Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 7 The Romantic Philosophers —Hegel
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IN HIS criticism of this use of the artist's intuition, Hegel insisted that Schelling had left out of his philosophy an account of the process by means of which this identification of the self with its object takes place; he left out of his philosophy a statement of the process by means of which the identification of the self and the object could be effected. Hegel's criticism of Schelling's philosophy is that it is a bare assertion of identity instead of being an actual presentation of the process by means of which the self and the object can be identified.
You will remember that I mentioned earlier that romanticism is a philosophy of evolution, of process. It was the background for the development of the theory of evolution. Back of this latter conception lies the assumption of a living process which takes on successively different forms. The assumption of all evolutionary thought is that life, as a physiological process, is the same whether in a complex or in a simple form, in plant or in animal. It is a single living process as such. And this process takes on a multitude of different forms. This is the background for Schelling's philosophy of identity; the living form persists and is identical, although it appears in different forms.
But what Schelling did was to assert this identity of the process and its expression of the self and its object without working out the detail of it. In another field Lamarck- -and, with even more success, Darwin-presented a picture in terms of which the detail of the process could be worked out. Darwin showed a life-process appearing in different forms; and he showed these differences as expressing the life-process now in this environment, now in that. Then he was able to show how,
(128) through variations, a new form might conceivably arise which would be better fitted to meet the exigencies of a new environment. Take such a situation as that which appeared during the glacial epoch, when a great ice sheet came down over Europe and America It brought with it a different climate, different living conditions; and the forms that survived had to change their characters. The woolly elephant, the hairy hippopotamus -forms of the sort of which we find the remains-were adjustments to a new environment. In that gradually changing climate, those forms survived which were able to grow such coats of hair as would enable them to withstand the cold. For some reason forms that could live on certain foods survived over those that could not. Forms which belonged to marshy areas gave way as the swamps dried out, and those forms which could migrate over greater distances took the place of those which could not. Such a picture is presented by Professor Marsh in his statement of the development of the horse here in America from a five-toed animal which gradually gave way to one with a single toe in the form of a hard hoof which enabled it to travel farther so that it could live on more sparsely scattered grass, and thus had a decided advantage over other forms. Back of all these pictures lies the assumption of a life-process going on in different environments in which it takes on first one form and then another, wherein it has to become a different object in its relationship to the world within which. it lives. The world and the form have, then, an identical content. The adjustment of the one to the other gives rise to the appearance of the different forms.
What Hegel insisted upon was that here is a process going on, a subject-object process, and that this process must exhibit the difference.- which we find in the world as. we know ir We cannot simply come back to the assertion that the world is identical with the self that knows it. We must be able to show in the process of knowledge itself the identity which is known to exist between the subject and its object, between the form and the world in which it has to live. Hegel, then, lays
(129) greater stress upon the dialectic than did Fichte and Schelling. He takes over, so to speak, the antinomies of Kant, those seeming contradictions into which thought was plunged when it tried to transcend the phenomenal world and get over to the standpoint of things-in-themselves. The antinomies from the point of view of these Romantic philosophers were not simply a warning that the mind had gotten beyond the limits of its knowledge; they were the actual process by means of which the object itself arose in the subject-object process. That is, the fundamental contradiction, or antinomy, for this school was that of the subject and object; and they were looking for the process by means of which they could pass over from the one to the other and achieve a larger self than that with which they started as a result.
Fichte had attempted to solve the contradiction by reference to the nature of the experience of the moral self, by pointing out what is involved in doing one's duty. Schelling attempted the same thing through reference to the intuition of the artist. What Hegel undertook to do was to show how this opposition between subject and object could be overcome, in some sense, by means of the recognition of the nature of the process of thought itself. In biological evolution we overcome the opposition between the identity of the life-process in all forms and the diversity of the living forms themselves by studying the process as it is taking place. We examine unicellular forms floating on the surface of the sea; we find other bits like these become colony forms living on the bottoms and in shallow water holes. Out of these have arisen bilateral forms which move toward their food with bilateral symmetry. We see how these have come out of the water to live on land; how plants and animals adjust themselves, especially in regard to their chemical needs? to one another, taking on successively different forms during the process. Now, Hegel attempted to set up a picture similar to this as it applied to the thought processes, to the process of knowing, and possibly of all sensing, perceiving, and thinking. He set out to follow this through as an identical process having
(130) different expressions. In this process we have another instance of the contradiction between subject and object, but at the same time we see an identity of the two.
As illustrative of this fact, take Hegel's statement in his Phanomenologie des Geistes, which is one of his earliest philosophical works, in which he said that under the simplest situations a person simply identifies something as here. There is a house here, and there is a tree over there. That is the only thing one can say: "Here is the house; there is the tree." But, if one shifts his position, he finds himself saying, "The tree is here and the house is there." The only statement that one can make under the new condition leads to the contradiction of the statement made before. One says the time now is such and such o'clock, and writes this down as 10:30 o'clock. Later one looks at the clock and finds that it is not 10:30 but 3:30, and the assertion made about the time now contradicts itself. Evidently, in our perception the here and the now are determined by the position of the observer. What was here is there, and what was there is here. What was now is then, and what was then is now. This shift depends simply upon the location of the self. You have a process in which you have to distinguish between yourself which is here and the object which is there. But you cannot maintain that position, that distinction, because you shift your own position. It is only in so far as you get back to the fundamental process of your experience that you can get some sort of an expression of the identity of these opposing positions. You have to bring back all these experiences, the experiences of this point and of that , of this moment and of that, to a self-process which is continually going on, taking on now this form, now that. When we pass from one situation over into another, we are denying any statements that we made before in the previous situation. We are putting ourselves at this moment in opposition to ourselves of a moment before. But we overcome the opposition of this fact by realizing that there is an identical subject-object relation which persists throughout. The stuff of the process is the same in both cases;
(131) but now it takes on this form, now that, just as biological evolutionists find this animal a living form and this other animal another living form. They are diverse, and yet each exhibits the same living process.
Hegel took the identity revealed in the subject-object relationship and sought to show that this identity persists in all the different forms of thought. This always brings him back to a contradiction. But what he shows is that this contradiction, instead of leading to a simple destruction of thought itself, leads to a higher level on which the opposing phases are overcome. That is, in the total process he discovers what he calls a "thesis," an "antithesis," and a "synthesis." In other words, he adds a third, a unifying, step to Kant's twofold antinomies. The most abstract expression of this is that which Hegel presents with respect to the very bare idea of Being itself. There can be no more Abstract conception than that of Being. We cannot say that it has any sort of being. We cannot describe it. It has no particular quality or quantity. We can say nothing of it but that it is. We have to empty out everything that could be put into Being in order that we may get back to just Being itself. But that, said Hegel, is not a definition of Being, but one of Not-Being. If you have given up every possible qualification which you can give to the idea of Being, you simply have a statement of Not-Being. The very idea of Being, taking simply the bare idea, brings with it the conception of Not-Being, of Nothing. Being and Nothing are identical, and yet in sharp contradiction to each other.
But this opposition does not, from the Hegelian standpoint, lead simply to the destruction of these ideas. Being and Not-Being are simply the two phases of Becoming. What becomes is Being, but what was before the Becoming is Not-Being. As I say, then, if you try to define Being from the Hegelian point of view, you find a situation which is practically a description of Not-Being and seems to contradict and destroy Being itself. But, if you can get hold of these as moments in a process instead of thinking of them as the same, you find that you have a con-
(132) -ception which harmonizes with what was previously a pure contradiction. In and of themselves, Being and Not-Being are contradictory; taken as moments in a process, they represent Becoming. Here we get a synthesis. It is in this process of bringing together subject and object that Hegel finds contradictions, but finds them as phases which lead to a synthesis or a higher expression of the self.
Hegel undertakes to carry out in detail the process by means of which the object appears both as the construction of the self and also as the not-self. He undertakes to carry this out in detail, and he calls it "logic." If we want to get an illustrative instance of this point of view of Hegel's, we can find it in the attitude of the research scientist. As I shall point out, Hegel does not do entire justice to this position; but still, it is the position which he is trying to present.
Let us take, for example, the discovery of the typhoid-fever germ. Before it was isolated, typhoid fever was known simply as a contagious disease. That is, it was spread through contact. A person who had the disease carried it to someone who did not have it. That was the theory of it. It was not known just what the nature of this contagion was, but it was assumed that where the disease spread there had always been contact between the person who had the disease and the person who became infected. Now let us suppose that a sporadic case of fever appears, that is, a case in which there has been no contact. No one else in the community has it, and this individual is a person who lives in the community, has not come in from the outside. He has had no contact with an infected person, and yet he comes down with typhoid fever. There you have, we will say, a contradiction between the actual experience of the physician or the health officer and the theory which is current with regard to the spread of typhoid fever.
There is a conflict there. The scientist under such circumstances sets out to find out what the meaning of this contradiction is. He gathers other instances, in so far as he can find them. He finds sporadic cases not only in his own community but else-
(133) -where. As other cases come up, he plots them on a map. He puts a pin on the map at the location of every house In which the disease appears. Then, let us say, he finds these pins all run along the line of a water course, or a milk route, or along the paths of persons who go to a certain market. That suggests to him that there is some sort of cause for the disease which is not necessarily given by contact but may be carried in the water, the milk, or the food from the market. And we assume that investigation is carried on until the microorganism which is the carrier of the disease, the cause of it, is finally identified. That is, the research scientist starts from a conflict, a contradiction. The contradiction in this case is that between the accepted theory in regard to the transfer of a contagious disease and the facts of the disease as it appears. There is a contagious disease, and yet no contact. This involves a conflict, for we are dealing with a disease which is both contagious and not contagious. You see, the procedure of the scientist is one in which he goes from what we may call the thesis and the antithesis to a synthesis in which both the others are taken up. It may be true that the disease is directly conveyed from one person to another. The microorganism may be transmitted directly. It is also possible that the disease may be considered contagious in the sense that may be conveyed by the organism through a stream of water or through milk, that is, by means of a carrier where no direct contact is made between the person who has the disease and the person who becomes infected. The conception of the microorganism is, you see, one which synthesizes these occurrences of typhoid fever so that the conflict which we first come to is overcome. In the former instance the appearance of a sporadic case was in direct conflict with the theory of contagious disease. If, now, we assume or can prove that the disease is conveyed by a microorganism, we can bring out and explain all the cases that have been explained by contact and also the sporadic cases that have seemed to be in conflict with the theory. A synthesis is constructed which takes up the opposing situations-the thesis and the antithesis-and unifies them.
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The abstract statement of this is the one I have given above in the first movement of the Hegelian logic. In this Hegel attempted to present Being, showing that the definition which he gave of it also, and inevitably, presented the definition of NotBeing. Being and Not-Being seem to be in conflict with each other. Yet, if you take bare Being by itself, you give it no content; and what you have defined as Being is also Not-Being. But the conception of Becoming is definitely one in which both Being and Not-Being appear. That which arises, which has arisen, is Not-Being as over against that which exists, which is Being. Thus a synthesis of the two opposites is established. This is a highly abstract statement of the type of problem which I have just given.
The definition, the thesis, in the case of contagious diseases is one which does not take into account the sporadic case. If you try to bring the latter into the statement, you have a carrying of disease without contact. In other words, you find yourself in a contradiction. Well, now, the passage from one of these to the other through the conception of the microorganism enables you to state both the contact experience, where the disease is actually transferred from the one who has it to another who has not, and also the sporadic case, in which no direct contact between persons is made. The difference between Hegel's abstract statement and the illustration I have used is that Hegel assumes that the statement which is made of Being carries with it the opposing statement of Not-Being. That is, he assumes that his universal will always have in it the opposite of itself. The opposition which is found in the case of the illustration I have used is not between two universals; it is not between the theory of contagion, that is, the carrying of the disease by actual contact, and the very opposite of that. That is not the conflict. It lies rather between the theory of contagion and the actual incident in experience, the sporadic case. That is, the conflict lies between the universal and an exception to that universal. That is where the problems in science always arise. They do not arise between the theory expressed in a law, for example, and the very
(135) opposite of that law. The conflict arises between the theory of the law and some particular observation, some particular socalled "fact" which is in conflict with that law. It is a conflict, then, not between universals but between the universal and the particular. If we put it into the terminology of logic, it is a conflict between a universal affirmative and a particular negative proposition. The sporadic case is an instance of getting a disease without contact, but you do not set up a universal proposition which says that no cases of disease are conveyed by contact. What you show is that, while there may be some cases in which it is conveyed by contact, there are at least some in which it is not. The scientific problem appears, then, in the form of an exception to an accepted law. And the conflict which the scientist, the research man, undertakes to solve is that between the exception and the law-not that between one law and another, one universal and another.
The general criticism of this point is, as I have already indicated, that Hegel assumed that our development, including the development of science, takes place through the conflict of universals, of ideas with each other. Actually, it takes place through the conflict of universals, or laws, and some particular event, some exception. If we make this reservation in regard to the Hegelian doctrine, we may still say that Hegel is correct in the assumption that the development of our knowledge takes place through conflict. It takes place through the appearance of problems and the solution of these problems. You have a thesis and an antithesis, and then you advance to a synthesis. Reflection is a process of solving problems. What we call our "reflective intelligence" is brought out in regard to some exception to what we have been in the habit of believing. We put all our views-, our idea., our methods of conduct, into universal form. We recognize that these universals are likely to be subject to exceptions, but we are in the habit of acting in that way. We expect things to happen in a universal fashion. But when an exception arises to that, then we are presented with a problem; we have something which we have to think out reflec-
(136) -tively. And that thinking involves the presentation of a hypothesis.
The illustration which we used before made use of the conception of a microorganism in water, milk, or food stuffs. These can be ingested by a person together with the organism and so convey the disease. Another highly interesting, sensational illustration of this situation is the case of yellow fever. In this case the disease is conveyed from one person to another through the intermediation of the mosquito. The person having the disease takes the organism into his own body, and there this microorganism runs a certain portion of its life-cycle. Then it is conveyed to some other victim at a later stage. The assumption was that yellow fever was a filth disease. That is, if you clean up a district, you can keep it free from yellow fever. Senator Wood went to Havana and cleaned up the city. He cleaned up the houses, the streets, the sewers-everything. But yellow fever continued. It was already known that the mosquito was a carrier of malarial fever. Therefore, the hypothesis was presented that this might be true of yellow fever, and it was tested out and found to be the case.
The Hegelian synthesis, in these cases, is the hypothesis which will reconstruct the older theory, harmonize it with the facts. The hypothesis is a construct in the mind of the scientist. He does not spin it, so to speak, out of himself, as a spider spins his web. He takes facts that are there, meanings that are assured; and then he finds some suggestion that will give him new hypotheses, new ways of looking at the situation in question, in such a fashion that it will take up both the facts belonging to the older law and these new exceptions. Out of these two the new hypothesis is made. In this sense, then, Hegel is correct in his assumption that our knowledge grows through the giving of problems-problems which arise out of contradictions in our knowledge. But, as I have said, he was not correct in assuming that this conflict is one between universals. It is not that. It comes when there is an exception that conflicts with a law and leads to the appearance in the mind of the scientist
(137) of a hypothesis which will solve his problem. And the hypothesis does arise out of the mind of the thinker, the scientist. It is a creation of the self. And when it has been created, it carries with it a new world.
Thus the world has been rebuilt over and over again. Since the period of the Renaissance entirely new conceptions of matter and of motion have come to take the places of the older conceptions given in the Aristotelian doctrine. We have changed the world from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican one. The sphere of the heavens has changed from a most limited universe to an indefinitely great universe. During the last half-century we have been busy at the task of reconstructing the universe all the way down in terms of space and time. We are continually reconstructing the world. That reconstruction is something that comes out of men's minds, out of their heads. It comes from the process of thinking. It involves the thought of Copernicus, of Kepler, of Newton, of Einstein, to give us these new views of the world, these new worlds. We did not stumble upon them. These men were not simply more open-eyed than others. The process of advance consists in thinking out some hypothesis that will solve a given problem. When this hypothesis has been thought out, it has to be tested, of course. I do not mean that the scientist can sit back in his chair to create a new world to take the place of the old. He can create a new idea of the world, and then he can take that idea out and see if it corresponds with the facts of experience; and, if it does agree with the facts of experience, it becomes the world as we live it. When we say the sun does not move about the earth, we accept this contradiction of the senses because of the thinking of such men as Pythagoras, Aristarchus, Copernicus They had to think things out before the world which revolves on its own axis could take its place in our experience as a great sphere in heaven revolving about the sun. Which it is, the one or the other, depends upon the actual thinking of scientists. Then they take this thought of theirs and bring it into the field of experience and see if it
(138) agrees with the facts. But the idea is theirs, their creation, the product of their creative intelligence.
All this is what Hegel really comes back to. The world of our experience is a world which we are continually creating in our thought. The astonishing thing is that such rapid reconstructions have taken place in recent times, such rapid reconstructions of fundamental ideas, such as those of matter and motion. These changes go on without our being disturbed about them. We naturally think of matter simply as subdivided stuff such as we can get between our thumb and finger. We break it up as far as we can under the microscope and with the imagination, but we always come out with something that we might get between our thumb and fingers if they were only small enough. But now we have come to conceive of matter in terms of energy. Mass itself has to be stated in terms of electromagnetism. We conceive of motion as that which goes on with certain velocities. Motion has been recognized for some time as relative; but now we find that motion itself varies in terms of distance covered and time passed in reference to the observer, and it also depends upon whether or not the observer is himself moving. The very distance covered is greater in one consentient state than in another. Such fundamental contradictions as that go into the very structure of the most primordial things in the world. This reconstruction is going on all the time. We expect it. We build our science on the theory of research. We assume that the world we know today will not be the world of our grandchildren. If it is, our descendants will have been poor scientists; if they cannot prove that we are wrong, they will be poor progeny. The business of science is to continually reconstruct its world. Science is a research procedure. Research does grow out of problems. Problems are exceptions to laws, rules-exceptions to the theory of the universe that we have accepted in the past. And the solution of these problems and the new worlds that come with them have to come out of the minds of men.
In the philosophy of Hegel the development of mind is the
(139) same thing as the development of the world. Fundamentally, it is the position of absolute idealism that this relation between the mind and nature constitutes things, that all relations, as such, are essentially aspects of that relation. It is thinking that relates things. This is a statement of absolute idealism, of course, because the world ultimately goes back to the Absolute Self which constructs and continually maintains the world through a process of thinking it. That is the metaphysical principle of this idealism-the world is the expression of the thought of the Absolute.
As an object, then, the world answers to the subject, which is the self. And the relationship between the object and the subject, as it appears in these relations, is just that of the subject to the object; and this is a process. just as thought itself is a process, so the world to the Absolute is essentially a process that is going on; and that process is the mind of the Absolute. It is a process that constitutes things, and the process is one with the Absolute Self.
The romantic phase of this idealism, as we have seen, places emphasis upon the self, and especially upon the emotional expressions that belong to the self as such. Of course, there have been idealisms prior to that of the Romantic school. There has been the idealism of Plato, of the Neo-Platonists, of Leibnitz; but in the idealism of none of these was the center of reality the self, although for them, too, the relations of things were the relations of thought. It is the self-process, the realization of the self through the not-self, and the construction of the latter by the former which gives the peculiar romantic character to the idealism of which I am speaking.
The world, then, is a creation of thought, it arises out of the process of thinking. That is the subject-object relation as Hegel presented it. It is a relationship in which the self finds conflicts in its world and then reconstructs this world through a synthesis, through a hypothesis, and finally advances to a new conflict. This is a statement of what goes on in science, in the process of the evolution of thought. It parallels the process of
(140) organic evolution. In the latter we have forms, animals, and plants that have certain habits, certain ways of living in the world. And then something happens, some geologic change occurs so that the animal can no longer get hold of the object that it eats as food. It meets a problem in obtaining nourishment; it meets a new enemy, a parasite, a microorganism. Something happens in its world which makes it run counter to the world in which it has been living. If we can conceive of a sufficiently successful mutation, we can perhaps find the solution of this problem within a single generation. What seems most often actually to take place are gradual changes, but the result of these changes is that there arises a new type of animal or plant which is adjusted to these changed surroundings. But with this arises a new world, for the animal or plant determines its world, its environment, in terms of its life-process. If an animal has eyes, it has an environment that has color; if it has ears, it lives in a world of sounds; if it has taste, its environment is sapid; if nostrils, its world is odorous. Change the animal and you change the environment, the world in which that animal lives. Give the animal a different digestive tract, and you have a new food. You may say the object is there before the animal, but it is not there as food. The animal comes with a stomach that can digest only certain things, and so determines its own world. Its own sensitiveness, its own methods of reaction, its own fashion of dealing with the world make a new world out of it. Thus we see that evolutionary advance means the solving of problems. The problem is put up to the individuals, to plant or animal, in terms of life and death; and the solution has to come in the appearance of some new form, a variant that springs from the older form. And with the new form comes another environment, an environment that is dependent upon the new form itself.
This is an opposition which appears in another manner in our thinking. It appears, for example, in the modern theory of relativity. The world within which the individual finds himself is a world in which he finds himself at rest while objects about him
(141) are in motion. Those objects which are at rest belong to the same consentient frame as the self. To a man on Mars the planet Mars would be at rest instead of in motion. The earth would be moving about the sun and spinning on its own axis. To a man on the sun, the sun would be at rest and all the planets and suns would be whirling about it. And it could not be said that any one of these structures is the correct one. If you say that the position of a hypothetical man on the sun is the correct position, then you have to ask as to the movement of the sun itself, for the sun is moving. Then you say, well, we will take the co-ordinates of the fixed stars and set them up as a fixed frame of reference while everything else moves within that frame. Then you soon find that the stars are not fixed and that you cannot get any object at rest which can be made a co-ordinate within which all motion can take place. Absolute motion is gone; absolute rest is gone. Motion and rest are to be stated from the point of view of the observer. That, in some sense, determines what the world in perspective shall be.
I bring up this modern situation, simply to indicate what lay back of the Romantic philosophy. It is a statement of the world from the point of view of the individual, varying as it appears in the experience of different groups of individuals. Yet, the fundamental assumption is that the world is the same world for all. The world that we see is the same world that a man on Mars may see if there is a man there, the same world that would be seen by a man on the sun. And yet all these worlds are dependent upon those different individuals and their positions. The process of perception, of thought, of organization, determines what the world shall be; and yet these different worlds, from these different standpoints, are in some sense identical. You can see that the problem remains the same.
The problem remains the same, but it is differently approached. We have left behind the Romantic philosophers' solution to it. The problem with which they were dealing now appears in a different form. There are different worlds in the experience of different individuals, and these different worlds
(142) are determined by the very process of sensing, of thinking, in the individuals. It is our thought, our perception, which determines the world in which we live, so that the world of each is in some sense different from that of the others, and yet it is identical. It is the same world; it must be the same world. There would be no meaning to our conversation, no coherence in our own thought in regard to the world about which we are all of us conversing, if it were not the same. If that in the perception of the individual which gives different persons different worlds were not, in some sense, organized into a single process, there would be no meaning. The opposition, then, between the world as it appears as an absolute object, if there is such a thing, and the self that knows it, is a real problem, a problem differently stated from the point of view of different philosophers at the present time. Einstein, for example, gives one type of statement, which is followed by Eddington; Whitehead gives another sort of statement. The problem is stated differently at different times in an attempt at its solution. The general problem now is presented in the form of an Einsteinian statement. We find the assumption that each sentient individual puts a certain frame of reference on the world so that the world has that particular form, just as if one looked through a curved glass. Then the world is subject to the curvature of the glass. If we look through plain glass, the world is another world. The world itself is dependent upon the perception of the individual. Yet the assumption remains that these worlds are all identical.
There we see the fundamental problem which was present for the Romantic philosophers in the opposition between the subject and the object. As I said before, what they were doing was to give a philosophy of evolution, because such a philosophy assumes that the development of the world is a process of meeting problems. We carry the conception of evolution over into life and even into inorganic processes. We speak of the evolution of a star out of a nebula. First it is a whirling mass; then it breaks into a double star; finally the stellar body passes from its neighborhood and branches out into spiral form. Each
(143) one of these steps is the solution of a problem presented to this particular form. Evolution is the process of meeting and solving problems. What the Romantic idealist attempted to do was to take this idea over into the field of thought. He recognized that what the human intelligence does is to meet problems and solve them, and that in doing this the individual mind is constantly recreating its world. Thus, what gives the peculiar character to this Romantic philosophy is the assumption that each mind is only a phase of an Absolute Self, so that our thinking is just a phase of the thinking of the Absolute Self. The process, however, that is, the important part of it, at least, is one in which conflict arises. In the philosophy of Hegel this appeared as the conflict between the thesis and antithesis, which is overcome in a synthesis. As he worked it out, Hegel's dialectic is a very abstruse, a very complicated, theory. But it is one which can be applied to every phase of life, and not only to the theory of knowledge. It can be applied to the theory of the state, the theory of law, to history, to theology, and, of course, as we have been showing, to science. It is a grandiose statement that had astonishing success for a time, during which it seemed to be the last word in philosophy.
There was, however, a surprising lapse of interest in this Hegelian dialectic. I have pointed out that this dialectic failed to agree with the scientific method. Hegel undertook to show that advance took place through conflicts between universals, whereas scientific procedure is the result of conflicts between universals and exceptions to them. Hegel undertook to show what the development of science must be, but he made himself ridiculous as a result of certain rash assumptions which he made as to what the development of science must be. The Hegelian dialectic did not devise a statement of scientific method. Ills method was one worked out in science itself, that is, the method of the scientist was worked out in science itself-that of the appearance of the exception and the statement of this in terms of the definite problem, the working-out of some hypothesis, and then the testing of that. That is the scientific method, and it
(144) cannot be stated in terms of the Hegelian dialectic. After all, the world is essentially a scientific world; and any philosophy which fails to express, to make use of scientific method, is a philosophy that is out of place. And the Hegelian doctrine, notwithstanding its astonishing success for the moment, lapsed simply because there was no real use for it.
However, there was one field of endeavor in which it did obtain a more lasting success, and that was in the theory of the state. Hegel's assumption was that we are all parts of the Absolute Self. Any view that the individual has is, however, finite, limited, incomplete, and consequently untrue when taken by itself. It would have to be supplemented by those of all the other selves organized in the Absolute Self. Hegel assumed that the community was a closer approach to the Absolute than was the individual. The highest form of the Absolute on earth was, in his mind, the state, so that the state represented a high form of intelligence, higher than that which the individual possessed. On this basis it was the duty of the individual to subject himself to the state. Hegel's doctrine was well received by the Prussian court, which agreed with its absolutistic attitude, with the absolutistic philosophy which lay behind it. It was a statement which expressed some of the organization and discipline of the Prussian community -- a government of the individual, an intelligence higher than that of the individual himself, a government from above down. The Hegelian statement did fit in very well with the theories of the Prussian state, for the Prussian state was very highly organized from the point of view of its trained intelligence. It was a bureaucracy. It had a monarch. As Hegel said, a monarch was just as necessary as the dotting of the "i." The real state was the organization of the bureaucracy itself with the trained intelligence that was behind it. This was worked out pretty definitely in the Prussian state by Frederick the Great. It was not autocratic but bureaucratic, having in its bureaus highly trained servants of the state itself, so that the state came to represent in the minds of the members of the community a higher type of intelligence than
(145) that found in the individual. And there was a devotion on the part of the individual to the state, a willingness to subject himself just because the state itself seemed to represent this higher type of intelligence. This, you see, was quite in accord with the Hegelian conception of the Absolute Self, and of the state as a higher expression of that Self than was found in the individual.
The Hegelian doctrine was successful, and exercised considerable influence in another field also. This other field was history, especially the philosophy of history. This whole Romantic movement was a very vivid stimulus to historical research and interest. It started off with a romantic interest and led on into an interpretation of present conditions in terms of past changes, and a correlative interpretation of past changes in terms of present conditions. This new historical interest in a process that had been going on leading up to present conditions, this backward look over the process from the point of view of present conditions, was what gave a peculiar interest and vividness to the historical sciences in all fields. It had back of it, of course, the evolutionary theories to which we have already referred. 1 have stated that the Hegelian dialectic was essentially an evolutionary theory, a recognition, that is, that new forms arise out of conflicts of old forms. In order to explain present forms, it is necessary to recognize the function of the old form and to discover the point at which it broke down, so to speak. This breakdown opened the door to the appearance of new forms. The Darwinian doctrine of evolution afforded an excellent hypothesis for the statement of this in concrete biological processes. The history of institutions could be explained similarly. On the basis of this doctrine you could find what the function of the old feudal institutions was, what the function of the organization of primitive society was. You could identify their functions in all the different forms of these institutions, and then you could show how the institution in one form broke down and a new form arose out of it. For example, you have the blood revenge as a method of control in the interrelationship of clans within a
(146) tribe, then the repression of the attack of one individual upon another through blood revenge, and the recognition that this very revenge is one that attacks the life of the tribe itself, for it sets up a vicious circle in which the punishment of one murder leads to another-the shedding of blood had itself to be again avenged. Out of this arose a method of rude justice, the court, with the taking-over of the administration of justice, of its own assessment of the crime and a penalty that should attach to it. There you have a conflict of interests, and yet you can trace the same function through them all. And then you have arising out of this the next form, which takes up the interest which lay back of the avenger's mind and the interest, later, of the community in the life of all its members and of fusing them into a body of law, with courts and their functionaries that should enforce that law.
I have pointed out that Hegel starts in his logic with the conception of Being and Not-Being, with the advance from this to Becoming. We find the same dialectical process in the development of his own thought and in the history of the race. There is an advance from quality to quantity, from quantity to measure, from measure to the physical thing, and so on up to the "idea" in the Hegelian sense. You have in the individual the development of one idea into another. That is the process of the history of philosophy. You also find the development of one cultural movement into another. That is the process of the philosophy of history. In other words, we find the same process in the history of man that we find in Hegel's logic.
This conception of the philosophy of history and of the history of philosophy is important in Hegel's philosophy. His assumption in this connection is that the development of human society follows the same set of categories as those which appear in logic. Reality develops, as we have seen, through Being, quality, quantity, measure, physical things, and so on up to the "idea." When we come to analyze the object of knowledge, we find that it passes through these different stages. In other words, the categories develop themselves. To return, for a mo-
(147) -ment, to Kant, you remember he conceived of the categories as forms of the mind given in advance of experience. Hegel assumes that the categories are forms which themselves arise through an inevitable process which shows their implication from one to another. This is, of course, the most general statement that could be given to evolutionary principles, and in this sense we can refer to one philosophy of the Romantic movement, that is, Hegel's, as definitely a philosophy of evolution. He traced the development of our ideas as they appeared in human history, following out the appearance of Being, as he conceived it, in the Milesian school of Greek philosophy, and followed it all out in detail from then on. He had to force matters a bit to get the historical development into the framework of his own logic, but he succeeded fairly well. He not only undertook to do this for the development of ideas in Greek philosophy and in the Greek community but was able also to give a statement for all the essential Christian dogmas as these appeared both in history and in logic.
I have tried to trace the historical background of this position. It reflects the importance that the self had reached after the French Revolution, when men were thrown back upon themselves, after the warfare of the French Revolution, and their return, perhaps with the sense of defeat but still with a heightened sense of themselves, to the old world which they had left behind, and to a rediscovery of this world when they revisited it in this character of the self. That is what constitutes the romantic character of this period, the emphasis upon the self, making the self the center of reality, conceiving the world as that which the self sets up, and sets up, so to speak, for the purpose of realizing itself, of putting itself into the not-self in order to realize itself.
In a very definite sense we can speak of this philosophy also not only as an evolutionary one but as one which is social in its character. Its most important result is to be found in the interest taken in human institutions, especially in the evolution of these institutions. Remember that these institutions had
(148) been thought of in the medieval period as given by God. They were there as forms of social organization which were, in some sense, given in advance of man, in the mind of God. They were fixed, just as Kant's categories were fixed. This latter important effect of the Hegelian doctrine was one not so evidently dialectical in its character. It found its expression in the study of social institutions; it laid emphasis upon history as that within which the forms of society have arisen, upon the study of ancient history not simply for the recording of bare political events, not simply as the scene for the appearance of great historical characters, but as that process within which the very forms of later society had arisen through a really evolutionary process. This approach to history was very much stimulated by the Hegelian doctrine; and although the Hegelian character was largely lost, the impetus which it gave was of very great importance.
What Hegel undertook to do, and in a great measure did do, was to show that institutions, as such, arose in the social process. It is in this process itself that institutions come into being. Of course, this gave a new standpoint from which to interpret, to understand, to criticize, these institutions. You can go back to the history of them, see how they have arisen out of particular conditions, see that they represent ideas that take on different forms in different situations. Then you are in a position to consider the form which the institution has at present, to see how far that form may be changed. One can study the institutions as he can study animal and vegetable forms. One can realize that the form of the institution is an expression of the period, and that, as each period demands change, that change can be brought about in the institution itself.
There was a very vivid interest in the study of human institutions. I have pointed out the vivid interest in history as such. It was carried over to the study of institutions. The Roman law, which was the background for the whole legal practice on the Continent, was presented from this standpoint; the ancient city was studied from this standpoint. And the
(149) laws of institutions, the family, the various governmental forms, the schools, were all looked at from the point of view of such a process of evolution; they were all looked at from the standpoint of structures which arose in a process, and which simply expressed that process at a certain moment. They were structures which carried within themselves contradictions, problems which must lead to further reconstructions.
This, of course, was carrying over revolution into evolution. What the political movement had undertaken was a revolution which should sweep away the old forms and substitute rational structures for them. Its leaders sought a state built absolutely upon the principles of reason, upon the rights of man. What such a philosophy as the one we are now examining presented was a long history of institutions which were adjusting themselves to the changes which were constantly taking place. If one could get into the structure, the movement, the current of the process, so to speak, then not only could one recognize in that a very gradual change but one could become a part of that change. One could recognize what the change must be, and set out to bring it about.
Thus evolution was brought in as a conception which was very important from the point of view of the institution. Another very important development which we will consider later in greater detail was that of the economic structure of society. There we have to go back to the so-called Industrial Revolution. In the period of Hegel that revolution had, in a measure, taken place; and Karl Marx undertook to interpret it from the point of view of what we call "socialistic propaganda." We will come back to that later. This was, however, one of the phases of the Hegelian dialectic which lasted after Hegel.
The two most important expressions of the Hegelian philosophy were to be found, then, in the interpretations of human institutions, and, more particularly, in this Marxian theory of the state which was both socialistic and communistic. The latter found its expression in the Communist Manifesto of 1847These are the two fields within which the Hegelian dialec-
(150) -tic did maintain itself. One was that of economic doctrine, the economic interpretation of history, as expressed in Marxian socialism, the dialectical materialism which has had added impulse of life through the control which the Communists, the Bolsheviki, have obtained in Russia. On the other hand, a new lease on life was given the Hegelian dialectic in England, not in the labor group, which answered relatively late to such a movement, but in the universities. Among them there grew up a definite Neo-Hegelian school that found in the dialectic something of a program which was not only philosophical but also social. T. H. Green is the representative of this latter phase of it. The religious field also came to be regarded as a possible field for the development of the dialectic. The interpretation which Hegel had given of ecclesiastical and doctrinal history appealed to the liberal theologian in England, especially to those within the established church. Anything can be explained by this dialectic. Not only that, but a great deal could also be explained away while still seeming to keep the meaning of that which could be regarded as having one form in one age and another form in another age. The dialectic opened the way toward a comparative history of dogma, of ecclesiastical institutions. It opened the way to the history of religion, with the interpretation of earlier religious forms and beliefs in terms of their function in the life of the community.
That sort of interpretation of history, then, in which there is found a continuance of function in organic process with the continual appearance of new forms, was a recognition which came very naturally through the Hegelian dialectic. It was carried over, as I said, in English thought in these two interests-one, a study of old institutions on the ecclesiastical and doctrinal side, the setting-out of the function of the doctrine, as over against its form, the interpretation of the particular form that doctrine took under particular conditions; and, on the other hand, it opened up a new world through a new approach to the social problem, the relation of the individual to the community, which was expressed particularly in the Neo-Hegelian philosophy
(151) of Green at Oxford. Here we have the identification of the individual with the community made a process not so much for the subordination of the individual to the state, as it was in the political philosophy of Hegel, but as an identity of the individual with the community, with a sort of inspiration for individual endeavor toward social ends. This identification of the individual with the community was very characteristic of the philosophy which was used in the political philosophy of Hegel for its statement of the subordination of the individual to the state. One could turn this the other way, recognize that the individual was what he was through his relation to the community. He owed himself to the community itself; he had a devotion to the community. And not only that, but one could recognize that in the reaction of the individual in the community arose those situations out of which changes took place. The individual could become the social reformer, one who could stand out in inadequate situations and point the way to higher syntheses. It is possible to take either attitude in the identification of the individual with the community-either the subordination of the individual to the state or the recognition that the individual is the means by which advance takes place.
There was, then, a very considerable revival of interest in England along these two lines; and the Hegelian school not only became, for the time being, the dominant school in English philosophy but it remains a very strong influence up to the present time, though more recently, of course, it has been displaced by the Realistic movement.
What I wanted to point out with reference to the labor movement and with reference to this history of institutions in society, particularly its development in England, was a continued life of Hegelian doctrine. After it left the philosophical chairs in Germany, it lapsed quite suddenly in German universities; but it had new life in England and in America. Royce, for example, is one of those Neo-Hegelians to whom we have referred. Dewey, in his early development, was another. The Romantic school was represented by the Concord school, by
(152) Emerson and others of that group. They were parallel, really, with the interest reflected in England, first of all in Coleridge and then in Carlyle. However, the real Neo-Hegelian movement belonged to a somewhat later date than these last-mentioned men, when it came as a sort of transplanting of the Hegelian doctrine from German soil to the Anglo-Saxon community.
