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
accidents, _i.e._ natural relations, viz. quantity, quality, relation,
activity, passivity, possession, position, time, place; and sixthly
nine moral relations, the virtues, viz. justice, prudence, courage,
temperance, faith, hope, love, patience, piety; and the vices, viz. envy,
wrath, inconstancy, covetousness, falsehood, gluttony, riotousness,
pride, sluggishness (_acedia_). These circles had to be placed in a
certain way, in order to give proper combinations. By turning them round
according to certain rules, by which all substances received the absolute
and relative predicates which fitted them, it was supposed that there
would be obtained in every possible combination universal science, truth,
and the knowledge of concrete objects in general.[54]
C. GENERAL STANDPOINT OF THE SCHOLASTICS.
After thus dealing with the subject in detail, we must pronounce judgment
on the Scholastics, and give an estimate of them. Though the subjects
which they investigated were lofty, and though there were noble, earnest
and learned individuals in their ranks, yet this Scholasticism on the
whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without
real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we
cannot return. For although religion is its subject matter, thought
here reached such an excessive point of subtlety that, as a form of
the mere empty understanding, it does nothing but wander amongst
baseless combinations of categories. Scholastic philosophy is this utter
confusion of the barren understanding in the rugged North German nature.
We see here two different worlds, a kingdom of life and a kingdom of
death. The intellectual kingdom, which is outside and above, while in
the popular conception, is thereby brought within the sphere of the
mere understanding and the senses, even though by nature it is purely
peculative; and this does not take place as in art, but, on the contrary,
after the fashion of ordinary reality. As the relationship of Father
and Son, to begin with, appealed to the senses, so the divine world was
furnished for the imaginative faculty and for purposes of devotion (in a
way unknown to the disciples of Plato) with angels, saints and martyrs,
instead of with thoughts;—or the thoughts are nothing but a rubbishy
metaphysic of the understanding. In the supersensuous world there was no
reality of the thinking, universal, rational self-consciousness to be met
with: in the immediate world of sensuous nature, on the other hand, there
was no divinity, because nature was but the grave of God, in the same
way that God was outside of nature. The existence of the Church, as the
government of Christ upon earth, is higher, it is true, than the external
existence which stands in contrast to it; for religion must rule our
temporal affairs, and through the subjection of worldly power the Church
became a theocracy. But the divine kingdom, the dwelling-place of the
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