Handbook of the history of philosophy / by Albert Schwegler; translated and annotated by James Hutchison Stirling.

  • Schwegler, Albert, 1819-1857.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of the history of philosophy / by Albert Schwegler; translated and annotated by James Hutchison Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    32/520 (page 4)
    —the history of thought—analytically. With greater justice we may maintain the exact contrary of the Hegelian thesis, and assert that what is first in itself is precisely last for us. We find the Ionic philosophy, for example, beginning, not with being as an abstract notion, but with what is most sensuous and concrete, with the material notion of water, air, etc. Even the being of the Eleatics, and the becoming of Heraclitus, are not pure forms of thought, but impure notions, materially coloured conceptions. On the whole, the demand is futile, to refer each philosophy, according as it historic- ally appears, to a logical category as its central principle, and simply for this reason, that the majority of these philosophies have for object the idea, not in its abstrac- tion, but in its realization in nature and man, and for the most part, consequently, rest not on logical but on physical, psychological, and ethical questions. Hegel ought not, therefore, to have limited the comparison of the historical, with the systematic evolution to logic, but to have extended it to the whole system of philoso- phical science. The Eleatics, Heraclitus, the Atomists— and so far, certainly, the Hegelian logic corresponds to the Hegelian history of philosophy—display such logical category on their front; but then, Anaxagoras, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle ? Should we force, nevertheless, on these philosophies a central principle, and reduce, for example, that of Anaxagoras to the notion of design, that of the Sophists to the notion of show (Schein), and that of Socrates to the notion of the good, which in part is impossible without violence, there arises the new difficulty that then the historical order of these categories no longer corresponds to that which they pos- sess in logic. In point of fact, indeed, Hegel attempts not any complete realization of his main idea, but even on the threshold of Greek philosophy has already aban- doned it. Being, becoming, individual being,—the Eleatics, Heraclitus, the Atomists,-thus far the parallel, as said, extends, but not farther. Not only there follows now Anaxagoras with the notion of a designing mind but even from the first the two series agree not Hegel would have been more consistent, had he entirely re- jected the Ionic philosophy (for matter is no logical cate- gory), and had he assigned to Pythagoras a place—seeing that the categories of quantity follow those of q™hty- after the Eleatics and the Atomists. In short, he would