Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/514

 49* HEGEL. of their phenomenon. But the form which Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for Schell- ing had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius — and science from intuition is impossible. The philosophy of the Illumination impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry ; he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts. Only not from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent, and the true essence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine ^the advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the scientific form of the other. The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed to the concrete and particular. The concept of the philosophy of reflection is mediate cogni- tion, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal. I Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immedi- ateness of the one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) i abstractness of the other, to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? A concrete concept would be one which sought the universal not without the particular, but in it; which should not find the infinite beyond the finite, nor the absolute at an unat- tainable distance above the world, nor the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein. If the pliilosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of subla- tion, and Schelling regarded them as immediately identi- cal, if the former denied the identity of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the absolute indifTerence which is to be grasped by intuition), the con- crete concept secures the identity of opposites through self -mediation^ their passing over into it ; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a process. First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally, reconciliation of opposites — this is the universal law of all development.