HEGELIANISM AND PERSONALITY.

LECTURE I.

KANT AND NEO-KANTIANISM.

IN beginning a second course of these Lectures, I may be permitted to refer very shortly to the argument of the former course, with the view of indicating a certain continuity of thought between the two. voted to a comparison and contrast of Scottish and German philosophy; and, amid much unlikeness, there still seemed to be justification for pointing to certain broad lines of similarity. These lines of similarity were determined by the opposition of both to a common foenamely, to Empiricism, as that appeared historically in the sensational atomism of Hume,

The first course was de

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which still remains, and must continue to remain, the classical form of that theory. Certain contentions of Reid were instanced which, if construed liberally, might fairly be compared with positions taken up by Kant against the Humian Empiricism. After the exhibition of these points of unanimity, certain other aspects of the Kantian theory were examined, which have made it, in my opinion, as fruitful of harm in one direction as it has been of good in another. I mean Kant's view of the subjectivity of the categories and forms of thought, and his doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, based as that is upon the notion of the thing-in-itself. In the last lecture, there was little opportunity for more than general considerations as to the possibility of philosophy as a completed system of the universe; but in the last paragraph I pointed out several important questions to which the answer of Hegelianism (which was taken as the type of such a system) seems, on the surface at all events, vague, if not unsatisfactory. These questions centred in the question of the nature of the individual, and it is here that we have to resume the subject.

There will be nothing further said in these

lectures of Scottish Philosophy. The object of this second course will be critically to test the Idealism reared upon Kant's foundations by his successors in Germany, and now represented in this country by a number of writers often classed together as Neo - Kantians or English Hegelians. Neither of these terms, perhaps, is unobjectionable, for the English followers of Hegel do not profess to bind themselves to any of the details, or even to many of the characteristic doctrines, of the master; while, if we use the former term, we must bear in mind that the doctrine of the English Neo2 Kantians is to the full as different from Kant as that of the Neo-Platonists from Plato. But it is useless to quarrel over a name whose denotation, at all events, is sufficiently understood. It is enough for our present purpose if we know who are the thinkers referred to, and what are their characteristic doctrines. I need only name, therefore, the late Professor Green of Oxford as the most eminent of the writers referred to, and one to whose utterances, more especially since his lamented death, a certain authority has been accorded, as to those of a leader and accredited exponent of this mode of thought.

Now the most superficial acquaintance with Green's writings is enough to tell us that his whole system centres in the assertion of a Self or Spiritual Principle as necessary to the existence alike of knowledge and morality. The presence of this principle of connection and unity to the particulars of sense alone renders possible a cosmos or intelligible world, and is likewise the sole explanation of ethics as a system of precepts. The impressive assertion of this one position constitutes Green's continually repeated criticism upon Locke and Hume, and upon current English Empiricism. It may almost be said to constitute his entire system. As regards the critical part of Green's work, there has been of late, I think, a growing admission of its victorious and, indeed, conclusive character. But as regards the nature of the Self or Spiritual Principle which is, in his hands, the instrument of victory, the candid reader of Green is forced to admit that almost everything is left vague. It was only in the Prolegomena to Ethics,' in fact, that any definite indication was given that the principle was to be interpreted as a universal or divine Self, somehow present and active in each individual. And even there this conception is