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. 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 exposition or constitution of the “idea” is the work of the Logic. As the total system falls into three parts, so every part of the system follows the triadic law. Every truth, every reality, has three aspects or stages; it is the unification of two contradictory elements, of two partial aspects of truth which are Logic. not merely contrary, like black and white, but contradictory, like same and different. The first step is a preliminary affirmation and unification, the second a negation and differentiation, the third a final synthesis. For example, the seed of the plant is an initial unity of life, which when placed in its proper soil suffers disintegration into its constitutents, and yet in virtue of its vital unity keeps these divergent elements together, and reappears as the plant with its members in organic union. Or again, the process of scientific induction is a threefold chain; the original hypothesis (the first unification of the fact) seems to melt away when confronted with opposite facts, and yet no scientific progress is possible unless the stimulus of the original unification is strong enough to clasp the discordant facts and establish a reunification. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a Fichtean formula, is generalized by Hegel into the perpetual law of thought.
In what we may call their psychological aspect these three stages are known as the abstract stage, or that of understanding (Verstand), the dialectical stage, or that of negative reason, and the speculative stage, or that of positive reason (Vernunft). The first of these attitudes taken alone is dogmatism; the second, when similarly isolated, is scepticism; the third, when unexplained by its elements, is mysticism. 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. The dialectic of negative reason rudely dispels these theories. 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. 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; but the easiest way of escaping it is to shut our eyes to one side of the antithesis. What is required, therefore, is to readjust our original thesis in such a way as to include and give expression to both the elements in the process.
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. God reveals Himself in the logical idea, in nature and in mind; but mind is not alike conscious of its absoluteness in every stage of development. Philosophy alone sees God revealing Himself in the ideal organism of thought as it were a possible deity prior to the world and to any relation between God and actuality; in the natural world, as a series of materialized forces and forms of life; and in the spiritual world as the human soul, the legal and moral order of society, and the creations of art, religion and philosophy.
This introduction of the absolute became a stumbling-block to Feuerbach and other members of the “Left.” They rejected as an illegitimate interpolation the eternal subject of development, and, instead of one continuing God as the subject of all the predicates by which in the logic the absolute is defined, assumed only a series of ideas, products of philosophic activity. They denied the theological value of the logical forms—the development of these forms being in their opinion due to the human thinker, not to a self-revealing absolute. Thus they made man the creator of the absolute. But with this modification on the system another necessarily followed; a mere logical series could not create nature. And thus the material universe became the real starting-point. Thought became only the result of organic conditions—subjective and human; and the system of Hegel was no longer an idealization of religion, but a naturalistic theory with a prominent and peculiar logic.
The logic of Hegel is the only rival to the logic of Aristotle. What Aristotle did for the theory of demonstrative reasoning, Hegel attempted to do for the whole of human knowledge. His logic is an enumeration of the forms or categories by which our experience exists. It carried out Kant’s doctrine of the categories as a priori synthetic principles, but removed the limitation by which Kant denied them any constitutive value except in alliance with experience. According to Hegel the terms in which thought exhibits itself are a system of their own, with laws and relations which reappear in a less obvious shape in the theories of nature and mind. Nor are they restricted to the small number which Kant obtained by manipulating the current subdivision of judgments. But all forms by which thought holds sensations in unity (the formative or synthetic elements of language) had their place assigned in a system where one leads up to and passes over into another.
The fact which ordinary thought ignores, and of which ordinary logic therefore provides no account, is the presence of gradation and continuity in the world. The general terms of language simplify the universe by reducing its variety of individuals to a few forms, none of which exists simply and perfectly. The method of the understanding is to divide and then to give a separate reality to what it has thus distinguished. It is part of Hegel’s plan to remedy this one-sided character of thought, by laying bare the gradations of ideas. He lays special stress on the point that abstract ideas when held in their abstraction are almost interchangeable with their opposites—that extremes meet, and that in every true and concrete idea there is a coincidence of opposites.
The beginning of the logic is an illustration of this. The logical idea is treated under the three heads of being (Seyn), essence (Wesen) and notion (Begriff). The simplest term of thought is being; we cannot think less about anything than when we merely say that it is. Being—the abstract “is”—is nothing definite, and nothing at least is. Being and not being are thus declared identical—a proposition which in this unqualified shape was to most people a stumbling-block at the very door of the system. Instead of the mere “is” which is as yet nothing, we should rather say “becomes,” and as “becomes” always implies “something,” we have determinate being—“a being” which in the next stage of definiteness becomes “one.” And in this way we pass on to the quantitative aspects of being.
The terms treated under the first head, in addition to those already mentioned, are the abstract principles of quantity and number, and their application in measure to determine the limits of being. Under the title of essence are discussed those pairs of correlative terms which are habitually employed in the explanation of the world—such as law and phenomenon, cause and effect, reason and consequence, substance and attribute. Under the head of notion are considered, firstly, the subjective forms of conception, judgment and syllogism; secondly, their realization in objects as mechanically, chemically or teleologically constituted; and thirdly, the idea first of life, and next of science, as the complete interpenetration of thought and objectivity. The third part of logic evidently is what contains the topics usually treated in logic-books, though even here the province of logic in the ordinary sense is exceeded. The first two divisions—the “objective logic”—are what is usually called metaphysics.
The characteristic of the system is the gradual way in which idea is linked to idea so as to make the division into chapters only an arrangement of convenience. The judgment is completed in the syllogism; the syllogistic form as the perfection of subjective thought passes into objectivity, where it first appears embodied in a mechanical system; and the teleological object, in which the members are as means and end, leads up to the idea of life, where the end is means and means end indissolubly till death. In some cases these transitions may be unsatisfactory and forced; it is apparent that the linear development from “being” to the “idea” is got by transforming into a logical order the sequence that has roughly prevailed in philosophy from the Eleatics; cases might be quoted where the reasoning seems a play upon words; and it may often be doubted whether certain ideas do not involve extra-logical considerations. The order of the categories is in the main outlines fixed; but in the minor details much depends upon the philosopher, who has to fill in the gaps between ideas, with little guidance from the data of experience, and to assign to the stages of development names which occasionally deal hardly with language. The merit of Hegel is to have indicated and to a large extent displayed the filiation and mutual limitation of our forms of thought; to have arranged them in the order of their comparative capacity to give a satisfactory expression to truth in the totality of its relations; and to have broken down the partition which in Kant separated the formal logic from the transcendental analytic, as well as the general disruption between logic and metaphysic. It must at the same time be admitted that much of the work of weaving the terms of thought, the categories, into a system has a hypothetical and tentative character, and that Hegel has rather pointed out the path which logic must follow, viz. a criticism of the terms of scientific and ordinary thought in their filiation
