The first major work by the Scottish philosopher James Hutchison Stirling (1820-1909), his magnum opus which ‘revealed for the first time to the English public the significance and import of Hegel’s idealistic philosophy’ (DNB).
‘Consisting of translations and commentaries on sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, the book is enormously complex; and, as one writer said of it, nearly as demanding as the original it seeks to explain. Throughout, Stirling exhibits his own struggle in coming to terms with Hegel; and he describes the book’s pages as dipped in the blood of an original experience’ (A.H. Stirling, 1912, p.. 157). As for Hegel’s ‘secret’, we are told that it is to be found in Kant. Kant’s great achievement, Stirling argues, is the identification of the a priori categories, and the demonstration that thought enters into the constitution of things. But Kant’s failing, Stirling claims, lies in the belief that these categories are mere representations of a Ding an sich. We are further told that Hegel’s advance (assisted by Fichte and Schelling) consists in the insight that not only do the categories permeate every corner of subjective experience, they are wholly objective as well. As Stirling tells us: ‘The universe [as seen by Hegel] is but a materialization, but a heterization of certain thoughts: these may be named, these thoughts are, the thoughts of God. To take it so, God has made the world on these thoughts. In them, then, we know the thoughts of God, and, so far, God Himself’ (The Secret of Hegel, 1897, p. 85, 2nd edn). The reaction to the Secret was immediate, and it made its author something of a celebrity’ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers).
