His studies in Greek literature made the
liveliest possible impression upon his mind, and all readers of Hegel's
works are struck with the fact that Greek methods of thinking-in
short, the Greek view of the world-became part and parcel of his
mind.
liveliest possible impression upon his mind, and all readers of Hegel's
works are struck with the fact that Greek methods of thinking-in
short, the Greek view of the world-became part and parcel of his
mind.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v12 - Gre to Hen
7148 (#546) ###########################################
7148
LAFCADIO HEARN
IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. ' Copyright 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
"A
ND this," the reader may say, "this is all that you went forth
to see: a torii, some shells, a small damask snake, some
stones? "
It is true. And nevertheless I know that I am bewitched.
There is a charm indefinable about the place; that sort of charm
which comes with a little ghostly thrill, never to be forgotten.
Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of num-
berless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and interblended:
the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening,
vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient,
mystic, mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of
treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of
sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of
rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished
generations.
And other memories ineffaceable: the first sight of the sea-girt
City of Pearl through a fairy veil of haze; the windy approach
to the lovely island over the velvety soundless brown stretch of
sand; the weird majesty of the giant gate of bronze; the queer,
high-sloping, fantastic, quaintly gabled street, flinging down sharp
shadows of aerial balconies; the flutter of colored draperies in the
sea wind, and of flags with their riddles of lettering; the pearly
glimmering of the astonishing shops.
And impressions of the enormous day, the day of the Land of
the Gods, a loftier day than ever our summers know; and the
glory of the view from those green sacred silent heights between
sea and sun; and the remembrance of the sky, a sky spiritual
as holiness, a sky with clouds ghost-pure and white as the light
itself, seeming indeed not clouds but dreams, or souls of Bodhi-
sattvas about to melt forever into some blue Nirvana.
And the romance of Benten, too,-the deity of Beauty, the
divinity of Love, the goddess of Eloquence. Rightly is she like-
wise named goddess of the sea. For is not the sea most ancient
and most excellent of speakers,-the eternal poet, chanter of that
mystic hymn whose rhythm shakes the world, whose mighty syl-
lables no man may learn?
## p. 7149 (#547) ###########################################
LAFCADIO HEARN
7149
THE TEMPLE OF KWANNON
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Copyright 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
A
ND we arrive before the far-famed Kamakura temple of Kwan-
non,- Kwannon, who yielded up her right to the Eternal
Peace that she might save the souls of men, and renounced
Nirvana to suffer with humanity for other myriad million ages;
Kwannon, the goddess of Pity and of Mercy.
I climb three flights of steps leading to the temple, and a
young girl seated at the threshold rises to greet us. Then she
disappears within the temple to summon the guardian priest, a
venerable man, white-robed, who makes me a sign to enter.
The temple is large as any that I have yet seen, and like
the others, gray with the wearing of six hundred years. From
the roof there hang down votive offerings, inscriptions, and lan-
terns in multitude, painted with various pleasing colors. Almost
opposite to the entrance is a singular statue, a seated figure of
human dimensions and most human aspect, looking upon us with
small weird eyes set in a wondrously wrinkled face. This face
was originally painted flesh tint, and the robes of the image pale
blue; but now the whole is uniformly gray with age and dust,
and its colorlessness harmonizes so well with the senility of the
figure that one is almost ready to believe one's self gazing at
a living mendicant pilgrim. It is Benzuru, the same personage
whose famous image at Asakusa has been made featureless by the
wearing touch of countless pilgrim fingers. To left and right of
the entrance are the Ni-O, enormously muscled, furious of aspect;
their crimson bodies are speckled with a white scum of paper
pellets spat at them by worshipers. Above the altar is a small
but very pleasing image of Kwannon, with her entire figure
relieved against an oblong halo of gold, imitating the flickering
of flame.
But this is not the image for which the temple is famed;
there is another to be seen, upon certain conditions. The old
priest presents me with a petition, written in excellent and elo-
quent English, praying visitors to contribute something to the
maintenance of the temple and its pontiff, and appealing to those
of another faith to remember that "Any belief which can make
men kindly and good is worthy of respect. " I contribute my
mite, and I ask to see the great Kwannon.
## p. 7150 (#548) ###########################################
7150
LAFCADIO HEARN
Then the old priest lights a lantern, and leads the way through
a low doorway on the left of the altar, into the interior of the
temple, into some very lofty darkness. I follow him cautiously
a while, discerning nothing whatever but the flicker of the lantern;
then we halt before something which gleams. A moment, and
my eyes, becoming more accustomed to the darkness, begin to
distinguish outlines; the gleaming object defines itself gradually
as a foot, an immense golden foot, and I perceive the hem of a
golden robe undulating over the instep. Now the other foot
appears; the figure is certainly standing. I can perceive that we
are in a narrow but also very lofty chamber, and that out of
some mysterious blackness overhead, ropes are dangling down
into the circle of lantern light illuminating the golden feet. The
priest lights two more lanterns, and suspends them upon hooks
attached to a pair of pendent ropes about a yard apart; then he
pulls up both together slowly. More of the golden robe is re-
vealed as the lanterns ascend, swinging on their way; then the
outlines of two mighty knees; then the curving of columnar thighs
under chiseled drapery, and as with the still waving ascent of the
lanterns the golden Vision towers ever higher through the gloom,
expectation intensifies. There is no sound but the sound of the
invisible pulleys overhead, which squeak like bats. Now above
the golden girdle, the suggestion of a bosom. Then the glowing
of a golden hand uplifted in benediction. Then another golden
hand holding a lotus. And at last a face, golden, smiling with
eternal youth and infinite tenderness,-the face of Kwannon.
So revealed out of the consecrated darkness, this ideal of
Divine femininity, creation of a forgotten art and time, is more
than impressive. I can scarcely call the emotion which it pro-
duces admiration; it is rather reverence.
But the lanterns, which paused awhile at the level of the
beautiful face, now ascend still higher, with a fresh squeaking of
pulleys. And lo! the tiara of the divinity appears, with strangest
symbolism. It is a pyramid of heads, of faces,- charming faces
of maidens, miniature faces of Kwannon herself.
For this is the Kwannon of the Eleven Faces,-Jiu-ichi-men-
Kwannon.
## p. 7151 (#549) ###########################################
LAFCADIO HEARN
7151
THE SHINTÖ FAITH
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Copyright 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
Ο
NCE more we are journeying through the silence of this holy
land of mists and of legends; wending our way between
green leagues of ripening rice, white-sprinkled with arrows.
of prayer, between the far processions of blue and verdant peaks
whose names are the names of gods. We have left Kitzuki far
behind. But as in a dream I still see the mighty avenue, the
――
ong succession of torii with their colossal shimenawa, the ma-
jestic face of the Guji, the kindly smile of the priest Sasa, and
the girl priestess in her snowy robes dancing her beautiful
ghostly dance. It seems to me that I can still hear the sound
of the clapping of hands, like the crashing of a torrent. I can-
not suppress some slight exultation at the thought that I have
been allowed to see what no other foreigner has been privileged
to see, the interior of Japan's most ancient shrine, and those
sacred utensils and quaint rites of primitive worship so well
worthy the study of the anthropologist and the evolutionist.
But to have seen Kitzuki as I saw it is also to have seen
something much more than a single wonderful temple. To see
Kitzuki is to see the living centre of Shintō, and to feel the life
pulse of the ancient faith, throbbing as mightily in this nine-
teenth century as ever in that unknown past whereof the Kojiki
itself, though written in a tongue no longer spoken, is but a
modern record. Buddhism, changing form or slowly decaying
through the centuries, might seem doomed to pass away at last
from this Japan to which it came only as an alien faith; but
Shinto, unchanging and vitally unchanged, still remains all-dom-
inant in the land of its birth, and only seems to gain in power
and dignity with time. Buddhism has a voluminous theology, a
profound philosophy, a literature vast as the sea. Shinto has no
philosophy, nc code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet by its
very immateriality it can resist the invasion of Occidental reli-
gious thought as no other Orient faith can. Shinto extends a
welcome to Western science, but remains the irresistible oppo-
nent of Western religion; and the foreign zealots who would
strive against it are astounded to find the power that foils their
uttermost efforts indefinable as magnetism and invulnerable as
air. Indeed, the best of our scholars have never been able to
## p. 7152 (#550) ###########################################
7152
LAFCADIO HEARN
tell us what Shintō is. To some it appears to be merely ances-
tor worship, to others ancestor worship combined with nature
worship; to others again it seems to be no religion at all; to
the missionary of the more ignorant class it is the worst form
of heathenism. Doubtless the difficulty of explaining Shintō has
been due simply to the fact that the sinologists have sought for
the source of it in books: in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, which
are its histories; in the Norito, which are its prayers; in the
commentaries of Motowori and Hirata, who were its greatest
scholars. But the reality of Shintō lives not in books, nor in
rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which
it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever
young. Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint super-
stitions, and artless myths, and fantastic magic, there thrills a
mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race, with all its
impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
Shintō is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the
sense of beauty, and the power of art, and the fire of heroism
and magnetism of loyalty, and the emotion of faith, have become
inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive.
Trusting to know something of that Oriental soul in whose
joyous love of nature and of life even the unlearned may discern
a strange likeness to the soul of the old Greek race, I trust also
that I may presume some day to speak of the great living power
of that faith now called Shintō, but more anciently Kami-no-michi,
or The Way of the Gods. "
((
## p. 7153 (#551) ###########################################
7153
XII-448
REGINALD HEBER
(1783-1826)
ON EARLIER generation of cultivated readers knew Heber by
heart, and the present one is inclined to rank him among
the best of the hymn-writers. His father was a country
gentleman of excellent Yorkshire family, incumbent of a double liv-
ing when double livings were legal and proper, and rector of Malpas
in Cheshire when his second son, Reginald, was born. Sent to Ox-
ford at seventeen, the boy began at once a brilliant university career.
In his first year (1800) he took the prize for his 'Carmen Seculare,' a
Latin poem describing the greatness of the
new century. He was but twenty when he
wrote in English his second prize poem,
'Palestine,' which was printed in 1807 and
several times reprinted; for it appealed to
the religious sense of the great middle-class
English public, still stirred by the remem-
brance of Wesley and the Evangelists. In
the theatre where it was recited it was
received with tumultuous enthusiasm, and
it is one of the very few prize poems that
have lived; Tennyson being perhaps the
only one of the great poets whose univer-
sity verses were admired by a later genera-
tion. There is a pretty story connecting
Walter Scott with the fortunate student's triumph. Scott, the smart
young sheriff of Selkirkshire, not yet famous, had become known by
his 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border' to that extraordinary book-
worm Richard Heber, half-brother of Reginald, whom the "Wizard"
afterward spoke of as "Heber the magnificent, whose library and
cellar are so superior to all others in the world. " Scott was visiting
his fellow antiquarian at Oxford, when the tall, shy, handsome young
undergraduate brought in his 'Palestine for their criticism. Both
the elders praised it, but Scott pointed out that a fine metaphor had
been missed in the description of the building of the Temple, and
Heber added the best lines in the poem :-
REGINALD HEBER
"No hammers fell; no ponderous axes rung:
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung. "
## p. 7154 (#552) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
7154
Two years later he won a third prize for the best English essay,
'On the Sense of Honor,' was elected a fellow of his college, and
traveled extensively. In 1807 he received holy orders and took
one of the family livings, which had been kept waiting for him.
He proved to be a most devoted parish priest, improving the church
services, building up the schools, and raising the standard of health
and morals among his people. He never liked his position, he con-
fides to a friend, "as half squire, half parson," but he did his best to
justify his place.
In 1822 he accepted with much hesitation the appointment to the
bishopric of Calcutta. At that time the whole of British India made
one vast see, the care of which demanded almost superhuman labor
and endurance. Poor Heber, always ardent and zealous, traveled over
his spiritual kingdom from bound to bound, preaching, teaching, estab-
lishing missions, baptizing, confirming, patching up peace between
quarrelsome societies, settling clerical differences, doing social duty,
sparing everybody but himself, always cheerful, always attentive,
always eager to do the one thing more. Overwork, or the merci-
less climate, or anxiety, or all together, killed him at the end of
three years in the very midst of his labors, when he was not yet
forty-three.
He wrote prose enough to fill two or three volumes, most of it
sermons, addresses, and lectures, besides an interesting book of
travels called A Journey through India, from Calcutta to Bombay. '
But he is best remembered for his hymns, still sung to-day in all
Protestant Christian churches. More than any other hymn-writer,
perhaps, he has been able to give the simple utterance of faith or
feeling its place in institutional worship. Sunday after Sunday, in
the English churches, the splendid roll of his 'Holy, Holy, Holy!
Lord God Almighty' sweeps the soul of the listener as with the
rushing of a mighty wind; in the 'Hymn for the Epiphany' many a
believer finds the voice of his own passion of faith and gratitude; in
the funeral hymns are uttered the woe and the triumph of humanity.
Among the world's great singers Heber's name will not be found,
but with the poets whom many generations love, his place is assured.
## p. 7155 (#553) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
(THE MISSIONARY HYMN
INTENDED TO BE SUNG ON OCCASION OF HIS PREACHING A SERMON FOR
THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY, IN APRIL, 1820
FR
'ROM Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand;
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile:
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.
Can we whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
7155
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation, oh salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learned Messiah's name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, his story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till like a sea of glory
It spreads from pole to pole;
Till, o'er our ransomed nature,
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.
## p. 7156 (#554) ###########################################
7156
REGINALD HEBER
SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
WAKE
AKE not, O mother, sounds of lamentation;
Weep not, O widow, weep not hopelessly:
Strong is his arm, the bringer of salvation,
Strong is the word of God to succor thee.
Bear forth the cold corpse slowly, slowly bear him;
Hide his pale features with the sable pall.
Chide not the sad one wildly weeping near him:
Widowed and childless, she has lost her all.
Why pause the mourners? who forbids our weeping?
Who the dark pomp of sorrow has delayed?
Set down the bier: he is not dead, but sleeping.
"Young man, arise! " He spake, and was obeyed.
-
Change, then, O sad one, grief to exultation,
Worship and fall before Messiah's knee.
Strong was his arm, the bringer of salvation,
Strong was the word of God to succor thee.
TRINITY SUNDAY
OLY, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Η
H Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty!
God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
Which wert and art and evermore shalt be.
Holy, holy, holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in power, in love, and purity.
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and
sea.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
## p. 7157 (#555) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
EPIPHANY
B
RIGHTEST and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
Cold on his cradle the dew-drops are shining,
Low lies his head with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore him in slumber reclining,-
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all.
Say, shall we yield him, in costly devotion,
Odors of Edom and offerings divine?
Gems of the mountain and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest or gold from the mine?
Vainly we offer each ampler oblation;
Vainly with gifts would his favor secure:
Richer by far is the heart's adoration,
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
BEFORE THE SACRAMENT
READ of the world, in mercy broken;
Wine of the soul, in mercy shed;
By Whom the words of life were spoken,
And in Whose death our sins are dead:
B'
Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
Look on the tears by sinners shed,
And be Thy feast to us the token
That by Thy grace our souls are fed.
7157
## p. 7158 (#556) ###########################################
7158
REGINALD HEBER
TO HIS WIFE-WRITTEN IN UPPER INDIA
I
F THOU wert by my side, my love,
How fast would evening fail
In green Bengala's palmy grove,
Listening the nightingale.
If thou, my love, wert by my side,
My babies at my knee,
How gayly would our pinnace glide
O'er Gunga's mimic sea.
I miss thee at the dawning gray,
When, on our deck reclined,
In careless ease my limbs I lay,
And woo the cooler wind.
I miss thee when by Gunga's stream
My twilight steps I guide,
But most beneath the lamp's pale beam,
I miss thee from my side.
I spread my books, my pencil try,
The lingering noon to cheer,
But miss thy kind approving eye,
Thy meek attentive ear.
But when of morn and eve the star
Beholds me on my knee,
I feel, though thou art distant far,
Thy prayers ascend for me.
Then on-then on; where duty leads,
My course be onward still,
On broad Hindostan's sultry meads,
O'er black Almorah's hill.
That course nor Delhi's kingly gates
Nor mild Malwah detain,
For sweet the bliss us both awaits
By yonder western main.
Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say,
Across the dark blue sea;
But ne'er were hearts so light and gay
As then shall meet in thee.
## p. 7159 (#557) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
AT A FUNERAL
ENEATH our feet and o'er our head
Is equal warning given;
Beneath us lie the countless dead,
Above us is the heaven.
B'
Their names are graven on the stone,
Their bones are in the clay;
And ere another day is done,
Ourselves may be as they.
Death rides on every passing breeze,
He lurks in every flower;
Each season has its own disease,
Its peril every hour.
Our eyes have seen the rosy light
Of youth's soft cheek decay,
And Fate descend in sudden night
On manhood's middle day.
Our eyes have seen the steps of age
Halt feebly towards the tomb,
And yet shall earth our hearts engage,
And dreams of days to come?
Turn, mortal, turn! thy danger know:
Where'er thy foot can tread
The earth rings hollow from below,
And warns thee of her dead.
Turn, Christian, turn! thy soul apply
To truths Divinely given;
The bones that underneath thee lie
Shall live for hell or heaven.
THE MOONLIGHT MARCH
I
SEE them on their winding way,
About their ranks the moonbeams play;
Their lofty deeds and daring high
Blend with the notes of victory;
And waving arms, and banners bright,
Are glancing in the mellow light.
7159
## p. 7160 (#558) ###########################################
7160
REGINALD HEBER
They're lost, and gone; the moon is past,
The wood's dark shade is o'er them cast;
And fainter, fainter, fainter still
The march
rising o'er the hill.
Again, again the pealing drum,
The clashing horn,-they come, they come;
Through rocky pass, o'er wooded steep,
In long and glittering files they sweep.
And nearer, nearer, yet more near,
Their softened chorus meets the ear.
Forth, forth, and meet them on their way:
The trampling hoofs brook no delay;
With thrilling fife and pealing drum,
And clashing horn, they come, they come.
## p. 7160 (#559) ###########################################
## p. 7160 (#560) ###########################################
DEN
G. W. F. HEGEL.
## p. 7160 (#561) ###########################################
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these philosophies are the same substa
to the truth that reason is the absolute
Greek philosophy gave him a vantage
[J
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## p. 7160 (#562) ###########################################
120
HEGEL
## p. 7161 (#563) ###########################################
7161
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
(1770-1831)
BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS
EORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL was born at Stuttgart on
the 27th of August, 1770. His biographers mention the fact
that Swabia, the birthplace of Hegel and Schelling, was also
the birthplace of Albertus Magnus, the greatest genius for philosophy
in the Middle Ages; of his pupils,- Thomas Aquinas being the light
of Christian theology, and Meister Eckhart being the fountain of Ger-
man mysticism and philosophy. But Hegel's ancestor John Hegel had
migrated from Carinthia into Swabia in the seventeenth century, seek-
ing freedom for the exercise of his newly acquired Protestant faith.
After the Lutheran reformation, which extended into the mountain-
ous portions of Austria, was vigilantly repressed by the Austrian
government, numbers of the most industrious and intelligent inhab-
itants migrated northward and westward for the sake of religious
freedom.
The father of our philosopher, George Louis Hegel, held an office
under the government, being a secretary of the Bureau of Public
Revenues. His mother was a well-informed and intelligent woman.
The events of his youth and early manhood are thoroughly prosaic,
up to the time of his meeting with Schelling. He was sent to the
Latin school at the age of five years, and at seven entered the gym-
nasium. It is reported of him that he read Shakespeare in Wieland's
translation at the age of eight years, and that at about the age of
thirteen he had done some study in geometry, surveying, Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew. He translated the work of Longinus on the Sublime
at the age of seventeen.
His studies in Greek literature made the
liveliest possible impression upon his mind, and all readers of Hegel's
works are struck with the fact that Greek methods of thinking-in
short, the Greek view of the world-became part and parcel of his
mind. He read the 'Antigone' of Sophocles at the age of eighteen,
and for many years after this studied Greek and Roman history and
the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. He very early perceived that
these philosophies are the same substantially, both of them reaching
to the truth that reason is the absolute. The fact of his study of
Greek philosophy gave him a vantage ground; he became later the
## p. 7162 (#564) ###########################################
7162
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
interpreter of the results of Greek philosophy into the language of
German philosophy, and was able to demonstrate the harmony of the
two great streams of human thinking.
At the age of eighteen he entered the University of Tübingen as
student of theology, and took great interest in the lectures on the
Psalms and on the Book of Job, carrying on at the same time studies
in biology and reviewing Greek literature. Schelling arrived at the
same university two years later, and awakened the more sluggish
intellect of Hegel into a new
ew activity. Before the advent of Schel-
ling, Hegel, it seems, had not looked upon philosophy as a process
of real knowing. It appeared to him rather like a record of curious
opinions, in which no trace of scientific necessity could be discovered.
But the fervent heat of Schelling's mind melted down these opinions
and separated the gold from the dross. Schelling could pierce at
once to the essential necessity of thought. He could see what belongs
to the constitution of the mind and determines the very structure
of thought itself. Schooled in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte,
Schelling grappled with the fundamental problems of philosophy with
as much assurance and familiarity as if they were every-day mat-
ters of the university lecture-room, or indeed of the students' boarding-
house. Hegel, five years his senior, borrowed courage from Schelling,
and commenced anew his studies in philosophy with an entirely dif-
ferent point of view. For fifteen years he willingly acknowledged
himself to be Schelling's disciple.
Meanwhile the French Revolution had begun, and was now in the
height of its progress. It was the external counterpart of the Kant-
ian revolution in philosophy. All realized institutions were attacked
by it, in the interest of individual freedom against authority. All
over Europe there came to be a feeling that man is the maker of
his institutions, and that he can demonstrate this authorship by tak-
ing to pieces Church and State, and reconstructing them at pleasure.
Kant and Fichte had attacked the problems of philosophy in the
same revolutionary spirit. It seemed to them as if they stood, for
the first time, face to face with truth. All other and earlier endeav-
ors had been fatuitous. Dogmatic philosophy had not attained truth,
but merely likelihood, or opinion. With the newly acquired faculties
of higher introspection discovered by Kant, it would be possible now
to settle ultimately and finally the attitude of the mind towards
fundamental problems of the universe. The problems of life could
all be solved without delay.
These views aroused unbounded enthusiasm. The Germans call
this epoch the "Aufklärung" (Enlightenment). It was a clearing-up
such as comes from cutting loose from the past, with a consciousness
that the individual commences a new book, with new ideas and with
## p. 7163 (#565) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7163
Hegel
no responsibilities to anything that has been written before.
had been much interested in Rousseau in his youth, and en the
French Revolution came to be discussed all over Europe, he like
most young men of his time adopted the gospel of liberty, equality,
and fraternity as his own. He and Schelling took an active part in
a political club founded for the dissemination of French ideas at the
university. In the course of a few years, however, he discovered the
shallowness of a movement which claims as its chief merit the neg-
lect of the past and the wholesale condemnation of existing institu-
tions. According to the principle of the French Revolution, no sooner
has something become an accomplished fact than it becomes a men-
ace to the freedom of the individual; it becomes tyrannical with its
authority. Hence, no sooner did the Revolution make a new consti-
tution than it began to amend it; for how could the people retain
their consciousness of freedom from authority unless they continually
recast their constitutional law? This lesson of the French Revolution
made the profoundest impression upon the mind of Hegel, given as
he was to looking behind the immediate appearance to the essential
form of the deed. He saw at once the irrationality of the Revolution,
and compared it to Saturn, who devoured his own offspring. He saw
vividly the absurdity of constitutional conventions which are to dis-
cover and adopt reasonable foundations, to be followed immediately
by new conventions which demolish the reasonable forms adopted by
their predecess
ssors. Hegel became conscious of the truth of the con-
servative principle which aims to build the present upon the past,
and to reinforce the insight of the present moment by the reflections
of all the rational hours that have gone before. This conservatism,
which appears in all of the works of Hegel, has been much con-
demned. It should be remembered that Hegel did not begin to write
books until he had reached this conclusion.
After two or three years' companionship with Schelling, Hegel,
having completed his theological studies at the university, left Jena
and became a private tutor in a family in Berne. It is interesting to
note that Fichte had held the position of tutor in Switzerland shortly
before this, and Herbart a similar position about the same time.
The three years of tutorship passed in studies on the most difficult
problems of all philosophies; namely, the reconciliation of the theo-
retical and practical sides of life the relation of intellect to will.
At this time, too, Hegel made a more thorough study of the Kantian
critiques, and took up Fichte's Science of Knowledge,' finding it far
more difficult to master than the Critique of Pure Reason. ' He
obtained, however, some assistance from Schelling in gaining an
insight into the subtle psychology of Fichte. For Schelling had
found the writings of Fichte more to his taste than those of any
―――
## p. 7164 (#566) ###########################################
7164
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
other philosopher; and just as Fichte had been nurtured on the writ-
ings of Kant, the ideas of which he had proceeded at once to com-
bine in a new system, so Schelling recast in a new form the ideas of
Fichte. He hastened to construe the world of nature, a priori, by
means of transcendental ideas. Self-consciousness revealed the hidden
laws and principles implicit in ordinary knowing; and these laws and
principles, discovered in the unconscious activity of the mind, were
identified by him with the moving forces of nature. He attributed
them to "an impersonal reason, a soul of the world. " Thus it comes
to pass that while Fichte laid the greatest stress on the subjective,
the will of the individual, the consciousness of the particular person,
- that is to say, on the free moral will,- Schelling on the other
hand emphasized the objective, the unconscious development of nature,
and laid great stress on the gradual unfolding of reason in the inor-
ganic world of matter. There was no necessary incongruity in the
two systems. But the one-sidedness due to the intense emphasis
given to the opposite poles soon produced a conflict. Fichte subor-
dinated everything else to the moral will, and regarded nature as
merely phenomenal and scarcely worthy of man's attention.
ling, on the other hand, turned to nature and history as unconscious
realizations of spirit in time and space, and held them up to view as
worthy of all study. They were treated in his philosophy with rever-
ence as Divine incarnations. Fichte slighted time and space, and
what they contained. He neglected the forms of matter and the
results of history,— everything conventional, such as institutions, cus-
toms, and philosophical systems. The world, in short, was treated
somewhat as the French revolutionists treated the past. Schelling,
on the other hand, looked upon the world as a revelation of the abso-
lute, and held it sacred, while subjectivity (the ego and its interests)
became less important in his eyes; and as a consequence, human aims
and endeavors, even moral aims, lost their interest to him. Not so
however with Hegel. Hegel did not for a moment, while he called
himself a disciple of Schelling, fail to see that the moral world is
more important than the physical world; although he believed the
physical world to be what Schelling claimed for it.
In the midst of these great philosophical movements, Hegel had
(in 1797) become a tutor in Frankfort, and had reinforced his insights
obtained through the study of Fichte and the explanations of Schel-
ling, by a study of Plato and Sextus Empiricus the skeptic. What
was most important, he began to get a new insight into the dialectic
which Fichte had set forth in his 'Science of Knowledge' as the
strictly scientific form of expounding philosophy. He saw how, in
the hands of Plato and Sextus, the negative plays the moving part
in developing thought and correcting its imperfections. Hegel later
## p. 7165 (#567) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7165
conceived the idea of uniting the Platonic dialectic with the Fichtean,
and completing an objective dialectic which he hoped to make of
great service in rational psychology, or logic as he called it.
In 1801 he returned to Jena, which had become not only a great
centre of literary activity but the chief centre of philosophic activity
in the world. Fichte had been charged with atheism, had resigned,
and gone to Berlin. Schelling was then lecturing at Jena as pro-
fessor extraordinarius. Hegel commenced to teach logic, metaphysics,
the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit. In 1805 he
lectured on the history of philosophy, pure metaphysics, and natural
right; in 1806 on the unity of philosophical systems. He began in
this year to unfold what he called the phenomenology of spirit; by
which he meant an exposition of the dialectic by which one's view
of the world changes from that of the earliest infancy up to the most
complete view to be found in the philosophy and religion of his
civilization. He showed how the barest fragments are seized at first
as if they were the truth of the whole world; next how these frag-
ments are supplemented and enlarged by further insight, obtained by
noticing their dependence on other things and their utter insufficiency
by themselves. This work, The Phenomenology of Spirit,' published
in 1807, remains the most noteworthy exposition of what Hegel calls
his dialectic; although in some respects it is amended and made
more complete in his larger 'Logic,' published in three volumes,
1812 to 1816.
But in 1803 Hegel had begun to be aware of a growing separation
between his view of the world and that of Schelling. He had been
substantially at one with Schelling so long as Schelling held the
doctrine that reason, or intelligence and will, is the absolute. This
was Schelling's view up to 1801. At that time the idea of polarity
became very attractive to him. The phenomenon of the magnet had
suggested a symbol by which he could explain human consciousness
and the world. We, the conscious human beings, represent one pole
of being, the subjective pole; while nature, in time and space, repre-
sents the other pole, the objective pole of being. Just as the indif-
ference-point unites the two poles in one magnet, so there is the
absolute, which is the indifference-point between the subjective and
objective poles of being; namely, between mind and nature: and of
course this indifference-point is neither mind nor nature, but a higher
principle uniting mind and nature. At this point Schelling very dis-
tinctly abandoned the current of European thought from Plato to
Fichte, and adopted the Oriental standpoint, as revealed in Hindoo
philosophy and in the philosophy of the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists.
It was a lapse into Orientalism, and if carried out would end in
agnosticism, or in the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of the
## p. 7166 (#568) ###########################################
7166
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
absolute. Another of its consequences would be the impossibility of
recognizing morals or ethics in the Divine. Since the absolute would
transcend the subjective as well as the objective, it would be some-
thing above morals, and consequently it could not be said to have
self-activity. Hegel never for one moment assented to this view, but
remained standing by the former attitude of Schelling, making the
absolute to be, not an indifference-point, but the perfection of the
subjective and objective as a reason whose will is creative, or a rea-
son whose intellect, in the act of knowing, also creates. After 1803,
Schelling ought to have seen that his new principle undermined the
very possibility of philosophy, and he should have ceased philoso-
phizing; for his absolute, as the indifference-point between reason
and nature, proved only an empty unity which did not explain the
origin of the polarity from it. The worlds of mind and nature could
not be anything but illusions, the Maya of the East-Indian thinking.
On the other hand, an absolute of reason could explain the rise of
antithesis, and could explain also the world of unconscious nature as
a progressive development of individuality—a sort of cradle for the
development of immortal souls. But Hegel, even in his lectures on
the history of philosophy nearly twenty years later, seems to take
pleasure in recognizing Schelling as his master. He does not expound
the final system as his own, but adopts the philosophy of Schelling
as the last contribution to the History of Philosophy. '
It may be of interest to remark here, that although Schelling con-
tinued to produce new developments in philosophy which undermined
the systems which he had built up before, yet there are two import-
ant and permanent interests advanced by his philosophizing. The
first of these has been mentioned. Instead of leaving nature as a
thing in itself, outside of and beyond all mind, Schelling recognizes
in it a genuine objective and independent development of reason,
fundamentally identical with mind. Human reason is reflected in the
forms of nature. This view brings one to see that the goal at which
the human soul has arrived, or is arriving, is confirmed or approved
by the great process of struggle for existence which is called nature.
"Mind sleeps in matter, dreams in the plant, awakes in the animal,
and becomes conscious in man. "
Still more important is the effort of Schelling to understand the
great systems of thought made by preceding thinkers-his study of
Giordano Bruno, and his interpretation of mythology. He success-
ively appropriated the standpoints of Kant, Fichte, Bruno, Spinoza,
Baader, and Boehme. His fertile mind threw great light on the posi
tive meaning contained in each of these systems of thought. He
became the best of commentators. He showed how a history of phi-
losophy should be written, not after the style of Mr. Lewes, who
## p. 7167 (#569) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7167
writes the biography of defunct philosophy, but a history that shows
the great insights which formed the life of these systems. Schelling
had discovered the vital basis for a history of philosophy that should
interpret the different systems of thought that had prevailed.
Hegel perhaps learned his most important lesson from Schelling
in this matter of the interpretation of systems of thought; and cer-
tainly Hegel shines best in writing the History of Philosophy,'
always being able to penetrate behind the words and seize the essen-
tial ideas which lived in the mind of the past thinker. Oftentimes
this idea was merely struggling for utterance, and not wholly articu-
late. This does not prevent Hegel from seizing the idea itself, and
setting it forth with success.
The gross outcome of Hegel's philosophy. is, in fact,- next after
his insight into the defect of Oriental thought,- his ability to seize
the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and prove its identity with the
thought of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. The easiest method by which
the student may arrive at the great thoughts of Plato and Aristotle
is to read in Hegel's History of Philosophy' his exposition of Socra-
tes and his followers. Hegel's high place is due to his able inter-
pretation of the speculative insights of the great systems of thought
which had prevailed in the world for twenty centuries, and on which,
in a sense, the institutions of modern civilization had been built. The
old philosophy had been so diluted, in making it a book of instruc-
tion for students and immature persons, that the insight into its
speculative necessity had been lost or become a tradition. The pro-
fessor is obliged to keep in mind the capacity of the pupil, in pre-
paring his text-book. In striving to make the subject clear to the
immature mind, which is not able to think except in images and
pictures, the professor changes his attitude from that of a discoverer
of truth to that of an expounder of truth. He is obliged to suppress
the strictly logical deduction, and substitute for it analogies and illus-
trations that flow from it; thus, to offer baked bread instead of seed
corn to his pupils. But by-and-by his pupils, nurtured on this thin
philosophical diet, become professors themselves. They have never
heard that Plato and Aristotle ever had any other meaning than the
commonplace doctrines learned in their text-books. Hence the de-
generacy of philosophy in the schools. On the other hand, eccentric
philosophers off the lines of the traditional school wisdom, like Bruno,
Spinoza, Boehme, and Swedenborg, have never been reduced to a text-
book form, and they still preserve a power to arouse original thought.
Schelling's writings have this power. They reveal the morning red
of truth, and the student becomes a mystic and beholds the truth for
himself. But it does not often occur to him that there is also clear
daylight behind the commonplace dogmas of school wisdom.
## p. 7168 (#570) ###########################################
7168
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
Hegel profited more by the example of Schelling in this matter
of interpreting the past systems of philosophy, than by anything else.
He became the great philosophical interpreter.
I have already mentioned his first original work, the 'Phenome-
nology of Spirit,' a book that he finished during the battle of Jena
(1806). It appeared from the press in the following year. This work
may be best described as an interpretation of the different stand-
points at which the mind arrives, successively, on its way from the
mere animal sense-perception up to the highest stage of thinking,
which sees the world to be a manifestation of Divine reason, and
reads its purpose in everything. One must not, however, understand
this book to be an attempt to present the contents of the world of
nature and of human history in a systematic form, for it is nothing
of the kind. It is rather a subjective clearing-up of the contents of
his own mind than an objective treatment of the contents of the
world, systematically. But the first part of it has something of
a very general character; namely, the exhibition of the dialectic
by which sense-perception passes from an immediate knowledge of
the here and now, to a knowledge of force, and further on, to the
insight that force must in all cases be a fragment of will-activity.
This part of the track of development must be common to all peo-
ples who have progressed up to, and beyond, the dynamic view of
the world. And again, in the next phase of it, where he develops
in order, one after the other, the germs of the several institutions of
the social life of man; namely, beginning with slavery, on through
the patriarchal despotism, up to free, constitutional forms of govern-
ment. He shows the rise of the moral idea, first in the mind of the
slave who, purified by his own sufferings, learns to see the import-
ance of moral conduct on the part of his master, not only for his
own (the slave's) well-being, but also for the accomplishment of any-
thing reasonable by his master himself. This deep insight is a key
to the explanation of the authorship of Æsop's Fables, the Enchiridion
of Epictetus, and the Hitopadesa, by slaves. In general, it explains
how it is that in Asia, in the realm of arbitrary power and despot-
ism, the moral systems of the world have arisen. It does not indicate
any lofty superiority on the part of the Asiatic mind, but rather its
backwardness in developing civil institutions such as we enjoy in
the Roman law, the English local self-government, and the American
Constitution. Hegel uses this key, not only to explain the history and
arrested development of civilization among the Oriental peoples, but
to explain the moral ideas of the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epi-
cureans.
The first part of the Phenomenology treats of consciousness, the
second part of self-consciousness, or the arrival at the certainty that
## p. 7169 (#571) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7169
a self is behind every total phenomenon, and that the self is an in-
dependent, originating being, and therefore morally responsible. He
shows how this idea prompts man to a study of nature, with a view
to understand how nature is a manifestation or revelation of mind.
This is the third study of the Phenomenology under the general title
of reason.
«
In Hegel's technique, reason" means the recognition of
mind as the outcome of the world-process. Absolute reason is creat-
ing individual beings, and endowing them with reason. The world
of nature and human history is a process whose object is the develop-
ment of individuality. Side by side with this theoretical or intellect-
ual side of the recognition of reason, Hegel places the actual struggle
of the will, and traces its ascent from mere caprice, up to the con-
sciousness of laws and obedience to them.
The fourth step of the Phenomenology he calls "spirit. " It is the
consciousness that makes institutions for the establishment and pres-
ervation of what is rational in the world. According to Hegel, rea-
son includes the discovery of rational laws in nature and rational
laws in human history and development; but in all this the individual
acts as individual, and his seeing and knowing is individual. Spirit
names the product of society, and not of the mere individual. In
social combinations, according to Hegel, there is a higher manifesta-
tion of intelligence and will than in the mere individual, and he calls
this manifestation "spirit. " Spirit is therefore man acting as a social
whole. His insight into this is used as a key to explain the phe-
nomena of his own time, particularly the French Revolution, in its
entire cycle from revolt against the State to a restoration of the State
under Napoleon.
He closes his Phenomenology by a brief study into the nature of
religion. He commences with the lowest forms of fetishism and
idolatry, and rising through the art religion of the Greeks, comes to
a third and highest religion, revealed religion; signifying by the word
"revealed," not so much that the Scriptures are divinely inspired, as
that they make known a God who reveals himself to men,—not an
inscrutable God, like that of the pantheistic religions, but a Divine-
human God, an absolute, conscious reason, and above all, a moral
God. For Hegel finds that the Hebrew insight in the Old Testament
reaches to such a knowledge of the absolute as is presupposed by
psychology, by the philosophy of nature, and by the philosophy of
history. It was reached by the intuition of that wonderful people in
Palestine.
Of many things man may be uncertain, but he can be absolutely
certain that the fundamental Being in the universe must respect the
moral law, otherwise he would destroy his own personality. Hav-
ing convinced himself of this, Hegel has arrived at his final chapter,
XII-449
## p. 7170 (#572) ###########################################
7170
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
absolutely knowing, and his "voyage of discovery" is done. He is
certain that there must be absolute science, because the highest of
religions presupposes this knowledge that the Divine being is ethical,
and necessarily possesses goodness and righteousness. Now Hegel is
ready to commence on his next work, the Logic, which will show
how the mind reaches the moral ideal. It is a thorough explora-
tion of the thoughts of the mind which arise in it through its own
activity, and not through mere experience. The category of being,
for instance, is a category that underlies all experience, and it re-
mains in the mind after having abstracted all that one has learned
through each and all his special senses; for all things learned by
experience are really qualities of being, but not being itself.
the categories of negation and of becoming. Such categories as
"somewhat," and "other," and "limit," "the finite," "the infinite,"
and all the other categories of quality; such categories as "quantity,"
"extensive" and "intensive," and "ratio,”—all these categories of
quality and quantity form a sort of surface to the thinking mind.
Underneath this it thinks categories of "phenomenon and noume-
non," categories of "positive and negative," "identity and difference,
"force and manifestation," "substance and attribute,» « cause and
effect," in short, the world of relativity.
Hegel goes on in his Logic to discuss - besides these categories
of quality and quantity which belong to immediate being, and which
constitute our superficial or surface thinking-the categories of es-
sence, such as cause and effect, which are the chief categories of
reflection, or the understanding; and finally comes to a third realm
of thinking, which deals with life and mind, showing up the laws of
the judgment and syllogism as found in Aristotle's Logic, and work-
ing out, along lines that Schelling first explored, into the realization of
mind in the mechanism, chemism, and teleology of the world; finally
considering the life of animal and plant, and then intellect and will
of man, and lastly the union of intellect and will in one being,- the
being of God, or as Hegel calls it, the "absolute idea. " This abso-
lute idea has the form of perfectly altruistic action. Its Divine occu-
pation is the creating of other beings, and the nurturing of the same
up to their immortal individuality.
With the appearance of conscious self-determination in the world,
there begins responsibility, and consequently conscious discrimination
between evil and righteousness. The institutions of civilization arise
in order to conserve the conscious practice of the right and the sup-
pression of evil.
In this his first work, the
Phenomenology,' we find the keys
which Hegel applies to the several departments of philosophy; his
work after 1807 lay in the lines therein mapped out. While in charge
## p. 7171 (#573) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7171
of a classical high school in Nuremberg, he elaborated and published
his 'Science of Logic,' in three volumes (1812 to 1816). The outline
of the Philosophy of Nature' he published in his Encyclopædia of
Philosophical Sciences' in 1817 at Heidelberg, whither he had gone.
in October 1816 to assume a professorship in the University. The
first volume of the Encyclopædia' contains a compend of his logic,
and the third volume contains the 'Philosophy of Spirit,' which is
mostly a systematic arrangement of materials to be found in his
"Phenomenology. '
In October 1818 Hegel became a professor in the University of
Berlin, occupying the chair formerly occupied by Fichte. In his Ber-
lin period he elaborated the details of the Philosophy of Spirit,' and
expanded its contents into a large number of volumes. In 1821 he
published his Philosophy of Right,' containing the science of juris-
prudence, morals, and politics. In the following years he lectured on
the philosophy of history, on the science of the fine arts and poetry,
on the philosophy of religion, and on the history of philosophy.
His manuscripts were edited by his disciples after his death, additions
being made to the manuscripts from the notes of the pupils taken
during the lectures. While engaged on a new edition of his complete
Logic, having finished the revision of the first volume, he died of
cholera, November 14th, 1831.
The edition of his complete works by his disciples contains in
Vol. i. his writings of the Schelling period; Vol. ii. , Phenomenology
of Spirit'; Vols. iii. , iv. , and v. , Science of Logic'; 'Outlines of the
Philosophy of Right' (one volume), Philosophy of History' (one vol-
ume), Esthetics,' including the Philosophy of the Fine Arts and
Poetry (three volumes), Philosophy of Religion' (two volumes),
"History of Philosophy' (three volumes), the Encyclopædia' (three
volumes), Miscellaneous Writings' (two volumes). To this list should
be added the Life of Hegel' by Rosenkranz (one volume). English
translations now exist of the Philosophy of History,' the Encyclo-
pædia,' the Philosophy of Right,' the Philosophy of Religion,' the
'History of Philosophy,' and a considerable portion of the 'Esthetics. '
<
Of these works, the Philosophy of Right' gives by far the best
philosophy of the family, industrial society, political economy, and
the State, that has been produced by the Kantian critical school. It
contains a brief but very luminous treatise on the science of morals
as distinct from ethics in general, which Hegel construes as the
science of institutions. Hegel's 'Philosophy of Esthetics,' including
the fine arts and poetry, treats of the three epochs of art, symbolic
(Oriental), classic (Greek and Roman), and romantic (Christian), as
well as the special arts, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and
poetry.
7148
LAFCADIO HEARN
IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. ' Copyright 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
"A
ND this," the reader may say, "this is all that you went forth
to see: a torii, some shells, a small damask snake, some
stones? "
It is true. And nevertheless I know that I am bewitched.
There is a charm indefinable about the place; that sort of charm
which comes with a little ghostly thrill, never to be forgotten.
Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of num-
berless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and interblended:
the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening,
vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient,
mystic, mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of
treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of
sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of
rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished
generations.
And other memories ineffaceable: the first sight of the sea-girt
City of Pearl through a fairy veil of haze; the windy approach
to the lovely island over the velvety soundless brown stretch of
sand; the weird majesty of the giant gate of bronze; the queer,
high-sloping, fantastic, quaintly gabled street, flinging down sharp
shadows of aerial balconies; the flutter of colored draperies in the
sea wind, and of flags with their riddles of lettering; the pearly
glimmering of the astonishing shops.
And impressions of the enormous day, the day of the Land of
the Gods, a loftier day than ever our summers know; and the
glory of the view from those green sacred silent heights between
sea and sun; and the remembrance of the sky, a sky spiritual
as holiness, a sky with clouds ghost-pure and white as the light
itself, seeming indeed not clouds but dreams, or souls of Bodhi-
sattvas about to melt forever into some blue Nirvana.
And the romance of Benten, too,-the deity of Beauty, the
divinity of Love, the goddess of Eloquence. Rightly is she like-
wise named goddess of the sea. For is not the sea most ancient
and most excellent of speakers,-the eternal poet, chanter of that
mystic hymn whose rhythm shakes the world, whose mighty syl-
lables no man may learn?
## p. 7149 (#547) ###########################################
LAFCADIO HEARN
7149
THE TEMPLE OF KWANNON
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Copyright 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
A
ND we arrive before the far-famed Kamakura temple of Kwan-
non,- Kwannon, who yielded up her right to the Eternal
Peace that she might save the souls of men, and renounced
Nirvana to suffer with humanity for other myriad million ages;
Kwannon, the goddess of Pity and of Mercy.
I climb three flights of steps leading to the temple, and a
young girl seated at the threshold rises to greet us. Then she
disappears within the temple to summon the guardian priest, a
venerable man, white-robed, who makes me a sign to enter.
The temple is large as any that I have yet seen, and like
the others, gray with the wearing of six hundred years. From
the roof there hang down votive offerings, inscriptions, and lan-
terns in multitude, painted with various pleasing colors. Almost
opposite to the entrance is a singular statue, a seated figure of
human dimensions and most human aspect, looking upon us with
small weird eyes set in a wondrously wrinkled face. This face
was originally painted flesh tint, and the robes of the image pale
blue; but now the whole is uniformly gray with age and dust,
and its colorlessness harmonizes so well with the senility of the
figure that one is almost ready to believe one's self gazing at
a living mendicant pilgrim. It is Benzuru, the same personage
whose famous image at Asakusa has been made featureless by the
wearing touch of countless pilgrim fingers. To left and right of
the entrance are the Ni-O, enormously muscled, furious of aspect;
their crimson bodies are speckled with a white scum of paper
pellets spat at them by worshipers. Above the altar is a small
but very pleasing image of Kwannon, with her entire figure
relieved against an oblong halo of gold, imitating the flickering
of flame.
But this is not the image for which the temple is famed;
there is another to be seen, upon certain conditions. The old
priest presents me with a petition, written in excellent and elo-
quent English, praying visitors to contribute something to the
maintenance of the temple and its pontiff, and appealing to those
of another faith to remember that "Any belief which can make
men kindly and good is worthy of respect. " I contribute my
mite, and I ask to see the great Kwannon.
## p. 7150 (#548) ###########################################
7150
LAFCADIO HEARN
Then the old priest lights a lantern, and leads the way through
a low doorway on the left of the altar, into the interior of the
temple, into some very lofty darkness. I follow him cautiously
a while, discerning nothing whatever but the flicker of the lantern;
then we halt before something which gleams. A moment, and
my eyes, becoming more accustomed to the darkness, begin to
distinguish outlines; the gleaming object defines itself gradually
as a foot, an immense golden foot, and I perceive the hem of a
golden robe undulating over the instep. Now the other foot
appears; the figure is certainly standing. I can perceive that we
are in a narrow but also very lofty chamber, and that out of
some mysterious blackness overhead, ropes are dangling down
into the circle of lantern light illuminating the golden feet. The
priest lights two more lanterns, and suspends them upon hooks
attached to a pair of pendent ropes about a yard apart; then he
pulls up both together slowly. More of the golden robe is re-
vealed as the lanterns ascend, swinging on their way; then the
outlines of two mighty knees; then the curving of columnar thighs
under chiseled drapery, and as with the still waving ascent of the
lanterns the golden Vision towers ever higher through the gloom,
expectation intensifies. There is no sound but the sound of the
invisible pulleys overhead, which squeak like bats. Now above
the golden girdle, the suggestion of a bosom. Then the glowing
of a golden hand uplifted in benediction. Then another golden
hand holding a lotus. And at last a face, golden, smiling with
eternal youth and infinite tenderness,-the face of Kwannon.
So revealed out of the consecrated darkness, this ideal of
Divine femininity, creation of a forgotten art and time, is more
than impressive. I can scarcely call the emotion which it pro-
duces admiration; it is rather reverence.
But the lanterns, which paused awhile at the level of the
beautiful face, now ascend still higher, with a fresh squeaking of
pulleys. And lo! the tiara of the divinity appears, with strangest
symbolism. It is a pyramid of heads, of faces,- charming faces
of maidens, miniature faces of Kwannon herself.
For this is the Kwannon of the Eleven Faces,-Jiu-ichi-men-
Kwannon.
## p. 7151 (#549) ###########################################
LAFCADIO HEARN
7151
THE SHINTÖ FAITH
From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Copyright 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
Ο
NCE more we are journeying through the silence of this holy
land of mists and of legends; wending our way between
green leagues of ripening rice, white-sprinkled with arrows.
of prayer, between the far processions of blue and verdant peaks
whose names are the names of gods. We have left Kitzuki far
behind. But as in a dream I still see the mighty avenue, the
――
ong succession of torii with their colossal shimenawa, the ma-
jestic face of the Guji, the kindly smile of the priest Sasa, and
the girl priestess in her snowy robes dancing her beautiful
ghostly dance. It seems to me that I can still hear the sound
of the clapping of hands, like the crashing of a torrent. I can-
not suppress some slight exultation at the thought that I have
been allowed to see what no other foreigner has been privileged
to see, the interior of Japan's most ancient shrine, and those
sacred utensils and quaint rites of primitive worship so well
worthy the study of the anthropologist and the evolutionist.
But to have seen Kitzuki as I saw it is also to have seen
something much more than a single wonderful temple. To see
Kitzuki is to see the living centre of Shintō, and to feel the life
pulse of the ancient faith, throbbing as mightily in this nine-
teenth century as ever in that unknown past whereof the Kojiki
itself, though written in a tongue no longer spoken, is but a
modern record. Buddhism, changing form or slowly decaying
through the centuries, might seem doomed to pass away at last
from this Japan to which it came only as an alien faith; but
Shinto, unchanging and vitally unchanged, still remains all-dom-
inant in the land of its birth, and only seems to gain in power
and dignity with time. Buddhism has a voluminous theology, a
profound philosophy, a literature vast as the sea. Shinto has no
philosophy, nc code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet by its
very immateriality it can resist the invasion of Occidental reli-
gious thought as no other Orient faith can. Shinto extends a
welcome to Western science, but remains the irresistible oppo-
nent of Western religion; and the foreign zealots who would
strive against it are astounded to find the power that foils their
uttermost efforts indefinable as magnetism and invulnerable as
air. Indeed, the best of our scholars have never been able to
## p. 7152 (#550) ###########################################
7152
LAFCADIO HEARN
tell us what Shintō is. To some it appears to be merely ances-
tor worship, to others ancestor worship combined with nature
worship; to others again it seems to be no religion at all; to
the missionary of the more ignorant class it is the worst form
of heathenism. Doubtless the difficulty of explaining Shintō has
been due simply to the fact that the sinologists have sought for
the source of it in books: in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, which
are its histories; in the Norito, which are its prayers; in the
commentaries of Motowori and Hirata, who were its greatest
scholars. But the reality of Shintō lives not in books, nor in
rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which
it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever
young. Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint super-
stitions, and artless myths, and fantastic magic, there thrills a
mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race, with all its
impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
Shintō is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the
sense of beauty, and the power of art, and the fire of heroism
and magnetism of loyalty, and the emotion of faith, have become
inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive.
Trusting to know something of that Oriental soul in whose
joyous love of nature and of life even the unlearned may discern
a strange likeness to the soul of the old Greek race, I trust also
that I may presume some day to speak of the great living power
of that faith now called Shintō, but more anciently Kami-no-michi,
or The Way of the Gods. "
((
## p. 7153 (#551) ###########################################
7153
XII-448
REGINALD HEBER
(1783-1826)
ON EARLIER generation of cultivated readers knew Heber by
heart, and the present one is inclined to rank him among
the best of the hymn-writers. His father was a country
gentleman of excellent Yorkshire family, incumbent of a double liv-
ing when double livings were legal and proper, and rector of Malpas
in Cheshire when his second son, Reginald, was born. Sent to Ox-
ford at seventeen, the boy began at once a brilliant university career.
In his first year (1800) he took the prize for his 'Carmen Seculare,' a
Latin poem describing the greatness of the
new century. He was but twenty when he
wrote in English his second prize poem,
'Palestine,' which was printed in 1807 and
several times reprinted; for it appealed to
the religious sense of the great middle-class
English public, still stirred by the remem-
brance of Wesley and the Evangelists. In
the theatre where it was recited it was
received with tumultuous enthusiasm, and
it is one of the very few prize poems that
have lived; Tennyson being perhaps the
only one of the great poets whose univer-
sity verses were admired by a later genera-
tion. There is a pretty story connecting
Walter Scott with the fortunate student's triumph. Scott, the smart
young sheriff of Selkirkshire, not yet famous, had become known by
his 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border' to that extraordinary book-
worm Richard Heber, half-brother of Reginald, whom the "Wizard"
afterward spoke of as "Heber the magnificent, whose library and
cellar are so superior to all others in the world. " Scott was visiting
his fellow antiquarian at Oxford, when the tall, shy, handsome young
undergraduate brought in his 'Palestine for their criticism. Both
the elders praised it, but Scott pointed out that a fine metaphor had
been missed in the description of the building of the Temple, and
Heber added the best lines in the poem :-
REGINALD HEBER
"No hammers fell; no ponderous axes rung:
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung. "
## p. 7154 (#552) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
7154
Two years later he won a third prize for the best English essay,
'On the Sense of Honor,' was elected a fellow of his college, and
traveled extensively. In 1807 he received holy orders and took
one of the family livings, which had been kept waiting for him.
He proved to be a most devoted parish priest, improving the church
services, building up the schools, and raising the standard of health
and morals among his people. He never liked his position, he con-
fides to a friend, "as half squire, half parson," but he did his best to
justify his place.
In 1822 he accepted with much hesitation the appointment to the
bishopric of Calcutta. At that time the whole of British India made
one vast see, the care of which demanded almost superhuman labor
and endurance. Poor Heber, always ardent and zealous, traveled over
his spiritual kingdom from bound to bound, preaching, teaching, estab-
lishing missions, baptizing, confirming, patching up peace between
quarrelsome societies, settling clerical differences, doing social duty,
sparing everybody but himself, always cheerful, always attentive,
always eager to do the one thing more. Overwork, or the merci-
less climate, or anxiety, or all together, killed him at the end of
three years in the very midst of his labors, when he was not yet
forty-three.
He wrote prose enough to fill two or three volumes, most of it
sermons, addresses, and lectures, besides an interesting book of
travels called A Journey through India, from Calcutta to Bombay. '
But he is best remembered for his hymns, still sung to-day in all
Protestant Christian churches. More than any other hymn-writer,
perhaps, he has been able to give the simple utterance of faith or
feeling its place in institutional worship. Sunday after Sunday, in
the English churches, the splendid roll of his 'Holy, Holy, Holy!
Lord God Almighty' sweeps the soul of the listener as with the
rushing of a mighty wind; in the 'Hymn for the Epiphany' many a
believer finds the voice of his own passion of faith and gratitude; in
the funeral hymns are uttered the woe and the triumph of humanity.
Among the world's great singers Heber's name will not be found,
but with the poets whom many generations love, his place is assured.
## p. 7155 (#553) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
(THE MISSIONARY HYMN
INTENDED TO BE SUNG ON OCCASION OF HIS PREACHING A SERMON FOR
THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY, IN APRIL, 1820
FR
'ROM Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand;
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile:
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.
Can we whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
7155
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation, oh salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learned Messiah's name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, his story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till like a sea of glory
It spreads from pole to pole;
Till, o'er our ransomed nature,
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.
## p. 7156 (#554) ###########################################
7156
REGINALD HEBER
SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
WAKE
AKE not, O mother, sounds of lamentation;
Weep not, O widow, weep not hopelessly:
Strong is his arm, the bringer of salvation,
Strong is the word of God to succor thee.
Bear forth the cold corpse slowly, slowly bear him;
Hide his pale features with the sable pall.
Chide not the sad one wildly weeping near him:
Widowed and childless, she has lost her all.
Why pause the mourners? who forbids our weeping?
Who the dark pomp of sorrow has delayed?
Set down the bier: he is not dead, but sleeping.
"Young man, arise! " He spake, and was obeyed.
-
Change, then, O sad one, grief to exultation,
Worship and fall before Messiah's knee.
Strong was his arm, the bringer of salvation,
Strong was the word of God to succor thee.
TRINITY SUNDAY
OLY, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Η
H Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty!
God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
Which wert and art and evermore shalt be.
Holy, holy, holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in power, in love, and purity.
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and
sea.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
## p. 7157 (#555) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
EPIPHANY
B
RIGHTEST and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
Cold on his cradle the dew-drops are shining,
Low lies his head with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore him in slumber reclining,-
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all.
Say, shall we yield him, in costly devotion,
Odors of Edom and offerings divine?
Gems of the mountain and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest or gold from the mine?
Vainly we offer each ampler oblation;
Vainly with gifts would his favor secure:
Richer by far is the heart's adoration,
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
BEFORE THE SACRAMENT
READ of the world, in mercy broken;
Wine of the soul, in mercy shed;
By Whom the words of life were spoken,
And in Whose death our sins are dead:
B'
Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
Look on the tears by sinners shed,
And be Thy feast to us the token
That by Thy grace our souls are fed.
7157
## p. 7158 (#556) ###########################################
7158
REGINALD HEBER
TO HIS WIFE-WRITTEN IN UPPER INDIA
I
F THOU wert by my side, my love,
How fast would evening fail
In green Bengala's palmy grove,
Listening the nightingale.
If thou, my love, wert by my side,
My babies at my knee,
How gayly would our pinnace glide
O'er Gunga's mimic sea.
I miss thee at the dawning gray,
When, on our deck reclined,
In careless ease my limbs I lay,
And woo the cooler wind.
I miss thee when by Gunga's stream
My twilight steps I guide,
But most beneath the lamp's pale beam,
I miss thee from my side.
I spread my books, my pencil try,
The lingering noon to cheer,
But miss thy kind approving eye,
Thy meek attentive ear.
But when of morn and eve the star
Beholds me on my knee,
I feel, though thou art distant far,
Thy prayers ascend for me.
Then on-then on; where duty leads,
My course be onward still,
On broad Hindostan's sultry meads,
O'er black Almorah's hill.
That course nor Delhi's kingly gates
Nor mild Malwah detain,
For sweet the bliss us both awaits
By yonder western main.
Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say,
Across the dark blue sea;
But ne'er were hearts so light and gay
As then shall meet in thee.
## p. 7159 (#557) ###########################################
REGINALD HEBER
AT A FUNERAL
ENEATH our feet and o'er our head
Is equal warning given;
Beneath us lie the countless dead,
Above us is the heaven.
B'
Their names are graven on the stone,
Their bones are in the clay;
And ere another day is done,
Ourselves may be as they.
Death rides on every passing breeze,
He lurks in every flower;
Each season has its own disease,
Its peril every hour.
Our eyes have seen the rosy light
Of youth's soft cheek decay,
And Fate descend in sudden night
On manhood's middle day.
Our eyes have seen the steps of age
Halt feebly towards the tomb,
And yet shall earth our hearts engage,
And dreams of days to come?
Turn, mortal, turn! thy danger know:
Where'er thy foot can tread
The earth rings hollow from below,
And warns thee of her dead.
Turn, Christian, turn! thy soul apply
To truths Divinely given;
The bones that underneath thee lie
Shall live for hell or heaven.
THE MOONLIGHT MARCH
I
SEE them on their winding way,
About their ranks the moonbeams play;
Their lofty deeds and daring high
Blend with the notes of victory;
And waving arms, and banners bright,
Are glancing in the mellow light.
7159
## p. 7160 (#558) ###########################################
7160
REGINALD HEBER
They're lost, and gone; the moon is past,
The wood's dark shade is o'er them cast;
And fainter, fainter, fainter still
The march
rising o'er the hill.
Again, again the pealing drum,
The clashing horn,-they come, they come;
Through rocky pass, o'er wooded steep,
In long and glittering files they sweep.
And nearer, nearer, yet more near,
Their softened chorus meets the ear.
Forth, forth, and meet them on their way:
The trampling hoofs brook no delay;
With thrilling fife and pealing drum,
And clashing horn, they come, they come.
## p. 7160 (#559) ###########################################
## p. 7160 (#560) ###########################################
DEN
G. W. F. HEGEL.
## p. 7160 (#561) ###########################################
CEORGE WHEE
LORES WALDAM
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SECTET
The father of out philosoper, Goo
under the government, being a
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The events of his youth and eady ma
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tr´ndation at the age of eight years,
thirteen he bad done some study in geor
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at the age of sevente on. His studies t
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Short, the Greek view of the world--b
Tl. He read the Antigone) of Sons,
and for many years after this studied
the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
these philosophies are the same substa
to the truth that reason is the absolute
Greek philosophy gave him a vantage
[J
? ,
## p. 7160 (#562) ###########################################
120
HEGEL
## p. 7161 (#563) ###########################################
7161
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
(1770-1831)
BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS
EORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL was born at Stuttgart on
the 27th of August, 1770. His biographers mention the fact
that Swabia, the birthplace of Hegel and Schelling, was also
the birthplace of Albertus Magnus, the greatest genius for philosophy
in the Middle Ages; of his pupils,- Thomas Aquinas being the light
of Christian theology, and Meister Eckhart being the fountain of Ger-
man mysticism and philosophy. But Hegel's ancestor John Hegel had
migrated from Carinthia into Swabia in the seventeenth century, seek-
ing freedom for the exercise of his newly acquired Protestant faith.
After the Lutheran reformation, which extended into the mountain-
ous portions of Austria, was vigilantly repressed by the Austrian
government, numbers of the most industrious and intelligent inhab-
itants migrated northward and westward for the sake of religious
freedom.
The father of our philosopher, George Louis Hegel, held an office
under the government, being a secretary of the Bureau of Public
Revenues. His mother was a well-informed and intelligent woman.
The events of his youth and early manhood are thoroughly prosaic,
up to the time of his meeting with Schelling. He was sent to the
Latin school at the age of five years, and at seven entered the gym-
nasium. It is reported of him that he read Shakespeare in Wieland's
translation at the age of eight years, and that at about the age of
thirteen he had done some study in geometry, surveying, Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew. He translated the work of Longinus on the Sublime
at the age of seventeen.
His studies in Greek literature made the
liveliest possible impression upon his mind, and all readers of Hegel's
works are struck with the fact that Greek methods of thinking-in
short, the Greek view of the world-became part and parcel of his
mind. He read the 'Antigone' of Sophocles at the age of eighteen,
and for many years after this studied Greek and Roman history and
the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. He very early perceived that
these philosophies are the same substantially, both of them reaching
to the truth that reason is the absolute. The fact of his study of
Greek philosophy gave him a vantage ground; he became later the
## p. 7162 (#564) ###########################################
7162
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
interpreter of the results of Greek philosophy into the language of
German philosophy, and was able to demonstrate the harmony of the
two great streams of human thinking.
At the age of eighteen he entered the University of Tübingen as
student of theology, and took great interest in the lectures on the
Psalms and on the Book of Job, carrying on at the same time studies
in biology and reviewing Greek literature. Schelling arrived at the
same university two years later, and awakened the more sluggish
intellect of Hegel into a new
ew activity. Before the advent of Schel-
ling, Hegel, it seems, had not looked upon philosophy as a process
of real knowing. It appeared to him rather like a record of curious
opinions, in which no trace of scientific necessity could be discovered.
But the fervent heat of Schelling's mind melted down these opinions
and separated the gold from the dross. Schelling could pierce at
once to the essential necessity of thought. He could see what belongs
to the constitution of the mind and determines the very structure
of thought itself. Schooled in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte,
Schelling grappled with the fundamental problems of philosophy with
as much assurance and familiarity as if they were every-day mat-
ters of the university lecture-room, or indeed of the students' boarding-
house. Hegel, five years his senior, borrowed courage from Schelling,
and commenced anew his studies in philosophy with an entirely dif-
ferent point of view. For fifteen years he willingly acknowledged
himself to be Schelling's disciple.
Meanwhile the French Revolution had begun, and was now in the
height of its progress. It was the external counterpart of the Kant-
ian revolution in philosophy. All realized institutions were attacked
by it, in the interest of individual freedom against authority. All
over Europe there came to be a feeling that man is the maker of
his institutions, and that he can demonstrate this authorship by tak-
ing to pieces Church and State, and reconstructing them at pleasure.
Kant and Fichte had attacked the problems of philosophy in the
same revolutionary spirit. It seemed to them as if they stood, for
the first time, face to face with truth. All other and earlier endeav-
ors had been fatuitous. Dogmatic philosophy had not attained truth,
but merely likelihood, or opinion. With the newly acquired faculties
of higher introspection discovered by Kant, it would be possible now
to settle ultimately and finally the attitude of the mind towards
fundamental problems of the universe. The problems of life could
all be solved without delay.
These views aroused unbounded enthusiasm. The Germans call
this epoch the "Aufklärung" (Enlightenment). It was a clearing-up
such as comes from cutting loose from the past, with a consciousness
that the individual commences a new book, with new ideas and with
## p. 7163 (#565) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7163
Hegel
no responsibilities to anything that has been written before.
had been much interested in Rousseau in his youth, and en the
French Revolution came to be discussed all over Europe, he like
most young men of his time adopted the gospel of liberty, equality,
and fraternity as his own. He and Schelling took an active part in
a political club founded for the dissemination of French ideas at the
university. In the course of a few years, however, he discovered the
shallowness of a movement which claims as its chief merit the neg-
lect of the past and the wholesale condemnation of existing institu-
tions. According to the principle of the French Revolution, no sooner
has something become an accomplished fact than it becomes a men-
ace to the freedom of the individual; it becomes tyrannical with its
authority. Hence, no sooner did the Revolution make a new consti-
tution than it began to amend it; for how could the people retain
their consciousness of freedom from authority unless they continually
recast their constitutional law? This lesson of the French Revolution
made the profoundest impression upon the mind of Hegel, given as
he was to looking behind the immediate appearance to the essential
form of the deed. He saw at once the irrationality of the Revolution,
and compared it to Saturn, who devoured his own offspring. He saw
vividly the absurdity of constitutional conventions which are to dis-
cover and adopt reasonable foundations, to be followed immediately
by new conventions which demolish the reasonable forms adopted by
their predecess
ssors. Hegel became conscious of the truth of the con-
servative principle which aims to build the present upon the past,
and to reinforce the insight of the present moment by the reflections
of all the rational hours that have gone before. This conservatism,
which appears in all of the works of Hegel, has been much con-
demned. It should be remembered that Hegel did not begin to write
books until he had reached this conclusion.
After two or three years' companionship with Schelling, Hegel,
having completed his theological studies at the university, left Jena
and became a private tutor in a family in Berne. It is interesting to
note that Fichte had held the position of tutor in Switzerland shortly
before this, and Herbart a similar position about the same time.
The three years of tutorship passed in studies on the most difficult
problems of all philosophies; namely, the reconciliation of the theo-
retical and practical sides of life the relation of intellect to will.
At this time, too, Hegel made a more thorough study of the Kantian
critiques, and took up Fichte's Science of Knowledge,' finding it far
more difficult to master than the Critique of Pure Reason. ' He
obtained, however, some assistance from Schelling in gaining an
insight into the subtle psychology of Fichte. For Schelling had
found the writings of Fichte more to his taste than those of any
―――
## p. 7164 (#566) ###########################################
7164
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
other philosopher; and just as Fichte had been nurtured on the writ-
ings of Kant, the ideas of which he had proceeded at once to com-
bine in a new system, so Schelling recast in a new form the ideas of
Fichte. He hastened to construe the world of nature, a priori, by
means of transcendental ideas. Self-consciousness revealed the hidden
laws and principles implicit in ordinary knowing; and these laws and
principles, discovered in the unconscious activity of the mind, were
identified by him with the moving forces of nature. He attributed
them to "an impersonal reason, a soul of the world. " Thus it comes
to pass that while Fichte laid the greatest stress on the subjective,
the will of the individual, the consciousness of the particular person,
- that is to say, on the free moral will,- Schelling on the other
hand emphasized the objective, the unconscious development of nature,
and laid great stress on the gradual unfolding of reason in the inor-
ganic world of matter. There was no necessary incongruity in the
two systems. But the one-sidedness due to the intense emphasis
given to the opposite poles soon produced a conflict. Fichte subor-
dinated everything else to the moral will, and regarded nature as
merely phenomenal and scarcely worthy of man's attention.
ling, on the other hand, turned to nature and history as unconscious
realizations of spirit in time and space, and held them up to view as
worthy of all study. They were treated in his philosophy with rever-
ence as Divine incarnations. Fichte slighted time and space, and
what they contained. He neglected the forms of matter and the
results of history,— everything conventional, such as institutions, cus-
toms, and philosophical systems. The world, in short, was treated
somewhat as the French revolutionists treated the past. Schelling,
on the other hand, looked upon the world as a revelation of the abso-
lute, and held it sacred, while subjectivity (the ego and its interests)
became less important in his eyes; and as a consequence, human aims
and endeavors, even moral aims, lost their interest to him. Not so
however with Hegel. Hegel did not for a moment, while he called
himself a disciple of Schelling, fail to see that the moral world is
more important than the physical world; although he believed the
physical world to be what Schelling claimed for it.
In the midst of these great philosophical movements, Hegel had
(in 1797) become a tutor in Frankfort, and had reinforced his insights
obtained through the study of Fichte and the explanations of Schel-
ling, by a study of Plato and Sextus Empiricus the skeptic. What
was most important, he began to get a new insight into the dialectic
which Fichte had set forth in his 'Science of Knowledge' as the
strictly scientific form of expounding philosophy. He saw how, in
the hands of Plato and Sextus, the negative plays the moving part
in developing thought and correcting its imperfections. Hegel later
## p. 7165 (#567) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7165
conceived the idea of uniting the Platonic dialectic with the Fichtean,
and completing an objective dialectic which he hoped to make of
great service in rational psychology, or logic as he called it.
In 1801 he returned to Jena, which had become not only a great
centre of literary activity but the chief centre of philosophic activity
in the world. Fichte had been charged with atheism, had resigned,
and gone to Berlin. Schelling was then lecturing at Jena as pro-
fessor extraordinarius. Hegel commenced to teach logic, metaphysics,
the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit. In 1805 he
lectured on the history of philosophy, pure metaphysics, and natural
right; in 1806 on the unity of philosophical systems. He began in
this year to unfold what he called the phenomenology of spirit; by
which he meant an exposition of the dialectic by which one's view
of the world changes from that of the earliest infancy up to the most
complete view to be found in the philosophy and religion of his
civilization. He showed how the barest fragments are seized at first
as if they were the truth of the whole world; next how these frag-
ments are supplemented and enlarged by further insight, obtained by
noticing their dependence on other things and their utter insufficiency
by themselves. This work, The Phenomenology of Spirit,' published
in 1807, remains the most noteworthy exposition of what Hegel calls
his dialectic; although in some respects it is amended and made
more complete in his larger 'Logic,' published in three volumes,
1812 to 1816.
But in 1803 Hegel had begun to be aware of a growing separation
between his view of the world and that of Schelling. He had been
substantially at one with Schelling so long as Schelling held the
doctrine that reason, or intelligence and will, is the absolute. This
was Schelling's view up to 1801. At that time the idea of polarity
became very attractive to him. The phenomenon of the magnet had
suggested a symbol by which he could explain human consciousness
and the world. We, the conscious human beings, represent one pole
of being, the subjective pole; while nature, in time and space, repre-
sents the other pole, the objective pole of being. Just as the indif-
ference-point unites the two poles in one magnet, so there is the
absolute, which is the indifference-point between the subjective and
objective poles of being; namely, between mind and nature: and of
course this indifference-point is neither mind nor nature, but a higher
principle uniting mind and nature. At this point Schelling very dis-
tinctly abandoned the current of European thought from Plato to
Fichte, and adopted the Oriental standpoint, as revealed in Hindoo
philosophy and in the philosophy of the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists.
It was a lapse into Orientalism, and if carried out would end in
agnosticism, or in the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of the
## p. 7166 (#568) ###########################################
7166
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
absolute. Another of its consequences would be the impossibility of
recognizing morals or ethics in the Divine. Since the absolute would
transcend the subjective as well as the objective, it would be some-
thing above morals, and consequently it could not be said to have
self-activity. Hegel never for one moment assented to this view, but
remained standing by the former attitude of Schelling, making the
absolute to be, not an indifference-point, but the perfection of the
subjective and objective as a reason whose will is creative, or a rea-
son whose intellect, in the act of knowing, also creates. After 1803,
Schelling ought to have seen that his new principle undermined the
very possibility of philosophy, and he should have ceased philoso-
phizing; for his absolute, as the indifference-point between reason
and nature, proved only an empty unity which did not explain the
origin of the polarity from it. The worlds of mind and nature could
not be anything but illusions, the Maya of the East-Indian thinking.
On the other hand, an absolute of reason could explain the rise of
antithesis, and could explain also the world of unconscious nature as
a progressive development of individuality—a sort of cradle for the
development of immortal souls. But Hegel, even in his lectures on
the history of philosophy nearly twenty years later, seems to take
pleasure in recognizing Schelling as his master. He does not expound
the final system as his own, but adopts the philosophy of Schelling
as the last contribution to the History of Philosophy. '
It may be of interest to remark here, that although Schelling con-
tinued to produce new developments in philosophy which undermined
the systems which he had built up before, yet there are two import-
ant and permanent interests advanced by his philosophizing. The
first of these has been mentioned. Instead of leaving nature as a
thing in itself, outside of and beyond all mind, Schelling recognizes
in it a genuine objective and independent development of reason,
fundamentally identical with mind. Human reason is reflected in the
forms of nature. This view brings one to see that the goal at which
the human soul has arrived, or is arriving, is confirmed or approved
by the great process of struggle for existence which is called nature.
"Mind sleeps in matter, dreams in the plant, awakes in the animal,
and becomes conscious in man. "
Still more important is the effort of Schelling to understand the
great systems of thought made by preceding thinkers-his study of
Giordano Bruno, and his interpretation of mythology. He success-
ively appropriated the standpoints of Kant, Fichte, Bruno, Spinoza,
Baader, and Boehme. His fertile mind threw great light on the posi
tive meaning contained in each of these systems of thought. He
became the best of commentators. He showed how a history of phi-
losophy should be written, not after the style of Mr. Lewes, who
## p. 7167 (#569) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7167
writes the biography of defunct philosophy, but a history that shows
the great insights which formed the life of these systems. Schelling
had discovered the vital basis for a history of philosophy that should
interpret the different systems of thought that had prevailed.
Hegel perhaps learned his most important lesson from Schelling
in this matter of the interpretation of systems of thought; and cer-
tainly Hegel shines best in writing the History of Philosophy,'
always being able to penetrate behind the words and seize the essen-
tial ideas which lived in the mind of the past thinker. Oftentimes
this idea was merely struggling for utterance, and not wholly articu-
late. This does not prevent Hegel from seizing the idea itself, and
setting it forth with success.
The gross outcome of Hegel's philosophy. is, in fact,- next after
his insight into the defect of Oriental thought,- his ability to seize
the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and prove its identity with the
thought of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. The easiest method by which
the student may arrive at the great thoughts of Plato and Aristotle
is to read in Hegel's History of Philosophy' his exposition of Socra-
tes and his followers. Hegel's high place is due to his able inter-
pretation of the speculative insights of the great systems of thought
which had prevailed in the world for twenty centuries, and on which,
in a sense, the institutions of modern civilization had been built. The
old philosophy had been so diluted, in making it a book of instruc-
tion for students and immature persons, that the insight into its
speculative necessity had been lost or become a tradition. The pro-
fessor is obliged to keep in mind the capacity of the pupil, in pre-
paring his text-book. In striving to make the subject clear to the
immature mind, which is not able to think except in images and
pictures, the professor changes his attitude from that of a discoverer
of truth to that of an expounder of truth. He is obliged to suppress
the strictly logical deduction, and substitute for it analogies and illus-
trations that flow from it; thus, to offer baked bread instead of seed
corn to his pupils. But by-and-by his pupils, nurtured on this thin
philosophical diet, become professors themselves. They have never
heard that Plato and Aristotle ever had any other meaning than the
commonplace doctrines learned in their text-books. Hence the de-
generacy of philosophy in the schools. On the other hand, eccentric
philosophers off the lines of the traditional school wisdom, like Bruno,
Spinoza, Boehme, and Swedenborg, have never been reduced to a text-
book form, and they still preserve a power to arouse original thought.
Schelling's writings have this power. They reveal the morning red
of truth, and the student becomes a mystic and beholds the truth for
himself. But it does not often occur to him that there is also clear
daylight behind the commonplace dogmas of school wisdom.
## p. 7168 (#570) ###########################################
7168
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
Hegel profited more by the example of Schelling in this matter
of interpreting the past systems of philosophy, than by anything else.
He became the great philosophical interpreter.
I have already mentioned his first original work, the 'Phenome-
nology of Spirit,' a book that he finished during the battle of Jena
(1806). It appeared from the press in the following year. This work
may be best described as an interpretation of the different stand-
points at which the mind arrives, successively, on its way from the
mere animal sense-perception up to the highest stage of thinking,
which sees the world to be a manifestation of Divine reason, and
reads its purpose in everything. One must not, however, understand
this book to be an attempt to present the contents of the world of
nature and of human history in a systematic form, for it is nothing
of the kind. It is rather a subjective clearing-up of the contents of
his own mind than an objective treatment of the contents of the
world, systematically. But the first part of it has something of
a very general character; namely, the exhibition of the dialectic
by which sense-perception passes from an immediate knowledge of
the here and now, to a knowledge of force, and further on, to the
insight that force must in all cases be a fragment of will-activity.
This part of the track of development must be common to all peo-
ples who have progressed up to, and beyond, the dynamic view of
the world. And again, in the next phase of it, where he develops
in order, one after the other, the germs of the several institutions of
the social life of man; namely, beginning with slavery, on through
the patriarchal despotism, up to free, constitutional forms of govern-
ment. He shows the rise of the moral idea, first in the mind of the
slave who, purified by his own sufferings, learns to see the import-
ance of moral conduct on the part of his master, not only for his
own (the slave's) well-being, but also for the accomplishment of any-
thing reasonable by his master himself. This deep insight is a key
to the explanation of the authorship of Æsop's Fables, the Enchiridion
of Epictetus, and the Hitopadesa, by slaves. In general, it explains
how it is that in Asia, in the realm of arbitrary power and despot-
ism, the moral systems of the world have arisen. It does not indicate
any lofty superiority on the part of the Asiatic mind, but rather its
backwardness in developing civil institutions such as we enjoy in
the Roman law, the English local self-government, and the American
Constitution. Hegel uses this key, not only to explain the history and
arrested development of civilization among the Oriental peoples, but
to explain the moral ideas of the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epi-
cureans.
The first part of the Phenomenology treats of consciousness, the
second part of self-consciousness, or the arrival at the certainty that
## p. 7169 (#571) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7169
a self is behind every total phenomenon, and that the self is an in-
dependent, originating being, and therefore morally responsible. He
shows how this idea prompts man to a study of nature, with a view
to understand how nature is a manifestation or revelation of mind.
This is the third study of the Phenomenology under the general title
of reason.
«
In Hegel's technique, reason" means the recognition of
mind as the outcome of the world-process. Absolute reason is creat-
ing individual beings, and endowing them with reason. The world
of nature and human history is a process whose object is the develop-
ment of individuality. Side by side with this theoretical or intellect-
ual side of the recognition of reason, Hegel places the actual struggle
of the will, and traces its ascent from mere caprice, up to the con-
sciousness of laws and obedience to them.
The fourth step of the Phenomenology he calls "spirit. " It is the
consciousness that makes institutions for the establishment and pres-
ervation of what is rational in the world. According to Hegel, rea-
son includes the discovery of rational laws in nature and rational
laws in human history and development; but in all this the individual
acts as individual, and his seeing and knowing is individual. Spirit
names the product of society, and not of the mere individual. In
social combinations, according to Hegel, there is a higher manifesta-
tion of intelligence and will than in the mere individual, and he calls
this manifestation "spirit. " Spirit is therefore man acting as a social
whole. His insight into this is used as a key to explain the phe-
nomena of his own time, particularly the French Revolution, in its
entire cycle from revolt against the State to a restoration of the State
under Napoleon.
He closes his Phenomenology by a brief study into the nature of
religion. He commences with the lowest forms of fetishism and
idolatry, and rising through the art religion of the Greeks, comes to
a third and highest religion, revealed religion; signifying by the word
"revealed," not so much that the Scriptures are divinely inspired, as
that they make known a God who reveals himself to men,—not an
inscrutable God, like that of the pantheistic religions, but a Divine-
human God, an absolute, conscious reason, and above all, a moral
God. For Hegel finds that the Hebrew insight in the Old Testament
reaches to such a knowledge of the absolute as is presupposed by
psychology, by the philosophy of nature, and by the philosophy of
history. It was reached by the intuition of that wonderful people in
Palestine.
Of many things man may be uncertain, but he can be absolutely
certain that the fundamental Being in the universe must respect the
moral law, otherwise he would destroy his own personality. Hav-
ing convinced himself of this, Hegel has arrived at his final chapter,
XII-449
## p. 7170 (#572) ###########################################
7170
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
absolutely knowing, and his "voyage of discovery" is done. He is
certain that there must be absolute science, because the highest of
religions presupposes this knowledge that the Divine being is ethical,
and necessarily possesses goodness and righteousness. Now Hegel is
ready to commence on his next work, the Logic, which will show
how the mind reaches the moral ideal. It is a thorough explora-
tion of the thoughts of the mind which arise in it through its own
activity, and not through mere experience. The category of being,
for instance, is a category that underlies all experience, and it re-
mains in the mind after having abstracted all that one has learned
through each and all his special senses; for all things learned by
experience are really qualities of being, but not being itself.
the categories of negation and of becoming. Such categories as
"somewhat," and "other," and "limit," "the finite," "the infinite,"
and all the other categories of quality; such categories as "quantity,"
"extensive" and "intensive," and "ratio,”—all these categories of
quality and quantity form a sort of surface to the thinking mind.
Underneath this it thinks categories of "phenomenon and noume-
non," categories of "positive and negative," "identity and difference,
"force and manifestation," "substance and attribute,» « cause and
effect," in short, the world of relativity.
Hegel goes on in his Logic to discuss - besides these categories
of quality and quantity which belong to immediate being, and which
constitute our superficial or surface thinking-the categories of es-
sence, such as cause and effect, which are the chief categories of
reflection, or the understanding; and finally comes to a third realm
of thinking, which deals with life and mind, showing up the laws of
the judgment and syllogism as found in Aristotle's Logic, and work-
ing out, along lines that Schelling first explored, into the realization of
mind in the mechanism, chemism, and teleology of the world; finally
considering the life of animal and plant, and then intellect and will
of man, and lastly the union of intellect and will in one being,- the
being of God, or as Hegel calls it, the "absolute idea. " This abso-
lute idea has the form of perfectly altruistic action. Its Divine occu-
pation is the creating of other beings, and the nurturing of the same
up to their immortal individuality.
With the appearance of conscious self-determination in the world,
there begins responsibility, and consequently conscious discrimination
between evil and righteousness. The institutions of civilization arise
in order to conserve the conscious practice of the right and the sup-
pression of evil.
In this his first work, the
Phenomenology,' we find the keys
which Hegel applies to the several departments of philosophy; his
work after 1807 lay in the lines therein mapped out. While in charge
## p. 7171 (#573) ###########################################
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL
7171
of a classical high school in Nuremberg, he elaborated and published
his 'Science of Logic,' in three volumes (1812 to 1816). The outline
of the Philosophy of Nature' he published in his Encyclopædia of
Philosophical Sciences' in 1817 at Heidelberg, whither he had gone.
in October 1816 to assume a professorship in the University. The
first volume of the Encyclopædia' contains a compend of his logic,
and the third volume contains the 'Philosophy of Spirit,' which is
mostly a systematic arrangement of materials to be found in his
"Phenomenology. '
In October 1818 Hegel became a professor in the University of
Berlin, occupying the chair formerly occupied by Fichte. In his Ber-
lin period he elaborated the details of the Philosophy of Spirit,' and
expanded its contents into a large number of volumes. In 1821 he
published his Philosophy of Right,' containing the science of juris-
prudence, morals, and politics. In the following years he lectured on
the philosophy of history, on the science of the fine arts and poetry,
on the philosophy of religion, and on the history of philosophy.
His manuscripts were edited by his disciples after his death, additions
being made to the manuscripts from the notes of the pupils taken
during the lectures. While engaged on a new edition of his complete
Logic, having finished the revision of the first volume, he died of
cholera, November 14th, 1831.
The edition of his complete works by his disciples contains in
Vol. i. his writings of the Schelling period; Vol. ii. , Phenomenology
of Spirit'; Vols. iii. , iv. , and v. , Science of Logic'; 'Outlines of the
Philosophy of Right' (one volume), Philosophy of History' (one vol-
ume), Esthetics,' including the Philosophy of the Fine Arts and
Poetry (three volumes), Philosophy of Religion' (two volumes),
"History of Philosophy' (three volumes), the Encyclopædia' (three
volumes), Miscellaneous Writings' (two volumes). To this list should
be added the Life of Hegel' by Rosenkranz (one volume). English
translations now exist of the Philosophy of History,' the Encyclo-
pædia,' the Philosophy of Right,' the Philosophy of Religion,' the
'History of Philosophy,' and a considerable portion of the 'Esthetics. '
<
Of these works, the Philosophy of Right' gives by far the best
philosophy of the family, industrial society, political economy, and
the State, that has been produced by the Kantian critical school. It
contains a brief but very luminous treatise on the science of morals
as distinct from ethics in general, which Hegel construes as the
science of institutions. Hegel's 'Philosophy of Esthetics,' including
the fine arts and poetry, treats of the three epochs of art, symbolic
(Oriental), classic (Greek and Roman), and romantic (Christian), as
well as the special arts, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and
poetry.
