Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/354

 340 A. K. ROGRES : essence of Hegelianism is the way in which it bases itself upon experience. Now experience, for us, is nothing if not a growth. It is a life of warfare ; the overcoming of difficul- ties ; the working out of inherent contradictions, and their solution by the discovery of a reconciling synthesis. This is the Hegelian dialectic in its application to human life, and the dialectic is made by Hegel the root of the matter, and is evidently intended to be an account of the inmost nature of the universe. 1 But the dialectic, once more, unless we empty it of everything that is characteristic of it, involves actual difficulties to overcome, and a synthesis which is only won at the end of a real and strenuous conflict ; it is a process of judgment which, if it is genuine at all, implies an actual advance in knowledge, to a result which was not in conscious- ness at the start. Hegel's Absolute literally comes to con- sciousness of itself. Now while this is conceivable enough in the case of our experience, where difficulties can arise from the fact that reality exists beyond us, and furnishes conditions which we need to take into account, it is to my mind entirely meaningless when applied to the Absolute. The presence of a difficulty to his knowledge at once makes the Absolute re- lative and partial ; and if a reality at a given stage in God's existence is unknown to God, we are entirely at a loss as to any way in which such an existence is conceivable. If, to meet this, we say that the knowledge of the whole is present all along, and that it is only the consciousness of its progres- sive realisation that shows an advance, we may, indeed, have solved the difficulty, but we have abandoned Hegelianism. We have given up the dialectic as the central fact of reality, and with it have set human development apart from the immediate experience of God. Human experience, at any rate, is a dialectic, a real growth, in which self-consciousness is actually a conquest, and the end is not already present in the beginning. But if God's life is a different thing from human life, it is not identical with it, and the task of philo- sophy has been no more than started. If, on the contrary, God is no more than human development, and the laws of developing experience are the laws of his growth, then the 1 Cf. Jones, Broii'nin<j, p. 301. " The eft'ort to know derives its impul-e and direction from the reality which is present and striving for complete realisation in the thought of man." " If reality is never known, it is ever being known," p. 303. Also Wallace, MIND, vol. v., 551 : "The Absolute the Hegelian God is at least life, at least Ego, and if these are not process self-surrendering, self-renewing process it is difficult to see where we are to look for examples of process." Caird, Lit. and Phil., vol. ii., p. 437 : " Spirit can fully realise its unity only through a world which, in the first instance, must present itself as the extreme opposite of spirit.' 1