Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and
above the rest of nature: it is rather nature’s “’universal immaterialism,
and simple ideal life(77).” There were ancient philosophers who spoke of
the soul as a self-adjusting number,—as a harmony, or equilibrium(78)—and
the moderns have added considerably to the list of these analogical
definitions. As definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things
give, as it were, by anticipation, an image of soul, as the “ideality,”
which reduces the manifold to unity. The adhesions and cohesions of
matter, its gravitating attractions, its chemical affinities and
electrical polarities, the intricate out-and-in of organic structure, are
all preludes to the true incorporating unity which is the ever-immanent
supersession of the endless self-externalism and successionalism of
physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or sensibility, the unity
which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly present. It is
implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,—which has no doors and no
windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it has nothing
outside it, because it “expresses” and “envelopes” (however confusedly at
first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising phraseology, we
may describe mind, where it _appears_ emerging in the natural world, as a
mere feeble and incidental outburst,—a rebellion breaking out as in some
petty province or isolated region against the great law of the physical
realm—we are in so speaking taking only an external standpoint. But with
the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is implicitly overcome.
To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside, nothing
transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only outside
a localised and limited mind—outside a mind which is imperfectly and
abstractly realised—not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute
negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may
be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To
accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and
externality of things into the unity and identity of one Idea, is the
process of development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic
knowledge, from appetite to art,—the process of culture through the social
state under the influence of religion.