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Updated: May 29, 2025
If, after the example of Hegel, we give up transcendent pantheism in favor of immanence, two unphilosophical modes of representing the absolute at once result on the one hand, materialism; on the other, popular, unphilosophical theism.
It would be unfair to attribute to Hegel any scientific motive or foundation, but all the other evolutionists, including Hegel's modern disciples, have derived their impetus very largely from the history of biological development. To a philosophy which derives a law of universal progress from this history there are two objections.
Reality must be rational, they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree 'somehow. Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of the 'dialectic process. Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic, and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality incarnate.
Such a confession of faith might easily be considered trivial, and it might even give rise to a supercilious smile if it required nothing less than the doctrine of antithesis taught by Kant and Hegel to be brought in to prove what are obviously matters of fact.
The new principle was now a universal or absolute one; but, as with Hegel, universal or absolute only in words, for to sense it is extremely real, just as Art in a certain sense is more real than the individual. It was the "generic conception of humanity, not something impersonal and universal but forming persons, inasmuch as only in persons have we reality."
If two magnitudes are equal to a third they are equal to one another; this statement is, as Hegel has shown, a conclusion, upon the correctness of which all logic depends, and which is demonstrated therefore outside of pure mathematics. The remaining axioms with regard to equality and inequality are merely logical extensions of this conclusion.
The magnetic poles, the formation of water from oxygen and hydrogen, the fact that Hegel is dead and that Herr Duehring is alive, are facts independent of my experience or that of any other single individual, and will be independent of that of Herr Duehring himself, as soon as he shall sleep the sleep of the just.
But let us approach the matter more closely. To physical science, one act is precisely the same as another; a mere matter of molecular movement or change. You raise your arm, you think with the energy and profundity of a Hegel; to the physicist it is all one and the same thing a fresh distribution of matter and motion, muscular contraction, and rise and fall of the grey pulp called brain.
When Hegel numbers him among the philosophers of the Illumination, on account of his lack of rational intuition, and some theologians on account of his religious rationalism, the answer to the former is that Kant did not lack the speculative gift, but only that it was surpassed by his gift of reflection, and, to the latter, that in regard to the positive element in religion he judged very differently from the deists and appreciated the historical element more justly than they if not to the same extent as Lessing and Herder.
These three connected and logically affiliated misstatements of fact namely, that my philosophy is "essentially idealistic," that it has been "appropriated" and "unconsciously borrowed" from the idealist Hegel, and that I have frequently made "extravagant pretensions as to the originality and profundity" of this merely "borrowed" and "appropriated" philosophy constitute in their totality a regular system of gross and studied misrepresentation, as methodical and coherent as it is unscrupulous.
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