The Logic of Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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is the same; but as Homer says of some stars that they have two names, the one in the language of the gods, the other in the language of ephemeral men—so for that substance there are two languages—the one of feeling, of pictorial thought, and of the limited intellect that makes its home in finite categories and inadequate abstractions, the other the language of the concrete notion. If we propose then to talk of and to criticise philosophy from the religious point of view, there is more requisite than to possess a familiarity with the language of the ephemeral consciousness. The foundation of scientific cognition is the substantiality at its core, the indwelling idea with its stirring intellectual life; just as the essentials of religion are a heart fully disciplined, a mind awake to self-collectedness, a wrought and refined substantiality. In modern times religion has more and more contracted the intelligent expansion of its contents and withdrawn into the intensiveness of piety, or even of feeling—a feeling which betrays its own scantiness and emptiness. So long however as it still has a creed, a doctrine, a system of dogma, it has what philosophy can occupy itself with and where it can find for itself a point of union with religion. This however is not to be taken in the wrong separatist sense (so dominant in our modern religiosity) representing the two as mutually exclusive, or as at bottom so capable of separation that their union is only imposed from without. Rather, even in what has gone before, it is implied that religion may well exist without philosophy, but philosophy not without religion—which it rather includes. True religion—intellectual and spiritual religion—must have body and substance, for spirit and intellect are above all consciousness, and consciousness implies an objective body and substance.
'The contracted religiosity which narrows itself to a point in the heart must make that heart's softening and contrition the essential factor of its new birth; but it must at the same time recollect that it has to do with the heart of a spirit, that the spirit is the appointed authority over the heart, and that it can only have such authority so far as it is itself born again. This new birth of the spirit out of natural ignorance and natural error takes place through instruction and through that faith in objective truth and substance which is due to the witness of the spirit. This new birth of the spirit is besides ipso facto a new birth of the heart out of that vanity of the one-sided intellect (on which it sets so much) and its discoveries that finite is different from infinite, that philosophy must either be polytheism, or, in acuter minds, pantheism, &c. It is, in short, a new birth out of the wretched discoveries on the strength of which pious humility holds its head so high against philosophy and theological science. If religiosity persists in clinging to its unexpanded and therefore unintelligent intensity, then it can be sensible only of the contrast which divides this narrow and narrowing form from the intelligent expansion of doctrine as such, religious not less than philosophical.'
After an appreciative quotation from Franz von Baader, and noting his reference to the theosophy of Böhme, as a work of the past from which the present generation might learn the speculative interpretation of Christian doctrines, he reverts to the position that the only mode in which thought will admit a reconciliation with religious doctrines, is when these doctrines have learned to 'assume their worthiest phase—the phase of the notion, of necessity, which binds, and thus also makes free everything, fact no less than thought.' But it is not from Böhme or his kindred that we are likely to get the example of a philosophy equal to the highest theme—to the comprehension of divine things. 'If old things are to be revived—an old phase, that is; for the burden of the theme is ever young—the phase of the Idea such as Plato and, still better, as Aristotle conceived it, is far more deserving of being recalled—and for the further reason that the disclosure of it, by assimilating it into our system of ideas, is, ipso facto, not merely an interpretation of it, but a progress of the science itself. But to interpret such forms of the Idea by no means lies so much on the surface as to get hold of Gnostic and Cabbalistic phantasmagorias; and to develope Plato and Aristotle is by no means the sinecure that it is to note or to hint at echoes of the Idea in the medievalists.'
The third edition of the Encyclopaedia, which appeared in 1830, consists of pp. lviii, 600—a slight additional increase. The increase is in the Logic, eight pages; in the Philosophy of Nature, twenty-three pages; and in the Philosophy of Spirit, thirty-four pages. The concrete topics, in short, gain most.
The preface begins by alluding to several criticisms on his philosophy—'which for the most part have shown little vocation for the business'—and to his discussion of them in the Jahrbücher of 1829 (Vermischte Schriften, ii. 149). There is also a paragraph devoted to the quarrel originated by the attack in Hengstenberg's Evangelical Journal on the rationalism of certain professors at Halle (notably Gesenius and Wegscheider)—(an attack based on the evidence of students' note-books), and by the protest of students and professors against the insinuations. 'It seemed a little while ago,' says Hegel (p. xli), 'as if there was an initiation, in a scientific spirit and on a wider range, of a more serious inquiry, from the region of theology and even of religiosity, touching God, divine things, and reason. But the very beginning of the movement checked these hopes; the issue turned on personalities, and neither the pretensions of the accusing pietists nor the pretensions of the free reason they accused, rose to the real subject, still less to a sense that the subject could only be discussed on philosophic soil. This personal attack, on the basis of very special externalities of religion, displayed the monstrous assumption of seeking to decide by arbitrary decree as to the Christianity of individuals, and to stamp them accordingly with the seal of temporal and eternal reprobation. Dante, in virtue of the enthusiasm of divine poesy, has dared to handle the keys of Peter, and to condemn by name to the perdition of hell many—already deceased however—of his contemporaries, even Popes and Emperors. A modern philosophy has been made the subject of the infamous charge that in it human individuals usurp the rank of God; but such a fictitious charge—reached by a false logic—pales before the actual assumption of behaving like judges of the world, prejudging the Christianity of individuals, and announcing their utter reprobation. The Shibboleth of this absolute authority is the name of the Lord Christ, and the assertion that the Lord dwells in the hearts of these judges.' But the assertion is ill supported by the fruits they exhibit—the monstrous insolence with which they reprobate and condemn.
But the evangelicals are not alone to blame for the bald and undeveloped nature of their religious life; the same want of free and living growth in religion characterises their opponents. 'By their formal, abstract, nerveless reasoning, the rationalists have emptied religion of all power and substance, no less than the pietists by the reduction of all faith to the Shibboleth of Lord! Lord! One is no whit better than the other: and when they meet in conflict there is no material on which they could come into contact, no common ground, and no possibility of carrying on an inquiry which would lead to knowledge and truth. "Liberal" theology on its side has not got beyond the formalism of appeals to liberty of conscience, liberty of thought, liberty of teaching, to reason itself and to science. Such liberty no doubt describes the infinite right of the spirit, and the second special condition of truth, supplementary to the first, faith. But the rationalists steer clear of the material point: they do not tell us the reasonable principles and laws involved in a free and genuine conscience, nor the import and teaching of free faith and free thought; they do not get beyond a bare negative formalism and the liberty to embody their liberty at their fancy and pleasure—whereby in the end it matters not how it is embodied. There is a further reason for their failure to reach a solid doctrine. The Christian community must be, and ought always to be, unified by the tie of a doctrinal idea, a confession of faith; but the generalities and abstractions of the stale, not living, waters of rationalism forbid the specificality of an inherently definite and fully developed body of Christian doctrine. Their opponents, again, proud of the name Lord! Lord! frankly and openly disdain carrying out the faith into the fulness of spirit, reality, and truth.'
In ordinary moods of mind there is a long way from logic to religion. But almost every page of what Hegel has called Logic is witness to the belief in their ultimate identity. It was no new principle of later years for him. He had written in post-student days to his friend Schelling: 'Reason and freedom remain our watch-word, and our point of union the invisible church[14].' His parting token of faith with another youthful comrade, the poet Hölderlin, had been 'God's kingdom[15].'