William Wallace and John Henry Muirhead

“ The beauty of art is a beauty born in the spirit of the artist and born again in the spectator; it is not like the beauty of natural things, an incident of their existence, but is “essentially a question, an address to a responding breast, a call to the heart and spirit.” The perfection of art depends on the degree of intimacy in which idea and form appear worked into each other. From the different proportion between the idea and the shape in which it is realized arise three different forms of art. ”

“ 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. It is the spirit of progress and change, the enemy of convention and conservatism; it is absolute and universal unrest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the thought thus regarded as the basis of all existence is not consciousness with its distinction of ego and non-ego. It is rather the stuff of which both mind and nature are made, neither extended as in the natural world, nor self-centred as in mind. Thought in its primary form is, as it were, thoroughly transparent and absolutely fluid, free and mutually interpenetrable in every part—the spirit in its seraphic scientific life, before creation had produced a natural world, and thought had risen to independent existence in the social organism. ”

“ Nature was no longer, as with Fichte, to be a mere spring-board to evoke the latent powers of the spirit. Nor was it, as in Schelling’s earlier system, to be a collateral progeny with mind from the same womb of indifference and identity. Nature and mind in the Hegelian system—the external and the spiritual world—have the same origin, but are not co-equal branches. The natural world proceeds from the “idea,” the spiritual from the idea and nature. ”

“ Last comes absolute religion, in which the mystery of the reconciliation between God and man is an open doctrine. This is Christianity, in which God is a Trinity, because He is a spirit. The revelation of this truth is the subject of the Christian Scriptures. For the Son of God, in the immediate aspect, is the finite world of nature and man, which far from being at one with its Father is originally in an attitude of estrangement. The history of Christ is the visible reconciliation between man and the eternal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But in this isolation from the world, self-consciousness has closed its gates against the stream of life. The perception of this is reason. Reason convinced that the world and the soul are alike rational observes the external world, mental phenomena, and specially the nervous organism, as the meeting ground of body and mind. But reason finds much in the world recognizing no kindred with her, and so turning to practical activity seeks in the world the realization of her own aims. Either in a crude way she pursues her own pleasure, and finds that necessity counteracts her cravings ”

“ Thought in this primary form, when in all its parts completed, is what Hegel calls the “idea.” But the idea, though fundamental, is in another sense final, in the process of the world. 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 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. ”

“ 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.
So far we have seen consciousness on one hand and the real world on the other. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ The lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, though unequal in their composition and belonging to different dates, serve to exhibit the vital connexion of the system with Christianity. Religion, like art, is inferior to philosophy as an exponent of the harmony between man and the absolute. ”

“ They thus seemed to come forward in the character of exponents rather than critics of the Western belief in God, freedom and immortality. 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? ”

“ 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. At a later date, with the call of Schelling to Berlin in 1841, it became fashionable to speak of Hegelianism as a negative philosophy requiring to be complemented by a “positive” philosophy which would give reality and not mere ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a relation to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schelling was found in the contemporary world, where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connexion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national art in which art is not a part but an aspect of the common life, and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the passion and power of beauty in the whole community. “Such art,” says Hegel, “is the common good and the work of all. ”

“ 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. From this position further consequences followed. Seeing that the individual soul must thus be taken to stand in respect to its inmost essence in complete harmony with the whole, it must eternally be at one with itself: all change must be appearance. ”

“ Each generation hands it on beautified to the next; each has done something to give utterance to the universal thought. 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 ”

“ Thus Hegelianism reduces dogmatism, scepticism and mysticism to factors in philosophy. The abstract or dogmatic thinker believes his object to be one, simple and stationary, and intelligible apart from its surrounding. He speaks, e.g., as if species and genera were fixed and unchangeable; and fixing his eye on the ideal forms in their purity and self-sameness, he scorns the phenomenal world, whence this identity and persistence are absent. ”

“ 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. But increasing culture presents new ideals, and the mind, absorbing the ethical spirit of its environment, gradually emancipates itself from conventions and superstitions. This Aufklärung prepares the way for the rule of conscience, for the moral view of the world as subject of a moral law. From the moral world the next step is religion ”

“ 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.
During these years Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin. Schelling, already on the way to fame, kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant’s postulation of God and immortality to crown the edifice of ethics. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No pantheistic theory of an eternal substance continuously expressing itself in different individuals who fall back into its being like drops into the ocean will here be sufficient. The ocean is the drops. “The Absolute requires each self not to make up a sum or to maintain an average but in respect of the self’s special and unique nature.” Finally as it cannot cease, neither can the individual soul have had a beginning. Pre-existence is as necessary and certain as a future life. ”

“ With the general acceptance of its main principle that the real is the rational, there came in the eighties a more critical examination of the precise meaning to be attached to it and its bearing on the problems of religion. The earlier Hegelians had interpreted it in the sense that the world in its ultimate essence was not only spiritual but self-conscious intelligence whose nature was reflected inadequately but truly in the finite mind. ”

“ The native attitude of consciousness towards existence is reliance on the evidence of the senses; but a little reflection is sufficient to show that the reality attributed to the external world is as much due to intellectual conceptions as to the senses, and that these conceptions elude us when we try to fix them. If consciousness cannot detect a permanent object outside it, so self-consciousness cannot find a permanent subject in itself. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. But this third stage is the place of effort, requiring neither the surrender of the original unity nor the ignoring of the diversity afterwards suggested. The stimulus of contradiction is no doubt a strong one ”