In a short essay, with much grim humour and quaint illustrations, Hegel tried to show what was meant by the name 'abstract,' which in his use of it denotes the cardinal vice of the 'practical' habit of mind. From this essay, entitled 'Who is the Abstract Thinker[1]?' it may be interesting to quote a few lines. A murderer is, we may suppose, led to the scaffold. In the eyes of the multitude he is a murderer and nothing more. The ladies perhaps may make the remark that he is a strong, handsome, and interesting man. At such a remark the populace is horrified. "What! a murderer handsome? Can anybody's mind be so low as to call a murderer handsome? You must be little better yourselves." And perhaps a priest who sees into the heart, and knows the reasons of things, will point to this remark, as evidence of the corruption of morals prevailing among the upper classes. A student of character, again, inquires into the antecedents of the criminal's up-bringing: he finds that he owes his existence to ill-assorted parents; or he discovers that this man has suffered severely for some trifling offence, and that under the bitter feelings thus produced he has spurned the rules of society, and cannot support himself otherwise than by crime. No doubt there will be people who when they hear this explanation will say "Does this person then mean to excuse the murderer?" In my youth I remember hearing a city magistrate complain that book-writers were going too far, and trying to root out Christianity and good morals altogether. Some one, it appeared, had written a defence of suicide. It was horrible! too horrible! On further inquiry it turned out that the book in question was the _Sorrows of Werther._
'By abstract thinking, then, is meant that in the murderer we see nothing but the simple fact that he is a murderer, and by this single quality annihilate all the human nature which is in him. The polished and sentimental world of Leipsic thought otherwise. They threw their bouquets, and twined their flowers round the wheel and the criminal who was fastened to it.--But this also is the opposite pole of abstraction.--It was in a different strain that I once heard a poor old woman, an inmate of the workhouse, rise above the abstraction of the murderer. The sun shone, as the severed head was laid upon the scaffold. "How finely," said the woman, "does God's gracious sun lighten up Binder's head!" We often say of a poor creature who excites our anger that he is not worth the sun shining on him. That woman saw that the murderer's head was in the sunlight, and that it had not become quite worthless. She raised him from the punishment of the scaffold into the sunlit grace of God. It was not by wreaths of violets or by sentimental fancies that she brought about the reconciliation: she saw him in the sun above received into grace.'