The Logic of Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

combinations and strained eccentricities—the mien of earnestness only covering self-deception and fraud upon the public. On the other side, again, we saw shallowness and unintelligence assume the character of a scepticism wise in its own eyes and of a criticism modest in its claims for reason, enhancing their vanity and conceit in proportion as their ideas grew more vacuous. For a space of time these two intellectual tendencies have befooled German earnestness, have tired out its profound craving for philosophy, and have been succeeded by an indifference and even a contempt for philosophic science, till at length a self-styled modesty has the audacity to let its voice be heard in controversies touching the deepest philosophical problems, and to deny philosophy its right to that cognition by reason, the form of which was what formerly was called demonstration.'

      'The first of these phenomena may be in part explained as the youthful exuberance of the new age which has risen in the realm of science no less than in the world of politics. If this exuberance greeted with rapture the dawn of the intellectual renascence, and without profounder labour at once set about enjoying the Idea and revelling for a while in the hopes and prospects which it offered, one can more readily forgive its excesses; because it is sound at heart, and the surface vapours which it had suffused around its solid worth must spontaneously clear off. But the other spectacle is more repulsive; because it betrays exhaustion and impotence, and tries to conceal them under a hectoring conceit which acts the censor over the philosophical intellects of all the centuries, mistaking them, but most of all mistaking itself.

      'So much the more gratifying is another spectacle yet-to be noted; the interest in philosophy and the earnest love of higher knowledge which in the presence of both tendencies has kept itself single-hearted and without affectation. Occasionally this interest may have taken too much to the language of intuition and feeling; yet its appearance proves the existence of that inward and deeper-reaching impulse of reasonable intelligence which alone gives man his dignity—proves it above all, because that standpoint can only be gained as a result of philosophical consciousness; so that what it seems to disdain is at least admitted and recognised as a condition. To this interest in ascertaining the truth I dedicate this attempt to supply an introduction and a contribution towards its satisfaction.'

The second edition appeared in 1827. Since the autumn of 1818 Hegel had been professor at Berlin: and the manuscript was sent thence (from August 1826 onwards) to Heidelberg, where Daub, his friend—himself a master in philosophical theology—attended to the revision of the proofs. 'To the Introduction,' writes Hegel[9], 'I have given perhaps too great an amplitude: but it, above all, would have cost me time and trouble to bring within narrower compass. Tied down and distracted by lectures, and sometimes here in Berlin by other things too, I have—without a general survey—allowed myself so large a swing that the work has grown upon me, and there was a danger of its turning into a book. I have gone through it several times. The treatment of the attitudes (of thought) which I have distinguished in it was to meet an interest of the day. The rest I have sought to make more definite, and so far as may be clearer; but the main fault is not mended—to do which would require me to limit the detail more, and on the other hand make the whole more surveyable, so that the contents should better answer the title of an Encyclopaedia.' Again, in Dec. 1826, he writes[10]: 'In the Naturphilosophie I have made essential changes, but could not help here and there going too far into a detail which is hardly in keeping with the tone of the whole. The second half of the Geistesphilosophie I shall have to modify entirely.' In May 1827, Hegel offers his explanation of delay in the preface, which, like the concluding paragraphs, touches largely on contemporary theology. By August of that year the book was finished, and Hegel off to Paris for a holiday.

      In the second edition, which substantially fixed the form of the Encyclopaedia, the pages amount to xlii, 534—nearly twice as many as the first, which, however, as Professor Caird remarks, 'has a compactness, a brief energy and conclusiveness of expression, which he never surpassed.' The Logic now occupies pp. 1214, Philosophy of Nature 215–354, and Philosophy of Spirit from 355–534. The second part therefore has gained least; and in the third part the chief single expansions occur towards the close and deal with the relations of philosophy, art, and religion in the State; viz. § 563 (which in the third edition is transposed to § 552), and § 573 (where two pages are enlarged to 18). In the first part, or the Logic, the main increase and alteration falls within the introductory chapters, where 96 pages take the place of 30. The Vorbegriff (preliminary notion) of the first edition had contained the distinction of the three logical 'moments' (see p. 142), with a few remarks on the methods, first, of metaphysic, and then (after a brief section on empiricism), of the 'Critical Philosophy through which philosophy has reached its close.' Instead of this the second edition deals at length, under this head, with the three 'attitudes (or positions) of thought to objectivity;' where, besides a more lengthy criticism of the Critical philosophy, there is a discussion of the doctrines of Jacobi and other Intuitivists.

The Preface, like much else in this second edition, is an assertion of the right and the duty of philosophy to treat independently of the things of God, and an emphatic declaration that the result of scientific investigation of the truth is, not the subversion of the faith, but 'the restoration of that sum of absolute doctrine which thought at first would have put behind and beneath itself—a restoration of it however in the most characteristic and the freest element of the mind.' Any opposition that may be raised against philosophy on religious grounds proceeds, according to Hegel, from a religion which has abandoned its true basis and entrenched itself in formulae and categories that pervert its real nature. 'Yet,' he adds (p. vii), 'especially where religious subjects are under discussion, philosophy is expressly set aside, as if in that way all mischief were banished and security against error and illusion attained;' … 'as if philosophy—the mischief thus kept at a distance—were anything but the investigation of Truth, but with a full sense of the nature and value of the intellectual links which give unity and form to all fact whatever.' 'Lessing,' he continues (p. xvi), 'said in his time that people treat Spinoza like a dead dog[11]. It cannot be said that in recent times Spinozism and speculative philosophy in general have been better treated.'

The time was one of feverish unrest and unwholesome irritability. Ever since the so-called Carlsbad decrees of 1819 all the agencies of the higher literature and education had been subjected to an inquisitorial supervision which everywhere surmised political insubordination and religious heresy. A petty provincialism pervaded what was then still the small Residenz-Stadt Berlin; and the King, Frederick William III, cherished to the full that paternal conception of his position which has not been unusual in the royal house of Prussia. Champions of orthodoxy warned him that Hegelianism was unchristian, if not even anti-christian. Franz von Baader, the Bavarian religious philosopher (who had spent some months at Berlin during the winter of 1823–4, studying the religious and philosophical teaching of the universities in connexion with the revolutionary doctrines which he saw fermenting throughout Europe), addressed the king in a communication which described the prevalent Protestant theology as infidel in its very source, and as tending directly to annihilate the foundations of the faith. Hegel himself had to remind the censor of heresy that 'all speculative philosophy on religion maybe carried to atheism: all depends on who carries it; the peculiar piety of our times and the malevolence of demagogues will not let us want carriers[12].' His own theology was suspected both by the Rationalists and by the Evangelicals. He writes to his wife (in 1827) that he had looked at the university buildings in Louvain and Liège with the feeling that they might one day afford him a resting-place 'when the parsons in Berlin make the Kupfergraben completely intolerable for him[13].' 'The Roman Curia,' he adds, 'would be a more honourable opponent than the miserable cabals of a miserable boiling of parsons in Berlin.' Hence the tone in which the preface proceeds (p. xviii).

      'Religion is the kind and mode of consciousness in which the Truth appeals to all men, to men of every degree of education; but the scientific ascertainment of the Truth is a special kind of this consciousness, involving a labour which not all but