III.—HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF NATURE.1
By S. ALEXANDER.
HEGEL'S Philosophy of Nature forms the second part of his great Encyclopædia, lying between the science of Logic and the science of the Spirit. In nature, according to Hegel's system, the notion of which Logic treats flies apart into points of matter, held together still, like the rings thrown off from the planet Saturn, by allegiance to their origin. In spirit the notion is real and complete: nature at best is life, the disjecta membra of the Idea; but spirit is life and notion too, or the living notion which we call mind.
The Philosophy of Nature, as we have it in the Encyclopædia,2
contains, besides the originally published treatise,
supplements derived from his lectures, which often illustrate
the severe thought of the text by lively and brilliant ideas
struck out in the heat of delivery. Besides this volume we
have the early system written at Frankfort,3 the greater
part of which is occupied by Nature; and in the Propædeutic,4
which Hegel wrote for his boys at Nürnberg, some
pages are devoted to the same subject. It would be an
interesting task to compare these three different forms of
the philosophy with one another and note their points of
difference; but they are in the main identical, and the
phenomenology of Hegel's own mind may be neglected in a
paper which pretends to give only a sketch of Hegel's
general position as a philosopher of nature. The Philosophy
of Nature is certainly one of the most suggestive, and
just as certainly the most perplexing of Hegel's works. It is
nearly always mentioned with an apology. Though it was
founded on the best knowledge of the time, how small that
knowledge seems to be ! and then again it is so fantastic
and so poetical that it may often be thought not to be
serious. For instance, when it is said (p. 151) that the tides
are caused by the longing of the moon's parched and lifeless
1 Read before the Aristotelian Society on 25th Jan., 1886.
2 Hegel's Werke, Bd. vii. 1, Naturphilosophie. Where only the page is
quoted, reference is made throughout the paper to this volume.
3 Described in Rosenkranz, Hegel's Leben, pp. 99 ff. The section on
Nature is pp. 112-123.
4 Hegel's Werke, xviii., pp. 169-178.
