Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
[Footnote 3: Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and
elsewhere. Schopenhauer, _Welt als Wille_, Book I. § 6.]
[Footnote 4: Bacon, _Novum Organum_, i. 10.]
[Footnote 5: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.]
[Footnote 6: See Chapter XII.]
[Footnote 7: Cf. _Ethica,_ iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting _rerum
externarum communis constitutio_ with _ipsa hominis natura, in se sola
considerata._]
[Footnote 8: See the _Discours préliminaire_ to the _Theodicee_.]
CHAPTER XVI.
THE NEW IDEALISM.
This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different
thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the
'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not
a desperate refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be reached
by the plunge of faith,--which seems rather the leap of despair: not
a _mere_ other-world,--always _other_, longed for, presaged, beheld
in dreamy vision, but unperceived by the clear light of intelligence:
clutched at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning
the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning faith to the
better land and the presence of the divine: but by persistence in
unfolding, expanding, adjusting, re-combining, and fortifying those
partial glimpses of the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen.
It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world: but not a
_mere_ other world; it is another, and yet not another, but the same,
seen, if you like to say, transfigured, idealised. But idealisation,
if so applied, means not an addition here and a subtraction there
made in reality, from some source outside--from some indeterminable
Whence (Whence indeed should such additions come?). It does not mean
a correction of faults and failures in the real, at the will of an
artist who is dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend it
out of other faces and forms stored up in memory or sketch-book.
This idealism does not in that sense idealise (so as to falsify). It
means complete reality; absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality:
nowhere fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing itself
in all its members. It means--to quote the Hegelian term--seeing all
things in the Idea--their notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying
'grip,' reflecting itself in their objectivity, and their reality
completing itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which
to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood is only dimly
suggested and partially supposed. Still less is it an idealism which,
as popularly understood, turns reality and historic fact into _mere_
ideas.