter on this mighty theme. My present purpose, rather, is only a very subordinate, a very casual, and, indeed, merely in- termistic one. But what I have given in the present reference, concerns surely what Hegel has to say on the one big problem, the foundations of belief ; and it may be not out of place, consequently, with philosophical interests before us, to advertise as much : Reflexions-philosophy, for Hegel, can only mean, so far, evidently, from all that we have seen, at least unsatisfactoriness as concerns the infinite interest, on the part of all these supreme authorities, Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, so far as their philosophies are concerned. If, then, we have given a true account of the first two paragraphs in name, as regards their content (purpose), perhaps we may be, so far, satisfied with them ; but what of the other three of the five ? Of these, too, the content, doubtless, as well as that of all those that follow, must be to the same effect : but what of the form ? For, though more important interests have, it may be, intervened to be spoken of, it is really the consideration of form that constitutes our main, or rather, indeed, our sole aim at present — Hegel's earliest writing. And by Hegel's earliest writing we mean, not that his earliest writing as to his own self, in Switzer- land, say, reported to us by Eosenkranz in his Life of him, or by Haym in his criticism, but his earliest THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 39 writing as actually by his own self published, and actually as so published presented to us now, say, in the first two volumes of his collected works (the two or three essays found in vol. xvi., even that valuable " Scepticism " among them, not being for the special notice at present). Of his writings in Switzerland, it may not be out of place to mention that I remark on them in my Notes to Schwegier, to the effect, that " they seem constructed for an understanding that moves only in the interior," etc. Eosenkranz, in regard at least to the earliest of these, does not seem to reflect a very different mind. They are, he says, " alternately fluent and light and then again disunited and knotted — at times, to an understanding intelligible even to triviality, then again obscure, mystic, motley, nay sometimes baroque." Of what seems, the very last of them, however, " a full-length critique of positive religion, in a MS. some thirty sheets long," his conclusion is that, "as regards popular vigour of diction, this work is the com- pletest that Hegel has written." But that must refer, surely, only to these fragmentary religious notices then and there in Switzerland. Haym, in regard to the same material, speaks pretty well to the same effect. It was not to " finished and completed forms " that Hegel came in Switzerland, he says ; and what handles the material is, "in the rule, a helpless — heavy, iter- ating, and reiterating, never contented with itself, paraphrase " — a paraphrase, moreover, that owes the 40 THE CATEGORIES peculiarity of its aspect to the peculiarity of the mind itself that thinks it. That mind, it appears, is a singular compound and amalgam somehow, at once sentimental and notional, pictorial and logical : there are in it both the Anschauung, the intuition, perception, of the artist and the bare thought, the rigorous Begriff, idea, of the thinker. But, after all, the compound and amalgam are only a would be : there is of them no Uend : " over masses of Anschauung,'' says Haym, " there floats a cloud of Begriffen" This peculiarity of the Hegelian internality, added to that of the respondent externality, will perhaps explain or justify what has been alluded to as relatively said in the Note Hegel to be found in the Schwegler. The psychology of Haym in that sort of double reference is very excellent all through this third lecture of his, and, with his gifts and ac- complishments of literary genius, the reading is charming. Be it, however, as it may with these reported closet-studies of Hegel, it is not with the writing in them that we have to do as Hegel's first. For us here Hegel's earliest writing, his first style, shall be that only that is for every eye in the volume or volumes with which the collected works open. If we except the first two paragraphs of the first volume, it will pretty readily suggest itself now that we call attention to the three other paragraphs as specimens of this writing. We mean to say, indeed, that the remaining paragraphs of this special intro- THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 41 duction to the first article in the book, Glauben und Wissen, are verbally and constructively, or as diction generally, not different from the three. Nay, more than that, we wish it to be supposed and just taken for granted, on the whole, that as each of the three is, so is the vohtme. The reader now, then, can form his own opinion. He may object, to begin with, that it is only a trans- lation he is offered; and to that there can be no reply but that, so far as Hegel is concerned, the translation may, in the present regard, possibly prove more favourable to him than even his own original would. And, really, one feels that there is no use to dwell here. Who, in all the world, let him be an HegeHan, an utterly accomplished Hegelian, EngHsh or German, no matter which, will call that intel- ligible speech? We know what Aufklarung (the 3rd par. of all) means, what the Aufklarung is. When we say enlightenment, we never for a moment think of French Infidelity ; but there is no German nowadays to whom the word Aufklarung is not a category — a single general term that sums up in itself and suggests, as a recognised historical movement, eighteenth century enlightenment — as to the truth of the Bible; what at the time was called "exposure," "disillusionment," "opening of the eyes," etc. No doubt a simple category for this is wanted, and would be as useful in Eng- lish as it is in German. (In a word, Aufklarung means eighteenth century Infidelity.) 42 THE CATEGORIES Well, if one gives oneself time — a good long time, and takes trouble, one comes to guess that Hegel is displeased with this movement so named, and vilipends it as operative of death to philosophy, whose life is in the absolute alone. The next paragraph (par. 4 of all) is a good deal harder ; one never comes to fix for oneself what is that " empirical necessity " that is referred to,* and what follows is at once too general and too par- ticular, for all its words of meaning, to be under- stood, either. The last paragraph seems the easiest, and is, perhaps, the worst: it is really difficult or impossible to find an articulate meaning of any value in it — ^gradually, from clause to clause, throughout (and they — these clauses — are sometimes a little simplified with me). And now the lesson from it all concerns 5. The Fhcenomenologie.f Michelet regards this work as " Propsedeutik " to the entire relative philosophy, and even as so understood and proposed by Hegel himself, just as these early articles of Michelet's own editing, "implicitly," are but propsedeutik to the Phae- nomenologie itself. Of this work he rightly remarks that it is "a comprehensive example of method" — method, in regard to which Schelling, for his part, be it as it may with the content, shall only have vacillated through quite "a series of * Philosophy that leaves any " empirical necessity " unex- plained is incomplete ! t See Note to Contents. THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 43 views." It is the immanent evolution of simple consciousness, he also rightly intimates further, that shall constitute this method; and in it the "facts {Thaten) of nature and collective history'* are said to appear " as so many stages of conscious- ness." But this — namely, to call the facts, say, of history, "stages of consciousness" — is to bring such matters a little too near the brink. When history appears in the Phaenomenologie, no doubt it is welcomed ; but an appearance carptim is not a one, a whole of constitutive stages, and later writers, absolute Hegelian experts, too, find Hegel's historical references in the Phssnomenologie only to come in, as it were, from without into the dialectic, and to be no " Historisieren " — of the stages of consciousness. Not that these writers would depreciate the book : no, very far from that. If the philosophy of Hegel has had two presenta- tions, one Logical, to put all on that side under the one word, and the other Phaenomenological, then, as with them the tide of speech goes, it would almost seem that the latter — though that is impossible ! — ^is the more important. Eosenkranz, Erdmann, Gabler, Michelet, Bolland, and a whole host of other or later writers — all unite in recog- nising the Phaenomenologie as the very inlet and entrance to Hegel — almost as the key itself rather to the very penetralia and sanctuary of the system. Erdmann's words here are about the briefest, strongest, and straightest to the point: The phsenomenologie, to him, namely, is the U THE CATEGORIES "Criterion whether a man will ever be able duly and truly to judge of Hegel." In a word, he only understands Hegel who has the cachet on him of the Phsenomenologie ! And I am supposed to resist this. If what I say in pages 381-85 of " What is Thought ? " resists this, then I do resist it. In that regard, in fact, I am just as Hegel himself is: I withdraw the Phaenomenologie from its precursory position as part, first part, of the System. "This title," says Hegel (WW., iii. 8), "will, in the second edition, not be again added." Henceforth the very subject is relegated to no more than a dozen pages of the entire Encyclopsedie (Edn. Eosenkranz), or to somewhat less of the Propsedeutik. The Logic, to Hegel, is the " reine Wissenschaf t " ; or, again, it is the "Speculative Philosophie." He_says (WW., iii. 33) once also in the same connexion : "In the Phsenomenologie I have shown con- sciousness in its movement onwards, from the first immediate contrariety (antithesis) of itself and its object — onwards even to the absolute knowledge (Wissen). This way proceeds through all the forms of the relation of consciousness to its object, and has for its result — the Begriff der Wissenschaft. This Begriff, apart from this, that it goes forth, arises (hervorgeht) within the Logic itself," etc. Can it be possible in any way more strongly to say that the Logic (the second presentation) as in itself a complete statement, is independent of the Phaenomenologie ? If the end of the Phae- THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 45 nomenologie is the Begriff, and if that Begriff equally goes forth, arises in the Logic, what need has this latter of that former? And if the latter is the faultlessly complete, faultlessly scientific development of the Begriff? What man will say that the Logic is not the whole that, itself and within itself, develops the Notion? Why, the entire book of Frantz and Hillert, whose one object is, " Hegel's Philosophy in Verbal Extracts," goes through Logic, Nature-Philosophy, Psychology, Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of History, Esthetic, Philosophy of Eeligion, and finally Philosophy itself as the highest form of truth, and has never — no, not from beginning to end — a word of the Phsenomenologie ! * But in all that I say not one word is to be understood as said against the value of the Phse- nomenologie of itself and in itself. In that sense the Phsenomenologie as the phsenomenologie is not only a valuable work, but it is even a wonderful work, a unique work; a work that for philosophy is single and sole in its kind as yet anywhere to be found. And I hope that I have shown not only that I know and value the work, but that I have exemplified as much, even here and there, not without profit. The thing is this : There is such a thing as the System of Hegel, and the question is. How can we * Some half a dozen pages extracted from what concerns knowledge of Sense, are the sole evidence of any acquaintance with the Phsenomenologie. 46 THE CATEGORIES best get to know it ? Where is it at fullest, com- pletest, in the most consistently consequential manner — and so most easily and intelligibly — ^put? For Hegel I surely every simplification that may make easier reading of the writing, or readier understanding of the System — ought to be made welcome ! Why, it is to be said and seen that the entire works of Hegel on the whole follow the method and manner of the Logic alone. It is in this reference that I have begun with these Jena writings in the first volume of the collective works of Hegel. I have, in a word, exposed, in the translated five paragraphs, the difficulty and unsatisfactoriness of Hegel's earliest writing: and to that earliest writing the Phse- nomenologie — ^in its painful infacility and crabbed infelicity — ^very certainly, quite as much belongs as Glauben und Wissen or the Differenz itself. The practical corollary, then, is. Where should a beginner begin ? 'Not, surely, with what is most difi&cult, but with what is easiest and most intel- ligible. And what is that ? That, surely, is not the first untried adventure and attempt, but the second well-thought, well- proved execution and achievement: in a word it is a conclusion and a close, and not the unbegun that only would begin ; it is logical, and not simply phenomenological. Haym is a man of genius, and in all accomplishments, he is literary. I shall quote a word or two of his on the Logic; and whatever his value as to the matter, no one can THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 47 for a single moment take exception to his judgment of the form. "Here," he says, and the italics are his own, " here are a new idea of the business of philosophical statement and a new sense for literary form. Hegel had only laboriously learned to work up his thoughts into intelligibleness for others. The Phsenomenologie — described as Jirst part of the system — could only leave behind it apprehensions as to whether that which was merely introduced by it, would be, in any way, even simply acces- sible. . . . We would have to read, as a second part to the Phaenomenologie, the whole Hegelian philosophy, and that, too, just in as obscure, heavy, and strained a vernacular as that which characterises the first. "(The crabbed opacity of the Frankfort Sketch has been made obvious to us by the most telling words, and 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, S. of H. 650.) The very keenest eye is hardly in a position (concerns the early writing of the Frankfort Sketch) now to discern, in the atmosphere of the pure thought, any one single speck of life, and now again the thought is scarcely in a position to find any way for itself through the motley, thick-lying, scattered structures. Not at any time surely, neither before nor after Hegel, has a man ever again so spoken or written. A diction, sometimes more abstract than that of Aristotle, sometimes darker than that of Jacob Bdhme — such is the hard and thorny shell out of which we must pluck the still crude nucleus of the Hegelian world -idea. . . . The Phsenomeno- logie is a psychology put to confusion and disorder 48 THE CATEGORIES hy history, and a history laid in ruins hy psychology. — In long procession there appear, before the throne of the absolute, historical figures tricked out into psychological spectres, and again, in turn, psycho- logical potences in the guise of historical per- sonalities. — Es ist in die Phsenomenologie so viel hineingeheimnisst, wie in den Zweiten theil des Faust (into the Pha^nomenologie there is as much in and in secreted, as into the second part of Faust). ... A ripe discipline of thought, a substantial inner development lay in the middle between the two works. When Hegel undertook now the production of a Logic, it was for him from quite other points of view, with many other aims and objects, and as in himself master of an in- finitely richer material than was possibly his in the beginning of his philosophical career. Hence the numerous differences of the two redactions in particulars, and of determinative decision in prin- ciples. . . . The scholastic form which in the Phsenomenologie was concealed by the poetic treatment of the various stages of consciousness and by the opaque figurativeness of the expression, comes in the Logic designedly to the front. All the affectation, all the precieuse and stiltedness have disappeared from the style of the Logic. The purpose is : there shall be speech this time as plain and as grammatically school-simple as is only possible. ... It is no small praise for the Logic at last that the didactic and literary skill of its author has proved itself not less than equal to the philosophical and artistic plan of the whole. Th& master-builder has understood how, just by this to make his house true to its purpose that he made it schon. His didactic art goes hand in hand wit^h his architectural. It is not least on this account that the Logic is intelligible — namely, THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 49 that its articulation, both in whole and in detail, evinces the greatest regularity and symmetry. . . . The Encyclopsedie offers us a new interest by its fixing, from this time out, the changed significance of the Phcenomenologie (italicised so). The Phse- nomenologie, in a word, realises not for itself again, in the Encyclopaedie as published, the place which it had already been obliged to put up with the loss of in the jottings of the Propge- deutik. It loses now for ever not only its place as introductive, but not less, its designation as First Part of the System. . . . How this change must naturally take place, is clear. To demonstrate the standpoint of absolute cognition in the spirit of the system lefore the System could only so long be a want as this System; the sole sufficient and complete proof of said standpoint, was not already in its totality made actual. The same reason which at first necessarily led to the assumption of the entire wealth of the absolute spirit into the Phae- nomenologie — the same reason must now of neces- sity put an end to the introductory role of the Phsenomenologie, and by consequence withdraw from it all the material with which initially the doctrine of consciousness had been lined and padded out. The Phsenomenologie could no longer bear itself as preliminary, general, collective representa- tion, and just as little as First Part, of the System. . . . He prepares repeatedly, moreover, in the Logic (ii. 158; iii. 272) for the disappearance (or for the transference) of the Phsenomenologie into the rank of a psychological chapter" (299, 94, 243-4, 293, 300-1, 338, 340). Haym might have added, as regards all that material which he refers to as withdrawn from D 50 THE CATEGORIES the Phsenomenologie, that neither was it lost, but rather that, in a much truer, fuller, riper, and exacter form, it offered the advantage of much greater enjoyment and ease of intelligence in all that in the various departments on the Logic side, step by step, followed. In the seventeenth volume of the " Works " there are deliverances of Hegel himself, — in formal reply to official consultation on the part of Methammer, Government, and the Ministry of Education, — which are not to be forgotten. Taken together, Hegel's replies, on the subject of philosophy in universities, to the Kcenigl- Preussischen Eegierungsrath and Professor E. von Hammer, and on that of the teaching of philo- sophy in Gymnasia, to the Ministry of Education, occupy no less than thirty pages. The subjects mentioned are Logic, Philosophy of JSTature, Philo- sophy of Mind, Morals, Natural Theology, History of Philosophy, Empirical Psychology, Ontology, one or two others the like, but never a word of Phaenomenologie. The dates, too, are significant; for the one is 1816 and the other as late as 1823. Not but that Niethammer's date of October 23, 1812, may offer points of view not less significant when put in connection with what is then said of the various subjects; but these generally being such as are already named, it will suffice to say no more here than this: The entire letter runs to sixteen pages, and in it as a whole the Phsenomeno- logie may have — less than four lines! — in which, THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 51 too, as actual matter of study, only the three psychological subjects of Consciousness, Self-Con- sciousness, and Eeason are prescribed. Of course it is an easy objection to any appeal ■of mine to Haym at this time that at any other time I have opposed to him a negative ; still, also, a,nd just at that other time, I have not been slack to ascribe to him the same affirmative which I doubt not to be his here : and, I do think, no one will deny or resist this affirmative in its present application — no one who is at all a pied on the business itself. That being : it is plain, without more words, how it is situated with the Phsenomenologie on the one ^ide, and with the Logic on the other. The thing, as I say is this, how advise the beginner to begin? Let him begin with the Propaedeutik ; let him proceed to the various prefaces and introductions — :say of the Philosophy of History, of the -^sthetick, •of the Philosophy of Keligion, of the Philosophy of Law, of the Logic, and (especially) of the Encyclo- paedic : thence let him go to the History of Philo- sophy, lut passing over prefaces and introductions there — for the nonce. He will then be in a con- •dition to wander where he will. But he must not -eapect yet to find all easy. Haym, at much greater length than I have shown, has done his best to establish the immeasurable superiority of the Logic to the Phsenomenologie in style, writing, in a thousand expedients of 52 THE CATEGORIES help — '^e.f, in an achievement that is at last called " 8ch6n " ! For all that, Hegel's writing is Hegel's writing — the conceivable groups of readers over it are as the climbers on the Alpine snows: some, trem- blingly, are giving themselves appui to a stand,, some are at pause before a crevasse, some, axe in hand, are cutting steps in an ice-bar, and some with broken rope-fragments are grasping at the snow, while others are gliding precipitately down a couloir. I have contented myself in this matter with general views, and have not, as it were, nigglingly, with particular after particular, studied to find fault. It would have been easy, for example, to doubt whether any one would not have found him- self at once occluded by Hegel's very beginning in. the Phaenomenologie. For, I fancy, no one will easily convince himself of the truth of the universal that is only so scrimply and barely wrung out from the " here " and the " now." To that, however, the full stop in the first word of the Logic is too dangerously near: "Pure Being and Pure Nothing is therefore the same ! " For, abstract as one may into Being, and abstract as one may into Nothing, no one will ever convincingly satisfy himself that the one (mere) abstraction, Being, is the same as the other (mere) abstraction. Nothing. It suited Hegel to realise collapse into Unity of the directly self-opposed Two : but what of us? That clump of matter in Time and Space, which we call Nature, is to us, with THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 53 suppression of every name, Being. With suppression of that, too, it is also Nothing. But, even hy reason ■of that suppression, these — Being and Nothing — Are not the same — always and for ever, rather they are the two self-opposing differents. An objection more in place would be to point out that it is largely, perhaps, to the example of the Phaenomenologie that we owe even these peculiarities of opacity in the general writing of Hegel that, at least to the bulk of readers, seem to be both crucial and critical. It is quite true that there are those '' widerhaarige'' — these so utterly repel- lent modes of speech — those "dark and infinitely interpretable oracle-expressions," ' which, in the midst of that merely stunning " Geklapper" of unlocateable abstraction, reduce even the very best-prepared brothers of the trade itself to agonies of effort that can only end in despair. ^Now it is the Phaenomenologie that is the very breeding and feeding ground of all that. And yet it is just in all that that we have — Hegel : the man who, simply in the truth of reason — simply in reason — is without his peer till we go back to Aristotle ! And, for the new light, the new guidance, it is plainly prescriptive that it is to Hegel we must look. Further, now, we seem to see in Hegel himself reflections, not without their place in determining the subordination of the Phsenomenologie. At p. 7, vol. iii. of his works, he formally discusses the new principles which he will be found to have applied 54 THE CATEGORIES to Logic. They give rise, he says, to " the absolute method of cognition," and that method consists in " the immanent development of the Notion." This immanent development, again, only means that the exposition concerned is the result of a dialectical movement of the Notion itself, or within itself. " I maintain," he says, " that only on this self -construing- method is philosophy capable of becoming objective, demonstrated science. I have, in the Phaenomenologie,^ attempted, in this wise, to explicate consciousness. Consciousness is Spirit, Mind, as concrete cognition^ and that, too, as externally applied." We have no difficulty in recognising as much, for we remember that the very first step in the Phaenomenologie is- " seTise-certainty." We have here, then, even so far, and as Hegel himself puts it, two things in con- trast. Logic on the one side and the Phaenomenologie on the other. Each, so far, exemplifies this same self-construing method. But there is a great dif- ference in the application. The application in Logic to Logic is entire: it is to the Greist as- Geist. The application in the Phsenomenologie to consciousness as consciousness is only partial: it is to the Geist only as erscheinende Geist. The former, too, is evidently internal; while the latter is expressly external — only to sense, that is, on its first or lowest stage. Even if, then, Hegel had, in the first instance, intended the Phseno- menologie to be, just in its own self, a finished, completed, entire philosophy, he must have, now, in the second instance, reflected that it could not THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 55 any longer be granted to hold any such essential and all-comprehending position. It must consent now to come down and be subordinated into a mere part. Consideration of the whole passage in reference will only the more and the more strengthen our suggestion of such and such " reflections." Then— What directly follows all this is the express, formal announcement that henceforth, and for the future, the Phsenomenologie is to be withdrawn from its position as "first part of the System of Science " ! This is plain : to begin as the Logic begins is to begin with, and proceed on, that single proper and peculiar, essential principle, the dialectic of which yields and forms the Categories: and it is the Categories that are "the pure essentities" (spoken of ibidem) "constitutive of the content of Logic." Whereas neither the beginning, nor all that follows, in the Phsenomenologie, can be characterised in anything like the same pure, essential, integrating fashion. But one could not well think of the beginning of the Phsenomenologie without thinking of its content and milieu as well; and so to think was to think also of what deficiencies might be altered and of what excellences might not be allowed to be lost. Hence what we see: the Phsenomenologie laid aside by itself as no longer an entire Part of, but only an inconsiderable Section in the 56 THE CATEGORIES System: not, however, on the whole, that one single excellence is lost. The Logic itself meets that; and not substantially alone, but even in instances. I observe, for example, that at the end, p. 126, of the chapter on ''Kraft und Verstand, Erscheinung und ubersinnliche Welt" I have pen- cilled, "All repeated in the Logik." For let there be what defects there may, illustratively or even materially, in the Phaenomenologie, still it is pregnant with that peculiar psychological in and in that is so specially Hegel's, and there at its freshest : it was a master that wrote it ; nor is he much less than a master that can read it. It does not follow, however, that it is an A B C to begin with. But, be it as it may with Hegel's earlier writing, it must still be said that, in his later, it is really impossible to see that any one to whom it is at all given to judge of writing, can for a moment fail to admire the choice, felicitous exactitude, the true, right community, of expression and thought which so wonderfully characterise it.* Word and thing are there one. And never was a thing with such originality and living newness of suggestion, such admirable largeness of comprehensive penetration and force, seen into, as literally never could it be better or more successfully named. No reader that has an eye need read more in irresistible proof of all this than the very beginning of the Logik, say, " Allgemeiner Begriff der Logik" Almost one might * See Note to Contents. THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 57 say, with absolute accuracy, that all there, whether in word or in thing, was, simply, purely, fully, punctuated perfection ! The English is not con- vertible with the German; but, if not for more than the face of proof, we venture to translate from this beginning a passage or two : — " The notion of Logic hitherto rests on the pre- supposed separatedness of the matter and the form of knowledge, of truth and the cognition of it. It is assumed that the what that is to be known is a ready- made world, apart from, outside of thought, indepen- dently existent; that thought by itself is blank, that as a form it subjects itself externally to the matter, fills itself therewith, and only so gets a content for itself, and becomes thereby a reality known. These two component parts of knowledge — (for it is the relation of component parts that is given them, and knowledge gets put together out of them only mechanical-wise or at highest chemical-wise) — these two component parts, I say, rank together in this way, that the matter is a complete ready- made object from the first, perfectly without call to thought for its reality; whereas thought, on the other hand, is something defective and deficient that, for its realisation, stands in need of a material or matter, and must, as mere yielding indefinite form, adjust itself thereto. Truth is the agreement of thought with its object, and to bring about this agreement — for it is not of itself fact — thought shall fit and suit itself to its object. Or thought and object, form and matter, not left in this misty indeterminateness of difference, but this difference baing more definitely taken, each shall be apart from the other, a sphere of its own. Thought, accordingly, in its receiving and forming of the 58 THE CATEGORIES matter, never gets out of its own self ; its receiving and fitting of itself to it, remains a modification of itself; it never gets to its other thereby; and the self-cognised state of affection present belongs more- over only to it; it comes, therefore, even in its relation to the object, not out of itself, out to the object — this remains, as a thing in itself, absolutely a beyond of thought. ... " The older Metaphysic had, in this reference, a higher idea of thought than has become current of late. The assumption was to it fundamental, namely, that what of and in things comes to be known throuojh thought — that that alone is the genuinely true in them; consequently, that not they themselves in their immediacy are true, but they as first raised into the form of thought, as things thought This Metaphysic, accordingly, held that thought and the determinations of thought are not a something alien to the objects, but rather their very essence, or that things and the thinking of them — how language itself declares their affinity ! — in themselves agree, that thought in its immanent ■ determination and the veritable nature of things are one and the same content. " But the reflecting understanding usurped the lead in philosophy. And it ought to be known what this expression — a key-phrase in other references not un- consciously in use — what it exactly meant : there is to be understood by it the abstracting and so separating imderstanding, that adheres to its separations. So far as it has any reference to reason, it bears itself as common understanding and makes good its opinion that truth rests on the reality of sense, that thoughts are only thoughts, meaning that only perception of sense gives them substantiality and reality; that reason, so far as it is left to its self, originates no more than fantasies of its own. Fn this relinquish- ^UNIVERSITY 4 TROUBLE STATEMENT 59 ment of its own self, on the part of reason, the idea of truth is lost ; reason, namely, has become reduced to this, that it knows only subjective truth, only what seems — only Erscheinung, appearance, only something to which the nature of the thing itself has no relation ; knowledge has fallen to opinion. . . . "So then, here, knowledge, perception, has from the unsatisfyingness of the determinations of the understanding, fled for refuge to sensible existence, imagining to have in it the firm and fixed and sole reality. But then again, as this is a cognition that knows itself to be only a cognition of ap- pearance, its incompetence is confessed — even pre- supposed indeed, as though there were positive knowledge, not of the things, in themselves, truly, but still of things within the sphere of appearance (Erscheinung) ; as though, with all, so to speak, only the sorts of the objects were different, and the oiie sort, the things in themselves, namely, did to be sure not, but the other kind, the appearances, cer- tainly did — fall into cognition. As though there were correct knowledge allowed a man, but with the intimation added that, all the same, he could see, not truth, but only untruth. Absurd as this would be, equally absurd were a true cognition that perceived not the object as it is in itself. . . . "The more consequently carried out transcen- dental. Idealism has recognised the nullity of the spectre still left standing by the Critical Philosophy, The Thing -in-itself, this abstract shade that has bid adieu to every particle of constituent content what- ever — has recognised, I say, this nullity and been minded completely to destroy it. This philosophy even made a beginning with reason — reason alone — in development of its principles out of its own self [Fichte]. But the subjective manner of this attempt suffered it not to come to the completion. In the 60 THE CATEGORIES sequel this manner was given up and with it also said beginning and the realisation of a Pure Cognition [Schelling]. "A substantial material basis is supposed to be required for it (Logic) from without. But logical reason itself is the Substantielle or Beelle that embraces within itself all the abstract elements, and is their coherent substantive, absolutely concrete unity. What, then, uses to be named a matter needs not to be far to seek ; it is not the fault of the object of Logic if it is to be supposed substanceless, but only of the way in which it is understood " (28, 29, 31, 32, 33). This — while I hope it fulfils the intention of its quotation, as concerns, namely, Hegel's power at once of seeing and saying — is at least suggestive in the special discussion precisely here in the immediate reference to the Phsenomenologie. In resumption, we may be reminded that if the Phse- nomenologie ends in the notions of Wissen and Wissenschaf fc, it is the Logik that is authoritatively pronounced to he the pure Wissen and the pure Wissenschaft — even a purer Wissen and a purer Wissenschaft — nor any longer, like the other, only preparatory and provisional, but now at length final, a thing in itself, finished, complete, full, absolutely independent of anything whatever before it, after it, or in any way beside it. Why, Logic is declared to be — if not exactly here, then elsewhere — and always in effect, the " reine Wissenschaft" nay, as, under its name and designation, proper and specific, even the "speculative Philosophic" — to what end, then, this unnecessary, and encumbering, and stumbling, and THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 61 obstructing, and mystifying preliminary^ Con- sciousness ! Why, even here Wahrheit, pure truth, which we are given to understand the Logic to he, is characterised as "the pure self -evolving self- consciousness " ; and this is followed by, so to speak, an absolute absolutifying of the Logic as alone the principiell ground every way. Nay, the Logic, he tells us (p. 35) is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought — as God : " This realm is the Truth as it is without or veil or hull — absolute; and so it may he said that this is the Darstellung Gottes, the Expression of God as He is in His eternal Essence hefore the creation of -Nature and a finite Soul " (italicised so) ! Or, speaking with less extravagance, and still of Logic — of Logic alone, and not possibly of anything only Phaenomenologic — we have from him (p. 63) this : — "The beginning must be an absolute, or what is here synonymous, an abstract, beginning ; and so it can presuppose nothing, must be mediated by nothing, nor have a ground ; it shall be itself rather ground of the entire science." — Ego ! There is not a word here — no, nor a thought — of any thing being necessary to mediate Logic, to be ^presupposed for Logic. And still farther away, with Logic alone, and with never a warning of " conscious- ness" is what immediately follows that Darstellung Gottes : — "Anaxagoras is applauded as the man who first 62 THE CATEGORIES spoke the thought, that j/oj/9, Thinking, is to be named as the principle of the world, as the inner- most being of the world. He has thereby laid the ground for an intellectual intuition of the universe, whose pure form must be Logic." Then this, again: if it only needs a scratch to expose the Tartar under the warranted G-aul, what more is required here, page after page, than just a touch to lay bare the one secret, the single secret of Hegel that lies in the Ego, say, even in the Ego of Fichte? Of course, as such, the revelation of this lies elsewhere ; but there are points indicative, so far, even here. "As Science, the Truth is the pure self -develop- ing self -consciousness, and has the form of the Self, that the in and for itself Beent is known notion, hut that the Begriff as such is the in and for itself Beent. This objective thinking then, is the content of pure science ; and this pure science, therefore, is so little formell, is so little in want of the matter for an actual and true cognition that its content, rather, is alone the absolute truth, or if we would still use the word matter, the true matter, — a matter, however, to which the form is not something merely external, inasmuch as this matter rather is pure thought, and consequently the absolute form itself (35). — The absolutely pure infinite form is enunciated as Self -Consciousness, Ego (italicised so; WW. xv. 621). — Kant made the deep observation that concerned a priori synthetic principles, and recognised the imity of self-consciousness as their root — recognised, that is, the identity of the Notion (BegrifiQ with itself : the deduction, then, should of necessity have been the demonstration of the transition of said THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 63 simple unity of self-consciousness into these, its characteristic forms and differences (Lk. iii. 282). — The Categories demonstrate themselves to be nothing else than the series of the evolution-forms of the Notion (Phil, of Eel. ii. 433).— Cognition of the Infinite Form, i.e. of the Begriff (Lk. i. 54). — Kant's main thought (Hauptgedanke) is to vindicate the categories for self -consciousness as the subjective Ego (53). — In the apprehending of the opposites in their unity or of the Positive in the Negative — in that consists the Speculative (44). — That by which the Begriff leads itself further is the Negative that it has in itself (43). — This, of the Categories, is their inner Negativity, their self-moving soul, the prin- ciple of all natural and spiritual life " (44). As intimated, all that concerns Categories, the Infinite Form, the Notion, Ego, etc., has been on our part matter of exhaustive demonstration elsewhere ; and, as, so evidently largely occurrent in the Text under view, is used now rather only by way of a reminder of proof ; but it ought not to escape notice that the Ego, alone by itself, is pretty well the key to it all. When it is said, for example, that Hegel's one principle is Inner Negativity, what is it that is meant thereby but that one thing in all the world, that entity of entities, which is at once, in a single concrete, a single inseparable, self-coherent life, Difference in Identity and Identity in Differ- ence — ^Ego. At the same time it is to be said that even in the Text before us there is a certain use, not so much perhaps of this " Negativity," say, as simply of negor tion — negation itself : a use which, as I incline 64 THE CATEGORIES to think, has to some extent misled, it may be, even the very best and most competent of students. Schwegler, for example, of whom I need not say here what I have said again and again of him elsewhere, has, as quoted in The Secret of Hegel at p. 607, this:— "The lever for the development is the dialectic method that advances by negation from one notion to another. Negation is the vehicle of the dia- lectic 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." Gabler, too, generally regarded as about the student of the Phcenomenologie, can, in some of his earliest sections, be quoted to a similar efifect: — "From one stage or form of concrete conscious- ness, there is an advance further, because it has manifested itself as a knowledge or knowing that self-sublates, or self-contradicts its own self, and accordingly does itself negate assumption and pre- supposition of the truth: this constitutes the Negative side of the progression. Directly, how- ever, from this negative result, there comes up a new form of consciousness, to which now the course of the consideration turns, or, rather, has already risen : and in this consists the Positive of the movement. — ^Each transition exhibits this negative and positive side. — This movement of consciousness has these three moments : 1. Immediate certainty — the immediate existence of the object ; 2. Negation of the certainty — the non-ness or otherwiseness of THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 65 the object; 3. Eeturn to the first unity of cer- tainty : (1) something is so ; (2) no, it is not so ; (3) but yes, it is so." Now there is no denying that this is the cur- rently usual manner of naming or explaining the dialectic of Hegel ; and quite as little is there any denying of the equally usual supposition that it is Hegel's own. And not, surely, without the pos- sibility of allegation in proof. The early pages of the larger Logik, for example — already, as it were, a Text before us — offer us at once perhaps the very best version of any such possibility — as quotation (say from p. 41) may show : — " In order to win the scientific progression and its quite simple cognition, all that essentially we have to strive to is — the recognition of the logical dictum that the negative is equally positive, or that the self-contradictory passes not into nullity, into abstract nothing, but, essentially, only into the the negation of its particular content, or that such a negation is not all negation, but the nega- tion of the particular thing concerned, and conse- quently it is a particular negation; that therefore in the result there is essentially contained that from which it is the result." Other expressions in regard to the negative here are these : — " Each form, in realising itself, at the same time resolves itself, has its own negation for result — and passes therewith into a higher form. — In that the resultant, the negation^ is a particular negation, it has a content. It is a new but higher, richer E 66 THE CATEGORIES notion than the preceding one; for it has become richer by its negation or contradictory ; contains it therefore, but also more than it, and is the unity of it and its contradictory." These quotations will be found to be at once full and exact. Compared with those of Schwegler and Gabler in the same dialectic reference, they will appear, I doubt not, not different. Still they are different. In Hegel the negative is a negative secundum quid : in Schwegler and Gabler it is a negative simpliciter. That is, the difference between the two negatives is that the one is a qualified negative, and the other an unqualified negative, a sheer negative, a negative "sans phrase." But the latter cuts out the very purpose of the former, and leaves with us, instead of a rationale vital and internal, only a process mechanical and external. If A is negated simpliciter to get a B and B is negated simpliciter to get a C, what possibility can there be of community between them? Each is itself, but only a self -same itself, an abstract itself ; and transition, movement, there can be none. A qualified negative has already an Inhalt, a content, and so already within itself an other. Hegel him- self, as we see, accentuates this, that the negation has an Inhalt, a content. And an Inhalt, a content, is not out of place here; for Hegel had himself an Inhalt, a content; even in what — as quoted, he spoke, he actually had an Inhalt, a content. He knew his own thoughts. But neither Schwegler nor Gabler knew them for him. He knew what he THE DOUBLE STATEMENT ^f hid ; while they, for their parts, knew of it nothing. Of any double in their conscionsness, they were guiltless. With such words and such authority before them, the simpliciter of the negative was — ■ for them — simply involuntary. But Hegel, for his part, however much it suited him to put such a colour on his dialectic, and so to make, as it were, even externally prominent the negative it involved, and necessarily involved, could not, in the teeth of the truth within him, have either any thought or any will for more than a negative secundum quid. ]N"ow what was this truth within him ? . I submit that it was this : In place, namely, •of this supereminent or superprominent negative that led, as we have seen, to a merely external and mechanical process in explanation of the dialectic •of Hegel, I submit that there is only one true explanation : — Eeference to the unity of a single living pulse, the actual pulse of actual living thought, ihe Notion, as suggested by Kant, as further developed by Fichte, but by a dialectic that, unfortunately for him, as well as for Schelling, was only external — in a word the Ego, really Fichte's Ego, but raised by Hegel into the concrete Ego which, left unnamed by him, and hid from others, was to him alone of all mankind the Secret that •developed the Categories and so the whole. In our last extracts, just see the ever-present Ego ! ^ Yes, that was his Secret, and it was already, in the main lines of it, complete within him when, from Frankfort, a humble family-tutor, he wrote — 68 THE CATEGORIES adroitly wrote, with Bamberg in his mouth, but Jena in his eye— to his now powerful friend, the- illustrious philosopher, the famous Professor Schelling, and received in return the generous call that made Mm ! That was his secret, and he carried it with him from Frankfort, through Jena,. Bamberg, Niirnberg, Heidelberg, on to Berlin ; and there it remained with him to the last — in a silence impenetrable, an adamantine concealment. Just to think of all that length of time, and of all these circumstances — nay, just to think of him at Jena only — -just to think of that reticent jaw of his all the time there that — with his own thoughts, and his own opinion of the man — he worked for Schelling I And there is no relenting even in his written books— how grim must not that remorseless jaw of his have come down on the poor friend whose "absolute" was only the "night in which, as we say, all cows are black I " No wonder that there was in Schelling a lifelong rancour ! It was absolutely his own act, that one little word that, im- pressed only a negative on his dialectic ! No doubt it could be said — no doubt the negative was indispensable, for how could one category be derived from another without a negative — how,, without a negative, could there be two in the principle itself — the one was not the other! And so, with infinite sang froid, he could perorate — endlessly discourse and perorate — on a negative secundum quid that he could not but foresee — with a chuckle foresee — would, in other hands, become THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 69 a, negative simpliciter, to lure and divert from that pease-weep's nest of his, the possible passenger! Why, he had already in his hands a proof. We have seen what Gabler made of the negative; and Hegel saw it: he acknowledges receipt of his relative book, and profusely thanks him therefor. Nor was Gabler without his reward : he got Hegel's Chair ! * But there is no occasion to refer to others ; what we have in Hegel himself is of sufficient quality in itself quite generally to mislead into a simple negative as constituting the lever of the Hegelian dialectic. What, in fact, are we to see in that one essential point of view to which we are directed by Hegel himself (6, 7, seq.) — namely, that what is concerned is a new idea of "scientific treatment generally (ein neuer Begriff wissenschaftlicher Behandlung tiberhaupt) " — in a word, the immanent Entwickelung des Begriffes? "Only so, I main- tain," he says, "is philosophy capable of being, objective demonstrated science " — that is " the absolute method des Erkennens (cognition)." If when so far, he had stopped and only added one word — Fgo — Begriff is Ego, he would have at once flashed the whole matter into the general conscious- ness — saved himself thereby the infinite trouble of actually volume upon volume of a hopeless * Gabler's book, further on, and as a whole, may be quite, Hegelianly, unexceptionable ; still the point remains as Schwegler has it — that that negative of Hegel's was taken quite generally simpliciter, Gabler's quoted text is precise enough. 70 THE CATEGORIES dialectic-^and others? — What would he have sayed .others— Lifetimes of Struggle! But he adds no such word- — ^he goes off to dis- tances unimaginable, and summons to his side all manner of new potences — or say all manner of the oldest, mightiest potences — -Understanding, Eeason itself, nay, Geist I but in new and magical roles. "We quote : — "The understanding determines, and holds the determinations fast ; Reason is negative and dialec- tical, because it breaks up the determinations of; the understanding into nothing; it is positive, because it gives birth to the universal, and holds in it as well the particular. In the same way as understanding is regarded as something separate from reason, so, too, is dialectical reason to be taken as something separate from positive reason. But in its truth reason is Geist, which, higher than both, is reason that understands, or an understand- ing that reasons. That Geist is the negative, that which constitutes the quality as well of dialectical reason as of understanding ; — it negates what is as simply one, and thus sets the determinate differ- ence of the understanding, it equally breaks it up, and so then is dialectical. It remains not, how- ever, in the nothing of this result, but is in it equally positive, and so has restored therewith the first simple one, but as a universal that is within itself concrete ; under this is not subsumed a given particular, but in said determining and in the resolution of it the particular has already at the same time determined itself (7). — Philosophy, if it would be science, cannot, borrow its method from a subordinate science, as mathematic is, just as little as content itself with categorical assurances! THE DOUBLE STATEMENT U of inner intuition, or with raisonnemenfs from grounds of external reflection. But it can only be the Nature of the Content itself which moves in scientific cognition, in that, at the same time, this own pivper Reflexion of the Content it is which itself first sets and makes its determination (6). - — This geistige (spiritual) movement which gives itself in its simple oneness its determinateness, as in this latter, again, it gives itself equality with itself, and is so the immanent development of the Notion — is the absolute method of knowledge (cognition), and at the same time the immanent soul of the content itself " (7). N"ow, would any one after all these wonders — this absolute new method in which the Inhalt^ the thing itself, was, by its own movement of its own self, to evolve and develop all — would or could any one get sight of any other conclusion than this : That no one, with, as he said, Mangel an Vorarbeitern, absence of foreworkers, and even after a vieljah- rigen Arbeit, a many-y eared labour, as he also said, could of himself and in himself, come to this new, hitherto unknown, and unexampled machinery ! Without premises the thing was impossible, were the man a giant, but still a man ! Ah, yes. Hegel had premises; Kant and Fichte were still before him ; and all that he did — at least for his own start — was to see into the Ego of Kant and Fichte its life, its own movement, its own immanent intellectual dialectic ! But to see this was his own — it involved a stride that took the world, even the creation of the world. 72 THE CATEGORIES in — and he would keep it to himself. Kvdos ! what could be more extraordinary and wonderful in its reach than such a "fetch " as that ? It was no use to speak of Schelling — but it was precisely that which Kant, which even Fichte, with all his neigh- bourhood to it, had missed.* Hegel would keep it all to his own self in absolute silence; and, in absolute silence, he would work it all out for himself ! That was a grim silence — that, years and years long, was a grim labour in the dark. Hegel would be himself — Hegel would be — among them all — himself 1 Christian Kapp was it, that could speak only of Napoleon and — Hegel ? Napoleon might have been sparing of his con- fidence, reserved, reticent, concealed ; but Napoleon could never have been more sparing of his con- fidence, never more reserved, reticent, concealed, than Hegel was. Just look to this — and it is said at p. 14 of the Phaenomenologie : — " The living Substance is that Existency which is in truth Subject, or — what is to say the same thing — which is in truth actual, real, only in so far as it is the movement of the setting (constituting) of its own self (des Sichselbstsetzens), or the mediating with its own self of the Self-becoming other to its own self (des Sichanderswerdens). It is as Subject the pure unal Negativitdt, even thereby the going into two, into duality, of the unality, or the * What even they had of it, Schelling deviated from, turned his back on, to find his distinction in the Naturphilosophie (see S. of H., p. 216, n.). THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 73 contraposing Yerdoppelung (endouhlement) which is again the negation of this equipollent dif-ference- ness and its contraposingness : only this restoring of equality to itself or the reflexion in the other- wiseness into itself — not an original [primarily existent] unity as such, or immediate [spontaneous] as such, is what is True. It is the becoming of its own self, the circle which presupposes its end as at once its aim and its beginning, and only through that, its constituting process and its end, is actual and real "—(Ego, I-Me) ! That paragraph — and he has a thousand the like — only exhibits the difficulties which Hegel ia put to in order to find expressions that shall convey the Ego in its own natural dialectic movement, and yet conceal and secrete it into the guise of an inde- pendent new logical movement in philosophy ! Hegel, alone of all mankind, shall demonstrate the creation of the universe by the immanent evolution of the Categories and their externalisation into Nature : the glory of this he will share with no man ! For, if he does at times name Ego, he still keeps it for all that to himself ! It is really extraordinary^-did he actually sup- pose that he would never be found out ? CHAPTER III CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS What the matter has come to in my hands, then, is : The principle of the Ego ; Evolved into the Cate- gories ; which, complete, are Externalised into Nature. The Categories are the first brood-thoughts : they pervade nature and are constitutive of it. It is only since Kant, and through him (with those after him) that they have come to this reach. Here, however, we take them up simply as they are in the hands of Hegel ; who, says Schwegler, " sought, 1, completely to collect them; 2, critically test them; 3, dialecti- cally develop them, the one from the other, into an internally articulated system of pure reason." Schwegler cannot be said to have specially chosen the word "sought"; but in so new and rare a matter it is, surely, somewhat unlikely that Hegel shall have done more than seeh. His feat may well be admirable; but at that period — ay, at this period — such a consummation were in the first instance conceivably possible to no man. This shadows out CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 75 an inquest into these Hegelian categories in their turn, precisely such as Schwegler claims for Hegel himself into Categories at all. We have in this direction the advantage, too, at present of a new test in judgment. Hegel does not grudge to tell us often enough of his dialectic; but he never speaks of it like Fichte, as a simple evolution of the Ego. We, then — should we by mediation of the Ego's own dialectic internality (in place of Fichte's externality of Limit) evolve the Categories — we, then, I say, might apply our own feat in test of the feat of Hegel. Ah, that were a feat comparable only to the feat itself of Hegel himself. That feat took a life- time. With all that has been suggested, or even all that has been realised, the happy man who in these days can promise himself such a lifetime is, we may be apt to fear, still to seek. It is to be considered here, indeed, that, even to do no more than take up the Categories of Hegel and examine them, in a usual way, and just as we are — that, if complete, and full, and thorough, would be tantamount to an expository and critical repetition of — with few exceptions — the whole twenty or twenty-one volumes ! Nay, more : would not that be tanta- mount to a necessity, or, at least, a demand, for an open-eyed and an open-handed translation of not less than every one volume of the whole twenty- one ? The least of all that, plainly, is no affair of the moment : still — leaving Physics to a section 2 here — it may be in place, and prove useful, to take up, for something of explanatory remark, section 1. 76 THE CATEGORIES 1. The Categories. FaiKng said translation, said inquest into Hegel's relative work as a whole, and especially said sug- gested new evolution of the categories formally from the Ego itself, we shall content ourselves with some- thing no more special than what may be less or more applicable in the way of general remark. Of Quality, naturally to begin with it, I have somewhere ventured to say that, in the alertness of a beginning, it (that section) is almost already equal to a very armoury of all Hegel's usual means and expedients. The whole progress of Hegel through Being, ^"othing, Becoming, Origin, Decease, Eeality, Negation, Something, Other, Being-in-itself, Being- for-other, Specific nature. Distinctive property. Limit, Finite, Infinite, etc., can plainly, as discussed, be called nothing else than an affair of the Cate- gories. Being and Nothing, for example, the special stumbling-blocks of all beginners, are, I should say now, as subjects of explanation, in the Secret of Hegel, too prolonged and too diffuse in explanation, even for explanation. Nay, after all that has lately been so specially said, it will possibly be thought, I doubt not, that when Hegel begins so, it is im- possible to see that he begins with that alleged Ego at all. It may be in some measure reconciliant, however, if I say that to start with Ego — simply with Ego and no more — ^is to start with an esse, a content, that is as yet no more than Bsing, plainly Being, but still Being that for any esse in it, is as CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 77 plainly Nothing. Then Being and Nothing, the one correspondent to the /, and the other to the Me, say, fall, in the dialectic of the Ego, even as the I and the Me faU into the I — they, too, fall into the amal- gamating concrete of the Becoming, This, as a suwestion, is to be taken in the mean- time for no more than it is worth. Now in this way there is an Esse put at once into the hands of Hegel, most welcomely accordant with a beginning of metaphysic as metaphysic just in the ordinary outlook ; and, probably, it will not be found difficult similarly, and on similar terms, to link on the other cat^ories mentioned or otherwise occur- rent. What has been said on Quantity and may be said on Measure^ is not such as to exact, we shaU pre- sume, any very dissimilar treatment. Under Wesen it is impossible to exaggerate the felicity of the discussion given to Identity^ Difference, and Contradiction ; and yet it is precisely here that we have the loudest — almost, indeed, the virulent — reproach to HegeL ReaUy about the most incisive of Hegel lies there ; and I think we may point to Stihstanc€j Cause, and Reciprocity under Bdaiion as of similar value. The transition of Beciprocity into the Notion can, at least, surely, be called happy. In the whole treatment of formal logic, which f oUows, no doubt, there is in a certain way no ad- vance beyond Aristotle, and yet it will have to be acknowledged that even here the Categories have led 73 ' THE CATEGORIES to a number of new hits at once striking and welcome. This formal logic as a whole Hegel views as subjectivity, and it passes, in his way of it, into objectivity ; which again is constituted by the Ideas of Mechanism, Chemism, and Teleology. And perhaps as much as this suggests some of the strongest, if not the strongest, objections to the general work of Hegel. Mechanism and chemism, for instance, to what end treat these so now, when their apparently express discussion is so immediately to follow under Nature ? Nay, reminded of as much, it may be asked, if logic, as logic, is subjective and within, are mechanism and chemism, as parts of it to be themselves foisted into subjectivity and the within ? Perhaps one might see a way or ways of somewhat reconciling this, but relative statement were not pre- cisely in call at present. For that matter, as already intimated, indeed, we do not mean it to be supposed that Hegel in his work is either infallible or fault- less. That of any human operation is not a thing to be said or even dreamed; and we know that finite edges do show, or seem to show, again and again, and yet again, through the work of Hegel ; as, for instance, transitions are to be found in it at times which are merely pictorial, or which at other times, are only so wilily won^ that they are dis- trusted or rejected as — just too good ! * * I had a friend who used to object to me this. Hegel was to him a man all too cunning of fence. There were devices in him suggestive of the conjuror rather than the philosopher : it is just possible that the " charlatan" derives thence ! CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 79 So far of Logic. Nature and Intelligence (Spirit) are supposed also to be instinct with Categories or the Categories — Nature raised through all its forms, from the most external element, space, to the most internal element that is found in nature, life — In- telligence, similarly followed from the lowest form of the natural soul up to the absolute spirit — but, really, they are there so much in their own substan- tiality as we know them, that it is from that sub- stantiality, and not from categories at all, that they are to be judged. Something of this we may see again. In the meantime, as regards the Categories, it may be suggested, that, for the relative understanding of them, there are summaries enough of them, short enough and summary enough, in the Propsedeutik and in the first edition of the Encycloptedie, readily available for any student who would have them ail at a glance before him. Indeed, in my last volume, to say nothing of — shall I say — the possible profits otherwise therewith communicated, there is not a little in that way implied and so more or less effected.* * Th€ title of the first volume of the Encyclopsedie, as end- ing in the clause Zum Gebrauch seiner Voiiesungen (for use with the Lectures) guarantees summariness. No student of Hegel should neglect this edition. I may mention here, too, that, in his A us friiherer Zeit, Arnold Ruge expressly runs through the Categories in a most expeditious and instructive fashion : the most of this that applies here, too, I have trans- lated in my article Arnold Ruge^ in the British Controversialist for May and June 1870. so THE CATEGORIES 2. Physics, It is so, then, in a single sentence {Ego into Categories, and these Externalised*) that we have the rationale of origin of the world on the part of metaphysics; but what of physics? — is there a single comprehensible suggestion of a rationale of origin, a beginning, there ? Of course there is the Nebular Hypothesis which, as first started by Wright, Kant, Herschel, Laplace, or other, is existent still, if by later hands, as naturally to be expected, somewhat, in extent or degree, modified. In some of these later hands, at all events, we are much struck by the emphasis that is expended on the insistence, not so much of a beginning, as of a summary end. A summary end — an end of all things ! This poor unfortunate world ! It was scarcely an honour for any one of us, men, erect, rational, as we are — ^it was scarcely an honour for any one of us to have been born into it ! But perhaps, after all, it is not as bad as that — - perhaps our reading has been too much wholesale — perhaps it is only our own solar system that has the nail -scratch, and the rest are untouched ? But no — we look again, and we really do not seem to * To this "single sentence" I do not suppose I have ever given a better form of expression than as early as the date No- vember 9, 1871, in my First Lecture on the Philosophy of Law ; namely {see there, p. 5) thus : — " The Ego develops into its own Categories, and these being complete, externalisation results from the one common law" — that is, mind as mind, internality as internality, is turned inside out bodily — Nature I CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 81 find it so ! " It therefore follows," we find said, "that as energy is constantly in a state of trans- formation, there is a constant degradation of energy to the final unavailable form of uniformally diffused heat; and that this will go on as long as trans- formations occur, until the whole energy of the universe has taken this final form." This, we read in English so, and in French, but by the same hand, thus : " Est-il en droit de se considerer comme sachant quelque chose, celui qui ignore ces decou- vertes modernes, si magnifiques dans leur simplicity, qui nous permettent de determiner la constitution et la composition chimique, non-seulement du soleil, mais des ^toiles, et des nebuleuses les plus eloignees de nous; de pr^ciser Forigine exterieure de TaU- ment qui nous nourrit et du combustible qui nous chaufife ; de comprendre la non-permanence de I'etat de choses actuellement existant sur notre globe; de retracer I'histoire passee de la terre et de la lune, et de prevoir, au moins en partie, I'avenir qui attend I'univers physique." It may be possible to point to the colour of qualification or limitation in what is said here, either in French or English; but when it is compared — all that there is of it (" glohe," " terre," " lune" " en partie," etc.) — with all that there is else of unequivocal assertion, it is surely pretty plain that it is a " whole " that is concerned, and that that whole is the " universe." There can be no doubt of it — what is concerned is the "universe," "I'univers physique," and in it, and in its regard, once more " la mort " ! — " la mort F 82 THE CATEGORIES sans phrase " ! And we owe it all to the decouvertes modernes. Est-il en droit de se considerer comme sachant quelque chose, celui qui ignore ces decou- vertes si magnifiques dans leur simplicite? Even as we are aware that it is really an ingenuousness of simpliciU that asks the question, we cannot hesitate to agree with at least its nett burden. That nett burden is M.E. — the mechanical equivalent — and positively he who in these days should find himself ignorant of it, would not, in general estimation, be very far wrong if he felt himself "not in his rights to consider himself as knowing anything." " Wells on dew " was once on a time pretty well a favourite reading, and Sir John Herschel on natural philosophy still, we doubt not, is such. But for the interest of a sound, strikingly resultful, variously comprehensive theory, we know not any other within the memory of the oldest among us that can, in name, surpass Energy. Still, we are not sure that we can say that, as it were, the " Corsican Boswell " on its cap should be : Here see the itat primitif as well as the Mat ultime of the physical universe! We have certainly an honest admiration for the simple admiration that is loud in the shout ; but we are, as certainly, without the conviction that will allow us to join in it. But — plainly — properly to judge of it here, we must take along with it the whole of the Nebular Hypothesis. And with this hypothesis, may not a beginning, the beginning, be said to be made from " a primordial vaporous matter diffused through space " ? CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 83 Absolutely, however, is it not to be said at once that a beginning so begun is no beginning : not one element in it is intelligibly a First. Space, for •example — or Time, Vapour — each, as there, as given, is but an unintelligible abstract. As we say of the first, "Giebt es einen Kaum" (does it so happen, then, that there is to be found, par hazard, such a thing as Space) ? So we may ask of Time — so we may ask of the Vapour : "for thinking requires to know the necessity." Perhaps it may be in perception of this that we have the gracious aside to all the three, Space, Time, and Vapour, "This" (of them) "does not drive the •Creator out of the field ! " Seeing that any further the whole labour of the handiwork is left to the Vapour alone, we may be allowed to suppose that ^11 up to that is graciously granted to — a god? The etat primitif, the primitive state can only mean that: infinite space, infinite time, and an infinite gas. We say infinite even of the gas ; for the dark backward and abysm of time can have allowed, by its own infinity in the infinity of space, at least a tantamount infinity of spread to the gas. But that is no beginning. These infinites ^re somewhat ticklish matters, and call for infinite allowances. We cannot wonder that Physics should be demure in regard to them — though we may — with what else is before us — regret it! For so Physics can allow us no more than, say, a merely epic middle with, what is only consonant, a merely epic god — deiLS ex machina ! 84 THE CATEGORIES But to take in hand the gas only, what are we to say of it? Well — at once — a very burdened gas, a very heavily burdened gas, it must have been, in the very first moment of its existence: for it must have already held in germ — all ! It must have been pregnant, seminally pregnant, with inimitably more than even the vegete young Adam whom Jean Paul saw exult, in the face of his Eve, with exclaim: "By heaven I walk up and down, girt with a seed-bag that contains the seeds of all the nations; and I carry the repertorium and treasure-chest of the whole human race ! " Even such a repertorium, infinitesimally filled up, the first original gas must have been ; * but how could anything else have followed ? One and sole, a single system, a single entity throughout all space ^ where was there provision for the faintest stir in it ? Occupant of all space, from end to end, from length to length, from breadth to breadth, had it had any name under either, it had not room even for the relief of a turn ; and give it heat, where was that heat to go to — unless to itself ; how was emission,. how was any bubble, how was any bubble of an * This is to assume m the gas a vis insita in account of the whole ultimate development. Mr Darwin is very obstinate in that, for his development, he will owe nothing to any influence from within, but all to influence from without — as bringing it nearer gravitation, I suppose. Whereas philo- sophy, quite as much for evolution as Darwin, will certainly have involution as well ; and Aristotle pointedly says the truth as usual, that there must be a principle from within to bring movement and concert into things : then," says Mr Darwin, " I had at last got a theory by which ^to work." Theory is rather too big a word : it implies a complex of corre- CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 113 lated particulars. Mr Darwin's " theory " was a simple idea — this, namely, that the progeny of an organism always exhibited some variation, never mind how slight, from its parent before it. On that simple idea Mr Darwin turned ; his whole soul flashed, kindled, and his mind flew open. It be- longed to his simple, ingenuous, sincere, straight, instantaneous nature to dwell here, on and on, as in a world of consequences. A variation, however accidental, might not just come and go : it might have consequences ; consequences, consequences ; and consequences again consequences : " The result would be the formation of a new species ! " Now all this might have come into the head of any man : it did not need to owe one jot, dot, or tittle of it to any particular knowledge of natural history ; and neither did it owe anything whatever in the mind of Darwin to his accomplishment, mastership in his own exclusive industry. From that moment's idea, indeed he turned from his peculiar study, as a study, to be matured, perfected, and completed, and gave himself up to one incessant action of miscellaneous inquiry — some of it Quixotic enough, hazardous enough, futile enough. Now, the love of hypothesis as quite a family tick is admitted. And Mr Francis Darwin has of his father these strong words : " It was as though he were charged with theorising power ready to flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory, and thus the fact became magni- H 11 THE CATEGORIES fied into importance : in this way it naturally hap- pened that many untenable theories occurred to him." He who does not see that the whole story is told in some one or two of these last sentences, ought to know that he is simply out of court — that he has no place whatever in the business. I turn to B. Evolution as Evolution. For this, too, is plain that, in all probability, there never was, pure and simple, a single Dar- winian unless Mr Darwin himself. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr Huxley are responsible for, it may be, three-fourths of the success of Mr Darwin. And Lyell, possibly quite ashamed at what he had been taken in to say at Aberdeen, had turned quite round; while' Huxley, in insisting on conditions, showed that the bottom-thought of Darwin was unknown to him. In fact, that there never was any one man, evolutionist as he might be, a Dar- winian evolutionist, pure and simple, will, I think, when the allegation is considered in the necessity of all the proof shown, be irresistibly agreed to. Why, if new species is the result of " variation" and if " of the causes of variation we are," as Mr Darwin says, " profoundly ignorant " — at the same time that, if " conditions " are " causes of variation," of them, too, on the same authority, " we are profoundly ignorant" — while, equally authoritatively, we are told withal that, as to any internal principle of evolu- tion, there is none such : what is there left for the hypothesis of natural selection to depend on — what CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 115 but the conjectural reference to accident and chance of Mr Darwin alone to himself ? And, honestly now, does that possibly leave anything else what- ever, on the whole field, of conceivable stability on the terms — does that, I ask, leave anything what- ever to the common sense of any other mortal ? The conclusion is peremptory : That the so far public voice became Darwinian, not because of the Darwinian rationale as Darwinian, but because of evolution as evolution, and in that because it hated Biblicalism — what is here called Aufkldrung ! And so we are left for a moment here with only evolution as Evolution abstractly before us. Now with evolution as evolution — all being looked at, things are not so bad. There is a crass way of looking at creation as Oreation at the hands of God, which is, at least to the understanding, a check ; while, if we conceive or suppose a first life from which all other lives natur- ally follow, we, by the very word naturally^ feel placed, as it were, at home. We need not, however, pursue this, or reason it out in either the one way or the other. Nature is not dead : it is a life. The Categories are an evolution — an evolution in themselves : but out of themselves, as an externalisation of them- selves, as Nature, they are also an evolution of themselves — self-accordantly in the inorganic. Why not, similarly, also, self-accordantly in the organic ? 116 THE CATEGORIES A peculiar point, too, we may say here, comes up in these millions and millions of years, through imagination of which Mr Darwin would effect realisation of his receipt. When one sees the per- fect aplomb with which he names these millions and millions, even in respect of such a comparatively near matter as the denudation of the Weald, one feels that Mr Darwin must have in his mind no less than an infinitude of time for the production, and further process, of that extraordinary, supposititious,, casual individual that — " born with some slight variation profitable to some part of its economy " — is to become, in the end, actually this our Floray actually this our Fauna — and all accidentally I But Infinity, to reason, is only the eternal I^ow. "I read, not long ago, an admirable book on^ geology ; and, in these perpetual wearings down and heavings up that seem really intimated there to go on and on, and round and round, recurrently for ever, I had a most vivid vision of an eternal life even on the part of this little Earth of ours.'' A development of which infinitude may be predi- cated — and even as a development — only is : it never was not ; and it never was aught else. To be sure, there are to be found, referentially in regard, certain positive calculations. If the geologist, in his wonder at the all but passive process, only ven- tures a word about indefinite millions of years as ta that matter of age of the earth, there are others bolder who write these years definitely down twenty; while another, with a half laugh in dis- CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 117 tinction of himself, comes jauntily to the front with ten ! But, if twenty, if ten, why not less ? No doubt, as just implied, in a development, there are shadings and shadowings, as it were ; but these shadings and shadowings are as much eternal as the eternally predicated development itself : they are as much now as it itself is. On the whole, we may allow ourselves to gaze rather at these millions, and millions, and millions of our confessedly imaginative Naturalist ! Withal, is not the entire consideration in regard conform to — just a part, indeed — of Mr Darwin's one whole philosophy ? Does not one single strain of reflection constitute, it may be, foundation, and centre, and animating principle to the entire labour that is his — his proprium, his peculium, Natural Selection ? That foundation, that centre, that animating principle is what he believes of Newton and of what Newton found — only what was physical. "It is mere rubbish thinking of the origin of life, and, as to the origin of matter," he says, matter being to him but a word for the uni- verse, "I have never troubled myself about such insoluble questions." And so all is but an inexpli- cable accident ; no Fauna but is the accident of an accident ; no Flora but is the accident of an acci- dent : " there seems to me to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, than in the course which the wind blows " — all. Creation itself, for no less is intimated, is but inexplicable accident. With all this in our minds on the part of Mr Darwin, I il8 THE CATEGORIES do not fancy that any one of us, naturally thinking, as we all do, and as undoubtedly did Diderot when he said : " It is the last of absurdities to believe or say that the eye has not been made to see nor the ear to hear " — I do not think, I say, that any one of us, so taught, so by very nature minded, would for one moment be prepared to credit his own eyes when he reads this astounding avowal of Mr Huxley's ! — " The supposition that the eye was made — for enabling the animal to see — ^has undoubtedly re- ceived its deathblow ! " In the "Concluding considerations of my Dar- winianism," I shall be found to have quoted some things from that excellent " Journal " of Mr Dar- win's which it might be wished he had remembered before committing himself to the accident of this world, or to such accidents of accidents as our Faunas and Floras. In the same connexion, I quote also from Erasmus (Darwin) much that is striking — much, indeed, so striking that — with Mr Huxley and the eye before us — one would like to quote it all again. I quote only this, however, as quite sufficient in itself to throw wide a door to all due meditation : — "What induces the bee, who lives on honey, to lay up vegetable powder for its young ? What in- duces the butterfly to lay its eggs on leaves, when itself feeds on honey ? What induces other flies to seek a food for their progeny different from what they consume themselves ? " CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 119 " Who taught the ant (asks Bacon) to bite every grain of corn that she burieth in her hill, lest it should take root and grow ? " So far as I am concerned, then, the taboo may be quite well raised now from the two pooh-poohed books that have so much to do with design, Cicero, on the Gods, and Paley on Natural Theology. Both of them deal in ideas ; and come from where they may, ideas are as true as things, thought as matter, subject as object. Nay, respectively, it is the former are the truer, or indeed the sole truth at last. I do honestly think that we are perfectly free again to enjoy our Cicero or our Paley just as we used to do. I desire to add before concluding, that I know not that I have made enough of these, the invisi- bles, the Infusoria, in my reference above to Mr Darwin ; and so now and here I allow myself to quote from the recognised Text - Books as follows : — " Many of the Infusoria are of a high grade of organisation. The reproductive process in many of them is perfectly well known, and it consists in some of them in a true sexual process, for which proper organs are provided." This evidence is not discrepant from that on which Kant founds — see back. When we recollect, then, that Mr Darwin has for his procession never in his eye a single individual that is not, so to speak, visibly solid — nay, that his 120 THE CATEGORIES very Proteine which is to give birth and origin to all is so very visibly solid, so very materially solid, that he cannot withhold the lament that, if it were formed now, "such matter would be instantly devoured, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." How we are to make good, before such a disturbing upthrow as this of these little creatures, the hiatus in his pro- cession of forms, it is difficult to see. The Glossary of his friend, Mr Dallas, mentions the Infusoria well enough, but he himself, so far as I know, never. " Minute, mostly microscopic creatures (Eotifera, namely) — nevertheless of a very high grade of organisation — possessing mouth, stomach, alimentary canal, a distinct and well-developed nervous system, a differentiated reproductive apparatus, and even organs of vision." " Many of these little masses of structureless jelly (Foraminifera) possess the power of manufacturing for themselves, of lime, or the still more intractable liint, external shells of surpassing beauty and mathe- matical regularity " (these for the shells). " No Physicist has hitherto succeeded in explain- ing any fundamental phenomenon upon purely physical and chemical principles. For example, it is certain that digestion presents phenomena which are yet inexplicable on any chemical theory. The Amoeba, an animalcule, a mere mobile lump of jelly, digests as perfectly as does the most highly organised animal, etc." " During the whole period of recorded human observation, not one single instance of the change of one species into another has been detected ; and. CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 121 singular to say, in successive geological formations, although new species are constantly appearing, no single case has yet been observed of one species passing into another." I think all has been said now that need be said on the whole theme of evolution, as it is understood at the present day. The single process of external accident by which acting, in infinite time, on the first organic element, "Proteine Compound," or already " one or more Primordial Forms," which, " by some wholly unknown process " (mere accident, then, as usual) just " appeared " — the single process of external accident, I say, by which Mr Darwin would account for all that in the world is organised, plant, brute, man, ought not to be lost from sight, as it really is. As it really is : for no evolutionist has before him now anything but the vague idea, as dic- tionaries have it, that "the higher are but the descendants of lower forms through an infinite variety of stages," though usually forgetting withal, as the dictionaries have it also, that to develop is "To advance from one stage to another by a process of natural or inherent evolution." Mr Darwin even categorically denied the inherency, because, as Mrs Browning has it, he was "not poet enough to understand that life develops from within I " As excellently applicable to Mr Darwin, it may be sufficiently in place to wind up here with this from Goethe : " Theories are usually the over hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would 122 THE CATEGORIES gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place, pictures, notions, nay, often mere words." The son (i. 149) tells of his father how it was that he " naturally " dealt in " many untenable theories." CHAPTEE IV EELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES And under this head it may suggest itself, from much that precedes, as for us in place, to consider only : the Auf klarung in its two numbers, No. 1 and No. 2. The AufklUrung, as the Aufklarung generally, means the " discrepancies " — that, whatever it is that, in the Bible, let it be Old or let it be New, checks — for instance, the Miracle of the Swine. We have the report of it, not in John, but in all the three Synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in all of them substantially to the same effect : namely, that uQclean spirits, called Legion, having one or two men demoniacally in possession, were cast out of him or them by the Saviour, and further ordered by Him, but at their own request, to enter into a great herd of many swine (some two thousand of them) then feeding at some distance off, which great herd of many swine thereupon instantly rushed down a steep place into the sea, and there perished, or were choked. The whole account in each of the three 123 124 THE CATEGORIES Evangelists is circumstantially a very full one ; but I have not, in any respect, so to speak, mitigated it. And at the same time, I cannot but think the spirit of fairness on my part that has dictated my choice of the example, will be readily allowed me even by the most devoted member of ^o. 1. Shakespeare himself does not hesitate to allow his Jew to speak derisively of " the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devil into," and without pro- test either, even on the part of the Christian, who at that early day, heard him. This may suggest that even in the days of Shakespeare the Aufklarung No. 1 had already at least begun. Shakespeare's dates are 1564-1616; those of the English Deists, Herbert, Blount, Toland, Collins, Wollaston, Annet, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Bolingbroke, may be said on the whole to run from the middle of the seventeenth to that of the eighteenth century ; while, lastly, those of Spinoza are 1632-77. The English Deists may, not altogether wrongly, be regarded as the earliest Bationalists. Like the later Germans, or others of the name, there are substantial thinkers among them ; but the bulk of them, then as now, can scarcely, or not at all, appear to us other than adherents of literal Aufklarung No. 1. As I have said elsewhere, I am inclined to name Spinoza's " Theologico-Political Tractate " as the opening, the beginning, the very first of the Aufklarung. This Tractate "has constituted the very arsenal of the Aufklarung, whether French or German: Voltaire's wit, and the erudition of tho RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 125 theological critics of the Fatherland, are alike in- debted to it." The Aufklarung, then, simply as the Aufkldrung or, as with me, the Aufklarung No. 1, is the histori- cal outburst of Biblical unbelief that preceded in France, but also elsewhere, the French Revolution — the disillusionising of the Bible, the expos6 or ex- posure of the "Discrepancies'* in the Christian Scriptures. This movement as it first appeared in Great Britain under such names, say, as Hume and Gibbon, was received by the bulk of the community with the intensest hate and the loudest execration. The good David, for example, was, in bodily pre- sence, hardly safe from the populace, whether alive or dead. But now has descended a " serener hour." A man, nowadays, may play his piano of a Sunday, and be even listened to ; but a generation or two ago, if he had as much as touched a note of it, only on a Fast day, he would have been denounced as an infidel, and the school playground would have been made painfully vocal for his children. Nay, the change is such that I was lately present with two or three or more rather high-placed Church Officials, Free and other, where said unfortunate herd of swine happened to be spoken of, and it was reported by one of them that he had heard it said that if the loss of the swine could have been brought home to any one man's door, against that man, the owner of the swine would have had an excellent case at law ! If such a palpable word of Aufklarung could pass among the members of them, it was only to be expected that OF THt UNIVERSITY 126 THE CATEGORIES the Churches themselves would — in their own way, truly — shortly follow suit. I dare say many of us may have taken note of this in our ordinary papers of the day — how the most accepted and approved magnates, Priucipals, Presidents, Professors, what not, are reported to have, again and again, somewhat liberally, and surely honestly, said an open word on Confessions of Faith, etc. And this, too, not with- out sympathy on the part of those under them. For such things, again, can only prompt the news papers to such encouraging avowals as these: " When everybody becomes openly unorthodox, no- body can be a heretic : we cannot see the wood for the trees. No one doubts that the vast majority of the ministers in all our Churches now hold opinions and cherish beliefs and disbeliefs which would at one time have brought upon them sentence of excommuni- cation." In fact, there is not a doubt of it, the Auf- klarung, the Biblical disillusion, as I say elsewhere, " has descended on the generality " ; and so much so, indeed, is this the case that " if a man would have any success with the general public nowadays," it is as an Aufgeklarter he must approve himself: there must not be even a suspicion that he is not " ad- vanced ! " Heine is rather popular among us at present, but I hardly think that even his most devoted and least religious admirers would applaud when Noack, himself surely not -i^Tz-aufgeklart, re- ports expressions of his (Heine's) in this connexion : — "This Theism" — there and then spoken of — " Schelling desired to make again salonfahig (draw- RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 127 ing-room-fit). And should we wonder (ii. 454), if the frivolous, witty Heine, in the year 1835, intro- duced, into the second part of his 'Salon,' the philosopher of the Eomantic ? Nevertheless, he sees, in the history of philosophy, nothing but futile attempts to save the old religion and luckier others to foist in for it something new. — After Christianity had become, in the century before his, a pure deism, Kant (so Heine continues) shall have given this deism its settler, too, put God to the sword, and forced immortality to breathe its last. It is, there- fore, in his judgment, properly speaking, a scandal that afterwards a few thinkers should have still presumed to seek to wake up God again from the dead. That (he finds) is particularly unpardonable on the part of Schelling, who began with Spinozism, but now, , as though a good Catholic, preaches an extra-mun- dane personal God that has had the folly to create the world." The translator would fain believe that such words — which, he confesses, pain him — are, surely, now, for the first time to be seen in English ; but there are others as bad or even worse to follow, and only a proposed application can possibly extend to either those or these the excuse of a moment. They, these latter, will be found in Eosenkranz's "Elucidations to Hegel's Encyklopsedie," which, published in 1870, certainly carry with them that excellent writer's maturest Hegel. It is towards the end of the little book that the subject of religion is taken up and with the references that we have in mind : — " When any one nowadays would make his debut as a philosopher, the first thing he has to do is to 128 THE CATEGORIES declare off not only from Christianity, but from religion, too, as a standpoint, namely — which, through natural science and education, has been long left behind." But " he (Hegel) is not ashamed of Christianity." " Unhappy times ! he exclaims, which we must always go on telling that there is a God. Of not one of our great philosophers can it be said that he was an atheist ; neither of Leibnitz and Kant, nor of Fichte and Schelling, nor of Krause and Herbart, nor of Baader and Hegel. Only of Schopenhauer, who, consequently, though opposed to Materialism, has become a favourite with the mass." "We wholly lose ourselves in mere sense — all comes to us from without — thought, thinking, is but a physio- logical process. Free-will as determination of one's own self is a chimera. There is only a mechanical determinism. The word Spirit, soul, should be struck from the vocabulary, because it only per- petuates the greatest and most pernicious falsehoods." " Since a generation back we have lived under an ever increasing thraldom of materialism and atheism. When Paul Leroux asserted that atheism had already penetrated to the masses, I opposed him. Very soon after, however, I came to the knowledge of facts which proved him to be right. In the German Workingmen's Unions of Switzerland, a song is sung which runs thus: — " Curse tlie God, the blind one, the deaf one, To whom we prayed in childish belief In whom we hoped, for whom we waited, He has scoffed us, he has fooled us." * " Fluch dem Gotte, dem blinden, dem tauhen, Zu dem wir gebetet in kindlichem Glauben Auf den wir gehofft, auf den wir geharrt, Er hat uns gefoppt, er hat uns genarrt." * The German Singer must have taken time over this to find rhymes for it ! RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 129 We may have friends who shall be partial to the Aufklarung and even to the No. 1 of it, and yet may be really the worthiest of mankind. Such men as these we would honestly expect to be shocked and revolted, as well by the frivolousness of Heine, as by the tunelessness of the Swiss. Almost we would expect them half to try back now — almost we would expect them to ask, what, then, is this Aufklarung No. 2? Of No. 2 I have said, I think for the first time, this : — • " For the last hundred years, the Aufklarung has been admitted as a historical fact ; but, equally as historical fact, there has to be admitted now the correction of it, what we may call the Aufklarung No. 2. No. 1 denied the spirit because of the letter. No. 2, so far as it can, accepts the letter because of the spirit. So far as Christianity is concerned, the dictum of Mr Gladstone is to be considered as very well in place. In a letter of his to the Rev. Alexander Webster, Aberdeen, as published in the Scotsman (of letter's date, 'N. 9. 90'), he has these words : ' As for myself, I build upon historical Christianity, the great world-fact of 1800 years.' The Christian civilisation, that is, after the pagan — or better, the classical pagan — civilisation is now the blood in our veins ; and by the right of it even a so-called atheist is substantially a Christian. It is but vulgarity for any one nowadays, harking back to the Aufklarung No. 1, to talk, so to speak, the shop of it." So far as concerns what is said here of the Spirit and the Letter, I think we are warranted in it by I 130 THE CATEGORIES Scripture itself : accordingly I quote a verse or two : — " But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. " God is a Spirit ; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing. " The Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He (the Comforter) shall testify of me. " Circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, and not in the letter. " Serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. " Not of the letter, but of the spirit : for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. " Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit." Still it is not to be said that the letter is to be unconsidered. That, however, is a consideration for the Church we belong to as the Church, and we who belong to it must respect its standards so long as its standards they are. But, just in mere ordinary reference, we, as individuals, as men, as human beings, cannot be denied our right to think out whatever is in contra- diction to the deepest reason or the plainest under- standing ; and, though we may not have said more than a single word relatively (the swine), we shall RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 131 assume, so far, that single word to suffice. What — when Christ's own words are not authenticatingly there — what, in the New Testament, the Evangelists write, or the Apostles write, or the Disciples write, can be characterised as on the whole popular — in all of them, namely, the exception apart, it is fairly characterisable as in general a popular account; nor of those who are responsible for what we read in the Old Testament are we to speak with more differences than the naturally relative ones. Of both Testaments, and without distinction of contents in either, we are taught that they are inspired. I know not, however, that we should offend if we made in our own minds the sanctioned distinction between the spirit and the letter. We may hesitate about the letter; but we do not for one moment hesitate about the spirit. Of the Bible as a whole, that it is inspired, that it is in spirit inspired, no man can doubt — nay, among all the books that have ever been written, that it is in spirit specially inspired must be the acknowledgment of every honest intelligence all the world over, at all warranted by education to speak. So much for what may be spirit in a popular account; but we cannot speak so of the letter. The basis of a popular account is always rumour — Tumour, so to speak, of the countryside: and such rumour is always the creature of the popular imagination, which, though it does not see a flying horse in the sky, says it does. I do not 132 THE CATEGORIES think I am called upon to illustrate this: it is a matter of everyday; and I am reminded of what I once before referred to in Hegel, where he warns- us against the got up stories about Pythagoras, and continues to this effect: "The life of Pythagoras- only shows to us in history at first hand through the medium of the figurating ideations of the first centuries after Christ in the taste or manner, more or less, in which the life of Christ is narrated to us, on the footing, that is, of common actuality (not in a poetical world), as a miscellany of many wondrous and adventurous fables, as a half and half of eastern and western fancies " (as regards Pythagoras, namely). This shall suffice for all that concerns the letter,. and for all that concerns popular infiguration in the letter. It may be objected here, however, that, if there be^ a possibility of recognising the Letter even through the plainest understanding, it does not suggest itself at once how it shall be as regards discernment of the Spirit. What this concerns is what is known, in current phrase, as the Testimony of the Spirit; and what that is it is for us to know now. Scripture, in less or more direct form, has such references to it as these : — " And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. " When He, the Spirit of truth, is come. He will guide you into all truth. RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 133 " The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. " It is the Spirit itself that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth." The truth is the testimony of the Spirit, and it is the testimony of the Spirit makes free. That is the great word of this testimony — that the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit. Specially, however, it is to be said, if only now for the first time, that— /or us — the spirit, the testifying spirit, concerned, is — The single breath of the co-integrated mass of the co-integrating categories, self-evolved, self-involved — consciousness, self-consciousness, the concrete ego, as in the Ego and /row the Ego that is the Infinite, the Living Universal, the absolute I Am : God. We see here, then; as in actual letter, what the testimony of the spirit is : It is the breath of the Categories. But these, the Categories, are they, then, a common possession ? Are they such in every man as to give every man — Testimony of the Spirit ? Potentially — Yes : Actually — No. Self-consciousness just as self -consciousness is the potentiality of reason ; and the potentiality of reason is the potentiality of the Categories. But poten- tiality, again, just as potentiality, is but the natural first, as this natural first, further, must, on its side, be matured, if not to, then always towards, the developed last — the Universal. That last no one of us ever is : the truest among 134 THE CATEGORIES us may approach, but never he. God alone is the Universal. All of us ordinary men, very diversely actual, can but, from reach to reach, rise. In the quoted paragraph that concerns the Auf- klarung in its numbers of 1 and 2, or of, what is- the same thing, the Letter and the Spirit, there is mention of Christianity as Christianity. IsTow that is a most important consideration. It is a considera- tion that the Aufklarung, just as the Aufkliirung, seems to have wholly neglected. Almost indeed it would seem as though the Aufklarung had said, the Aufklarung being judge, Christianity is nought and not. But is that so? Because of the Miracle of the Swine is Christianity nought — is Christianity to be thought as not? And here it is that the Auf- klarung No. 2 has its cue. Even as an external event, Christianity is there : Christianity has come, Christianity is, Christianity is a historical movement, Christianity is itself History, Christianity is in fact Us. The rights and lots of the Slave, the rights and lots of the Poor, the rights and lots of Woman, the rights and lots of Man as Man — Life, Heart, Soul — a New Life, a New Heart, a New Soul: That is Christianity. Nay Science, the Stars of Heaven, the Ends of the Earth, and the Deeps of the Sea: That is Christianity. And all that is not to be because of the miracle of the swine ! Is it not innocent, this, on the part of the Aufgeklarter — to forget all about Christianity RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 135 as Christianity, and remember only the miracle of the swine! Think only what our books tell us about our Lyric Poetry: — " As the inner world has only through Christianity attained to its true development and import, so also only in the Christian world is it that lyrical poetry has completely and in all its differences developed itself." The mere subject of Culture again shall lead to the production of such distinctions as these : — " If there was a blossom of Culture in Greece, it was only in the Christian world that it could be ripened to fruit. It was the world-re- ligion of Jesus that was fitted at full to bring culture into its innermost sanctuary, so that thence, inspired with the divine breath, it might penetrate the entire spirit, all the relations of life, and replenish them with vitality and soul." And of Christianity gener- ally we are told elsewhere : — " The acknowledgment of the one true God, and of Jesus as His Christ, and the obligation to a moral life according to the idea of the Godhead — these, therefore, are the essentials of Christianity. This simplicity of the religious belief, this character of universality, goodwill to all men, this freeing of the religious life from all the limitations of special places and prescribed cere- monials, and this noble, moral spirit, which has moulded life according to the idea of the Perfection which has in Jesus an embodied ideal, and this direction of religion to the purely human without respect of rank, nation, and political constitution, has procured Christianity so wide an extension and 136 THE CATEGORIES given it so beneficent an influence on the destiny of mankind." This, too, in the same connexion is a general principle, and of importance, that it is on individual free-will that with us, nowadays, the State is founded, a condition that in ancient times was politically impossible. That a State should be pos- sible on individual free-will, for that mankind had to wait the advent of Christianity ; for it was with Christianity that there came into the world the new principle of such free-will, of such liberty. The softening and enriching influence of Christianity — that in Christianity which exalted and expanded the soul of man into the universal itself — nay, within that, the hard training and discipline of the Christian duties and the Christian life : just all that Christianity means — that was the necessity of the modern State. I have noted, on the part of others, or even myself elsewhere, a variety of express passages to the same effect ; but I dread disproportionately to heap. I may remind, however, that a propos of a reference to Hegel, on the foundations of belief (p. 13), I had a remark or two which, surely as apposite here, I may venture to repeat : — " The Aufkliirung, namely, with its absolute com- pleteness of general information, supported, too, by the full enlightenment of all knowledge of science, rigorous, exact scientific truth as it now is — the Auf- klarung, I say, tends to deny, or, at least, sceptically to doubt, every item, every the most momentous and vital particular, of Religion — Eeligion, as we have RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 137 it ' through the ages.' Am I wrong in venturing to surmise that this to some extent summarises the central idea of a book that, considering the number of editions it counts, must have given thought, and a thought, to not a few presently existing readers — this book,* namely, * The Foundations of Belief,' by Mr Balfour." And now it may be in place here that, in this the religious reference, we pass to a word — only a word — on Hegel ; but what it concerns can be characterised only as the profound result of a truly categorical depth and gravity of inquest and insight. " It is not necessary to read very deep into Hegel," says Schelling, to come to know that his main quest is ** the An sich of things." The An sich of things is, in the language of Schelling, their Was, their What ; and one need not indeed go deeper than the surface to come to know that, with all his philosophy, it is the Was of religion that is to Hegel his main pivot. This, and that to Hegel also God is, as it were, the constitutive thought of religion — to know as much, I say, is to be lost in wonder as to what knowledge, or what want of knowledge, could have warranted * This remarkable work seems to me to be really a plea for spiritualism against the undue pretentions of the too prevalent modern view which may be named " Naturalism " as with "Mr Balfour." A friend writes me this his wind up of criticism on it : — " The book ought to be read by these ^educated' people who are apt, in the present day, to talk as if science was so certain and philosophy so unreal : it might be useful for them to learn on what very insecure foundations what they think to be so certain really rests." This book is a cheering event in these days ; and much to the same effect is Mr Haldane's veritable philosophy in that his attractive and somewhat unique work, The Pathway to Reality. 138 THE CATEGORIES any man unmisgivingly to lay at the bottom of a whole book - judgment (to the Public) on Hegel that he, Hegel "had the audacity to say that philosophy was to make us indifferent to whether God existed or not!" This can be only paralleled by that magnanimous attempt on the part of certain learned Professors, as recorded in Transactions of certain learned Scottish Societies, fundamentally to expose and explode that "Hegelian Calculus" of Hegel's own, which they themselves had — dreamt ! As regards Hegel's declarations in respect of God, I will quote a few from the Philosophy of Eeligion : — " God is the beginning of All and the end of All ; as All proceeds from Him, so also All goes back to Him ; and He is no less the middle, that animates and inspires All and, preserving those forms in their existence, puts into all of them soul. " The object of religion is the eternal truth, God, and nothing but God. "God is the Absolute Spirit, who is there not only in our thought, but as existent person. " God is einer — a person, not eines — a substance, as in Pantheism. "God is the God of all men — not mere all-em- bracing, general spirit (i. 4, 21, 27; ii. 48, 186)." Such quotations might, in either connexion be indefinitely multiplied, but all to the single effect, that God to Hegel is the One, Sole, Personally Existent, Living God. In fact, in actual fact — in truth, in very truth, he RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 139 only will say the fact and the truth of Hegel, who says that Hegel, the whole of Hegel, is to be found in that single edge, that single concrete edge — religion, the religious moment: "God's Grace and Man's Sacrifice." It was not for nothing that, all these years of his lonely exile in Switzerland at Berne, Hegel grubbed and groped and burrowed himself into religion — burrowed himself into religion — Christianity — and there found himself : found himself in God. It is in the first volume of the Philosophy of Eeligion — in what is there called The Religious Relation that Hegel lays the deep foundations — the Metaphysic — of this whole Crisis. And no man can miss it who absorbs himself into the " Cultus " that follows. The Cultus takes up some fifty pages ; but more than a hundred are given to the Eeligious Eolation that precedes it. Hegel, in discussion and exposition, is very particular and full here; but I am minded — without going into them either — to direct attention to no more than the final twenty pages. But what these concern is the very heart of Hegel, the very eye of his whole business, to call it so. They concern, that is, "The Speculative Notion (Begriff) of Eeligion." For this Begriff Hegel, at some length prepares the way by certain expositions that concern the Finite, the last one of which bears to be "The Rational Consideration of the Finite," and that means the result to the Finite when it is viewed 140 THE CATEGORIES by reason. The paragraph that opens here I translate thus : — " This standpoint is to be considered as it stands in relatio7i to the form of Eeflexion in its highest point. Transition from this standpoint must be dialectical in its nature and dialectically made. This, however, belongs to Logic. We shall proceed thus : concretely state it, and, as for what concerns necessity in the transition, appeal to the consequence of the standpoint itself which is this : — / as finite am a nullity, and as such to be abolished, but this abolishment, all the same, is not accomplished if this immediate individuality withal remains and so remains that only this Ego is the affirmative, as the standpoint of reflexion gives it. The finite that rates itself non-finite is only abstract identity y void in itself, the highest form of untruth, the lie and the bad. There must, then, be a standpoint got in which the Ego (the Me), in this individualism, does, in fact and reality, do denial on itself. I must be the particular subjectivity that is in effect denied (negated) ; but there must be an objective (something) recognised by me even so, which in point of fact is valid to me as true, as the affirmative, put in my place, in which I as this Ego (this Me) am negated, but in which my self-dependence (my Me in fact) is at the same time maintained. The self-depen- dence of reflexion is so individual a one that it gives place within itself to not another such, and as it must give place to some other, it proceeds in this without law and order (of will say), i.e., it has place for nothing Objective. Shall really an Objective be recognised, there belongs to that, that I become determined as a Universal, hold myself as, am to myself a Universal. This, now, is nothing else than the standpoint of thinking reason; and just religion RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 141 itself is this act, this action of thinking reason and of one that in reason thinks : as individual (Einzelner) to set one's self as the universal, and negating one's self as individual (Einzelner — Singular), to find one's true self as the universal. " Of this standpoint, the universal general moments, the more particular thought moments, are now to be brousrht to view." This is not happy writing. In rendering it, I have felt obliged to follow the conceived thoughts as well as the expressed words of Hegel. An example will explain. One sentence runs in German : " Die Freiheit der Eeflexion ist eine solche, die nichts in sich enstehen lasst und da sie doch entstehen lassen muss, in diesem Setzen ohne Gesetz und Ordnung verfahrt, d. h. nichts Objectives entstehen lasst. The freedom of Eeflexion is such a one, that it lets nothing arise in its self and as it, nevertheless, must let arise, proceeds in this Setting without law and order, i.e., lets nothing objective arise." I do not suppose there is any one, German or English, who can make anything of this. I cannot certainly affirm that what I make of it (higher up) is right. The difficulty is all too great. In truth it may be that what we have here but illustrates the fact that what of Hegel had publica- tion only at the hands of others after his death, cannot be depended on in the same way as what he himself published. I conceive the burthen of the whole passage quoted to be this : My ego (as me) knows itself to be finite 142 THE CATEGORIES — singular, an individual, not a universal — and so knows itself in that quality to be no more than a null, a nothing : Knows, that is, that it has its truth, its reality only in the universal : into which negated, that its very negatedness is only an absorbedness, an identifiedness. That is the act of religion : the singular or particular is identified into the universal —God. Accurately, this is nothing else than that God created man — but in his own image. Man is a creature, finite ; but in his consciousness, the image of God, man is infinite. "This is nothing else" (as just said) "than the standpoint of thinking reason; and just religion itself is this act, this action of thinking reason and of one that, with reason or in reason, thinks ; to set one self, a singular, as the universal, and, negating one's self as singular, to find one's true self as the universal" (188). "Of this standpoint, the universal general moments, the more particular thought moments, are now to be shown " (189). Ajid now there follows an intimate exposition, demonstration, of " The Speculative Notion (Begriff) of Eeligion." This I leave to the reader; and, with what- ever difficulty, he can always realise it for himself, if he will but duly absorb himself — and Think (189-204). The result is, that Christianity is, with all that I may quote — and all shall be relative — directly or indirectly, this : — RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 143 Blessedness can only be said of God, in whom Will, and realisation of his absolute Might are one. For man, however, agreement of externality with hisinter- nality is circumscribed and contingent (Propsed. 31). The substantial relation of man to God seems to be a Beyond, a Yonder. But the love of God to man and of man to God annuls the disunion between this side and what is conceived as a yonder side, and is The Eternal Life. This identity is made visible in Christ. As son of man, he is son of God. For the God-Man there is no yonder. Not as this individual man is he, but as man universal, as the veritable, the true man. The external side of his history must be distinguished from the religious side. He suffered and died in lowliness, in shame. His pain was the depth of the unity of the divine and human nature in life and suffering. The " Messed. Gods " of the heathens were figured as in a yonder : through Christ has common reality, this lowliness, which is not disgrace, been itself made sacred (ib. 204). Christianity, round which turned the revolution of the world that now is. The absolute nature of God is not to be named substance, but subject (person), spirit. As though without God there could be anything absolute or true at all (xvii. 156, 167, 290). With the idea of Christianity, as the new religion which has come into the world, the essential principle is that the Absolute is known in concrete wise as Spirit, God is not a mere general thought, a con- ception. Within Christianity, the ground-fact is, that in man there has arisen the consciousness of the truth, of substantial Spirit, and that man be participant of this truth. Man must be so that for him this truth is ; further he must be convinced of this as possible. This is the absolute call and need ; man must have come to the consciousness that this 144 THE CATEGORIES alone is the truth. The first interest in the Christian religion, therefore, is that the import of the Idea be revealed to man : or, more particularly, that there come to the consciousness of man the unity of the divine and human nature, on the one side as sub- stantial unity, and on the other as in the Cultus realised unity. The Christian life is that our sub- jectivity have trust in this idea, that the individual know himself as taken in claim, that he make him- self worthy in himself to attain to this unity, that the spirit of God, grace, as it is named, dwell in him. In Christianity this substantiality of the intellectual world. Spirit, has become common consciousness — this is a second creation of the world, which has followed the first ; only first in it has spirit come to understand itself as Ego = Ego, i.e., as self- conscious- ness (xv. 35-7, 106). That a man is in himself free, in his substance as man born free : that was known neither to Plato nor Aristotle. Only in the Christian principle is essen- tially the individual personal soul, spirit, of infinite, absolute worth ; God wills that there shall be help for all men. With the Christian religion came the truth that before God all men are equal ; for Christ has emancipated them into Christian liberty. And so this liberty is made independent of birth, station, learning, etc., etc. (xiii. 63). God is self -conscious- ness ; He knows Himself in another consciousness that in itself is the consciousness of God, but also as itself, in that it knows its identity with God, an identity, however, which is realised by negation of the finite (xii. 191). The eternal life of the Christian is the spirit itself of God, and the spirit of God is just this, to be self -consciousness of Himself as the divine spirit (xi. 394). Only Christianity, through the doctrine of God made man, and from the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of the faithful, RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 145 first gave to the human consciousness a perfectly free relation to the infinite and thereby made possible the notional (Jbegreifende) cognition of Spirit in its absolute infinitude. First, only through the Christian religion has the one nature of God (but distinguished within itself), the totality of the divine Spirit in the form of unity, been revealed (vii. pt. 2. 4, 32). The Christian God is not merely the known God, but the absolutely himself-knowing God, and not merely conceived, but rather absolutely actual personality. The universal in its true and compre- hensive signification is a thought, of which it must be said that it (the thought) took thousands of years before it came into the consciousness of man, and which only through Christianity reached its full recognition. The true ground, why there are no longer any slaves in Europe, is to be sought in nothing else than in the principle of Christianity itself. The Christian religion is the religion of perfect freedom; and only for the Christian is man as such in his infinitude and universality (vi. 297, 321-2). Not one word that has now been said, but has its essential bearing on the Aufklarung No. 1. That Christianity as Christianity, a whole world's signifi- cance, should lose its import, should forfeit its validity, its truth, its deep consequence to humanity as humanity because of the miracle of the swine ! Let the commonality of the account be what it may, let the popularity of the account be what it may — eminently natural and eminently naturally in place both, they are both but of the surface surface and of the external external, as, consequently, of the contingent contingent. What are they to the depth K 146 THE CATEGORIES and internality of the truth of God ? The Aufkla- rung No. 1, is but vulgarity out of date ! The Aufklarung 'No. 1, is but vulgarity out of date ! And if, when so placed, it is vulgarity out of date, what is it when it is the relation to Jesus that is in place ? What is the Book — what is it in the Evangelists — ^what in the Apostles — in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — in James, and Peter, and Jude — in Paul — in and under all these names what is the Book — what is the New Testament — what can we say that it is, but that it is Jesus ? Whole and sole it is as Jesus, only as Jesus, that we see the Book. The Book is Jesus, and Jesus is the Book. We have histories and histories on our shelves, and, no doubt, we have great men — great men and good men — in all of them ; but is there a single man of them all, great men, good men, equal to Jesus ? Not one ! Even in the finite — that is, of men — Jesus is alone what we can think of as the Universal. And after Philosophy, as we have seen, the Universal has its own meaning. "Shakespeare entering, we should all rise," said Lamb, " but Christ, we should all kneel." * Is there any place for the vulgarity of an Aufkla- rung No. 1, here ! ■^ "Napoleon shutting up the New Testament said of Christ — 'Savez vous que je me connais en hommes? Eh bien, celui-1^ ne fut pas un homme.'" Browning chronicles all this somewhere. CHAPTEE V CONCLUSION I KNOW not, however, that I have anything of importance to say by way of conclusion : this whole little book, indeed, I really regard as no more than as something of an appendix (something valuaUe as 5uch?) to my preceding volume. If, then, I have given it the title of The Categories, it is only because I regard these in the main to function all through it ; and I positively do not seem to myself to require to ^peak at any greater length on that head generally. As, however, it must seem to my readers that I have troubled myself most with the great names of the Kantian era, I think I may pardonably add just a word in connexion therewith. In the previous volume I am very full on Kant. That is, I am quite full on the Categories as they are in Kant. I may refer here to all that I have else- where said of Carlyle's^ro^os on the veteran. Carlyle lays stress on the bodily smallness of the man, in regard to which he thinks Kant's letters give him a right to speak morally as though in connexion with 147 148 THE CATEGORIES the known facts physical. I have presumed to differ from Mr Carlyle in this, instancing Kant's extra- ordinary fertility, that he has no sooner done with one Kritik than he is ready with a second, and a. third — with remarkable work after remarkable work, in fact, all freshly, frankly written, and with new and original ideas of his own. His third Kritik, the aesthetic one, is perhaps as regards such ideas the more remarkable of these latter; but, for all that,, his practical works are about the most interesting and inspiriting things he has ever written. One geta absorbed in them. Still, the climax and crown of them, which I suppose we may take the Categorical Imperative to be, though, no doubt, welcome, useful,, and all suggestive — precisely so on the individual occasion of call, too — is but itself abstract, certainly a universal, but as certainly only an abstract universal, not freighted with any table of completion and in- struction in regard to a philosophical scheme of all our various concrete duties, etc. Carlyle has Kant before him as " a small, most methodical, clear and nimble man, with those fine sharp cheery honest eyes, brow, intellect, those projected quizzically cautious lips of his : " and, doubtless, he was the best of all that. I do not suppose it can be held that Carlyle was always right. Nevertheless he was^ everywhere and at all times the True Thomas, and certainly — to me at least — his forte lay, not only in the perfect picturing of individual external scenery — the actuality without, but also in the sketching of individual internal character — the reality within. CONCLUSION 149 Carlyle's Kant, then, is perhaps, in its own way, not without at least a certain picturesque truth: in- tellectually, we must say at once, however, that Kant was not a small man. No doubt, if you eliminate from his works but one thing only, he will cease to Ije, what he is now, epochal. That one thing is the ■Categories — of course with all that they involve. This, too, is true : that the origin of the categories as they appear in Kant was pretty much the accident of an accident ; for it was pretty much by accident that Hume, in treating causality, asked in a way : If the oausal necessity is not a posteriori, where is it ? as it was pretty much by accident that, in return, Kant answered : why, a priori, of course ! And already, at the word, the German tree was planted ? Kant's earlier and smaller works, had they been alone, might, not at all improbably, have easily and reasonably disappeared — and he with them. But, his later and greater works, even without the cate- gories (which are what is magistral in them) — would they have disappeared ? If not epochal, Kant would no longer have been as a Descartes, or a Spinoza, or a Leibnitz, or a Locke, or a Eerkeley, or a Hume — no longer that, perhaps — but would he not, in advance of the Eeids, the Stewarts, the Browns, have been at least half of the way towards them? The third Kritik, independently of the categories, has excellences of its own ; and still more righteously can this be said for the second. No doubt, the Jlrst 150 THE CATEGORIES and great Kritik, the one epochal work of Kant^ would, in such circumstances, shrink into the spectre^ of a sheet or two. And how could it be otherwise ? Withdraw the machinery, all these heavy masses of — Analytics, Dialectics, Syntheses of Apprehension,, of Eeproduction, of Eecognition, Schematisms,. Axioms, Anticipations, Analogies, Postulates, Para- logisms, Antinomies — scores more endlessly — with- draw all these, I say, and what would remain? Something not so "methodic" it might be, but I rather think, to most people, perhaps, something both " clearer " and " nimbler ! " That is how Kant would be, if but divested of one- thing — the categories. But leave him the categories- and divest him of but one other thing — the Aufkld- rung : and all the rats have left the ship ! I feel certain that Noack, and all who are as he — and they constitute, far and away, the bulk of those who sit around to judge — would, without that one other thing, at once see in Kant nothing ! And positively it is as concerns the Aufklarung, or, better, it is as concerns religion generally, that, if exception be taken at any time to Kant as shallow,, it will be at least most markedly on that ground that there is truth in it. It is on that ground that, in the first place, I would rest the distinction between Kant and HegeL Compare how Kant, in the ordinary outside way, would acknowledge the u^es of religion for morality, morals, and how Hegel, as in the Keligious Eolation and the Cultus, would take us into the very inmost CONCLUSION 151 of the Eeality — into the very inmost of the Presence ! It is there that the difference between the two men is even infinite. It is there, then, in that difference, that we may think of thinness and superficiality on the one side, and of intensest depth, intensest truth on the other. There is more than that in this difference ; but I do not propose in the meantime here to enter rigorously and at full into the particulars that con- stitute it. Let it be enough for me to say now, that to the best of my belief and judgment — and I think after all this time and what it means I know both — Hegel is a greater man than Kant. And yet it is the Categories that are the work and worth, the vitality, the epochal service, the tribute and communication of both. The Categories ? And Hegel took them from Kant : it is the Categories of Kant made Hegel ? Yes ! but what did Hegel make of them ? His score of volumes — his whole twenty- one volumes are his making of them. It does not follow from all this — as already in- timated — that Kant's praise does not remain. Kant was not a small man : make seriously or suppositi- tiously what deductions you may, he was not small. By very nature, he had a perfectly clear, susceptible, capable understanding that, with an altogether avid curiosity, welcomed information, intelligence, ideas, from all sides, but from that side — in some special degree, no doubt, even from the first — where was presage of his Chair, the Chair in which he was representative of Logic, Metaphysics — Philosophy, to his life's end. For, withal, he had read and he 152 THE CATEGORIES had thought, this little man : he had no interest in life, indeed, but to read and to think. And if he read, he also wrote; and deduct from it what you may — Aufkliirung, Categories — what he wrote at his best was always of signal originality and instructive import. Facts are facts : and look at it as you may, name it as you may, Kant's fact — let it even be by accident of an accident — was an epochal fact, and an epochal fact it will remain. And so, then, it is out of all proportion to call this epochal man " small" " spiritually small : " it was not as a small man that Kant was the historical originator of a historical epoch. And if Hegel is a greater man than Kant, it is only in and of the Kantian Philosophy he writes. Saying no more than this of Kant, I think it will be pretty plain that, on the whole, nothing further need be said here of Fichte. Of Schelling, his Positive matter is so peculiar and so difficult, that if I did say the more that I have, it would be welcome; but here, nevertheless, not in place. It is needless to dwell on contradictions, as e.g. the doss granted to be a matter of experience, and yet the dass only reasoned to — not, to be sure, as in the negative philosophy from the effect to the cause, but from the cause to the efifect ! And yet no ! even that does not state the case; for Schelling's Sei/n (the dass) is to be conceived as something that is before and beyond both thought and sense : and what can that mean, but that it can be got to — neither by thought nor by sense ? ! A veritable Frius — surely ! but what good is it if unattainable ? I have called CONCLUSION 153 it x; and no doubt Schelling thinks it something more positive if conceived — just conceived — as all potentiality or as the potentiality of all, whether as the totality of thought, reason, or as the totality of empirism; but just call my x, if you will, the totality of sense or the totality of reason ; or just, by all means call it the totality of both at once — then, pray, tell me in what respect is it less an x ? Of Hegel, as I say, I scarcely think I have any- thing to add. Of course neither in his case nor in that of the others, is there to be expected from me the particulars of the enormous works of either of the four of them. That is the business only of a complete translation, in all cases attended in the main by an equally complete, detailed, relative com- mentary and criticism. When I began this work it was my one ever- present idea. " It would be a fine thing if I could give a generally intelligible and explanatory body to the — Four Corners of German Philosophy." How — after a life-time, or the better half of one — I may have succeeded, it is for others to judge. One thing I should wish to say at last, that the strange mistake in regard to Hegel has been exploded and exposed ; and that he has been demonstrated, in his own deep way, not only to act on the conviction that God is the single truth of the universe, but on that also that Christianity lies with him as animating influence at the very heart of his Philosophy itself. Nay, is it so certain that Hegel, after all, was not, in his belief at heart, in the religious and philosophical 154 THE CATEGORIES vision of his soul, just as Bohme was, or as any one Mystic of the Middle-Ages was, Eckhart, or Tauler, or others, simply Goft-begeistert ? What was that "intellectual world" of his — or what was that " eternal life " of his ? A few pages back there are some extracts in a Christian and religious reference which I should suppose it would be difficult for any one to read without the question, was not Hegel, then, if philosophically in earnest, not less, in the centre, religiously in earnest ? " The substantial relation " — " the unity of the divine and human nature " — " the infinitude and universality of man " — the " unity of God but distinguished in itself," a plurality, then, " a totality," but is not that so as though the One were Many and the Many One? There is the "identity made visible in Christ," etc. — so much else indeed — but these are points, plainly, not for the formality of exposition now ! We may be sure of this, however, that take it as we may, there was to Hegel in this universe, but one single essentiality, substantiality, and truth : God ! And if this was so to Hegel, it was not otherwise to Aristotle, as I think no one for a moment can possibly doubt who reads in that reference the passage in my Gifford Lectures translated from the Lambda of the Metaphysics. How, then, are we to explain on the part of Aristotle, and, as it is not out of place to say on the part of Plato also — how, then are we to explain this action on the part of ancient philosophy generally — how else than that this action addressed itself ex- clusively to a unity — addressed itself, as it were, to CONCLUSION 155 the study and consideration of a single jprinciple ? By fixing eye on a single principle — God, say — it was meant that they were to understand all. No doubt, in the mediaeval thinking, this single principle, God, remained — remained and in a form magnified, exalte — in a form d fortiori, so to speak. But, now, in Christianity, this single form was doubled: there was added to this form (God), through Christ — Man. God was as Mind, Thought, Eeason ; but Man, as the Finite, Mundane, was but as Nature, but as the nature generally, of the every- day world we saw around us. Hence a duplicity. Man was at once a duplicity in himself : he was in himself at once Mind and Matter. This, withal, is at once to name the distinctions that grew, and grown, were Modern Philosophy! Not that these distinctions were in evidence at once. No ; Christianity itself as such, especially- — as against your Jupiters, and the rest — the God of Christianity, constituted, as it were, the all of general speech for the interval of some four hundred years. After these it was, however, that Augustin began to give voice to the problem between Mind and Matter with the discussion of which, later, it was the fortune of Descartes, formally to illustrate himself. By this we mean that, even up to these latter days which are just beside us, the general terms heard were those of Materialism on the one side, as those of Idealism on the other — a duplicity. Now the vital core of this duplicity was the theory of perception, perception strictly so called — sense-perception. Not but that 156 THE CATEGORIES even in ancient times there was some approach to the problem so far as concerns the fallibility of the senses. I suppose there was some talk of this kind ; pretty well, after all, on the part of every one of them — unless the nakedly materialistic: Eleatics, Heraclitans, Empedocleans, Sceptics, Sophists, and indeed, generally all. Even Plato refers to the fluctuation that belongs to sense. Still, on the whole, we may hold, I think, that what an ancient saw was what he saw. That grass was that grass ; that tree, that tree : each out there in space, in the garden, a thing, an actual thing, an object, an actual object — and always to remain actually such, let him turn his back on it, or go outside, or do anything else that pleased him. It never occurred to him that as he only knew within, whatever he knew could be, and must be, itself, only within ! I fully believe that Aristotle, absolute idealist, would have willingly endorsed every one word of all these then, as I equally fully believe that the absolute idealist, Hegel, did he live, would not for a moment hesitate to endorse every one word of them now. Such conun- drums as those of Descartes, or of Hobbes and Hume, ay, or of Fichte and Kant, did not for either Aristotle or Hegel, in good truth, function. If, indeed, cogni- tion, human cognition, cognition just as cognition, can only know within, and, consequently, never can know a without in its self, in its own reality, as a without — if, we say, this be so, how are we to under- stand the divine cognition? — that God never saw the tree He planted, or the man He made, or beast CONCLUSION 157 of the field, or fowl of the air ! Philosophy, in its explanation of the universe (as which it can be shut up in a single sentence — this, namely, That the dialectic of God's own Self -consciousness develops the Categories — Thought, Eeason, the Within ; That these Categories, by the same dialectic exter- nalised are — the Universe, Nature, the Without) — Philosophy, with this interpretation of the uniyerse, has no need I say, to doubt but that man, the finite, just as he is physiologically constructed, does know, does see the actual without as the actual without, grass as grass, tree as tree, man as man, etc., etc. And this being, the whole of that metaphysic that, with Descartes, say, or with Hume, Kant, or another, is in mortal anxiety as to what The Thing In Itself may be, is futile. Philosophy has three objects. Logic, Nature, Mind ; and to the solution of all three of them it applies Categories. There are the Cate- gories in Kant, in Fichte, in Schelling ; but in all three of them, they are only meagre, or only ineptly deduced: and it is in Hegel alone that, in quantity and quality, they come near to what they should be. For the Categories are the Secret — the Categories constitute the one Secret of the whole. There are those who, having curiosity to know and philosophise this world, just at once look away off, as it is said, ins Blaue hinein, into the Blue, ek top oXov ovpavov, and start on their Pasear just as they are; and, "just as they are," they are excellent intelli- gences and well-educated, but they need not be 158 THE CATEGORIES categorically educated. Only the Greeks and the Germans, to say so, are categorically educated : and, as just referred to, Hegel of all mankind is the most so. His categories, and as they are, constitute at this moment the most complete body of metaphysic — philosophy — that exists ; but it by no means follows that, just as they are, they are final. The secret of the dialectic that deduces them has been given : there are those coming who, on it or with it, will operate to constructions, combinations, configurations, that are beyond prophecy. It is for Philosophy itself to concentrate itself hither. Of our philosophers, to speak of them in an ordinarily human way, as a Macaulay or a Carlyle might — that Kant was a harmless, decent, kindly little man, with plenty of intelligence in his brain and most acceptable industry in his action ; — that Fichte, always as I have elsewhere depicted him, was, in his simple manhood, the noblest of the four ; — that Hegel, as ordinary plain man, sound, solid, real, was domes- tically all that and more — truly a man of heart, sense, duty; — and that Schelling was, in every respect, pretty well as I have on the whole and more than once represented him. PBnrrKD by olivbk and botd, ebinbcboh. THE CATEGORIES AN APPENDIX FURTHER THE CATEGORIES AN APPENDIX FURTHER DARWIN AND EMERSON WITH TWO NOTES— THE EGO, AND CAUSALITY BY JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING HON. LL.D.EDIN., HON. LL.D.GLASG. Fore^n Member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin ; first-appointed Oifford Lecturer on the Whole Foundation^ Lectured Edinburgh University, 1888-90, etc., etc. EDINBURGH OLIVER AND BOYD LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 1907 CONTENTS PAGE I. Darwin and Emerson 9 n. Note on the Ego ....... 43 III. Note on Causality : A Necessary Explanation 46 THE CATEGORIES AN APPENDIX FURTHER I. — Darwin and Emekson " I HAVE found," says Mr Darwin, " the most extra- ordinary difficulty in making able men understand at what I was driving. . . . They have convinced me that I must be a very bad explainer. . . . Neither of them (Lyell, Hooker) really understands what I mean by natural selection ; I am inclined to give up the attempt as hopeless. I am beginning to despair of ever making the majority understand my notions. Both Hooker and Lyell use expressions to which I demur." Mr Darwin, then, saw a peculiarity in his doctrine that he got nobody to understand ; and it was in fact the luck of this misunderstanding that, existent from the first with the " majority," simply made him. This peculiarity, namely, connected with both, is, in point of fact, rightly neither — neither natural selec- tion nor yet evolution. It turns wholly and solely on Design ; and this it was that — by the " majority " — as unseen, was not understood. Mr Darwin, that is, has made it plain to himself that what has been 10 regarded as Design is no such thing, but only the aimless, purposeless result of mere random, haphazard, outside, literal accident. I mean that he does not only assert and affirm this as the actual fact to his mind, but that, beyond all possibility of doubt, he thinks that he demonstratively proves it, too. What, to wit, through all the ages has been regarded as the Design of God, the Design of the Universe, Mr Darwin insists — emphatically insists — most emphatically insists — on replacing — replac- ing by a Proxy, a Proxy of his own: "No more Design," he cries, "than in the course which the wind blows ! " Surely this is a most interesting point to see into ; as we know, indeed — or shall know, if we will look close enough — this, namely, that evolution, natural selection, the entire doctrine, more than just " con- nected" with it, wholly, solely, and individually, depends upon it. Surely it is the point, crucially and critically the point. This the point, then — how does he (Darwin) come to it, and what is it ? He turns his eye on "millions of generations," and "cannot doubt" that "individuals of a species," even by simple "accident," will be born in them " with some variation profitable to some part of their economy." "An organic being like the woodpecker, or the mistletoe, may thus " — thus, he feels sure ^ — " come to be adapted to a score of contingencies." * See pp. 232-4 of Darwinianism. 11 That — adaptation of means to ends, contrivance, purpose, intention — each, under whatever name, obvious, manifest, palpable, glaringly existent — that, all that is what we name Design, and the truth of it is — the Proxy, the Darwin's Proxy of accident, mere accident — proxy and nothing else ! At page 112 of the book (the Categories) will be found a number of Mr Darwin's illustrations. They are these: seal, bat, flying-fish, bird with longer beak, elephant with inclining tusks, British insect with exotic plant, the bear that feeds itself to a whale in the water. Besides these, there are a few others, but of great interest, as the woodpecker, the tree-frog, the mistletoe, tillandsia, etc. With the bulk of them, indeed, I have, more or less, already dealt, as in the little book itself, or in Darwinianism, say. If, then, I shall now, in representation of the rest, signalise only one illustration, that one shall be, surely in its exceptionally constapt repetition, Mr Darwin's own special favourite. And that favourite will, I doubt not, at once suggest itself to every reader as the "bird with a beak 1^75-th of an inch longer than usual." The supposition is peculiar, and not quite such as to prove a likely one to everybody, perhaps; but, without wish to make difficulties, we may accept it just as it comes. During " millions of generations," ^ then, a bird — which, no doubt, has already met, in 1 Life, ii. 124. 12 these millions, with millions and millions of all sorts of accidents, not one of them all, however, presum- ably, in what to Mr Darwin, for his special case, is "the right direction" — at long and last does meet with an accident in such distinguished direction as is required; an accident, namely, such — and so directed — that it (the bird) can turn it (the accident) to the use and profit of itself. If, however, we would see precisely here this use and profit, it is to the Origin that we must turn. There, as at page 82, we learn Mr Darwin's denial of change in organisms being in any way due to " some innate law " ; so at page 72 we hear of the " curved beak" as more advantageous for feeding than the "straight," with "preservation" of the former and " destruction " of the latter. No doubt, then, it is in this way that we are to figure the casual accident of chance (the xoirth of an inch), and also at the same time its adoption into curvature by natural selection. Nor is it any the less expected of us, here as well, to understand that we have now suggested to us an instance of the Proxy, the counterfeit, that is to supplant and supersede the Design which even our atheists believed to be present in the universe as a universe, through a power — a wisdom, as it were — innate of its own — the vis insita naturae. Mr Huxley, on the whole, does not seem aware of Mr Darwin's — to say so — artificial manufacture of Design by adaptation of natural accident and all manner of higglety-pigglety (to use Sir John 13 Herschel's word) accidents. So much is this the case, that, while he (Mr Huxley) expresses out-and- out surprise as to where Mr Darwin, without con- ditions, is to find his variation at all, he yet actually says of "the selective action of external condi- tions," " that suggestion is the central idea of the Origin of Species, and contains the quintessence of Darwinism." {That in the teeth of his own sur- prise! That of the Darwin who was "inclined to swear at the North Pole, and even to speak dis- respectfully of the equator," etc. !) All the same, if Mr Huxley (as he really seems to be) is not aware of Mr Darwin's Accident-Proxy, he certainly finds its result, and very glaringly too, in the action of his own conditions ; for he has allowed himself to say as much as this, and plainly to their credit. "The teleology which supposes the eye was made — for enabling the animal to see — has undoubtedly received its death-blow." Whether, then, we choose Mr Darwin's receipt of accident or Mr Huxley's recipe of conditions, it is evident that we have always but one and the same result: not Design, namely, but only a Proxy of it — in that reference Mr Huxley's unreasoned conditions being in point of fact not a bit better than Mr Darwin's unreasonable accidents. Now, how does Mr Carlyle, say, take all this? "Wonderful to me," he cries, "as indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind — never could waste the least thought upon it!" And surely he who wrote Sartor Besartus, and in it a chapter on 14 " Organic Filaments," and another as well, following it, on "Natural Supernaturalism," and in one or other of them such words as these : — "Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole: mankind, the Image that creates and reflects Nature, without which Nature were not. There is in man a quite indestructible Eeverence for whatsoever holds of Heaven. Say not that thou hast now no Symbol of the Godlike. Is not God's Universe a Symbol of the Godlike ; is not Immensity a Temple ; is not Man's History and Men's History, a perpetual Evangel ? Is not the Universe fixed to move by unalterable rules? I, too, must believe that God does indeed never change. We speak of the Volume of Nature : and truly a volume it is, whose Author and Writer is God. Am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or two hundred or two million times ? Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hundred years ago : his sphere-melody still flows, still sounds. The real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and what- ever will be, is even now and for ever. Then sawest thou that this fair Universe is in very deed the star- domed City of God ; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. We are Spirits. Whence ? Heaven, whither ? From God and to God." What can we expect of a Carlyle, with such things in his mind, but the righteous indignation of a soul outraged, when he is assured that God's Design, the Design of the Universe, is not design, not design at all, not the least thing in the world of design — that, 15 on the contrary, only a Proxy, a counterfeit, a sham, is henceforth to be seen as all that there is of Design ? And Emerson was Carlyle's brother; it is to Emerson that Carlyle calls, " My friend ! you know- not what you have done for me: Lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognisable as a man^s voice, and I have a kinsman and brother : God be thanked for it." It was as he read, that Carlyle spoke ; and scarcely can it be said that what he read was without the meed of some melodious tear : for he cries, " I could have wept to read that speech ; the clear, high melody of it went tingling through my heart." If Carlyle had wept to hear of Emerson as vowed to Darwin, then the tear meant was not a tear from the deeps of admiration, love, but no more than the bitter of a tear from the depths of scorn, No falser libel could have speech than to name an Emerson with a Huxley or a Darwin. There are Job, the Psalmist, and the Prophets, and there are Paul and the others, inspired Apostles ; but, these apart, never on this earth did spiritual beauty shine in purity from the words of a man as they shone from the words of the holy Emerson ; and not one of them but fell overpower- ingly — tearfully it may be — on the heart of his fellow with the bliss of Design — the Design of the Universe, the Design of God. Anaximander may be in some sort named loosely Darwinian, because of animals in the moist that, feeding easily, may have preceded man with his more complex necessities, and 16 men so might be fish -like in birth ; but, consistency or continuity of thought otherwise failing, we have but the fancy of the moment. Whereas the coinci- dentia oppositorum, the evavriorrjg, the evavrioTpoTrri, the oSog avooKaTO), the olvt'l^ovv, the kirecrQai tw ^vpm, and much else, indeed the whole ideal thought of Heraclitus, as akin to the general spirit that is in advocacy here with us, is essentially alien to the evolution, whether of the Proxy by chance of Accident or of the Proxy by chance of Weather. And in point of fact Emerson's philosophy can be at all named with that of Heraclitus only in so far as Heraclitus would owe all to himself: it was not TroXvuiaOia that taught him vovv\ and so, too, Emerson, eagerly availing himself of English access anywhere, and sitting with ardent curiosity beside science that lectured, was still, for production, secluded to his own self-consciousness. That self- consciousness was alone the sanctuary to which, with veiled head, in awe, he listened for those oracular inspirations that appealed, as though with tears, to the very heart of the grim Carlyle. Heraclitus being so, I, for my part, relatively not quite a novice, can name no other ancient Greek that for a moment can, even as Anaximander, bear the imputation of the Evolution that is current now — an imputation that is, on the whole, loud, in, say, the Centenary Edition of the works of Emerson. Cer- tainly, in this connection at all, it seems absurd to name Empedocles with the Four Elements and their 17 dominants, Love and Hate; nor less so to join on with him Xenophanes, who began what is known as *' the One-sided All-one doctrine," that is to say, the Philosophy of the Eleatics. Xenophanes simply denied, namely, such a thing as a Becoming at all, and asserted only a Being (as it were an Is that only is). Perhaps, indeed, it may come to appear wonderful that evolution, as currently understood, or even more so as left to the one or two express experts, could be extracted or extorted from any one single expression, or all of them together, of Mr Emerson's. And yet, so far as is intelligible to me at least, the only warrant for such operation lies simply in the two words, Identity and Amelioration (or for Identity say Unity). There is no doubt that the holy Emerson would identify in God all, everything whatever; and, at the same time, also, just as little doubt is there that he sees all things to rank together, each in its place, just as plants are in their orders, classes, genera, etc., and as Aristotle, followed by Leibnitz and so many others, saw all things in series from least development up to the finally highest, Man. It is all very well to name amelioration as evolution only in its best sense; but to put side by side, and on the same level, and in the same name, as though they were kindred affirmations, and not unconditional contra- dictories, the profane Proxy of a Darwin with the divine Design of a purely spiritual Emerson, is simply sacrilege. It is certainly enough to point B 18 out this ; but it may be well to consider and examine this so-called evolution of Mr Emerson's. That evolutionary ideas had any influence on his mind^ how inapplicable and nugatory that is, has been already under comment ; and yet it has been insisted on at great length as singularly apposite. As an undoubted step forward, we have mention of Mr Emerson's belief in the Nebular Hypothesis. That Mr Emerson should have used the word in any general reference and direction, goes without saying. But did he do so? The twelve- volume Centenary Edition of his works is graced by a perhaps even unusually full and complete index; but "Nebular Hypothesis " does not appear in it ; while I, who have read every page of the whole twelve volumes themselves cannot remember to have ever encoun- tered it myself. A good deal of weight is placed on Mr Emerson's visit to the Jardin des Plantes^ as well as on a phrase, " arrested and progressive development," ascribed to John Hunter. Neither visit nor phrase yields more than the series of living things, from lowest to highest, that, in all time, I suppose, as said, from Aristotle till now, has been a general reference. From page xxix., vol. i., and from page 360, vol. viii., there seems considerable doubt a& to the phrase being Hunter's at all ; as also in regard to the mention of Darwin on the part of Emerson, in page 7, vol. viii. The visit has its interest, and the phrase itself is rightly descriptive enough, belong to whom it may; but in neither is there any proof 19 of Mr Emerson's evolution. As Aristotle, with wonderful notices all about, speaks of Xature pro- ceeding from the inanimate, through plant to animal and man, so does the naturalist now ; and there is no debate in that connection. In fact there is, in Aristotle's theorising then, just such thought as there is, ^ace evolution, in anyone's theorising now. That reminds that Mr Emerson, in these relative divine suggestions as voiced by himself, or as voiced of him by Carlyle, has a remark that, by very name, tells on the naturalist here as thus : — " Nor (Wks. I. 68) has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of colour, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lays open." So far as this passage may prove in any v/ay light-giving, it may be general evidence relatively not out of place to add some few passages in a like direction. I have, as to that indeed, marked scores and scores of them throughout the whole twelve volumes, but to quote them all would be tantamount to writing down here, literally, or almost literally, every one of Mr Emerson's very best essays. But what follows the last quotation runs thus : — 20 " A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century." Then in illustration of " this mystery " which is the mentioned " congruity " of absolute Design, we have a pageful of quotations from the said sweet psalmist : — " Head with foot hath private amity, And both with moons and tides." That, if with any suggestion of evolution, goes certainly something a little further than the proxy of either accident or stress; for it means simply the identity of God in His own universe, the " con- gruity " that makes the universe one, a unity. "Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Find their acquaintance there." " For us the winds do blow. The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow j Nothing we see but means our good As our delight, or as our treasure." " The stars have us to bed : Night draws the curtain ; which the sun withdraws. Music and light attend our head." " All things unto our flesh are kind, In their descent and being ; to our mind In their ascent and cause. More servants wait on man than he'll take notice of . . . Oh mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him." Emerson notes that, in regard to such truths as these, there is to " science " only a " half-sight " ; and 21 so he quotes, nominally from Plato, "that poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." It is in the reference to the said congruity that he speaks of himself as one to whom the woods minister suggestion " of an occult relation between man and the vegetable " : " they nod to me, and I to them," he cries — " I am not alone and unacknowledged." " The visible heavens and earth sympathise with Jesus — the intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God." " For although the works of Nature are innumerable and all different, the result or expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radi- cally alike and even unique. A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression. What is common to them all — that perfectness and harmony — is beauty." " But beauty in Nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty — not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature." Is there, or at all can there be, a final cause to the Proxyists ? "The relation between the mind and matter stands in the will of God — day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist in necessary ideas as in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit." When did a Proxyist see anything originate in a world of spirit — beast or bird, acid or alkali ? 22 " Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history. Nature is the symbol of spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself, and man in all ages and countries embodies it in his language as the Father. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value. The whole of Nature is a metaphor of the human mind. What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the councils of the Creation." (Mr Darwin, doubtless, and Mr Huxley too, looked on the Creation so ! valuing even that natural history of theirs only so far as it is supernatural !) " ' The steady and prodigal provision for the sup- port and delight of man on this green ball ' (as the Proxyists believe !) — the unity of Nature — the unity in variety — which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impres- sion — each particle is a microcosm — is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. The noblest ministry of Nature is to stand as the apparition of G-od. Man has access to the entire mind of the Creator." Is not the single intention of the Evolutionist this : — to supersede the Creator — a Creator at all, instead of creation, to present us with a proxy ? " A man cannot be a Naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. There are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding." In the contrast of the Proxy of design, as against Design as Design, the Design of the Uni- verse, which is alone Emerson's design, lies, I hold, 23 the utter contradiction of the holy Emerson, of the Emerson of the Oversoul — the soul that is the single idea, the single vitality, the one and single soul of Emerson. There are, however, less than half a dozen quotations that concern what is assumed to be Emerson's positively literal and undeniable pro- nouncements for the express doctrine of Evolution as evolution. They are those that we see again and again about the worm, the caterpillar, scorpion, grass, etc. "Striving to be man, the worm mounts through all the spires of form. We feel that there is an occult relation between the very worm, the crawling scorpion, and man. He says to the caterpillar, How dost thou, brother ? Please God, 3^ou shall yet be a philosopher. " The poor grass wiH plot and plan What it will do when it is man." All that now is but Emerson's own — quaint Emersonian speech that has under it only Emerson's own proper and peculiar philosophy — universal unity of all things under God ; but as Leibnitz has it, and long before Leibnitz, Aristotle, in their reasonable rise from minerals, through the animals to man : " Identity unites all things, and explains one by another." No doubt Emerson believed in *' the sure advance of life through the ages " ; but he had no debt to Darwin in that regard, nor does he say he had. In point of fact, there is no such rise in Darwin. As Darwin himself tells us, and as we might very plainly see for ourselves in his 2-i own proper and peculiar Creator, Accident, rise at all is not necessary ; original individual or original species may still exist ! The change in the Proxy, with whatever guise of design in it, need not be improvement — let it be ever so true and sure and certain all the same, that, of course, and just as a matter of course, only the fittest persist. There is in vol. i., and it is repeated in vol. ix. (Em., W. W.), this quotation from Plotinus: "We might say that all beings, not only rational ones, but even irrational ones, the plants, and even the soil that bears them, aspire to attain conscious know- ledge." Shall we say, then, on the strength of as much as this, that Plotinus was an evolutionist ? If Emerson is an evolutionist in his day because of what he then said, is there not the same reason for predicating evolutionism of the Greek long centuries ago ? The anachronism implied here is not one whit more absurd than the assumption that Emerson suggested evolutionism as early as the date of his very first -^ovk— Nature, namely, thereby anticipating, by a generation say, even the " Origin '* itself, and so drawing an effacing sponge, as it were, over the whole business ! Of pertinent quotations under Emerson's own hand, there are before me, still temptingly, many others. If I allow myself indulgently to make use of yet a few more, it will be only as aware that a final reading will offer me opportunity of possible abridcrment. 25 " Physical appearances only become of interest as media of teaching certain spiritual truths. . . . We should keep our minds in a constant state of recep- tivity for the divine thought or idea which underlies sensuous appearance" (Words once again hardly natural to the mere physical thinking in a Proxy). " The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible " {e.g., that the idea that the eye was made to see by, has got its death-blow — ' Vernunf t, welche in Anderem zu sich selbst zu kommen sich bemliht '). " Nature is a movable cloud, which is always, and never, the same cloud (That is Heraclitus, if you will ; but it is to neither the one nor the other evolution). " The mind is one, and nature is its correlative " (Through the Proxy ! ) "Always the inmost becomes the outmost" (The Proxy says, v. v.). " The ultimate fact, resolution of all into the ever-blessed One. my brothers, God exists ! There is a soul at the centre of Nature " (Mr Darwin sees that soul to be the possibility of accident). " Always the souFs scale is one ; the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. If we will see how the thing stands in God. . . . For the Maker of all stands behind us and casts His dread omniscience over all. Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. All nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organising itself. The noblest ministry of Nature is to stand as an apparition of God. There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and grada- ion" (And so where is that accident which Proxy bows to as, say, awed Creator of the most delicately design ful organising relations of all that has life and feeling, virtue, function ?). " I read " (says Carlyle once) " with a satisfaction 26 given me by the books of no other living mortal. Such lightning gleams of meaning as are to be found here — what a Fiat Lux into the deeps of a philo- sophy which hardly three men living have yet dreamt of." — So Emerson : — " The perfected man must help on the ascending Creation by the divinity which is in him. — The soul which animates nature. All rests at last on the simplicity of Nature — nob any swell, any brag, any strain or shock, but a firm common sense — a true proportion between her means and her performance. Sem'per sibi similis. You shall not catch her in any anomalies, nor swaggering into any monsters — ever the strictest regard to rule, and an absence of all surprises. No; Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors. The like strictness is in her dealings with us. She is always serious — does not jest with us. Where we have begun in folly, we are brought quickly to plain dealing. Life could not be carried on except by fidelity and good earnest " (Yet to Mr Darwin accident is all, and to Mr Huxley, that an eye was made to see by, has got its death- blow). " Beauty, in its largest and prof oundest sense, is one expression for the universe, but not as yet the last or highest expression for the final cause " (Would that a final cause did exist for men to whom Design is only the Proxy of an accident !) But, really, to quote Emerson in this one reference were a task endless : the possibility of a further and a further only grows upon us. One might almost point to what has been said of Emerson by Carlyle as alone and of itself sufficient in proof of a radical incompatibility between such a philosophy as that of Emerson and the action of Evolution, whether as only 27 nominally apprehended by the public, or, again, as simply put (figured and understood) by either of the two generally accredited evolutionists; while, in Carlyle*s regard, the single quotation above seems by itself relatively ample, at the same time that in the " Notes " to this, the Centenary Edition of Emer- son's works, there will be found other such expres- sions of true Thomas's quite as strong, and almost passim. But, whether for Design in the general or for Evolution itself in the particular, the evidence of Emerson himself is without a call for addition: Emerson is the precise, express, peremptory contra- dicter of any and every evolutionary coryphaeus whatever. For why ! The business of his philo- sophy — the business of him, is this: Den grossen Gedanken der Schopfung noch einmal zu denken (once again to think the great thought of the creation). Ha ! that great thought doubtless, he thought, who saw the bear, out of himself, create the whale, or he, that other, who knew that an eye, etc. ! Of evolution asserted, not unemphatically either, as special to Emerson, we have already said something. In pages xxvi.-xxx. of vol. i., however, the point is discussed formally at full length, and it will be just, perhaps also safe, to look again considerately at the whole subject. The Centenary Edition delivers what it has to say on Emerson and evolution in eight points of a formal argument. 1 find", however, that all the points that 28 may have any, or appear to have any real significance, have, in the foregoing, been sufficiently met. Nos. 1 and 2, for example, Emerson's "mind and hopeful temperament," his looking on " beneficent law as universal, working alike on matter or spirit," have been used by me in the direction against evolution ; and, just so, " spirit " itself has been shown, always and everywhere, as to Emerson, the single sub- stantial interest. Material things, he has said again and again, have value and meaning so far as they have spiritual law under them — so far, in short, as all that is material is but symbolical of spirit. As for No. 3, that the "nebular hypothesis early de- lighted him." Of course there is not the slightest wish, idea, attempt, to impugn or oppugn any special knowledge of the fact personally as a fact on the part of any one, particularly of any one who had the privilege of household familiarity. But still, even in that reference, this is strange that, though the phrase, "nebular hypothesis," is quite a usual one in philosophical literature, if only as a matter of mere phrase in any view, I do not recollect to have ever seen it, even so used, by Emerson ; at the same time, further, that, as has been said already, it is not, in the pretty full index, to be found at all. Then, what concerns the ancient philosophers, No. 4, has been by me, — who have all, not only the great German commentators and historians, Zeller, Schwegler, Kixner, Ueberweg, Erdmann, Biese, Trendelenburg, Bonitz, al., butalso the Fragments of 29 the said ancient philosophers themselves, as gathered by Eitter and Preller, and still better, perhaps, by Mullach, —already authoritatively denied. No. 5 mentions Leibnitz, Coleridge, Cuvier, Bufifon, of whom not one supports Evolution: 6, concerns the Jardin des Flantes, and has been already spoken to ; 7, Lyell and Lamarck, the one is no evolutionist, and the other is not under discussion here, at the same time that he is dismissed by Darwin himself ; while what as last concerns John Hunter has been also already met. The " scale of being from minerals through plants to animals and man," mentioned in connection with Leibnitz, we have already seen as due in the first place to Aristotle, and as asserted, moreover, by us to be what is alone true in the whole discussion, but not as making for evolution, and not as even dreamt of by either Aristotle or Leibnitz in any such relation. There are in the index several refer- ences under the word " Evolution " ; but there is not a single one of them that testifies to more than this advancing scale of being, the melioration or ameliora- tion of Emerson meaning also always the same thing. " Nature from first to last is in incessant advance from less to more, from rude to finer organisation. How far off yet is the trilobite? how far ojff the quadruped ? how inconceivably remote is man ? All duly arrive. — A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings, 30 — Indemnifying the student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races. I^J'ature has a higher end in the production of individuals than security, namely, ascension^ or the passage of the soul into higher forms." By that passage of the soul into higher forms, Emerson certainly does not mean to see form, or forms, each passing or changing into its own self by dint of some mere casual accident of its own self. It is not so that Emerson ever saw a soul show its emergence into existence. Emerson, in so speaking, has never singly individuals in his eye; no ! but always races — races with a new soul each, passed into it by the will of God. When (xii. 22) Emerson says of the musk-rat: "There is a perfect correspondence; or 'tis only man modified to live in a mudbank. A fish, in like manner, is man furnished to live in the sea; a thrush, to fly in the air ; and a mollusc is a cheap edition, with a suppression of the costlier illustra- tions, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oysterbank, or among the seaweed " — he (Emerson) is not to be supposed to use " modified " in the Darwinian sense, as though in reference to evolution : it is God who, in creating, has directly, or, through the granted vis insita naturce, indirectly, designed, modified, furnished, edited, etc., etc., musk- rat, fish, thrush, mollusc, and each independently in its own mudbank, sea, air, oysterbank, or seaweed, etc., etc. Emerson never for a moment saw the 31 little bit of protoplasm, the amoeba say, that, after all manner of mischanced accidents did, in the million-yeared, long series at last chance on such first accident "in the right direction," and such similar second, third, fourth, fifth — or hundred - millionth accident — each presumably with its own long unchancef ul interval — to the production eventu- ally of such completed, designful, full organi- sations of plant, animal, and man as surround us now. And some of these last words may profitably suggest to us a picture of the whole adventurous, unsecured, imagination which, in proposal, we name casual, fortuitous, outside Proxy. By the extracts made, surely this is clear. The spiritual-mindedness of Emerson, by no expedient of evolution or other, is to be confounded with the material-mindedness of a Huxley or a Darwin. Literally, just literally indeed — the one is as high above the other as heaven is above the earth. Eeligion is as vitality to Emerson, while to the Proxyists it is as nought — nothing, or something even worse, error, delusion, falsehood. The list of references under Eeligion in the said index to Emerson's works is a long one, and it is richly indicative. "Creation," Creator," "Deity," "Divi- nity," have all matter to the point; while under "God" the references are a column. Emerson, educated as a Unitarian, preached from a Unitarian pulpit; but he left it, and what this Centenary Edition, in note or text, gives him to say of the 32 creed of the sect is such a phrase as "pale nega- tions," " corpse-cold." " The conversation soaring to principles, Unitarianism is boyish . . . Unitarianism rushes to pure Theism." This he said, and, not rushing, the mood on him grew — this, while life proceeds with him, at the same time that Christ and Christianity are what he appears most minded devoutly and piously to speak of. Surely, indeed, it belonged to the very divinity of that oracu- larly interpretative self-consciousness of Emerson's (which was to him philosophy, science) to see into the Divinity of Christianity, even in the humanity that is the heart of it. Philosophy has still infinity in view when it says man is God. Man made in the image of God is still but in a material body, material in time, material in space. Material so, he is but a fallible creature, born, as it is said, in sin. He is unprepared so to enter into the spiritual community of the second life. To that he needs Christ — Christ and Christianity. By the extracts made, indeed, surely it is plain that evolution as evolution — the evolution of its experts, or the sort of mere nominal evolution, neither understood nor sought to be understood by the ordinary intelligence in its vague vacuousness of sequacious assumption and assurance — surely it is plain that evolution, the usual modern doctrine, never was, and never could have been, a doctrine also of Emerson, any more than of Carlyle, who, just generally looking at it in its relations to Nature 33 and its consequences there, contemptuously indig- nant, could only exclaim of it, " Wonderful to me, as indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind — never could waste the least thought upon it." And really can honestly any man, knowing about no tribe or nation ever yet met with destitute of belief in God and immortality — knowing too, perhaps, all that about Hume, Napoleon, and, even in the very midst of his physics, Kant — Hume, Napoleon, Kant (see my " Gifford Lectures " and Darwinianism) — each with the stars above him — honestly, I say, can any man really look — really look at the matter and not exclaim with Carlyle, "Never could waste the least thought upon it ! " Suppose we just look again at the steps of it : — Individuals of a species will, in millions of genera- tions, be born with some certain (possibly only slight) variation. (The very first step has already to the fore pre-existent organisation, at once in species, as at once in individuals — an absolute premiss, unex- plained, inexplicable !) Variation is a matter of accident, mere chance. There is no such thing as what is called a vis insita, an innate, inherent principle, tendency, aboriginal power of improvement, adaptation: only diversified variability is enough. Any variation is, in the first instance, no more than an accident — a simple appearance of chance. Time itself as time is never to be supposed to c 34 initiate change, foster growth, development, matura- tion, maturity. Neither is there any such power, influence, in conditions : a little more heat or cold, damp or dry, is indifferent ; absurd to suppose that climate should make a pediculus formed to climb hairs, or a wood- pecker trees. Variation, so far as result (progeny) is concerned, may be null, of no effect. Or it may be actually, and, indeed, actively nega- tive; it may bring disadvantage only, and prove to the organism itself finally destructive. But still, if in the right direction, it may prove affirma- tive — bring a profit, an advantage. On the last supposition rests the whole of natural selection, the whole of evolution. But the feature, the most specially, and, so to speak, even letrayingly char- acteristic of the theory is still this: Evolution, Natural Selection, does not necessarily imply or involve improvement, ascent, rise into the visibly actual fact of adapted form, contrivance : the original, or aboriginal, primordial, prototypal organism, the at least possible recipient subject of a first variation, may, even at this moment, with never a change, first, last, or intermediate, actually exist. Now these are pretty well the entire round of particulars that constitute — and they are all to be found elsewhere with me under the hand of Mr Darwin himself — in every feature the complete OD fcheory of the Darwinian Evolution, the Darwinian Selection. And surely the design which is to be suggested to us as the outcome of the whole, is most righteously to be called Proxy. So confident and proud, indeed, is Mr Darwin of this his proxy, as the one result all along aimed at, that he actually has the expres- sion, "my deity, 'Natural Selection.'" Design as design, however, the Design of the Deity whom man names God, is not a proxy. That is the design that to all philosophers is design. The Germans, Kant and the rest, can name only one design, God's design, as it is in Nature ; and since the Greeks, they are held to be the greatest, or even, as some say, the only philosophers. And the Greeks themselves, how are they? Will Mr Darwin, if they are not with him, slaughter Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle ? or will they ? — Ah ! Design fed, design animated, the teaching of all these great Greeks ; design intrinsic, design with the stamp of truth and reality as of the hall, to say so, on it; design genuine, that alone is design — ihe design of the universe, the design of God. The design of Mr Darwin is, as the metal of Mr Pinchbeck, brummagem. Even his well-meant illustrations that satisfy himself, of variations by accident that are proposed as conceivably tropically selected, will, properly looked at, hardly satisfy, perhaps, others. They (seen already) are these : — A bird born with a beak yw th 36 of an inch longer tlian usual ; seals beginning to feed on the shore ; bats taking to feed on the ground, or anywhere else except in the air ; a British insect feeding on an exotic plant; variation of direction in the tusks of an elephant; a black bear swim- ming with widely open mouth, catching insects in the water. Mr Darwin candidly admits that all these ex- amples or illustrations are no more than merely supposititious. He frankly tells us himself that he knows of no case whatever of a seal feeding on the shore ; and we easily see that as is the seal to his knowledge, so also is it with bat, insect, and exotic plant, elephant and tusks : even the black bear he did not see himself ; and if Hearne the hunter saw it, it was not Hearne the hunter saw the whale come out of it, but only, to the amusement of Lyell (see elsewhere the story), Mr Darwin himself, multiparous in dream. It occurs to me here to ask, Did Mr Darwin ever wonder how swordfish and elephant, say, managed to live while the sword for the one and the trunk for the other were not grown, but only growing ? Then, again, for conditions, Mr Darwin, if he did not know that Mr Huxley asked with surprise, how, without conditions, "variation should occur at all " still knew that he (Huxley), making conditions the very lever of variation, and blind to Darwin's very secret, the Selection of Accident (which, as what "he was driving at," he could get nobody to see, not even Lyell and Hooker), 37 essentially disagreed with him, and so, thus, essenti- ally also, did not understand him — why, I say, did Mr Darwin, though not quite without a sniff at Huxley (see Darwinianism, page 163), fail to inflict on Huxley the " demur " he inflicted on Lyell and Hooker? What Mr Darwin's theory of evolution is — what his central idea, the selection, the natural selec- tion of accidents is — in a word, what the entire machinery of his action is, must, from all these clauses, not one of which is not specifically, pecu- liarly, substantially Mr Darwin's own — stand out, now, there, nakedly open, without a rag to drape it. Theory ! Can that be even named theory, which from the very instant of start, Sisfelo de se, suicidal, self -destructive, is absolutely nugatory. His origin, as origin, is accident, and on what is that accident to fall ? Mr Darwin, arming himself with the possibilities of "millions of generations," "cannot doubt" — allows himself to take it for granted — that it will fall, indefinitely, on " individuals of a species " / Actu- ally he cannot start his first accident — that accident of accidents — without having, quite loosely before him, any number of individuals and — already, actu- ally, any number of species ! He cannot move from the spot without his accident. And his accident itself — why, it cannot fall on nothing ! I^'ay, it cannot fall on even something! To be productive of a result, as, of course, it is really intended to be, it cannot fall on iron or a stone, say. Nay, there is 38 only one something on which, productively as intended, it can fall. It must fall on — an organism — already to the fore ! But never mind the start: take Mr Darwin's very end. Intermediately, to say so, Charles, like his grandfather, Erasmus, with his filaments, thought first of one parent for each kingdom. He comes by and by to four or five primordial forms ; but these contract in the end (as the filaments did) into some single prototype. He had spoken at first of assuming creation for " one or a few forms." It is not long, however, before creation is utterly discarded, and a simple appearance, " by some wholly unknown process," is adopted instead. Thus, he says once, "I think that all vertebrata have descended from one parent, but how that parent appeared we know not." Now is not that very simple, or even silly, on the part of Mr Darwin ? They descended from a parent, a first organism that just appeared. But an organism is an organism, and if it just then and there appeared and was, call for intromission of Nature to originate there is none : natural selection, evolution, the whole theory, so far as it was to substitute any plain, ordinary, intelligible, expedient from without for any principle from within, any vis innata naturce, not even to name creation, design, God, is, at a word, summarily dismissed. Why, with one primordial prototype any chance even of a Struggle for Existence disappears, not again to 39 reappear, I fear me much, even with entrance of these few, four or five, primordial forms, let them be created, or let them only appear. Whatever is created or just appears is precisely alike in this respect, that it is only a. middle; "it is an ax in either case, and an x in neither, for it is simply to be taken as it is in the one or the other. If it is created, it is just positively so ; and if it appears, what it is it just positively again is. Mr Darwin's first is from the first an unexplained first ; and the premiss being so, no consequence is otherwise. Mr Darwin's own expedient relieves him of nothing. His position is infected and utterly ineffectual. What is created, he must accept ; and what appears, he must simply accept also: as either — for all its consequences it is equally responsible. And as either it is unpreceded by what is absolutely and alone necessary, the all-productive and creative — accident ! Mr Darwin admits to Haeckel, "if it could be proved true, this would be most important to us," and the "this" is a proteine compound, spontan- eously formed, just chemically, in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts : " this," as a discovery of transcendent import- ance, he tells Wallace, he would like to live to see proved true. This remarkable " this," however, has never been proved true (see Pasteur); and now, alas! it never can be proved true, "for at the present day such matter, formed with all these 40 living animals, and not as it was at first with none, would be instantly devoured and absorbed ! " ^ But accident, accident, accident — who can philoso- phise, rationalise accidents? Not that philosophy, reason, is exactly the want of Mr Darwin. No, his accident is to be, inexplicably somehow, just a talisman, potent as any drum, or ring, or rod, or lamp in an Arabian story. A hundredth of an inch, say, in the beak of a bird, purely an accident, and unintel- ligibly so, might prove, we cannot yet say has proved, the Open Sesame to a new species ! Now that is but a beginning. But so charming did it prove as a hint, a hint to account naturally, physically, for the appearance of design in things, that presently it grew and grew prolifically to fill the very mind of Mr Darwin so that he applied it as a key at last, that at least to him was a name to conjure out of sight all mystery. If flower and tree and beast and man were accidents (just as one's eye was to Huxley), so was every thing in Nature accident, mountain and sea and plain, and smoking volcano. The clump of matter was an accident, and life itself. The whole world was an accident. Space and time were accidents. Exist- ence at all ! why existence — existence was just an accident ! Mr Darwin tells Asa Gray, he had " no intention to write atheistically ; but he cannot see, as others do, evidence of design on all sides : he is inclined to look on everything, with its details, ^ It is Mr Darwin who speaks. 41 whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance ! " So, then, with natural selection — with evolution — that is what it all comes to. Nor can, even with protoplasm, Mr Huxley help. Let us just look back and ask ourselves, would the holy Emerson, whom we have seen, be pleased, brother-like, sympathetically to welcome and triumphantly to cry Bravo ! to such a consummation, to such a colophon as that ? Emerson ! who only valued ideas — who knew that the world was hung on ideas — that no sensuous appearance in it but had an idea under it — an idea in the mind of God ? Kant says (W. W. i. 224-5) : "The structure of plants and animals exhibits contrivance to which the general and necessary laws of I^ature are inadequate ; it would be absurd to regard the first production of a plant or animal as a mechanical, coincidental result of the general laws of Nature." Will anyone point to a single word in all Emerson that denies this: is not to Emerson spirit all ? what room does he offer for matter to crush spirit? Is not Kant at one with Aristotle when {De Fartihm, i. 1, 5 — fuller, 1, 2) he says, "For in all the works of Nature there is not chance, but design " ? " The cardinal idea of Aristotle's system," assures us the brilliant Haym, " is the idea of design. In all reality, for Aristotle, the Idea is immanent. Eealising itself, it is the moving and forming soul, 42 and it is that as End. N"ature is designful action. Her products form a series of higher and ever higher realisation of natural ends ; what on a lower stage is only in beginning and possibility, reveals itself unfolded and realised on the one that follows/' As for the Centenary Edition of the works of Emerson, if so far we are not at one with it, it may be right to add now, here in the end, that, at least, we are at one with it elsewhere. The notes show excellent familiarity with its pages, with admirable memory of passages to compare in them. 43 IL— The Ego " Christian Kapp was it " (the words occur at page 72), "that could speak only of Napoleon and — Hegel ! Napoleon might have been sparing of his confidence, reserved, reticent, concealed; but Napoleon could never have been more sparing of his confidence, never more reserved, reticent, con- cealed, than Hegel was. Just look to this" — and there is quoted a passage from page 14 of the Fhcenomenologie. And then I go on to say " that it " (the passage — and he has a thousand the like) " only exhibits the difficulties which Hegel is put to in order to find expressions that shall convey the Ego in its own natural dialectic movement, and yet con- ceal and secrete it into the guise of an independent, new, logical movement in philosophy." There occur also in the three or four preceding pages of the little book, other Hegelian quotations, or references, in which the Ego, in that its peculiar function, is undoubtedly implied. Probably the single chapter, " Hegel," in WTiat is Thought ? needs no supplement; still, where Hegel is concerned, illustration can never prove in excess ; and so it is. 44 even further, that I would wish to go many years back and remind, perhaps, of one of the very first things said by me of Hegel to interest, namely, what occurs in this paragraph now at page 5 of the new edition of the Secret of Hegel : " 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 of 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 {EncyTc., page 26): '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 45 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." That, then, is accurately what the Idea is to Hegel's own self : and is it aught else than the Ego ? Is it possible for any words to express more pre- cisely, more pictorially, even, the constitutive nature, action, movement, notion — of self-consciousness? — of self -consciousness as self -consciousness ? — not less in its difference than in its identity, exact, equal, alike in both? The very definition of the Idea, as it is to Hegel himself, is, surely, not less than the very definition of the Ego to everybody else: can demonstration, 'proof, ever jprove itself more absolute ? 46 III. — Causality The Lector Benevolus will please to add to the Note at page 95, as follows : — It may be asked here in regard to the matter of Causality, if, or since. Identity explains it — that is, accounts for the relation of Necessity between the cause and its effect — what is the use of all that Categorical Deduction of it? Let it be observed, however, that exactly the same question might be put in regard of all the Categories. If there is difference in the two opposing characters of the concrete, there is also identity. In fact, in the whole deduction of the Categories there is at work only the single principle of Identity in Difference : Ego ! The eye sees succession only — it is Eeason supplies the Category. Morft0 by tbe same Hutbor THE SECRET OF HEGEL. New Edition. 16s. OUver & Boyd, Edinburgh. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. (Out of Print) MATERIALISM IN RELATION TO THE STUDY OF MEDICINE. (Out of Print.) SCHWEGLER'S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. Four- teenth Edition. 6s. *' AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM." Improved Edition. 2s. PHILOSOPHY OF LAW. 6s. JERROLD, TENNYSON, AND MACAULAY. 5s. BURNS IN DRAMA, Etc. 6s. PHILOSOPHY IN THE POETS. Is. 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