useless for any purpose, but especially so in relation to religion. On the other hand, without defending the extraordinary obscurity of Hegel, we must not assume that philosophy, if true, should be easy of comprehension to untrained or inattentive minds. For the reflection and self-scrutiny which philosophy implies is most difficult precisely when applied to those simple movements on which we are least accustomed to reflect. And it would be as unreasonable to require that metaphysics should be level to the comprehension of all the men whose minds are its subject as that anatomy and physiology should be easy and accessible to those whose bodies furnish the material for those studies.

Perhaps there are few educated minds which have not at one time or another felt, if not faced, the great problem, How can I know? The external world cannot reach me, save through subjective experiences of my own: and who, therefore, shall assure me that the whole fabric of so-called external things, which I have supposed to constitute my knowledge, is anything more than a phantasmagoria which is somehow imaged to me, but the inner reality of which, if any reality it has, I can never touch. Locke felt some of the force of the question when he allowed that the secondary qualities of bodies are not in the things themselves, but in our own perceiving minds. Berkeley extended, as in reason bound, the same observation to the whole external world and all its qualities. Hume forced the argument to that complete scepticism to which it so evidently points. Kant showed that our knowledge does not consist merely of the outward world, nor its reality depend upon the reality of that outward world in itself. He proved that the mind brings a necessary action of its own to organize and combine those outward impressions, and he found real knowledge in the work of the mind itself: 'We know objects because, so far as their most general determinations are concerned, we produce the objects we know.' 1 What we call nature is not a mere series of impressions, but a system of related appearances, and relations are the work of the mind which perceives them. In this sense the understanding makes nature. But this by no means implies the absurdity, which an unthinking opponent is hasty to impute,. of supposing that nature comes into existence at the moment when this or that person begins to think of it. This will, indeed, be the inevitable conclusion if the observer regards his own intelligence as dealing with a universe in which no other

1 The Philosophy of Kant, by Professor Caird, p. 669.

intelligence can be found at work.' But it is impossible for our minds to do their work of combining our impressions into an intelligible nature, a system of sequence and law, without recognizing the fact that nature and our own intelligence along with it proceed from and are ruled by an all-comprehending intelligence above them both: 'We must hold that there is a consciousness for which the relations of fact that form the object of our gradually attained knowledge already and eternally exist; and that the growing knowledge of the individual is a progress towards this consciousness.' 2

Kant, while proving that all knowledge can be only a knowledge of relations, and that all relation is the work of the mind, could not bring himself wholly to surrender the idea of outward existence unconnected with thought. He conceived that behind that relation to a perceiving intellect, which alone enables us to predicate anything whatever of things, there must be a somewhat which he calls the thing in itself.' Things in themselves contribute the matter of our experience, while the mind imparts its form.

The objections to this view are manifest.3 For this thing in itself must be something which stands in no relation to us; it is the residuum which remains in the vessel after all that forms our knowledge has been drawn off. Now, if it bears no relation to us, how can we know its existence? For we have been compelled to admit that we can know nothing except relatively to our thought. We cannot assert the existence of anything save in relation to thought, nor form the slightest notion of what existence out of relation to our thought would mean. Let the reader make the attempt, and he will probably end by assenting to Principal Caird, that

'To go beyond or attempt to conceive of an existence which is prior to and outside of thought, "a thing in itself" of which thought is only the mirror, is self-contradictory, inasmuch as that very thing in itself is only conceivable by, exists only for, thought. We must think it before we can ascribe to it even an existence outside of thought.'* If this reasoning be accepted, a man finds himself in the following condition. He is conscious of himself and he is conscious that he has to do with a whole universe of nature

2 Ibid. p. 75.

1 Green, Prolegomena, p. 38. 3 Schopenhauer, however, regards the doctrine of the thing in itself' as Kant's chief service to philosophy (Die Welt, &c., vol. i. p. 494). This means for Schopenhauer the dethroning of a supreme intelligence and the substitution, as maker and ruler of life, of a blind unknowing and unknown force, veiled by illusion. Not such was its meaning for Kant.

Introduction, p. 156.

which is not himself. But what these outward things are in themselves he knows not. Even to call them by the name of outward things is to attribute to them a quality which is derived from his own mind. The mind contributes, not something alone, but everything, to the knowledge of nature.' Reflecting so, we might be brought to think each one of his own self as being the only reality, and of all which we call knowledge as simply modifications of this self. This would probably be no unfair description of Fichte's position, but it is not Hegel's. To Hegel the self is as incapable of recog

nition without the not-self as the not-self without the self.

It is the law of thought that nothing can be conceived by our minds except through definitions which distinguish it from other things. It exists, therefore, for our thought only in relation to these other things which we must call in to lay down its bounds and limits, and if these limits and negations fall out of our thought it must fall along with them. In ceasing to be able to tell what the thing is not, we should cease to be able to teil what it is. This book which I see before me is defined as to size and shape by its relation to its bounding space. In thinking what it fills and what it is, I must think of what it does not fill and what it is not. And if this bounding space and the surrounding objects which it is not were to cease to exist for my thought, the book must cease to exist for me too. This distinction and separation of the book and the not-book implies a relation between the two and requires belief in a unity which includes in it both the book and the not-book. The extreme example of this leading principle in Hegel's philosophy is found in the astounding statement that Being and not-Being are identical. The meaning of this, as Professor Caird is careful to explain to us, 'is not that Being and not-Being are not also distinguished; but it does mean that the distinction is not absolute, and that if it is made absolute, at that very moment it disappears.' But without troubling ourselves to grapple with such extremes of the principle, we can probably all conceive, and perhaps assent to, the general statement that, as we can conceive nothing to exist except in relation to thought, so we cannot think of anything except in relation to other things from which it stands distinguished, and the existence of which is necessarily implied by the existence of it.

Now, this law of thought, which as such is a law of existence, applies in its full force to our self-consciousness. We

1 Introduction, p. 235.

2 Hegel, p. 163.

cannot wholly separate-off ourselves from that which is not ourselves; for we can only think of self through its distinction from not-self and the distinction necessarily implies a relation between the self and not-self, and a unity of thought and of being in which both are comprehended. Self only exists through finding itself in that which is outward to self, while, again, this outward universe is only known in and through ourselves. And the very nature of human consciousness makes this the law of life that neither anything that we know nor yet we ourselves can ever be said to be in such a sense as to form a fixed subject of thought independent of a relation to some other thing which the mind must pass to in the very act of thinking of its existence. Thus nothing is, but is becoming. We ourselves, in obedience to the ceaseless law of change, pass our lives in a constant development of the self into the not-self and the not-self into the self. At every stage of its growth and at every minutest portion of that stage the organism not only is, but is passing away from that which it is.'

One may assent to this account of consciousness and life as very true so far as it goes, and yet perceive that it is capable of perversion to the grossest absurdity both of theory and practice. It is, as Principal Caird observes, an 'obviously absurd assertion that the world only exists as we think it, that our poor thought creates and uncreates the world.' This is the exaggeration of one scale of the Hegelian balance. We can only find ourselves in the world by rendering ourselves up with unreserved submission to the outward facts. Our poor thought cannot create the world, and the same principle requires us to allow that we are equally incapable of creating any single fact in the world. But the other scale of the balance, the principle that the not-self gives us the self, is in its own way as liable to error. For it may be so exaggerated as to make us the mere sport of the change and flow of things which, taking up ourself, shall fill it with what contents they please, and make us live as their blind forces order.

The element which can alone preserve the system from these absurdities of extravagant egoism or fatalistic materialism is the principle that our intelligence, in its changeful work of informing the world and being by the world informed, must regard itself as the instrument of an intelligence which is eternal. Nature, the finite mind, and God or the infinite mind, are not discordant or irreconcilable ideas, but ideas which belong to one organic whole or system of knowledge.'1 1 Introduction, p. 233.

There is one sentence in the Prolegomena of Mr. Green which seems well to express the whole theory upon which his system is founded:

'Either we must deny the reality of relations altogether, and treat them as fictions of our combining intelligence: or we must hold that, being the product of our combining intelligence, they are yet empirically real on the ground that our intelligence is a factor in the real of experience or if we suppose them to be real otherwise than merely as for us, otherwise than in the "cosmos of our experience," we must recognize as the condition of their reality the action of some unifying principle analogous to our understanding.'1

Again :

'Our action in knowledge, the action by which we connect successive phenomena in the unity of a related whole, is an action as absolutely from itself, as little to be accounted for by the phenomena through which it became an intelligent experience, or by anything alien to itself, as is that which we have found to be implied in the existence of the universal order. This action of our mind in knowledge-to say nothing of any other achievement of the human spiritbecomes to us when reflected on, a causa cognoscendi in relation to the action of a self-originating mind in the universe: which we then learn to regard as the causa essendi to the same action, exercised under whatever limiting conditions, by ourselves.' 2

To the same effect Professor Caird :

'The process of the liberation of thought from itself is not the mere negation of thought, which would necessarily be the negation of the object of thought also: it is the negation of thought and being alike as separate from each other, and the revelation of their implicit unity. . . . That the intelligence can in its utmost self-surrender still maintain itself—that it can rise to a unity which is beyond its distinction from the object and its opposition to the object, is already the pledge that all such opposition and distinction may be overcome and resolved; or in other words, that the world may be shown to be not merely the object but the manifestation of intelligence ;'

and he proceeds to inform us that 'this doctrine, that we need only to cast aside all prepossessions and take the world as it is in order to find intelligence in it, is what Hegel attempts to prove in his Logic.'

93

Professor Green works out an interesting illustration of his philosophy from the common phrase which speaks of us as studying the book of nature.

'In reading a sentence we see the words successively, we attend to them successively, and we recall their meaning successively. But

1 Prolegomena, p. 32. 2 Ibid. p. 82.

3 Caird's Hegel, pp. 156–7.