Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel. One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception, the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being, where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].'
[Footnote 1: Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.]
[Footnote 3: _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 9.]
[Footnote 4: Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter iii. of the _Logic._]
[Footnote 5: Jacobi's _Werke_, v. 79, III, 115, 417.]
[Footnote 7: Jacobi's _Werke,_ iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.]
[Footnote 8: Jacobi's _Werke_, iv. i, p. xxi.]
[Footnote 9: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel,_ i. 330.]
[Footnote 10: Jacobi's _Werke_, iii. 53.]
[Footnote 11: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel_, ii. 468.]
[Footnote 13: Hegel's _Vermischte Schriften,_ i. 50.]
[Footnote 14: Compare pages 121-142 of the _Logic._]
[Footnote 15: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 54 (_Werke_, ii).]
[Footnote 16: _Practical Essays,_ p. 43.]
By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel the truth, with our eyes as it were closed, but must open them full upon it, Hegel does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the finite sciences. The name 'finite,' like the name 'empirical,' is not a title of which the sciences have any cause to be ashamed. They are called empirical, because it is their glory and their strength to found upon experience. They are called finite, because they have a fixed object, which they must expect and cannot alter; because they have an end and a beginning,--presupposing something where they begin, and leaving something for the sciences which come after. Botany rests upon the researches of chemistry: and astronomy hands over the record of cosmical movements to geology. Science is interlinked with science; and each of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever, in the strict sense of the word, make up a whole or total. They have broken off, sometimes by accident, and sometimes for convenience, from one another. The sciences have budded forth here and there upon the tree of popular knowledge and ordinary consciousness, as the interest and needs of the time drew attention closer to various points and objects in the world surrounding us.