Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/673

657 insists that in passing from the abstract to the concrete he is making use of a process of thought only. Even for Hegel, who is quite well aware that men in their earliest recorded life had a strong tribal or communal instinct, and aware also, that the individual has always sought to merge himself in some or other broad general ideal, the temptation is at times too strong to compare a simple abstract phase of personality with an actual primitive ideal. But notwithstanding these seeming lapses from grace on the part of Hegel, he is abundantly clear that the abstract will, with the consideration of which he opens his ethical inquiries, is not a flesh-and-blood creation, is, in fact, no more a breathing man than Hawthorne's Feathertop, with its combined flail, pudding-stick and gold embroidery, is a real don. It is not meant that Hegel destroys the actual individual in order to scrutinize, but only that he might by means of this scrutiny suggest the way back into life.

When we start upon an inquiry into an actual historical process, our interest in the earlier stages is very different from our interest in the first stages of Hegel's logical evolution. In the case of history the persons who represent a past ideal, represent, I mean, in the sense of having thought it and worked it out, were warmed and cooled by much the same summer and winter as we, laughed and died like ourselves, and are therefore of perennial interest, and that, too, although the ideal, for which they struggled, cannot possibly be ours. But the earlier phases of an evolution, which we may call logical, formal, or abstract, are something like the preliminary arrangements of a juggler's trick. They are there merely for the sake of something else, and do not contain anything ultimately interesting, since everything of that kind has been carefully removed. Hence the first stages of Hegel's thought are valuable as revealing vividly by way of contrast what the true person is not, or, at most, what a mere side or fraction of a true personality is.