Before dealing with any of the details of this scheme we may summarize Hegel’s position. Kant found an a priori element in experience, a universality which transcended the given; but he wrongly identified it with the subjective, the mind-made. Hegel swept this identification aside. These principles, he argued, apply to the known as such, subject as well as thing; they are doubtless principles of thought, but they are no less principles of the world; they go beneath the opposition of subjective and objective, they characterize all experience, and are not more truly called mental than are particular laws of nature—nor less so. Kant’s Critique professed to be epistemological, an inquiry into the nature and limits of the knowing faculty; Hegel’s investigation is frankly logical and metaphysical. It deals directly with the known world, and investigates the knowing which apprehends objects.
Hegel’s objective standpoint has given rise to the charge that he proposes to evolve the world out of his own inner consciousness. The criticism may mean many things. It may imply that Hegel sat down in the seclusion of his study, shut out in so far as he could all reference to common experience, and concocted an arbitrary scheme from the idiosyncracies of his private fancies. This is a matter of evidence and need not raise the general question of the ultimate relation of reason and science; for such capricious imaginings are condemned as much by the sanity of thought as by experimental knowledge of fact. Hegel must not be prejudged on this point, for he claims that his method is not private and fanciful but open and rational. On the other hand the criticism may cut deeper. It may rest on the assumption that reason and the truth fall apart, and that a theory may be wholly rational and yet untrue. From this point of view, to evolve the world out of one’s inner consciousness means simply to exercise a rational and critical activity. It is only in this sense that Hegel would admit the truth of the statement, and his whole theory is a denial of the accompanying supposition that apart from and beyond reasonable knowledge there is anything with which knowledge is in any way concerned. It should be clear from what has been said that from Hegel’s standpoint the nature of the cognitive subject is fundamentally one with that of his world. The constitutive
