The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 7
LECTURE VII.
HEGEL.
Concerning Hegel, who forms our special topic in this
lecture, it is extraordinarily difficult to get or to give any
general impressions that will not be seriously misleading.
I undertake my task, therefore, with a very strong impression
of its importance and its difficulty. The outcome of
what we have thus far discussed in these lectures is briefly
this: Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a
true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe,
and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical
form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner
life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a
skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason
itself, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers
appeared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny,
dogmatic and uncertain. Thought endeavored, nevertheless,
to re-win its great assurances in a new form. Truth,
said Idealism, is essentially an affair of the inner life.
The world of truth is the world as it would appear to a
complete and fully self-conscious self. The outer
universe is only a show world. Its reality is only practical.
It is essentially a mirage of the inner life. The real
universe is the universe of the spirit. Our deepest
relation is not to the natural order at all, but to the one true
self, namely, God’s own life.
Such, as we found, was the position reached alike by Fichte and the romanticists. But in their further thought they diverged. For Fichte, the centre of the universe, as his idealism conceives it, is the moral law. The infinite self longs for rational and active self-possession. Hence it differentiates itself into numerous forms, as the vine grows out into its own branches. These branchings of the one great vine of the spirit form our finite and essentially incomplete selves.
But for the romanticists, as we found, the centre of the world is not so much the moral law as the interest which every spirit has in a certain divine wealth of emotion and of experience. The world is the world of ideas; things exist because spirits experience them; and spirits experience because, as parts of the divinely complete life, it is their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in their self-realization as possible.
I.
Before we now pass directly to Hegel it is necessary
to say yet a word of the more technical speculations of
Schelling, of whom, in his character as romanticist, we
heard something in the last lecture. Schelling’s development,
as you already know, was very rapid; his writings
were early voluminous. He was a man of mark and a
professor at Jena by the time he had reached his twenty-third
year. His systematic views during his youthful
period seemed to his readers to alter with a dangerously
magical ease and swiftness of transformation. He
himself meanwhile denied, during the years up to 1809, that
there was so far any significant change from the essential
doctrines of his early works. He had added, he said, to
what he at first taught. More truth had come to him;
not a contradiction of former insight. But readers found
it suspicious that each new book of Schelling’s seemed to
supersede all his previous efforts. In 1797, he published
his “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature.” During
the next three years appeared his “System of Transcendental
Idealism” and his “First Sketch of a System of
the Philosophy of Nature.” These two latter works were to be a first statement, so their author declared, of the
two great and seemingly opposed aspects of philosophy.
The outer world was to be shown as after all the
manifestation of spirit; the inner world of the self was to be
exhibited as inevitably expressing itself in relation to an
outer, a natural order. The fundamental thought of the
whole doctrine was in substance this: Fichte had declared
that it is the self-assertion of the absolute self, the free
choice of the true Ego, that is the source of all truth.
When I as knower recognize a truth, that is because I as
doer have first made this truth. This view Schelling also
accepts. But now, as one sees, a conscious self is at once
the doer of its present act, and the contemplator of the
results of its past acts. As I look out on the world of
nature, I see crystallized before me the expression of what
my true and absolute self has already been doing. The
same activity that this present consciousness exemplifies
for me has been there from eternity, and nature is the
concrete embodiment to the onlooker of the results of his
own eternal deeds. Nature then is not merely, as Fichte
had said, my duty made manifest to my senses; it is also
my timelessly past spiritual life, — not of course my finite
or individual and private past life, but the life of my
deeper self, of the one and absolute divine spirit. This
autobiography of spirit, manifest to our eyes, is then the
natural order. On the other hand, the inner life as such
is capable of a philosophical treatment; for this is, as it
were, not the record of the spirit's past, but the fullness
of the spirit’s conscious actuality We have thus a
twofold philosophy to be wrought out, and Schelling in 1799
and 1800 publishes his two sketches as though in topic,
if not in execution, they completely covered the ground.
But In 1801 appeared a new treatise, called by Schelling
simply “Exposition of my System of Philosophy,” and
here the doctrine seems to take a new form, which readers
could only with great difficulty reconcile with what had Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/217 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/218 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/219 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/220 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/221 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/222 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/223 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/224 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/225 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/226 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/227 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/228 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/229 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/230 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/231 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/232 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/233 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/234 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/235 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/236 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/237 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/238 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/239 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/240 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/241 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/242 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/243 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/244 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/245 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/246 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/247 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/248 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/249 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/250 but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic;
so that you in vain endeavor to get satisfaction from
Hegel’s treatment of outer nature, of science, of
mathematics, or of any coldly theoretical topic. About all these
things he is immensely suggestive, but never final. His
system, as system, has crumbled, but his vital comprehension
of our life remains forever.