Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/97

Rh METAPHYSIC 87 Self -consciousness presupposes consciousness ; for, while the apprehension of objects in consciousness is possible only in relation to the unity of the self, yet it is only in relation to and distinction from these objects that we are conscious of that unity. Hence the two opposites, self and not-self, are bound together, and presuppose a unity which reveals itself in their opposition, and which, when made explicit, must reconcile them. If, therefore, self- consciousness, in its first opposition to consciousness, gives rise to an ideal of knowledge to which our empirical knowledge of objects is inadequate, this arises from the fact that not only empirical knowledge but also the ideal to which it is opposed is imperfect, or that they both point to a unity which is manifested in their difference, and which is capable of containing and resolving it. In other words, the opposition of science to its ideal, which Kant has stated in his Antinomies, is not an absolute opposition, but one the origin and end of which can be seen. This opposition reaches its highest point in the con trast between the transparent unity of self-consciousness, in which the difference of knower and known is evanescent, and the essential manifoldness and self-externality of the world in space, in which the differences seem to be insoluble. We must, indeed, think of self-consciousness as having life in itself and therefore as differentiating itself from itself ; but this differentiation is held within the limit of its unity, it is a separation of movements which are separated only as they are united. On the other hand, the world in space presents itself as the sphere of external determination, in which things are primarily disunited and act only as they are acted on from without, and in which this external influence never goes so far as to destroy their reciprocal j externality. In this sense it is that the opposition of mind : and matter was taken by Descartes, and it is a survival of the same mode of thought that leads many even now to draw absolute lines of division between a priori and a : posteriori, between ideas and facts, between spiritual and j natural. Kant and Fichte give a new aspect to the difficulty by showing that the difficulty is one of recon-. ciling consciousness and self-consciousness, and that in consciousness there is already present the unity which is manifested in self-consciousness, as, on the other hand, it ; is only through consciousness and in opposition to it that self-consciousness is possible. And Fichte made a further step when he attempted to show that the categories and the forms of perception, time and space, which Kant had taken as inexplicable facts, are implied in this contrast of con sciousness and self-consciousness. The error that clings to Fichte s speculations is, however, that he treats conscious ness merely as a necessary illusion which exists simply j with a view to self-consciousness, and hence is led to regard j self-consciousness itself because it is essentially related to this necessary illusion as a schema or image of an unknowable absolute. In fact, in the end Fichte falls back upon the abstract identity in which Kant had found his noumenon, and so ends his philosophy with mysticism. Even Schelling, though he saw that the absolute unity must be one that transcends the difference of self and not- self, did not finally escape the tendency to merge all difference in absolute oneness. On the other hand, it was the endeavour of Hegel to proceed in the opposite way, not to lose self-consciousness or subjectivity in a mere unity of substance, but rather to show that the absolute substance can be truly defined only as a self-conscious subject. And just because he did this he was prepared to take a further step, and to regard the external world, not as Fichte regarded it, as merely the opposite of spirit, nor as Schelling regarded it, as merely the repetition and co-equal of spirit, but rather as its necessary manifestation or as that in and through which alone it can realize itself. His doctrine therefore might be summed up in two proposi tions, first, that the absolute substance is spiritual or self- conscious, and, secondly, that the absolute subject or spirit can be conceived as realizing itself only through that very world of externality which at first appears as its opposite. In both respects Hegel s philosophy reverses the via ntga- tiva of mysticism, and teaches that it is only through the exhaustion of difference that the unity of science, of which the mind contains in itself the certitude, is to be realized. For mind or spirit, viewed in itself, is conceived as a self- differentiating unity, a unity which exists only through opposition of itself to itself. And it is but a necessary result of such a conception that spirit can fully realize its unity only through a world which in the first instance must present itself as the extreme opposite of spirit. Hence the process of thought in itself, which is exhibited in the logic, ends in the opposition to thought of a world which is its negative counterpart. And the &quot;absolute spirit &quot; of Hegel is thus, not pure self-consciousness, but that more concrete unity of self-consciousness with itself which it attains through and by means of this world. The effect of this view upon the relation of metaphysic to science, which we are at present considering, is noticeable. It does not, as is often supposed, supersede science by an a priori construction of the universe, nor does it leave the results of science unchanged and simply provide for it a deeper foundation. The latter was the point at which Kant and Fichte stopped ; for, while they showed the relativity of experience to the principle of self-consciousness, they conceived that the function of metaphysic is completed in showing the phenomenal character of the objects of science, and in reserving a free space beyond the phe nomenal world for &quot; God, freedom, and immortality.&quot; Schelling, on the other hand, as he did not adopt this merely negative view of the relation of spirit to nature or of a priori to empirical truth, was obliged to reinterpret the latter by the former. As, however, he did not recog nize any distinctions which were not merely quantitative, he was led to apply the same easy key to every lock, and to think that he had explained all the different forms of existence, organic and inorganic, when he had merely pointed out a certain analogy between them. The meta physic of Hegel, whatever may be said of the actual philosophy of nature produced by its author, contains no necessity for any such arbitrary procedure. In his Logic, indeed, he attempts to give us in abstracto the movement of thought in itself, from its simplest determination of being as qualitative or quantitative, through the reflective categories of substance and cause, up to its full conscious ness of itself in its organic unity. 1 And in so doing he of course gives us an account of the various categories which science uses in the interpretation of nature. He further attempts to show that the highest categories of science are in themselves imperfect and self-contradictory, in other words, that they mark a stage of thought which falls short of that unity of being and knowing after which science is striving, and which is the presupposition as well as the goal of all intelligence. But, while he does this, he clearly acknowledges two things, on the one hand that nature is essentially different from pure self- consciousness, and that therefore logic can never by direct evolution of its categories anticipate the investiga tions of science, and, in the second place, that the final interpretation of nature through the highest categories presupposes its interpretation by the lower categories, and cannot be directly achieved without it. In other words, 1 This subject the progress of thought from lower to higher cate gories and methods will be more fully discussed in the third section.