What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel

WHAT IS LIVING AND WHAT IS DEAD
OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

WHAT IS LIVING AND
WHAT IS DEAD OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

BY

BENEDETTO CROCE

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF
THE THIRD ITALIAN EDITION, 1912

BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

B.A. (OxoN.), M.R.A.S.

NEW YORK /RUSSELL & RUSSELL

FIRST PUBLISHED IN K)I$

REISSUED, 1969, BY RUSSELL & RUSSELL

A DIVISION OF ATHENEUM PUBLISHERS, INC.

BY ARRANGEMENT WITH MACMILLAN & CO. LTD., LONDON

L. C. CATALOG CARD NO! 79-83845
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

READERS of this translation will observe that I
have followed the Italian in discarding where the
original does so the use of capitals for the words
idea, spirit and so forth. It is true that they are
printed with capitals in German ; but then, so are
all other substantives, and by avoiding their use,
such words as idea and spirit are better under
stood as immanent rather than as transcendental
" things-in-themselves."

I used " gnoseology " in my translation of the
Philosophy of the Practical instead of the para
phrase " theory of knowledge." This word,
regularly formed from the Greek, seems to me
worthy a place in English, which has made no
difficulty about accepting an analogous, but not
identical, term such as Epistemology. When

vi PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

neologisms cover a new thought or facilitate, by
abbreviating, expression, it seems to me that they
are always legitimate, and I have not hesitated to
introduce one or two other words thus employed.
The tendency to avoid neologism at all costs by
the adoption of paraphrase, frequent in contem
porary English writers, seems to me to frustrate
the very purpose which it is intended to serve,
rendering yet more difficult by the very common
ness of the words used as paraphrase the already
sufficiently subtle qualifications of philosophy.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

THE study, What is living and what is dead of
the Philosophy of Hegel, was published in 1906
(Bari, Laterza), and contained an essay on
Hegelian bibliography as an appendix. This has
since been increased in the German and French
translations of that volume and would now have
need of not a few additions. But it has seemed
to me opportune in the present J collection to
suppress altogether the bibliographical portion
as something extraneous to its nature, and to
republish it, if ever, separately. And indeed, if
any one will give himself the trouble of looking
through, correcting, completing and keeping it up
to date for the use of students of Hegel, I propose

1 The Essay on Hegel is the first of a series of essays upon philo
sophical subjects contained in the volume from which this essay has been
selected for translation into English. — D. A.

vii

viii PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL
to present him with that first study of mine, with
permission to exercise upon it most fully the jus
utendi et abutendi. In this reimpression of the
critical study of 1906 will be found instead certain
elucidations of various points of the Hegelian
philosophy, which answer to censures and objec
tions that have been made to me ; though I have
as a rule preferred, as more persuasive, objective
treatment or retreatment of disputed points to
polemic properly so called.

B. CROCK.

RAIANO (AQUILA),
September 1912.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE DIALECTIC OR SYNTHESIS OF OPPOSITES . i

II. EXPLANATIONS RELATING TO THE HISTORY OF

THE DIALECTIC .... -33

III. THE DIALECTIC AND THE CONCEPTION OF

REALITY • 52

IV. THE NEXUS OF THE DISTINCTS AND THE FALSE

APPLICATION OF THE DIALECTIC FORM . . 78

V. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS INTO PAR
TICULAR CONCEPTS AND DEGREES OF TRUTH
(STRUCTURE OF THE LOGIC) . . . .100

VI. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PARTICULAR CONCEPTS

INTO PHILOSOPHICAL ERRORS . . .120

I. Art and Language (^Esthetic).

VII. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PARTICULAR CONCEPTS

INTO PHILOSOPHICAL ERRORS . . .134

II. History (Idea of a Philosophy of History).

VIII. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PARTICULAR CONCEPTS

INTO PHILOSOPHICAL ERRORS. . . .150

III. Nature (Idea of a Philosophy of Nature).

ix

PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

PAGE

IX. THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FALSE SCIENCES
AND THE APPLICATION OF THE DIALECTIC TO
THE INDIVIDUAL AND TO THE EMPIRICAL . 174

X. DUALISM NOT OVERCOME 192

XI. THE CRITICISM AND CONTINUATION OF THE

THOUGHT OF HEGEL 203

Conclusion.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION1

THE following lines were written before the out
break of war, but I see no reason to qualify
any of the statements therein contained. The
madness and immoralism of twentieth century
Germany has nothing in common with her great
writers of a hundred years ago and more. There
has been a great decline of German thought
coincident with material prosperity and aspiration
for universal dominion.

Readers of the following pages, accustomed to
Hegel's Himalayan severity and ruggedness of
style and to the arid and difficult treatment of the
Hegelian philosophy, so long in vogue, both here
and in Germany, will probably be surprised at the
profound yet pellucid clarity of Croce's thought.
Hegel has at last found a critic and interpreter
equal to the task, in the thinker who has already
given us complete the Philosophy of the Spirit.
Croce has passed beyond and therefore been able

1 Some of these thoughts are taken from other essays of Croce.
XI

xii PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

to look back upon Hegel, to unravel the gorgeous
yet tangled skein of his system, and supply to all
future students the clue of Ariadne.

Who but Croce would have thought of recom
mending that Hegel should be read like a poet?
Were it not for his own work upon aesthetic, such
a statement would seem absurd ; but in the light
of the two degrees of theoretic knowledge and
of the formation of logic from aesthetic intuitions,
such a remark assumes its full significance.
Rather, then, than dwell for ever upon some
technical difficulty, such as that presented by the
first triad of the Logic, he recommends us to read
Hegel "like a poet," that is without paying undue
attention to the verbal form, the historical accident
of what he says, but full attention to its poetic
truth. In reading a philosopher, we should seek
his inspiration in the mazes of his text, without
paying undue attention to the pedantries and
formulae with which such a writer as Hegel is
(historically) overlaid. We should see in the
Hegelian triads the mighty effort of the philosopher
against Eleaticism and all forms of Nihilism, and
his attempt to create a new and superior form of
Heracliticism. The cut-and-dried Hegel of the
schools is thus to be avoided ; and when with
Croce's help we have scraped the lichen of his

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xiii

formulae from the thought of Hegel, we find
beneath it the true philosopher, the hater of all
that is abstract and motionless, of the should-be
that never is, of the ideal that is not real.

The title of this book sufficiently explains its
scope and object. The magnificent critique and
explanation of the dialectic is followed by the ex
position of one of Hegel's two great errors, the
confusion of distincts and opposites, and of its
far-reaching evil consequences for a great part of
the Hegeli'an system. That this error should
appear in the Logic itself is characteristic of
Hegel, who is not guilty of any mere inadvertence
or blunder, but errs grandly in a vital part of
his system. One of the most important deduc
tions from this error is that of the death of art,
to be merged, according to Hegel, in philosophy.
Croce's refutation of this fallacy and of the
application of the dialectic to the empirical world,
were they his sole contribution to philosophic
criticism and research, would suffice to lay all
students of Hegel beneath an obligation of en
lightened gratitude to the philosopher of Naples.

Croce points out how it was owing to the
application of the dialectic of opposites to the
category of distincts that Hegel conceived so great
a contempt for the practical as compared with the

xiv PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

theoretic world. He was led by his theory to look
upon the former as one from which the thinker
freed himself by the power of his thought. In
Hegel, the poet and the sage look down from
their tower of ivory upon the throng below. He
conceived the dialectic as a temporal becoming,
a progressiis ad finitum, and once he had attained
to the contemplative life, the sage would naturally
no longer desire any sort of intercourse with the
throng. There would thus be cessation of the
dialectic. But becoming cannot negate itself.
The true becoming is ideal ; it is the intelligence
of real becoming, in the same way as the universal
is not divergent or indifferent in respect to the
particular, but is the intelligence of the particular ;
so that universal and particular, ideal and real be
coming, are the same. Outside ideal becoming
is not real becoming, but only temporal becoming,
that is to say, arithmetical time, a construction of
the abstract intellect ; just as the real individual is
not outside the universal, but only the empirical in
dividual, isolated, atomicized, monadized. Eternity
and real time coincide, because the eternal is in
every instant and every instant is in the eternal.

Hegel's identification of the real and the
rational led him to support energetically the
action of the State and of all great men, and

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xv

his confusion of the ethical with the economic
led to the creation of Nietzsche's Superman, a
being above the morality of the throng. The
rationality of the real should, however, be closely
connected with the most rigid condemnation of
error and of evil, and the perpetuity of the dialectic
with the constancy of the true. The idea of finite
progress must therefore be looked upon as in
complete, until it has been enriched by the dialectic
with the idea of infinite progress. This latter,
taken by itself, is also void of content, for an
eternal approximation and never attaining is not
progress : it does not matter to Tantalus if the
sweet spring-water be a mile or an inch from his
lips, if he is never to touch it with them. The
symbol of humanity is neither God nor man, but
the God-man, Christ, Who is the eternal in the
temporal and the temporal in the eternal.
Another way of stating the same thing is to com
bine the western idea of a perpetual breathless
pursuit of truth, and the static oriental idea of the
perpetual return. The spirit and history are
identical, as in their turn are philosophy and
history, because neither is complete without the
others. We possess the truth at every moment,
by the act of thinking, and this truth is at every
instant changed into will and nature, and therefore

xvi PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

into a new problem, which must be constantly
added to, if it is to remain truth. A man may
sacrifice all he has for the truth, even his own soul,
but he can never sacrifice morality, owing to the
contradiction that this would imply. Croce has
more than a good word to say of the study of
Hegel in Great Britain, and indeed he recently
observed to the present writer that his own thought
remained far more itself in the English than in the
German versions of his Aesthetic and Philosophy
of the Practical : in the latter it seemed to melt
away. But the study of Hegel should receive a
new and vigorous impetus from this work, which
should do much to correct the widespread con
fusion of the data of empirical or natural science
with true science, which is philosophy, the science
of sciences. Philosophy assigns its sphere to each
of the empirical sciences, and in their sphere philo
sophy is not competent. Confusion has arisen
from the attempts so often made by natural
scientists to solve problems outside their com
petency. A man may be an excellent entomo
logist, but his views upon the problem of know
ledge will be devoid of interest, unless he be also
a philosopher. The domination of empiricism in
this country has led to suspicion of thought which
is simply thought as yet untranslated into volitional

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xvii

act. Discussing recently in London the origins
of socialism with a leading statesman, he remarked
to me that socialism was the result of modern
economic conditions, factories, etc. He seemed
disinclined to admit that socialism in its theoretic
form first existed in the mind of Hegel and then
filtered down through Feuerbach and Marx, to
Sorel and the syndicalists of our day. There
seems to exist the belief that thought can arise
from psychical friction, like a spark from tinder.
Reality is looked upon by many as the physical,
mind as an epiphenomenon. Without the philo
sophers above mentioned, there could have been
no "social question" as it presents itself to-day.
The labour troubles of Roman days were settled
more easily than those of the modern world
because without the modern theoretic basis. They
could not, however, have existed without some
theoretic basis, however rudimentary. The French
Revolution broke out first in the brain of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau.

Much will, in my opinion, have been achieved
by the publication in English of this book, if it
lead our men of action — and as a nation the
English have the genius of practical action — to
respect Hegel as one of the greatest practical
forces the world has ever seen. They are not

xviii PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

likely to become mere dreamers by so doing,
for here we run no risk of underrating those
elements of empirical thought represented by
aeroplanes and other automobiles. Matter changes
place with far greater rapidity than heretofore,
but there is one thing that is " never in a hurry,"
yet supremely worthy of attention, and that, as
readers of Hegel know, is the idea.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

THE ATHENAEUM,
PALL MALL, LONDON.

WHAT IS LIVING AND WHAT IS DEAD
OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

I

THE DIALECTIC OR SYNTHESIS
OF OPPOSITES

HEGEL is one of those philosophers who have
made not only immediate reality but philosophy
itself the object of their thought, thus contribut
ing to elaborate a logic of philosophy. I believe,
therefore, that the logic of philosophy (with the
consequences ensuing from it for the solution of
particular problems and for the conception of life)
was the goal to which the main effort of his mind
was directed. It was there that he found or
brought to perfection and full value, principles of
high importance which had been unknown to or
hardly mentioned by previous philosophers, or
insufficiently marked by them, and which may
therefore be considered as his true discoveries.

Strange is the aversion to this conception of a
logic of philosophy (for it is really very simple
and should be accepted as irresistibly evident).

2 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

It is the idea, in other words, that philosophy
proceeds by a method peculiar to itself, the theory
of which should be sought and formulated. No
one doubts that mathematics has a method of its
own, which is studied in the logic of mathematics ;
that the natural sciences have their method,
from which arises the logic of observation, of
experiment, of abstraction ; that historiography
has its method, and that therefore there is a
logic of the historical method ; that poetry and
art in general give us the logic of poetry and art,
i.e. aesthetic ; that in economic activity is inherent
a method, which is afterwards reflected in
economic science ; and that finally the moral
activity has its method, which is reflected in
ethic (or logic of the will, as it has sometimes
been called). But when we come to philosophy,
very many recoil from this conclusion : that it,
too, from the moment of its inception, must have
a method of its own, which must be determined.
Conversely, very few are surprised at the fact
that treatises on logic, while giving much space
to the consideration of the disciplines of the
mathematical and natural sciences, as a rule
give no special attention to the discipline of
philosophy, and often pass it over altogether in
silence.

THE DIALECTIC 3

It is very natural that a logic of philosophy
should be denied by those who, owing to lack of
reflection or mental confusion or eccentricity,
deny philosophy in general. For it cannot be
claimed that the theory of an object should be
recognized when the reality of the object itself
is denied. If philosophy does not exist, then
the logic of philosophy does not exist. Good-bye
to both ; enjoy such a position if it satisfy you.
But if I have called this spectacle strange, it is
because we too often see those very philosophers
or philosophizers, as the case may be, showing
themselves altogether devoid of the conscious
ness of this inevitable necessity. Some of them
assert that philosophy must follow the abstract-
deductive method of mathematics. Others see
for it no other way of salvation than a rigorous
adherence to the experimental method. They
dream and extol a philosophy studied in the
laboratory and the clinic, an empirical metaphysic,
and so on. Finally (and this is the latest fashion,
which, if not new, is at least newly revived), we
are now commended to an individual and fantastic
philosophy, which produces itself like art. Thus,
from the compasses to the bistouri, and from that
to the zither ! every method seems good for
philosophy, save the method of philosophy itself.

4 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

One single observation should suffice against
such views : namely, that if philosophy is to
provide the understanding, and be as it were the
reflective consciousness of art and history, of
mathematics and of the researches of natural
science, of the practical and moral activity, we
fail to see how it can do this by conforming to
the method of one of those particular objects.
He who, when studying a poem, limits his study
to the application of the poetical method, will
feel in himself the creation of the poet, this or
that particular work of art ; but he will not thus
attain to a philosophic knowledge of the poem.
He who limits himself to mathematical thinking,
when studying a mathematical theory, will be the
disciple, the critic, the perfecter of that theory ;
but he will not attain knowledge of the nature of
mathematical activity. I f the objectf of philosophy
be not the production or the reproduction of art
and mathematics and of the various other
activities of man, but the comprehension (the
understanding) of them all, this comprehension is
itself an activity, proceeding by a method of its
own, infused or implicit, which it is important to
make explicit.

In any case the hope of understanding and
of judging the work of Hegel is vain, if we

THE DIALECTIC 5

do not always keep clearly before the mind
that this problem which we have just enunciated
was his main and principal problem, the central
problem of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and of
the new forms assumed by this book in the
Science of Logic and in the Encyclopaedia of Philo
sophical Sciences. Almost all histories of philo
sophy, and even the special monographs concern
ing Hegel (for example, the recent and most
ample monograph by Kuno Fischer), consist
in a summary repetition of the contents of his
books, so close as to repeat his divisions by
sections and chapters. But a complete exposi
tion of Hegel's thought, an inward and critical
exposition, should, in the first place and in chief
part, be devoted to his doctrine of the nature
of philosophic enquiry, and to the differences
between such enquiry and other theoretic and non-
theoretic forms.

Above all, what should be made clear is the
triple character that philosophic thought assumes
in Hegel, in relation to the three spiritual
modes or attitudes with which it is most readily
confused. Philosophic thought is for Hegel :
firstly, concept ; secondly, universal ; thirdly,
concrete. It is concept, that is to say it is not
feeling, or rapture, or intuition, or any other

6 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

similar alogical psychical state, incapable of exact
demonstration. This distinguishes philosophy
from theories of mysticism and of immediate
knowledge ; for these have at the most a negative
significance, in so far as they recognize that
philosophy cannot be constructed by the method
of the empirical and natural sciences, i.e. of the
sciences of the finite. They are, if you will,
profound, but with an " empty profundity."
Hegel becomes ferociously satirical against
mysticism, with its frenzies, its sighings, its raising
the eyes to heaven, its bowing the neck and
clasping the hands, its faintings, its prophetic
accents, its mysterious phrases of the initiates.
He always maintains that philosophy should have
a rational and intelligible form ; that it should be,
"not esoteric but exoteric," not a thing of sects,
but of humanity. The philosophic concept is
universal, not merely general. It is not to be
confounded with general representations, as for
instance, "house," "horse," "blue," which are
usually termed concepts, owing to a custom
which Hegel calls barbaric. This establishes the
difference between philosophy and the empirical
or natural sciences, which are satisfied with types
and class-conceptions. Finally, the philosophic
universal is concrete : it is not the making of a

THE DIALECTIC 7

skeleton of reality, but the comprehension of it
in its fulness and richness. Philosophic abstrac
tions are not arbitrary but necessary, and are
therefore adequate to the real, which they do not
mutilate or falsify. And this establishes the
difference between philosophy and the mathe
matical disciplines ; for these latter do not
justify their points of departure, but " command
them," and we must, says Hegel, obey the
command to draw such and such lines, in the
belief that this will be " opportune" for the con
duct of the demonstration. Philosophy, on the
other hand, has for its object that which really
is ; and it must completely justify itself, without
admitting or allowing any presupposition.1

And in order to elucidate this triple difference,
according to which the true concept, i.e. the
philosophical concept, shows itself logical, uni
versal, and concrete, it would be necessary to
include in a complete exposition the minor
doctrines, which are attached to the first and
fundamental doctrine, some of which are of great
importance, such as the resumption of the onto-
logical argument (the defence of Saint Anselm
against Kant), which maintains that in the

1 See especially the introduction to the Phenomenology and the pre
liminaries to the Encyclopaedia.

8 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

philosophic concept, as distinct and different
from mere representations of particulars, essence
implies existence. Another is the review of the
doctrine which regards the " judgment " as a con
nexion of subject and predicate. That doctrine
is based on something that is not clearly in
telligible to thought, and is therefore inadequate
to philosophy, of which the true form is the
"syllogism," in so far as that has the logical
character of reuniting itself with itself; others,
again, are the critique of the theory, which con
siders the concept to be a compound of "marks"
(which Hegel calls the true " mark " of the super
ficiality of ordinary logic); the critique of divisions
into species and classes ; the demonstration
(which may have curative efficacy in our times)
of the vanity of every "logical calculus"; and
not a few others besides.

But it is not my intention to offer in these
pages a complete exposition of Hegel's system,
nor even of his logical doctrine ; but rather
to concentrate all attention upon the most
characteristic part of his thought, upon the new
aspects of truth revealed by him, and upon the
errors which he allowed to persist or in which he
became entangled. For this reason, then, I set
aside the various theses briefly mentioned above

THE DIALECTIC 9

(from which it seems to me impossible to dissent,
although I recognize too how necessary it is that
they should be studied, since they form the often
neglected A B C of philosophy), and I come
without further ado to the point around which all
the disputes have been kindled and against which
his opponents have aimed their direct denials —
the treatment of the problem of opposites.

This is a problem whose terms must be
clearly defined if we wish to understand its
gravity and difficulty. The philosophic concept
(which, as has been mentioned, is a concrete
universal), in so far as it is concrete, does not
exclude distinctions, indeed it includes them in
itself. It is the universal, distinct in itself, re
sulting from those distinctions. As empirical
concepts are distinguished into classes and sub
classes, so the philosophic concept possesses its
particular forms, of which it is not the mechanical
aggregate, but the organic whole, in which every
form unites itself intimately with the others and
with the whole. For example, fancy and intellect,
in relation to the concept of spirit or spiritual
activity, are particular philosophic concepts ; but
they are not outside or beneath spirit, they are
indeed spirit itself in those particular forms ; nor
is the one separated from the other, like two

io PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

entities each confined to itself, and external to
the other, but the one passes into the other.
Hence fancy, as is commonly said, however
distinct it may be from intellect, is the foundation
of intellect and indispensable to it.

Our thought however, in investigating reality,
finds itself face to face, not only with distinct, but
also with opposed concepts. These latter cannot
be identified with the former without more ado,
nor be considered as special cases of them, as if
they were a sort of distinct concepts. The logical
category of distinction is one thing, and the
category of opposition is another. As has been
said, two distinct concepts unite with one another,
although they are distinct ; but two opposite con
cepts seem to exclude one another. Where one
enters, the other totally disappears. A distinct
concept is presupposed by and lives in its other,
which follows it in the sequence of ideas. An
opposite concept is slain by its opposite : the
saying, mors tua vita mea applies here. Examples
of distinct concepts are those already mentioned,
of fancy and intellect. And to these others
could be added, such as rights, morality and the
like. But examples of opposite concepts are
drawn from those numerous couples of words, of
which our language is full and which certainly

THE DIALECTIC n

do not constitute peaceable and friendly couples.
Such are the antitheses of true and false, ot good
and evil, beautiful and ugly, value and lack of
value, joy and sorrow, activity and passivity,
positive and negative, life and death, being and
not-being, and so on. It is impossible to confuse
the two series, distincts and opposites : so con
spicuously do they differ.

Now, if distinction do not impede, if indeed
it rather render possible the concrete unity of
the philosophic concept, it does not seem possible
that the same should be true of opposition.
Opposition gives rise to deep fissures in the
bosom of the philosophic universal and of each
of its particular forms, and to irreconcilable
dualisms. Instead of finding the concrete uni
versal, the organic whole of reality which it seeks,
thought seems everywhere to run against two
universals, opposing and menacing each other.
In this way, the fulfilment of philosophy is
impeded ; and since an activity which cannot
attain to its fulfilment, thereby shows that it has
imposed an absurd task on itself, philosophy itself,
the whole of philosophy, is menaced with failure.

The seriousness of this impasse is the reason
that the human mind has always laboured at this
problem of opposites, without, however, always

12 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

clearly realizing what it has been doing. And
one of the solutions upon which it has relied in
the course of centuries, has consisted in excluding
opposition from the philosophic concept, and in
maintaining the unreality of that perilous logical
category. The facts, to tell the truth, proved just
the opposite ; but the facts were denied and only
one of the terms was accepted, the other being
declared " illusion" ; or, what comes to the same
thing, a merely quantitative difference was drawn
between the two. This logical doctrine of
opposites is contained in the philosophic systems
of sensationalism, of empiricism, of materialism,
of mechanism, or however otherwise they may
be termed. Thought and truth appeared in
them in turn, a secretion of the brain, or an
effect of habit and association ; virtue, a mirage
of egoism ; beauty, a refinement of sensuality ;
the ideal, some kind of voluptuous or capricious
dream ; and so on.

Another logical doctrine, which posits oppo
sition as a fundamental category, has for
centuries employed its force against this first
doctrine. It is found in the various dualistic
systems, which reassert the antithesis that the
first, with a delicate sleight of hand, had caused
to disappear. These systems accentuate both

, THE DIALECTIC 13

terms, being and not-being, good and evil, true
and false, ideal and real, those of the one
series being at variance with those of the other.
Without doubt, the dualistic view retains its
value against abstract monism : a polemical value
due to its denial of the other's negation. But
in itself, it is as little satisfactory as the other,
because if the first sacrifices opposition to unity,
the second sacrifices unity to opposition.

In thought both these sacrifices are so
impossible, that we continually see those who
maintain the one doctrine turning more or less
consciously into maintainers of the other. The
Unitarians surreptitiously introduce the duality
of opposites, under the guise of the duality of
reality and of illusion : an illusion with which
they could no more dispense than with reality
itself, so that they sometimes even say that the
spring of life is in illusion. And the opposition
ists all admit some sort of identity or unity of
opposites unattainable by the human mind,
owing to its imperfection, but necessary in order
adequately to think reality. In this way, both
become involved in contradictions, and come
to recognize that they have not solved the
problem which they had set themselves, and
that it still remains a problem.

i4 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

For " necessary illusion," or " necessary
imperfection of the human mind," are mere
words, to which, try as we will, we cannot give
any meaning. We know only accidental and
relative illusions, individual and relative im
perfections. A reality other than the real, a
mind beyond the human mind, we can neither
conceive nor constitute a term in any com
parison. Thus reality and mind show us both
unity and opposition. And (as Leibniz said of
philosophical systems) the Unitarians, in so far
as they affirm the first, the oppositionists, in so
far as they affirm the second, are right in what
they affirm and wrong in what they deny.
Hegel is never weary of admiring the virile
firmness of the materialists and sensationalists
and monists of every sort in asserting the
unity of the real, and if, owing to the historical
conditions in which his thought developed, he
admired the dualistic forms less, and indeed
never lost an opportunity of expressing his
antipathy to them, on the other hand he never
forgot that the consciousness of opposition is
equally invincible and equally justifiable with
that of unity.

The case, then, seems desperate ; and no less
desperate is the case of desperation. For, to

i THE DIALECTIC 15

declare the question insoluble would itself compel
us to consider, whether, by that very declaration,
we had not already cut the knot in favour of
thought, that is to say, of hope. The casual
observer of the history of philosophy sees a
restoration of dualism follow every affirmation
of monism, and vice versa : each unable wholly
to strangle the other, but able to hold it in check
for a time. It would seem almost as though, when
man has satiated himself with the uniformity of
monism, he distracts himself with the variety of
dualism ; and, when he is tired of this, he plunges
again into monism, and alternates the two move
ments, thus tempering hygienically the one
with the other. The casual observer, at every
epidemic of materialism, says with a smile, Wait ;
now will come spiritualism. And when spiritual
ism celebrates its chiefest triumphs, he smiles in
the same way and says, Wait ; materialism will
return in a little while ! But the smile is forced,
or soon vanishes, for there is nothing really
cheerful in the condition of him who is ceaselessly
tossed from one extreme to another, as by an
invincible force beyond control.

Nevertheless, amid the difficulties which I have
made clear, there is at the bottom of our souls
a secret conviction, that this unconquerable

16 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

dualism, this insoluble dilemma, is ultimately
conquerable and soluble : that the idea of unity
is not irreconcilable with that of opposition, and
that we can and should think opposition in the
form of a concept, which is supreme unity.
Ingenuous thought (which is usually called non-
philosophical, but would perhaps be better called
naively, or potentially, philosophical) is not
embarrassed at the difficulty : it thinks at once
both unity and opposition. Its motto is not
mors tua vita mea, but concordia discors. It
recognises that life is a struggle, but never
theless a harmony ; that virtue is a combat
against ourselves, but that it is nevertheless our
selves. It recognizes that, when one opposition
has been overcome, a new opposition springs
from the very bosom of the unity, so there must
be a new conquest, then a new opposition, and
so on ; but it recognizes, too, that this is just
the way of life. It knows nothing of exclusive
systems : the wisdom of proverbs gives one blow
to the hoop and another to the barrel, and gives
advice now with optimistic, now with pessimistic
observations, which deny and complete one
another in turn. What is wanting to ingenuous
thought, to potential philosophy? Implicitly,
nothing. And so, amidst the smoke and the dust

THE DIALECTIC 17

of the battles of science, we always sigh for the
good sense, for the truth which each one can
find immediately in himself, without recourse to
the labourings, the subtleties, and the exaggera
tions of professional philosophers. But the sigh
is vain ! the battle has been joined, and there is
no way to peace save through victory. Ingenuous
thought (and this is its defect) cannot give the
grounds of its affirmations : it vacillates before
every objection ; it becomes confused and contra
dicts itself. Its truths are not complete truths,
because they are not found united, but merely
placed alongside one another. It works only
with juxtaposition, and fails in systematic
coherence. Contradictions and doubts and the
painful consciousness of antitheses are welcome ;
welcome is all conflict if through it we are to
attain to the truth that is complete and secure
in itself. Such truth, indeed, though it differs
widely from the truth of ordinary and ingenuous
thought in degree of elaboration, cannot but be
substantially the same ; and it is certainly a bad
sign when a philosophy is at variance with in
genuous consciousness. For this very reason it
often happens that when people meet a simple
and conclusive statement of philosophic truths,
that may have cost the labours of centuries, they

i8 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

will shrug their shoulders and remark that the
boasted discovery is indeed a very easy thing,
plain and known of all men. Precisely the same
thing occurs in the case of the most inspired
creations of art, which are developed with
such simplicity and naturalness that every one
experiences the illusion of having achieved, or
of being able to achieve them himself.

If ingenuous thought give the hope and the
indication of the possibility of the reconciliation
of unity and opposition, another form of spiritual
creation, of which all have experience, provides
a sort of model. The philosopher has at his side
the poet. And the poet, too, seeks the truth;
the poet, too, thirsts for the real ; he too, like the
philosopher, recoils from arbitrary abstractions,
because he strives towards the living and the
concrete : he too, abhors the mute ecstasies of
the mystics and the sentimentalists, because it is
what he feels that he utters and makes to ring
in the ear in beautiful words, limpid and silvery.
But the poet is not condemned to the unattain
able. This very reality, torn and rent with
opposition, is the object of his contemplation,
and he makes it, though throbbing with opposi
tion, yet one and undivided. Cannot the philo
sopher do the same ? Is not philosophy, like

THE DIALECTIC 19

poetry, knowledge ? Why should this perfection,
this power of solving and of representing unity
in opposition, be wanting to the philosophic con
cept when it is in all respects analogous to
aesthetic expression? It is true that philosophy
is knowledge of the universal, and therefore
thought ; and that poetry is knowledge of the
individual, and therefore intuition and imagination.
But why should not the philosophic universal,
like the aesthetic expression, be both at once
difference and unity, discord and concord, discrete
and continuous, permanent and ever-changing ?
Why should reality lose its true character when
mind rises from the contemplation of the particular
to the contemplation of the whole ? Does not
the whole live in us as vividly as does the
particular ?

And here it is that Hegel gives his shout of
jubilation, the cry of the discoverer, the Eureka,
his principle of solution of the problem of
opposites: a most simple principle, and so obvious
that it deserves to be placed among those sym
bolized by the egg of Christopher Columbus.
The opposites are not illusion, neither is unity
illusion. The opposites are opposed to one
another, but they are not opposed to unity.
For true and concrete unity is nothing but the

20 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

unity, or synthesis, of opposites. It is not
immobility, it is movement. It is not fixity,
but development. The philosophic concept is
a concrete universal, and therefore a thinking
of reality as at once united and divided. Only
thus does philosophic truth correspond to poetic
truth, and the pulse of thought beat with the
pulse of things.

It is, indeed, the only possible solution. It
rejects neither of the two preceding, which I
have called "monism" and "dualism of opposites,"
but justifies both. It regards them as one-sided
truths, fragments which await their integration in
a third, in which the first and second, even the
third itself, disappear, merged in the unique truth.
And that truth is that unity has not opposition
opposed to it, but holds it within itself; and that,
without opposition, reality would not be reality,
because it would not be development and life.
Unity is the positive, opposition the negative ;
but the negative is also positive, positive in so
far as negative. Were it not so, the fulness and
richness of the positive would be unintelligible.
If the analogy between poetry and philosophy be
not satisfactory, if it be not sufficiently clear what
is meant by a concrete concept, which as the
logical form of development corresponds to in-

THE DIALECTIC 21

tuition as its poetical form, we might say, now
that comparisons and metaphors are more readily
chosen from the natural sciences (sacrificing
exactitude of analogy to aptness of comparison),
that the concrete universal, with its synthesis of
opposites, expresses life and not the corpse of
life ; it gives the physiology, not the anatomy, of
the real.

Hegel calls his doctrine of opposites dialectic,
rejecting, as liable to cause misunderstandings,
the other formulae of unity and coincidence of
opposites, because in these stress is laid only upon
the unity, and not at the same time upon the
opposition. The two abstract elements, or the
opposites taken in and by themselves, he calls
moments, a figure taken from the moments of the
lever, and the word "moment" is sometimes also
applied to the third term, the synthesis. The re
lation of the two first to the third is expressed by
the word "solution" or "overcoming" (Aufkeben).
And that, as Hegel intimates, means that the two
moments in their separation are both negated,
but preserved in the synthesis. The second
term (in relation to the first) appears as negation,
and the third (in relation to the second) as a
negation of negation, or as absolute negativity,
which is also absolute affirmation. If, for conveni-

22 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

ence of exposition, we apply numerical symbols
to this logical relation, we may call the dialectic
a triad or trinity, because it appears as composed
of three terms ; but Hegel never ceases putting
us on our guard against the extrinsic and arbitrary
character of this numerical symbolism, which is
altogether unsuited to the expression of specula
tive truth. And indeed, to speak accurately, in
the dialectic triad we do not think three concepts,
but one single concept, which is the concrete
universal, in its own inner nature and structure.
More than that, in order to obtain this synthesis
it is above all things necessary to define the
opposition of the terms. And if the activity
which defines the opposition be called intellect,
and the activity which yields the synthesis reason,
it is evident that intellect is necessary to reason,
is a moment of it, is intrinsic to it ; and this,
indeed, is how Hegel sometimes considers it.

Whoever cannot rise to this method of think
ing opposites can make no philosophic affirmation
which is not self-contradictory and passes into
its own contrary. This has already been ex
emplified in the discussion of the antithesis of
monism and dualism. And it can be seen in the
first triad of the Hegelian Logic : the triad which
comprehends in itself all the others, and which,

THE DIALECTIC 23

as is well known, is constituted by the terms
being, nothing, and becoming. What is being
without nothing ? What is pure, indeterminate,
unqualified, indistinguishable, ineffable being, i.e.
being in general, not this or that particular being ?
How can it be distinguished from nothing ? And,
on the other hand, what is nothing without being,
i.e. nothing conceived in itself, without determina
tion or qualification, nothing in general, not the
nothing of this or that particular thing ? In
what way is this distinguished from being ? To
take one of the terms by itself comes to the same
thing as to take the other by itself, for the one
has meaning only in and through the other.
Thus to take the true without the false, or the
good without the evil, is to make of the true some
thing not thought (because thought is struggle
against the false), and therefore something that
is not true. And similarly it is to make of the
good something not willed (because to will the
good is to negate the evil), and therefore some
thing that is not good. Outside the synthesis,
the two terms taken abstractly pass into one
another and change sides. Truth is found only
in the third ; that is to say, in the case of the
first triad, in becoming, which, therefore, is, as
Hegel says, " the first concrete concept."

24 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Nevertheless, this error, which consists in
taking the opposites outside the synthesis, is
constantly reappearing. And against it there
must always be directed the polemic which shows,
as has just been shown, that outside the synthesis,
the opposites are unthinkable. This polemic is
the dialectic in its " subjective " or "negative"
sense. But it must not be confused with the true
and proper meaning of the doctrine of dialectic
in its objective or positive sense, which may also
be designated the logical doctrine of development.
In this negative dialectic the result is not the
synthesis, but the annulment, of the two opposite
terms, each on account of the other ; and there
fore the terminology, which we have explained
above, also acquires, like the word "dialectic3'
itself, a somewhat different meaning. The
intellect, in so far as it is not an intrinsic moment
of reason and inseparable from it, but is, on the
contrary, the affirmation of the separate opposites
which claims to stand alone as ultimate truth,
intellect, in this sense, becomes a derogatory and
depreciatory term. It is the abstract intellect,
the eternal enemy of philosophic speculation. It
is, at bottom, reason itself failing of its own task.
"It is not the fault of the intellect if we do
not proceed further, but a subjective impotence

THE DIALECTIC 25

of reason which permits that determination to
continue in that state." 1 The triad itself gives
place to a quatriad of terms : two affirmations
and two negations. Reason intervenes as negative
reason, to bring confusion into the domain of
intellect ; but if, in this negative capacity, it
prepare and compel the positive doctrine, it
neither produces nor states it.

The confusion between the merely negative
aspect of Hegel's dialectic and its positive
content has given rise to an objection to the
Hegelian doctrine of opposites, which is the
battle-charger so often mounted by his advers
aries : a Brigliadoro or a Bayard so very old and
broken down that I do not see how any one
still succeeds in keeping his seat on it. It has
been said : If being and nothing are identical
(as Hegel proves or thinks he proves), how can
they constitute becoming ? Becoming, on Hegel's
theory, must be a synthesis of opposites, not of
identities, of which there can be no synthesis.
a~a remains a, and does not become b. But
being is identical with nothing only when being
and nothing are thought badly, or are not thought
truly. Only then does it happen that the one
equals the other, not as a — a, but rather as

1 Wissensch. der Logik, iii. 48.

26 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

0 = 0. For the thought which thinks them truly,
being and nothing are not identical, but pre
cisely opposite, and in conflict with one another.
And this conflict (which is also a union, since
two wrestlers, in order to wrestle, must lay hold
of one another !) is becoming. It is not a concept
added to or derived from the first two taken in
their separation, but a unique concept, outside of
which there are two abstractions, two unreal
shadows, being and nothing, each by itself, which
are, as such, united, not by their conflict, but by
their common vacuity.

Another objection, which has also seemed
triumphant, consists in observing that the concrete
universal, with its synthesis of opposites, — the
very mark of its concreteness — is not a pure
logical concept, because it tacitly introduces in
the representation of movement and of develop
ment an element of sense or intuition. But if
the words are given their precise significance,
sense and intuition should mean something
particular, individual, and historical. And what
is there in the Hegelian concept of the universal
which we can show to be particular, individual, or
historical ? What can we separate out as such
an element, in the way in which, for instance,
we can distinguish the particular, individual, or

THE DIALECTIC 27

historical element in the empirical concept of
"oak," or of "whale," or of "feudal regime"?
Movement or development has about it nothing
of the particular and contingent. It is a universal.
It has no sense-element ; it is a thought, a concept,
the true concept exactly adequate to reality. Its
logical theory is the concrete universal, the
synthesis of opposites. But it may be that this
objection was intended against the character
which the concept possesses in Hegel's logic.
There it is not something empty and indifferent,
not a mere " recipient " ready to receive any
content, but the ideal form of reality itself. And
if, in this objection, " logic " is taken to be only
an inconceivable abstraction, an abstraction which
" is commanded," like that of mathematics, and
" intuition " is taken to be the speculative concept,
the criticism reveals, not a defect in Hegel, but
his true glory. For it makes it clear that he has
destroyed that false concept of a barren and
formal logic as an arbitrary abstraction, and to
the true logical concept he has given a character
of concreteness, which can also be called " intui
tion," when intuition signifies, as we showed
above, that philosophy must spring from the
bosom of divine Poetry, matre pule lira filia
pulch* ior.

28 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Philosophy, thus set in friendly relations with
poetry, enters that state which in these days of
Nietzschian phraseology is called " dionysiac."
It is a state to terrify timid thinkers, who, how
ever, in so far as they philosophize, find them
selves, without knowing it, in the same condition.
Thus our Rosmini, aghast at the dialectic of being
and not being, exclaimed : " And even were it
as true, as it is false, that being can deny itself,
the question would always recur : what could
move it to deny itself? What reason could be
assigned for this alleged desire, on the part of
being, to deny itself and to ignore itself? why, in
short, should it make this mad effort to annul
itself? for the system of Hegel does nothing less
than make being go mad and introduce madness
into all things. Thus he claims to give them life,
movement, free passage, becoming. I do not
know if a similar effort was ever made in the
world, to make all things, even being itself, go
mad."1 Probably Rosmini did not remember
that the same description, though certainly in far
better style, had been given by Hegel himself
in the Phenomenology, when, having represented
the movement of reality, — that process of coming

1 Saggio storico-critico sidle categoric e la dialettica^ posthumous work
(Turin, 1883), p. 371.

THE DIALECTIC 29

into being and passing away which itself is with
out beginning and without end — he concluded
with the words : " The true is the Bacchic de
lirium, in which not one of its components is not
drunk ; and since each becomes immediately dis
solved when the others withdraw, — that delirium
is also simple and transparent repose." Reality
seems mad, because it is life : philosophy seems
mad, because it breaks up abstractions and lives
that life in thought. It is a madness which is
the highest wisdom, and the true and not meta
phorical madmen are they who become mad with
the empty words of semi-philosophy, who take
formulas for reality, who never succeed in raising
themselves to that clear sky whence they can see
their work as it really is. They see the sky above
their heads, unattainable by them, and are ready
to call it a madhouse.

Another manifestation of this same irrational
fear is the cry that, with such logic as this, the
very base and rule of man's thought is taken from
him — the principle of identity and contradiction.
Proofs are cited in Hegel's frequent outbursts of
ill-humour against this principle and in his say
ing that for it there should be substituted the
opposite principle : that everything is self-contra-

1 Phanom. d. Geistes? p. 37.

30 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

dictory. But things do not stand precisely in
this case. Hegel does not deny the principle of
identity, for otherwise he would have been obliged
to admit that his logical theory was at once true
and not true, true and false ; that philosophic
ally, being and nothing could be thought in the
synthesis, and also, each in and for itself, outside
the synthesis. And all his polemic, all his
philosophy, would no longer have any meaning ;
it would never have been seriously accomplished ;
whereas, obviously, it is most serious. So far
from destroying the principle of identity, Hegel
gives it new life and force, makes it what truly
it ought to be and what in ordinary thought it is
not. For in ordinary thought, in semi-philosophy,
reality is left divided, as has been seen, into two
parts. Now it is the one, now the other, and
when it is the one, it is not the other. And yet,
in this effort after exclusion, the one passes into
the other and both are fused in nothingness. It
is these truly unthinkable contradictions that
ordinary thought claims to justify and embellish
by adducing the principle of identity. If attention
be paid to the words of Hegel alone, we might
say that he does not believe in the principle of
identity ; but if we look closer, we see that what
Hegel does not believe in is the fallacious use of

THE DIALECTIC 31

the principle of identity — the use made of it by those
abstract thinkers who retain unity by cancelling
opposition, or retain opposition by cancelling
unity; or, as he says, the principle of identity
taken as a " law of the abstract intellect/' That
fallacious use exists, because we are unwilling to
recognize that opposition or contradiction is not a
defect, or a stain, or an evil in things, which could
be eliminated from them, far less a subjective
error of ours ; but that it is indeed the true being
of things. All things are contradictory in them
selves, and thought must think this contradiction.
This establishes truly and firmly the principle of
identity, which triumphs over opposition in think
ing it, that is to say, in grasping it in its unity.
Opposition thought is opposition overcome, and
overcome precisely in virtue of the principle of
identity. Opposition unrecognized, or unity un
recognized, is apparent obedience to the principle,
but in effect is its real contradiction. There is
the same difference between Hegel's method of
thinking and the method of ordinary thought as
there is between him who confronts and conquers
an enemy and him who closes his eyes in order
not to see him, and believing that he has thus got
rid of him, becomes his victim. " Speculative
thought consists in determining opposition as

32 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

thought does, and in so doing it determines
itself. It does not, like representative thought,
allow itself to be dominated by opposition into
resolving its own determinations only in other
determinations or in nothingness." l Reality is
a nexus of opposites, and is not rendered dis
sipated and discrete thereby. Indeed, it is in
and through opposition that reality eternally
generates itself. Nor does thought, which is
supreme reality, the reality of reality, become
dissipated or discrete, but it grasps unity in
opposition and logically synthesizes it.

The dialectic of Hegel, like all discoveries
of truth, does not come to drive preceding truths
from their place, but to confirm and to enrich
them. The concrete universal, unity in dis
tinction and in opposition, is the true and
complete principle of identity, which allows no
separate existence, either as complement or
rival to the principle enunciated in older
doctrines, because it has absorbed the older
principle into itself and has transformed it into
its own flesh and blood.

1 Wissensch. d. Logik, ii. 67-8.

II

EXPLANATIONS RELATING TO THE
HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC

SOME historians of philosophy have thought that
the problem of opposites was the whole problem
of philosophy. Hence the history of the various
attempts at a solution of this problem has
sometimes been taken for the whole history of
philosophy, and the one has been narrated in
place of the other. But the dialectic, so far
from being the whole of philosophy, is not even
the whole of logic ; although it is a most
important part of it, and might be called its
crown.

The reason for this confusion will perhaps be
evident from what was said above. It lies in
the intimate connexion between the logical
problem of opposites and the great disputes of
the monists and the dualists, of the materialists
and the spiritualists. These disputes form the

33

34 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

principal part of the treatises and histories of
philosophy, although they do not constitute its
primary and fundamental task, which is better
expressed by the phrase " know thyself." But
this apparent coincidence will disappear, when
we consider that to think logically and to
construct a logical theory of logic, are two
different things ; that it is one thing to think
dialectically, and another to have logical con
sciousness of dialectical thought. Were this
not so, the Hegelian solution would have already
been finally given by the many philosophers
who have in fact thought reality dialectically,
or at least given on the occasions when they
have thought it in that way. Doubtless, every
philosophic problem calls up all the others. All
can be discovered implicit in each one, and in
the solution, true or false, of one problem, there
is the solution, true or false, of all. But if it is
impossible altogether to separate the histories
of individual philosophic problems from one
another, it is also true that these problems are
distinct ; and we should not confuse the various
members of the organic whole, if we do not
wish to lose all idea of that whole itself.

This principle we must bear in mind, if we
are to circumscribe the enquiry as to the

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 35

historical development of the dialectic doctrine
of opposites, and thereby to recognize the place
and originality that belong to the thought of
Hegel. This enquiry, within these precise
limits, has perhaps not yet been carried out in
a suitable way. This is due also to the fact
that the general consciousness of those who
cultivate philosophic studies has not been
persuaded of the importance and truth of the
doctrine, so that there have been wanting the
necessary interest and the directive criterion
for research into its history. The best that
has been collected on this theme, is to be found
in the books of Hegel himself, especially in his
History of Philosophy^ and here it is opportune
rapidly to review his scattered remarks, making,
where necessary, some additions and some
comments.

Was Hegel the first to formulate the logical
principle of the dialectic and of its development ?
Had he forerunners, and if so, who were they ?
Through what forms and through what approxi-

1 See also the historical introduction to the Logik u. Metaphysik ot
Kuno Fischer (2nd ed., 1865), and the Prohisione ed introduzione alle
lezioni di filosofia of B. Spaventa (Napoli, 1862; reprinted by Gentile
with the new title : La Filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia
europea, Bari, 1908). For the immediate antecedents of the Hegelian
dialectic and for the various phases of its development, see preferably Al.
Schmid, Entwickelungsgeschicte der hegehchen Logik (Regensburg, 1858).

36 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

mations did that principle pass, prior to attain
ing in him to its perfection ?

The doctrine of dialectic is the work of
mature thought, the product of long philosophic
incubation. In Hellenic antiquity we find, in
Zeno of Elea's refutations of the reality of
motion, the first perception of the difficulties
to which the principle of opposites gives rise.
Motion is the very fact of development in the
form in which it offers itself most easily to
reflexion. And Zeno, having set the difficulties
in very clear relief, resolved the contradiction
by denying the reality of movement. (His
arguments of the arrow, of Achilles and the
tortoise, etc., showed the contradictions involved
in space and time.) Motion is an illusion of
the senses ; being, reality, is one and immovable.
In opposition to Zeno, Heraclitus made of
movement and becoming the true reality. His
sayings are: " being and not-being are the
same," " all is, and also is not," "everything
flows." His comparisons of things with a river,
of the opposite which is in its opposite as sweet
and bitter are in honey, of the bow and of the
lyre ; his cosmological views of war and peace,
of discord and harmony, show how profoundly
Heraclitus felt reality as contradiction and

,i HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 37

development. Hegel used to say that there
was not one affirmation of Heraclitus that he
had not incorporated in his own logic. But it
is to be observed, that by the very act of
incorporating them in his doctrine, he conferred
upon these affirmations a far more precise
signification than they had possessed when they
stood alone. Without doubt we must hold them
in high esteem, just as they have been handed
down, an ingenuous and penetrating vision of
the truth. But we must not insist upon them
too much, lest we should run the risk of
historical falsification, and make a Post-Kantian
of a Pre-Socratic.

The same remark applies to the Platonic
dialectic of the Parmenides, the Sophist, the
Philebus, dialogues whose interpretation and
historical place are matters of much dispute.
Hegel thought that they contained the essence
of the Platonic philosophy, the attempt, i.e. to
pass from the universal, still as yet abstract, to
the concrete universal, to posit the speculative
form of the concept as unity in diversity.
Questions are discussed there concerning the
one and the many, identity and non-identity,
motion and rest, coming into being and passing
away, being and not being, finite and infinite,

38 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

the limited and the unlimited. The conclusion
of the Parmenides is, that the one is and is not,
is itself and other than itself, and that things in
relation to themselves and in distinction from
others are and are not, appear and do not appear.
And all of this indicates an attempt to overcome
a difficulty, which issues only in a negative result.
In any case, as Hegel noted, in Plato we find the
dialectic, but not yet complete consciousness of
its nature. It is a speculative method of thinking,
greatly superior in value to the argumentations
of the Sophists or to the later ingenuities of the
Sceptics : but it does not attain to the level of
logical doctrine. Of Aristotle, it may be said
that his logical consciousness is in disagreement
with his speculative consciousness : his logic is
purely intellectualist, his metaphysic is a study
of the categories.

We can discover nothing more than an
extremity of need, or perhaps a conscious
ness of helplessness and an indication of the
lacuna, in the doctrines of Philo the Jew
and of the Gnostics. For them, true reality,
absolute being, is considered unattainable by
thought — the ineffable, inscrutable God, the
abyss where all is negated. This is equally true
of Plotinus, for whom all predicates are inadequate

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 39

to the Absolute, each of them expressing but a
determination of it. In Proclus is developed an
idea that Plato had already mentioned — the idea
of the trinity or the triad. This idea, and the
idea of the Absolute as spirit, is the great
philosophic advance implicit in Christianity.

Nicholas of Cusa, inheriting Neoplatonic and
mystical traditions, was the thinker who, at the
beginning of the modern world, most energetically
expressed the need of the human spirit to emerge
from dualisms and conflicts, and to raise itself to
that simplicity where opposites coincide. And
the Cusan was the first to perceive that this
coincidence of opposites is in antithesis to the
merely abstract logic of Aristotle, who conceived
contrariety as perfect difference,1 and did not
admit that unity could contain contraries, since
he regarded each thing as the privation of its
opposite. Cusanus maintained against this,
that unity is prior to duality, the coincidence of
opposites prior to their separation. But in his
view, that which unites the opposites, thought
as simple coincidence, is incomprehensible to
man, either by sense, or by reason, or by
intellect, which are the three forms of the human
mind. It remains a simple limit ; and of God,

1 'H IvavTibTys t<rrl 5ta0opd rAetos, Metaphys. 10553.

40 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

who is a union of all contraries, no other know
ledge is permitted, save an incomprehensible
comprehension, a learned ignorance.1

His thought seems to assume a more positive
function in Giordano Bruno, who proclaims
himself a disciple of " the divine Cusan." Bruno
also upholds the coincidence of opposites as the
best principle of a philosophy that has been
forgotten and must be resuscitated ; and gives
an eloquent description of the unification of
contraries, of. the perfect circle and of the
straight line, of the acute and obtuse angle, of
heat and cold, of corruption and generation, of
love and hate, of poison and antidote, of the
spherical and the plane, of the concave and the
convex, of wrath and patience, of pride and
humility, of avarice and liberality. And there
is an echo of the Cusan in these memorable
words: "Whoever wishes to know the greatest
secrets of nature, let him study and contemplate
the least and the greatest of contraries and
opposites. Profound is the magic that knows how
to draw the contrast, after having found the point
of union. This was the direction of Aristotle's
thought, when he posited privation, conjoined

1 On the Cusan, see Fiorentino, // Risorgimento filosofico nel
Quattrocento (Napoli, 1885), cap. ii.

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 41

with a determinate disposition, as the progenitrix,
parent and mother of form ; but he could never
attain to it. He could not, because stopping at
\htgenus of opposition, he was hampered in such
a way that he failed to descend to the species of
contrariety, so that he did not attain, did not
even fix his eyes upon the goal. Hence he
erred at every step, through saying that the
contraries could not truly come together in the
same subject." In his naturalistic intuition, the
principle of the coincidence of opposites becomes
to Bruno a kind of aesthetic principle of con
templation : " We delight in colour, not in one
specific colour, whatever it may be, but chiefly
in one, which weaves into itself all colours. We
delight in a voice, not in a single voice, but in
one complex sound which results from the
harmony of many voices. We delight in a
sensible, but chiefly in that which comprehends
in itself all sensibles ; in a knowable which
comprehends in itself every knowable ; in an
apprehensible, which embraces all that can be
understood ; in a being which completes the
whole, but chiefly in that which is the whole
itself." The principle is no longer beyond

1 De la causa principio ed uno, Dialogue V., in fine (V. Dialoghi
metafisici, ed. Gentile, Bari, Laterza), 1907, pp. 255-257.

42 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

man's reach ; it is a power of the human mind ;
though not yet a rigorously logical power. It
still awaits its justification in a doctrine of the
concept.

The unity of opposites is also earnestly
asserted by the philosophus theutonicus, Jacob
Bohme. He posits the antitheses in their full
force, says Hegel, but does not allow his thought
to be arrested by the strength of the differences,
and proceeds to posit unity. For him, the " yes "
is unknowable without the u no." The One, God,
is in himself unknowable. If he is to be known,
he must distinguish himself from himself, the
Father must duplicate himself in the Son. Bohme
sees the triad in all things, and fathoms the
significance of the Christian trinity, but he too
does not succeed in putting his thoughts into
the form proper to thought.

The philosophy of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries which developed under the
influence of the mathematical science of nature,
was not capable even of setting the problem in
the form proper to thought. For Descartes,
thought and extension unite in God, but in an
incomprehensible manner. For Spinoza, they
unite in Substance: but "mode," which is the
third term after substance and attribute, does

n HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 43

not constitute a dialectic synthesis. Leibniz is
wrecked on the problem of evil and arrives at
an optimism of but slight philosophical value.
The popular philosophy of the eighteenth
century resolves all antitheses in God, who thus
becomes an assemblage of contradictions, the
problem of problems. Only here and there do
we find in some solitary thinker hints and
suggestions of the dialectic solution. For
example, there is the philosophus italicus, G. B.
Vico, who not only actually thinks history and
life dialectically, but recoils from the logic of
Aristotle, and from that of Cartesian physics and
mathematics, founding on the one hand a logic
of fancy (poetic logic), and of history (logic of
certainty) ; on the other he gives importance to
the inductive logic of observation and of ex
periment, as presage of a more concrete logic.
Another solitary figure, in many respects akin
to Vico, John George Hamann (who was said by
Jacobi to unite in himself in a high degree all
extremes) showed himself from youth onwards
dissatisfied with the principles of identity and
reason and attracted by that of the coincidentia
oppositorum. Hamann had met with this principle
in the De triplici minima et mensura of Bruno ;
and he had carried it " for years in his head

44 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

without being able either to forget it or to under
stand it." Yet it seemed to him to be "the
sole sufficient reason of all contradictions* and
the true process of their solution and levelling,"
which would put an end to all the contests of the
abstract thinkers.1 From Hamann knowledge
of this principle passed to Jacobi, who published
the extracts relating to it which are to be found
in the works of Bruno. But Jacobi, hampered
by his theory of immediate knowledge, though
he indicated the lacuna, was not himself in
a position to pass beyond it by strict logical
thought.

The reason for this is, that in order to arrive
at a truly logical statement of the problem of
opposites, and to escape the mystical and agnostic
solution (which indeed was no solution), it was
necessary that the Kantian revolution should
be accomplished. It was Kant, — although
his whole Critique of Pitre Reason seemed to
Hamann much less important than the sole
pronouncement of Bruno on the principium
coincidentiae oppositorum — who was precisely in
virtue of that critique, the true progenitor of the
new principle of the coincidence of opposites,

1 For Hamann, cf. Hegel, Vermischte Schriften, ii. 36-37, 87-88,
and the Essays collected in B. Croce, Saggi fiL iii.

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 45

of the new dialectic, that is, of the logical
doctrine of dialectic.

It is true that Kant, like his immediate pre
cursors, from Descartes to Leibniz and to Hume,
was under the influence of the prevailing intel-
lectualism and of the ideal of a mathematical
science of nature. Hence his agnosticism, the
phantom of the thing-in-itself, the abstractness
of the categorical imperative, and his respect
for traditional logic. But at the same time, he
maintains and renders more effective the differ
ence between intellect and reason. In the
Critique of Judgment he propounds a mode of
thinking reality, which is no longer merely
mechanical, no longer either the external teleo
logy of the eighteenth century, but is genuine
internal teleology ; he catches sight of the idea
beyond the abstract concept. Better still, in his
exposition of the Antinomies, Kant advances
the problem of opposites a stage further. The
Antinomies certainly seem insoluble, but the
contradictions spring directly from the necessities
of the human mind. What is more important
(what indeed is his true glory), he discovers the
a priori synthesis-, and that, as Hegel observed,
can be nothing but " an original synthesis of
opposites." With Kant this synthesis does not

46 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

receive its full value. It is not developed in the
dialectic triad. But once it had been brought to
light, it could not be slow to reveal the riches
which it contained in itself. The a priori synthesis
is the source of transcendental logic, which exists
by the side of the old logic, at first parallel to
it, but inevitably bound to end by destroying it.
Kant also throws into relief the form of triplicity,
and although he employs it in an altogether ex
trinsic manner, yet he does employ it constantly,
and almost with the presentiment of its near and
greater destinies.

The task that awaited philosophy after Kant
seems evident: to develop the a priori synthesis,
to create the new philosophical logic, to solve the
problem of opposites, by destroying the dualisms
that had not only been left intact, but rendered
more powerful, by Kant. And if there be little
more in Fichte than there was in Kant, yet in
him everything becomes more simple and more
transparent. The thing-in-itself is denied. But
on the other hand the concept of the Ego retains
a subjective significance, and does not accomplish
the true unity of subject and object, so that Fichte
does not succeed in justifying nature in relation
to spirit, and ends, like Kant, in moral abstract-
ness and in faith. But the idea of a new

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 47

Logic is better determined, so much so that
philosophy is conceived as a doctrine of science ;
and the form of triplicity assumes a dominant
position, as thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Schelling takes another step forward, in arriving
at the conviction that it is not possible to think
philosophically, except through the principle of
identity of opposites ; for he conceives the
Absolute as identity of opposites. But for him
the Absolute is indifference of subject and object.
Its differences are merely quantitative. It is
not yet subject and spirit. And his theory
of knowledge is without logic, because for him
the instrument of philosophy is aesthetic con
templation. This deficiency Schelling never
succeeded in overcoming, and the consequences
were so serious as to give rise to what has been
called his second manner, the metaphysic of the
irrational. __

Hegel, as is known, appeared later in the
philosophical world than his young contemporary
Schelling, whose disciple in a certain sense he may
be called. But what for Schelling was the point
of arrival, was for Hegel a point of transition ;
what was for Schelling the final phase, whence
began the process of his degeneration, was for
Hegel a juvenile phase. He too for some time

48 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

knew no other instrument of philosophy than aes
thetic contemplation, knew intuition as intellectual
intuition, and knew no other philosophical system
than the work of art. He too (in the first sketch of
his system that has been preserved) placed at the
summit of spiritual development, not philosophy,
but religion. But the profound scientific spirit
of Hegel led him gradually to recognize that
philosophy cannot have any other form than that
of thought, in the precise sense in which thought
differs from fancy and intuition. Certainly, it
was no longer thought in the old logico-natural-
istic sense : after Kant, Fichte and Schelling,
that was no longer a possible meaning : the
intellectualism of the two preceding centuries
had been mortally wounded. There must be a
logical form, which should preserve and reinforce
the recent conquests of philosophy ; a logical
form, which should be the form of the real in its
integrity. Everything urged Hegel into this
path of enquiry ; his admiration for the harmony
of the Hellenic world ; his participation in the
romantic movement, so rich in antitheses ; his
theological studies, from which it seemed to him
that the Christian idea of the Trinity, attenuated
or rendered void by Protestant rationalism, should
find its refuge and its true meaning in the

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 49

new philosophy ; his speculative studies on the
Kantian synthesis and antinomies. And with
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he detached
himself from the philosophical tendencies to
which he had previously adhered, and brought
to light his principle of solution of the problem
of opposites : — no longer a simple coincidence
in a third unknown or unintelligible term ; no
longer motionless unity ; no longer the intuition
of Schelling ; but unity and diversity together,
movement and dialectic. The preface to the
Phenomenology has been called " Hegel's farewell
to Romanticism"; but the truth is that it was
only because of his secession that Romanticism
was saved for philosophy. Only a romantic who
had in a certain sense surpassed Romanticism
could pluck its philosophical fruit.

The logic of the dialectic is therefore to be
considered a true and original discovery of
Hegel, not only in comparison with his remote
predecessors, but also with those who are nearest
to him. If a proof of this be sought, one need
only consider his attitude towards these latter.
Kant, who disclaimed Fichte, would have dis
claimed Hegel even more decisively. In Kant's
philosophy there were not the necessary con
ditions for understanding Hegel, and therefore

50 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

there could be no true criticism. But Hegel,
who combated in a definitive manner the
erroneous tendencies and aspects of the Kantian
philosophy, and all the obsolete views which
appeared in its train, was also the man who
showed what a new and fruitful contribution it
had made to philosophy. So true is this that it
has been possible to say that no one but Hegel
has understood Kant.1 Schelling always remained
deaf and hostile to the conception of his former
friend ; and during the half century that he
survived, he obstinately opposed to it his own
theory, grown old and degenerate. Sometimes,
indeed (as in the celebrated preface to the
Fragments of Cousin), while violently rejecting the
philosophy of Hegel, in the same breath he com
plained that he had been robbed by him : without
however anywhere clearly formulating either the
nature of the theft, or the error. Hegel, on the
other hand, always venerated Schelling as " the
father of the new philosophy." He recognized
the gleam of dialectic that there was in him, and
always calmly pointed out his merits and his

1 " For my part, I have to declare that, so far as it has been given me
to see, I have no evidence that any man has thoroughly understood Kant
except Hegel, or that this latter himself remains aught else than a
problem whose solution has been arrogated, but never effectuated "
(J. H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, London, 1865, i. 14).

ii HISTORY OF THE DIALECTIC 51

defects. If a superior point of view show itself
such by comprehending within it those that are
inferior ; if the proof of the truth of a doctrine
lie in its power of furnishing at once the justifica
tion of truths discovered by others and the
explication of their errors ; then this sort of proof
has not been wanting to the doctrine of Hegel.
Kant did not fully understand himself, and fell
into the arms of the neocriticists, who turned
from his transcendental logic to merely natural
istic logic ; Schelling did not fully understand
himself and ended with little credit as the second
Schelling. But for Hegel, both ended in his
great mind, who was their spiritual son : an end
more worthy than that of serving as an exercise
for little scholars, or of surviving each by himself
in the failure to know himself.

Ill

THE DIALECTIC AND
THE CONCEPTION OF REALITY

To think dialectically, and to think the logical
theory of the dialectic, are, then, two distinct
mental acts. Yet it is clear that the second act
strengthens the first, by giving it consciousness of
itself and freeing it from the embarrassments that
arise from false ideas concerning the nature of
philosophic truth. This is precisely what occurs
in the case of Hegel. He is not only the great
theorist of the dialectic form of thought, but the
most complete dialectician who has appeared in
history. His dialectical treatment of the ordinary
conception of reality modifies it in several parts
and changes its general aspect. All the dualities,
all the fissures, all the hiatus, and, so to speak, all
the rents and wounds with which reality shows
itself to be lacerated by the abstract intellect,

are filled, closed and healed. A complete unity

52

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 53

(gediegene Einheit] is realized : the coherence of
the organic whole is re-established ; blood and
life again circulate within it.

And we must note above all that there dis
appears a series of dualisms, which are not true
opposites, not even true distincts. They are
false opposites and false distincts, terms which
cannot be thought either as elements constitutive
of the concept as universal, or as its particular
forms, for the simple reason that, as formulated,
they do not exist. Hegel (who, in his criticism,
refers here and there to the difference between
them and genuine distincts and opposites) exactly
determines their genesis, which is to be found in
the phantasmagorias of abstraction. They are
dualities of terms, which have their origin in the
empirical sciences, in the perceptive and legislative
consciousness, in the sciences of phenomena.
These sciences, just because they are immersed in
phenomena, whenever they attempt to rise to the
universal are compelled to break up reality into
appearance and essence, external and internal,
accident and substance, manifestation and force,
finite and infinite, many and one, sensible and super
sensible, matter and spirit, and such like terms.
Were these terms truly distinct (or if they truly
designated distincts), they would give rise to the

54 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

problem of the conjunction of distincts in the
concrete concept. Were they true opposites, really
opposed (or if they designated things truly and
really opposed),1 they would give rise to the
problem of the synthesis of opposites. But, since
they are not, since they assume their appearance
of distinction and opposition, only through the
arbitrary abstraction of the empiricists, naturalists
and mathematicians, criticism of them, achieved
by a negative dialectic, is accomplished by a
different process from that which directs positive
dialectic.

They are, in truth, unthinkable ; and every
attempt to overcome the duality, by insisting
upon either of the two terms, as it appears in
distinction from the other, ends by changing it
into the other. Materialism preserves the
phenomenon, matter, the finite, the sensible, the
external, etc. ; but, since that term is naturally so
constituted as to require its other, the infinite
appears again in that finite, assuming the form
of a quantitative infinite, of a finite from which
another finite is born, then another finite, then
another, to infinity. This is what Hegel called
the false or bad infinite. Supernaturalism pre-

1 These and similar reservations are made necessary by the plurality
of meanings which those words have had in philosophical language.

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 55

serves the other term as sole reality ; but essence
without appearance, the internal without the
external, the infinite without the finite, become
something inscrutable and unknowable. Here
appears the thing-in-itself, which would better be
called vacuity in itself', the great mystery, which
(Hegel says) is a very easy thing to know ;
because not only is the thing-in-itself not outside
thought, but on the contrary is a product of
thought, of thought which has been pushed on to
pure abstraction, and which takes as its object
empty identity with itself. The thing-in-itself,
from its very inanity, leads back to the phe
nomenon, to the finite, to the external, as alone
real and thinkable ; and precisely in as much as
it is phenomenon, it is finite and external.

The positive correction is given by the
concrete concept, by that character of concrete-
ness, proper to the Hegelian concept and
differentiating it from naturalistic and mathe
matical abstractions. The real is neither of those
terms ; nor is it their sum : it is the concrete
concept, which fills the emptiness of the thing in
itself and annihilates the distance, which had
separated that from the phenomenon. It is the
absolute, which is no longer a parallelism of
attributes or an indifference to both ; but which

56 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

accentuates and confers new significance on one
of the terms, which, in virtue of that new
significance, absorbs and brings the other within
itself. Thus substance becomes subject, the
absolute determines itself as spirit and idea ; and
materialism is overcome. Thus too reality is
no longer an internal confronting an external :
nature (according to the saying of Goethe, which
Hegel accepts and makes his own) has neither
nut nor shell, but is all of a piece. The one is
not beyond the many, but is the many ; spirit is
not beyond body, but is body. And super-
naturalism is overcome.1

With the destruction of these false distinctions
and oppositions, which may all be summarily
represented by the duality of essence and
appearance, there is connected the purely dialectic
treatment (the positive dialectic) of true opposi
tions. These may be summarily represented by the
antithetic duality of being and not-being. This is
a dualism founded upon real opposition ; for no
one could think of denying the existence of evil,
of the false, of the ugly, of the irrational, of death,
and the antithesis of these terms to the good, to the
true, to the beautiful, to the rational and to life.

1 For the criticism of these concepts, see especially the doctrine of
the Essence, which forms the second part of the Logic.

in DIALECTIC AND REALITY 57

Nor does Hegel deny it. But owing to his
logical doctrine, which sees in the very act of
thinking opposites, the conception of reality itself
as development, he cannot consider the negative
term, the side of not-being, as something opposed
to and separated from the other. If the negative
term did not exist, development would not exist ;
reality, and with it, the positive term, would dis
appear. The negative is the spring of develop
ment ; opposition is the very soul of the real.
The lack of all contact with error is not thought
and is not truth ; but is the absence of thought,
and therefore of truth. Innocence is a character
istic, not of action, but of inaction : he who acts,
errs ; but he who acts is at grips with evil. A
true felicity, a felicity that is truly human or
manly, is not a beatitude that knows no suffering.
Such a beatitude would be possible only to
fatuity and imbecility ; and the conditions of it
find no place in the history of a world which,
where strife is wanting (says Hegel), " shows its
pages blank."

If this be true (as it doubtless is, in accord
ance with the general and profound persuasion of
humanity, expressed in many aphorisms, which
seem sometimes to be Hegelian phrases), the
relation between the ideal and the real, the

58 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

rational and the real, cannot be understood in the
sense that these words bear in the philosophy of
the schools ; that is, as the conflict between a
rational which is not real and a real which is not
rational. What is real is rational, and what is
rational is real.1 The idea and the fact are the
same. What, for instance, do we call rational in
the domain of scientific thought, but thought
itself? An irrational thought is not thought; as
thought it is unreal. What da we call rational in
the domain of artistic production ? The work of
art itself: an artistic fact, if it were ugly, would
not be artistic fact ; it is certainly no artistic
" reality," which includes the " note " of ugliness ;
but artistic unreality. What is called irrational,
is, then, the unreal ; and cannot be considered
as a species or class of real objects. Without
doubt, even unreality has its reality, but it is the
reality of unreality, the reality which belongs to
not-being in the dialectic triad, to the nothing
which is not the real, but the stimulus of the real,
the spring of development.

Those who, relying on this doctrine of the
identity of the real and the rational, have applied
the term optimism to the. Hegelian conception of
reality and of life, have grossly misunderstood his

1 Preface to the Philosophy of Rights ; and cf. Encycl. § 6.

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 59

meaning. Hegel cancels neither the evil nor the
ugly, nor the false nor the vain : nothing could be
more alien to his conception of reality, so dramatic,
and in a certain sense so tragic. What he sets
himself to do is to understand the function of evil
and of error ; and to understand it as evil and as
error is surely not to deny it as such, but rather
to strengthen it. To do this is not to close one's
eyes upon the sad spectacle, or to falsify it with
the puerile justifications of the external teleology
of the eighteenth century (as, for instance, did
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre). But the truth at
the bottom of this superficial ascription of
optimism to Hegel is that he cannot be called a
pessimist ; because pessimism is the negation of
the positive term in the dyad of opposites, just as
optimism is the negation of the negative term.
And indeed, have there ever been or can there
ever be self-consistent optimists or pessimists ?
No more than there have been self-consistent
monists or dualists. Every optimist has a pessi
mistic side ; just as every pessimist proposes a
method of liberation from evil and from error,
and therefore has his optimistic side. Good and
evil are opposed and correlative terms ; and the
affirmation of the one is the affirmation of the
other. Hegel, who denies both, while preserving

6o PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

both in the dialectic synthesis, is beyond both
optimism and pessimism, high up on that
philosophic Olympus, where there is neither
laughter nor tears ; for laughter and tears have
become objects for spirit, and their agitation is
overcome in the serenity of thought, as in the
concreteness of life.

Fact, reality, is always rational and ideal ;
it is always truth, always wisdom and moral
goodness. But, be it well understood, by fact
is meant what is really fact ; by reality, what
is truly reality. The illogical, the unpleasing,
the ugly, the base, the capricious, is nor fact,
but the absence of fact, it is void, not-being ; at
most it is the demand for true being, the stimulus
to reality, not reality itself. Hegel never
dreamed of accepting and justifying as fact what
is misplaced and perverted ; and may this not
be his justification for considering it, as he
considers it, unreality and void ? As the old
saying has it, Nature abhors a void ; but man
most certainly does so, because the void is the
death of his activity, i.e. of his being as man.

If Hegel's philosophy furnishes the justifica
tion, not of evil, but only of the function of
evil, on the other hand he was never weary of
warning against the facility and superficiality

in DIALECTIC AND REALITY 61

with which people are wont to declare irrational
that . which effectually has been and is, and
which, in virtue of this effective existence,
cannot be considered irrational. Hegel is the
great enemy of the discontented with life, of
those sensitive souls who perpetually declaim
and agitate in the name of reason and virtue,
and (to take an historical example) of Faustism,
which proclaims that theory is grey and the tree
of life green, which rebels against the laws of
custom and of existence, which despises truth
and science, and instead of being possessed by
the celestial spirit, falls into the power of the
earthly spirit. He is the enemy of encyclopaedic
humanitarianism and of Jacobinism, which
opposes its own exquisite heart to hard reality,
and sees everywhere the tyranny and roguery
of priests and despots ; and of Kantian abstract-
ness, of a duty which is always outside human
feeling. He hates that virtue, which is always
at strife with the course of the world ; which
brings stones to birth that it may dash itself
against them ; which never knows just what
it wishes ; which certainly has a big head, but
big because it is swelled, and which, if it be
seriously occupied with anything, is occupied
with admiring its own unapproachable and

62 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

moving perfection. He hates the Sollen, the
ought to be, the impotence of the ideal, which
always ought to be and never is, which never
finds a reality adequate to it, when, as a matter
of fact, all reality is adequate to the ideal. The
destiny of that " ought to be" is to become
wearisome, as do all the most beautiful words
(Justice, Virtue, Duty, Morality, Liberty, etc.),
in the mouths of those for whom they are mere
words, resounding in noisy barrenness, where
others act who do not fear to soil the purity of
the idea by translating it into deed. In the
strife between the " ought to be," between this
vain virtue and the course of the world, the
course of the world always wins. For either
the course of the world does not change and
the demands of virtue reveal themselves as
arbitrary and absurd, and therefore as not truly
virtuous : at the most they are good intentions,
perhaps excellent intentions ; but " the laurels
of good intentions are dry leaves, which have
never been green." Or else, the end of virtue
is achieved, it enters into and becomes part of
the world's course ; and what dies in this case
is not the course of the world, but virtue,
separated from the actual ; unless indeed it is
willing to continue living, in order to sulk at its

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 63

ideal for having been guilty of becoming real !
The illusion arises from the struggle, which is
certainly real ; but not as the struggle of the
individual with the world, but as the struggle
of the world with itself, of the world that makes
itself. "Each one wills and believes himself
better than the world in which he is ; but he
who is better, only expresses his world better
than others express it."1

What then is this repugnance of the bearers
of ideal towards the actual, of the admirers of
the universal towards individuality? Individu
ality is nothing but the vehicle of universality,
the process of its becoming effective. Nothing
can be achieved if it does not become a passion
of man : nothing great can be done without
passion. And passion is activity, which is
directed toward particular interests and ends.
So much is it true that particular interest is
the vehicle of the universal, that men by the
very pursuit of their own private ends realize
the universal. For instance, one man makes
a slave of another, and from the strife between
slave and master, there arises in both the true

1 From the aphorisms, to be found in the appendix of Rosenkranz's
Hegel's Leben, p. 550.— For the satire on the Sollen see especially the
Phenomenology, section Vernunft, B, and the introduction to the
Philosophy of History.

64 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

idea of liberty and of humanity. Their actions
achieve more than their conscious intentions,
and fulfil the immanent intentions, the intentions
of reason, which avails itself of them ; this is
the cunning of reason (die List der Vernunft].
This must not be understood in a transcendental
sense. The cunning of reason is the imaginative
phrase which denotes the rationality of all that
man truly does (of any human work whatsoever),
whether or no he has reflective consciousness
of it. Thus the artist creates the work of art
and does not understand the completed work ;
yet, though he fail to understand it, his work
is not irrational, for it obeys the supreme
rationality of genius. Thus the good and
ingenuously heroic soul believes that it simply
obeys the impulse of its own individual
sentiment ; it is not conscious of its action
in the way in which the observer and the
historian are conscious of it later ; and it is
not for this reason less good and less heroic.
Great men take the very will of reason, what
is real and substantial in the wants of their
time and people, and make of them their own
individual passion, their own peculiar interest :
they are the " men of affairs " of the world-
spirit. And this is precisely the reason why

in DIALECTIC AND REALITY 65

those who judge them superficially never succeed
in discovering in them anything but mean
motives. They see no other aspect of their
work than the personal, although that is
essential; and thus they justify the proverb
that no man is a hero to his valet ; and this
is true, as Hegel observes (and Goethe takes
pleasure in repeating the acute remark), not
because the great man is not a great man, but
because the valet is a valet. For this reason,
honours and gratitude are not usually accorded
to great men by their contemporaries ; nor do
they receive this satisfaction at the hands of
the public opinion of posterity. What falls to
them is not honour, but immortal glory ; they
live in the spirit of those very people who strove
with them, and who yet are full of them.

This Hegelian manner of considering life,
translated into terms of current politics, has been
held to be a conservative spirit. For this reason
it has been said that just as Rousseau was the
philosopher of the French Revolution, so Hegel
was the special philosopher of the Prussian
Restoration, the philosopher of the secret council
of government and of the bureaucratic ruling of
the state. But without going into the question
of the greater or less truth in fact of these affirma-

66 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

III

tions, it is important to distinguish between the
historical Hegel and the philosopher Hegel.
The historical individual, the Hegel who took
part, under certain determinate conditions, in the
social and political problems of his time and of
his nation, — the Hegel who belongs to the bio
grapher and the political historian, — must not be
confused with the philosopher Hegel, who alone
belongs to the historian of philosophy. The
position from which a particular political attitude
can be deduced shows by that very fact that it is
not pure philosophical truth. Philosophy should
not meddle (observed the same Hegel) with things
that do not concern it ; and therefore Plato might
well have spared himself the trouble of giving
advice to nurses on the way they should carry
children in their arms ; and Fichte, of " construct
ing " a model police passport, which should be
furnished, according to him, not only with
particulars as to its bearer, but also with his
portrait. Hegel's conception of life was so
philosophical that conservatism, revolution, and
restoration, each in turn, finds its justification in it.
On this point the socialist Engels and the con
servative historian Treitschke l are in agreement ;

1 H. Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im ig. Ja.hr hundert, vol. iii.
(1885), pp. 720-1 ; F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, imd der Ausgang der
klassischen deutschen Philosophic (Stuttgart, 1888).

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 67

for both recognize that the formula of the identity
of the rational and the real could be invoked
equally by all political opinions and parties, which
differ from one another, not as to this common
formula, but in determining what is the rational
and real, and what the irrational and unreal : on
every occasion that a political party prepared for
war against an institution or class of society, it pro
claimed its adversary irrational, i.e. devoid of solid
and real existence; and by this declaration brought
itself into line with Hegelian philosophy. All
the wings of the Hegelian school variously
participated in the revolution of the nineteenth
century, and especially in that of 1848. It was
even two Hegelians who wrote in that year the
vigorous Communist Manifesto. But the formula
common to all of them was not an empty label ;
it stood for the fact that the Jacobinism and the
crude naturalism of the century of the " Enlighten
ment " were henceforth ended, and that all men
of all parties had learned from Hegel the meaning
of true political sense. The early work, in which,
examining the condition of Germany, he defined
it as an " abstract state " (ein Gedankenstaat}, has
reminded one of his critics of the Florentine
Secretary and his profound analysis of the
actual conditions of the Italy of the Renais-

68 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

sance.1 And Cavour and Bismarck seemed to
appear as splendid embodiments of the Hegelian
theory, men in whom the rational and the real
were always fused and united, in whom they were
not estranged from one another, in the painful
and futile conflict, characteristic of the minds of
idealizers and dreamers.

The consequence to which this mediation of
opposites led, combined with the destruction of
false distincts and opposites, was the exaltation
of history. History — the life of the human race,
facts which are developed in time — ceases to be
conceived as something separate from and in
different to the essence of things, to the idea, or,
what is even worse, as something which weakens
and degrades the idea. Thus had history appeared
in the various dualistic systems ; not to speak of
materialism, which, since it denies all values,
cannot admit the value even of history. And
between historians and philosophers there had
sprung up a profound disagreement, a mutual
misunderstanding. This is not the place to recall
the most ancient forms of this disagreement,
such as the philosophy of Descartes, which is
pre-eminently antihistorical ; and Spinozism (or
Oriental pantheism, as Hegel called it, adding

1 Cf. K. Fischer, Hegels Lebcn ti. Werke, p. 59.

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 69

that it was erroneously considered to be atheism,
but should rather be called " acosmism "), and all
the sensationalism and intellectualism of the
eighteenth century. But even among Hegel's
own contemporaries, history has no place in the
system of Herbart, who is altogether without the
idea of development ; nor in that of Schopenhauer,
for whom the life of the human race does not
present problems of progress ; nor in the positivist
systems of Comte and of Spencer.

In the system of Hegel, on the contrary, where
the infinite and the finite are fused in one, and
good and evil constitute a single process, history
is the very reality of the idea, spirit is nothing
outside its historical development ; in it, every
fact, precisely because it is a fact, is a fact of the
idea and belongs to the concrete organic whole
of the idea. For Hegel, therefore, all history
becomes sacred history. On this point, too, it may
be said that in a certain sense there is general
agreement ; because particular attention and
admiration has always been accorded to the
great historical works, which were inspired by the
influence of Hegel ; histories of religions, of
languages, of literatures, of rights, of economics,
and of philosophy. But Hegel's influence in
historical studies has been generally considered

70 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

an accident, due simply to the personality of the
master, who was a passionate student and a con
summate master of historical knowledge. It was
not observed that it was really the inevitable
consequence of that much combated dialectic
principle of the solution of opposites and of false
opposites ; or of the Hegelian logic in its most
characteristic aspect. Thus the advancement of
historical study was recognized as a great benefit,
but the true reason of the advancement was
ignored ; the consequence was accepted, the pre
miss was rejected.

The sacred character, assumed by history,
is an aspect of the character of immanence,
proper to Hegelian thought, to his negation of
all transcendence. Certainly, it has been equally
an error to praise or to blame his thought as
materialism and naturalism ; for how could a
philosophy, which reveals the genesis of these
illusions, a philosophy of activity, a philosophy
whose principle is spirit and idea, ever be
naturalistic and materialistic ? But when these
words were intended to signify the antireligious
character of Hegelian thought, there was some
truth in the observation. It is a philosophy (I
should say the only philosophy), which is radically
irreligious, because it is not content to oppose

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 71

itself to religion or to range it alongside of itself,
but it resolves religion into itself and substitutes
itself for it. And for this same reason, from
another point of view, it may be called the only
philosophy that is supremely religious ; since its
task is to satisfy in a rational manner the need
for religion — the highest of all man's needs.
Outside of reason it leaves nothing ; there is
no insoluble remainder. " The questions to
which philosophy has no answer have their
answer in this, that they ought not to be asked."

The perpetual youth of the Hegelian philo
sophy, its indomitable vigour, its unexhausted
fecundity lie, then, in the logical doctrine, and
in the thought effectively in conformity with that
doctrine. And its vigour, fecundity, and youth are
increasingly apparent even in our own day, which
is marked by a new efflorescence of neurotic
mysticism, and of insincere religiosity, by an anti^
historical barbarism engendered by ppsitiyism, and
the Jacobinism which frequently ensues in these
conditions. Whoever feels the dignity of man
and the dignity of thought can find satisfaction
in no other solution of conflicts and of dualisms
than in the dialectical, the solution won by the
genius of Hegel.

The one philosopher, who more than others

72 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

can be ranged with Hegel in this respect, is
G. B. Vico, whom I have already referred to as
the precursor of the antischolastic logical doctrine,
an aesthetician like Hegel, a preromantic, as
Hegel was a romantic, yet resembling him closely
in his genuinely dialectic thinking. Certainly
the attitude of Vico toward religion is less radical
than that of the later German philosopher. For
if Hegel, biographically speaking, was a very
ambiguous Christian, insufficiently explicit in
stating his position towards the Church, Vico,
from the biographical point of view, was a most
sincere and unequivocal Catholic. Nevertheless,
the whole thought of Vico is not only anticatholic,
but antireligious. For he explains how myths
and religions are formed by a natural process ;
and his renunciation of this principle of explana
tion in the single case of Hebrew history and
religion, if, from the subjective point of view,
it be the idiosyncrasy of a believer, objectively it
assumes the value of unconscious irony, similar
to the conscious irony of Machiavelli, when he
forbore to enquire how the Papal States ever
subsisted beneath a very bad government, because
(he said) " they are ruled by superior reasons,
to which the human mind cannot attain." Vico
establishes that the true is identical with the

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 73

deed, that only he who has done a thing can
truly know it. Consequently he assigns to man
full consciousness of the world of man, because
it is his own work ; and to God he restores
knowledge of all the rest of the natural world,
because he alone, who made it, has knowledge
of it : a limitation, which forms but a slight
obstacle to the revolutionary principle which he
enunciated, and which, once established for the
human world, must of necessity be extended to
the whole of reality. And so profoundly irre
ligious was the whole theory of knowledge of
this pious Catholic, that immediately after his
death it was said that he had been obliged to
conceal part of the thought in his books, by order
of the churchmen. Rationalists saw in Vico their
master, while zealous Catholics reproved him as
the fountain-head of the antireligious movement
of the historical epoch, which followed upon his.

But the resemblances between Vico and Hegel
are far more evident when we leave this point
of religion. As Hegel was in opposition to
and in conflict with the antihistoricism of the
Encyclopaedists and of the Aufklarung, so was
Vico against the antihistoricism of Descartes
and his school. He showed that if philosophers
did not bring their reasonings into line with the

74 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

authority of philologists, and if philologists failed
to criticize their authority by the reasonings
of philosophers, both equally achieved only half
their purpose. As Hegel set himself in opposi
tion to the Utopian preachers of abstractions
and champions of sentiment and enjoyment, so
Vico refuted at once both Stoics and Epicureans,
and recognized only those whom he called
"political philosophers." He railed at those
learned men who, forgetting the struggles and the
pains of which the web of reality is woven, dictated
u rules for conduct, impossible or dangerous to
the human condition, such as the regulation of the
duties of life by the pleasures of the senses " ;
and who gave laws and founded republics " in
shady repose," which "had no other habitation
than in the minds of the learned." He knew
well that "governments must conform to the
nature of the governed"; and that "native
customs, and above all the customs of natural
liberty, cannot be changed in a trice, but only
gradually, in the passage of time." Vico, not
less than Hegel, had the idea of the " cunning of
reason." He called it divine Providence : " which,
out of the passions of men, all intent upon their
private advantage, for the sake of which they
lived like wild beasts in solitudes, has created

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 75

civil order, by which men live in human society."
What does it matter that men are unconscious
of what they do? The fact is not thereby the
less rational. " Homo non intelligendo fit omnia,
. . . because by understanding man explains his
mind and understands things, but when he does
not understand he creates things of himself, and
in so doing becomes that into which he transforms
himself." "And must we not say" (he exclaims
elsewhere) "that this is a counsel of superhuman
wisdom ? Without the force of laws . . . but
making use precisely of the customs of men, of
those habits which are as unrestrained as the
natural expressions of human nature, ... it
divinely regulates and guides them. It is true
that men have made for themselves this world
of nations ; . . . but the profounder truth is that
this world is certainly the outcome of a mind
often different from, sometimes opposed, and
always superior to those particular ends, which
men had proposed to themselves. These narrow
ends, transformed into means for realizing wider
ends, this greater mind has always adopted in
order to preserve the race of man upon the earth.
Thus, for example, men wish to give free course
to their lusts and to abandon their offspring, and
thereby they create the chastity of marriage,

;6 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

whence families arise ; heads of families wish
to exercise to the extreme their paternal power
over their dependants, and thereby cities arise.
The reigning classes of nobles desire to abuse
their feudal power over the plebeians, and thereby
they are brought into subjection to the laws,
created by popular freedom ; free peoples wish to
loose themselves from the restraint of their laws
and thereby they become subject to monarchs.
Monarchs wish to strengthen their own positions
by debasing their subjects with all the vices of
dissoluteness, and thereby they reduce them to
endure slavery from stronger nations ; nations
wish to destroy themselves, and by going into
solitude to preserve what remains of themselves,
whence, like the phoenix, they arise again. It
was Mind that achieved all this, for there was
intelligence in the actions of men. It was not
Fate, for there was choice in their actions ; nor
Chance, for there was continuity ; always from the
same actions there followed the same results." l

These are the same ideas, often with the same
metaphors, images, and turns of phrase as in
Hegel. And this is the more wonderful, since

1 The quotations from Vico are in the Works, ed. Ferrari, v. 96, 97,
98, 117, 136, 143, 146-7, 183, 571-2; vi. 235. [See now my Philosophy
of G. B. Vico, Bari, 1911.]

DIALECTIC AND REALITY 77

the German philosopher (at least during the
period that he was meditating his philosophy and
composing his Phenomenology of Spirit] does not
seem to have known the other " phenomenology,"
meditated in Naples a century earlier, under the
title of 7* he New Science. It almost seems as if
the soul of the Italian Catholic philosopher had
migrated into the German thinker, reappearing
in him, at the distance of a century, more mature
and more self-conscious.

IV

THE CONNEXION OF DISTINCTS
AND THE FALSE APPLICATION
OF THE DIALECTIC FORM

How then has it come about that this system
of philosophical thought, established with such
logical depth, so rich in irresistible truth, so
harmonious with and sympathetic towards con-
creteness, passion, fancy, and history, has appeared
to some thinkers and has been condemned by
them as abstract, intellectualistic, full of arbitrari
ness and artifice, at variance with history, nature,
and poetry, in a word as the opposite of what
it means to be ? How can we explain the violent
reaction against it, a reaction which seemed
successful and definitive, and which it would be
superficial (and little in the spirit of Hegel) to
explain as entirely due to accidental motives, to
lack of intelligence and to ignorance ? On the

other hand, how has it come about that this

78

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 79

philosophical system has been invoked in support
of the most different schools, such as materialism
and theism, the very schools which Hegel in
tended to combat and to surpass ? And how
comes it too (if I may be permitted a personal
instance, which perhaps does not relate exclus
ively to a personal case) that I, who am writing
now with such a feeling of complete agreement,
this interpretation of and commentary on the
Hegelian doctrine of the synthesis of opposites,
should for several years of my mental life have
felt a marked repugnance to the system of Hegel,
especially as it is presented in the Encyclopaedia,
with its tripartite division into Logic, Philosophy
of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit, both as I
understood it myself, and as I saw it expounded
and advocated by Hegelians ? And how comes
it that even now, in re-reading those works, I
sometimes feel the old Adam, the old repugnance,
arising within me? — The inmost reason for all
this must be sought. Now that we have indi
cated the healthy part of the system, we must
point out the diseased part as well. After having
shown what is living in the system of Hegel, we
must show also what is dead in it, the unburied
bones, which hinder the very life of the living.
And we must not be too easily contented with

8o PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

a concession, which has often been offered by
strictly orthodox Hegelians — the recognition that
Hegel could and did err in many of his state
ments of historical fact and of the natural and
mathematical sciences, owing to the limitations
both of the general state of knowledge of his
time and of his own individual culture. Such
Hegelians admit all this part of the system
must be re-examined and corrected, or even
reconstructed from top to bottom, in the light
of the progress of those special branches of
study. The implication would be that it is
only as historian and as naturalist that Hegel
is deficient and out of date ; as philosopher, as
one who never founds his truth upon empirical
data, he remains intact. His adversaries rightly
remain unsatisfied with this concession ; because
the source of the dissatisfaction with the system
of Hegel is not the quantity or the quality of
the erudition which it contains (most admirable,
despite its deficiencies and occasional archaisms),
but precisely the philosophy. I have declined
above to consider the influence of Hegel's
thought upon historical studies as something
separate from and independent of the principles
of his system. Here, for the same reason, I
cannot consent to consider the cause of his

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 81

errors as independent of his philosophical
principles. Those of his errors which have
seemed historical and naturalistic, are at bottom,
or for the most part, philosophical errors,
because they spring from his thought, from
his method of conceiving history and natural
science. Hegel is all of a piece ; and it is to
his credit that his errors cannot in general be
explained as an accidental series of inconsequent
irrelevancies.

The problem, then, is to seek out what
might be the philosophical error or errors (or
the fundamental error, and the others derived
from it) which fused and combined in Hegel's
thought with his immortal discovery, and
thereby to understand the reaction against the
Hegelian system, in so far as this reaction was
not the usual obstructionism, which all original
truths encounter, but rested on evidently
rational grounds. And since, according to what
has already been said, the logic of philosophy
was the special field of Hegel's mental activity,
it is to be presumed that there we shall find
the origin of the error, which would in that
case be an error of logical theory.

It is therefore a just feeling of the direction
in which this search should be conducted that

82 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

IV

has led anti- Hegelian criticism in general to
neglect the particular and incidental details of
the system, and to set itself to exhibit the
error of the principle of the synthesis of
opposites itself, on the ground, either that the two
terms are not opposed, or that their synthesis
is not logical, or that it destroys the principle
of identity and contradiction, or on similar
grounds. Yet we have seen that substantially
none of these objections is well founded, and
every other objection that can be thought out
satisfactorily proves to be equally unfounded :
for that principle resists and will resist every
examination and assault. The error of Hegel,
then, is to be sought in his logic ; but, as it
seems to me, in another part of his logic.

In the rapid summary of the various Hegelian
doctrines given at the beginning of this work,
when it was important to go directly to the
problem of the dialectic, only passing reference
was made to the doctrine of the relation of
distincts, or, as it would be expressed in natura
listic logic, to the theory of classification. That
doctrine must now be considered more closely,
because it is my firm conviction that in it is
hidden the logical error committed by Hegel, so
weighty in its consequences.

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 83

The philosophical concept, the concrete
universal or the Idea, is the synthesis of
distincts, just as it is the synthesis of opposites.
We talk, for example, of spirit, or of spiritual
activity in general ; but we also talk continually
of the particular forms of this spiritual activity.
And while we consider all of these particular
forms essential to complete spiritual achievement
(so that deficiency in any one of them offends
us and impels us to find a remedy, and its
total or partial absence shocks us as something
monstrous and absurd), we are also jealous and
vigilant that no one of them should be confused
with any other. Therefore we reprove him
who judges art by moral criteria, or morality
by artistic criteria, or truth by utilitarian criteria,
and so on. Even if we were to forget the
distinction, a glance at life would remind us of
it : for life shows the spheres of economic, of
scientific, and of moral activity almost externally
distinct, and makes the same man appear a
specialist, now as poet, now as man of business,
now as statesman, now as philosopher. And
philosophy itself should remind us of the
distinction, for it is not capable of expression
without specialization into aesthetic, logic, ethic,
and the like : all of them philosophy, yet each

84 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

of them a philosophy distinct from the
others.

These distincts, of which we have given
examples and which are at once unity and
distinction, constitute a connexion or a rhythm,
which the ordinary theory of classification is
not capable of explaining. Hegel saw this
very clearly ; and he never ceased to combat
the importation of empirical classification into
philosophy, the conception of concepts as
subordinate and co-ordinate. In ordinary classi
fication one concept is taken as foundation ;
then another concept is introduced, extraneous
to the first, and this is assumed as the basis
of division, like the knife with which one cuts
a cake (the first concept) into so many little
pieces, which remain separate one from another.
With such procedure, and with such a result,
farewell to the unity of the universal. Reality
breaks up into a number of elements, external
and indifferent to one another : philosophy, the
thinking of unity, is rendered impossible.

Hegel's abhorrence of this method of
classification caused him to reject prior to
Herbart (incorrectly credited with the first
statement of this criticism) the conception
of faculties of the soul, to which Kant

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 85

5till adhered ; and to reject (as he writes
in I8O21) that psychology which represents
the spirit as a "bag full of faculties." " The
feeling that we have of the living unity of the
spirit," he repeats in the Encyclopaedia (§ 379,
and cfr. § 445), and in all his other books, in
the most various forms and on the most various
occasions, " is itself opposed to the breaking
up of the spirit into different forces, faculties,
or activities, whatever they be, conceived as
independent of one another." And be it
observed that Hegel, always sollicitus sevvandi
unitatem spiritus, was able to develop this
criticism with far greater right and with far
greater consistency than Herbart, who never
succeeded in making his refutation of faculties
of the soul agree with his atomistic metaphysic,
and with his ethic and aesthetic, which consisted
of catalogues of ideas, separated from one
another and without relation to each other.
But nevertheless, in the opinion of the writers
of psychological manuals and histories of
philosophy, Herbart passes for a revolutionary
in his view of the spirit, and Hegel almost as
a reactionary, who should have preserved the
old scholastic divisions !

1 Verhdltnis d. Skeptizismus zur Philosophic (in Werke, xvi. 130).

86 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

If ''distinct" concepts cannot be posited in
separation but must be unified in their distinction,
the logical theory of these distincts will not be
the theory of classification, but that of implication.
The concept will not be cut in pieces by an
external force, but will divide itself by a move
ment internal to itself, and throughout these acts
of self-distinction it will maintain its own identity ;
the distincts will not be in a relation of mutual
indifference, but of lower and higher degree.
The classification of reality must be replaced by
the conception of degrees of Spirit, or in general
of reality : the classificatory scheme by the scheme
of degrees.

And the thought of Hegel set out on this
path, the only one that conformed to the principle
with which he started, the concrete universal.
The theory of degrees permeates all his works,
although it nowhere receives full and explicitly
reasoned statement. Here, too, he had his pre
cursors, whom we should investigate ; and here,
too, the philosopher most nearly akin to him
is perhaps Vico. For Vico never distinguished
spirit, languages, governments, rights, customs,
religions, otherwise than as a series of degrees :
spirit as sense , imagination, and mind\ languages
as divine mental language, heroic language, and

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 87

language for articulate speech : governments as
theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic ; rights as
divine right, established by the gods, heroic right,
established by force, and human right, established
by fully developed human reason ; and so on.
For this reason, Vico too conceived philosophy,
not as a cabinet with separate pigeon-holes, but
as "eternal ideal history, upon which particular
histories appear in time." But if Hegel did not
know the work of Vico, he had other incentives
toward the solution which he sought. The very
sensualism of the eighteenth century, especially
the doctrine of Condillac, notwithstanding the
poverty of its categories and of its presupposi
tions, seemed to him valuable, in so far as it
contained the attempt to render comprehensible
the variety of forms in the unity of spirit, by
demonstrating their genesis. His criticism of
Kant for having simply enumerated the faculties
and the categories in his tables was supplemented
by his appreciation of Fichte, for having affirmed
the necessity of the " deduction " of the categories.
But his true and proper precursor was Schelling's
system of identity, with the method of potentiality,
for which reality developed itself as a series of
powers or degrees. " The subject-object " (thus
did Schelling himself recall his juvenile concep-

88 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

IV

tion in his vindication of himself against Hegel)
"in virtue of its own nature, objectifies itself,
but from every objectification it returns victorious
and shows itself on every occasion at a higher
power of subjectivity, until, when it has ex
hausted every one of its virtualities, it appears as
subject triumphing over all." l

What does the theory of degrees mean ?
What are its terms, and what is their relation ?
What difference does it present to the terms and
relation of the theory of opposites ? In the
theory of degrees, every concept — and let the
concept be a — is both distinct from and united
to the concept b, which is superior to it in degree ;
hence (beginning the exposition of the relation)
if a be posited without b, b cannot be posited
without a. Again, taking as an example the
relation of two concepts, a case which I have
studied at length elsewhere,2 that of art and
philosophy (or of poetry and prose, of language
and logic, of intuition and thought, and so on),
we see how an insoluble puzzle and enigma for
empirical and classificatory logic resolves itself
naturally in speculative logic, thanks to the
doctrine of degrees. It is not possible to posit

1 In the preface to the Fragments of Cousin.
2 In my ^Esthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic.

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 89

art and philosophy as two distinct and co-ordinate
species of a genus (which might be e.g. the
cognitive form) to which both are subordinate,
so that the presence of the one excludes the
other, as in the case of co-ordinate members.
There is proof of this in the many distinctions
between poetry and prose, which have been
given, and continue to be given, all of them most
vain, since they are founded upon arbitrary
characteristics. But the knot is unravelled, when
we think of the relation as one of distinction and
union together : poetry can exist without prose
(although it does not exclude it), but prose can
never exist without poetry ; art does not include
philosophy, but philosophy directly includes art.
And in fact, no philosophy ever exists save in
words, images, metaphors, forms of speech,
symbols, which are its artistic side, a side so real
and indispensable that, were it wanting, philo
sophy itself would be wanting. An unexpressed
philosophy is not conceivable : man thinks in
speech. The same thing can be proved by
adducing other dyads of philosophic concepts,
the transition from rights to morality, or from
the perceptive consciousness to the legislative
consciousness. Thus the real, which is one, is
divided in itself, grows on itself, to use the words

90 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

of Aristotle, or, to use those of Vico, passes
through its ideal history — and in the last stage,
which gathers up in itself all the preceding,
attains to itself, in its complete or perfect form.

If now we pass from the relation of the stages
a and b (in the example chosen, art and
philosophy) and pass to the relation of the
opposites in the synthesis, a, /3, 7 (employing
the example of being, not-being, and becoming),
we shall be able to perceive the logical difference
between the two relations, a and b are two
concepts, the second of which would be abstract
and arbitrary without the first, but which, in
its connexion with the first, is as real and
concrete as it is. On the other hand, a and /?,
taken out of relation to 7, are not two concepts,
but two abstractions ; the only concrete concept
is 7, becoming. If we apply arithmetical symbols
to the two connexions, we have in the first a dyad,
in the second a unity, or, if we prefer it, a triad,
which is triunity. If we wish to give the name
(objective) dialectic both to the synthesis of
opposites and to the connexion of the different
degrees, we must not lose sight of the fact that
the one dialectic has a different process from
that of the other. If we wish to apply to both
connexions the Hegelian terms "moments" and

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 91

"overcoming," which is at once " suppressing "
and " maintaining," we must note that these
terms bear different meanings in the two cases.
Indeed, in the theory of degrees, both the
moments are concrete, as has been noted ; in the
synthesis of opposites both are abstract, pure
being and not-being. In the nexus of degrees a
is overcome in b, that is to say, as independent
it is suppressed and preserved as dependent :
spirit in passing from art to philosophy negates
art and at the same time maintains it as the
expressive form of philosophy. In the nexus
of opposites, considered objectively, a and /3, in
their mutual distinction, are both of them
suppressed and maintained ; but only meta
phorically, because they never exist as a and fi
distinct from one another.

These are profound differences, which do not
permit that both modes of connexion should be
treated in the same manner. The true is not in
the same relation to \htfalse as it is to the good',
nor is the beautiful to the ugly in the same
relation as it is to philosophic truth. Life with
out death and death without life are two opposed
falsities, whose truth is life, which is a nexus of
life and death, of itself and of its opposite. But
truth without goodness and goodness without

92 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

truth are not two falsities, which are annulled
in a third term : they are false conceptions, which
resolve themselves in a connexion of degrees,
for which truth and goodness are at once distinct
and united : goodness without truth is impossible,
since it is impossible to will the good without
thinking it ; truth without goodness is possible,
only in the sense in which that proposition co
incides with the philosophic thesis of the priority
of the theoretic over the practical spirit, with
the theorems of the autonomy of art and the
autonomy of science.

Without doubt, a, being a concrete concept,
that is, presenting the concrete concept in one
of its particularizations, is also a synthesis
of affirmation and negation, of being and not-
being. Thus, to return again to the same ex
ample, artistic fancy lives as fancy ; and therefore
it is concrete, it is activity which affirms itself
against passivity, beauty which affirms itself
against ugliness. And being and not-being
become particularized, consequently, as truth
and falsity, beauty and ugliness, goodness and
wickedness, and so on. But this contest does
not take place for one degree in relation to another \
for those degrees, considered in their distinction,
are the concept of the spirit in its determinations,

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 93

and not the universal concept of spirit considered
in its dialectic of synthesis of opposites. The
organism is the struggle of life against death ;
but the members of the organism are not therefore
at strife with one another, hand against foot, or
eye against hand. Spirit is development, history,
and therefore both being and not-being, be
coming ; but spirit sub specie aeterni, which
philosophy considers, is eternal ideal history,
which is not in time. It is the series of the
eternal forms of that coming into being and
passing away, which, as Hegel said, itself never
comes into being and never passes away. This
is an essential point : if neglected we fall into
the equivocation, to which Lotze (alluding per
haps to a passage of the Parmenides) referred
when he wrote, that because the servant takes
care of his master's boots it does not follow that
the concept of servant takes care of the boots
of the concept of master !

When we say that the spirit is not satisfied
with art, and is driven by its dissatisfaction to
elevate itself to philosophy, we speak correctly ;
only we must not allow ourselves to be misled
by a metaphor. The spirit, which is no longer
satisfied with artistic contemplation, is no longer
the artistic spirit, it is already beyond that level

94 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

—it is the incipient philosophic spirit. And in
the same way the spirit which feels itself dis
satisfied with the universality of philosophy and
thirsts for intuition and for life, is no longer the
philosophical but the aesthetic spirit, a single and
determinate aesthetic spirit which begins to fall
in love again with some determinate vision and
intuition. In the second, as in the first case, the
antithesis does not arise in the bosom of the
degree that has been surpassed. As philosophy
does not contradict itself as philosophy, so art
does not contradict itself as art ; and every one
knows the complete satisfaction, the profound
and untroubled pleasure, which springs from the
enjoyment of the work of art. The individual
spirit passes from art to philosophy and passes
again from philosophy to art, in the same way
that it passes from one form of art to another, or
from one problem of philosophy to another : that
is, not through contradictions intrinsic to each of
these forms in distinction from the others, but
through the contradiction that is inherent in the
real, which is becoming. And the universal
spirit passes from a to b, and from b to a through
no other necessity than that of its own eternal
nature, which is to be both art and philosophy,
theory and praxis, or however otherwise it may

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 95

determine itself. So true is this that if this
ideal transition were caused by a contradiction
which revealed itself as intrinsic to any determin
ate degree, it would no longer be possible to
return to that degree, which had been recognized
as self-contradictory : to return to it would be a
degeneration or a retrogression. And who would
ever dare to consider it a retrogression to return
from philosophy to aesthetic contemplation ? Who
could ever judge to be contradictory or erroneous
either of the essential forms of the human spirit ?
That transition of ideal history is not a transition,
or rather it is an eternal transition, which, from
this view-point of eternity, is a being.

Hegel did not make this most important dis
tinction, which I have endeavoured to make
clear, between the theory of opposites and theory
of distincts. He conceived the connexion of these
degrees dialectically , in the manner of the dialectic
of opposites \ and he applied to this connexion the
triadic form, which is proper to the synthesis of
opposites. The theory of distincts and the theory
of opposites became for him one and the same.
And it was almost inevitable that this should be
so, owing to the peculiar psychological condition
in which the discoverer of a new aspect of the
real finds himself (in this case, the synthesis of

96 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

opposites). He is so tyrannized over by his own
discovery, so inebriated with the new wine of
that truth, as to see it everywhere before him,
and to be led to conceive everything according
to the new formula. It was also almost inevit
able that this should be so, owing to the relations,
close as they are subtle, which unite the theory
of distincts to that of opposites, and both to the
theory of the concrete universal or idea. There
are also in the theory of degrees, as in that of
opposites, various moments that are overcome,
that is, are negated, and at the same time main
tained : in the former too, as in the latter, there
is unity in diversity. To discern the differences
between the two theories was reserved for a later
historical period, when the new wine was matured
and settled.

We can find proofs of the lack of this
distinction and of the confusion caused by its
absence at every step in the system of Hegel,
in which the relation of distinct concepts is
always presented as a relation of thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis. Thus we find in the
anthropology : natural soul, thesis ; sensitive
soul, antithesis ; real soul, synthesis. In the
psychology : theoretic spirit, thesis ; practical
spirit, antithesis ; free spirit, synthesis ; and

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 97

again : intuition, thesis ; representation, anti
thesis ; ethicity, synthesis ; or again, in this
last : the family, thesis ; civil society, anti
thesis ; the state, synthesis. In the sphere of
absolute spirit : art is thesis ; religion, anti
thesis ; philosophy, synthesis ; or in that of
subjective logic : concept is thesis ; judgment,
antithesis ; syllogism, synthesis ; and in the
logic of the idea : life is thesis ; knowledge,
antithesis ; absolute idea, synthesis. And so
on. This is the first case of that abuse jrf
the triadic form which has offended and still
offends so seriously all who approach the system
of Hegel, and has been justly described as
an abuse. For who could ever persuade him
self that religion is the not-being of art, and
that art and religion are two abstractions which
possess truth only in philosophy, the synthesis
of both ; or that the practical spirit is the
negation of the theoretical, that representation
is the negation of intuition, civil society the
negation of the family, and morality the negation
of rights ; and that all these concepts are
unthinkable outside their synthesis, — free spirit,
thought, the state, ethicity, — in the same way
as being and not-being, which are true only
in becoming? Certainly Hegel was not always

98 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

faithful to the triadic form (and indeed he
declared in one of his juvenile essays that
quadratum est lex naturae, triangulum mentis] ;
and often, in developing particular cases, he
minimized the error of the triadic form ; but
no such particular determination can suppress
the principle of division assumed as foundation.
On other occasions the triadic form seems
almost to be an imaginative mode of expressing
thoughts, which of themselves do not attain
to their substantial truth. But to accept such
an interpretation would be tantamount to
discrediting that form in its logical value, i.e.
in precisely the value which it must most fully
maintain in the dialectic or synthesis of
opposites. On the other hand, to defend the
affirmations of Hegel with extrinsic arguments
would be to proceed like an advocate who
wishes to win with ingejiuity rather than with
trufh ; or like a swindler who puts forward
money of good alloy, in order to pass false
money in the confusion,J

The error is not such as can be corrected
incidentally, nor is it an error of diction : it
is an essential error, which however small it
may seem in the summary formula in which it
has been given — the confusion between the

iv DISTINCTS & FALSE DIALECTIC 99

theory of distincts and the theory of opposites,—
yet produces the gravest results ; that is to
say, from it arises, if I am not mistaken, all
that is philosophically erroneous in the system
of Hegel. This we must now examine in
detail.

V

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS
INTO PARTICULAR CONCEPTS
AND DEGREES OF TRUTH
(STRUCTURE OF THE LOGIC)

THE application of the dialectic of opposites to
the relation of distincts, carried out with full

•"""" — * -

logical seriousness (as indeed was to be
expected from the vigorous and systematic
mind of Hegel), was bound to entail, as it did,
a double consequence. On the one hand, what
are philosophical errors came to acquire the
dignity of partial or particular concepts, that is,
of distinct concepts ; and on the other, what are
really distinct concepts were lowered to the
level of simple attempts at truth, to incomplete
and imperfect truths : that is to say, they
assumed the aspect of philosophical errors.

The first of these consequences determined
the structure of the Logic, as we find it, at

100

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 101

least in germ, in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
and as it is set forth later in detail in the great
Science of Logic (1812-1816), and in the small
one of the Encyclopaedia (1817, 1827, 1830).
The second determined the character of
aesthetic and gave origin to the two philo
sophical sciences of history and of nature, as
they may be seen, chiefly in the Encyclopaedia,
and in the courses of lectures posthumously
published.

To begin with the first point, opposites
and distincts being confused with one another,
the abstract moments of the concept (which in
its truth and concreteness is the synthesis of
opposites) are naturally taken to be related
to one another in the same way that the lower
concepts are to the higher. For example,
being and nothing, which in relation to
becoming are two abstractions, become, by
analogy, two degrees, in the sense in which,
for example, in the series of distinct concepts,
intuition, thought, and practical activity, intuition
and thought are stages relative to the third
stage, practical activity. But what are those
two abstractions, being and nothing, taken

O <J '

separately, each in itself, but two falsities, or
two errors? Indeed, the first of these corre-

102 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

spends for Hegel to the Eleatic or to other
allied philosophical views, which conceive the
absolute as simple being, and God as nothing
but the whole of all reality, the most real.
The second corresponds to the Buddhistic view,
which conceives nothingness as the base of
things, as the true absolute. They are therefore
two opposite, yet similar, philosophical errors,
both of which claim to think the indeterminate
and abstract as supreme reality. And what,
on the other hand, are intuition and thoiight
but two truths ? The first term sums up the
whole imaginative activity of man and gives
rise to a particular philosophical science,
—^Esthetic ; the second is the crown of all
human scientific activity and gives rise to the
science of sciences — Logic. They are, therefore,
not two unreal abstractions, but two concrete
and real concepts.

Once this has been posited^ it becomes clear
that owing to the confusion between the dialectic
of opposites and the connexion of distincts
and to the assumption that the opposites, taken
abstractly, fulfil the same function as the distinct
concepts, those errors become transmuted into
truths. They become particular truths, truths
of a lower degree of spirit, but still necessary

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 103

forms of spirit, or categories. And when these
errors have been baptized truths of a certain
kind, there is nothing to hinder every error,
error in general, being considered particular
truths. The phenomenology of error thus assumes
the appearance of an ideal history of truth.

This baptism, this transfiguration, has seemed,
and will still seem to some, to be the recognition
of a principle as important as it is profound.
Do we not frequently speak, even in ordinary
language, of progressive errors, of errors which
open the way to truth ? Do we not say that
humanity has learned more from certain errors
than from many truths ? The Eleatics_ were
wrong in conceiving the absolute as simple

being ; but that error of theirs nevertheless

..^=> — -*• >

affirms an undeniable, though partial truth,

that the absolute is also being. Descartes and
Sjginoza were wrong in positing the parallelism
of mind and body, of thought and extension ;
but unless, thanks to that very error, the
distinction between the two terms had been
fixed and thrown into relief, how could their
concrete unity have been thought afterwards ?
Kant was wrong in presenting the antinomies
as insoluble ; but it was thus he came to
recognize the necessity of the antinomies, the

io4 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

basis of the dialectic. Schelling was wrong
in conceiving the absolute as sim£lg_jdentjty_ ;
but that error of his was the bridge which had
to be crossed to reach the conception of the
absolute as unity in opposition and distinction.
Unless Plato had conceived the Ideas as
transcendent, how could the merely logical
concept of Socrates jever have been changed
into the Aristotelian concrete (awo\ov) •? How
could the a priori synthesis of Kant ever have
appeared without the sceptical negation of
Hume? He who wishes truth to be generated
without error wishes for the son without the
father. He who despises error despises truth
itself, for truth is incomprehensible without

those antecedent errors, which are therefore

. ^... — — —

its eternal aspects. \

But here too we must be careful not to
allow ourselves to be led^astraj by metaphors ;
we must re-think the thing itself. In
error, that which may justly be called progres
sive, or fruitful, or the like, is not error but
truth. When we consider a doctrine as a
whole, we may declare it to be false or true ;
but if we consider it more in detail, the doctrine
resolves itself into a series of affirmations,
some of which are true and some false ; and

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 105

its progressiveness and fruitfulness lie in the
affirmations which are true, not in those which
are false, and which therefore cannot even be
called affirmations. Thus, in the Eleatic
doctrine, the affirmation that the absolute ,.is_
being, is true : what is false, is that it is nothing
but being. Even in the highest expression of
truth, " The absolute is spirit," the absolute
is being, though not simple being. Similarly,
in the Cartesian and Spinozist parallelism, the
distinction of mind from body, of thought from
extension, is, at least in a certain sense, true ;
but it remains to be explained how it is
produced : what is false is the hasty metaphysical
theory, which explains those two terms by
making them two manifestations of God, or
two attributes of substance, and takes the
statement of the problem for the solution.
Thus too, in Platonic transcendency, the truth
lies in the value assigned to the idea, as no
longer purely subjective, but as objective and
real : the error lies in separating the ideas
from real things, and in placing them in a
world which we cannot think, but can only
imagine ; and in thus imagining them we
confuse them again with things real and finite.
It is the error in each of these doctrines that

io6 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

is the incentive to progress : it is the not-being,
the necessary moment of development ; without
contradiction and doubt, without perplexity and
dissatisfaction, we should make no advance.
Man would not conquer truth, because he
would cease to think, and indeed would
altogether cease to be. So much we know
henceforth : it is the principle of the synthesis
of opposites, which has been, expounded and
fully accepted above. But if this principle
affirm the synthesis of being and not-being,
it does not therefore possess the virtue of changing
not -being into being, darkness into light, the
incentive to progress into progress, error into
partial truth or degree of truth. The error,
which is preserved in truth as a particular
degree or aspect of it, is that aspect of truth
which is contained in the doctrines that we
call erroneous. These aspects of the truth are
the true subject of the history of thought :
error as error is the hemisphere of darkness,
which the ligrrtjof truth has not yet illuminated ;
and we write the history of successive illumina
tions, not of darkness, which is without history,
because it accompanies every history. Therefore
the transmutation of errors into truths, this
first consequence of the transference of the

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 107

dialectic of opposites to the connexion of
distincts, into which Hegel allowed himself to

be drawn, is to be considered as fundamentally

•« — * —

erroneous.

If these explanations, which I have premised,
and if these canons of judgment which I have
laid down, be exact, we are now in a position to
understand the problem and the structure of the
Hegelian Logic : not indeed, be it well under
stood, the principle of the logical doctrines of
Hegel (the concrete concept) and of his various
particular doctrines (the theory of opposites, the
theory of distincts, etc.) — of which we have already
discoursed in preceding chapters — but of that
determinate thought which led Hegel to conceive
a fundamental science, which he called Logic or
the Science of logic, and developed in thrQe.secjtiQns,
the logic of Being^ the logic of ^Essen^e, and the
logic of the Concept. It is a science, which has,
not without reason, seemed strange and obscure,
rigorous in appearance, but arbitrary in fact and
at every step ; something unseizable, because it
provides no secure point to take hold of or to
lean upon.

The problem of the Hegelian Logic (as appears
from the principal content of that book) is to
submit to examination the various definitions of

io8 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

the Absolute, that is, to review critically all forms
of philosophy, in order to demonstrate, by means
of their difficulties and contradictions, the truth
of that philosophy which considers the Absolute
as spirit or idea. Further, it is to show at the
same time that the aspects of truth brought to
light by other philosophies find their justification
in this conception, so that this philosophy is the
result, as it has been the aspiration, of all the
efforts of human thought. Hence in the Logic
there pass before us, now sometimes expressly
named, now sometimes in allusion and reference,
Oriental Emanationism, Buddhism, Pythagorean-
ism, Eleaticism, Heracliteanism, the Atomism
of Democritus, Platonism, Aristotelianism, the
doctrines of the Pantheists, of the Sceptics and
of the Gnostics, Christianity, Saint Anselm,
Scholasticism ; then, too, Descartes, Spinoza,
Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Jacobi, Herder ; and other philo
sophical points of view. It is the " pathologv_pf
thought," as it has been called by an English
writer, in a sense somewhat different from mine :
it is the polemic, by which every philosophy
affirms and maintains its life against other philo
sophies, more or less discordant with, and hostile
to it.

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 109

This polemic, if we observe it well, can be
conducted in two distinct modes, one of which
presupposes the other as its basis. The different
philosophies, and their partially erroneous points
of view, can be studied in their individuality,
in the definite form that they assumed with
various thinkers at different times, in chronological
sequence ; and we thus have the History o/
Philosophy (which is both history and criticism,
like every true history). Or we can study the
universal possibilities of philosophical errors, their
perpetual sources, the confusion of philosophy
with the various other activities of the human
spirit ; and in this case the polemic against errors
is philosophy itself, the whole system ; for it is
only in the completely developed system that the
causes of errors become clear. A polemic against
errors can be placed, for convenience' sake, now
at the beginning, now in the middle, and now at
the end of a philosophic theory ; but logically
it is inseparable from the philosophy itself,
because, as Bacon said, as the straight line is
the measure both of itself and of the curve, so
verum index sui et falsi ; or, as is generally said,
every affirmation is also negation. This criticism,
AvHich is the entire system, is also the basis of
that other criticism, the history of philosophy.

no PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Hegel, by the affirmative theses of his
philosophy, discharged magnificently the task of
criticizing philosophical errors : certainly, within
the limits of his system, or up to the point at
which the errors of his own system prevented
him from seeing further into the errors of others ;
but in any case with a breadth and richness such
as no other philosopher, save Aristotle, had
ever displayed. Aristotle indeed stands to the
previous development of Hellenic thought in
the same relation as Hegel stands to the whole
philosophical development up to his own time,
from the Hellenic, even from the Oriental world.
Hence the Logic of Hegel has on several occasions
been compared with and placed beside the Met a-
physic of Aristotle.1

And for this reason, in the History of Philo
sophy also, Hegel attained to heights never reached
previously to him and rarely since, so much so that
he is considered as the true founder of the history
of philosophy, no longer understood as literary
history or as a collection of erudite matter, but
as internal history, as an exposition which philo
sophy itself makes of its own genesis in time, as
the great autobiography of philosophic thought.

1 " C'est la seule metaphysique qui existe, avec cclle d'Aristote." H.
Taine, in a letter of 1851 : see Sa Vie ct sa correspondance (Paris, 1902),
i. 162-3, cf. p. 145.

METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS in

But owing to the confusion between the
dialectic and the connexion of distincts, and to
the consequent conception of errors as particular
truths, Hegel was not satisfied with the two
modes indicated, but attempted a third mode—
that realized in the structure of the Logic.
Here errors are Jreated as distinct concepts^
that is, as categories \_ and the attempt is made
to deduce, or to develop errors, in the same way
that the categories or the distinct concepts are
deduced andf cTeveTopedT The method proper to
truth is applieoVto non-truthJJI

What was bound to happen in this desperate
attempt, this violent and spasmodic, effort toward
the impossible? " Sil est difficile, cest fait; sil
est impossible, on le fera" said some courtier-
minister of the an^ienj^gime. And he performed
the impossible with a fiat of his will, leading the
state to ruin and provoking the revolution.
Similarly his own will ruled supreme in the
structure that Hegel devised. He begins at the
beginning. Hegel always gave himself great
trouble over this problem of the beginning, not
less than over that of the introduction to be
provided to philosophy (the senseless dispute as
to the place that the Phenomenology has in the
system is well known). Yet he himself recognizes

ii2 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

quite clearly that philosophy is a "circle" and
thereby implies the incon£eivability of a necessary
starting-point. A circle can be entered at any
point ; and so it is with philosophy. We can
begin with the concept of spirit in general, pro
ceeding from that by determinations, or we can
proceed by successive complications from the
most simple concept, or by discomposition, from
the most complex, or from some intermediary
concept, by going backwards and forwards ; or,
finally, from some problem and philosophicaMn-
vestigation and criticism of errors, we can work
to a complete system. It is in this way that
every one begins to philosophize ; and here, at
this point, is reality : each one has his beginning,
TO TTpwrov TTpo? ^a?, and at this stage of apprehen
sion there is no Trp&rov (frvo-ei. The preference to be
accorded to one beginning rather than to another
is at most a question of didactic convenience.
But if the problem of the beginning is of no
importance in philosophy, it is true, on the other
hand, that philosophy, objectively considered, has
its first position, its Trp&rov fyvaei : a first, which
is also last, the first which is a circle, such as, for
example, in the philosophy of Hegel, Spirit or
Idea. But in the Logic > in so far as it is an
examination of a series of errors, how can a first

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 113

be thought that should be first of necessity, a
Trpwrov <f>vaei? Hegel began with pure being,
that is, with the examination of the philosophical
systems which define the Absolute as simple
being ; and he repeatedly tried to justify this
beginning, but in vain. It was a beginning like
any other, equally justified with any other ; but
unjustifiable if it is claimed to justify it as the
only one. Why should we not commence with
the philosophies which place the root of things
in one of the other of the cosmological elements,
the water of Thales or the air of Anaximenes ?
Or with the sensationalis^philo_sophies, for which
the absoJ.ui£-J^-_lhe_relative, and reality is the
phenomenon ? Let the starting-point be pure
being : only, an examination which begins at
this point, has "commanded" a principle, like
that laid down in the mathematical disciplines.
Or again, the course of the argument has a
purely biographical, autobiographical, or aesthetic
value. Indeed, the Phenomenology, which begins
from sensible certainty, and the Logic, which
begins from pure being, follow here and there a
course, which recalls some philosophic romance :
Emile, perhaps, or the journey of the Irishman
in search of the best of religions.

The beginning was arbitrary ; and the sequel

n4 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

was arbitrary. It is not easy to hold Hegel's
Logic in one's mind, unless recourse be had to
learning it mechanically : for there is no necessary
generation of its successive parts from one another.
Triad follows triad ; but it does not appear that
one triad links itself to another, triadically, as
the method implies. After the first triad, of being,
not-being, and becoming, comes the category of
the determinate being (Daseyn) : but if there is
to be a link between them, determinate being
should arise from becoming as its antithesis, i.e.
as not-becoming. But the fact is that Hegel
himself says, that determinate being corresponds
to pure being in the preceding triad. For this
reason, the series of triads of the Hegelian Logic
has been interpreted by some critics, not as a
great uninterrupted chain, but as a single funda
mental triad, into which other triads are inserted ;
and into which still others could be inserted, as
well as that limited number which Hegel gave,
apparently by way of example. But on this
interpretation, the necessary ascent through
different degrees, from pure being to the idea,
is made illusory, and that ascent was the purpose
of the Logic. So the book is thus reduced to a
congeries of criticisms directed against the affirma
tions of abstract terms, which are resolved in

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 115

dialectic syntheses. And it would be necessary
to add that the criticisms are concerned not only
with abstract opposites, but also with false
opposites ; and therefore it is not altogether an
erroneous view which has noted a certain change
of method in the Logic, as it gradually rises from
the primary to the ulterior categories. It is
clear that the content of the criticism changes,
when we pass from the errors concerning being
to those which refer to essence and to the
concept; hence Hegel himself says, that "in
being we have another and a passing into
another ; in essence, the appearing in the
opposite, and in the concept, the distinction
between the particular and universality, which
continues as such in that which is distinct from it,
and is in a relation of identity with the distinct."
If there be no necessary connexion between
the successive parts of Hegel's Logic, there
appear in it on the other hand marks of the
tendencies which might be expected in a thought-
content, which has been compelled into those
schematic forms, as into a bed of Procrustes.
That content, as has already been said, could
only be developed, either in the form of the
exposition of a complete philosophic system (and

n6 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

in this case, as a philosophy of spirit), or in the
form of a history of philosophy. And the treat
ment of the Logic approximates sometimes to
the one type, sometimes to the other. For
instance, we discover an attempt at a history
of philosophy in the order of the first categories,
in which appear successively Parmenides, Hera-
clitus, Democritus ; and then again, in other
parts, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant : the first part
of the doctrine of the concept contains the
critique of the Aristotelian analytic ; the second
part, the criticism of the Leibnizian monadology.
And again, it has an even stronger tendency to
transform itself into a philosophy (speculative
and not empirical) of spirit, i.e. of the particular
forms of spirit, cognitive and practical, in their
necessary relation. Thus, in the doctrine of
being (section on quantity) there is the gnoseo-
logy of arithmetical procedure ; in the doctrine of
essence, of the theory involved in the natural
sciences. In the doctrine of the concept, in the
first section, there is the logic of the concept, of
the judgment, and of the syllogism ; and then,
in the third section, the more properly philo
sophical logic. In the parts relating to objectivity,
the concepts of mechanism and chemism are
elucidated, and in those relating to teleology and

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 117

life, there is a sketch of a philosophy of nature ;
while a practical philosophy appears in the section
on the Idea, in the discussion of will. Finally,
aesthetic is not altogether excluded : in the
compendium of logic, which is to be found in the
Propaedeutic of 1808-1812, the category of the
" Beautiful" is united to that of "Life."1 For
this reason also, it is desperate to attempt to
keep the various parts of the system of Hegel
distinct from one another. The Logic anticipates
the Philosophy of the Spirit, which takes up again
the themes of the Logic, the Philosophy of nature
develops the doctrines of being and of the essence ;
the parts of the Logic relating to mechanism, to
chemism and to life, anticipate the Philosophy of
nature : the Phenomenology of Spirit contains the
whole system in a first sketch (if we do not take
account of the System der Sittlichkeit, which
Hegel did not publish, and which was the very
first sketch).

A concrete content, taken from the history of
philosophy, and in great measure from the Philo
sophy of spirit, a violent and arbitrary arrange
ment, imposed by thefalse^ idea of an a priori
deduction of errors : that is how the Hegelian

1 Philosophische Propiideutik, ed. Rosenkranz, 2nd course, § 10 (in
Werke, xviii. 120).

nS PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL v

Logic presents itself to me. The arrangement
injures the content. But in saying this and in
condemning the undertaking of Hegel, as em
bodied in the Logic, I do not intend to condemn
to death and to oblivion that richest of all the
books which bear the title Logic ; on the contrary,
I mean to place it in conditions favourable to its
life and to the continued exercise of its profound
influence upon the mind. He who takes up the
Logic of Hegel, with the intention of understand
ing its development and above all the reason of
the commencement, will be obliged ere long to
put down the book in despair of understanding
it, or persuaded that he finds himself face to face
with a mass of meaningless abstractions. But he
who, like the jipj^ojL&ab^is, " a philosophical
be_ast," instead of leaving the bone alone, takes
a bite at it, now here and now there, chews it,
breaks it up and sucks it, will eventually nourish
himself with the substantial marrow. Hegel and
his disciples after him, have persistently pointed
to the door by which the Logic can be entered :
pure being, from which we must gradually pass
by the vestibules and up the stairs of nothing,
of becoming, of determinate being, of something,
of the limit > of change, of being for self, etc. etc. :
in order to reach the sanctuary of the Goddess, or

v METAMORPHOSIS OF ERRORS 119

the Idea. But he who obstinately knocks at that
gate and believes the false information, that such
and no other must be the door and the stair, will
vainly attempt to enter the palace. That door,
which has been indicated as the only one, is a
closed, indeed a sham door. Take the palace by
assault from all sides ; thus alone will you reach
the interior, and penetrate to the very sanctuary.
And it may be that you will see the countenance
of the Goddess lit with a benevolent smile, be
holding the "saintly simplicity" of many of her
devotees.

VI

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PARTI
CULAR CONCEPTS INTO PHILO
SOPHICAL ERRORS

I. ART AND LANGUAGE (^ESTHETIC)

THE other consequence, the second counter
blow arising from the confusion between the
synthesis of opposites and the relation of dis-
tincts, was not less grave. Owing to this
confusion, Hegel deprived himself of the means
of recognizing the autonomy and of attributing
their just and proper value to the various forms
of the spirit. Error was confused with particular
truth, and, as philosophical errors had become for
Hegel particular truths, so particular truths were
bound to be associated with errors and to become
philosophical errors, to lose all intrinsic measure,
to be brought to the level of speculative truth,
and to be treated as nothing but imperfect forms
of philosophy.

120

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 121

For this reason, Hegel did not completely
succeed in recognizing the nature of the aesthetic,
or of the historical, or of the naturalistic activity ;
that is to say, of art, or of history, or of the
physical and natural sciences.

Without doubt, the pages of Hegel concerning
aesthetic are animated with great artisticjeelingj
and on the whole there prevails in them the
tendency to make-art a primary element in human
life, a mode of knowledge and of spiritual_elevaL-
tiojn. We are carried by these pages far beyond
and far above 'the vulgar view, for which art is
a superfluous accident of real life, a pleasure, a
game, a pastime ; or a simple mode of instruction,
empirical and relative. The constant contact
of Hegelian speculation with taste and with
works of art, and the dignity which it assigned
to the artistic activity, gave it an effective in
fluence over men's minds and made it a powerful
stimulus to the study of aesthetic problems. This
is a merit, which, in part, is common to all the
aesthetic theories of the Romantic period (the great
period of the fermentation and the renewal of the
philosophy of art and of literary and artistic criti
cism and history), and which, in part, is peculiar
to the Hegelian aesthetic, in virtue of its wealth
of ideas, of judgments and of problems.

122 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

But the elements of truth, scattered in plenty in
the Hegelian eesthetic, are either too general, or
merely incidental, and are, in principle, divergent
from the fundamental concept of art, which Hegel
accepts, and which is erroneous.

It is erroneous, because Hegel, firm in his
belief that every form of spirit (save the ultimate
and supreme form) is nothing but a provisional
and contradictory way of conceiving the Absolute,
could not discover that first ingenuous theoretic
form, which is the lyric or the musicjof spirit,
and in which there is nothing philosophically
contradictory, because the philosophic problem
has not yet emerged. This first form is its
condition. It is the region of the intuition, of
pure fancy, of language, in its essential character,
as painting, music or song : in a word, it is the
region of art. When Hegel begins his medita
tion upon the phases of spirit, he is already at
a point where that region is behind him, and
yet he does not recognize that he has passed it.
The Phenomenology takes its start from sensible
certainty, according to Hegel the simplest form
of all : that in which (he says) we behave towards
reality in an immediate or receptive manner
changing nothing in it and abstaining from all
the labour of concepts. And he does not find

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 123

it difficult to show that such contemplation, which
seems to be the richest and most true, is, on the
contrary, the most abstract and the poorest.
The thing is now, and is not the moment after ;
it is here, and in a moment, in the here there is
something else ; all that survives, is the abstract
this, here, now ; everything else disappears. But
the sensible certainty, of which Hegel speaks, is
not the first theoretic form ; it is not genuine
sensible certainty, cuo-Orjo-t,? pure and simple. It
is not, as he believes, immediate consciousness :
it is already mingled with intellectual reflexion,
it already contains the question as to what is
truly real. In place of genuine sensible certainty
(such as we have in aesthetic contemplation,
where there is no distinction between subject
and object, no comparison of one thing to another,
no collocation in spatial and temporal series)
there has been substituted the first reflexion upon
sensible knowledge ; and it is natural that that
first reflexion should seem imperfect and to be
surpassed. Hegel often repeats that : " the
subject without predicate resembles, in the
phenomenon, the thing without properties, the
thing - in - itself, an empty and indeterminate
foundation ; it is the concept in itself, which, only
with the predicate, receives differentiation and

i24 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

determination." But art is, precisely, subject
without predicate ; that is quite other than the
nothingness and void of the thing-in-itself and
of the thing without properties. It is intuition
without intellectual relations ; it is the emotion,
which a poem communicates, through which there
opens a view of a reality, which we cannot render
in intellectual terms and which we possess only
in singing or in re-singing, that is, only in
creating it.

Since Hegel never reaches the region of
aesthetic activity and therein the theoretic form
which is truly primary, so he does not succeed in
explaining language. Language, too, becomes,
in his eyes, an organized contradiction. Indeed,
for him it is the work of memory, which he calls
"productive," because it produces "signs"; and
the sign is explicitly defined as an immediate
intuition, which represents a content "altogether
different from that which is its own." By means
of language the intelligence impresses its re
presentation upon an external element. The
form of language, therefore, is intellectual ; it is
the product of a logical instinct, which is after
wards theorized in grammar. Owing to this
logical form, language tries to express the in
dividual, but cannot do so : " you wish to say this

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 125

piece of paper, upon which I am writing, or rather
have written, — precisely this ; but you do not say
it. What you say is a universal, the this!'
Thus, according to Hegel, does language confute
itself, attempting to express the individual, and,
on the contrary, always expressing the universal.
—But for the omne individuum ineffabile of the
scholastics, which Hegel here seems to repeat,
we must substitute the opposite solum individuum
effabile (or -else correct the former with the
addition : logicis modis ineffabile}. How can we
ever think that a human activity, such as language,
does not attain its end, that it proposes to itself
an end that is absurd and therefore that it must
dwell in self-deception, from which it cannot
escape ? Language is essentially poetry and
art : by language, or by artistic expression, we
grasp individual reality, that individual shading,
which our spirit intuites and renders, not in terms
of concepts, but in sounds, tones, colours, lines,
and so on. For this reason, language, under
stood in its true nature, and in the full extent of
its meaning, is adequate to reality. The illusion
of inadequacy arises when the term language is
applied to a fragment of this full meaning, and
when that fragment is separated from the organic
whole to which it belongs. Thus paper, this

126 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

paper, of which I speak, is not only what is ex
pressed by the words " this paper " in themselves,
torn asunder from their context and rendered
abstract. It is what my eyes, or rather, my
whole spirit, has present to it ; which in so far as
it represents, it can also render externally, with
sound, colour, and so on. If I say: "this paper
precisely," it is because I have it before me and
am showing it to others : the words that issue from
my mouth obtain their full meaning from the
whole psychical situation in which I find myself,
and so from the intention, intonation, and gesture,
with which I pronounce them. If we abstract
them from that situation, certainly they will appear
inadequate to that individual : but that is because
we have made them so, by mutilating them. But
Hegel (who had no clear idea of the aesthetic
condition of the spirit) could not completely
understand language ; he was obliged to think of
it in that mutilated and intellectualized manner,
and therefore to declare it contradictory. And
when, in his ^Esthetic, he passes from the language
of prose to consider the language of poetry, he
falls back into the old rhetoric, after some attempt
to emerge from it. Poetic language also, in the
end, he regards as a mere "sign," essentially
different from the lines and the colours of

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 127

sculpture and of painting, and from the tones
of music.

Thus Hegel's erroneous logical theory con
cerning distinct concepts conceals from him the
place that properly belongs to the aesthetic
activity ; and suggests to him a philosophy of
language, which leads him of necessity to consider
language as an error. But it is not only language
that is treated in this fashion. Art, its true
function unrecognized, obtrudes itself upon his
mind ; and since he does not know what to make
of it, he transfers it to a place, where it does not
belong and where, like language (which has first
been arbitrarily separated from the representative
and aesthetic activity, with which it altogether
coincides), it too ends by appearing as nothing
but imperfection and error. Hegel could neither
pass it by in silence nor get rid of it lightly (as is
the way of naturalistic and positivist philosophers).
His time would not permit this, nor would his
individual disposition, in which interest in art was
so prominent. The conception to which he
attained was substantially that of his time. Kant,
in the third Critique, had studied the aesthetic
activity along with the teleological judgment, as
one of the modes of representing nature, when
the mechanical conceptions of the exact sciences

28 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

VI

are surpassed ; Schiller had indicated it as the
ground of reconciliation in the struggle between
necessity and liberty, and Sqhelling conceived it
as the true organ of the Absolute. Schopenhauer
was later to consider it in like manner as the
contemplation of the Ideas and the freeing of the
will. For Hegel also, this activity, which the
whole romantic period sometimes substituted for,
sometimes placed above, and sometimes placed
below religion and philosophy, became a mode of
apprehending the Absolute, of solving the great
philosophical problem. In the Phenomenology, he
makes it a form of religion, superior to merely
natural religion (which adores material objects,
feUcJjes and the like), because it is indeed a mode
of adoring spirit as subject ; in the Encyclopaedia
he makes it, with but slight difference, the religion
of beauty, a first degree in relation to revealed
religion, inferior to the latter, as this latter, in its
turn, is inferior to philosophy. The history of
poetry and of art consequently appears in the
lectures on ^.sthetic^ as a history of philosophy,
of religion and of the moral life of humanity : a
history of human ideals, in which the individuality
of works of art, that is to say, the properly
aesthetic form, occupies a secondary place, or is
referred to only incidentally.

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 129

If the conception of art, as engaged upon the
same problem as religion and philosophy, is
common to his time, what is peculiar to Hegel
is the relation which he establishes between those
three forms : the distinctive character, which he
assigns to art in relation to religion and philosophy.
Hegel could not, as others did, make the aesthetic
activity complementary to the philosophical activity,
solving in its way the problems that were insoluble
to philosophy. Still less could he make it an
activity superior to the philosophical. His logical
assumption was bound to lead him to the usual
solution of the dialectic, in its application to
distinct concepts. The artistic activity is distinct
from the philosophical only through its imperfec
tion, only because it apprehends the Absolute in
a sensible and immediate form, whereas philosophy
apprehends it in the pure medium of thought.
This means, logically, that art is not at all
distinct ; and that for Hegel it is practically
reduced (whether he like it or not) to a philo
sophical error, or an illusory philosophy. True
art would be philosophy, which addresses itself
again to the same problem upon which art has
worked in vain and attains a perfect solution of it.

That such is the genuine thought of Hegel, is
proved by the fact that he does not shrink from

130 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

the extreme consequence of this theory. When
philosophy is completely developed, art must
disappear, because it is superfluous : art must
die, and indeed it is already quite dead. If it is
an error, it is not necessary and eternal. The
history of art, which Hegel traces, is directed to
shewing the gradual dissolution of the artistic
form, which has no place, in modern times, in our
true and highest interests. It is a past, or the
survival of the past. This grandiose paradox
illuminates everywhere the aesthetic error of
Hegel, and better perhaps than any other ex
ample makes clear the error of his logical assump
tion. In defence of Hegel, it has been said that
the death of art, of which he speaks, is that eternal
death, which is an eternal^ rebirth : such as we
observe in the spirit of man, when he passes
from poetry to philosophy, rising from the intuition
to the universal, so that in his eyes, the world
of intuition loses__its^_colpur^ But against this
interpretation, there is the fact that Hegel speaks
of the death of art, not in the sense of perpetually
renewing itself, but as actually about to happen
and as having happened, of a death of art in the
historical world. This is in complete agreement
with his treatment of the degrees of reality as a
series of opposites, difficult to abstract and to

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 131

separate from one another. Once he had assumed
this application of the dialectic, Hegel had no
other choice than one of two ways, either to
suppress art by means of that grandiose paradox,
or to preserve it with a not less grandiose
inconsistency.

For this reason, it is not altogether wrongly
that the system of Hegel (whose twin principles
of the concrete concept and the dialectic, are of
frankly aesthetic inspiration) has appeared to be
a cold intellectualjsm, irreconcilable to the artistic
consciousness. And the misunderstanding of
art leaves its traces in his treatment of all the
problems into which the concept of art enters as
a necessary and proximate premiss. Hegel is
usually considered an adversary of the Aristotelian
formal logics; but it would be better to say, with
greater exactness, that he was the adversary of
classificatory and naturalistic logic, or, better still,
tEat he limited himself to revealing the inadequacy
of classificatory and naturalistic logic to provide
a principle for philosophy. We have already
recognized this merit in him and his polemic
on this subject could not have a different mean
ing. " Aristotle " (he says) " is the author of _jn^
Jtellectual logic (the logic of the abstract intellect),
whose forms concern only the relation of finites

132 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

between themselves ; the true, therefore, cannot
be conceived in them." l But the method of
classification is not what is most characteristic
in the logic of Aristotle and of his school : the
classificatory tendency is also to be found in the
Baconian or inductive logic. The characteristic
of the Aristotelian logic is its syllogistic, or
verbalism, the confusion into which it falls
between logical_jthought and speech, and its
claim to establish logical forms, while limiting

itself to verbal forms.

* -

Hegel did not and could not criticize this
error, because he was without the instrument of
criticism, which can be furnished only by a valid
philosophy of language. He certainly tries to
^distinguish between the proposition and the
logical judgment ; but he cannot adduce good
reasons for this distinction, and he states that
a proposition (for instance "it is hot") becomes
a judgment only when with it we answer the
doubt that may arise as to the truth of the
affirmation. The exact distinction was beyond
his reach, for it consists in recognizing that the
pure proposition is nothing but speech itself, or
language as pure aesthetic fact, in which there
is no logic, though it is the necessary vehicle

1 Gesch. der Philos? ii. 365-68.

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 133

of logical thought. Indeed, not only does he re
tain the tripartition of concept, logical judgment
and syllogism, and the division between element
ary forms and methodology, between definition,
division, demonstration and proof, but he even
sets to work to distinguish and define new classes
of judgments and of syllogisms.

VII

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PARTI
CULAR CONCEPTS INTO PHILO
SOPHICAL ERRORS

II. HISTORY (IDEA OF A PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY)

IT might be said that the failure to understand
the autonomy of art also prevented Hegel from
understanding the character of history (historio
graphy). But the truth is that Hegel was unable
to do full justice to this theoretic form, for the
same reason as in the case of the others, i.e. as
we have already mentioned, because he trans
formed particular concepts into philosophical
errors. From the logical point of view, the two
errors have the same origin. Psychologically, it is
probable that the first prepared the way for the
second ; as it is also psychologically probable
that Hegel's idea of religion contributed in some
measure to produce the first. He regarded

religion as an imaginative and more or less

134

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 135

imperfect form of philosophy ; and this was
bound to lead him to assign an analogous position
to art in relation to philosophy.

History, herein differing from art, presupposes
philosophical thought as its condition ; but, like
art, it finds its material in the intuitive element.
History, therefore, is always narration, and never
theory and system, though it has theory and system
at its foundation. So that, on the one hand,
historians are trained to the scrupulous study of
documents, and on the other to the formation of
clear ideas upon reality and life, and especially
upon those aspects of life which they undertake
to treat historically. It has seemed therefore
that history cannot dispense with scientific
accuracy and yet remain always a work of art.
If all historical works be reduced to their simplest
expression, the historical judgment, or the pro
position affirming that " something has happened "
(for example, Caesar was killed, Alaric devastated
Rome, Dante composed the Comedy, etc.), we
see, upon analysing these propositions, that each
one of them is constituted of intuitive elements,
which act as subject and of logical elements,
which act as predicate. The first for instance
and speaking generally, will be Caesar, Rome,
Dante, the Comedy, and so on ; and the second,

136 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

the concepts of slaughter, devastation, artistic
composition, and such like.

From this historical gnoseology, it follows
that every progress of philosophic thought is
translated into a progress of historical knowledge,
since we understand far more adequately what
were truly the historical facts of Dante's com
position of his poem, when we know better what
poetry and artistic creation are. But we also
gather that the attempt would be vain to resolve
those historical affirmations into abstract philo
sophic affirmations. That would be to absorb
the whole and complete fact in what is merely
the condition of the fact. History can give rise
to a conceptual science of an empirical character,
as when we pass from it to a sociology that
proceeds by types and classes ; but for that very
reason, it is not absorbed by that conceptual
science, of which it remains the presupposition or
the basis. Conversely, history can give rise to
philosophy, when we pass from the historical con
sideration of the particular to the theoretical
elements, which are at the bottom of that con
sideration ; but, for that very reason, it cannot be
said to be absorbed in that philosophy, which is
its pre-supposition and its basis, ^philosophy
of history, understood not as the elaboration of

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 137

this abstract philosophy, but as history of a second
degree, a history obtained by means of that
abstract philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.

What is the significance of such an idea of a
philosophy of history, as history of a second
degree? Neither more nor less than the annul
ment of history. For this second degree, this
postulated philosophical consideration of historical
narrative, this philosophic history, would be true
history, in relation to which the history of the
historians would be revealed as error, because it
is constructed according to a method which does
not lead to truth, or, what amounts to the same
thing, does not lead to complete truth. On the
appearance of the second form, the first form
would be dissolved ; or rather, it would be dis
solved, precisely because it would not be a form,
but something formless. The idea- of a philo
sophy of history is the non-recognition of the
autonomy of historiography, to the advantage of
abstract philosophy. Whenever such a claim is
made, one seems to hear the bells tolling for the
death of the history of historians. The historians
—usually so docile when their attention is called
to some progress in science or philosophy, which
may help to make clear some part of their work
as narrators — yet rebel with violence when any

138 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

one talks to them of a philosophy of history, of
some sort of speculative method of knowing
history, or when the attempt is made to persuade
them to consign the labour, into which they have
put all their powers, and of which every line and
every shade is dear to them, to the hands of
philosophers who are not historians, to revise
and complete it. And their rebellion is reason
able. It is just as if a painter or a musician
were told to consign to the philosophers his
picture or his score, when he had completed it,
so that they might raise it to the second power,
by introducing into it strokes of the philosophic
brush and philosophic harmonies>

T^epTliadTo~pastr-and "deposit the idea of
a philosophy of history ; and he had to negate,
as he did negate, the history of the historians,
for that was required by his logical presupposition.
He divided philosophy into pure or formal philo
sophy (which should have been logic, and was
also metaphysics), and into applied and concrete
philosophy, comprising the two philosophies of
nature and of spirit, into the second of which the
philosophy of history entered again ; the three
together composed the encyclopaedia of the
philosophical sciences. Thus Hegel adopted as
his own the traditional Scholastic division of

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 139

philosophy into rational and real, and this not as
a simple formula and external scheme, but as
expressing also the demand for a philosophic
treatment of the contingent facts of nature and
of human history. All history, as I have pre
viously explained, can be called concrete or
applied philosophy ; but these words did not
possess so innocent a meaning for Hegel as for
ourselves. For him they implied the sharp dis
tinction of the history, contained in the philo
sophical encyclopaedia, from all the other histories,
which constitute the work of historians. In his
lectures upon the philosophy of history, this dis
tinction is very clearly drawn, for he places on
the one side original historiography and reflective
historiography (the second of these two being
subdivided into general, pragmatic, critical and
conceptual history), and on the other philosophic
historiography or philosophy of history.

Hegel affirms that this philosophic historio
graphy should have its own method, different
from the method of ordinary historiography, and
he claims for it the character of an a priori con
struction. It is true that by this he sometimes
seems to mean, not a distinctive character, but
only the need for a better elaborated a priori.
He notes that ordinary historians also write

140 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

a priori history, for they proceed from certain
thoughts and representations of their own, which,
though defective and arbitrary, yet are always
a priori. But the a priori that he introduces
is not the logical element, the interpretation of
intuitive data, which has been recognized above
as indispensable for all historical work. Rather,
it is a history already complete, which needs only
to be clothed in names and dates. " The one
thought" (writes Hegel) " with which philosophy
approaches history is the simple thought of reason :
that reason rules the world, and therefore in the
history of the world also, there is a rational
process." But there is far more in it than this,
or rather, we learn what these words really mean,
when we see him trace the necessary process of
reason in the historical world. The history of
the world is the progress in the consciousness of
liberty : its single moments or degrees are the
various national spirits ( Volksgeister), the various
peoples, each one of which is destined to re
present one degree only, and to accomplish only
one task in the whole achievement. Before
Hegel seeks the data of facts, he knows what
they must be ; he knows them in anticipation, as
we know philosophic truths, which spirit finds in
its own universal being and does not deduce

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 141

from contingent facts. In the History of Philo
sophy, which is perhaps his principal historical
work, he knows a priori that the history of
philosophy and the system of philosophy are
identical. The theme is the same development,
which is represented in the system itself in the
pure medium of thought, free from historical
externalities ; and in the history it has the
addition of these externalities (names and dates).
The first phases of Hellenic thought are the first
categories of metaphysic and the phases follow
one another in the same order as the categories.

Against an interpretation of Hegel's theory
of the philosophy of history, might be set his
various declarations of the great respect due to
actual fact. But we must first examine what value
these declarations can assume or retain. "That
there is rational process in the history of the
world" (he says) "should be shown by the con
sideration of history itself ... it should be a
result : we must take history as it is, and proceed
historically and empirically" The accidental is
extraneous to philosophy; and history (he says
elsewhere) '-'should lower the universal into
empirical individuality and into effectual reality ;
the idea is its essence but the appearance of the
idea is in the sphere of accident and in the realm

M2 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

of arbitrary choice." But if accident and in
dividuality are truly extraneous to philosophy,
if we can know them only empirically, there can
be no a priori philosophy of history, but only
history itself. And if a philosophy of history be
created, then this accidental and individual, and
the historical and empirical method, are not
recognized and are refuted. We cannot escape
from the dilemma. To recommend attention to
facts, or to recognize that the study of documents
is the indispensable point of departure for history,
are mere words, when in consequence of the
adoption of certain principles, it is not known
what use to make of those facts and documents.
Those of Hegel's disciples, who have believed
that they could save both the goat and the
cabbage by maintaining both the speculative and
the philological methods in history, have saved
neither the one nor the other. It is very
ingenuous to affirm that one and the same
activity can be exercised with two different
methods ; for the method is intrinsic to the
activity, and a duplicity of methods means a
duplicity of activity. It is worse than ingenuous
to make the two methods alternate and come to
one another's assistance, as though they were two
friends and companions engaged in the same task.

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 143

At other times, Hegel seems to understand his
a priori scheme as nothing but a rough anticipa
tion of what is given by actual history: "It may be
thought " (he writes in the History of Philosophy"]
" that the philosophic order of the degrees of the
idea must be different from that of the concepts
which are produced in time ; but in the Whole
(im Ganzen) the order is the same." At other
times again he modifies his statement in such a
way that hardly anything remains of it. Thus,
in affirming the identity of the philosophic system
and the history of philosophy, he observes :
" The philosophy which is last in time is also
the result of all preceding philosophies, and
should contain the principle of them all : it is
therefore — but only if it be truly a philosophy—
the most developed, the richest and the most
concrete." The reservation implied in the
parenthesis amounts to a tautological affirma
tion, that the most developed, the richest and
most concrete philosophy, is not the last in time,
but that which is truly a philosophy ; since it
is possible that a philosophic system which con
stitutes a regression may appear last in time.
What are we to conclude from all this ? That
Hegel never had in mind an a priori philosophy
of history, the idea of which is, however, closely

i44 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

connected with his dialectic treatment of distincts ?
No, but rather that error is contradiction ; and
that Hegel's erroneous thesis of a philosophy
of history (of an ideal history, which is not eternal,
but in time] shows itself to be error, by the
involuntary contradictions in which Hegel be
comes involved. Certainly, we cannot conclude
that those admissions suffice to heal the defects of
the erroneous thesis and to change it into truth.

That the philosophy of history, thus conceived,
should not suffer beside itself history properly
so-called, but should negate it, is not merely a
probable inference, from Hegel's principle, but is
explicitly enough stated in several propositions.
And indeed, the very fact that he defines the
philosophy of history as "the thinking contem
plation of history " (recalling immediately after
wards, that thought alone distinguishes man
from the animal), is confirmation that he regards
history as such, either as not thought, or as
imperfect thought. And the attitude of antipathy
and depreciation, which he adopts toward pro
fessional historians, is likewise significant ; almost
as though a philosopher of art should quarrel
with professional poets and painters. But most
instructive of all is what he says of the facts
which are the material of the historian's study.

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 145

The only facts which, in his opinion, are valuable
for history are those which represent the move
ment of spirit or the history of the State. All the
particular facts that remain " are a superfluous
mass which, when faithfully collected, only oppress
and obscure the objects worthy of history ; the
essential characteristic of the spirit and of the
times is always contained in great events. It
is, therefore, a true sentiment that has led to
the handing over of such representations of the
particular to romances (such as those of the cele
brated Walter Scott^ etc.). It is to be held a
proof of good taste to unite pictures of unessen
tial and particular life to a subject-matter equally
unessential, such as those that fiction extracts
from private facts and subjective passions. But
to mingle, in the interests of so-called truth,
individual trivialities of time and people with the
representation of general interests is not only
contrary to judgment and to taste, but contrary
to the concept of objective truth. For, according
to this concept, the truth for spirit is that which
is substantial, not the vacuity of external existence,
and of accident. It is perfectly indifferent whether
such insignificant things are formally documented,
or, as in fiction, invented in a characteristic
manner and attributed to such and such a name,

VII

i46 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

or to such and such circumstances." Whoever
meditates these words will find in them most
plainly the pernicious distinction between two
kinds of facts, between historical facts and non-
historical facts, essential facts and unessential facts,
which has often since reappeared among the dis
ciples of Hegel. It reappeared first in Edwar<^
Cans, who, when publishing the lectures of the mast&r
upon the philosophy of history, took occasion to
repeat that this discipline would lose in dignity if
it had to encumber itself with the micrology of
facts, and that consequently its function was to
demonstrate the necessity, not of all facts, but
only of the great epochs of history and of great
groups of people, and to leave the rest to merely
narrative history. And it has reappeared right
down to that Italian Hegelian, who maintained
some years ago, in a well-known polemic, that
documents were necessary, to establish in what
prisons Thomas Campanella was successively
confined, and how many days and hours he
suffered torture : but were not necessary for the
determination of the historical meaning of his
thought and action. This second thing would
be deduced a priori from the ideas of the
Renaissance, the Catholic Church, the reforms
of Luther, and the Council of Trent. Such dis-

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 147

tinctions, so far from preserving a class of facts
as necessary for true history, make it that all
facts, even the very notion of fact, are rejected
as useless. Indeed, what reason is there for
regarding the facts a, b, c, d, e as unessential and
superfluous, other than that they are individual
and contingent ? And are not the facts/, g, h, i,
1$, /, which it is wished to declare essential and
indispensable, equally contingent and individual ?
If it be a contingent fact that Napoleon suffered
from cancer of the stomach, will not the i8th
Brumaire and the battle of Waterloo be also
contingent ? Will not the whole epoch of the
Revolution and the Empire be contingent ? And
thus (since individuality and contingency extend
to all facts), the whole history of the world will
be contingent. And, on the other hand, if the
French Revolution and the i8th Brumaire and
Waterloo were necessary facts, we do not see
how necessity can be denied to Bonaparte, who
was an actor in the drama ; and to Bonaparte
just as he was constituted in effective reality : in
his strength and in his mental and physical
weaknesses ; in his resistance to fatigue in his
early years, which enabled him to remain whole
days erect on horseback and to spend whole
nights bent over his little table of work, and in

148 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

the abdominal disease of his mature years. As
reality has neither kernel nor shell and comes
forth all in a jet, as the internal and the external
are all one (and Hegel has taught this), so the
mass of facts is a compact mass, it is not composed
of an essential kernel and an inessential shell, of
facts that are intrinsically necessary and facts that
are superfluous externalities. When these distinc
tions are adopted in ordinary language, there is
always implied a reference to definite historical
representations, in relation to the theme of which,
and only in relation to that definite theme, certain
masses of facts appear superfluous. The dis
tinction is so evidently relative that, if we change
our point of view, and pass from one theme to
another, what before was superfluous becomes
necessary, and what before was necessary becomes
superfluous.

But in the passage quoted there is one thing
more to be noted. Hegel hands over to romance,
that is, to a form of art, the facts which do not
seem to him to be historical — we should say
all facts ; and since art was for him a pro
visional form, which philosophy dissipates and
displaces, this is another way of shewing the evil
fate of history at the hands of Hegelian philosophy.
It is a strange fate that the same philosophy,

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 149

which, in virtue of one of its logical doctrines,
had so effectively vindicated the value of history,
of the res gestae, found, as the result of another
of its logical doctrines, that it could not recognize
the value of the historia rerum gestarum and so
of the same res gestae. Famished for history,
nourished on history, Hegel's philosophy, without
understanding that it did so, yet advocated fasting.
And the contradiction blazed in the light of the
sun, before the eyes of all the world ; for, as
there issued from the school of Hegel a series
of great writers of history, so there came forth
from the same school the most petulant and comic ,-p*
depreciators of history and of fact that the world
has ever seen.

VIII

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PARTICU
LAR CONCEPTS INTO PHILO
SOPHICAL ERRORS

III. NATURE (!DEA OF A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE)

IT was certainly a more difficult task to under
stand the true limits, or the true nature, of the
natural and mathematical disciplines. From the
Renaissance onward, there had taken place a
continual enlargement of what was called experi
mental and mathematical science, the exact science
of nature ; and science had come more and more
to rule the intellect, even life itself. Philo
sophical speculation gave way before exact science,
or received to some extent its imprint, as is plain
from many parts of the systems of Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibniz. The sensationalism and
materialism of the eighteenth century had been
the ultimate consequence of that predominance

of the naturalistic ideal.

150

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 151

It is true that when the mind of Hegel was
forming, a movement of doubt and of reaction
had already commenced, and (not to speak of
Vico, who must again be mentioned here) it
was being made clear in several quarters of
Germany that exact natural science was in
adequate to attain to real reality, to the bottom
of things. Philosophers like Kant, armed at all
points with mathematics and with empirical
knowledge, analysing the methods of the exact
sciences and drawing their conclusions, proclaimed
the limits of scientific knowledge, and assigned
the fundamental problems to the practical reason
and to aesthetic and teleological intuition. Other
philosophers, like Jac_dbi, studying the most
notable monument of the application of exact
science to speculative problems, the philosophy
of Spinoza, showed that with the method of the
finite sciences we cannot escape from the finite,
and therefore declared that God and the infinite
and moral problems belonged to the realm of
feeling and of immediate knowledge. Poets,
artists and men of letters, at the time of the
Sturm und Drang, felt the cold and the void
of the intellectualism of the Aufklarung \ and
like Goethe, they aspired to a vision of a
living nature, to be revealed only to him

152 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

who should contemplate it with a sympathetic
soul.

Hegel accepted this critical inheritance, and
gave it vigorous expression, by establishing, as
has already been mentioned, the difference
between the method of philosophy and that of
the mathematical and natural disciplines.

Nevertheless, even in this movement which
seems so hostile to the ideal of the exact sciences,
the weight and power of that ideal makes itself
an effective influence.- For example, if Kant
deny to exact science the possibility of solving
Trle~ttao!amental problems, it is also certain that,
for • -hi fti , "The fbrfly : science to which man can attain
is just this exact science ; and the solutions
which he proposes by another method, have not
cognitive or thought value for him ; that is, they
have not true value. If Jacobi criticize the
method of the finite sciences in relation to the
knowledge of God, it is none the less certain
that, for him, the only form of knowledge is that
of the finite sciences ; the other is not knowledge,
it is not translatable into the form of thought,
and remains " sentiment."

In Hegel and in his immediate predecessor
Schelling, things would seem to take a different
form, because both posited as true knowledge

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 153

the knowledge of the intellectual intuition and
of the idea. But, on deeper investigation, we
discover in both the same prepossession (which
could be called the specially modern preposses
sion), in favour of the exact sciences, though in
them it receives a new statement. Instead of
excluding the exact sciences from philosophy,
and of considering philosophy as incapable of
scientific exactitude, Schelling and Hegel consider
the exact sciences as insufficiently scientific and
include them in philosophy, which elaborates them,
rendering them scientifically rigorous and supply
ing them with an internal necessity. Kant and
Jacobi, each in his own way, made the exact
sciences non-philosophical in character, and philo
sophy non-scientific ; Schelling and Hegel make
the exact sciences a semi-philosophy, and philo
sophy the true science. These are two different
solutions of a problem, but for both the same
assumptions. And the principal of these is the
persuasion that the exact sciences have theoretic
value, or that their concepts are more or less
perfect logical formulations.

Now, in order definitely to settle the dispute
between exact science and philosophy, and to
recognize the respective rights of both, it was
necessary to adopt an altogether different method.

154 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

So long as the naturalistic and philosophic
methods were taken to be two methods of
scientific truth, conflict was inevitable, for the
reason already recorded, that a determinate
activity has but one intrinsic method, its own.
Hence, if the first method were admitted to be
science, the second was shaken and was bound
to fall ; philosophy had to be eliminated. Con
versely, if the speculative method were admitted
to be the only method of truth, the other was a
mere clumsy and contradictory tentative on the
lines of the first method and had to yield before the
complete development of the speculative method.
The mathematical and naturalistic disciplines had
to be replaced by philosophy, since they were a
mediocre philosophy, which could not maintain
itself against a better philosophy. On the other
hand, the way of escape, taken by Kant and by
Jacobi, the consigning of philosophy to the
practical reason or to sentiment, i.e. to the non-
theoretical, was closed, once thought had been
shewn capable of the solution of the problems of
reality, and philosophical logic had been dis
covered. The only other way that was open
was to consign the naturalistic and mathematical
disciplines,/.^. exact science, to the non-theoretical,
that is, to the practical. This path has been

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 155

entered upon in our day, and it seems to me that
it must increasingly appear, not only fruitful, but
necessary.

It cannot be said that Hegel had no notion of
the practical nature of the naturalistic and mathe
matical disciplines. His books are rich in analysis
and observations, which could be transplanted
without alteration into the books of the most
modern theorists of the method of those disciplines.
Read his pages on the concept of law in the
empirical sciences. Law (he says) is nothing but
the constant image of the inconstant appearance ;
so that, in passing from the more particular to
the more general laws, in reducing them to unity,
we run into tautologies, in which the intellect
expresses not the reality of things, but only its
own necessity. What is the postulate, that in a
uniformly accelerated movement, the velocities
are proportionate to the times, but just the
definition of a uniformly accelerated movement ?
And what are the numerous hypotheses worked
out by the physicists but assertions, which corre
spond neither to empirical reality nor to the
philosophic concept, as, for example, the pores, of
which we speak, without their being demonstrated
by experience ? Of the notion of centrifugal and
centripetal forces, Hegel observes that it is a

156 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

metaphysical monster, which is simply presup
posed and which we are forbidden to submit to
any intellectual examination as to the mysterious
fashion in which it happens that these forces
increase and decrease and each in turn acquires
or loses its preponderance. In the exact sciences,
what is called thinkable is unthinkable, because

it isjajse. "It is quite thinkable, as they say,

that a uniformly increasing and decreasing move
ment should take place in circles ; but this think-
ability is nothing but an abstract possibility of
representation, which neglects the determinate
character of what is under consideration, and
which therefore is not only superficial, but false."
In the same way, in mathematics, the name
irrational is applied only to what the science
contains of reality and rationality.

In addition to these and to very many other
similar observations, which are scattered in
profusion, both through the Phenomenology and
the Logic, as well as through the Philosophy of
Nature, there recur frequently in the pages of
Hegel the words intellectiial jutions (Verstandes-
fiktionen], arbitrary^_con£eptions (willkiirlicli), to
indicate the constructions of the abstract intellect
and of the natural and mathematical disciplines.
And fiction and arbitrariness appeal precisely to

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 157

the voluntary and practical activity ; and since
those acts of will have a secularjiistory and are
the result of most noble efforts and are held in
high esteem, even in enthusiastic admiration, on
account of the proved utility of the results
attained, it should be evident that it was im
possible to speak of acts of will in a^ depreciatory^
sense, or of practical acts, as if these were per
formed at the bidding of capnc_e and of evil
passions ; Uut rather in the sense of acts of will
rationally justifiable or of legitimate practical acts.
But there is a case in which Hegel explicitly
shows that he recognizes the non-scientific, yet
legitimate character of those constructions, as
they are and as they must remain. It is where
he propounds to himself the question as to
whether philosophic mathematics are possible :
that is, " a science which knows by concepts
what ordinary mathematical science deduces from
presupposed determinations according to the
method of the intellect." His answer is that
such a science is impossible. " Mathematics "
(he says) "is the science of the finite determina
tions of magnitude, which must remain and
have value in their finitude and must not pass
beyond it ; and therefore it is essentially a science
of the intellect. Since it has the capacity of

158 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

being a perfect intellectual science, it is desirable
rather to preserve to it the advantage which it
possesses over other sciences of the same kind,
than to disturb it by the admixture of the con
cept, which is heterogeneous to it, or of empirical
ends" (JSnc. § 259). "If we desired to treat
philosophically the configurations of space or of
unity " (he had said in the preceding edition of
the same book), "they would lose their meaning
and their particular form : a philosophy of them
would become a matter of logic or of some other
concrete philosophical science, according as a
more concrete meaning came to be attributed to
the concepts." He knew, on the other hand,
that "arithmetic does not contemplate numbers
and their figures, but operates (pperierf) with them ;
for number is indifferent determinateness and
inert, and must_j3e_set jn motion and placed in
relations, from without." Once a form of activity
was admitted, which operates with thought-data
but does not think them, there should have been
no difficulty in extending the observation and in
attaching to it all the other scattered observations
on the non-theoretical procedure of the natural
and mathematical disciplines, and thereby attain
ing a truer theory of the genuine nature of exact
science.

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 159

Hegel also had very clearly in mind a concept
of nature, or of the naturalistic method, not
metaphysical, but simply gnoseological, i.e. a
method applicable not only to the so-called
inferior manifestations of reality (the three natural
kingdoms), but also to all the others (to the orbis
intellectualis}. Thus he considered Hugo Grotius's
theory of the external right of States as analogous
to the natural philosophy of Newton : Aristotelian
logic seemed to him to be nothing but a natural
istic science of thought, in which the forms of
thought were described and placed alongside one
another, as is done in natural history with the
unicorn and the mammoth, with the black-beetle
and the mollusc ; and the same comparison was
suggested in ethics by the doctrine of virtue
( Tugendlehre\ By this path, too, he should have
been able to reach the conclusion that the content
of the so-called natural sciences is not indeed a
part of reality, but a mode of treating all reality,
a mode which arises and persists side by side
with the philosophical, precisely because, con
fined within its own limits, it does not compete
with philosophy.

Another characteristic observation of Hegel,
which would lead to the same result, is the affirma
tion, upon which he greatly insists, that nature,

160 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

herein differing from humanity, has no history.
Now, if all reality be movement and development,
how can a part of reality ever be conceived, which
is not, together with the whole, in process of be
coming ? But, in truth, that which has no history
is nature in the naturalistic sense ; that is to say,
nature contracted and mummified in abstract
classes and concepts. And this affords another
ground against considering these classes and con
cepts as modes of apprehending real reality. An
English critic has opportunely noted that the
philosophy of history, or the treatment of uni
versal political history, corresponds, in the Philo
sophy of the spirit, to the section on objective
spirit, in the same way that the histories of art,
of religion and of philosophy, which Hegel has
specially treated elsewhere, correspond respect
ively to the section on absolute spirit, which
comprehends the three spheres of art, religion,
and philosophy. Thus in that philosophy of
spirit, only the section on subjective spirit or
psychology has no corresponding historical
treatment : no history is given of man, con
sidered psychologically.1 Why? Precisely be
cause psychology is a naturalistic science
and is thus condemned to the same historical

1 Mackintosh, Hegel and Hegdianism, p. 236, n.

VIII

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 161

sterility which has been recognized in nature
in general.

But notwithstanding these suggestions, not
withstanding the observations which he had
occasion to make and the admissions which more
or less consciously fell from his lips, Hegel did not
draw the conclusion which seems to us correct.
He did not proclaim the philosophical indiffej:eric£_
of the natural and mathematical disciplines and
their complete autonomy ; he turned instead
towards the solution which had already been
adopted by Schelling, when he had conceived a
philosophy of nature. The reason is quite clear.
He was driven to that conclusion by his logical
presupposition. As art and history had appeared
to his mind as philosophical errors to be turned
into truths, the one in pure philosophy, the other
in the philosophy of history as he had conceived
it ; so analogically, the natural and mathematical
disciplines could not retain their relative autonomy
as practical formulations of reality and of ex
perience, and had to be treated as philosophic
attempts and partial errors, to be turned to truth
in a philosophy of nature. " The antithesis " (he
says) " between physics and philosophy of nature
is not that between a not-thinking and a thinking
of nature. A philosophy of nature means nothing

i62 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

but a thinking contemplation of nature ; and this
ordinary physics also is ; for its determinations
of forces, laws, etc., are thoughts ; only, in physics
those thoughts are formal and intellectualistic."
" In the philosophy of nature there is no other
question than just the replacing of the categories
of the intellect by the relations of the speculative
concept and the understanding and the determin
ing of experience according to these relations."
Not only must philosophy agree with natural
experience ; but the birth and formation of
philosophic science has empirical physics as
presupposition and condition." He well sees
that in the natural sciences, classifications are
purely artificial, and their purpose is to give
clear and simple marks as aids to subjective
knowledge ; but he nevertheless believes that
they can be replaced by " natural " classifications,
and it seems to him that he has discovered a kind
of beginning of such classifications in the re
searches of comparative anatomy and in the
division of animals into vertebrate and inverte
brate, and of plants into monocotyledons and
dicotyledons, and others similar to this. He
often speaks elsewhere of an " instinct of reason,"
which should manifest itself in the theories of the
physicists and naturalists, in which the speculative

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 163

concept would be in some measure anticipated.
And this explains also why he defends against
the naturalistic and mathematical nominalism of
Locke, the reality of natural genera and of
mathematical concepts, and why he preserves
unshaken his faith in the "eternal laws of nature."
A single remark suffices to show how unten
able is this equivocal position. If any one
wishes to apply philosophy to historical facts, he
cannot do otherwise than narrate history (which
in order to be history must always be to some
extent philosophically ilkiminated) ; and if any one,
in the presence of history, is seized with the
desire for a philosophical system, he cannot do
otherwise than abandon historical exposition and
expound abstract philosophy ; so, in the same
way, if any one, in the presence of the natural
sciences, is disturbed by the need for philo
sophy, he has but two ways of satisfying it,
according as his need is for a concrete or for an
abstract philosophy. In the first case, he must
pass from the natural and mathematical disciplines
(and from their intellectualist and arbitrary con
cepts) to the historical vision of the things of
nature and of man ; in the second, he must
simply and solely return to philosophy. But a
philosophy of natiire, a philosophy which should

1 64 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

have the natural sciences as its base, is also (as,
on another side, the philosophy of history is) a
contradiction in terms ; because it implies philo
sophic thought of those arbitrary concepts, which
philo^ophy^djQ£s_ji.QL_kaciLjv, and upon which it
consequently has no hold, either to affirm or to
deny them.

Hegel repeatedly called attention to the
difference between his philosophy of nature
and Schelling's, criticizing the latter for being
founded upon the analogy between organic and
inorganic, upon the comparison of one sphere
of nature with another, and developed by the
application of a prearranged plan. But Hegel's
philosophy of nature is equally incapable of
development, save by means of analogy. The
only difference is that in it the analogy is taken
from the forms of the concept, and that he there
talks of judgment, syllogism, dialectic opposites,
and the like. Hence the divergence between
the two philosophies, mother and daughter, has,
in my opinion, but slight importance. Nor does
it seem to me fitting to attribute to Hegel's
natural philosophy, with its concept of becoming
and of evolution, the merit of being the precursor
of Darwin's discoveries. The evolution and the
dialectic of the concepts, in Hegel's philosophy

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 165

of nature, is purely ideal. It leaves natural
species intact, and indeed proclaims their fixity.
" It has been a clumsy representation on the
part of ancient as well as of modern philosophy
of nature, to regard the progress and transition
from one natural form or sphere to a higher
as an actual product of external reality, which,
in order that it may be made clear, has been
driven back into the obscurity of the past. Ex
ternality is the special characteristic of nature,
by means of which she permits differences to
assert themselves and to appear as indifferent
existences : the dialectic concept, which guides
the degrees in their progress, is immanent in
them. Nebulous representations, which are at
bottom of sensible origin, like those of the birth
of plants and of animals from water and of the
most highly developed animal organisms from
the lowest, etc., must be altogether excluded
from philosophic consideration " (Enc. § 249).
This is sheer hostility to the hypothesis of
transformation and it is what might be expected
from Hegel, who does not recognize any historicity
in nature.

Certainly, when we speak of the fallacious
idea of a philosophy of nature and condemn the
mode of treatment proposed by Hegel, it is not

1 66 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

necessary to include in the condemnation the
whole book which bears that title. The devil
is not so ugly as he is painted ; and Hegel's
book also contains (generally in observations
appended to his paragraphs, these forming the
greater part of the book) a host of most just
criticisms, which seem at first glance to be
directed against mathematicians, physicists and
naturalists, but which are really directed against
the metaphysic which they mingle with their
teachings, or wrongfully deduce from them. That
is to say, they are directed against the " ineffable
metaphysic," as Hegel calls it, which changes
into realities these mathematical and naturalistic
abstractions, like forces, pores, atoms and so on.
Here Hegel is quite right and we cannot with
hold from him our lively agreement.

This polemic is also the only just part of the
violent invective against Newton, or against the
bacLjpetaphysic, which Newton (although he had
uttered the warning : " Physicists, beware of
MetajDhysic "), introduced or suggested. For
the rest, the invectives of Hegel are documents
of the hostility towards naturalists and mathe
maticians, which the idea of a philosophy of
nature brought with it ; just as the idea of a
philosophy of history inspired a certain hostility

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 167

against professional historians. His hostility, as
we have said, did not arise from contempt for
those disciplines ; it came rather from an excess
of love, from the too lofty and philosophical idea,
which Hegel still had of them and which made
him severe towards those who cultivated them.
Nevertheless, his bete__noir^, was destined to
become the greatest representative of modern
exact science. Hegel accumulated criticisms,
accusations and sarcasms against Newton, from
the dissertation De orbitis planetarum to the last
edition of the Encyclopaedia. In the dissertation,
he deplores " illam, quae Newtone incepta est,
mathematices et physices confusionem " ; and he
remarks jestingly about the little story of the
apple, that this fruit was three times fatal to the
human race, causing first the sin of Adam, then
the destruction of Troy, and finally by falling
upon the head of Newton, the ruin of natural
philosophy ! * Newton (he says, summarizing, in
the History of Philosophy) was the chief contributor
to the introduction into science of the reflective
determinations of forces, by substituting the laws
of forces for the laws of phenomena. In physics
and optics, he made bad observations and even

1 ... universae generis humani, deinde Troiae miseriae principiis
pomuni adfuisset malum et jam scientiis philosophicis omen " (in IVerke,
xvi. 17).

1 68 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

worse syllogisms. From experience he passed
to general points of view, made these fundamental,
and from them constructed single facts. Such is
the nature of his theories. He was a barbarian
in the use of concepts, and never bethought
himself that he was employing determinations ojf
thought. He handled concepts as we handle
stones and pieces of wood. The experiments
and reasonings of his Optics, which are adduced
as the most sublime example'of such operations
in the study of nature, should really serve as an
example of how one should not experiment or
reason. Nature opposes these pretended ex
periments ; for she is greatly superior to the
mean idea of her entertained by any one who
puts his faith in them. Similar outbursts, which
culminate in the hurling of an accusation of bad
faith at Newton (whom he accuses of having
knowingly altered the results of certain experi
ments), have caused scandal and have been
judged with great severity. But while making
allowance for whatever small element of passion
may be mingled with his criticisms, and without
attempting to excuse Hegel by recording how
in these criticisms and even in the violence of
his language, he was in accord with some of his
eminent contemporaries and chiefly with Goethe,

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 169

it is certain that, on the whole, his polemic, alike
in its justice and in its unjust exaggeration, is
simply the logical consequence of the philosophic
position which Hegel took up in relation to the
intellectualism

In the philosophy of nature also, as in the
philosophy of history, Hegel never dared to declare
the empirical and positive method altogether
erroneous, so that it could be wholly replaced
by the speculative method. For him, the
empirical sciences, by constructing their laws
and their concepts, come to meet (entgegenarbeiten)
the work of the philosopher, to whom they offer
the material ready and half elaborated ; and
as we have seen, he recommended a^reement^
between physics and philosophy. And declara
tions of the same sort have been repeated
by the disciples of Hegel, such as Michelet,
Rosenkranz, and Vera. This last compares
physicists to the labourers and the philosopher
to the architect, and says that " la physique
r assemble et prepare les materiaux, que la philo
sophic vient ensuite marquer de sa forme"' But
these are phrases, inspired by much impertinence
towards physicists and in any case empty of all
content. For in truth, we do one of two things :
either' we think that the empirical method is

i;o PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

capable of positing some laws, some genera, some
concepts, in a word, some truths ; and in that
case we cannot understand why the other laws,
genera, truths and concepts, and the whole system
of them, should not be attainable with the same
method. For the activity, which posits the first
naturalistic concept, reveals in that act its capacity
for positing the others and the whole ; just as in
poetry, it is the same activity and no other which
forms the first verse, and which completes the
whole poem. Or else we think that the empirical
method is not capable of any truth, however small ;
and in that case the speculative method not only
has no need of the other, but can draw from it
no assistance. To make verbal concessions to
physics and to the empirical method, is mere
trifling, and satisfies nobody. Hegel, in consider
ing the exact sciences to be a semi-philosophy,
really denied them altogether and absorbed them
in philosophy ; which thus assumed all their rights
and duties. And having thus placed so great a
burden upon the shoulders of philosophy, he had
no longer any right to lighten it by trying to
place part of it again upon the empirical sciences,
which were henceforth for him annulled and non
existent. All the rights imply all the duties ; it
was henceforth the business of philosophy, not

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 171

of empirical science, to prove and to justify the
existence of this or that particular fact of nature ;
to discover stars, physical forces, chemical bodies,
physiological elements, unknown species of animals
and vegetables. That poor devil Krug was (it
seems this must henceforth be admitted) simply
the spokesman of good sense, when he demanded
of the natural philosophy of Schelling that it
should deduce the moon with its characteristics,
or a rose, a horse, a dog, or even only the pen
with which he, Krug, was writing at that moment.
Hegel from first to last of his writings made fun
of him and represented him as a comical person,1
and perhaps he may have been so ; but this does
not prevent Hegel's reply to Krug's objection
from being embarrassed and ambiguous beneath
an appearance of careless ease. For Hegel
seemed to say on the one hand that things of
that kind, individual facts (and all facts are
individual), do not belong to philosophy ; and
on the other, that the deduction is quite possible,
but that science has far more urgent tasks on
hand than the deduction of Mr. Krug's pen.
And the illustrious Neapolitan philologist and
physician, Salvatore Tommasi, was also, like

1 See an article of 1802, in Werke, \\\. 57-59; and cf. Encyclopaedia,
§ 250 ;/.

VIII

172 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Krug, in the right, when he replied, not without
annoyance, to the Hegelian De Meis, who was a
persistent protagonist of some sort of speculative
physiology and pathology, that he would be dis
posed to turn his attention to the method recom
mended, only when some sort of discovery in
medicine had been made by means of it : for
example, the direct cure of pneumonia.

The attempt to hold on to the coat-tails of the
empirical sciences, after having dismissed them,
has then no other meaning, as has been said
above with regard to history (and the basis of
the natural sciences is historical), than to prove
that Hegel's thesis is false. It does not heal
the false nor make it true. But the analogy
does not end here. Hegel, despairing of ever
being able altogether to rationalize history, as
his idea of a philosophy of history demanded,
ended by arbitrarily cutting away a part of
historical fact, which seemed to him more em
barrassing than the rest, and by consigning it to
fiction. And he did the same for the natural
sciences, in relation to many classes and species
of natural facts, to an infinite number of the
appearances of reality, and to what are called
rare cases, exceptions, or extraordinary beings.
His discovery is delicious : it is of the impotence

PARTICULAR CONCEPTS 173

of Nature (die Ohnmacht der Natur), of her
weakness, her swoonings and faintings, during
the difficult task of achieving the rationality of
the concept ! But in the realm of history we did
not allow ourselves to be persuaded to abandon
a part of the facts, for we had learned from Hegel
himself that fact is sacred. So here, in the realm
of nature, having learned from him that there is
reason in the world, we shall not consent to
believe that one part of reality is rebellious or
inert towards reason. And what has been called
the impotence of nat2ire, is clearly nothing but
the impotence of the philosophy of nature, as
conceived by Schelling and Hegel, to keep faith
with its own programme.

IX

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FALSE
SCIENCES AND THE APPLICA
TION OF THE DIALECTIC TO
THE INDIVIDUAL AND TO THE
EMPIRICAL

HEGEL might have posited the idea of a philo
sophy of history and of a philosophy of nature ;
he might have desired it, have inculcated and
defended it, and have done nothing else. A
programme may be announced, and then it may
be resolved not to carry it out : a thing which
often happens, especially when the programme is
dangerous. There are not a few systems and
books, which have never gone beyond intro
ductions and preliminaries, even in contemporary
literature, and in their number are some of those
announced with the greatest boasting. It would
almost be worth while making an instructive

catalogue of them. But Hegel did not leave the

174

FALSE SCIENCES 175

philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature
as ideas in the air ; he constructed both effectively.
In this passage to actualization, he had to force
himself to treat individual facts and empirical
concepts like particular philosophical concepts ;
and since he had already applied the dialectic to
these last, he was obliged to proceed to the
dialectic treatment of individual facts and of
empirical concepts,

And this is the second great abuse that Hegel
made of his dialectical discovery. In order to
reach this second abuse, and to place ourselves
in a position to give its exact formulation and
genesis, it was indispensable to pass through the
first, and to work out its manifold consequences.
For this second abuse, that is, the failure to
recognize the autonomy of history and of the
positive sciences, is in its turn a consequence of
some of these. Without following that path in
all its twists and turnings, we could not com
prehend how Hegel could ever have arrived at
so strange a thought : but by following it, we
reach, not only a full comprehension of the fact,
but a kind of feeling of admiration for the in
genuity of that closely-knit web of errors, for the
method of that madness, as Pploniu^ would have
said.

IX

176 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

The second abuse is the most commonly
known : and it has contributed more than any
thing else to bring the Hegelian philosophy into
disrepute. If certain parts of philosophy were in
jured by the first, the second injured or menaced
historical studies and the positive sciences ; and
both alike reacted energetically in their own
defence.

But in this connexion, we must not neglect to
make certain observations. The acquired con
viction of the error of the method which Hegel
defended and strove to apply, has involved in a
general condemnation all Hegel's books on the
history of civilization and of art, of philosophy
and of religion, and on the various mathematical
disciplines. If the method is erroneous (so the
ingenuous reasoning runs) what value, or what
guarantee can attach to the results ? The books
from beginning to end will be sophisticated
science and history. And for this reason, not
only is the philosophy of nature never sought
and consulted by students of natural phenomena,
and some translators even omit it from their
versions of the Encyclopaedia ; but even Hegel's
treatises upon historical subjects have themselves
been viewed with diffidence, almost with the fear
of being stained by contact with them. Now,

FALSE SCIENCES 177

those books are to be examined, like all books,
both in their general execution and in their
details ; for Hegel could act and on many
occasions did act in them, either against or in
dependently of his programme. Goethe, in the
same way, according to the best authorities,
wished to adopt methods in optics altogether
foreign to physics, which have drawn down upon
him the unanimous reproval of specialists in that
subject, and yet in other branches of natural
science, such as botany and anatomy, he made
true and proper discoveries.1 Indeed, speaking
in general, the value of Schelling's and of Hegel's
and of their disciples' books on the philosophy of
nature continually increases as we pass from the
more abstract to the more concrete parts, from
physics to physiology, from the so-called in
organic world to the organic ; and the reason for
this is clearly that the utility of the mathematical
method decreases in the more concrete parts.
In any case, if Hegel did not, as it appears,
obtain important results, nor make original obser
vations in the positive parts of his naturalistic
treatises (such as we find in the works of

1 See Helmholtz's two lectures, " Uber Goethes naturwissenschaftliche
Arbeiten," and " Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher
Ideen " (in Vortrage und Rederi], Braunschweig, 1896, i. 23-47, ii. 335-

i;8 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Treviranus, of Oken, etc.)1; if the best that he
offers is perhaps always in pyschology and an
thropology, a subject in which he was more
properly versed ; in the treatment of history, on
the other hand, he stands on a level with the
greatest historians of the nineteenth century,
although it was (partly thanks to him) the century
of historical writing. In the history of philosophy
(of which, as has already been noted, he may be
considered almost the creator) his observations
are as full of truth as they are original. This
applies to his characterizations of the Presocratics
(and particularly of Parmenides, Heraclitus and
of the Sophists), of Socrates himself, of Plato, of
Aristotle, of the Stoics and of the Sceptics, of
the Neo-Platonists and of Christianity ; and in
modern times, of the English empirical philo
sophy, of the critical-speculative period of Kant
and of Schelling, of Jacobi and of the sentiment
alists and mystics. In the study of ancient philo
sophy, he fully realized the profound difference
between its way of presenting and of understand
ing problems and the way of modern philosophy ;
and the error of rendering its propositions in
terms of current philosophy, as did Brucker or

1 Compare with this, on the other hand, a note by Engels, Antidiihring^,
pp. xv-xvi, which places in relief certain merits of Hegel as a physicist
and naturalist.

FALSE SCIENCES 179

Tiedmann. His political history gives broad and
luminous views on the character and the con
nexions of the great historical epochs, of Greece,
of Rome, of the Middle Ages, of the Reformation
and of the French Revolution. The history of
literature and of the arts, interspersed in his
lectures on aesthetics, contains views and judg
ments (for example, on the Homeric epos, on
ancient tragedy, on the Shakespearean drama, on
Italian painting of the Renaissance and on Dutch
painting), which have all become popular. And
in truth, any one who makes a special study of
the historical ideas which were in vogue in the
nineteenth century and have become part of the
patrimony of our culture, would be astonished at
the great number of them which derive from
Hegel as their first source, or which received
definite form at his hands, although they have
been repeated and popularized by writers (like
Taine) who either did not know, or were in
error about their origin. Again, it would be an
unfair criticism, though often made, to accuse
Hegel of historical errors, by making use of
researches and discoveries posterior to him.
(Sometimes these criticisms have rested on
doubtful discoveries, as when he has been blamed
for not having taken the " matriarchate " into

i8o PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

consideration, or for not having had a suspicion
of the sociological theories which assign the
origin of art to economic labour and industrial
decoration.) No historian, however great, could
withstand such an examination : neither Thucy-
dides nor Polybius, nor Machiavelli, not even a
Niebuhr or a Mommsen. And equally it would
be unfair to make too heavy and personal a charge
of certain political and national prejudices, which
appear neither more nor less frequently in his
constructions of history than in so many other
historians, philosophers and publicists : from the
Italian " primacy " of Gioberti to the contem
porary Germanist manias of Herr Chamberlain
or of Herr Woltmann.

And in discussing these historical errors, which
were the consequence of philosophical errors, it
is necessary also to distinguish between those
arising from erroneous philosophical concepts
and those which are connected with his dialectic.
The former, Hegel often has in common with
other philosophers or with the philosophy of
his time (for example, the treatment of the history
of poetry and of art, based upon the concept of
an art that should be substantially religion or
philosophy ; and also, in general, the claim to
construct or to reconstruct speculatively the

IX

FALSE SCIENCES 181

course of history) ; but it is the latter which
alone it concerns us to seek here.

But when all these reservations have been
made, it is certain that we do meet in the books
of Hegel examples of the dialectic^ treatment
of the individual and empirical ; and that suffices
to explain and in part to justify the viojent.
reaction of historians and naturalists against the
dialectic itself. t

For the reasons already given, there are
fewer examples in his historical expositions; in
deed, the history of philosophy may be considered
almost altogether exempt. But the universal
history which Hegel developed, is conceived
in triadic form, as the Oriental worjd, the classi
cal world and the Germj.nic^world, These are
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which receive
concreteness for better or worse in the formula,
that the Orient knew and knows that only^jone
man is free ; the Graeco- Roman world, that some,
are .fzee ; the Germanic world, that all are free.
Hence the character of the first is despotism,
of the second democracy and aristocracy, of the
third monarchy. In order to establish this triad,
Hegel is obliged to suppress many facts in space
and time. In space, he altogether eliminates
the fifth part of the world. Australia and the

182 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

other islands between Asia and America, seem
to him to be affected with " physical immaturity."
America itself is for him nothing but an append
age of European civilization, and he refuses to
take into consideration the very ancient civiliza
tions of Mexico and of Peru, because from what
we know of them, "they were altogether natural
and bound to perish at the approach of Spirit."
As regards time, he maintains that history only
begins when there are historians, hence the
German word Geschichte (or the Italian word
"storia") means both history a parte subjecti
and history a parte objecti. Peoples may have
passed a long life without a State ; but this,
which is their prehistory, has nothing to do with
history. It was with reference to such limitations
in time and space that Hegel put down in one
of his note-books in the last year of his life : "In
universal history, the same division is valid as
was in use among the Greeks : — Greeks and
barbarians."1 In this way, he sought to adapt
to his dialectic universal history as it appears in
the books of the historians ; and he deluded
himself that he had found in the individual a
point of departure which should have the pre
cision of the first term of the dialectic triad.

1 Aphorism , a. d. Berliner Periods, in Rosenkranz, p. 559.

FALSE SCIENCES 183

Such would be the spiritual Orient, where rises
the sun of history. But the triad, conquered
with such difficulty, totters at every particular
development which Hegel attempts. Indeed,
to take only those which first catch the eye, this
fundamental triad widens into a quatriad, the
Oriental world, the Greek world, the Roman
world, and the Germanic world ; and in the
Orient, China and India are at once sacrificed
to Persia, which is for Hegel the first truly
historical nation. In like manner, the history
of art gives rise to a triad of Oriental or
Symbolical, Greek or Classical, and Christian
or Romantic, art : a triad whose very formulation
is unstable enough, deduced as it is from the
lack of equilibrium between content and form,
and of which the synthesis would be, not the
third term, but the second. Hegel seems also
to refer to a fourth artistic period, later than
the Romantic : and this would change this triad
also into a quatriad ; unless indeed the last phase
is meant to be the dissolution of art into philo
sophy. The history of religions is arranged
in three phases : natural religion, the religion of
the duplication of consciousness in itself, and the
religion of the transition to the religion of liberty.
The two last are also determined triadically : the

184 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

religion of reduplication into the religions of
measure (the Chinese), of fancy (the Indian),
and of internality (the Buddhist) ; the religion
of the transition into the religions of nature, of
spiritual liberty, and of absoluteness or absolute
religion. And these are subdivided into new
triads. The religion of nature is subdivided into
the religions of light (the Persian), of pain (the
Syrian), of the enigma (the Egyptian) ; the
religion of spiritual liberty, into the religions of
sublimity (the Jewish), of beauty (the Greek), of
the intellect or of finality (the Roman). Absolute
religion would then be Christianity. But one
of the most curious examples of the dialectic
construction of the individual is furnished by the
characterization of the three parts of the world.
Hegel, as has been said, got rid of the two others
by saying that they did not seem to him mature,
either physically or spiritually : the " new world,"
according to him, presented an incompletely
developed division into a northern part and a
southern part, in the manner of the magnet ! But
the ancient world exhibited the complete division
into three parts ; of which the first, Africa (the
region of metal, of the lunar element, hardened
by heat, in which man is confined within himself
and obtuse), is mute spirit, which does not attain

FALSE SCIENCES 185

to knowledge ; the second, Asia, is splendid
bacchantic dissipation, the region of formless and
indeterminate generation, which cannot order
itself; and the third, Europe, represents conscious
ness, and constitutes the rational part of the
earth, with its equilibrium of rivers, valleys, and
mountains ; and the centre of Europe is Germany.1
The dialectic construction runs riot in the
philosophy of nature, the field of the empirical
concepts. In its positive part, that book is at
bottom nothing but a compendium of mathe
matical and naturalistic disciplines, divided into
three sections : first, geometry and mechanics,
second, astronomy, physics and chemistry ; tl^ird,
mineralogy, botany, zoology, geology and physio
logy. This compendium of different sorts of
knowledge is arranged in the fundamental triad
of mechanics, physics and organic physics and
the whole is subdivided into minor triads. We
need not concern ourselves with the idea that
since in universal history the point of con
vergence and the final result is the Germanic
spirit, so in thej:osmolo£[caLcon£epUoti-ef Hegel,
the centre of the universe is the Earth (and
Germany would be the centre of the earth, at
least according to the words above quoted).

1 Naturphilosophie^ § 340 Zus.

1 86 PHILOSOPHY Of HEGEL

This only shows once more how a lofty philo
sophical intellect can now and then be sub
jugated by sentiment and prejudice. Let us
rather consider some examples of the dialectic
of geometry and of physics. Besides the three
dimensions of space, Hegel posits three dimen
sions of time ; past, present, and future ; but
whereas he observes that the three dimensions
of time are not existentially differentiated in
nature, he seems to admit that the three
dimensions of space are so differentiated. In
any case, these three would be founded upon
the nature of the concept, although (he says)
the determinations of the concept, in this first
form of externality, abstract quantity, are only
superficial and constitute differences which are
altogether empty. They are superficial, they are
empty, they are arbitrary ; yet Hegel deduces
them dialectically. The point is the negation of
space ; but it is a negation essentially spatial ;
and so becomes a line ; and the negation of the
negation is the surface ! And he offers the
deduction of the celestial bodies ; the central
body is the thesis, the moon and the comets are
the bodies of the antithesis ; the synthesis, the
body of the concrete totality, is the planet.
Magnetism seems to him the demonstration ad

FALSE SCIENCES 187

oculos of the dialectic concept in nature, of the
complete syllogism. The two poles are the
extremities of a real line existing in sense, yet
they do not possess sensible and mechanical
reality, but ideal reality, and shew themselves
to be altogether inseparable. The point of in
difference, in which their substance finds place,
is their unity as determinations of the concept,
in such a way that they receive sense and exist
ence only in such a unity ; and polarity is only
the relation of such moments. Owing to the
necessity of the dialectic form, Hegel combats
the identification of magnetism, electricity, and
chemistry, which physical science tries to effect ;
and wishes the three facts to be both united and
distinct. He would be equally opposed to the
physiologists, who abolish the clear distinction
between the animal cell and the vegetable cell,
or consider life as disseminated everywhere.
The three " natural kingdoms " answered his
triadic theory too well to permit of his not
preserving them in dialectic form, as geological,
vegetable and animal nature. In the first, life
posits to itself its own conditions ; in the second,
the individual is still external to its own members,
which are themselves individuals ; in the third,
the members exist essentially as members of the

i88 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

individual, and therefore the individual is subject.
The dialectic applies also each of these forms of
nature : the process of the plant is divided into
three syllogisms, that is to say, into the process
of formation, into the process of opposition toward
inorganic nature, and into the process of reproduc
tion, the unity of the two preceding. The dia
lectical reconstruction of the five senses, which
are five and not three, is more laborious. But
Hegel is not dismayed. For him the senses are
five, yet they are three. The first is that which
belongs to the mechanical sphere, of weight and
cohesion and of their change, that is to say, the
sense of touch. The second is — the two senses
of the antithesis, that is to say that of particular
ized aerity, and that which comprehends the
neutrality of concrete water, and the antithesis
of the solution of concrete neutrality : taste and
smell. The third is the sense of ideality, and it
also is double : that is to say, the sense of ideality
as manifestation of the external by the external,
of light in general, and more precisely, of light
determined in the concrete externality of colour ;
and the sense of the manifestation of internality,
which makes itself known as such in its ex-
ternalization, by tone ; that is to say, sight and
hearing !

ix FALSE SCIENCES 189

Other examples of this dialectic of the empirical
are to be found in profusion in what for us is
also a philosophy of nature (in the gnoseological
sense), or a philosophy of the empirical ; i.e. in
many parts of the aesthetic, of the logic, and of
the philosophy of spirit. In the aesthetic, the
system of the arts is developed triadically. The
first of the arts, architecture, creates the temple
of God : the second, sculpture, creates God him
self; the 'third expresses the feelings of the
faithful in colours, tones, and words, and is sub
divided into painting, music, and poetry. The
labour of condensing into three, what empirically
is determined by another number (the five arts
into three, the five senses into three) is spared
to him in the fields of poetry and of rhetoric, in
which he found ready the tripartition into lyric,
epic, and dramatic poetry, as in natural science
he found the three natural kingdoms. In logic,
his classification of the judgments is, with a new
terminology, word for word the same as that of
Kant, which has a quatriad as basis : the judg
ment of quality becomes that of existence, the
judgment of quantity that of reflexion, the judg
ment of relation that of necessity, the judgment
of modality that of the concept ; and the triadic
subdivisions of these are preserved. The syl-

190 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

logism (which is the synthesis in relation to
judgment as antithesis, or the restoration of the
concept in the judgment and so the unity and
truth of both, is also developed triadically, as
syllogism of determinate being, syllogism of
reflexion, and syllogism of necessity. In the
philosophy of spirit, Hegel knows well that
psychology cannot serve as basis for philosophy ;
yet he treats it dialectically. Subjective spirit is
developed in the three degrees of anthropology,
of phenomenology and of psychology ; the first
includes the soul, natural, sentient, and real ; the
second, consciousness, consciousness of self, and
reason ; the third, theoretic, practical, and free
spirit. Objective spirit has the three moments
of rights, morality, and ethics : rights are sub
divided into rights of property, of contract, and
of rights against wrong. The ethical sphere is
subdivided into family, civil society, and the
State ; the State, finally, into internal rights,
external rights, and (a curious leap) universal
history.

The Hegelian dialectic has so often been
satirized, but no satire can compare with that
which the author himself unconsciously gives
of it, when he tries to think Africa, Asia, and
Europe, or the hand, the nose, and the ear, or

FALSE SCIENCES 191

family patrimony, paternal authority, and the last
will and testament, with the same rhythm with
which he had thought being, nothing, and becom
ing. It sometimes seems as if Hegel was not
in full possession of his thought, so much so that
he was obliged to assist himself with mythology :
in the same way that (according to an ingenious
interpretation of Hegel himself) Plato, when his
thought failed to master certain arduous problems
which in his time were not yet ripe for solution,
replaced the solution by thought with the solu
tion by imagination, the concept with the myth.

X

DUALISM NOT OVERCOME

THE panlogism, which has been noted in the
system of Hegel, is nothing but the sum of the
errors arising from the misuse of the dialectic,
which I have analyzed and exposed one by one.
It is the substitution of philosophic thought for
all the other processes of the spirit, which must
all acquire logical (philosophical) form and perish.
But it is an error to consider panlogism as the
fundamental characteristic of the system, when
it is but a morbid excrescence, growing from it.
There is no need to adduce as proof of Hegel's
panlogism his identification of logic and meta-
physic, in that for him logic is at the same time
metaphysic. Because for Hegel Logic, so-called,
had nothing in common with the logic of the
schools (nor, in general, with a science of logic
as a particular philosophical science). His logic

was the doctrine of the categories, of which logic,

192

x DUALISM NOT OVERCOME 193

in the narrow sense, constituted only one, or only
one group. And since the categories embraced
all spirit and all reality, it is clear that the
identification of logic and metaphysic, of logic
and philosophy, was at bottom nothing more than
the identification of metaphysic with metaphysic,
of philosophy with philosophy. That his meta
physic and philosophy are developed, in part, as
panlogism, is true ; but it is a different question.
The error lies exactly in the use of the principle,
not in the principle by itself.

The other accusation which has been made
against the system of Hegel, that it is a more
or less masked dualism, would appear to be
irreconcilable with the accusation of panlogism ;
but it is not so. Since error can never affirm
itself with the full coherence of truth, the error
of panlogism converts itself into its contrary, that
is, into dualism. The field of this conversion is
the philosophy of nature, where, as has been
shown, there appears everywhere, solid and
persistent, the old concept of nature, suggested
by the physical and natural sciences. Hegel
gave this concept a philosophical value, thereby
making it the thought of a reality which should
stand opposed to, or behind, the reality of
spirit. The critical point of this conversion,

194 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

or the revelation of the dualism, which is dis
covered at the very moment when he tries to
conceal it, is the celebrated transition from the
idea to nature, on which Hegel expressed him
self very briefly and obscurely, and on which
his disciples have shed so many words, but so
little light : " The idea, which is for itself, con
sidered according to this unity with itself, is
intuitive. But, as intuition, the idea is brought
into the one-sided determination of immediacy
or negation, by means of extrinsic reflexion.
The absolute freedom of the idea is therefore
that it does not pass only into life, nor allow
life to appear in it only as finite knowledge ; but
in the absolute truth of itself, it resolves to allow
to go freely out of itself, as nature, the moment of
its particularity or of its first determination and
of its otherness, the immediate idea which is its
reflexion " (Enc. par. 244).

This conversion and this transition are so
dangerous, that many interpretations of the
Hegelian thought have been proposed (and
others might be proposed) in order to avoid the
danger, to eliminate the dualism and to pre
serve to the system its initial motive, which is
absolute idealism, or substance as subject. But
none of those interpretations seems to be in

DUALISM NOT OVERCOME 195

accordance with the genuine thought of the
philosopher.

Thus it may be convenient to maintain that
the transition from the idea to nature is, for
Hegel, nothing but the transition from philosophy
to experience, from philosophy to natural science,
whose existence, subsistence, and independence
side by side with philosophy, Hegel would never
have thought of denying. The system of Hegel
would become in this way a philosophy of mind
or of spirit, universal, extraneous, but not hostile
to experience, that is, to the observation and
study of particular historical and natural facts.
But such an interpretation is met by the simple
consideration, that Hegel does not pass from
philosophy to natural (empirical) science, but from
logic or philosophy in general to the £hilQ_$Qphy.sA

Tf~

nature ; and therefore he understands nature, not
as the empirical concept in contrast with the
speculative, but as a speculative concept, which
has equal rights with every other.

This same difficulty confronts the interpreta
tion which declares that there is no transition,
either logical or temporal, between the idea and
nature, because the idea does not become nature,
but is already nature ; the individual is the
universal, and the universal is the individual.

196 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL x

Doubtless, in this way dualism would be avoided ;
because it is the universal alone which is grasped
in philosophical consideration. The individual
(which, philosophically, is the universal itself) is
realized, in so far as it is merely individual, by in
tuition, that is to say, by a level of spirit, which pre
cedes the philosophical level and is its condition.
But Hegel has not abandoned the individual to
the poets or historians : he thought the philosophy
of the individual, when he thought the philosophy
of nature and of history. In order to interpret
him in the manner proposed, it would be neces
sary to cut out from his system, not some few
incidental pages of digression, but to mutilate
it by whole books and sections, and these from
among the parts, which, to the author at least,
seemed to be vital organs of the whole structure.
A third interpretation could be elaborated,
founded upon a meaning of the word "nature,"
of which there are traces in Hegel, as the negative
moment of spirit, as passivity opposed to activity,
the mechanical opposed to the teleological, as not-
being opposed to being. In this case, spirit and
nature would not be two distinct concepts, concepts
of two realities, or of two forms of reality ; but
one unique concept of the unique reality, which
is synthesis of opposites, dialectic and develop-

DUALISM NOT OVERCOME 197

ment ; and its unity would be saved. The idea,
which is alienated from itself as nature, to return
to itself in spirit, would be spirit itself, understood
in its concreteness, which includes the negative
moment. The Italian thinker, Spavenj£, came
very near this interpretation, when he wrote that :
" the logos in itself is not reality, save in so far
as it is Logic, that is, spirit as thought of thought
(pure thought) ; and nature, fixed as nature, is
not self-sufficient, and therefore it not only pre
supposes ideally the logos, but has absolute spirit
as its real principle, precisely because it has it as
its real and absolute end. " 1 Yet, side by side
with this meaning of the word nature as negation
and not-being (as side by side with the meaning
of the word nature as the individual and the
matter of intuition), Hegel maintains the idea of
nature understood as reality, as the other of spirit,
TO eVepoy Katf avro (the other in itself). Indeed,
were this not so, Hegel could never have thought
of constructing a philosophy of the negative, of
not being, of what is a mere abstraction ; whereas
he does write a philosophy of nature, and there
fore understands by the object of that philosophy
something positive.

Finally, some have attempted to interpret the

1 Principi di etica, pp. 53-54.

198 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Hegelian tripartition of logos, nature and spirit,
as if nature and spirit were nothing but the
concrete spirit itself, divided only empirically into
two parts ; and the logos would signify the true
reality that constitutes both, their identity in the
apparent division : it would be spirit in its uni
versality, and not only as it appears in the world
called social or human, when that is empiric
ally separated from the rest. But it would be
impossible to cancel the profound distinction
which Hegel makes between nature and spirit,
and which he affirms as the distinction between
an unconscious and a conscious logicity. Pan-
psychism was far from Hegel's intention ; for him,
thought belonged to man and was foreign to the
animal ; in nature, there is not thought, but only
determinations of thought, which is different ;
there certainly is an intelligence, but, as Schelling
said (and Hegel approved), it is intelligence petri
fied. Therefore Hegel maintained that in nature
the forms of spirit are not, as in the conscious
spirit, resolved into one another, but have the
position of separate existences. Matter and
movement, for example, exist as facts in the solar
system ; the determinations of the senses exist
as a quality of bodies, and also separately, as
elements, and so on (Enc. par. 380) : the dialectic

DUALISM NOT OVERCOME 199

nature of the concept stands as a natural fact, in
the positive and negative poles of the magnet.
To regard nature and spirit as a single series,
distinguishable into two only by a convention, as
civilized man is distinguished from the savage,
may be a just conception ; but it was altogether
foreign to the intention of Hegel. His distinction
of nature and spirit, whatever may be said to the
contrary, is qualitative ; if the difference between
unconscious and conscious beings, between things
and thinkers, is qualitative.

In the genuine thought of Hegel, as found in
his philosophy of nature, spirit and nature are,
then, two realities : the one opposed to the other,
or the one the basis of the other, but, in any case,
each distinct from the other. Therefore he had
recourse to a third term, the logos : the necessity
of overcoming the dualism drove him to try to
overcome it with the triadic form, which had
done such excellent service in overcoming the
dualism of opposites. But since nature and spirit
are not opposites in his thought, they are not two
abstractions, but two concrete realities ; and the
triadic form was inapplicable. Nor was it valid
to apply the form of criticism which, also with
marvellous results, he had adopted for the con
cepts of reflexion, in the doctrine of the essence ;

200 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

since, for him, nature and spirit, in the sense in
which he took them, were not concepts of re
flexion, difficult to distinguish, but two quite dis
tinct concepts, of quite determinate character. The
third term, the Logos, is, in his triad, the first,
the thesis. But, while the content of the second
term, the antithesis, is clearly nothing but the
whole of mathematical, physical, and natural
theories ; and the content of the third term, the
synthesis, is, equally clearly, psychology on the
one hand, and on the other, the philosophies of
rights, of art, of religion, and of the absolute
spirit or Idea ; the first, the thesis, the Logos,
has no content of its own, but borrows it from
the other two parts, especially from the last, and
mingles with it a polemic against inadequate
philosophies. The fact is, that this Logos, for
him who truly separates it from nature and from
spirit and looks it well in the face, reveals itself
as nothing but the dark foundation of the old
metaphysic : God, in whom were united the two
substances of Descartes, the substantia sive Deus,
which, in Spinoza, supported the two attributes
of thought and of extension. It is the Absolute
of Schelling, indifference of nature and of spirit ;
or the blind (but not too blind) Will of Scho
penhauer, from which come forth nature and

DUALISM NOT OVERCOME 201

consciousness ; or the Unconscious of Edward
von Hartmann, which, also with much manifesta
tion of reason, gives a beginning to consciousness.
Hegel had reproached Schelling with conceiving
the Absolute as substance and not as subject.
But his Logos is indeed a subject, which cannot
be thought as subject, or rather, which cannot be
thought at all. It is, as Hegel himself says,
" God in his eternal essence before the creation
of nature and of the finite spirit " ; and we can
well think God in nature and in the finite spirit,
Deus in nobis et nos, but certainly not a God
outside or prior to nature and man. The triadic
expedient, and the term Logos, to which Hegel
has recourse, show that he is always entangled
in dualism ; that he struggles valiantly against it,
but does not escape from it.

This dualism wot overcome, in which Hegel's
absolute idealism becomes entangled, owing to
the grave logical error he has committed, is the
reason of the division of the Hegelian school
into a right and a left, and for the eventual
extension of the latter to an extreme left. The
right wing interpreted Hegel theistically. The
subject, the Logos of Hegel, was the personal
God ; and the relation of the Hegelian philosophy
to Christianity was not exhausted in the recog-

202 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

nition of the great philosophical element contained
in Christian theology, but extended to a much
more substantial agreement. The left wing
was opposed to all transcendence and to the
whole conception of a personal God. It empha
sized the character of immanence of the system,
and finally came to sympathize with philosophic
materialism, in so far as this in its own way has
an immanent and not a transcendental character.
It would be impossible to decide which of the
two interpretations was the more faithful to the
thought of Hegel ; for both of them were founded
upon Hegelian doctrines, and were opposed and
hostile to one another, precisely because those
doctrines were contradictory.

XI

THE CRITICISM AND CONTINUATION
OF THE THOUGHT OF HEGEL

CONCLUSION

WITH the interpretation of the philosophy of
Hegel, which I have attempted in this essay,
I have declared at the same time what, in my
opinion, is the task that should fall to its critics
and to those who continue it. It was necessary
to preserve the vital part of it, that is to say,
the new concept of the concept, the concrete
universal, together with the dialectic of opposites
and the doctrine of degrees of reality ; to refute
with the help of that new concept and by develop
ing it, all panlogism, and every speculative con
struction of the individual and of the empirical, of
history and of nature ; to recognize the autonomy
of the various forms of spirit, while preserving
their necessary connexion and unity ; and finally,
to resolve the whole philosophy into a pure philo-

203

204 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

sophy of spirit (or a logic -metaphy sic, as it
might then have been called). It was necessary
to draw forth the Hegelian thought " from the
sheath of its members," that is to say, of its false
members, which had been badly attached to it ;
and to permit it to form its own members,
answering to the nature of the primitive germ.

The school of Hegel failed altogether in this
task. It divided, as has been observed, into right
and left, and subdivided into secondary fractions,
on the importance to be attached to the respective
tendencies towards transcendence and towards
immanence, in the system ; and yet it remained
wholly united in preserving and increasing the
dialectical entanglement, the confusion between
the dialectic of opposites and the dialectic of
distincts, between the dialectic of the absolute and
the dialectic of the contingent. Michelet, for
example, the editor of the Philosophy of Nature,
amused himself with dialectically correcting
certain details ; such as the place that belongs
to the fifth part of the world in the dialectic of
geography, which we have already mentioned.
He believed that the islands of Oceania represent
the ultimate future of the human race, the ex
treme development of democratic self-government.
And to those who did not see clearly into dia-

CONCLUSION 205

lectic modes of reasoning, Michelet replied that
the dialectic method, like artistic creation, makes
no claim to universal acceptance, but must remain
" a specific talent of the favourite of the Gods."
Truly this was far from doing honour to the
master, who had affirmed so persistently and with
so profoundly human a sense, that philosophy
must not be esoteric, but exoteric. Rosenkranz
(another of the principal representatives of the
right wing), after he had constructed in his
^Esthetic of the Ugly, in a way which I shall
content myself with calling bizarre, all the terms
of the coarsest and most vulgar psychology, also
proposed re-arrangements and corrections of the
philosophy of nature. His corrections concerned,
e.g. the dignity of the fixed stars, which Hegel
was supposed to have slighted in favour of the
planets and of the earth ; the division between
physics and astronomy, which Hegel was supposed
to have wrongfully confused ; the transference of
the process of crystallization from the physical to
the organic ; and the like. But on the other
hand, he never abandoned the Hegelian assump
tion of the philosophy of nature ; indeed, where
Hegel had lighted on a glimpse of the truth by
declaring the impossibility of a dialectic con
struction of mathematics, Rosenkranz was ready

206 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

XI

to contradict him. " This cannot be admitted,"
he exclaims, " because if the dialectic method be
universal, why should mathematics be excluded
from it?" Vera, the Italian champion of ortho
doxy, continued the exploits against Newton.
He maintained that the science of nature is to
be effected by three methods, the experimental,
the mathematical, and the speculative, which last
is the crown of the three : and he wrote, among
other things : " Nous disons quit y a un, air, une
lumiere, et meme un temps et un espace apparents
et qui sont sentis, et un air, une lumiere, etc., qui
n apparais sent point et qui sont simple ment pense's. "
Passing from the extreme right to the extreme
left, and dwelling for a moment upon a writer,
who has in recent times been much known and
discussed in Italy, Frederick Engels (the friend
and collaborator of Karl Marx), we can see how

he reduced philosophy^ hy_ equating it to the

positive sciences, and preserving of it only "the
doctrine of thought and of its laws : formal (!)
logic and the dialectic." And of this dialectic,
" which was nothing but the science of the
general laws of the movement and development
of human societies and of thought," Engels
gave such examples as the following. A grain
of barley, put into the earth, sprouts, and becom-

CONCLUSION 207

ing a plant, is negated ; but other grains come
from the plant : and this is the negation of the
negation. The chrysalis is negated when the
butterfly comes out of it ; but the butterfly
reproduces the chrysalis — again the negation
of the negation. In arithmetic, a is negated
by — a, but, negating the negation, we have
— a x — a = a 2 ; that is to say, the first a raised
to a power. In history, civilization begins with
common proprietorship of the soil ; private pro
perty denies primitive communism ; socialism
will effect the negation of the negation, re
producing the primitive communism, but raised
to a higher power. In the history of philosophy,
the first moment is original materialism ; this is
negated by idealism, which afterwards suffers the
negation of its negation, in dialectical material
ism. Nor can it be objected (added Engels),
that it is possible to negate a grain of barley by
eating it, or an insect by treading upon it, or the
positive magnitude a by cancelling it ; because the
negation must be such as to render possible the
negation of the negation : otherwise (he remarks
ingenuously), there would not be a dialecticprocess.1

1 Antiduhrin^ intr. , pp. 9-11, and on the negation of the negation,
pp. 137-146. This extract is also to be found in Italian in the Appendix
of Labriola's book, Discorrendo di Socialismo e di filosofia (Rome, 1897),
pp. 168-178.

208 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

Who will narrate in all their wealth of amus
ing details the lamentable fortunes of the dialectic
method at the hands of Hegel's disciples? One
of them dialecticized spirit as the masculine
principle, nature as the feminine, and history as
the matrimonial union. Another found in the
Oriental world, the category of being ; in the
classical world, the category of essence ; and in
the modern world, the category of the concept.
For yet another, antiquity was the kingdom of
art ; the modern world, that of philosophy ; the
future was to be the kingdom of morality ; and
in the ancient world, Athens was made to corre
spond with dynamic electricity, Sparta with static
electricity, Macedonia with electro- magnetism,
Persia with light, Rome with expansive and
absorbent heat.1 These stupidities are to be
found in profusion in books illustrium virorum
as well as obscurorum ; nor can it be said that
those of the obscure men are the least significant.

The best of the school were those who, feeling
themselves unable to go beyond Hegel, or believ
ing that the time was not yet ripe for doing so,
limited themselves to preserving the doctrines of

1 These examples are taken from C. Knapp, from A. v. Cieszkowski,
etc., in P. Earth, Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels u. d. Hegelianer, pp. 29,
62. For other characteristic examples, see the historical part of my
Esthetic, c. 13.

CONCLUSION 209

the master as a sacred trust, emphasizing the
profound elements of truth in them, and refrain
ing, as though through an instinct for the truth,
from insisting upon the difficult parts (the philo
sophy of nature, or the philosophy of history),
yet without refuting them explicitly. They
showed their cautious and critical spirit, also, in,
as it were, reconducting Hegel to his Kantian
foundations, and in making the necessity of the
transition from Kant to Hegel the object of their
continuous study. Such were Kuno Fischer in
Germany, to whom we owe a lucid re-elaboration
of the Hegelian logic;1 Bertrando Spaventa in
Italy; Stirling in Great Britain;2 and several of
the students whom they formed in the three
countries. Spaventa did not pass beyond or
transform Hegel, but he foresaw clearly that
this was necessary and had to happen. " In the
philosophers (he remarked on this subject), in
the true philosophers, there is always something
underneath, which is more than they themselves
and of which they are not conscious ; and this is

1 See his Logik zind Metaphysik. (1852), especially in the second
edition of 1865.

2 J. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel ( London, 1865): " That secret may be
indicated at shortest thus : as Aristotle — with considerable assistance from
Plato — made explicit the abstract universal, that was implicit in Socrates,
so Hegel — with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling —
made explicit the concrete universal, that was implicit in Kant" (i. p. 1 1 ;
cf. p. 317).

210 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

the germ of a new life. To repeat the philo
sophers mechanically, is to suffocate this germ,
to impede its developing and becoming a new
and more perfect system."1

Of the adversaries of Hegel, it must be said
that they too failed of their duty ; and indeed,
had they done it, they would not have been the
adversaries, but the disciples and continuers of
his thought. For if his fanatical followers pre
served the dialectic, just as it stood, with its
confusions and false applications, they, on the
other hand, rejected it altogether ; thus falling
into an analogous but opposite error. We may
set aside the bizarre Schopenhauer, who belched
forth contumelies against Hegel, but spoke of
him by hearsay, without knowing anything pre
cise about him.2 Indeed his calumnious gossip
never rises above the level of the general or
anecdotic. Herbart, far better balanced, at least
recognized in Hegel " one of those rare men born
for speculation " ; and held that the Hegelian
philosophy, because of the clear relief in which
it sets the contradictions, with which reality, as it
presents itself to thought, is charged, constitutes

1 Proluzione e introduzione cit., pp. 182-183.

2 Such is also the opinion of the anti- Hegelian R. Haym, in his essay
on Schopenhauer (reprinted in the Gesammelte .4z;/5Yi/s,<?, Berlin, 1903) ;
cf. pp. 330-31.

XI

CONCLUSION 211

the best propaedeutic to metaphysic.1 But if we
read the refutations of the dialectic by Trendelen-
burg in Germany, by Rosmini in Italy, by Janet
in France (to name only the most important), we
cannot but experience a feeling of distrust ; for
when we realize that a critic makes his task too
easy, we divine from his very words of condemna
tion and of depreciation that there is something
much more profound in the question, which he
has failed Jo reach. Doubtless those ingenious
confuters brought to light difficulties, and some
times errors ; but they did not show the true
genesis of the errors, how they derived from the
exaggeration of a new and great truth. " To
confute a philosophy (Hegel himself said) means
nothing but to surpass its limits, and to lower its
determinate principle, so as to make of it an ideal
moment."2

But with the new generation that reached
maturity after 1848, the philosophical adversaries
of Hegel were soon succeeded by barbaric
adversaries. These hated nothing in Hegel but
philosophy itself, which he represented in all its
grandiose seventy : Philosophy, which is without
heart and without compassion for the feeble-

1 See his criticism of the Encyclopaedia, Werke, ed. Hartenstein, xii.
670, 685.

2 Enc. § 86 Zus.

212 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

minded and for the lazy_\ Philosophy, which is
not to be placated with the specious offerings of
sentiment and of fancy, nor with the light foods
of half-science. For these, Hegel was the un
avenged shade of the speculative need of the
human spirit ; a shade which seemed disposed
to take its own revenge at any moment. Hence
the fierce hatred of Hegel : a hatred composed
of fear and of remorse, and certainly not caused
by the errors of his system. Hegel had observed
that after Fichte philosophy had become too
subtle, and could no longer be an occupation for
the beau monde and for the cultured public, as it
had been in the eighteenth century, previous to
Kant.1 But the positivist regression reduced
minds to such an extremity, that they were
rendered blind to the distinction between the
concept and sensation, between speculation and ._
empiricism. How then could it have been possible
for such an age, which lacked all the elementary
or propaedeutic distinctions, to understand or
criticize Hegel, who assumes the knowledge and
solution of the elementary problems, whose
thought revolves round the ultimate and most
refined questions, who breathes and lives on the
most lofty summits ? For such as these, to look

1 Gesch. d. Phil*, iii. 577-8.

CONCLUSION 213

upon him was to awake in themselves the sad
consciousness of impotence, with its agitations
and "irritations, and its ferocious condemnation
of joys that it may not taste.

Happily, in our day, there is an improvement
in our intellectual outlook. It is more favourable
to philosophy in general, and more favourable to
Hegel himself. We are now beginning to possess
a philosophy of art and of language, a theory of
history, a gnoseology of the mathematical and
naturalistic disciplines, which render impossible
the reappearance of those errors, in which Hegel
became entangled. In particular, the old concept
of nature, inherited from science, or rather from
the philosophy of the seventeenth century, is
in process of dissolution : every day it becomes
clearer how nature, as a concept, is a product of
the practical activity of man ; and it is only when
he forgets how he has acquired it, that he finds
it opposed to him as something external, which
terrifies him with its aspect of impenetrable
mystery. On the other hand, a certain philo
sophical romanticism is everywhere appearing
again, and this is a condition (though nothing
more than a condition) for the true understanding
of Hegel and all the philosophers of his time.
People are sighing again for mysticism and for

2i4 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

immediate knowledge, after the manner of Jacob! ;
and they are setting up again the old Schellinghian
ideal of an aesthetic contemplation, which should
give to the spirit a thirst for truth and for con-
creteness, something that (natural) science cannot
give. Thus, Bergson, one of the writers who
have attached themselves to this movement,
advocates as a metaphysic of the absolute, an
intuitive knowledge, " qui sinstalle dans le mouve-
ment et adopte la vie meme des choses." * But was
not this just what Hegel demanded, and the
point from which he began — to find a form of
mind, which should be mobile as the movement
of the real, which should participate in the life of
things, which should feel " the pulse of reality,"
and should mentally reproduce the rhythm of its
development, without breaking it into pieces or
making it rigid and falsifying it ?

But for Hegel, such a view was only a starting-
point, not a conclusion, as it is for the writer we
have quoted, and for others of like tendencies.
The renunciation of thought would have been
asked of Hegel in vain. And to have shown
that the demand of concrete knowledge is satisfied
in the form of thought, is his great merit, his

1 " Introduction a la Metaphysiquc " in Revue de mttaph. et de morale,
xi. p. 29.

CONCLUSION 215

immortal discovery. Hence the necessity of
studying Hegel critically, and of sifting the
intimate and vital elements of his thought from
the extrinsic and dead. The modern consciousness
can neither accept the whole of Hegel, nor wholly
refute him, as used to be done fifty years ago.
In relation to him it stands in the position of the
Roman poet to his lady : nee tecum vivere possum,
nee sine te. It does not appear that we can now
obtain this critical revision of Hegelianism from
its German fatherland, which is so forgetful of
its great son that it has not even reprinted his
works and frequently expresses judgments con
cerning him, which astound us who belong to
this remote fringe of Italy, for we have never
altogether forgotten him, and have in some wise
made him our own, uniting him in brotherhood
with our Nolan Bruno and with our Vico, the
Parthenopean. Far more important than the
German studies, are the studies on Hegelianism,
which have been carried on for over thirty years
in England. There the work of Stirling has
shown itself to be very fruitful ; for there Hegel
is clearly expounded, truthfully interpreted and
criticized reverently and with freedom of mind.
In return, the powerful spirit of George Hegel
has for the first time awakened to the speculative

2i6 PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL

life the minds of the English, who have been for
centuries the world purveyors of empirical philo
sophy and who even in the last century seemed
incapable of producing any philosophers better
than Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.

Now, if any one were to ask me if he should
or should not be an " Hegelian," and if I am an
Hegelian, I might, after all I have said, dispense
with a reply. Yet I wish as a corollary, to answer
here this question in a way which is perhaps
derived from that very philosophy. I am, and
believe it necessary to be, an Hegelian ; but in
the same sense in which any one who has a philo
sophical spirit and philosophical culture in our
time, is and feels himself to be at once : Eleatic,
Heraclitean, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic,
Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist, Car
tesian, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Vichian, Kantian;
and so on. That is to say, in the sense that no
thinker and no historical movement of thought
come to pass without bearing fruit, without
depositing an element of truth, which forms part,
consciously or no, of living modern thought.
Neither I nor any sensible person would wish to
be an Hegelian, in the sense of a servile and
obsequious follower, who professes to accept
every word of the master, or in the sense of a

xi CONCLUSION 217

religipus sectarian, who considers disagreement
a sin. In short, Hegel too has discovered a
moment of the truth ; to this moment we must
accord recognition and value. That is all. If
this does not happen just at present, it does not
much matter. The Idea is not in a hurry, as
Hegel used to say. The same content of truth
must be reached, sooner or later, by a different
way ; and, if we have not availed ourselves of his
direct help, yet when we look back upon the
history of thought, we must still proclaim him,
with much marvel, a prophet.

But the first condition for resolving whether
to accept or to reject the doctrines which Hegel
propounds (I am constrained to make explicit
what I should have preferred to leave to be
understood) is to read his books : and to put an
end to the spectacle, half comical and half dis
gusting, of the accusation and the abuse of a
philosopher by critics who do not know him, and
who wage a foolish war with a ridiculous puppet
created by their own imaginations, under the
ignoble sway of traditional prejudice and in
tellectual laziness.

THE END

CROCE, BENEDETTO B

29^8

What is living and what is .C75
dead of the philosophy of
wegel . .