'Question, answer presuppose Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,--_is,_ it knows; As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, Unaffected by its end,--that this thing likewise needs must be; Call this--God, then, call that--Soul, and both the only facts for me. Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves them such: Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'
But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'--meaning thereby that, given the feeling, he has only to
'Define it well For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'
Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the perception--the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception--of faith, a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once, something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head. It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed conversion--a new birth--becoming a new man. But though such a change always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,--as if the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history and a preparation. Of that pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the record: a record which Hegel has written both in the _Phenomenology of Mind_, and, more methodically, in his _Encyclopaedia._ The passage from nature to God--or from man's limitations to the divine fullness--must be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].'