A	»	B	»	C	»	D	»	E
F	»	G	»	H	»	I	»	J
K	»	L	»	M	»	N	»	O
P	»		R	»	S	»		T
U	»		V	»	W	»		Z

Samuel Richardson - "Clarissa, Volume 7"

B. M. Bower - "The Long Shadow"

Stanley John Weyman - "The Castle Inn"

Robert D'Awans - "L'Ameublement de l'Hotel de Pitsembourg au milieu du XVIIe siecle"

Nicholas Brealey Buys Davies-Black
Moreover Technologies - Premier purveyor of real-time news and RSS feeds from across the Web

Gray Gets New Ingram Role; Lovett Heading Ingram Digital
Ad - Get Info for Book Publishing from 14 search engines in 1.

PW Morning Report, January 6, 2009">The PW Morning Report, January 6, 2009
We have been looking for ways to fuel additional growth, said Chuck Dresner, v-p, associate publisher of NB North America, which has offices in Boston, Mass. Davies-Black has built up an excellent publishing program and a recognized brand in some of the

The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. by Various

V >> Various >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII.




That the logical development of the categories of thought is the same as
the historical evolution of life--and _vice versa_--establishes for
Hegel the identity of thought and reality. In the history of philosophy,
the discrepancy between thought and reality has often been emphasized.
There are those who insist that reality is too vast and too deep for man
with his limited vision to penetrate; others, again, who set only
certain bounds to man's understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of
knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very
shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of
reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought certainly
does present an array of conflicting views concerning the limits of
human reason. But all the contradictions and conflicts of thought prove
to Hegel the sovereignty of reason. The conflicts of reason are its own
necessary processes and expressions. Its dialectic instability is
instability that is peculiar to all reality. Both thought and reality
manifest one nature and one process. Hence reason with its "dynamic"
categories can comprehend the "fluent" reality, because it is flesh of
its flesh and bone of its bone. Hegel's bold and oft quoted words "What
is rational is real; and what is real is rational," pithily express his
whole doctrine. The nature of rationality and the nature of reality are,
for Hegel, one and the same spiritual process, the organic process of
triumphing over and conquering conflicts and contradictions. Where
reality conforms to this process it is rational (that which does not
conform to it is not reality at all, but has, like an amputated leg,
mere contingent existence); the logical formula of this process is but
an abstract account of what reality is in its essence.

The equation of the real and the rational, or the discovery of one
significant process underlying both life and reason, led Hegel to
proclaim a new kind of logic, so well characterized by Professor Royce
as the "logic of passion." To repeat what has been said above, this
means that categories are related to one another as historical epochs,
as religious processes, as social and moral institutions, nay, as human
passions, wills, and deeds are related to one another. Mutual conflict
and contradiction appear as their sole constant factor amid all their
variable conditions. The introduction of contradiction into logical
concepts as their _sine qua non_ meant indeed a revolutionary departure
from traditional logic. Prior to Hegel, logical reasoning was reasoning
in accordance with the law of contradiction, i. e., with the assumption
that nothing can have at the same time and at the same place
contradictory and inconsistent qualities or elements. For Hegel, on the
contrary, contradiction is the very moving principle of the world, the
pulse of its life. _Alle Dinge sind an sich selbst widersprechend_, as
he drastically says. The deeper reason why Hegel invests contradiction
with a positive value lies in the fact that, since the nature of
everything involves the union of discrepant elements, nothing can bear
isolation and independence. Terms, processes, epochs, institutions,
depend upon one another for their meaning, expression, and existence; it
is impossible to take anything in isolation. But this is just what one
does in dealing with the world in art or in science, in religion or in
business; one is always dealing with error and contradiction, because
one is dealing with fragments or bits of life and experience. Hence--and
this is Hegel's crowning thought--anything short of the whole universe
is inevitably contradictory. In brief, contradiction has the same sting
for Hegel as it has for any one else. Without losing its nature of
"contradictoriness," contradiction has logically this positive meaning.
Since it is an essential element of every partial, isolated, and
independent view of experience and thought, one is necessarily led to
transcend it and to see the universe in organic wholeness.

Thus, as Hegel puts his fundamental idea, "the truth is the whole."
Neither things nor categories, neither histories nor religions, neither
sciences nor arts, express or exhaust by themselves the whole essence of
the universe. The essence of the universe is the _life_ of the totality
of all things, not their _sum_. As the life of man is not the sum of his
bodily and mental functions, the whole man being present in each and all
of these, so must the universe be conceived as omnipresent in each of
its parts and expressions. This is the significance of Hegel's
conception of the universe as an organism. The World-Spirit--Hegel's
God--constitutes, thinks, lives, wills, and is _all_ in unity. The
evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of God himself.

The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in
systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary
ramifications. These ramifications themselves are conceived as
constituting complete wholes, such as logic, nature, mind, society,
history, art, religion, philosophy, so that the universe in its onward
march through these is represented as a Whole of Wholes--_ein Kreis von
Kreisen_. In Hegel's complete philosophy each of these special spheres
finds its proper place and elaborate treatment.

Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in
each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no
he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development
manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical
formula--these and other problems should arouse an interest in Hegel's
writings. The following selections may give some glimpse of their
spirit.

In conclusion, some bare suggestions must suffice to indicate the reason
for Hegel's great influence. Hegel has partly, if not wholly, created
the modern historical spirit. Reality for him, as even this inadequate
sketch has shown, is not static, but is essentially a process. Thus
until the history of a thing is known, the thing is not understood at
all. It is the becoming and not the being of the world that constitutes
its reality. And thus in emphasizing the fact that everything has a
"past," the insight into which alone reveals its significant meaning,
Hegel has given metaphysical expression and impetus to the awakening
modern historical sense. His idea of evolution also epitomizes the
spirit of the nineteenth century with its search everywhere for geneses
and transformations--in religion, philology, geology, biology. Closely
connected with the predominance of the historical in Hegel's philosophy
is its explicit critique of individualism and particularism. According
to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The
particular--independent and unrelated--is an abstraction. The isolation
of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates
and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of
subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly
in Hegel's theory of the State, has left its impress upon political,
social, and economic theories of his century. Not less significant is
the glorification of reason of which Hegel's complete philosophy is an
expression. Reason never spoke with so much self-confidence and
authority as it did in Hegel. To the clear vision of reason the universe
presents no dark or mysterious corners, nay, the very negations and
contradictions in it are marks of its inherent rationality. But Hegel's
rationalism is not of the ordinary shallow kind. Reason he himself
distinguishes from understanding. The latter is analytical, its function
is to abstract, to define, to compile, to classify. Reason, on the other
hand, is synthetic, constructive, inventive. Apart from Hegel's special
use of the term, it is this synthetic and creative and imaginative
quality pervading his whole philosophy which has deepened men's insight
into history, religion, and art, and which has wielded its general
influence on the philosophic and literary constellation of the
nineteenth century.

* * * * *



GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY[1] (1837)

TRANSLATED BY J. SIBREE, M.A.


The subject of this course of lectures is the Philosophical History of
the World. And by this must be understood, not a collection of general
observations respecting it, suggested by the study of its records and
proposed to be illustrated by its facts, but universal history itself.
To gain a clear idea, at the outset, of the nature of our task, it seems
necessary to begin with an examination of the other methods of treating
history. The various methods may be ranged under three heads:

I. Original History.
II. Reflective History.
III. Philosophical History.

I. Of the first kind, the mention of one or two distinguished names will
furnish a definite type. To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides,
and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the
most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they
had before their eyes and whose spirit they shared. They simply
transferred what was passing in the world around them to the realm of
re-presentative intellect; an external phenomenon was thus translated
into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the
material supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for
the conceptive faculty.

These original historians did, it is true, find statements and
narratives of other men ready to hand; one person cannot be an
eye-and-ear witness of everything. But, merely as an ingredient, they
make use only of such aids as the poet does of that heritage of an
already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind
together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for
immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and
traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim
and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to
nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary,
we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what
they were about. The domain of reality--actually seen, or capable of
being so-affords a very different basis in point of firmness from that
fugitive and shadowy element in which were engendered those legends and
poetic dreams whose historical prestige vanishes as soon as nations have
attained a mature individuality.

Such original historians, then, change the events, the deeds, and the
states of society with which they are conversant, into an object for the
conceptive faculty; the narratives they leave us cannot, therefore, be
very comprehensive in their range. Herodotus, Thucydides, Guicciardini,
may be taken as fair samples of the class in this respect. What is
present and living in their environment is their proper material. The
influences that have formed the writer are identical with those which
have molded the events that constitute the matter of his story. The
author's spirit and that of the actions he narrates are one and the
same. He describes scenes in which he himself has been an actor, or at
any rate an interested spectator. It is short periods of time,
individual shapes of persons and occurrences, single, unreflected
traits, of which he makes his picture. And his aim is nothing more than
the presentation to posterity of an image of events as clear as that
which he himself possessed in virtue of personal observation, or
lifelike descriptions. Reflections are none of his business, for he
lives in the spirit of his subject; he has not attained an elevation
above it. If, as in Caesar's case, he belongs to the exalted rank of
generals or statesmen, it is the prosecution of his own aims that
constitutes the history.

Such speeches as we find in Thucydides, for example, of which we can
positively assert that they are not _bona fide_ reports, would seem to
make against our statement that a historian of his class presents us no
reflected picture, that persons and people appear in his works in
_propria persona_ ... Granted that such orations as those of
Pericles--that most profoundly accomplished, genuine, noble
statesman--were elaborated by Thucydides, it must yet be maintained that
they were not foreign to the character of the speaker. In the orations
in question, these men proclaim the maxims adopted by their countrymen
and formative of their own character; they record their views of their
political relations and of their moral and spiritual nature, and publish
the principles of their designs and conduct. What the historian puts
into their mouths is no supposititious system of ideas, but an
uncorrupted transcript of their intellectual and moral habitudes.

Of these historians whom we must make thoroughly our own, with whom we
must linger long if we would live with their respective nations and
enter deeply into their spirit--of these historians to whose pages we
may turn, not for the purposes of erudition merely, but with a view to
deep and genuine enjoyment, there are fewer than might be imagined.
Herodotus, the Father, namely the Founder, of History, and Thucydides
have been already mentioned. Xenophon's _Retreat of the Ten Thousand_ is
a work equally original. Caesar's _Commentaries_ are the simple
masterpiece of a mighty spirit; among the ancients these annalists were
necessarily great captains and statesmen. In the Middle Ages, if we
except the bishops, who were placed in the very centre of the political
world, the monks monopolize this category as naive chroniclers who were
as decidedly isolated from active life as those elder annalists had been
connected with it. In modern times the relations are entirely altered.
Our culture is essentially comprehensive, and immediately changes all
events into historical representations. Belonging to the class in
question, we have vivid, simple, clear narrations--especially of
military transactions--which might fairly take their place with those of
Caesar. In richness of matter and fulness of detail as regards strategic
appliances and attendant circumstances, they are even more instructive.
The French "Memoirs" also fall under this category. In many cases these
are written by men of mark, though relating to affairs of little note;
they not unfrequently contain such a large amount of anecdotal matter
that the ground they occupy is narrow and trivial. Yet they are often
veritable masterpieces in history, as are those of Cardinal Retz, which,
in fact, trench on a larger historical field. In Germany such masters
are rare, Frederick the Great in his _Histoire de mon temps_ being an
illustrious exception. Writers of this order must occupy an elevated
position, for only from such a position is it possible to take an
extensive view of affairs--to see everything. This is out of the
question for him who from below merely gets a glimpse of the great world
through a miserable cranny.

II. The second kind of history we may call the _Reflective._ It is
history whose mode of representation is not really confined by the limits
of the time to which it relates, but whose spirit transcends the
present. In this second order a strongly marked variety of species may
be distinguished.

1. It is the aim of the investigator to gain a view of the entire
history of a people, of a country, or of the world in short, what we
call universal history. In this case the working up of the historical
material is the main point. The workman approaches his task with his own
spirit--a spirit distinct from that of the element he is to manipulate.

Here a very important consideration is the principles to which the
author refers the bearing and motives of the actions and events which he
describes, as well as those which determine the form of his narrative.
Among us Germans this reflective treatment and the display of ingenuity
which it affords assume a manifold variety of phases. Every writer of
history proposes to himself an original method. The English and French
confess to general principles of historical composition, their viewpoint
being more nearly that of cosmopolitan or national culture. Among us,
each labors to invent a purely individual point of view; instead of
writing history, we are always beating our brains to discover how
history ought to be written.

This first kind of Reflective history is most nearly akin to the
preceding, when it has no further aim than to present the annals of a
country complete. Such compilations (among which may be mentioned the
works of Livy, Diodorus Siculus, Johannes von Mueller's _History of
Switzerland_) are, if well performed, highly meritorious. Among the best
of the kind may be included such annalists as approach those of the
first-class writers who give so vivid a transcript of events that the
reader may well fancy himself listening to contemporaries and
eye-witnesses. But it often happens that the individuality of tone which
must characterize a writer belonging to a different culture is not
modified in accordance with the periods which such a record must
traverse. The spirit of the writer may be quite apart from that of the
times of which he treats. Thus Livy puts into the mouths of the old
Roman kings, consuls, and generals, such orations as would be delivered
by an accomplished advocate of the Livian era, and which strikingly
contrast with the genuine traditions of Roman antiquity--witness, for
example, the fable of Menenius Agrippa. In the same way he gives us
descriptions of battles as if he had been an actual spectator; but their
salient points would serve well enough for battles in any period, for
their distinctness contrasts, even in his treatment of chief points of
interest, with the want of connection and the inconsistency that prevail
elsewhere. The difference between such a compiler and an original
historian may be best seen by comparing Polybius himself with the style
in which Livy uses, expands, and abridges his annals in those periods of
which Polybius' account has been preserved. Johannes von Mueller, in the
endeavor to remain faithful in his portraiture to the times he
describes, has given a stiff, formal, pedantic aspect to his history. We
much prefer the narratives we find in old Tschudi; all is more naive and
natural than when appearing in the garb of a fictitious and affected
archaism.

A history which aspires to traverse long periods of time, or to be
universal, must indeed forego the attempt to give individual
representations of the past as it actually existed. It must foreshorten
its pictures by abstractions, and this includes not merely the omission
of events and deeds, but whatever is involved in the fact that Thought
is, after all, the most trenchant epitomist. A battle, a great victory,
a siege no longer maintains its original proportions, but is put off
with a mere allusion. When Livy, for instance, tells us of the war with
the Volsci, we sometimes have the brief announcement: "This year war was
carried on with the Volsci."

2. A second species of Reflective history is what we may call the
pragmatical. When we have to deal with the past and occupy ourselves
with a remote world, a present rises into being for the mind--produced
by its own activity, as the reward of its labor. The occurrences are,
indeed, various; but the idea which pervades them-their deeper import
and connection--is one. This takes the occurrence out of the category of
the past and makes it virtually present. Pragmatical (didactic)
reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and
indefeasibly of the present, and quicken the annals of the dead past
with the life of today. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly
interesting and enlivening depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral
reflections must here be specially noticed--the moral teaching expected
from history; the latter has not infrequently been treated with a direct
view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate
the soul and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for
impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of people and
states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their
affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, statesmen, nations, are
wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience
offers in history; yet what experience and history teach is this-that
peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, nor
have they acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved
in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so
strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by
considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the
pressure of great events a general principle gives no help.

It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the past. The pallid
shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the
present. Looked at in this light nothing can be shallower than the
oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French
Revolution; nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and
that of our times. Johannes von Mueller, in his _Universal History_ as
also in his _History of Switzerland_, had such moral aims in view. He
designed to prepare a body of political doctrines for the instruction of
princes, governments, and peoples (he formed a special collection of
doctrines and reflections, frequently giving us in his correspondence
the exact number of apothegms which he had compiled in a week); but he
cannot assert that this part of his labor was among the best he
accomplished. It is only a thorough, liberal, comprehensive view of
historical relations (such for instance, as we find in Montesquieu's
_L'Esprit des Lois_) that can give truth and interest to reflections of
this order. One Reflective history, therefore, supersedes another. The
materials are patent to every writer; each is prone to believe himself
capable of arranging and manipulating them, and we may expect that each
will insist upon his own spirit as that of the age in question.
Disgusted by such reflective histories, readers have often returned with
pleasure to narratives adopting no particular point of view--which
certainly have their value, although, for the most part, they offer only
material for history. We Germans are content with such; but the French,
on the other hand, display great genius in reanimating bygone times and
in bringing the past to bear upon the present condition of things.

3. The third form of Reflective history is the _Critical_. This deserves
mention as preeminently the mode, now current in Germany, of treating
history. It is not history itself that is here presented. We might more
properly designate it as a History of History--a criticism of historical
narratives and an investigation of their truth and credibility. Its
peculiarity, in point of fact as well as intention, consists in the
acuteness with which the writer extorts from the records something
which was not in the matters recorded. The French have given us much
that is profound and judicious in this class of composition, but have
not endeavored to make a merely critical procedure pass for substantial
history; their judgments have been duly presented in the form of
critical treatises. Among us, the so-called "higher criticism," which
reigns supreme in the domain of philology, has also taken possession of
our historical literature; it has been the pretext for introducing all
the anti-historical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest.
Here we have the other method of making the past a living reality; for
historical data subjective fancies are substituted, whose merit is
measured by their boldness--that is, the scantiness of the particulars
on which they are based and the peremptoriness with which they
contravene the best established facts of history.

4. The last species of Reflective history announces its fragmentary
character on its very face. It adopts an abstract position; yet, since
it takes general points of view (such, for instance, as the History of
Art, of Law, of Religion), it forms a transition to the Philosophical
History of the World. In our time this form of the history of ideas has
been especially developed and made prominent. Such branches of national
life stand in close relation to the entire complex of a people's annals;
and the question of chief importance in relation to our subject is,
whether the connection of the whole is exhibited in its truth and
reality, or is referred to merely external relations. In the latter
case, these important phenomena (art, law, religion, etc.), appear as
purely accidental national peculiarities. It must be remarked, if the
position taken is a true one, that when Reflective history has advanced
to the adoption of general points of view, these are found to constitute
not a merely external thread, a superficial series, but are the inward
guiding soul of the occurrences and actions that occupy a nation's
annals. For, like the soul-conductor, Mercury, the Idea is, in truth,
the leader of peoples and of the world; and Spirit, the rational and
necessitated will of that conductor, is and has been the director of
the events of the world's history. To become acquainted with Spirit in
this, its office of guidance, is the object of our present undertaking.