Hegel's Philosophy of Mind Part 6

In Hegel's view hypnotic phenomena produce a kind of temporary and artificial atavism. Mechanical or chemical means, or morbid conditions of body, may cause even for the intelligent adult a relapse into states of mind closely resembling those exhibited by the primitive or the infantile sensibility. The intelligent personality, where powers are bound up with limitations and operate through a chain of means and ends, is reduced to its primitively undifferentiated condition. Not that it is restored to its infantile simplicity; but that all subsequent acquirements operate only as a concentrated individuality, or ma.s.s of will and character, released from the control of the self-possessed mind, and invested (by the latter's withdrawal) with a new quasi-personality of their own. With the loss of the world of outward things, there may go, it is supposed, a clearer perception of the inward and particularly of the organic life. The Soul contains the form of unity which other experiences had impressed upon it: but this form avails in its subterranean existence where it creates a sort of inner self. And this inner self is no longer, like the embodied self of ordinary consciousness, an intelligence served by organs, and proceeding by induction and inference. Its knowledge is not mediated or carried along specific channels: it does not build up, piecemeal, by successive steps of synthesis and a.n.a.lysis, by gradual idealisation, the organised totality of its intellectual world. The somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their vision directly into regions where the waking consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter. But that region is not the world of our higher ideas,-of art, religion, and philosophy. It is still the sensitivity-that realm of sensitivity which is ordinarily covered by unconsciousness. Such sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were, hear themselves growing; they may discern the hidden quivers and pulses of blood and tissue, the seats of secret pain and all the unrevealed workings in the dark chambers of the flesh. But always their vision seems confined to that region, and will fall short of the world of light and ideal truth.

It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive solidarity with earth, and flowers, and trees, the life that "rolls through all things," not towards the spiritual unity which broods over the world and "impels all thinking things," that these immersions in the selfless universe lead us.

What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on the natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the work of intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the fully-developed mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute Mind which in our highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate to. But mind, as it tends towards the higher end to "merge itself in light," to identify itself yet not wholly lost, but retained, in the fullness of undivided intellectual being, so at the lower end it springs from a natural and underlying unity, the immense solidarity of nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature-the "Substance" which is to be raised into the "Subject" which is true divinity. Between these two unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won over-soul, lies the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which narrows and of redintegration which enlarges,-which alternately builds up an isolated personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and sympathy. It is because mental or tacit "suggestion"(88) (i.e. will-influence exercised without word or sign, or other sensible mode of connexion), thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than dexterous apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or transposition of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive, clairvoyance (i.e.

the power of describing, as if from direct perception, objects or events removed in s.p.a.ce beyond the recognised limits of sensation), and somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed eyes,-it is because these things seem to show the essential ideality of matter, that Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of consciousness and even of practical life in society are a derivative and secondary state; a product of processes of individualism, which however are never completed, and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to fulfil. From a state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than can be described as personality-lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too, had regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world underlying the development of egoity and self-consciousness(89): "the merely sensuous man is still in somnambulism," only a somnambulism of waking hours: "the true waking is the life in G.o.d, to be free in him, all else is sleep and dream." "Egoity," he adds, "is a merely _formal_ principle, utterly, and never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force)." For Schopenhauer, too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove the absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to the intellectual categories of s.p.a.ce, time, and causal sequence: to prove the reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious divisions.

(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.

The result of the first range in the process of psycho-genesis was to make the body a sign and utterance of the Soul, with a fixed and determinate type. The "anthropological process" has defined and settled the mere general sentiency of soul into an individualised shape, a localised and limited self, a bundle of habits. It has made the soul an Ego or self: a power which looks out upon the world as a spectator, lifted above immanence in the general tide of being, but only so lifted because it has made itself one in the world of objects, a thing among things. The Mind has reached the point of view of reflection. Instead of a general identifiability with all nature, it has encased itself in a limited range, from which it looks forth on what is now other than itself. If previously it was mere inward sensibility, it is now sense, perceptive of an object here and now, of an external world. The step has involved some price: and that price is, that it has attained independence and self-hood at the cost of surrendering the content it had hitherto held in one with itself. It is now a blank receptivity, open to the impressions of an outside world: and the changes which take place in its process of apprehension seem to it to be given from outside. The world it perceives is a world of isolated and independent objects: and it takes them as they are given. But a closer insistance on the perception develops the implicit intelligence, which makes it possible. The percipient mind is no mere recipiency or susceptibility with its forms of time and s.p.a.ce: it is spontaneously active, it is the source of categories, or is an apperceptive power,-an understanding. Consciousness, thus discovered to be a creative or constructive faculty, is strictly speaking self-consciousness(90).

Self-consciousness appears at first in the selfish or narrowly egoistic form of appet.i.te and impulse. The intelligence which claims to mould and construe the world of objects-which, in Kant's phrase, professes to give us nature-is implicitly the lord of that world. And that supremacy it carries out as appet.i.te-as destruction. The self is but a bundle of wants-its supremacy over things is really subjection to them: the satisfaction of appet.i.te is baffled by a new desire which leaves it as it was before. The development of self-consciousness to a more adequate shape is represented by Hegel as taking place through the social struggle for existence. Human beings, too, are in the first instance to the uninstructed appet.i.te or the primitive self-consciousness (which is simply a succession of individual desires for satisfaction of natural want) only things,-adjectival to that self's individual existence. To them, too, his primary relation is to appropriate and master them. Might precedes right.

But the social struggle for existence forces him to recognise something other which is kindred to himself,-a limiting principle, another self which has to form an element in his calculations, not to be neglected. And gradually, we may suppose, the result is the division of humanity into two levels, a ruling lordly cla.s.s, and a cla.s.s of slaves,-a state of inequality in which each knows that his appet.i.te is in some measure checked by a more or less permanent other. Lastly, perhaps soonest in the inferior order, there is fas.h.i.+oned the perception that its self-seeking in its isolated appet.i.tes is subject to an abiding authority, a continuing consciousness. There grows up a social self-a sense of general humanity and solidarity with other beings-a larger self with which each identifies himself, a common ground. Understanding was selfish intelligence: practical in the egoistic sense. In the altruistic or universal sense practical, a principle social and unifying character, intelligence is Reason.

Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single objects in s.p.a.ce and time, and as an appet.i.tive self bent upon single gratifications, has ended as a rational being,-a consciousness purged of its selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on the universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal, swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer purely ant.i.thetical and exclusive(91). He has reached what is really the moral standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal self-consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the ant.i.theses of individualities and of outward and inward have ceased to trouble. "The natural man," says Hegel(92), "sees in the woman flesh of his flesh: the moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and spiritual being and by its means." Hitherto we have been dealing with something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the third part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a being who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general truth, and carries out ideal purposes.

Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence and rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by which reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in theoretical and practical mind, is feeling-or immediate knowledge and immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate perception-a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the idea of a general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the outward existence conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent perception or intuition the important factor is attention, which raises it above mere pa.s.sive acceptance and awareness of a given fact. Attention thus involves on one hand the externality of its object, and on the other affirms its dependence on the act of the subject: it sets the objects before and out of itself, in s.p.a.ce and time, but yet in so doing it shows itself master of the objects. If perception presuppose attention, in short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make them ours, and the s.p.a.ce and time they fill are projected by us. So attended to, they are appropriated, inwardised and recollected: they take their place in a mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-individualised character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental property, but retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived. Such revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of a.s.sociation. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and recollected by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not really fully master of them until it has been able to give them a certain objectivity, by replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible sign. By means of words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations into quasi-realities: it creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world of language, where ideas live a potential, which is also an actual, life.

Words are sensibles, but they are sensibles which completely lose themselves in their meaning. As sensibles, they render possible that verbal memory which is the handmaid of thought: but which also as merely mechanical can leave thought altogether out of account. It is through words that thought is made possible: for it alone permits the movement through ideas without being distracted through a mult.i.tude of a.s.sociations. In them thought has an instrument completely at its own level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and a.n.a.lysis.

It is as such a thinking being-a being who can use language, and manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a rational will. A concept of something to be done-a feeling even of some end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what can be called will. At first indeed its material may be found as immediately given and all its volitionality may lie in the circ.u.mstance that the intelligent being sets this forward as a governing and controlling Ought. Its vehicle, in short, may be mere impulse, or inclination, and even pa.s.sion: but it is the choice and the purposive adoption of means to the given end. Gradually it attains to the idea of a general satisfaction, or of happiness. And this end seems positive and definite. It soon turns out however to be little but a prudent and self-denying superiority to particular pa.s.sions and inclinations in the interest of a comprehensive ideal. The free will or intelligence has so far only a negative and formal value: it is the perfection of an autonomous and freely self-developing mind. Such a mind, which in language has acquired the means of realising an intellectual system of things superior to the restrictions of sense, and which has emanc.i.p.ated reason from the position of slave to inclination, is endued with the formal conditions of moral conduct. Such a mind will transform its own primarily physical dependence into an image of the law of reason and create the ethical life: and in the strength of that establishment will go forth to conquer the world into a more and more adequate realisation of the eternal Idea.

Essay V. Ethics And Politics.

"In dealing," says Hegel, "with the Idea of the State, we must not have before our eyes a particular state, or a particular inst.i.tution: we must rather study the Idea, this actual G.o.d, on his own account. Every State, however bad we may find it according to our principles, however defective we may discover this or that feature to be, still contains, particularly if it belongs to the mature states of our time, all the essential factors of its existence. But as it is easier to discover faults than to comprehend the affirmative, people easily fall into the mistake of letting individual aspects obscure the intrinsic organism of the State itself. The State is no ideal work of art: it stands in the everyday world, in the sphere, that is, of arbitrary act, accident, and error, and a variety of faults may mar the regularity of its traits. But the ugliest man, the criminal, a sick man and a cripple, is after all a living man; the affirmative, Life, subsists in spite of the defect: and this affirmative is here the theme(93)." "It is the theme of philosophy," he adds, "to ascertain the substance which is immanent in the show of the temporal and transient, and the eternal which is present."

(i.) Hegel as a Political Critic.

But if this is true, it is also to be remembered that the philosopher is, like other men, the son of his age, and estimates the value of reality from preconceptions and aspirations due to his generation. The historical circ.u.mstances of his nation as well as the personal experiences of his life help to determine his horizon, even in the effort to discover the hidden pulse and movement of the social organism. This is specially obvious in political philosophy. The conception of ethics and politics which is presented in the _Encyclopaedia_ was in 1820 produced with more detail as the _Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts_. Appearing, as it did, two years after his appointment to a professors.h.i.+p at Berlin, and in the midst of a political struggle between the various revolutionary and conservative powers and parties of Germany, the book became, and long remained, a target for embittered criticism. The so-called War of Liberation or national movement to shake off the French yoke was due to a coalition of parties, and had naturally been in part supported by tendencies and aims which went far beyond the ostensive purpose either of leaders or of combatants. Aspirations after a freer state were entwined with radical and socialistic designs to reform the political hierarchy of the Fatherland: high ideals and low vulgarities were closely intermixed: and the n.o.ble enthusiasm of youth was occasionally played on by criminal and anarchic intriguers. In a strong and wise and united Germany some of these schemes might have been tolerated. But strength, wisdom, and unity were absent. In the existing tension between Austria and Prussia for the leaders.h.i.+p, in the ill-adapted and effete const.i.tutions of the several princ.i.p.alities which were yet expected to realise the advance which had taken place in society and ideas during the last thirty years, the outlook on every hand seemed darker and more threatening than it might have otherwise done. Governments, which had lost touch with their peoples, suspected conspiracy and treason: and a party in the nation credited their rulers with gratuitous designs against private liberty and rights. There was a vast but ill-defined enthusiasm in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the younger world, and it was shared by many of their teachers. It seemed to their immense aspirations that the war of liberation had failed of its true object and left things much as they were. The volunteers had not fought for the political systems of Austria or Prussia, or for the three-and-thirty princes of Germany: but for ideas, vague, beautiful, stimulating. To such a mood the continuance of the old system was felt as a cruel deception and a reaction. The governments on their part had not realised the full importance of the spirit that had been aroused, and could not at a moment's notice set their house in order, even had there been a clearer outlook for reform than was offered. They too had suffered, and had realised their insecurity: and were hardly in a mood to open their gates to the enemy.

Coming on such a situation of affairs, Hegel's book would have been likely in any case to provoke criticism. For it took up a line of political theory which was little in accord with the temper of the age. The conception of the state which it expounded is not far removed in essentials from the conception which now dominates the political life of the chief European nations. But in his own time it came upon ears which were naturally disposed to misconceive it. It was unacceptable to the adherents of the _ancien regime_, as much as to the liberals. It was declared by one party to be a glorification of the Prussian state: by another to rationalise the sanct.i.ties of authority. It was pointed out that the new professor was a favourite of the leading minister, that his influence was dominant in scholastic appointments, and that occasional gratuities from the crown proved his acceptability. A contemporary professor, Fries, remarked that Hegel's theory of the state had grown "not in the gardens of science but on the dung-hill of servility." Hegel himself was aware that he had planted a blow in the face of a "shallow and pretentious sect," and that his book had "given great offence to the demagogic folk." Alike in religious and political life he was impatient of sentimentalism, of rhetorical feeling, of wordy enthusiasm. A positive storm of scorn burst from him at much-promising and little-containing declamation that appealed to the pathos of ideas, without sense of the complex work of construction and the system of principles which were needed to give them reality. His impatience of demagogic gush led him (in the preface) into a tactless attack on Fries, who was at the moment in disgrace for his partic.i.p.ation in the demonstration at the Wartburg. It led him to an attack on the b.u.mptiousness of those who held that conscientious conviction was ample justification for any proceeding:-an attack which opponents were not unwilling to represent as directed against the principle of conscience itself.

Yet Hegel's views on the nature of political unity were not new. Their nucleus had been formed nearly twenty years before. In the years that immediately followed the French revolution he had gone through the usual anarchic stage of intelligent youth. He had wondered whether humanity might not have had a n.o.bler destiny, had fate given supremacy to some heresy rather than the orthodox creed of Christendom. He had seen religion in the past "teaching what despotism wished,-contempt of the human race, its incapacity for anything good(94)." But his earliest reflections on political power belong to a later date, and are inspired, not so much by the vague ideals of humanitarianism, as by the spirit of national patriotism. They are found in a "Criticism of the German Const.i.tution"

apparently dating from the year 1802(95). It is written after the peace of Luneville had sealed for Germany the loss of her provinces west of the Rhine, and subsequent to the disasters of the German arms at Hohenlinden and Marengo. It is almost contemporaneous with the measures of 1803 and 1804, which affirmed the dissolution of the "Holy Roman Empire" of German name. The writer of this unpublished pamphlet sees his country in a situation almost identical with that which Macchiavelli saw around him in Italy. It is abused by petty despots, distracted by mean particularist ambitions, at the mercy of every foreign power. It was such a scene which, as Hegel recalls, had prompted and justified the drastic measures proposed in the _Prince_,-measures which have been ill-judged by the closet moralist, but evince the high statesmans.h.i.+p of the Florentine. In the _Prince_, an intelligent reader can see "the enthusiasm of patriotism underlying the cold and dispa.s.sionate doctrines." Macchiavelli dared to declare that Italy must become a state, and to a.s.sert that "there is no higher duty for a state than to maintain itself, and to punish relentlessly every author of anarchy,-the supreme, and perhaps sole political crime." And like teaching, Hegel adds, is needed for Germany.

Only, he concludes, no mere demonstration of the insanity of utter separation of the particular from his kin will ever succeed in converting the particularists from their conviction of the absoluteness of personal and private rights. "Insight and intelligence always excite so much distrust that force alone avails to justify them; then man yields them obedience(96)."

"The German political edifice," says the writer, "is nothing else but the sum of the rights which the single parts have withdrawn from the whole; and this justice, which is ever on the watch to prevent the state having any power left, is the essence of the const.i.tution." The Peace of Westphalia had but served to const.i.tute or stereotype anarchy: the German empire had by that instrument divested itself of all rights of political unity, and thrown itself on the goodwill of its members. What then, it may be asked, is, in Hegel's view, the indispensable minimum essential to a state? And the answer will be, organised strength,-a central and united force. "The strength of a country lies neither in the mult.i.tude of its inhabitants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its size, but solely in the way its parts are by reasonable combination made a single political force enabling everything to be used for the common defence."

Hegel speaks scornfully of "the philanthropists and moralists who decry politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private utility at the cost of right": he tells them that "it is foolish to oppose the interest or (as it is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the utility of the state to its right": that the "rights of a state are the utility of the state as established and recognised by compacts": and that "war" (which they would fain abolish or moralise) "has to decide not which of the rights a.s.serted by either party is the true right (-for both parties have a true right), but which right has to give way to the other."

It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of political supremacy which has been a.s.sociated with the name of Hobbes. But his views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, "who can rule and dare not lie." "All states," he declares, "are founded by the sublime force of great men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his features which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against their will. Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is otherwise.... This is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to express the absolute will. All gather round his banner. He is their G.o.d."

"The state," he says again, "is the self-certain absolute mind which recognises no definite authority but its own: which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception."

So also Hobbes describes the prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But the Hegelian G.o.d immanent in the state is a higher power than Hobbes knows: he is no mortal, but in his truth an immortal G.o.d. He speaks by (what in this early essay is called) the Absolute Government(97): the government of the Law-the true impersonal sovereign,-distinct alike from the single ruler and the mult.i.tude of the ruled. "It is absolutely only universality as against particular. As this absolute, ideal, universal, compared to which everything else is a particular, it is the phenomenon of G.o.d. Its words are his decision, and it can appear and exist under no other form.... The Absolute government is divine, self-sanctioned and not made(98)." The real strength-the real connecting-mean which gives life to sovereign and to subject-is intelligence free and entire, independent both of what individuals feel and believe and of the quality of the ruler. "The spiritual bond," he says in a lower form of speech, "is public opinion: it is the true legislative body, national a.s.sembly, declaration of the universal will which lives in the execution of all commands." This still small voice of public opinion is the true and real parliament: not literally making laws, but revealing them. If we ask, where does this public opinion appear and how does it disengage itself from the ma.s.ses of partisan judgment? Hegel answers,-and to the surprise of those who have not entered into the spirit of his age(99)-it is embodied in the Aged and the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in the real world: they are by nature and function disengaged from the struggles of particular existence, have risen above the divergencies of social cla.s.ses. They breathe the ether of pure contemplation. "The sunset of life gives them mystical lore," or at least removes from old age the distraction of selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions of human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel's view is that the real voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained indifference to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see life steadily and whole.

If this utterance shows the little belief Hegel had in the ordinary methods of legislation through "representative" bodies, and hints that the real _substance_ of political life is deeper than the overt machinery of political operation, it is evident that this theory of "divine right" is of a different stamp from what used to go under that name. And, again, though the power of the central state is indispensable, he is far from agreeing with the so-called bureaucratic view that "a state is a machine with a single spring which sets in motion all the rest of the machinery."

"Everything," he says, "which is not directly required to organise and maintain the force for giving security without and within must be left by the central government to the freedom of the citizens. Nothing ought to be so sacred in the eyes of a government as to leave alone and to protect, without regard to utilities, the free action of the citizens in such matters as do not affect its fundamental aim: for this freedom is itself sacred(100)." He is no friend of paternal bureaucracy. "The pedantic craving to settle every detail, the mean jealousy against estates and corporations administrating and directing their own affairs, the base fault-finding with all independent action on the part of the citizens, even when it has no immediate bearing on the main political interest, has been decked out with reasons to show that no penny of public expenditure, made for a country of twenty or thirty millions' population, can be laid out, without first being, not permitted, but commanded, controlled and revised by the supreme government." You can see, he remarks, in the first village after you enter Prussian territory the lifeless and wooden routine which prevails. The whole country suffers also from the way religion has been mixed up with political rights, and a particular creed p.r.o.nounced by law indispensable both for sovereign and full-privileged subject. In a word, the unity and vigour of the state is quite compatible with considerable lat.i.tude and divergence in laws and judicature, in the imposition and levying of taxes, in language, manners, civilisation and religion. Equality in all these points is desirable for social unity: but it is not indispensable for political strength.

This decided preference for the unity of the state against the system of checks and counterchecks, which sometimes goes by the name of a const.i.tution, came out clearly in Hegel's att.i.tude in discussing the dispute between the Wurtembergers and their sovereign in 1815-16.

Wurtemberg, with its complicated aggregation of local laws, had always been a paradise of lawyers, and the feudal rights or privileges of the local oligarchies-the so-called "good old law"-were the boast of the country. All this had however been aggravated by the increase of territory received in 1805: and the king, following the examples set by France and even by Bavaria, promulgated of his own grace a "const.i.tution" remodelling the electoral system of the country. Immediately an outcry burst out against the attempt to destroy the ancient liberties. Uhland tuned his lyre to the popular cry: Ruckert sang on the king's side. To Hegel the contest presented itself as a struggle between the attachment to traditional rights, merely because they are old, and the resolution to carry out reasonable reform whether it be agreeable to the reformed or not: or rather he saw in it resistance of particularism, of separation, clinging to use and wont, and basing itself on formal pettifogging objections, against the spirit of organisation. Anything more he declined to see. And probably he was right in ascribing a large part of the opposition to inertia, to vanity and self-interest, combined with the want of political perception of the needs of Wurtemberg and Germany. But on the other hand, he failed to remember the insecurity and danger of such "gifts of the Danai": he forgot the sense of free-born men that a const.i.tution is not something to be granted (_octroye_) as a grace, but something that must come by the spontaneous act of the innermost self of the community.

He dealt rather with the formal arguments which were used to refuse progress, than with the underlying spirit which prompted the opposition(101).

The philosopher lives (as Plato has well reminded us) too exclusively within the ideal. Bent on the essential nucleus of inst.i.tutions, he attaches but slight importance to the variety of externals, and fails to realise the practice of the law-courts. He forgets that what weighs lightly in logic, may turn the scale in real life and experience. For feeling and sentiment he has but scant respect: he is brusque and uncompromising: and cannot realise all the difficulties and dangers that beset the Idea in the mazes of the world, and may ultimately quite alter a plan which at first seemed independent of petty details. Better than other men perhaps he recognises in theory how the mere universal only exists complete in an individual shape: but more than other men he forgets these truths of insight, when the business of life calls for action or for judgment. He cannot at a moment's notice remember that he is, if not, as Cicero says, _in faece Romuli_, the member of a degenerate commonwealth, at least living in a world where good and evil are not, as logic presupposes, sharply divided but intricately intertwined.

(ii.) The Ethics and Religion of the State.

This idealism of political theory is ill.u.s.trated by the sketch of the Ethical Life which he drew up about 1802. Under the name of "Ethical System" it presents in concentrated or undeveloped shape the doctrine which subsequently swelled into the "Philosophy of Mind." At a later date he worked out more carefully as introduction the psychological genesis of moral and intelligent man, and he separated out more distinctly as a sequel the universal powers which give to social life its higher characters. In the earlier sketch the Ethical Part stands by itself, with the consequence that Ethics bears a meaning far exceeding all that had been lately called moral. The word "moral" itself he avoids(102). It savours of excessive subjectivity, of struggle, of duty and conscience. It has an ascetic ring about it-an aspect of negation, which seeks for abstract holiness, and turns its back on human nature. Kant's words opposing duty to inclination, and implying that moral goodness involves a struggle, an antagonism, a victory, seem to him (and to his time) one-sided. That aspect of negation accordingly which Kant certainly began with, and which Schopenhauer magnified until it became the all-in-all of Ethics, Hegel entirely subordinates. Equally little does he like the emphasis on the supremacy of insight, intention, conscience: they lead, he thinks, to a view which holds the mere fact of conviction to be all-important, as if it mattered not what we thought and believed and did, so long as we were sincere in our belief. All this emphasis on the good-will, on the imperative of duty, on the rights of conscience, has, he admits, its justification in certain circ.u.mstances, as against mere legality, or mere natural instinctive goodness; but it has been overdone.

Above all, it errs by an excess of individualism. It springs from an att.i.tude of reflection,-in which the individual, isolated in his conscious and superficial individuality, yet tries-but probably tries in vain-to get somewhat in touch with a universal which he has allowed to slip outside him, forgetting that it is the heart and substance of his life. Kant, indeed, hardly falls under this condemnation. For he aims at showing that the rational will inevitably creates as rational a law or universal; that the individual act becomes self-regulative, and takes its part in const.i.tuting a system or realm of duty.

Still, on the whole, "morality" in this narrower sense belongs to an age of reflection, and is formal or nominal goodness rather than the genuine and full reality. It is the protest against mere instinctive or customary virtue, which is but compliance with traditional authority, and compliance with it as if it were a sort of quasi-natural law. Moralising reflection is the awakening of subjectivity and of a deeper personality. The age which thus precedes morality is not an age in which kindness, or love, or generosity is unknown. And if Hegel says that "Morality," strictly so called, began with Socrates, he does not thereby accuse the pre-Socratic Greeks of inhumanity. But what he does say is that such ethical life as existed was in the main a thing of custom and law: of law, moreover, which was not set objectively forward, but left still in the stage of uncontradicted usage, a custom which was a second nature, part of the essential and quasi-physical ordinance of life. The individual had not yet learned to set his self-consciousness against these usages and ask for their justification. These are like the so-called law of the Medes and Persians which alters not: customs of immemorial antiquity and unquestionable sway. They are part of a system of things with which for good or evil the individual is utterly identified, bound as it were hand and foot. These are, as a traveller says(103), "oral and unwritten traditions which teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed under certain penalties; and without the aid of fixed records, or the intervention of a succession of authorised depositaries and expounders, these laws have been transmitted to father and son, through unknown generations, and are fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and unalterable."

The ant.i.thesis then in Hegel, as in Kant, is between Law and Morality, or rather Legality and Morality,-two abstractions to which human development is alternately p.r.o.ne to attach supreme importance. The first stage in the objectivation of intelligence or in the evolution of personality is the const.i.tution of mere, abstract, or strict right. It is the creation of inst.i.tutions and uniformities, i.e. of laws, or rights, which express definite and stereotyped modes of behaviour. Or, if we look at it from the individual's standpoint, we may say his consciousness awakes to find the world parcelled out under certain rules and divisions, which have objective validity, and govern him with the same absolute authority as do the circ.u.mstances of physical nature. Under their influence every rank and individual is alike forced to bow: to each his place and function is a.s.signed by an order or system which claims an inviolable and eternal supremacy. It is not the same place and function for each: but for each the position and duties are predetermined in this metaphysically-physical order. The situation and its duties have been created by super-human and natural ordinance. As the Platonic myth puts it, each order in the social hierarchy has been framed underground by powers that turned out men of gold, and silver, and baser metal: or as the Norse legend tells, they are the successive offspring of the white G.o.d, Heimdal, in his dealings with womankind.

The central idea of the earlier social world is the supremacy of rights-but not of right. The sum (for it cannot be properly called a system) of rights is a self-subsistent world, to which man is but a servant; and a second peculiarity of it is its inequality. If all are equal before the laws, this only means here that the laws, with their absolute and thorough inequality, are indifferent to the real and personal diversities of individuals. Even the so-called equality of primitive law is of the "Eye-for-eye, Tooth-for-tooth" kind; it takes no note of special circ.u.mstances; it looks abstractly and rudely at facts, and maintains a hard and fast uniformity, which seems the height of unfairness. Rule stands by rule, usage beside usage,-a mere aggregate or mult.i.tude of petty tyrants, reduced to no unity or system, and each pressing with all the weight of an absolute mandate. The pettiest bit of ceremonial law is here of equal dignity with the most far-reaching principle of political obligation.

In the essay already referred to, Hegel has designated something a.n.a.logous to this as Natural or Physical Ethics, or as Ethics in its relative or comparative stage. Here Man first shows his superiority to nature, or enters on his properly ethical function, by transforming the physical world into his possession. He makes himself the lord of natural objects-stamping them as his, and not their own, making them his permanent property, his tools, his instruments of exchange and production. The fundamental ethical act is appropriation by labour, and the first ethical world is the creation of an economic system, the inst.i.tution of property.

For property, or at least possession and appropriation, is the dominant idea, with its collateral and sequent principles. And at first, even human beings are treated on the same method as other things: as objects in a world of objects or aggregate of things: as things to be used and acquired, as means and instruments,-not in any sense as ends in themselves. It is a world in which the relation of master and slave is dominant,-where owner and employer is set in ant.i.thesis against his tools and chattels. But the Nemesis of his act issues in making the individual the servant of his so-called property. He has become an objective power by submitting himself to objectivity: he has literally put himself into the object he has wrought, and is now a thing among things: for what he owns, what he has appropriated, determines what he is. The real powers in the world thus established are the laws of possession-holding: the laws dominate man: and he is only freed from dependence on casual externals, by making himself thoroughly the servant of his possessions.

The only salvation, and it is but imperfect, that can be reached on this stage is by the family union. The s.e.xual tie, is at first entirely on a level with the other arrangements of the sphere. The man or woman is but a chattel and a tool; a casual appropriation which gradually is transformed into a permanent possession and a permanent bond(104). But, as the family const.i.tuted itself, it helped to afford a promise of better things. An ideal interest-the religion of the household-extending beyond the individual, and beyond the moment,-binding past and present, and parents to offspring, gave a new character to the relation of property. Parents and children form a unity, which overrides and essentially permeates their "difference" from each other: there is no exchange, no contract, nor, in the stricter sense, property between the members. In the property-idea they are lifted out of their isolation, and in the continuity of family life there is a certain a.n.a.logue of immortality. But, says Hegel, "though the family be the highest totality of which Nature is capable, the absolute ident.i.ty is in it still inward, and is not inst.i.tuted in absolute form; and hence, too, the reproduction of the totality is an appearance, the appearance of the children(105)." "The power and the intelligence, the 'difference' of the parents, stands in inverse proportion to the youth and vigour of the child: and these two sides of life flee from and are sequent on each other, and are reciprocally external(106)." Or, as we may put it, the G.o.d of the family is a departed ancestor, a ghost in the land of the dead: it has not really a continuous and unified life. In such a state of society-a state of nature-and in its supreme form, the family, there is no adequate principle which though real shall still give ideality and unity to the self-isolating aspects of life. There is wanted something which shall give expression to its "indifference," which shall control the tendency of this partial moralisation to sink at every moment into individuality, and lift it from its immersion in nature. Family life and economic groups (-for these two, which Hegel subsequently separates, are here kept close together) need an ampler and wider life to keep them from stagnating in their several selfishnesses.

This freshening and corrective influence they get in the first instance from deeds of violence and crime. Here is the "negative unsettling" of the narrow fixities, of the determinate conditions or relations.h.i.+ps into which the preceding processes of labour and acquisition have tended to stereotype life. The harsh restriction brings about its own undoing. Man may subject natural objects to his formative power, but the wild rage of senseless devastation again and again bursts forth to restore the original formlessness. He may build up his own pile of wealth, store up his private goods, but the thief and the robber with the instincts of barbarian socialism tread on his steps: and every stage of appropriation has for its sequel a crop of acts of dispossession. He may secure by acc.u.mulation his future life; but the murderer for gain's sake cuts it short. And out of all this as a necessary consequence stands avenging justice. And in the natural world of ethics-where true moral life has not yet arisen-this is mere retaliation or the _lex talionis_;-the beginning of an endless series of vengeance and counter-vengeance, the blood-feud. Punishment, in the stricter sense of the term,-which looks both to antecedents and effects in character-cannot yet come into existence; for to punish there must be something superior to individualities, an ethical idea embodied in an inst.i.tution, to which the injurer and the injured alike belong. But as yet punishment is only vengeance, the personal and natural equivalent, the physical reaction against injury, perhaps regulated and formulated by custom and usage, but not essentially altered from its purely retaliatory character. These crimes-or transgressions-are thus by Hegel quaintly conceived as storms which clear the air-which shake the individualist out of his slumber. The scene in which transgression thus acts is that of the so-called state of nature, where particularism was rampant: where moral right was not, but only the right of nature, of pre-occupation, of the stronger, of the first maker and discoverer. Crime is thus the "dialectic"

which shakes the fixity of practical arrangements, and calls for something in which the idea of a higher unity, a permanent substance of life, shall find realisation.

The "positive supersession(107)" of individualism and naturalism in ethics is by Hegel called "Absolute Ethics." Under this t.i.tle he describes the ethics and religion of the state-a religion which is immanent in the community, and an ethics which rises superior to particularity. The picture he draws is a romance fas.h.i.+oned upon the model of the Greek commonwealth as that had been idealised by Greek literature and by the longings of later ages for a freer life. It is but one of the many modes in which Helena-to quote Goethe-has fascinated the German Faust. He dreams himself away from the prosaic worldliness of a German munic.i.p.ality to the unfading splendour of the Greek city with its imagined coincidence of individual will with universal purpose. There is in such a commonwealth no pain of surrender and of sacrifice, and no subsequent compensation: for, at the very moment of resigning self-will to common aims, he enjoys it retained with the added zest of self-expansion. He is not so left to himself as to feel from beyond the restraint of a law which controls-even if it wisely and well controls-individual effort. There is for his happy circ.u.mstances no possibility of doing otherwise. Or, it may be, Hegel has reminiscences from the ideals of other nations than the Greek. He recalls the Israelite depicted by the Law-adoring psalmist, whose delight is to do the will of the Lord, whom the zeal of G.o.d's house has consumed, whose whole being runs on in one pellucid stream with the universal and eternal stream of divine commandment. Such a frame of spirit, where the empirical consciousness with all its soul and strength and mind identifies its mission into conformity with the absolute order, is the mood of absolute Ethics. It is what some have spoken of as the True life, as the Eternal life; in it, says Hegel, the individual exists _auf ewige Weise_(108), as it were _sub specie aeternitatis_: his life is hid with his fellows in the common life of his people. His every act, and thought, and will, get their being and significance from a reality which is established in him as a permanent spirit. It is there that he, in the fuller sense, attains a?t???e?a, or finds himself no longer a mere part, but an ideal totality.

This totality is realised under the particular form of a Nation (_Volk_), which in the visible sphere represents (or rather is, as a particular) the absolute and infinite. Such a unity is neither the mere sum of isolated individuals, nor a mere majority ruling by numbers: but the fraternal and organic commonwealth which brings all cla.s.ses and all rights from their particularistic independence into an ideal ident.i.ty and indifference(109).

Here all are not merely equal before the laws: but the law itself is a living and organic unity, self-correcting, subordinating and organising, and no longer merely defining individual privileges and so-called liberties. "In such conjunction of the universal with the particularity lies the divinity of a nation: or, if we give this universal a separate place in our ideas, it is the G.o.d of the nation." But in this complete accordance between concept and intuition, between visible and invisible, where symbol and significate are one, religion and ethics are indistinguishable. It is the old conception (and in its highest sense) of Theocracy(110). G.o.d is the national head and the national life: and in him all individuals have their "difference" rendered "indifferent." "Such an ethical life is absolute truth, for untruth is only in the fixture of a single mode: but in the everlasting being of the nation all singleness is superseded. It is absolute culture; for in the eternal is the real and empirical annihilation and prescription of all limited modality. It is absolute disinterestedness: for in the eternal there is nothing private and personal. It, and each of its movements, is the highest beauty: for beauty is but the eternal made actual and given concrete shape. It is without pain, and blessed: for in it all difference and all pain is superseded. It is the divine, absolute, real, existing and being, under no veil; nor need one first raise it up into the ideality of divinity, and extract it from the appearance and empirical intuition; but it is, and immediately, absolute intuition(111)."

If we compare this language with the statement of the Encyclopaedia we can see how for the moment Hegel's eye is engrossed with the glory of the ideal nation. In it, the moral life embraces and is co-extensive with religion, art and science: practice and theory are at one: life in the idea knows none of those differences which, in the un-ideal world, make art and morality often ant.i.thetical, and set religion at variance with science. It is, as we have said, a memory of Greek and perhaps Hebrew ideals. Or rather it is by the help of such memories the affirmation of the essential unity of life-the true, complete, many-sided life-which is the presupposition and idea that culture and morals rest upon and from which they get their supreme sanction, i.e. their const.i.tutive principle and unity. Even in the Encyclopaedia(112) Hegel endeavours to guard against the severance of morality and art and philosophy which may be rashly inferred in consequence of his serial order of treatment.

"Religion," he remarks, "is the very substance of the moral life itself and of the state.... The ethical life is the divine spirit indwelling in consciousness, as it is actually present in a nation and its individual members." Yet, as we see, there is a distinction. The process of history carries out a judgment on nation after nation, and reveals the divine as not only immanent in the ethical life but as ever expanding the limited national spirit till it become a spirit of universal humanity. Still-and this is perhaps for each time always the more important-the national unity-not indeed as a mult.i.tude, nor as a majority-is the supreme real appearance of the Eternal and Absolute.

Having thus described the nation as an organic totality, he goes on to point out that the political const.i.tution shows this character by forming a triplicity of political orders. In one of these there is but a silent, practical ident.i.ty, in faith and trust, with the totality: in the second there is a thorough disruption of interest into particularity: and in the third, there is a living and intellectual ident.i.ty or indifference, which combines the widest range of individual development with the completest unity of political loyalty. This last order is that which lives in conscious identification of private with public duty: all that it does has a universal and public function. Such a body is the ideal n.o.bility-the n.o.bility which is the _servus servorum Dei_, the supreme servant of humanity. Its function is to maintain general interests, to give the other orders (peasantry and industrials) security,-receiving in return from these others the means of subsistence. _n.o.blesse oblige_ gives the death-blow to particular interests, and imposes the duty of exhibiting, in the clearest form, the supreme reality of absolute morality, and of being to the rest an unperturbed ideal of aesthetic, ethical, religious, and philosophical completeness.

It is here alone, in this estate which is absolutely disinterested, that the virtues appear in their true light. To the ordinary moralising standpoint they seem severally to be, in their separation, charged with independent value. But from the higher point of view the existence, and still more the accentuation of single virtues, is a mark of incompleteness. Even quality, it has been said, involves its defects: it can only s.h.i.+ne by eclipsing or reflecting something else. The completely moral is not the sum of the several virtues, but the reduction of them to indifference. It is thus that when Plato tries to get at the unity of virtue, their aspect of difference tends to be subordinated. "The movement of absolute morality runs through all the virtues, but settles fixedly in none." It is more than love _to_ fatherland, and nation, and laws:-that still implies a relation to something and involves a difference. For love-the mortal pa.s.sion, where "self is not annulled"-is the process of approximation, while unity is not yet attained, but wished and aimed at: and when it is complete-and become "such love as spirits know(113)"-it gives place to a calmer rest and an active immanence. The absolute morality is _life in_ the fatherland and for the nation. In the individual however it is the process upward and inward that we see, not the consummation. Then the ident.i.ty appears as an ideal, as a tendency not yet accomplished to its end, a possibility not yet made fully actual. At bottom-in the divine substance in which the individual inheres-the ident.i.ty is present: but in the appearance, we have only the pa.s.sage from possible to actual, a pa.s.sage which has the aspect of a struggle. Hence the moral act appears as a virtue, with merit or desert. It is accordingly the very characteristic of virtue to signalise its own incompleteness: it emerges into actuality only through antagonism, and with a taint of imperfection clinging to it. Thus, in the field of absolute morality, if the virtues appear, it is only in their transiency. If they were undisputedly real in morality, they would not separately show. To feel that you have done well implies that you have not done wholly well: self-gratulation in meritorious deed is the re-action from the shudder at feeling that the self was not wholly good.

The essential unity of virtue-its negative character as regards all the empirical variety of virtues-is seen in the excellences required by the needs of war. These military requirements demonstrate the mere relativity and therefore non-virtuousness of the special virtues. They equally protest against the common beliefs in the supreme dignity of labour and its utilities. But if bravery or soldierlike virtue be essentially a virtue of virtues, it is only a negative virtue after all. It is the blast of the universal sweeping away all the habitations and fixed structures of particularist life. If it is a unity of virtue, it is only a negative unity-an indifference. If it avoid the parcelling of virtue into a number of imperfect and sometimes contradictory parts, it does so only to present a bare negation. The soldier, therefore, if in potentiality the unity of all the virtues, may tend in practice to represent the ability to do without any of them(114).

The home of these "relative" virtues-of morality in the ordinary sense-is the life of the second order in the commonwealth: the order of industry and commerce. In this sphere the idea of the universal is gradually lost to view: it becomes, says Hegel, only a thought or a creature of the mind, which does not affect practice. The materialistic worker of civilisation does not see further than the empirical existence of individuals: his horizon is limited by the family, and his final ideal is a competency of comfort in possessions and revenues. The supreme universal to which he attains as the climax of his evolution is only money. But it is only with the vaster development of commerce that this terrible consequence ensues.

At first as a mere individual, he has higher aims, though not the highest.

He has a limited ideal determined by his special sphere of work. To win respect-the character for a limited truthfulness and honesty and skilful work-is his ambition. He lives in a conceit of his performance-his utility-the esteem of his special circle. To his commercial soul the military order is a scarecrow and a nuisance: military honour is but trash. Yet if his range of idea is narrow and engrossing in details, his aim is to get wors.h.i.+p, to be recognised as the best in his little sphere.

But with the growth of the trading spirit his character changes: he becomes the mere capitalist, is denationalised, has no definite work and can claim no individualised function. Money now measures all things: it is the sole ultimate reality. It transforms everything into a relation of contract: even vengeance is equated in terms of money. Its motto is, The Exchanges must be honoured, though honour and morality may go to the dogs.