ILAYM ON HEGEL. * Wrrn the instinctive dread of fire that
is popularly ascribed to the burnt child, will he who has at all familiarized himself with the works of the Epigoni in German philosophy shrink from a new book on Hegel. How often on the appearance of some new " Logi]c," or " Metaphysik," or " Encyclopredic," with a table of contents indicating the structure of the Hegelian skeleton, has he flattered himself that some lover of his species has inherited or invented a clue that will guide the intellectual traveller through the darkest of labyrinths, and now flings it forth for the benefit of any one whose thirst for knowledge will stimulate him to quaff down some five hundred pages of German print ; and how often has he been deceived ! If Hegel is dark, dark also are his inter- preters—indeed, it frequently happens, as in Sheridan's Critic, that the interpreter is the harder of the two. Moreover, the vic- tim of metaphysical passion—a passion more rare but quite as potent as the infatuation of love or the taste for dram-drinking- may flatter himself as he turns over the pages bequeathed by the master's own hand, that he is listening to an oracle, whose mean- ing transcends the power of lucid expression. With all his ob- scurity, and the unconvincing nature of his reasonings, Hegel constantly throws out flashes that prove him to be endowed with no ordinary acuteness—to be as good a judge of everyday things as the veriest Baconian, who never lifts his feet from "terra firma" ; and if the reader is blessed with ordinary modesty, he will argue by analogy, that when so much that he understands is obviously sound, it may fairly be assumed that some soundness lies behind the impenetrable veil that cloaks the full meaning of the philosopher. But no such flattering unction comes over the soul of him who reads the work of a Hegelian propagandist. The old joke about the unintelligi- bility of metaphysics both to the teacher and the taught recurs painfully to his mind, and he not only doubts the ability of the dis- ciple to conduct him to the sanctum of the master, but has shrewd suspicions that the disciple himself was never truly initiated. In this age of bookmaking, we can readily conceive the possibility of a man achieving a very specious compendium of algebra with- out being master of more than the symbols of the science, by a felicitous use of paste and scissors ; and we suspect something very similar to such a proceeding has taken place in the case of many proposed attempts to familiarize the world with the mysteries of the Hegelian philosophy. Like the "De Augmentis " of Bacon, Hegel's system, whether represented as a whole or by any one of its departments, offers a broad chart, that at once strikes the eye, and is as easy to be apprehended in the letter as it is hard to be grasped in the spirit. Words in general are styled "wise men's counters" by Thomas Hobbes, and certainly the most com- plete set of verbal counters ever employed by the wise, the cun- ning, or the shallow, has been gathered from the phraseology of Hegel, and put about with the least possible regard to the intrin- sic value of the circulating medium. Never was there so free a traffic with intellectual wampum and cowrie-shells as among the members of the Hegelian school.
Why, after being deceived over and over again, we opened a book having on its titlepage so unpromising an inscription as "Hegel and his Times," coupled with the name of an author who, though this is not his first appearance, can scarcely be regarded as familiar—why we committed this rash act, we cannot say. It is sufficient to affirm that we found something so much better than we had a right to expect—something so different from the old Raymond-Lullyism into which the school of Hegel had de- generated—that we turned to the beginning and read the book steadily through. It is certainly not without its dark places but, taken as a whole, it is perhaps the most amusing and instructive book ever written on the subject of German philosophy. Herr Haym (praised be he therefor !) does not attempt to teach the system of Hegel in the form left by the master, and those who wish for a pocket-book of Hegelian counters to make a rattling noise in transcendental salons had better go to some other mint than is here presented. It is purely from an historical point of view that Herr Haym regards the philosophy that about a quarter of a century since held such despotic sway in Prussia. Hegelism is considered in reference to the times in which it was produced, and those by which, after its first production, it was frequently modified ; till the point is clearly established, that where practi- cal application was required never was theory less absolute, never was doctrine more blown about by every wind of circumstance, than the system which gloried in the name of "absolute idealism."
It is, however, a singular fact, that Hegel is less indebted to the other philosophers of his country than is commonly supposed. We can deduce Fichte from Kant as readily as we can -deduce Berkeley from Locke ; and the earlier works of Schelling belong in thought, form, and phraseology, to the school of 'Fichte. But • Jlegel foul seine Zeit, von R. Hayti'. Berlin, Gertner ; London, D. Nutt. there is no such intimate connexion between any of these and. Hegel. He looks boldly on an objective world as if a critical philosophy had never existed ; the arguments of Kant against super-mundane flights are ignored rather than answered. The mind, round which, according to Kant, the sensible world revolved as the planets round the sun in the Copernican system, deve- loped itself without any very violent forcing into the absolute " Ich " (I or " Ego ") of Fichte ; and this, sublimed to such a de- gree that it lost its pronominsl tail, became, by less gentle means, the "absolute" of Schelling. Hegel reached his " absolute " too, but it was not by this road. Little cared he for the struggle be- tween " Ego " and " Non-ego " that was regarded with admiring awe by the philosophical mob of Germany. Still less to his taste were " phenomena " and " noumena," and synthesis a priori. His heart was with the ancient Greeks, in whom he saw a general harmony of life that seemed like a realized ideal ; his head found a more congenial logic in the " Parmenides " of Plato than in the teaching of his own days. Hegel and his " times " never seem more independent of each other than when, a plodding and some- what heavy student, he begins to fag out his theory of an absolute mind, that projects itself into a visible world, and then reverts to itself as religion, art, politics, philosophy. The broad theory, which never changed, was the creation of his youth ; and when he joined Schelling, and in the eyes of the world was a mere cham- pion of Schellingism, the relation between the two philosophers was not that of master and disciple. Journeying by totally dif- ferent roads, two travellers had found themselves at the same point, and for a very short time consented to remain together.
The whole German literature of the classical period is distin- guished by its thoroughly impractical character. In early youth some of the writers had indeed their little ebullitions of juvenile wrath, and the effects of the revolution in the neighbouring country may be discovered in a few abstract declamations against tyrannical princes, profligate ministers, and oppressive fash- ions of society ; but even these ultimately settled into an cesthe- tical or philosophical quietism, and, perceiving little to interest them in the actualities of the surrounding world, contented themselves with fashioning a world after their own inclinations. The poets plunged into Hellenism or Romanticism, and found pleasant company among Dryads and Oreades, knights and minuesingers ; the philosophical successors of Kant (never to be confounded with Kant himself) constructed systems of the universe, which no external convulsion could shock. Schelling could start from his "absolute," which was neither subject nor object, and make it yield him a pleasant progeny ; and Hegel, with his "absolute mind" or "idea," could sufficiently parti- cipate in his views to become a temporary ally. Both, as natives of the South, could sneer at the more sober and prosaic thought of the North, which had moreover brought itself into disrepute by the hostility of Nicolai and his clique to Goethe in his early days. Prussia might be the land of cold common sense, but Swabia was the region for speculative genius. Prussia repre- sented Protestantism, with its ramifications of pietism, critical philosophy, and Deistical enlightenment. On the other hand, Catholicism was domiciled in the South ; and even Hegel, after- wards its most declared enemy, could regard the elder faith with complacency, as a fine compact organization, complete in all its parts, and approximating close to the realization of an ideal.
But the alliance of Hegel and Schelling was of no long dura- tion. Schelling and his school adopted the tone of sublime dreamers, and for the due perception of the "absolute," re- quired in the neophyte the possession of a sort of sixth sense—a special intuition. Hegel, on the contrary, loved logic, and set up thought above every kind of inspiration or sentiment. Gradually he lost his respect for a school in which the recognition of the identity of all things in the absolute was looked upon as consum- mate wisdom, and satirically declared that there was equal pro- fundity in the proverbial aphorism that all cats (cows, say the Germans) are grey in the dark. It should be observed that Sehelling's Absolute was a mere caput mortuum of abstrac- tion, obtained by stripping the Fichtian Ego of its subjective character ; but that the Absolute Mind of Hegel was in itself con- crete, though composed of many links of abstraction; the connexion of these links with each other, or rather their growth out of each other, being the theme of his " Logik." The categories, such as "quantity' "quality," and the like, according to which, as thinking individuals, we are compelled to class our ordinary no- tions, all have their place in that Absolute Mind, which is the origin of all things. The common-sense people of this island may look upon the system of Hegel as thought run mad ; but it is based on thought nevertheless, and has nothing in common with any sort of mysticism. That most singular work "Die Phamo- menologie des Geistes,"—in which Hegel, describing the phases of mind, assumed the boldest analogy between psychology and his- tory, and even comprised the terrorism of Robespierre and St. Just among the stages of mental development,—was nevertheless a de- cided farewell to the intuitive speculators, for it proposed to show how the common conditions of human thought, consistently canied out, would lead to an absolute philosophy. Herr Haym inform us that the " Pluenomenologie " is now read scarcely more than the " Messiah " of Klopstock ; and this no doubt arises from the diffi- culty of fitting it to the system, as propounded in later forms. Hard as it is, it is written in a style intended to be popular, ,and its divisions do not correspond to those classifications which now appear indispensable to Hegelism. Indeed, though professedly an introduction to philosophy, the " Pluenomenologie " is rather an exposition of the philosophy itself, after a fashion subsequently abandoned.
Another difference between Hegel and his contemporaries was the great interest he took in practical life. Early in his career he had edited a newspaper of the ordinary kind ; no political details of the day were too insignificant to be deemed by him unworthy of notice; and hence throughout his life he had always one foot in a grand ideal world, the other in a very petty real world, in which the functions of bureaux and the regulations of police occupied a conspicuous place. The most superficial student of his works must have observed that he constantly employs two opposite man- ners of appealing to his readers or his audience. The propositions that compose the substance of any one of his dissertations, and the arguments on which they are based, are repulsive and unconvin- cing to a degree that is ihe more provoking from the affectation of satisfactory proof that pervades the whole discourse. In a word, we have the dryness of algebraical formula) without any approach to mathematical demonstration. But besides these fleshless bones of the Hegelian skeleton, there is always an "introduction" and a running series of illustrative addenda. These show a breadth of knowledge, a command of satire, a clearness of view, a practical sense, that scarcely seem compatible with the mind that constructed the system. While evolving a universe from a few abstract no- tions 'Hegel may be taken for a dreamer, whose visions are not the less wild because they lack every quality that can charm the sense : when an adversary is to be attacked, he employ's the most intelligible invectives, and lashes the victim with a ridicule that the most general public can appreciate. The coexistence of two opposite tendencies in IfegePs mind is one great cause—as Herr Haym very successfully shows—of the difficulty that every unsophisticated person must feel in grasping his system. Now he seems to teach us that the world of ideas is the only reality; and the student has a right to suppose, that when he has mastered the " Logik," in which this world is regu- larly built up before his eyes, he is in the land of imperishable truth, and may fairly dismiss from his thoughts the ignes fatui which glimmer round the sacred territory and are mistaken for actualities by men of ordinary stamp : but presently he is dis- turbed in his sweet repose by discovering that Hegel has an affec- tion for these realities of the mob. Though his " Logik " is com- plete, the intellectual traveller must proceed to a "science of 'nature" ; the leap which he takes to pass from the former to the latter being the most terrific ever known in philosophical gym- nastics. Still more will he stare when he finds that the absolute idea of Hegelism is realized in the Prussian Government as esta- blished at the time of the restoration of the Bourbons.
The expression " time-server " does not occur throughout Herr Haym's book, but the fact that Hegel, rigid in the construction of his system, was able and willing to apply it for any purpose that might be useful according to existing circumstances, is clearly made out by the whole tenonr of the work. He could be an Hellenic Republican, a Napoleonist of Bavaria, a Prussian Absolutist— a freethinker or a rigid upholder of orthodoxy—and still the system preserved not only its identity but its applicability through every change, the authority of the system-maker increasing as years advanced. In the philosophical tyranny which he founded Hegel has had no successor ; the sort of despotism is no longer in consonance with the spirit of the age; but Herr Haym's book is 'well worth general perusal, if only for the sake of the picture it exhibits of action and reaction between mind, and, circumstance in the instance of a most remarkable individual.
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