Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
If this be so, then there is behind the external world and behind the
mind an organism of pure types or forms of thought,--an organism which
presents itself, in a long array of fragments, to the senses in the
world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which
then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the
mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in a more
than organic unity. The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental
problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover the nature and
law of that totality or primeval unity,--the totality which we see
appearing in the double aspect of nature and mind, and which we first
become acquainted with as it is manifested in this state of dis-union.
To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel seeks. It lays bare
the kingdom of those potent shades,--the phases of the Idea--which
embodies itself more concretely in the external world of body, and the
inward world of mind. The psychological or individualist conditions,
which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes seem to set up mind as an
entity parallel to the objects of nature, and antithetic to nature as
a whole, have fallen away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its
actualisation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not in
the narrow ground of an individual's level of development, but in the
realised formations of reasonable knowledge and action, as shown in Art
and Life, Science and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which
might be in us or in the world, but which, being to a certain extent
different from either, was the focus of two orders of manifestations.