Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

Georg Hegel · en
holds the “book of the justice of the King omnipotent,” the sceptre in her
left is “corporal judgment against sin(20).”

There is indeed no sufficient reason for contemning the term Mind. If
Inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind has—perhaps to a dainty taste—made
the word unsavoury, that is no reason for refusing to give it all the
wealth of soul and heart, of intellect and will. The _mens aeterna_ which,
if we hear Tacitus, expressed the Hebrew conception of the spirituality of
God, and the Νοῦς which Aristotelianism set supreme in the Soul, are not
the mere or abstract intelligence, which late-acquired habits of
abstraction have made out of them. If the reader will adopt the term (in
want of a better) in its widest scope, we may shelter ourselves under the
example of Wordsworth. His theme is—as he describes it in the
_Recluse_—“the Mind and Man”: his


                        “voice proclaims
    How exquisitely the individual Mind
    (And the progressive powers perhaps no less
    Of the whole species) to the external World
    Is fitted;—and how exquisitely too
    The external World is fitted to the Mind;
    And the creation (by no lower name
    Can it be called) which they with blended might
    Accomplish.”


The verse which expounds that “high argument” speaks


    “Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope
    And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith.”


And the poet adds:


                              “As we look
    Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
    My haunt, and the main region of my song;
    Beauty—a living Presence of the earth
    Surpassing the most fair ideal forms
    ... waits upon my steps.”


The reality duly seen in the spiritual vision


                    “That inspires
    The human Soul of universal earth
    Dreaming of things to come”


will be a greater glory than the ideals of imaginative fiction ever
fancied:


    “For the discerning intellect of Man,
    When wedded to this goodly universe
    In love and holy passion, shall find these
    A simple produce of the common day.”


If Wordsworth, thus, as it were, echoing the great conception of Francis
Bacon,


    “Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
    Of this great consummation,”


perhaps the poet and the essayist may help us with Hegel to rate the
Mind—the Mind of Man—at its highest value.




Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.