But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in the philosophy of the logical intellect. The _subtilitas naturae_[4] far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this century called _reason_[5]. It is in life as much as in our mind. It comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition by which man had treated nature as a mere world of _objects_--things to be used and to minister to his pleasure--but always alien to him, always mere matter to be manipulated _ab extra._ Yet even to get full use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only something _analogous_ to sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere emotional operation. The imagination in question is the 'scientific' imagination--the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a fact--a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection, but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.
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Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy — Part 108
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