The new reality is this highway of the spirit, very course and raceway of self-consciousness is traversed in the movement and self-correctio of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the si mission of the will to the control of the moral

8177. It is the last of these phases of self-ce sciousness that Fichte, who was Kant's immedia Fichteanism, successor, regards as of paramount i lute Spirit as portance. As Platonism began with the ideal of the good or the object of life

or the Abso

Moral
Activity.

so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or the story of life. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and te divide itself into a community of moral selves through which the moral virtues may be realized. Nature and society flow from the conception of an absolute moral activity, or ego. Such an ego could not be pure and isolated and yet be moral. The evidence of this is the common moral consciousness. My duty compels me to act upon not-self or environment, and to respect and coöper ate with other selves. Fichte's absolute is this moral consciousness universalized and made eternal. Moral value being its fundamental principle the universe must on that very account em

the

race both nature, or moral indifference, and huanity, or moral limitation.

omanticism,

pirit as entiment.

§ 178. But the Romanticists, who followed close pon Fichte, were dissatisfied with so hard and exclusive a conception of spiritual being. r the Absolute Life, they said, is not all duty. Indeed, the true spiritual life is quite >ther, not harsh and constrained, but free and spontaneous—a wealth of feeling playing about a constantly shifting centre. Spirit is not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seeking the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the nature of reality, then he is most wise who is most rich in sentiment. The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists they felt it.

§ 179. Hegel, the master of the new idealism, set himself the task of construing spirit in terms Hegelianism, as consecutive as those of Fichte, and or the Absolute as comprehensive as those of the Romanticists. Like Plato, he found in dialectic the supreme manifestation of the spiritual life. There is a certain flow of ideas which

Spirit as

Dialectic.

determines the meaning of experience, and is : truth of truths. But the mark of the new prop is this: the flow of ideas itself is a process of s correction due to a sense of error. Thus sensation is abstract and bare thought is abstr The real, however, is not merely the concrete which they are united, but the very process in t course of which through knowledge of abstracti thought arrives at the concrete. The principle negation is the very life of thought, and it is ti life of thought, rather than the outcome of thought which is reality. The most general form of th dialectical process contains three moments: the moment of thesis, in which affirmation is made: the moment of antithesis, in which the opposite & serts itself; and the moment of synthesis, in whicł a reconciliation is effected in a new thesis. Thus thought is the progressive overcoming of contradiction; not the state of freedom from contradiction, but the act of escaping it. Such processes are more familiar in the moral life. Morality consists, so even common-sense asserts, in the overcoming of evil. Character is the resistance of temptation; goodness, a growth in grace through discipline. Of such, for Hegel, is the very kingdom of heaven. It is the task of the philosopher,

H

task to which Hegel applies himself most asduously, to analyze the battle and the victory pon which spiritual being nourishes itself. And nce the deeper processes are those of thought, e Hegelian philosophy centres in an ordering of otions, a demonstration of that necessary proression of thought which, in its whole dynamical ogical history, constitutes the absolute idea.

Philosophy

of Nature

§ 180. The Hegelian philosophy, with its emphasis upon difference, antagonism, and developThe Hegelian ment, is peculiarly qualified to be a philosophy of nature and history. Those and History. principles of spiritual development which logic defines are conceived as incarnate in the evolution of the world. Nature, as the very antithesis to spirit, is now understood to be the foil of spirit. In nature spirit alienates itself in order to return enriched. The stages of nature are the preparation for the reviving of a spirituality that has been deliberately forfeited. The Romanticists, whether philosophers like Schelling or poets like Goethe and Wordsworth, were led by their feeling for the beauty of nature to attribute to it a much deeper and more direct spiritual significance. But Hegel and the Romanticists alike are truly expressed in Emerson's belief that the

spiritual interpretation of nature is the "science."

"The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, tion, and animation, for he does not stop at these ir but employs them as signs. He knows why the ph meadow of space was strown with these flowers we d suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is ad with animals, with men, and gods; for in every wor speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."

The new awakening of spirit which is for He the consummation of the natural evolution, begi with the individual or subjective spirit, and èvelops into the social or objective spirit, which s morality and history. History is a veritable lectic of nations, in the course of which the cor sciousness of individual liberty is developed, a coördinated with the unity of the state. The hig est stage of spirit incarnate is that of absolut spirit, embracing art, religion, and philosophy In art the absolute idea obtains expression in ser suous existence, more perfectly in classical than it

5 Emerson: Op. cit., p. 25.

The possibility of conflict between this method of natur study and the empirical method of science is significantly attested by the circumstance that in the year 1801 Hege published a paper in which he maintained, on the ground of certain numerical harmonies, that there could be n planet between Mars and Jupiter, while at almost exactly the same time Piazzi discovered Ceres, the first of the asteroids.