Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

Of such a nascent intellect, a nascent reason, and nascent moral sense, they find recognisable traces in the scanty similarities which the behaviour of child or savage offers to those of civilised man. We cannot fail to note that in their descriptions they have before them a special state of man, and one which, far from accurately defined, merely follows the general impression made upon us by those beings we name civilised. An extremely fluctuating character inevitably marks this total impression. For there are no general facts:—the genuine psychological documents lie in the momentary states of individuals: and there is an immeasurably long way from these to the height of the universal concept of man in general.”

And yet Man in general,—Man as man and therefore as mind—the concept of Man—normal and ideal man—the complete and adequate Idea of man—is the true terminus of the psychological process; and whatever be the difficulties in the way, it is the only proper goal of the science. Only it has to be built up, constructed, evolved, developed,—and not assumed as a datum of popular imagination. We want a concept, concrete and real, of Man and of Mind, which shall give its proper place to each of the elements that, in the several examples open to detailed observation, are presented [pg lxxxvii] with unfair or exaggerated prominence. The savage and the child are not to be left out as free from contributing to form the ideal: virtues here are not more important than vices, and are certainly not likely to be so informing: even the insane and the idiot show us what human intelligence is and requires: and the animals are also within the sweep of psychology. Man is not its theatre to the exclusion of woman; if it records the results of introspection of the Me, it will find vast and copious quarries in the various modes in which an individual identifies himself with others as We. And even the social and civilised man gets his designation, as usual, a potiori. He is more civilised and social than others: perhaps rather more civilised than not. But always, in some measure, he is at the same time unsocial or anti-social, and uncivilised. Each unit in the society of civilisation has to the outside observer—and sometimes even to his own self-detached and impartial survey—a certain oddity or fixity, a gleam of irrationality, which shows him to fall short of complete sanity or limpid and mobile intelligence. He has not wholly put off the savage,—least of all, says the cynic, in his relations with the other sex. He carries with him even to the grave some grains of the recklessness and petulance of childhood. And rarely, if ever, can it be said of him that he has completely let the ape and tiger die.

But that is only one way of looking at the matter—and one which, perhaps, is more becoming to the pathologist and the cynic, than to the psychologist. Each of these stages of psychical development, even if that development be obviously describable as degeneration, has something which, duly adjusted, has its place and function in the theory of the normally-complete human mind. The animal, the savage, and [pg lxxxviii] the child,—each has its part there. It is a mutilated, one-sided and superficial advance in socialisation which cuts off the civilised creature from the natural stem of his ancestry, from the large freedom, the immense insouciance, the childlikeness of his first estate. There is something, again, wanting in the man who utterly lacks the individualising realism and tenderness of the woman, as in the woman who can show no comprehension of view or bravery of enterprise. Even pathological states of mind are not mere anomalies and mere degenerations. Nature perhaps knows no proper degenerations, but only by-ways and intricacies in the course of development. Still less is the vast enormity or irregularity of genius to be ignored. It is all—to the philosophic mind—a question of degree and proportion,—though often the proportion seems to exceed the scale of our customary denominators. If an element is latent or quiescent (in arrest), that is no index to its absolute amount: “we know not what's resisted.” Let us by all means keep proudly to our happy mediocrity of faculty, and step clear of insanity or idiotcy on one hand, and from genius or heroism on the other. But the careful observer will notwithstanding note how delicately graded and how intricately combined are the steps which connect extremes so terribly disparate. It is only vulgar ignorance which turns away in hostility or contempt from the imbecile and the deranged, and only a worse than vulgar sciolism which sees in genius and the hero nothing but an aberration from its much-prized average. Criminalistic anthropology, or the psychology of the criminal, may have indulged in much frantic exaggeration as to the doom which nature and heredity have pronounced over the fruit of the womb even before it entered the shores of light: yet they have at least [pg lxxxix] served to discredit the free and easy assumption of the abstract averagist, and shown how little the penalties of an unbending law meet the requirements of social well-being.

Yet, if psychology be willing to learn in all these and other provinces of the estate of man, it must remember that, once it goes beyond the narrow range in which the interpretations of symbol and expression have become familiar, it is constantly liable to blunder in the inevitable effort to translate observation into theory. The happy mean between making too much of palpable differences and hurrying on to a similar rendering of similar signs is the rarest of gifts. Or, perhaps, it were truer to say it is the latest and most hardly won of acquirements. To learn to observe—observe with mind—is not a small thing. There are rules for it—both rules of general scope and, above all, rules in each special department. But like all “major premisses” in practice, everything depends on the power of judgment, the tact, the skill, the “gift” of applying them. They work not as mere rules to be conned by rote, but as principles assimilated into constituents of the mental life-blood: rules which serve only as condensed reminders and hints of habits of thought and methods of research which have grown up in action and reflection. To observe we must comprehend: yet we can only comprehend by observing. We all know how unintelligible—save for epochs of ampler reciprocity, and it may be even of acquired unity of interest—the two sexes are for each other. Parents can remember how mysteriously minded they found their own elders; and in most cases they have to experience the depth of the gulf which in certain directions parts them from their children's hearts. Even in civilised Europe, the ordinary member of each nation has an underlying [pg xc] conviction (which at moments of passion or surprise will rise and find harsh utterance) that the foreigner is queer, irrational, and absurd. If the foreigner, further, be so far removed as a Chinaman (or an Australian “black”), there is hardly anything too vile, meaningless, or inhuman which the European will not readily believe in the case of one who, it may be, in turn describes him as a “foreign devil.” It can only be in a fit of noble chivalry that the British rank and file can so far temporise with its insular prejudice as to admit of “Fuzzy-wuzzy” that