Volume 1

The secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian system in origin, principle, form, and matter / by James Hutchison Stirling.

Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian system in origin, principle, form, and matter / by James Hutchison Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    60/574
    Ilcge], alas ! never puts his mouth askew, never thmks of hiassing his breath, never lays himself out at all for tlie luxury of a soar. Here are no ardours, no en- thusiasms, no aspirations; here is an air so cool, so clear, that all such tropical luxuriances wither in it. Hegel, no more than Kant, will attempt anything by a Genie- schwimg : all in both is thought, and thought that rises, slowly, laboriously, only by unremitting step after step. Apart from thought qua thought, Kant and Hegel are both veryplain feUows : Kant, a very plain Httle old man, whose only obstacle to us is, after aU, just his endless garruHty, his iterating, and again iterating, and always iterating Geschwatz ; Hegel, a dry Scotsman who speaks at, rather than to us, and would seem to seek to enlighten by provoking us! It is not at all rhetoric, eloquence, poetry, that we are to expect in them, then; in fact, they are never in the air, but always on the ground, and this is their strength. Many people, doubtless, from what they hear of Hegel, his Idealism, his Absolute Ideahsm, &c., will not be prepared for this. They have been told by men who pretended to know, that Hegel, hke some common conjuror, would prove the chair they sat on not a chair, &c. &c. This is a very vulgar con- ception, and must be abandoned, together with that other that would consider Hegel as impracticable, unreal, visionary, a dreamer of dreams, ' a man with too many bees in his bonnet.' Hegel is just the reverse of this; he is wholly down on the sohd floor of substantial fact, and will not allow himself to quit it—^no, not for a moment's indulgence to his subjective vanity—a mo- ment's recreation on a gust of genius. Hegel is a Sua- bian. There are Suahian licks as well as Lockerhy licks.