Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
its form contingent. The content is not in unity with the form, and this
form is hence in itself contingent, because it, considered on its own
account, is the movement onwards in a foreign content. The major premise
is the content existent for itself, the minor is likewise the content
not through itself, for it goes back into the infinite, _i.e._ it has
not the form in itself; the form is not the content. The opposite may
always be made out equally well through the syllogism, for it is a matter
of indifference to this form what content is made its basis. “Dialectic
does not assist in the discovery of the arts; many arts were found out by
chance.”[102]
It was not against this syllogism generally, _i.e._ not against the
Notion of it (for Bacon did not possess this), but against deduction as
it was put into operation, as it was to the scholastics—the deduction
which took an assumed content as its basis—that Bacon declaimed, urging
that the content of experience should be made the basis, and the method
of induction pursued. He demanded that observations on nature and
experiments should be made fundamental, and pointed out the objects
whose investigation was of special importance in the interests of human
society, and so on. From this there then resulted the establishment of
conclusions through induction and analogy.[103] In fact it was only to
an alteration in the content that, without being aware of it, Bacon
was impelled. For though he rejected the syllogism and only permitted
conclusions to be reached through induction, he unconsciously himself
drew deductions; likewise all these champions of empiricism, who followed
after him, and who put into practice what he demanded, and thought they
could by observations, experiments and experiences, keep the matter
in question pure, could neither so do without drawing deductions, nor
without introducing conceptions; and they drew their deductions and
formed their notions and conceptions all the more freely because they
thought that they had nothing to do with conceptions at all; nor did
they go forth from deduction to immanent, true knowledge. Thus when
Bacon set up induction in opposition to the syllogism, this opposition
is formal; each induction is also a deduction, which fact was known even
to Aristotle. For if a universal is deduced from a number of things, the
first proposition reads, “These bodies have these qualities;” the second,
“All these bodies belong to one class;” and thus, in the third place,
this class has these qualities. That is a perfect syllogism. Induction
always signifies that observations are instituted, experiments made,
experience regarded, and from this the universal determination is derived.
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