Hegel was quite sensible how great would be the difficulty of presenting
philosophy to mankind under the form of opposites. Most of us live
in the one-sided truth which the understanding offers to us, and
if occasionally we come across difficulties like the time-honoured
controversy of necessity and free-will, or the Eleatic puzzle of
Achilles and the tortoise, we relegate some of them to the sphere of
mystery, others to the book of riddles, and go on our way rejoicing.
Most men (like Aristotle) have been accustomed to regard a contradiction
in terms as the end of strife; to be told that contradiction is the life
and mainspring of the intellectual world is indeed a paradox to them.
Every abstraction is at first the enemy of every other, yet they are
linked together, each with all, in the chain of Being. The struggle for
existence is not confined to the animals, but appears in the kingdom of
thought. The divisions which arise in thought between the physical and
moral and between the moral and intellectual, and the like, are deepened
and widened by the formal logic which elevates the defects of the human
faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of the mind which
makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions become so
familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as absolutely
fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which Hegel
delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
the growth of 'what we are pleased to call our minds,' by reverting to
a time when our present distinctions of thought and language had no
existence.
Of the great dislike and childish impatience of his system which would
be aroused among his opponents, he was fully aware, and would often
anticipate the jests which the rest of the world, 'in the superfluity
of their wits,' were likely to make upon him. Men are annoyed at what
puzzles them; they think what they cannot easily understand to be full
of danger. Many a sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in
the categories of the understanding which Hegel resolves into their
original nothingness. For, like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned'
in the intellectual world. Nor can we deny that he is unnecessarily
difficult, or that his own mind, like that of all metaphysicians, was
too much under the dominion of his system and unable to see beyond:
or that the study of philosophy, if made a serious business (compare
Republic), involves grave results to the mind and life of the student.
For it may encumber him without enlightening his path; and it may weaken
his natural faculties of thought and expression without increasing
his philosophical power. The mind easily becomes entangled among
abstractions, and loses hold of facts. The glass which is adapted to
distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and present to us.