Hegelianism and Personality

In beginning a second course of these Lectures, I may be permitted to refer very shortly to the ai^ument of the former course, with the view of indicating a certain continuity of thought between the two. The first course was devoted to a comparison and contrast of Scottish and German philosophy; and, amid much un- Ukeness, 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 foe — namely, to Empiricism, as that appeared historically in the sensational atomism of Hume, 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.