and interdependence, than himself in every case kept to the right
way. The day for a fuller investigation of this problem will partly
depend upon the progress of the study of language in the direction
marked out by W. von Humboldt.
The Philosophy of Nature starts with the result of the logical
development, with the full scientific “idea.” But the relations of
pure thought, losing their inwardness, appear as relations
of space and time; the abstract development of thought
appears as matter and movement. Instead of thought, we
Philosophy
of nature.
have perception; instead of dialectic, gravitation; instead
of causation, sequence in time. 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. Lastly, under the head of “organic,” come geology,
botany and animal physiology—presenting the concrete results of
these processes in the three kingdoms of nature.
The charges of superficial analogies, so freely urged against the “Natur-philosophie” by critics who forget the impulse it gave to physical research by the identification of forces then believed to be radically distinct, do not particularly affect Hegel. But in general it may be said that he looked down upon the mere natural world. The meanest of the fancies of the mind and the most casual of its whims he regarded as a better warrant for the being of God than any single object of nature. Those who supposed astronomy to inspire religious awe were horrified to hear the stars compared to eruptive spots on the face of the sky. Even in the animal world, the highest stage of nature, he saw a failure to reach an independent and rational system of organization; and its feelings under the continuous violence and menaces of the environment he described as insecure, anxious and unhappy.
His point of view was essentially opposed to the current views of science. To metamorphosis he only allowed a logical value, as explaining the natural classification; the only real, existent metamorphosis he saw in the development of the individual from its embryonic stage. Still more distinctly did he contravene the general tendency of scientific explanation. “It is held the triumph of science to recognize in the general process of the earth the same categories as are exhibited in the processes of isolated bodies. This is, however, an application of categories from a field where the conditions are finite to a sphere in which the circumstances are infinite.” In astronomy he depreciates the merits of Newton and elevates Kepler, accusing Newton particularly, à propos of the distinction of centrifugal and centripetal forces, of leading to a confusion between what is mathematically to be distinguished and what is physically separate. The principles which explain the fall of an apple will not do for the planets. As to colour, he follows Goethe, and uses strong language against Newton’s theory, for the barbarism of the conception that light is a compound, the incorrectness of his observations, &c. In chemistry, again, he objects to the way in which all the chemical elements are treated as on the same level.
The third part of the system is the Philosophy of Mind. Its three divisions are the “subjective mind” (psychology), the “objective mind” (philosophic jurisprudence, moral and political philosophy) and the “absolute mind” (the philosophy of art, religion and philosophy). The subjects Philosophy of mind. 1. Psychology. of the second and third divisions have been treated by Hegel with great detail. The “objective mind” is the topic of the Rechts-Philosophie, and of the lectures on the Philosophy of History; while on the “absolute mind” we have the lectures on Aesthetic, on the Philosophy of Religion and on the History of Philosophy—in short, more than one-third of his works.
The purely psychological branch of the subject takes up half of the space allotted to Geist in the Encyklopädie. It falls under the three heads of anthropology, phenomenology and psychology proper. Anthropology treats of the mind in union with the body—of the natural soul—and discusses the relations of the soul with the planets, the races of mankind, the differences of age, dreams, animal magnetism, insanity and phrenology. In this obscure region it is rich in suggestions and rapprochements; but the ingenuity of these speculations attracts curiosity more than it satisfies scientific inquiry. In the Phenomenology consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are dealt with. The title of the section and the contents recall, though with some important variations, the earlier half of his first work; only that here the historical background on which the stages in the development of the ego were represented has disappeared. Psychology, in the stricter sense, deals with the various forms of theoretical and practical intellect, such as attention, memory, desire and will. In this account of the development of an independent, active and intelligent being from the stage where man like the Dryad is a portion of the natural life around him, Hegel has combined what may be termed a physiology and pathology of the mind—a subject far wider than that of ordinary psychologies, and one of vast intrinsic importance. It is, of course, easy to set aside these questions as unanswerable, and to find artificiality in the arrangement. Still it remains a great point to have even attempted some system in the dark anomalies which lie under the normal consciousness, and to have traced the genesis of the intellectual faculties from animal sensitivity.
The theory of the mind as objectified in the institutions of law, the family and the state is discussed in the “Philosophy of Right.” Beginning with the antithesis of a legal system and morality, Hegel, carrying out the work of Kant, presents the synthesis of these elements in the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) 2. Law and history. of the family and the state. Treating the family as an instinctive realization of the moral life, and not as the result of contract, he shows how by the means of wider associations due to private interests the state issues as the full home of the moral spirit, where intimacy of interdependence is combined with freedom of independent growth. The state is the consummation of man as finite; it is the necessary starting-point whence the spirit rises to an absolute existence in the spheres of art, religion and philosophy. In the finite world or temporal state, religion, as the finite organization of a church, is, like other societies, subordinate to the state. But on another side, as absolute spirit, religion, like art and philosophy, is not subject to the state, but belongs to a higher region.
The political state is always an individual, and the relations of these states with each other and the “world-spirit” of which they are the manifestations constitute the material of history. 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. Three main periods—the Oriental, the Classical and the Germanic—in which respectively the single despot, the dominant order, and the man as man possess freedom—constitute the history of the world. 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. And at any rate the method is greater than Hegel’s employment of it.
But as with Aristotle so with Hegel—beyond the ethical and political sphere rises the world of absolute spirit in art, religion and philosophy. The psychological distinction between the three forms is that sensuous perception (Anschauung) is the organon of the first, presentative conception 3. Art, religion and philosophy. (Vorstellung) of the second and free thought of the third. The work of art, the first embodiment of absolute mind, shows a sensuous conformity between the idea and the reality in which it is expressed. The so-called beauty of nature is for Hegel an adventitious beauty. 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. When the idea, itself indefinite, gets no further than a struggle and endeavour for its appropriate expression, we have the symbolic, which is the Oriental, form of art, which seeks to compensate its imperfect expression by colossal and enigmatic structures. In the second or classical form of art the idea of humanity finds an adequate sensuous representation. But this form disappears with the decease of Greek national life, and on its collapse follows the romantic, the third form of art; where the harmony of form and content again grows defective, because the object of Christian art—the infinite spirit—is a theme too high for art. Corresponding to this division is the classification of the single arts. First comes architecture—in the main, symbolic art; then sculpture, the classical art par excellence; they are found, however, in all three forms. Painting and music are the specially romantic arts. Lastly, as a union of painting and music comes poetry, where the sensuous element is more than ever subordinate to the spirit.
The lectures on the Philosophy of Art stray largely into the next sphere and dwell with zest on the close connexion of art and religion; and the discussion of the decadence and rise of religions, of the aesthetic qualities of Christian legend, of the age of chivalry, &c., make the Ästhetik a book of varied interest.
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. In it the absolute exists as the poetry and music of the heart, in the inwardness of feeling. Hegel after expounding the nature of religion passes on to discuss its historical phases, but in the immature state of religious science falls into several mistakes. At the bottom of the scale of nature-worships he
