Various

“ So far we have seen consciousness on one hand and the real world on the other. The stage of Geist reveals the consciousness no longer as critical and antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a community, as no longer isolated from its surroundings but the union of the single and real consciousness with the vital feeling that animates the community. This is the lowest stage of concrete consciousness—life, and not knowledge; the spirit inspires, but does not reflect. It is the age of unconscious morality, when the individual’s life is lost in the society of which he is an organic member. ”

“ The universe, then, is a process or development, to the eye of philosophy. It is the process of the absolute—in religious language, the manifestation of God. In the background of all the absolute is eternally present; the rhythmic movement of thought is the self-unfolding of the absolute. ”

“ It sets its face against the idealism which either thundered against the world for its deficiencies, or sought something finer than reality. Philosophy is to be the science of the actual world—it is the spirit comprehending itself in its own externalizations and manifestations. The philosophy of Hegel is idealism, but it is an idealism in which every idealistic unification has its other face in the multiplicity of existence. It is realism as well as idealism, and never quits its hold on facts. Compared with Fichte and Schelling, Hegel has a sober, hard, realistic character. ”

“ Finally, unable to impose upon the world either selfish or humanitarian ends, she folds her arms in pharisaic virtue, with the hope that some hidden power will give the victory to righteousness. But the world goes on in its life, heedless of the demands of virtue. The principle of nature is to live and let live. Reason abandons her efforts to mould the world, and is content to let the aims of individuals work out their results independently, only stepping in to lay down precepts for the cases where individual actions conflict, and to test these precepts by the rules of formal logic. ”

“ From the moral world the next step is religion; the moral law gives place to God; but the idea of Godhead, too, as it first appears, is imperfect, and has to pass through the forms of nature-worship and of art before it reaches a full utterance in Christianity. Religion in this shape is the nearest step to the stage of absolute knowledge; and this absolute knowledge—“the spirit knowing itself as spirit”—is not something which leaves these other forms behind but the full comprehension of them as the organic constituents of its empire ”

“ The fact which ordinary thought ignores, and of which ordinary logic therefore provides no account, is the presence of gradation and continuity in the world. The general terms of language simplify the universe by reducing its variety of individuals to a few forms, none of which exists simply and perfectly. The method of the understanding is to divide and then to give a separate reality to what it has thus distinguished. It is part of Hegel’s plan to remedy this one-sided character of thought, by laying bare the gradations of ideas. ”

“ God reveals Himself in the logical idea, in nature and in mind; but mind is not alike conscious of its absoluteness in every stage of development. Philosophy alone sees God revealing Himself in the ideal organism of thought as it were a possible deity prior to the world and to any relation between God and actuality; in the natural world, as a series of materialized forces and forms of life; and in the spiritual world as the human soul, the legal and moral order of society, and the creations of art, religion and philosophy. ”

“ If there is equilibrium both mechanical and thermal at every stage of the cycle, the ideal engine will be perfectly reversible. That is to say, all its operations will be exactly reversed as regards transfer of heat and work, when the operations are performed in the reverse order and direction. On this understanding Carnot’s principle may be put in a different way, which is often adopted, but is really only the same thing put in different words: The efficiency of a perfectly reversible engine is the maximum possible, and is a function solely of the limits of temperature between which it works. ”

“ The Lectures on the Philosophy of History, edited by Gans and subsequently by Karl Hegel, is the most popular of Hegel’s works. The history of the world is a scene of judgment where one people and one alone holds for awhile the sceptre, as the unconscious instrument of the universal spirit, till another rises in its place, with a fuller measure of liberty—a larger superiority to the bonds of natural and artificial circumstance. ”

“ It is a matter of common observation that rays of the sun or of a fire falling on a body warm it, and it was in the first instance natural to suppose that heat itself somehow travelled across the intervening space from the sun or fire to the body warmed, in much the same way as heat may be carried by a current of hot air or water. But we now know that energy of radiation is not the same thing as heat, though it is converted into heat when the rays strike an absorbing substance. ”

“ It only appears in consciousness as the crowning development of the mind. Only with philosophy does thought become fully conscious of itself in its origin and development. Accordingly the history of philosophy is the pre-supposition of logic, or the three branches of philosophy form a circle.
The exposition or constitution of the “idea” is the work of the Logic. As the total system falls into three parts, so every part of the system follows the triadic law. Every truth, every reality, has three aspects or stages; it is the unification of Logic. ”

“ The whole falls under the three heads of mechanics, physics and “organic”—the content under each varying somewhat in the three editions of the Encyklopädie. The first treats of space, time, matter, movement; and in the solar system we have the representation of the idea in its general and abstract material form. Under the head of physics we have the theory of the elements, of sound, heat and cohesion, and finally of chemical affinity—presenting the phenomena of material change and interchange in a series of special forces which generate the variety of the life of nature. ”

“ The philosopher did not pose as a practical statesman. He described the German empire in its nullity as a conception without existence in fact. In such a state of things it was the business of the philosopher to set forth the outlines of the coming epoch, as they were already moulding themselves into shape, amidst what the ordinary eye saw only as the disintegration of the old forms of social life. ”

“ It is the spirit of progress and change, the enemy of convention and conservatism; it is absolute and universal unrest. In the realm of abstract thought these transitions take place lightly. In the worlds of nature and mind they are more palpable and violent. So far as this Hegel seems on the side of revolution. But reason is not negative only; while it disintegrates the mass or unconscious unity, it builds up a new unity with higher organization. ”

“ Every one has heard the legend which makes Hegel say, “One man has understood me, and even he has not.” He abruptly hurls us into a world where old habits of thought fail us. In three places, indeed, he has attempted to exhibit the transition to his own system from other levels of thought; but in none with much success. In the introductory lectures on the philosophy of religion he gives a rationale of the difference between the modes of consciousness in religion and philosophy (between Vorstellung and Begriff) . ”

“ In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality: he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and proclaiming the divine which is in man and cannot be overcome by error and evil, unless the man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. ”

“ But although he goes to the Scriptures, and tastes the mystical spirit of the medieval saints, the Christ of his conception has traits that seem borrowed from Socrates and from the heroes of Attic tragedy, who suffer much and yet smile gently on a destiny to which they were reconciled. Instead of the Hebraic doctrine of a Jesus punished for our sins, we have the Hellenic idea of a man who is calmly tranquil in the consciousness of his unity with God. ”

“ We stand on safer ground when we come to Elijah’s bold intervention on behalf of righteousness when he declared in the name of Yahweh the divine judgment on Ahab and his house for the judicial murder of Naboth. We here observe a great advance in the vocation of the prophet. He becomes the interpreter and vindicator of divine justice, the vocal exponent of a nation’s conscience. ”

“ Without difference of temperature there is no transfer of heat. When two bodies have been brought to the same temperature by conduction, they are also in equilibrium as regards radiation, and vice versa. If this were not the case, there could be no equilibrium of heat defined by equality of temperature. A hot body placed in an enclosure of lower temperature, e.g. a calorimeter in its containing vessel, generally loses heat by all three modes simultaneously in different degrees. ”

“ When Hellenism came to stand in the world for something concrete and organic, it was, of course, no mere abstract principle, but embodied in a language, a literature, an artistic tradition. In the earliest existing monument of the Hellenic genius, the Homeric poems, one may already observe that regulative sense of form and proportion, which shaped the later achievements of the race in the intellectual and artistic spheres. ”

“ From the sense of heat, again, we naturally derive the idea of a continuous scale or order, expressed by such terms as summer heat, blood heat, fever heat, red heat, white heat, in which all bodies may be placed with regard to their degrees of hotness, and we speak of the temperature of a body as denoting its place in the scale, in contradistinction to the quantity of heat it may contain. ”

“ As time went on it became obvious that without departure from the spirit of idealism Hegel’s principle was susceptible of a different interpretation. Granted that rationality taken in the sense of inner coherence and self-consistency is the ultimate standard of truth and reality, does self-consciousness itself answer to the demands of this criterion? If not, are we not forced to deny ultimate reality to personality whether human or divine? ”

“ We may regard it as axiomatic that a given body (say a pound of water) in a given state (say boiling under a given pressure) must always contain the same quantity of heat, and conversely that, if it contains a given quantity of heat, and if it is under conditions in other respects, it must be at a definite temperature, which will always be the same for the same given conditions. ”

“ Appealing to reality it shows that the identity and permanence of forms are contradicted by history; instead of unity it exhibits multiplicity, instead of identity difference, instead of a whole, only parts. Dialectic is, therefore, a dislocating power; it shakes the solid structures of material thought, and exhibits the instability latent in such conceptions of the world. ”

“ Those who are said to have genius have acquired some special aptitude by which they render the general shapes of the nation their own work, one in one point, another in another. What they produce is not their invention, but the invention of the whole nation ”

“ Between the hedonism of the ancients and that of modern philosophers there lies a great gulf. Practically speaking ancient hedonism advocated the happiness of the individual: the modern hedonism of Hume, Bentham and Mill is based on a wider conception of life. The only real happiness is the happiness of the community, or at least of the majority: the criterion is society, not the individual. Thus we pass from Egoistic to Universalistic hedonism, Utilitarianism, Social Ethics, more especially in relation to the still broader theories of evolution. ”

“ The values honoured by the rulers of the world must naturally impress themselves upon the subject multitudes. The Macedonian chiefs found their pride in being champions of Hellenism. Of Alexander there is no need to speak. The courts of his successors in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt were Greek in language and atmosphere. All kings liked to win the good word of the Greeks by munificence bestowed upon Greek cities and Greek institutions. All of them in some degree patronized Greek art and letters, and some sought fame for themselves as authors. ”

“ Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from without, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. ”

“ It was not probably till the reorganization of the kingdom by Archelaus (413-399) that Greek culture found any abundant entrance into Macedonia. Now all that was most brilliant in Greek literature and Greek art was concentrated in the court of Aegae; the palace was decorated by Zeuxis; Euripides spent there the end of his days. From that time, no doubt, a certain degree of literary culture was general among the Macedonian nobility; their names in the days of Philip are largely Greek; the Macedonian service was full of men from the Greek cities within Philip’s dominions. ”

“ A people’s religion completes and consecrates their whole activity: in it the people rises above its finite life in limited spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself all at one. Even philosophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infinite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of apprehending the infinite than even religion. ”

“ If a hot iron is placed on a cold iron plate, we may observe that the plate is heated and the iron cooled until both attain appreciably the same degree of warmth; and we infer from similar cases that something which we call “heat” tends to pass from hot to cold bodies, and to attain finally a state of equable diffusion when all the bodies concerned are equally warm or cold. Ideas such as these derived entirely from the sense of heat, are, so to speak, embedded in the language of every nation from the earliest times. ”

“ Inaccuracy in detail and artifice in the arrangement of isolated peoples are inevitable in such a scheme. A graver mistake, according to some critics, is that Hegel, far from giving a law of progress, seems to suggest that the history of the world is nearing an end, and has merely reduced the past to a logical formula. The answer to this charge is partly that such a law seems unattainable, and partly that the idealistic content of the present which philosophy extracts is always an advance upon actual fact, and so does throw a light into the future. ”

“ The external bases of Israel’s religion had been swept away, and in exchange for these Jeremiah had led his countrymen to the more permanent internal grounds of a spiritual renewal. But a religion could not permanently subsist in this world of space and time without some external concrete embodiment. It was the task of Ezekiel to take up once more the broken threads of Israel’s religious traditions, and weave them anew into statelier forms of ritual and national polity. The priest-prophet’s keen eye for detail, manifested in the elaborate vision of the wheels and living creatures (Ezek. i.) ”

“ In reply to Bradley’s argument for the unreality of the self, Hegel is interpreted as meaning that the opposition between self and not-self on which it is founded is one that is self-made and in being made is transcended. The fuller our knowledge of reality the more does the object stand out as an invulnerable system of ordered parts, but the process by which it is thus set in opposition to the subject is also the process by which we understand and transform it into the substance of our own thought. ”

“ Prevost’s leading idea was that all bodies, whether cold or hot, are constantly radiating heat. Heat equilibrium, he says, consists in an equality of exchange. When equilibrium is interfered with, it is re-established by inequalities of exchange. If into a locality at uniform temperature a refracting or reflecting body is introduced, it has no effect in the way of changing the temperature at any point of that locality. ”

“ In space void of matter, we should have pure radiation, but it is difficult to obtain so perfect a vacuum that the effects of the residual gas in transferring heat by conduction or convection are inappreciable. In the interior of an opaque solid we should have pure conduction, but if the solid is sensibly transparent in thin layers there must also be an internal radiation, while in a liquid or a gas it is very difficult to eliminate the effects of convection. ”

“ Even the barbarian courts, their neighbours or vassals, were swayed by the dominant fashion to imitation. But by the courts alone Hellenism could never have been propagated far. Greek culture had been the product of the city-state, and Hellenism could not be dissevered from the city. It was upon the system of Greek and Macedonian cities, planted by Alexander and his successors, that their work rested, and though their dynasties crumbled, their work remained. ”

“ How much motive power (defined by Carnot as weight lifted through a certain height) can be obtained from heat alone by means of an engine repeating a regular succession or “cycle” of operations continuously? Is the efficiency limited, and, if so, how is it limited? Are other agents preferable to steam for developing motive power from heat? In discussing this problem, we cannot do better than follow Carnot’s reasoning which, in its main features could hardly be improved at the present day. ”

“ Thus although we may regard the equilibrium in such an enclosure as being due to equal exchanges of heat in all directions, the equal and opposite streams of radiation annul and neutralize each other in such a way that no actual transfer of energy in any direction takes place. The state of the medium is everywhere the same in such an enclosure, but its energy of agitation per unit volume is a function of the temperature, and is such that it would not be in equilibrium with any body at a different temperature. ”

“ A body may possess energy in virtue of its state (gas or steam under pressure) , or in virtue of its position (a raised weight) , or in various other ways, when at rest. In these cases it is said to possess potential energy. It may also possess energy in virtue of its motion or rotation (as a fly-wheel or a cannon-ball) . In this case it is said to possess kinetic energy, or energy of motion. In many cases the energy (as in the case of a vibrating body, like a pendulum) is partly kinetic and partly potential, and changes continually from one to the other throughout the motion. ”