G.W.F. Hegel

“ If the philosophical knowledge of religion is conceived of as something to be reached historically only, then we should have to regard the theologians who have brought it to this point as clerks in a mercantile house, who have only to keep an account of the wealth of strangers, who only act for others without obtaining any property for themselves. They do, indeed, receive salary, but their reward is only to serve, and to register that which is the property of others. Theology of this kind has no longer a place at all in the domain of thought ”

“ As a result of this general disposition of the spirit of our time, philosophy has not only won a position which is externally favourable—with what is external it is never concerned, and least of all where it, and active interest in it, takes the form of an institution of the State—but is favoured inwardly, since its principle already lives in the minds and in the hearts of men as an assumption. ”

“ It may happen that religion is awakened in the heart by means of philosophical knowledge, but it is not necessarily so. It is not the purpose of philosophy to edify, and quite as little is it necessary for it to make good its claims by showing in any particular case that it must produce religious feeling in the individual. Philosophy, it is true, has to develop the necessity of religion in and for itself, and to grasp the thought that Spirit must of necessity advance from the other modes of its will in conceiving and feeling to this absolute mode ”

“ Such is only the relation, however, as it at first appears, when knowledge is still severed from the religious side, and is finite knowledge. On the contrary, when we look more closely, it becomes apparent that as a matter of fact the content, the need, and the interest of philosophy represent something which it has in common with religion.
The object of religion as well as of philosophy is eternal truth in its objectivity, God and nothing but God, and the explication of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but is knowledge of what is not of the world ”

“ Philosophy thinks what otherwise exists only for the ordinary idea and sensuous perception. Man who thus forms general ideas, is in his character as Man a thinking being also, and the substance of religion comes to him as a being who thinks. It is only a thinking being that can have a religion, and to think is also to form ideas, though the former act alone is the free form of truth. The Understanding thinks too, but it does not get beyond identity; for it the Notion is Notion, and Being is Being. ”

“ Miss Sanderson had decided on "idea" as the least objectionable rendering of "Vorstellung,"—perhaps the most troublesome word in the Hegelian language,—and this the Editor has retained where the German word was used in a very special sense; but "ordinary thought," "popular conception," and other equivalent expressions have been freely employed; and in this connection the Editor desires to acknowledge the great assistance he has derived from the notes on Hegelian terms given by Professor Wallace in the valuable Prolegomena to his translation of Hegel's "Logic." ”

“ Moral good belongs essentially to Man; but since his power is finite, and since the realisation of the Good in him is limited owing to the natural element attaching to him, since, in fact, he is himself the enemy of the Good, it is not within his power to realise it. The existence of God is here conceived of simply as a postulate, as something that should be, and which should have for Man subjective certainty, because the Good represents what is ultimate in his reason. ”

“ But the development of reason as perfected in thought does not stand in opposition to this Spirit, and consequently it cannot be absolutely different from the work which the Divine Spirit has produced in religion. The more a man in thinking rationally lets the true thing or fact [2] itself hold sway with him, renounces his particularity, acts as universal consciousness, while his reason does not seek its own in the sense of something special, the less will he, as the embodiment of this reason, get into that condition of opposition ”

“ But the Philosophy of Religion, as being rational knowledge, is opposed to the arbitrariness of this argumentative process, and is the Reason of the Universal, which presses forward to unity.
Philosophy is therefore very far removed from being on the common highway on which this Theology of Reason and this exegetical argumentative process move, the truth rather being that it is these tendencies chiefly which combat it, and seek to bring it under suspicion. They protest against philosophy, but only in order to reserve to themselves the arbitrariness of their argumentative process. ”

“ Thus if philosophy has always been regarded as the opponent of the doctrines of the Church, it cannot any longer be such, since these doctrines, which it seemed to threaten with destruction, are no longer regarded by general conviction as of importance. A great part of the danger which threatens philosophy from this side when she considers these dogmas in order to comprehend them ought to be thus taken away, and so philosophy can take up a more untrammelled attitude with regard to dogmas which have so much sunk in interest with theologians themselves. ”

“ Satisfaction, everything in the way of a foundation or first principle is, on the contrary, found to exist in the eternal world as something which is independent in-and-for-itself. As opposed to this, in the form taken by the syllogism, the Being of both is expressed in a similar way—both in the one proposition of the connection: If a contingent world exists, an Absolutely-necessary exists too; as also in the other in which it is stated as a presupposition that a contingent world does exist ”

“ As the Lutheran Reformation carried faith back to the first centuries, so the principle of immediate knowledge has carried Christian knowledge back to the primary elements. If, however, this process at first causes the essential content to evaporate, yet it is philosophy which recognises this very principle of immediate knowledge as representing content, and as being such carries it forward to its true expansion within itself.
The want of sound sense which marks the arguments advanced against philosophy knows no bounds. ”

“ In the case of contingency, the nature of determinate Being or existence belonging to it is, as has been already remarked, so far evident that it is seen at the same time to have the character of something which is virtually a nullity, and consequently the transition to its Other, to the Necessary, is already expressed in that existence itself. It is an instance of the same thing as we have in abstract identity, which is a simple reference to self ”

“ It beholds the One in all things, and consequently clothes this purely abstract One in all the glory and splendour of the natural and spiritual universe. The souls of the Eastern Poets dive into this ocean and drown in it all the necessities, the aims, the cares of this petty circumscribed life, and revel in the enjoyment of this freedom, upon which they lavish by way of ornament and adornment all the beauty of the world. ”

“ In this region of spirit flow the streams of forgetfulness from which Psyche drinks, and in which she drowns all sorrow, while the dark things of this life are softened away into a dream-like vision, and become transfigured until they are a mere framework for the brightness of the Eternal. ”

“ A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between the Heracliteans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined—both schools claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses, and each charging the other with illusion. Now the significance of Hegel's philosophy can be grasped only when we bear in mind that it was just this profound distinction between the permanent and the changing that Hegel sought to understand and to interpret. He saw more deeply into the reality of movement and change than any other philosopher before or after him. ”

“ There is hardly a word that has so many meanings as Idea, and I doubt whether any of the raw recruits, just escaped from school, and unacquainted with the history of philosophy, could have had any idea of what Hegel’s Idea was meant for. Yet they talked about it very eloquently and very positively over their glasses of beer; and anybody who came from Berlin and could speak mysteriously or rapturously about the Idea and its evolution by the dialectic process, was listened to with silent wonder by the young Saxons, who had been brought up on Kant and Krug. ”

“ According to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The particular—independent and unrelated—is an abstraction. The isolation of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly in Hegel's theory of the State, has left its impress upon political, social, and economic theories of his century. Not less significant is the glorification of reason of which Hegel's complete philosophy is an expression. ”

“ Even at Berlin the popularity of Hegelianism came suddenly to an end, and after a time no truly scientific man liked to be called a Hegelian. These sudden collapses in Germany are very instructive. As long as a German professor is at the head of affairs and can do something for his pupils, his pupils are very loud in their encomiums, both in public and in private. They not only exalt him, but help to belittle all who differ from him. So it was with Hegel, so it was at a later time with Bopp, and Curtius, and other professors, particularly if they had the ear of the Minister of Education. ”

“ Sophie Charlotte [18] and Hegel’s Philosophy of History will accompany me, and both will delight me greatly. My soul rather turns to you. I shall certainly find a torrent of ideas in that Hegel, whom his editor, Gans, in so masterly a manner has not deprived of his great individuality; but a man who is as I am, like an insect, inseparable from the earth and its natural variations, feels himself uneasy and constrained at an abstract assertion of totally unfounded facts and views on America and the Indian world. At the same time I appreciate what is grand in the conception of Hegel. ”

“ From all periods of the world—from medieval piety and stoical pride, Kant and Sophocles, science and art, religion and philosophy—with disdain of mere chronology, Hegel gathers in the vineyards of the human spirit the grapes from which he crushes the wine of thought. The mind coming through a thousand phases of mistake and disappointment to a sense and realization of its true position in the universe—such is the drama which is consciously Hegel’s own history, but is represented objectively as the process of spiritual history which the philosopher reproduces in himself. ”

“ And there is no doubt that, as a movement of reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly indulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack others. ”

“ One of the peculiarities of the philosophy was, that it was capable of diametrically opposite interpretations. From this time onwards we observe it to be one of the most powerful instruments in the remoulding, the reconstruction of life. We saw that it was so in the case of Heine, who never alludes to Hegel's conversion to Prussian Conservatism except to apologise for it; to him Hegel is always the great philosopher of the new era, the mighty sovereign of the realm of thought.
HEGEL
Until Hegel was called to Berlin he had been unsuccessful as a teacher. ”

“ And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. ”

“ Among students of philosophy the mention of Hegel's name arouses at once a definite emotion. Few thinkers indeed have ever so completely fascinated the minds of their sympathetic readers, or have so violently repulsed their unwilling listeners, as Hegel has. ”

“ Thus Hegel's dialectic modulates only in the sphere of his distance. His being is universal existence, and, as universals have only a logical truth, being in se is equivalent to Nothing. But Nothing hasn't even a logical basis. Lithe as human thought is it can't compass the conception. It is a mere brutum fulmen devised to disguise the absence of thought or its inanition; and Hegel, if he had been wise, would have said no-thought instead of no-thing. For no-thing doesn't express the complete absence of existence. ”

“ He is claimed as their head by widely different schools of thought, all of which appeal to him as the original source of their line of argument. The Right wing, and the Left, as well as the Centre, profess to be the genuine descendants of the prophet, and to inherit the mantle of his inspiration. If we believe one side, Hegel is only to be rightly appreciated when we divest his teaching of every shred of religion and orthodoxy which it retains. ”