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Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
3rd Book: Philosophy of Mind/Spirit
Author: G.W.F. Hegel (3rd Edition, Berlin 1830)
Translated by William Wallace
This HTML file does not contain any of the Notes ("Zusätze") of the "Freundesausgabe"
("Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten."),
Berlin 1832-1845, only the main corpus, the text of the 1830,
the last edition done by Hegel himself
- SUB-SECTION A. ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SOUL
- SUB-SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS
- SUB-SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY, MIND
Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
INTRODUCTION
§377
The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just
because it is the most 'concrete' of sciences. The significance of that
'absolute' commandment, Know thyself - whether we look at it in itself
or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance - is not
to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities,
character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge
it commands means that of man's genuine reality - of what is
essentially and ultimately true and real - of mind as the true and
essential being. Equally little is it the purport of mental philosophy
to teach what is called knowledge of men - the knowledge whose aim is
to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of other men, and
lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart. Information
of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unless on the assumption
that we know the universal - man as man, and, that always must be, as
mind. And for another, being only engaged with casual, insignificant,
and untrue aspects of mental life, it fails to reach the underlying
essence of them all - the mind itself.
§378
Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational
Psychology, has been already alluded to in the Introduction to the
Logic as an abstract and generalizing metaphysic of the subject.
Empirical (or inductive) psychology, on the other hand, deals with the
'concrete' mind: and, after the revival of the sciences, when
observation and experience had been made the distinctive methods for
the study of concrete reality, such psychology was worked on the same
lines as other sciences. In this way it came about that the
metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and so
prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the
same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common- sense
metaphysics with its analysis into forces, various activities, etc.,
and rejected any attempt at a 'speculative' treatment.
The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic. The main aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to reintroduce unity of idea and principle into the theory of mind, and so reinterpret the lesson of those Aristotelian books.
§379
Even our own sense of the mind's living unity naturally
protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties,
forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as
independent of each other. But the craving for a comprehension of the
unity is still further stimulated, as we soon come across distinctions
between mental freedom and mental determinism, antitheses between free
psychic agency and the corporeity that lies external to it, whilst we
equally note the intimate interdependence of the one upon the other. In
modern times especially the phenomena of animal magnetism have given,
even in experience, a lively and visible confirmation of the underlying
unity of soul, and of the power of its 'ideality'. Before these facts,
the rigid distinctions of practical common sense are struck with
confusion; and the necessity of a 'speculative' examination with a view
to the removal of difficulties is more directly forced upon the
student.
§380
The 'concrete' nature of mind involves for the observer the
peculiar difficulty that the several grades and special types which
develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so
many separate existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is
otherwise in external nature. There, matter and movement, for example,
have a manifestation all their own - it is the solar system; and
similarly the differentiae of sense-perception have a sort of earlier
existence in the properties of bodies, and still more independently in
the four elements. The species and grades of mental evolution, on the
contrary, lose their separate existence and become factors, states, and
features in the higher grades of development. As a consequence of this,
a lower and more abstract aspect of mind betrays the presence in it,
even to experience, of a higher grade. Under the guise of sensation,
for example, we may find the very highest mental life as its
modification or its embodiment. And so sensation, which is but a mere
form and vehicle, may to the superficial glance seem to be the proper
seat and, as it were, the source of those moral and religious
principles with which it is charged; and the moral and religious
principles thus modified may seem to call for treatment as species of
sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades of mental life are
under examination, it becomes necessary, if we desire to point to
actual cases of them in experience, to direct attention to more
advanced grades for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects
will be treated of by anticipation which properly belong to later
stages of development (e.g. in dealing with natural awaking from sleep
we speak by anticipation of consciousness, or in dealing with mental
derangement we must speak of intellect).
What Mind (or Spirit) is
§381
From our point of view mind has for its presupposition
Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason its absolute
prius. In this its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as
the 'Idea' entered on possession of itself. Here the subject and object
of the Idea are one - either is the intelligent unity, the notion. This
identity is absolute negativity -for whereas in Nature the intelligent
unity has its objectivity perfect but externalized, this
self-externalization has been nullified and the unity in that way been
made one and the same with itself. Thus at the same time it is this
identity only so far as it is a return out of nature.
§382
For this reason the essential, but formally essential,
feature of mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion's absolute negativity
or self-identity. Considered as this formal aspect, it may withdraw
itself from everything external and from its own externality, its very
existence; it can thus submit to infinite pain, the negation of its
individual immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in
this negativity and possess its own identity. All this is possible so
long as it is considered in its abstract self-contained universality.
§383
This universality is also its determinate sphere of being.
Having a being of its own, the universal is self-particularizing,
whilst it still remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of
mental being is 'manifestation'. The spirit is not some one mode or
meaning which finds utterance or externality only in a form distinct
from itself: it does not manifest or reveal something, but its very
mode and meaning is this revelation. And thus in its mere possibility
mind is at the same moment an infinite, 'absolute', actuality.
§384
Revelation, taken to mean the revelation of the abstract
Idea, is an unmediated transition to Nature which comes to be. As mind
is free, its manifestation is to set forth Nature as its world; but
because it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the
same time presupposes the world as a nature independently existing. In
the intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its
being - a being in which the mind procures the affirmation and truth of
its freedom.
The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science: and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The word 'Mind' (Spirit) - and some glimpse of its meaning - was found at an early period: and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality; and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme and the soul of philosophy.
Subdivision
§385
The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:
(1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the ideal totality of the Idea - i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is to be self-contained and free. This is Mind Subjective.
(2) In the form of reality: realized, i.e. in a world produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of necessity. This is Mind Objective.
(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and of mind as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself, mind in its absolute truth. This is Mind Absolute.
§386
The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the
finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea, and finitude here means the
disproportion between the concept and the reality - but with the
qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind's own light - a show
or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself,
in order, by its removal, actually to realize and become conscious of
freedom as its very being, i.e. to be fully manifested. The several
steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of
being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger, and through
which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of
that liberation is given the identification of the three stages -
finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own
creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form
of this truth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness
of it.
A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern, to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in fact such a modesty of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed and absolute, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the finite is not, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the implicit Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to is a retention of this vanity - the finite - in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind's development we shall see this vanity appear as wickedness at that turning-point at which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.
SECTION ONE - MIND SUBJECTIVE
§387
Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as
cognitive. Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical
category of the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the
concrete mind.
Subjective mind is: (A) Immediate or implicit: a soul - the Spirit in Nature - the object treated by Anthropology. (B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other things: mind in correlation or particularization: consciousness - the object treated by the Phenomenology of Mind. (C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject - the object treated by Psychology.
In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.
For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification it presents is an advance of development: and so in mind every character under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself into, and to realize in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again, is itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer) it is for itself - for the special form, viz. which the mind has in that step. The ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the mind or soul is, what happens to it, what it does. The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses - all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.
We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here to be studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is the individuals only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind to exist in them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as self-instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself, links it in unity with itself, and so makes it actual mind.
SUB-SECTION A. ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SOUL
(a) The Physical Soul (a) Physical Qualities (b) Physical Alterations (c) Sensibility (b) The Feeling Soul (a) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy (b) Self-feeling (c) Habit (c) The Actual Soul
A. ANTHROPOLOGY
THE SOUL
§388
Spirit (Mind) came into being as the truth of Nature. But
not merely is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first
of what went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of
the notion the special meaning of 'free judgement'. Mind, thus come
into being, means therefore that Nature in its own self realizes its
untruth and sets itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no
longer as the universality which in corporal individuality is always
self-externalized, but as a universality which in its concretion and
totality is one and simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but
soul.
§389
The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is
Nature, the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple 'ideal'
life. Soul is the substance or 'absolute' basis of all the
particularizing and individualizing of mind: it is in the soul that
mind finds the material on which its character is wrought, and the soul
remains the pervading, identical ideality of it all. But as it is still
conceived thus abstractly, the soul is only the sleep of mind - the
passive of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.
The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something true, and mind conceived as a thing, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon imponderable matters, like heat, light, etc., to which they might perhaps add space and time. These 'imponderables', which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the 'vital' matter, which may also be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material.
The fact is that in the Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is implicitly at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception of life - with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is still at the same time forfeited to the away of self-externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter - the truth that matter itself has no truth.
A cognate question is that of the community of soul and body. This community (interdependence) was assumed as a fact, and the only problem was how to comprehend it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an incomprehensible mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not - whence Epicurus, when attributing to the gods a residence in the pores, was consistent in not imposing on them any connection with the world. A somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz have all indicated God as this nexus. They meant that the finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and, so holding, there philosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely as another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true identity of finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the case of Spinoza, is too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibniz, though his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so only by an act of judgement or choice. Hence, with Leibniz, the result is a distinction between soul and the corporeal (or material), and the identity is only like the copula of a judgement, and does not rise or develop into system, into the absolute syllogism.
§390
The Soul is at first - (a) In its immediate natural mode -
the natural soul, which only is. (b) Secondly, it is a soul which
feels, as individualized, enters into correlation with its immediate
being, and, in the modes of that being, retains an abstract
independence. (c) Thirdly, its immediate being - or corporeity - is
moulded into it, and with that corporeity it exists as actual soul.
(a) THE PHYSICAL SOUL(1)
§391
The soul universal, described, it may be, as an anima mundi,
a world-soul, must not be fixed on that account as a single subject; it
is rather the universal substance which has its actual truth only in
individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a
single soul, it is a single soul which is merely: its only modes are
modes of natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a
free existence: i.e. they are natural objects for consciousness, but
objects to which the soul as such does not behave as to something
external. These features rather are physical qualities of which it
finds itself possessed.
(a) Physical Qualities(2)
§392
(1) While still a 'substance' (i.e. a physical soul) the
mind takes part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of
climates, the changes of the seasons, and the periods of the day, etc.
This life of nature for the main shows itself only in occasional strain
or disturbance of mental tone.
In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and telluric life of man. In such a sympathy with nature the animals essentially live: their specific characters and their particular phases of growth depend, in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it. In the case of man these points of dependence lose importance, just in proportion to his civilization, and the more his whole frame of soul is based upon a sub-structure of mental freedom. The history of the world is not bound up with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the destinies of individuals with the positions of the planets.
The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the response to the changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only in faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the fore only in morbid states (including insanity) and at periods when the self-conscious life suffers depression.
In nations less intellectually emancipated, which therefore live more in harmony with nature, we find amid their superstitions and aberrations of imbecility a few real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundation what seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of events arising therefrom. But as mental freedom gets a deeper hold, even these few and slight susceptibilities, based upon participation in the common life of nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary, remain for ever subject to such influences.
§393
(2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial
globe, the general planetary life of the nature-governed mind
specializes itself and breaks up into the several nature-governed minds
which, on the whole, give expression to the nature of the geographical
continents and constitute the diversities of race.
The contrast between the earth's poles, the land towards the north pole being more aggregated and preponderant over sea, whereas in the southern hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant from each other, introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which Treviranus (Biology, Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and fauna.
§394
This diversity descends into specialities, that may be
termed local minds - shown in the outward modes of life and occupation,
bodily structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency
and capacity of the intellectual and moral character of the several
peoples.
Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations each possessing a persistent type of its own.
§395
(3) The soul is further de-universalized into the
individualized subject. But this subjectivity is here only considered
as a differentiation and singling out of the modes which nature gives;
we find it as the special temperament, talent, character, physiognomy,
or other disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or single
individuals.
(b) Physical Alterations
§396
Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities,
as alterations in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its
development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a
more concrete definition or description of them would require us to
anticipate an acquaintance with the formed and matured mind.
(1) The first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man's life. He begins with Childhood - mind wrapped up in itself. His next step is the fully developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality which is still subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the position of the individual himself, who is still short of independence and not fully equipped for the part he has to play (Youth). Thirdly, we see man in his true relation to his environment, recognizing the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it - a world no longer incomplete, but able in the work which it collectively achieves to afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his share in this collective work he first is really somebody, gaining an effective existence and an objective value (Manhood). Last of all comes the finishing touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while on its realist side it passes into the inertia of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests and entanglements of the outward present (Old Age).
§397
(2) Next we find the individual subject to a real
antithesis, leading it to seek and find itself in another individual.
This - the sexual relation - on a physical basis, shows, on its one
side, subjectivity remaining in an instinctive and emotional harmony of
moral life and love, and not pushing these tendencies to an extreme
universal phase, in purposes political, scientific, or artistic; and on
the other, shows an active half, where the individual is the vehicle of
a struggle of universal and objective interests with the given
conditions (both of his own existence and of that of the external
world), carrying out these universal principles into a unity with the
world which is his own work. The sexual tie acquires its moral and
spiritual significance and function in the family.
§398
(3) When the individuality, or self-centralized being,
distinguishes itself from its mere being, this immediate judgement is
the waking of the soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life,
in the first instance, as one natural quality and state confronts
another state, viz. sleep. - The waking is not merely for the observer,
or externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the judgement
(primary partition) of the individual soul - which is self-existing
only as it relates its self-existence to its mere existence,
distinguishing itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The
waking state includes generally all self-conscious and rational
activity in which the mind realizes its own distinct self. - Sleep is
an invigoration of this activity - not as a merely negative rest from
it, but as a return back from the world of specialization, from
dispersion into phases where it has grown hard and stiff - a return
into the general nature of subjectivity, which is the substance of
those specialized energies and their absolute master.
The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those posers, as they may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy: - Napoleon, for example, on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class of ideology. The characterization given in the section is abstract; it primarily treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental element implicate but not yet as invested with a special being of its own. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in fundamentals it remains the same), we must take the self-existence of the individual soul in its higher aspects as the Ego of consciousness and as intelligent mind. The difficulty raised anent the distinction of the two states properly arises, only when we also take into account the dreams in sleep and describe these dreams, as well as the mental representations in the sober waking consciousness under one and the same title of mental representations. Thus superficially classified as states of mental representation the two coincide, because we have lost sight of the difference; and in the case of any assignable distinction of waking consciousness, we can always return to the trivial remark that all this is nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete theory of the wakin soul in its realized being views it as consciousness and intellect: and the world of intelligent consciousness is something quite different from a picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main only externally conjoined, in an unintelligent way, by the laws of the so-called Association of Ideas; though here and there of course logical principles may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves essentially as a concrete ego, an intelligence: and because of this intelligence his sense-perception stands before him as a concrete totality of features in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the same time determined through and with all the rest. Thus the facts embodied in his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjective representation and distinction of the facts as something external from the person, but by virtue of the concrete interconnection in which each part stands with all parts of this complex. The waking state is the concrete consciousness of this mutual corroboration of each single factor of its content by all the others in the picture as perceived. The consciousness of this interdependence need not be explicit and distinct. Still this general setting to all sensations is implicitly present in the concrete feeling of self. - In order to see the difference between dreaming and waking we need only keep in view the Kantian distinction between subjectivity and objectivity of mental representation (the latter depending upon determination through categories): remembering, as already noted, that what is actually present in mind need not be therefore explicitly realized in consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the intellectual sense to God need stand before consciousness in the shape of proofs of God's existence, although, as before explained, these proofs only serve to express the net worth and content of that feeling.
(c) Sensibility(3)
§399
Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere
alterations, but alternating conditions (a progression in infinitum).
This is their formal and negative relationship: but in it the
affirmative relationship is also involved. In the self-certified
existence of waking soul its mere existence is implicit as an 'ideal'
factor: the features which make up its sleeping nature, where they are
implicitly as in their substance, are found by the waking soul, in its
own self, and, be it noted, for itself. The fact that these
particulars, though as a mode of mind they are distinguished from the
self- identity of our self-centred being, are yet simply contained in
its simplicity, is what we call sensibility.
§400
Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the
inarticulate breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and
unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still
'immediate' - neither specially developed in its content nor set in
distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to its
most special, its natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is thus
limited and transient, belonging as it does to natural, immediate being
- to what is therefore qualitative and finite.
Everything is in sensation (feeling): if you will, everything that emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner in which a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and religion only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling. What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the facts of it are objective - set over against consciousness, so that as it is put in me (my abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me (from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a mode of my individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a form: it is thus treated as my very own. My own is something inseparate from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with its underlying self in all its definite content is just this inseparability; which, however, yet falls short of the ego of developed consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is with a quite different intensity and permanency that the will, the conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever be true of feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is correct to say that above everything the heart must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by which anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, etc., and an appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad. This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, godless, mean, etc.? That the heart is the source only of such feelings is stated in the words: 'From the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, blasphemy, etc.' In such times when 'scientific' theology and philosophy make the heart and feeling the criterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; just as it is nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and that he has feeling in common with them.
§401
What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the
naturally immediate, as 'ideally' in it and made its own. On the other
hand and conversely, what originally belongs to the central
individuality (which as further deepened and enlarged is the conscious
ego and free mind) gets the features of the natural corporeity, and is
so felt. In this way we have two spheres of feeling. One, where what at
first is a corporeal affection (e.g. of the eye or of any bodily part
whatever) is made feeling (sensation) by being driven inward, memorized
in the soul's self-centred part. Another, where affections originating
in the mind and belonging to it, are in order to be felt, and to be as
if found, invested with corporeity. Thus the mode or affection gets a
place in the subject: it is felt in the soul. The detailed
specification of the former branch of sensibility is seen in the system
of the senses. But the other or inwardly originated modes of feeling no
less necessarily systematize themselves; and their corporization, as
put in the living and concretely developed natural being, works itself
out, following the special character of the mental mode, in a special
system of bodily organs.
Sensibility in general is the healthy fellowship of the individual mind in the life of its bodily part. The senses form the simple system of corporeity specified. (a) The 'ideal' side of physical things breaks up into two - because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality, distinction appears as mere variety - the senses of definite light, (§ 317) - and of sound, (§ 300). The 'real' aspect similarly is with its difference double: (b) the senses of smell and taste, (§§ 321, 322); (c) the sense of solid reality, of heavy matter, of heat (§ 303) and shape (§ 310). Around the centre of the sentient individuality these specifications arrange themselves more simply than when they are developed in the natural corporeity.
The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science - a psychical physiology. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in the feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate sensation to the persistent tone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underlies the symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. But the most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily form adopted by certain mental modifications, especially the passions or emotions. We should have, for example, to explain the line of connection by which anger and courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the 'irritable' system, just as thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the 'sensible' system. We should want a more satisfactory explanation than hitherto of the most familar connections by which tears, and voice in general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other specializations lying in the line of pathognomy and physiognomy, are formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and the organs are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they form at the same time a physical system for the expression of mental states, and in this way they get quite another interpretation.
§402
Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found
existing, are single and transient aspects of psychic life -
alterations in the substantiality of the soul, set in its self-centred
life, with which that substance is one. But this self-centred being is
not merely a formal factor of sensation: the soul is virtually a
reflected totality of sensations - it feels in itself the total
substantiality which it virtually is - it is a soul which feels.
In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly distinguished: still we do not speak of the sensation - but of the feeling (sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected with sensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasizes rather the side of passivity-the fact that we find ourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of mode in feeling - whereas feeling at the same time rather notes the fact that it is we ourselves who feel.
(b) THE FEELING SOUL - (SOUL AS SENTIENCY)(4)
§403
The feeling or sentient individual is the simple 'ideality'
or subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to
raise its substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the
character of subjectivity, to take possession of it, to realize its
mastery over its own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere
natural, but an inward, individuality: the individuality which in the
merely substantial totality was only formal to it has to be liberated
and made independent.
Nowhere so much as in the case of the soul (and still more of the mind) if we are to understand it, must that feature of 'ideality' be kept in view, which represents it as the negation of the real, but a negation, where the real is put past, virtually retained, although it does not exist. The feature is one with which we are familiar in regard to our mental ideas or to memory. Every individual is an infinite treasury of sensations, ideas, acquired lore, thoughts, etc.; and yet the ego is one and uncompounded, a deep featureless characterless mine, in which all this is stored up, without existing. It is only when I call to mind an idea, that I bring it out of that interior to existence before consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, ideas and information, supposed to have been forgotten years ago, because for so long they had not been brought into consciousness, once more come to light. They were not in our possession, nor by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for the future come into our possession; and yet they were in us and continue to be in us still. Thus a person can never know how much of things he once learned he really has in him, should he have once forgotten them: they belong not to his actuality or subjectivity as such, but only to his implicit self. And under all the superstructure of specialized and instrumental consciousness that may subsequently be added to it, the individuality always remains this single-souled inner life. At the present stage this singleness is, primarily, to be defined as one of feeling - as embracing the corporeal in itself: thus denying the view that this body is something material, with parts outside parts and outside the soul. Just as the number and variety of mental representations is no argument for an extended and real multeity in the ego; so the 'real' outness of parts in the body has no truth for the sentient soul. As sentient, the soul is characterized as immediate, and so as natural and corporeal: but the outness of parts and sensible multiplicity of this corporeal counts for the soul (as it counts for the intelligible unity) not as anything real, and therefore not as a barrier: the soul is this intelligible unity in existence - the existent speculative principle. Thus in the body it is one simple, omnipresent unity. As to the representative faculty the body is but one representation, and the infinite variety of its material structure and organization is reduced to the simplicity of one definite conception: so in the sentient soul, the corporeity, and all that outness of parts to parts which belongs to it, is reduced to ideality (the truth of the natural multiplicity). The soul is virtually the totality of nature: as an individual soul it is a monad: it is itself the explicitly put totality of its particular world - that world being included in it and filling it up; and to that world it stands but as to itself.
§404
As individual, the soul is exclusive and always exclusive:
any difference there is, it brings within itself. What is
differentiated from it is as yet no external object (as in
consciousness), but only the aspects of its own sentient totality, etc.
In this partition (judgement) of itself it is always subject: its
object is its substance, which is at the same time its predicate. This
substance is still the content of its natural life, but turned into the
content of the individual sensation-laden soul; yet as the soul is in
that content still particular, the content is its particular world, so
far as that is, in an implicit mode, included in the ideality of the
subject.
By itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its features are not developed to conscious and intelligent content: so far it is formal and only formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in cases where it is as a form and appears as a special state of mind (§ 380), to which the soul, which has already advanced to consciousness and intelligence, may again sink down. But when a truer phase of mind thus exists in a more subordinate and abstract one, it implies a want of adaptation, which is disease. In the present stage we must treat, first, of the abstract psychical modifications by themselves, secondly, as morbid states of mind: the latter being only explicable by means of the former.
(a) The feeling soul in its immediacy
§405
(aa) Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a
monadic individual, it is, because immediate, not yet as its self, not
a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence
the individuality of its true self is a different subject from it - a
subject which may even exist as another individual. By the self-hood of
the latter it - a substance, which is only a non-independent predicate
- is then set in vibration and controlled without the least resistance
on its part. This other subject by which it is so controlled may be
called its genius.
In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its mother's womb: - a condition neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but psychical - a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no self, as yet nothing impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject, the single self of the two. The mother is the genius of the child; for by genius we commonly mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence of its own, and constitutes the subjective substantiality of some one else who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal independence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of existence, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiency and realized activity, as concrete subjectivity.
If we look only to the spatial and material aspects of the child's existence as an embryo in its special integuments, and as connected with the mother by means of umbilical cord, placenta, etc., all that is presented to the senses and reflection are certain anatomical and physiological facts - externalities and instrumentalities in the sensible and material which are insignificant as regards the main point, the psychical relationship. What ought to be noted as regards this psychical tie are not merely the striking effects communicated to and stamped upon the child by violent emotions, injuries, etc., of the mother, but the whole psychical judgement (partition) of the underlying nature, by which the female (like the monocotyledons among vegetables) can suffer disruption in twain, so that the child has not merely got communicated to it, but has originally received morbid dispositions as well as other predispositions of shape, temper, character, talent, idiosyncrasies, etc.
Sporadic examples and traces of this magic tie appear elsewhere in the range of self-possessed conscious life, say between friends, especially female friends with delicate nerves (a tie which may go so far as to show 'magnetic' phenomena), between husband and wife and between members of the same family.
The total sensitivity has its self here in a separate subjectivity, which, in the case cited of this sentient life in the ordinary course of nature, is visibly present as another and a different individual. But this sensitive totality is meant to elevate its self-hood out of itself to subjectivity in one and the same individual: which is then its indwelling consciousness, self-possessed, intelligent, and reasonable. For such a consciousness the merely sentient life serves as an underlying and only implicitly existent material; and the self-possessed subjectivity is the rational, self-conscious, controlling genius thereof. But this sensitive nucleus includes not merely the purely unconscious, congenital disposition and temperament, but within its enveloping simplicity it acquires and retains also (in habit, as to which see later) all further ties and essential relationships, fortunes, principles-everything in short belonging to the character, and in whose elaboration self-conscious activity has most effectively participated. The sensitivity is thus a soul in which the whole mental life is condensed. The total individual under this concentrated aspect is distinct from the existing and actual play of his consciousness, his secular ideas, developed interests, inclinations, etc. As contrasted with this looser aggregate of means and methods the more intensive form of individuality is termed the genius, whose decision is ultimate whatever may be the show of reasons, intentions, means, of which the more public consciousness is so liberal. This concentrated individuality also reveals itself under the aspect of what is called the heart and soul of feeling. A man is said to be heartless and unfeeling when he looks at things with self-possession and acts according to his permanent purposes, be they great substantial aims or petty and unjust interests: a good-hearted man, on the other hand, means rather one who is at the mercy of his individual sentiment, even when it is of narrow range and is wholly made up of particularities. Of such good nature or goodness of heart it may be said that it is less the genius itself than the indulgere genio.
§406
(bb) The sensitive life, when it becomes a form or state of
the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human being is a disease.
The individual in such a morbid state stands in direct contact with the
concrete contents of his own self, whilst he keeps his self-possessed
consciousness of self and of the causal order of things apart as a
distinct state of mind. This morbid condition is seen in magnetic
somnambulism and cognate states.
In this summary encyclopaedic account it is impossible to supply a demonstration of what the paragraph states as the nature of the remarkable condition produced chiefly by animal magnetism - to show, in other words, that it is in harmony with the facts. To that end the phenomena, so complex in their nature and so very different one from another, would have first of all to be brought under their general points of view. The facts, it might seem, first of all call for verification. But such a verification would, it must be added, be superfluous for those on whose account it was called for: for they facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring the narratives - infinitely numerous though they be and accredited by the education and character of the witnesses - to be mere deception and imposture. The a priori conceptions of these inquirers are so rooted that no testimony can avail against them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes. In order to believe in this department even what one's own eyes have seen and still more to understand it, the first requisite is not to be in bondage to the hard and fast categories of the practical intellect. The chief points on which the discussion turns may here be given:
(a) To the concrete existence of the individual belongs the aggregate of.his fundamental interests, both the essential and the particular empirical ties which connect him with other men and the world at large. This totality forms his actuality, in the sense that it lies in fact immanent in him; it has already been called his genius. This genius is not the free mind which wills and thinks: the form of sensitivity, in which the individual here appears innnersed, is, on the contrary, a surrender of his self-possessed intelligent existence. The first conclusion to which these considerations lead, with reference to the contents of consciousness in the somnambulist stage, is that it is only the range of his individually moulded world (of his private interests and narrow relationships) which appear there. Scientific theories and philosophic conceptions or general truths require a different soil - require an intelligence which has risen out of the inarticulate mass of mere sensitivity to free consciousness. It is foolish therefore to expect revelations about the higher ideas from the somnambulist state.
(b) Where a human being's senses and intellect are sound, he is fully and intelligently alive to that reality of his which gives concrete filling to his individuality: but he is awake to it in the form of interconnection between himself and the features of that reality conceived as an external and a separate world, and he is aware that this world is in itself also a complex of interconnections of a practically intelligible kind. In his subjective ideas and plans he has also before him this causally connected scheme of things he calls his world and the series of means which bring his ideas and his purposes into adjustment with the objective existences, which are also means and ends to each other. At the same time, this world which is outside him has its threads in him to such a degree that it is these threads which make him what he really is: he too would become extinct if these externalities were to disappear, unless by the aid of religion, subjective reason, and character, he is in a remarkable degree self-supporting and independent of them. But, then, in the latter case he is less susceptible of the psychical state here spoken of. - As an illustration of that identity with the surroundings may be noted the effect produced by the death of beloved relatives, friends, etc. on those left behind, so that the one dies or pines away with the loss of the other. (Thus Cato, after the downfall of the Roman republic, could live no longer: his inner reality was neither wider nor higher than it.) Compare home-sickness, and the like.
(c) But when all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside it and its relationship to that world, is under a veil, and the soul is thus sunk in sleep (in magnetic sleep, in catalepsy, and other diseases, for example, those connected with female development, or at the approach of death, etc.), then that immanent actuality of the individual remains the same substantial total as before, but now as a purely sensitive life with an inward vision and an inward consciousness. And because it is the adult, formed, and developed consciousness which is degraded into this state of sensitivity, it retains along with its content a certain nominal self-hood, a formal vision and awareness, which, however, does not go so far as the conscious judgement or discernment by which its contents, when it is healthy and awake, exist for it as an outward objectivity. The individual is thus a monad which is inwardly aware of its actuality - a genius which beholds itself. The characteristic point in such knowledge is that the very same facts (which for the healthy consciousness are an objective practical reality, and to know which, in its sober moods, it needs the intelligent chain of means and conditions in all their real expansion) are now immediately known and perceived in this immanence. This perception is a sort of clairvoyance; for it is a consciousness living in the undivided substantiality of the genius, and finding itself in the very heart of the interconnection, and so can dispense with the series of conditions, external one to another, which lead up to the result - conditions which cool reflection has in succession to traverse and in so doing feels the limits of its own external individuality. But such clairvoyance - just because its dim and turbid vision does not present the facts in a rational interconnection - is for that very reason at the mercy of every private contingency of feeling and fancy, etc. - not to mention that foreign suggestions (see later) intrude into its vision. It is thus impossible to make out whether what the clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves in. - But it is absurd to treat this visionary state as a sublime mental phase and as a truer state, capable of conveying general truths.(5)
(d) An essential feature of this sensitivity, with its absence of intelligent and volitional personality, is this, that it is a state of passivity, like that of the child in the womb. The patient in this condition is accordingly made, and continues to be, subject to the power of another person, the magnetizer; so that when the two are thus in psychical rapport, the selfless individual, not really a 'person', has for his subjective consciousness the consciousness of the other. This latter self-possessed individual is thus the effective subjective soul of the former, and the genius which may even supply him with a train of ideas. That the somnambulist perceives in himself tastes and smells which are present in the person with whom he stands en rapport, and that he is aware of the other inner ideas and present perceptions of the latter as if they were his own, shows the substantial identity which the soul (which even in its concreteness is also truly immaterial) is capable of holding with another. When the substance of both is thus made one, there is only one subjectivity of consciousness: the patient has a sort of individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual: and this nominal self accordingly derives its whole stock of ideas from the sensations and ideas of the other, in whom it sees, smells, tastes, reads, and hears. It is further to be noted on this point that the somnambulist is thus brought into rapport with two genii and a twofold set of ideas, his own and that of the magnetizer. But it is impossible to say precisely which sensations and which visions he, in this nominal perception, receives, beholds, and brings to knowledge from his own inward self, and which from the suggestions of the person with whom he stands in relation. This uncertainty may be the source of many deceptions, and accounts among other things for the diversity that inevitably shows itself among sonmambulists from different countries and under rapport with persons of different education, as regards their views on morbid states and the methods of cure, or medicines for them, as well as on scientific and intellectual topics.
(e) As in this sensitive substantiality there is no contrast to external objectivity, so within itself the subject is so entirely one that all varieties of sensation have disappeared, and hence, when the activity of the sense-organs is asleep, the 'common sense', or 'general feeling' specifies itself to several functions; one sees and hears with the fingers, and especially with the pit of the stomach, etc.
To comprehend a thing means in the language of practical intelligence to be able to trace the series of means intervening between a phenomenon and some other existence on which it depends - to discover what is called the ordinary course of nature, in compliance with the laws and relations of the intellect, for example, causality, reasons, etc. The purely sensitive life, on the contrary, even when it retains that mere nominal consciousness, as in the morbid state alluded to, is just this form of immediacy, without any distinctions between subjective and objective, between intelligent personality and objective world, and without the aforementioned finite ties between them. Hence to understand this intimate conjunction, which, though all-embracing, is without any definite points of attachment, is impossible, so long as we assume independent personalities, independent one of another and of the objective world which is their content - so long as we assume the absolute spatial and material externality of one part of being to another.
(b) Self-feeling (sense of self)(6)
§407
(aa) The sensitive totality is, in its capacity as
individual, essentially the tendency to distinguish itself in itself,
and to wake up to the judgement in itself, in virtue of which it has
particular feelings and stands as a subject in respect of these aspects
of itself. The subject as such gives these feelings a place as its own
in itself. In these private and personal sensations it is immersed, and
at the same time, because of the 'ideality' of the particulars, it
combines itself in them with itself as a subjective unit. In this way
it is self- feeling, and is so at the same time only in the particular
feeling.
§408
(bb) In consequence of the immediacy, which still marks the
self-feeling, i.e. in consequence of the element of corporeality which
is still undetached from the mental life, and as the feeling too is
itself particular and bound up with a special corporeal form, it
follows that although the subject has been brought to acquire
intelligent consciousness, it is still susceptible of disease, so far
as to remain fast in a special phase of its self-feeling, unable to
refine it to 'ideality' and get the better of it. The fully furnished
self of intelligent consciousness is a conscious subject, which is
consistent in itself according to an order and behaviour which follows
from its individual position and its connection with the external
world, which is no less a world of law. But when it is engrossed with a
single phase of feeling, it fails to assign that phase its proper place
and due subordination in the individual system of the world which a
conscious subject is. In this way the subject finds itself in
contradiction between the totality systematized in its consciousness,
and the single phase or fixed idea which is not reduced to its proper
place and rank. This is Insanity or mental Derangement.
In considering insanity we must, as in other cases, anticipate the full-grown and intelligent conscious subject, which is at the same time the natural self of self-feeling. In such a phase the self can be liable to the contradiction between its own free subjectivity and a particularity which, instead of being 'idealized' in the former, remains as a fixed element in self-feeling. Mind as such is free, and therefore not susceptible of this malady. But in older metaphysics mind was treated as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing, i.e. as something natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity - the settled fixture of some finite element in it. Insanity is therefore a psychical disease, i.e. a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement may appear to start from the one more than the other, and so also may the cure.
The self-possessed and healthy subject has an active and present consciousness of the ordered whole of his individual world, into the system of which he subsumes each special content of sensation, idea, desire, inclination, etc., as it arises, so as to insert them in their proper place, He is the dominant genius over these particularities. Between this and insanity the difference is like that between waking and dreaming: only that in insanity the dream falls within the waking limits, and so makes part of the actual self- feeling. Error and that sort of thing is a proposition consistently admitted to a place in the objective interconnection of things. In the concrete, however, it is often difficult to say where it begins to become derangement. A violent, but groundless and senseless outburst of hatred, etc., may, in contrast to a presupposed higher self-possession and stability of character, make its victim seem to be beside himself with frenzy. But the main point in derangement is the contradiction which a feeling with a fixed corporeal embodiment sets up against the whole mass of adjustments forming the concrete consciousness. The mind which is in a condition of mere being, and where such being is not rendered fluid in its consciousness, is diseased. The contents which are set free in this reversion to mere nature are the self-seeking affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest of the passions - fancies and hopes - merely personal love and hatred. When the influence of self-possession and of general principles, moral and theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the natural temper under lock and key, the, earthly elements are set free - that evil which is always latent in the heart, because the heart as immediate is natural and selfish. It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper hand in insanity, but in distinction from and contrast to the better and more intelligent part, which is there also. Hence this state is mental derangement and distress. The right psychical treatment therefore keeps in view the truth that insanity is not an abstract loss of reason (neither in the point of intelligence nor of will and its responsibility), but only derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason; - just as physical disease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and total, loss of health (if it were that, it would be death), but a contradiction in it. This humane treatment, no less benevolent than reasonable (the services of Pinel towards which deserve the highest acknowledgement), presupposes the patient's rationality, and in that assumption has the sound basis for dealing with him on this side - just as in the case of bodily disease the physician bases his treatment on the vitality which as such still contains health.
(c) Habit(7)
§409
Self-feeling, immersed in the detail of the feelings (in
simple sensations, and also desires, instincts, passions, and their
gratification), is undistinguished from them. But in the self there is
latent a simple self-relation of ideality, a nominal universality
(which is the truth of these details): and as so universal, the self is
to be stamped upon, and made appear in, this life of feeling, yet so as
to distinguish itself from the particular details, and be a realized
universality. But this universality is not the full and sterling truth
of the specific feelings and desires; what they specifically contain is
as yet left out of account. And so too the particularity is, as now
regarded, equally formal; it counts only as the particular being or
immediacy of the soul in opposition to its equally formal and abstract
realization. This particular being of the soul is the factor of its
corporeity; here we have it breaking with this corporeity,
distinguishing it from itself - itself a simple being - and becoming
the 'ideal', subjective substantiality of it - just as in its latent
notion (§ 389) it was the substance, and the mere substance, of it.
But this abstract realization of the soul in its corporeal vehicle is not yet the self - not the existence of the universal which is for the universal. It is the corporeity reduced to its mere ideality; and so far only does corporeity belong to the soul as such. That is to say, just as space and time as the abstract one-outside-another, as, therefore, empty space and empty time, are only subjective forms, a pure act of intuition; so is that pure being (which, through the supersession in it of the particularity of the corporeity, or of the immediate corporeity as such, has realized itself) mere intuition and no more, lacking consciousness, but the basis of consciousness. And consciousness it becomes, when the corporcity, of which it is the subjective substance, and which still continues to exist, and that as a barrier for it, has been absorbed by it, and it has been invested with the character of self-centred subject.
§410
The soul's making itself an abstract universal being, and
reducing the particulars of feelings (and of consciousness) to a mere
feature of its being is Habit. In this manner the soul has the contents
in possession, and contains them in such manner that in these features
it is not as sentient, nor does it stand in relationship with them as
distinguishing itself from them, nor is absorbed in them, but has them
and moves in them, without feeling or consciousness of the fact. The
soul is freed from them, so far as it is not interested in or occupied
with them: and whilst existing in these forms as its possession, it is
at the same time open to be otherwise occupied and engaged - say with
feeling and with mental consciousness in general.
This process of building up the particular and corporeal expressions of feeling into the being of the soul appears as a repetition of them, and the generation of habit as practice. For, this being of the soul, if in respect of the natural particular phase it be called an abstract universality to which the former is transmuted, is a reflexive universality (§ 175); i.e. the one and the same, that recurs in a series of units of sensation, is reduced to unity, and this abstract unity expressly stated.
Habit like memory, is a difficult point in mental organization: habit is the mechanism of self-feeling, as memory is the mechanism of intelligence. The natural qualities and alterations of age, sleep, and waking are 'immediately' natural: habit, on the contrary, is the mode of feeling (as well as intelligence, will, etc., so far as they belong to self-feeling) made into a natural and mechanical existence. Habit is rightly called a second nature; nature, because it is an immediate being of the soul; a second nature, because it is an immediacy created by the soul, impressing and moulding the corporeality which enters into the modes of feeling as such and into the representations and volitions so far as they have taken corporeal form (§ 401).
In habit the human being's mode of existence is 'natural', and for that reason not free; but still free, so far as the merely natural phase of feeling is by habit reduced to a mere being of his, and he is no longer involuntarily attracted or repelled by it, and so no longer interested, occupied, or dependent in regard to it. The want of freedom in habit is partly merely formal, as habit merely attaches to the being of the soul; partly only relative, so far as it strictly speaking arises only in the case of bad habits, or so far as a habit is opposed by another purpose: whereas the habit of right and goodness is an embodiment of liberty. The main point about Habit is that by its means man gets emancipated from the feelings, even in being affected by them. The different forms of this may be described as follows: (a) The immediate feeling is negated and treated as indifferent. One who gets inured against external sensations (frost, heat, weariness of the limbs, etc., sweet tastes, etc.), and who hardens the heart against misfortune, acquires a strength which consists in this, that although the frost, etc. - or the misfortune - is felt, the affection is deposed to a mere externality and immediacy; the universal psychical life keeps its own abstract independence in it, and the self-feeling as such, consciousness, reflection, and any other purposes and activity, are no longer bothered with it. (b) There is indifference towards the satisfaction: the desires and impulses are by the habit of their satisfaction deadened. This is the rational liberation from them; whereas monastic renunciation and forcible interference do not free from them, nor are they in conception rational. Of course in all this it is assumed that the impulses are kept as the finite modes they naturally are, and that they, like their satisfaction, are subordinated as partial factors to the reasonable will. (c) In habit regarded as aptitude, or skill, not merely has the abstract psychical life to be kept intact per se, but it has to be imposed as a subjective aim, to be made a power in the bodily part, which is rendered subject and thoroughly pervious to it. Conceived as having the inward purpose of the subjective soul thus imposed upon it, the body is treated as an immediate externality and a barrier. Thus comes out the more decided rupture between the soul as simple self- concentration, and its earlier naturalness and immediacy; it has lost its original and immediate identity with the bodily nature, and as external has first to be reduced to that position. Specific feelings can only get bodily shape in a perfectly specific way (§ 410); and the immediate portion of body is a particular possibility for a specific aim (a particular aspect of its differentiated structure, a particular organ of its organic system). To mould such an aim in the organic body is to bring out and express the 'ideality' which is implicit in matter always, and especially so in the specific bodily part, and thus to enable the soul, under its volitional and conceptual characters, to exist as substance in its corporeity. In this way an aptitude shows the corporeity rendered completely pervious, made into an instrument, so that when the conception (e.g. a series of musical notes) is in me, then without resistance and with ease the body gives them correct utterance.
The form of habit applies to all kinds and grades of mental action. The most external of them, i.e. the spatial direction of an individual, viz. his upright posture, has been by will made a habit - a position taken without adjustment and without consciousness - which continues to be an affair of his persistent will; for the man stands only because and in so far as he wills to stand, and only so long as he wills it without consciousness. Similarly our eyesight is the concrete habit which, without an express adjustment, combines in a single act the several modifications of sensation, consciousness, intuition, intelligence, etc., which make it up. Thinking, too, however free and active in its own pure element it becomes, no less requires habit and familiarity (this impromptuity or form of immediacy), by which it is the property of my single self where I can freely and in all directions range. It is through this habit that I come to realize my existence as a thinking being. Even here, in this spontaneity of self-centred thought, there is a partnership of soul and body (hence, want of habit and too-long-continued thinking cause headache); habit diminishes this feeling, by making the natural function an immediacy of the soul. Habit on an ampler scale, and carried out in the strictly intellectual range, is recollection and memory, whereof we shall speak later.
Habit is often spoken of disparagingly and called lifeless, casual, and particular. And it is true that the form of habit, like any other, is open to anything we chance to put into it; and it is habit of living which brings on death, or, if quite abstract, is death itself: and yet habit is indispensable for the existence of all intellectual life in the individual, enabling the subject to be a concrete immediacy, an 'ideality' of soul - enabling the matter of consciousness, religious, moral, etc., to be his as this self, this soul, and no other, and be neither a mere latent possibility, nor a transient emotion or idea, nor an abstract inwardness, cut off from action and reality, but part and parcel of his being. In scientific studies of the soul and the mind, habit is usually passed over - either as something contemptible - or rather for the further reason that it is one of the most difficult questions of psychology.
(C) THE ACTUAL SOUL(8)
§411
The Soul, when its corporeity has been moulded and made
thoroughly its own, finds itself there a single subject; and the
corporeity is an externality which stands as a predicate, in being
related to which, it is related to itself. This externality, in other
words, represents not itself, but the soul, of which it is the sign. In
this identity of interior and exterior, the latter subject to the
former, the soul is actual: in its corporeity it has its free shape, in
which it feels itself and makes itself felt, and which as the Soul's
work of art has human pathognomic and physiognomic expression.
Under the head of human expression are included, for example, the upright figure in general, and the formation of the limbs, especially the hand, as the absolute instrument, of the mouth - laughter, weeping, etc., and the note of mentality diffused over the whole, which at once announces the body as the externality of a higher nature. This note is so slight, indefinite, and inexpressible a modification, because the figure in its externality is something immediate and natural, and can therefore only be an indefinite and quite imperfect sign for the mind, unable to represent it in its actual universality. Seen from the animal world, the human figure is the supreme phase in which mind makes an appearance. But for the mind it is only its first appearance, while language is its perfect expression. And the human figure, though the proximate phase of mind's existence, is at the same time in its physiognomic and pathognomic quality something contingent to it. To try to raise physiognomy and above all cranioscopy (phrenology) to the rank of sciences, was therefore one of the vainest fancies, still vainer than a signatura rerum, which supposed the shape of a plant to afford indication of its medicinal virtue.
§412
Implicitly the soul shows the untruth and unreality of
matter; for the soul, in its concentrated self, cuts itself off from
its immediate being, placing the latter over against it as a corporeity
incapable of offering resistance to its moulding influence. The soul,
thus setting in opposition its being to its (conscious) self, absorbing
it, and making it its own, has lost the meaning of mere soul, or the
'immediacy' of mind. The actual soul with its sensation and its
concrete self-feeling turned into habit, has implicitly realised the
'ideality' of its qualities; in this externality it has recollected and
inwardized itself, and is infinite self-relation. This free
universality thus made explicit shows the soul awaking to the higher
stage of the ego, or abstract universality, in so far as it is for the
abstract universality. In this way it gains the position of thinker and
subject - specially a subject of the judgement in which the ego
excludes from itself the sum total of its merely natural features as an
object, a world external to it - but with such respect to that object
that in it it is immediately reflected into itself. Thus soul rises to
become Consciousness.
1. Naturliche Seele.
2. Naturliche Qualitaten.
3. Empfindung.
4. Die fuhlende Seele.
5. Plato had a better idea of the relation of prophecy generally to the state of sober consciousness than many moderns, who supposed that the Platonic language on the subject of enthusiasm authorized their belief in the sublimity of the revelations of somnambulistic vision. Plato says in the Timaeus (p. 71), 'The author of our being so ordered our inferior parts that they too might obtain a measure of truth, and in the liver placed their oracle (the power of divination by dreams). And herein is a proof that God has given the art of divination, not to the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man; for no man when in his wits attains prophetic truth and inspiration; but when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled by sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or possession (enthusiasm).' Plato very correctly notes not merely the bodily conditions on which such visionary knowledge depends, and the possibility of the truth of the dreams, but also the inferiority of them to the reasonable frame of mind.
6. Selbstgefuhl.
7. Gewohnheit.
8. Die wirkliche Seele
SUB-SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS
(a) Consciousness proper (a) Sensuous Consciousness (b) Sense-perception (c) The Intellect (b) Self-consciousness (a) Appetite (b) Self-consciousness Recognitive (c) Universal Self-consciousness (c) Reason
B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
CONSCIOUSNESS
§413
Consciousness constitutes the reflected or correlational
grade of mind: the grade of mind as appearance. Ego is infinite
self-relation of mind, but as subjective or as self-certainty. The
immediate identity of the natural soul has been raised to this pure
'ideal' self-identity; and what the former contained is for this
self-subsistent reflection set forth as an object. The pure abstract
freedom of mind lets go from it its specific qualities - the soul's
natural life - to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of
this latter, as external to it, that the ego is in the first instance
aware (conscious), and as such it is Consciousness. Ego, as this
absolute negativity, is implicitly the identity in the otherness: the
ego is itself that other and stretches over the object (as if that
object were implicitly cancelled) - it is one side of the relationship
and the whole relationship - the light, which manifests itself and
something else too.
§414
The self-identity of the mind, thus first made explicit as
the Ego, is only its abstract formal ideality. As soul it was under the
phase of substantial universality; now, as subjective reflection in
itself, it is referred to this substantiality as to its negative,
something dark and beyond it. Hence consciousness, like reciprocal
dependence in general, is the contradiction between the independence of
the two sides and their identity in which they are merged into one. The
mind as ego is essence; but since reality, in the sphere of essence, is
represented as in immediate being and at the same time as 'ideal', it
is as consciousness only the appearance (phenomenon) of mind.
§415
As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the
dialectical movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. the successive
steps in further specification of consciousness, does not, to it, seem
to be its own activity, but is implicit, and to the ego it seems an
alteration of the object. Consciousness consequently appears
differently modified according to the difference of the given object;
and the gradual specification of consciousness appears as a variation
in the characteristics of its objects. Ego, the subject of
consciousness, is thinking: the logical process of modifying the object
is what is identical in subject and object, their absolute
interdependence, what makes the object the subject's own.
The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described as having viewed the mind as consciousness, and as containing the propositions only of a phenomenology (not of a philosophy) of mind. The Ego Kant regards as reference to something away and beyond (which in its abstract description is termed the thing-in-itself); and it is only from this finite point of view that he treats both intellect and will. Though in the notion of a power of reflective judgement he touches upon the Idea of mind - a subject-objectivity, an intuitive intellect, etc., and even the Idea of Nature, still this Idea is again deposed to an appearance, i.e. to a subjective maxim (§ 58). Reinhold may therefore be said to have correctly appreciated Kantism when he treated it as a theory of consciousness (under the name of 'faculty of ideation'). Fichte kept to the same point of view: his non-ego is only something set over against the ego, only defined as in consciousness: it is made no more than an infinite 'shock', i.e. a thing-in-itself. Both systems therefore have clearly not reached the intelligible unity or the mind as it actually and essentially is, but only as it is in reference to something else.
As against Spinozism, again, it is to be noted that the mind in the judgement by which it 'constitutes' itself an ego (a free subject contrasted with its qualitative affection) has emerged from substance, and that the philosophy, which gives this judgement as the absolute characteristic of mind, has emerged from Spinozism.
§416
The aim of conscious mind is to make its appearance
identical with its essence, to raise its self-certainty to truth. The
existence of mind in the stage of consciousness is finite, because it
is merely a nominal self-relation, or mere certainty. The object is
only abstractly characterized as its; in other words, in the object it
is only as an abstract ego that the mind is reflected into itself:
hence its existence there has still a content, which is not as its own.
§417
The grades of this elevation of certainty to truth are three
in number: first (a) consciousness in general, with an object set
against it; (b) self-consciousness, for which ego is the object; (c)
unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, where the mind sees
itself embodied in the object and sees itself as implicitly and
explicitly determinate, as Reason, the notion of mind.
(a) CONSCIOUSNESS PROPER(1)
(a) Sensuous consciousness
§418
Consciousness is, first, immediate consciousness, and its
reference to the object accordingly the simple, and underived certainty
of it. The object similarly, being immediate, an existent, reflected in
itself, is further characterized as immediately singular. This is
sense-consciousness.
Consciousness - as a case of correlation - comprises only the categories belonging to the abstract ego or formal thinking; and these it treats as features of the object (§ 415). Sense-consciousness therefore is aware of the object as an existent, a something, an existing thing, a singular, and so on. It appears as wealthiest in matter, but as poorest in thought. That wealth of matter is made out of sensations: they are the material of consciousness (§ 414), the substantial and qualitative, what the soul in its anthropological sphere is and finds in itself. This material the ego (the reflection of the soul in itself) separates from itself, and puts it first under the category of being. Spatial and temporal Singularness, here and now (the terms by which in the Phenomenology of the Mind (Werke ii, p. 73), I described the object of sense-consciousness) strictly belongs to intuition. At present the object is at first to be viewed only in its correlation to consciousness, i.e. a something external to it, and not yet as external on its own part, or as being beside and out of itself.
§419
The sensible as somewhat becomes an other: the reflection in
itself of this somewhat, the thing, has many properties; and as a
single (thing) in its immediacy has several predicates. The muchness of
the sense-singular thus becomes a breadth - a variety of relations,
reflectional attributes, and universalities. These are logical terms
introduced by the thinking principle, i.e. in this case by the Ego, to
describe the sensible. But the Ego as itself apparent sees in all this
characterization a change in the object; and sensuous consciousness, so
construing the object, is sense-perception.
(b) Sense-perception (2)
§420
Consciousness, having passed beyond the sensible, wants to
take the object in its truth, not as merely immediate, but as mediated,
reflected in itself, and universal. Such an object is a combination of
sense qualities with attributes of wider range by which thought defines
concrete relations and connections. Hence the identity of consciousness
with the object passes from the abstract identity of 'I am sure' to the
definite identity of 'I know, and am aware'.
The particular grade of consciousness on which Kantism conceives the mind is perception: which is also the general point of view taken by ordinary consciousness, and more or less by the sciences. The sensuous certitudes of single apperceptions or observations form the starting-point: these are supposed to be elevated to truth, by being regarded in their bearings, reflected upon, and on the lines of definite categories turned at the same time into something necessary and universal, viz. experiences.
§421
This conjunction of individual and universal is admixture -
the individual remains at the bottom hard and unaffected by the
universal, to which, however, it is related. It is therefore a tissue
of contradictions - between the single things of sense apperception,
which form the alleged ground of general experience, and the
universality which has a higher claim to be the essence and ground -
between the individuality of a thing which, taken in its concrete
content, constitutes its independence and the various properties which,
free from this negative link and from one another, are independent
universal matters (§ 123). This contradiction of the finite which runs
through all forms of the logical spheres turns out most concrete, when
the somewhat is defined as object (§§ 194 seqq.).
(c) The Intellect (3)
§422
The proximate truth of perception is that it is the object
which is an appearance, and that the object's reflection in self is on
the contrary a self-subsistent inward and universal. The consciousness
of such an object is intellect. This inward, as we called it, of the
thing is, on one hand, the suppression of the multiplicity of the
sensible, and, in that manner, an abstract identity: on the other hand,
however, it also for that reason contains the multiplicity, but as an
interior 'simple' difference, which remains self-identical in the
vicissitudes of appearance. The simple difference is the realm of the
laws of the phenomena - a copy of the phenomenon, but brought to rest
and universality.
§423
The law, at first stating the mutual dependence of
universal, permanent terms, has, in so far as its distinction is the
inward one, its necessity on its own part; the one of the terms, as not
externally different from the other, lies immediately in the other. But
in this manner the interior distinction is, what it is in truth, the
distinction on its own part, or the distinction which is none. With
this new form-characteristic, on the whole, consciousness implicitly
vanishes: for consciousness as such implies the reciprocal independence
of subject and object. The ego in its judgement has an object which is
not distinct from it - it has itself. Consciousness has passed into
self-consciousness.
(b) SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS(4)
§424
Self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness: the latter
is a consequence of the former, all consciousness of an other object
being as a matter of fact also self-consciousness. The object is my
idea: I am aware of the object as mine; and thus in it I am aware of
me. The formula of self-consciousness is I = I: - abstract freedom,
pure 'Ideality'; and thus it lacks 'reality': for as it is its own
object, there is strictly speaking no object, because there is no
distinction between it and the object.
§425
Abstract self-consciousness is the first negation of
consciousness, and for that reason it is burdened with an external
object, or, nominally, with the negation of it. Thus it is at the same
time the antecedent stage, consciousness: it is the contradiction of
itself as self-consciousness and as consciousness. But the latter
aspect and the negation in general is in I = I potentially suppressed;
and hence as this certitude of self against the object it is the
impulse to realize its implicit nature, by giving its abstract
self-awareness content and objectivity, and in the other direction to
free itself from its sensuousness, to set aside the given objectivity
and identify it with itself. The two processes are one and the same,
the identification of its consciousness and self-consciousness.
(a) Appetite or Instinctive Desire(5)
§426
Self-consciousness, in its immediacy, is a singular, and a
desire (appetite) - the contradiction implied in its abstraction which
should yet be objective - or in its immediacy which has the shape of an
external object and should be subjective. The certitude of one's self,
which issues from the suppression of mere consciousness, pronounces the
object null: and the outlook of self-consciousness towards the object
equally qualifies the abstract ideality of such self-consciousness as
null.
§427
Self-consciousness, therefore, knows itself implicit in the
object, which in this outlook is conformable to the appetite. In the
negation of the two one-sided moments by the ego's own activity, this
identity comes to be for the ego. To this activity the object, which
implicitly and for self-consciousness is self-less, can make no
resistance: the dialectic, implicit in it, towards self-suppression
exists in this case as that activity of the ego. Thus while the given
object is rendered subjective, the subjectivity divests itself of its
one-sidedness and becomes objective to itself.
§428
The product of this process is the fast conjunction of the
ego with itself, its satisfaction realized, and itself made actual. On
the external side it continues, in this return upon itself, primarily
describable as an individual, and maintains itself as such; because its
bearing upon the self-less object is purely negative, the latter,
therefore, being merely consumed. Thus appetite in its satisfaction is
always destructive, and in its content selfish: and as the satisfaction
has only happened in the individual (and that is transient) the
appetite is again generated in the very act of satisfaction.
§429
But on the inner side, or implicitly, the sense of self
which the ego gets in the satisfaction does not remain in abstract
self-concentration or in mere individuality; on the contrary - as
negation of immediacy and individuality the result involves a character
of universality and of the identity of self-consciousness with its
object. The judgement or diremption of this self-consciousness is the
consciousness of a 'free' object, in which ego is aware of itself as an
ego, which however is also still outside it.
(b) Self-consciousness Recognitive(6)
§430
Here there is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness,
at first immediately, as one of two things for another. In that other
as ego I behold myself, and yet also an immediately existing object,
another ego absolutely independent of me and opposed to me. (The
suppression of the singleness of self-consciousness was only a first
step in the suppression, and it merely led to the characterization of
it as particular.) This contradiction gives either self-consciousness
the impulse to show itself as a free self, and to exist as such for the
other: - the process of recognition.
§431
The process is a battle. I cannot be aware of me as myself
in another individual, so long as I see in that other an other and an
immediate existence: and I am consequently bent upon the suppression of
this immediacy of his. But in like measure I cannot be recognized as
immediate, except so far as I overcome the mere immediacy on my own
part, and thus give existence to my freedom. But this immediacy is at
the same time the corporeity of self-consciousness, in which as in its
sign and tool the latter has its own sense of self, and its being for
others, and the means for entering into relation with them.
§432
The fight of recognition is a life and death struggle:
either self-consciousness imperils the other's life, and incurs a like
peril for its own - but only peril, for either is no less bent on
maintaining his life, as the existence of his freedom. Thus the death
of one, though by the abstract, therefore rude, negation of immediacy,
it, from one point of view, solves the contradiction, is yet, from the
essential point of view (i.e. the outward and visible recognition), a
new contradiction (for that recognition is at the same time undone by
the other's death) and a greater than the other.
§433
But because life is as requisite as liberty to the solution,
the fight ends in the first instance as a one-sided negation with
inequality. While the one combatant prefers life, retains his single
self-consciousness, but surrenders his claim for recognition, the other
holds fast to his self-assertion and is recognized by the former as his
superior. Thus arises the status of master and slave.
In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see, on their phenomenal side, the emergence of man's social life and the commencement of political union. Force, which is the basis of this phenomenon, is not on that account a basis of right, but only the necessary and legitimate factor in the passage from the state of self-consciousness sunk in appetite and selfish isolation into the state of universal self-consciousness. Force, then, is the external or phenomenal commencement of states, not their underlying and essential principle.
§434
This status, in the first place, implies common wants and
common concern for their satisfaction - for the means of mastery, the
slave, must likewise be kept in life. In place of the rude destruction
of the immediate object there ensues acquisition, preservation, and
formation of it, as the instrumentality in which the two extremes of
independence and non-independence are welded together. The form of
universality thus arising in satisfying the want, creates a permanent
means and a provision which takes care for and secures the future.
§435
But secondly, when we look to the distinction of the two,
the master beholds in the slave and his servitude the supremacy of his
single self-hood resulting from the suppression of immediate self-hood,
a suppression, however, which falls on another. This other, the slave,
however, in the service of the master, works off his individualist
self-will, overcomes the inner immediacy of appetite, and in this
divestment of self and in 'the fear of his lord' makes 'the beginning
of wisdom' - the passage to universal self- consciousness.
(c) Universal Self-consciousness
§436
Universal self-consciousness is the affirmative awareness of
self in an other self: each self as a free individuality has his own
'absolute' independence, yet in virtue of the negation of its immediacy
or appetite without distinguishing itself from that other. Each is thus
universal self-consciousness and objective; each has 'real'
universality in the shape of reciprocity, so far as each knows itself
recognized in the other freeman, and is aware of this in so far as it
recognizes the other and knows him to be free.
This universal reappearance of self-consciousness - the notion which is aware of itself in its objectivity as a subjectivity identical with itself and for that reason universal - is the form of consciousness which lies at the root of all true mental or spiritual life - in family, fatherland, state, and of all virtues, love, friendship, valour, honour, fame. But this appearance of the underlying essence may also be severed from that essence, and be maintained apart in worthless honour, idle fame, etc.
§437
This unity of consciousness and self-consciousness implies
in the first instance the individuals mutually throwing light upon each
other. But the difference between those who are thus identified is mere
vague diversity - or rather it is a difference which is none. Hence its
truth is the fully and really existent universality and objectivity of
self-consciousness - which is Reason.
Reason, as the Idea (§ 213) as it here appears, is to be taken as meaning that the distinction between notion and reality which it unifies has the special aspect of a distinction between the self-concentrated notion or consciousness, and the object subsisting external and opposed to it.
(c) REASON(7)
§438
The essential and actual truth which reason is, lies in the
simple identity of the subjectivity of the notion with its objectivity
and universality. The universality of reason, therefore, whilst it
signifies that the object, which was only given in consciousness qua
consciousness, is now itself universal, permeating and encompassing the
ego, also signifies that the pure ego is the pure form which overlaps
the object and encompasses it.
§439
Self-consciousness, thus certified that its determinations
are no less objective, or determinations of the very being of things,
than they are its own thoughts, is Reason, which as such an identity is
not only the absolute substance, but the truth that knows it. For truth
here has, as its peculiar mode and immanent form, the self-centred pure
notion, ego, the certitude of self as infinite universality. Truth,
aware of what it is, is mind (spirit).
1. Das Bewu§tsein als solches: (a) Das sinnliche Bewu§tsein
2. Wahrnehmung
3. Der Verstand.
4. Selbstbewu§tsein.
5. Die Begierde
6. Das anerkennende Selbstbewu§tsein.
7. Die Vernunft.
SUB-SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY, MIND
(a) Theoretical Mind
(a) Intuition
(b) Representation
(aa) Recollection
(bb) Imagination
(cc) Memory
(c) Thinking
(b) Mind Practical
(a) Practical Sense or Feeling
(b) The Impulses and Choice
(c) Happiness
(c) Free Mind
C. PSYCHOLOGY
MIND(1)
§440
Mind has defined itself as the truth of soul and
consciousness - the former a simple immediate totality, the latter now
an infinite form which is not, like consciousness, restricted by that
content, and does not stand in mere correlation to it as to its object,
but is an awareness of this substantial totality, neither subjective
nor objective. Mind, therefore, starts only from its own being and is
in correlation only with its own features.
Psychology accordingly studies the faculties or general modes of mental activity qua mental - mental vision, ideation, remembering, etc., desires, etc.- apart both from the content, which on the phenomenal side is found in empirical ideation, in thinking also and in desire and will, and from the two forms in which these modes exist, viz. in the soul as a physical mode, and in consciousness itself as a separately existent object of that consciousness. This, however, is not an arbitrary abstraction by the psychologist. Mind is just this elevation above nature and physical modes, and above the complication with an external object - in one word, above the material, as its concept has just shown. All it has now to do is to realize this notion of its freedom, and get rid of the form of immediacy with which it once more begins. The content which is elevated to intuitions is its sensations: it is its intuitions also which are transmuted into representations, and its representations which are transmuted again into thoughts, etc.
§441
The soul is finite, so far as its features are immediate or
connatural. Consciousness is finite, in so far as it has an object.
Mind is finite, in so far as, though it no longer has an object, it has
a mode in its knowledge; i.e. it is finite by means of its immediacy,
or, what is the same thing, by being subjective or only a notion. And
it is a matter of no consequence, which is defined as its notion, and
which as the reality of that notion. Say that its notion is the utterly
infinite objective reason, then its reality is knowledge or
intelligence: say that knowledge is its notion, then its reality is
that reason, and the realization of knowledge consists in appropriating
reason. Hence the finitude of mind is to be placed in the (temporary)
failure of knowledge to get hold of the full reality of its reason, or,
equally, in the (temporary) failure of reason to attain full
manifestation in knowledge. Reason at the same time is only infinite so
far as it is 'absolute' freedom; so far, that is, as presupposing
itself for its knowledge to work upon, it thereby reduces itself to
finitude, and appears as everlasting movement of superseding this
immediacy, of comprehending itself, and being a rational knowledge.
§442
The progress of mind is development, in so far as its
existent phase, viz. knowledge, involves as its intrinsic purpose and
burden that utter and complete autonomy which is rationality; in which
case the action of translating this purpose into reality is strictly
only a nominal passage over into manifestation, and is even there a
return into itself. So far as knowledge which has not shaken off its
original quality of mere knowledge is only abstract or formal, the goal
of mind is to give it objective fulfilment, and thus at the same time
produce its freedom.
The development here meant is not that of the individual (which has a certain anthropological character), where faculties and forces are regarded as successively emerging and presenting themselves in external existences series of steps, on the ascertainment of which there was for a long time great stress laid (by the system of Condillac), as if a conjectural natural emergence could exhibit the origin of these faculties and explain them. In Condillac's method there is an unmistakable intention to show how the several modes of mental activity could be made intelligible without losing sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their necessary interconnection. But the categories employed in doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling principle is that the sensible is taken (and with justice) as the prius or the initial basis, but that the latter phases that follow this starting-point present themselves as emerging in a solely affirmative manner, and the negative aspect of mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed as a sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As the theory of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left as if it were the true and essential foundation.
Similarly, if the activities of mind are treated as mere manifestations, forces, perhaps in terms stating their utility or suitability for some other interest of head or heart, there is no indication of the true final aim of the whole business. That can only be the intelligible unity of mind, and its activity can only have itself as aim; i.e. its aim can only be to get rid of the form of immediacy or subjectivity, to reach and get hold of itself, and to liberate itself to itself. In this way the so-called faculties of mind as thus distinguished are only to be treated as steps of this liberation. And this is the only rational mode of studying the mind and its various activities.
§443
As consciousness has for its object the stage which preceded
it, viz. the natural soul (§ 413), so mind has or rather makes
consciousness its object: i.e. whereas consciousness is only the
virtual identity of the ego with its other (§ 415), the mind realizes
that identity as the concrete unity which it and it only knows. Its
productions are governed by the principle of all reason that the
contents are at once potentially existent, and are the mind's own, in
freedom. Thus, if we consider the initial aspect of mind, that aspect
is twofold - as being and as its own: by the one, the mind finds in
itself something which is, by the other it affirms it to be only its
own. The way of mind is therefore
(a) to be theoretical: it has to do with the rational as its immediate affection which it must render its own: or it has to free knowledge from its presupposedness and therefore from its abstractness, and make the affection subjective. When the affection has been rendered its own, and the knowledge consequently characterized as free intelligence, i.e. as having its full and free characterization in itself, it is
(b) Will: practical mind, which in the first place is likewise formal - i.e. its content is at first only its own, and is immediately willed; and it proceeds next to liberate its volition from its subjectivity, which is the one-sided form of its contents, so that it
(c) confronts itself as free mind and thus gets rid of both its defects of one-sidedness.
§444
The theoretical as well as the practical mind still fall
under the general range of Mind Subjective. They are not to be
distinguished as active and passive. Subjective mind is productive: but
it is a merely nominal productivity. Inwards, the theoretical mind
produces only its 'ideal' world, and gains abstract autonomy within;
while the practical, while it has to do with autonomous products, with
a material which is its own, has a material which is only nominally
such, and therefore a restricted content, for which it gains the form
of universality. Outwards, the subjective mind (which as a unity of
soul and consciousness, is thus also a reality - a reality at once
anthropological and conformable to consciousness) has for its products,
in the theoretical range, the word, and in the practical (not yet deed
and action, but) enjoyment.
Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in modern times have yet derived least profit from the more general mental culture and the deeper conception of reason. It is still extremely ill off. The turn which the Kantian philosophy has taken has given it greater importance: it has, and that in its empirical condition, been claimed as the basis of metaphysics, which is to consist of nothing but the empirical apprehension and the analysis of the facts of human consciousness, merely as facts, just as they are given. This position of psychology, mixing it up with forms belonging to the range of consciousness and with anthropology, has led to no improvement in its own condition: but it has had the further effect that, both for the mind as such, and for metaphysics and philosophy generally, all attempts have been abandoned to ascertain the necessity of essential and actual reality, to get at the notion and the truth.
(a) THEORETICAL MIND
§445
Intelligence(2) finds itself determined: this is its
apparent aspect from which in its immediacy it starts. But as
knowledge, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own.
Its activity has to do with the empty form - the pretense of finding
reason: and its aim is to realize its concept or to be reason actual,
along with which the content is realized as rational. This activity is
cognition. The nominal knowledge, which is only certitude, elevates
itself, as reason is concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge.
The course of this elevation is itself rational, and consists in a
necessary passage (governed by the concept) of one grade or term of
intelligent activity (a so-called faculty of mind) into another. The
refutation which such cognition gives of the semblance that the
rational is found, starts from the certitude or the faith of
intelligence in its capability of rational knowledge, and in the
possibility of being able to appropriate the reason, which it and the
content virtually is.
The distinction of Intelligence from Will is often incorrectly taken to mean that each has a fixed and separate existence of its own, as if volition could be without intelligence, or the activity of intelligence could be without will. The possibility of a culture of the intellect which leaves the heart untouched, as it is said, and of the heart without the intellect - of hearts which in one-sided way want intellect, and heartless intellects - only proves at most that bad and radically untrue existences occur. But it is not philosophy which should take such untruths of existence and of mere imagining for truth - take the worthless for the essential nature. A host of other phrases used of intelligence, e.g. that it receives and accepts impressions from outside, that ideas arise through the causal operations of external things upon it, etc., belong to a point of view utterly alien to the mental level or to the position of philosophic study.
A favorite reflectional form is that of powers and faculties of soul, intelligence, or mind. Faculty, like power or force, is the fixed quality of any object of thought, conceived as reflected into self. Force (§ 136) is no doubt the infinity of form - of the inward and the outward: but its essential finitude involves the indifference of content to form (ib. note). In this lies the want of organic unity which by this reflectional form, treating mind as a 'lot' of forces, is brought into mind, as it is by the same method brought into nature. Any aspect which can be distinguished in mental action is stereotyped as an independent entity, and the mind thus made a skeleton-like mechanical collection. It makes absolutely no difference if we substitute the expression 'activities' for powers and faculties. Isolate the activities and you similarly make the mind a mere aggregate, and treat their essential correlation as an external incident.
The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called cognition (knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence inter alia knows - besides which it also intuits, conceives, remembers, imagines, etc. To take up such a position is in the first instance, part and parcel of that isolating of mental activity just censured; but it is also in addition connected with the great question of modern times, as to whether true knowledge or the knowledge of truth is possible - which, if answered in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort. The numerous aspects and reasons and modes of phrase with which external reflection swells the bulk of this question are cleared up in their place: the more external the attitude of understanding in the question, the more diffuse it makes its simple object. At the present place the simple concept of cognition is what confronts the quite general assumption taken up by the question, viz. the assumption that the possibility of true knowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecute or to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence. It follows from this that it is absurd to speak of intelligence and yet at the same time of the possibility or choice of knowing or not. But cognition is genuine, just so far as it realizes itself, or makes the concept its own. This nominal description has its concrete meaning exactly where cognition has it. The stages of its realizing activity are intuition, conception, memory, etc.: these activities have no other immanent meaning: their aim is solely the concept of cognition (§ 445 note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that they are useful for something else than cognition, or that they severally procure a cognitive satisfaction of their own; and that leads to a glorification of the delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It is true that even as isolated (i.e. as non-intelligent), intuition, imagination, etc. can afford a certain satisfaction: what physical nature succeeds in doing by its fundamental quality - its out-of-selfness - exhibiting the elements or factors of immanent reason external to each other - that the intelligence can do by voluntary act, but the same result may happen where the intelligence is itself only natural and untrained. But the true satisfaction, it is admitted, is only afforded by an intuition permeated by intellect and mind, by rational conception, by products of imagination which are permeated by reason and exhibit ideas - in a word, by cognitive intuition, cognitive conception, etc. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that intuition, conception, etc. are not isolated, and exist only as 'moments' in the totality of cognition itself.
(a) Intuition (Intelligent Perception)(3)
§446
The mind which as soul is physically conditioned - which as
consciousness stands to this condition on the same terms as to an
outward object - but which as intelligence finds itself so
characterized - is (1) an inarticulate embryonic life, in which it is
to itself as it were palpable and has the whole material of its
knowledge. In consequence of the immediacy in which it is thus
originally, it is in this stage only as an individual and possesses a
vulgar subjectivity. It thus appears as mind in the guise of feeling.
If feeling formerly turned up (§ 399) as a mode of the soul's existence, the finding of it or its immediacy was in that case essentially to be conceived as a congenital or corporeal condition; whereas at present it is only to be taken abstractly in the general sense of immediacy.
§447
The characteristic form of feeling is that though it is a
mode of some 'affection', this mode is simple. Hence feeling, even
should its import be most sterling and true, has the form of casual
particularity - not to mention that its import may also be the most
scanty and most untrue.
It is commonly enough assumed that mind has in its feeling the material of its ideas, but the statement is more usually understood in a sense the opposite of that which it has here. In contrast with the simplicity of feeling it is usual rather to assume that the primary mental phase is judgement generally, or the distinction of consciousness into subject and object; and the special quality of sensation is derived from an independent object, external or internal. With us, in the truth of mind, the mere consciousness point of view, as opposed to true mental 'idealism', is swallowed up, and the matter of feeling has rather been supposed already as immanent in the mind. - It is commonly taken for granted that as regards content there is more in feeling than in thought: this being specially affirmed of moral and religious feelings. Now the material, which the mind as it feels is to itself, is here the result and the mature result of a fully organized reason. hence under the head of feeling is comprised all rational and indeed all spiritual content whatever. But the form of selfish singleness to which feeling reduces the mind is the lowest and worst vehicle it can have - one in which it is not found as a free and infinitely universal principle, but rather as subjective and private, in content and value entirely contingent. Trained and sterling feeling is the feeling of an educated mind which has acquired the consciousness of the true differences of things, of their essential relationships and real characters; and it is with such a mind that this rectified material enters into its feeling and receives this form. Feeling is the immediate, as it were the closest, contact in which the thinking subject can stand to a given content. Against that content the subject reacts first of all with its particular self-feeling, which though it may be of more sterling value and of wider range than a one-sided intellectual standpoint, may just as likely be narrow and poor; and in any case is the form of the particular and subjective. If a man on any topic appeals not to the nature and notion of the thing, or at least to reasons - to the generalities of common sense - but to his feeling, the only thing to do is to let him alone, because by his behaviour he refuses to have any lot or part in common rationality, and shuts himself up in his own isolated subjectivity - his private and particular self.
§448
(2) As this immediate finding is broken up into elements, we
have the one factor in Attention - the abstract identical direction of
mind (in feeling, as also in all other more advanced developments of
it) - an active self-collection - the factor of fixing it as our own,
but with an as yet only nominal autonomy of intelligence. Apart from
such attention there is nothing for the mind. The other factor is to
invest the special quality of feeling, as contrasted with this
inwardness of mind, with the character of something existent, but as a
negative or as the abstract otherness of itself. Intelligence thus
defines the content of sensation as something that is out of itself,
projects it into time and space, which are the forms in which it is
intuitive. To the view of consciousness the material is only an object
of consciousness, a relative other: from mind it receives the rational
characteristic of being its very other (§§ 247, 254).
§449
(3) When intelligence reaches a concrete unity of the two
factors, that is to say, when it is at once self-collected in thi