its simphcity, its self-identity, that it appears steady, fixed, and permanent. But this self-identity is Uke- wise negativity; hence that fixed and stable exist- ence carries the process of its own dissolution within itself. The determinateness appears at first to be so solely through its relation to something else; and its process seems imposed and forced upon it externally. But its having its own otherness within itself, and the fact of its being a self-initiated process — these are implied in the very simplicity of thought itself. For Preface 55 this is self-moving thought, thought that distinguishes, is inherent inwardness, the pure notion. Thus, then, it is the very nature of understanding to be a process, and being a process it is Rationahty.
In the nature of existence as thus described — to be its own notion and being in one — consists logical necessity in general. This alone is what is rational, the rhythm of the organic whole: it is as much know- ledge of content as that content is notion and essential nature. In other words, this alone is the sphere and element of speculative thought. The concrete shape of the content is resolved by its own inherent process into a simple determinate quahty. Thereby it is raised to logical form, and its being and essence coincide; its concrete existence is merely this process that takes place, and is eo ipso logical existence. It is therefore needless to apply a formal scheme to the concrete content in an external fashion; the content is in its very nature a transition into a formal shape, which, however, ceases to be formahsm of an external kind, because the form is the indwelling process of the con- crete content itself.
This nature of scientific method, which consists partly in being inseparable from the content, and partly in determining the rhythm of its movement by its own agency, finds, as we mentioned before, its peculiar systematic expression in speculative philo- sophy. What is here stated describes in effect the essential principle; but cannot stand for more at this stage than an assertion or assurance by way of antici- pation. The truth it contains is not to be found in this exposition, which is in part historical in character. And just for that reason, too, it is not in the least 66 Phenomenology of Mind refuted if anyone assures us on the contrary that this is not so, that the process instead is here so and so, if ideas we are all used to, being truths accepted or settled and famihar to everyone, are brought to mind and recoimted, or, again, if something new is served up and guaranteed as coming from the inner sanc- tuaries of inspired intuition.
Such a view is bomid to meet with opposition. The first instinctive reaction on the part of knowing, when offered somethmg that was unfamihar, is usually to resist it. It seeks by that means to save freedom and native insight, to secure its own inherent authority against ahen avithority — for that is the way anything apprehended for the first time appears. This attitude is adopted, too, in order to do away with the sem- blance of a kind of disgrace which would he in the fact that something has had to be learnt. In like manner, again, when the unfamihar or unknown is received with applause, the reaction is in the same way an exaltation of freedom and native authority. It consists in something analogous to ultra-revolution- ary declamation and action.
Hence the important thing for the student of science is to make himself undergo the strenuous toil of conceptual I'eflection, of thinking in the form of the notion. This demands concentrated attention on the notion as such, on simple and ultimate determinations like being-in- itself, being-for-itself, self-identity, and so on; for these are elemental, pure, self-determined functions of a kind we might call souls, were it not that their con- ceptual nature denotes something higher than that term contains. The interruption by conceptual thought of the habit of always thinking in figurative ideas Preface 57 Preface 57 {Vorstellungen) is as annoying and troublesome to this way of thinking as to that process of formal intelligence which in its reasoning rambles about with no real thoughts to reason with. The former, the habit, may be called materialised thinking, a fortuitous mental state, one that is absorbed in what is material, and hence finds it very distasteful at once to hft its self clear of this matter and be confined to itself alone. The latter, the process of raisonnement, is, on the other hand, detachment from all content, and conceited superiority to it. What is wanted here is the effort and struggle to give up this kind of freedom, and instead of being a merely arbitrary principle directing the content anyhow, this freedom should sink into and pervade the content, should get it directed and controlled by its own proper nature, i.e. by the self as its own self, and should see this process taking place. We must abstain from interrupting the immanent rhythm of the move- ment of conceptual thought; we must refrain from arbitrarily interfering with it, and introducing ideas and reflections that have been obtained elsewhere. Restraint of this sort is itself an essential condition of attending to and getting at the real nature of the notion.
There are the two aspects in the case of that ratio- cinative procedure which mark its contrast from con- ceptual thinking and call for further notice. Raisonne- ment, in the first place, adopts a negative attitude to- wards the content apprehended; knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothingness. To see what the content is not is merely a negative process; it is a dead halt, which does not of itself go beyond itself, and proceed to a new content; it has to get hold of 58 Phenomenology of Mind something else from somewhere or other in order to have once more a content. It is reflection upon and into the empty ego, the vanity of its own knowledge. Conceit of this kind brings out not only that this con- tent is vain and empty, but also that to see this is itself fatuity too: for it is negation with no perception of the positive element within it. In that this reflec- tion does not even have its own negativity as its content, it is not inside actual fact at all, but for ever away outside it. On that account it imagines that by as- serting mere emptiness it is going much farther than insight that embraces and reveals a wealth of content. On the other hand, in the case of conceptual thinking, as was above indicated, the negative aspect falls within the content itself, and is the positive substance of that content, as well by being its inherent character and moving principle as by being the entirety of what these are. Looked at as a result, it is determinate specific negation, the negative which is the outcome of this process, and consequently is a positive content as well.
In view of the fact that ratiocinative thinking has a content, whether of images or thoughts or a mixture of both, there is another side to its process which makes conceptual comprehension difficult for it. The pecuHar nature of this aspect is closely connected with the essential meaning of the idea (ISea) above described, in fact, expresses the idea in the way this appears as the process of thinking apprehension. For just as ratiocinative thinking in its negative reference, which we have been describing, is nothing but the self into which the content returns; in the same way, on the other hand, in its positive cognitive process the self Preface 69 is an ideally presented subject to wliicli the content is related as an accident and predicate. This sub- ject constitutes the basis to which the content is attached and on which the process moves to and fro. Conceptual thinking goes on in quite a different way. Since the concept or notion is the very self of the object, manifesting itself as the development of the object, it is not a quiescent subject, passively sup- porting accidents: it is a self-determining active concept which takes up its determinations and makes them its own. In the course of this process that inert passive subject really disappears; it enters into the different constituents and pervades the content; in- stead of remaining in inert antithesis to determinateness of content, it constitutes, in fact, that very specificity, i.e. the content as differentiated along with the pro- cess of bringing this about. Thus the sohd basis, which ratiocination found in an inert subject, is shaken to its foundations, and the only object is this very movement of the subject. The subject supplying the concrete filling to its own content ceases to be something transcending this content, and cannot have further predicates or accidents. Conversely, again, the scattered diversity of the content is brought under the control of the self, and so bound together; the content is not a universal that can be detached from the subject, and adapted to several indifferently. Consequently the content is in truth no longer predicate of the subject; it is the very substance, is the inmost reality, and the very principle of what is being considered. Ideational thinking {vmstellen), since its nature consists in dealing with accidents or predicates, and in exercising the right to transcend them because they are nothing more 60 Phenomenology of Mind than predicates and accidents — this way of thinking is checked in its course, since that which has in the pro- position the form of a predicate is itself the substance of the statement. It is met by a counter-thrust, as we may say. Starting from the subject, as if this were a permanent base on which to proceed, it discovers, by the predicate being in reahty the substance, that the subject has passed into the predicate, and has thereby ceased to be subject: and since in this way what seems to be predicate has become the entire mass of the content, whole and complete, thinking cannot wander and ramble about at will, but is restrained and con- trolled by this weight of content.
Usually the subject is first set down as the fixed and objective self; from this fixed position the neces- sary process passes on to the multiphcity of deter- minations or predicates. Here the knowing ego takes the place of that subject and is the function of knit- ting or combining the predicates one with another, and is the subject holding them fast. But since the former subject enters into the determinate constitu- ents themselves, and is their very life, the subject in the second case — viz. the knowing subject — finds that the former, — which it is supposed to be done with and which it wants to transcend, in order to return into itself, — is still there in the predicate: and instead of being able to be the determining agency in the process of resolving the predicate — reflectively deciding whether this or that predicate should be attached to the former subject — it has really to deal with the self of the con- tent, is not allowed to be something on its own account {fur sich), but has to exist along with this content.
What has been said can be expressed in a formal Preface 61 manner by saying that the nature of judgment or the proposition in general, which involves the distinction of subject and predicate, is subverted and destroyed by the speculative judgment; and the identical pro- position, which the former becomes [by uniting subject and predicate], imphes the rejection and repudiation of the above relation between subject and predicate. This conflict between the form of a proposition in general and the unity of the notion which destroys that form, is similar to what we find between metre and accent in the case of rhythm. Rhythm is the result of what hovers between and unites both. So in the case of the speculative or philosophical judg- ment; the identity of subject and predicate is not intended to destroy their distinction, as expressed in propositional form; their unity is to appear as a harmony of the elements. The form of the judgment is the way the specific sense appears, or is made mani- fest, it is the accent which differentiates the content of its meaning: that the predicate expresses the substance, and the subject itself falls within the uni- versal, is the unity wherein that accent dies aAvay.
To explain what has been said by examples let us take the proposition God is Being. The predicate is " being ": it has siibstantive significance, and thus absorbs the meaning of the subject within it. Being is meant to be here not predicate but the essential nature. Thereby, God seems to cease to be what he was when the proposition was put forward, viz. a fixed subject. Thinking [i.e. ordinary reflection], instead of getting any farther with the transition from sub- ject to predicate, in reality finds its activity checked through the loss of the subject, and it is thrown back 62 Phenomenology of Mine on the thought of the subject because it misses this subject. Or again, since the predicate has itself been pronounced to be a subject, to be the being, to be the essential reality, which exhausts the nature of the sub- ject, thinking finds the subject directly present in the predicate too: and now, instead of having, in the predicate, gone into itself, and preserved the freedom characteristic of ratiocination, it is absorbed in the content all the while, or, at any rate, is required to be so.
Similarly, when it is said: " the real is the universal," the real, qua subject, passes away in its predicate. The universal is not only meant to have the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition stated that the real is universal: the universal is meant to express the essential nature of the real. Thinking therefore loses that fixed objective basis which it had in the subject, just as much as in the predicate it is thrown back on the subject, and therein returns not into itself but into the subject underlying the content.
This unaccustomed restraint imposed upon thought is for the most part the cause of the complaints made regarding the unintelhgibihty of philosophical writings, when otherwise the individual has in him the requisite mental cultivation for understanding them. In w^hat has been said we see the reason for the definite objection often made against them, that a good deal has to be read repeatedly before it can be understood — an accusa- tion which is meant to imply something objectionable in the extreme, and one which if granted to be sound admits of no further reply. It is obvious from the above what is the state of the case here. The philo- sophical proposition, being a proposition, calls up the Preface 63 Preface 63 accepted view of the usual relation of subject and predicate, and suggests the idea of the customary pro- cedure which takes place in knowledge. Its philo- sophical content destroys this way of proceeding and the ordinary view taken of this process. The common view discovers that the statement is intended in another sense than it is thinking of, and this correction of its opinion compels knowledge to recur to the proposition and take it now in some other sense.
There is a difficulty which might well be avoided. It consists in mixing up the methods of procedure followed by speculation and ratiocination, when what is said of the subject has at one time the significance of its conceptual principle, and at another time the meaning of its predicate or accidental quality. The one mode of thinking invalidates the other; and only that philosophical exposition can manage to become plastic in character which resolutely sets aside and has nothing to do with the ordinary way of relating the parts of a proposition.
As a matter of fact, non-speculative thinking has its rights too, which are justifiable, but are disregarded in the speculative way of stating a proposition. Abolish- ing the form of the proposition must not take place merely in an immediate manner, merely through the bare content of the proposition. On the contrary, we must give explicit expression to this cancelling process; it must be not only that internal restraining and con- fining of thought within its own substance; this turning of the conception back into itself has to be expressly brought out and stated. This process, which constitutes what formerly had to be accomphshed by proof, is the internal dialectical movement of the 64 Phenomenology of Mind proposition itself. This alone is the concrete specula- tive element, and only the exphcit expression of this is a speculative systematic exposition. Qua proposi- tion, the speculative aspect is merely the internal restriction of, thought within its own substance where the return of the essential principle into itself is not yet brought out. Hence we often find philosophical expositions referring us to the inner intuition, and thus dispensing with the systematic statement of the dialectical movement of the proposition, which is what we wanted all the while. The proposition ought to ex- press ivhat the truth is: in its essential nature the truth is subject: being so, it is merely the dialectical move- ment, this self-producing course of activity, maintaining its advance by returning back into itself. In the case of knowledge in other spheres this aspect of the arti- culated internal nature of the content is constituted by proof. When dialectic, however, has been separated from proof, the idea of philosophical demonstration as a matter of fact vanishes altogether.
On this point it may be mentioned that the dialectical process Ukewise consists of parts or elements which are propositions. The difficulty indicated seems there- fore to recur continually, and seems to be a difficulty inherent in the nature of the case. This is like what happens in the ordinary process of proving anything; the grounds it makes iise of themselves need to be based on other grounds again, and so on ad infinitum. This manner of furnishing grounds and conditions, how- ever, concerns that type of proof from which the dia- lectical movement is distinct and hence belongs to the process of external knowledge. As to what this move- ment is, its element is the bare concept; this furnishes Preface 65 a content which is through and through subject im- pUciter and per se. There is to be found, therefore, no sort of content standing in a relation, as it were, to an underlying subject, and getting its significance by being attached to this as a predicate. The proposition as it appears is a mere empty form.
Apart from the sensuously apprehended or ideally presented {vorgestellten) self, it is in the main the mere name qua name which denotes the subject pure and simple, the empty unit without any conceptual cha- racter. For this reason it would e.g. be expedient to avoid the name " God." because this word is not in its primary use a conception as well, but the special name of an underlying subject, its fixed resting-place; while, on the other hand, being or the one, singleness, sub- ject, etc., themselves directly indicate conceptions. Furthermore, if speculative truths are stated about that subject [God], even then their content is devoid of the immanent notion, because that content is merely present in the form of a passive subject, and owing to this the speculative truths easily take on the character of mere edification. From this side, too, the obstacle, arising from the habit of putting the speculative pre- dicate in the form of a proposition, instead of taking it as an inherent essential conception, is capable of being made greater or less by the mere way philoso- phical truths are put forward. Philosophical exposition, faithfully following its insight into the nature of specu- lative truth, must retain the dialectical form, and exclude everything which is not grasped conceptually and is a conception.
As in the case of the procedure of ratiocination, the study of philosophy finds obstruction, too, in the un- VOL. I.— F 66 Phenomenology of Mind reasoning conceit that builds itself on well-established truths, which the possessor considers he has no need to return upon and reconsider, but rather takes to be fundamental, and thinks he can propound as well as decide and pass sentence by means thereof. In this regard, it is especially needful to make once again a serious business of philosophy. In all spheres of science, art, skill, and handicraft it is never doubted that, in order to master them, a considerable amount of trouble must be spent in learning and in being trained. A.S regards philosophy, on the contrary, there seems still an assumption prevalent that, though every one with eyes and fingers is not on that account in a position to make shoes if he only gets leather and a last, yet everybody understands how to philosophise straight away, and pass judgment on philosophy, simply because he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason — as if he did not in the same way possess the standard for shoemaking too in his own foot. It seems as if the possession of philosophy lay just in the want of knowledge and study, as if philosophy left off where the latter began. It is commonly held to be a formal kind of knowledge devoid of all substantial content.
There is a general failure to perceive that, in the case of any knowledge and any science, what is taken for truth, even as regards content, can only deserve the name of " truth " when philosophy has had a hand in its production. Let the other sciences try as much as they hke to get along by ratiocination or raisonnement without philosophy, they are unable to keep alive without it, or to have any spiritual significance and truth in them.
As regards philosophy in its proper and genuine Preface 67 sense, we find put forward without any hesitation, as an entirely sufficient equivalent for the long course of mental discipHne — for that profound and fruitful process through which the human spirit attains to knowledge — the direct revelation of the divine and the healthy common sense of mankind, imtroubled and undisciplined by any other knowledge or by proper philosophical reflection. These are held to be a good substitute for real philosophy, much in the way as chicory is lauded as a substitute for coffee. It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and barbarity of mind, with neither grace nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected state- ment of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and toleration, and even the inspiration of genius. This last used once upon a time, as every one knows, to be all the rage in the case of poetry, as it is now in philosophy. Instead of poetry, however, the efforts of this form of inspiration, when it had any sense at all, resulted in the production of jejune prose, or, if it got beyond that, it produced raving nonsense. In the same way here in the case of philosophy; philosophising by the hght of nature, which thinks itself too good for conceptual thinking, and, because of the want of it, takes itself to have direct intuitive ideas and poetical thoughts, — such philosophising trades in arbitrary combinations of an imagination merely disorganised through thinking — ficti- tious creations that are neither fish nor flesh, neither poetry nor philosophy.
On the other hand again, when instinctive philosophy follows the more secure course prescribed by healthy 68 Phenomenology of Mind common sense, it supplies, at tlie very best, a rhetorical melange of commonplace truths. When it is charged with the triviahty of what it offers, it assures us, in reply, that the fullness and richness of its meaning lie deep down in its own heart, and that others must feel this too, since with such phrases as the " heart's natural innocence," " purity of conscience," and so on, it supposes it has expressed things that are ultimate and final, to which no one can take exception, and about which nothing further can be required. But the very problem in hand was just that the best must not be left behind hidden away in secret, but be brought out of the depths and set forth in the light of day. It could quite well from the start have spared itself this trouble of bringing forward ultimate and final truths of that sort; they were long since to be found, say, in the Catechism, in popular proverbs, etc. It is an easy matter to take such truths in their indefinite and crooked inaccurate form, and in many cases to point out that the mind convinced of them is conscious of the very opposite truths. When it struggles to get itself out of the mental embarrassment thereby produced, it will tumble into further confusion, and possibly burst out