A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel's _Werke_ (vii. i) and select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find a great deal--and probably more, the less he really knows of any of the subjects under discussion--that he cannot make head or tail of: language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And that sounds hard--the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel, like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing an instrument--man, and that is mind--by which its rationality may be realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are at one.
[Footnote 1: Kant's _Kritik d. r. Vernunft_: Methodenl. Architektonik d. r. Vern.]
[Footnote 5: Kant, _Kritik d. r. Vern.,_ Deduction of the Categories, Sect. III.]
[Footnote 7: _Encycl._ Sect. 244 (_Logic,_ p. 379).]
[Footnote 8: _Encyclop._ §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given in _Werke_ vii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies from Hegel's _Naturphilosophie_ has been collected by Riehl in his _Philosophisher Criticismus_, ii. 2, 120.]
[Footnote 9: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.]
We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect and set in relation,--to connect, it may be erroneously, or without proper scrutiny, or under the influence of passions or prejudices,--but at any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has impatiently banned this tendency as a mere fountain of errors. The human mind, says Francis Bacon, always assumes a greater uniformity in things than it finds; it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional cases, and would fain go beyond all limits in its everlasting cry, Why and To what end. It varies in individuals between a passion for discovering similarities and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness. But notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly duckling Reason _will_ go beyond what is given: it knows no insuperable limitation. It may be guilty of what Bacon calls 'anticipation'--an induction on evidence insufficient--or it may subdue itself to the duty of 'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in either case, it is an act of association, synthesis, unification. For Nous _is_ archè, and knows that it is: it will not yield to clamour or mere rebuke: it, too, cannot be commanded, unless by first obeying it: and Bacon, having duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself,' is obliged to let it go to gather the grapes before they are quite ripe, and to indulge it with a 'prerogative' of instances. As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others are never weary of telling us: 'We think in relations. This is truly the form of all thought: and if there are any other forms they must be derived from this[1].' Man used to be defined as a thinking or rational animal: which means that man is a connecting and relation-giving animal; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making him out to be a 'political' animal, is only a corollary, most applicable in the region of Ethics. Here is the ultimate point, from which the natural consciousness, and the energies of science, art, and religion equally start upon their special missions.