Hegel"s Philosophy of Mind.
by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
PREFACE.
I here offer a translation of the third or last part of Hegel"s encyclopaedic sketch of philosophy,-the _Philosophy of Mind_. The volume, like its subject, stands complete in itself. But it may also be regarded as a supplement or continuation of the work begun in my version of his _Logic_. I have not ventured upon the _Philosophy of Nature_ which lies between these two. That is a province, to penetrate into which would require an equipment of learning I make no claim to,-a province, also, of which the present-day interest would be largely historical, or at least bound up with historical circ.u.mstances.
The translation is made from the German text given in the Second Part of the Seventh Volume of Hegel"s Collected Works, occasionally corrected by comparison with that found in the second and third editions (of 1827 and 1830) published by the author. I have reproduced only Hegel"s own paragraphs, and entirely omitted the _Zusatze_ of the editors. These addenda-which are in origin lecture-notes-to the paragraphs are, in the text of the Collected Works, given for the first section only. The psychological part which they accompany has been barely treated elsewhere by Hegel: but a good popular exposition of it will be found in Erdmann"s _Psychologische Briefe_. The second section was dealt with at greater length by Hegel himself in his _Philosophy of Law_ (1820). The topics of the third section are largely covered by his lectures on Art, Religion, and History of Philosophy.
I do not conceal from myself that the text offers a hard nut to crack. Yet here and there, even through the medium of the translation, I think some light cannot fail to come to an earnest student. Occasionally, too, as, for instance, in ---- 406, 459, 549, and still more in ---- 552, 573, at the close of which might stand the words _Liberavi animam meam_, the writer really "lets himself go," and gives his mind freely on questions where speculation comes closely in touch with life.
In the _Five Introductory Essays_ I have tried sometimes to put together, and sometimes to provide with collateral elucidation, some points in the Mental Philosophy. I shall not attempt to justify the selection of subjects for special treatment further than to hope that they form a more or less connected group, and to refer for a study of some general questions of system and method to my _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel"s Philosophy_ which appear almost simultaneously with this volume.
OXFORD, _December, 1893_.
FIVE INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS.
Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.
The art of finding t.i.tles, and of striking out headings which catch the eye or ear, and lead the mind by easy paths of a.s.sociation to the subject under exposition, was not one of Hegel"s gifts. A stirring phrase, a vivid or picturesque turn of words, he often has. But his lists of contents, when they cease to be commonplace, are apt to run into the bizarre and the grotesque. Generally, indeed, his rubrics are the old and (as we may be tempted to call them) insignificant terms of the text-books. But, in Hegel"s use of them, these conventional designations are charged with a highly individualised meaning. They may mean more-they may mean less-than they habitually pa.s.s for: but they unquestionably specify their meaning with a unique and almost personal flavour. And this can hardly fail to create and to disappoint undue expectations.
(i.) Philosophy and its Parts.
Even the main divisions of his system show this conservatism in terminology. The names of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia are, we may say, non-significant of their peculiar contents. And that for a good reason. What Hegel proposes to give is no novel or special doctrine, but the universal philosophy which has pa.s.sed on from age to age, here narrowed and there widened, but still essentially the same. It is conscious of its continuity and proud of its ident.i.ty with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.
The earliest attempts of the Greek philosophers to present philosophy in a complete and articulated order-attempts generally attributed to the Stoics, the schoolmen of antiquity-made it a tripart.i.te whole. These three parts were Logic, Physics, and Ethics. In their entirety they were meant to form a cycle of unified knowledge, satisfying the needs of theory as well as practice. As time went on, however, the situation changed: and if the old names remained, their scope and value suffered many changes. New interests and curiosities, due to altered circ.u.mstances, brought other departments of reality under the focus of investigation besides those which had been primarily discussed under the old names. Inquiries became more specialised, and each tended to segregate itself from the rest as an independent field of science. The result was that in modern times the territory still marked by the ancient t.i.tles had shrunk to a mere phantom of its former bulk. Almost indeed things had come to such a pa.s.s that the time-honoured figures had sunk into the misery of _rois faineants_; while the real business of knowledge was discharged by the younger and less conventional lines of research which the needs and fashions of the time had called up. Thus Logic, in the narrow formal sense, was turned into an "art" of argumentation and a system of technical rules for the a.n.a.lysis and synthesis of academical discussion. Physics or Natural Philosophy restricted itself to the elaboration of some metaphysical postulates or hypotheses regarding the general modes of physical operation. And Ethics came to be a very unpractical discussion of subtleties regarding moral faculty and moral standard. Meanwhile a theory of scientific method and of the laws governing the growth of intelligence and formation of ideas grew up, and left the older logic to perish of formality and inanition. The successive departments of physical science, each in turn a.s.serting its independence, finally left Natural Philosophy no alternative between clinging to its outworn hypotheses and abstract generalities, or identifying itself (as Newton in his great book put it) with the _Principia Mathematica_ of the physical sciences. Ethics, in its turn, saw itself, on one hand, replaced by psychological inquiries into the relations between the feelings and the will and the intelligence; while, on the other hand, a host of social, historical, economical, and other researches cut it off from the real facts of human life, and left it no more than the endless debates on the logical and metaphysical issues involved in free-will and conscience, duty and merit.
It has sometimes been said that Kant settled this controversy between the old departments of philosophy and the new branches of science. And the settlement, it is implied, consisted in a.s.signing to the philosopher a sort of police and patrol duty in the commonwealth of science. He was to see that boundaries were duly respected, and that each science kept strictly to its own business. For this purpose each branch of philosophy was bound to convert itself into a department of criticism-an examination of first principles in the several provinces of reality or experience-with a view to get a distinct conception of what they were, and thus define exactly the lines on which the structures of more detailed science could be put up solidly and safely. This plan offered tempting lines to research, and sounded well. But on further reflection there emerge one or two difficulties, hard to get over. Paradoxical though it may seem, one cannot rightly estimate the capacity and range of foundations, before one has had some familiarity with the buildings erected upon them. Thus you are involved in a circle: a circle which is probably inevitable, but which for that reason it is well to recognise at once. Then-what is only another way of saying the same thing-it is impossible to draw an inflexible line between premises of principle and conclusions of detail. There is no spot at which criticism can stop, and, having done its business well, hand on the remaining task to dogmatic system. It was an instinctive feeling of this implication of system in what professed only to be criticism which led the aged Kant to ignore his own previous professions that he offered as yet no system, and when Fichte maintained himself to be erecting the fabric for which Kant had prepared the ground, to reply by the counter-declaration that the criticism was the system-that "the curtain was the picture."
The Hegelian philosophy is an attempt to combine criticism with system, and thus realise what Kant had at least foretold. It is a system which is self-critical, and systematic only through the absoluteness of its criticism. In Hegel"s own phrase, it is an immanent and an incessant dialectic, which from first to last allows finality to no dogmatic rest, but carries out Kant"s description of an Age of Criticism, in which nothing, however majestic and sacred its authority, can plead for exception from the all-testing _Elenchus_. Then, on the other hand, Hegel refuses to restrict philosophy and its branches to anything short of the totality. He takes in its full sense that often-used phrase-the Unity of Knowledge. Logic becomes the all-embracing research of "first principles,"-the principles which regulate physics and ethics. The old divisions between logic and metaphysic, between induction and deduction, between theory of reasoning and theory of knowledge,-divisions which those who most employed them were never able to show the reason and purpose of-because indeed they had grown up at various times and by "natural selection" through a vast ma.s.s of incidents: these are superseded and merged in one continuous theory of real knowledge considered under its abstract or formal aspect,-of organised and known reality in its underlying thought-system. But these first principles were only an abstraction from complete reality-the reality which nature has when unified by mind-and they presuppose the total from which they are derived.
The realm of pure thought is only the ghost of the Idea-of the unity and reality of knowledge, and it must be reindued with its flesh and blood.
The logical world is (in Kantian phrase) only the _possibility_ of Nature and Mind. It comes first-because it is a system of First Principles: but these first principles could only be elicited by a philosophy which has realised the meaning of a mental experience, gathered by interpreting the facts of Nature.
Natural Philosophy is no longer-according to Hegel"s view of it-merely a scheme of mathematical ground-work. That may be its first step. But its scope is a complete unity (which is not a mere aggregate) of the branches of natural knowledge, exploring both the inorganic and the organic world.
In dealing with this endless problem, philosophy seems to be baulked by an impregnable obstacle to its progress. Every day the advance of specialisation renders any comprehensive or synoptic view of the totality of science more and more impossible. No doubt we talk readily enough of Science. But here, if anywhere, we may say there is no Science, but only sciences. The generality of science is a proud fiction or a gorgeous dream, variously told and interpreted according to the varying interest and proclivity of the scientist. The sciences, or those who specially expound them, know of no unity, no philosophy of science. They are content to remark that in these days the thing is impossible, and to pick out the faults in any attempts in that direction that are made outside their pale.
Unfortunately for this contention, the thing is done by us all, and, indeed, has to be done. If not as men of science, yet as men-as human beings-we have to put together things and form some total estimate of the drift of development, of the unity of nature. To get a notion, not merely of the general methods and principles of the sciences, but of their results and teachings, and to get this not as a mere lot of fragments, but with a systematic unity, is indispensable in some degree for all rational life. The life not founded on science is not the life of man. But he will not find what he wants in the text-books of the specialist, who is obliged to treat his subject, as Plato says, "under the pressure of necessity,"
and who dare not look on it in its quality "to draw the soul towards truth, and to form the philosophic intellect so as to uplift what we now unduly keep down(1)." If the philosopher in this province does his work but badly, he may plead the novelty of the task to which he comes as a pioneer or even an architect. He finds little that he can directly utilise. The materials have been gathered and prepared for very special aims; and the great aim of science-that human life may be made a higher, an ampler, and happier thing,-has hardly been kept in view at all, except in its more materialistic aspects. To the philosopher the supreme interest of the physical sciences is that man also belongs to the physical universe, or that Mind and Matter as we know them are (in Mr. Spencer"s language) "at once ant.i.thetical and inseparable." He wants to find the place of Man,-but of Man as Mind-in Nature.
If the scope of Natural Philosophy be thus expanded to make it the unity and more than the synthetic aggregate of the several physical sciences-to make it the whole which surpa.s.ses the addition of all their fragments, the purpose of Ethics has not less to be deepened and widened. Ethics, under that t.i.tle, Hegel knows not. And for those who cannot recognise anything unless it be clearly labelled, it comes natural to record their censure of Hegelianism for ignoring or disparaging ethical studies. But if we take the word in that wide sense which common usage rather justifies than adopts, we may say that the whole philosophy of Mind is a moral philosophy. Its subject is the moral as opposed to the physical aspect of reality: the inner and ideal life as opposed to the merely external and real materials of it: the world of intelligence and of humanity. It displays Man in the several stages of that process by which he expresses the full meaning of nature, or discharges the burden of that task which is implicit in him from the first. It traces the steps of that growth by which what was no better than a fragment of nature-an intelligence located (as it seemed) in one piece of matter-comes to realise the truth of it and of himself. That truth is his ideal and his obligation: but it is also-such is the mystery of his birthright-his idea and possession.
He-like the natural universe-is (as the _Logic_ has shown) a principle of unification, organisation, idealisation: and his history (in its ideal completeness) is the history of the process by which he, the typical man, works the fragments of reality (and such mere reality must be always a collection of fragments) into the perfect unity of a many-sided character.
Thus the philosophy of mind, beginning with man as a sentient organism, the focus in which the universe gets its first dim confused expression through mere feeling, shows how he "erects himself above himself" and realises what ancient thinkers called his kindred with the divine.
In that total process of the mind"s liberation and self-realisation the portion specially called Morals is but one, though a necessary, stage.
There are, said Porphyry and the later Platonists, four degrees in the path of perfection and self-accomplishment. And first, there is the career of honesty and worldly prudence, which makes the duty of the citizen.
Secondly, there is the progress in purity which casts earthly things behind, and reaches the angelic height of pa.s.sionless serenity. And the third step is the divine life which by intellectual energy is turned to behold the truth of things. Lastly, in the fourth grade, the mind, free and sublime in self-sustaining wisdom, makes itself an "exemplar" of virtue, and is even a "father of G.o.ds." Even so, it may be said, the human mind is the subject of a complicated Teleology,-the field ruled by a multifarious Ought, psychological, aesthetical, social and religious. To adjust their several claims cannot be the object of any science, if adjustment means to supply a guide in practice. But it is the purpose of such a teleology to show that social requirements and moral duty as ordinarily conceived do not exhaust the range of obligation,-of the supreme ethical Ought. How that can best be done is however a question of some difficulty. For the ends under examination do not fall completely into a serial order, nor does one involve others in such a way as to destroy their independence. You cannot absolve psychology as if it stood independent of ethics or religion, nor can aesthetic considerations merely supervene on moral. Still, it may be said, the order followed by Hegel seems on the whole liable to fewer objections than others.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, the only English philosopher who has even attempted a _System_ of Philosophy, may in this point be compared with Hegel. He also begins with a _First Principles_,-a work which, like Hegel"s _Logic_, starts by presenting Philosophy as the supreme arbiter between the subordinate principles of Religion and Science, which are in it "necessary correlatives." The positive task of philosophy is (with some inconsistency or vagueness) presented, in the next place, as a "unification of knowledge." Such a unification has to make explicit the implicit unity of known reality: because "every thought involves a whole system of thoughts." And such a programme might again suggest the Logic. But unfortunately Mr. Spencer does not (and he has Francis Bacon to justify him here) think it worth his while to toil up the weary, but necessary, mount of Purgatory which is known to us as Logic. With a nave realism, he builds on Cause and Power, and above all on Force, that "Ultimate of Ultimates," which seems to be, however marvellously, a denizen both of the Known and the Unknowable world. In the known world this Ultimate appears under two forms, matter and motion, and the problem of science and philosophy is to lay down in detail and in general the law of their continuous redistribution, of the segregation of motion from matter, and the inclusion of motion into matter.
Of this process, which has no beginning and no end,-the rhythm of generation and corruption, attraction and repulsion, it may be said that it is properly not a first principle of all knowledge, but the general or fundamental portion of Natural Philosophy to which Mr. Spencer next proceeds. Such a philosophy, however, he gives only in part: viz. as a Biology, dealing with organic (and at a further stage and under other names, with supra-organic) life. And that the Philosophy of Nature should take this form, and carry both the First Principles and the later portions of the system with it, as parts of a philosophy of evolution, is what we should have expected from the contemporaneous interests of science(2).
Even a one-sided attempt to give speculative unity to those researches, which get-for reasons the scientific specialist seldom asks-the t.i.tle of biological, is however worth noting as a recognition of the necessity of a _Natur-philosophie_,-a speculative science of Nature.
The third part of the Hegelian System corresponds to what in the _Synthetic Philosophy_ is known as Psychology, Ethics, and Sociology. And here Mr. Spencer recognises that something new has turned up. Psychology is "unique" as a science: it is a "double science," and as a whole quite _sui generis_. Whether perhaps all these epithets would not, _mutatis mutandis_, have to be applied also to Ethics and Sociology, if these are to do their full work, he does not say. In what this doubleness consists he even finds it somewhat difficult to show. For, as his fundamental philosophy does not on this point go beyond noting some pairs of verbal ant.i.theses, and has no sense of unity except in the imperfect shape of a "relation(3)" between two things which are "ant.i.thetical and inseparable,"
he is perplexed by phrases such as "in" and "out of" consciousness, and stumbles over the equivocal use of "inner" to denote both mental (or non-spatial) in general, and locally sub-cuticular in special. Still, he gets so far as to see that the law of consciousness is that in it neither feelings nor relations have independent subsistence, and that the unit of mind does not begin till what he calls two feelings are made one. The phraseology may be faulty, but it shows an inkling of the _a priori_.
Unfortunately it is apparently forgotten; and the language too often reverts into the habit of what he calls the "objective," i.e. purely physical, sciences.
Mr. Spencer"s conception of Psychology restricts it to the more general physics of the mind. For its more concrete life he refers us to Sociology.
But his Sociology is yet unfinished: and from the plan of its inception, and the imperfect conception of the ends and means of its investigation, hardly admits of completion in any systematic sense. To that incipiency is no doubt due its excess in historical or anecdotal detail-detail, however, too much segregated from its social context, and in general its tendency to neglect normal and central theory for incidental and peripheral facts.
Here, too, there is a weakness in First Principles and a love of catchwords, which goes along with the fallacy that ill.u.s.tration is proof.
Above all, it is evident that the great fact of religion overhangs Mr.
Spencer with the attraction of an unsolved and unacceptable problem. He cannot get the religious ideas of men into co-ordination with their scientific, aesthetic, and moral doctrines; and only betrays his sense of the high importance of the former by placing them in the forefront of inquiry, as due to the inexperience and limitations of the so-called primitive man. That is hardly adequate recognition of the religious principle: and the defect will make itself seriously felt, should he ever come to carry out the further stage of his prospectus dealing with "the growth and correlation of language, knowledge, morals, and aesthetics."
(ii.) Mind and Morals.
A Mental Philosophy-if we so put what might also be rendered a Spiritual Philosophy, or Philosophy of Spirit-may to an English reader suggest something much narrower than it actually contains. A Philosophy of the Human Mind-if we consult English specimens-would not imply much more than a psychology, and probably what is called an inductive psychology. But as Hegel understands it, it covers an unexpectedly wide range of topics, the whole range from Nature to Spirit. Besides Subjective Mind, which would seem on first thoughts to exhaust the topics of psychology, it goes on to Mind as Objective, and finally to Absolute mind. And such combinations of words may sound either self-contradictory or meaningless.
The first Section deals with the range of what is usually termed Psychology. That term indeed is employed by Hegel, in a restricted sense, to denote the last of the three sub-sections in the discussion of Subjective Mind. The Mind, which is the topic of psychology proper, cannot be a.s.sumed as a ready-made object, or datum. A Self, a self-consciousness, an intelligent and volitional agent, if it be the birthright of man, is a birthright which he has to realise for himself, to earn and to make his own. To trace the steps by which mind in its stricter acceptation, as will and intelligence, emerges from the general animal sensibility which is the crowning phase of organic life, and the final problem of biology, is the work of two preliminary sub-sections-the first ent.i.tled _Anthropology_, the second the _Phenomenology of Mind_.
The subject of Anthropology, as Hegel understands it, is the Soul-the raw material of consciousness, the basis of all higher mental life. This is a borderland, where the ground is still debateable between Nature and Mind: it is the region of feeling, where the sensibility has not yet been differentiated to intelligence. Soul and body are here, as the phrase goes, in communion: the inward life is still imperfectly disengaged from its natural co-physical setting. Still one with nature, it submits to natural influences and natural vicissitudes: is not as yet master of itself, but the half-pa.s.sive receptacle of a foreign life, of a general vitality, of a common soul not yet fully differentiated into individuality. But it is awaking to self-activity: it is emerging to Consciousness,-to distinguish itself, as aware and conscious, from the facts of life and sentiency of which it is aware.
From this region of psychical physiology or physiological psychology, Hegel in the second sub-section of his first part takes us to the "Phenomenology of Mind,"-to Consciousness. The sentient soul is also conscious-but in a looser sense of that word(4): it has feelings, but can scarcely be said _itself_ to know that it has them. As consciousness, the Soul has come to separate what it is from what it feels. The distinction emerges of a subject which is conscious, and an object _of_ which it is conscious. And the main thing is obviously the relationship between the two, or the Consciousness itself, as tending to distinguish itself alike from its subject and its object. Hence, perhaps, may be gathered why it is called Phenomenology of Mind. Mind as yet is not yet more than emergent or apparent: nor yet self-possessed and self-certified. No longer, however, one with the circ.u.mambient nature which it feels, it sees itself set against it, but only as a pa.s.sive recipient of it, a _tabula rasa_ on which external nature is reflected, or to which phenomena are presented.
No longer, on the other hand, a mere pa.s.sive instrument of suggestion from without, its instinct of life, its _nisus_ of self-a.s.sertion is developed, through antagonism to a like _nisus_, into the consciousness of self-hood, of a Me and Mine as set against a Thee and Thine. But just in proportion as it is so developed in opposition to and recognition of other equally self-centred selves, it has pa.s.sed beyond the narrower characteristic of Consciousness proper. It is no longer mere intelligent perception or reproduction of a world, but it is life, with perception (or apperception) of that life. It has returned in a way to its original unity with nature, but it is now the sense of its self-hood-the consciousness of itself as the focus in which subjective and objective are at one. Or, to put it in the language of the great champion of Realism(5), the standpoint of Reason or full-grown Mind is this: "The world which appears to us is our percept, therefore in us. The real world, out of which we explain the phenomenon, is our thought: therefore in us."
The third sub-section of the theory of Subjective Mind-the Psychology proper-deals with Mind. This is the real, independent Psyche-hence the special appropriation of the term Psychology. "The Soul," says Herbart, "no doubt dwells in a body: there are, moreover, corresponding states of the one and the other: but nothing corporeal occurs in the Soul, nothing purely mental, which we could reckon to our Ego, occurs in the body: the affections of the body are no representations of the Ego, and our pleasant and unpleasant feelings do not immediately lie in the organic life they favour or hinder." Such a Soul, so conceived, is an intelligent and volitional self, a being of intellectual and "active" powers or phenomena: it is a Mind. And "Mind," adds Hegel(6), "is just this elevation above Nature and physical modes and above the complication with an external object." Nothing is _external_ to it: it is rather the internalising of all externality. In this psychology proper, we are out of any immediate connexion with physiology. "Psychology as such," remarks Herbart, "has its questions common to it with Idealism"-with the doctrine that all reality is mental reality. It traces, in Hegel"s exposition of it, the steps of the way by which mind realises that independence which is its characteristic stand-point. On the intellectual side that independence is a.s.sured in language,-the system of signs by which the intelligence stamps external objects as its own, made part of its inner world. A science, some one has said, is after all only _une langue bien faite_. So, reversing the saying, we may note that a language is an inwardised and mind-appropriated world. On the active side, the independence of mind is seen in self-enjoyment, in happiness, or self-content, where impulse and volition have attained satisfaction in equilibrium, and the soul possesses itself in fullness. Such a mind(7), which has made the world its certified possession in language, and which enjoys itself in self-possession of soul, called happiness, is a free Mind. And that is the highest which Subjective Mind can reach.
At this point, perhaps, having rounded off by a liberal sweep the scope of psychology, the ordinary mental philosophy would stop. Hegel, instead of finishing, now goes on to the field of what he calls Objective Mind. For as yet it has been only the story of a preparation, an inward adorning and equipment, and we have yet to see what is to come of it in actuality. Or rather, we have yet to consider the social forms on which this preparation rests. The mind, self-possessed and sure of itself or free, is so only through the objective shape which its main development runs parallel with.
An intelligent Will, or a practical reason, was the last word of the psychological development. But a reason which is practical, or a volition which is intelligent, is realised by action which takes regular shapes, and by practice which transforms the world. The theory of Objective Mind delineates the new form which nature a.s.sumes under the sway of intelligence and will. That intellectual world realises itself by transforming the physical into a social and political world, the given natural conditions of existence into a freely-inst.i.tuted system of life, the primitive struggle of kinds for subsistence into the ordinances of the social state. Given man as a being possessed of will and intelligence, this inward faculty, whatever be its degree, will try to impress itself on nature and to reproduce itself in a legal, a moral, and social world. The kingdom of deed replaces, or rises on the foundation of, the kingdom of word: and instead of the equilibrium of a well-adjusted soul comes the harmonious life of a social organism. We are, in short, in the sphere of Ethics and Politics, of Jurisprudence and Morals, of Law and Conscience.
Here,-as always in Hegel"s system-there is a triad of steps. First the province of Law or Right. But if we call it Law, we must keep out of sight the idea of a special law-giver, of a conscious imposition of laws, above all by a political superior. And if we call it Right, we must remember that it is neutral, inhuman, abstract right: the right whose principle is impartial and impa.s.sive uniformity, equality, order;-not moral right, or the equity which takes cognisance of circ.u.mstances, of personal claims, and provides against its own hardness. The intelligent will of Man, throwing itself upon the mere gifts of nature as their appointed master, creates the world of Property-of things instrumental, and regarded as adjectival, to the human personality. But the autonomy of Reason (which is latent in the will) carries with it certain consequences. As it acts, it also, by its inherent quality of uniformity or universality, enacts for itself a law and laws, and creates the realm of formal equality or order-giving law. But this is a _mere_ equality: which is not inconsistent with what in other respects may be excess of inequality. What one does, if it is really to be treated as done, others may or even must do: each act creates an expectation of continuance and uniformity of behaviour. The doer is bound by it, and others are ent.i.tled to do the like. The material which the person appropriates creates a system of obligation. Thus is const.i.tuted-in the natural give and take of rational Wills-in the inevitable course of human action and reaction,-a system of rights and duties. This law of equality-the basis of justice, and the seed of benevolence-is the scaffolding or perhaps rather the rudimentary framework of society and moral life. Or it is the bare skeleton which is to be clothed upon by the softer and fuller outlines of the social tissues and the ethical organs.
And thus the first range of Objective Mind postulates the second, which Hegel calls "Morality." The word is to be taken in its strict sense as a protest against the quasi-physical order of law. It is the morality of conscience and of the good will, of the inner rect.i.tude of soul and purpose, as all-sufficient and supreme. Here is brought out the complementary factor in social life: the element of liberty, spontaneity, self-consciousness. The motto of mere inward morality (as opposed to the spirit of legality) is (in Kant"s words): "There is nothing without qualification good, in heaven or earth, but only a good will." The essential condition of goodness is that the action be done with purpose and intelligence, and in full persuasion of its goodness by the conscience of the agent. The characteristic of Morality thus described is its essential inwardness, and the sovereignty of the conscience over all heteronomy. Its justification is that it protests against the authority of a mere external or objective order, subsisting and ruling in separation from the subjectivity. Its defect is the turn it gives to this a.s.sertion of the rights of subjective conscience: briefly in the circ.u.mstance that it tends to set up a mere individualism against a mere universalism, instead of realising the unity and essential interdependence of the two.
The third sub-section of the theory of Objective Mind describes a state of affairs in which this ant.i.thesis is explicitly overcome. This is the moral life in a social community. Here law and usage prevail and provide the fixed permanent scheme of life: but the law and the usage are, in their true or ideal conception, only the unforced expression of the mind and will of those who live under them. And, on the other hand, the mind and will of the individual members of such a community are pervaded and animated by its universal spirit. In such a community, and so const.i.tuting it, the individual is at once free and equal, and that because of the spirit of fraternity, which forms its spiritual link. In the world supposed to be governed by mere legality the idea of right is exclusively prominent; and when that is the case, it may often happen that _summum jus summa injuria_. In mere morality, the stress falls exclusively on the idea of inward freedom, or the necessity of the harmony of the judgment and the will, or the dependence of conduct upon conscience. In the union of the two, in the moral community as normally const.i.tuted, the mere idea of right is replaced, or controlled and modified, by the idea of equity-a balance as it were between the two preceding, inasmuch as motive and purpose are employed to modify and interpret strict right. But this effect-this harmonisation-is brought about by the predominance of a new idea-the principle of benevolence,-a principle however which is itself modified by the fundamental idea of right or law(8) into a wise or regulated kindliness.