which however is contained the totality of the form as the system of terms describing its content. This content is the system of Logic. All that is at this stage left as form for the idea is the Method of this content,--the specific consciousness of the value and currency of the 'moments' in its development.
* * * * * To speak of the absolute idea may suggest the conception that we are at length reaching the right thing and the sum of the whole matter.
It is certainly possible to indulge in a vast amount of senseless declamation about the idea absolute. But its true content is only the whole system of which we have been hitherto studying the development.
It may also be said in this strain that the absolute idea is the universal, but the universal not merely as an abstract form to which the particular content is a stranger, but as the absolute form, into which all the categories, the whole fullness of the content it has given being to, have retired. The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion, he cannot but imagine them to be something outside of which lies the whole of life and the whole of the world. The same may be said to be the case with human life as a whole and the occurrences with which it is fraught. All work is directed only to the aim or end; and when it is attained, people are surprised to find nothing else but just the very thing which they had wished for. The interest lies in the whole movement. When a man traces up the steps of his life, the end may appear to him very restricted: but in it the whole _decursus vitae_ is comprehended. So, too, the content of the absolute idea is the whole breadth of ground which has passed under our view up to this point. Last of all comes the discovery that the whole evolution is what constitutes the content and the interest. It is indeed the prerogative of the philosopher to see that everything, which, taken apart, is narrow and restricted, receives its value by its connexion with the whole, and by forming an organic element of the idea. Thus it is that we have had the content already, and what we have now is the knowledge that the content is the living development of the idea. This simple retrospect is contained in the _form_ of the idea. Each of the stages hitherto reviewed is an image of the absolute, but at first in a limited mode, and thus it is forced onwards to the whole, the evolution of which is what we termed Method.
238.] The several steps or stages of the Speculative Method are, first of all, (a) the Beginning, which is Being or Immediacy: self-subsistent, for the simple reason that it is the beginning. But looked at from the speculative idea, Being is its self-specialising act, which as the absolute negativity or movement of the notion makes a judgment and puts itself as its own negative. Being, which to the beginning as beginning seems mere abstract affirmation, is thus rather negation, dependency, derivation, and pre-supposition. But it is the notion, of which Being is the negation: and the notion is completely self-identical in its otherness, and is the certainty of itself. Being therefore is the notion implicit, before it has been explicitly put as a notion. This Being therefore, as the still unspecified notion,--a notion that is only implicitly or 'immediately' specified--is equally describable as the Universal.
When it means immediate being, the beginning is taken from sensation and perception--the initial stage in the analytical method of finite cognition. When it means universality, it is the beginning of the synthetic method. But since the Logical Idea is as much a universal as it is in being--since it is pre-supposed by the notion as much as it itself immediately _is,_ its beginning is a synthetical as well as an analytical beginning.
* * * * * Philosophical method is analytical as well as synthetical, not indeed in the sense of a bare juxtaposition or mere alternating employment of these two methods of finite cognition, but rather in such a way that it holds them merged in itself. In every one of its movements therefore it displays an attitude at once analytical and synthetical.
Philosophical thought proceeds analytically, in so far as it only accepts its object, the Idea, and while allowing it its own way, is only, as it were, an on-looker at its movement and development. To this extent philosophising is wholly passive. Philosophic thought however is equally synthetic, and evinces itself to be the action of the notion itself. To that end, however, there is required an effort to keep back the incessant impertinence of our own fancies and private opinions.
239.] (b) The Advance renders explicit the _judgment_ implicit in the Idea. The immediate universal, as the notion implicit, is the dialectical force which on its own part deposes its immediacy and universality to the level of a mere stage or 'moment.' Thus is put the negative of the beginning, its specific character: it supposes a correlative, a relation of different terms,--the stage of Reflection.
Seeing that the immanent dialectic only states explicitly what was involved in the immediate notion, this advance is Analytical; but seeing that in this notion this distinction was not yet stated,--it is equally Synthetical.
* * * * * In the advance of the idea, the beginning exhibits itself as what it is implicitly. It is seen to be mediated and derivative, and neither to have proper being nor proper immediacy. It is only for the consciousness which is itself immediate, that Nature forms the commencement or immediacy, and that Spirit appears as what is mediated by Nature. The truth is that Nature is the creation of Spirit, and it is Spirit itself which gives itself a pre-supposition in Nature.
240.] The abstract form of the advance is, in Being, an other and transition into an other; in Essence showing or reflection in the opposite; in Notion, the distinction of individual from universality, which continues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, what is distinguished from it.
241.] In the second sphere the primarily implicit notion has come as far as shining, and thus is already the idea in germ. The development of this sphere becomes a regress into the first, just as the development of the first is a transition into the second.
It is only by means of this double movement, that the difference first gets its due, when each of the two members distinguished, observed on its own part, completes itself to the totality, and in this way works out its unity with the other. It is only by both merging their one-sidedness on their own part, that their unity is kept from becoming one-sided.
242.] The second sphere developes the relation of the differents to what it primarily is,--to the contradiction in its own nature. That contradiction which is seen in the infinite progress is resolved (c) into the end or terminus, where the differenced is explicitly stated as what it is in notion. The end is the negative of the first, and as the identity with that, is the negativity of itself. It is consequently the unity in which both of these Firsts, the immediate and the real First, are made constituent stages in thought, merged, and at the same time preserved in the unity. The notion, which from its implicitness thus comes by means of its differentiation and the merging of that differentiation to close with itself, is the realised notion,--the notion which contains the relativity or dependence of its special features in its own independence. It is the idea which, as absolutely first (in the method), regards this terminus as merely the disappearance of the show or semblance, which made the beginning appear immediate, and made itself seem a result. It is the knowledge that the idea is the one systematic whole.
243.] It thus appears that the method is not an extraneous form, but the soul and notion of the content, from which it is only distinguished, so far as the dynamic elements of the notion even on their own part come in their own specific character to appear as the totality of the notion. This specific character, or the content, leads itself with the form back to the idea; and thus the idea is presented as a systematic totality which is only one idea, of which the several elements are each implicitly the idea, whilst they equally by the dialectic of the notion produce the simple independence of the idea.
The science in this manner concludes by apprehending the notion of itself, as of the pure idea for which the idea is.
244.] The Idea which is independent or for itself, when viewed on the point of this its unity with itself, is Perception or Intuition, and the percipient Idea is Nature. But as intuition the idea is, through an external 'reflection,' invested with the one-sided characteristic of immediacy, or of negation. Enjoying however an absolute liberty, the Idea does not merely pass over into life, or as finite cognition allow life to show in it: in its own absolute truth it resolves to let the 'moment' of its particularity, or of the first characterisation and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature.
* * * * * We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with which we began.
This return to the beginning is also an advance. We began with Being, abstract Being: where we now are we also have the Idea as Being: but this Idea which has Being is Nature.
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS CHAPTER I.
and reproduces an original, but submerged, thought (cf. Hegel's _Werke_, vi. p. xv): to be distinguished from Reflexion (cf.
_Werke_, i. 174).
P. 7, § 3. On the blending of universal (thought) and individual (sensation) in what is called perception (Wahrnehmen) see _Encycl._ §§ 420, 421.
P. 8, § 3. Cf. Fichte, _Werke_, ii. 454: 'Hence for the common sort of hearers and readers the uncommon intelligibility of certain sermons and lectures and writings, not one word of which is intelligible to the man who thinks for himself,--because there is really no intelligence in them. The old woman who frequents the church--for whom by the way I cherish all possible respect--finds a sermon very intelligible and very edifying which contains lots of texts and verses of hymns she knows by rote and can repeat. In the same way readers, who fancy themselves far superior to her, find a work very instructive and clear which tells them what they already know, and proofs very stringent which demonstrate what they already believe. The pleasure the reader takes in the writer is a concealed pleasure in himself. What a great man! (he says to himself); it is as if I heard or read myself.
P. 10, § 6. Cf. Hegel, _Werke>_ viii. 17: 'In this conviction (that what is reasonable is actual, and what is actual is reasonable) stands every plain man, as well as the philosopher; and from it philosophy starts in the study both of the spiritual and of the natural universe----The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognise the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of reason (which is synonymous with the Idea), when in its actuality it simultaneously enters external existence, emerges with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases, and envelopes its kernel with the motley rind with which consciousness is earliest at home,--a rind which the notion must penetrate before it can find the inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But the infinite variety of circumstance which is formed in this externality by the light of the essence shining in it,--all this infinite material, with its regulations,--is not the object of philosophy...To comprehend _what is,_ is the task of philosophy: for _what is_ is reason. As regards the individual, each, whatever happens, is a son of his time. So too philosophy is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that a philosophy can overleap its present world as that an individual can overleap his time. If his theory really goes beyond actualities, if it constructs an ideal, a world as it ought to be, then such existence as it has is only in his intentions--a yielding element in which anything you please may be fancy-formed.' Cf. Schelling, _Werke,_ iv.
390: 'There are very many things, actions, &c. of which we may judge, after vulgar semblance, that they are unreasonable. All the same we presuppose and assume that everything which is or which happens is reasonable, and that reason is, in one word, the prime matter and the real of all being.'
P. 12, § 7. Cf. Fichte, _Werke,_ ii. 333: 'Man has nothing at all but experience; and everything he comes to be comes to only through experience, through life itself. All his thinking, be it loose or scientific, common or transcendental, starts from experience and has experience ultimately in view. Nothing has unconditional value and significance but life; all other thinking, conception, knowledge has value only in so far as in some way or other it refers to the fact of life, starts from it, and has in view a subsequent return to it.'
P. 13, § 7 (note). Thomas Thomson (1773-1852), Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow, distinguished in the early history of chemistry and allied sciences. The _Annals of Philosophy_ appeared from 1813 to 1826.--_The art of preserving the hair_ was published (anonymous) at London in 1825.
P. 14, § 7 (note). The speech from the throne was read on Feb. 3rd, 1825.
The shipowners' dinner was on Feb. 12. The _Times_ of Feb. 14 gives as Canning's the words 'the just and wise maxims of sound not spurious philosophy.'
P. 17, § 10. 'Scholasticus' is the guileless 'freshman,' hero of certain Facetiae (attributed to the Pythagorean philosopher Hierocles) which used occasionally to form part of the early Greek reading of schoolboys.
K. L. Reinhold (1754-1823) presents in his intellectual history a picture of the development of ideas in his age. At the beginning his _Attempt of a new theory of the human representative faculty_ (1789) is typical of the tendency to give a subjective psychological interpretation of Kant's theory of knowledge But the period of Reinhold's teaching here referred to is that of _Contributions to an easier survey of the condition of philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century_ (Beiträge, 1801): the tendency which Hegel, who reviewed him in the _Critical Journal of Philosophy_ (_Werke,_ i. 267 _seqq._), calls 'philosophising before philosophy.'--A similar spirit is operative in Krug's proposal (in his _Fundamental Philosophy,_ 1803) to start with what he called 'philosophical problematics.'
the tendency to confound the defect of a particular piece of reasoning with the incompetence of human reason altogether.
P. 22, § 13. The dictum that the historical succession of philosophical systems is identical with their logical sequence should not be taken too literally and mechanically. Its essential point is simply the theorem that history is not a casual series of unconnected events--the deeds of particular persons, but is an evolution under laws and uniformities:--it is this theorem applied to philosophies.
But difficulties may easily arise in the application of the general principle: _e.g._ it will be seen (by comparison of § 86 and § 104) that though Pythagoras precedes Parmenides, and number is a stepping-stone to pure thought still pure Being comes at an earlier stage than Quantity.
P. 23, § 13. There is a silent reference to what Reinhold professed to make the subject of his teaching at Jena--'philosophy without surnames' (ohne Beinamen),--_i.e._ not a 'critical' philosophy;--or to the 'Philosophy which may not bear any man's name of Beck. As Hegel says, _Werke,_ xvi. 138, 'The solicitude and apprehension against being one-sided is only too often part of the weakness which is capable only of many-sided illogical superficiality.'
P. 27, § 16. By 'anthropology' is meant not the anthropology of modern writers, who use the name to denote mainly the history of human culture in its more rudimentary stages, and as exhibited chiefly in material products, but the study of those aspects of psychology which are most closely allied with physiological conditions.
With the power of the intuition of genius to give almost all that logical synthesis can produce, cf. _Werke,_ I. 331: 'In this way a grand and pure intuition is able, in the purely architectonic features of its picture, though the inter-connection of necessity and the mastery of form does not come forward into visibility, to give expression to the genuine ethical organism--like a building which silently exhibits the spirit of its author in the several features of its mass, without the image of that spirit being set forth anywhere in one united shape. In such a delineation, made by help of notions, it is only a want of technical skill which prevents reason from raising the principle it embraces and pervades into the "ideal" form and becoming aware of it as the Idea. If the intuition only remains true to itself and does not let analytic intellect disconcert it, it will probably--just because it cannot dispense with notions for its expression--behave awkwardly in dealing with them, assume distorted shapes in its passage through consciousness, and be (to the speculative eye) both incoherent and contradictory: but the arrangement of the parts and of the self-modifying characters betray the inward spirit of reason, however invisible. And so far as this appearance of that spirit is regarded as a product and a result, it will as product completely harmonise with the Idea.' Probably Goethe is before Hegel's mind.
P. 28, § 17. The triplicity in unity of thought--its forthgoing 'procession,' (cf. p. 362 _seqq._) and its return, which is yet an abiding in itself (Bei:sich:sein) was first explicitly schematised by Proclus, the consummator of Neo-Platonism. In his _Institutio Theologica_ he lays it down that the essential character of all spiritual reality (aσώματον) is to be πρὸς ἑαυτὸ ἐπιστρεπτικόν, _e.g._ to return upon itself, or to be a unity in and with difference,--to be an original and spontaneous principle of movement (c. 15): or, as in C 31: πὰν τὸ πρoῒὸν ἀπό τινος κατ' οὐσίαν ἐπιστρέφεται πρὸς ἐκεῖνο ἀφ' οὗ πρόεισιν. Its movement, therefore, is circular κυκλικὴν ἔχει τὴν ἐνέργειαν (c. 33): for everything must at the same time remain altogether in the cause, and proceed from it, and revert to it (c. 35).
Such an essence is self-subsistent (αὐθυπόςτατον),--is at once agent (πάραγον) and patient (παραγόμενον). This 'mysticism' (of a trinity which is also unity of motion which is also rest), with its πρόοδoς, ἐπιστroφή, and μονή, is taken up, in his own way, by Scotus Erigena (De Divisione Naturae) as _processio_ (or _divisio_), _reditus,_ and _adunatio._ From God 'proceed'--by an _eternal_ creation--the creatures, who however are not outside the divine nature; and to God all things created _eternally_ return.
CHAPTER II.
come--perhaps influenced by the example of Jacobi--to the conclusion that 'Truth is a word which, in philosophical discourse, deserves to be used only of the certainty of the Eternal and non-empirical Actual.'
(And so Spinoza, ii. 310.)
P. 32. 'The young have been flattered'--_e.g._ by Fichte, _Werke,_ i.
435: 'Hence this science too promises itself few proselytes amongst men already formed: if it can hope for any at all, it hopes for them rather from the young world, whose inborn force has not yet been ruined in the laxity of the age.'
P. 38, § 20. What Kant actually said (_Kritik der reinen Vernunft: Elementarlehre,_ § 16), was 'The _I think_ must be able to accompany all my conceptions' (Vorstellungen). Here, as often elsewhere. Hegel seems to quote from memory,--with some shortcoming from absolute accuracy.
From this point Fichte's idealism takes its spring, _e.g. Werke,_ ii.
505: 'The ground of all certainty,--of all consciousness of fact in life, and of all demonstrative knowledge in science, is this: _In_ and _with_ the single thing we affirm (setzen) (and whatever we affirm is necessarily something single) we also affirm the absolute totality as such...Only in so far as we have so affirmed anything, is it certain for us,--from the single unit we have comprehended under it away to every single thing in the infinity we shall comprehend under it,--from the one individual who has comprehended it, to all individuals who will comprehend it...Without this absolute "positing" of the absolute totality in the individual, we cannot (to employ a phrase of Jacobi's) come to bed and board.'
'Obviously therefore you enunciate not the judgment of a single observation, but you embrace and "posit" the sheer infinitude and totality of all possible observations:--an infinity which is not at all compounded out of finites, but out of which, conversely, the finites themselves issue, and of which finite things are the mere always-uncompleted analysis. This--how shall I call it, procedure, positing, or whatever you prefer--this "manifestation" of the absolute totality, I call intellectual vision (Anschauung). I regard it--just because I cannot in any way get beyond intelligence--as immanent in intelligence, and name it so far egoity (Ichheit),--not objectivity and not subjectivity, but the absolute identity of the two:--an egoity, however, which it was to be hoped would not be taken to mean individuality. There lies in it, what you' (he is addressing Reinhold, who here follows Bardili)' call a repetibility _ad infinitum._ For me, therefore, the essence of the finite is composed of an immediate vision of the absolutely timeless infinite (with an absolute identity of subjectivity and objectivity), and of a separation of the two latter, and an analysis (continued _ad infinitum_) of the infinite. In that analysis consists the temporal life: and the starting-point of this temporal life is the separation into subject and object, which through the intellectual vision (intuition) are still both held together.'
§ 140 (_Werke,_ viii. 191): 'Finally the mere conviction which holds something to be right is given out as what decides the morality of an action. The good we will to do not yet having any content, the principle of conviction adds the information that the subsumption of an action under the category of good is purely a personal matter. If this be so, the very pretence of an ethical objectivity is utterly lost. A doctrine like this is closely allied with the self-styled philosophy which denies that the true is cognoscible: because for the Will, truth--_i.e._ the rationality of the Will--lies in the moral laws.
Giving out, as such a system does, that the cognition of the true is an empty vanity, far transcending the range of science (which recognises only appearance), it must, in the matter of conduct, also find its principle in the apparent; whereby moral distinctions are reduced to the peculiar theory of life held by the individual and to his private conviction. At first no doubt the degradation into which philosophy has thus sunk seems an affair of supreme indifference, a mere incident in the futilities of the scholastic world: but the view necessarily makes itself a home in ethics, which is an essential part of philosophy; and it is then in the actual world that the world learns the true meaning of such theories.
'As the view spreads that subjective conviction, and it alone, decides the morality of an action, it follows that the charge of hypocrisy, once so frequent, is now rarely heard. You can only qualify wickedness as hypocrisy on the assumption that certain actions are inherently and actually misdeeds, vices, and crimes, and that the defaulter necessarily is aware of them as such, because he is aware of and recognises the principles and outward acts of piety and honesty, even in the pretence to which he misapplies them. In other words, it was generally assumed as regards immorality that it is a duty to know the good, and to be aware of its distinction from the bad. In any case it was an absolute injunction which forbade the commission of vicious and criminal acts, and which insisted on such actions being imputed to the agent, so far as he was a man, not a beast. But if the good heart, the good intention, the subjective conviction, are set forth as the true sources of moral worth, then there is no longer any hypocrisy, or immorality at all: for whatever one does, he can always justify it by the reflection on it of good aims and motives; and by the influence of that conviction it is good. There is no longer anything _inherently_ vicious or criminal: instead of the frank and free, hardened and unperturbed sinner, comes the person whose mind is completely justified by intention and conviction. My good intention in my act, and my conviction of its goodness, make it good. We speak of judging and estimating an _act._ But on this principle it is only the aim and conviction of the agent--his faith--by which he ought to be judged.
And that not in the sense in which Christ requires faith in objective truth, so that for one who has a bad faith, _e.g._ a conviction bad in its content, the judgment to be pronounced must be bad, _e.g._ conformable to this bad content. But faith here means only fidelity to conviction. Has the man (we ask) in acting kept true to his conviction?
It is formal subjective conviction on which alone the obligation of duty is made to depend.
'A principle like this, where conviction is expressly made something subjective, cannot but suggest the thought of possible error, with the further implied presupposition of an absolutely-existing law. But the law is no agent: it is only the actual human being who acts; and in the aforesaid principle the only question in estimating human actions is how far he has received the law into his conviction. If, therefore, it is not the actions which are to be estimated and generally measured by that law, it is impossible to see what the law is for, and what end it can serve. Such a law is degraded to a mere outside letter, in fact an empty word; which is only made a law, _i.e._ invested with obligatory force, by my conviction.
'Such a law may claim its authority from God or the State: it may even have the authority of tens of centuries during which it served as the bond that gave men, with all their deed and destiny, subsistence and coherence. And these are authorities in which are condensed the convictions of countless individuals. And for me to set against that the authority of my single conviction--for as my subjective conviction its sole validity is authority--that self-conceit, monstrous as it at first seems, is, in virtue of the principle that subjective conviction is to be the rule, pronounced to be no self-conceit at all.
'Even if reason and conscience--which shallow science and bad sophistry can never altogether expel--admit, with a noble illogicality, that error is possible, still by describing crime and wickedness as only an error we minimise the fault. For to err is human:--Who has not been mistaken on one point or another, whether he had fresh or pickled cabbage for dinner, and about innumerable things more or less important? But the difference of more or less importance disappears if everything turns on the subjectivity of conviction and on persistency in it. But the said noble illogicality which admits error to be possible, when it comes round to say that a wrong conviction is only an error, really only falls into a further illogicality--the illogicality of dishonesty. One time conviction is made the basis of morality and of man's supreme value, and is thus pronounced the supreme and holy.
Another time all we have to do with is an error: my conviction is something trivial and casual, strictly speaking something outside, that may turn out this way or that. And, really, my being convinced _is_ something supremely trivial? if I cannot _know_ truth, it is indifferent how I think; and all that is left to my thinking is that empty good,--a mere abstraction of generalisation.
'It follows further that, on this principle of justification by conviction, logic requires me, in dealing with the way others act against my action, to admit that, so far as they in their belief and conviction hold my actions to be crimes, they are quite in the right.
On such logic not merely do I gain nothing, I am even deposed from the post of liberty and honour into a situation of slavery and dishonour.
Justice--which in the abstract is mine as well as theirs--I feel only as a foreign subjective conviction, and in the execution of justice I fancy myself to be only treated by an external force.'
P. 44, § 23. Selbstdenken--to think and not merely to read or listen is the recurrent cry of Fichte (_e.g. Werke,_ ii. 329). According to the editors of _Werke,_ xv. 582, the reference here is to Schleiermacher and to his Monologues. Really it is to the Romantic principle in general, especially F. Schlegel.
(Wissenschaftslehre), besides (for the reason above noted that it has no auxiliary, no vehicle of the intuition at all, except the intuition itself), elevates the human mind higher than any geometry can It gives the mind not only attentiveness, dexterity, stability, but at the same time absolute independence, forcing it to be alone with itself, and to live and manage by itself. Compared with it, every other mental operation is infinitely easy; and to one who has been exercised in it nothing comes hard. Besides as it prosecutes all objects of human lore to the centre it accustoms the eye to hit the proper point at first glance' in everything presented to it, and to prosecute it undeviatingly For such a practical philosopher therefore there can be nothing dark, complicated, and confused, if only he is acquainted with the object of discussion. It comes always easiest to him to construct everything afresh and _ab initio,_ because he carries within him plans for every scientific edifice. He finds his way easily, therefore, in any complicated structure. Add to this the security and confidence of glance which he has acquired in philosophy--the guide which conducts in all _raisonnement_ and the imperturbability with which his eye meets every divergence from the accustomed path and every paradox. It would be quite different with all human concerns, if men could only resolve to believe their eyes. At present they inquire at their neighbours and at antiquity what they really see, and by this distrust in themselves errors are eternalised. Against this distrust the possessor of philosophy is for ever protected. In a word, by philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands.'
reference is to some verses of Schelling in _Werke,_ iv. 546 (first published in _Zeitschrift für speculative Physik,_ 1800). We have no reason to stand in awe of the world, he says, which is a tame and quiet beast-- Sterft zwar ein Riesengeist darinnen, Ist aber versteinert mit allen Sinnen; In todten und lebendigen Dingen Thut nach Bewustseyn mächtig ringen.
In human shape he at length awakes from the iron sleep, from the long dream: but as man he feels himself a stranger and exile; he would fain return to great Nature; he fears what surrounds him and imagines spectres, not knowing he might say of Nature to himself-- Ich bin der Gott, den sie im Busen hegt, Der Geist, der sich in allem bewegt: Vom frühsten Ringen dunkler Kräfte Bis zum Erguss der ersten Lebenssäfte,...herauf zu des Gedankens Jugendkraft Wodurch Natur verjüngt sich wieder schafft, Ist eine kraft, ein Wechselspiel und Weben, Ein Trieb und Drang nach immer höherm Leben.
Cf. Oken, _Naturphilosophie,_§ 2913: 'A natural body is a thought of the primal act, turned rigid and crystallised,--a word of God.'
Phrases of like import are not infrequent in Schelling's works (about 1800-1), _e.g. Werke,_1. Abth. iii. 341: 'The dead and unconscious products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts to "reflect" itself; so-called dead nature is in all cases an immature intelligence' (unreife Intelligenz), or iv. 77, 'Nature itself is an intelligence, as it were, turned to rigidity (erstarrte) with all its sensations and perceptions'; and ii. 226 (_Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur,_ 1797), 'Hence nature is only intelligence turned into the rigidity of being; its qualities are sensations extinguished to being; bodies are its perceptions, so to speak, killed.'
A close approach to the phrase quoted is found in the words of another of the 'Romantic' philosophers: 'Nature is a petrified magic-city' (versteinerte Zauberstadt). (Novalis, _Schriften,_ ii. 149.)
'My absolute Ego is obviously not the individual: that explanation comes from injured snobs and peevish philosophers, seeking to impute to me the disgraceful doctrine of practical egoism. But the _individual must be deduced from the absolute ego._ To that task my philosophy will proceed in the "Natural Law." A finite being--it may be deductively shown--can only think itself as a sense-being in a sphere of sense-beings,--on one part of which (that which has no power of origination) it has causality, while with the other part (to which it attributes a subjectivity like its own) it stands in reciprocal relations. In such circumstances it is called an individual, and the conditions of individuality are called rights. As surely as it affirms its individuality, so surely does it affirm such a sphere the two conceptions indeed are convertible. So long as we look upon ourselves as individuals--and we always so regard ourselves in life, though not in philosophy and abstract imagination--we stand on what I call the "practical" point of view in our reflections (while to the standpoint of the absolute ego I give the name "speculative"). From the former point of view there exists for us a world independent of us,--a world we can only modify; whilst the pure ego (which even on this altitude does not altogether disappear from us,) is put outside us and called God. How else could we get the properties we ascribe to God and deny to ourselves, did we not after all find them within us, and only refuse them to ourselves in a certain respect, i.e., as individuals? When this "practical" point of view predominates in our reflections, realism