Hegel's Philosophy of Mind — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Georg Hegel · en
The third part of the Hegelian System corresponds to what in the
_Synthetic Philosophy_ is known as Psychology, Ethics, and Sociology. And
here Mr. Spencer recognises that something new has turned up. Psychology
is “unique” as a science: it is a “double science,” and as a whole quite
_sui generis_. Whether perhaps all these epithets would not, _mutatis
mutandis_, have to be applied also to Ethics and Sociology, if these are
to do their full work, he does not say. In what this doubleness consists
he even finds it somewhat difficult to show. For, as his fundamental
philosophy does not on this point go beyond noting some pairs of verbal
antitheses, and has no sense of unity except in the imperfect shape of a
“relation(3)” between two things which are “antithetical and inseparable,”
he is perplexed by phrases such as “in” and “out of” consciousness, and
stumbles over the equivocal use of “inner” to denote both mental (or
non-spatial) in general, and locally sub-cuticular in special. Still, he
gets so far as to see that the law of consciousness is that in it neither
feelings nor relations have independent subsistence, and that the unit of
mind does not begin till what he calls two feelings are made one. The
phraseology may be faulty, but it shows an inkling of the _a priori_.
Unfortunately it is apparently forgotten; and the language too often
reverts into the habit of what he calls the “objective,” i.e. purely
physical, sciences.
Mr. Spencer’s conception of Psychology restricts it to the more general
physics of the mind. For its more concrete life he refers us to Sociology.
But his Sociology is yet unfinished: and from the plan of its inception,
and the imperfect conception of the ends and means of its investigation,
hardly admits of completion in any systematic sense. To that incipiency is
no doubt due its excess in historical or anecdotal detail—detail, however,
too much segregated from its social context, and in general its tendency
to neglect normal and central theory for incidental and peripheral facts.
Here, too, there is a weakness in First Principles and a love of
catchwords, which goes along with the fallacy that illustration is proof.
Above all, it is evident that the great fact of religion overhangs Mr.
Spencer with the attraction of an unsolved and unacceptable problem. He
cannot get the religious ideas of men into co-ordination with their
scientific, aesthetic, and moral doctrines; and only betrays his sense of
the high importance of the former by placing them in the forefront of
inquiry, as due to the inexperience and limitations of the so-called
primitive man. That is hardly adequate recognition of the religious
principle: and the defect will make itself seriously felt, should he ever
come to carry out the further stage of his prospectus dealing with “the
growth and correlation of language, knowledge, morals, and aesthetics.”
(ii.) Mind and Morals.