47 The British Hegelians
It was formerly a matter of some surprise to me that there should be so many Hegelians in England, and in such places of influence. I could imagine how the system might have taken root in circles where the classic tradition was absent or enfeebled—in America, in Scotland, among the Dissenters or Jews in England itself; but how could Oxford and Cambridge fail to see in that system the trail of the serpent? How could they mistake it for a Christian or for a spiritual philosophy? It is indeed, in form, an encyclopaedic system, and in that sense suitable to universities; and it deifies knowledge such as an encyclopaedia can give, turning it into the sum total of reality, so that it flatters the self-sufficiency of pedants, or that of any reflective mind. But in Oxford and Cambridge knowledge is not everything; they are more and less than universities; the learning they cultivate is selective and pursued in the service of aristocratic liberty. I should not expect them to care much for a philosophy that was not poetic and devout. I sometimes fancy how the genuine Oxonians must have smiled to hear T. H. Green, in the early days of transcendentalism, talking about his spiritual principle in nature. By spiritual he meant mind-made; he thought the world, remaining just as it is, could suddenly be proved to be spiritual if you could show that a mental synthesis was requisite to hold it together. But what possible advantage is it to the world to be held together by a mental synthesis, rather than by space or time or the truth of its constitution? A synthesis of worthless facts does not render them severally better, nor itself a good. A spirit whose essential function was to create relations would be merely a generative principle, as the spider is to its web; it would be no better than its work, unless perhaps it was spiritual enough to grow weary of that vain labour. Spiritual, for those who retain the language of Christendom, signifies free from the world and from the flesh, and addressed to the eternal and to the beautiful.
Everything, however, has its explanation, and in the matter of English Hegelism I think I begin to see it. In the first place, I was rashly identifying England with a figment of my dreams, with which I was in love: I saw in my mind’s eye a manly and single-minded England, free, candid, poetical, akin to feudal France, beauty-loving like old Italy, the Benjamin of the Roman family of nations, adding to the dignity and disinterestedness of the Castilian character only a certain blond charm, a certain infusion of northern purity, and of sympathy with the wild and rural voices of nature. In this England, in which there was something Spartan and archaically Greek, the men were like Hippolytus and the women like Antigone. Naturally it was unintelligible to me that the system of Hegel should take root in such a nation. Persons with a ripe moral tradition are not attracted by sophistry. No argument, however specious, will convince them that the experience of man on earth makes up the whole universe, or the chief part of it; much less will they allow fortune, under the pompous name of evolution, to dictate to them their moral allegiance. The chief force of the Hegelian system for those who are not metaphysicians lies in the criterion of progress which it imposes. This criterion is not beauty in art, nor truth in philosophy, nor justice in society, nor happiness in the individual life: the criterion is simply the direction which the actual movement happens to be taking. Hegel endeavours to show in what way forms are inevitably passing into one another. Thus his ethics begs defence of history, and his history calls for aid on metaphysics. And what metaphysics? A logic of moral fashions. Now it seemed to me axiomatic that eager co-operation with whatever is going on, or is bound to win, would be repulsive to a man of honour. Nor could I conceive a true Englishman taking kindly even to the grand side of this system, which to me personally is rather attractive, I mean to its satirical elevation. The English mind is tender and temperate: it deprecates scorn. But Hegel, in his scathing moods, is comparable to Heraclitus; he mocks every opinion with an opinion which refutes it, and every life with another life which kills it. He has the wisdom of the serpent; but unlike Heraclitus, whose fabled tears were warm, he has the heart of the serpent too. He despises finitude because it is weak, as if an infinity of pervasive weakness were strong, or a perpetual flux a victory for anything. Laughing, I can’t help thinking, up his sleeve, he suggests that this flux itself is a victory for the spirit, meaning by spirit the law by which he supposes that this flux is controlled. But this is sheer mockery: the only moral victory is that achieved, under favourable conditions, by some living spirit, glad to be expressed or to have been expressed in some perfect form. The finite only is good: the infinite tides are worth exactly what they cast up. There is a bitter idolatry of fate in this system which might seem splendid to a barbarian; but how, I asked myself, can it be anything but horrible to a cultivated conscience, or to a pupil of the Greeks?
In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and overbalanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, nor bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, nor sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything. In the real England there is a strong if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose. Being so much in earnest, they are convinced that they must be living on the highest principles: what, then, is more intelligible than that they should welcome a philosophy which assures them that such is the case? They are well pleased to hear, on the highest metaphysical authority, that the first duty of a rich man is to grow richer, and of a settled man to redouble in loyalty to his wife, his community, his party, and his business. The Protestant reformers told them so formerly in biblical language; the Protestant philosophers tell them so now in the language of Hegel.
Besides, on its technical side, the Hegelian system has a great strength, and was most apposite in the predicament in which, fifty years ago, philosophy found itself in England. It supplied three illusions which idealism sadly needed if it was to become orthodox and popular: the illusions of profundity, of comprehensiveness, and of finality. It was a philosophy of progress—another claim to popularity in the nineteenth century—not only progress in the world at large, but especially in philosophy itself; and a philosophy of progress cannot ask us to go back, to cry peccavi, and reconsider the false assumptions on which we may have been reasoning for two hundred or for two thousand years. It must accept these assumptions and go on building upon them, always a higher and a higher structure. Now the principal assumption of British philosophy, on which German philosophy itself rests, was that nothing can be experienced except experience itself, and nothing known except knowledge. But the Germans analysed far more accurately than the British had formerly done what the notions of experience and knowledge contain. They demonstrated the unity of glance that is essential to it, and thus refuted (without of course removing) the successive and episodic character of experience, as the honest but unwary empiricists had conceived it. Hume and Mill had remained naturalists in regard to the distribution of those volatile ideas to which they pretended to reduce the world. John Stuart Mill had a deeper and a sweeter mind than his critics; there was something in him akin to Wordsworth or to Matthew Arnold; but his inherited principles were treacherous, and opened the door to just such a concentration of egotism as the Hegelians brought about. Moreover, Hume and Mill had seemed depressing; they perplexed without filling the mind; they made everything that is most familiar and interesting seem strangely hypothetical; whereas in Hegel the pageant of nature and history appeared to be re-formed and to march round and round the stage of the ego under the strongest light to the loudest music. There was a sort of deafening optimism about it; and not only was a convenient school-book universe offered you, warranted complete, but all previous philosophies were succinctly described, refuted, and linked together, in a manner most convenient for tutorial purposes. Of course, the true character and eternal plausibility of each great system were falsified in such a survey; each was attached artificially to what happened to precede and to follow it in time, or in the knowledge of the historian; as if history were a single chain of events, and its march dialectical—a fiction which Hegel did not blush to maintain. An inner instability was thus attributed to each view which came only from the slippery mind of the critic touring amongst them, without the least intention of finding anywhere a home in which to rest. Hegel was not looking for the truth—why dream of truth when you possess learning?—he was writing an apology for opinion. He enjoyed understanding and imagining things plausibly, and had a great intelligence to pour into his constructions; but this very heat of thought fused everything into the mould of his method, and he gave out that he had understood every system much better than those who believed in it, and had been carried by its inner contradictions (which its adepts never saw) to the next convenient position in the development of human fancy, and of his own lectures.
Abstraction, such as withdrawal of the mind from worldly affairs, is condemned by this philosophy: you must glut the brain and heart with everything that exists. An even worse abstraction, for a philosopher, is to detach the object from the subject, and believe it to exist independently. But what is abstraction? Can attention ever render things more discrete than they are in their own nature? Suppose I abstract a coin from another man’s pocket: it is easily proved by Hegel’s logic that such an abstraction is a mere appearance. Coins cannot exist as coins except as pocketed and owned; at the same time they imply an essential tendency to pass into the pockets of other men: for a coin that could not issue from the pocket would be a coin in name only, and not in function. When it actually passes from one man’s pocket into another’s, this circumstance, far from justifying us in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all men’s pockets (when not empty and therefore, in function, not pockets at all) are intrinsically related and, in a higher sense, one and the same purse. Therefore, we may conclude, it was not the sly transference of the coin from my neighbour’s pocket into mine that was the wrongful abstraction, but only the false supposition that if the coin was his it was not, by right of eminent domain, mine also. A man, in so far as he is the possessor of coins, is simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as there is transferable coin, in them, are one pocket together. In this way we avoid false abstraction by proving that everything is abstract.
Nor is this all; for strange as it may seem, Hegel appeals also to one type of religious people, and seems to them to lift religious faith triumphantly above all possible assaults of fact or of science. Are not all facts mere ideas? And must not all ideas be bred in the mind according to its own free principles of life and effort? Is not all this semblance of externality in things a blessed foil to spiritual activity? Does not this universal mutation pay loud homage to eternal law? Things go by threes: that is the reason why they exist and why they move, and the sovereign good to be attained by their motion. If every truth turns out to be a lie, every lie is a part of some higher truth; if everything becomes unreal, because it passes into something else, this other thing inherits its reality; and if we look at things as a whole instead of seriatim, and spread out our moving film into a panorama, we perceive that everything has implied everything else from the beginning, and formed a part of it; So that only from the point of view of ignorance is anything earlier, or better, or truer than anything else. Here, in the All, we have rest from our labours.
In this way even the slaves of the world at last learn to overcome the world; but it is too late. This All, even if it were open to human survey, would have no value: it defeats each of its constituent lives and is itself responsive to no living desire. The indistinction which the vague idea of it produces in the mind may be soothing to the weary; but better than mystical relief at the end would have been moral freedom in the beginning. That a different life will supersede mine is nothing against my happiness; that time is swallowing me up is nothing against my appropriate eternity. How vain the crabbed hand of the miser stringing his pearls and never looking at them, counting the drops that trickle into his cup and never emptying it, never feeling the intoxication of living now, of telling the truth frankly, and of being happy here I If the devil laughs at me because I am mortal, I laugh at him for imagining that death can trouble me, or any other free spirit, so long as I live, or after I am dead.