Chapter I

Page 5, § 2. After-thought = Nachdenken, _e.g._ thought which retraces and reproduces an original, but submerged, thought (cf. Hegel's _Werke_, vi. p. xv): to be distinguished from Reflexion (cf. _Werke_, i. 174).

P. 7, § 3. On the blending of universal (thought) and individual (sensation) in what is called perception (Wahrnehmen) see _Encycl._ §§ 420, 421.

P. 8, § 3. Cf. Fichte, _Werke_, ii. 454: 'Hence for the common sort of hearers and readers the uncommon intelligibility of certain sermons and lectures and writings, not one word of which is intelligible to the man who thinks for himself,--because there is really no intelligence in them. The old woman who frequents the church--for whom by the way I cherish all possible respect--finds a sermon very intelligible and very edifying which contains lots of texts and verses of hymns she knows by rote and can repeat. In the same way readers, who fancy themselves far superior to her, find a work very instructive and clear which tells them what they already know, and proofs very stringent which demonstrate what they already believe. The pleasure the reader takes in the writer is a concealed pleasure in himself. What a great man! (he says to himself); it is as if I heard or read myself.

P. 10, § 6. Cf. Hegel, _Werke>_ viii. 17: 'In this conviction (that what is reasonable is actual, and what is actual is reasonable) stands every plain man, as well as the philosopher; and from it philosophy starts in the study both of the spiritual and of the natural universe----The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognise the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of reason (which is synonymous with the Idea), when in its actuality it simultaneously enters external existence, emerges with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases, and envelopes its kernel with the motley rind with which consciousness is earliest at home,--a rind which the notion must penetrate before it can find the inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But the infinite variety of circumstance which is formed in this externality by the light of the essence shining in it,--all this infinite material, with its regulations,--is not the object of philosophy.... To comprehend _what is,_ is the task of philosophy: for _what is_ is reason. As regards the individual, each, whatever happens, is a son of his time. So too philosophy is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that a philosophy can overleap its present world as that an individual can overleap his time. If his theory really goes beyond actualities, if it constructs an ideal, a world as it ought to be, then such existence as it has is only in his intentions--a yielding element in which anything you please may be fancy-formed.' Cf. Schelling, _Werke,_ iv. 390: 'There are very many things, actions, &c. of which we may judge, after vulgar semblance, that they are unreasonable. All the same we presuppose and assume that everything which is or which happens is reasonable, and that reason is, in one word, the prime matter and the real of all being.'

P. 11, § 6. Actuality (Wirklichkeit) in _Werke,_ iv. 178 _seqq._

P. 12, § 7. Cf. Fichte, _Werke,_ ii. 333: 'Man has nothing at all but experience; and everything he comes to be comes to only through experience, through life itself. All his thinking, be it loose or scientific, common or transcendental, starts from experience and has experience ultimately in view. Nothing has unconditional value and significance but life; all other thinking, conception, knowledge has value only in so far as in some way or other it refers to the fact of life, starts from it, and has in view a subsequent return to it.'

P. 13, § 7 (note). Thomas Thomson (1773-1852), Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow, distinguished in the early history of chemistry and allied sciences. The _Annals of Philosophy_ appeared from 1813 to 1826.--_The art of preserving the hair_ was published (anonymous) at London in 1825.

P. 14, § 7 (note). The speech from the throne was read on Feb. 3rd, 1825.

The shipowners' dinner was on Feb. 12. The _Times_ of Feb. 14 gives as Canning's the words 'the just and wise maxims of sound not spurious philosophy.'

P. 17, § 10. 'Scholasticus' is the guileless 'freshman,' hero of certain Facetiae (attributed to the Pythagorean philosopher Hierocles) which used occasionally to form part of the early Greek reading of schoolboys.

K. L. Reinhold (1754-1823) presents in his intellectual history a picture of the development of ideas in his age. At the beginning his _Attempt of a new theory of the human representative faculty_ (1789) is typical of the tendency to give a subjective psychological interpretation of Kant's theory of knowledge But the period of Reinhold's teaching here referred to is that of _Contributions to an easier survey of the condition of philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century_ (Beiträge, 1801): the tendency which Hegel, who reviewed him in the _Critical Journal of Philosophy_ (_Werke,_ i. 267 _seqq._), calls 'philosophising before philosophy.'--A similar spirit is operative in Krug's proposal (in his _Fundamental Philosophy,_ 1803) to start with what he called 'philosophical problematics.'

P. 19, § 11. Plato, _Phaedo,_ p. 89, where Socrates protests against the tendency to confound the defect of a particular piece of reasoning with the incompetence of human reason altogether.

P. 22, § 13. The dictum that the historical succession of philosophical systems is identical with their logical sequence should not be taken too literally and mechanically. Its essential point is simply the theorem that history is not a casual series of unconnected events--the deeds of particular persons, but is an evolution under laws and uniformities:--it is this theorem applied to philosophies. But difficulties may easily arise in the application of the general principle: _e.g._ it will be seen (by comparison of § 86 and § 104) that though Pythagoras precedes Parmenides, and number is a stepping-stone to pure thought still pure Being comes at an earlier stage than Quantity.

P. 23, § 13. There is a silent reference to what Reinhold professed to make the subject of his teaching at Jena--'philosophy without surnames' (ohne Beinamen),--_i.e._ not a 'critical' philosophy;--or to the 'Philosophy which may not bear any man's name of Beck. As Hegel says, _Werke,_ xvi. 138, 'The solicitude and apprehension against being one-sided is only too often part of the weakness which is capable only of many-sided illogical superficiality.'

P. 27, § 16. By 'anthropology' is meant not the anthropology of modern writers, who use the name to denote mainly the history of human culture in its more rudimentary stages, and as exhibited chiefly in material products, but the study of those aspects of psychology which are most closely allied with physiological conditions.

With the power of the intuition of genius to give almost all that logical synthesis can produce, cf. _Werke,_ I. 331: 'In this way a grand and pure intuition is able, in the purely architectonic features of its picture, though the inter-connection of necessity and the mastery of form does not come forward into visibility, to give expression to the genuine ethical organism--like a building which silently exhibits the spirit of its author in the several features of its mass, without the image of that spirit being set forth anywhere in one united shape. In such a delineation, made by help of notions, it is only a want of technical skill which prevents reason from raising the principle it embraces and pervades into the "ideal" form and becoming aware of it as the Idea. If the intuition only remains true to itself and does not let analytic intellect disconcert it, it will probably--just because it cannot dispense with notions for its expression--behave awkwardly in dealing with them, assume distorted shapes in its passage through consciousness, and be (to the speculative eye) both incoherent and contradictory: but the arrangement of the parts and of the self-modifying characters betray the inward spirit of reason, however invisible. And so far as this appearance of that spirit is regarded as a product and a result, it will as product completely harmonise with the Idea.' Probably Goethe is before Hegel's mind.

P. 28, § 17. The triplicity in unity of thought--its forthgoing 'procession,' (cf. p. 362 _seqq._) and its return, which is yet an abiding in itself (Bei:sich:sein) was first explicitly schematised by Proclus, the consummator of Neo-Platonism. In his _Institutio Theologica_ he lays it down that the essential character of all spiritual reality (aσώματον) is to be πρὸς ἑαυτὸ ἐπιστρεπτικόν, _e.g._ to return upon itself, or to be a unity in and with difference,--to be an original and spontaneous principle of movement (c. 15): or, as in C 31: πὰν τὸ πρoῒὸν ἀπό τινος κατ' οὐσίαν ἐπιστρέφεται πρὸς ἐκεῖνο ἀφ' οὗ πρόεισιν. Its movement, therefore, is circular κυκλικὴν ἔχει τὴν ἐνέργειαν (c. 33): for everything must at the same time remain altogether in the cause, and proceed from it, and revert to it (c. 35). Such an essence is self-subsistent (αὐθυπόςτατον),--is at once agent (πάραγον) and patient (παραγόμενον). This 'mysticism' (of a trinity which is also unity of motion which is also rest), with its πρόοδoς, ἐπιστroφή, and μονή, is taken up, in his own way, by Scotus Erigena (De Divisione Naturae) as _processio_ (or _divisio_), _reditus,_ and _adunatio._ From God 'proceed'--by an _eternal_ creation--the creatures, who however are not outside the divine nature; and to God all things created _eternally_ return.