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 Rh thought; its warm profusion, which clothes itself in a thousand wonderful shapes, withers into barren forms and universals shapeless as murky northern clouds.' By thinking it we have altered the given, and thereby set up a dualism. Things as given to us are detailed, concrete, individual indeed particular; but the content of our thought is universal. Have we not converted real existences into contents of knowledge, into something which we have made? In trying to grasp objects we have altered them, and we seem to have missed our hold. 'We make the thing universal and our own, and yet qua natural thing it ought to be free and independent.' Intellectualism thus has two sides. It puts forth 'realistic' intentions, and assumes that reality is the given, that which is independent of the apprehending subject. But at the same time it is an attitude of thought, and all thought is a transforming and appropriating principle; thus it chooses the relevant from the irrelevant, links up and interprets what is not given in that fashion, and in general bullies experience into supplying it with contents marked by its own characteristics. On this side it manifests an unconscious idealism, and presents another instance of inadequate thought turning into its opposite.

The assumption which intellectualism takes as its explicit principle, and which its performance flouts, is that the object of knowledge is a hard and impenetrable reality, inherently out of touch with the nature of apprehending knowledge. This assumption the opposite abstraction to pure theory, viz. the practical attitude, flatly denies. It assumes that things are utterly in relation to mind, and is a thorough-going idealism. The satisfaction of any desire or impulse naively crosses the gulf which intellectualism has declared to be impassable. 'The wit and need of man', says Hegel, 'has found endless ways of changing and mastering nature. … Whatever powers nature evolves and looses against man, cold, wild beasts, water, fire, he knows means against them, and indeed he takes these means from nature and uses them against itself. The craft of his reason enables him to set one natural force against another, to destroy the one by the other, and so preserve and maintain himself.' In the practical attitude the objective is subordinated to the subjective.