The Logic of Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
was the characteristic right of the mind to know the truth. If this be so, it also implies that everything we know both of outward and inward nature, in one word, the objective world, is in its own self the same as it is in thought, and that to think is to bring out the truth of our object, be it what it may. The business of philosophy is only to bring into explicit consciousness what the world in all ages has believed about thought. Philosophy therefore advances nothing new; and our present discussion has led us to a conclusion which agrees with the natural belief of mankind.
23.] (d) The real nature of the object is brought to light in reflection; but it is no less true that this exertion of thought is my act. If this be so, the real nature is a product of my mind, in its character of thinking subject—generated by me in my simple universality, self-collected and removed from extraneous influences—in one word, in my Freedom.
Think for yourself, is a phrase which people often use as if it had some special significance. The fact is, no man can think for another, any more than he can eat or drink for him: and the expression is a pleonasm. To think is in fact ipso facto to be free, for thought as the action of the universal is an abstract relating of self to self, where, being at home with ourselves, and as regards our subjectivity, utterly blank, our consciousness is, in the matter of its contents, only in the fact and its characteristics. If this be admitted, and if we apply the term humility or modesty to an attitude where our subjectivity is not allowed to interfere by act or quality, it is easy to appreciate the question touching the humility or modesty and pride of philosophy. For in point of contents, thought is only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts; and in point of form it is no private or particular state or act of the subject, but rather that attitude of consciousness where the abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which it is identical with all individuals. In these circumstances philosophy may be acquitted of the charge of pride. And when Aristotle summons the mind to rise to the dignity of that attitude, the dignity he seeks is won by letting slip all our individual opinions and prejudices, and submitting to the sway of the fact.
24.] With these explanations and qualifications, thoughts may be termed Objective Thoughts—among which are also to be included the forms which are more especially discussed in the common logic, where they are usually treated as forms of conscious thought only. Logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics, the science of things set and held in thoughts,—thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things.
An exposition of the relation in which such forms as notion, judgment, and syllogism stand to others, such as causality, is a matter for the science itself. But this much is evident beforehand. If thought tries to form a notion of things, this notion (as well as its proximate phases, the judgment and syllogism) cannot be composed of articles and relations which are alien and irrelevant to the things. Reflection, it was said above, conducts to the universal of things: which universal is itself one of the constituent factors of a notion. To say that Reason or Understanding is in the world, is equivalent in its import to the phrase 'Objective Thought.' The latter phrase however has the inconvenience that thought is usually confined to express what belongs to the mind or consciousness only, while objective is a term applied, at least primarily, only to the non-mental.
(1) To speak of thought or objective thought as the heart [and soul of the world, may seem to be ascribing consciousness to the things of nature. We feel a certain repugnance against making thought the inward function of things, especially as we speak of thought as marking the divergence of man from nature. It would be necessary, therefore, if we use the term thought at all, to speak of nature as the system of unconscious thought, or, to use Schelling's expression, a petrified intelligence. And in order to prevent misconception, thought-form or thought-type should be substituted for the ambiguous term thought.
From what has been said the principles of logic are to be sought in a system of thought-types or fundamental categories, in which the opposition between subjective and objective, in its usual sense, vanishes. The signification thus attached to thought and its characteristic forms may be illustrated by the ancient saying that 'νοῧς governs the world,' or by our own phrase that 'Reason is in the world: which means that Reason is the soul of the world it inhabits, its immanent principle, its most proper and inward nature, its universal. Another illustration is offered by the circumstance that in speaking of some definite animal we say it is (an) animal. Now, the animal, quâ animal, cannot be shown; nothing can be pointed out excepting some special animal. Animal, quâ animal, does not exist: it is merely the universal nature of the individual animals, whilst each existing animal is a more concretely, defined and particularised thing. But to be an animal—the law of kind which is the universal in this case—is the property of the particular animal, and constitutes its definite essence. Take away from the dog its animality, and it becomes impossible to say what it is. All things have a permanent inward nature, as well as an outward existence. They live and die, arise and pass away; but their essential and universal part is the kind; and this means much more than something common to them all.
If thought is the constitutive substance of external things, it is also the universal substance of what is spiritual. In all human perception thought is present; so too thought is the universal in all the acts of conception and recollection; in short, in every mental activity, in willing, wishing and the like. All these faculties are only further, specialisations of thought. When it is presented in this light, thought has a different part to play from what it has if we speak of a faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties, such as perception, conception and will, with which it stands on the same level. When it is seen, to be the true universal of all that nature and mind contain, it extends its scope far beyond all these, and becomes the basis of everything. From this view of thought, in its objective meaning as [greek: nous], we may next pass to consider the subjective sense of the term. We say first, Man is a being that thinks; but we also say at the same time, Man is a being that perceives and wills. Man is a thinker, and is universal: but he is a thinker only because he feels his own universality. The animal too is by implication universal, but the universal is not consciously felt by it to be universal: it feels only the individual. The animal sees a singular object, for instance, its food, or a man. For the animal all this never goes beyond an individual thing. Similarly, sensation has to do with nothing but singulars, such as this pain or this sweet taste. Nature does not bring its "νοῦς" into consciousness: it is man who first makes himself double so as to be a universal for a universal. This first happens when man knows that he is 'I.' By the term 'I' I mean myself, a single and altogether determinate person. And yet I really utter nothing peculiar to myself, for every one else is an 'I' or 'Ego,' and when I call myself 'I,' though I indubitably mean the single person myself, I express a thorough universal. 'I,' therefore, is mere being-for-self, in which everything peculiar or marked is renounced and buried out of sight; it is as it were the ultimate and unanalysable point of consciousness We may say 'I' I and thought are the same, or, more definitely, 'I' is thought as a thinker. What I have in my consciousness, is for me. 'I' is the vacuum or receptacle for anything and everything: for which everything is and which stores up everything in itself. Every man is a whole world of conceptions, that lie buried in the night of the 'Ego.' It follows that the 'Ego' is the universal in which we leave aside all that is particular, and in which at the same time all the particulars have a latent existence. In other words, it is not a mere universality and nothing more, but the universality which includes in it everything. Commonly we use the word 'I' without attaching much importance to it, nor is it an object of study except to philosophical analysis. In the 'Ego,' we have thought before us in its utter purity. While the brute cannot say 'I,' man can, because it is his nature to think. Now in the 'Ego' there are a variety of contents, derived both from within and from, without, and according to the nature of these contents our state may be described as perception, or conception, or reminiscence. But in all of them the 'I' is found: or in them all thought is present. Man, therefore, is always thinking, even in his perceptions: if he observes anything, he always observes it as a universal, fixes on a single point which he places in relief, thus withdrawing his attention from other points, and takes it as abstract and universal, even if the universality be only in form.
In the case of our ordinary conceptions, two things may happen. Either the contents are moulded by thought,