Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
But in its notion of a complete and all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual in the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as an organic whole, or organism.
Hence Bergson's interpenetration of the present by the past, Hegelian continuity and identity-in-diversity, and a host of other notions which are thought to be profound because they are obscure and confused. The contradictions resulting from confounding image and prototype in memory force us to precision.
Already the great Russian historian Karamzin had declared that henceforth Clio must be silent or accord to Russia a prominent place in the history of the nations. Now, by the Hegelian theory, the whole of the Slav race was left out in the cold, with no high mission, with no new truths to divulge, with nothing better to do, in fact, than to imitate the Germans.
There was a time when the Hegelian wise men triumphantly instructed the masses; and the crowd, understanding nothing, blindly believed in every thing, finding confirmation in the fact that it was on hand; and they believed that what seemed to them muddy and contradictory there on the heights of philosophy was all as clear as the day. But that time has gone by.
Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed: self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only. The Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations, intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us.
Here it is explained as consisting of mechanical force and matter, and this as a formula of pure logic, etc. As soon then as the unity of matter and mechanical force is at an end evolution proceeds. The formula of pure logic is nothing but a lame attempt to make the Hegelian categories "an Sich and fuer Sich" of use in a philosophy of realism.
The ordinary Protestant theological theory of tragedy is even more inadequate than the Hegelian. For, by assuming that there is no genuine loss in the world, that every evil is compensated for in the future lives of the heroes, it takes away the sting from their sacrifice and so deprives them of their crown of glory. It makes every adventure a calculation of prudence and every despair a farce.
But such a view, though it might satisfy Spencer and those whom we may call Hegelian evolutionists, could not be accepted as adequate by the more whole-hearted votaries of change. An ideal to which the world continuously approaches is, to these minds, too dead and static to be inspiring.
But before doing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the hegelian procedure. The peculiarity is one which will come before us again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I only note it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediate finite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their own others.
Two of his finest sonnets, on "Silence" and "Wendell Phillips," were by mischance omitted, and a good many included that were either failures or written for some trifling occasion, and never intended for publication. As if to prevent all chance of popularity, the best pieces were placed at the close of the book and a long unfinished Hegelian poem at the beginning.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking