Hugh Adam Reyburn

“ But in spite of this undeniable immaturity of some parts of Hegel’s view, I feel sure that what is needed in social philosophy is development and not revolution. One important step which must be taken if we are to profit by the advance which has been made is to appropriate the truth of the philosophy which has come down to us. Hegel is the last great original thinker in the main line of the evolution of philosophy, and I doubt whether the new philosophic movements of our own day have mastered his thought. ”

“ Substance is conceived as the underived and supreme, but the thought is one-sided. Substance is the ground of the accidents, and they receive their justification and truth from it; their immediate appearance is traced back to substance and based on it. But, on the other hand, substance does not ground itself in its accidents, it is prior to them and does not develop through their change. What is posited is the accident and not substance: substance is the original, the underived. Now this conception has, perhaps unwittingly, been used by many thinkers who treat of freedom. ”

“ But experience is only the beginning. What is given is not the final truth, not the finished perfect work which alone deserves the name of the real; it is rather a problem, a vague we-know-not-what. Thought has to interpret the datum, and solve the problem; and the succession of general principles by means of which we attempt this interpretation is the content of logic. One of the most fruitful ways of regarding Hegel’s Logic is to look upon it as a protracted and thorough study of the relations of unity and difference, or of universal and particular. ”

“ Thus it is true that in unfolding the nature of mind Hegel is analysing or remaking for knowledge the principles of things; but it is no less true that the evolution of an arbitrary scheme in the mind is not the analysis of reality—it is not the analysis of mind itself. By bringing the world and mind into harmony Hegel has made metaphysics possible, but at the same time he has made logic, the key, more difficult by extending its content and forcing it to wait on the nature of things. ”

“ In any ordered world of thought which has risen to the level of substance, change and process find a place. And such change has an explanation. But if the first principle, substance itself, contain no such explanation, then beyond it there lie forces and powers which it cannot control, and which are alien to it. But the first principle, substance, at the same time claims supremacy and completeness ”

“ And in these days we are forced to listen to some one, be he a newspaper editor, a street orator, or a politically minded acquaintance, who is eager to add his authority to that of the law and the prophets, and to instruct us on all questions of right and justice. Everyday experience often makes it possible for one to detect the general bearing of Hegel’s argument in this sphere, even when his expressions are unusual; for, after all, Hegel too was a good citizen and lived in the common atmosphere. ”

“ Kant found an a priori element in experience, a universality which transcended the given; but he wrongly identified it with the subjective, the mind-made. Hegel swept this identification aside. These principles, he argued, apply to the known as such, subject as well as thing; they are doubtless principles of thought, but they are no less principles of the world; they go beneath the opposition of subjective and objective, they characterize all experience, and are not more truly called mental than are particular laws of nature—nor less so. ”

“ When we force this point to the utmost it yields the conclusion that substance does nothing. Doubtless it posits its accidents and determines them; but how can there be a power that acts and is unaffected by its action? Substance is unmoved; and the movement must therefore be in some way illusion—if substance is the whole truth. But against this we have to set the reality of the movement; for to deny the movement is to annihilate the accidents and substance along with them. ”

“ Almost a century has passed since Hegel published the Encyclopaedia, and the world has not stood still in the meantime. Some forms of social life which were present to Hegel have decayed, and passed into the keeping of history; other forms have developed since his time; and our knowledge of political life is both more accurate and more extensive than his possibly could be. As he himself might say, the world has become more mature and philosophy has now a more complete construction over against it to be built into an intellectual kingdom. ”

“ Aristotle’s conception of the individual is ambiguous, because at times he seems to regard it as the union of two disparate elements, matter and form, while at others he treats it as the infima species itself. It seems fair to suppose that, on the whole, Aristotle’s thought was dualistic, and that he regarded the universal as incapable in itself of giving the concrete detail of life. Universal and particular do come together for him, as in Hegel’s categories of essence, but the reason of their union is not present in their nature. ”

“ If a student seeks to go beyond these introductions, he speedily discovers that the postponed logical problems contain the very substance of logic, and that the boundary wall between logic and metaphysics falls when he approaches it.
It may be taken for granted that logic deals with true thought. If so, is it possible to analyse the nature of true thinking without reference to the object of knowledge? The word, thought, is without doubt an ambiguous one, and covers a fatal tendency to confuse the act of thinking, a psychological subject-matter, with the object or content known. ”

“ Being which is not existence in some place and time, and under some special circumstances, and so forth, is as good as non-existence—it is the same as non-existence. Hegel’s contention is that if we are in earnest with our thought and carry it as far as it will go, such a category changes in our hands and shows a meaning which we try to exclude from it. This state of things can be mended only when we adopt a more concrete principle which includes both aspects as part of itself. ”

“ The thinker notes a distinction between the aspects of appearance and essence. The surface show of a thing is not its whole truth; behind that show there is a certain identity and permanence—an essence. As we progress in this series of categories we gradually discover that things are inter-connected; and we now see that we have not said the complete truth when we affirm that a thing is itself—it is also bound up with the rest of the universe and contains implications of the whole within the four corners of its being. We may take ‘thinghood’ as our first example of these principles of essence. ”

“ Causality is the embodiment of necessity: in a causal series nothing can call itself its own; everything has been made what it is by forces which are other than it and which it regards as alien. That is to say, in causality itself the inherent unity is not yet in its own true form, it is not able to master and possess the element of difference. To put it another way, the aspects of the conception of causality, viz. identity and difference, pass immediately into one another, and the rationale of the movement is seen but imperfectly. ”

“ When we force reality, as it were, into one of these primitive categories and try to take it abstractly, it avenges itself by turning into another form. The neglected aspects appear in spite of us, and the despised unity of the system as a whole reveals itself by forcing a half idea to turn into its opposite. This change, however, is not part of the category itself. That is to say, the change is immediate for the thinker who uses such principles; he does not apprehend the inner nexus which produces the conversion, and each term is, for him, unmediated by its opposite. ”

“ The self has no power over itself, and the mysterious inborn nature of it is an alien force.
This is the characteristic defect of the categories of essence. Substance must have accidents, it exists only in its accidents; but yet it gains nothing by going out into them. It is in se and not in alio; yet it is only in going forth into finitude. The two aspects, mediate and immediate, universal and particular, unity and difference, infinite and finite, original and derivative, or however else one likes to name them, lie side by side in the categories of essence. ”

“ Logic is not encumbered by the actual living man, and the dialectic is not a history of personal sufferings which cannot be made good. Although at first dialectic changes are external and unintelligible to the mind which uses elementary principles, yet these changes themselves are seen by fuller knowledge to be a self-evolution of the complete truth. In its higher stages thought has to include the lower categories, and the elements of perfect knowledge are known by it as opposites. [12] But although tragedy and the dialectic differ in completeness, the power is the same; it is the whole. ”