HEGEL 609 know, were written while he was watching as a nurse at the bedside of his wife. Hegel's "Phenomenology," which he used to call his "voyage of discovery," was issued at Bamberg in 1807. The object of this work is to describe the stages and process through which the mind must proceed from the simplest form of con- sciousness up to absolute knowledge ; and to exhibit this, not merely as a matter of fact, but also as a (logically) necessary ascent. One of his disciples says that in this most finished of his writings he is the Dante of philosophy, since he shows how consciousness passes from the inferno of sense, through the purgatory of the understanding, into the paradise of philo- sophic freedom. In principle and method it is a protest against Schilling's imagination of a special intellectual intuition. The absolute is not " shot out all at once, like a ball from a Hstol ;" it is, and it is attained by, a process. The stadia of this process are, simple conscious- less, self-consciousness, reason, spirit (here used as equivalent to objective morality), reli- ion (including art), and absolute knowledge, process itself is necessary ; the method is maanent in thought. Its moving principle is lat of contradiction or negation. Each lower ige is contradicted or negatived in thought ; lis negation does not give zero as its result, but rather an opposite or antagonistic princi-
- and these antagonistic principles struggle
irough (the negation of the negation) to a n'gher unity; and so on, until we arrive at "lat absolute knowledge which is the result it was the source of these evolutions, in finch all these antagonisms are both abolished id preserved. Arrived at this state of knowl- edge, the spirit knows itself to be identical rith universal reason ; the finite self-conscious- less and the absolute self-consciousness are one; the infinite is no longer foreign to and outside of the finite. With a knowledge of this high consummation, the race enters upon a new epoch ; the old has passed away ; the conflicts of all the schools are adjusted. Man knows the absolute reason; the absolute reason knows itself in man. To this all history, all thought have been tending; the history of thought is this very process; the completion of thought found in the science of the absolute. Such was the daring prophecy with which a secluded student, in the ancient and quiet city of Nu- remberg, heralded a revolution in the world of mind. Nor did he stop with the proclama- tion. In his " Logic," published in two vol- les, three parts, between March, 1812, and July, 1816, he developed his system in its most rigorous and abstract form. This is one of the boldest and subtlest works of human specula- tion. It is designed to answer the question to which the " Phenomenology " led, viz. : What is that absolute knowledge which has been shown to be necessary ? It is the completion of the system of categories, which Kant had elaborated, after Aristotle. It is not logic alone, nor metaphysics alone; it is both to- I gethcr. It is not the science of thought alone, nor that of being alone; it is the science of both thought and being, viewed as identical and pervaded by the same logical law. The whole system is reason itself, or the absolute idea absolute idealism. The terms logic, idea, and reason are used in an unusual, in a uni- versal sense. Reason and idea are not merely subjective ; logic gives the law of being as well as of thought. That Hegel reduced all knowl- edge to that of mere relations and all being to mere logic, is an entire misconception of his theory. The system of logic, as the first part of philosophy, contemplates reason (the idea) as it is in itself, and not in its manifestations. Hegel used to T;all it "the kingdom of the shades;" his "voyage of discovery" led him first into this kingdom. He also speaks of it as equivalent to " God in his eternal being, be- fore the finite world was created." In Platonic phrase, it is the ideas of the Divine mind, be- fore they assume finite forms and modes. These ideas (this idea) are developed by an immanent law, the dialectic process of which we have spoken above; and herein consists the pecu- liarity of the work. The process is that of the idea itself, and all that we can do in the matter is to stand by and see how it is done ; though there must be "speculation in the eyes" that see this process carried through and out. Thus, we begin with the conception of being, the most universal and indeterminate of all. As entirely indeterminate, it is the same as noth- ing. Being and nothing are thus the same, but they are also different; they are identical, but antagonistic; and, as such, they result in a process of becoming (das Werderi), for the very idea of becoming includes being and not- being. This is ingenious and acute as an analysis of the conceptions ; but is it a real or possible process in being as such ? The whole science of logic is distributed into three parts being, essence, and conception ; the first two are the ontological logic, the third is the subjective logic. The categories that fall under being are three quantity, quality, and measure. The categories under essence are also three es- sence in itself, phenomena as expressing essence, and actual existence as the union of the other two. Here also, of course, come the discus- sions about the antinomies of the understand- ing. The categories of the third part of logic, that is, of conceptions or notions, are three the subjective conception, the object, and last and highest of all, the idea. This logic, now, forms the first great division of Hegel's whole scheme of philosophy. This was fully pre- sented, in outline, in his Encylclopadie der phi- losophischen Wissenscha/ten, published in 1817", in a third edition in 1830, and issued in his collected works with additional notes from his lectures. Here the categories of the "Logic" are applied to all the particular sciences. Of his whole system, the most general idea is that of God or the Absolute Spirit. This spirit is not mere substance, as in Spinoza, but also
