12 D. G. BITCHIE : from history as he understood it. His actual procedure was inductive and experiental as much as any real scientific procedure can be inductive and experiental. 1 Common- sense laughs at Hegel for saying that mere Being = Nothing. But he could find abundant historical evidence for the logical transition. If the Absolute be thought of as that of which we may not predict anything determinate, it becomes equiv- alent to Nothing. Oriental religions and philosophies and Neoplatonic conceptions of the Absolute confirm his view ; and did not Eleatic philosophy end in the paradox of Gorgias who wrote : Trcpl </>i;<re<DS r] rov // O^TOS ? Hegel and some of his followers have been blamed for reading his system into Aristotle. The answer is given by Karl Michelet in his Preface to his Commentary on the Ethics: " restituit tantum magistro SILO quae ex ipso mutuatus est ". Scholars have been scandalised by an unhappy mis- translation which Hegel made of a passage in Plato's Sophistes. He mistranslated a particular sentence now and then, as many more special students of things Greek have done ; 2 1 Bosenkranz, Hegel's Leben, pp. 10, 11, 14, supplies evidence that He,gel was studying not only Euripides and Sophocles, but Thucydides and Aristotle's Ethics (in 1788) before he studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (in 1789). The first traces of a tendency to philosophy are to be found in a little note-book which he began to keep in 1785, in which he collected definitions. The definition of logic (from whatever source de- rived) is certainly remarkable and significant : " ein Inbegriff der Regeln <des Denkens, abstrahirt aus der Geschichte der Menschheit" "a sum- mary of the rules of thinking, abstracted from the history of mankind ". In 1788 (his first year at Tubingen University), in a dissertation " On -some of the Advantages of Classical Studies," he speaks of the reading of Greek and Latin authors as an appropriate preparation for the study of philosophy. We are exercised in the use of abstract conceptions and we find the germs of the philosophy of later times. "The many contradic- tions of the ancient philosophers, especially in their speculations on the practical part of philosophy, have at least lightened our trouble in finding the via media where the truth lies " (Bosenkranz, p. 27). By them- selves such remarks might seem only the conventional apologetics of classical education, but in Hegel's case they are undoubtedly the germs of his conception of the relation between philosophy and history. Ueber- weg in his History of Philosophy (Engl. transl., vol. ii., p. 235) says that for his master's degree (1790) Hegel wrote an essay "On the Study of the History of Philosophy ". This is not mentioned by Bosenkranz, who makes the mistake of supposing Hegel himself to have written the thesis De limite officiorum humanorum seposita animorum immortalitate, which he had to defend (see Karl v. Hegel's edition of his father's Letters, i., p. 16 note). It is quite clear that Hegel had laboriously -studied history and Greek literature and philosophy before he had de- finitely arrived at his philosophical system, and certainly before he elaborated his Logic.
- E.g., Grote and Zeller in their astonishing interpretation of a passage
in Aristotle's will. (Cf. MIND, N.S., vol. vi., p, 565.)
