Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/684

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XX.

are not without significance; and the present study of them is very illuminating.

But one is inclined to question whether the experience upon which Hegel is insisting in his category of life may rightly be called mystical. It is, indeed, an experience that cannot be exhausted by the mechanical categories of the Critique of Pure Reason or by the abstract universal, the moral law, of the Critique of Practical Reason. It is an experience that is more immediate than are the categories of discursive thought. But, when we have said so much, we have not necessarily identified the experience with the immediacy of mysticism. For the immediacy of mysticism we usually think of as an immediacy that transcends all mediation; and it is not clear that Hegel has in mind such an immediacy. If the identification is to be made, therefore, it would seem that a more detailed justification of it is necessary. This demand becomes all the more emphatic, when we recall the nature of the immediacy that, is worked out in the Phenomenology and the Encyclopædia. For here we find that immediacy is the result of an elaborate process of mediation and that an unmediated immediacy is fundamentally erroneous. And, in the light of this fact, we are led to suspect that the immediacy of Leben, even at this early period in Hegel's development, means for him something more than mystical intuition.

Again, the writer of the essay is sometimes inclined to speak as if the younger Hegel were more faithful to experience than was the Hegel of maturer years. "Needless to say, the later Hegel became enmeshed in a metaphysical web of his own, and did not remain true to these more modest yet more significant intuitions of his youth " (p. 75). This way, however, danger lies. The notion that Hegel deserted experience in the Encyclopædia seems to me completely erroneous. It is interesting to have disclosed to us the fact that the hold of the younger Hegel on experience led to his break with the Kantian and Enlightenment philosophy; but we should never forget that the Hegel of later years was just as faithful to experience. If the Dialectic had its birth in the historical and concrete, it seems certain that it never lost its birth -right.

G. W. Cunningham.

Middlebury College.

A Beginner's History of Philosophy. By Herbert Ernest Cushman. Vol. II. Modern Philosophy. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911.—pp. xvii, 377.

Not a great deal more needs to be added to the account of Professor Cushman's first volume which appeared in a recent number of the Review. The same pedagogical treatment which constitutes the chief claim to attention on the part of the former volume is attempted also in dealing with the modern period; and while in the nature of the case the proportion of space given to the general progress of civilization has here to be decreased considerably in the interest of the presentation of systems, there still remains a sufficient difference of emphasis to justify the book as an addition to the texts now in the field. Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which chiefly give