HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY. Hegelianism is confessedly one of the most difficult of all philosophies. Every one has heard the legend which makes Hegel say, "One man has understood me, and even he has not." He abruptly hurls us into a world where old habits of thought fail us. In three places, indeed, he has attempted to exhibit the transition to his own system from other levels of thought ; but in none with much success. In the intro ductory lectures on the philosophy of religion he gives a rationale of the difference between the modes of consciousness in religion and philosophy (between Vorstellung and Begri ff) . In the begin ning of the Encyklopddie he discusses the defects of dogmatism, empiricism, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi. In the first case he treats the psychological aspect of the difference; in the latter he presents his doctrine less in its essential character than in special relations to the prominent systems of his time. The Phenome nology of Spirit, called "the first part" of his system, suffers from a different fault. It is not an introduction—for the philosophy which it was to introduce was not then fully elaborated. Even to the last Hegel had not so externalized his system as to treat it as something to be led up to by gradual steps. His philosophy was not one aspect of his intellectual life, to be contemplated from others; it was the ripe fruit of concentrated reflection, and had become the one all-embracing form and principle of his think ing. More than most thinkers, his thought was moulded by the influences of his time and the lessons of history.
The Phenomenology.—The Phenomenology is the picture of the Hegelian philosophy in the making—at the stage before the scaffolding has been removed from the building. For this reason the book is at once the most brilliant and the most difficult of Hegel's works—the most brilliant as a speculative effort con structed to combine the abstract record of a logical evolution with the real history of an intellectual growth; the most difficult because, instead of treating the rise of intelligence (from its first appearance in contrast with the real world to its final recognition of its presence in, and rule over, all things) as a purely subjective process, it exhibits this rise as wrought out in historical epochs, national characteristics, forms of culture and faith, and philo sophical systems. The theme is identical with the introduction to the Encyklopiidie; but it is treated in a very different style. From all periods of the world—from mediaeval piety and stoical pride, Kant and Sophocles, science and art, religion and philosophy —regardless of mere chronology, Hegel gathers in the vineyards of the human spirit the grapes from which he crushes the wine of thought. The mind coming through a thousand phases of mistake and disappointment to a sense and realization of its true position in the universe—such is the drama which is subjectively Hegel's own history, but is represented objectively as the process of the spiritual history of humanity reproduced in himself. The Pheno menology stands to the Encyklopadie somewhat as the dialogues of Plato stand to the Aristotelian treatises. It contains almost all his philosophy—but irregularly and without due proportion.
The Phenomenology treats of the attitudes of consciousness towards reality under the six heads of consciousness, self-con sciousness, reason (Vernunft), spirit (Geist), religion and absolute knowledge. The native attitude of consciousness towards existence is reliance on the evidence of the senses; but a little reflection is sufficient to show that the reality attributed to the external world is as much due to intellectual conceptions as to the senses, and that these conceptions elude us when we try to fix them. If conscious ness cannot detect a permanent object outside it, so self-conscious ness cannot find a permanent subject in itself. It may, like the Stoic, assert freedom by holding aloof from the entanglements of real life, or like the sceptic regard the world as a delusion, or finally, as the "unhappy consciousness" (Ungliickliches Bewusstsein), may be a recurrent falling short of a perfection which it has placed above it in the heavens. But in this isolation from the world, self-consciousness has closed its gates against the stream of life. The perception of this is reason. Reason convinced that the world and the soul are alike rational observes the external world, mental phenomena, and specially the nervous organism, as the meeting ground of body and mind. But reason finds much in the world recognizing no kindred with her, and so turning to practical activity seeks in the world the realization of her own aims. Reason abandons her efforts to mould the world, and is content to let the aims of individuals work out their results independently, only stepping in to lay down precepts for the cases where individual actions conflict, and to test these precepts by the rules of formal logic.
So far we have seen consciousness on one hand and the real world on the other. The stage of Geist reveals the consciousness no longer as critical and antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a community, as no longer isolated from its surroundings but the union of the single and real consciousness with the vital feeling that animates the community. This is the lowest stage of concrete consciousness—life, and not knowledge; the spirit inspires, but does not reflect. It is the age of unconscious morality, when the individual's life is lost in the society of which he is an organic member. But increasing culture presents new ideals, and the mind, absorbing the ethical spirit of its environment, gradually emancipates itself from conventions and superstitions. This Au f kldrung prepares the way for the rule of conscience, for the moral view of the world as subject of a moral law. From the moral world the next step is religion ; the moral law gives place to God. But the idea of Godhead, too, as it first appears, is imperfect, and has to pass through the forms of nature-worship and of art before it reaches a full utterance in Christianity. Religion in this shape is the nearest step to the stage of absolute knowledge; and this absolute knowledge—"the spirit knowing itself as spirit"— is not something which leaves these other forms behind but the full comprehension of them as the organic constituents of its empire; "they are the memory and the sepulchre of its history, and at the same time the actuality, truth and certainty of its throne." Here, according to Hegel, is the field of philosophy.
The preface to the Phenomenology signalled the separation from Schelling—the adieu to romance. Philosophy is to be the science of the actual world—it is the spirit comprehending itself in its own externalizations and manifestations. The philosophy of Hegel is idealism, but it is an idealism in which every idealistic unifica tion has its other face in the multiplicity of existence. It is realism as well as idealism, and never quits its hold on facts. Nature and mind in the Hegelian system—the external and the spiritual world —have the same origin, but are not co-equal branches. The natural world proceeds from the "idea," the spiritual from the idea and nature. Reality, independent of the individual consciousness, there must be ; reality, independent of all mind, is an impossibility. At the basis of all reality, whether material or mental, there is thought. Thought in its primary form, when in all its parts com pleted, is what Hegel calls the "idea," But the idea, though fundamental, is in another sense final, in the process of the world. It only appears in consciousness as the crowning development of the mind. Only with philosophy does thought become fully con scious of itself in its origin and development. Accordingly the history of philosophy is the presupposition of logic, or the three branches of philosophy form a circle.
Logic.—The exposition or constitution of the "idea" is the work of the Logic. As the total system falls into three parts, so every part of the system follows the triadic law. Every truth, every reality, has three aspects or stages; it is the unification of two contradictory elements, of two partial aspects of truth which are not merely contrary, like black and white, but contradictory, like same and different. The first step is a preliminary affirmation and unification, the second a negation and differentiation, the third a final synthesis. For example, the seed of the plant is an initial unity of life, which when placed in its proper soil suffers dis integration into its constituents, and yet in virtue of its vital unity keeps these divergent elements together, and reappears as the plant with its members in organic union. Or again, the process of scientific induction is a threefold chain; the original hypothesis (the first unification of the fact) seems to melt away when con fronted with opposite facts, and yet no scientific progress is possible unless the stimulus of the original unification is strong enough to clasp the discordant facts and establish a reunification. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a Fichtean formula, is generalized by Hegel into the essential law of thought.
In what we may call their psychological aspect these three stages are known as the abstract stage, or that of understanding (Verstand), the dialectical stage, or that of negative reason, and the speculative stage, or that of positive reason (Vernunft). The first of these attitudes taken alone is dogmatism ; the second, when similarly isolated, is scepticism ; the third, when detached from its elements, is mysticism. Thus Hegelianism reduces dogmatism, scepticism and mysticism to factors in philosophy. The abstract or dogmatic thinker believes his object to be one, simple and stationary, and intelligible apart from its surroundings. The dialectic of negative reason rudely dispels these views. Appealing to reality it shows that the identity and permanence of forms are contradicted by history; instead of unity it exhibits multiplicity, instead of identity difference, instead of a whole, only parts. Dialectic is, therefore, a dislocating power; it shakes the solid structures of material thought, and exhibits the in stability latent in such conceptions of the world. In the realm of abstract thought these transitions take place lightly. In the worlds of nature and mind they are more palpable and violent. But reason is not negative only; while it disintegrates the mass or unconscious unity, it builds up a new unity with higher organ ization. What is required is to readjust our original thesis in such a way as to include and give expression to both the elements in the process.
The universe, then, is a process or development, to the eye of philosophy. It is the process of the absolute—in religious lan guage, the manifestation of God. In the background of all, the absolute is eternally present; the rhythmic movement of thought is the self-unfolding of the absolute. God reveals Himself in the logical idea, in nature and in mind ; but mind is not alike conscious of its absoluteness in every stage of development. Philosophy alone sees God revealing Himself in the ideal system of thought, as it were "in his eternal being prior to the creation of nature and a finite mind"; in the natural world, as a series of materialized forces and forms of life; and in the spiritual world as the human soul, the legal and moral order of society, and the creations of art, religion and philosophy.
The logic of Hegel is the only rival to the logic of Aristotle. What Aristotle did for the theory of demonstrative reasoning, Hegel attempted to do for the whole of human knowledge. His logic is an enumeration of the forms or categories by which our experience exists. It carried out Kant's doctrine of the categories as a priori synthetic principles, but removed the limitation by which Kant denied them any constitutive value except in alliance with experience. According to Hegel the terms in which thought exhibits itself are a system of their own, with laws and relations which reappear in a less obvious shape in the theories of nature and mind. Nor are they restricted to the small number which Kant obtained by manipulating the current subdivision of judgments. But all forms by which thought holds sensations in unity (the formative or synthetic elements of language) had their place assigned in a system where one leads up to and passes over into another.
The fact which ordinary thought ignores, and of which ordinary logic therefore provides no account, is the presence of gradation and continuity in the world. The general terms of language simplify the universe by reducing its variety of individuals Co a few forms, none of which exists simply and perfectly. The method of the understanding is to divide and then to give a separate reality to what it has thus distinguished. It is part of Hegel's plan to remedy this one-sided character of thought, by laying bare the gradations of ideas. He lays special stress on the point that abstract ideas when held in their abstraction are almost interchangeable with their opposites—that extremes meet, and that in every true and concrete idea there is a coincidence of opposites.
The beginning of the Logic is an illustration of this. The logical idea is treated under the three heads of being (Sein), essence (Wesen) and notion (Begriff). The simplest term of thought is being; we cannot think less about anything than when we merely say that it is. Being—the abstract "is"—is nothing definite, and nothing at least is. Being and not being are thus declared identical —a proposition which in this unqualified shape was to most people a stumbling-block at the very door of the system. Instead of the mere "is" which is as yet nothing, we should rather say "be comes," and as "becomes" always implies "something," we have determinate being—"a being" which in the next stage of definite ness becomes "one." And in this way we pass on to the quantita tive aspects of being.
The terms treated under the first head, in addition to those already mentioned, are the abstract principles of quantity and number, and their application in measure to determine the limits of being. Under the title of essence are discussed those pairs of correlative terms which are habitually employed in the explanation of the world—such as law and phenomenon, cause and effect, reason and consequence, substance and attribute. Under the head of notion are considered, firstly, the subjective forms of concep tion, judgment and syllogism ; secondly, their realization in objects as mechanically, chemically or teleologically constituted; and thirdly, the idea first of life, and next of science, as the com plete interpenetration of thought and objectivity. The third part of logic evidently is what contains the topics usually treated in logic-books, though even here the province of logic in the ordinary sense is exceeded. The first two divisions—the "objective logic" —are what is usually called metaphysics.
The characteristic of the system is the gradual way in which idea is linked to idea so as to make the division into chapters only an arrangement of convenience. The merit of Hegel is to have indicated and to a large extent displayed the filiation and mutual limitation of our forms of thought ; to have arranged them in the order of their comparative capacity to give a satisfactory ex pression to truth in the totality of its relations; and to have broken down the partition which in Kant separated the formal logic from the transcendental analytic, as well as the general disruption be tween logic and metaphysic.
His point of view was essentially opposed to the current views of science. To metamorphosis he only allowed a logical value, as explaining the natural classification ; the only real, existent meta morphosis he saw in the development of the individual from its embryonic stage. Still more distinctly did he contravene the general tendency of scientific explanation. "It is held the triumph of science to recognize in the general process of the earth the same categories as are exhibited in the processes of isolated bodies. This is, however, an application of categories from a field where the conditions are finite to a sphere in which the circumstances are infinite." In astronomy he depreciates Newton and elevates Kepler, accusing Newton particularly, a propos of the distinction of centrifugal and centripetal forces, of leading to a confusion between what is mathematically to be distinguished and what is physically separate.
The purely psychological branch of the subject takes up half of the space allotted to Geist in the Encyklopadie. It falls under the three heads of anthropology, phenomenology and psychology proper. Anthropology treats of the mind in union with the body —of the natural soul—and discusses the relations of the soul with the planets, the races of mankind, the differences of age, dreams, animal magnetism, insanity and phrenology. In the Phenomenology consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are dealt with. The title of the section and the contents recall, though with some important variations, the earlier half of his first work; but here the historical background on which the stages in the development of the ego were represented has disappeared. Psychology, in the stricter sense, deals with the various forms of theoretical and prac tical intellect, such as attention, memory, desire and will. In this account of the development of an independent, active and intelli gent being from the stage where man like the Dryad is a portion of the natural life around him, Hegel has combined what may be termed a physiology and pathology of the mind—a subject far wider than that of ordinary psychologies. It is a great merit to have even attempted some system in the dark anomalies which lie under the normal consciousness, and to have traced the genesis of the intellectual faculties from animal sensitivity.
The political state is always an individual, and the relations of these states with each other and the "world-spirit" of which they are the manifestations constitute the material of history. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History, edited by Gans and subse quently by Karl Hegel, is the most popular of Hegel's works. The history of the world is a scene of judgment where one people and one alone holds for awhile the sceptre, as the unconscious instrument of the universal spirit, till another rises in its place, with a fuller measure of liberty—a larger superiority to the bonds of natural and artificial circumstance. Three main periods—the Oriental, the Classical and the Germanic—in which respectively the single despot, the dominant order, and the man as man possess freedom—constitute the history of the world. Inaccuracy in de tail and artifice in the arrangement of isolated peoples are in evitable in such a scheme. A graver mistake, according to some critics, is that Hegel, far from giving a law of progress, seems to suggest that the history. of the world is nearing an end, and has merely reduced the past to a logical formula. The answer to this charge is partly that such a law seems unattainable, and partly that the idealistic content of the present which philosophy extracts is always an advance upon actual fact, and so does throw a light into the future. And at any rate the method is greater than Hegel's employment of it.
The lectures on the Philosophy of Art stray largely into the next sphere and dwell with zest on the close connection of art and religion; and the discussion of the decadence and rise of religions, of the aesthetic qualities of Christian legend, of the age of chivalry, etc., make the Asthetik a book of varied interest.
The lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, though unequal in their composition and belonging to different dates, serve to exhibit the vital connection of the system with Christianity. Religion, like art, is inferior to philosophy as an exponent of the harmony between man and the absolute. In it the absolute exists as the poetry and music of the heart, in the inwardness of feeling. Hegel after expounding the nature of religion passes on to discuss its historical phases, but in the immature state of religious science falls into several mistakes. At the bottom of the scale of nature worships he places the religion of sorcery. The gradations which follow are apportioned with some uncertainty amongst the re ligions of the East. With the Persian religion of light and the Egyptian of enigmas we pass to those faiths where Godhead takes the form of a spiritual individuality, i.e., to the Hebrew religion (of sublimity), the Greek (of beauty) and the Roman (of adaptation). Last comes absolute religion, in which the mystery of the reconciliation between God and man is an open doctrine. This is Christianity, in which God is a Trinity, because He is a spirit. The revelation of this truth is the subject of the Christian Scriptures. For the Son of God, in the immediate aspect, is the finite world of nature and man, which far from being at one with its Father is originally in an attitude of estrangement. The his tory of Christ is the visible reconciliation between man and the eternal. With the death of Christ this union, ceasing to be a mere fact, becomes a vital idea—the Spirit of God which dwells in the Christian community.
The lectures on the History of Philosophy deal disproportion ately with the various epochs, and in some parts date from the beginning of Hegel's career. In trying to subject history to the order of logic they sometimes misconceive the filiation of ideas. But they created the history of philosophy as a scientific study. They showed that a philosophical theory is not an accident or whim, but an exponent of its age determined by its antecedents and environments, and handing on its results to the future.
Among Italian Hegelians are A. Vera, Raffaele Mariano and B. Spaventa (1817-1883) ; see V. de Lucia, L'Hegel in Italia (1891) . In Sweden, J. J. Borelius of Lund; in Norway, G. V. Lyng (d. 1884), M. J. Monrad (1816-1897) and G. Kent (d. 1892) have adopted Hegelianism; in France, P. Leroux and P. Prevost.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Exposition and Criticism. I. General. F. A. StudenBibliography.--Exposition and Criticism. I. General. F. A. Studen- maier, Darstellung and Kritik des Hegel'schen Systems (Mainz, 1844) ; J. H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (1865, 2nd ed., 1898), A. Ruge, Aus fruiterer Zeit (3 vols., 1862-63 ; 2nd ed., 1867) ; E. Caird, Hegel (i88o, 2nd ed., 1883) ; A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality (1887, 2nd ed., 1893) ; J. B. Baillie, The Idealistic Con struction of Experience (1906) ; B. Croce, Cid che e vivo e cid che e morto della filosofia di Hegel (1907) , Eng. trans. What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel (1915) .