CHAPTER VIII.. P. 211, § 113. Self-Relation--(sich) Auf Sich Beziehen.

P. 211, § 113. Self-relation--(sich) auf sich beziehen.

P. 213, § 115. The 'laws of thought' is the magniloquent title given in the Formal Logic since Kant's day to the principles or maxims (principia, Grundsätze) which Kant himself described as 'general and formal criteria of truth.' They include the so-called principle of contradiction, with its developments, the principle of identity and excluded middle: to which, with a desire for completeness, eclectic logicians have added the Leibnizian principle of the reason. Hegel has probably an eye to Krug and Fries in some of his remarks. The three laws may be compared and contrasted with the three principles, --homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms, in Kant's Kritik d. r. Vern. p. 686.

P. 217, § 117. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, Liv. ii. ch. 27, § 3 (ed. Erdmann, p. 273: cf. fourth Letter to Clarke). Il n'y a point deux individus indiscernables. Un gentilhomme d'esprit de mes amis, en parlant avec moi en présence de Madame l'Electrice dans le jardin de Herrenhausen, crut qu'il trouverait bien deux feuilles entièrement semblables. Madame l'Electrice l'en défia, et il courut longtems en vain pour en chercher.

The principle of individuation or indiscernibility is: 'If two individuals were perfectly alike and equal and, in a word, indistinguishable by themselves, there would be no principle of individuation: (Leibniz, ed. Erdm. p. 277) Poser deux choses indiscernables est poser la même chose sous deux noms (p. 756). Principium individuationis idem est quod absolutae specificationis quâ res ita sit determinata, ut ab aliis omnibus distingui possit.

P. 221, § 119. Polarity. Schelling, ii. 489. 'The law of Polarity is a universal law of nature'; cf. ii. 459: 'It is a first principle of a philosophic theory of nature to have a view (in the whole of nature), on polarity and dualism.' But he adds (476), 'It is time to define more accurately the concept of polarity.' So Oken, Naturphilosophie: §76: 'A force consisting of two principles is called Polarity.' § 77: 'Polarity is the first force which makes its appearance in the world.' § 81: 'The original movement is a result of the original polarity.'

P. 223, § 119. Cf. Fichte, ii. 53. 'To everything but this the logically trained thinker can rise. He is on his guard against contradiction. But, in that case, how about the possibility of the maxim of his own logic that we can think no contradiction. In some way he must have got hold of contradiction and thought it, or he could make no communications about it. Had such people only once regularly asked themselves how they came to think the merely possible or contingent (the not-necessary), and how they actually do so! Evidently they here leap through a not-being, not-thinking, &c, into the utterly unmediated, self-initiating, free,--into beënt non-being,--in short, the above contradiction, as it was laid down. With consistent thinkers the result of this incapacity is nothing but the utter abolition of freedom,--the most absolute fatalism and Spinozism.

P. 227, §121. Leibniz (ed. Erdmann, p. 515). 'The principle of la raison déterminante is that nothing ever occurs without there being a cause for it, or at least a determinant reason, i.e. something which may serve to render a reason à priori why that is existent rather than in any other way. This great principle holds good in all events.' Cf. p. 707. 'The principle of "sufficient reason" is that in virtue of which we consider that no fact could be found true or consistent, no enunciation truthful, without there being a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise.... When a truth is necessary, we can find the reason of it by analysis, resolving it into simpler ideas and truths, until we come to primitive ideas.... But the sufficient reason ought also to be found in contingent truths or truths of fact, i.e. in the series of things spread through the universe of creatures, or the resolution into particular reasons might go into a limitless detail: ... and as all this detail embraces only other antecedent, or more detailed contingencies, ... the sufficient or final (dernière) reason must be outside the succession or series of this detail of contingencies, however infinite it might be. And it is thus that the final reason of things must be in a "necessary substance," in which the detail of the changes exists only eminenter, as in the source,--and it is what we call God.' (Monadology §§ 32-38.)

Hence the supremacy of final causes. Thus Opp. ed. Erdmann, p. 678: Ita fit ut efficientes causae pendeant a finalibus, et spiritualia sint natura priora materialibus. Accordingly he urges, p. 155, that final cause has not merely a moral and religious value in ethics and theology, but is useful even in physics for the detection of deep-laid truths. Cf. p. 106: C'est sanctifier la Philosophie que de faire couler ses ruisseaux de la fontaine des attributs de Dieu. Bien loin d'exclure les causes finales et la considération d'un être agissant avec sagesse, c'est de là qu'il faut tout déduire en Physique. Cf. also Principes de la Nature (Leibn. ed. Erdm. p. 716): 'It is surprising that by the sole consideration of efficient causes or of matter, we could not render a reason for those laws of movement discovered in our time. Il y faut recourir aux causes finales.'

P. 228, § 121 Socrates. The antitheses between Socrates and the Sophists belongs in the main to the Platonic dialogues,--not co the historical Socrates. It is the literary form in which the philosophy of Plato works out its development through the criticism of contemporary opinions and doctrines. And even in Plato's writings the antagonism is very unlike what later interpretations have made out of it.

P. 231, § 124. Thing by itself (thing in itself) the Ding:an:sich.

P. 235, § 126. Cf. Encycl. § 334 (Werke, viii. 1. p. 411). 'In empirical chemistry the chief object is the particularity of the matters and products, which are grouped by superficial abstract features which make impossible any system in the special detail. In these lists, metals, oxygen, hydrogen, &c.--metalloids, sulphur, phosphorus appear side by side as simple chemical bodies on the same level. The great physical variety of these bodies must of itself create a prepossession against such coordination; and their chemical origin, the process from which they issue, is clearly no less various. But in an equally chaotic way, more abstract and more real processes are put on the same level. If all this is to get scientific form, every product ought to be determined according to the grade of the concrete and completely developed process from which it essentially issues, and which gives it its peculiar significance; and for that purpose it is not less essential to distinguish grades in abstractness or reality of the process. Animal and vegetable substances in any case belong to a quite other order: so little can their nature be understood from the chemical process, that they are rather destroyed in it, and only the way of their death is apprehended. These substances, however, ought above all to serve to counter-act the metaphysic predominant in chemistry as in physics,--the ideas or rather wild fancies of the unalterability of matters under all circumstances, as well as the categories of the composition and the consistence of bodies from such matters. We see it generally admitted that chemical matters lose in combination the properties which they show in separation: and yet we find the idea prevailing that they are the same things without the properties as they are with them,--so that as things with these properties they are not results of the process.'--Cf. Werke, vii. a. 372: 'Air does not consist of oxygen and nitrogen: but these are the forms under which air is put,' cf. ib.403.

P. 241, § 131. Fichte's Sonnenklarer Bericht appeared in 1801.

P. 247, § 136. Herder's Gott: Gespräche über Spinoza's System, 1787, 2nd ed. 1800. 'God is, in the highest and unique sense of the word, Force, i.e. the primal force of all forces, the soul of all souls' (p. 63), 'All that we call matter, therefore, is more or less animate: it is a realm of efficient forces. One force predominates: otherwise there were no one, no whole' (p. 207). 'The supreme being (Daseyn) could give its creatures nothing higher than being. (Theophron.) But, my friend, being and being, however simple in the concept, are in their estate very different; and what do you suppose, Philolaus, marks its grades and differences? (Phil.) Nothing but forces. In God himself we found no higher conception; but all his forces were only one. The supreme force could not be other than supreme goodness and wisdom, ever-living, ever-active. (Theoph.) Now you yourself see, Philolaus, that the supreme, or rather the All (for God is not a supreme unit in a scale of beings like himself), could not reveal himself otherwise than in the universe as active. In him nothing could slumber, and what he expressed was himself. He is before everything, and everything subsists in him: the whole world an expression, an appearance of his ever-living, ever-acting forces' (p. 200).

'It was the mistake of Spinoza,' says Herder, 'to be unduly influenced by the Cartesian phraseology. Had he chosen the conception of force and effect, everything would have gone easier, and his system become much more distinct and coherent. 'Had he developed the conception of power, and the conception of matter, he must in conformity with his system necessarily have come to the conception of forces, which work as well in matter as in organs of thinking: he would in that case have regarded power and thought as forces, e.g. as one.' (Cf. H. Spencer, 'Force, the Ultimate of Ultimates.' First Princ. p 169)

According to Rosenkranz (Leben Hegels, p. 223) there exists in manuscript a criticism by Hegel on the second edition of Herder's God. Herder's Dialogue belongs to the controversy aroused by Jacobi's letters on Spinoza.

P. 250, § 136. Newton. Leibniz charges him with the view that God needs from time to time remonter sa montre, otherwise it would cease going: that his machine requires to be cleaned (décrasser) by extraordinary aid' (ed. Erdm. p. 746).

P. 252, § 140. The verses quoted occur in Goethe's Werke ii. 376, under the heading Allerdings. Originally the first four lines appeared in Haller's poem Die menschlichen Tugenden thus--

Ins Innre der Natur bringt sein erschaffner Geist: Zu glücklich, wenn sie noch die äußre Schale weist!

(To nature's heart there penetrates no mere created mind: Too happy if she but display the outside of her rind.)

Hegel--reading weizt for weist--takes the second line as

Too happy, if he can but know the outside of her rind.

Goethe's attack upon a vulgar misuse of the lines belongs to his dispute with the scientists. His verses appeared in 1820 as Heiteres Reimstück at the end of Heft 3 zur Morphologie,--of which the closing section is entitled Freundlicher Zuruf (Werke xxvii. 161), as follows:--

"Ins Innre der Natur," O du Philister!-- "Dringt kein erschaffner Geist." . . . . . . "Glückselig! wem sie nur Die äußre Schale weis't." Das hör' ich sechzig Jahre wiederholen, Ich fluche drauf, aber verstohlen: Sage mir taufend tausendmale: Alles giebt sie reichlich und gern; Natur hat weder Stern Noch Schale, Alles ist sie mit einem Male.

I swear--of course but to myself--as rings within my ears That same old warning o'er and o'er again for sixty years, And thus a thousand thousand times I answer in my mind: --With gladsome and ungrudging hand metes nature from her store: She keeps not back the core, Nor separates the rind, But all in each both rind and core has evermore combined.]

P. 254, § 140. Plato and Aristotle: cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 247 A (φθόνoς γὰρ ξω θείον χόρoυ ἴσταται); Timaeus, 29 E; and Aristotle, Metaph. i. 2. 22.

P. 256, § 140. Goethe: Sämmtl. Werke, iii. 203 (Maxime und Reflexionen). Gegen große Vorzüge eines Andern giebt es kein Rettungsmittel als die Liebe. Cf. Schiller to Goethe, 2 July, 1796. 'How vividly I have felt on this occasion ... that against surpassing merit nothing but Love gives liberty' (daß es dem Vortrefflichen gegenüber seine Freiheit giebt als die Liebe).

'Pragmatic.' This word, denoting a meddlesome busybody in older English and sometimes made a vague term of abuse, has been in the present century used in English as it is here employed in German.

According to Polybius, ix. I. 2, the πραγματικὸς τρόπος τῆς ἱστορίας is that which has a directly utilitarian aim. So Kant, Foundation of Metaph. of Ethic (Werke, viii. 41, note): 'A history is pragmatically composed when it renders prudent, i.e. instructs the world how it may secure its advantage better or at least as well as the ages preceding.' Schelling (v. 308) quotes in illustration of pragmatic history-writing the words of Faust to Wagner (Goethe, xi. 26):

Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst, Das ist im Grund der herren eigner Geist,, In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.

Cf. also Hegel, Werke, ix. 8. 'A second kind of reflectional history is the pragmatic. When we have to do with the past and are engaged with a distant world, the mind sees rising before it a present, which it has from its own action as a reward for its trouble. The events are different; but their central and universal fact, their structural plan is identical. This abolishes the past and makes the event present. Pragmatic reflections, however abstract they be, are thus in reality the present, and vivify the tales of the past with the life of to-day.--Here too a word should specially be given to the moralising and the moral instructions to be gained through history,--for which it was often studied.... Rulers, statesmen, nations, are especially bidden learn from the experience of history. But what experience and history teach is that nations and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted upon teaching which could have been drawn from it.'

Cf. Froude: Divorce of Catherine, p. 2. 'The student (of history) looks for an explanation (of political conduct) in elements which he thinks he understands--in pride, ambition, fear, avarice, jealousy, or sensuality.'

P. 257, § 141. Cf. Goethe, xxiii, 298. 'What is the outside of an organic nature but the ever-varied phenomenon of the inside? This outside, this surface is so exactly adapted to a varied, complex, delicate, inward structure that it thus itself becomes an inside: both aspects, the outside and the inside, standing in most direct correlation alike in the quietest existence and in the most violent movement.'

P. 260, § 143. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. p. 266.

P. 269, § 147. Cf. Schelling, Werke, v. 290 (cf. iii. 603). 'There are three periods of history, that of nature, of destiny, and of providence. These three ideas express the same identity, but in a different way. Destiny too is providence, but recognised in the real, as providence, is also destiny, but beheld (angeschaut) in the ideal.'

P. 275, § 151. On the relation between Spinoza and Leibniz cf. Hegel, Werke, iv. 187-193. It would be a mistake, however, to represent Leibniz as mainly engaged in a work of conscious antagonism to Spinoza.

P. 277, § 153. Jacobi.--Jacobi (like Schopenhauer) insists specially on the distinction between grounds (Gründe)--which are formal, logical, and verbal, and causes (Ursachen)--which carry us into reality and life and nature. To transform the mere Because into the cause we must (he says) pass from logic and the analytical understanding to experience and the inner life. Instead of the timelessness of simultaneity which characterises the logical relation cf ground and consequent, the nexus of cause and effect introduces the element of time,--thereby acquiring reality (Jacobi, Werke, iii. 452). The conception of Cause--meaningless as a mere category of abstract thought--gets reality as a factor in experience, ein Erfahrungsbegriff, and is immediately given to us in the consciousness of our own causality (Jacobi, Werke, iv. 145-158). Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vern. p. 116.

P. 283, § 158. The Amor intellectualis Dei (Spinoza, Eth. v. 32) is described as a consequence of the third grade of cognition, viz. the scientia intuitiva which 'proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate cognition of the essence of things (ii. 40, Schol. 2). From it arises (v. 27), the highest possible acquiescentia mentis, in which the mind contemplates all things sub specie aeternitatis (v. 29), knows itself to be in God and sees itself and all things in their divine essence. But this intellectual love of mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself (v. 36) 'From these things we clearly understand in what our salvation or blessedness or liberty consists: to wit, in the constant and eternal love towards God, or in the love of God towards men' (Schol. to v. 36).