Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/112

Rh 102 which Hegel develops and expresses it. And there are perhaps many at the present time who are prepared to accept the former, but who yet suspect, or even reject, the latter. And no doubt there is much in Hegel s Logic and Philosophy of Spirit, and still more in his Philosophy of Nature, which there is reason to regard with distrust. In clever hands that are not checked by a sufficient con sciousness of the whole, the Hegelian dialectic may be made into the means of producing a seeming proof of any thing. Nor is it always easy to determine how far Hegel himself was tempted by an impatient consciousness of the universality of his method to employ it in cases where the conditions of its successful application were wanting. Sometimes he seems to forget, what he himself teaches, that science must first have generalized experience and deter mined it by its finite categories, ere it is possible for philosophy to give its final interpretation. Yet, when we realize the nature of that interpretation, and of the trans formation of science which philosophy by means of it proposes to effect, it becomes clear that the dialectic of Hegel is no extraneous addition to his idealism, but is part and parcel of the same movement of thought. For this dialectic rests on the idea that thought or self-conscious ness finds in its own organic unity the ultimate key to all difficulties in regard to the objects of thought and their relations to each other and to the mind. Self-consciousness, as has been already shown, is implicitly the whole web of categories which it throws over the world, and by aid of which it makes the world intelligible. All these it contains in itself ; and, as it proceeds to determine the meaning of things, it simply produces its store, and exhausts itself on the object. Now, if it be idealism, in the strict sense of the word, to make thought or self-conscious ness the principle and ultimate explanation of all that exists, it is obvious that we cannot separate idealism from such a dialectic as this, which is nothing more than the mind s consciousness of its own movement or process of self-affirmation. If to find thought in things be more than an empty word, then the movement or process which thought is must explain at once the transition from thought to what in opposition to it we call &quot; things,&quot; and must give us the means of reconciling that opposition. In other words, the same movement by which thought deter mines itself as self-conscious, i.e., as a unity realized through difference, must also be conceived as the explanation of the difference between pure thought and the world, and as the solution of that difference in the idea of absolute spirit. Such idealism has a close relation to Christianity ; it may be even said to be but Christianity theorized. It has often been asserted that Hegel s philosophy of religion is but an artificial accommodation to Christian doctrine of a philo sophy which has no inherent relation to Christianity. If, however, we regard the actual development of that philo sophy it would be truer to say that it was the study of Christian ideas which first produced it. What delivered Hegel from the mysticism in which the later philosophies of Fichte and Schelling tended to lose themselves, and led him, in his own language, to regard the absolute &quot;not merely as substance but as subject,&quot; what made him recognize with Fichte that the absolute principle is spiritual, and yet enabled him with Schelling to see in nature, as the opposite of spirit, the very means of its realization, was his thorough appreciation of the ethical and religious meaning of Christianity. In the great Christian aphorism that &quot;he who loseth his life alone can save it&quot; he found a key to the difficulties of ethics, a reconciliation of hedonism and asceticism. For what this saying implies is that a spiritual or self-conscious being is one who is in contradiction with himself when he makes his individual self his end. In opposing his own interest to that of others, he is preventing their interests from becoming his ; all things are his, and his only, who has died to himself. But if this be the truth of morality, it is something more, for &quot; morality is the nature of things.&quot; We cannot separate the law of the life of man from the law of the world in which he lives. And, if it is the nature of things, as it is the nature of spirit, that he who loseth his life shall save it, the world must be referred to a spiritual principle, and the Christian doctrine of the nature of God is only the converse of the Christian law of ethics. To Hegel, starting from this point, a new light was thrown on the Fichtean treatment of the idea of self, and the Fichtean proof that the consciousness of self implies a relation to an object which is opposed to the self, and which yet from another point of view since an object exists only for a subject cannot I be anything but an element of its own life. It was seen that this movement of thought is no mere fluctuation between contradictory positions, to be terminated finally by an ipse dixit of faith, but that the unity of the opposite elements is apprehensible by the intelligence, and that indeed it is its presence to the intelligence which makes the consciousness of opposition possible. It was in this sense that Hegel could say that that unity of opposites which had been called unintelligible by previous writers was just the very nature of the intelligence, and that only a view of the world guided by this idea could be properly intelligible, while every other view must contain in it an unsolved contradiction, an element that remains per manently impervious to thought. The great objection to a metaphysic like this, at least an objection which weighs much in the minds of many, is that which springs from the contrast between the claim of absolute knowledge which it seems to involve and the actual limitations which our intelligence encounters in every direction. If the theory were true, it is felt we ought to be nearer the solution of the problems of our life, practical and speculative, than we are ; the riddle of the painful earth ought to vex us less ; we ought to find our way more easily through the entanglement of facts, and to be able to deal with practical difficulties in a less tentative manner. Yet there is really no antagonism between such a doctrine and a consciousness of the limita tion of our faculties ; nay rather, it is only on such a theory that a rational distrust of ourselves can be based. When Aristotle meets the warning that we should think finite and human things since we are finite and human with the answer that we ought rather, so far as in us lies, to rise to what is immortal and divine, he is not denying the limits of man s knowledge and power ; on the contrary, he is rather pointing to the very principle which makes us conscious of those limits ; for it is just because there is in man a principle of infinity that he knows his finitude, and, conversely, it is just in the consciousness of this finitude that he rises above it. A rational humility is possible only to one who has in himself the measure of his own weakness, and who, if he &quot; trembles like a guilty thing surprised,&quot; is yet conscious that he is trembling before himself. This truth is often expressed by Kant with special relation to the moral consciousness, as where he contrasts the limitation of man, as a sensible being, occupying an infinitesimal space in the boundless world of sense, with his freedom from all limitation as a personal self, a member of the truly infinite world of intelligence. But it is not necessary to adopt Kant s abstract division of the sensible from the intelligible world to see that the consciousness of the greatness of the problem which has to be solved in human life and thought is deepened and widened by that very idea of philosophy which yet gives us the assurance that the problem is not insoluble, and even that, in principle, it is already solved (E. c.)