an external and illusory world, and divides itself into a plurality of free and active beings.

Fichte, being concerned solely with the moral life, admitted the actuality of spiritual reality alone. Schelling, who was well versed in natural science, endeavoured to escape from this subjectivity, and to restore reality to the world without separating it from the mind. The real and the ideal, the objective and subjective, are, as it were, the two poles of the Absolute. The task of philosophy is to evolve alternately Nature from intelligence, and intelligence from Nature, and thus to establish the identity of the two terms; philosophy is completed by the science of the Beautiful which is created by the simultaneous operation of the conscious and the unconscious, blended in the inspiration of genius. The unity and progress of the world can only be explained by a world-soul (Weltseele), a plastic principle which organizes the universe. This world-soul, this Absolute, which in its indifference embraces and reconciles the subject and the object, is apprehended by us in an intellectual intuition (intellectuelle Anschauung), of our deepest being. That which in our minds arrives at selfconsciousness is the very activity which in Nature created the universe. Matter is spirit with its fire extinguished. Reality is the evolution of the Absolute, the life of the universal soul; and philosophy is the history of God. Mind can only be understood by a construction of the universe: the plurality of souls is only a means employed by the Absolute to develop itself by becoming more and more conscious of itself and of its freedom.

Hegel holds with Schelling that all things come from the Absolute, but he reproaches his predecessor with having posited the Absolute without defining it: das Absolute sei wie aus der Pistole geschossen, (his Absolute was, as it were, shot out of a pistol). For Hegel the Absolute is the Idea, reality is the Truth. Consciousness is only a moment in the evolution of Being. To absolute knowledge, being and thought are identical; the rational is the real, the real is the rational. Metaphysics is a system of Logic. Hegel's Logic develops the system of the concepts which express all the developments of nature and of spirit. His method is a dialectic, proceeding by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and thus advancing from contra

dictions to ever fuller and more complex reconciliations; a real dialectic which is not created by consciousness, but whose movement is the same as the movement of the evolution of things. The Logic, in an unbroken dialectical chain, leads to the Philosophy of Nature, that is to say to the Idea estranged, as it were, from itself; and this again leads to the Philosophy of Spirit, or to the Idea which has returned from nature to itself, and assumes, along with possession of itself, an existence that is independent.

The development of Spirit is the logical process which leads it from dependence on nature to freedom, which is its essence. The moments of this progress are the Subjective Spirit, the Objective Spirit and the Absolute Spirit. The Subjective Spirit as depending on nature and on the body (human temperament, sleep, etc.) is the object of Anthropology. Phenomenology deals with the Subjective Spirit in its progressive elevation towards reason; Psychology considers it in its specula

tive and practical powers. Intelligence emancipates itself speculatively when it recognizes that all is reason realized; practically, when its content is determined by will.

The unity of will and thought is the active energy of a freedom that determines itself. The essence of morality is will taking reason as its end; which means that the mind is free when it recognizes that it creates everything, when, consequently, it wills everything that it creates; in other words, when the Idea, conscious of itself and of its products, recognizes itself as God in the spirit. Objective Spirit consists in the products of the will: customs, laws, states. Absolute Spirit is Art, which is the Idea appearing in a determinate form; Religion, which is the form under which the Absolute appears to imagination and to feeling; Philosophy, which is the idea thinking itself, truth knowing itself, conscious reason. The divine Spirit finds itself again and comes to rest in Hegel's mind and in that of his disciples. The truth, which is now the soul, is God Himself.

Scottish and French Spiritualism.

In the meantime a less ambitious philosophy was being developed in Scotland and France. Reid, the founder of the Scottish school, appealed to common sense as a means of

escape from the scepticism of Hume. "I take it for granted that all the thoughts that I am conscious of or remember, are the thoughts of one and the same thinking principle, which I call myself, or my mind" (On the Intell. Powers, I, Ch. II). He endeavours, nevertheless, to prove by logic the existence of the soul which he had begun by assuming without discussion. Starting from a common-sense principle, he says: "Every action or operation therefore supposes an agent; every quality supposes a subject. . . We do not give the name of mind to thought, reason, or desire, but to that being which thinks, which reasons, which desires" (Ibid.). In order to determine the nature of the soul he reasons from phenomena to an underlying substance. My personal identity therefore implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself."

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Royer-Collard accepted the doctrines of Reid. Maine de Biran insists strongly on the difference between the knowledge of self which is immediate and direct, and our knowledge of external things which is mediate and indirect. The soul considered in its substance is an unknown quantity, but, through reflection on itself, the subject knows itself as a cause, and distinguishes itself from all its phenomena. In the primitive fact of effort, the Ego already apprehends itself in its antithesis to the Non-ego, and consequently posits itself in its opposition to that which is not itself. Jouffroy, who at first followed Reid in his inference of substance from phenomena, finally associated himself with this theory, according to which, it is through intuitive reflection alone that we reach the Ego. M. Ravaisson, developing Maine de Biran's ideas, maintains that reflection does not give us, besides itself, some unknown substance; but that it apprehends that very essence of the soul which is, in the first place, force, and finally love, since force presupposes a tendency. At the same time he insists on the incessant passage of life into thought, and he abandons the Cartesian dualism for a doctrine which approaches the theories of Leibnitz and Schelling.

Conclusion.

The hypothesis of a soul is suggested by the necessity of finding a reason both for the unity of the universe and

for the unity of the body and of thought. Hence the hypothesis of a universal soul and of individual souls. The theory of a world-soul is apt to reappear whenever men have tried to dispense with a creative and providential God. Materialism, Empiricism, Criticism, Spiritualism are, as we have seen, the chief solutions which have been proposed. Materialism, evading the question, leaves us only a principle of division and multiplicity, which it has not even succeeded in defining. Empiricism, by developing in its analyses the data of the problem—which it refuses to attack-has assisted in making the problem stand out more clearly. Criticism, in the a priori forms of thought, provides an explanation of both the concatenation of phenomena and the unity of the mind. The different metaphysical hypotheses are the result of repeated efforts to find for the harmony of the universe, as for the unity of the body and the human mind, a real principle which would be their sufficient reason.

CHAPTER IV

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MATTER AND MIND

THOSE systems of philosophy which exclude dualism are yet obliged to account in some way for the appearances which have suggested the hypothesis of two ultimate substances. Every metaphysical theory admits the existence of an active and a passive principle, and seeks in the relations of these two terms an explanation of nature and of human life. What we have then to look for in History are the solutions successively proposed for the problem which in its acute form, so to speak, becomes the problem of the intercommunication of substances. In this way we shall complete our summary of the essential elements in the great metaphysical theories concerning nature and man.

Pre-Socratic Philosophy: Confusion between Active and Passive Principles.

As we have seen, the first Greek philosophers had no clear conception of the distinction between matter and mind. The element whose evolution constituted the world, was at once matter and force. Thales' fluid principle was a living, divine thing (Arist. De Anim. 411 a, 7). The air of Anaximenes was in perpetual motion, and was God (Cic. De Nat. Deor. 1, 10). Diogenes of Apollonius, to explain the order of the world, contents himself with making intelligence an attribute of the material element (air), which, according to him, constitutes the substance of things (Simplic, In Phys. 36b). With Heraclitus, fire is at once the primary element of things, the