Episode 18

It is shown from what has been said regarding the formal nature of the Idea, that only a history of Philosophy thus regarded as a system of development in Idea, is entitled to the name of Science: a collection of facts constitutes no science. Only thus as a succession of phenomena established through reason, and having as content just what is reason and revealing it, does this history show that it is rational: it shows that the events recorded are in reason. How should the whole of what has taken place in reason not itself be rational? That faith must surely be the more reasonable in which chance is not made ruler over human affairs, and it is the business of Philosophy to recognize that however much its own manifestations may be history likewise, it is yet determined through the Idea alone.

Through these general preliminary conceptions the categories are now determined, the more immediate application of which to the history of Philosophy we have now to consider. This application will bring before us the most significant aspects in this history.

a. The development in Time of the various Philosophies.

The first question which may be asked in reference to this history, concerns that distinction in regard to the manifestation of the Idea, which has just been noticed. It is the question as to how it happens that Philosophy appears to be a development in time and has a history. The answer to this question encroaches on the metaphysics of Time, and it would be a digression from our object to give here more than the elements on which the answer rests.

It has been shown above in reference to the existence of Mind, that its Being is its activity. Nature, on the contrary, is, as it is; its changes are thus only repetitions, and its movements take the form of a circle merely. To express this better, the activity of Mind is to know itself. I am, immediately, but this I am only as a living organism; as Mind I am only in so far as I know myself. Know thyself, the inscription over the temple of the oracle at Delphi, is the absolute command which is expressed by Mind in its essential character. But consciousness really implies that for myself, I am object to myself. In forming this absolute division between what is mine and myself, Mind constitutes its existence and establishes itself as external to itself. It postulates itself in the externality which is just the universal and the distinctive form of existence in Nature. But one of the forms of externality is Time, and this form requires to be farther examined both in the Philosophy of Nature and the finite Mind.

This Being in existence and therefore Being in time is a moment not only of the individual consciousness, which as such is essentially finite, but also of the development of the philosophical Idea in the element of Thought. For the Idea, thought of as being at rest, is, indeed, not in Time.

To think of it as at rest, and to preserve it in the form of immediacy is equivalent to its inward perception. But the Idea as concrete, is, as has been shown, the unity of differences; it is not really rest, and its existence is not really sense-perception, but as differentiation within itself and therefore as development, it comes into existent Being and into externality in the element of Thought, and thus pure Philosophy appears in thought as a progressive existence in time. But this element of Thought is itself abstract and is the activity of a single consciousness. Mind is, however not only to be considered as individual, finite consciousness, but as that Mind which is universal and concrete within itself; this concrete universality, however, comprehends all the various sides and modes evolved in which it is and becomes object to the Idea. Thus Mind's thinking comprehension of self is at the same time the progression of the total actuality evolved. This progression is not one which takes its course through the thought of an individual and exhibits itself in a single consciousness for it shows itself to be universal Mind presenting itself in the history of the world in all the richness of its form. The result of this development is that one form, one stage in the Idea comes to consciousness in one particular race, so that this race and this time expresses only this particular form, within which it constructs its universe and works out its conditions. The higher stage, on the other hand, centuries later reveals itself in another race of people.

Now if we thus grasp the principles of the Concrete and of Development, the nature of the manifold obtains quite another signification, and what is said of the diversity in philosophies as if the manifold were fixed and stationary and composed of what is mutually exclusive, is at once refuted and relegated to its proper place. Such talk is that in which those who despise Philosophy think they possess an invincible weapon against it, and in their truly beggarly pride in their pitiful representations of it, they are in perfect ignorance even of what they have and what they have to know in any meagre ideas attained, such as in that of the manifold and diverse. Yet this category is one which anybody can understand; no difficulty is made in regard to it, for it is thoroughly known, and those who use it think they can do so as being entirely comprehensible-as a matter of course they understand what it is. But those who believe the principle of diversity to be one absolutely fixed, do not know its nature, or its dialectic; the manifold or diverse is in a state of flux; it must really be conceived of as in the process of development, and as but a passing moment. Philosophy in its concrete Idea is the activity of development in revealing the differences which it contains within itself; these differences are thoughts, for we are now speaking of development in Thought.