VI. THE COMMENTATORS OF HEGEL: SCHWEGLER, IN the interest of one's own self-seeking to demonstrate the shortcomings of one's predecessors, is a procedure now so vulgar that it would, perhaps, have been better taste to have left to others the task which is here begun. Any plea in excuse can found only on the important aid which may be so afforded to a general understanding of the single theme, and is only to be made good by the result. There are many other Commentators of Hegel, but we have selected these examples, too, of feelings impartial, partial, and hostile-as the latest and most generally-acknowledged best. Now, each of the three has devoted a vast amount of labour and time to the study of Hegel, and all of them have, more or less, attained to a very considerable relative knowledge. It is not, then, what is in general meant by ignorance that we would object here, but only a peculiar and insufficient state of knowledge in this way, that the path of this knowledge has been ever on the outside, from particular to particular, with darkness and incoherences between, and without perception of the single light in which the whole should show-without attainment of the single Rück, of the single turn, stir, touch by which the painful and unreachable Many should kaleidoscopically collapse into the held and intelligible One. In a word, whatever general connexion they may have perceived between Hegel and Kant, and however often they may have used, each of them, the word Begriff, they have all failed to detect that literal one connexion and that literal one signification which have been accentuated in the preceding pages. Hegel was literal with Idealism; the whole is Thought, and the whole life of it is Thought; and, therefore, what is called the History of Philosophy will be in externality and contingency, but a Gesetztseyn of Thought, but an explicitment, a setting of one thought the other. So it was that Spinoza was Substance, Hume Causality, Kant Reciprocity, and Hegel the Notion-the Notion as set by Kant, and as now to be developed subjectively by Hegel into the Subjective Logic which ends in the Idea. So it was that he, as it were, anallegorised actual history, even contemporary history, even his own position, into the plastic dialectic of his abstract Logic. Hegel was literal with Idealism up to the last invisible negation of the negation-up to the ultimate pure Negativity within which even the triple muscle of the Notion lay a hidden Nisus, retracted into transparency. To Hegel even the very way which had led to this was, so far, false; it was but the chain of the finite categories; and their whole truth was this negative One. Thus it was that Hegel completed the whole movement of which Kant, Fichte, and Schelling had been successive vital knots; but still this completion he reached only by making good his attachment directly to the first of them. This was effected by the entire realisation and vitalisation of Logic, even scholastic Logic (which Kant had begun), by reduction simply of the All into the simply technical moments of Logic as named Simple Apprehension, &c., through substitution of his own conscious concrete Notion (which, in a word, is but the one existent, and the only existent, Entelechie of Difference and Identity), for the unconscious abstract Notion of Kant that lay in the question: 'How are à priori Synthetic Judgments possible?' It is this literality which we assert to have been universally missed, and we claim to have discovered the Notion which Hegel meant, what we call the concrete Universal, as well as the precise nature of the genesis of this notion with special reference to Kant. It often happens that, when particular announcements of this nature are made, many previous general expressions come to be collected which seem very fairly to convey the particularity announced. Now these ex post facto coincidences, as they may be termed, while they belong to the peculiar industry of the mere rats of literature, are themselves particularly delusive and deceptive. In these very volumes we have many instances in point. Some of these instances we shall adduce by way of illustration just as they occur. 'Hegel is quite in earnest when he maintains the co-incidence of History and of Logic: this (vol. i. p. 38) is a very explicit and perfectly categorical statement; nevertheless, it was probably written years before the true thought, or anything like the true thought, of the fact which it seems to convey, had dawned on the mind of the writer. Plato's Taurov and Jάrepov, as well as a triad of an sich, ausser sich, and für sich, are spoken of, not far from the same neighbourhood, but quite blindly as to the true issues involved. Thus Hegel, horsed on his idea, penetrates and permeates the whole universe both of mind and matter, and construes all into a one individuality: The Whole is to be conceived as an organic idea-a concrete idea: He who understands Hegel's word Begriff, understands Hegel.' These statements are also very strikingly correct, the last in especial seems to reach the root; yet they are made years in advance, and had I left the subject then, I should have left it wholly ignorant of Hegel. Here follow a few more such blind guesses, results of external comparison, on the part of one absolutely denied as yet entrance to the internal truth. The process pictured in the History of Philosophy is the process of Philosophy itself: It is the peculiar nature of the Idea to be the union of the universal and the particular in the individual: Kant's categories form really the substance of Hegel: Hegel's general undertaking, indeed, seems to be, to restore the evolution immanent to thought itself (which evolution has only presented itself concretely and chronologically in the particular thinkers preserved in History)-to restore this evolution to universal consciousness in abstract purity, &c. &c.' + Such instances, however, are so far unsatisfactory in that they rest only on one's own authority. Two examples which we have already seen in this connexion from Spinoza may be attended with more conviction. The first occurs under Remark 1 of the first Chapter on Quantity: it is that which relates to a Quantity of Imagination as different from one of Intellect. Now, both Kant and Hegel are here anticipated and in leading distinctions; nevertheless, it is quite certain that Kant knew nothing of this, and that Hegel * They occur vol. i., pp. 79, vol. i. The last, however exact it 80. seem, is due only to an external look at the first portions of the Phaenomenologie.' To be found respectively at pages 82, 89, 97, and 195, of VOL. II. D D was able to perceive it only when he had made his own progress in Kant and from Kant. The other example is that of the Intellectual and Imaginative Infinite, which occurs, about one-third of the way on, in the long Mathematical note with which Quantity is terminated in vol. ii. On the whole, we have, for our part, no hesitation in concluding that words which as they fell from their speaker related only to some isolated particular, or to some result of mere outside comparison, may be found ex post facto very fairly to convey some whole inner and vital truth of wide application. SCHWEGLER. We have already spoken with sincere respect of this most accomplished man and admirable writer; and it is to be acknowledged at once that he has not only perfectly availed himself of many of the main lessons both of Kant and Hegel, but that he possesses also an accurate acquaintance with the bulk of their details. Nevertheless, we hold that, having failed to penetrate into the very inmost articulation of Kant's à priori elements, he missed the key without which it was impossible but that Hegel must have remained a mere outer assemblage and, on the whole, impervious to him. The few considerations on which this opinion rests we shall mention in the order in which they occurred to us in perusing his book, the History of Philosophy in Epitome.' The first point to which we shall advert is contained in the first four pages of the excellent little work alluded to, and relates, on the part of Schwegler, to objections to, or rather to a rejection of, the Hegelian equation of Philosophy and its History. In passing to this we may |