Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
constituents are presented in their several isolation. Such phenomena are
relapses into more rudimentary grades: but with the difference that they
are set in the midst of a more advanced phase of intellectual life.
Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a
certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the
mental range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the
Unconscious seemed—and to many still seems—a region in which the charlatan
and the dupe can and must play into each other’s hands. Once in the whirl
of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how far
you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type.
Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and
observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract
observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe;
scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience
against what Bacon has called “monodical” phenomena, phenomena i.e. which
claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private and
privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a
determination to treat all instances which oppose its hitherto ascertained
laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent
observation, confusions of memory, and superstitions of ignorance. Above
all, great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect
themselves with these revelations—interests, at any rate, to which our
common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the
customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something
of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much
was at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispassionate
observation.
The philosophers were found—as might have been expected—amongst those most
strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been fascinated by the
spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned away sceptical. At
least as early as 1806 Schelling had been interested by Ritter’s
researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human will
to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a distance.
He was looking forward to the rise of a _Physica coelestis_, or New
Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date
his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel
phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in
the range of the physical powers, especially of the physical powers of the
human psyche as a natural agent. The divining-rod was revived.
Clairvoyance and somnambulism were carefully studied, and the curative
powers of animal magnetism found many advocates(83).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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