[Footnote 6: It is perilous and misleading (said the ancient Graiae, who dwell on the way to the Hesperides of philosophy) to interpret an old system by the language of modern (and especially German) idealism. It is much worse, replied Perseus, not to interpret it at all, but to repeat its magic _ipsissima verba_,--carefully Latinised, as if they belonged to a cabinet of fossils.]
[Footnote 7: _Encyclopaedia_, §§ 387, 389.]
[Footnote 8: The above is an attempt to give a very condensed synopsis of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (_Encyclopaedia_).]
[Footnote 9: See especially in the _Theodicee,_ part I. § 43 seqq. Cf. Nouv. Ess. II. § 9, _incline sans necessiter:_ I. § 13, _La nécessité ne doit pas être confondue avec la détermination._]
[Footnote 10: _Microcosmus_, Book IX. chap. 4.]
[Footnote 11: See the well-known passage in _Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre__,_ Book II. chap. a.]
Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that the mind was nothing before it exercised itself[1]. The mind,--and the same will turn out true of many things else where it is at first unsurmised,--is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly refined substance, which we can lay hold of without further trouble. It is what it has become, or what it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be' = 'To have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom never to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It is easy to talk of and about conscience and freewill, as if these were existing things in a sort of mental space, as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and an orange, or as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is free or not, as glibly as one might ask whether an orange is sweet; and the answer can be given with equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases. Everything in these cases depends on whether the will has made itself free or not, whether indeed we are speaking of the will at all, and on what we mean by freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way, taking no account of circumstances, is one of those temptations which lead the intellect astray and produce only confusion and wordy war--as a good deal of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind and its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dissected with the same calmness of analysis as other substances which adapt themselves to the scalpel: nor is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific process, subject to the control of the synthesis in physiology.