Коллектив авторов - The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07

Thus, as Hegel puts his fundamental idea, "the truth is the whole." Neither things nor categories, neither histories nor religions, neither sciences nor arts, express or exhaust by themselves the whole essence of the universe. The essence of the universe is the life of the totality of all things, not their sum . As the life of man is not the sum of his bodily and mental functions, the whole man being present in each and all of these, so must the universe be conceived as omnipresent in each of its parts and expressions. This is the significance of Hegel's conception of the universe as an organism. The World-Spirit—Hegel's God—constitutes, thinks, lives, wills, and is all in unity. The evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of God himself.

The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary ramifications. These ramifications themselves are conceived as constituting complete wholes, such as logic, nature, mind, society, history, art, religion, philosophy, so that the universe in its onward march through these is represented as a Whole of Wholes— ein Kreis von Kreisen . In Hegel's complete philosophy each of these special spheres finds its proper place and elaborate treatment.

Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical formula—these and other problems should arouse an interest in Hegel's writings. The following selections may give some glimpse of their spirit.

In conclusion, some bare suggestions must suffice to indicate the reason for Hegel's great influence. Hegel has partly, if not wholly, created the modern historical spirit. Reality for him, as even this inadequate sketch has shown, is not static, but is essentially a process. Thus until the history of a thing is known, the thing is not understood at all. It is the becoming and not the being of the world that constitutes its reality. And thus in emphasizing the fact that everything has a "past," the insight into which alone reveals its significant meaning, Hegel has given metaphysical expression and impetus to the awakening modern historical sense. His idea of evolution also epitomizes the spirit of the nineteenth century with its search everywhere for geneses and transformations—in religion, philology, geology, biology. Closely connected with the predominance of the historical in Hegel's philosophy is its explicit critique of individualism and particularism. According to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The particular—independent and unrelated—is an abstraction. The isolation of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly in Hegel's theory of the State, has left its impress upon political, social, and economic theories of his century. Not less significant is the glorification of reason of which Hegel's complete philosophy is an expression. Reason never spoke with so much self-confidence and authority as it did in Hegel. To the clear vision of reason the universe presents no dark or mysterious corners, nay, the very negations and contradictions in it are marks of its inherent rationality. But Hegel's rationalism is not of the ordinary shallow kind. Reason he himself distinguishes from understanding. The latter is analytical, its function is to abstract, to define, to compile, to classify. Reason, on the other hand, is synthetic, constructive, inventive. Apart from Hegel's special use of the term, it is this synthetic and creative and imaginative quality pervading his whole philosophy which has deepened men's insight into history, religion, and art, and which has wielded its general influence on the philosophic and literary constellation of the nineteenth century.

The subject of this course of lectures is the Philosophical History of the World. And by this must be understood, not a collection of general observations respecting it, suggested by the study of its records and proposed to be illustrated by its facts, but universal history itself. To gain a clear idea, at the outset, of the nature of our task, it seems necessary to begin with an examination of the other methods of treating history. The various methods may be ranged under three heads:

I. Original History.

II. Reflective History.

III. Philosophical History.

I. Of the first kind, the mention of one or two distinguished names will furnish a definite type. To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides, and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had before their eyes and whose spirit they shared. They simply transferred what was passing in the world around them to the realm of re-presentative intellect; an external phenomenon was thus translated into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the material supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for the conceptive faculty.

These original historians did, it is true, find statements and narratives of other men ready to hand; one person cannot be an eye-and-ear witness of everything. But, merely as an ingredient, they make use only of such aids as the poet does of that heritage of an already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary, we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what they were about. The domain of reality—actually seen, or capable of being so-affords a very different basis in point of firmness from that fugitive and shadowy element in which were engendered those legends and poetic dreams whose historical prestige vanishes as soon as nations have attained a mature individuality.

Such original historians, then, change the events, the deeds, and the states of society with which they are conversant, into an object for the conceptive faculty; the narratives they leave us cannot, therefore, be very comprehensive in their range. Herodotus, Thucydides, Guicciardini, may be taken as fair samples of the class in this respect. What is present and living in their environment is their proper material. The influences that have formed the writer are identical with those which have molded the events that constitute the matter of his story. The author's spirit and that of the actions he narrates are one and the same. He describes scenes in which he himself has been an actor, or at any rate an interested spectator. It is short periods of time, individual shapes of persons and occurrences, single, unreflected traits, of which he makes his picture. And his aim is nothing more than the presentation to posterity of an image of events as clear as that which he himself possessed in virtue of personal observation, or lifelike descriptions. Reflections are none of his business, for he lives in the spirit of his subject; he has not attained an elevation above it. If, as in Cæsar's case, he belongs to the exalted rank of generals or statesmen, it is the prosecution of his own aims that constitutes the history.