Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning." According to this view the path to thought leads away from reality. Courageous and thorough-going as this conception is, and suggestive, as it is, of the removal of artificial barriers, intellectual and social, it must retire, if we accept the guidance of evolution, before the view that the path from sense to thought is upward, and towards a reality, which is to be found ultimately in reason or self-consciousness. Such a view was propounded by Hegel, for whom real and rational were synonymous terms.
When we think of the theory of development, we think of its founder Hegel. But the principle of development has, like the French Revolution, devoured its own children; and Hegel's view, though it probably was the chief agent in dispossessing the conceptions we have been considering, is now in its turn said to be inadequate. "Every now and then," says Lichtenberg, "we must make an examination of words, because, while the world moves on, words are standing still,"[1] and development is one of the terms, which now need to be given a new content.
In the philosophy of Hegel the earlier phases of consciousness, whether of the individual or mankind, are conceived of as being taken up into a larger and larger unity, as reason, or self-consciousness, or spirit is more and more fully realized. He has, for example, said, "Everything is in sensation."[2] Were such a remark to be taken literally, sensation would be regarded by Hegel as a final form of consciousness. But he only means that everything, which emerges into conscious activity, has its source in sensation. Accordingly the final phase of consciousness does not contradict or merely annul the initial phase, but is on the contrary its real fruition. "The bud disappears when the flower bursts into bloom, and it might be said that the bud
