G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Table of Contents

A. IDEALISM AND SCEPTICISM.

Thought generally is simple, universal self-identity, but in the form of negative movement, whereby the determinate abrogates itself. This movement of Being-for-self is now an essential moment of thought, while hitherto it was outside it; and thus grasping itself as movement in itself, thought is self-consciousness - at first indeed formal, as individual self-consciousness. Such a form it has in scepticism, but this distinction marks it off from the older scepticism, that now the certainty of reality is made the starting point. With the ancients, on the contrary, scepticism is the return into individual consciousness in such a way that to it this consciousness is not the truth, in other words that scepticism does not give expression to the results arrived at, and attains no positive significance. But since in the modern world this absolute substantiality, this unity of implicitude and self-consciousness is fundamental - that is, this faith in reality generally - scepticism has here the form of idealism, i.e. of expressing self-consciousness or certainty of self as all reality and truth. The crudest form of this idealism is when self-consciousness, as individual or formal, does not proceed further than to say: All objects are our conceptions. We find this subjective idealism in Berkeley,⁽¹⁾ and another form of the same in Hume.

1. In the lectures of 1825-1826 and 1829-1830 Berkeley was passed over by Hegel; in both courses Hume follows directly after the Scottish and French philosophers, and thus comes immediately before Kant; in the course of 1825-1826 the French philosophy precedes the Scottish also.