Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
it includes elements of thought, and probably of desire and will.
This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called introspection:
difficulties so great and real that they have provoked in natural
reaction a set against introspection altogether, and the adoption of
the external observation (physiological or so-called psycho-physical)
employed in the 'objective' sciences. And hence when we accept the
name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &c., as if it expressed
something specially existent in a detached shape of its own, we make
an assumption which it is impossible to justify. We are reckoning
with paper-money which belongs to no recognised currency, and may be
stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence is that the thing with
which we begin our examination is an opaque point,--a mere _terminus a
quo_, from which we start on our journey of explication, leaving the
_terminus_ itself behind us unexplained.
The constituents of mind do not lie side by side tranquilly
co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses.
Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while
they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity. In
our investigations we cannot begin with what is to be defined. The
botanist, if he is to give us a science of the plant, must begin with
something whose indwelling aim it is to be itself and to realise its
own possibility. He must begin with what is not the plant, and end
with what is; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the tendency
to pass into the plant. The speculative science of biology begins with
a cell, and builds these cells up into the tissues and structures out
of which vegetables and animals are constituted. The object of the
science appears as the result of the scientific process: or, _a science
is the ideal construction of its object_. As in these cases, so in the
case of thought. We must see it grow up from its simplest element, from
the bare point of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no
better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of thought will
grow and spread; and see it appear as a result due to the ingrowing and
outgrowing union of many elements, none of which satisfies by itself,
but leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of abstractions in
what is more and more concrete. The will and conscience, understanding
and reason, of man are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and
examined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have in hand: and
to be sure of that is to see that the mind is the necessary outcome
of a course of development. The mind is not an immediate _datum,_
with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with
a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediated unity, i. e.
a unity which has grown up through a complex interaction of forces,
and which lives in differences through comprehending and reconciling
antagonisms.