Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/654

Rh 620 HEGEL in the totality of its relations ; and to have broken down the parti tion which in Kant separated the formal logic from the transcen dental 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 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 &quot;idea.&quot; 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 have perception ; instead of dialectic, gravitation ; instead of causation, sequence in time. The whole falls under the three heads of mechanics, physics, and &quot; organic, &quot; the content under each varying somewhat in the three editions of the Encyclopedic. The first treats of space, time, matter, movement ; and in the solar system we have the representa tion 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 &quot; organic,&quot; comegeology, 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 &quot; Natur-philosophie &quot; 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 in spire 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 independ ent 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 lie only allowed a logical value, as explaining the natural classification ; the only real, existent meta morphosis he saw in the development of the individual from its embryonic stage. Still more distinctly did he contravene the gene ral tendency of scientific explanation. &quot;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 in finite.&quot; In astronomy he depreciates the merits of Newton and elevates Kepler, accusing Newton particularly, propos of the dis tinction of centrifugal and centripetal forces, of leading to a con fusion 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 &quot;subjective mind&quot; (psychology), the &quot;ob jective mind (philosophic jurisprudence, moral and political philo sophy), and the &quot;absolute mind&quot; (the philosophy of art, religion, and philosophy). The subjects of the second and third divisions have been treated by Hegel with great detail. The &quot;objective mind &quot; is the topic of the Jicckts- Philosophic, and of the lectures on the Philosophy of History; while on the &quot;absolute mind&quot; we have the lectures on ^Esthetic, 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 &quot;Geisf in the Encyclopddic. 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 com bined 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 arrange ment. 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 &quot; Philosophy of Eight.&quot; 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 (Sittliclikcit) of the family and the state. Treating the family as an instinctive realization cf 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 &quot; world-spirit &quot; of which they are the manifestations constitute the material of history. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History, edited by Cans and subse quently by Karl Hegel, is the most popular of He-gel 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 in strument of the universal spirit, till another rises in its place, with a fuller measure of liberty a larger superiority to the Londs 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 ( Vorstclhnig} 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 spec tator ; it is not like the beauty of natural things, an incident of their existence, but is &quot;essentially a question, an address to a re sponding breast, a call to the heart and spirit.&quot; 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 com pensate 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.