The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Logic of Hegel, by G. W. F. Hegel This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: The Logic of Hegel Author: G. W. F. Hegel Contributor: William Wallace Translator: William Wallace Release Date: July 13, 2017 [EBook #55108] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOGIC OF HEGEL *** Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature (online soon in an extended version, also linking to free sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational materials,...) Images generously made available by the Hathi Trust. THE LOGIC OF HEGEL TRANSLATED FROM THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES By WILLIAM WALLACE, M.A, LL.D. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1892 NOTE The present volume contains a translation, which has been revised throughout and compared with the original, of the Logic as given in the first part of Hegel's Encyclopaedia, preceded by a bibliographical account of the three editions and extracts from the prefaces of that work, and followed by notes and illustrations of a philological rather than a philosophical character on the text. This introductory chapter and these notes were not included in the previous edition. The volume containing my Prolegomena is under revision and will be issued shortly. W. W. CONTENTS Bibliographical Notice on the Three Editions and Three Prefaces of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. CHAPTER I. Introduction CHAPTER II. Preliminary Notion CHAPTER III. First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity CHAPTER IV. Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity:— I. Empiricism II. The Critical Philosophy CHAPTER V. Third Attitude of Thought to Objectivity:— Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge CHAPTER VI. Logic Further Defined and Divided CHAPTER VII. First Subdivision of Logic:— The Doctrine of Being CHAPTER VIII. Second Subdivision of Logic:— The Doctrine of Essence CHAPTER IX. Third Subdivision of Logic:— The Doctrine of the Notion NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. ON CHAPTER I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX INDEX BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE ON THE THREE EDITIONS AND THREE PREFACES OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA 3 30 60 76 82 121 143 156 207 287 383 387 395 398 406 409 410 417 424 433 [Pg ix] The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline is the third in time of the four works which Hegel published. It was preceded by the Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1807, and the Science of Logic (in two volumes), in 1812-16, and was followed by the Outlines of the Philosophy of Law in 1820. The only other works which came directly from his hand are a few essays, addresses, and reviews. The earliest of these appeared in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, issued by his friend Schelling and himself, in 1802—when Hegel was one and thirty, which, as Bacon thought, 'is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass'; and the latest were his contributions to the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, in the year of his death (1831). This Encyclopaedia is the only complete, matured, and authentic statement of Hegel's philosophical system. But, as the title-page bears, it is only an outline; and its primary aim is to supply a manual for the guidance of his students. In its mode of exposition the free flight of speculation is subordinated to the needs of the professorial class-room. Pegasus is put in harness. Paragraphs concise in form and saturated with meaning postulate and presuppose the presiding spirit of the lecturer to fuse them into continuity and raise them to higher lucidity. Yet in two directions the works of Hegel furnish a supplement to the defects of the Encyclopaedia. One of these aids to comprehension is the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in his thirty-seventh year. It may be going too far to say with David Strauss that it is the Alpha and Omega of Hegel, and his later writings only extracts from it.[1] Yet here the Pegasus of mind soars free through untrodden fields of air, and tastes the joys of first love and the pride of fresh discovery in the quest for truth. The fire of young enthusiasm has not yet been forced to hide itself and smoulder away in apparent calm. The mood is Olympian—far above the turmoil and bitterness of lower earth, free from the bursts of temper which emerge later, when the thinker has to mingle in the fray and endure the shafts of controversy. But the Phenomenology, if not less than the Encyclopaedia it contains the diamond purity of Hegelianism, is a key which needs consummate patience and skill to use with advantage. If it commands a larger view, it demands a stronger wing of him who would join its voyage through the atmosphere of thought up to its purest empyrean. It may be the royal road to the Idea, but only a kingly soul can retrace its course. The other commentary on the Encyclopaedia is supplied partly by Hegel's other published writings, and partly by the volumes (IX-XV in the Collected works) in which his editors have given his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, on Aesthetic, on the Philosophy of Religion, and on the History of Philosophy. All of these lectures, as well as the Philosophy of Law, published by himself, deal however only with the third part of the philosophic system. That system (p. 28) includes (i) Logic, (ii) Philosophy of Nature, and (iii) Philosophy of Spirit. It is this third part—or rather it is the last two divisions therein (embracing the great general interests of humanity, such as law and morals, religion and art, as well as the development of philosophy itself) which form the topics of Hegel's most expanded teaching. It is in this region that he has most appealed to the liberal culture of the century, and influenced (directly or by reaction) the progress of that philosophical history and historical philosophy of which our own generation is reaping the fast- accumulating fruit. If one may foist such a category into systematic philosophy, we may say that the study of the 'Objective' and 'Absolute Spirit' is the most interesting part of Hegel. Of the second part of the system there is less to be said. For nearly half a century the study of nature has passed almost completely out of the hands of the philosophers into the care of the specialists of science. There are signs indeed everywhere—and among others Helmholtz has lately reminded us—that the higher order of scientific students are ever and anon driven by the very logic of their subject into the precincts or the borders of philosophy. But the name of a Philosophy of Nature still recalls a time of hasty enthusiasms and over-grasping ambition of thought which, in its eagerness to understand the mystery of the universe jumped to conclusions on insufficient grounds, trusted to bold but fantastic analogies, and lavished an unwise contempt on the plodding industry of the mere hodman of facts and experiments. Calmer retrospection will perhaps modify this verdict, and sift the various contributions (towards a philosophical unity of the sciences) which are now indiscriminately damned by the title of Naturphilosophie. For the present purpose it need only be said that, for the second part of the Hegelian system, we are restricted for explanations to the notes collected by the editors of Vol. VII. part i. of the Collected works—notes derived from the annotations which Hegel himself supplied in the eight or more courses of lectures which he gave on the Philosophy of Nature between 1804 and 1830. Quite other is the case with the Logic—the first division of the Encyclopaedia. There we have the collateral authority of the 'Science of Logic,' the larger Logic which appeared whilst Hegel was schoolmaster at Nürnberg. The idea of a new Logic formed the natural sequel to the publication of the Phenomenology in 1807. In that year Hegel was glad to accept, as a stop-gap and pot-boiler, the post of editor of the Bamberg Journal. But his interests lay in other directions, and the circumstances of the time and country helped to determine their special form. 'In Bavaria,' he says in a letter[2], 'it looks as if organisation were the current business.' A very mania of reform, says another, prevailed. Hegel's friend and fellow-Swabian, Niethammer, held an important position in the Bavarian education office, and wished to employ the philosopher in the work of carrying out his plans of re-organising the higher education of the Protestant subjects of the crown. He asked if Hegel would write a logic for school use, and if he cared to become rector of a grammar school. Hegel, who was already at work on his larger Logic, was only half-attracted by the suggestion. 'The traditional Logic,' he replied[3], 'is a subject on which there are text-books enough, but at the same time it is one which can by no means remain as it is: it is a thing nobody can make anything of: 'tis dragged along like an old heirloom, only because a substitute—of which the want is universally felt—is not yet in existence. The whole of its rules, still current, might be written on two pages: every additional detail beyond these two is perfectly fruitless scholastic subtlety;—or if this logic is to get a thicker body, its expansion must come from psychological paltrinesses,' Still less did he like the prospect of instructing in theology, as then rationalised. 'To write a logic and to be theological instructor is as bad as to be white- [Pg x] [Pg xi] [Pg xii] [Pg xiii] washer and chimney-sweep at once.' 'Shall he, who for many long years built his eyry on the wild rock beside the eagle and learned to breathe the free air of the mountains, now learn to feed on the carcases of dead thoughts or the still-born thoughts of the moderns, and vegetate in the leaden air of mere babble[4]?' At Nürnberg he found the post of rector of the 'gymnasium' by no means a sinecure. The school had to be made amid much lack of funds and general bankruptcy of apparatus:—all because of an all-powerful and unalterable destiny which is called the course of business.' One of his tasks was 'by graduated exercises to introduce his pupils to speculative thought,'—and that in the space of four hours weekly[5]. Of its practicability—and especially with himself as instrument —he had grave doubts. In theory, he held that an intelligent study of the ancient classics was the best introduction to philosophy; and practically he preferred starting his pupils with the principles of law, morality and religion, and reserving the logic and higher philosophy for the highest class. Meanwhile he continued to work on his great Logic, the first volume of which appeared in two parts, 1812, 1813, and the second in 1816. This is the work which is the real foundation of the Hegelian philosophy. Its aim is the systematic reorganisation of the commonwealth of thought. It gives not a criticism, like Kant; not a principle, like Fichte; not a bird's eye view of the fields of nature and history, like Schelling; it attempts the hard work of re-constructing, step by step, into totality the fragments of the organism of intelligence. It is scholasticism, if scholasticism means an absolute and all-embracing system; but it is a protest against the old school-system and those who tried to rehabilitate it through their comprehensions of the Kantian theory. Apropos of the logic of his contemporary Fries (whom he did not love), published in 1811, he remarks: 'His paragraphs are mindless, quite shallow, bald, trivial; the explanatory notes are the dirty linen of the professorial chair, utterly slack and unconnected.'[6] Of himself he thus speaks: 'I am a schoolmaster who has to teach philosophy,—who, possibly for that reason, believes that philosophy like geometry is teachable, and must no less than geometry have a regular structure. But again, a knowledge of the facts in geometry and philosophy is one thing, and the mathematical or philosophical talent which procreates and discovers is another: my province is to discover that scientific form, or to aid in the formation of it[7].' So he writes to an old college friend; and in a letter to the rationalist theologian Paulus, in 1814[8], he professes: 'You know that I have had too much to do not merely with ancient literature, but even with mathematics, latterly with the higher analysis, differential calculus, chemistry, to let myself be taken in by the humbug of Naturphilosophie, philosophising without knowledge of fact and by mere force of imagination, and treating mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as Ideas.' In the autumn of 1816 Hegel became professor of philosophy at Heidelberg. In the following year appeared the first edition of his Encyclopaedia: two others appeared in his lifetime (in 1827 and 1830). The first edition is a thin octavo volume of pp. xvi. 288, published (like the others) at Heidelberg. The Logic in it occupies pp. 1-126 (of which 12 pp. are Einleitung and 18 pp. Vorbegriff); the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 127-204; and the Philosophy of Mind (Spirit), pp. 205-288. In the Preface the book is described (p. iv) as setting forth 'a new treatment of philosophy on a method which will, as I hope, yet be recognised as the only genuine method identical with the content.' Contrasting his own procedure with a mannerism of the day which used an assumed set of formulas to produce in the facts a show of symmetry even more arbitrary and mechanical than the arrangements imposed ab extra in the sciences, he goes on: 'This wilfulness we saw also take possession of the contents of philosophy and ride out on an intellectual knight-errantry—for a while imposing on honest true-hearted workers, though elsewhere it was only counted grotesque, and grotesque even to the pitch of madness. But oftener and more properly its teachings—far from seeming imposing or mad—were found out to be familiar trivialities, and its form seen to be a mere trick of wit, easily acquired, methodical and premeditated, with its quaint combinations and strained eccentricities,—the mien of earnestness only covering self-deception and fraud upon the public. On the other side, again, we saw shallowness and unintelligence assume the character of a scepticism wise in its own eyes and of a criticism modest in its claims for reason, enhancing their vanity and conceit in proportion as their ideas grew more vacuous. For a space of time these two intellectual tendencies have befooled German earnestness, have tired out its profound craving for philosophy, and have been succeeded by an indifference and even a contempt for philosophic science, till at length a self-styled modesty has the audacity to let its voice be heard in controversies touching the deepest philosophical problems, and to deny philosophy its right to that cognition by reason, the form of which was what formerly was called demonstration.' 'The first of these phenomena may be in part explained as the youthful exuberance of the new age which has risen in the realm of science no less than in the world of politics. If this exuberance greeted with rapture the dawn of the intellectual renascence, and without profounder labour at once set about enjoying the Idea and revelling for a while in the hopes and prospects which it offered, one can more readily forgive its excesses; because it is sound at heart, and the surface vapours which it had suffused around its solid worth must spontaneously clear off. But the other spectacle is more repulsive; because it betrays exhaustion and impotence, and tries to conceal them under a hectoring conceit which acts the censor over the philosophical intellects of all the centuries, mistaking them, but most of all mistaking itself. 'So much the more gratifying is another spectacle yet-to be noted; the interest in philosophy and the earnest love of higher knowledge which in the presence of both tendencies has kept itself single-hearted and without affectation. Occasionally this interest may have taken too much to the language of intuition and feeling; yet its appearance proves the existence of that inward and deeper-reaching impulse of reasonable intelligence which alone gives man his dignity,— proves it above all, because that standpoint can only be gained as a result of philosophical consciousness; so that what it seems to disdain is at least admitted and recognised as a condition. To this interest in ascertaining the truth I dedicate this attempt to supply an introduction and a contribution towards its satisfaction.' [Pg xiv] [Pg xv] [Pg xvi] [Pg xvii] The second edition appeared in 1827. Since the autumn of 1818 Hegel had been professor at Berlin: and the manuscript was sent thence (from August 1826 onwards) to Heidelberg, where Daub, his friend—himself a master in philosophical theology—attended to the revision of the proofs. 'To the Introduction,' writes Hegel[9], 'I have given perhaps too great an amplitude: but it, above all, would have cost me time and trouble to bring within narrower compass. Tied down and distracted by lectures, and sometimes here in Berlin by other things too, I have—without a general survey—allowed myself so large a swing that the work has grown upon me, and there was a danger of its turning into a book. I have gone through it several times. The treatment of the attitudes (of thought) which I have distinguished in it was to meet an interest of the day. The rest I have sought to make more definite, and so far as may be clearer; but the main fault is not mended—to do which would require me to limit the detail more, and on the other hand make the whole more surveyable, so that the contents should better answer the title of an Encyclopaedia.' Again, in Dec. 1826, he writes[10]: 'In the Naturphilosophie I have made essential changes, but could not help here and there going too far into a detail which is hardly in keeping with the tone of the whole. The second half of the Geistesphilosophie I shall have to modify entirely.' In May 1827, Hegel offers his explanation of delay in the preface, which, like the concluding paragraphs, touches largely on contemporary theology. By August of that year the book was finished, and Hegel off to Paris for a holiday. In the second edition, which substantially fixed the form of the Encyclopaedia, the pages amount to xlii, 534—nearly twice as many as the first, which, however, as Professor Caird remarks, 'has a compactness, a brief energy and conclusiveness of expression, which he never surpassed.' The Logic now occupies pp. 1214, Philosophy of Nature 215-354, and Philosophy of Spirit from 355-534. The second part therefore has gained least; and in the third part the chief single expansions occur towards the close and deal with the relations of philosophy, art, and religion in the State; viz. § 563 (which in the third edition is transposed to § 552), and § 573 (where two pages are enlarged to 18). In the first part, or the Logic, the main increase and alteration falls within the introductory chapters, where 96 pages take the place of 30. The Vorbegriff (preliminary notion) of the first edition had contained the distinction of the three logical 'moments' (see p. 142), with a few remarks on the methods, first, of metaphysic, and then (after a brief section on empiricism), of the 'Critical Philosophy through which philosophy has reached its close.' Instead of this the second edition deals at length, under this head, with the three 'attitudes (or positions) of thought to objectivity;' where, besides a more lengthy criticism of the Critical philosophy, there is a discussion of the doctrines of Jacobi and other Intuitivists. The Preface, like much else in this second edition, is an assertion of the right and the duty of philosophy to treat independently of the things of God, and an emphatic declaration that the result of scientific investigation of the truth is, not the subversion of the faith, but 'the restoration of that sum of absolute doctrine which thought at first would have put behind and beneath itself—a restoration of it however in the most characteristic and the freest element of the mind.' Any opposition that may be raised against philosophy on religious grounds proceeds, according to Hegel, from a religion which has abandoned its true basis and entrenched itself in formulae and categories that pervert its real nature. 'Yet,' he adds (p. vii), 'especially where religious subjects are under discussion, philosophy is expressly set aside, as if in that way all mischief were banished and security against error and illusion attained;' ... 'as if philosophy—the mischief thus kept at a distance—were anything but the investigation of Truth, but with a full sense of the nature and value of the intellectual links which give unity and form to all fact whatever.' 'Lessing,' he continues (p. xvi), 'said in his time that people treat Spinoza like a dead dog[11]. It cannot be said that in recent times Spinozism and speculative philosophy in general have been better treated.' The time was one of feverish unrest and unwholesome irritability. Ever since the so-called Carlsbad decrees of 1819 all the agencies of the higher literature and education had been subjected to an inquisitorial supervision which everywhere surmised political insubordination and religious heresy. A petty provincialism pervaded what was then still the small Residenz-Stadt Berlin; and the King, Frederick William III, cherished to the full that paternal conception of his position which has not been unusual in the royal house of Prussia. Champions of orthodoxy warned him that Hegelianism was unchristian, if not even anti-christian. Franz von Baader, the Bavarian religious philosopher (who had spent some months at Berlin during the winter of 1823-4, studying the religious and philosophical teaching of the universities in connexion with the revolutionary doctrines which he saw fermenting throughout Europe), addressed the king in a communication which described the prevalent Protestant theology as infidel in its very source, and as tending directly to annihilate the foundations of the faith. Hegel himself had to remind the censor of heresy that 'all speculative philosophy on religion maybe carried to atheism: all depends on who carries it; the peculiar piety of our times and the malevolence of demagogues will not let us want carriers[12].' His own theology was suspected both by the Rationalists and by the Evangelicals. He writes to his wife (in 1827) that he had looked at the university buildings in Louvain and Liège with the feeling that they might one day afford him a resting-place 'when the parsons in Berlin make the Kupfergraben completely intolerable for him[13].' 'The Roman Curia,' he adds, 'would be a more honourable opponent than the miserable cabals of a miserable boiling of parsons in Berlin.' Hence the tone in which the preface proceeds (p. xviii). 'Religion is the kind and mode of consciousness in which the Truth appeals to all men, to men of every degree of education; but the scientific ascertainment of the Truth is a special kind of this consciousness, involving a labour which not all but only a few undertake. The substance of the two is the same; but as Homer says of some stars that they have two names, the one in the language of the gods, the other in the language of ephemeral men—so for that substance there are two languages,—the one of feeling, of pictorial thought, and of the limited intellect that makes its home in finite categories and inadequate abstractions, the other the language of the concrete notion. If we propose then to talk of and to criticise philosophy from the religious point of view, there is more requisite than to possess a familiarity with the language of the ephemeral consciousness. The foundation of scientific cognition is the substantiality at its core, the [Pg xviii] [Pg xix] [Pg xx] [Pg xxi] indwelling idea with its stirring intellectual life; just as the essentials of religion are a heart fully disciplined, a mind awake to self-collectedness, a wrought and refined substantiality. In modern times religion has more and more contracted the intelligent expansion of its contents and withdrawn into the intensiveness of piety, or even of feeling,—a feeling which betrays its own scantiness and emptiness. So long however as it still has a creed, a doctrine, a system of dogma, it has what philosophy can occupy itself with and where it can find for itself a point of union with religion. This however is not to be taken in the wrong separatist sense (so dominant in our modern religiosity) representing the two as mutually exclusive, or as at bottom so capable of separation that their union is only imposed from without. Rather, even in what has gone before, it is implied that religion may well exist without philosophy, but philosophy not without religion—which it rather includes. True religion—intellectual and spiritual religion—must have body and substance, for spirit and intellect are above all consciousness, and consciousness implies an objective body and substance. 'The contracted religiosity which narrows itself to a point in the heart must make that heart's softening and contrition the essential factor of its new birth; but it must at the same time recollect that it has to do with the heart of a spirit, that the spirit is the appointed authority over the heart, and that it can only have such authority so far as it is itself born again. This new birth of the spirit out of natural ignorance and natural error takes place through instruction and through that faith in objective truth and substance which is due to the witness of the spirit. This new birth of the spirit is besides ipso facto a new birth of the heart out of that vanity of the one-sided intellect (on which it sets so much) and its discoveries that finite is different from infinite, that philosophy must either be polytheism, or, in acuter minds, pantheism, &c. It is, in short, a new birth out of the wretched discoveries on the strength of which pious humility holds its head so high against philosophy and theological science. If religiosity persists in clinging to its unexpanded and therefore unintelligent intensity, then it can be sensible only of the contrast which divides this narrow and narrowing form from the intelligent expansion of doctrine as such, religious not less than philosophical.' After an appreciative quotation from Franz von Baader, and noting his reference to the theosophy of Böhme, as a work of the past from which the present generation might learn the speculative interpretation of Christian doctrines, he reverts to the position that the only mode in which thought will admit a reconciliation with religious doctrines, is when these doctrines have learned to 'assume their worthiest phase—the phase of the notion, of necessity, which binds, and thus also makes free everything, fact no less than thought.' But it is not from Böhme or his kindred that we are likely to get the example of a philosophy equal to the highest theme—to the comprehension of divine things. 'If old things are to be revived—an old phase, that is; for the burden of the theme is ever young—the phase of the Idea such as Plato and, still better, as Aristotle conceived it, is far more deserving of being recalled,—and for the further reason that the disclosure of it, by assimilating it into our system of ideas, is, ipso facto, not merely an interpretation of it, but a progress of the science itself. But to interpret such forms of the Idea by no means lies so much on the surface as to get hold of Gnostic and Cabbalistic phantasmagorias; and to develope Plato and Aristotle is by no means the sinecure that it is to note or to hint at echoes of the Idea in the medievalists.' The third edition of the Encyclopaedia, which appeared in 1830, consists of pp. lviii, 600—a slight additional increase. The increase is in the Logic, eight pages; in the Philosophy of Nature, twenty-three pages; and in the Philosophy of Spirit, thirty-four pages. The concrete topics, in short, gain most. The preface begins by alluding to several criticisms on his philosophy,—'which for the most part have shown little vocation for the business'—and to his discussion of them in the Jahrbücher of 1829 (Vermischte Schriften, ii. 149). There is also a paragraph devoted to the quarrel originated by the attack in Hengstenberg's Evangelical Journal on the rationalism of certain professors at Halle (notably Gesenius and Wegscheider),—(an attack based on the evidence of students' note-books), and by the protest of students and professors against the insinuations. 'It seemed a little while ago,' says Hegel (p. xli), 'as if there was an initiation, in a scientific spirit and on a wider range, of a more serious inquiry, from the region of theology and even of religiosity, touching God, divine things, and reason. But the very beginning of the movement checked these hopes; the issue turned on personalities, and neither the pretensions of the accusing pietists nor the pretensions of the free reason they accused, rose to the real subject, still less to a sense that the subject could only be discussed on philosophic soil. This personal attack, on the basis of very special externalities of religion, displayed the monstrous assumption of seeking to decide by arbitrary decree as to the Christianity of individuals, and to stamp them accordingly with the seal of temporal and eternal reprobation. Dante, in virtue of the enthusiasm of divine poesy, has dared to handle the keys of Peter, and to condemn by name to the perdition of hell many—already deceased however—of his contemporaries, even Popes and Emperors. A modern philosophy has been made the subject of the infamous charge that in it human individuals usurp the rank of God; but such a fictitious charge—reached by a false logic—pales before the actual assumption of behaving like judges of the world, prejudging the Christianity of individuals, and announcing their utter reprobation. The Shibboleth of this absolute authority is the name of the Lord Christ, and the assertion that the Lord dwells in the hearts of these judges.' But the assertion is ill supported by the fruits they exhibit,—the monstrous insolence with which they reprobate and condemn. But the evangelicals are not alone to blame for the bald and undeveloped nature of their religious life; the same want of free and living growth in religion characterises their opponents. 'By their formal, abstract, nerveless reasoning, the rationalists have emptied religion of all power and substance, no less than the pietists by the reduction of all faith to the Shibboleth of Lord! Lord! One is no whit better than the other: and when they meet in conflict there is no material on which they could come into contact, no common ground, and no possibility of carrying on an inquiry which would lead to knowledge and truth. "Liberal" theology on its side has not got beyond the formalism of appeals to liberty of conscience, liberty of thought, liberty of teaching, to reason itself and to science. Such liberty no doubt describes the infinite right of the spirit, and the second special condition of truth, supplementary to the first, faith. But the rationalists [Pg xxii] [Pg xxiii] [Pg xxiv] [Pg xxv] steer clear of the material point: they do not tell us the reasonable principles and laws involved in a free and genuine conscience, nor the import and teaching of free faith and free thought; they do not get beyond a bare negative formalism and the liberty to embody their liberty at their fancy and pleasure—whereby in the end it matters not how it is embodied. There is a further reason for their failure to reach a solid doctrine. The Christian community must be, and ought always to be, unified by the tie of a doctrinal idea, a confession of faith; but the generalities and abstractions of the stale, not living, waters of rationalism forbid the specificality of an inherently definite and fully developed body of Christian doctrine. Their opponents, again, proud of the name Lord! Lord! frankly and openly disdain carrying out the faith into the fulness of spirit, reality, and truth.' In ordinary moods of mind there is a long way from logic to religion. But almost every page of what Hegel has called Logic is witness to the belief in their ultimate identity. It was no new principle of later years for him. He had written in post-student days to his friend Schelling: 'Reason and freedom remain our watch-word, and our point of union the invisible church[14].' His parting token of faith with another youthful comrade, the poet Hölderlin, had been 'God's kingdom[15].' But after 1827 this religious appropriation of philosophy becomes more apparent, and in 1829 Hegel seemed deliberately to accept the position of a Christian philosopher which Göschel had marked out for him. 'A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect,' he remarks[16], 'are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.' This is not the place—in a philological chapter—to discuss the issues involved in the announcement that the truth awaits us ready to hand[17] 'in all genuine consciousness, in all religions and philosophies.' Yet one remark may be offered against hasty interpretations of a 'speculative' identity. If there is a double edge to the proposition that the actual is the reasonable, there is no less caution necessary in approaching and studying from both sides the far-reaching import of that equation to which Joannes Scotus Erigena gave expression ten centuries ago: 'Non alia est philosophia, i.e. sapientiae studium, et alia religio. Quid est aliud de philosophia tractare nisi verae religionis regulas exponere?' Christian Märklin, cap. 3. Hegel's Briefe, i. 141. Ibid. i. 172. Hegel's Briefe, i. 138. Ibid. i. 339. Hegel's Briefe, i. 328. Ibid. i. 273. Ibid. i. 373. Hegel's Briefe, ii. 204. Ibid. ii. 230. Jacobi's Werke, iv. A, p. 63. Hegel's Briefe, ii. 54. Ibid. ii. 276. Hegel's Briefe, i. 13. Hölderlin's Leben (Litzmann), p. 183. Verm. Sehr. ii. 144. Hegel's Briefe, ii. 80. The following Errata in the Edition of the Logic as given in the Collected Works (Vol. VI.) are corrected in the translation. The references in brackets are to the German text. Page 95, line 1. Und Objektivität has dropped out after der Subjektivität. [VI. 98, l. 10 from bottom.] P. 97, l. 2. The 2nd ed. reads (die Gedanken) nicht in Solchem, instead of nicht als in Solchem (3rd ed.). [VI. p. 100, l. 3 from bottom.] P. 169, l. 13 from bottom. Instead of the reading of the Werke and of the 3rd ed. read as in ed. II. Also ist dieser Gegenstand nichts. [VI. p. 178, l. 11.] P. 177, l. 3 from bottom. Verstandes; Gegenstandes is a mistake for Verstandes; Gegensatzes, as in edd. II and III. [VI. p. 188, l. 2.] P. 231, l. 19. weiten should be weitern. [VI. p. 251, l. 3 from bottom.] P. 316, l. 15. Dinglichkeit is a misprint for Dingheit, as in Hegel's own editions. [VI. p. 347, l. 1.] [Pg xxvi] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [Pg xxvii] P. 352, l. 14 from bottom, for seine Realität read seiner Realität. [VI. p. 385, l. 8.] THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC (THE FIRST PART OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES IN OUTLINE) BY G. W. F. HEGEL CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. 1.] Philosophy misses an advantage enjoyed by the other sciences. It cannot like them rest the existence of its objects on the natural admissions of consciousness, nor can it assume that its method of cognition, either for starting or for continuing, is one already accepted. The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. Both in like manner go on to treat of the finite worlds of Nature and the human Mind, with their relation to each other and to their truth in God. Some acquaintance with its objects, therefore, philosophy may and even must presume, that and a certain interest in them to boot, were it for no other reason than this: that in point of time the mind makes general images of objects, long before it makes notions of them, and that it is only through these mental images, and by recourse to them, that the thinking mind rises to know and comprehend thinkingly. But with the rise of this thinking study of things, it soon becomes evident that thought will be satisfied with nothing short of showing the necessity of its facts, of demonstrating the existence of its objects, as well as their nature and qualities. Our original acquaintance with them is thus discovered to be inadequate. We can assume nothing, and assert nothing dogmatically; nor can we accept the assertions and assumptions of others. And yet we must make a beginning: and a beginning, as primary and underived, makes an assumption, or rather is an assumption. It seems as if it were impossible to make a beginning at all. 2.] This thinking study of things may serve, in a general way, as a description of philosophy. But the description is too wide. If it be correct to say, that thought makes the distinction between man and the lower animals, then everything human is human, for the sole and simple reason that it is due to the operation of thought. Philosophy, on the other hand, is a peculiar mode of thinking—a mode in which thinking becomes knowledge, and knowledge through notions. However great therefore may be the identity and essential unity of the two modes of thought, the philosophic mode gets to be different from the more general thought which acts in all that is human, in all that gives humanity its distinctive character. And this difference connects itself with the fact that the strictly human and thought-induced phenomena of consciousness do not originally appear in the form of a thought, but as a feeling, a perception, or mental image—all of which aspects must be distinguished from the form of thought proper. According to an old preconceived idea, which has passed into a trivial proposition, it is thought which marks the man off from the animals. Yet trivial as this old belief may seem, it must, strangely enough, be recalled to mind in presence of certain preconceived ideas of the present day. These ideas would put feeling and thought so far apart as to make them opposites, and would represent them as so antagonistic, that feeling, particularly religious feeling, is supposed to be contaminated, perverted, and even annihilated by thought. They also emphatically hold that religion and piety grow out of, and rest upon something else, and not on thought. But those who make this separation forget meanwhile that only man has the capacity for religion, and that animals no more have religion than they have law and morality. Those who insist on this separation of religion from thinking usually have before their minds the sort of thought that may be styled after-thought. They mean 'reflective' thinking, which has to deal with thoughts as thoughts, and brings them into consciousness. Slackness to perceive and keep in view this distinction which philosophy definitely draws in respect of thinking is the source of the crudest objections and reproaches against philosophy. Man,—and that just because it is his nature to think,—is the only being that possesses law, religion, and morality. In these spheres of human life, therefore, thinking, under the guise of feeling, faith, or generalised image, has not been inactive: its action and its productions are there present and therein contained. But it is one thing to have such feelings and generalised images that have been moulded and permeated by thought, and another thing to have thoughts about them. The thoughts, to which after-thought upon those modes of consciousness gives rise, are what is comprised under reflection, general reasoning, and the like, as well as under philosophy itself. The neglect of this distinction between thought in general and the reflective thought of philosophy has also led to another and more frequent misunderstanding. Reflection of this kind has been often maintained to be the condition, or even the only way, of attaining a consciousness and certitude of the Eternal and True. The (now somewhat antiquated) [Pg 1] [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] metaphysical proofs of God's existence, for example, have been treated, as if a knowledge of them and a conviction of their truth were the only and essential means of producing a belief and conviction that there is a God. Such a doctrine would find its parallel, if we said that eating was impossible before we had acquired a knowledge of the chemical, botanical, and zoological characters of our food; and that we must delay digestion till we had finished the study of anatomy and physiology. Were it so, these sciences in their field, like philosophy in its, would gain greatly in point of utility; in fact, their utility would rise to the height of absolute and universal indispensableness. Or rather, instead of being indispensable, they would not exist at all. 3.] The Content, of whatever kind it be, with which our consciousness is taken up, is what constitutes the qualitative character of our feelings, perceptions, fancies, and ideas; of our aims and duties; and of our thoughts and notions. From this point of view, feeling, perception, &c. are the forms assumed by these contents. The contents remain one and the same, whether they are felt, seen, represented, or willed, and whether they are merely felt, or felt with an admixture of thoughts, or merely and simply thought. In any one of these forms, or in the admixture of several, the contents confront consciousness, or are its object. But when they are thus objects of consciousness, the modes of the several forms ally themselves with the contents; and each form of them appears in consequence to give rise to a special object. Thus what is the same at bottom, may look like a different sort of fact. The several modes of feeling, perception, desire, and will, so far as we are aware of them, are in general called ideas (mental representations): and it may be roughly said, that philosophy puts thoughts, categories, or, in more precise language, adequate notions, in the place of the generalised images we ordinarily call ideas. Mental impressions such as these may be regarded as the metaphors of thoughts and notions. But to have these figurate conceptions does not imply that we appreciate their intellectual significance, the thoughts and rational notions to which they correspond. Conversely, it is one thing to have thoughts and intelligent notions, and another to know what impressions, perceptions, and feelings correspond to them. This difference will to some extent explain what people call the unintelligibility of philosophy. Their difficulty lies partly in an incapacity—which in itself is nothing but want of habit—for abstract thinking; i.e. in an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about in them. In our ordinary state of mind, the thoughts are clothed upon and made one with the sensuous or spiritual material of the hour; and in reflection, meditation, and general reasoning, we introduce a blend of thoughts into feelings, percepts, and mental images. (Thus, in propositions where the subject-matter is due to the senses —e.g. 'This leaf is green'—we have such categories introduced, as being and individuality.) But it is a very different thing to make the thoughts pure and simple our object. But their complaint that philosophy is unintelligible is as much due to another reason; and that is an impatient wish to have before them as a mental picture that which is in the mind as a thought or notion. When people are asked to apprehend some notion, they often complain that they do not know what they have to think. But the fact is that in a notion there is nothing further to be thought than the notion itself. What the phrase reveals, is a hankering after an image with which we are already familiar. The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it, and, when transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is. One consequence of this weakness is that authors, preachers, and orators are found most intelligible, when they speak of things which their readers or hearers already know by rote,—things which the latter are conversant with, and which require no explanation. 4.] The philosopher then has to reckon with popular modes of thought, and with the objects of religion. In dealing with the ordinary modes of mind, he will first of all, as we saw, have to prove and almost to awaken the need for his peculiar method of knowledge. In dealing with the objects of religion, and with truth as a whole, he will have to show that philosophy is capable of apprehending them from its own resources; and should a difference from religious conceptions come to light, he will have to justify the points in which it diverges. 5.] To give the reader a preliminary explanation of the distinction thus made, and to let him see at the same moment that the real import of our consciousness is retained, and even for the first time put in its proper light, when translated into the form of thought and the notion of reason, it may be well to recall another of these old unreasoned beliefs. And that is the conviction that to get at the truth of any object or event, even of feelings, perceptions, opinions, and mental ideas, we must think it over. Now in any case to think things over is at least to transform feelings, ordinary ideas, &c. into thoughts. Nature has given every one a faculty of thought. But thought is all that philosophy claims as the form proper to her business: and thus the inadequate view which ignores the distinction stated in § 3, leads to a new delusion, the reverse of the complaint previously mentioned about the unintelligibility of philosophy. In other words, this science must often submit to the slight of hearing even people who have never taken any trouble with it talking as if they thoroughly understood all about it. With no preparation beyond an ordinary education they do not hesitate, especially under the influence of religious sentiment, to philosophise and to criticise philosophy. Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite. This comfortable view of what is required for a philosopher has recently received corroboration through the theory of [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] immediate or intuitive knowledge. 6.] So much for the form of philosophical knowledge. It is no less desirable, on the other hand, that philosophy should understand that its content is no other than actuality, that core of truth which, originally produced and producing itself within the precincts of the mental life, has become the world, the inward and outward world, of consciousness. At first we become aware of these contents in what we call Experience. But even Experience, as it surveys the wide range of inward and outward existence, has sense enough to distinguish the mere appearance, which is transient and meaningless, from what in itself really deserves the name of actuality. As it is only in form that philosophy is distinguished from other modes of attaining an acquaintance with this same sum of being, it must necessarily be in harmony with actuality and experience. In fact, this harmony may be viewed as at least an extrinsic means of testing the truth of a philosophy. Similarly it may be held the highest and final aim of philosophic science to bring about, through the ascertainment of this harmony, a reconciliation of the self-conscious reason with the reason which is in the world,—in other words, with actuality. In the preface to my Philosophy of Law, p. xix, are found the propositions: What is reasonable is actual; and, What is actual is reasonable. These simple statements have given rise to expressions of surprise and hostility, even in quarters where it would be reckoned an insult to presume absence of philosophy, and still more of religion. Religion at least need not be brought in evidence; its doctrines of the divine government of the world affirm these propositions too decidedly. For their philosophic sense, we must pre-suppose intelligence enough to know, not only that God is actual, that He is the supreme actuality, that He alone is truly actual; but also, as regards the logical bearings of the question, that existence is in part mere appearance, and only in part actuality. In common life, any freak of fancy, any error, evil and everything of the nature of evil, as well as every degenerate and transitory existence...