It will greatly facilitate the appreciation of the history of Hegel’s views on Logic if at the outset we give some indication of his attitude to the problem of philosophy as a whole, the direction from which he approached philosophy, and the primary influences which helped to determine the course of his mental development. Hegel’s earliest conception of the nature of Logic has at least this in common with his latest, that Logic is no mere appendage or accident in his general system, but an integral element of it. The statement, therefore, of his general Philosophical point of view will throw no inconsiderable light on his theory of Logic.
Hegel’s intellectual development illustrates in a very suggestive manner a peculiarity of his own system. It consists in holding in succession opposite positions, along with the strenuous attempt to reconcile these opposites in such a way as to do complete justice to the importance of each. This, perhaps, may be taken as an indication that he possessed an unusually profound intellectual insight into the limitations inherent in the very nature of principles taken by themselves and in isolation; but more probably it was due to the natural sanity of a well-balanced personality which instinctively recoils from over-emphasis on any one part, no matter how important, of that single and completed whole whose life it shares. Hegel’s mind was continually and keenly alive to the value of the divergent aspects of the reality presented to it.
So much so, indeed, that a positive statement in one direction is unhesitatingly pitted against, and even “turned round” at times with bewildering facility into, its very counterpart – a modus operandi which is to a large extent the source of the perplexity found in deciphering his meaning. This appreciation of contrariety amongst the facts of experience is prominent at the very outset of his intellectual development, and determines it from first to last.
The first stage in Hegel’s career after leaving the gymnasium was devoted mainly to Theology. No doubt in his case, as in that of many another Weltkind, the capricious hand of fortune had most to do with deciding the course his earliest steps should take; but on this occasion fortune’s fingers turned the key of destiny at the first trial. For, whatever may have been Hegel’s interest in school theology, and in spite of the fact that he ultimately abandoned the intention of directly serving the Church, it is unquestionably Hegel’s intense appreciation of the aims and objects of religion that gives the dominant tone to his whole philosophy.
Not only is this evident from such records as we have of his studies during the years immediately succeeding his residence at Tübingen Theological Seminary, but we shall find it impossible to understand the position he assigns to religion in his final scheme,[1] and the incessant recurrence of its fundamental ideas and problems throughout his work, unless we assume this peculiarly intimate connexion in his own thought between religion and philosophy. The problems of the religious consciousness of his time compelled him to seek some satisfaction for them in philosophy; and in the light of this origin of his inquiry his subsequent development must be interpreted.
This pronounced influence of religion on Hegel’s philosophy must not, however, be understood in any narrow sense; for with it there was inevitably associated the problem of morality. The content of morality and religion is fundamentally the same. Both express what in man is most concrete, most universal, and most vital to his interests, and hence both directly appealed to a mind like Hegel’s, which from the first was awake to all that was deepest and most real in human life. These then must be taken together as supplying the objects with which Hegel was primarily concerned.
Now this native predisposition for ethico-religious inquiry put Hegel at once en rapport with the dominant spiritual movement of his time.
The wave of the new Humanism had at last (by 1794) broken over Germany, and carried with it everything and every one of affective significance during that epoch. Not only had the new Copernican metaphysics become the passionate creed and conviction of the leading philosophers of the day, led for the most part by Fichte; the influence of precisely the same ideas was also at work in the outpourings of the poetic genius of Goethe and Schiller, who were the princely embodiments of the new spirit. On Hegel the effect of this intellectual environment was not simply unconscious; he was ever closely in touch with the various agencies at work in the life around him, and found it easy to be sympathetically appreciative of the work of other minds. Thus his own innate mental proclivities, combined with the spiritual forces operative at the time, brought Hegel at the earliest stage of his intellectual development under the immediate influence of the master-builder of the new epoch – Kant. And though Kant’s influence is peculiarly associated with this first period of Hegel’s career, we shall find that it remained effective to the last.
At the outset, however, it was not primarily the value of Kant’s principle and result for philosophy proper that made them of such interest to Hegel; their importance lay rather in their bearing on religion and morality. For their purely speculative import he did not profess much concern. He was prepared to study the development of the Kantian doctrine by Fichte, Reinhold, and his friend Schelling; but in these matters he was content to be a “learner,” to leave “theoretical” problems to others.[2] He was aware, indeed, of the supreme theoretical value of the principle, and from the complete realisation of its meaning he expected a “Revolution in Germany;"[3] but Hegel’s own attention was absorbed by it because of the flood of light it threw on what was then of most interest to him – the problems of the religious consciousness. His mind is alive with the new spirit of freedom infused into intellectual life, with the new rationalism that is investing the discussion of religious questions.
