The categories

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fill MM

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LIBRARY

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
Class

THE CATEGORIES

THE CATEGORIES

BY

JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING

HON. LL.D. EDIN., HON. LL.D. GLASG.

Foreign Member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin ; first-appointed

Gifford Lecturer on the Whole Foundation, Lectured

Edinburgh University, 1888-90, etc., etc.

EDINBURGH
OLIVEE AND BOYD

LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO., LTD.

1903

/

Go tbe /Ifcemorg of

MY WIFE

WHOSE IRREPARABLE LOSS IS ASSOCIATED INSEPARABLY
WITH ITS PUBLICATION

3 Dedicate tbte Xittle JBooft

TO ME SHE WAS

THE SWEETEST WOMAN AND THE MOST INGENUOUS

THE TRUEST WIFE AND THE FAITHFULEST

THAT IN THE WILL OF GOD

EVER BLESSED MAN

CONTENTS

CHAP. I'AGK

I. OF CATEGORIES GENERALLY . . . .17

II. OF THE DOUBLE STATEMENT ... 22

1. The Contradiction of Reason and Faith.— 2.
Reflexion-Philosophy, — 3. The Mother's Lap.—
4. Hegel's Earliest Writing.— 5. The Phaeno-
menologie. *

III. CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS . . . .74

IV. RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES . . .123
V. CONCLUSION . . 147

* A general reader may not be interested in the discussion as
to positions Logical and Phsenomological ; but much occurs to
be said in Hegel's regard which is somewhat new, perhaps, and
otherwise possibly such that the philosophical student might
regret to miss it.

A R?
or THE

UNIVERSITY

OF

PKEFACE

ASSUMING it to be seen from elsewhere that to
reason is to proceed from something before us, to
some other something not then before us, through
what in some way is a thread of identity — assuming
further that to found and ground reasoning as
reasoning there is required a principle, a single
principle, that, of itself self-certain, is in want of
not another beyond it : — Such principle, evidently,
must, as conditioning progress from identity to
difference, be in itself at once both — such that it is
at once identity and difference — such that its differ-
ence is at the same time its identity, and its iden-
tity at the same time its difference — such that from
its identity it is that you pass to its difference, and
not less back again from its difference to its iden-
tity. There is only one existence — one actually
known and recognised existence — in all this world,
that comes up to, or can realise, in every point of
view, the principles, the discrimina, the contra-
distinguishing significatives indicated.

It is the Ego.

Keaders may have been shocked, I fear, by the

8 PREFACE

assumption in my last volume * that the antithesis
and reciprocity, the dialectic, the ratio, of subject
and object in the Ego is — Thought ! Still this of
the Ego has been at least named or, to say so,
even acted upon by the imexceptively accredited,
the universally received and accepted, highest
masters in the realms of pure thought — say, for
the nonce, Kant and Hegel.

The latter has such expressions as these : — Ego
and Thought are the same — Ego is Thought — every
man is an entire world of ideas which are buried in
the night of the Ego — Ego is the universal into
which every particular is negated and absorbed — I
or Me, sounds trivial, but it is not so to reflection.
The brute cannot say /, but only the man, for man
is Thought. Then Kant, I have already quoted him
elsewhere to say: That man can have Ego in his
apprehension exalts him infinitely above all other
living beings on earth — this capability is the under-
standing (Thought) itself.

And what does it amount to, this — to say that the
immanent or innate ratio within the Ego is Thought?
To say that — if the Ego itself is Thought — is only a
little more particular, is only to approach a little
nearer to the individual, precisely functioning prin-
ciple or reason. But it is not to say that the Ego
so regarded, is tantamount to the actual personality
of a living man. Concrete Ego, as existent, is more
than the merely notional Ego. Concrete Ego has
its constitutive content within it or under it: the

* " What is Thought 1 or, The Problem of Philosophy."

PREFACE 9

absolute Ego, the absolute content ; the finite ego,
its own finite content. Nor is that other, the
notional Ego, after all, anything new, unheard of, or
absurd. Keally, the Ego, Ego at all, as first prin-
ciple is nothing strange. Descartes is there with
his primitive basis of self-consciousness. Spinoza
said for Ego, Substance ; but that Substance is really
his master's Ego. Leibnitz, when he said Monad,
said nothing but Ego; and his Monadology (take
with it my water-drop in Schwegler, p. 442) is about
the most perfect species of ordinary idealism, and of
a little more than ordinary idealism, as yet extant.
Berkeley will only have two minds reciprocally, and
that is Ego. Even Hume, who has only ideas in
a mind, does, in actual and good truth — though
without the word— name Ego. Then the Germans ?
Jacobi has only, in his natural "feeling " and " be-
lief," Ego; but have we not found Jacobi himself
(Secret of Hegel, p. 232, or Hegel's Logik, p. 95)
naming Ego " the pure spontaneity " ? And what is
that but the pure self -create? Kant, in ultimate
analysis, can have, for new and substantial dis-
covery, left him only the quarry of the Categories,
with not a single ground or principle under them
but Ego ; for that is beyond a doubt — they are all of
them referred thither; so that, even more than
implicitly, his one single principle of a priori de-
rivation and deduction is Ego. Eichte did no more
than openly and loudly shout all this : it can be
easily read in himself without a call to the authority
of either Schelling or Hegel. This testimony of

10 PREFACE

Biese, however, is (Aristot. i. x.) summary : the ego
was to Fichte " cause of itself, to itself beginning
and end, free and absolute, the single true reality."
Fichte himself actually says (WW. x. 97), "das
Wortlein Ich — the little word Ego will be indeed at
last the sole prize of Kant's, and, if I dare name
myself after him, of my own knowledge-devoted
life " ; as elsewhere this, " my whole philosophy, is
built on the pure Ego."

Nor can Schelling well be said to have done more
than what, not without some little soupqon of a boast,
he claims for himself, the supplementing of Fichte's
sujective deduction by "a completely objective de-
monstration" of his own; while Hegel caps all by
absolutely creating, though perhaps not much less
absolutely in silence and concealment, his own vast
system out from the very pulse-beat of the heart of
the Ego itself. And neither need we stop here : the
grand quadrilateral (of Kant and the others) is not
without its outliers, nor these without their runners
between. There is Krause, for example, the best of
them it may be, it is of him that we hear that there
is a progression in his philosophy " from self-con-
sciousness as the first certainty in cognition" —
" with Ego, of the truth of which there can be no
doubt, there is found a fixed starting-point as well
as a subjective criterion of truth." That, and more,
too, we have from Erdmann ; while in the same
reference we have again as much as this from else-
where, " that God, namely, is the infinite uncon-
ditioned Ego, as also that finite beings of reason

PREFACE 11

know themselves in God as finite egoes." Nay, there
are, say, the Indian assurances to a like effect : " He
first said, I am I ; therefore his name was I."

Of the Ego, then, as underlying, prompting,
guiding, and animating, from first to last, so much
of modern philosophy, there can be no doubt ; while,
as regards ancient philosophy, we have but to name
Anaxagoras to be reminded that vov?, thought, the
Ego, with quite as little doubt, constituted through-
out the main suggestive and determinative concep-
tion then.

Let such be the judgment of history, then,
modern, ancient ; but what is the state of the case
in its own simple nature ? Let us just see our own
idea of what it is to think. What is it that we do
when we think ? Only try it ! Why, think your
ink-bottle, pen, paper, or the fire, say. Can you
think the very shoe on your foot without — GENERAL-
ISING ?

If we will but take the trouble to consult those
who tell us of the faculties of the mind, we shall find
that, directly or indirectly, all those authorities agree
upon this, that Generalisation is precisely the one
act that constitutes thinking. This, Locke finds,
according to Stewart, " to form the characteristical
attribute of a rational nature " ; and, Locke himself
certainly tells us (II. xi. 10) that " the having of
general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction
betwixt man and brutes " ; while Stewart himself
has it (Elements, etc., I. iv.) that " without this
faculty of the mind we should have been perfectly

12 PREFACE

incapable of general speculation — reasoning." Well,
then, if Thought be simply Generalisation, what is
that ultimately — what is the generalisation ulti-
mate ? Why, Ego ! *

Self -consciousness is the single condition of thought
— the single foundation of thought — it is thought.
And the proposition is that this is the ultimatum of
the whole of Philosophy.

Nevertheless, in the little volume referred to,
this, that the Eatio of the Ego is Thought, was
not the one purpose of the work itself. That pur-
pose was specially, after all, what bore on German
Philosophy; which, I was presumptuous enough to
natter myself, had been, so far, brought therewith
to something of a terminal crisis.

Of that little book itself, I could not expect,
published as it was in the thick of the war, much
notice to be taken. Nevertheless, even then, it was
not without certain very gratifying press notices;
and I hope I may be pardoned now if, without
having the impertinence to name them, I allow my
amour propre the indulgence of quoting a few of
the, no doubt, too favourable expressions of friends
of mine who, as experts, and officially placed, had
been troubled by me with copies of the volume.
And yet, if I put some stress on the fact of these
friends being expressly, officially expert, it at least
notifies to myself that I have not quite missed my
footing beneath the laudation of an enthusiasm

* Or take it thus : To generalise a particular is to find a
genus, and the genera of genera are the Categories. — Ego !

PREFACE 13

which, on the part of two or three others is, as I dare
not deny, very dear to me !

" A book in which every page expresses years of
thought."

The writer, acknowledged to be at the head of all
experts, goes on to a personal ranking which is too
flatteringly kind for the recipient at all to allow
himself to quote.

"I have read it all with the keenest pleasure.
For acute and penetrating criticism, it is almost
superhuman. Poor Immanuel ! ! How will you dare
to look him in the face when you get to Heaven ?
Perchance there are no Categories there I "

A reader may see in this only half a kindly
irony. The same reader will think it quite natural
that / see in it truth. And I do see in it this truth :
Kant has never yet been so analysed, will never
again in this world be so analysed — oh, well, say —
without cribbing ! I willingly admit, all the same,
that there may be partiality in it ; but if there be, it
is, as on the part of a perfectly honourable and
accomplished expert, a partiality of which I am
proud.

One or two of my correspondents rather signalise
points only : —

" Chapter II., which you say ' the general reader '
may ' pass by/ is most excellent and conclusive."

"I have been interested in much of it. You
certainly hit off in an admirably lucid way the
main fallacy in the Quantified Predicate doctrine:
would it were dropt from the books on Logic ! "

H PREFACE

" Your exposure of the weakness of the Kantian
categories leaves nothing to be desired: especially
the point that the 'Given' is always already
categorised, gives its own cue, and sounds its own
prompter's whistle. That part of Kant's book, I
shall never read again."

I do not think that it is required of me to say
that these latter correspondents are also official
experts : the fact shows.

I shall follow these up, and conclude here by —
only the usual generalities apart — a whole single
letter.

" There is all the ' tang ' of the Secret in the new
volume, and it is not a little remarkable that thirty-
five years should separate the two. May we not say,
indeed, that this is The Secret or at least the
Secret told out ? It is so I understand the book as
the final clearing up of the mystery, the stripping-
off of the last veil that has hitherto obscured and
distorted the view of Hegel. There is, of course,
much else, much of yourself ; but this, I take it, is
the beginning and end of the book. Attentive
readers must find this indicated in the 'Secret'
and in the 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Law'
clearly enough, but it has never been pressed home
with so much authority and such wealth of illustra-
tive support.

" But stated as you state it, it is more than
interpretation: it has all the value of a sub-
stantive philosophical pronouncement. On these
all-important points I find it full of instruction —
first, the question of the primal avdyKrj (and in
a general reference the ontological argument) ;
secondly, the 'philosophy of contingency'; and

PREFACE 15

thirdly, the personality of God. The way you put
this last point makes it, I think, more convincing
than any direct utterance one can find in Hegel,
and the contrast you draw between Schelling and
Hegel in this respect is helpful. The difference
between the two would seem to lie mainly in
Hegel's strict fidelity to the action of the Ego,
while Schelling, as you say, returns to Spinoza's
Substance in this very act of professing to leave it
behind.

" Apart from the strictly philosophical matter, I
need hardly say I have read with great interest your
incisive psychology of the relations between Schel-
ling and Hegel. There must have been a natural
antipathy latent between two such different natures.
Schelling's attitude must, to begin with, and up to
the Phsenomenologie, have been one of indulgent
patronage, with just a spice of contempt for the
slow-going man who wrote such a ghastly style,
and who must have appeared 'wooden' in many
ways to his brilliant junior. If this was his general
feeling, it would go far to explain his bitterness
when he found himself superseded by his lumbering
follower. The light you throw on the medical
allusion in the Preface is quite new to me, and,
if not inadvertent on Hegel's part, the stab was
certainly unpardonable. Caroline, too, the redoubt-
able, much-married Eomanticist, would hardly draw
to Hegel."

That, certainly, is remarkable, the interval of thirty-
five years, to which the writer alludes; but of all
human beings, German, English, or other, he alone
has seen and said the totality and finality of the
" Secret." Apart its complete possession of the sub-
ject, the generosity of its content, with much

16 PREFACE

else — rail stamps this letter as indeed the letter
of a friend, but of a friend whose simple word
it is impossible to distrust, as that of a free, open,
modest, singularly candid, and ably accomplished
mind.

ERRATUM

PAGE 79.— First line of footnote, " first volume "
should read " first edition."

Platonic, Patristic, Scholastic, down through Valla,
Yivcs, Eamus, Gassendus, Campanella,. Bacon, Des-
cartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, and many others,
to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Krause, Herbart, Hegel.
This, plainly, is tantamount to a whole history,

17 B

16 PREFACE

else — rail stamps this letter as indeed the letter
of a friend, but of a friend whose simple word
it is impossible to distrust, as that of a free, open,
modest, singularly candid, and ably accomplished

THE CATEGORIES

CHAPTEE I

OF CATEGOKIES GENEKALLY

IN starting with the word "Categories," and as
though for a general reader, it certainly does seem
only natural that such general reader would expect
to be told in the first place, at least generally, what
categories are.

Trendelenburg, now, has formally an express
book on the subject, his "Geschichte der Cate-
gorienlehre," just a history of all that concerns
the general subject of the Categories. Beginning
with the Aristotelian Categories, he treats at full
length of all others that appeared to him justly to
fall under the name : Pythagorean, Eleatic, Sophistic,
Socratic, Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Neo-
Platonic, Patristic, Scholastic, down through Valla,
Vivts, Bamus, Gassendus, Campanella,. Bacon, Des-
cartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, and many others,
to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Krause, Herbart, Hegel.

This, plainly, is tantamount to a whole history,

17 B

18 THE CATEGORIES

whether ancient, mediaeval, or modern, treated, as
it were, by this one single man, and from his one
single point of view. It is well that the reader
in question should know as much; but we here,
for. our part, have no such apparent totality of an
object. Nor indeed is it, in essential depth, neces-
sary. It is really with Kant, and since Kant, that,
in relation to Categories, we can, of essential depth,
talk at all.

Kant began the subject in this way, that, per-
plexed by Hume's call for the reason that necessarily
bound the effect to its cause, and shut out from the
whole sphere of sensible experience, in which, as
stands up at once to every eye on the least reflection,
what is called contingency is alone all and every-
where, while, for its part again, what is called
necessity is null and nowhere (causes and effects
in this world, for example, are all of them matter
of mere sense, mere sensible experience ; and there
is nothing whatever to suggest that the processes
among them are in any way more) — So perplexed
and so shut out (or so shut in), Kant, I say, was
driven, in his search for necessity, to the a priori
of the intellect as apart from, and independent
of, all matters of sense and of what we name the
experience that holds of it.

Kant, as he was led on and on in this search,
eventually applied himself to judgment as judgment,
in so far, that is, as judgment is a simple, innate
function or faculty of mere pure a priori intellect,
understanding : and, accordingly, what he first

OF CATEGORIES GENERALLY 19

tabulates is what he calls Quantity. Quantity was
his first Category. All matters of sense, of sensible
experience, received into the mind, from without,
say, were submitted to Quantity from within, to
the control of Quantity from within, and under this
control were accordingly ordered, arranged, dressed,
modified — intellectually, to say so, nationalised.
That is, what were first, or at first, the mere
sparse contingent things taken into the mind by
the action of our special senses, smell, taste,
touch, hearing, and sight, were now converted by
the Category into Notions — notions that with sense
for their matter had intellect, understanding, for
their Form. Further, then, these notions, these
notionalised things, with the Contingency of their
matter of sense, had now the Necessity of their
form of the intellect, the understanding.

Quantity, in its definite terms, contained three
Categories. That is, Quantity was either Universal,
Particular, or Singular — a division that, as one sees,
is made familiar to us by every Logical Text-book.
How each of these categories, ideal itself, may be
conceived to act, infecting, so to speak, and assum-
ing into its own self the matter of sense ideally
inchoate within, will by strict reference to its logical
function, with some little trouble perhaps, not
remotely suggest itself.

These explanations we shall suppose to suffice for
the other categories also, conspicuous for their part
in their full tables as found in Kant's various works
relevant, especially in the Prolegomena and the

20 THE CATEGORIES

Kritik of Pure Beason. In whole, under four head-
titles, they are twelve in number. Twelve ! When
one thinks that, with Kant, the whole information
which we owe to the senses, is, so far, not informa-
tion at all, but only something crass, raw, rude,,
brute, really unseen, unheard, till these twelve
categories have taken it in hand, drenched it,,
dressed it, [cooked it : made a world of it — this
world ; one can only pity these unfortunate twelve
that have all these millions and millions of objects
with all their millions and millions of mutual rela-
tions between them — one can only pity these twelve,.
I say, for their immeasurable task, an actual universe
to account for !

And this, at least partly, is what we may suppose
Fichte to have thought. Fichte saw at once, namely ,.
into and gauged the findings of Kant. Categories,
the categories were the centre of philosophy : the
Categories were Philosophy itself. And so we had
the WissenscJiaftslehre.

Schelling immediately followed with his mere
repetitions of Fichte — naturally in his own way of
course, and in no long time afterwards (under
Hegel), with his divergences and divagations, which,,
as from a man of genius, talent, and infinite accom-
plishment, will always be found engaging, interest-
ing, informative, and instructive (psychologically
and philosophically my relative word is to be found
elsewhere) ; but they are not by any means in line-
with philosophy as it was then approving itself, and
really, absolutely, without an eye on the part of

OF CATEGORIES GENERALLY 21

Schelling to what Hegel had on his part then in
hand.

It is this Hegel who will always be known in
philosophy as, even after Kant, the master of Cate-
gories. Trendelenburg (in his Latin somewhat
imposing, though all the others, as Bonitz, Waitz,
like Eitter and Preller, write capital Latin, but pos-
sibly, all the same, not one of them perhaps so
lightly, easily, flowingly as Mullach, or with more
elegance than our own Hutcheson) — Trendelenburg,
who has never absent from his mind a coup de grace
to Hegel, cannot be said to have even entered on a
discussion of his categories in the* express book
relative. A very full list of them, nevertheless, as
they appear in the greater Logic, is to be found in
Dr William T. Harris, the American Commissioner
of Education's book on the " Genesis of the Cate-
gories of the Mind," on Hegel's Logic that is. As
concerns this our little book, however, though bear-
ing in its title the word, it is not meant to talk of
Categories, as formally the business in hand. What
comes into speech here is, for the most part, a
general theme, and really in continuance of philo-
sophy as I have of late written on it, say, in my
immediately previous book, " What is Thought ? "

CHAPTER II

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT

1. The Contradiction of Reason and Faith. — 2. Reflexion-
Philosophy.— 3. The Mother's Lap.— 4. Hegel's Earliest
Writing. — 5. The Phsenomenologie.

1. The Contradiction of Reason and Faith.

THAT I begin here so will presently explain itself :
And for actual first, I quote at once from " Glauben
und Wissen, oder die Keflexionsphilosophie der
Subjektivitat, in der Vollstandigkeit ihrer Formen,
als Kantische, Jacobische, und Fichtesche Philo-
sophic " (Belief and Knowledge, or the Keflexioii-
Philosophy of Subjectivity in the Entirety of its
Forms, as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philo-
sophy), as immediately follows : —

" In our culture, we have risen so far above the
ancient dualism of reason and faith, philosophy and
religion, that this dualism has taken on quite
another sense, and been transferred to philosophy.
That reason is the handmaid of faith, as earlier
times expressed it, and whereto philosophy im-
movably opposed its own absolute autonomy — these

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 23

conceptions or expressions have disappeared. And
reason — if it is reason that has given itself the
name — has so asserted itself in positive religion
that any contest of philosophy against that positive
[miracle and such else], is regarded as something
by-past, and faded from view; and that Kant, in
his attempt to vitalise the positive form of religion
through a gloss from his own philosophy, did not
for this reason fail, that the peculiar sense of these
forms would be injured thereby, but that, on the
contrary, they themselves were seen to be no
longer worth reference. The question, however, is
whether victorious reason has not met with the fate
that the conquering strength of barbarous nations
is not unwont to meet with as against the submitting
weakness of others that are civilised : externally
to rule, namely, but, internally, or in spirit,
to fall vanquished by the vanquished, conquered
by the conquered. The glorious victory which en-
lightened or enlightening reason, has won over
what — in its small measure of relative appreciation
— it understood religion to be, is, seen in its truth,
nothing else than this: that neither what it sup-
posed to be religion remained religion, nor that the
all-conquering reason remained reason ; while the
new birth, triumphant over the dead, that was to
have been the child of peace to unite both — has
in it just as little of reason proper, as of true
religion."

This, the first paragraph in the whole works of
Hegel, is, whether in its matter or in its form, singu-
larly characteristic. And by/orm here I do not mean,
technically, the dialectic, though that wonderful
child, triumphant over the two corpses (for the
original has it so — " auf diesen Leichnamen trium-

24 THE CATEGORIES

phirend ") would seem, not more ambiguously than
usual, to point thither, but simply Hegel's style
(diction, copia verborum, provision or use of words) ;
while by matter I do mean his Inhalt, for that
Inhalt — that, his matter, generally named — cannot
be better expressed than by reference to the
"Gegensatz der Vernunft und des G-laubens" (the
contradiction of reason and faith), a reference
which is to sum itself up in the hinted substitution
of reason proper for what is ordinarily thought
reason, and the similar substitution of true religion
for religion ordinarily so named. For that lies
in the intimation that, as regards the difference in
question, both sides have failed; because, namely,
that what, on the one side, was called reason, was
not reason, and that what, on the other side, was
called religion, was not religion.

As we see, then, this first paragraph is well
in place as introductory, generally, to the works
of Hegel, nor is it less so as specially introductory
to the one work which is immediately concerned ;
for that refers to the direct predecessors of Hegel —
namely, Kant, Jacobi, and Eichte ; and precisely on
the same theme — namely, philosophy and religion.

2. Beflexion- Philosophy.

The philosophies of these three men are to be
proved, it seems, as the title in front carries it,
"reflexion-philosophies of subjectivity." It is
Michelet that edits this first volume of the works

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 25

of Hegel; and so it is that we naturally turn at
once to him for some explanation of this — surely
strange — phrase, at once there in all its conspicuity
of title. Our curiosity here, however, shall reach
no further than to what in Michelet concerns, not
the whole of Hegel's article on these philosophies,
but only its introduction ; which still counts no less
than fifteen long and closely condensed pages. In
comment of them, Michelet, nevertheless, has no
more than barely two of his own loose ones; and
his first remark is that this essay is rightly placed
at the forefront of the Hegelian philosophy, for
the reconciliation of reason and faith is " the main
problem of the self-completing consciousness of a
people." He instances, in proof, Neo-Platonism for
the Greeks, and these philosophies of Kant, Jacobi,
and Fichte for the Germans; but adds for the
latter that they still required the complement of
Hegel himself. It is probably a little too much,
however, I may remark, to find in Neo-Platonism
an intellectual understanding of the Greek religion,
and a consequent reconciliation of it with Greek
philosophy; but it is right to say that Hegel,
led up to it by Kant and the others, did aim at
such a reconciliation with Christian philosophy of
Christian religion. That, too, is right, that Michelet
(p. xx) refers to Hegel as attributing the general
movement to the principle of Protestantism (to
deduce, namely, "the truth from one's own inner
and the testimony of the spirit/'

There follows now, however (as concerns what

26 THE CATEGORIES

might only be wished), hardly a phrase further that
applies as special explanation to the introduction of
Hegel's essay ; and surely one word, in that regard at
least, might have thrown, possibly, some not unwel-
come light on that " strange " expression, " Eeflexions-
Philosophies of Subjectivity," and so served as a
key to the whole subject. Indirectly, nevertheless,
by indication (p. xx) of the content of all the three
philosophies being, as expressly named, " mere "belief,
not even of an objective dogma, but in the form of
subjective feeling" one is enabled to conjecture that
a reflexion-philosophy of subjectivity is a philo-
sophy where the philosophising subject is alone
at last with precisely no more than his own sub-
jectivity of belief and feeling, unsupported by any
ascertained principle of objective knowledge.

We can now see, then, the entire compass of
Michelet's two loose pages on the fifteen others,
long and condensed, of Hegel, though only in
introduction to, pretty well, half a volume.

3. The "Mother's Lap."

Before turning on our steps, however, as may seem
suggested, it will, we think, not badly avail to
place here, in reference to certain expressions of
Michelet in his short preface to the volume as a
whole, what we hold to be the reasonable view to
be taken on the question as to whether Schelling
is to be named, along with these others, Kant,
Jacobi, Fichte, as a predecessor of Hegel, in con-

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 27

sequence, on his part, of actual originating and
determining philosophical influence.

A first word of Michelet's here is this: "I had
proposed this " — i.e. to begin with them — " because I
knew that these four Dissertations, Hegel's earliest
writings, contained the germ of his whole philo-
sophy, specially, too, as it had just emerged from
its mother's lap, say, in the preceding historical
standpoint of the philosophy of Schelling."

Michelet's voice is about the loudest, perhaps, in
the — to me, at least — vulgar cry that Hegel comes
from Schelling. To me, indeed, this almost amounts
to a blot on Michelet's knowledge of Hegel. In
view of what we see — say, if nowhere else, in the
preceding volume of mine, and also, earlier, in the
Secret of Hegel (Chapter I.) — to have been the
fruit of the relations of the two men at Jena, we
may contend, rather, that Schelling comes from
Hegel. One may discover, if one will, signs enow
of an unconscious yielding on the part of Schelling
to the authority of Hegel, which may pardonably
found a presumption in the case. There is no doubt
that Hegel was introduced to Fichte by Schelling
in these first two Fichtian pamphlets of his; but
the quarry of Hegel's knowledge of Fichte, for all
that, was Fichte himself. As for " a mother's lap,"
that, for all of them in common, was the lap of
Kant; and if Hegel did really cling considerably
closer to that " lap " than the rest, that only showed
the depth of his inquest and the truth of his
insight.

28 THE CATEGORIES

There are many single sentences in Schelling
which can be cited for their speculative, or, even,
to say so, their Hegelian relevancy; but, loosely
in place, they admit not of reference to any Hegelian
source. Still, such references as those on p. vii
that concern the changes of philosophy, or the
unchange of the substantial unity, cannot but
attract the eye at least with a thought of Hegel.
That on p. viii, again, recognition, to wit, " of the
greatest tenderness" to Schelling on the part of
Hegel (" as of Aristotle to Plato ") " even when he
refuted him," does not go well with that searching
and irresistible scoff which we know of from the
preface to the Phaenomenologie ; while, even in
admitting failure for Schelling and success for
Hegel in "the absolute form," it is safe to see
fatal ignorance on Michelet's part of what that
form is — the Ego, namely, and the native dialectic
of the Ego. For he has these words : " In his philo-
sophical efforts Hegel proceeded always from this,
that the absolute content (Inhalt) of philosophy had
been realised by Schelling." Now we know that
the absolute form was the very vitality of Hegel,
and that, too, for the content, the matter itself. Not
even the content, then, could Hegel have allowed
to be owing by him to Schelling. Michelet is so
fixed in his own idea, nevertheless, that, later
(p. xix) we find it repeated and, to say so, even
in a tone higher. "In the Differvnz" he says,
" Hegel opposes to the system of Fichte (that
highest concentration of the Eeflexion-Philosophy),

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 29

absolute Heil (salvation, redemption), in the objec-
tive idealism of the Schellingian system."

We may add here, though only for no more than
addition, this, that at p. xii Miehelet interjects
once, that, whilst Hegel " holds the philosophy set
up by Schelling to be the completest (vollendeste)
and the last," yet, etc. ; and again this, " Hegel, so
far, mostly only took for granted the content (Inhalt)
of the Schellingian philosophy as the highest."

Now all that, as we see it, does not represent the
mind of Hegel as, in these references, it really was
to Schelling. Hegel, when, in the Differenz, he
sought to repay to Schelling some little of the
immense debt which, in a personal regard, he owed
to him at Jena, was glad to think that there was
something he could point to in Schelling as not
Fichte's, or even as beyond Fichte — Hegel, I say,
had at that very moment, at least in principle,
all his own before him. In the record of Hegel's
life, then, as well as in his writings of the period,
it can scarcely be difficult to find, quite convinc-
ingly, a proof of as much. ISTay, he must have
had, even there and then, all in his mind that he
afterwards threw out, so mercilessly, about " Schema-
tism" In a word, we hold that Miehelet, here
and elsewhere (say in editing the Natur-Phikh
sophie), always, with regard to that " mother's lap,"
gives Schelling a credit that is quite beyond the
truth. Indeed, despite all that Schelling really
was, Hegel might have been inclined to find hia
Jena patron at last, with his eager head and his

30 THE CATEGORIES

adventurous marriage, something too much of a
light weight. Had Hegel really taken admiringly
to Schelling, one would have almost expected to
find not so few letters on his part to Schelling,
the rather, too, that Schelling's letters to Hegel
show, as one seems to see, quite an empressement
of friendship. It is certainly not of friendship
that there is any sign on the part of Hegel to
Schelling in what the preface to the Phaenomeno-
logie tells us. But, on the other side, as has been
said, there is even to be found a certain submission
on the part of Schelling to a certain authority on
the part of Hegel. " I confess that as yet I do not
understand thy meaning in that thou opposest the
Begriff to the Anschauung: under the former thou
canst not mean anything else than what thou and I
named Idee, the nature of which precisely is to have
a side on which it is Begriff, and another on which
it is Anschauung." That (Schelling's Life and
Letters, ii. 124) is not much * ; but, knowing how the
three terms had with Hegel their own so very dis-
tinctive senses, one feels tempted to fancy something
alluded to in it almost of a consultation and agree-
ment between the two friends, in which, on the
whole somehow, it was not so supposable that it was
the present maker of the remark, Schelling, who
had the whip-hand in the position, as rather that
it was the other, Hegel. There can be no doubt
that the former highly valued the opinion of the
latter. " Thy letter," Schelling writes to Hegel (op.
* Unless what the words themselves imply further.

1

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 31

Git. i. 481), "has doubly delighted me, because I
have been long wishing to hear from thee again;"
while on another occasion he has (ii. 110) this:
" How altogether delighted I was to get thy letter,
it is almost impossible for me to say, nor how much
I have grieved to be for so long a time almost wholly
without any communication from thee ... of thy
work at last to appear (p. 112), I have been full of
intense expectation, what must the result be, if thy
very maturity still takes time to itself to mature its
fruits! I only wish for thee further the peaceful
position and leisure requisite for the completion of
such solid and, as it were, timeless works." When
this one so solid and timeless work came to hand, was
it only a solid and timeless rancour that could
follow that so assured and ardent expectation !
It was only before the event that he could write
such a friend this (ii. 23) : " I bring to thy notice,
dear friend, a plan, for the realisation of which on
the philosophical side I should like to enlist thee
(even detached thoughts from thy hand would be
welcome) ... I can offer and assure thee of a
considerable honorar." We may recollect, too, how
(Fichte's Life and Correspondence, ii. 356), he
(Schelling) recommended the " Differenz" to Fichte
"as a book from a sehr vorziiglichen Kopf." We
may be able to recall also how Schelling (WW. 1,
V. 170) assures the public that Dr Hegel was "an
altogether categorical man, who cannot endure the
many ceremonies with philosophy, and, only so —
straight to the point — has withal appetite."

32 THE CATEGORIES

And so we cannot but think again of that
remorseless rancour, pitiless virulence, that fol-
lowed such intensity of friendship.

Schilling's Myth-Essay was published in 1793;
his first Fichte-Pamphlet in 1794; the second in
1795; certain Journal Articles in 1795-6-7-8; the
Ideen, 1797; the Weltseele, 1798; First Sketch
of a System of Nature-Philosophy and Sequent
Introduction, 1799 ; Transcendental Idealism and
Journal of Speculative Physics (first volume), 1800 :
and we know that Hegel only began publication,
for his part, in 1801 — only began too, by the
exaltation of Schelling to the very pinnacle of the
philosophy in reign — and, further, by reason of
these very works ! That Hegel, then, came after
Schelling, and must have learnt from Schelling
is as little to be denied as the sun in the sky at
twelve o'clock, noon. But what follows for Hegel,
if, on his first publication, at that very moment
he possessed, and against Schelling possessed —
Ms secret ? — a secret that was a secret, and that
remained a secret, till, generations later, and not
so very long ago neither, it was at last finally told
at full ! What follows, I mean, as regards its
bearing on the question of the " mother's lap " ?
What follows, in that reference, even for the Natur-
philosophie ? No doubt, looking at the two relative
nature-philosophies, Schelling's and Hegel's, one
finds at once a likeness: there is largely a very
similar nomenclature. Just to see with the eyes
is to see also with the mind a determinative

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 33

priority on the part of Schelling. Of course, both
can but name, in the first instance, the very
same things, and, largely, in the very same order,
too. But there must be more than that; and no
one can be supposed to deny that there is more
than that. The work, then, let the one resemble
the other externally as it may, may, internally,
greatly differ in the one from the other. And that
is the truth. Schelling had not the Ego, the
native dialectic of the Ego ; but Hegel had, and his
work is instinct with it, proceeds upon it. There
is a Note to that effect at p. 216 of the New
Edition of the Secret of Hegel*

This will suffice now for the question of the
"Mother's Lap," as we have it generally, and not
only specially as Michelet has suggested it to us. We
return to what we began with, the very first article
in the works of Hegel, and our business with it.

4. Hegel's Earliest Writing.

The first paragraph in the works of Hegel we
have just had before us ; and I shall now, for the
purpose I have momently in hand, translate the two
or three that immediately follow, but passing over
the directly next, or second one, for a brief instant.

" The negative procedure of the Aufklarung,
whose positive side, in its idle paltering, was
without core, has contrived to get one for itself
in this way, that it came itself to see its own
negativeness, and that it partly freed itself from

* Elsewhere I quote others to remark on the essential dif-
erence of the two works.

34 THE CATEGORIES

shallowness through the sheerness and completeness
of the negative, but that it partly, also, just thereby,
can have, for positive knowledge, even so again,
merely what is empirical and finite, but what is
eternal only as something that is away elsewhere,
and so, that, for actual knowledge, it is only a
vacuum, an endless emptiness (of cognition, know-
ledge) which can be filled only with the subjectivity
of longing and dream. And what used to prove
the death of philosophy, that reason, namely,
should renounce and resign its right in the Absolute,
utterly exclude itself therefrom, and only negatively
bear itself thereto, became once for all, now, the
highest point of philosophy; and the non-ens of
the Aufklarung through consciousness thereover, has
got constituted into system.

"Incomplete philosophies, just by being incom-
plete, immediately presuppose an empirical neces-
sity ; and on its account and in its reference it is that
the side of their incompleteness gets to be under-
stood. The empirical element, what lies there in
the world as common actuality, is, in philosophies
of it, present in form of the notion [intellectual
standard] as one with consciousness and thereby
substantiated. The common subjective principle
of the above-named philosophies is partly, not as it
were a narrow form of the spirit of a small time, or
of a small number : partly the mighty spiritual
form which is their principle, has, without doubt,
reached in them the completion of its consciousness
and of its philosophical development, and so come
to be fully enunciated for cognition.

"The great form of the world-spirit, however,
which has recognised itself in these philosophies,
is the principle of the North and, religiously looked
at, of Protestantism; — the subjectivity in which
goodness (Schonheit) and truth manifest themselves

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 35

in feelings and convictions, in love and understand-
ing. Eeligion builds in the heart of the individual
its temples and altars, and sighs and prayers seek
the God whose aspect it denies itself because the
danger of the understanding is then present to which
a seen form would seem a thing, the grove but
trees. The inner must indeed become also outer,
purpose reach reality in the act, religious feeling
express itself in movement, and faith that flees the
actuality of cognition, find objectivity for itself in
thoughts, ideas, words. But the understanding
straitly separates the objective from the subjective,
so that this becomes of no worth, and is nothing ; just
as the conflict of subjective goodness (Schonheit)
must find due security for itself against the neces-
sity that makes objective what is subjective. And
what goodness so would become real, objective, and
where consciousness would seek representation, take
bodily form, or move as so fashioned — that must
wholly fall aside; for it would be a dangerous
superfluity, and might, as made by understanding
a something, become an evil: quite as the good
feeling (das scho'ne Gefilhl) which should become
passionless aspection, prove a superstition." *

* Perhaps, on the whole, the Translator is not altogether
without virtue at the last here ; but what invites remark is
"goodness" for Schonheit. Schon, in the dictionary, is fine,
fair, beautiful ; and neither word seems applicable here. The
Germans, in fact, use sclwn very peculiarly, without warning.
Carlyle translates Gothe's Schone Seele by Fair Saint, and not
at all badly. The Soul in question was, evidently, a seraph
from birth, which had inward traffic afterwards, all through
life, only with the most naive and innocent phantasies of
purity and piety. Soul-purity, soul-piety, soul-goodness can
alone translate Hegel's Schonheit as above. " Powerless
Beauty hates understanding " (see S. of H., p. 417 ; Phcen.,
pp. 24, 25). That is the same sort of ideal use of the word
and it is quite a common one.

36 THE CATEGORIES

The fifteen pages of introduction which we have
stated to occur before the subject proper of the
article itself — Kant, namely, with Jacobi and
Fichte — gets entered upon, consist of twenty such
paragraphs as the four translated ones; and we
pretty well guess how the reader — let him be as
accomplished (even Hegelianly) as he may — who-
for the first time sees them, cannot but find them.
The first one of the four, I take it, will offer the
least difficulty. The theme is plain, Eeason and
Faith ; and I daresay we are all so much advanced
(aufgeklart) nowadays, that we can without diffi-
culty understand what is meant by the change in
the question, especially as illustrated by the refer-
ence to Kant. It is, perhaps, not quite so certain,,
at the same time, that we will all agree with Hegel
in giving the victory — evidently a somehow modi-
fied one — not to Eeason, but to Eeligion, in the
contest !

It is now that we shall translate the second para-
graph (thus making five of them), in the hope that
it will lend us some additional light.

" Eeason — which in and for itself had already lost
by this, that it took religion only as something posi-
tive, and not idealistically — has been able to do
nothing better for itself than, after the battle, once
for all see itself, reach the knowledge of itself, and
recognise its own non-ness in this way, that it sets
the letter than itself (inasmuch as it itself is only
understanding) as a further in a belief beyond and
above itself (outcome of the philosophies of Kantr
Jacobi, and Fichte) ; and that it once more makes

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 37

itself the handmaid of a faith. With Kant the
supersensible is incapable of being known by
reason : the supreme idea is not as well real. With
Jacobi, 'reason is ashamed to beg, and to dig it has
neither hands nor feet ' : to man it is only given to
have the feeling and the consciousness of his ignor-
ance of the truth, simply a presage of the truth in
a reason which is merely something on the whole,
subjective and instinctive. According to Fichte,
God is something inconceivable, and unthinkable :
knowledge (to know, knowing) knows nothing but
that nothing is known, and must seek refuge in
faith. In all of them the absolute, can be, accord-
ing to the old distinction, as little against as for,
reason : it is above reason."

What is here said, in this second paragraph, taken
with what has been already seen in the first (com-
ment included), cannot, surely, be allowed to pass
without suggesting, to any one who is awake to the
time, the single question that may allowably be
held, speculatively, at least, largely to dominate it.

The Aufklarung, namely, with its absolute com-
pleteness of general information, supported, too, by
the full enlightenment of all knowledge of science,
rigorous, exact scientific truth, as it now is, tends to
•dany — certainly tends sceptically to doubt — every
item, every the most momentous and vital par-
ticular, of Religion — Eeligion as we have it through
<( the ages."

Am I wrong in venturing to surmise that this to
some extent summarises the central idea of a book
that, considering the number of editions it counts,
must have given thought, and a thought, to not a

38 THE CATEGORIES

few presently existing readers — this book, namely,
" The Foundations of Belief," by Mr Balf our ?

It is not my purpose here to enter on this mighty
theme. My present purpose, rather, is only a very
subordinate, a very casual, and, indeed, merely in-
termistic one. But what I have given in the
present reference, concerns surely what Hegel has
to say on the one big problem, the foundations of
belief ; and it may be not out of place, consequently,
with philosophical interests before us, to advertise
as much : Reflexions-philosophy, for Hegel, can only
mean, so far, evidently, from all that we have seen,
at least unsatisfactoriness as concerns the infinite
interest, on the part of all these supreme authorities,
Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, so far as their philosophies are
concerned.

If, then, we have given a true account of the first
two paragraphs in name, as regards their content
(purpose), perhaps we may be, so far, satisfied with
them ; but what of the other three of the five ?

Of these, too, the content, doubtless, as well as
that of all those that follow, must be to the same
effect : but what of the form ? For, though more
important interests have, it may be, intervened to
be spoken of, it is really the consideration of form
that constitutes our main, or rather, indeed, our sole
aim at present — Hegel's earliest writing.

And by Hegel's earliest writing we mean, not that
his earliest writing as to his own self, in Switzer-
land, say, reported to us by Eosenkranz in his Life
of him, or by Haym in his criticism, but his earliest

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 39

writing as actually by his own self published, and
actually as so published presented to us now, say, in
the first two volumes of his collected works (the two
or three essays found in vol. xvi., even that valuable
" Scepticism " among them, not being for the special
notice at present).

Of his writings in Switzerland, it may not be out
of place to mention that I remark on them in my
Notes to Schwegler, to the effect, that " they seem
constructed for an understanding that moves only
in the interior," etc. Eosenkranz, in regard at least
to the earliest of these, does not seem to reflect a
very different mind. They are, he says, " alternately
fluent and light and then again disunited and
knotted — at times, to an understanding intelligible
even to triviality, then again obscure, mystic,
motley, nay sometimes baroque." Of what seems,
the very last of them, however, " a full-length
critique of positive religion, in a MS. some thirty
sheets long," his conclusion is that, "as regards
popular vigour of diction, this work is the com-
pletest that Hegel has written." But that must
refer, surely, only to these fragmentary religious
notices then and there in Switzerland.

Haym, in regard to the same material, speaks
pretty well to the same effect. It was not to
" finished and completed forms " that Hegel came
in Switzerland, he says ; and what handles the
material is, "in the rule, a helpless — heavy, iter-
ating, and reiterating, never contented with itself,
paraphrase " — a paraphrase, moreover, that owes the

40 THE CATEGORIES

peculiarity of its aspect to the peculiarity of the
mind itself that thinks it. That mind, it appears, is
a singular compound and amalgam somehow, at
once sentimental and notional, pictorial and logical :
there are in it both the Anschauung, the intuition,
perception, of the artist and the bare thought, the
rigorous Begriff, idea, of the thinker. But, after
all, the compound and amalgam are only a would
be : there is of them no blend : " over masses of
Anschauung" says Haym, " there floats a cloud of
Begriffen"

This peculiarity of the Hegelian internality, added
to that of the respondent externality, will perhaps
explain or justify what has been alluded to as
relatively said in the Note Hegel to be found in the
Schwegler. The psychology of Haym in that sort of
double reference is very excellent all through this
third lecture of his, and, with his gifts and ac-
complishments of literary genius, the reading is
charming.

Be it, however, as it may with these reported
closet-studies of Hegel, it is not with the writing in
them that we have to do as Hegel's first. For us
here Hegel's earliest writing, his first style, shall
be that only that is for every eye in the volume or
volumes with which the collected works open.

If we except the first two paragraphs of the first
volume, it will pretty readily suggest itself now that
we call attention to the three other paragraphs as
specimens of this writing. We mean to say, indeed,
that the remaining paragraphs of this special intro-

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 41

duotion to the first article in the book, G-lauben und
Wissen, are verbally and constructively, or as diction
generally, not different from the three. Nay, more
than that, we wish it to be supposed and just taken
for granted, on the whole, that as each of the three
is, so is the volume.

The reader now, then, can form his own opinion.
He may object, to begin with, that it is only a trans-
lation he is offered; and to that there can be no
reply but that, so far as Hegel is concerned, the
translation may, in the present regard, possibly
prove more favourable to him than even his own
original would.

And, really, one feels that there is no use to
dwell here. Who, in all the world, let him be an
Hegelian, an utterly accomplished Hegelian, English
or German, no matter which, will call that intel-
ligible speech? We know what Aufklarung (the
3rd par. of all) means, what the Aufklarung is.
When we say enlightenment, we never for a
moment think of French Infidelity ; but there is no
German nowadays to whom the word Aufklarung
is not a category — a single general term that sums
up in itself and suggests, as a recognised historical
movement, eighteenth century enlightenment — as
to the truth of the Bible; what at the time was
called "exposure," "disillusionment," "opening of
the eyes," etc. N"o doubt a simple category for
this is wanted, and would be as useful in Eng-
lish as it is in German. (In a word, Aufklarung
means eighteenth century Infidelity.)

42 THE CATEGORIES

Well, if one gives oneself time — a good long
time, and takes trouble, one comes to guess that
Hegel is displeased with this movement so named,
and vilipends it as operative of death to philosophy,
whose life is in the absolute alone.

The next paragraph (par. 4 of all) is a good deal
harder ; one never comes to fix for oneself what is
that " empirical necessity " that is referred to,* and
what follows is at once too general and too par-
ticular, for all its words of meaning, to be under-
stood, either. The last paragraph seems the easiest,
and is, perhaps, the worst: it is really difficult
or impossible to find an articulate meaning of any
value in it — gradually, from clause to clause,
throughout (and they — these clauses — are sometimes
a little simplified with me).

And now the lesson from it all concerns

5. The Phcenomenologie.^

Michelet regards this work as " Propsedeutik "
to the entire relative philosophy, and even as so
understood and proposed by Hegel himself, just as
these early articles of Michelet's own editing,
"implicitly," are but propaedeutik to the Phse-
nomenologie itself. Of this work he rightly
remarks that it is "a comprehensive example of
method" — method, in regard to which Schelling,
for his part, be it as it may with the content, shall
only have vacillated through quite "a series of

* Philosophy that leaves any " empirical necessity " unex-
plained is incomplete !
t See Note to Contents.

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 43

views." It is the immanent evolution of simple
consciousness, he also rightly intimates further,
that shall constitute this method ; and in it the
"facts (Thateri) of nature and collective history"
are said to appear " as so many stages of conscious-
ness." But this — namely, to call the facts, say, of
history, "stages of consciousness" — is to bring
such matters a little too near the brink. When
history appears in the Phsenomenologie, no doubt
it is welcomed ; but an appearance carptim is not
a one, a whole of constitutive stages, and later
writers, absolute Hegelian experts, too, find Hegel's
historical references in the Phsenomenologie only
to come in, as it were, from without into the
dialectic, and to be no " Historisieren " — of the
stages of consciousness. Not that these writers
would depreciate the book : no, very far from that.
If the philosophy of Hegel has had two presenta-
tions, one Logical, to put all on that side under
the one word, and the other Pheenomenological,
then, as with them the tide of speech goes, it
would almost seem that the latter — though that
is impossible ! — is the more important. Rosenkranz,
Erdmann, Gabler, Michelet, Bolland, and a whole
host of other or later writers — all unite in recog-
nising the Phsenomenologie as the very inlet and
entrance to Hegel — almost as the key itself rather
to the very penetralia and sanctuary of the
system. Erdmann's words here are about the
briefest, strongest, and straightest to the point :
The phsenomenologie, to him, namely, is the

44 THE CATEGORIES

" Criterion whether a man will ever be able duly
and truly to judge of Hegel." In a word, he only
understands Hegel who has the cachet on him of
the Phaenomenologie ! And I am supposed to
resist this. If what I say in pages 381-85 of
" "What is Thought ? " resists this, then I do resist
it. In that regard, in fact, I am just as Hegel
himself is : I withdraw the Phaenomenologie from
its precursory position as part, first part, of the
System. "This title/' says Hegel (WW., iii. 8),
"will, in the second edition, not be again added."
Henceforth the very subject is relegated to no
more than a dozen pages of the entire Encyclopaedic
(Edn. Kosenkranz), or to somewhat less of the
Propsedeutik. The Logic, to Hegel, is the "reine
Wissenschaf t " ; or, again, it is the "Speculative
Philosophie." Hejsays (WW., iii. 33) once also in
the same connexion :

"In the Phsenomenologie I have shown con-
sciousness in its movement onwards, from the first
immediate contrariety (antithesis) of itself and its
object — onwards even to the absolute knowledge
(Wissen). This way proceeds through all the
forms of the relation of consciousness to its object,
and has for its result — the Begriff der Wissenschaf t.
This Begriff, apart from this, that it goes forth,
arises (hervorgeht) within the Logic itself," etc.

Can it be possible in any way more strongly
to say that the Logic (the second presentation)
as in itself a complete statement, is independent
of the Phaenomenologie ? If the end of the Phaa-

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 45

nomenologie is the Begriff, and if that Begriff
equally goes forth, arises in the Logic, what need
has this latter of that former? And if the latter
is the faultlessly complete, faultlessly scientific
development of the Begriff? What man will say
that the Logic is not the whole that, itself and
within itself, develops the Notion? Why, the
entire book of Frantz and Hillert, whose one
object is, " Hegel's Philosophy in Verbal Extracts,"
goes through Logic, Nature-Philosophy, Psychology,
Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of History,
^Esthetic, Philosophy of Eeligion, and finally
Philosophy itself as the highest form of truth,
and has never — no, not from beginning to end —
a word of the Phaenomenologie ! *

But in all that I say not one word is to be
understood as said against the value of the Phse-
nomenologie of itself and in itself. In that sense
the Phsenomenologie as the phsenomenologie is not
only a valuable work, but it is even a wonderful
work, a unique work; a work that for philosophy
is single and sole in its kind as yet anywhere to
be found. And I hope that I have shown not
only that I know and value the work, but that
I have exemplified as much, even here and there,
not without profit.

The thing is this : There is such a thing as the
System of Hegel, and the question is, How can we

* Some half a dozen pages extracted from what concerns
knowledge of Sense, are the sole evidence of any acquaintance
with the Phaenomenologie.

46 THE CATEGORIES

best get to know it ? "Where is it at fullest, com-
pletest, in the most consistently consequential
manner — and so most easily and intelligibly — put?
For Hegel ! surely every simplification that may
make easier reading of the writing, or readier
understanding of the System — ought to be made
welcome ! Why, it is to be said and seen that
the entire works of Hegel on the whole follow the
method and manner of the Logic alone.

It is in this reference that I have begun with
these Jena writings in the first volume of the
collective works of Hegel. I have, in a word,
exposed, in the translated five paragraphs, the
difficulty and unsatisfactoriness of Hegel's earliest
writing: and to that earliest writing the Phse-
nomenologie — in its painful infacility and crabbed
infelicity — very certainly, quite as much belongs
as Glauben und Wissen or the Differenz itself.

The practical corollary, then, is, Where should
a beginner begin ? Not, surely, with what is most
difficult, but with what is easiest and most intel-
ligible. And what is that ?

That, surely, is not the first untried adventure
and attempt, but the second well-thought, well-
proved execution and achievement: in a word it
is a conclusion and a close, and not the unbegun
that only would begin ; it is logical, and not simply
phenomenological. Haym is a man of genius, and
in all accomplishments, he is literary. I shall
quote a word or two of his on the Logic; and
whatever his value as to the matter, no one can

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 47

for a single moment take exception to his judgment
of the form,

"Here," he says, and the italics are his own,
" here are a new idea of the business of philosophical
statement and a new sense for literary form. Hegel
had only laboriously learned to work up his
thoughts into intelligibleness for others. The
Phsenomenologie — described as first part of the
system — could only leave behind it apprehensions
as to whether that which was merely introduced
by it, would be, in any way, even simply acces-
sible. . . . We would have to read, as a second
part to the Phsenomenologie, the whole Hegelian
philosophy, and that, too, just in as obscure, heavy,
and strained a vernacular as that which characterises
the first.

"(The crabbed opacity of the Frankfort Sketch
has been made obvious to us by the most telling
words, and the grateful change of the Logic to
perspicuity and symmetry, to aids and assistances
of all kinds, has been by the same means made
equally plain, S. of H. 650.) The very keenest
eye is hardly in a position (concerns the early
writing of the Frankfort Sketch) now to discern,
in the atmosphere of the pure thought, any one
single speck of life, and now again the thought
is scarcely in a position to find any way for itself
through the motley, thick-lying, scattered structures.
Not at any time surely, neither before nor after
Hegel, has a man ever again so spoken or written.
A diction, sometimes more abstract than that of
Aristotle, sometimes darker than that of Jacob
Bohme — such is the hard and thorny shell out
of which we must pluck the still crude nucleus
of the Hegelian world-idea. . . . The Phsenomeno-
logie is a psychology put to confusion and disorder

48 THE CATEGORIES

by history, and a history laid in ruins by psychology.
— In long procession there appear, before the throne
of the absolute, historical figures tricked out into
psychological spectres, and again, in turn, psycho-
logical potences in the guise of historical per-
sonalities.— Es ist in die Phaenomenologie so viel
hineingeheimnisst, wie in den Zweiten theil des
Faust (into the Phsenomenologie there is as much
in and in secreted, as into the second part of
Faust). ... A ripe discipline of thought, a
substantial inner development lay in the middle
between the two works. When Hegel undertook
now the production of a Logic, it was for him from
quite other points of view, with many other aims
and objects, and as in himself master of an in-
finitely richer material than was possibly his in
the beginning of his philosophical career. Hence
the numerous differences of the two redactions in
particulars, and of determinative decision in prin-
ciples. . . . The scholastic form which in the
Phsenomenologie was concealed by the poetic
treatment of the various stages of consciousness
and by the opaque figurativeness of the expression,
comes in the Logic designedly to the front. All
the affectation, all the precieuse and stiltedness
have disappeared from the style of the Logic.
The purpose is : there shall be speech this time as
plain and as grammatically school-simple as is only
possible. ... It is no small praise for the Logic
at last that the didactic and literary skill of its
author has proved itself not less than equal to
the philosophical and artistic plan of the whole.
The master-builder has understood how, just by
this to make his house true to its purpose that
he made it schon. His didactic art goes hand in
hand with his architectural. It is not least on
this account that the Logic is intelligible — namely,

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 49

that its articulation, both in whole and in detail,
evinces the greatest regularity and symmetry. . . .
The Encyclopaedic offers us a new interest by its
fixing, from this time out, the changed significance of
the Phcenomenologie (italicised so). The Phae-
nomenologie, in a word, realises not for itself
again, in the Encyclopaedic as published, the
place which it had already been obliged to put
up with the loss of in the jottings of the Propae-
deutik. It loses now for ever not only its place
as introductive, but not less, its designation as
First Part of the System. . . . How this change
must naturally take place, is clear. To demonstrate
the standpoint of absolute cognition in the spirit
of the system before the System could only so long
be a want as this System; the sole sufficient and
complete proof of said standpoint, was not already
in its totality made actual. The same reason which
at first necessarily led to the assumption of the
entire wealth of the absolute spirit into the Phae-
nomenologie — the same reason must now of neces-
sity put an end to the introductory role of the
Phaenomenologie, and by consequence withdraw
from it all the material with which initially the
doctrine of consciousness had been lined and padded
out. The Phaenomenologie could no longer bear
itself as preliminary, general, collective representa-
tion, and just as little as First Part, of the System.
. . . He prepares repeatedly, moreover, in the
Logic (ii. 158 ; iii. 272) for the disappearance (or
for the transference) of the Phaenomenologie into
the rank of a psychological chapter" (299, 94,
243-4, 293, 300-1, 338, 340).

Hayrn might have added, as regards all that
material which he refers to as withdrawn from

D

50 THE CATEGORIES

the Phsenomenologie, that neither was it lost, but
rather that, in a much truer, fuller, riper, and
exacter form, it offered the advantage of much
greater enjoyment and ease of intelligence in all
that in the various departments on the Logic side,
step by step, followed.

In the seventeenth volume of the " Works " there
are deliverances of Hegel himself, — in formal
reply to official consultation on the part of
Niethammer, Government, and the Ministry of
Education, — which are not to be forgotten.
Taken together, Hegel's replies, on the subject
of philosophy in universities, to the Kosnigl-
Preussischen Eegierungsrath and Professor F. von
Hammer, and on that of the teaching of philo-
sophy in Gymnasia, to the Ministry of Education,
occupy no less than thirty pages. The subjects
mentioned are Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philo-
sophy of Mind, Morals, Natural Theology, History
of Philosophy, Empirical Psychology, Ontology,
one or two others the like, but never a word of
Phsenomenologie. The dates, too, are significant;
for the one is 1816 and the other as late as 1823.
Not but that Methammer's date of October 23,
1812, may offer points of view not less significant
when put in connection with what is then said
of the various subjects; but these generally being
such as are already named, it will suffice to say no
more here than this : The entire letter runs to
sixteen pages, and in it as a whole the Phaenomeno-
logie may have — less than four lines! — in which,

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 51

too, as actual matter of study, only the three
psychological subjects of Consciousness, Self-Con-
.sciousness, and Reason are prescribed.

Of course it is an easy objection to any appeal
of mine to Haym at this time that at any other
time I have opposed to him a negative ; still, also,
and just at that other time, I have not been slack
to ascribe to him the same affirmative which I
doubt not to be his here : and, I do think, no one
will deny or resist this affirmative in its present
application — no one who is at all a pied on the
business itself.

That being : it is plain, without more words, how
it is situated with the Phsenomenologie on the one
side, and with the Logic on the other.

The thing, as I say is this, how advise the
beginner to begin?

Let him begin with the Propsedeutik ; let him
proceed to the various prefaces and introductions —
say of the Philosophy of History, of the ^Esthetick,
of the Philosophy of Religion, of the Philosophy of
Law, of the Logic, and (especially) of the Encyclo-
psedie : thence let him go to the History of Philo-
sophy, but passing over prefaces and introductions
there — for the nonce. He will then be in a con-
dition to wander where he will. But lie must not
expect yet to find all easy.

Haym, at much greater length than I have shown,
has done his best to establish the immeasurable
superiority of the Logic to the Phaenomenologie
in style, writing, in a thousand expedients of

52 THE CATEGORIES

help — bref, in an achievement that is at last called
"schon"\

For all that, Hegel's writing is Hegel's writing —
the conceivable groups of readers over it are as
the climbers on the Alpine snows: some, trem-
blingly, are giving themselves appui to a stand,,
some are at pause before a crevasse, some, axe in
hand, are cutting steps in an ice-bar, and some
with broken rope-fragments are grasping at the
snow, while others are gliding precipitately down
a couloir.

I have contented myself in this matter with
general views, and have not, as it were, nigglingly,.
with particular after particular, studied to find
fault. It would have been easy, for example, to-
doubt whether any one would not have found him-
self at once occluded by Hegel's very beginning in
the Phaenomenologie. For, I fancy, no one will
easily convince himself of the truth of the universal
that is only so scrimply and barely wrung out from
the " here " and the " now." To that, however, the full
stop in the first word of the Logic is too dangerously
near: "Pure Being and Pure Nothing is therefore
the same ! " For, abstract as one may into Being,.
and abstract as one may into Nothing, no one will
ever convincingly satisfy himself that the one (mere)
abstraction, Being, is the same as the other (mere),
abstraction, Nothing. It suited Hegel to realise
collapse into Unity of the directly self -opposed Two :
but what of us? That clump of matter in Time
and Space, which we call Nature, is to us, with.

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 53

suppression of every name, Being. With suppression
of that, too, it is also Nothing. But, even ~by reason
of that suppression, these — Being and Nothing —
•are not the same — always and for ever, rather they
.are the two self-opposing differents.

An objection more in place would be to point out
that it is largely, perhaps, to the example of the
Phsenomenologie that we owe even these peculiarities
of opacity in the general writing of Hegel that,
at least to the bulk of readers, seem to be both
crucial and critical. It is quite true that there
.are those " widerhaarige" — these so utterly repel-
lent modes of speech — those "dark and infinitely
interpretable oracle-expressions," which, in the
midst of that merely stunning " G-eklapper" of
unlocateable abstraction, reduce even the very
best-prepared brothers of the trade itself to
.agonies of effort that can only end in despair.
Now it is the Phaenomenologie that is the very
breeding and feeding ground of all that.

And yet it is just in all that that we have —
Hegel : the man who, simply in the truth of reason —
.-simply in reason — is without his peer till we go back
to Aristotle ! And, for the new light, the new
guidance, it is plainly prescriptive that it is to
Hegel we must look.

Further, now, we seem to see in Hegel himself
reflections, not without their place in determining
the subordination of the Phsenomenologie. At p. 7,
vol. iii. of his works, he formally discusses the new
principles which he will be found to have applied

54 THE CATEGORIES

to Logic. They give rise, he says, to " the absolute
method of cognition," and that method consists in
" the immanent development of the Notion." This
immanent development, again, only means that the
exposition concerned is the result of a dialectical
movement of the Notion itself, or within itself. " I
maintain," he says, " that only on this self -construing
method is philosophy capable of becoming objective,,
demonstrated science. I have, in the Phsenomenologie,
attempted, in this wise, to explicate consciousness.
Consciousness is Spirit, Mind, as concrete cognition,,
and that, too, as externally applied" We have no-
difficulty in recognising as much, for we remember
that the very first step in the Phaenomenologie is
" se%s0-certainty." We have here, then, even so far,,
and as Hegel himself puts it, two things in con-
trast. Logic on the one side and the Phaenomenologie
on the other. Each, so far, exemplifies this same
self-construing method. But there is a great dif-
ference in the application. The application in
Logic to Logic is entire : it is to the Geist as-
Geist. The application in the Phaenomenologie-
to consciousness as consciousness is only partial:
it is to the Geist only as erscheinende Geist.
The former, too, is evidently internal ; while the
latter is expressly external — only to sense, that is,
on its first or lowest stage. Even if, then, Hegel
had, in the first instance, intended the Phseno-
menologie to be, just in its own self, a finished,,
completed, entire philosophy, he must have, now,
in the second instance, reflected that it could not

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 55

any longer be granted to hold any such essential
and all-comprehending position. It must consent
now to come down and be subordinated into a
mere part.

Consideration of the whole passage in reference
will only the more and the more strengthen our
suggestion of such and such " reflections."

Then—

What directly follows all this is the express,
formal announcement that henceforth, and for the
future, the Phsenomenologie is to be withdrawn
from its position as "first part of the System of
Science " \

This is plain : to begin as the Logic begins is to
begin with, and proceed on, that single proper and
peculiar, essential principle, the dialectic of which
yields and forms the Categories: and it is the
Categories that are "the pure essentities" (spoken
of ibidem) "constitutive of the content of Logic."
Whereas neither the beginning, nor all that follows,
in the Phaenomenologie, can be characterised in
anything like the same pure, essential, integrating
fashion.

But one could not well think of the beginning
of the Phaenomenologie without thinking of its
content and milieu as well; and so to think was
to think also of what deficiencies might be altered
and of what excellences might not be allowed to be
lost. Hence what we see: the Phsenomenologie
laid aside by itself as no longer an entire Part
of, but only an inconsiderable Section in the

56 THE CATEGORIES

System: not, however, on the whole, that one
single excellence is lost. The Logic itself meets
that; and not substantially alone, but even in
instances. I observe, for example, that at the end,
p. 126, of the chapter on "Kraft und Verstand,
ErscTieinung und iibersinnliche Welt," I have pen-
cilled, "All repeated in the Logik!' For let there
be what defects there may, illustratively or even
materially, in the Pheenomenologie, still it is
pregnant with that peculiar psychological in and in
that is so specially Hegel's, and there at its freshest :
it was a master that wrote it ; nor is he much less
than a master that can read it. It does not follow,
however, that it is an A B C to begin with.

But, be it as it may with Hegel's earlier writing,
it must still be said that, in his later, it is really
impossible to see that any one to whom it is at all
given to judge of writing, can for a moment fail to
admire the choice, felicitous exactitude, the true,
right community, of expression and thought which
so wonderfully characterise it.* Word and thing
are there one. And never was a thing with such
originality and living newness of suggestion, such
admirable largeness of comprehensive penetration and
force, seen into, as literally never could it be better
or more successfully named. No reader that has
an eye need read more in irresistible proof of all
this than the very beginning of the Logik, say,
" Allgemeiner Begriff der Logik." Almost one might

* See Note to Contents.

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 57

say, with absolute accuracy, that all there, whether
in word or in thing, was, simply, purely, fully,
punctuated perfection ! The English is not con-
vertible with the German; but, if not for more
than the face of proof, we venture to translate from
this beginning a passage or two : —

" The notion of Logic hitherto rests on the pre-
supposed separatedness of the matter and the form
of knowledge, of truth and the cognition of it. It is
assumed that the ivhat that is to be known is a ready-
made world, apart from, outside of thought, indepen-
dently existent; that thought by itself is blank, that
as a form it subjects itself externally to the matter,
fills itself therewith, and only so gets a content for
itself, and becomes thereby a reality known. These
two component parts of knowledge — (for it is the
relation of component parts that is given them, and
knowledge gets put together out of them only
mechanical-wise or at highest chemical-wise) —
these two component parts, I say, rank together
in this way, that the matter is a complete ready-
made object from the first, perfectly without call to
thought for its reality; whereas thought, on the
other . hand, is something defective and deficient
that, for its realisation, stands in need of a material
or matter, and must, as mere yielding indefinite
form, adjust itself thereto. Truth is the agreement
of thought with its object, and to bring about this
agreement — for it is not of itself fact — thought
shall fit and suit itself to its object. Or thought
and object, form and matter, not left in this misty
indeterminateness of difference, but this difference
being more definitely taken, each shall be apart
from the other, a sphere of its own. Thought,
accordingly, in its receiving and forming of the

58 THE CATEGORIES

matter, never gets out of its own self ; its receiving
and fitting of itself to it, remains a modification of
itself; it never gets to its other thereby; and the
self-cognised state of affection present belongs more-
over only to it; it comes, therefore, even in its
relation to the object, not out of itself, out to the
object — this remains, as a thing in itself, absolutely
a beyond of thought. . . .

" The older Metaphysic had, in this reference, a
higher idea of thought than has become current of
late. The assumption was to it fundamental,
namely, that what of and in things comes to be
known through thought — that that alone is the
genuinely true in them; consequently, that not
they themselves in their immediacy are true, but
they as first raised into the form of thought, as
things thought. This Metaphysic, accordingly, held
that thought and the determinations of thought
are not a something alien to the objects, but rather
their very essence, or that things and the thinking
of them — how language itself declares their affinity !
— in themselves agree, that thought in its immanent
determination and the veritable nature of things are
one and the same content.

" But the reflecting understanding usurped the lead
in philosophy. And it ought to be known what this
expression — a key-phrase in other references not un-
consciously in use — what it exactly meant : there is to
be understood by it the abstracting and so separating
understanding, that adheres to its separations. So far
as it has any reference to reason, it bears itself as
common understanding and makes good its opinion
that truth rests on the reality of sense, that thoughts
are only thoughts, meaning that only perception of
sense gives them substantiality and reality; that
reason, so far as it is left to its self, originates no
more than fantasies of its own. hi this relinquish-

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 59

merit of its own self, on the part of reason, the idea
of truth is lost ; reason, namely, has become reduced
to this, that it knows only subjective truth, only
what seems — only Erscheinung, appearance, only
something to which the nature of the thing itself
has no relation ; knowledge has fallen to opinion. . . .

"So then, here, knowledge, perception, has from
the unsatisfyingness of the determinations of the
understanding, fled for refuge to sensible existence,
imagining to have in it the firm and fixed and sole
reality. But then again, as this is a cognition
that knows itself to be only a cognition of ap-
pearance, its incompetence is confessed — even pre-
supposed indeed, as though there were positive
knowledge, not of the things, in themselves, truly,
but still of things within the sphere of appearance
(Erscheinung) ; as though, with all, so to speak, only
the sorts of the objects were different, and the one
sort, the things in themselves, namely, did to be
sure not, but the other kind, the appearances, cer-
tainly did — fall into cognition. As though there
were correct knowledge allowed a man, but with
the intimation added that, all the same, he could
see, not truth, but only untruth. Absurd as this
would be, equally absurd were a true cognition that
perceived not the object as it is in itself. . . .

"The more consequently carried out transcen-
dental Idealism has recognised the nullity of the
spectre still left standing by the Critical Philosophy,
The Thing -in-itself, this abstract shade that has bid
adieu to every particle of constituent content what-
ever— has recognised, I say, this nullity and been
minded completely to destroy it. This philosophy
even made a beginning with reason — reason alone —
in development of its principles out of its own self
[Fichte]. But the subjective manner of this attempt
suffered it not to come to the completion. In the

60 THE CATEGORIES

sequel this manner was given up and with it also said
beginning and the realisation of a Pure Cognition
[Schelling].

"A substantial material basis is supposed to be
required for it (Logic) from without. But logical
reason itself is the Substantielle or Eeelle that embraces
within itself all the abstract elements, and is their
coherent substantive, absolutely concrete unity.
What, then, uses to be named a matter needs not to
be far to seek ; it is not the fault of the object of
Logic if it is to be supposed substanceless, but only of
the way in which it is understood " (28, 29, 31, 32, 33).

This — while I hope it fulfils the intention of its
quotation, as concerns, namely, Hegel's power at
once of seeing and saying — is at least suggestive
in the special discussion precisely here in the
immediate reference to the Phsenomenologie. In
resumption, we may be reminded that if the Phae-
nomenologie ends in the notions of Wissen and
Wissenschaf fc, it is the Logik that is authoritatively
pronounced to le the pure "Wissen and the pure
"Wissenschaft — even a purer Wissen and a purer
WissenscTiaft — nor any longer, like the other, only
preparatory and provisional, but now at length final,
a thing in itself, finished, complete, full, absolutely
independent of anything whatever before it, after it,
or in any way beside it. Why, Logic is declared to
be — if not exactly here, then elsewhere — and always
in effect, the " reine Wissenschaft" nay, as, under its
name and designation, proper and specific, even the
"speculative Philosophic" — to what end, then, this
unnecessary, and encumbering, and stumbling, and

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 61

obstructing, and mystifying preliminary ? Con-
sciousness ! "Why, even here Wahrheit, pure truth,
which we are given to understand the Logic to be,
is characterised as "the pure self -evolving self-
consciousness " ; and this is followed by, so to speak,
an absolute absolutifying of the Logic as alone the
principiell ground every way. Nay, the Logic, he
tells us (p. 35) is to be understood as the system of
pure reason, as the realm of pure thought — as God :
" This realm is the Truth as it is without or veil
or hull — absolute; and so it may be said that this
is the Darstellung Gottes, the ^Expression of God as He
is in His eternal Essence before the creation of Nature
and a finite Soul " (italicised so) !

Or, speaking with less extravagance, and still of
Logic — of Logic alone, and not possibly of anything
only Phsenomenologic — we have from him (p. 63)
this : —

"The beginning must be an absolute, or what is
here synonymous, an abstract, beginning ; and so it
can presuppose nothing, must be mediated by nothing,
nor have a ground ; it shall be itself rather ground
of the entire science." — Ego !

There is not a word here — no, nor a thought — of
any thing being necessary to mediate Logic, to be
presupposed for Logic. And still farther away, with
Logic alone, and with never a warning of " conscious-
ness" is what immediately follows that Darstellung
Gottes: —

"Anaxagoras is applauded as the man who first

62 THE CATEGORIES

spoke the thought, that vov?, Thinking, is to be
named as the principle of the world, as the inner-
most being of the world. He has thereby laid the
ground for an intellectual intuition of the universe,
whose pure form must be Logic!'

Then this, again: if it only needs a scratch to
expose the Tartar under the warranted Gaul, what
more is required here, page after page, than just
a touch to lay bare the one secret, the single secret
of Hegel that lies in the Ego, say, even in the Ego
of Fichte? Of course, as such, the revelation of
this lies elsewhere ; but there are points indicative,
so far, even here.

"As Science, the Truth is the pure self -develop-
ing self-consciousness, and has the form of the Self,
that the in and for itself Be'ent is known notion, but
that the Begriff as such is the in and for itself Be'ent.
This objective thinking then, is the content of pure
science ; and this pure science, therefore, is so little
formell, is so little in want of the matter for an
actual and true cognition that its content, rather, is
alone the absolute truth, or if we would still use the
word matter, the true matter, — a matter, however,
to which the form is not something merely external,
inasmuch as this matter rather is pure thought,
and consequently the absolute form itself (35). —
The absolutely pure infinite form is enunciated as
Self -Consciousness, Ego (italicised so; WW. xv. 621).
— Kant made the deep observation that concerned
a priori synthetic principles, and recognised the
unity of self -consciousness as their root — recognised,
that is, the identity of the Notion (Begriff) with
itself : the deduction, then, should of necessity have
been the demonstration of the transition of said

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 63

simple unity of self-consciousness into these, its
characteristic forms and differences (Lk. iii. 282). —
The Categories demonstrate themselves to be
nothing else than the series of the evolution-forms
of the Notion (Phil, of Eel. ii. 433).— Cognition of
the Infinite Form, i.e. of the Begriff (Lk. i. 54). —
Kant's main thought (Hauptgedanke) is to vindicate
the categories for self-consciousness as the subjective
Ego (53). — In the apprehending of the opposites in
their unity or of the Positive in the Negative — in
that consists the Speculative (44). — That by which
the Begriff leads itself further is the Negative that
it has in itself (43). — This, of the Categories, is their
inner Negativity, their self-moving soul, the prin-
ciple of all natural and spiritual life " (44).

As intimated, all that concerns Categories, the
Infinite Form, the Notion, Ego, etc., has been on our
part matter of exhaustive demonstration elsewhere ;
and, as, so evidently largely occurrent in the Text
under view, is used now rather only by way of a
reminder of proof ; but it ought not to escape notice
that the Ego, alone by itself, is pretty well the
key to it all. When it is said, for example, that
Hegel's one principle is Inner Negativity, what is it
that is meant thereby but that one thing in all the
world, that entity of entities, which is at once, in a
single concrete, a single inseparable, self -coherent
life, Difference in Identity and Identity in 'Differ-
ence— Ego.

At the same time it is to be said that even in the
.Text before us there is a certain use, not so much
perhaps of this "Negativity," say, as simply of nega-
tion— negation itself : a use which, as I incline

64 THE CATEGORIES

to think, has to some extent misled, it may be,
even the very best and most competent of students.
Schwegler, for example, of whom I need not say
here what I have said again and again of him
elsewhere, has, as quoted in The Secret of Hegel at
p. 607, this :—

"The lever for the development is the dialectic
method that advances by negation from one notion
to another. Negation is the vehicle of the dia-
lectic march. Every previously established notion
is negated, and out of its negation a higher, richer
notion is won. This method, which is at once
analytic and synthetic, Hegel has carried out
throughout the whole system of the Science."

Gabler, too, generally regarded as about the
student of the Phcenomenologie, can, in some of his
earliest sections, be quoted to a similar effect : —

"From one stage or form of concrete conscious-
ness, there is an advance further, because it has
manifested itself as a knowledge or knowing that
self-sublates, or self-contradicts its own self, and
accordingly does itself negate assumption and pre-
supposition of the truth: this constitutes the
Negative side of the progression. Directly, how-
ever, from this negative result, there comes up a
new form of consciousness, to which now the course
of the consideration turns, or, rather, has already
risen : and in this consists the Positive of the
movement. — Each transition exhibits this negative
and positive side. — This movement of consciousness
has these three moments : 1. Immediate certainty —
the immediate existence of the object ; 2. Negation
of the certainty — the non-ness or otherwiseness of

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 65

the object; 3. Keturn to the first unity of cer-
tainty: (1) something is so; (2) no, it is not so;
(3) but yes, it is so/'

Now there is no denying that this is the cur-
rently usual manner of naming or explaining the
dialectic of Hegel ; and quite as little is there any
denying of the equally usual supposition that it is
Hegel's own. And not, surely, without the pos-
sibility of allegation in proof. The early pages of
the larger Logik, for example — already, as it were,
a Text before us — offer us at once perhaps the very
best version of any such possibility — as quotation
(say from p. 41) may show : —

" In order to win the scientific progression and its
quite simple cognition, all that essentially we have
to strive to is — the recognition of the logical dictum
that the negative is equally positive, or that the
self-contradictory passes not into nullity, into
abstract nothing, but, essentially, only into the
the negation of its particular content, or that
such a negation is not all negation, but the nega-
tion of the particular thing concerned, and conse-
quently it is a particular negation ; that therefore
in the result there is essentially contained that
from which it is the result."

Other expressions in regard to the negative here
are these: —

"Each form, in realising itself,, at the same time
resolves itself, has its own negation for result—-
and passes therewith into a higher form. — In that
the resultant, the negation, is a particular negation,
it has a content. It is a new but higher, richer

E

66 THE CATEGORIES

notion than the preceding one; for it has become
richer by its negation or contradictory ; contains it
therefore, but also more than it, and is the unity
of it and its contradictory."

These quotations will be found to be at once
full and exact. Compared with those of Schwegler
and Gabler in the same dialectic reference, they
will appear, I doubt not, not different. Still they
are different. In Hegel the negative is a negative
secundum quid: in Schwegler and Gabler it is a
negative simpliciter. That is, the difference between
the two negatives is that the one is a qualified
negative, and the other an unqualified negative,
a sheer negative, a negative "sans phrase." But
the latter cuts out the very purpose of the former,
and leaves with us, instead of a rationale vital and
internal, only a process mechanical and external.
If A is negated simpliciter to get a B and B is
negated simpliciter to get a C, what possibility can
there be of community between them? Each is
itself, but only a self-same itself, an abstract itself ;
and transition, movement, there can be none. A
qualified negative has already an Inhalt, a content,
and so already within itself an other. Hegel him-
self, as we see, accentuates this, that the negation
has an Inhalt, a content. And an Inhalt, a content,
is not out of place here ; for Hegel had himself an
Inhalt, a content; even in what — as quoted, he
spoke, he actually had an Inhalt, a content. He
knew his own thoughts. But neither Schwegler
nor Gabler knew them for him. He knew what he

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 67

hid ; while they, for their parts, knew of it nothing.
Of any double in their consciousness, they were
guiltless. With such words and such authority
before them, the simpliciter of the negative was —
for them — simply involuntary. But Hegel, for his
part, however much it suited him to put such a
colour on his dialectic, and so to make, as it were,
even externally prominent the negative it involved,
.and necessarily involved, could not, in the teeth of
the truth within him, have either any thought or
.any will for more than a negative secundum quid.

Now what was this truth within him ?

I submit that it was this : In place, namely,
of this supereminent or superprominent negative
that led, as we have seen, to a merely external and
mechanical process in explanation of the dialectic
of Hegel, I submit that there is only one true
explanation : — Reference to the unity of a single
living pulse, the actual pulse of actual living
thought, the Notion, as suggested by Kant, as
further developed by Fichte, but by a dialectic that,
unfortunately for him, as well as for Schelling, was
only external — in a word the Ego, really Fichte's
Ego, but raised by Hegel into the concrete Ego
which, left unnamed by him, and hid from others,
was to him alone of all mankind the Secret that
•developed the Categories and so the whole. In
our last extracts, just see the ever-present Ego !

Yes, that was his Secret, and it was already, in
the main lines of it, complete within him when,
from Frankfort, a humble family-tutor, he wrote —

68 THE CATEGORIES

adroitly wrote, with Bamberg in his mouth, but
Jena in his eye — to his now powerful friend, the-
illustrious philosopher, the famous Professor
Schelling, and received in return the generous
call that made him! That was his secret, and he
carried it with him from Frankfort, through Jena,
Bamberg, Niirnberg, Heidelberg, on to Berlin ; and
there it remained with him to the last — in a silence
impenetrable, an adamantine concealment. Just to
think of all that length of time, and of all these
circumstances— nay, just to think of him at Jena
only — just to think of that reticent jaw of his all
the time there that — -with his own thoughts, and his
own opinion of the man — he worked for Schelling !
And there is no relenting even in his written
books — how grim must not that remorseless jaw
of his have come down on the poor friend whose
"absolute" was only the "night in which, as we
say, all cows are black ! " No wonder that there
was in Schelling a lifelong rancour ! It was
absolutely his own act, that one little word that, im-
pressed only a negative on his dialectic ! No doubt
it could be said — no doubt the negative was
indispensable, for how could one category be
derived from another without a negative — how,
without a negative, could there be two in the
principle itself — the one was not the other ! And
so, with infinite sang froid, he could perorate —
endlessly discourse and perorate — on a negative
secundum quid that he could not but foresee — with
ajshuckle foresee— would, in other hands, become-

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 69

a, negative simpliciter, to lure and divert from that
pease-weep's nest of his, the possible passenger!'
Why, he had already in his hands a proof. We
have seen what G-abler made of the negative; and
Hegel saw it : he acknowledges receipt of his
relative book, and profusely thanks him therefor.
Nor was Gabler without his reward : he got Hegel's
Chair ! *

But there is no occasion to refer to others ; what we
have in Hegel himself is of sufficient quality in
itself quite generally to mislead into a simple
negative as constituting the lever of the Hegelian
dialectic. What, in fact, are we to see in that one
essential point of view to which we are directed
by Hegel himself (6, 7; seq.) — namely, that what is
concerned is a new idea of "scientific treatment
generally (ein neuer Begriff wissenschaftlicher
Bahandlung liberhaupt) "—in a word, the immanent
Entwickelung des Begriffes? "Only so, I main-
tain," he says, "is philosophy capable of being,
objective demonstrated science " — that is " the
absolute method des Erkennens (cognition)." If
when so far, he had stopped and only added one
word — Ego — Begriff is Ego, he would have at once
flashed the whole matter into the general conscious-
ness— saved himself thereby the infinite trouble
of actually volume upon volume of a hopeless

* Gabler's book, further on, and as a whole, may be quite,
Hegelianly, unexceptionable ; still the point .remains as
Schwegler has it — that that negative of Hegel's was taken quite
generally simpliciter, Gabler's quoted text is precise enough.

70 THE CATEGORIES

dialectic — and others ? — What would he have
saved others — Lifetimes of Struggle!

But he adds no such word — he goes off to dis-
tances unimaginable, and summons to his side all
manner of new potences — or say all manner of the
oldest, mightiest potences — Understanding, Reason
itself, nay, G-eist ! but in new and magical roles.
We quote : —

"The understanding determines, and holds the
determinations fast ; Reason is negative and dialec-
tical, because it breaks up the determinations of
the understanding into nothing; it is positive,
because it gives birth to the universal, and holds
in it as well the particular. In the same way as
understanding is regarded as something separate
from reason, so, too, is dialectical reason to be
taken as something separate from positive reason.
But in its truth reason is G-eist, which, higher than
both, is reason that understands, or an understand-
ing that reasons. That Geist is the negative, that
which constitutes the quality as well of dialectical
reason as of understanding ; — it negates what is
as simply one, and thus sets the determinate differ-
ence of the understanding, it equally breaks it up,
and so then is dialectical. It remains not, how-
ever, in the nothing of this result, but is in it
equally positive, and so has restored therewith the
first simple one, but as a universal that is within
itself concrete ; under this is not subsumed a given
particular, but in said determining and in the
resolution of it the particular has already at the
same time determined itself (7). — Philosophy, if it
would be science, cannot, borrow its method from
a subordinate science, as ma thematic is, just as
little as content itself with categorical assurances

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 71

of inner intuition, or with raisonnements from
grounds of external reflection. But it can only be
the Nature of the Content itself which moves in
scientific cognition, in that, at the same time, this
own proper Reflexion of the Content it is which
itself first sets and makes its determination (6).
— This geistige (spiritual) movement which gives
itself in its simple oneness its determinateness,
as in this latter, again, it gives itself equality
with itself, and is so the immanent development
of the Notion — is the absolute method of knowledge
(cognition), and at the same time the immanent
soul of the content itself " (7).

Now, would any one after all these wonders —
this absolute new method in which the Inhalt, the
thing itself, was, by its own movement of its own
self, to evolve and develop all — would or could any
one get sight of any other conclusion than this : That
no one, with, as he said, Mangel an Vorarbeitern,
absence of foreworkers, and even after a vieljah-
rigen Arbeit, a many-yeared labour, as he also said,
could of himself and in himself, come to this new,
hitherto unknown, and unexampled machinery !
Without premises the thing was impossible, were
the man a giant, but still a man ! Ah, yes. Hegel
had premises; Kant and Fichte were still before
him ; and all that he did — at least for his own start
— was to see into the Ego of Kant and Fichte its life,
its own movement, its own immanent intellectual
dialectic !

But to see this was his own — it involved a stride
that took the world, even the creation of the world,

72 THE CATEGORIES

in — and he would keep it to himself. Kudos!
what could be more extraordinary and wonderful in
its reach than such a "fetch " as that ? It was no
use to speak of Schelling — but it was precisely that
which Kant, which even Fichte, with all his neigh-
bourhood to it, had missed.* Hegel would keep it
all to his own self in absolute silence; and, in
absolute silence, he would work it all out for
himself !

That was a grim silence — that, years and years
long, was a grim labour in the dark. Hegel would
be himself — Hegel would be — among them all —
himself ! Christian Kapp was it, that could speak
only- of Napoleon and — Hegel ?

Napoleon might have been sparing of his con-
fidence, reserved, reticent, concealed ; but Napoleon
could never have been more sparing of his con-
fidence, never more reserved, reticent, concealed,
than Hegel was. Just look to this— and it is said
at p. 14 of the Phsenomenologie : —

" The living Substance is that Existency which is
in truth Subject, or— what is to say the same thing —
which is in truth actual, real, only in so far as it is
the movement of the setting (constituting) of its
own self (des Sichselbstsetzens), or the mediating
with its own self of the Self-becoming other to its
own self (des Sichanderswerdens). It is as Subject
the pure unal Negativitat, even thereby the going
into two, into duality, of the unality, or the

* What even they had of it, Schelling deviated from, turned
his back on, to find his distinction in the Naturphilosophie
(see S. of H., p. 216, n.).

THE DOUBLE STATEMENT 73

con trapesing Verdoppelung (endoullement) which
is again the negation of this equipollent dif-ference-
ness and its contraposingness : only this restoring
of equality to itself or the reflexion in the other-
wiseness into itself — not an original [primarily
existent] unity as such, or immediate [spontaneous]
as such, is what is True. It is the becoming of its
own self, the circle which presupposes its end as at
once its aim and its beginning, and only through
that, its constituting process and its end, is actual
and real "—(Ego, I-Me) !

That paragraph — and he has a thousand the
like — only exhibits the difficulties which Hegel is
put to in order to find expressions that shall convey
the Ego in its own natural dialectic movement, and
yet conceal and secrete it into the guise of an inde-
pendent new logical movement in philosophy !

Hegel, alone of all mankind, shall demonstrate
the creation of the universe by the immanent
evolution of the Categories and their externalisation
into Nature : the glory of this he will share with
no man ! For, if he does at times name Ego, he
still keeps it for all that to himself !

It is really extraordinary — did he actually sup-
pose that he would never be found out ?

CHAPTEE III

CATEGOKIES AND PHYSICS

WHAT the matter has come to in my hands, then, is :
The principle of the Ego ; Evolved into the Cate-
gories ; which, complete, are Externalised into
Nature.

The Categories are the first brood-thoughts : they
pervade nature and are constitutive of it. It is only
since Kant, and through him (with those after him)
that they have come to this reach. Here, however,
we take them up simply as they are in the hands of
Hegel ; who, says Schwegler, " sought, 1, completely
to collect them ; 2, critically test them ; 3, dialecti-
cally develop them, the one from the other, into
an internally articulated system of pure reason."
Schwegler cannot be said to have specially chosen
the word " sought " ; but in so new and rare a
matter it is, surely, somewhat unlikely that Hegel
shall have done more than seek. His feat may well
be admirable ; but at that period — ay, at this period
— such a consummation were in the first instance
conceivably possible to no man. This shadows out

74

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 75

an inquest into these Hegelian categories in their
turn, precisely such as Schwegler claims for Hegel
himself into Categories at all. We have in this
direction the advantage, too, at present of a new test
in judgment. Hegel does not grudge to tell us often
enough of his dialectic ; but he never speaks of it
like Fichte, as a simple evolution of the Ego. We,
then — should we by mediation of the Ego's own
dialectic internality (in place of Fichte's externality
of Limit) evolve the Categories — we, then, I say,
might apply our own feat in test of the feat of
Hegel. Ah, that were a feat comparable only to the
feat itself of Hegel himself. That feat took a life-
time. With all that has been suggested, or even all
that has been realised, the happy man who in these
days can promise himself such a lifetime is, we may
be apt to fear, still to seek. It is to be considered
here, indeed, that, even to do no more than take up
the Categories of Hegel and examine them, in a
usual way, and just as we are — ^that, if complete,
and full, and thorough, would be tantamount to an
expository and critical repetition of — with few
exceptions — the whole twenty or twenty-one
volumes ! Nay, more : would not that be tanta-
mount to a necessity, or, at least, a demand, for
an open-eyed and an open-handed translation of not
less than every one volume of the whole twenty-
one ? The least of all that, plainly, is no affair of
the moment : still — leaving Physics to a section 2
here — it may be in place, and prove useful, to take
up, for something of explanatory remark, section 1.

76 THE CATEGORIES

1. The Categories.

Failing said translation, said inquest into Hegel's
relative work as a whole, and especially said sug-
gested new evolution of the categories formally from
the Ego itself, we shall content ourselves with some-
thing no more special than what may be less or
more applicable in the way of general remark.

Of Quality, naturally to begin with it, I have
somewhere ventured to say that, in the alertness of
a beginning, it (that section) is almost already equal
to a very armoury of all Hegel's usual means and
expedients. The whole progress of Hegel through
Being, Nothing, Becoming, Origin, Decease, Eeality,
Negation, Something, Other, Being-in-itself, Being-
for-other, Specific nature, Distinctive property,
Limit, Finite, Infinite, etc., can plainly, as discussed,
be called nothing else than an affair of the Cate-
gories. Being and Nothing, for example, the special
stumbling-blocks of all beginners, are, I should say
now, as subjects of explanation, in the Secret of
Hegel, too prolonged and too diffuse in explanation,
even for explanation. Nay, after all that has lately
been so specially said, it will possibly be thought,
I doubt not, that when Hegel begins so, it is im-
possible to see that he begins with that alleged Ego
at all. It may be in some measure reconciliant,
however, if I say that to start with Ego — simply
with Ego and no more — is to start with an esse, a
content, that is as yet no more than Bsing, plainly
Being, but still Being that for any esse in it, is as

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 77

plainly Nothing. Then Being and Nothing, the one
correspondent to the /, and the other to the Me, say,
fall, in the dialectic of the Ego, even as the I and
the Me fall into the I — -they, too, fall into the amal-
gamating concrete of the Becoming.

This, as a suggestion, is to be taken in the mean-
time for no more than it is worth.

Now in this way there is an Esse put at once into
the hands of Hegel, most welcomely accordant with
a beginning of metaphysic as metaphysic just in the
ordinary outlook ; and, probably, it will not be found
difficult similarly, and on similar terms, to link on
the other categories mentioned or otherwise occur-
rent.

What has been said on Quantity and may be said
on Measure, is not such as to exact, we shall pre-
sume, any very dissimilar treatment.

Under Wesen it is impossible to exaggerate the
felicity of the discussion given to Identity, Difference,
and Contradiction ; and yet it is precisely here that
we have the loudest — almost, indeed, the virulent —
reproach to Hegel. Eeally about the most incisive
of Hegel lies there ; and I think we may point to
Substance, Cause, and Eeciprocity under Relation
as of similar value. The transition of Eeciprocity
into the .Notion can, at least, surely, be called
happy.

In the whole treatment of formal logic, which
follows, no doubt, there is in a certain way no ad-
vance beyond Aristotle, and yet it will have to be
acknowledged that even here the Categories have led

78 THE CATEGORIES

to a number of new hits at once striking and welcome.
This formal logic as a whole Hegel views as
subjectivity, and it passes, in his way of it, into
objectivity ; which again is constituted by the Ideas
of Mechanism, Chemism , and Teleology. And perhaps
as much as this suggests some of the strongest, if
not the strongest, objections to the general work of
Hegel. Mechanism and chemism, for instance, to
what end treat these so now, when their apparently
express discussion is so immediately to follow under
Nature ? Nay, reminded of as much, it may be
asked, if logic, as logic, is subjective and within,
are mechanism and chemism, as parts of it to be
themselves foisted into subjectivity and the within ?
Perhaps one might see a way or ways of somewhat
reconciling this, but relative statement were not pre-
cisely in call at present. For that matter, as already
intimated, indeed, we do not mean it to be supposed
that Hegel in his work is either infallible or fault-
less. That of any human operation is not a thing
to be said or even dreamed ; and we know that
finite edges do show, or seem to show, again and
again, and yet again, through the work of Hegel ;
as, for instance, transitions are to be found in it at
times which are merely pictorial, or which at other
times, are only so wilily won, that they are dis-
trusted or rejected as — just too good ! *

* I had a friend who used to object to me this. Hegel was
to him a man all too cunning of fence. There were devices in
him suggestive of the conjuror rather than the philosopher : it
is just possible that the " charlatan " derives thence !

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 79

So far of Logic. Nature and Intelligence (Spirit)
are supposed also to be instinct with Categories or
the Categories — Nature raised through all its forms,
from the most external element, space, to the most
internal element that is found in nature, life — In-
telligence, similarly followed from the lowest form
of the natural soul up to the absolute spirit — but,
really, they are there so much in their own substan-
tiality as we know them, that it is from that sub-
stantiality, and not from categories at all, that they
are to be judged.

Something of this we may see again. In the
meantime, as regards the Categories, it may be
suggested, that, for the relative understanding of
them, there are summaries enough of them, short
enough and summary enough, in the Propsedeutik
and in the first edition of the Encyclopaedie, readily
available for any student who would have them all
at a glance before him. Indeed, in my last volume,
to say nothing of — shall I say — the possible profits
otherwise therewith communicated, there is not a
little in that way implied and so more or less
effected.*

* The title of the first volume of the Encyclopaedic, as end-
ing in the clause Zum Gebrauch seiner Vorlesungen (for use
with the Lectures) guarantees summariness. No student of
Hegel should neglect this edition. I may mention here, too,
that, in his A us friiherer Zeit, Arnold Huge expressly runs
through the Categories in a most expeditious and instructive
fashion : the most of this that applies here, too, I have trans-
lated in my article Arnold Ruge, in the British Controversialist
for May and June 1870.

80 THE CATEGORIES

2. Physics.

It is so, then, in a single sentence (Ego into
Categories, and these Externalised*) that we have
the rationale of origin of the world on the part
of metaphysics; but what of physics? — is there
a single comprehensible suggestion of a rationale
of origin, a beginning, there ?

Of course there is the Nebular Hypothesis which,
as first started by Wright, Kant, Herschel,
Laplace, or other, is existent still, if by later
hands, as naturally to be expected, somewhat, in
extent or degree, modified. In some of these later
hands, at all events, we are much struck by the
emphasis that is expended on the insistence, not
so much of a beginning, as of a summary end.
A summary end — an end of all things ! This poor
unfortunate world ! It was scarcely an honour for
any one of us, men, erect, rational, as we are — it
was scarcely an honour for any one of us to have
been born into it !

But perhaps, after all, it is not as bad as that —
perhaps our reading has been too much wholesale —
perhaps it is only our own solar system that has
the nail -scratch, and the rest are untouched ? But
no — we look again, and we really do not seem to

* To this "single sentence" I do not suppose I have ever
given a better form of expression than as early as the date No-
vember 9, 1871, in my First Lecture on the Philosophy of Law ;
namely (see there, p. 5) thus : — " The Ego develops into its
own Categories, and these being complete, externalisation
results from the one common law'^that is, mind as mind,
internality as internality, is turned inside out bodily — Nature j

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 81

find it so ! " It therefore follows," we find said,
"that as energy is constantly in a state of trans-
formation, there is a constant degradation of energy
to the final unavailable form of uniformally diffused
heat; and that this will go on as long as trans-
formations occur, until the whole energy of the
universe has taken this final form." This, we read
in English so, and in French, but by the same
hand, thus : " Est-il en droit de se considerer comme
sachant quelque chose, celui qui ignore ces decou-
vertes modernes, si magnifiques dans leur simplicity
qui nous permettent de determiner la constitution
et la composition chimique, non-seulement du soleil,
mais des e"toiles, et des nebuleuses les plus eloignees
de nous; de pr^ciser 1'origine exterieure de Tali-
men t qui nous nourrit et du combustible qui nous
chauffe ; de comprendre la non-permanence de
Tetat de choses actuellement existant sur notre
globe; de retracer 1'histoire passee de la terre
et de la lune, et de prevoir, au moins en partie,
1'avenir qui attend 1'univers physique." It may be
possible to point to the colour of qualification or
limitation in what is said here, either in French or
English; but when it is compared — all that there
is of it (" globe," " terre," " lune" " en partie" etc.) —
with all that there is else of unequivocal assertion,
it is surely pretty plain that it is a " whole " that
is concerned, and that that whole is the " universe."
There can be no doubt of it — what is concerned
is the " universe," " 1'univers physique," and in it,
and in its regard, once more " la mort " ! — " la mort

F

82 THE CATEGORIES

sans phrase " ! And we owe it all to the decouvertes
modernes. Est-il en droit de se considerer comme
sachant quelque chose, celui qui ignore ces decou-
vertes si magnifiques dans leur simplicite ? Even
as we are aware that it is really an ingenuousness
of simplicity that asks the question, we cannot
hesitate to agree with at least its nett burden.
That nett burden is M.E. — the mechanical
equivalent — and positively he who in these days
should find himself ignorant of it, would not, in
general estimation, be very far wrong if he felt
himself "not in his rights to consider himself as
knowing anything." " Wells on dew " was once on
a time pretty well a favourite reading, and Sir John
Herschel on natural philosophy still, we doubt not,
is such. But for the interest of a sound, strikingly
resultful, variously comprehensive theory, we know
not any other within the memory of the oldest
among us that can, in name, surpass Energy. Still,
we are not sure that we can say that, as it were,
the " Corsican Boswell " on its cap should be : Here
see the e'tat primitif as well as the dtat ultime of the
physical universe ! We have certainly an honest
admiration for the simple admiration that is loud
in the shout ; but we are, as certainly, without the
conviction that will allow us to join in it.

But — plainly — properly to judge of it here, we
must take along with it the whole of the Nebular
Hypothesis. And with this hypothesis, may not a
beginning, the beginning, be said to be made from " a
primordial vaporous matter diffused through space " ?

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 83

Absolutely, however, is it not to be said at once
that a beginning so begun is no beginning : not one
element in it is intelligibly a First. Space, for
example — or Time, Yapour — each, as there, as
given, is but an unintelligible abstract. As we
say of the first, "Giebt es einen Baum" (does it
so happen, then, that there is to be found, par
hazard, such a thing as Space) ? So we may ask
•of Time — so we may ask of the Vapour : "for
thinking requires to know the necessity" Perhaps
it may be in perception of this that we have the
gracious aside to all the three, Space, Time, and
Vapour, "This" (of them) "does not drive the
•Creator out of the field ! " Seeing that any further
the whole labour of the handiwork is left to the
Vapour alone, we may be allowed to suppose that
.all up to that is graciously granted to — a god?
The etat primitif, the primitive state can only
mean that: infinite space, infinite time, and an
infinite gas. "We say infinite even of the gas ; for
the dark backward and abysm of time can have
allowed, by its own infinity in the infinity of space,
at least a tantamount infinity of spread to the
gas. But that is no beginning. These infinites
.are somewhat ticklish matters, and call for infinite
.allowances. We cannot wonder that Physics should
be demure in regard to them — though we may —
with what else is before us — regret it! For so
Physics can allow us no more than, say, a merely
epic middle with, what is only consonant, a merely
epic god — deus ex machina !

84 THE CATEGORIES

But to take in hand the gas only, what are we to-
say of it? Well — at once — a very burdened gas,
a very heavily burdened gas, it must have been,.
in the very first moment of its existence: for it
must have already held in germ — all ! It must
have been pregnant, seminally pregnant, with
illimitably more than even the vegete young Adam
whom Jean Paul saw exult, in the face of his Eve,,
with exclaim : " By heaven I walk up and down,,
girt with a seed-bag that contains the seeds of all
the nations; and I carry the repertorium and
treasure-chest of the whole human race ! " Even
such a repertorium, infinitesimally filled up, the
first original gas must have been ; * but how could
anything else have followed ? One and sole, a.
single system, a single entity throughout all space,.
where was there provision for the faintest stir in
it ? Occupant of all space, from end to end, from
length to length, from breadth to breadth, had it
had any name under either, it had not room even
for the relief of a turn ; and give it heat, where was
that heat to go to — unless to itself ; how was emission,.
how was any bubble, how was any bubble of an

* This is to assume in the gas a vis insita in account of the
whole ultimate development. Mr Darwin is very obstinate
in that, for his development, he will owe nothing to any
influence from within, but all to influence from without — as
bringing it nearer gravitation, I suppose. Whereas philo-
sophy, quite as much for evolution as Darwin, will certainly
have involution as well ; and Aristotle pointedly says the
truth as usual, that there must be a principle from within
to bring movement and concert into things : &s dtov lv rots
oftcriv virdpxeiv TU>' diriav TJTIS Kiv-^ffei /cat ffvvd^ei rd Trpdy/Jiara.

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 85

ooze, in a cram-full whole — possible ? One and sole,
it ought to have lain inert to infinitude.

Or take it otherwise, give ample room and verge
enough, grant gas the possibility of an infinite
stretch in space — grant this, on and on, from the
first : then definitive dissipation — already beyond
prophecy — has long since eventuated ! To this,
plainly, the terms themselves, the terms of the
end, suffice; for creation itself on these — any
creation — can prove but temporary, fugitive; and
infinite time, an eternity ago, has consummated
an extremity in the past. This must be so, on the
given terms, I say; or else, and otherwise, it is
simply inexplicable and a mysterious miracle, how
a perishable and perishing universe, such as this
demonstrated present one, could have possibly main-
tained itself even in the state we see it.

But take the world just as it is at present, and on
the given terms of physics: what is the spectacle
that — still on these terms — we should expect to
see?

The proposition of physics is, That an end of the
universe is a necessity in consequence of an eventual
utter dissipation, dispersion, and loss of heat; for
energy itself, as energy, is to take at last that
ultimate and final form. In the first place, now, it
is evident that this distinguished disaster, this
absolute black, this — catastrophe — in triumphant
prophecy of which so much pride has been taken —
if it is to come, has not yet come. It is still to
come ! Orion can still put his fingers in his belt ;

86 THE CATEGORIES

Sirius is as lucent as ever ; and even our somewhat
inconsiderable Sun has not yet lost all " his original
brightness."

Suppose it, in the second place, to be still
coming — say after one single, original, ubiquitous
creative development; or say after a succession of
several or innumerable, less or more partial, but all
perishable, creative developments — what sort of a
spectacle would space furnish as a whole — and if
we could see it as a whole ! — at this moment present
to us? For all the world — never mind the size:
in the infinitude of space all the contents of space
are in such relative ratio that they themselves are,,
conceivably, in any possible question of positive
size, only infinitesimal — for all the world, then,
that spectacle of space as a whole before us is the
spectacle of an infinite whole of infinitely mixed
contents, some, to say so, alive but others again
dead — for all the world, as I say, a swarm — a
congeries of bees — that, living (the actual suns),
buzz — that (the extinct suns), dead, hustle !

But, in the third place, the "universe," pace
Energy, is not yet to be trampled out and finally
done with — no, not yet, and even again not
yet — no, not yet, even on its own terms !
Can the dissipation ever be final ? In an infinite
space, in an infinite time, there must be — on the
terms — even an infinitude of the dead, and what
is to hinder them from stopping the way? Nay,
suppose that nothing less than a simple totality
of evanescence is to be insisted on for heat, does

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 87

not, for all that, gravitation exist — and is not
gravitation, for all that, still bound to exist — as
much gravitation as ever — the same gravitation —
and as grave, not the tiniest morsel less grave, for
the dead than for the living? Of this, as of a
bare fact, one might cry, What of that ? But the
retort might still only die off in a sob at the thought
of — Collisions ! " The action of the sun is supposed
not to be due chiefly to the combustion of inflam-
mable matter : it is believed to be a vibration kept
up in its substance by the violent impact of large
bodies drawn into it from space, and falling with
tremendous force upon its surface. The effect of
such a shock — conversion into atomic vapour — •
a vibration infinitely greater than, etc., etc., and
cause at once of heat and light, etc., etc. ! "

With such a force present throughout space
even on materials dead, who may venture to declare
an ultimate extinction of the universe ? Does the
history of astronomy — with amendment after amend-
ment, correction after correction — warrant it ? See
the differences here as to the angle of parallax —
say even of — the latest and likeliest — Alpha
Centauri alone ! Ah, nous avons pu faire avec
certitude des pas gigantesques dans 1'investigation
de 1'etat primitif, aussi bien que de 1'etat ultime
de 1'univers physique — is it then with "certitude"
that that so tremendous colophon impends?

It is, of course, the colophon, the end, rather,
and not the beginning, that seems physics' fancy;
but is, then, the beginning different? With so

88 THE CATEGORIES

much behind us, may we not still ask, with the
sole prospect of a negative, Is there a single
intelligible suggestion of a rationale of origin, a
beginning, in physics? And, as for an end, is
not that chuckle of physics, with all its reality
of mathematics and discoveries, over that its strut
— "1'etat ultime de 1'univers," rather small?

3. Physics (continued).

Of course there goes to all this the supposition
that Time and Space are infinite. Perhaps, indeed,
it is but a natural supposition and, pretty well, the
common one. Kant, in his celebrated Theory of
the Heavens, explicitly assumes it : he speaks of
worlds in space without number and without end,
and yet as constitutive of but a single system with
a given centre; for mutually independent systems
would only tend to hasten onwards to the destruc-
tion of the universe. As we have seen, he might
have added : and, with an infinite time behind us,
any such swarm of fallible systems would have
been already extinct. One wonders a little, at
the same time, that he made no bones of a centre
for Space: where, Space being infinite, could he
have found a spot to pitch it in ? And yet, see
how wise we are ! any spot whatever would answer
the conditions : it would have quite as much space
on this side as on that, and above as below ! As
for Physicists, I am not quite sure that there are
not a few of them, at a small puzzle here. Possibly

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 89

Geologists and Naturalists would not murmur much,
if, letting Space go as it might, they had ever at
command any lengths of time whatever to come and
go upon, whereas the Physicist proper, I fancy,
would rather have it all just the other way: both
finite — but at least space. Mr Clerk Maxwell, for
example, puts it rather neatly about the latter.
"Every place," he says, "has a definite position
with respect to every other place;" and by this
he would have us infer that relativity of position
is what constitutes our idea of space. " Any one,"
he intimates, " who will try to imagine the state of
a mind conscious of knowing the absolute position
of a point will ever after be content with our
relative knowledge." This, as I say — if not at
bottom only half-consciously in innocent blind of
one's self — is to put things rather neatly. Never-
theless, I think we must admit that space, time
also, is infinite, let us try to define either in this
way or in that.

A writer whom we all respect (we certainly
respect Mr Clerk Maxwell), but who can charac-
teristically both love and hate, has it that, "when
we find in modern times conclusions, however able,
drawn without experiment from such a text as
' Causa cequat effectum,' we feel that the writer and
his supporters are, as regards method, little in
advance of the science of the dark ages." It is
not quite happy to relegate into mediseval night
a man or men who can believe in the ordinary
axiom of causality; nor can we promptly credit

90 THE CATEGORIES

that either the man or the men saw or sought

o

their facts, not in the usual field of material event
— no, but actually in the axiom itself — as though
it were adequate, even so, to prove, not general
only, but positively a repertory and quarry of
particulars as well ! But we champion neither
Mayer nor Joule : we respect genius and manliness
even when the characteristic feeling shows — if
we may allow ourselves the word — a little rowdy-
ish, perhaps smilingly rowdyish, like violets on
Vesuvius: and it is only Physics a propos of
causality that we have to think of here. The fact,
indeed, is that we, personally, have had of late so
much to say of causality, in some little connexion,
too, with the denial of any relation to it unless
time, that we are almost tempted to fear here that
Physics may have been led to suppose that such
a denial, so much and recently in vogue, is Meta-
physics' own. For even Mr Clerk Maxwell does
not seem to have any very much more assured
cognition of Causality than we may apprehend to
obtain in the above. At p. 20 of "Matter and
Motion" for example, it is said : —

"There is a maxim which is often quoted, that,
The same causes will always produce the same effects ; "
while on p. 21 it is negatively added : " There is
another maxim which must not be confounded with
that quoted to assert That like causes produce like
effects. This is only true," Mr Maxwell continues,
" when small variations in the initial circumstances
produce only small variations in the final state of
the system. In a great many physical phenomena

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 91

this condition is satisfied ; but there are other cases
in which a small initial variation may produce
a very great change in the final state of the system,
as when the displacement of the 'points' causes
a railway train to run into another instead of
keeping its proper course."

This falls into the objection discussed by me
elsewhere, that the most momentous results may
follow apparently the most insignificant causes.
A spot on a lady's dress may revolutionise Europe ;
the finger of a child may launch into the sea the
mightiest warship : so, displaced points, may murder
thousands. I assert here, as I assert there, that it
is still identity that is the causal law at work. To
keep following the course of the rails is certainly
no change of identity. Set grooved wheels on
guiding rails, curved or straight, it would be a
little unreasonable to find fault with them for
obediently keeping to the identity entrusted to
them. Neither could the opposing train be blamed
for a like fidelity on its side. So, train to train was
just motion to motion, as in Hume's two billiard
balls. As for any possible resultant catastrophe,
the identity, plainly, would lie in the momenta and
the nature of the objects. Kant himself, with all
that he propounds on causality, says this: "The
wonder at the following of an effect from its cause
ceases as soon as I plainly and distinctly see into the
adequacy of the cause ; " and that is simply as much
as to say : it is in identity that I look to find a cause
for an effect. The substantiality of a cause just

92 THE CATEGORIES

substantially repeats itself in the substantiality
of the effect. The rail was the rail and the wheel
was the wheel; but the deviation of the rail was
the deviation of the wheel. To meet the substan-
tiality that is called cause, it is alone the corre-
spondent substantiality that counts. Even so
Hume. He posed his reader by rivetting his
attention on the objects as objects, and conse-
quently concealing from him precisely the nerve
at work. For objects are not causes always
necessarily only in one quality: the same object
may be, in a score of different ways, cause. The
balls themselves, in Hume's case, did not pass
the one into the other: they only took on a com-
munity of states; as Lear and the Fool were wet
by the same rain. And yet Hume's language has
that in it only to mislead. "The effect," he says,
"is totally different from the cause, and conse-
quently can never be discovered in it." The one
ball, truly, cannot be discovered in the other; but
that is no reason why the effect may not be dis-
covered in the cause. The smashing train was not
the smashed one. The objects themselves, the
balls, the trains, remain apart. Once thrown by
motion into the relation of cause and effect, they
have still qualities that render them liable or
amenable to the same relation under more than
one very different name. Blow your fuel into a
blaze, it is the air is the cause, the oxygen, not
the bellows: the same effect might have been
produced by an iron plate, or by a newspaper,

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 93

properly held before the grate, but neither the
plate nor the newspaper is identical with the
bellows. The smoker has always causality between
his lips or at the ends of his fingers, and we may
safely leave the rationale of it, the philosophy
of it, to him. One wonders if the man who gave
the little deviating push was not, to Mr Maxwell,
a murderer ?

That it sometimes happens, as I have remarked
elsewhere, that to the effect we know not the cause
— this is not by any means a founded objection.
The daily tides, for example, may have been
observed for hundreds of years only with wonder,
till Kepler, or another, pointed to the Moon; and
it was the kite of Franklin led to the rationale
of the Thunderstorm. Nay, I doubt not that still
in all departments of Science, we know a great
many effects, but not their causes. Why HO,
in the laboratory, should mean Water, for instance,
can only lead to wonder when thought of. That
these two vapours should sink together into that
so very different liquid is something very extra-
ordinary. And the wonder is none the less, but
all the more, when we know that only a certain
proportion, H02, is effective. Still there is the
identity: the water can be parted into H here
and 0 there. To drop white acid on white wood,
and see a "black emerge may show a difference to
puzzle; but when we know that the acid has ab-
sorbed the hydrogen and the oxygen (water) and
left behind the carbon Hack, we see identity.

94 THE CATEGORIES

The differences that follow only from the different
proportions of the same components — it is their
resolution into identity that seems the most
hopeless.

Not that difficulty, however, nor, on the same level,
any other such, can excuse Physics for ignorance in
regard to such a specially domestic matter as
causality. Mr Huxley, for example, was all his
life the very autocrat of the physical side, and
as very specially against the metaphysical or
spiritual one, and he opined Causality, as I see
from his deliverances on Protoplasm, to be but
" contingent succession ! " That is something con-
siderably worse than we have seen already in
regard to the deplorable effects of only "small
variations," or to uses of the axiom that were
only worthy of the "dark ages." Nay, we know'
that there are philosophers, more or less meta-
physical even, who, let them be as metaphysical
as they may, are, probably much more, on the
whole, even physically accomplished, Mr Mill, for
example, Professor Bain; and Mr Huxley, out
of all measure, out-Herods them. They, not
accepting necessity, assuredly affirm invariableness.
We have still with them, then, a certain constancy
of succession; whereas with Mr Huxley everything
may work loose from everything else, and any
connexion of the effect with the cause is not to
be depended upon. That is about the nineteenth
century's last !

But this of Causality in the reference to Physics,

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 95

if only, and only by the bye, illustrative, is not
what immediately occupies us* — the question of
a beginning. And suppose we have sufficiently
canvassed that on the general or inorganic side, it
is not quite so certain that a relevant word may
not be said for Physics on the organic side. It
is that side that we may have to look to for
a moment.

4. Physics (continued).

On this, the organic side, it is, I think, only
what is called evolution that can connect itself
with the question of a Beginning. And here
it is but naturally suggested at once that we
should consider, First, Darwinism in what alone
is strictly, distinctively, and properly vital to it
as Darwinism; and, Second, Evolution, generally,
widely, or, it may be, even vaguely (by the public)
conceived or figured as evolution, name and thing.

A. Darwinism, strictly, properly as such.

* We do not offer any apology for the episode, nevertheless :
Causality is in some ways the centre of the position — even
Physics must acknowledge the critical importance of the
question— if only just as a question. As regards the general
subject of Causality, 1 know not but what I have said now
in regard to an object not being causal necessarily only in
one of its qualities or powers, may prove supplementary to
my formal discussion of the subject elsewhere. And I am
reminded here of an excellent recent book of Professor
Laurie of Melbourne's, in which he has some special remarks
on Causality, among which there is one honouring me by
wishing I had taken up the subject of Causality as a whole.
If Professor Laurie will kindly look to p. 173 and the Note in
it of my little book on " What is Thought," he will find that,
to my own idea, I have written perhaps exhaustively on that
subject.

96 THE CATEGORIES

And here Mr Darwin's own words are, describ-
ingly, these : —

" I cannot doubt that during millions of genera-
tions individuals of a species will be born with
some slight variation profitable to some part of its
economy; such will have a better chance of sur-
viving, propagating this variation, which again
will be slowly increased by the accumulative action
of natural selection; and the variety thus formed
will either co-exist with, or more commonly will
exterminate its parent form: an organic being
like the woodpecker, or the mistletoe, may thus
come to be adapted to a score of contingencies."

The words in the above extract, which I have
italicised — namely, some slight variation profitable to
some part of its economy — contain — especially in
two of them as key words, "profitable variation " —
the whole of Darwinism, the entire doctrine of
the name, Natural Selection. Nor are these words
unaccompanied by others which are the rationale,
the reasoning, on which the doctrine rests. Mr
Darwin " cannot doubt " that " during millions of
generations," " some time or other," such " profitable
variation" will take place, and the movement
thus begun will, naturally, just by reason of the
profit, accumulatively terminate at last in such
changes as are a new species. Mr Darwin cannot
doubt of anything so probable : and, so, to Mr Darwin
it actually is. Positively there is nothing more
than that : that is, absolutely, and in honest truth,
reasoning and all, the whole of — Natural Selection.

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 97

The variation bringing profit gives a turn to the
entire life of the creature ; which in the end is
a new species — nay ! — which in the end, by
"favour" of a whole series and succession of
innumerable such variations of profit, is a veritable
procession and sequence of species after species,
terminating only in what we see — the majestic
faunas and floras of the present !

No reader who comes new to the subject will
be apt to believe this ; and nevertheless it is true.
Mr Darwin says it all himself — the whole of it —
of himself and for himself. General considerations,
he admits, alone support natural selection : the
very groundwork of the theory is incapable of
proof. " I quite agree with what you say : he
(Lieutenant Huttort) is one of the very few who
see that the change of species cannot be directly
proved" (ii. 362, and then iii. 25): "In fact the
belief in natural selection must at present be
grounded entirely on general considerations — we
cannot prove that a single species has changed ;
nor can we prove that the supposed changes are
beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory;
nor can we explain why some species have changed
and others have not." If any reader will honestly
follow out these admissions into their constitutive
content, he will wonder what in all the world
is left Mr Darwin at last. Why, in sober and
good truth, there is nothing left Mr Darwin at
last but Mr Darwin himself — looking away out
there into " millions of generations " in dream !

G

98 THE CATEGORIES

And the public thought this dream, this mere
imagination, was a scientific apodictic proof of
all these innumerable species of plants and animals
being sprung — all of them — from a single slight
variation of accident and chance in a piece of
" proteine compound " that, " some time or other,"
had just "appeared" — "by some wholly unknown
process ! "

The " proteine compound " is not to Mr Darwin
his only premiss of development. It becomes
sometimes " some single prototype," and at other
times again " four or five primordial forms," which
either give rise to, or are, the "Progenitors" he
by-and-by finds it necessary to postulate or grant.

And here the idea of Origin — of Origin as
Origin — cannot but force itself in upon us. If
a First, a pre-existent First, has to be postulated,
and so consequently granted, why is there any
claim of Origin — what reason is there for speaking
of origin at all ? Origin — as currently interpreted
by the public at large, who had not seen, who
had only heard, and who believed that Mr Darwin
proposed to initiate them into the origin, not merely
of species derived from species, but of the very
creatures, the living creatures themselves that
constitute species, that are species — in such cir-
cumstances, origin can only demonstrate itself as
a palpable misnomer.

Yet this, with his own reputation as a Naturalist
since the voyage of the Beagle — this misnomer it
was that made Darwin. Why, a similar use of the

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 99

word origin — and it was as much their right as
it was his — might have similarly made in advance
Erasmus the grandfather or Lamarck — say even
Maupertuis, or at all events Bonnet, Robinet,
Telliamed, who were, all of them, evolutionists,
and very much accredited evolutionists, too, though
not in the sort of by-way that, by conceived selected
variation, Mr Darwin was. Telliamed at least
might have found with Mr Huxley (who, we might
almost say, was specially Mr Darwin's gladiator) so
far, still more favour than even Mr Darwin himself ;
for Mr Huxley, if asking with surprise, how, without
conditions, "variation should occur at all," would
have met in Telliamed as good a conditionist as
himself: his doctrine being that "The present
plants and animals, under influence of external
conditions, combined with co-operating efforts at
perfection on the part of the organisms themselves,
have gradually developed themselves in the course
of many thousand years." And we may note here
that, as long as Mr Huxley did not understand
Mr Darwin on conditions, so long must he be
said not to have understood him at all. Per-
plexities or mistakes, indeed, in regard to the
great doctrine — and we shall allow ourselves to
say they were numerous — may be illustrated, and
very significantly, by the reference of Kingsley
when he exclaimed that Darwin "was rushing in
like a flood and conquering everywhere by the mere
force of truth and fact," where the truth and fact
he thus credited to Darwin were — Bonnet's pro-

100 THE CATEGORIES

position, by the bye — "primal forms with laws
of innate self-development," precisely the proposi-
tion that Darwin stood there for no other purpose
than expressly to deny. For Mr Darwin's forms,
prototype or other, had no reference to such accom-
modation as Kant's, That the ante-dating of the
Divine interference neither removes nor lessens it.
We have just seen these forms, in Mr Darwin's
way of it, only to have "appeared," "by some
wholly unknown process," and without any call
for God at all: he, for his part, as we also know,
had "long regretted (iii. 18) that he truckled to
public opinion, and used the pentateuchal term
of creation by which he really meant," appeared,
etc., as just said.

It is illustrative here, too, in regard to the
"proteine compound," shall we say? to refer to
what Kant has in a note (i. 228) on the In-
fusoria : —

"When I see the numerous animal forms in a
single drop of water — sort of robber-ruffians, some
of them, armed with weapons to destroy, but, just
as they would destroy, to be destroyed themselves
by still stronger ruffians — when I see the craft,
the artifice, the violence," etc., etc.

Surely such creatures, only visible to the micro-
scope, greatly contrast with that "proteine com-
pound" so palpably gross that, did it exist now,
these animals of ours, as Mr Darwin laments,
would devour it all up ! And where are they,
these minims, in the procession? What are they

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 101

links from ? What are they links to ? Where
at all can we think them to come in?

That it is " conceivable " has the force of fact for
Mr Darwin. "It is conceivable that flying-fish
might have been modified into perfectly winged
animals — it is conceivable that during millions
of generations individuals of a species will be
born so and so — and so I cannot doubt that during
millions of generations individuals of a species have
been born so and so ! " All is conceivable ; but are
they arrived, then — merely "in supposition," like Shy-
lock's, as they are — these argosies, freighted from the
air with variations that are accidents, and from the
clouds with profits that are the accidents of accidents ?
Is a dream, even conceivable when awake, science —
and is it so easily transmutable into facts and a
fact by words and a word ? Nay, are they con-
ceivable— even conceivable — these existences, indi-
viduals of species in millions of generations, that
only in millions of chances can show that rarity
of rarities, that chance — "in the right direction"?
" The more I work " (or drearn) ! " the more I feel con-
vinced," says Mr Darwin, " that it is by the accumu-
lation of extremely slight variations that new
species arise ; " and, no doubt, this, with the mere
"spontaneity and chance" of the variation, is the
whole of the doctrine, totum et rotundum, the
whole of natural selection. But is it the product
of work, then, and not simply of perception in
a groove, a " conception ? " Nothing can more
incisively illustrate this in Mr Darwin than the

102 THE CATEGORIES

fate of the story of the Bear and the Whale.
Warned by Lyell that he must at least keep the
Bear out of court, Mr Darwin murmurs; but,
grudgingly, obeys. Lyell, however, no longer in
view, he restores it ! His imagination was so
constituted that, unable to resist it himself as a
first step, he feels assured that no reader could
escape its convincingness in the same position ! It
is " conceivable : " it needs no more than that to sub-
stantiate a fact ! And, with variation an accident,
profit an accident, Mr Darwin, to be able to create
the Fauna and Flora of a universe, asks nothing
more than the accident of an accident !

" Wonderful to me," says Mr Carlyle, " as indi-
cating the capricious stupidity of mankind — never
could waste the least thought upon it ! "

The illustrations of natural selection are prompted
and conducted by just such principles as the plot
and plan of it. Mr Darwin admits knowing of
" no fact showing any the least incipient variation
of seals feeding on the shore;" yet the situation
itself so much suggests such a beginning as con-
ceivable that he cannot help naming it in the
relation. A British insect may be ingeniously
conceived to feed on an exotic plant and — the taste,
suggestively, prove fatal ! In some relatively
similar way, Bats, Birds, Flying-Fish, and Elephants,
or Bears (" Darwinianism" " Gifford Lectures "), are
all so conveniently supposable to show, that they
may be equally supposed to prove !

We saw, a short way back, that sometimes per-

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 103

plexities and mistakes accompanied one's first im-
pressions in regard to Darwin and his doctrine.
Kingsley, for example, thought himself by no means
relatively unorthodox when he identified himself
with a doctrine which Darwin, for his part, stood
simply there to refute ; and, stranger still, we may
refer almost similarly to Mr Huxley. It is not
doing any injustice to Mr Huxley to suppose him
to have been almost Mr Darwin's " gladiator." *
One has only to read pp. 173-4 of Darwinianism to
know that it is hardly possible to suppose a stronger
record than they are of the efforts of one man for
the glory of another : and yet he certainly did not
understand what he had most at heart, and what he
stood forward for, Mr Darwin's doctrine as Mr
Darwin himself understood it. He held, namely,
that " new species result from the selective action of
external conditions upon the variations ; " and Mr
Darwin, denying conditions — to Mr Huxley's own
surprise — any entrance whatever into his proceed-
ings, would have been even scandalised by the
supposition that what to him was "selection" de-
pended in any way on the intromission of a little
more heat and cold, or damp and dry, etc., etc. The
selective action that formed a pediculus to climb
hairs, or a woodpecker to climb trees, was not to Mr
Darwin in any way a matter of conditions — no, not

* Surely it is, in a way, just as such "gladiator" that Mr
Huxley describes himself : " Endowed with an amount of
combativeness which may stand you in good stead, I am
sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness."

104 THE CATEGORIES

that, but something, however external, that still
entered into the life of the organism itself.

Natural selection, pure and simple, was alone the
idea of Mr Darwin. So it was that he allowed no
part in it, either to conditions, or to natural develop-
ment due to any principle from within. All change
to an organism should be due only to some acci-
dental variation in itself, that should accident-
ally fit into its own life: it was that accidental
fitting in of an accidental variation that was to him,
wholly and solely — Natural Selection. Conditions
lessened for him the "glory" of natural selection,
as so, doubtless, did any action of principles of
development from within. Now, why was this ?
Why could either influence "lessen the glory of
natural selection?"

There must be, as there is, a certain secret
here.

When one gives all possible space to the genesis
of natural selection, as explained here or, very much
more at large, elsewhere, one cannot help asking,
why, then, all that big heavy Origin-book, of which,
surely, a good three-fourths must be out from and
beyond the mere idea as such of natural selection,
abstract, or in puris naturalibus. I have taken full
account of all that elsewhere, and dispense myself
from it here (concerns compilation, common-place
book, materials of others). .

The " Secret " lies in how Darwin looks on Gravi-
tation, Newton, and the Physicists, but not less in
how he sums up to his own mind the world in a

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 105

religious — we cannot for Mr Darwin say, philo-
sophical— reference.

Under the Physicists all is physical ; while in the
other reference, it is mere " rubbish " for Mr Darwin
to ask for the " origin of matter " or for that of
"life." To Mr Darwin the World is simply an
inexplicable accident, and not less such an accident
life itself.

If now you allow " a proteine compound " merely
by accident to " appear," from which by accident all
species physically follow, you have before you the
universe of Darwin, and not less that peculiar and
original feat of his own by which he has supple-
mented and complemented Newton and inorganics
by Charles Darwin and organics, with the result of a
single universality, a single unity in the names of
both.

Oh, if for it all, there were but sound logic and
existential fact ! What has been said may suffice —
but I allow, myself just a touch or two further.

It may be remembered that it occurred to be
noted a few pages back (p. 33) that Mr Darwin was
somewhat curiously decided in this, that he denied
to his original living and,- so far, organised material
that somehow had just " appeared," whether at first
then, or in its evolutions subsequently, any posses-
sion of a vis insita, a principle of development from
within. He, for his part, would (Life and Letters,
ii. 176 — Origin, p. 82) stand in no need of any
"aboriginal" power, or "necessity of change through
some innate law : " all for him, on the contrary..

106 THE CATEGORIES

should be but matter of physical adventure
mechanical hap — in the shape, say, of these ex-
tremely small, slight, trifling, and thereto, acci-
dental, chance variations of his, that (not one whit
less merely accidentally and by chance) should some-
how turn out useful, profitable in some way, for the
organism concerned, but just as that organism was,
and found itself in its ordinary, natural habitat, and
ordinary, natural life there. Suppose a bird, for
example, " born with T^-o th of an inch longer beak
than usual," as is the favourite illustration, this
beak being longer might possibly prove to curve a
little — Mr Darwin does not say this, but he doe&
opine that the curved beaks would destroy the
straight ones (Origin, p. 72).

As for conditions, I have so exhausted, in Dar-
winianism, all that concerns them, that I may dis-
pense myself from any further relative notice here
also. Of course, without conditions externally, or a
motive principle internally, variation — variation to
profit — may appear such a very indeterminate, in-
terrupted, and only occasional, by-the-bye matter,
that any relative advance from it may be thought
so possibly remote as almost to be pretty well be-
yond speech; but we must bear in mind that Mr
Darwin, as in his " longer period than 300 million
years " for the denudation of the Weald, does not
at all stint himself in the matter of dates : a million
years, more or less, is but a bagatelle to him : having
such dark backward and abysm of time behind him,
he can feel that, with all the uncertainty in the

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 107

when of the variation to profit and advance, there is-
always for the waiting leisure enough! Length of
time, as in averages on the blackboard, easily wipes
out all irregularities. Or, just to say it all in a
word :

The bottom-thought of Darwin's mind was Newton
and gravitation — gravitation in and of physical
clumps and a clump — on which last even organised
living existences were but physical, change in them
being due only to accidents — physical accidents in
themselves and of themselves — accidents not always
accompanied by the corollary of profit, that some-
times did not immediately follow, but proving good
for the most part sometime or other, a consumma-
tion that there was plenty of time to wait for. The
universe was but physical, and it counted no element
— no, nor principle, a God, for example, or a soul —
that was not physical.

And this shall finish Mr Darwin's theory, or doc-
trine, or hypothesis, as to me, in the end, after labour
enough, it has exhibited itself.*

Mr Darwin's fame and name as a naturalist is
understood to rest on the " Natural Selection " with
which he identified himself. It seems an odd thing
to say — still there may, after all, be something of
truth in it — that but for Natural Selection, Mr
Darwin might have been in the end a fuller, com-
pleter, more perfect and accomplished naturalist.

* Darwinianism and the Gifford Lectures will amply meet
any wish for quotation-references or additional information
and evidence.

108 THE CATEGORIES

Has any one ever taken it into his head to ask
What was Darwin's education as a Naturalist ?
Was it technically academic, academically, techni-
cally complete, academically, technically systematic ?
Even so far as self-taught, was the result at last, as
though technically and academically, a finished,
completed, filled up, systematic Whole ? I am in-
clined to hold, after all evidence available, that Mr
Darwin's knowledge of Geology was such a whole,
more fully, perfectly, maturely, than his knowledge
of either Botany or Zoology. Suppose we dip into
his life and follow him relatively on in it as the tes-
timony there is offered us.

But I break off here. I am not at all minded to
say one word that would detract from Mr Darwin.

Mr Darwin — not that any words of mine are any
compliment, or can in any way settle his historical
place — was, as are still words of mine, such a
naturalist as we can set beside only a Linnaeus and
a Cuvier ; but he was in that line, perhaps — it is a
queer word to use — a Romanticist rather than a
Classicist. There are, namely, the great Kingdoms
or Sub-kingdoms : Protozoa, Coelenterata, Annuloida,
Annulosa, Mollusca, with all their Classes, Sub-
classes, Orders, Sub-orders ; not to speak at all of
the Yertebrata in their Classes, Sub-classes, Orders,
Sub-orders, Sections, etc., etc. (the Glossary of Mr
Dallas in the Origin will give all the names as they
respectively were in the time of Darwin). Now, it
cannot be said that Mr Darwin was au fait in all of
these. That is what we mean by the reference to

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 109

education. In that reference we do seem to be told
all that there is to be told in the Life and Letters.
Nevertheless, in all that we hear, even of Botany
and Henslow, we never can make out that Darwin
underwent regular instruction in — regular courses of
Botany, Zoology, etc. — such courses as, with his own
application, were calculated to make a scientifically
finished, completed, systematic, academic whole in
the mind of the student of them. It is not for a
moment meant to say that Mr Darwin did not have
almost always as his own, generally, such knowledge
as even accomplished men would be glad to possess
a tithe of, but only this — that, in his relative acquisi-
tions, to say so, he was, on the whole, a Romanticist.
He was given up to leading articles, or a leading
article. Beetles, Insects that stir, Birds, were really
for the most part the stock in which he absorbed
himself. If we can but think of him, the young
man, as only so educated, once for all, on the
Beagle, reading, reading Lyell, with his net at the
stern, going ashore always as he could, with the
geological hammer in his hand, and a Milton in his
pocket — we shall be able in picture pretty well to
realise him — even to realise him in his acquirements,
whether general or special, when, not yet twenty-
three, he went aboard ship for the voyage that in a
certain way made him. And we have but to read
that most excellent and interesting Journal of his to
know that wherever the ship took him, thither his
leading article still followed him. Go ashore where
he may, it is his beetles he hunts. " In one day," he

110 THE CATEGORIES

cries, " I caught 68 species." At Bahia there is the
PyropTiorus luminosus; from Rio, in a perfect rapture,
amid numberless names of glory (see Darwinianism,
p. 81), he writes Henslow and Fox, assuring the
latter consolatorily, that, for all the new riches, it is
their old friend, Crux Major, he looks back upon as
still the most dear to him. And so it continues all
through the voyage. At sea, in Patagonia, on the
Andes, Keeling Island, Tierra del Fuego, the Gala-
pagos, St Helena, it is always beetles engross him.
At the last so famous island it is wonderful how he
busies himself with the dung-beetles. Long after,
indeed, it is not different with him. He exhorts his
friend Hooker, going to Palestine, to turn every
stone on the top of Mount Lebanon in search of
beetles. He envies Mr Wallace his captures, and
cries out that " collecting is the best sport in the
world." Late in life, he literally gloats in descrip-
tion of all his beetles at Cambridge, and of all the old
posts, trees, and banks where he found them. Tell-
ing then also of his third boy catching a Brackinus
crepitans — nay, he exclaims, " My blood boiled with
the old ardour when he caught a Licinus, a prize
unknown to me — I feel like an old war-horse at the
sound of the trumpet when I read about the captur-
ing of rare beetles — it makes me long to begin
collecting again." Almost, I fancy, no one will take
it ill of me when I say, " beetles ran in his blood,"
and will even, perhaps, forgive me if I add that the
probability is that Mr Darwin was, as indeed partly
said already, rather a romanticist and sentimentalist

/ UNIVERSITY J

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 111

in his Natural History, and that on his return home
in 1837, he did not set himself, as in his final career,
to a mature, ultimate systematisation of his one sub-
ject in whole and in part, but, ambitiously, to what,
as side by side with them, should be to the inorganic
physics of Newton, the complementary organic
physics — say, of himself — Darwin ! And so, from
that time, it was that he confined himself, not to
natural history as a study to be perfected, but to the
gathering together of a common-place book-compila-
tion, in which every word that made for a natural
explanation of life and living beings might be
adopted and signalised. Accordingly, as he says
himself, he read all manner of " agriculturists and
horticulturists " ; he depended on answers to all
manner of " printed inquiries " sent out to all manner
of " breeders and gardeners " ; not less on " conversa-
tion " with such, and not less on experiences in " gin-
palaces in the Borough." So it was that he came to
his organic physics — Natural Selection. Was it so
that Newton came to his inorganic physics — Gravita-
tion ? Or was the one, Darwin, as the other, Newton,
was — prepared ? When the one, so modestly con-
fident, declared that so and so is, now that the law
of Gravitation is discovered, was it just the same
thing and fact, when the other, Mr Darwin, so
sweetly innocent, similarly declared that so and so
is, " now that the law of Natural Selection is dis-
covered ? " Where is that law ?

1. A variation, a mere thing of accident and
chance, whether from within or without; 2. By

112 THE CATEGORIES

mere chance, unforeseen, unlocked for, & profit from
it (i.e., a casual, fortuitous use and application of it)
— an accident — two accidents :

The accident of an accident !
G-ood heavens ! Is that a law ?

"Suppose the case that a Seal takes to feeding on the
shore" — presumably to stick there (Darwin). What!
not to scunner at such stuff for food, and to flop back,
disillusioned, into its home, the sea, for its natural fish
again ? Suppose a Bat taking to feed on the ground
— well, suppose so, and it dies of inanition, for its
food is in the air, and not a particle of it has come
to ground. What flying-fish will find its food in
the air, or will not be in a hurry to return to the
sea ? That longer beak of the Bird is under no
necessity to curve, nor has Darwin said so. The
Elephant's inclining tusks tell nothing ; and, really,
I suppose myself quite able to tell that the British
Insect that, led to it, by curiosity or hunger, tasted
the exotic plant, was unhappy enough only to puke
and retch after it. Then the Bear that becomes a
Whale ! E contra, the Whale that taking to feed on
the shore becomes a Bear ! Positively, it docs tackle
a poor body's ingenuity to make a creature for the
element, or the element for a creature !

The whole of Mr Darwin's single action and one
thought lies here : — " Favourable variations would
tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be
destroyed." " Here, then," says Mr Darwin, " I had
at last got a theory by which ato work." Theory is
rather too big a word : it implies a complex of corre-

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 113

lated particulars. Mr Darwin's " theory " was a
simple idea — this, namely, that the progeny of an
organism always exhibited some variation, never
mind how slight, from its parent before it. On that
simple idea Mr Darwin turned ; his whole soul
flashed, kindled, and his mind flew open. It be-
longed to his simple, ingenuous, sincere, straight,
instantaneous nature to dwell here, on and on, as in
a world of consequences. A variation, however
accidental, might not just come and go : it might
have consequences ; consequences, consequences ; and
consequences again consequences : " The result
would be the formation of a new species ! " Now
all this might have come into the head of any man :
it did not need to owe one jot, dot, or tittle of it to
any particular knowledge of natural history ; and
neither did it owe anything whatever in the mind of
Darwin to his accomplishment, mastership in his own
exclusive industry. From that moment's idea, indeed
he turned from his peculiar study, as a study, to be
matured, perfected, and completed, and gave himself
up to one incessant action of miscellaneous inquiry
— some of it Quixotic enough, hazardous enough,
futile enough.

Now, the love of hypothesis as quite a family
tick is admitted. And Mr Francis Darwin has of
his father these strong words : " It was as though
he were charged with theorising power ready to
flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance,
so that no fact, however small, could avoid releasing
a stream of theory, and thus the fact became magni-

H

11 THE CATEGORIES

fied into importance : in this way it naturally hap-
pened that many untenable theories occurred to
him."

He who does not see that the whole story is told
in some one or two of these last sentences, ought to
know that he is simply out of court — that he has no
place whatever in the business. I turn to

B. Evolution as Evolution.

For this, too, is plain that, in all probability,
there never was, pure and simple, a single Dar-
winian unless Mr Darwin himself. Sir Charles
Lyell and Mr Huxley are responsible for, it may be,
three-fourths of the success of Mr Darwin. And
Lyell, possibly quite ashamed at what he had been
taken in to say at Aberdeen, had turned quite
round ; while Huxley, in insisting on conditions,
showed that the bottom-thought of Darwin was
unknown to him. In fact, that there never was
any one man, evolutionist as he might be, a Dar-
winian evolutionist, pure and simple, will, I think,
when the allegation is considered in the necessity of
all the proof shown, be irresistibly agreed to. Why,
if new species is the result of " variation," and if
" of the causes of variation we are," as Mr Darwin
says, " profoundly ignorant " — at the same time that,
if " conditions " are " causes of variation," of them,
too, on the same authority, " we are profoundly
ignorant" — while, equally authoritatively, we are
told withal that, as to any internal principle of evolu-
tion, there is none such : what is there left for the
hypothesis of natural selection to depend on — what

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 115

but the conjectural reference to accident and chance
of Mr Darwin alone to himself ? And, honestly
now, does that possibly leave anything else what-
ever, on the whole field, of conceivable stability on
the terms — does that, I ask, leave anything what-
ever to the common sense of any other mortal ? The
-conclusion is peremptory :

That the so far public voice became Darwinian,
not because of the Darwinian rationale as Darwinian,
but because of evolution as evolution, and in that
because it hated Biblicalism — what is here called
A.ufklarung !

And so we are left for a moment here with only
evolution as Evolution abstractly before us.

Now with evolution as evolution — all being looked
at, things are not so bad.

There is a crass way of looking at creation as
Oreation at the hands of God, which is, at least to
the understanding, a check ; while, if we conceive or
suppose a first life from which all other lives natur-
ally follow, we, by the very word naturally, feel
placed, as it were, at home.

We need not, however, pursue this, or reason it
out in either the one way or the other.

Nature is not dead : it is a life. The Categories
are an evolution — an evolution in themselves : but
out of themselves, as an externalisation of them-
selves, as Nature, they are also an evolution of
themselves — self-accordantly in the inorganic.

Why not, similarly, also, self-accordantly in the
organic ?

116 THE CATEGORIES

A peculiar point, too, we may say here, comes up
in these millions and millions of years, through
imagination of which Mr Darwin would effect
realisation of his receipt. When one sees the per-
fect aplomb with which he names these millions and
millions, even in respect of such a comparatively
near matter as the denudation of the "Weald, one
feels that Mr Darwin must have in his mind no less
than an infinitude of time for the production, and
further process, of that extraordinary, supposititious,,
casual individual that — " born with some slight
variation profitable to some part of its economy " —
is to become, in the end, actually this our Flora,
actually this our Fauna — and all accidentally !

But Infinity, to reason, is only the eternal Now.

"I read, not long ago, an admirable book on
geology ; and, in these perpetual wearings down and
heavings up that seem really intimated there to go
on and on, and round and round, recurrently for
ever, I had a most vivid vision of an eternal life
even on the part of this little Earth of ours."

A development of which infinitude may be predi-
cated— and even as a development — only is : it never
was not ; and it never was aught else.

To be sure, there are to be found, referentially in
regard, certain positive calculations. If the geologist,
in his wonder at the all but passive process, only ven-
tures a word about indefinite millions of years as to
that matter of age of the earth, there are others
bolder who write these years definitely down
twenty ; while another, with a half laugh in dis-

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 117

tinction of himself, comes jauntily to the front with
ten ! But, if twenty, if ten, why not less ?

No doubt, as just implied, in a development, there
are shadings and shadowings, as it were ; but these
shadings and shadowings are as much eternal as the
eternally predicated development itself : they are as
much now as it itself is.

On the whole, we may allow ourselves to gaze
rather at these millions, and millions, and millions
of our confessedly imaginative Naturalist !

Withal, is not the entire consideration in regard
conform to — just a part, indeed — of Mr Darwin's
one whole philosophy ? Does not one single strain
of reflection constitute, it may be, foundation, and
centre, and animating principle to the entire labour
that is his — his proprium, his peculium, Natural
Selection ? That foundation, that centre, that
animating principle is what he believes of Newton
and of what Newton found — only what was
physical. "It is mere rubbish thinking of the
origin of life, and, as to the origin of matter," he
says, matter being to him but a word for the uni-
verse, "I have never troubled myself about such
insoluble questions." And so all is bub an inexpli-
cable accident ; no Fauna but is the accident of an
accident ; no Flora but is the accident of an acci-
dent : " there seems to me to be no more design in
the variability of organic beings, than in the course
which the wind blows " — all, Creation itself, for no
less is intimated, is but inexplicable accident. With
all this in our minds on the part of Mr Darwin, I

118 THE CATEGORIES

do not fancy that any one of us, naturally thinking,,
as we all do, and as undoubtedly did Diderot when
he said : " It is the last of absurdities to believe or
say that the eye has not been made to see nor the
ear to hear " — I do not think, I say, that any one of
us, so taught, so by very nature minded, would for
one moment be prepared to credit his own eyes
when he reads this astounding avowal of Mr
Huxley's !—

" The supposition that the eye was made — for
enabling the animal to see — has undoubtedly re-
ceived its deathblow ! "

In the "Concluding considerations of my Dar-
winianism," I shall be found to have quoted some
things from that excellent " Journal " of Mr Dar-
win's which it might be wished he had remembered
before committing himself to the accident of this
world, or to such accidents of accidents as our
Faunas and Floras. In the same connexion, I quote
also from Erasmus (Darwin) much that is striking —
much, indeed, so striking that — with Mr Huxley
and the eye before us — one would like to quote it
all again. I quote only this, however, as quite
sufficient in itself to throw wide a door to all due
meditation : —

"What induces the bee, who lives on honey, to
lay up vegetable powder for its young ? What in-
duces the butterfly to lay its eggs on leaves, when
itself feeds on honey ? What induces other flies to
seek a food for their progeny different from what
they consume themselves ? "

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 119

" Who taught the ant (asks Bacon) to bite every
grain of corn that she burieth in her hill, lest it
should take root and grow ? "

So far as I am concerned, then, the taboo may be
quite well raised now from the two pooh-poohed
books that have so much to do with design, Cicero,
on the Gods, and Paley on Natural Theology. Both
of them deal in ideas ; and come from where they
may, ideas are as true as things, thought as matter,
subject as object. Nay, respectively, it is the former
are the truer, or indeed the sole truth at last. I
do honestly think that we are perfectly free again
to enjoy our Cicero or our Paley just as we used
to do.

I desire to add before concluding, that I know
not that I have made enough of these, the invisi-
bles, the Infusoria, in my reference above to Mr
Darwin ; and so now and here I allow myself
to quote from the recognised Text - Books as
follows : —

" Many of the Infusoria are of a high grade of
organisation. The reproductive process in many of
them is perfectly well known, and it consists in some
of them in a true sexual process, for which proper
organs are provided."

This evidence is not discrepant from that on which
Kant founds — see back.

When we recollect, then, that Mr Darwin has for
his procession never in his eye a single individual
that is not, so to speak, visibly solid — nay, that his

120 THE CATEGORIES

very Proteine which is to give birth and origin to
all is so very visibly solid, so very materially solid,
that he cannot withhold the lament that, if it were
formed now, "such matter would be instantly
devoured, which would not have been the case
before living creatures were formed." How we are
to make good, before such a disturbing upthrow as
this of these little creatures, the hiatus in his pro-
cession of forms, it is difficult to see. The Glossary
of his friend, Mr Dallas, mentions the Infusoria
well enough, but he himself, so far as I know,
never.

" Minute, mostly microscopic creatures (Kotifera,
namely) — nevertheless of a very high grade of
organisation — possessing mouth, stomach, alimentary
canal, a distinct and well-developed nervous system,
a differentiated reproductive apparatus, and even
organs of vision."

" Many of these little masses of structureless jelly
(Foraminifera) possess the power of manufacturing
for themselves, of lime, or the still more intractable
Hint, external shells of surpassing beauty and mathe-
matical regularity " (these for the shells).

" No Physicist has hitherto succeeded in explain-
ing any fundamental phenomenon upon purely
physical and chemical principles. For example, it is
certain that digestion presents phenomena which are
yet inexplicable on any chemical theory. The Amoeba,
an animalcule, a mere mobile lump of jelly, digests as
perfectly as does the most highly organised animal,
etc."

"During the whole period of recorded human
observation, not one single instance of the change
of one species into another has been detected ; and,

CATEGORIES AND PHYSICS 121

singular to say, in successive geological formations,
although new species are constantly appearing, no
single case has yet been observed of one species
passing into another."

I think all has been said now that need be said
on the whole theme of evolution, as it is understood
at the present day. The single process of external
accident by which acting, in infinite time, on the
first organic element, "Proteine Compound," or
already " one or more Primordial Forms," which,
" by some wholly unknown process " (mere accident,
then, as usual) just " appeared " — the single process
of external accident, I say, by which Mr Darwin
would account for all that in the world is organised,
plant, brute, man, ought not to be lost from sight, as
it really is. As it really is : for no evolutionist has
before him now anything but the vague idea, as dic-
tionaries have it, that " the higher are but the
descendants of lower forms through an infinite
variety of stages," though usually forgetting withal,
as the dictionaries have it also, that to develop
is "To advance from one stage to another by a
process of natural or inherent evolution." Mr
Darwin even categorically denied the inherency,
because, as Mrs Browning has it, he was "not
poet enough to understand that life develops from
within ! "

As excellently applicable to Mr Darwin, it may
be sufficiently in place to wind up here with this
from Goethe : " Theories are usually the over hasty
efforts of an impatient understanding that would

122 THE CATEGORIES

gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their
place, pictures, notions, nay, often mere words."
The son (i. 149) tells of his father how it was
that he "naturally" dealt in "many untenable
theories."

CHAPTEE IV

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES

AND under this head it may suggest itself, from
much that precedes, as for us in place, to consider
only : the Aufklarung in its two numbers, No. 1 and
No. 2.

The Aufklarung, as the Aufklarung generally,
means the " discrepancies " — that, whatever it is
that, in the Bible, let it be Old or let it be New,
checks — for instance, tho Miracle of the Swine. We
have the report of it, not in John, but in all the
three Synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in
all of them substantially to the same effect : namely,
that unclean spirits, called Legion, having one or two
men demoniacally in possession, were cast out of him
or them by the Saviour, and further ordered by Him,
but at their own request, to enter into a great herd
of many swine (some two thousand of them) then
feeding at some distance off, which great herd of
many swine thereupon instantly rushed down a
steep place into the sea, and there perished, or were
choked. The whole account in each of the three

123

124= THE CATEGORIES

Evangelists is circumstantially a very full one ; but
I have not, in any respect, so to speak, mitigated it.
And at the same time, I cannot but think the spirit
of fairness on my part that has dictated my choice
of the example, will be readily allowed me even by
the most devoted member of No. 1. Shakespeare
himself does not hesitate to allow his Jew to speak
derisively of " the habitation which your prophet, the
Nazarite, conjured the devil into," and without pro-
test either, even on the part of the Christian, who at
that early day, heard him. This may suggest that
even in the days of Shakespeare the Aufklarung
No. 1 had already at least begun. Shakespeare's
dates are 1564-1616; those of the English Deists,
Herbert, Blount, Toland, Collins, Wollaston, Annet,
Shaftesbury, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Bolingbroke,
may be said on the whole to run from the middle of
the seventeenth to that of the eighteenth centiiry ;
while, lastly, those of Spinoza are 1632-77. The
English Deists may, not altogether wrongly, be
regarded as the earliest Nationalists. Like the
later Germans, or others of the name, there are
substantial thinkers among them ; but the bulk of
them, then as now, can scarcely, or not at all, appear
to us other than adherents of literal Aufklarung
No. 1. As I have said elsewhere, I am inclined to
name Spinoza's " Theologico-Political Tractate " as
the opening, the beginning, the very first of the
Aufklarung. This Tractate "has constituted the
very arsenal of the Aufklarung, whether French or
German: Voltaire's wit, and the erudition of tho

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 125

theological critics of the Fatherland, are alike in-
debted to it."

The Aufklarung, then, simply as the Aufklarung
or, as with me, the Aufklarung No. 1, is the histori-
cal outburst of Biblical unbelief that preceded in
France, but also elsewhere, the French Revolution —
the disillusionising of the Bible, the expose" or ex-
posure of the "Discrepancies" in the Christian
Scriptures. This movement as it first appeared in
Great Britain under such names, say, as Hume and
Gibbon, was received by the bulk of the community
with the intensest hate and the loudest execration.
The good David, for example, was, in bodily pre-
sence, hardly safe from the populace, whether alive
or dead. But now has descended a " serener hour."
A man, nowadays, may play his piano of a Sunday,
and be even listened to ; but a generation or two
ago, if he had as much as touched a note of it, only
on a Fast day, he would have been denounced as an
infidel, and the school playground would have been
made painfully vocal for his children. Nay, the
change is such that I was lately present with two
or three or more rather high-placed Church Officials,
Free and other, where said unfortunate herd of
swine happened to be spoken of, and it was reported
by one of them that he had heard it said that if the
loss of the swine could have been brought home to
any one man's door, against that man, the owner of
the swine would have had an excellent case at law ! If
such a palpable word of Aufklarung could pass among
the members of them, it was only to be expected that

126 THE CATEGORIES

the Churches themselves would — in their own way,
truly — shortly follow suit. I dare say many of us
may have taken note of this in our ordinary papers
of the day — how the most accepted and approved
magnates, Principals, Presidents, Professors, what
not, are reported to have, again and again, somewhat
liberally, and surely honestly, said an open word on
Confessions of Faith, etc. And this, too, not with-
out sympathy on the part of those under them.
For such things, again, can only prompt the news
papers to such encouraging avowals as these :
" When everybody becomes openly unorthodox, no-
body can be a heretic : we cannot see the wood for
the trees. No one doubts that the vast majority of
the ministers in all our Churches now hold opinions
and cherish beliefs and disbeliefs which would at one
time have brought upon them sentence of excommuni-
cation." In fact, there is not a doubt of it, the Auf-
klarung, the Biblical disillusion, as I say elsewhere,
" has descended on the generality " ; and so much so,
indeed, is this the case that " if a man would have any
success with the general public nowadays," it is as
an Aufgeklarter he must approve himself: there
must not be even a suspicion that he is not " ad-
vanced ! " Heine is rather popular among us at
present, but I hardly think that even his most
devoted and least religious admirers would applaud
when Noack, himself surely not imaufgeklart, re-
ports expressions of his (Heine's) in this connexion : —

"This Theism" — there and then spoken of —
" Schelling desired to make again salonfahig (draw-

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 127

ing-room-fit). And should we wonder (ii. 454), if
the frivolous, witty Heine, in the year 1835, intro-
duced, into the second part of his 'Salon,' the
philosopher of the Eomantic ? Nevertheless, he
sees, in the history of philosophy, nothing but futile
attempts to save the old religion and luckier others
to foist in for it something new. — After Christianity
had become, in the century before his, a pure deism,
Kant (so Heine continues) shall have given this
deism its settler, too, put God to the sword, and
forced immortality to breathe its last. It is, there-
fore, in his judgment, properly speaking, a scandal that
afterwards a few thinkers should have still presumed
to seek to wake up God again from the dead. That
(he finds) is particularly unpardonable on the part
of Schelling, who began with Spinozism, but now,
as though a good Catholic, preaches an extra-mun-
dane personal God that has had the folly to create
the world."

The translator would fain believe that such words
— which, he confesses, pain him — are, surely, now,
for the first time to be seen in English ; but there
are others as bad or even worse to follow, and only a
proposed application can possibly extend to either
those or these the excuse of a moment. They, these
latter, will be found in Eosenkranz's " Elucidations
to Hegel's Encyklopredie," which, published in 1870,
certainly carry with them that excellent writer's
matures t Hegel. It is towards the end of the little
book that the subject of religion is taken up and
with the references that we have in mind : —

" When any one nowadays would make his debut
as a philosopher, the first thing he has to do is to

128 THE CATEGORIES

declare off not only from Christianity, but from
religion, too, as a standpoint, namely — which,
through natural science and education, has been
long left behind." But " he (Hegel) is not ashamed
of Christianity." " Unhappy times ! he exclaims,
which we must always go on telling that there is a
God. Of not one of our great philosophers can it be
said that he was an atheist ; neither of Leibnitz and
Kant, nor of Fichte and Schelling, nor of Krause
and Herbart, nor of Baader and Hegel. Only of
Schopenhauer, who, consequently, though opposed to
Materialism, has become a favourite with the mass."
"We wholly lose ourselves in mere sense — all comes to
us from without — thought, thinking, is but a physio-
logical process. Free-will as determination of one's
own self is a chimera. There is only a mechanical
determinism. The word Spirit, soul, should be
struck from the vocabulary, because it only per-
petuates the greatest and most pernicious falsehoods."
" Since a generation back we have lived under an
ever increasing thraldom of materialism and atheism.
When Paul Leroux asserted that atheism had already
penetrated to the masses, I opposed him. Very soon
after, however, I came to the knowledge of facts
which proved him to be right. In the German
Workingmen's Unions of Switzerland, a song is
sung which runs thus: —

" Curse the God, the blind one, the deaf one,
To whom we prayed in childish belief
In whom we hoped, for whom we waited,
He has scoffed us, he has fooled us."*

" Finch dem Gotte, dem blinden, dem tauben,
Zu dem wir gebetet in kindlichem Glauben
Auf den wir gehofft, auf den wir geharrt,
Er hat uns gefoppt, er hat uns genarrt."

* The German Singer must have taken time over this to find
rhymes for it !

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 129

We may have friends who shall be partial to the
Aufklarung and even to the No. 1 of it, and yet may
be really the worthiest of mankind. Such men as
these we would honestly expect to be shocked and
revolted, as well by the frivolousness of Heine, as by
the tunelessness of the Swiss. Almost we would
expect them half to try back now — almost we would
expect them to ask, what, then, is this Aufklarung
No. 2?

Of No. 2 I have said, I think for the first time,
this : — •

" For the last hundred years, the Aufklarung has
been admitted as a historical fact ; but, equally as
historical fact, there has to be admitted now the
correction of it, what we may call the Aufklarung
No. 2. No. 1 denied the spirit because of the letter.
No. 2, so far as it can, accepts the letter because
of the spirit. So far as Christianity is concerned,
the dictum of Mr Gladstone is to be considered as
very well in place. In a letter of his to the
Rev. Alexander Webster, Aberdeen, as published
in the Scotsman (of letter's date, 'N. 9. 90'), he
has these words: 'As for myself, I build upon
historical Christianity, the great world-fact of 1800
years.' The Christian civilisation, that is, after the
pagan — or better, the classical pagan — civilisation is
now the blood in our veins ; and by the right of it
even a so-called atheist is substantially a Christian.
It is but vulgarity for any one nowadays, harking
back to the Aufklarung No. 1, to talk, so to speak,
the shop of it."

So far as concerns what is said here of the Spirit
and the Letter, I think we are warranted in it by

I

130 THE CATEGORIES

Scripture itself : accordingly I quote a verse or
two: —

" But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and
in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship
Him.

" God is a Spirit ; and they that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit and in truth.

"It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh
profiteth nothing.

" The Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the
Father, He (the Comforter) shall testify of me.

" Circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit,
and not in the letter.

" Serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness
of the letter.

" Not of the letter, but of the spirit : for the letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

" Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and He in
us, because He hath given us of His Spirit."

Still it is not to be said that the letter is to be
unconsidered. That, however, is a consideration for
the Church we belong to as the Church, and we who
belong to it must respect its standards so long as its
standards they are.

But, just in mere ordinary reference, we, as
individuals, as men, as human beings, cannot be
denied our right to think out whatever is in contra-
diction to the deepest reason or the plainest under-
standing ; and, though we may not have said more
than a single word relatively (the swine), we shall

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 131

assume, so far, that single word to suffice. What—
when Christ's own words are not authenticatingly
there — what, in the New Testament, the Evangelists
write, or the Apostles write, or the Disciples write,
can be characterised as on the whole popular — in
all of them, namely, the exception apart, it is
fairly characterisable as in general a popular
account; nor of those who are responsible for
what we read in the Old Testament are we to
speak with more differences than the naturally
relative ones. Of both Testaments, and without
distinction of contents in either, we are taught
that they are inspired. I know not, however,
that we should offend if we made in our own
minds the sanctioned distinction between the spirit
.and the letter. We may hesitate about the letter;
but we do not for one moment hesitate about the
spirit. Of the Bible as a whole, that it is inspired,
that it is in spirit inspired, no man can doubt — nay,
among all the books that have ever been written,
that it is in spirit specially inspired must be the
acknowledgment of every honest intelligence all
the world over, at all warranted by education to
speak.

So much for what may be spirit in a popular
account; but we cannot speak so of the letter.
The basis of a popular account is always rumour —
rumour, so to speak, of the countryside : and such
rumour is always the creature of the popular
imagination, which, though it does not see a
flying horse in the sky, says it does. I do not

132 THE CATEGORIES

think I am called upon to illustrate this: it is a
matter of everyday; and I am reminded of what
I once before referred to in Hegel, where he warns
us against the got up stories about Pythagoras, and
continues to this effect : " The life of Pythagoras
only shows to us in history at first hand through
the medium of the figurating ideations of the
first centuries after Christ in the taste or manner,
more or less, in which the life of Christ is narrated
to us, on the footing, that is, of common actuality
(not in a poetical world), as a miscellany of many
wondrous and adventurous fables, as a half and
half of eastern and western fancies " (as regards
Pythagoras, namely).

This shall suffice for all that concerns the letter,
and for all that concerns popular infiguration in the
letter.

It may be objected here, however, that, if there be
a possibility of recognising the Letter even through
the plainest understanding, it does not suggest itself
at once how it shall be as regards discernment of
the Spirit.

What this concerns is what is known, in current
phrase, as the Testimony of the Spirit; and what
that is it is for us to know now.

Scripture, in less or more direct form, has such
references to it as these : —

" And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free.

" When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will
guide you into all truth.

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 133

" The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit
that we are the children of God.

" It is the Spirit itself that beareth witness .because
the Spirit is truth."

The truth is the testimony of the Spirit, and it is
the testimony of the Spirit makes free. That is the
great word of this testimony — that the Spirit itself
beareth witness with our spirit.

Specially, however, it is to be said, if only now for
the first time, that— -for us — the spirit, the testifying
spirit, concerned, is —

The single breath of the co-integrated mass of the
co-integrating categories, self-evolved, self-involved
— consciousness, self-consciousness, the concrete ego,
as in the Ego and /row the Ego that is the Infinite,
the Living Universal, the absolute I Am : God.

We see here, then; as in actual letter, what the
testimony of the spirit is : It is the breath of the
Categories.

But these, the Categories, are they, then, a common
possession ? Are they such in every man as to give
every man — Testimony of the Spirit ?

Potentially — Yes : Actually — No.

Self-consciousness just as self-consciousness is the
potentiality of reason ; and the potentiality of reason
is the potentiality of the Categories. But poten-
tiality, again, just as potentiality, is but the natural
first, as this natural first, further, must, on its side,
be matured, if not to, then always towards, the
developed last — the Universal.

That last no one of us ever is : the truest among

134 THE CATEGORIES

us may approach, but never be. God alone is the
Universal.

All of us ordinary men, very diversely actual, can
but, from reach to reach, rise.

In the quoted paragraph 'that concerns the Auf-
klarung in its numbers of 1 and 2, or of, what is
the same thing, the Letter and the Spirit, there is
mention of Christianity as Christianity. Now that is
a most important consideration. It is a considera-
tion that the Aufklarung, just as the Aufkliirung,
seems to have wholly neglected. Almost indeed it
would seem as though the Aufklarung had said, the
Aufklarung being judge, Christianity is nought and
not. But is that so? Because of the Miracle of
the Swine is Christianity nought — is Christianity to
be thought as not? And here it is that the Auf-
klarung No. 2 has its cue.

Even as an external event, Christianity is there r
Christianity has come, Christianity is, Christianity
is a historical movement, Christianity is itself
History, Christianity is in fact Us. The rights
and lots of the Slave, the rights and lots of the
Poor, the rights and lots of Woman, the rights and
lots of Man as Man — Life, Heart, Soul — a New Life,
a New Heart, a New Soul: That is Christianity.
Nay Science, the Stars of Heaven, the Ends of
the Earth, and the Deeps of the Sea: That is
Christianity.

And all that is not to be because of the miracle of
the swine ! Is it not innocent, this, on the part of
the Aufgeklarter — to forget all about Christianity

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 135

as Christianity, and remember only the miracle of
the swine ! Think only what our books tell us
about our Lyric Poetry: —

" As the inner world has only through Christianity
attained to its true development and import, so also
only in the Christian world is it that lyrical poetry
has completely and in all its differences developed
itself." The mere subject of Culture again shall
lead to the production of such distinctions as
these : — " If there was a blossom of Culture in
Greece, it was only in the Christian world that it
could be ripened to fruit. It was the world-re-
ligion of Jesus that was fitted at full to bring culture
into its innermost sanctuary, so that thence, inspired
with the divine breath, it might penetrate the entire
spirit, all the relations of life, and replenish them
with vitality and soul." And of Christianity gener-
ally we are told elsewhere : — " The acknowledgment
of the one true God, and of Jesus as His Christ, and
the obligation to a moral life according to the idea
of the Godhead — these, therefore, are the essentials
of Christianity. This simplicity of the religious
belief, this character of universality, goodwill to all
men, this freeing of the religious life from all the
limitations of special places and prescribed cere-
monials, and this noble, moral spirit, which has
moulded life according to the idea of the Perfection
which has in Jesus an embodied ideal, and this
direction of religion to the purely human without
respect of rank, nation, and political constitution,
has procured Christianity so wide an extension and

136 THE CATEGORIES

given it so beneficent an influence on the destiny of
mankind." This, too, in the same connexion is a
general principle, and of importance, that it is on
individual free-will that with us, nowadays, the State
is founded, a condition that in ancient times was
politically impossible. That a State should be pos-
sible on individual free-will, for that mankind had
to wait the advent of Christianity; for it was with
Christianity that there came into the world the new
principle of such free-will, of such liberty. The
softening and enriching influence of Christianity —
that in Christianity which exalted and expanded
the soul of man into the universal itself — nay,
within that, the hard training and discipline of the
Christian duties and the Christian life : just all that
Christianity means — that was the necessity of the
modern State.

I have noted, on the part of others, or even
myself elsewhere, a variety of express passages to
the same effect ; but I dread disproportionately to
heap. I may remind, however, that a propos of a
reference to Hegel, on the foundations of belief
(p. 13), I had a remark or. two which, surely as
apposite here, I may venture to repeat : —

" The Aufklarung, namely, with its absolute com-
pleteness of general information, supported, too, by
the full enlightenment of all knowledge of science,
rigorous, exact scientific truth as it now is — the Auf-
klarung, I say, tends to deny, or, at least, sceptically
to doubt, every item, every the most momentous and
vital particular, of Eeligion — Eeligion, as we have

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 137

it ' through the ages/ Am I wrong in venturing to
surmise that this to some extent summarises the
central idea of a book that, considering the number
of editions it counts, must have given thought, and
a thought, to not a few presently existing readers —
this book,* namely, ' The Foundations of Belief/ by
Mr Balfour."

And now it may be in place here that, in this the
religious reference, we pass to a word — only a word —
on Hegel ; but what it concerns can be characterised
only as the profound result of a truly categorical
depth and gravity of inquest and insight. "It is
not necessary to read very deep into Hegel," says
Schelling, to come to know that his main quest is
" the An sick of things." The An sich of things is,
in the language of Schelling, their Was, their What ;
and one need not indeed go deeper than the surface
to come to know that, with all his philosophy, it is
the Was of religion that is to Hegel his main pivot.
This, and that to Hegel also God is, as it were, the
constitutive thought of religion — to know as much,
I say, is to be lost in wonder as to what knowledge,
or what want of knowledge, could have warranted

* This remarkable work seems to me to be really a plea for
spiritualism against the undue protentions of the too prevalent
modern view which may be named " Naturalism " as with
"Mr Ball'our." A friend writes me this his wind up of
criticism on it : — " The book ought to be read by these
' educated ' people who are apt, in the present day, to talk
as if science was so certain and philosophy so unreal : it might
be useful for them to learn on what very insecure foundations
what they think to be so certain really rests." This book is a
cheering event in these days ; and much to the same effect is
Mr Haldane's veritable philosophy in that his attractive and
somewhat unique work, The Pathway to Reality.

138 THE CATEGORIES

any man unmisgivingly to lay at the bottom of a
whole book- judgment (to the Public) on Hegel
that he, Hegel "had the audacity to say that
philosophy was to make us indifferent to whether
God existed or not!" This can be only paralleled
by that magnanimous attempt on the part of certain
learned Professors, as recorded in Transactions of
certain learned Scottish Societies, fundamentally to
expose and explode that " Hegelian Calculus" of
Hegel's own, which they themselves had — dreamt !

As regards Hegel's declarations in respect of
God, I will quote a few from the Philosophy of
Eeligion : —

" God is the beginning of All and the end of All ;
as All proceeds from Him, so also All goes back to
Him ; and He is no less the middle, that animates
and inspires All and, preserving those forms in their
existence, puts into all of them soul.

" The object of religion is the eternal truth, God,
and nothing but God.

" God is the Absolute Spirit, who is there not only
in our thought, but as existent person.

" God is einer — a person, not eines — a substance,
as in Pantheism.

"God is the God of all men — not mere all-em-
bracing, general spirit (i. 4, 21, 27 ; ii. 48, 186)."

Such quotations might, in either connexion be
indefinitely multiplied, but all to the single effect,
that God to Hegel is the One, Sole, Personally
Existent, Living God.

In fact, in actual fact — in truth, in very truth, he

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 139

only will say the fact and the truth of Hegel, who
says that Hegel, the whole of Hegel, is to be found
in that single edge, that single concrete edge —
religion, the religious moment: "God's Grace and
Man's Sacrifice."

It was not for nothing that, all these years of his
lonely exile in Switzerland at Berne, Hegel grubbed
and groped and burrowed himself into religion —
burrowed himself into religion — Christianity — and
there found himself : found himself in God.

It is in the first volume of the Philosophy of
Eeligion — in what is there called The Religious
Relation that Hegel lays the deep foundations —
the Metaphysic — of this whole Crisis. And no
man can miss it who absorbs himself into the
" Gultus " that follows. The Cultus takes up some
fifty pages ; but more than a hundred are given to
the Eeligious Eelation that precedes it. Hegel, in
discussion and exposition, is very particular and
full here; but I am minded — without going into
them either — to direct attention to no more than
the final twenty pages.

But what these concern is the very heart of
Hegel, the very eye of his whole business, to call
it so. They concern, that is, "The Speculative
Notion (Begriff) of Eeligion."

For this Begriff Hegel, at some length prepares
the way by certain expositions that concern the
Finite, the last one of which bears to be "The
Rational Consideration of the Finite," and that
means the result to the Finite when it is viewed

140 THE CATEGORIES

by reason. The paragraph that opens here I
translate thus: —

" This standpoint is to be considered as it stands
in relation to the form of Eeflexion in its highest
point. Transition from this standpoint must be
dialectical in its nature and dialectically made.
This, however, belongs to Logic. We shall proceed
thus : concretely state it, and, as for what concerns
necessity in the transition, appeal to the consequence
of the standpoint itself which is this : — / as finite
am a nullity, and as such to be abolished, but this
abolishment, all the same, is not accomplished if
this immediate individuality withal remains and so
remains that only this Ego is the affirmative, as the
standpoint of reflexion gives it. The finite that
rates itself non-finite is only abstract identity, void
in itself, the highest form of untruth, the lie and
the bad. There must, then, be a standpoint
got in which the Ego (the Me\ in this individualism,
does, in fact and reality, do denial on itself. I must
be the particular subjectivity that is in effect denied
(negated) ; but there must be an objective (something)
recognised by me even so, which in point of fact is
valid to me as true, as the affirmative, put in my
place, in which I as this Ego (this Me) am negated,
but in which my self-dependence (my Me in fact)
is at the same time maintained. The self-depen-
dence of reflexion is so individual a one that it gives
place within itself to not another such, and as it
must give place to some other, it proceeds in this
without law and order (of will say), i.e., it has place
for nothing Objective. Shall really an Objective
be recognised, there belongs to that, that I become
determined as a Universal, hold myself as, am to
myself a Universal. This, now, is nothing else than
the standpoint of thinking reason; and just religion

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 141

itself is this act, this action of thinking reason and of
one that in reason thinks : as individual (Einzelner)
to set one's self as the universal, and negating one's
self as individual (Einzelner — Singular), to find one's
true self as the universal.

" Of this standpoint, the universal general
moments, the more particular thought moments,
are now to be brought to view."

This is not happy writing. In rendering it, I
have felt obliged to follow the conceived thoughts
as well as the expressed words of Hegel. An example
will explain. One sentence runs in German : " Die
Freiheit der Eeflexion ist eine solche, die nichts in
sich enstehen liisst und da sie doch entstehen lassen
muss, in diesem Setzen ohne Gesetz und Ordnung
verfahrt, d. h. nichts Objectives entstehen lasst.
The freedom of Eeflexion is such a one, that it lets
nothing arise in its self and as it, nevertheless, must
let arise, proceeds in this Setting without law and
order, i.e., lets nothing objective arise." I do not
suppose there is any one, German or English, who
can make anything of this. I cannot certainly affirm
that what I make of it (higher up) is right. The
difficulty is all too great.

In truth it may be that what we have here but
illustrates the fact that what of Hegel had publica-
tion only at the hands of others after his death,
cannot be depended on in the same way as what he
himself published.

I conceive the burthen of the whole passage quoted
to be this : My ego (as me) knows itself to be finite

142 THE CATEGORIES

— singular, an individual, not a universal — and so
knows itself in that quality to be no more than a
null, a nothing : Knows, that is, that it has its truth,
its reality only in the universal : into which negated,
that its very negatedness is only an absorbedness,
an identifiedness. That is the act of religion : the
singular or particular is identified into the universal
—God.

Accurately, this is nothing else than that God
created man — but in his own image. Man is a
creature, finite ; but in his consciousness, the image
of God, man is infinite.

"This is nothing else" (as just said) "than the
standpoint of thinking reason; and just religion
itself is this act, this action of thinking reason and
of one that, with reason or in reason, thinks ; to set
one self, a singular, as the universal, and, negating
one's self as singular, to find one's true self as
the universal" (188). "Of this standpoint, the
universal general moments, the more particular
thought moments, are now to be shown " (189).

And now there follows an intimate exposition,
demonstration, of

" The Speculative Notion (Begriff) of Eeligion."

This I leave to the reader; and, with what-
ever difficulty, he can always realise it for himself,
if he will but duly absorb himself — and Think
(189-204).

The result is, that Christianity is, with all that I
may quote — and all shall be relative — directly or
indirectly, this : —

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 143

Blessedness can only be said of God, in whom Will,
and realisation of his absolute Might are one. For
man, however, agreement of externality with hisinter-
nality is circumscribed and contingent (Propped. 31).
The substantial relation of man to God seems to be a
Beyond, a Yonder. But the love of God to man
and of man to God annuls the disunion between
this side and what is conceived as a yonder side,
and is The Eternal Life. This identity is made
visible in Christ. As son of man, he is son of
God. For the God-Man there is no yonder. Not
as this individual man is he, but as man universal,
as the veritable, the true man. The external side
of his history must be distinguished from the religious
side. He suffered and died in lowliness, in shame.
His pain was the depth of the unity of the divine
and human nature in life and suffering. The " blessed
Gods " of the heathens were figured as in a yonder :
through Christ has common reality, this lowliness,
which is not disgrace, been itself made sacred (ib. 204).

Christianity, round which turned the revolution
of the world that now is. The absolute nature
of God is not to be named substance, but subject
(person), spirit. As though without God there could
be anything absolute or true at all (xvii. 156, 167,
290).

With the idea of Christianity, as the new religion
which has come into the world, the essential principle
is that the Absolute is known in concrete wise as
Spirit, God is not a mere general thought, a con-
ception. Within Christianity, the ground-fact is,
that in man there has arisen the consciousness of
the truth, of substantial Spirit, and that man be
participant of this truth. Man must be so that for
him this truth is ; further he must be convinced of
this as possible. This is the absolute call and need ;
man must have come to the consciousness that this

144 THE CATEGORIES

alone is the truth. The first interest in the Christian
religion, therefore, is that the import of the Idea be
revealed to man : or, more particularly, that there
come to the consciousness of man the unity of the
divine and human nature, on the one side as sub-
stantial unity, and on the other as in the Cultus
realised unity. The Christian life is that our sub-
jectivity have trust in this idea, that the individual
know himself as taken in claim, that he make him-
self worthy in himself to attain to this unity, that the
spirit of God, grace, as it is named, dwell in him.
In Christianity this substantiality of the intellectual
world, Spirit, has become common consciousness —
this is a second creation of the world, which has
followed the first; only first in it has spirit come to
understand itself as Ego — Ego, i.e., as self-conscious-
ness (xv. 35-7, 106).

That a man is in himself free, in his substance as
man born free : that was known neither to Plato nor
Aristotle. Only in the Christian principle is essen-
tially the individual personal soul, spirit, of infinite,
absolute worth ; God wills that there shall be help
for all men. With the Christian religion came the
truth that before God all men are equal ; for Christ
has emancipated them into Christian liberty. And
so this liberty is made independent of birth, station,
learning, etc., etc. (xiii. 63). God is self-conscious-
ness ; He knows Himself in another consciousness
that in itself is the consciousness of God, but also as
itself, in that it knows its identity with God, an
identity, however, which is realised by negation of
the finite (xii. 191). The eternal life of the Christian
is the spirit itself of God, and the spirit of God is
just this, to be self-consciousness of Himself as the
divine spirit (xi. 394). Only Christianity, through
the doctrine of God made man, and from the presence
of the Holy Spirit in the community of the faithful,

RELIGION AND THE CATEGORIES 145

first gave to the human consciousness a perfectly
free relation to the infinite and thereby made possible
the notional (begreifende) cognition of Spirit in its
absolute infinitude. First, only through the Christian
religion has the one nature of God (but distinguished
within itself), the totality of the divine Spirit in the
form of unity, been revealed (vii. pt. 2. 4, 32).

The Christian God is not merely the known God,
but the absolutely himself-knowing God, and not
merely conceived, but rather absolutely actual
personality. The universal in its true and compre-
hensive signification is a thought, of which it must
be said that it (the thought) took thousands of years
before it came into the consciousness of man, and
which only through Christianity reached its full
recognition. The true ground, why there are no
longer any slaves in Europe, is to be sought in
nothing else than in the principle of Christianity
itself. The Christian religion is the religion of
perfect freedom; and only for the Christian is
man as such in his infinitude and universality
(vi. 297, 321-2).

Not one word that has now been said, but has its
essential bearing on the Auf Ida' rung No. 1. That
Christianity as Christianity, a whole world's signifi-
cance, should lose its import, should forfeit its
validity, its truth, its deep consequence to humanity
as humanity because of the miracle of the swine !
Let the commonality of the account be what it may,
let the popularity of the account be what it may
— eminently natural and eminently naturally in
place- both, they are both but of the surface surface
and of the external external, as, consequently, of the
contingent contingent. What are they to the depth

K

146 THE CATEGORIES

and internality of the truth of God ? The Aufkla-
rung No. 1, is but vulgarity out of date !

The Aufklarung No. 1, is but vulgarity out of
date ! And if, when so placed, it is vulgarity out of
date, what is it when it is the relation to Jesus that
is in place ? What is the Book — what is it in the
Evangelists — what in the Apostles — in Matthew,
Mark, Luke, John — in James, and Peter, and Jude —
in Paul — in and under all these names what is the
Book — what is the New Testament — what can we
say that it is, but that it is Jesus ? Whole and sole
it is as Jesus, only as Jesus, that we see the Book.
The Book is Jesus, and Jesus is the Book. We have
histories and histories on our shelves, and, no doubt,
we have great men — great men and good men — in
all of them ; but is there a single man of them all,
great men, good men, equal to Jesus ? Not one !
Even in the finite — that is, of men — Jesus is alone
what we can think of as the Universal. And after
Philosophy, as we have seen, the Universal has its
own meaning.

"Shakespeare entering, we should all rise," said
Lamb, " but Christ, we should all kneel." *

Is there any place for the vulgarity of an Aufkla-
rung No. 1, here !

* "Napoleon shutting up the New Testament said of
Christ — 'Savez vous que je me connais en homines ? Eh
bien, celui-la ne fut pas un homme.'" Browning chronicles
all this somewhere.

CHAPTEE Y

CONCLUSION

I KNOW not, however, that I have anything of
importance to say by way of conclusion : this whole
little book, indeed, I really regard as no more than
as something of an appendix (something valuable as
such ?) to my preceding volume. If, then, I have
given it the title of The Categories, it is only because
I regard these in the main to function all through it ;
and I positively do not seem to myself to require to
speak at any greater length on that head generally.
As, however, it must seem to my readers that I have
troubled myself most with the great names of the
Kantian era, I think I may pardonably add just a
word in connexion therewith.

In the previous volume I am very full on Kant.
That is, I am quite full on the Categories as they are
in Kant. I may refer here to all that I have else-
where said of Carlyle's^ropos on the veteran. Carlyle
lays stress on the bodily smallness of the man, in
regard to which he thinks Kant's letters give him a
right to speak morally as though in connexion with

147'

148 THE CATEGORIES

the known facts physical. I have presumed to differ
from Mr Carlyle in this, instancing Kant's extra-
ordinary fertility, that he has no sooner done with
one Kritik than he is ready with a second, and a
third — with remarkable work after remarkable work,
in fact, all freshly, frankly written, and with new
and original ideas of his own. His third Kritik, the
aesthetic one, is perhaps as regards such ideas the
more remarkable of these latter; but, for all that,
his practical works are about the most interesting
and inspiriting things he has ever written. One gets
absorbed in them. Still, the climax and crown of
them, which I suppose we may take the Categorical
Imperative to be, though, no doubt, welcome, useful,
and all suggestive — precisely so on the individual
occasion of call, too — is but itself abstract, certainly a
universal, but as certainly only an abstract universal,
not freighted with any table of completion and in-
struction in regard to a philosophical scheme of all
our various concrete duties, etc. Carlyle has Kant
before him as " a small, most methodical, clear and
nimble man, with those fine sharp cheery honest
eyes, brow, intellect, those projected quizzically
cautious lips of his : " and, doubtless, he was the
best of all that. I do not suppose it can be held
that Carlyle was always right. Nevertheless he was
everywhere and at all times the True Thomas, and
certainly — to me at least — his forte lay, not only in
the perfect picturing of individual external scenery
— the actuality without, but also in the sketching
of individual internal character — the reality within.

CONCLUSION 149

€arlyle's Kant, then, is perhaps, in its own way, not
without at least a certain picturesque truth: in-
tellectually, we must say at once, however, that Kant
was not a small man. No doubt, if you eliminate
irom his works but one thing only, he will cease to
l)e, what he is now, epochal. That one thing is the
•Categories — of course with all that they involve.
This, too, is true : that the origin of the categories as
they appear in Kant was pretty much the accident of
an accident ; for it was pretty much by accident that
Hume, in treating causality, asked in a way : If the
causal necessity is not a posteriori, where is it ? as it
was pretty much by accident that, in return, Kant
answered : why, a priori, of course !

And already, at the word, the German tree was
planted ?

Kant's earlier and smaller works, had they been
alone, might, not at all improbably, have easily and
reasonably disappeared — and he with them. But,
his later and greater works, even without the cate-
gories (which are what is magistral in them) —
would they have disappeared ? If not epochal,
Kant would no longer have been as a Descartes,
or a Spinoza, or a Leibnitz, or a Locke, or a
Berkeley, or a Hume — no longer that, perhaps —
but would he not, in advance of the Keids, the
Stewarts, the Browns, have been at least half of
the way towards them?

The third Kritik, independently of the categories,
has excellences of its own ; and still more righteously
can this be said for the second. No doubt, the first

150 THE CATEGORIES

and great Kritik, the one epochal work of Kantr
would, in such circumstances, shrink into the spectre
of a sheet or two. And how could it be otherwise T
Withdraw the machinery, all these heavy masses of
— Analytics, Dialectics, Syntheses of Apprehension,
of Eeproduction, of Eecognition, Schematisms,.
Axioms, Anticipations, Analogies, Postulates, Para-
logisms, Antinomies — scores more endlessly — with-
draw all these, I say, and what would remain?
Something not so " methodic " it might be, but I
rather think, to most people, perhaps, something both.
" clearer " and " nimbler ! "

That is how Kant would be, if but divested of one-
thing — the categories. But leave him the categories
and divest him of but one other thing — the Avfkla-
rung : and all the rats have left the ship ! I feel
certain that Noack, and all who are as he — and they
constitute, far and away, the bulk of those who sit
around to judge — would, without that one other thing,
at once see in Kant nothing !

And positively it is as concerns the Aufklarung,
or, better, it is as concerns religion generally, that, if
exception be taken at any time to Kant as shallow,
it will be at least most markedly on that ground
that there is truth in it.

It is on that ground that, in the first place, I
would rest the distinction between Kant and Hegel.
Compare how Kant, in the ordinary outside way,,
would acknowledge the uses of religion for morality,
morals, and how Hegel, as in the Eeligious Eelation
and the Cultus, would take us into the very inmost

CONCLUSION 151

of the Eeality — into the very inmost of the Presence !
It is there that the difference between the two men
is even infinite. It is there, then, in that difference,
that we may think of thinness and superficiality on
the one side, and of intensest depth, intensest truth on
the other. There is more than that in this difference ;
but I do not propose in the meantime here to enter
rigorously and at full into the particulars that con-
stitute it. Let it be enough for me to say now, that
to the best of my belief and judgment — and I think
after all this time and what it means I know both
— Hegel is a greater man than Kant.

And yet it is the Categories that are the work
and worth, the vitality, the epochal service, the tribute
and communication of both. The Categories ? And
Hegel took them from Kant : it is the Categories of
Kant made Hegel ? Yes ! but what did Hegel make
of them ? His score of volumes — his whole twenty-
one volumes are his making of them.

It does not follow from all this — as already in-
timated— that Kant's praise does not remain. Kant
was not a small man : make seriously or suppositi-
tiously what deductions you may, he was not small.
By very nature, he had a perfectly clear, susceptible,
capable understanding that, with an altogether avid
curiosity, welcomed information, intelligence, ideas,
from all sides, but from that side — in some special
degree, no doubt, even from the first — where was
presage of his Chair, the Chair in which he was
representative of Logic, Metaphysics — Philosophy,
to his life's end. For, withal, he had read and he

152 THE CATEGORIES

had thought, this little man : he had no interest in
life, indeed, but to read and to think. And if he
read, he also wrote; and deduct from it what you
may — Aufkliirung, Categories — what he wrote at his
best was always of signal originality and instructive
import. Facts are facts : and look at it as you may,
name it as you may, Kant's fact — let it even be by
accident of an accident — was an epochal fact, and
an epochal fact it will remain. And so, then, it is
out of all proportion to call this epochal man " small,"
" spiritually small : " it was not as a small man that
Kant was the historical originator of a historical
epoch. And if Hegel is a greater man than Kant, it
is only in and of the Kantian Philosophy he writes.

Saying no more than this of Kant, I think it will
be pretty plain that, on the whole, nothing further
need be said here of Fichte.

Of Schelling, his Positive matter is so peculiar and
so difficult, that if I did say the more that I have, it
would be welcome; but here, nevertheless, not in place.
It is needless to dwell on contradictions, as e.g. the
dass granted to be a matter of experience, and yet
the dass only reasoned to — not, to be sure, as in the
negative philosophy from the effect to the cause, but
from the cause to the effect ! And yet no ! even
that does not state the case; for Schelling's Seyn
(the dass) is to be conceived as something that is
before and beyond both thought and sense : and what
can that mean, but that it can be got to — neither by
thought nor by sense ? ! A veritable Prius — surely !
but what good is it if unattainable ? I have called

CONCLUSION 153

it x; and no doubt Schelling thinks it something
more positive if conceived — just conceived — as all
potentiality or as the potentiality of all, whether as
the totality of thought, reason, or as the totality
of empirism; but just call my x, if you will, the
totality of sense or the totality of reason ; or just,
by all means call it the totality of both at once —
then, pray, tell me in what respect is it less an x ?

Of Hegel, as I say, I scarcely think I have any-
thing to add. Of course neither in his case nor in
that of the others, is there to be expected from me
the particulars of the enormous works of either of
the four of them. That is the business only of a
complete translation, in all cases attended in the
main by an equally complete, detailed, relative com-
mentary and criticism.

When I began this work it was my one ever-
present idea. " It would be a fine thing if I could
give a generally intelligible and explanatory body to
the — Four Corners of German Philosophy." How —
after a life-time, or the better half of one — I may
have succeeded, it is for others to judge.

One thing I should wish to say at last, that the
strange mistake in regard to Hegel has been exploded
and exposed ; and that he has been demonstrated, in
his own deep way, not only to act on the conviction
that God is the single truth of the universe, but on that
also that Christianity lies with him as animating
influence at the very heart of his Philosophy itself.
Nay, is it so certain that Hegel, after all, was not, in
his belief at heart, in the religious and philosophical

154 THE CATEGORIES

vision of his soul, just as Bohme was, or as any one
Mystic of the Middle-Ages was, Eckhart, or Tauler,
or others, simply Gott-legeistert ? What was that
"intellectual world" of his — or what was that
" eternal life " of his ? A few pages back there are
some extracts in a Christian and religious reference
which I should suppose it would be difficult for any
one to read without the question, was not Hegel, then,
if philosophically in earnest, not less, in the centre,
religiously in earnest ? " The substantial relation " —
" the unity of the divine and human nature " — " the
infinitude and universality of man " — the " unity of
God but distinguished in itself," a plurality, then,
" a totality," but is not that so as though the One
were Many and the Many One? There is the
"identity made visible in Christ," etc. — so much
else indeed — but these are points, plainly, not for
the formality of exposition now ! We may be sure
of this, however, that take it as we may, there was
to Hegel in this universe, but one single essentiality,
substantiality, and truth : God ! And if this was so
to Hegel, it was not otherwise to Aristotle, as I think
no one for a moment can possibly doubt who reads
in that reference the passage in my Gifford Lectures
translated from the Lambda of the Metaphysics.

How, then, are we to explain on the part of
Aristotle, and, as it is not out of place to say on
the part of Plato also — how, then are we to explain
this action on the part of ancient philosophy generally
— how else than that this action addressed itself ex-
clusively to a unity — addressed itself, as it were, to

CONCLUSION 155

the study and consideration of a single principle ?
By fixing eye on a single principle — God, say — it
was meant that they were to understand all.

No doubt, in the mediaeval thinking, this single
principle, God, remained — remained and in a form
magnified, exalte — in a form d fortiori, so to speak.
But, now, in Christianity, this single form was
doubled: there was added to this form (God),
through Christ — Man. God was as Mind, Thought,
Eeason ; but Man, as the Finite, Mundane, was but
as Nature, but as the nature generally, of the every-
day world we saw around us. Hence a duplicity.
Man was at once a duplicity in himself : he was in
himself at once Mind and Matter. This, withal, is
at once to name the distinctions that grew, and
grown, were Modern Philosophy !

Not that these distinctions were in evidence at
once. No ; Christianity itself as such, especially —
as against your Jupiters, and the rest — the God of
Christianity, constituted, as it were, the all of general
speech for the interval of some four hundred years.
After these it was, however, that Augustin began to
give voice to the problem between Mind and Matter
with the discussion of which, later, it was the fortune
of Descartes, formally to illustrate himself. By this
we mean that, even up to these latter days which are
just beside us, the general terms heard were those of
Materialism on the one side, as those of Idealism on
the other — a duplicity. Now the vital core of this
duplicity was the theory of perception, perception
strictly so called — sense-perception. Not but that

156 THE CATEGORIES

even in ancient times there was some approach to
the problem so far as concerns the fallibility of the
senses. I suppose there was some talk of this kind ;
pretty well, after all, on the part of every one of
them — unless the nakedly materialistic: Eleatics,
Heraclitans, Empedocleans, Sceptics, Sophists, and
indeed, generally all. Even Plato refers to the
fluctuation that belongs to sense. Still, on the
whole, we may hold, I think, that what an ancient
saw was what he saw. That grass was that grass ;
that tree, that tree : each out there in space, in the
garden, a thing, an actual thing, an object, an actual
object — and always to remain actually such, let him
turn his back on it, or go outside, or do anything
else that pleased him. It never occurred to him
that as he only knew within, whatever he knew
could be, and must be, itself, only within ! I fully
believe that Aristotle, absolute idealist, would have
willingly endorsed every one word of all these then,
as I equally fully believe that the absolute idealist,
Hegel, did he live, would not for a moment hesitate to
endorse every one word of them now. Such conun-
drums as those of Descartes, or of Hobbes and Hume,
ay, or of Fichte and Kant, did not for either Aristotle
or Hegel, in good truth, function. If, indeed, cogni-
tion, human cognition, cognition just as cognition,
can only know within, and, consequently, never can
know a without in its self, in its own reality, as a
without — if, we say, this be so, how are we to under-
stand the divine cognition? — that God never saw
the tree He planted, or the man He made, or beast

CONCLUSION 157

of the field, or fowl of the air ! Philosophy, in its
explanation of the universe (as which it can be shut
up in a single sentence — this, namely,

That the dialectic of G-od's own Self -consciousness
develops the Categories — Thought, Eeason, the
Within ;

That these Categories, by the same dialectic exter-
nalised are — the Universe, Nature, the Without) —
Philosophy, with this interpretation of the universe,
has no need I say, to doubt but that man, the finite,
just as he is physiologically constructed, does know,
does see the actual without as the actual without,
grass as grass, tree as tree, man as man, etc., etc.

And this being, the whole of that metaphysic that,
with Descartes, say, or with Hume, Kant, or another,
is in mortal anxiety as to what The Thing In Itself
may be, is futile. Philosophy has three objects,
Logic, Nature, Mind ; and to the solution of all three
of them it applies Categories. There are the Cate-
gories in Kant, in Fichte, in Schelling ; but in all
three of them, they are only meagre, or only ineptly
deduced : and it is in Hegel alone that, in quantity
and quality, they come near to what they should be.

For the Categories are the Secret — the Categories
constitute the one Secret of the whole.

There are those who, having curiosity to know and
philosophise this world, just at once look away off, as it
is said, ins Blaue hinein, into the Blue, «V rov o\ov
ovpavov, and start on their Pasear just as they are ;
and, "just as they are," they are excellent intelli-
gences and well-educated, but they need not be

158 THE CATEGORIES

categorically educated. Only the Greeks and the
Germans, to say so, are categorically educated : and,
as just referred to, Hegel of all mankind is the most
so. His categories, and as they are, constitute at this
moment the most complete body of metaphysic —
philosophy — that exists ; but it by no means follows
that, just as they are, they are final. The secret of
the dialectic that deduces them has been given: there
are those coming who, on it or with it, will operate
to constructions, combinations, configurations, that
are beyond prophecy. It is for Philosophy itself to
concentrate itself hither.

Of our philosophers, to speak of them in an
ordinarily human way, as a Macaulay or a Carlyle
might — that Kant was a harmless, decent, kindly
little man, with plenty of intelligence in his brain and
most acceptable industry in his action ; — that Fichte,
always as I have elsewhere depicted him, was, in his
simple manhood, the noblest of the four ; — that Hegel,
as ordinary plain man, sound, solid, real, was domes-
tically all that and more — truly a man of heart,
sense, duty; — and that Schelling was, in every
respect, pretty well as I have on the whole and
more than once represented him.

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