Prolegomena to the study of Hegel's philosophy and especially of his logic

Front matter

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Preface

The present volume of Prolegomena completes the second edition of my Logic of Hegel which originally appeared in 1874. The translation, which was issued as a separate volume in the autumn of 1892, had been subjected to revision throughout : such faults as I could detect had been amended, and many changes made in the form of expression with the hope of rendering the interpretation clearer and more adequate. But, with a subject so abstruse and complicated as Hegel's Logic, and a style so abrupt and condensed as that adopted in his Encyclopaedia, a satisfactory translation can hardly fall within the range of possibilities. Only the enthusiasm of youth could have thrown itself upon such an enterprise; and later years have but to do what they may to fulfil the obligations of a task whose difficulties have come to seem nearly insuperable. The translation volume was introduced by a sketch of the growth of the Encyclopaedia through the three editions published in its author's lifetime: and an appendix of notes supplied some literary and historical elucidations of the text, with quotations bearing on the philosophical development between Kant and Hegel.

viii PREFACE.

The Prolegomena, which have grown to more than twice their original extent, are two-thirds of them new matter. The lapse of twenty years could not but involve a change in the writer's attitude, at least in details, towards both facts and problems. The general purpose of the work, however, still remains the same, Vto supply an introduction to the study of Hegel, especially his Logic, and to philosophy in general. But, in the work of altering and inserting, I can . hardly imagine that I have succeeded in adjusting the additions to the older work with that artful juncture which would simulate the continuity of organic growth. To perform that feat would require a master who surveyed from an imperial outlook the whole system of Hegelianism in its history and meaning; and I at least do not profess such a mastery. Probably therefore a critical review will discern inequalities in the ground, and even discrepancies in the statement, of the several chapters. To remove these strains of inconsistency would in any case have been a work of time and trouble: and, after all, mere differences in depth or breadth of view may have their uses. The writer cannot always compel the reader to understand him, as he himself has not always the same faculty to penetrate and comprehend the problems he deals with. In these arduous paths of research it may well happen that the clearest and truest perceptions are not always those which communicate themselves with fullest persuasion and gift of insight Schopenhauer has somewhere compared the structure of his philosophical work to the hundred-gated Thebes : so many, • he says, are the points of access it offers for the

PREFACE. IX

pilgrims after truth to reach its central dogma. So — if one may parallel little things with his adventurous quest — even the less speculative chapters, and the less consecutive discourse, of these Prolegomena may prove helpful to some individual mood or phase of mind. If— as I suspect — the Second Book should elicit the complaint that the reader has been kept wandering too long and too deviously in the Porches of Philosophy, >I will hope that sometimes in the course of these rovings he may come across a wicket-gate where he can enter, and — which is the main thing — gather truth *" fresh and fruitful for himself.

Fourteen chapters, viz. II, XXIV, and the group from VII to XVIII inclusive, are in this edition almost entirely new. Three chapters of the first edition, numbered XIX, XXII, XXIII, have been dropped. For the rest, Chaps. III-VI in the present correspond to Chaps. II-V in the first edition : Chap. XIX to parts of VII, VIII: Chaps. XX-XXIII to Chaps. IX-XII : Chaps. XXV-XXX to Chaps. XIII- XVIII : and Chaps. XXXI, XXXII to Chaps. XX, XXI. But some of those nominally retained have been largely rewritten.

The new chapters present, amongst other things, a synopsis of the progress of thought in Germany during the half-century which is bisected by the year 1800, with some indication of the general conditions of the intellectual world, and with some reference to the interconnexion of speculation and actuality. Jacobi and Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling have been especially brought under succinct review. In the first edition I did Kant less than justice. I have now, so far as my

X PREFACE.

limits allowed, tried to rectify the impression; and even more perhaps, by a clear palinode, to tender my apology for the meagre and somewhat inappreciative notice I gave to the great names of Fichte and Schelling. For like reasons, and from a growing perception how much post-Kantian thought owed to the pre-Kantian thinkers, Spinoza and Leibniz have been partly brought within my range. If, furthermore, I may seem to have transgressed the due amount of allusions and comparisons drawn from Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, the excuse must be sought in that fixture of philosophical horizon which can hardly but creep on after a quarter of a century spent in teaching philosophy under the customs and ordinances of the Oxford School of Classical Philology.

It would be to mistake the scope of this survey to seek in it a history of the philosophers of the period I have named. They have been presented, not in and for themselves, but as momenta or constituent! factors in producing Hegel's conception of the aim' and method of philosophy. To do this it was necessary to lay stress on their inner purport and implications: to treat the individual thinker in subordination to the general movement of ideas : to give, as far as was possible, a constructive conception of them rather than an analysis and chronicle. Yet as the picture had to be done, so to say, with a few vigorous touches, and made characteristic rather than descriptive, it cannot have that fairness and completeness which only patient study of every feature and untiring experiment in reconstruction can enable even the artist to produce. I may have seemed to confine the environment too

PREFACE. XI

exclusively to continental thinkers: but this is not, I think, due to any anti-patriotic bias. English (by which term, I may explain to my countrymen, I mean English-writing) thought, if it has its own intrinsic value, has after all been only an occasional influence, of suggestion and modification, in Germany. It is not therefore an integral portion of my theme. Even in Kant's case, too much may be made of the stimulus he received from Hume.

Even twenty years ago, my translation could hardly be described literally as a voice crying in the wilderness. But since that time there has been a considerable out-put of history, translation, and criticism referring to the great age of German philosophy, and a comparatively numerous group of writers, more or less familiar with the aims and principles of that period, have treated various parts of philosophy with notable independence and originality. To these writers it has sometimes been found convenient to give the title of Neo- Kantians, or Neo - Hegelians. The prefix suggests that they do not in all points reproduce the ideal or the caricature which vulgar tradition fancied, and perhaps still fancies, to be implied in German 'transcendentalism/ And that for the good reason that the springs of the movement lie in the natural and national revulsion of English habits of mind. Slowly, but at length, thev storms of the great European revolution found their way to our intellectual world, and shook church and state, society and literature. The homeless spirit of the age had to reconsider the task of rebuilding its house of life. It may have been that some of the seekers, in the fervour of a first impression, spoke

Xll PREFACE.

unadvisedly, as if salvation could and would come to English philosophy only by Kant and Hegel. Yet, there was a real foundation for the belief that the insularity — however necessary in its season, and however admirable in some of its results — which had secluded and narrowed the British mind since the middle of the eighteenth century, needed something deeper and stronger than French 'ideology' to bring it abreast of the requirements of the age. Whatever may be the drawbacks of transcendentalism, they are virtues when set beside the vulgar ideals of enlighten- • ment by superficialisation. Mill has well pointed out I how the spirit of Coleridge was for the higher intellectual life a needful complement to the spirit of Bentham. Yet the spirit of Coleridge had but caught v some of the side-lights and romantic illuminations : it had not dared to face the central sun either in literature or philosophy. The scholar who has given usv^ excellent versions of Fichte's lighter works, those who have translated and expounded Kant, and the great author who opened German literature to the British public, have brought us nearer the higher teaching of Germany. In Germany itself it has always been the possession only of the few. Even at the height of the classical period there were litterateurs who vended thousands of their books for Goethe's hundreds, and the great philosophers had ten opponents V to one follower even amongst the teachers of their day. Yet Goethe and not Kotzebue gave the permanent law to literature; Hegel, and not Krug or Fries, has influenced philosophy. To have had the resolution to learn in this school is the merit of ' Neo-Hegelianism.'

PREFACE, xiii

It has probably not found Kant free from puzzles and contradictions, or Hegel always intelligible. But the example of the Germans has served to widen and deepen our ideas of philosophy: to make us think more highly of its function, and to realise that it is essentially science, and the science of supreme reality. And it has at least familiarised many with the heresy that dilettantism and occasional fits of speculativeness are worth as little in philosophy as elsewhere. To have striven for dignity in its scope, and scientific security v in its method, is something. If the Neo-Hegelian has not given philosophy a settled language, it may be urged that a philosophical language cannot be created by the easy device of inventing a few Hellenisticseeming vocables.

I could have wished to make these volumes a worthier contribution to the work whereby these and other writers have recently enriched our island philosophy. Not least because of the honoured name I have ventured to write on the dedication-page. If, as Epicurus said, we should above all be grateful to the past, the first meed is from the scholar due to the v teachers of earlier years, and not least those who have now entered into their rest. I do not forget what I, and others, owed to T. H. Green, my predecessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy ; that example of highsouled devotion to truth, and of earnest and intrepid thinking on the deep things of eternity. But at this season the memory of my Oxford tutor and friend is naturally most prominent. The late Master of Balliol College was >piore than a mere scholar or a mere philosopher. He seemed so idealist and yet so prac-

XIV PREFACE.

tical: so realist and yet so full of high ideals: so* delicately kind and yet so severely reasonable. You felt he saw life more steadily and saw it more whole than others: as one reality in which religion and philosophy, art and business, the sciences and theology, were severally but elements and aspects. To the amateurs of novelty, to the slaves of specialisation, to the devotees of any narrow way, such largeness might, with the impatience natural to limited minds, have seemed indifference. So must appear those who on higher planes hear all the parts in the harmony of humanity, and with the justice of a wise love maintain an intellectual S6phrosyn€. On his pupils this secret power « of an other-world serenity laid an irresistible spell, and bore in upon them the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there was the fuller truth of life « and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to fulfil the amplest requirements of their place.

In earlier days Jowett had been keenly interested in German philosophy, and had made a version (most of which was still extant in 1868) of the Logic I have translated. But Greek literature, and above all Plato, drew him to more congenial fields. It was on his suggestion, — or shall I say injunction ?— at that date, that the work I had casually begun was some years later prosecuted to completion. It was his words, again, two years ago, that bade me spare no labour in the work of revision.

Oxford, Dtcttnbtr, 1893.

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The 'Logic of Hegel9 is a name which may be given to two separate books. One of these is the 'Science of Logic* (Wissenschaft der Logik), first published in three volumes (1812-1816), while its author was schoolmaster at Nuremberg. A second edition was on its way, when Hegel was suddenly cut off, after revising the first volume only. In the ' Secret of Hegel/ the earlier part of this Logic has been translated by Dr. Hutchison Stirling, with whose name German philosophy is chiefly associated in this country.

The other Logic, of which the present work is a translation, forms the First Part in the ' Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences/ The first edition of the Encyclopaedia appeared at Heidelberg in 1817; the second in 1827; and the third in 1830. It is well to bear in mind that these dates take us back forty or fifty years, to a time when modern science and Inductive Logic had yet to win their laurels, and when the world was in many ways different from what it is now. The earliest edition of the Encyclopaedia contained the pith of the system. The subsequent editions brought some new materials, mainly intended to smooth over and explain the transitions between the various sections, and to answer the objections of xvi FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDI TI OH.

critics. The work contained a synopsis of philosophy in the form of paragraphs, and was to be supplemented by the viva voce remarks of the lecturer.

The present volume is translated from the edition of 1843, forming the Sixth Volume in Hegel's Collected Works. It consists of two nearly equal portions. One half, here printed in more open type, contains Hegel's Encyclopaedia, with all the author's own additions. The first paragraph under each number marks the earliest and simplest statement of the first edition. The other half, here printed in closer type, is made up of the notes taken in lecture by the editor (Henning) and by Professors Hotho and Michelet. These notes for the most part connect the several sections, rather than explain their statements. Their genuineness is vouched for by their being almost verbally the same with other parts of Hegel's own writings.

The translation has tried to keep as closely as possible to the meaning, without always adhering very rigorously to the words of the original. It is, however, much more literal in the later and systematic part, than in the earlier chapters.

The Prolegomena which precede the translation have not been given in the hope or with the intention of expounding the Hegelian system. They merely seek to remove certain obstacles, and to render Hegel less tantalizingly hard to those who approach him for the first time. How far they will accomplish this, remains to be seen.

Oxford, September, 1873.

Chapter I. Why Hegel Is Hard To Understand

4 The condemnation/ says Hegel, 'which a great man lays upon the world, is to force it to explain him V The greatness of Hegel, if it be measured by this standard, must be something far above common. Interpreters of his system have contradicted each other, almost as variously as the several commentators on the Bible. He is claimed as their head by widely different schools of thought, all of which appeal to him as the original source of their line of argument. The Right wing, and the Left, as well as the Centre, profess to be the genuine descendants of the prophet, and to inherit the mantle of his inspiration. If we believe one side, Hegel is only to be rightly appreciated when we divest his teaching of every shred of religion and orthodoxy which it retains. If we believe another class of expositors, he was the champion of Christianity.

These contradictory views may be safely left to abolish each other. But diversity of opinion on such topics is neither unnatural, nor unusual. The meaning and the bearings of a great event, or a great character, or a great work of reasoned thought, will be estimated and explained in different ways, according to the effect

4 PROLEGOMENA. [i.

they produce on different minds and different levels of life and society. Those effects, perhaps, will not present themselves in their true character, until long after the original excitement has passed away. To some minds, the chief value of the Hegelian system will lie in its vindication of the truths of natural and revealed religion, and in the agreement of the elaborate reasonings of the philosopher with the simple aspirations of mankind towards higher things. To others that system will have most interest as* a philosophical history of thought, — an exposition of that organic development of reason, which underlies and constitutes all the varied and complex movement of the world. To a third class, again, it may seem at best an instrument or method of investigation, stating the true law by which knowledge proceeds in its endeavour to comprehend and assimilate existing nature.

While these various meanings may be given to the Hegelian scheme of thought, the majority of the world either pronounce Hegel to be altogether unintelligible, or banish him to the limbo of a priori thinkers, — that bourne from which no philosopher returns. To argue with those who start from the latter conviction would be an ungrateful, and probably a superfluous task. Wisdom is justified, we may be sure, of all her children. But it may be possible to admit the existence of difficulties, and agree to some extent with those who complain that Hegel is impenetrable and hard as adamant. There can be no doubt of the forbidding aspect of the most prominent features in his system. He is hard in himself, and his readers find him hard. His style is not of the best, and to foreign eyes seems unequal. At times he is eloquent, stirring, and striking: again his turns are harsh, and his clauses tiresome to disentangle: and we are always coming upon that

I.] THINKING IN VACUO. 5

childlikeness of literary manner, which English taste fancies it can detect in some of the greatest works of German genius; There are faults in Hegel, which obscure his meaning: but more obstacles are due to the nature of the work, and the pre-occupations of our j minds. There is something in him which fascinates y/ the thinker, and which inspires a sympathetic student with the vigour and the hopefulness of the spring-time. Perhaps the main hindrance in the way of a clear vision is the contrast which Hegelian philosophy offers to our ordinary habits of mind. Generally speaking, we rest contented if we can get tolerably near our object, and form a general picture of it to set before ourselves. It might almost be said that we have never thought of such a thing as being in earnest either with our words or with our thoughts. We get into a way of speaking with an uncertain latitude of meaning, and leave a good deal to the fellow-feeling of our hearers, who are expected to mend what is defective in our utterances. For most of us the place of exact thought is supplied by metaphors and pictures, by mental images, and figures generalised from the senses. And thus it happens that, when we come upon a single precise and definite statement, neither exceeding nor falling short in its meaning, we are thrown out of our reckoning. Our fancy and memory have nothing left for them to do : and, as fancy and memory make up the greater part of what we loosely call thinking, our powers of thought seem to be brought to a standstill. Those who crave for fluent reading, or prefer easy writing, some* thing within the pale of our usual mental lines, are more likely to find what they seek in the ten partially correct and approximate ways commonly used to give expression to a truth, than ih the one simple and accurate statement of the thought. We prefer a

6 PROLEGOMENA. [i.

familiar name, and an accustomed image, on which our faculties may work. But in the atmosphere of Hegelian

V thought, we feel very much as if we had been lifted into a vacuum, where we cannot breathe, and which is a fit habitation for unrecognisable ghosts only.

Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs the heights of Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after circling in grand curve upon the mountain-side, and perhaps after having been dragged mysterious distances through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself as it would seem back at the same place as he looked forth from some minutes before ; and it is only after a brief

/ comparison that he realises he now commands a wider view from a point some hundreds of feet higher. So the student of Hegel — (and it might be the case with _Fi4±te"^sbyas"tfieniachinery of the dialectical method, with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, carries him round and round from term to term of thought — like the Logos and the Spirit, which blow us whithersoever they list — begins to suffer from dizziness at the apprehension that he has been the victim of phantasmagoria and has not really moved at all. It is only later — if ever — that he recognises that the scene, though similar, is yet not altogether the same. It is only later — if ever — that he understands that the path of philosophy is no wandering from land to land more remote in search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God ; no setting forth of new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and move, and have our being,— the manifestation in more closely-knit unity and more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal, which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps even no, traces of its power and glory.

I.] THINKING IN VACUO. 7

To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we have to go through in trying to answer a riddle. The terms of the problem to be solved are all given to us : the features of the object are, it may be, fully described : and yet somehow we cannot at once tell what it is all about, or add up the sum of which we have the several items. We are waiting to learn the subject of the proposition, of which all these statements may be regarded as the predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly \ been said : but we are at a loss to see what it has been I said about. Our mind wanders round from one familiar object to another, and tries them in succession to see whether any one satisfies the several points in the statement and includes them all. We grope here and there for something we are acquainted with, in which the bits of the description may cohere, and get a unity which they cannot give themselves. When once we have hit upon the right object, our troubles are at an end : and the empty medium is now peopled with a creature of our imagination. We have reached a fixed point in the range of our conception, around which the given features may cluster.

All this trouble caused by the Hegelian theory of what philosophy involves — viz. really beginning at the beginning, is saved by a device well known to the several branches of Science. It is the way with them to assume that the student has a rough general image of the objects which they examine; and under the guidance, or with the help of this generalised image, they go on to explain and describe its outlines more completely. They start with an approximate concep-^ tion, such as anybody may be supposed to have ; and this they seek to render more definite. The geologist, for example, could scarcely teach geology, unless he could pre-suppose or produce some acquaintance on the

8 PROLEGOMENA. [i.

part of his pupils with what Hume would have called an ' impression ' or an ' idea ' of the rocks and formations of which he has to treat The geometer gives a short, and, as it were, popular explanation of the sense in which angles, circles, triangles, &c. are to be understood : and then by the aid of these provisional definitions we come to a more scientific notion of the same terms. The third book of Euclid, for example, brings before us a clearer notion of what a circle is, than the nominal explanation in the list of definitions. By means of these temporary aids, or, as we may call them, leading-strings for the intellect, the progress of the ordinary scientific student is made tolerably easy. Bu£ v in philosophy, as it is found in Hegel, there is quite another way of working. The helps in question are absent: and until it be seen that they_are .nJaL even needed, the__Hegelian theory Wl11 ™*mgin a fiPflW mystery. For that which the first glance seemed to show as an enigma, is only the plain and unambiguous statement of thought. Instead of casting around for images and accustomed names, we have only to accept the several terms and articles in the development of thought as they present themselves. These terms merely require to be apprehended. They stand in no immediate need of illustration from our experience. What we have to bring to the work, is patience, selfrestraint, the sacrifice of our cherished habits of mind, the surrender of the natural wish to see at once what it all comes to, what it is good for, how it squares with other convictions. As Bacon reminded his age, Into the kingdom of philosophy, as into the kingdom of heaven, none can enter, nisi sub persona infantis : i. e. unless he at least steadfastly resolve to renounce that world which lieth in the Evil.

Ordinary knowledge consists in referring a new object

I.] WHAT'S IN A NAME? 9

to a class of objects, that is to say, to a generalised image with which we are already acquainted. It is not so much cognition as re-cognition. ' " What is the truth ? " ' asked Lady Chettam of Mrs. Cadwallader in Middlemarch. '"The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic — nasty to take, and sure to disagree." " There could not be anything worse than that," said Lady Chettam, with so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned something exact about Mr. Casaubon's disadvantages/ Once we have referred the new individual to a familiar category or a convenient metaphor, once we have given it a name, and introduced it into the society of our mental drawing-room, we are satisfied. We have put a fresh object in its appropriate drawer in the cabinet of our ideasj and hence, with the pride of a collector, we can calmly call it our own. But such acquaintance, proceeding from a mingling of memory and naming, is not the same thing as knowledge in the strict sense of the term \ ' What is he ? Do you know him ? ' These are our questions : and we are satisfied when we learn his name and his calling. We may never have penetrated into the inner nature of those objects, with whose tout ensemble, or rough outlines, we are so much at home, that we fancy ourselves thoroughly cognisant of them. Classifications are only>/ the first steps in science: and we do not understand a thought because we can view it under the guise of some of its illustrations.

In the case of the English reader of Hegel some peculiar hindrances spring from the foreign language. In strong contrast to most of the well-known German philosophers, he may be said to write in the popular and national dialect of his country. Of course there

1 * Das Bekannte flberhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt.' Phtnomenologu dts Geistes, p. 34.