PREFATORY ESSAY BY THE TRANSLATOR
ON THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF ANOTHER WORLD
"With such barren forms of thought, that are always in a world beyond, Philosophy has nothing to do. Its object always something concrete, and in the highest sense present."--HEGEL'S _Logic_, Wallace's translation, p. 150.
It will surprise many readers to be told that the words which I have quoted above embody the very essence of Hegelian thought. The Infinite, the supra-sensuous, the divine, are so connected in our minds with futile rackings of the imagination about remote matters which only distract us from our duties, that a philosophy which designates its problems by such terms as these seems self-condemned as cloudy and inane. But, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Hegel is faithful to the present and the concrete. In the study of his philosophy we are always dealing with human experience. "My stress lay," says Mr. Browning,
"on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." For "a soul" read "the mind," and you have the subject-matter to which Hegel's eighteen close-printed volumes are devoted. The present introductory remarks are meant to insist on this neglected point of view. I wish to point out, in two or three salient instances, the transformation undergone by speculative notions when sedulously applied to life, and restrained from generating an empty "beyond." By so doing I hope to pave the way for a due appreciation of Hegel's philosophy of fine art. That the world of mind, or the world above sense, exists as an actual and organized whole, is a truth most easily realized in the study of the beautiful. And to grasp this principle as Hegel applies it is nothing less than to acquire a new contact with spiritual life. The spiritual world, which is present, actual, and concrete, contains much besides beauty. But to apprehend one element of such a whole constitutes and presupposes a long step towards apprehending the rest. It is for this reason that I propose, in the first place, to explain, by prominent examples, the conception of a spiritual world which is present and actual, and then to let Hegel speak for himself on the particular sphere of art. So closely connected indeed are all the embodiments of mind, that the Introduction to the "Philosophy of Fine Art" is almost a microcosm of his entire system.
We know, to our cost, the popular conception of the supra-sensuous world. Whatever that world is, it is, as commonly thought of, not here and not now. That is to say, if here and now, it is so by a sort of miracle, at which we are called upon to wonder, as when angels are said to be near us, or the dead to know what we do. Again, it is a counterpart of our present world, and rather imperceptible to _our_ senses, than in its nature beyond contact with sense as such. It is peopled by persons, who live eternally, which means through endless ages, and to whose actual communion with us, as also to our own with God, we look forward in the future. It even perhaps contains a supra-sensuous original corresponding to every thing and movement in this world of ours. And it does _not_ necessarily deepen our conception of life, but only reduplicates it.
Such a world, whatever we may think about its actual existence, is _not_ the "other world" of philosophy. The "things not seen" of Plato or of Hegel are not a double or a projection of the existing world.
Plato, indeed, wavered between the two conceptions in a way that should have warned his interpreters of the divergence in his track of thought.
But in Hegel, at least, there is no ambiguity. The world of spirits with him is no world of ghosts. When we study the embodiments of mind or spirit in his pages, and read of law, property, and national unity; of fine art, the religious community, and the intellect that has attained scientific self-consciousness, we may miss our other world with its obscure "beyond," but we at any rate feel ourselves to be dealing with something real, and with the deepest concerns of life.
We may deny to such matters the titles which philosophy bestows upon them; we may say that this is no "other world," no realm of spirits, nothing infinite or divine: but this matters little so long as we know what we are talking about, and are talking about the best we know. And what we discuss when Hegel is our guide, will _always_ be some great achievement or essential attribute of the human mind. He never asks, "Is it?" but always "What is it?" and therefore has instruction, drawn from experience, even for those to whom the titles of his inquiries seem fraudulent or bombastic.
These few remarks are not directed to maintaining any thesis about the reality of nature and of sense. Their object is to enforce a distinction which falls _within_ the world which we know, and not _between_ the world we know and another which we do not know. This distinction is real, and governs life. I am not denying any other distinction, but I am insisting on this. No really great philosopher, nor religious teacher,--neither Plato, nor Kant, nor St. Paul--can be understood unless we grasp this antithesis in the right way. All of these teachers have pointed men to another world. All of them, perhaps, were led at times by the very force and reality of their own thought into the fatal separation that cancels its meaning. So strong was their sense of the gulf between the trifles and the realities of life, that they gave occasion to the indolent imagination--in themselves and in others--to transmute this gulf from a measure of moral effort into an inaccessibility that defies apprehension. But their purpose was to overcome this inaccessibility, not to heighten it.
The hardest of all lessons in interpretation is to believe that great men mean what they say. We are below their level, and what they actually say seems impossible to us, till we have adulterated it to suit our own imbecility. Especially when they speak of the highest realities, we attach _our_ notion of reality to what _they_ pronounce to be real. And thus we baffle every attempt to deepen our ideas of the world in which we live. The work of intelligence is hard; that of the sensuous fancy is easy; and so we substitute the latter for the former.
We are told, for instance, by Plato, that goodness, beauty, and truth are realities, but not visible or tangible. Instead of responding to the call so made on our intelligence by scrutinizing the nature and conditions of these intellectual facts--though we know well how tardily they are produced by the culture of ages--we apply forthwith our idea of reality as something separate in space and time, and so "refute"
Plato with ease, and remain as wise as we were before. And it is true that Plato, handling ideas of vast import with the mind and language of his day, sometimes by a similar error refutes himself.
He makes, for instance, the disembodied soul see the invisible ideas. Thus he travesties his things of the mind as though they were things of sense, only not of _our_ sense--thereby destroying the deeper difference of kind that alone enables them to find a place in our world. That his doctrine of ideas was really rooted, not in mysticism, but in scientific enthusiasm, is a truth that is veiled from us partly by his inconsistencies, but far more by our own erroneous preconceptions.
There is, however, a genuine distinction between "this" world and the "other" world, which is merely parodied by the vulgar antitheses between natural and supernatural, finite and infinite, phenomenal and noumenal. We sometimes hear it said, "The world is quite changed to me since I knew such a person," or "studied such a subject," or "had suggested to me such an idea." The expression may be literally true; and we do not commonly exaggerate, but vastly underrate its import. We read, for instance, in a good authority, "These twenty kinds of birds (which Virgil mentions) do not correspond so much to our species as to our genera; for the Greeks and Romans, I need hardly say, had only very rough-and-ready methods of classification, just as is the case with uneducated people at the present day."
Any one may verify the same fact as regards the observation of flowers. Every yellow ranunculus is called a "butter-cup," every large white umbellifer a "hemlock."
These, with hundreds of other differences of perception, affect the surroundings in which men consciously live, at least as much as a considerable degree of deafness or blindness. It is no metaphor, but literal fact, to say that man's whole environment is transformed by the training even of his mere apprehension of natural objects. But there is more in the matter than this. Without going into metaphysics, which I wish to avoid, I cannot, indeed, maintain that mind "makes" natural objects, although by enabling us to perceive them it unquestionably makes our immediate conscious world. My individual consciousness does not make or create the differences between the species of ranunculus, although it does create my knowledge of them. But when we come to speak of the world of morals or art or politics, we may venture much further in our assertions. The actual facts of this world do directly arise out of and are causally sustained by conscious intelligence; and these facts form the world above sense. The unity of a Christian church or congregation is a governing fact of life; so is that of a family or a nation; so, we may hope, will that of humanity come to be. What is this unity? Is it visible and tangible, like the unity of a human body? No, the unity is "ideal;" that is, it exists in the medium of thought only; it is made up of certain sentiments, purposes, and ideas. What even of an army? Here, too, an ideal unity is the mainspring of action. Without mutual intelligence and reciprocal reliance you may have a mob, but you cannot have an army. But all these conditions exist and can exist in the mind only. An army, _qua_ army, is not a mere fact of sense; for not only does it need mind to perceive it--a heap of sand does that--but it also needs mind to _make_ it.
The world of these governing facts of life is the world of the things not seen, the object of reason, the world of the truly infinite and divine. It is, of course, a false antithesis to contrast seeing with the bodily eye and seeing with the mind's eye. The seeing eye is always the mind's eye. The distinction between sense and spirit or intellect is a distinction _within the mind_ just as is St. Paul's opposition between the spirit and the flesh. Nevertheless, the mind that only sees colour--sense or sense-perception--is different from the mind that sees beauty, the self-conscious spirit. The latter includes the former, but the former does not include the latter. To the one the colour is the ultimate fact; to the other it is an element in a thing of beauty. This relation prevails throughout between the world of sense and the world above sense. The "things not seen," philosophically speaking, are no world of existences or of intelligences co-ordinate with and severed from this present world. They are a value, an import, a significance, superadded to the phenomenal world, which may thus be said, though with some risk of misunderstanding, to be degraded into a symbol. The house, the cathedral, the judge's robe, the general's uniform, are ultimate facts for the child or the savage; but for the civilized man they are symbols of domestic life, of the Church, and of the State. Even where the supra-sensuous world has its purest expression, in the knowledge and will of intelligent beings, it presupposes a sensuous world as the material of ideas and of actions. "This" world and the "other" world are continuous and inseparable, and all men must live in some degree for both. But the completion of the Noumenal world, and the apprehension of its reality and completeness, is the task by fulfilling which humanity advances.
I pass to the interpretation, neither technical nor controversial, of one or two of Hegel's most alarming phrases.
The "infinite" seems to practical minds the very opposite of anything real, present, or valuable. As the description of life, it is the mere negation of the life we know; as the description of a purpose, it is the very antithesis of any purpose that we can conceive to be attainable; as the description of a being, it appears to be formed by denying every predicate which we attach to personality. And I could wish that Hegel had not selected this much-abused term as the distinctive predicate of what is most real and most precious in life.
He adhered to it, no doubt, because his infinity, though different in nature to that of common logic, yet rightly fills the place and meets the problem of that conception. I will attempt to explain how this can be, and what we are discussing when we read about infinity in the Hegelian philosophy.
It is an obvious remark, that infinity was a symbol of evil in Hellenic speculation, whereas to Christian and modern thought it is identified with good. Much idle talk has arisen on this account, as to the limitation of the Hellenic mind. For in fact, the Finite ascribed to Pythagoras, and the idea of limit and proportion in Plato or in Aristotle, are far more nearly akin to true infinity than is the Infinite of modern popular philosophy. Infinite means the negation of limit. Now, common infinity, which may be identified in general with enumeration _ad infinitum_,--the _false_ infinity of Hegel--is the attempt to negate or transcend a limit which inevitably recurs. It arises from attempting a task or problem in the wrong way, so that we may go on for ever without making any advance towards its achievement.
All quantitative infinity--which of course has its definite uses, subject to proper reservations--is of this nature. A process does not change its character by mere continuance, and the aggregate of a million units is no more free from limitation than the aggregate of ten. A defect in kind cannot be compensated by mere quantity. We see the fallacious attempt in savage, barbaric, or vulgar art. Meaningless iteration, objectless labour, enormous size, extravagant costliness, indicate the effort to satisfy man's need of expression by the mere accumulation of work without adequate idea or purpose. But such efforts, however stupendous, never attain their goal. They constitute a recurrent failure to transcend a recurrent limit, precisely analogous to enumeration _ad infinitum_. A hundred thousand pounds' worth of bricks and mortar comes no nearer to the embodiment of mind than a thousand pounds' worth. To attempt adequate expression by mere aggregation of cost or size is therefore to fall into the infinite process or the false infinity.
Another well-known instance is the pursuit of happiness in the form of "pleasure for pleasure's sake." The recurrence of unchanging units leaves us where we were. A process which does not change remains the same, and if it did not bring satisfaction at first, will not do so at last.
We might as well go on producing parallels to infinity, in the hope that somehow or somewhere they may meet. An infinite straight line may serve as a type of the kind of infinity we are considering.
Infinity in the Hegelian sense does not partake in any way of this endlessness, or of the unreality which attaches to it. Its root-idea is self-completeness or satisfaction. That which is "infinite" is without boundary, because it does not refer beyond itself for explanation, or for justification; and therefore, in all human existence or production infinity can only be an aspect or element. A picture, for instance, regarded as a work of fine art, justifies itself, gives satisfaction directly and without raising questions of cause or of comparison, and is in this sense--_i.e._ in respect of its beauty--regarded as "infinite." When, on the other hand, we consider this same work of art as an historical phenomenon, as a link in a chain of causation--_e.g._ as elucidating the development of a school, or proving the existence of a certain technical process at a certain date--then we go beyond itself for its interest and explanation, and depress it at once into a finite object. The finite is that which presents itself as incomplete; the infinite that which presents itself as complete, and which, therefore, does not force upon us the fact of its limitation.
This character belongs in the highest degree to self-conscious mind, as realized in the world above sense; and in some degree to all elements of that world--for instance, to the State--in as far as they represent man's realized self-consciousness. It is the nature of self-consciousness to be infinite, because it is its nature to take into itself what was opposed to it, and thus to make itself into an organized sphere that has value and reality within, and not beyond itself. If false infinity was represented by an infinite straight line, true infinity may be compared to a circle or a sphere.
The distinction between true and false infinity is of the profoundest moral import. The sickly yearning that longs only to escape from the real, rooted in the antithesis between the infinite and the actual or concrete, or in the idea of the monotonous "_infini_" which is one with the "_abîme_" or the "_gouffre_," is appraised by this test at its true value. It is seen to rest on a mere pathetic fallacy of thought and sentiment. So far from the infinite being remote, abstract, unreal, nothing but the infinite can be truly present, concrete, and real.
The finite always refers us away and away through an endless series of causes, of effects, or of relations. The infinite is individual, and bears the character of knowledge, achievement, attainment. In short, the actual realities which we have in mind when, in philosophy, we speak of the infinite, are such as a nation that is conscious of its unity and general will, or the realm of fine art as the recognition of man's higher nature, or the religious community with its conviction of an indwelling Deity.
Now, whether we like the term Infinite or not, whether or no we think that man's life can be explained and justified within the limits of these aims and these phenomena, there is no doubt that these matters are real, and are the most momentous of realities. In acquainting ourselves with their structure, evolution, and relation to individual life, we are at least not wasting time, nor treating of matters beyond human intelligence.
There is a very similar contrast in the conception of human Freedom.
"Free will" is so old a vexed question, that though the conflict still rages fitfully round it, the world hardly conceives that much can turn upon its decision. But when in place of the abstract, "Is man free?" we are confronted with the concrete inquiry, "When, in what, and as what, does man carry out his will with least hindrance and with fullest satisfaction?" then we have before us the actual phenomena of civilization, instead of an idle and abstract Yes or No.
Man's Freedom, in the sense thus contemplated, lies in the spiritual or supra-sensuous world by which his humanity is realized, and in which his will finds fulfilment. The family, for example, property, and law are the first steps of man's freedom. In them the individual's will obtains and bestows recognition as an agent in a society whose bond of union is ideal--_i.e._ existing only in consciousness; and this recognition develops into duties and rights. It is in these that man finds something to live for, something in which and for the sake of which to assert himself. As society develops he lives on the whole more in the civilized or spiritual world, and less in the savage or purely natural world. His will, which is himself, expands with the institutions and ideas that form its purpose, and the history of this expansion is the history of human freedom. Nothing is more shallow, more barbarously irrational, than to regard the progress of civilization as the accumulation of restrictions. Laws and rules are a necessary aspect of extended capacities. Every power that we gain has a positive nature, and therefore involves positive conditions, and every positive condition has negative relations. To accomplish a particular purpose you must go to work in a particular way, and in no other way.
To complain of this is like complaining of a house because it has a definite shape. If freedom means absence of attributes, empty space is "freer" than any edifice. Of course a house may be so ugly that we may say we would rather have none at all. Civilization may bring such horrors that we may say "rather savagery than this;" but in neither case are we serious. Great as are the vices of civilization, it is only in civilization that man becomes human, spiritual, and free.
The effort to grasp and apply such an idea as this can hardly be barren. It brings us face to face with concrete facts of history, and of man's actual motives and purposes. True philosophy here, as everywhere, plunges into the concrete and the real; it is the indolent abstract fancy that thrusts problems away into the remote "beyond"
or into futile abstraction. Plato, the philosopher, knows well that the mind is free when it achieves what as a whole it truly wills. But Plato, the allegorist and imaginative preacher, refers the soul's freedom to a fleeting moment of ante-natal choice, which he vainly strives to exempt from causal influence. Pictorial imagination, with its ready reference to occurrences in past and future, is the great foe to philosophic intelligence.
Finally, it is impossible to omit all reference to the notion of an immanent Deity, which forms the very centre of Hegel's thought. When an unspeculative English reader first meets with Hegel's passionate insistence that God is not unknowable, that He necessarily reveals himself as a Trinity of persons, and that to deny this is to represent men as "the heathen who know not God," he feels as if he had taken sand into his mouth. He is inclined to ask what these Neo-Platonic or mediæval doctrines are doing in the nineteenth century, and why we should resuscitate dead logomachies that can have no possible value for life or conduct. Now, I must not attempt here to discuss the difficult question of Hegel's ultimate conception of the being of God, and I am bound to warn any one who may read these pages that I only profess to reproduce one--though by far the most prominent--side of that conception. But, subject to this reservation, I have no hesitation in saying, that our own prejudices form the only hindrance to our seeing that Hegel's subject-matter is here, as elsewhere, human life. He gives us what he takes to be the literal truth, and we will have it to be metaphor. Verbally contradicting Kant, he accepts, completes, and enforces Kant's thought. "Revelation can never be the true ground of religion," said Kant; "for revelation is an historical accident, and religion is a rational necessity of man's intelligent nature."
"Revelation is the only true knowledge of God and ground of religion," says Hegel, "because _revelation consists in the realization of God in man's intelligent nature_." We are, however, not unaccustomed to such phrases, and our imagination is equal to its habitual task of evading their meaning. We take them to be a strong metaphor, meaning that God, who is a sort of ghostly being a long way off, is, notwithstanding, more or less within the knowledge of our minds, and so is "in" them, as a book which is actually in London may be in my memory when I am in Scotland. Now, right or wrong, this is not what Hegel means. He means what he says; that God is spirit or mind,
and exists in the medium of mind, _which is actual as intelligence, for us at any rate, only in the human self-consciousness_. The thought is hard from its very simplicity, and we struggle, as always, to avoid grasping it. We imagine spirits as made of a sort of thin matter, and so as existing just like bodies, although we call them disembodied. And then we think of this disembodied form as an alternative to human form, and suppose spirit to have somehow a purer existence apart from human body. This error really springs from imagining the two as existences of the same kind, and so conflicting, and from not realizing the notion of spirit as mind or self-consciousness, which is the only way of conceiving its actual presence in our world.
Mind uses sensuous existence as its symbol; perhaps even needs it. The poet who has hit Hegel's thought so nearly,
fails here:--
"This weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?"
Here we leave the track of the higher Pantheism for that of vulgar mysticism. Spiritual being is conceived as somehow incompatible with bodily shape, either because incapable of any concrete embodiment, or because it has a quasi-material shape of its own. Now, this is just the reverse of the Hegelian idea. According to Hegel, it is only in the human form that intelligence can for us find its full expression. The notion of a spiritual body other than and incompatible with the natural body does not arise. Spirit exists in the medium of consciousness, not in a peculiar kind of matter. The spiritualization of the natural body is not to be looked for in an astral or angel body, but in the gait and gesture, the significance and dignity, that make the body of the civilized man the outward image of his soul, and distinguish him from the savage as from the animal. The human soul becomes actual itself, and visible to others, only by moulding the body into its symbol and instrument. It ought to have been an axiom of physiology, Hegel says, that the series of animated forms must necessarily lead up to that of man. For this is the only sensuous form in which mind could attain adequate manifestation. Thus anthropomorphism in fine art is no accident, nor an unworthy portrayal of divinity. If the Deity is to be symbolized to sense, it must be in the image of man. The symbol is not indeed the reality, as the sensuous image is not conscious thought; but this is a defect inherent in artistic presentation, and not attributable to anthropomorphism in particular.
It is obvious that in the light of such a conception, a speculative import can be attached to the doctrine of the Incarnation, and Hegel's reading of Christian ideas is, in fact, to be interpreted entirely in this sense. This is not the place to go deeper into such views, which, however profound, may perhaps continue to seem non-natural expositions of Christian dogma. I am only concerned to show how here, also, the speculative idea, operating upon the concrete and actual, generates a fresh and inspiring insight into life and conduct. Few chapters of anthropology are more thorough, profound, and suggestive than Hegel's account of the "actual soul;" _i.e._ of the habits and attributes which make the body distinctively human by stamping it with the impress of mind. Nor has philosophic insight ever done better service to the history of religion than in grasping the essence of Christianity as the _unity_, (not merely the _union_) of the divine and human nature.
Among the things which are spiritually discerned, an important place belongs to beauty. As a boundary and transition between sense and thought, it is peculiarly fitted to illustrate the reality which we claim, in contradistinction to mere sensuous appearance, for what is best in life. Many who distrust Hegelian formulæ are convinced that beauty at least is real. They will admit that fine art and the recognition of beauty are not trifles, not amusements, but rank high among the interests that give life its value. All such will find themselves in sympathy with the purpose of a great philosopher who has bent all the power of his genius and his industry to vindicating a place for art as an embodiment of the divine nature. The Introduction to Hegel's "Æsthetic," which is all that it was possible to reproduce in the present volume, lacks, of course, the solidity and detailed elaboration of the treatise. Yet to all who care for thorough and noble thought on a great subject, and for a defence of their faith in the true spiritual realities, I have hope that the ensuing pages, however marred by imperfect translation, will be welcome.
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